Chapter Six Hundred and Seven

It took a few trips to move all of the dust bunnies up and into the Beaver, but that was fine, I wanted the little ones to have time to settle in, and that meant making space for them.

Unfortunately, the cargo-side of the ship was right out. There were too many dangerous things there. So, we had to keep them on the passenger side.

I bravely donated my room to the dust bunnies, and filled the space with a few extra blankets and some of their favourite cushions. I did remove the spade and Weedbane from the room, just in case, but I left my hat collection behind after one of the dust bunnies managed to wear my old kettle helm (with the help of three of his little pals, because it was a smidge heavy for them). 

The core took longer to load. We built a bracket for it, and I heard Amaryllis gripe at length about how dangerous it was to carry something giving off that much magical energy. That was... probably fair, actually. Even just standing on the deck above the core, I could feel magical energy suffusing the air. 

There was some worry that it would interfere with the gravity generator, so we ended up pulling the core out again just to make space at the very, very front of the ship, right up against the prow and as far from the rear where more delicate machinery was placed. 

Moving things around ended up eating a solid hour, and in that time, the keep continued to fall. There was a moment where the drop slowed down significantly, but that only lasted a few minutes. I saw Tristain leaving the keep soon after, looking exhausted, and I suspected that he had just poured a lot of magic into keeping their home afloat a little longer.

Some of the black Avatars boarded the Beaver. Just three of them, but still. Mathew was the first aboard, the researcher and magical expert that had been in charge of the core. It only made sense that he’d come with it. 

As far as I could tell, the core was one of the more precious things that the Black Avatars had, but I also saw them moving some heavy crates around, and I suspected that they had decades, or centuries, worth of high-level magical items and ancient artefacts. 

A group that prided themselves on independence and who travelled the world like they did, righting wrongs and blowing up problems would definitely end up collecting some weird and dangerous things.

I think it was telling that they didn’t mind us grabbing the core.

The next on board was Percival. The big human man carried a sack on his back as large as I was. It clunked with every motion, and I had an inkling that it was filled with armour and weapons. 

I greeted him, and then had to awkwardly point out that, since the one side of the ship was now taken up by the core, he’d have to bunk with a bunch of others at the rear. Not the nicest place to put up a guest, but it was the best we could do at the moment. 

He took it well and said that it wouldn’t be the first time he slept in a hammock. 

Finally, the last Black Avatar coming with us boarded. Guinivere. I had a suspicion that she would be coming aboard. The fox-lady hopped up onto the deck, carrying a small rucksack alongside her and looking a little less put-together than when I’d last seen her.

“Hey,” I said. “Are you okay?”

“I’m well enough, Captain Bunch,” she said. “Is your ship nearly ready to depart?”

“Ah, yeah, it should be,” I said. “Just a few more minutes to get everything together, and we’ll be ready to hit the skies. I might go down and double-check our cargo hold, though, just in case.”

My Captaining sense was going off a little. It wasn’t a warning, but it was more like... like wearing a shirt with a very itchy tag, maybe? It felt like something was off and it bothered me, so I wanted to go down there and give everything a once over, just in case.

“Are you the last one coming with us?” I asked.

Guinevere nodded. “I am. We can depart at your leisure. The rest... we have made a call to some allies and have other ships on their way over. No one will be left behind.”

“I’m sorry. About the keep,” I said.

“I know. It’s... not fine, but we have all lived and lost before. If anything, this might be good for us, as a group. Hah! Maybe I’ve spent too much time with Tristain, I’m starting to grow contemplative and... urgh, optimistic.”

“There’s nothing wrong with a bit of optimism!” I said. “Optimism keeps you happy, even when the world doesn’t feel like a happy place.”

“Yes, I’m sure,” Guinevere replied. She swished her tails, then gestured. “Do you wish to inspect the core with me? Before we depart?”

I nodded, and we did just that. The core was fixed at the prow, and when we arrived, but Awen and Amaryllis were there, standing well back.

“This thing is dangerous,” Amaryllis said. “We’re going to end up with mana-poisoning if we don’t limit contact with it.”

“Oh,” I said. The hold was usually a pretty dark and humid space, though I kept it clean as a matter of course, so it wasn’t mouldy or anything. “Maye we can have other sleep on deck? Or in a rotation?”

“That’s not too big of a concern. Honestly, the Beaver is almost perfect for this one use-case,” Amaryllis said. “We can have the crew split nearly evenly across both hulls, and the wideness of the ship acts in our favour. I think that if we put a plan in place where everyone rotates which hull their on and spends as much mana as possible at all times, we ought to avoid the worst of it, but that will require some effort.”

That would be a little tricky, but we could do it. If anything, there might be an upside to it. Mana regeneration was usually pretty slow. A few points a minute or so. I wasn’t sure what the exact rate was. What I did know was that being close to a dungeon core created a massive surplus of mana. 

We could cast spells all day long and still have mana to spare. Heck, it had been enough mana to keep a castle afloat and create a storm around it at the same time. That was... a lot.

If we used this right, my friends, the whole crew, might gain a lot of skill with our spellwork.

I nodded, then looked at Amaryllis. “Can you do me a favour?” I asked her.

Her eyes narrowed a little. “That depends,” she said. “What sort of favour?”

“Can you prepare a lesson plan? Something to teach everyone a few useful spells. All of the crew, the scallywags, everyone. We need to spend a lot of mana, right? Might as well come out of it having mastered a few good spells?”

“That... actually, that’s a surprisingly sensible idea.”

“Thanks! I try to be surprisingly sensible sometimes.”

We unhooked the Beaver from the keep a few minutes later.

I don’t know what it was, exactly, that I felt. Maybe some sort of melancholy? Empathetic melancholy. The Black Keep wasn’t my home, but it was someone’s and it was a spectacular place. Now it was cosigned to the bottom of the sea. 

Would it be lost forever? 

I couldn’t imagine anyone being willing or able to retrieve it. Maybe in the far, far future some archeologists would stumble upon it and wonder how it had ended up where it did, but otherwise, it was likely that the entire magical thing would be written off as nothing more than a passing myth.

We could have left, but I chose to have us hover around. Natural rain clouds joined the last remnants of the storm, and we watched as the Black Avatars boarded their ships and took to the skies.

Without anyone keeping the magic fed, the spells keeping the fortress afloat slowly weakened and gave out, and just like that, the Black Keep crashed into the waves of the Moonswept Sea and were swallowed up. 

It felt like we should have been at a funeral. I may have been sniffling as little, even if the three Black Avatars onboard the Beaver merely watched with stony expressions. 

“We’ll get her for this,” Mathew said.

“W-who?” I asked.

“The woman responsible for the Evil Roots. We’ll see if she enjoys seeing her home drown. She made herself an enemy of the world, and now us as well.”

***