The final mangled prisoner slumps forward in their chair as the last of their life slips away and blood pours from their eyes. Emily steps back, wiping her palm-blade clean on the clothes of the least damaged corpse as she runs through the sparse information they gave her.

A Morzea-trained death squad without a single mage so they remain unnoticed by Chroni's defences... It's smart, I'll give them that, but the spell in their heads gives me something to scan for when I help update the city's protective array.

She lights a flame with a spark of mana and reduces the corpses to ash that she ejects through the ship's vents. After cleaning up her workshop, Emily leaves Elisime, sending a set of commands to a squad of her metal soldiers, deploying them to guard the city's docks and watch for a certain ship due to carry in a delivery of raw inhibition powder within the week.

Emily casually walks over the city on a bolt of lightning, quickly locating the other two active members of The Crystal Skull, exactly where their leader said they would be, before ending them both with single shots from her left palm as she passes. When she reaches The Dome, she doesn't call on Pod, leaving him to his task as she makes her way to the information hub to claim the down payment on her deal with the king.

"How can I help?" asks the clerk she approaches, maintaining a business-like smile despite the pressure Emily carries.

"I'd like to claim temporary access to the city's array," Emily states, ignoring the whispered conversations following her.

"That… One moment please," the clerk says with a nervous frown, stopping themselves before they can deny her and turning to rifle through the drawers behind them.

It takes a few seconds for them to find the green crystal embedded in a silver metal plate that they're looking for and channel their mana into it. When they turn back around, their expression has morphed into one of surprise.

"You have permission," they say as more of a question than a statement before quickly shaking themselves out of their stupor when Emily makes no move to explain. "Right, sorry, this has never happened before. I'll call one of the Protectors now to guide you there."

They turn back to the wall of drawers and pull out yet another wind crystal, this one unbound by metal, and use it to send a message.

"They'll be with you in a minute, please wait by the transportation rooms."

Emily nods and turns away, ignoring the curious gazes that follow her from the clerk and those who overheard their conversation. She stops and leans against the last section of bare wall before the transportation rooms' doors, watching for her guide in silence.

No one tries to approach her, not even any of the few familiar faces she spots, but everyone keeps looking, unable to ignore the crushing weight of her presence tinted by metal and lightning. The mana flowing beneath her skin remains constant, with Technomancer's Breath running almost fully subconsciously, but one of her cores is focused on attributing half of it with her favoured elements, letting them suffuse her flesh as she ever so slowly prepares her body for its innate defensive barrier.

After almost half an hour, a mage wearing rich purple robes with a head of short, dark hair that compliments well steps out from one of the doors Emily's watching. Her mana is tinted with water and, though she's trying to conceal it, Emily can tell from the purity alone that she's third circle.

"Hello, Miss Coldstone," the woman greets, performing a standard mage's salute with a stern, guarded expression. "I'm Protector Azolla, and I shall be your guide today."

"Please, just Emily," she replies, pushing herself off the wall and mirroring her greeting before gesturing for her to lead the way.

"Of course," Azolla says, turning on her heel and heading back towards the door she came from, moving with a smooth grace that's rare even among mages. "While I know not how you achieved it, you have been granted a single day to gaze upon our glorious work, along with the right to know the truth of its purpose. You shall, however, be under careful watch the entire time, and if you make any move to interfere with The Mist, we have permission to turn its entire force on you to prevent it. You'd do well to keep that in mind."

Emily raises a silent brow as the transportation room's door clicks shut behind them, unbothered by the threat and impressed that a mage weaker than her has the guts to make it.

"The Mist?" she asks, focusing on the emphasis Azolla put on the words and ignoring the rest.

"That is the true name of the array we manage. Give me your hand."

Emily obliges, taking the offered hand before the array beneath them pulses and space twists, dropping them off in another part of The Dome far deeper than Emily has ever had access to before. The corridor they appear in is dim, lit only by faintly glowing, multicoloured traces of mana running along every surface of what appears to be a natural cave.

"This way," Azolla says, releasing her hand and striding forward.

Emily follows, feeling but not seeing as they pass through several magical protections woven into the passageway that twists and turns while leading them downwards. They pass several sealed offshoots, and Emily tries to glean the forms and purposes of the protective spells they pass, but none of the runes forming them are within her excessive detection range. A small, impressed smile curls her lips as they walk on in silence, but it's wiped from her face the moment they step out into an open chamber containing a few purple-robed, third circle mages who turn to look at her, to be replaced with unconcealed awe.

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"Beautiful," she mutters, not paying any attention to Azolla's response as her eyes jump through twisting space.

The array is balanced disharmony, with flowing runes constantly shifting and adjusting, entering self-created folds of space on one side before coming out, changed, dozens of metres away. There are hues of purple, blue, green, and red meeting and melding across its structure, highlighting the rotating rings of silver and black metal suspended in the centre of the space, rotating around each other without ever meeting while somehow passing through each other and constantly changing sizes and positions.

There are runes carved into the metal as they are in the air, but unlike those flowing freely around them, they remain constant, shifting like the sands on a beach but never changing.

The walls of the chamber are covered in pulsing veins of mana pouring energy out into the modified space, but Emily can see the oddities in their geometries where they've been led away from their natural paths to better complement the array they fuel. There are open airways cut into the roof of the massive cavern, carrying out the thick white mist being pumped out of the centre of the floating metal rings.

Emily's mind spins, buzzing with machina as she accelerates her thoughts to process the dizzying inflow of information from her sight and passive mana senses alone.

"Can I look closer?" she asks her guide without even glancing at her.

"You have permission to look and touch, as long as you don't interfere," Protector Azolla replies.

Emily steps forward, descending the rough steps carved into the sloped wall of the cavern and approaching the bottom of the twisting metal rings. She reaches out, letting a stream of mana flow from her arms and twine with the array, reading the shifting runes and carving an understanding into her mind.

She falls into a trance, carefully weaving her own energy through the massive construct and trying to form a complete blueprint in her head. Time ticks by and, before she's even ten per cent finished, a tap on her shoulder breaks her focus.

"Your time's up," Azolla says, trying to pull her back and starting in surprise when Emily doesn't move an inch.

"No wonder he was fine giving me a day in here," Emily mutters, ignoring her guide and releasing her hold on The Clock's activation switch. "This is the most complicated spell I've ever seen."

***

Six resets later, Emily has a half-decent understanding of The Mist. However, the more she understands, the more questions begin to rise to the forefront of her mind.

"What are you hiding?" she says more to herself than anyone else as her gaze drifts between the folded pockets of space actively modifying sections of the array.

"What are you talking about? We're not hiding anything. We've let you look as permitted, now come on, it's time to leave," Azolla says with frustration in her tone, tugging on Emily's shoulder again to no avail before turning to her fellow Protectors. "Prepare to invert the array!"

Time rolls back again, and Emily's curiosity grows.

***

After ten more resets, she completes her blueprint of the exposed array without any satisfaction. Emily turns her focus to the walls of the cavern, pushing her mana outwards and trying to connect to the overlapping mana veins pouring their lifeblood into the cavern.

She meets a resistance she's never felt before, as if the channel she usually uses to connect is already occupied, and it takes five more resets for her to locate the discrepancy between the amount of mana being released and the amount being used by the array. She follows the excess mana, watching as it slips into the gaps of reality bending the array. She tries to reach into the twisted space, but her connection to her own power is severed the moment it vanishes into the impossible folds.

Four more resets, and Emily releases a thin wave of charge the moment she returns, slipping through the defences of the unprepared Protectors in the blink of an eye before increasing the voltage and shocking them unconscious. They try to resist, but none remain standing by the time her mana reserves are half empty, leaving Emily to probe the array more violently, forming a new spatial spell created between time and slicing into the distorted space, gathering more data in the limited time she has before half a dozen prepared Protectors storm the room, calling upon The Mist and changing its form in an instant.

The twisting metal rings freeze before turning in reverse, and the mist rising up to the ceiling plummets towards Emily, shifting into a darker hue. She feels her instincts screaming not to let the condensed magical vapour touch her, and activates The Clock again before it can, utilising the few stretched moments of frozen time before she's thrust back to the beginning to read the changes in the complicated spell above.

Her back and forth with the Protectors happens eight times before enlightenment strikes, and Emily latches onto the underlying signature present in all of the spatial oddities, the same signature blocking her connection to the veins of power below.

"A hidden pocket dimension," she says as she finally anchors her mana to the foreign signature, slipping it into the gaps in space and reading the hidden runes that bear a staggering similarity to the weaving of space she discovered in The Covenant's library years ago.

"What are you talking about?" Azolla asks, the sincere confusion in her voice confirming Emily's conjecture that the Protectors don't truly know what they're maintaining.

Emily doesn't respond, settling down below the array cross-legged and breathing in the dense mana around her, utilising her improved understanding of space to start creating a spell to break open a door into the concealed space. It takes a few more days in frozen time for her to complete her work, and once she thinks she's done, Emily returns to the start one final time.

She disables the Protectors, locking their muscles with a delicate blanket of charge and focusing enough power on their mana-protected minds to keep them dazed and unable to cast. Knowing that none of their warning measures will activate yet, Emily takes advantage of the time alone that she's bought herself and begins a complicated weaving of purple runes.

She carves them onto the air around her, splitting a stream of ambient mana away from the array and using it to link her spell to the signature suffusing the hidden space she's targeting. Her mana reserves drop as she works, and it doesn't take long for her to start drawing on her machina as well, converting it to mana to keep building her door.

As the first Protector loses strength and falls unconscious, Emily completes her work and watches space distort, folding in on itself and ripping open to reveal a fractured mirror of the room that she's certain doesn't represent the space on the other side.

Cautiously, Emily releases a mechanical drone from her belt, sending the small bird through the undulating doorway first and frowning when her connection to it is shattered.

"It feels stable, despite how it looks…" she mutters, briefly considering the danger of what she's about to do.

Her right hand raises to rest on her left bicep, tracing her flesh fingers over the cold glass of The Clock as hurried footsteps echo down the open passageway through which she entered the array's chamber.

"Only one way to find out."

She steps forward, vanishing into the folds of space as her portal closes behind her.

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