[Fairy skin]

[Fairy skin] was the name that surfaced into Matts mind. It was what he would name his strange variant of [Arcane protection]

It wasn’t a very masculine name, nor a name that arguable fitted with the technique, but in his dreamy mind he had decided on it. It came from his deep dreams, the sort that people don’t remember.

He was not yet awake, nor was he asleep.

His consciousness merely rested in between. Allured by the felling of comforting rest and unconcern he stayed there, not wanting to wake up and with the situation that he knew lured behind the veil called “Waking up”

Suddenly the ground started shacking. Disrupting his comfort.

Matt decided to ignore it, stubbornly insisting on just 5 more minutes.

The ground kept on shaking.

Matt was brought out of the drowsiness. With a resolution, very opposite of what intentions he earlier had had in “Sleepy land”, he opened his eyes and resolutely got on his feet.

Shaked by the earthquake he took on his backpack and sword.

The rumbeling contiuned.

Surrounded by the liquid looking karst stones he stood there trying to keep balance, wondering if he had to be wary of falling stalactites, but the old formations mostly held, only some of the smaller and thin hanging icicles, gave into the quake and fell.

For a short while the sound of dripping was seemingly replaced by the sound of the falling icicles. Aside from the natural sound of the earthquake.

The quake went silent.

Now completely awake Matt stood there dumbfounded. Then with a “Hmm” he resumed what he had done yesterday and started walking north.

The strangenes of the earthquake barely corssed his mind.

It turned out [Hardening and [sharpening] in many ways were two sides of the same coin. Both were dealing with the redistribution of force. Compacting and spreading it.

This made it easier for Matt to grasp it as he, during his walk, practiced [Sharpening] with one of the icicles from before.

Not that it was easy either, as there were just as many things they didn’t have in common.

He found that most of it relied on cladding the object with aura, leading it into a pointy or sharp end. Conveniently this also had the advantage of distributing the stress of the edge and onto the rest of the object and thus not tear on it.

Then there was some trickery such as not letting the side of aura part of the blade have influence on the edge and the actual blade, or in this case: icicle.

As he fiddled with this he realized this had two types of challenges: Sharpening a sharp object, and sharpening a dull object.

One was too make the already sharp object sharper.

The other was to create a blade that extended long enough away from the object to make a cutting edge, which was trick. Was the object too dull there was the simple challenge of being able to even extend the aura the required amount.

Obviously more advanced variations would have several ways to overcome those obstacles.

Right now, however, he was just working on getting the hang of the basics.

A few hours went by with him just venturing deeper into the endless cave.

It was as he was walking in the caves that he noticed something in the rear of his eyesight.

Matt made a sudden turn in that direction, nothing.

Could it had been his imagination? No, surely there was more steps down the stair of madness before you would start hallucinating, and he was feeling fine for now.

His hand moved towards his sword. Now he could feel a presence near some light.

The light moved behind some hangs before cutting a corner and revealing itself:

Matt loosened up , false alarm.

“Oh, hi buddy, are you lost too?”

It was just a wisp.

It swirled a few times around. Then it just floated patiently a few meters in front of him.

Most wisps survived by feeding on the mana of the recently death, but other than that they were mostly harmless.

“Sorry, I’m not death yet”

Almost as if it understood him, of which it didn’t, it dimmed a little in light level.

Matt laughed a little.

“I guess I’m not the only, felling a bit famished here “

It seemed frei…

It’s light level increased, it flew straight towards him! He narrowly avoided before it retreated again. It gave off some electric sparks.

“What did you do that for!?”

It was not friendly, definitely not friendly. He drew his sword, but it wouldn’t be of much use in such a confined space.

It began attacking him again. He blocked it with his sword.

Like a swirling ball, not willing to let go, it kept pushing before it once again retreated a little.

Using his razor-sharp reflexes, he had when dueling, he swung the sword after it. [Sharpening]

He felt the enchantments of the sword: The internal mana of the crystal replicated what he did, effectively doubling the [Sharpening]. Knowing that [Sharpening] was a technique that relied more on quality than quantity, it made him unsure on how exactly that helped.

The wisp barely avoided it, the blade passing by just beneath it.

Arcane lightning moved towards him. He did not have time to react.

The lightning-formed mana hit him.

[Fairy skin]. Most of it just dissipated into ambient mana on contact, only giving of a miniscule amount of actual lightning.

The wisp hit his face, the hungry creature tried suck out his mana. It was only meet by a cold impenetrable wall.

Two hands took a hold of it and removed it from Matts face.

Haven given up on using the sword, he fought hard not let go of it, it was desperately trying to escape.

The creature struggled to understand the situation it was in. Ordinarily it should be able to slip through his fingers. Most of its body was made of mana, and should thus be able to phase through physical matter its actual body was the size of a hazelnut at most.

Now, however, its arcane body was meet by something impenetrable and immoveable.

It desperately pulled away. Matt stumbled forward and fell, surprised by the sudden movement, but held on to it.

[Boosted force] His hands lit up in white, green and blue flames as he moved the wisp closer to his chest. It made a high-pitched sound, spewing out useless [arcane lightning] in protest.

Matt decided to try something he hadn’t done before. He moved as much of his remaining mana he could towards his fingers: [Boosted sharpening], the edge now spew out mana in a sharp edge, increasing the cutting force.

And thus, by simply moving his hands together, he cut the wisp to pieces.

The mana from the wisp spread out and turned into ambient mana, leaving only some gooey exoplasma.

Matt sat there for a few seconds, waiting for the adrenalin to settle little. Okay that wasn’t too bad, he thought. His life hadn’t actually been in danger he realized, so maybe using his last mana had been to rash of a decision?

He started to smear out the exoplasma from his hand, it was kind of a disgusting dense combination of mana and matter. An idea struck him.

He collected the smeared out exoplasma again and added it into a side pocket of his bag. Maybe there was some use of it later.

Right now he took a mediating position, he didn’t know what other encounters he might stumble upon and he wanted to be prepared for that.

He took on his headphones and his phone, and started searching in his albums. He was sure he had downloaded that track somewhere...

Ah, there it was: binaural beats for Meditation 11-14 Hz, increased focus and mana intake.

Nice.

He putted the track on and started meditating.

Martin felt the portal tearing on his psyche, but he somehow held onto his conciseness.

For a moment he had the frightening experience of felling his entire body be turned into particles, then he saw it reassemble and land hard on grassy ground, next to his sister.

A moment went in silence as he realized he was having an out of body experience.

The moment ended. His psyche returned to the body. He opened his eyes, another headache was quickly retreating. He had had a lot of those lately. No, correction, it was only two, that didn’t qualify as a lot.

The sun was shining on him, from a clear blue sky. It was relatively low on the sky, most of the warm, humid, temperature came, however, from the surrounding air around him, and not the sun.

The sun was different positioned on sky from where he came from, the portal had indeed covered a huge distance.

More importantly, unless the queen lived on meadow, this wasn’t where the queen was.

The meadow was filled with rocky formations, and surrounded by a forest, a mountain range could be seen in the distance, covering it in a half-circle.

The Meadow were higher than the surrounding forest, making it more like a very flat and long hill.

Mathilde moved.

“auchh, that felt like a hard landing”

“That portal was something of a crazy trip, wasn’t it?”

“Falling unconscious and waking up felling beat up? Yeah…crazy…. ”

“So, you didn’t experience…never mind. Problem is, we didn’t end up where we were supposed to.”

Mathilde got up and looked around.

“Nope, not unless the queen prefers living in the meadow”

“Exactly my thoughts”

Mathilde jumped around, trying to remove the beat up felling she had.

“So, what do we do now?” she asked.

“well... we find a high place so that we can better locate were we are in the world, and then we need to look out for Matt, however we do that”

“Awesome! Let’s climb the rock over there! I’m just goanna call him”

She started moving through the high grass towards a rock formation, she took out her phone. Entered the pin code and clicked on contacts, then on “mah other-brother” then on call.

and again.

and again.

With a disappointed groan, she placed the phone back in her pocked.

“Dammit, No connection” she murmured.

“No, neither is there internet coverage, but your thoughts are right, let me try the GPS”

Martin activated the “Atlas” function on his phone, too his rejoice the GPS worked. Then he saw where they were. Then he stopped up. A chill went down his spin.

“This... can’t be...”

He stared in disbelief on his phone. Was this really correct?

Mathilde stopped detecting that her brother hadn’t moved.

“Alright what are you so dramatic about?” she asked, walking back to him.

”It… eeh…appears that we are in the south end of... the void region”

The void region. Following the revolution of society, the planet quickly became charted. No longer was the world a large unknown and unexplored place, you could spin a Globus and see a map outline of everything, and with the inventions of airplanes, and more advanced portals, you could almost literally go anywhere you wished too.

Except for the void region. A small continental sized black mass outlined by a mountain range, surrounding most of the void.

“Void” might be a misleading word, but it was the public impression of the area. It was more accurately an area covered by huge magic ward, or shield. Nothing escaped the void, and the only thing that entered it was light.

Nobody could see inside of it, thus it appeared like a black mysterious void on the planet.

There had been serious attempts at breaking through the barrier, powerful spells, digging, drop ins from above, nothing worked. The only conclusion was that nobody could enter it.

And now they were inside of it.

There was a moment of silence.

Mathilde said something first.

“No way… how awesome is that!”

“Mathilde, while interesting, this is for once not something to be happy about” Martins voice shaked, the situations implications for his future frightened him.

Mathilde turned around and moved towards the rock again.

“Don’t be such a downer!” she yelled back at him

“This just became an adventure!”

She began climbing the rock formation.

“This most certainly wasn’t planned”

“The best adventures aren’t planned, that’s what makes them adventures”

“it’s not an adventure this is serious, and potential life-threatening”

They had now climbed half-way.

“Dammit martin, I already told you not to be a downer…”

“How can you be so positive?”

“how can you be so negative?” She had reached the flat, and grassy top of the formation. Martin followed her, saying nothing. Mathilde continued.

“It’s just, sometimes being happy is a better alternative” Her voice crackled, she couldn’t keep away the situations reality anymore. Her breathing became deep, trying to control herself and not freak out.

Would she see her brother again? Her parents? Did they even survive the curse? And how would she survive? Finding food and not get eaten by animals?

Martin stood silently beside her, he had already thought the same things.

He stared across the landscape, the formation was just high enough to so see above most of the lower positioned trees.

In his back was the mountain range, too his sides, in the distance he saw something akin to natural walls, appearing to have been made from earthquakes or some unnatural phenomenon. They stretched ahead of him until they almost meet, literally.

Martin squeezed his eyes, there was something there at the end. After the forest Was that…

“hey look, isn’t that a city?”

He pointed, to show her.

Mathilde looked, and yes there at the very horizon was something akin to a city.

“I think it is, like, with walls, and a tower and such?”

“yes, I think”

“so, I guess, we now know where we are headed? “

“yes, towards the city”

They climbed down the rock formation again.