The manor felt easier to navigate, now. There were still hallways with far too many left turns - there were also hallways with too many right turns, but the left turns felt somehow worse - and he could still walk down a hallway and come to the same room he had left from, but it felt like he could navigate, now. The foyer seemed to have the arched exit to the outdoors most of the time now, as well, although John hadn't approached it again.

The foyer occasionally opened up into another enormous room, an enormous rectangular hall perhaps twice as long as it was wide, with two other doors on the sides. Tall, like the foyer, lit by four skylights that ran the length of the hall, metalwork barely visible holding the sheets of glass aloft; the sky was blue. There were, of course, the ever-present lanterns, adding golden light to the blue.

The walls were the same light brown wooden planking, split by eight enormous tapestries, four to each of the two long walls, bordered in yellow and green squares, which rendered simplistic nature scenes; one portrayed a meadow with a single tree, another a mountain range, the next a forest scene.

There were four columns of tables running down its length, perhaps a dozen tables per column, all constructed of the red-tinged wood from which the bedroom furniture had been constructed. The grain was, like much of the woodgrain in this place, in whirls and loops instead of straight lines. He couldn't imagine trying to cut the stuff, whatever tree it was from.

The chairs had simple white cushions attached to the seats, and high, skeletal backs, comprised of seven vertical slats, with a single horizontal slat halfway up. Each of the vertical slats ended in a carved knob. There were eight chairs to each table, spaced just far apart that elbows wouldn't rub. John tried one of the chairs; it was comfortable enough, but he wouldn't want to spend much time in one.

Both of the doors led to identical kitchens; circular rooms, the center of which held large firepits, as wide across as John was tall. The ceiling was an uncharacteristic black, forming a cone leading up to what looked like from below like a smokestack. There was a breeze in the kitchens, the source of which John couldn't find. The walls were all counterspace, the doors the only entrance or exit. Under the cabinets were shelves full of utensils and dishes. John didn't explore the two kitchens much, beyond noting that they were mostly identical. Each also had a door, which led to small room with empty shelves, and empty hooks suspended from the comparatively low ceiling; larders, probably. There were also barrels set against a wall, but judging by the weight, all empty.

There were more bedrooms; he'd found at least seven, differentiated by the color of the fabrics, but the fact that he found another room with white cloth, identical to his own - he knew the difference only in that the layout of the bed and the study were reversed - suggested that there might be more. He hadn't paid close attention to the orientation of the alcoves in the other rooms.

There were also garderobes, small rooms containing only a bench with a hole in it. He had found, with some mental discomfort but physical relief, that they turned up behind doors whenever he started looking for one.

There were also larger bathing areas, except with pools set into the floor instead of the tub in his own room, stone steps encircling the square pools. The water steamed. The towels in these - or maybe it was only the one room, repeated as he searched - were white. The room had only one other door, leading to a privy.

He found no barracks, nor armory, nor storerooms of any kind. Nor did he find access to the four towers he had observed from outside the manor. He also never crossed the hallway with the pool of what he quietly hoped wasn't actually blood, from his experiment with bending space. Or perhaps it had been cleaned up.

Growing restless and uneasy, John gave up on the explorations of the increasingly repetitive rooms, after the third door in a row brought him back to the library. He returned to his room, the open door appearing as soon as he turned a corner, and settled into the study chair.

This place was ... convenient. If he could silence the shuddering voice in his mind that was alternating between monosyllabic utterances and railing that the walls would bleed if cut. And if he ignored the fact that he hadn't been able to find a way out, even once he had managed to get to the manor grounds.

His eyes moved back to the bookshelf. A title caught his eye; he had seen it in the library. "A Compendium of the Known Offworlder Species". That ... hadn't been in his study before, he was pretty certain.

John found his hand shaking slightly as he leaned over, pulling it from the shelf, the books on the left falling to a slant with a quiet 'papf' of leather bindings colliding. The book was settled onto his lap, and he opened it up.

Neat, flowing lines topped the page he opened to, somewhere around halfway through the book. Piraphagos. Beneath was an illustration, which must have used half a bottle of ink, of a blacked-in oval, with jagged textured-gray triangles filling ... was that a mouth, were those supposed to be teeth? Was the entire thing a mouth? He read the description below.

This variant of phage consumes fire and ash, devouring heat itself. Victims of its bite are left frozen and brittle with a cold that does not dissipate. It can be tracked by following the trail of ice it leaves behind, for mundane heat cannot replenish what it has consumed. A phage, its reproductive cycle is unknown, but juveniles range in size from a hen's egg to the size of a grown man's head, and these pose little danger in themselves; anything larger has been known to kill those of weak constitution in a single bite.

John studied the illustration, and turned to the next page; the ink bleeding through the pages meant only one entry existed per page.

Crevog headed this entry, below which was a ... rather disturbed illustration; a human head with long hair, facing up, trailed by a spine, the hair mixing with the spine; there were odd protrusions on the spine where it met what the illustrator presumably intended to be the ground. Below the chin were a pair of narrow eyes, and a mouth with teeth that, were it not for the rest of the illustration, John would have chalked up to an exaggeration on the part of the illustrator.

Like many offworlder variants, the crevog would seem to be designed to create disgust, revulsion, and fear in the mind of the beholder. The Crevog moves on small insectile legs, resembling human fingers, protruding from the spine. All observed Crevog have had feminine features of the face, and most of those observed have been possessed of what is assumed to be a minor teleportation ability. Many specimens have also been observed to exhibit aetherial characteristics when attacking, meaning they are particularly problematic for magii to deal with. No information on their reproductive cycle is available.

John sat back, closing the book, not particularly interesting in reading any more from the vile thing. That had been ... more or less what he had expected, when he first encountered the book. Lithe maggots were the only offworlder he had particular experience with - every soldier dealt with the cursed carrion-eaters at some point in their careers. They were bad enough; cut them apart with a sword and you had two to deal with, and they grew as big as his two fists put together. They'd also explode in small hordes out of corpses, eating the insides first and multiplying; one of the maggots wasn't terribly dangerous, but a pile of them could just swarm over and devour a man no matter how quickly he stomped and crushed them.

Hell, they didn't even need to eat you. John shuddered to remember the aura of rot that surrounded them; weak individually, but a group of them together made every wound fester and blacken in seconds. Cleaning up battlefields and burning corpses was important, if disgusting, work, which if ignored could mean disaster for nearby villages, a plague of death that spread until it was burned out.

The book was replaced on the shelf. He picked something else out, "The Wagonwright and the Wyvern", and settled in for some considerably lighter reading.

The next was a book on magical history, and John found himself groaning at the language, which used the old Simui language to obfuscate. Mil taris. Just call a thing what it was, a mage. And the book took great pains to distinguish between the different kinds of tari - magic. Ievra tar, for the elemental school; mira tar, for focal and thaumaturgy schools; and mavri tar, instead of viviomancers, biomancers, and necromancers, treating the three schools of magic as if they were the same damned thing. It at least had acknowledged that "mira tar" referred to two distinct schools of spellcrafting.

If he hadn't spent time in the Three Isles, the damned book would be incomprehensible. It was old, that was something of an excuse; this was pretty common in older reference works. At least the bits on the mathematics behind "mavri tar" was interesting, few people bothered with the mathematics anymore, as the spell schools were generally considered fully explored and defined. When he had left the Three Isles, everybody interested in the leading edge of magical research was experimenting with selenomancy. Less because sleep magic was particularly powerful or potent, John had gathered, than because it was new and interesting, and people could still get historical credit for developing new spell forms.

This book seemed to have been written sometime around the point of the schism of necromancy from viviomancy and biomancy, as it mentioned the differences that were arising between the construction of the spells that animated dead flesh, and those that restored and altered it. He was amused to note, in view of his thoughts on selenomancy, that he didn't recognize any of the names of the people who had been developing the spells forms of what would become necromancy.

The three spell schools dedicated to biological matter, living or dead, were probably the most complex, and had required the development of a new mathematics, which focused on patterns made up of smaller parts of themselves, to construct the spell forms around. Flesh and wood simply aren't as simple as fire or wind. John settled back into his chair, enjoying the reading on the difficulties involved there.

Jonathon put that book down when it started getting into the politics that had divided the Four Towers, a long-dead institution that had developed the elemental and planar spell schools, and the Jhenn, an equally extinct religious sect which had developed the focal and thaumaturgy spell schools.

He had found the details about religion particularly irksome; they didn't even have gods when the book was written, less so when the Jhenn had been about. Unless you counted Artra, the creator, but as far as he knew Artra had been trying his damnedest to kill humanity at the time. Fucking mystery cults.

Sighing, John rose, looking up to the windows. He'd have sworn it should be evening by now, but judging by the brightness of the sky, or whatever he was looking at, it was still midday. Maybe this place messes with time as well as space. But he wasn't exactly ravenous yet, so perhaps it hadn't been as long as he thought. He walked down the hallway, wandering until the foyer had a door to the outside, which it did the second time he found it.

The sun was, indeed, overhead. John looked over the grounds, wondering vaguely who maintained the grass outside the manor fence. And then, with a huff, he started walking the perimeter; his legs ached from sitting and reading, and he found that he needed to stretch them out and get moving.

Nobody tended the vegetable fields, nobody tended the orchards, nobody tended the animal pen, where he stopped to watch the birds peck at the ground, finding the companionship of the mundane creatures relaxing. He hadn't expected to see anybody; maybe Zyet, as he was curious as to where the creepy man got off to when he wasn't appearing behind John with the ring of a bell that wasn't in evidence. Sage historian indeed.

And, indeed, the creepy sage showed up again that evening - it felt more like a week, save that hunger had barely set in - a bell ringing outside his bedroom door. John opened the door to a face that was crinkled up into something that might be a smile, if one was generous.

"Dinner, sir." John took the covered platter, and Zyet turned without another word and started walking, before John even had the opportunity to offer thanks. Weighing food against the mystery, John stepped out, looking after - and the man was gone, the hallway empty. Right.

It was the same meal as yesterday, and John ate slowly and deliberately, barely tasting. Leonard had asked him if he had any plans for the decade. Had Leonard been here before him? Was this a ten year stint, whatever this actually was? Why was he even here, eating food and reading books in a manor apparently designed by a mad planar magus?

The magic here was impressive. Incredibly so, if John let himself process exactly what the manor represented, setting aside the fear of it for a rational analysis; the simplest thing he had seen, in terms of planar magic itself, was the bigger-on-the-inside effect at play within the fenced perimeter, and while the effect was simple, the scale was massive, the work of a master magi. If it was planar magic at all; there was certainly some kind of magic at play, but it wasn't one he could even identify through his arcana dedication.

The hallways, on the other hand, were, he was reasonably certain, entirely beyond the scope of any living magus. John had spent a decade studying magic with some of the most gifted magi in the continent, and he'd not even heard of anything like this. Moving rooms, maybe. Geometries that allowed five left turns, possibly. But rooms changing, and blood in the spaces ... he stopped that train of thought immediately. The manor was not alive.

Right. If he was stuck here a decade, and then forced to find a successor, he knew a dozen people back at the Three Isles that would trade a limb for the opportunity to study this place. Not that he was particularly enthusiastic about anybody replicating what he had seen so far - well, maybe the moving rooms, it was very useful to be able to find a privy whenever he needed one - but perhaps the insanity that had given birth to the place could be put to some more useful purpose.

The plate was empty. John set the utensils back on it, and replaced the cover, retreating to the bath to wash up. The water was steaming and clean. He started to leave, then stopped and turned, focusing on arcana while trying to inspect the water, to see by what means it was kept hot and refreshed.

He left the room with a shiver, finding nothing that could explain it.

John went back to exploring, trying to find a way into one of the four towers. He settled on a strategy of trying to go in one direction; if a hallway corner forced him left, he'd take the next right at an intersection; he kept a mental counter, adding to it whenever he took a left, and subtracting whenever he took a right, and kept it close to zero. He checked doors as he went, to see what was beyond them.

Mostly bedrooms. There were at least 20, now; white, blue, green, yellow, orange, purple, red, a different shade of red, brown, and different shade of white, all in two different orientations. Jonathon wasn't entirely certain he'd done a perfect job at tracking orientations.

And he did find a storeroom, mostly empty, except a rack of farming implements against one wall. There were also a couple of sacks of seeds, unrecognized to him; one bag contained bulbous red-and-white-striped seeds, about the size of the tip of his pinky, with a point on one end. The other contained some kind of grain seed, tiny and yellow, and when he first opened it, he thought he had found a bag of sand. Otherwise the room was bare, empty iron shelves in rows. The shelves hadn't rusted, and he wasn't sure if that was odd or not.

Otherwise, John didn't find much of anything. The hall kept going. He gave up with the enterprise after what might have been two hours of walking, and turned the next corner looking for his room. It was the first door on the left, already opened for him. He slept.

His third day in the manor, out of three thousand and six hundred, if the decade estimate was correct. A slight pain behind his eyes had woken him up, quickly faded; his potential had grown a little bit again. Jonathon wasn't entirely certain why, usually a growth in potential signified learning something new, or winning - or losing, sometimes, if he learned something from it - a fight.

He spent the morning reading some light fiction, about a huntress who fell in love with a baron's son, and when he finished, looking up, it was with a sense of emptiness. Given the size of the library, it was entirely possible he could spend the next ten years reading, but he needed to do something else with his time.

He found the storeroom again - it took thinking of the farming implements for it to appear behind a door, as opposed to thinking of a storeroom, or maybe the doors he could see were already pre-set in terms of what the opened into, he'd have to do some experimentation.

Grabbing a hoe and the bag of red and white seeds, he walked to the foyer and out the door, looking around in the midmorning sun. Huh. Had there been chairs on the porch before? He walked off to the left, where a bare patch of dirt was visible. Now, how did farmers do this?

He ended up using the corner of the hoe, dragging it as he walked backwards, to pull up a line of dirt. He repeated this five more times, about a pace apart, until there was a small square of lines of furrows. Setting the rake down next to the bag of seeds, he pulled a handful out, and moved to the first line.

He wasn't sure what the seeds were, so walked heel to toe, every third step dropping a seed into the furrow. Reached the end of the line, he turned around, and walked back, again heel to toe, this time using his boots to push the upturned line of dirt back into the furrow to fill it.

He repeated the process for each furrow, barely making a dent in the bag of seeds, and looked up at the sun. It had barely moved. Right.

He stopped when the bag was empty, the sun halfway down its descent. His square was ... somewhat larger, now, although the last furrow had ended up going mostly empty when he ran out of seeds. John looked up at the sky, which was only slightly cloudy. Well, the crops at the back of the manor seemed to be doing sort of alright. He walked around the manor, looking for a source of water.

There wasn't a well, nor could he find a spigot, or any other source of ready water. Well, rain would have to do. Curious, now, he moved to a corner of the nearest field, kneeling to examine the plant growing there. The crop here was a green stalk, almost a stick growing out of the ground, tapering to a point, with triangular leaving sticking out of the sides. Maybe a root vegetable?

John left the field, looking to the orchard, reluctant to approach again; it had smelled awful. He did have a source of water, as he considered his options, but ... well, the lake-summoning invocation didn't do anything in half measures, if he remembered the words correctly. It had flooded one of the Three Isles completely, only the forgecrafted wards on the buildings preventing the irrevocable destruction of countless priceless books of antiquity.

Here? This land would be marsh for weeks. No, he couldn't use it. But John did wonder what would happen if he used it inside the manor. No, bad idea. But then again ...

He rounded the corner, bringing into the field he had sown when his thoughts died, abruptly. There were neat columns of very wilted plants where he had left light tamped soil. There were knee-high stalks, where there should have been flat earth, purple leaves hanging limply up their lengths. John approached, moving slowly, an itch rising up his spine. That ... that wasn't right.

The stalk opened readily to a knife pilfered from a kitchen, revealing pulpy, woodlike material in a paler purple than the leaves. His sample had a simple root system, just a tangle of thin white cords hanging from the base where he had pulled it from the ground. There was a faint hint of magic to the plant, but nothing extraordinary.

He was sitting in his study, the half-dissected plant sitting on the reading table, a botanist's field guide in his lap. It was sorted by criteria he didn't fully understand, and his attention drifted between the plant, and the book, which had illustrations drawn with a careful and steady hand, albeit without color.

He was reasonably certain he was in the right major section, what the book called a family, now - it had something to do with the stem, or stalk in this case. Family followed by a subsection categorization that he thought might be leaf shape, although there were a lot of exceptions as he flipped through the book.

It wasn't the right section; he tried twice more before he located the plant; a purple coneberry. The seeds were the berries, which were edible, which he thought might mean disgusting - there was another classification, delicious, which suggested that edible wasn't. The conical fruit the seeds grew on was the portion that was, apparently, the primary reason the plant was cultivated; the cob, as the book called it, had a variety of purposes.

The cob was mildly poisonous unless twice-boiled, throwing the water out each time, after which it could be dried and ground up to make a nutritious flour. The poison itself also had some alchemical properties which, when distilled, could be used in a number of different potions.

It did not grow magically quickly, at least normally; his field of crops should have taken around six weeks, if he interpolated the illustrations of various states of growth correctly. It fruited at four months, and every three to six weeks thereafter, and died in the winter.

John closed the book and set it aside, looking at the plant again. If all plants grew that quickly in here, how long would it take for the soil to be stripped? He was vaguely aware of crop rotation, the practice of changing out plants to keep soil from becoming barren, but knew nothing of how exactly it worked. Maybe all the plants inside the fence were dead because of how quickly everything grew in here.

Or maybe this manor just has a sickly aura that kills everything. Not a pleasant thought. But Leonard hadn't seemed sickly, so maybe, if that was the case, it just effected plants? They probably didn't have the magical resistance that humans developed over time, after all. Well, most of them. Probably grass didn't, at least.

Another possibility, of course, was that the half-dead state of all the plants had something to do with the rapid growth within water. They certainly looked like they could use it. John stood, picking up the book, and went to the library to replace it.

The dissected plant was gone when he got back to the bedroom. He settled back into his chair, reaching over to the bookshelf for some more light reading, and settled back until Zyet appeared with the ringing of a bell.

"Dinner, sir."

The same meal again. At least John had managed to thank the man before he'd completely disappeared from sight, this time. He ate while he read, until the light from the windows faded into dusk, and then moved to the bed.

He dreamt of hallways, walls scratched and bleeding, and doors that opened up into snarls of teeth that spun and ground against each other.

He spent the next morning picking coneberries, filling a large basket he found in the farmer's storeroom, and the afternoon carefully stripping off the seeds and refilling the bag he had taken them from, and then three more empty canvass bags. He wasn't sure if the basket, or bags, had been in the storeroom the last time he'd visited, and wasn't certain he really wanted that question answered.

The cobs, conical things about the size of his fist, he placed flats down on the metal shelves, filling most of the shelves in the storeroom. When he went back outside, the field was full of unpicked coneberries again. He ignored them, instead walking a couple of circuits around the perimeter of the fence.

On his return, John collected the basket once more, and started collecting the coneberries again, this time just piling them up in the storeroom. Not long after, dinner arrived; John thanked Zyet for the meal, and sat down in the storeroom, shoveling through the food. It probably wouldn't work, but he had to try it. The field was full of dead plants, when he went out again; dead, dry, and brittle. He pulled them up, piling them in another corner of the storeroom, and then it was time for some sleep.

More nightmares, little changed from the previous night.

John stacked the dried plants against the fence, forming a latticework with them. On top of these he piled the conical cobs - dry and brittle, crumbling in his hands, as they had been in the storeroom for months. Finally, as the sun reached the peak of its ascent, he dumped the last basket of the coneberries, also dry and brittle, the seeds falling off as he handled them, on top of that.

John sat down, then, tired and sweaty from the countless trips back and forth. The manor hadn't given him any trouble, and the storeroom had always been easily located. Steel and flint, now. It took three sparks before the pile ignited, the flames leaping up with a roar that sent him onto his ass, scrabbling backwards on the ground away from the sudden and intense heat; clothwing wyverns had nothing on this.

The fire roared, clouds of dust leaping up and igniting in small explosions, accompanied by a caucophony of popping as the seeds ruptured and spit. He had to move back again, and then again, as the inferno blazed hot, air blowing past him to feed the flames, which grew hotter and higher as he watched. The brown grass nearby blackened and disintegrated with tiny puffs of flame, but it didn't spread from the sporadic ill-grown plants, which just wasn't thick enough to support the spread of the fire. John watched with satisfaction. This probably wasn't quite hot enough to melt the iron, but maybe it would weaken it.

The flames started guttering and dying after just a few minutes of intense heat - the fuel burned hot, but it also burned fast. John pressed the flat of his hand to the ground, pushing himself to a knee, and then rising, feeling his age. He moved cautiously forward, looking over the metal where it met the ground. It was still black. He had expected a glow.

Well, it isn't getting any hotter. He moved closer, the heat in the air not seeming to agree with the thought, and gave the metal an experimental kick with the side of his boot. Nothing. He tried again, harder. Still nothing. Alright then. He sat on the ground, turning to the side and then onto his stomach, feet towards the fence, and crawled towards it. Winding up his leg, he kicked out with all his strength.

The dirt met his face. Spitting, he rolled back onto his back, and, wiping his eyes clear, looked. The fence still stood there. He fell backwards into the ground, a wave of exhaustion rolling over him. That hadn't worked. Maybe if he buried it, made some charcoal? But then again... John sat up, and pulled himself to his feet. He walked over to the pile of ash, embers still red, and leaned down, tapping a finger against the metal.

It was cold.