“I was hoping it wasn’t them. What are you thinking?” Geordi asked, as we headed for the outer sections of the Formation, where the people already engaged in drawing Mana were gathered and staying in Meditation.

There were already hundreds of them here. As more people were freed up from fighting, more were being transported here and arranged around the Seven Star Formations that formed the heart of the feeding arrangements. Other nations might use precious resources, such as Elemental Diamonds, to sub for the Mana, but America was going to brute force it with people.

“It may not surprise you that some of the Wizardry research is into the uses and misuses of Dark Mana. We do it so we know what is going to be thrown at us, and how to counter it.”

“Sounds reasonable,” he agreed. “I imagine you wash a lot of Dark Mana down with vivus, too.”

“They do. Primary Dark research goes on in Little Finger.” I pointed to that on the back of my left hand, and he nodded understanding, picking out the Wind Tower Compound in the upper half of Michigan, above the Break Line and on the shore. “One of the focuses is naturally on how they would conceal Auras. They’ve hit on several combinations of Chaos and Shadow Magic which do the job, as well as Psychic Magic instances which could be developed. The key thing is that naturally there’s no existing spells for this stuff...”

“So the wielder needs to be an Archmage,” he nodded. He wasn’t worried about an Archmage with two powerful Beasts here, happily.

“Or armed with a very specific kind of Shadow Contract. Either way, we’re probably looking at a Deacon.”

“He’s very good. We haven’t been able to sense the source of the Dark Mana, but it’s sneaking in and aggravating any existing Elemental imbalances, which we naturally have because some Elements are far more common than others.” Even with the Spellhouses, that hadn’t changed. “It’s probably costing at least twenty percent of the Mana draw, which with the numbers we are putting up, is huge.”

“Do you have any Mages here with Earth and Chaos Elements?” I asked him.

He ran through his Visual File list. “Three people; two men, one woman,” he confirmed. "Part of the security measures was naturally confirming everyone’s Elements, but an Archmage with four Elements who could conceal their Aura could certainly masquerade as a Mage with only three."

“If I am correct, they are using Chaos Magic to disperse their Shadow or Curse Element Draw throughout the feeder Formations evenly, making it sourceless. It would seem to be coming in with everyone else’s Elements, but instead of accumulating it’s being used to disrupt the harmony here and is expended, leaving no trace.”

It went without saying that Earth Magic would allow them to fuck with the Formation.

We came up on the Formations, hundreds of men and women engaged in the drawing of Mana day and night, bringing it in to be sucked up by the Formation. The amount needed was colossal, and a whole day of drawing Mana, even with the Seven Stars Elemental Formations as a foundation, was literally a drop in the bucket of what needed to be done. When fully active, there would be thousands of mages active here, pumping the Mana into the gathering spell.

There was enough Mana that the flow of it was slightly visible, although to Magesight and Awareness there was a virtual river swirling into and around everyone.

I eyed the display of Mana and colors, broadcasting it to the two Beasts also watching with great interest. Plainstomper Emperor had wandered up outside the ten-foot walls, barely higher than his hoof, to look down at what was about to happen with great dark eyes, his dark and curly hide gleaming like polished brown-grey stone, short horns gleaming white and oddly sharp for their size.

“I Sing to Truth,” I murmured softly, and Geordi gasped and clasped his hands to his ears, while both Great Beasts flinched reflexively at a Word of Creation. The Sublime Chord rose out and up, gathering in the magic coming in there and modulating it into perfect harmony... and with iron strength.

There was a hiss of counterpressure and reaction from something that was completely locked out of the sudden harmony encapsulating the river of Mana coming in, forcibly shunted out by my control and boosting of the Mana draw. The pressure on the barbs of crimson Mana that slowly materialized as they were forced out of the interplay of many colors drove them back, back, and back towards their source...

“Augh!” The woman at the center of the web they’d made splurted out blood even as she jumped frantically to her feet, turning and staring at me, and attracting a lot of attention from those around her who suddenly realized she’d been doing something wrong.

I didn’t give her a chance to rant or make a claim or trigger any kind of spell trap. Twenty miles of atmosphere came down and flattened her to the ground like a bloody pancake, then took her remains and exploded them back up into the sky, burning in a flash of vivus as they did so.

I held out my hand, and a slickly clean human skull, all the organic matter wiped away from it, fell down to just above my hand.

“Fill in her spot in the formation and continue on,” I told all the very startled mages watching me. “This is the one responsible for slowing you all down.” I released Noble to continue the Sublime Chord, the mages quickly falling back into the flow and harmony of the Song.

The incoming Mana draw increased perceptively. Between Chord and harmony, it was almost twice what it had been!

“There’s no way she was here alone, nor that she hasn’t been sabotaging something. I’m going to have to go over the entire Formation and the land underneath it in detail. My guess is she both planted something, and has been trying to build something out of sight and Awareness below.”

Geordi winced. “And you can fix it, right?”

“She wasn’t a Sage. The worst she could do is contaminate what we’ve done and force us to start over. We’re still months ahead of schedule.”

------

Lightning Mana was seething around underground, half of the Heaven and Earth Seal. Bison and Eagle were studying everything below with great fascination. It didn’t escape either of them that if they worked together, they could let loose some Lightning that would totally blow away anything the Stormcrown Eagle could do alone.

Over two hundred human Earth mages were also studying the Formation, muttering softly as they followed the traces and paths slowly and artfully carved and laying dormant below the main Formation.

It wasn’t complete, because then it would have been active and obvious. However, the incomplete lines could have been drawn in within ten minutes or so, and in doing so created a massive leeching effect, which would have been channeled into the likewise slumbering, but very powerful lump of shadowstone sitting down there.

I could tell the Eagle and the Bison were both upset that such a thing had gotten here without them sensing it. They glared at the three petrified men with Auras revealed when I’d forced away the Chaos or Psychic Magic concealing them, to be taken away and questioned by the White Necromancers at more length and direction.

“What was that going to do?” Geordi asked helplessly.

“My guess is it would attempt to form a permanent Gate to the netherworld, sucking in all that Mana you’ve been accumulating to do so.” I tilted my head slightly. “I think that’s the heart of either a half-Emperor or Emperor of the Netherworld. It’s already attuned the Mana we’ve gathered, it’s all wasted now. We’ll have to disperse it, or...” I tapped my chin thoughtfully, and slowly smiled wickedly.

“Plainstomper Emperor, Elder Windcrasher!” I called out to the two of them, gaining both of their attention instantly. “The Mana we have accumulated is already attuned to the corrupt Heart below, and is unusable for the Floodbreaker Ritual. I am wondering... would you like to use it to blow the ever-living fuck out of that Heart and whatever being it originally came from?”

The defiant battle-cry and rumbling bellow of challenge from both Great Beasts conveyed the idea that they were very interested in that idea, indeed!

--------

There was a bunch of quick Pattern-changing, some instructions and demonstrations to the Eagle and the Bison, and then every single Human vacated the site of the Breaker Pattern, pulling back to two miles away.

The nearby herd of Bison of the Golden Sea ambled up behind us to watch and make sure nothing bothered us, not that anything would be so stupid with an Emperor standing right over there.

It took the two Great Beasts about twelve hours to set the whole thing up, expending colossal amounts of Mana in the process, and the build-up brought in some curious Rulers from the distance, including Racing Thunder, the Eternal Winds Wolf Emperor of the Plains.

I drifted over to talk to him, informing him of what was going on and why it was happening, and he actually wandered over and began to help. He didn’t have a Stormcrown’s instinctive control of Air, but he had lots of power, and he sped up the massive Heaven and Earth Seal’s establishment and reinforced it admirably.

The sky clear to the horizon was soon a vortex churning around the growing Seal etched into the sky, a similar one under the ground also reverberating. The huge quantity of Mana we’d already gathered was sucked away to empower everything, and when Earth and Sky had enough, the spell went off.

Not many people here, including me, had seen a Forbidden Curse Magic of this level go off. The bolt of Lightning that gathered between the heavens and the earth was utterly blinding when it flared into existence between clouds and soil, an incarnation of destructive arcane power, and that slumbering Dark Heart was right in the middle of it.

I blew an Argent Circle of Protection out just in time to catch the scream of mental fury before it could blow out the minds of the men and women around me. They all gasped and staggered at the touch of an Imperial Netherworlder, the weaker ones falling down and screaming about worms in their minds, but the Silver Magic blazed and burned and held the influence back as that bar of incandescent Mana in the distance did all its work.

Everyone turned back as the flaring vanished, although I’d been staring at it the whole time, Devasight making me immune to bright light. The people on the ground were quickly attended to by the couple Psychics among them, the rest of us staring at the walls around the Formation, which had all been shattered, knocked over, and sent tumbling by the shockwave.

“Let’s go,” I told them calmly, and everyone got on the Disks of one kind or another as I spread my Wings and took off, towing them all behind me.

Windsmasher came gliding down from above slowly, but it was Plainstomper who raised up a horn-like stone perch for the Stormcrown Eagle as he came down. Bison and Wolf, natural enemies, drew up on either side of the Eagle, and then all of them turned to look at us as we came gliding in on Wings and our quaint little buttons of Earth magic.

There was a twenty-foot hole burned in the middle of the Formation, and cracks and rents throughout the rest of it that would have to be fixed. The stone had been crystallized, liquified, melted, and vaporized, and all the grass inside was utterly gone now, leaving a seared patch of soil behind.

Vivic mists were still bubbling up out of the columnar pit in the stone.