[Year 8061, Spivuss 41st.]

The words, numbers and an elaborate carving of the sun rising over Skyisle valley signified the year, season and date on the wooden dial-calendar hanging on the wall of my dad’s woodworking workshop.

“Forty first?” The silver-tinted, pale, mental projection of Delta tilted her head.

“You don’t remember the Ishikarian calendar?” I asked as I packed dad’s backpack with ropes and anchors.

“Lost a bunch of recent memories in the Astral,” She shook her head with a sad look. “Going to have to re-learn some things. What’s Spivuss?”

“You could download this stuff from Bessie, you know,” I commented.

“Then we’d have fewer things to talk about. I really missed talking to you,” she said. “Astral phantoms don’t communicate with words. They mostly sing about how hungry they are and how I should swim into their mouth, become part of them. They have no civilization, no society, only need and want and hunger, an eternal craving for magic that drives them. Most of them are just shells, shadows of things long gone. They aren’t very different from single-celled organisms who exist to consume and to reproduce.”

I glanced at Delta, looking up from my packing. She looked forlorn. Her situation wasn’t the greatest. I was the only person in the world that she could talk to, her only source of understanding, friendship and... entertainment. I looked over the workshop's numerous shelves crammed with tools, materials and old projects. After a minute of contemplation, I grabbed an old, guitar-like instrument and attached it to the side of the backpack.

Then I walked to the wall that held the calendar.

“The Ishikarian calendar consists of six seasons,” I turned the dial on dad’s wooden calendar counter-clockwise and hundreds of gears inside it softly rumbled, moving the stars, the moon and the sun above the carving of Skyisle. “The six months relate to various times of day. Each new year starts with Dawn [Ecaminuss]. There are approximately fifty days in each month.”

I spun the dial forward, Ishikarian hex-numbers changing from one to another. Delta nodded eagerly, reaching out to the wooden calendar with an Infoscope thread extending from her arm.

“Dad carved this calendar himself thirteen and a half years ago,” she commented. “His woodworking magical signature is imprinted onto it. The Ishikaran years approximately coincide with ones from your Earth?”

“As far as I can tell, yes.” I nodded. “Novazem is similar to Earth in several aspects… except for mana, obviously.”

I spun the dial faster. A carving of the sun coming out of the earth revealed itself. “Foreday [Spivuss]. This is the current season. Early spring. Time for planting.”

Delta nodded. I turned the dial forward. The wooden sun rose higher over the carving of a field.

“Noon [Temminus]. Summer. Hot and sunny weather.”

The gears clicked forward. “Sunset [Eaminnus]- Autumn, mild and windy.” A carving of a tree bending in the wind emerged out of the ground.

I spun the dial.

“Twilight [Ottamuss]. Winter weather, frost and first snow.” The display window now showed a snow-covered village.

“Midnight [Ximinnus]. Darkest & deepest winter, lit mostly by the glow of Lunaria.” The wooden sun vanished and Lunaria covered in golden rings came up.

“The mechanism inside this calendar is very interesting,” Delta commented. “The gearwork beneath the panels is made of various magic-reinforced wood. It’s incredibly precise. It reminds me of the Antikythera mechanism!”

I smiled, recalling how I had read about the Ancient Greek hand-powered orrery in a Soviet magazine of scientific discoveries. The Antikythera mechanism was fascinating because it was the oldest known, 2000-year-old, mechanical computer used for predicting the orbits of the moon and planets.

“The people of Ishikaria clearly understand complex mathematics well enough to make analogue computer clockwork, just like ancient Greeks from Earth." I nodded. "We just need to push them in the right direction.”

“If we can,” Delta sighed. “I’m worried about the reach of the Empire. I saw that Kliss has a new armacus packed with Level ninety nine spells. How does the Empire view Ishikaria and Skyisle?”

“As a resource,” I replied. “From the books that Instructor Wiklogg read to us, Ishikaria is described as a Semi-Autonomous territory within the Gregarius Imperium. Technically, any Vow-free Ishikarian can apply to be an Imperial citizen in Agamemnon… all they have to do is abandon their belief in Ishira and say the Vow to Equality.”

“Vows,” Delga sighed. “So everyone in the Empire is like Kliss? That’s not good. That’s really not good.”

“Gregarius is an Empire built on Vows,” I nodded. “It’s how the Empire keeps its citizens in check. Everyone is equal under the Law of Equality. I feel like I’ve gone from one Soviet state to another... except instead of commissars it's Vows that watch over people." I sighed. "We’ve made a mistake with Kliss. Older Vows are stronger… they clearly take precedence. It’s like Asimov’s laws of robotics. The servants of the Empire are more akin to Vow-controlled machines than people.”

“So... how many walk under the Vow to Equality?” Delta asked, her hands trembling and shimmering with Infoscope threads.

“Millions,” I answered. “The Empire has magitek tools and immense, complex machines made by high-artificers. Flying warships, living armor, tanks. Its legions are packed with specialist mages. The levels aren’t exactly mentioned, but they can do a lot if the books are to be believed. Overseer Kliss is just a little fly compared to the people standing above her and the people above her superiors are even stronger.”

“Damn it,” Delta growled.

“The odds were stacked sky-high against us from the start,” I exhaled. “It wasn’t a game that we could win.”

After I talked to Kliss at the edge of the village, discovering through Delta that the Overseer had followed us, I had time to think things over and realized a few things.

It was just me and my soul-sister against the entire Gregarius Imperium. A deadly tsunami of professionals, artifacts and wealth could turn our way at any moment. The might of the Imperium could crush us whenever it wanted, to pulverize all of Skyisle. We were just a mote in the eye of god. The Imperium could blink at any moment to make us disappear.

I knew that we couldn't just vanish Kliss because behind her stood a thousand-some-year-old system, a bureaucracy, the purpose of which was to weed out aberrations like me, to exterminate souls that came up and claimed the place of another. I was concerned that it was only a matter of time until we were discovered, worried that my parents and both of my sisters would end up dead because of me.

“Don't be glum. I’ve got you another chance," Delta said, having evaluated my expression. "Kliss doesn’t know about me and she doesn’t know that you’re an aberration. We need to keep at it."

“I know,” I nodded, putting on the stuffed backpack. “Let's go.”

__________________________________________

The millennia-old Alanian Hex-beacon tower greeted us with its moss-covered walls. White clouds sailing across the deep-blue sky could be spotted through numerous windows and gaps in the ancient structure.

I circled the old tree that grew in the middle of the derelict slowly and carefully, trying not to trip on piles of uneven rubble. My investigation revealed a small, dark cavity between two enormous roots. It was a decent place to put up my dad’s tent.

The large tree was some kind of a mixture between an Oak and a Willow. The thick, purple leaves of the tree shimmered ever so slightly with orange, yellow and pink colours. It was similar to the pink-leafed trees surrounding the Church of Equality, but also very different.

“Is this a magical tree? Why are the leaves doing that?” I asked Delta as I unpacked my newest acquisitions into the tent.

“Yes. It’s a seven-hundred-year-old Mystic-Willow-Oak. It’s been changed by the magrad seeping from the broken batteries beneath the ground. The slowly leaking mana mutated, twisted its genetic structure into something stronger, far bigger than it should have been. That’s what makes it a Mystic tree, as opposed to a regular one.” She replied smugly.

“Magrad?"

"Magical radiation," Delta specified. "Over-abundance of wild mana. I think that one of the batteries is fractured in the Astral."

"Leaking mana? Is that dangerous to us?” I inquired.

“Nah, the Astral Engine is nearly dead and the ley lines leading from the Obelisk to the batteries are all decayed now.” She answered. “There is a little residual mana excess in the tree, but I doubt it’ll make you more messed up than you already are. Hopefully the mana-rich air will make you grow bigger and tougher."

"What about the phantoms?" I inquired.

"As far as I can see, whatever little power remains in the Obelisk is keeping them away," Delta replied. "Anyways, what’s the plan for today?”

I showed her the rope. “First - I’m going to climb to the top of the magic tree.”

“That sounds like a very unsafe idea,” she commented. “You know, I could just fly up there and you can watch from your Mindspace…”

“I could...” I spun the rope tipped with a metal claw and threw it as high as I could. “But it’s not the same experience as doing it in person.”

The hook caught one of the top branches on my third try.

“Teenagers.” Delta rolled her eyes.

“Humans,” I said. “I can’t feel the wind on my face and the perspective looks all wrong through the Infoscope. Help me fuse the claw to the branch. I don't want to fall off.”

Delta’s ghostly avatar flickered to her spell-form. She flew to the top of the tree. The view of what she saw appeared in one of my eyes. I pushed [Modify] through her, securing the claw firmly to the tree, tested the rope and started climbing.

I met her atop of the tree after about ten minutes of climbing. She was sitting down on a branch as a ghostly girl, looking out onto the distance. I sat down next to her, rubbing my sore hands for a few minutes. I really needed to get into better shape, my body was sad and weak.

The clouds slowly parted, revealing a view of Skyisle valley. Waterfalls came down from the glacier-capped mountains, shimmering with azure shades. Countless rainbows manifested wherever the water struck the rocks. Grasses-covered rooftops of the village peeked from between the trees.

“Happy?” She asked.

“Yep,” I nodded, grinning. The ancient tree swayed back and forth, hundreds of colorful leaves whispering softly. I looked up. The metal room topping the tower was decayed beyond saving, featuring hundreds of jaggedly holes. It didn’t look safe. I decided not to climb there.

“Ferrotitanium,” Delta commented, noticing that I was looking at the metal beams. “A lot of this decay isn’t natural. I think the tower might have been attacked. There's nothing of value here. If there was a hex-beacon in that ruin, it’s long gone.”

I looked down. “Do you think it fell, or was it taken?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “I’ll have to scan the ground… very slowly and very carefully. If there was a beacon and it fell… well, it probably contains no-spy runes and… I’m still not fully healed, you know.”

I nodded. The [Skyisle-Ward Master-Key] amulet taken from Kliss twelve years ago was hanging on my chest. It was made to be worn by people, not spells. Unfortunately, the effect of the amulet only extended a few centimeters away from my skin. Delta had to stay inside of my body and scan whatever I touched with my hand or my foot. A couple of times she lost an appendage to a no-spy rune when she had reached out too far outside of the field. The only way to search the ground of the tower for the theoretical parts of the beacon would require me walking all over the floor, while she scanned the ground with her tendrils.

Delta had definitely over-estimated our speed of fixing up this tower. Our investigation revealed that unlike the wards inside of our house, the tower didn’t belong to us - while many of its parts were decayed, the things that remained functional like the batteries and the obelisk were heavily warded against spying and modification. We decided to put this problem to the side for another day.

Having grown bored of sitting on the tree branch, I slid down the rope back to the ground, pulled a shovel from the backpack and started to dig a hole between the two roots, deepening the small alcove.

In a few hours of intensive labor, I had made sufficient space to fit my dad’s tent.

I spent another half hour putting it up, placing it in the hole I'd dug, so that it was mostly hidden in the ground like a Russian peasant’s hut called “Zemlyanka”. I had covered up the tent flap and hidden the entrance and all exposed parts of the tent with brambles, shrubs and branches, making it nearly invisible at a glance.

With enough time, using the smallest amounts of Modify, I planned to fuse the branches permanently to each other around the tent and also to make more room beneath the tree-roots, making it akin to a Soviet World War 2 sniper’s hut.

In the meanwhile, Delta coordinated her bees to build a nest on a low branch right above my small hut, as a second degree of protection.

We didn’t plan to do any cosmetic changes to the tower itself - it was supposed to look like an empty, broken derelict. We’ve made plans to add our own no-spy runes on the tent itself, focused specifically on hiding it from sight. The main issue was building them in a way to make sure that they didn’t hurt Delta. Warding was an incredibly complex science and we had merely scratched its surface with our [Rewind] hexagram.

I unrolled a wrapped up sandwich made by mom and had a brief lunch, taking a break from labor-intensive work. The back of the tent faced a broken wall of the tower, the view showcasing the Valley of Death. The Valley was completely covered in thick, white misty clouds.

When I was done with the sandwich, I pulled out the guitar and tried to play it. It wasn’t amazing and required a bunch of adjustments. Delta helpfully aided me with her scan, telling me what to adjust and where. When I was done, I started to play songs by Soviet composer Vladimir Vysotsky. Though the Soviet Ministry of Culture largely ignored his work, Vysotsky had achieved great renown amongst the regular, hard working people like myself.

My voice was young and imperfect but it didn’t matter. Delta’s ghostly form sat next to me, listening to the words. In a few minutes, she started to sing along inside of my head with the voice of Alysa Selezneva from the "Guest from the Future" film.

We sang songs about comrade Stalin, the wolves of the gulag, friendship, gymnastics, the circus, the drunk genie in the bottle, the butterfly collector and many other songs by Vysotsky that my soul had recalled. Although she was a living spell, a ghostly illusion of a girl sitting next to me, her presence filled my heart with pure joy.

I knew that we were facing practically insurmountable odds, but I also wasn’t afraid to deviate from the path. The mists of the Valley of Death in front of us called out to me, a sinister mystery that hid the ancient past. Somewhere out there was our Legacy and I hoped that we could find a way to retrieve it, succeed where others had failed.