From the sky above, Thessa had a full view of what happened on the ship with Erika and her new Omic crew. Part of her couldn't help but feel guilty.
"I feel like we might be asking too much from Erika," the Keeper said to her companion, Magister Vienna.
Unlike the Fae, the most lethal woman on the planet hardly batted an eye at the tiny dot struggling in the fathomless waves below. Her hand danced across the controls as she piloted the ship with the skill of someone who had survived countless dogfights in the cold, empty void of space.
The situation couldn't be more bizarre: an ancient warrior of humanity accompanying a disgraced heir of the exalted Landia clan, riding the Prime Magister's personal spacefaring egg straight into the fortified front gate of Fae Garden.
The Light Clan girl, unable to stand the frigid atmosphere, turned toward the brunette at her side. "Should we go down and help her a little?"
"She will be fine," Vienna answered without glancing back. "Something tells me she thrives under pressure."
"Are you sure?" Thessa's voice tightened as clouds rushed past them through the front window. The Ambassador surfed above the stormy layer and approached the vast, lonely blackness of space.
She never liked the void. The knowledge that only a thin layer of metal, or Fairy-Wood, separated her from death by suffocation always terrified her.
Vienna, detecting the subtle change in the Fae's tone, swiveled toward the paling Keeper. Her mouth twisted into the gleeful smile of a prankster.
Like a cheeky child, she pulled the ship up in a sharp swerve. The Ambassador rumbled and dipped; G-force slammed them backward like a tidal wave. Thessa shrieked, her composure completely shattered. The scream would have continued until the reinforced window cracked had Vienna not decelerated the ship into a comfortable drift toward the starry vacuum.
Thessa's heart settled back into her chest. A snicker from beside her ignited her temper like kindling.
"You did that on purpose!"
"You are funny," Vienna didn't even try to hide her amusement. "I'm surprised there's a space traveler who can't handle this level of speed. Aren't you an Adept Warrior? Emotional control should come naturally to you."
Thessa crossed her arms, unimpressed by the prank. "I never went out to space much. And do you think every Adept Warrior keeps their guard up all the time?"
"Very well, High Priestess of the Leviathan."
"Don't call me that!"
"Aren't they elegant creatures?" Vienna's eyes sparkled with mischief. "You should be pleased with your title."
Thessa suppressed the urge to punch Vienna in the face—not because it was immature, but because she doubted punching someone so far out of her league qualified as a productive use of calories. Perhaps stepping on the Magister's toes would be a better revenge.
Before she could put her idea into practice, Artemis's voice sounded throughout the cabin.
"We are receiving a transmission from a frequency our database identifies as belonging to the Landia Clan."
Thessa sighed. "Patch her in. Don't send us the image transmission, just the voice."
"Yes, little girl."
"I'm not—"
A 'click' rang out and a grating, high-pitched voice emerged.
"To the ship arriving from the Planet of Omicron, this is Mimio Landia, the heiress of—"
"Hello, Mimio," Thessa greeted, her expression flatter than a frozen lake.
"Thessa? You're on the ship."
"Yes, and you're here to drag me to Camelot to be tried by the elders, right?"
"How did—"
"We've been monitoring the Rift Lines around Omicron for days. Just hurry up and unlock the gate to Fae Garden's domain so we can get this over with."
"Who are you to make demands of—"
"I'm the older sister you booted to a planet which is now spiraling out of the family's control." Thessa raised her eyebrows. "You shoved me there. I know you're the one receiving the heat for what happened." She leaned forward. "Or would you prefer I turn back and gallivant off to another planet? It's been a long time since we played a game of catch, but I doubt the elders would appreciate you failing to bring me in."
"Wait. You're giving yourself up without a fight?"
"Why bother fighting when I did nothing wrong?"
A silence fell for a second. The muffled sound of a scuffle came from the other end of the line before a new voice called out.
"Lady Thessa, it has been a long time."
"Elder Green," the former heiress identified the speaker immediately. "Took you long enough to get that idiot off the controls."
The elder laughed. "This is the first task the council has given her. And your accomplishments on Omicron have her worried. I'll be undoing the lock on the Twisted Garden now. Can I trust you to come peacefully?"
"That's the plan. And it feels good to talk to you again, Elder."
"The feeling is mutual, Thessa."
The transmission cut, leaving a grumpy Fae and one thoroughly amused Magister.
"Is that your little sister?" Vienna asked. "What a delightfully mischievous child."
"Don't let your guard down," Thessa warned. "She might be incompetent in almost everything else, but she excels at using her connections to get what she wants."
"Oh, she's that type," Vienna smirked. "Shouldn't be a problem for me, then."
Thessa studied the Magister's face. She had no idea what inspired such confidence, and in some way, she admired the brunette's bravado.
"I don't know how you can be so confident."
"Let's just say I know something you don't," Vienna replied, flicking a sequence of levers. "We're entering the Rift Lines—brace yourself."
Space shuddered. The Ambassador roared, its Rift Compass churning as the laws of physics parted before ancient mysticism. From that gap in reality emerged the pearly gate. The milky pathway shimmered with starlight and wonder, fracturing the black emptiness around them. Reality twisted upon itself, and soon the silvery egg of The Ambassador slipped into another realm entirely.
Thessa leaned back as the void warped into the surreal spacescape of the Rift Lines. She had opened similar passages many times on Omicron. Most Rift Lines linked two marked locations through transdimensional space, allowing travel that circumvented light's unyielding speed limit. But this journey was different—traveling into Fae Garden carried its own peculiar weight.
"Home sweet home," Thessa said with what Vienna recognized as barely contained longing.
The shining path of Rift Lines faded into fog and finally into an ethereal forest extending beyond comprehension. This dimension twisted light itself into something resembling fading morning mist—but the ever-moving bark, shifting like brown sands caught in phantom winds, revealed the true nature of their surroundings. Around them played melodies that existed nowhere else in the song of the universe: a kingdom ruled by meandering laws, neither kind nor cruel.
They had arrived inside the domain of the Five Fae Clans, the Twisted Garden where the descendants of Luna resided.
"I always wondered why this place resembled a wood from Old Earth," Vienna muttered.
The Fae turned toward the human, surprised. "Wait, this is a wood from Old Earth?"
"Most of the forests on Old Earth have already been torn down," the reply sounded wistful. "What remains is under the nobility's control."
Vienna resumed piloting the ship. Thessa watched her companion closely. Something felt hollow about this woman. Part of her understood the reason: no culture could remain spiritually healthy after having so many pieces taken from it.
The Keeper—whose status was in doubt—managed to feel something akin to gratitude. Her position might not be enviable, but unlike humanity and High Terraria, the Fae Garden hadn't fallen into a cultural regression at terminal velocity. She would have spent the entire journey back home delving deeper into melancholy had Artemis not chimed in at that moment.
"Magister, we've detected a broadcast from the previous channel."
"Let me guess: Mimio is yelling nonsense at us again."
"No, Miss Landia. It's an SOS signal."
"A what?"
Vienna's veteran instincts activated the moment 'SOS' registered in her ears. "Patch the broadcast in," she barked. "And how long would it take us to reach their coordinates?"
Artemis began playing the audio: "This is Landia-5," came a garbled voice, heavily distorted by white noise. "We are under attack by unknown assailants. Requesting aid from any—"
The voice cut off abruptly, and Artemis proceeded to deliver another piece of bad news.
"Due to the twisted nature of Fae Garden, the onboard sensors can barely operate. It's impossible to pinpoint our exact arrival time at the location. My self-driving software cannot navigate this area of space. I believe I lack—to quote the Prime Magister—'mental awareness' to do it."
"Right," Thessa suddenly remembered the obvious problem. "The Twisted Garden is a place where distance and time are almost meaningless. Only sentient biological entities can navigate through this place."
She skipped most of the technical explanation. As a star student, she understood it had something to do with how specialized electromagnetic spectrum wavelengths perceived through optic nerves triggered several dozen hormones that provided directional sense in this place. Without those necessary components, this special area of the Rift Lines would resemble a blank void where location markers didn't exist.
"I know that," Vienna grumbled. "Even the old man still couldn't replicate how we navigate this place for an AI."
"Everyone will be dead by the time we arrive manually. Wait—"
Thessa, confronted with a crisis, suddenly conceived an idea. It was the same type of crazy initiative-taking which helped her complete Omicron Wizardry, but had also led her to attack Edgar on Leviathan Nest. The result had been a mixed bag, but in times like these, she felt ever so thankful for her inability to hesitate.
She hurried to the back of the ship, into Wonderweiss's onboard medical bay, and slipped on her Fairy-Wood armor and her trusty Artillery Staff.
"What are you doing?" Vienna leaned back in her chair.
"Every Adept Warrior has a recall safety protocol embedded in case they get thrown out in the Twisted Garden," Thessa explained. "This entire place is nothing but twisted Rift Lines, where ground and sky don't even exist, so we developed a technique to pull our officers to the nearest ship when someone falls overboard during exercises."
"And how does that—"
"The marker locks to the nearest Fae Garden ship—in this case, Mimio's."
Vienna blinked. "You plan to throw yourself off this ship, activate the safety device, and let it drag you to a vessel that's being assaulted by an unknown force?"
"Brilliant plan, right?" Thessa walked toward the airlock of their vessel, but Vienna swiftly intervened.
"This is a horrible plan!" she shouted. "You don't know the enemy's numbers and have no backup. Hand that recall beacon to me—"
"It's locked only to me," Thessa murmured. "I know you're much stronger, but I need to go. Sorry." Her eyes darkened with resolve. "That girl is an idiot, but she's still family."
Vienna stuttered uncharacteristically. The brunette knew she couldn't win this argument. The blonde Fae's face began merging with countless faces of soldiers she'd sent into danger. Like those times—too many times—Vienna steeled herself and maintained a strong front.
She couldn't let this burden show. It would be bad for both of them if the senior officer lost her composure.
"This is a tracker designed to work through scramblers. It will send out a slow-dispersing tracer we can detect even in this place," Vienna pressed the device into Thessa's hand. "Take this with you, and it will show me the exact path to follow. Just hold on until I reach you."
The young Fae nodded and stepped into the airlock—a small chamber set apart from Wonderweiss's medical equipment. She took one last look at her concerned comrade.
"Don't worry, I'll come back," Thessa promised.
"Good luck, and don't die," she said as a transparent forcefield separated them.
Thessa nodded and punched one of the few buttons she understood. The gate clicked, alarms blared, and Artemis warned: "The gate will open in three seconds. Please get ready, Miss Landia."
The gate slowly lifted, and Thessa felt the cosmic atmosphere striking her face. She was familiar with this ethereal breeze; her pet Rift-Rift could open gates like this often. She should be used to this by now, but her thighs still shook at the thought of implementing her half-baked gamble in a place like the Twisted Garden.
Thessa muttered a minor prayer to Luna, closed her eyes, and stepped outside the ship. Weightless nothing greeted her for a second before Thessa mentally reached out to the psychic interface of her armor and triggered the recall option. She had done this several times during training safety drills.
And like those times, her stomach lurched and space flipped. She gripped the beacon tightly, terrified of dropping it.
Thessa had no idea how to describe this sensation. Falling shouldn't be possible where gravity didn't exist, but this experience seemed similar enough. She fell from The Ambassador's airlock and saw everything shatter into a million shards of glass. After what felt like an eternity of falling deeper and deeper, frantically waving her arms in the pit of broken space, she, at last, landed on a deck of Fairy-Wood with a thump.
Thessa groaned in pain and got up, only to be hit with the burning stench. She shook her head and scowled, feeling the heat of flaming chemicals eating through the deck in smoldering piles surrounded by prone bodies in Fairy-Wood armor and...
"This couldn't be an official uniform," Thessa hurriedly investigated one of the bodies—charred, but its diminutive frame told her this used to be a goblin. "Oh no," she found a signet bearing a familiar flaming ship sigil. "What is a goblin from Kondu doing here?"
But her question was soon interrupted by the sound of an explosion emerging from deep inside the ship.