Page 76 of Gate of Chaos


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“Fine. I’m focusing. So if a grimoire getslost, or destroyed, what happens then?”

“The Chaos dragon is on their own.”

I sank back on my ass, stunned and dumb. “What about the Queen’s grimoire?”

“TheQueen’s grimoire?!” Akoni exclaimed.

Keon didn’t react. “Everything of the Queen’s was destroyed, including her children and her name. There’s no grimoire.”

Auryn hugged me around the shoulders and his magic trembled against mine. “It was always a stretch. We always danced on the edge.”

I tried to shake Auryn off. “It can’t be over. There’s got to be something we missed. It can’t end like this!”

Keon seized my hands and crushed them together. His forearms bulged, and the tension rattled his jaw. “Itisover, Helena. There’s nowhere left to look.This has happened before. This is part of order. This is entropy and order at the exact same origin point.”

No. No. No. No.

“You’re where it ends, and where it begins,” Keon said sadly. “A forge-breaker.”

No.

Keon released my hands and reached for his tablet. “Here. We found this about portals. It’s not how Gates were built—they were totally different—but maybe one day this will be useful.”

It was the sort of watered-down semi-technical document I’d have expected to see prepared for a city council, but was actually a presentation on the history of the FTL chorus drive that powered the ships. Because the FTL chorus drive had been based—loosely—off portals.

Portals were created by passing a magical, braided filament—my ribbons and gossamer threads—with a hollow core through local quantum fields, and securing the filament on each end while drawing it tight to pull the fields into cosmic ruching. On either end, the portal was knotted to anchor stones—gravity—, and a power source that would keep the filament rotating to increase the gravity along the thread so it would hold together.

We all called it the “fabric” of space-time, but this was getting a bit absurd. I’d never considered parachute day in PE class to be the physical to-scale manifestation of the cosmos.

A group of non-chaotic engineers had developed the chorus drive theory after carefully studying at least one Chaos dragon. A very carefully selected chorus of Wyrm-caliber dragons could create a similar effect. Even in the “void” of space, there were still quantum fields, and dragon magic was the ability to manipulate quantum fields. Portals passedthroughthe fields and were permanent as long as they were powered, but the chorus could pull the shipoverthem to accelerate. Needle versus boat.

Portals were limited to the planet they had been built upon and subject to a number of rules and limits. Even under the best of circumstances, portals could rarely be longer than two thousand miles. A portal that traversed the wrong point on a planet could upset the planet’s tummy, and nobody wanted to be around for a space rock with a nasty case of planetary norovirus.

But a portal, once built, was permanent, assuming that enough energy continued to be put into it to keep it spinning. Any Wyrm dragon of sufficient power could wind the clock, so to speak. Short-distance or little-used portals did not need as much maintenance.

Thatwas what the K’Dol structure had been for: the waves flowing over and through the carved stone channels had generated power to keep the portal spinning. The Atlantis portal must have remained stable because nobody used it, but the dripping water passing over the rock face must have generated just enough energy to keep it going, while the latent radiation of the crashed ship on the other kept it warm.

Akoni asked the most pressing question. “Is thereanythingon Gates?Anything.”

“We know there were three active Gates: one to Earth, two to other planets. We only have names for those other planets, and no other information. The history and function isn’t known. We only know they exist because they’re mentioned in other documents. We know only the most powerful Chaos dragons could forge Gates. And to make things even more confusing, there are references to Gates going back to the first Chaos dragon. But we, as a species, only achieved spaceflight eighteen thousand years ago. There are no records of contact with other species or worldspriorto our own first contact. So what the Gates were for, or where they led…”

He shrugged.

“That makes no sense,” Akoni said, annoyed. “The power core currently in that slot by the Gate in Northismanufactured. We have the documentation on how and where and when those were manufactured. And the history of how they were developed.”

We sat in the miasma of stillness. It had all just… ended.

Keon tried to hold my hands. I pulled back. “No. The cosmos didn’t make me and go through allthisfor nothing. I’m a forge-breaker.”

“Perhapsthisis what you’re supposed to break apart.” Keon gestured to all of West.

I tucked my hands between my knees. “There’s one thing left.”

Akoni raised a brow.

“K’Dol.”

Twenty-Two

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