21st of Gnielm, 334 EA
Citadel of the Athalial League, Athal
Sylber saw the shape of a whisper, rippling out across endless disjointed space, and it drew him to fixation.
He was sitting, now, days later, searching in his way staying perfectly still. A tapestry of starlight adorned the ceiling above him erudite symbols representing all that had ever been seen. A living network, nodes of real space and faintly pulsing threads like trails of comets. The Dome of the Atlas, a monumentalized map of all the demiplanes explored by the Athalial League.
“To the request of guildfellow Sylber Huekrib,” the voice of an archivist, even toned and disembodied by prestidigitation, rolled out through the hall, “refocusing on the known cluster Illiara.”
The ceilings display washed over into a single solid wall of illumination, before allowing blank space back in to reform a clear picture of a subsection of the former map. All around scholars grumbled and tuned out, reorganizing their notes or rubbing rest into their eyes.
“Oy, Sylber.” A voice, leaning over from behind, whispered. It was one he knew well enough, Jolien’s. They had come up together through the Commission of Discernment, before she fell fully under the sway of Reach ideology and switched tracts onto the Commission of Naturalization. “What’s the deal? Illiara’s a dead zone, tread back and forth. Why pull the focus?”
“I’m not sure, yet.” Sylber thumbed his quill, eyes still locked up to the ceiling. “There were some readings coming off of a waystation out there, anomalies in the aether. Something incongruous.”
“Well fuck, Syl,” Jolien let out a snort, “Illiara’s got the highest concentration of wild magic zones anywhere on the lattice, it might as well be nothing but anomalies. If your goal is to carve any gen coming out of that clusterfuck into a reasonable shape you’ll be whittling your whole career.”
“This is different.” Sylber said simply, fingers tracking over paper notes he had brought with him.
“Oh, sorry, my mistake,” Jolien spoke a little bit too loudly to be anything other than mocking, “This is different everybody. Raise the banners. I thought the whole dome was being held up from actual research on a lark, but this, this is different.”
“What’s your problem, Jolien?” Sylber’s brow furrowed, peeved.
“My problem is that Illiara is a waste of your talent. It’s been on the board for two centuries, and in that time how much has it gotten the League? Barely anything. We’ve walked the length and breadth of it, but it’s so fraught that nobody wants to settle there. It’s worthless.” She paused long enough to slug down the dregs of her tea. “Why not focus that beautiful big brain of yours on something wholly new, something nobody’s ever touched before?”
“That’s not how this works. That’s not it at all.” Sylber’s posture remained still as he explained, “We’re here to explore, to discover. To learn. I am, at least. And you don’t get to learn something from nothing. There have to be reference points. New knowledge comes when you think on the spaces between where we are sure.”
And just at that moment, the quantities fell into place.
“Spaces between.” Sylber mumbled to himself.
“What was that?” Jolien asked, again too loudly.
“Look, there and there.” Sylber pointed up towards two parallel streams of planar links, flattened from circular to a subtle oval in their constituent map. “I read those planes as Elohnih and the Sylva of the Three Takes. Is that right?”
“What? Yeah, that’s what it says there. What about them?” Jolien leaned over the back of the chair further.
“Look at these metrics.” Sylber held up the scrawled parchment for Jolien to examine. “From the waystation on Elohnih. The tensile undulation in its perpendicular connecting leylines, the way it modulates as a fixed point against the centrifugal rotation that that cycle it’s a part of should be exhibiting. Three Takes does the exact same thing, equal but opposite. That shouldn’t happen, unless-”
“Unless there was a leyline between the two of them that wasn’t listed on the map.” Jolien finished the thought, glibness giving way to dawning understanding.
“Exactly.” Sylber’s words tumbled over each other excitedly, “There’s a gap between them, one that we didn’t know to fill until something started making noise inside of it. And I’d stake my heart on the guess that it’s not just a leyline between them, I think there’s a whole new demiplane. Otherwise where in all hells would the disturbance be coming from in the first place?”
The two sat a moment, staring up at the empty space between the two blinking dots meant to symbolize entire worlds.
Sylber stood suddenly, a flurry of movement as he began collecting the papers that had worked him up to this revelatory thought. “I’m going. I’ll have provost Grejyre post a contract, she’s out in that direction last I heard, and I’ll take it myself. I think you should come to.”
A beat passed, and Sylber cracked a knowing smile. “Who knows what we’ll find, now that we’ve found it.”
The Etra Anthology 