“Those who had the fortune – or misfortune – to witness a scene that would be passed on as a legend forever onwards were typically not the strong, or the important, or the intelligent. It was instead simply those who just happened to be at the right place at the right moment to witness said event by mere happenstance.

Or, again, for some it might well be the wrong place at the wrong time, for those caught up in such an event in a less pleasant manner.” - Cinna-Dahl Edmuntae, elven historian.

“By me gramma’s bearded cunt!” cursed the old dwarf as he came to his senses. Everyone in the caravan – Aideen and Celia included – were caught entirely off-guard by the events that took place before their eyes, likely less than a day’s travel away from their location or so at most. “What in all of creation was that fucking about!?”

“A working of Void magic…” muttered Aideen almost subconsciously to the dwarf’s question. Even she still looked in awe at what just took place moments ago, her mind replaying the event over and over as she tried to make some semblance of explanation for it. “It was a working of Void magic… just on a scale far larger than any I had ever witnessed… or even thought possible.”

“That’s… That’s an entire mountain! Gone just like that!” Celia pointed out, no less awestruck than everybody else. Like most of the others, she didn’t even have a proper idea of what just happened. Even Aideen’s muttered explanation mostly went in one ear and out the other, as her brain had a hard time parsing the information as what it was. “Gone like it was never there!”

Most everyone felt the same way as she did.

Even Aideen had a difficult time believing what she had just witnessed with her own eyes. She had seen another magic of similar caliber in the past, namely the death orb that the Bone Lord used to entirely depopulate the city of Danna, but that had been a different case. The Bone Lord’s magic only affected living things and left the city otherwise unharmed. On the other hand, whatever just took place removed an entire mountain and then some.

Void magic was one of the least explored areas of magic in the world, if only due to the dearth of proper Void mages. The most potent and skilled Void mage Aideen knew were people who worked for the Death’s Hand, one of which was extremely skilled at manipulating the void that he practically clad himself in an armor of void in battle, which rendered him nearly impervious to all harm while making any of his touches potentially deadly.

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Most Void mages that survived their awakening were like him, Void-Dancers, as they were called, and used their magic in similar ways, keeping it close to themselves. The other half of Void mages, those with Death affinity as their major, survived their awakening even more rarely, and as such there were even fewer of them in existence.

The way they used Void magic greatly resembled what Aideen had just witnessed, however.

It was the scale that boggled her mind. The Void mages she knew could only project their magic a couple meters away from them while keeping the working stable, at best. The orb they had just witnessed must have had a radius of several kilometers at the very least, and from the result she saw, was not a hollow sphere either, as everything within was simply consumed by the void.

After she took a bit more time to think about it, however, she realized that she had witnessed a rather similar phenomenon before.

“Are there stores of mana stones beneath that mountain?” she asked.

“Mana stones? Yes, why?” asked the old dwarf after a moment of surprise at her question. He seemed to think about it a bit more before he elaborated further. “We still had plenty of enchanted artifacts from the old kingdom and those were almost always powered by mana stones, so there was likely a steady stock of it back in the ruins. What about them?”

To use mana stones to power enchanted artifacts was a commonplace solution, usually designed to allow artifacts that needed more mana to function to be usable for even non-mages, who generally lack the mana density needed to power it themselves. As a culture that held the arts of crafting and enchantment highly, the dwarves were naturally masters of it.

However, Aideen also recalled the result of an experiment gone wrong, when Colin – the goblin researcher her grandpa had sponsored – tried to enact a working far beyond his own capacity by tapping a mana stone rather than having others work together with him. The resulting explosion from that experiment burned the inside of the lab, along with Colin himself to ashes. They only learned of it because Colin was unliving and thus capable of reporting the incident once his physical form had been reconstituted.

The explosion had also been far greater in scale than what Colin and the mana stone together should have been able to empower.

“Seen something similar before. A researcher tried to empower something beyond his capacity by directly tapping a mana stone. Everything burned and blew up into ashes, the whole lab was a loss,” explained Aideen. She noticed how the old dwarf looked askance at her, as if asking what that had to do with the event they witnessed. “That researcher was a middling mage at best, and he used one mana stone.”

“Oh-” said the dwarf as understanding dawned on his mind. If a middling mage and a single mana stone could cause a conflagration that demolished an entire lab, then with the vast warehouses of mana stones beneath the mountains, paired with a far more capable mage… “Me be a beardless cretin. Archmage Rockwell!”

“I don’t claim to be familiar with Archmage Rockwell, or the dangers beneath the mountain, but I’m very familiar with how people might react in desperate situations,” Aideen continued, the faces of many in the caravan having paled visibly by then as they digested the potential consequences of the cataclysm they just witnessed. “If something down there drove Archmage Rockwell to desperate straits, and he happened to be near a mana stone warehouse… It wouldn’t have been too strange for him to try to make use of them in a desperate, last ditch gamble… and we might have just witnessed his final and greatest working of magic just earlier.”