“Changing into a horror? Have you talked to Margrethe about that?” Blaze sipped his zeht while he watched Serenity over the rim of the mug.

Serenity shook his head and leaned back, resting against the back of the chair. Sometimes it was nice to not have wings. “No, Rube definitely isn’t suffering from monster core exposure. It’s similar, but in some ways exactly the opposite; it happened while the djinn was alive, plus a burst either while I was fighting it or right after it died. There’s also no lingering Essence; if anything, it’s like the area’s been drained of everything.”

Serenity frowned. At the time, he’d thought it had corrupted Rube’s Potential. Was that literally true or was it simply him seeing everything through a different lens? “Something was twisted or corrupted, almost like … where magic comes from? I’ve been calling it Potential but maybe that’s not the term you know it as. There’s no magic at all in the affected area. It’s completely unlike the corruption caused by a monster core.”

“Tell me about the monster. You called it a djinn?” Blaze didn’t seem to know the word. Well, that wasn’t that surprising; it wasn’t a word in Bridge. Serenity hadn’t been able to find a good translation, so he’d simply used the English word.

“Yeah … it’s not very specific. Djinn is a catch-all for powerful spirits that can be trapped. In the original language, I think it’s even broader than that, but that doesn’t matter for this one. Djinn are usually hostile or at best mischievous. They have a reputation for being able to grant wishes, which they’ll give to the person who finds them, but usually they don’t grant them the way you’d want. Sometimes they only give the wish to the person who frees them. I don’t think this was the wish-granting kind, though; it didn’t seem to have a way to speak on its own.”

Blaze looked doubtful, so Serenity kept talking. “This djinn was trapped in a clay vase, with a clay stopper, but the seal was cracked. Rube found it in the woods; I think it was left there for someone to find, but I haven’t started looking into that yet.”

Blaze spoke over Serenity. “Why do you have to look into it? Does the local Lord not care?”

That was the equivalent of asking “Why don’t you let the police handle it?” Serenity paused and thought out loud. “If I took it to the police, it’d either be ignored since it’s littering at the worst and not easy to track down or it’d be tossed on the desk of someone with some magical ability which means it’d probably go to Lancaster or someone in his unit. I can ask him for help but I don’t think he has anyone better suited to work on it than I am, and they’re quite busy right now. I could be out closing portals, but I’d have to find them first.”

The moment when Russ pulled out a badge and handed it to Rissa popped up in Serenity’s memory. Had he said something about working for the Secret Service, or did Serenity misremember that? “I’m pretty sure the proper authority is Russ, and he came to me for help. So that’s why it’s me; I wonder if Rissa or Phoebe can find the trail?”

Serenity was still thinking about what his next step was when Blaze pulled him back on topic. “So you’ve said how it was found; what was the monster?”

“I’m not sure it was a monster. It didn’t have a core.” Serenity reminded himself that semantics weren’t why they were talking. “As for what it was, it was a cloud of magic. It almost looked like green and red smoke. The magic was wrong. It seemed to come and go, like it wasn’t there all the time. The djinn was trying to take over Rube’s body; when it saw me, it tried to attack me instead. That didn’t go well for it. It seemed to think I was a better fit for it, that Rube would do but I was tastier?”

Serenity still wasn’t entirely certain the djinn had ever really known it was talking to him. It’d seemed to respond, but he’d also heard what had to be its thoughts.

“A possessing spirit? One that corrupts the body of its victim? That’s what you mean when you say djinn?” Blaze sounded doubting. “I don’t think those can exist on low-Tier worlds like Earth.”

Serenity shook his head. “Earth wasn’t always low-Tier. There’s a lot of evidence of a higher-Tier past, and the jar the djinn was in seems to be part of that evidence.” The key piece of evidence Serenity had, of course, was the testimony of Earth’s World Core. Mentioning that would derail the conversation even worse than it already was.

“Hmm. I don’t know one that appears red and green or anything about magic that comes and goes, but it almost sound like you’re talking about a siepvert.” Blaze’s suggestion was clearly also not a word in Bridge; Serenity could only assume that it was from his own language. “They’re rare predatory spirits released by a poorly-done summoning spell. Most of the time, they kill and eat their summoner and then go back where they came from, but sometimes they stick around. The possessive types seem to be a bit more likely to stay at first, by possessing either their summoner or someone nearby, but they usually dissipate or leave after their first possession ends.”

Wait, summoning? That sounded a lot like a different mythological creature. One that Vengeance had run into quite a few times, though he’d never seen one that looked like a cloud of red-and-green smoke. One that he didn’t think of as a djinn. “Demon. We’d call that a demon. That might be a better word for it than djinn; I think you’re right about that.”

They’d been misled by the connotation of the star symbol in the clay stopper; they’d taken it to be a version of the Seal of Solomon and thought of djinn, when it quite famously also worked on demons.

“Whatever you call them, it takes a lot of magic to pull a siepvert from the Netherworld. I’ve stopped more than one summoning; it’s simply not possible on a world at less than Tier Three.” Blaze didn’t just sound doubtful; he sounded confident.

Serenity had the perfect reply. All he had to do was talk about what he’d seen shown to him by the World Core. He knew what had happened; he even knew some of the place-names, as though Gaia had told him even though the vision had been wordless. “The Age of Magic ended in a war of the Gods. Gaia tried to stop it, but was attacked herself for daring to try to protect her world. A’Atla was cut from its foundations and sent to the bottom of the Sea for the dual sins of trying to overreach the bounds of Man and allowing the followers of different Gods to mingle and change. The loss of A’Atla ended the war and ended the Age of Magic.”

Come to think of it, a large island like A’Atla sinking in the ocean ought to cause some flooding; if an undersea landslide would cause a tsunami, what would the displacement of miles of above-water land to below the sea do?

There were an awful lot of flooding myths around the world. Was it possible that they were related?

Surely not. Flooding wasn’t that unusual; the fact that flooding happens worldwide doesn’t mean there was once a worldwide flood. It was possible, but it wasn’t necessary.

“That’s the story, as I was given it by one who was there. What happened immediately afterwards, I do not know; it’s lost in legend and histories written by people who weren’t there. What I know is that the gods vanished from everyday life, though belief in them stayed; creatures other than humans hid or fled. Perhaps one of the factions won or perhaps the devastation was simply too great, I don’t know.” Serenity could certainly speculate, but trying to line up the fall of A’Atla - surely that was Atlantis? - with history didn’t seem like it would be simple.

Serenity suspected that the devastation was great enough most of it was lost, but he strongly suspected that a great deal of what wasn’t lost to the destruction was deliberately discarded. All those empty places Gaia had shown him probably weren’t empty because their peoples had all moved to better places, unless you considered death a better place. Earth’s history was filled with horrors. That was true from the history he knew; the history he didn’t know was unlikely to be better.

“Huh. I’ve never heard of a Fall fast enough that it could be traced to a single event. It’s always a slow decline.” Blaze sounded thoughtful, but also like he believed Serenity’s story.

Serenity’s expression darkened. “It happens. Rarely at low Tiers, though it can send a world to the lower Tiers. Individuals simply aren’t strong enough. At high Tiers, they can be.” He huffed, thinking of Tzintkra. “Something a lot like that happened on Tzintkra, someone damaged the World Core when she stole a piece of it, shattered it into several fragments. It’s why the planet’s such a mess. Though there was a war, too; I never found out if that was triggered by her actions or if she took advantage of it to reach the Core.” He was pretty sure it had to be one of the two, but it wasn’t something he’d put time into.

Blaze shook his head. “I’ve been to Tzintkra. Didn’t stay long; even their Shining City had a feel of despair that wasn’t pleasant. I guess a fast Fall would explain that, and explain why they’ve been trying to recover the surface for at least a century.”

Serenity was confident it was longer than that, but he wasn’t sure how long. “Tzintkra isn’t why we’re here. You said you thought the demon might be a seep-something?”

“Siepvert. Summoned possessing spirit; some do have a corruptive effect. From what you said, I assume it was only a partial possession, that the siepvert never actually took full control? Was it waiting on the entire body to become corrupted?” Blaze stood up and headed to the door before returning to the table and setting his empty mug down. “Follow me; I’ve got some reference works back in my room that I think we’re going to need.”

Blaze’s room had the same basic setup as Serenity’s, but there was an extra set of shelves above the bed. It looked like it was added after everything else, even though it was made of the same wood. The shelves were filled with books, scrolls, and even some that looked more like loose sheets of paper in folders. Serenity could see several different binding types as well.

None of the books were set on their end like in a modern library; instead, they were all flat, with different books of similar sizes lying on top of each other. Serenity wasn’t certain if that was an attempt to preserve the books or simply Blaze’s preference.

Blaze pulled down one book and two scrolls. “It’ll be in one of these.”

Half an hour later, Blave rotated the book so that Serenity could see it. “Is this what your friend’s arms look like?”

It was a black-and-white drawing of a creature that Serenity would probably have labeled as an eldritch horror rather than a demon, but it was likely the two definitions weren’t that different. He took a good look at the arms on the drawing. “It’s close. Neither is that long, and I can’t quite tell if the tentacle-hand is right. The eye in the palm of the other hand is. I don’t see the weeping sores.”

Blaze nodded. “They’re all supposed to be a little different, but I thought I remembered something. This is closer than I expected to find; it’s definitely a siepvert. How did you kill it? The notes say that it’s impossible to kill, it has to be banished.”

Serenity shrugged. “Everything dies. It was weakened; I weakened it more, then I killed it.”

Serenity wasn’t going to explain more than that, not even for Blaze.

Blaze waited for a moment, then turned the page in the book. “These are the notes of a scholar who documented the magical precautions taken against siepverts. All it will do is ease the pain and prevent it from spreading unless you have a godstouched who opposes the siepvert. I believe you said gods were rare on your world?”

“They’re starting to become known again. I might be able to find someone.” Would Russ do? Was a Guardian a “godstouched”?

Blaze nodded. “The last step requires a master healer, unfortunately. I doubt you have many of those. If you can get me permission to come to your world, I’ll come once the Tutorial’s over and your planet is open.”

“You have permission. It should be soon after the Tutorial ends if not before; things should be picking up soon. We’re at -” Serenity paused and checked the Quest indicator. “Thirty-six closed so far, a lot more to go.”

Blaze looked at Serenity with an expression he couldn’t read, then clearly pulled up his own Status and looked at something. He didn’t say anything immediately; he simply shook his head.