“It knows Essentia.”

“The Diary, sister.”

“Not our biggest concern. It seeks the Temples.”

“Prepare our Children, sister. Agreement must be forged.”

“My king… My friend has died?” The armored dwarf uttered with sadness.

“I’m sorry, Heulir.”

There was a short silence after which the dwarf furiously shouted words that could probably be heard throughout the whole City.

“What happened? Who is responsible for this act of pure evil? I swear to Rem, if I ever find this creature I will strangle it with my own Dwarven hands!”

“Calm down, friend. There’s no need to speak like this. Like I earlier said to our good friend Kate: we don’t have the slightest clue of what happened to our king, nor who did it.”

“I… My… Excuse me, I need a minute,” he said while walking off with a mixed expression of anger and sadness on his face.

“Will he be alright?” Even though I didn’t know the Dwarf, I sincerely felt bad for him.

“I hope so, he has known The King ever since he was born. I imagine this must throw his whole life head over tails.”

There was a silence in the conversation, accompanied by Val’s glassy sounds – which had grown accustomed to me by now – in which we both looked at nothing in specific. In the end, Feldir was the one to break the silence.

“You should get going…”

“Why would I worry? In theory I have an eternity of time to talk to The King, right? It’s not like he’s just going to vanish…” That sounded way more rude than I originally anticipated. It apparently sounded rude enough for Valentina to turn slightly red.

“Watch your attitude, young lady.”

“Excuse me, I didn’t mean for that to come out the way it did.”

Feldir completely ignored my apology. “He won’t leave The Plane anytime soon, that’s right. But that doesn’t mean you have much time to find out what happened. Our monarchy is on the verge of breaking down due to this. The King didn’t leave any family members behind, so there will be a race for power starting any moment when the other Dwarves figure this out.”

“Is there no mention of a possible successor in his testament?”

“You seem to forget The King died unexpectedly at a relatively young age; sadly, he didn’t have any testament prepared yet.”

“Are you going to compete in this race for power, Feldir?” I don’t know if I would be concerned if he was. It didn’t seem like a good idea to me anyway.

“Of course I am not. It would only cause more uproar; I live eternally: I’d be the last king The City will have known; our civilization won’t accept that without any sign of violence.”

“Good point. Now where can I find this Ethereal Plane?”

“All things come in good time, Kate. You cannot go to The Plane yet.”

“But didn’t you say I need to hurry? Wasn’t a race for power just starting?”

“I did, but you don’t understand. You still need a way of defending yourselves with Essentia.”

“Feldir, you know I can manipulate it. I’d love to learn from you, but I have The Book of Love with me, there’s no need for any advanced Essentia Manipulation just yet.”

“I know, but think about it Kate, what do you need for Essentia Manipulation?”

“A great source of power and knowledge…”

“No,” he interrupted my reasoning, “That is incidental. What is the principle thing you need with Essentia Manipulation?”

“A lot of focus? A clear mind?”

“No!” Feldir – the one who told me that ‘all things come in good time’ – was, ironically, becoming impatient, “The base of Essentia Manipulation is the ability to reach and harvest Essentia.”

“Well… yeah, I figured…”

“How were you planning on getting the Essentia? You weren’t thinking it’d just appear out of thin air, were you?”

“No… of course I wasn’t. I just hadn’t stood still by the fact—”

“Good, because you can’t. And that’s not a given for you alone, that goes for all non-divine creatures on The Lands. We need a medium from which we gather Essentia. Granted: since you’ll be going through a lot of grassland and forests, there will be plenty of fauna and flora to harvest for Primal Essentia, but you can’t be reliant on that in this stage of The Third Era anymore, especially since there isn’t any form of harvestable Essentia inside The Plane, aside from the Mortis that resides there – which you won’t be needing.”

“So, what do you suggest?”

He reached inside his inner pocket for something. A few seconds later he looked up with a giant grin on his face and threw six small, sharp shards of what I assumed to be glass in my general direction, to which I yelled, with probably the most high-pitched “Aaah!” I’ve ever yelled in my entire life, and held my arm in front of my head in order to protect it.

Nothing hit me, however, and all I heard was a loud laugh coming from Feldir. I lowered my hand and saw the glass shards where in reality seven tiny, gray-tinted crystals, floating in mid-air about a feet in front of me.

“Are you out of your mind? That gave me a heart attack!” It did, at least in the metaphorical sense.

“I’m sorry Kate, I couldn’t resist it.” He kept laughing at it.

I don’t know if I was feeling mad or still afraid, but, either way, I wanted to punch Feldir right in the eye.

“So what are these?” I asked after a moment of calming down.

“These are uncharged Essentia Crystals.”

I remembered reading something about Essentia Crystals being uncharged in The History and Use of Essentia, they are Crystals which don’t have an Essentia type bound to them yet. Essentia types are bound to Crystals whenever they are first touched by any type; from that point onwards the Crystal will only store that specific type.

“So, how do I charge these then?”

“You don’t. You don’t have time to stop by the Essentia Farm right now, so I’ll channel some of my own to your Crystals.”

All of his Crystals began floating right above his head in a straight line, the same happened for mine – which were only about a tenth of the size of his – but a few inches away from them. Six flows of liquefied, gassy Essentia were coming from his – now slowly turning grayer – Crystals, which formed into a spherical structure. One of the Crystals – the blue one, which I assumed housed Water Essentia – fell out of the colorful ray of Essentia rather quickly, as the Crystal started to crack when it was nearing the end of its storage. Not much after, the spherical structure began changing color fairly rapidly, and from it originated six new Essentia rays, each going into its own Crystal, as they were rapidly filling in color, until they were fully filled – with the exception of the blue one, of course.

After he had channeled some of his Essentia to my Crystals, he fell to his knees, completely exhausted. Both Valentina and I rapidly floated towards him.

“Feldir, are you alright?” We helped him get back on his feet.

“Thanks for helping me. I’m fine, don’t worry. I’ve just grown too old for this kind of demanding Essentia Manipulation.”

“You should take a rest.”

“I should, but not before I know you’re on your way to The Plane.”

“I’ll leave right away, where is the exit?”

He looked straight towards me with either surprise or disbelieve in his eyes.

“You don’t plan on walking all the way there, right?”

“Actually… I was. Is there a better alternative?”

“Of course there is! Walking all the way there would take you… What? Like three or four days? That is if you don’t encounter anyone.” He mumbled something I could barely understand: “Or anything, for that matter.”

“So you’re saying you can bring me straight to The Plane?”

He smiled at my ignorance.

“I fear it’s not that easy. I can take you about halfway there, but that’s it.”

“How?”

“In the same way you got navigated through the tunnels under The Mountain: Air Essentia Powered Teleportation Units, but one which is vastly more powerful.”

“You mean there’s one located here, in The City?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

I wasn’t so much happy as I was annoyed by that fact.

“So why couldn’t you just send me straight towards The City, instead of dropping me off in a random cave?”

“You don’t seem to know how the Teleportation Units work. See, the way they transport you is through the roots of The Tree of Life. It takes the Essentia you’re composed of and sends them through said roots, and not all roots are directly connected to one another. The Teleportation Unit in The Library had only direct contact with the Unit in those tunnels, otherwise it’d have to pass through The Tree of Life.”

“And why can’t we go through The Tree of Life?”

“That’s simple: first and foremost, it just takes too much Essentia to send a creature all the way through there, and secondly: The Tree is well-guarded. If the creature saw it being used for means like these, she would probably go on a rampage to destroy all who misuse the natural flow of Essentia.”

“One more question: Why can you share this information with me, even though you are bound to a Vinculum Anathemium?”

“Contrary to what you might think, a Vinculum Anathemium is a very forgiving curse with a strict set of rules which can be evaded fairly easily. In my case, it makes a clear difference between giving new, detailed information and clarifying already experienced facts. Since you already experienced Essentia flow, as well as traveled through Teleportation Units several times, this information is classed in the latter category, and thus is not counted as breaking the Vinculum.”

Feldir was doing some strange hand gestures again, which made the Essentia Crystals slowly move to my general direction, floating still in mid-air.

“Here,” he said while lowering his hands again, “The Crystals are now bound to your being. They will float around you and follow you around wherever you go. They’ll even make sure not to fly into anything and stupidly break. And the best part? It doesn’t even require Magica Essentia to stay functional!”

“Thanks. Now where is this teleporter?”

He made the hand sign to follow him, as he went down the flights of stairs Val and I were so eager to get up to.

He took us to the stone castle which was located roughly in the middle of The City, on the place where the sun would stand perpendicular to it exactly at noon. The castle was enormous, and made out of smooth, light gray stones all the way from bottom to top. It consisted of three stories, each smaller in size – like an ancient type of pyramid almost. The windows it had – it had a lot of windows – were decorated on the outside with Essentia Crystals which, I assumed, were both functioning as a light source, and as a way to show the riches of The King. Each floor had its own color of Crystal: First green, then yellow, and lastly purple.

The outside part of each floor was contained by battlements. I didn’t see anyone patrolling on the walkways, but I figured that was because there no longer was a king to protect. There wasn’t any crowd at the door of the castle just yet, but it probably wouldn’t take much longer before that was the case when people realized the position of power was up for grabs.

“Look at the sheer size of this place…” I said mostly to Valentina and myself. “I know we saw it from all the way back there, but when you’re right next to it… Makes you feel really small, especially for you probably.”

“Excuse me?” Feldir took that as an insult towards him.

“Oh right… Sorry, I wasn’t talking about you, Feldir.”

The door was a big, wooden one, reinforced with metal plating and sealed with vines all over. Feldir made the vines retreat towards the doorframe using some Earth Essentia, and opened the door with ease.

“Are you sure you’re allowed to do that?”

“Silly Kate, of course I am! I’ve been a friend of the royal family ever since Gilmor I, first King under The Mountain, was born.”

The door swung open and revealed a room with two flights of stairs going up and one going down in front of us. To the left and right were each two doors made of oaken wood, with silver handles. From the ceiling, a chandelier hung down made from an alloy of which I didn’t know the origin, but the candles in this chandelier had been replaced with Fire Essentia Crystals and were lighting up the whole room. As we entered it, Feldir closed the door behind us, and made the vines creep up onto it again.

“Down there.”

He walked towards the narrow stairwell in the middle of the room, between the two other flights leading to the first floor, both of them had a red carpet running over them. The one we were going down, however, had not. This one was also the only one not to be made from fir wood, but from marble-like stone. It wasn’t too long, but long enough to turn into darkness, were it not for the small Air Essentia Crystals which were carved in the walls on both sides.

On the bottom of the stairs, we came into a small room which bared the resemblance of a study: there was one sole bookcase, next to which was a comfortable chair just big enough for one Dwarf to sit in. In the other corner of the room was a wooden desk with a wooden chair in front of it. On the desk lay a piece of parchment with a quill standing upright in a pot of ink, which were lit up by yet another Air Essentia Crystal. The floor of the room was completely done in dark spruce wood, except from a tile of about one feet by one feet in the middle, which housed two circles of light: a green one, and a yellow one.

“This Teleportation Unit is connected directly to The Tree of Life. It can send you there, but no farther.”

“Didn’t you say I couldn’t go to The Tree of Life?”

“I said you couldn’t go through it, because an alteration in The Tree is noticed by the creature almost immediately. But you can go to it: alteration in roots is barely noticeable; they change all the time. The chance she sees you use that specific root is astronomically small. The City under The Mountain is peanuts compared to the chamber where you’ll end up.”

Feldir was beginning to make the teleporter ready for use, and we took place above the tile. Even though this would be the third time we did this, Val still held onto me as strong as the first time as she turned a darkish blue.

“Girl, you don’t need to be afraid. It’s already the third time; we know nothing can go wrong… isn’t that right, Feldir?”