Another few minutes brought them to the temple itself. As much as the island had developed, it was still basically wild around the temple itself, and the land was oddly silent as they made their way to the door. Stepping inside the temple, which they all did with a certain reverence, didn’t come with any obvious changes. Not at first, anyway.
“I feel weird,” Marco said. “Like the air is heavy. Anyone else?”
“Not me,” Riv said, as Aethe moved a bit closer to Marco, tensing and suddenly looking more on guard. “Elisa?”
“Not me either. Marco, what?”
“Shh,” Marco said. “Something’s happening.”
The notification that popped up a moment later hurt to look at. It was readable, but every second it spent in Marco’s awareness felt like it was nibbling away at his mind. He steeled himself and read it anyway. Normal system notifications were a different experience than this was, and so even were the temple notifications he normally got that piggybacked on the system’s way of doing things. This was more like the temple was trying to imitate the system, forcing through words the system didn’t want him to see.
The only problem was he didn’t understand a single character of them.
“Elisa. Give me a notebook. Now.” Marco reached out as a bewildered scholar handed him a pad of paper and a pencil. “Everyone be quiet. This hurts. I don’t want to make mistakes and have to do anything over.”
Marco copied down the runes as best he could, hoping Elisa would make sense of his gibberish later. There were hundreds of them, and the amount of focus he had to put on the notification to get anywhere close to an accurate representation of each made everything hurt that much more. It took a few minutes to do, and when it was done, he was spent. He crumpled to the stone floor as he finally closed the notification, holding his head.
“I hope that’s useful for you,” Marco said. “Do you understand any of it?”
“More than you’d think, but I’ll need some quiet time to put it together. Can you walk?”
“Just give me a few minutes to catch my breath. We can get back to the ship after that.”
—
When they got back to the town and started making their way through to the docks, there really was no reason Marco could see to stop. He still felt wiped from the experience of transcribing the temple’s message, but he didn’t need to be all that tired to know there wasn’t any use in stopping at unknown buildings to buy goods below the grade of what they needed or to make new friends they’d be leaving in a few minutes anyway.
They did see the old woman one more time before they left, busy verbally bashing some workers back into good order and diligence. She acknowledged them for just a single moment, nodding at the group and raising a hand in a goodbye before they left. As Marco pulled the ship out to sea, it wasn’t so much that he had a feeling that he’d never see the Invisible Isle again as he knew it. There was simply no reason for The Foolish Endeavor to ever sail that way again.
“I need time. Not much, but at least a few hours. I’m going down to my bunk to work on this.” Elisa waved the paper filled with marks Marco had made in the air. “I’d criticize you for being messy with this, but I know you were in pain. I’ll try to make it count.”
Marco nodded and continued focusing on sailing. Their next stop, he thought, was Riv’s island. Their quartermaster hadn’t been able to go home since the very beginning of their friendship, and Marco was fairly sure he hadn’t remembered to send any letters before they set off to the outer seas. If they were resolving things, the next person with a right to put their own personal island behind them was Riv.
Of course, that was if he chose to stay with them at all. Marco didn’t expect that visiting Gulf Isle would have any effect on him personally, since the only people he really had connections with there were Elisa and Tatric. Elisa had her dad and the option of a long, calm career as a very high-level scholar. He didn’t expect she’d take it, but she might. Riv had whatever life he had left on his home island, and though he didn’t talk about it much, Marco knew it hadn’t been all bad.
The possibility that his crew might fracture was real. The only person he couldn’t imagine leaving was Aethe, who appeared to have suffered every moment she had tried to get her human-style independence to work with her collective, group-based elf people. Now that she had bound herself to Marco more permanently, the idea that she'd go back to a place that had hurt her seemed beyond the realm of reasonable worries.
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For now, though, he just needed to sail. They were moving fast, but the initial trip from their home had more or less warped them through days or weeks worth of travel by means of the hidden sea dungeon. It would be a while before they were able to get anywhere near home, especially if he didn’t focus on sailing.
Luckily, though, these days focusing on sailing was a much more passive process than it had once been. The runes had a cluster of functions related to making sure he could power the ship while not actively at the wheel, and that kept the craft on course even if Marco wasn’t actively steering it. As Elisa worked, he spent some time with Aethe at the prow, silently looking out at the water before turning to help Riv clean out the chicken enclosures. After that, he took to inspecting the ship’s twin masts, the sails, and all the rigging. It was all in good condition, courtesy of the ship’s nearly automatic repair process. Even knowing that in advance, actually seeing and verifying that made him feel better.
It was good that Aethe didn’t join him for that. He wasn’t sure if the runeblocks had a function for keeping them from steering directly into huge gaps in normal reality, but Aethe’s watchful eyes meant he didn’t have to find out.
“Marco. Heads up,” Aethe called from the prow. “Something bad ahead.”
It was rare enough for Aethe to describe something vaguely, let alone completely negatively. Marco almost leapt back to the wheel, where what he saw was enough to compel him to turn as fast as the rudder would allow him to.
It was a hole in the ocean. Not a whirlpool, not an eddy, not a weird wave, but a huge, miles-wide hole. Where the surface of the ocean should have been, there was normal air. Without much experience in huge circular cavities in water that looked like they had been punched straight out of the sea, Marco still expected that water should have been rushing over the edge of it. That wasn’t happening. From what he could see, the sides of the pit were completely smooth walls of water, unmoving and unbothered by their physics-defying positioning.
Marco couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Neither could the system, apparently, though it gave it an honest try.
Anomaly
Nature, as defined by the system, is everything around you, and it runs on rules. Things fall down, for the most part. Hot things burn. Cold things freeze. Light tends to make things brighter and more visible. There are thousands of these kinds of laws playing in anything you see, no matter how simple it might appear. These rules not only impose order but actually make order possible by establishing a consistent canvas on which the stories of the world can be drawn.
Something or someone is affecting the local rules of nature in this region. What you see before you is something that, according to the laws of nature, should not exist. It is not alone in this sense, since the system often bends or breaks those rules in the function of classes or magical items. Where it differs from that, however, is that the system has no involvement here. It did not intend or want the irregularity you see and has no solutions for eliminating it.
While nature-defying effects created by the system seek balance and stability, this anomaly does nothing of the sort. If it does not grow or change, that is by luck rather than design. More likely, it will continue to exist in some form or another, however dangerous, until such time as the power driving it is disengaged or destroyed.
“That’s not great,” Marco said. “Get Elisa. It’s another piece of her puzzle.”
Elisa didn’t need to be retrieved after all, though, and emerged from belowdecks carrying her notebooks before Aethe could take a single step to find her.
“What is?” Her eyes glinted with interest and wonder as she spotted the pit. “Oh. I see. Yes, that tracks, kind of.”
“It does? How?” Riv had been quiet on the matter up until now, but as usual Elisa was able to shake him out of his stupor. “How could that hole possibly explain anything?”
“Well, it’s the message Marco wrote down. It says something like this. I think. I’m getting better at the language, but there are still a bunch of things I haven’t managed to really make rules for yet.”
She handed over the note. Marco read it, wishing it could just be a bit more reassuring than it actually was.
Danger has been detected/seen. The temple network in this place is stagnant. Previous attempts to slow that effect created time, but have now failed. The energy is in backlash. The water and wind are becoming disastrous in all their forms.
This effect will increase with time. Seek out temples. Seek out solutions. Above all, take the power home. Grow the net.
“So yes, it lines up.” Elisa took the paper back once everyone had read it. “I just wish I understood what it meant by taking back the power or making a bigger net.”
“I think taking back the power is simple enough. We did it once already, unless I’m wrong about a lot of other things. When we took on Jare’s burden.”
“It could be,” Elisa said. “It probably is. But we don’t want to assume. If we can, we need to stop at more temples along the way and try to figure out more about what’s going on. Marco, you didn’t get any kind of tracking to the local temple power like you normally do?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.” Marco sunk his attention into the part of his gut that normally gave him ideas about this kind of thing and found nothing. “Which is weird in and of itself.”
“It does sound like someone’s been patchworking, and now it’s all coming back on them.” Riv said. “You really shouldn’t do that.”