“It won’t work, you know,” Nil said.

At the other side of the room, Dallion kept on hacking at the wall with his Nox dagger. Each strike would leave an unmistakable mark on the transparent surface. Unfortunately, no matter the number of cracks, the wall refused to give in. Not even the smallest piece would chip off, making the otherwise devastating weapon as efficient as a crayon.

Dallion stopped, then slid his hand over the damaged area. The cracks seemed strangely smooth, as if they had been made centuries ago. It was almost as if the room was repairing itself despite the lack of magic symbols.

“It’s supposed to be like that,” the old echo continued from his side of the room. “Only a person from outside can let you out. Well, mostly someone from outside.”

“Why are you here?” Dall asked, still refusing to look the echo in the eye. “I still have my blocker on.”

“Because I created this place, dear boy. You can say it’s linked to me, which allows me to come and go as I choose. If you’re asking why I’m here now specifically, it’s for your benefit entirely.”

Dallion didn’t say a word.

“I suspect something must have happened for you to have put it on, so I thought I’d come help. Judging by your reaction, it might have been the wrong call.”

It almost seemed that the echo was clueless regarding Dallion’s suspicions. It would take much to come up with a plausible story and continue to work together as before. However, that was a temporary measure, and besides that, Dallion knew the echo far too well to fall for such an obvious trick. Nil probably knew everything and what he didn’t, he could guess. Phoil had been the real problem, though, completely blindsiding Dallion. The boy had always seemed suspicious, but all the time Dallion had been convinced he could take him on should it come to a confrontation. Apparently, that wasn’t the case.

“What’s this place?”

“It’s a prison realm. The dwarves called it an oubliette. Of course, theirs were in real life. Thanks to their natural magic, they could build a cage of iron without doors or windows; dwarves could come and go as they please, while the other races would find themselves in an inescapable cell. One fine day someone decided to copy the principle and make an item out of it.”

A realm to be imprisoned in for eternity without the option of dying. Dherma’s former village chief had mentioned that during their fight. Dallion had found the concept slightly disturbing at the time. He’d never imagined he’d experience it. Even now, his mind was refusing to accept the fate that awaited him.

“You created this?”

“I created many things here. Even back when I was an apprentice, I had a knack for modifying realms. My expertise only grew from there.”

“Imprisoning people for infinity? Nice hobby.”

“I wasn’t the one who invented them. I just rediscovered the process. There are a handful of mages capable of making them. The youngsters lack patience, the ambitious set their sights on something more important, which left me to create most of the prison items in the Academy and a few noble houses.” Nil leaned against the wall. “This is one of my early crude attempts. I suppose the boy found it in some closet somewhere. Its purpose was to help teach apprentices to create prison items of their own.”

Insult was added to injury. The item that had imprisoned Dallion was a training prop?

“For the really intricate ones, I was inspired by the principle of the Vermillion ring. Not only was the awakened’s mind captured in the realm, but his body as well.” The echo attempted a smile. “Now that you’re in here, I guess I can tell you how this whole thing works.”

“Just stop!” Dallion shouted. “I know you did this!” Dallion clenched his fists. “You were the Archmage, the one who tried to open a link to the seven worlds and had his lab explode as a result.”

Nil remained silent. There was not enough sarcasm in the world that would help him respond to such an accusation, especially since it was the truth. In truth, the fault was as much his as that of Alien’s faction. The experiment was reckless, to say the least. As far as Dallion was concerned, the only thing worse than having the contraption blow up Archmage’s lab, was allowing it to remain intact.

“You used me to stir things up here,” Dallion continued. “The visit to your friend, the vortex hunts, my time at the Learning Hall. It was all planned so you could get back at them. Well, you must be pleased with yourself.”

A purple whirlwind surrounded Nil. Several seconds later, it was gone, presenting an entirely different person. The old aristocrat was gone, replaced by someone with the embodiment of authority—a mage so powerful that at one point the entire Academy had trembled before him.

“You’re correct. I have used you for my purposes. In my mind, there never was any doubt that you’d become a hunter. Most otherworlders do. You, Jiroh, and Eury were supposed to gather what I had lost, and you did. However, I never even imagined you could obtain the magic trait. Once you did, everything fell into place. I’d no longer have to hunt down the scraps that were lost from my research building. Instead, I planned to use you to reclaim what’s rightfully mine.”

The echo took several steps towards Dallion. In his current form, he was a whole head taller, despite Dallion being in his normal size.

“Even now, there are a few who are still loyal to me. None of them are of particular significance, but they are there and grateful to me. Yet, there’s one thing you were wrong about.” He narrowed his eyes. “I wasn’t the one who let out the shardflies, nor was I the one who imprisoned you here.”

Every instinct told Dallion that the man was telling the truth. And still, he was uncertain whether he should believe him. Beyond a certain level, it became impossible to tell whether someone was lying, even while using awakened means.

“If you didn’t cause this, how was I to get your things back?” Dallion asked.

“By becoming an exceptional apprentice. You’re already quite skilled. A mage your level, and with Moon magic within, it was all but certain that a high-ranking mage would be put in charge of your apprenticeship. Maybe the Archmage himself would take you on. From there, it would have been a simple thing to have you set up an intricate spell that would transport the horde of items to me.”

So, Dallion wasn’t wrong about Adzord, at least not entirely.

“And if I had refused?”

“That’s the beauty of it, dear boy. I wouldn’t have told you. All you needed to do was go to specific spots at specific times. I would have done the rest.”

“Casting spells from my personal realm into the real world?” Dallion couldn’t help but be impressed.

“I was exceptionally skilled once. They reduced a lot of my power when they banished me from here, but not all. I still have enough for a trick or two.”

You’ve been using me all along, Dallion said to himself. Then again, Dallion had also taken advantage of his knowledge. It was almost a true symbiotic relationship... of sorts.

“If you made this, do you know a way out?” Dallion asked.

“Oh, everyone knows a way out. There’s no absolute prison, except one created by the Moons. Prison artifacts always allow escape. It’s all a matter of odds: keep the awakened long enough so that first and hunger take their toll.”

Dallion looked back at the wall behind him. There was no trace of the marks he had left there minutes ago. Clearly, that wasn’t the way to go. He had to be smart about this, not rush at it with brute force.

“How about challenging the guardian?” he asked. “Won’t that get me out?”

“It would. That’s why I made sure that the prison items had no guardians. In order to make a prison item, one must use an artifact. And when I saw use, I mean use. The realm of the original sphere item is completely erased and something different emerges in its place. The more impressive the artifact, the stronger the prison.”

Good thing you didn’t get your hands on a world item, Dallion thought.

“One more thing, dear boy. I know I usually accuse you of charging before thinking. In this case, you have to do just that. There’s one other thing that separates a prison item from a normal one: the passage of time.” The echo drew a pattern in the air with the wave of the hand. The entire room lit up. “I’m not sure about the time ratio of this prison, but for every week here, a second might well pass in the real world. It might be a month or even a year, but a few seconds is all the boy out there needs to kill you. If you don’t find a way to escape before then… well, there’s no point in discussing what would happen.”

From that moment, the search began. While Nil couldn’t remember the specifics of the prison realm he had built, he shared a few of the basics. Unlike what one might imagine, escaping from the realm didn’t involve solving a puzzle or completing a challenge. The closest one could compare it to was safecracking. In order to return to the real world, Dallion had to shatter part of the realm, and the item with it. Brute force was as good a method as any, although prison realms were usually protected against such approaches. Magic also didn’t seem to work. At one point, Dallion even tried a series of point attacks in the hopes he could drill a hole through a spot on the wall. Sadly, nothing worked.

“You didn’t leave any weak-spots.” Dallion sat on the floor to rest a bit. Combat splitting had saved him the time to try to attack each individual spot in the room. Sadly, it hadn’t done much to preserve his strength. “How did you hide the magic threads?”

“Behind the walls,” Nil explained. “No illusions, from what I could remember. I just took advantage of the material. It’s actually a wall of sand.”

“Doesn’t look like sand.” Dallion slid the tip of his Nox dagger along the floor.

“That’s because you’re thinking of the grain, not the wall. Have you tried writing on sand? Everything is quickly filled in as soon as you remove your finger. This is the same. It’s not that the wall repairs itself, it just moves about to fill the space you’ve created.”

That was rather interesting. If true, it also meant that Dallion wasn’t causing any damage with his attacks, but rather displacing the material to other parts of the room.

Drawing a spell in the air, he tried to open a portal to the realm of water, as Harp had shown him. Yet no sooner had the portal formed that it flickered away without having any effect.

“Portal spells don’t work,” Nil said. “And neither would a vermillion rind. Not here, in any event.”

“You’ve thought of everything.”

“Dear boy, it’s not difficult to consider the obvious ways out. You’ll have to use some of your out of the box thinking if you want to get ahead.”

Dallion did just that.

Without wasting a moment, he drew the heat symbol on one of the walls and stepped back. This time, the symbol flashed in a magnificent purple, instantly heating up the wall like a furnace.

“You won’t be able to melt it,” Nil sounded slightly disappointed.

“That’s not what I had in mind.” Dallion drew another heat symbol, not too far away. This one, though, was made in such a way so as to extract heat, effectively freezing the part of the wall. “I just need to harden part of it.”