The lesson ground well into the night. Henry took over once Damien exhausted his knowledge, but they didn’t let it go so late that it ate too much into the next day. The three all went to bed and traded watches throughout the night. Night was a relative term, as the gray light never changed or relented. All they had to go off was how tired they felt.

Morning the following day was much the same as it had been for the previous one. It was hard to tell if it even was morning. Still, they slowly got back up and readied themselves. Damien and Sylph both produced toothbrushes, much to Quinlan’s amusement.

“What?” Damien asked, noticing her expression. “I’m not going to find a healer to fix my teeth if I can avoid it.”

“I just burn everything away with magma,” Quinlan replied. “It’s much faster and feels nice.”

“Seems safe,” Sylph said. Quinlan shrugged. “It’s fine once you hit my level of control.”

Her words didn’t seem to be bragging as much as a simple statement of fact.

“That makes me even more concerned about Cheese,” Sylph muttered. “Just what is he using?”

“Let’s hope we don’t have to find out,” Damien said, pausing in between brushing his teeth. “For now, Quinlan, we actually had a favor to ask of you.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Me? I can’t help you get that artifact from Cheese, I’m sorry. I need it for myself.”

“Nothing like that.” Damien shook his head. “We’re actually hoping you could just point us in the direction of the sewers or catacombs or whatever it is beneath the city. Sylph and I spent all day yesterday looking for it, but we couldn’t find anything. Not even a monster or the like. Just… old crusty city.”

“Really?” Quinlan asked, blinking. “That’s strange. I got attacked by half a dozen monsters while I was trying to get beneath the city. There are a fair number of entrances as well. I can’t believe you missed them all.”

Damien shrugged. “Well, we did.”

“I’ll show you one, then,” Quinlan promised, spitting a small blob of magma out of her mouth and wiping her lips. “Follow me.”

They packed their meagre belongings up and then set off after Quinlan. She took them through a section of the city the two had already passed through the previous day. As they went, a frown grew on Quinlan’s face.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

“What doesn’t?” Sylph asked.

“The city. I know I passed an entrance to the underground somewhere in this area. It’s where I went in, but I can’t find it anymore.”

“Could someone be hiding them from us?” Damien wondered. “That seems kind of pointless, and do Teddy or Reva even have an ability like that?”

“Teddy doesn’t,” Quinlan said. “I’m not sure about Reva, but I don’t know much about her at all. It would be quite a waste of time for her to be following you around, making it harder to find entrances, though. She didn’t strike me as stupid.”

“Then what could it be?” Damien asked, glancing around and raising his hands helplessly. “All I’m seeing is gray crap. And what about the monsters? If you ran into a bunch and we haven’t, something seems weird there too.”

“I did think we’d run into at least one by now,” Quinlan admitted, sucking on her cheeks. “Huh. I don’t know what magic could even do this.”

“A fair number,” Henry said, popping out of Damien’s shadow and shaping himself into his spherical form. “Earth could do it without too much difficulty. All they’d have to do is seal the ground over wherever the entrance was and make it look somewhat believable. There are also a number of different schools of magic that can create illusions to varying degrees – it could be those as well. Furthermore, it could be a Mind mage making us unable to see something right in front of us.”

“Could a Mind user really affect something like you?” Quinlan asked doubtfully.

“Nope,” Henry replied with a giggle. “Absolutely not. But it’s still a possible way someone could have hidden the passages.”

“Henry, don’t be difficult,” Damien scolded.

“When is he not?” Sylph asked.

“Hey!” Henry complained. “No teaming up on me. That’s no fair. Quinlan, back me up here.”

“I’m staying firmly out of this one,” Quinlan said, hiding a laugh. “But shouldn’t we be a little more concerned about someone being able to hide this kind of thing from us? They have to be pretty strong to evade your senses.”

“Eh, I’m blind as a rat,” Henry said. He bobbed in a shrug. “I highly doubt something that powerful got past Stormsword, though. The man’s an asshole, but he’s very powerful. And frankly, none of the students here are a concern.”

“None?” Quinlan raised an eyebrow. “Cheese? Aven?”

“Well, I’m curious to see what they can do,” Henry admitted. “But I’ll stand by what I said. They’re kids. If we go all out, then we’ll win. You recall what happened when we fought. That was me at less than half of my strength and separated from Damien.”

Quinlan scrunched her nose at the memory. “That’s not a memory I want to relive. It was pretty pathetic.”

“Don’t feel too bad,” Henry said. “You weren’t completely disappointing. I almost had a little fun, and you’re great at procuring goats.”

Quinlan heaved a defeated sigh. “One of the top prospects at Mountain Hall, reduced to goat herder for an egotistical floating octopus.”

Henry harrumphed and darted back into Damien’s shadow, vanishing and leaving them standing in the alley.

“That was remarkably useless for figuring out what in the Seven Planes is actually going on,” Quinlan said.

“You’ll get used to it,” Sylph said. “Henry likes popping in to annoy us.”

“How aren’t you at least a little nervous?” Quinlan asked. “Whatever Henry says, this is still probably a powerful opponent. What if it’s Aven or Cheese? If Cheese is only ranked second in Blackmist, I don’t want to think what Aven is.”

“We told you before,” Sylph replied with a shrug. “We’ve dealt with a lot worse than a student. We’ll handle it, although we’re on a bit of a time crunch at the moment. This is starting to get a little annoying.”

Damien sighed. “I’ll just handle it the way I normally do. Thanks for the help, Quinlan.”

“I didn’t do much,” Quinlan said with a frown.

“Well, you showed us where the entrance to the underground was,” Damien said with a reassuring grin. “That’s enough. I assume you’re going after Cheese now?”

“It sounds like I’m about to dig through a restaurant’s trash when you put it that way,” Quinlan grumbled. She waved her injured arm. “But yes, I am. I don’t have a choice.”

“Take care, then,” Damien said. “Don’t kill yourself over whatever that artifact is. There’s always another option.”

“If only that were true,” Quinlan said with a sad smile. “What are you planning here, though? I’m a little concerned it might happen to me, so if you’ve got a solution to breaking out of whatever this is, I’d love to know it.”

“I’m not so sure it would work for you,” Damien replied, drawing in a slow breath as he drew Ether into his body, drinking it out of the golden strands surrounding them at an alarming rate. “But it involves a lot of magical energy.”

Quinlan’s eyes widened and she took several steps back. Sylph stepped up next to Damien, standing close to him as motes of Space magic gathered on the ground around them. They spread until nearly a dozen of them had been arranged in a ring.

“You’re casting them outside your body?” Sylph asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I’m using mental energy to hold them in place from the start so I can cast at longer ranges,” Damien replied, his brow furrowed in concentration. “It’s not easy, but now’s as good a time to practice it as any. You ready?”

Sylph nodded. “Good luck, Quinlan. We’ll see you tonight. Same place?”

Quinlan nodded. “To you as well. Try not to destroy too much of the city.”

“No promises,” Damien said with a smirk. The gravity spheres he’d laid out on the ground detonated as one. The ground shattered, large chunks of stone ripping away as fragments were sucked into the spells’ epicenters.

He sent another wave of the destructive space magic coursing into the damaged rock, lining the blasts up before triggering them all at once again. The ground sank under their weight and dust rose into the air.

Damien started to gather energy for a third round, but there was no need. The rock finally gave way beneath them. Sylph grabbed onto him as they plummeted, vanishing into the hole he’d just created.

Before they could fall too far, Damien grabbed their clothes with his telekinesis. Their fall hadn’t gotten a chance to accelerate much, so he managed to keep them descending at a wobbly, slow rate until they touched the ground a little less than a minute later.

“That was deeper than I expected,” Sylph said, letting go of Damien and brushing dust off her clothes. “Nice descent, though.”

“Thanks,” Damien said. They stood in a stone room, lit by faint golden lights embedded in the walls. Several doorways had been carved into the walls. He approached one of the lights, squinting at it. It was a miniature translucent rock, stuffed full of what he strongly suspected to be magic. However, there were no runes to be found on it. “Well, this is interesting. How is this still powered?”

“Maybe the runes are on the back?” Sylph suggested, peering at it. “Or just really small and we can’t see them because of the light?”

Damien considered prying the gem out, then dismissed the thought. Messing with unknown magic wasn’t generally a great idea, and given that Henry had yet to say anything, he suspected his companion was waiting for him to get a nasty shock.

“I most certainly am not,” Henry said in his mind.

I didn’t say anything. I thought you said you couldn’t read my mind.

“I said I got surface level thoughts, and that one was very loud,” Henry replied. “But you should totally try to pull that out. It would be funny.”

I’ll pass.

“Don’t mess with the shiny rocks,” Damien said. “Henry wants me to pull it out, so we’ll probably get zapped.”

“Noted,” Sylph replied. She examined the doors surrounding them and scrunched her nose. “Not much to go off. They all look the same.”

“Then we pick a direction and go,” Damien said. “Wandering around aimlessly has yet to fail me.”

“Do you do that often?”

“Well, no. But it still hasn’t failed.”

“You can’t fail something you don’t do.”

“Do you have a better idea?” Damien asked, crossing his arms.

Sylph smirked. “Nope. Works for me.”

Damien rolled his eyes and picked one of the corridors at random. He strode up to it, bringing a tear spell to his fingertips and carving a large chunk out of the wall. “There. Now we’ll know which way we came.”

“Nice,” Sylph said. “I was just going to chip it with my dagger, but that’s a lot more effective.”

They headed into the tunnel behind the door and descended into the darkness. The light stones still lined the walls, but they were fewer and farther in between with every passing step. Damien tried to light the way with a spinning orb of destructive energy, but the purple energy did little to actually illuminate anything.

Several minutes passed. Damien and Sylph kept their hands in contact, partially to make sure they knew where the other one was.

The two soon reached another room, identical to the first. Damien and Sylph exchanged a glance. Sylph shrugged and he pointed at another door. They headed through it, then repeated the process.

Nearly an hour passed as they wandered aimlessly through the underground area of Forsad, marking their path as they went.

“Not many artifacts down here,” Damien observed in a low voice.

“Well, we were told that most of the artifacts were already taken,” Sylph replied. “Unless you think someone is somehow making us walk in circles or something?”

Damien shook his head. “I don’t think so. I sent a miniature tear into the corner of a few doors we passed. It was really small and only took a tiny chunk off, I really doubt anyone would have noticed that if they weren’t close to us, and the chunk wasn’t missing when we passed through the last hall.”

“Then you’re really bad at choosing where we wander,” Sylph said with a laugh.

“You try it, then.”

Damien felt Sylph shrug. They emerged into the next room and she rubbed her chin before pointing at the door on the far right. Damien walked up to it and stepped out. His foot plummeted through the floor and Sylph grabbed him by the back of his mage armor, yanking him back onto solid ground.

“Eight Planes,” Damien swore, his heart suddenly racing. He peered back into the hallway. What he’d taken for dark floor was actually a pit with no end in sight. The dim light from the magical stones seemed to flicker mockingly.

“Maybe you should pick them,” Sylph decided.

“Maybe,” Damien agreed. “Thanks for the save, though.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Damien gathered his nerves again and chose a different door, this time stepping out much more carefully. When he felt solid ground beneath his feet, he and Sylph set off once more.