Southwest Truths (Semiautomatic Sorceress Book 3) by Kal Aaron (the red fox clan .txt) 📗

from the passenger cabins. Sailors scurried about on the top deck, inspecting and securing anything that was loose. She kept forgetting she needed to get used to the overwhelming sensation of sorcery pressing on her from the defenses around Last Remnant and the island itself. She took some deep, calming breaths.

She sometimes wondered how other Illuminated got used to it. It felt like someone was always squeezing her lungs and was another reason she didn’t like visiting the island. As far as she knew, the sensation didn’t lessen with time. Only people’s perception of it lessened as they got used to it.

Dense gray fog surrounded the yacht. It didn’t penetrate the field, allowing everybody on board to complete their final preparations with little trouble but not letting them see a yard in front of the boat.

Intan jogged away from a life preserver he’d been inspecting. “You come to see the final approach, Lyssa?”

She nodded. “It’s been years since I last came here. Something about it reminds me of what’s supposed to be special about sorcery.”

“Same with me.” Intan smiled. “No offense, Lyssa, but what you do as a Torch doesn’t impress me the way Last Remnant does.”

“That’s kind of the point.” Lyssa laughed. “I don’t think any individual Illuminated could stand up to the concentration of spells, rituals, and shards they have there.”

“It makes me wonder what Lemuria was like.”

“I can’t imagine,” she said and added, “No one knows. I guess everyone was more concerned about surviving than writing anything down, but at least we still have this place.”

“It’s why I love this job.” Intan pointed toward the ship’s bow. “I can visit the greatest place on Earth even though I’m not a Sorcerer, and I get to do it more than most of you. When I get tired of it, I can leave.”

Lyssa offered a polite nod, not wanting to admit she didn’t like going to Last Remnant even though she was impressed by it. Shadows suffered discrimination by the Society, but they were also free of most of the Society’s politics.

Thunder boomed in the sky and lightning bolts descended from the heavens, striking the water again and again. The fog cleared, but the fierce wind pushed sheets of rain toward them. The water cascaded down the spells protecting the ship and flowed over the invisible field. Small droplets made it through the barrier and sprinkled the deck.

Lyssa took a deep breath and slowly let it out. This was the part she never liked on the final approach: the storm barrier. It wasn’t hard to picture how a couple of shards or a spell failing might end with them on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. The barrier was an effective defense against the ships and vessels that managed to get close by somehow avoiding the misdirection spells in the area.

Intan squinted into the distance. “It’ll be fine, Lyssa. The captain checked all the key shards before we left. We’ll get through the storm without any trouble.”

Lightning continued to flash around them, forming a white wall in the sky. The boat shimmied, but its protective enchantments kept the motion mild. Lyssa didn’t usually do well on boats, but she’d never had any trouble with the transports to and from Last Remnant.

Lyssa opened her mouth to ask Intan a question, but the continuous resounding roar of the thunder drowned out anything she tried to say. She popped up her collar and slipped on her mask to protect her from the now-constant sprinkle making it through the barrier.

Intellectually, she understood that the final storm barrier wasn’t that large. Passing through it with the key shards took less than ten minutes, but the relentless lightning strikes, some barely missing the boat, and the raging bellow of the weather set her heart to pounding, more out of excitement than fear.

The transition was sudden. One minute, the sky was filled with lightning, and the next, blue skies and pleasant clouds hung overhead, with the dark storm ending in a clean line behind the yacht.

“Welcome back, Lyssa,” Intan said, gesturing at the island. “Welcome to Last Remnant.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Massive sheer cliffs and jagged mountains ringed the perfectly circular island on all sides. Glowing small and medium barrier islands formed a maze in the sea around Last Remnant. Though their placement looked haphazard from the surface, when looking directly down, they were arranged to trace huge versions of the arcane sigils used to conceal the island and help channel the storm barrier, among other defenses. There was a reason the Society had managed to keep the location of Last Remnant secret for thousands of years.

Individual Sorcerers and shards had limits. Rituals took time, but the Society’d had ten thousand years to refine the defenses and spells on the island, including updating them with each iteration of Shadow technology. Even the rise of planes had only presented a minor challenge. After all, the island’s defenses weren’t only about keeping out the Shadows.

Although every Illuminated visited the island, most couldn’t get there without the help of one of the sanctioned transports and their myriad shards. It was a vestige of a time when the political future of the Society was unclear.

The defensive spells even kept the island off satellite images. The internet was filled with alleged pictures of the island, but none was the real thing.

The Society had even encouraged younger, tech-savvy Illuminated to flood the net with wrong information. Everyone knew Last Remnant was in the Indian Ocean, but few had any idea how to get there, let alone defeat the spells protecting the island.

It wasn’t as simple as someone selling a location. Without the necessary shards or spells, it was almost impossible to make it to the island without going off-course, and the storm barrier waited for the lucky few.

A single narrow inlet provided the only passage past the cliffs and mountains into Last Remnant proper. Though the yacht slowed from the full cruising speed it had used to zip across the ocean faster than a