What would someone do when learning their time was shortlived? Stay and wait in comfort? Leave and experience as much as they could?
Denial. The answer was to still believe in immortality.
In this forsaken realm void of magic, monsters endured; surely a human could do the same. To live a beggar and keep going. That human had decided to travel as far as she could in search of an answer. I had decided that at some point her human nature would be her salvation.
Humans had created me, after all. The clay golem. The perfect craft for a low magic environment. How could they not be the same?
Without magic, things would be tougher, nothing more.
And so at dawn I helped my mistress mount the turtled elephant, a wilhorn, and got on the head myself. Knowing that magic would lack us eventually, I had drawn glyphs on the beast's head to keep it obedient.
We departed. My mistress silent behind me. The young lady looked behind her at the hill where the Amber pavilion had welcomed her all these days; where the parasitic mushroom still engulfed fauna and flora alike. Then she let her eyes wander a the slow wobble of the wilhorn.
Soon enough, we were leaving the hills and terraces of Shiranu. The ruined city regressed in a mass of white spires.
Our direction had been set by the mountain of Kunshu, the crashed floating island. We passed by its dying vegetation, its rabid monsters, its drying streams and waterfalls.
Then the steppe turned to a rocky desert cut by ridges like ripples on the land.
This was the true face of the realm: barren grounds, vast and silent, where not even monsters wandered. The air itself felt different, like moving in thin, invisible sand.
Anywhere else would be an oasis in comparison.
She had chosen that direction because it was the only one she knew; I had chosen it because it had the closest such respite. City or dungeon, by now those were as dangerous and impoverished. This stop would be a dungeon.
A zoo, for the humans of old.
In the hazy, dusty horizon a mountain took shape, greyed out with yellow patches and eroded, stretching wide. A vent turned its top into a blackened basin from which crevices reached its other peaks all the way to the base. There were nothing but entrances to its underground.
"I bet the whole region was on fire." My mistress remarked. She was trying to sound enthusiastic.
"Acid and sulfurous lakes." I corrected. "Very colorful, not very breathable."
I stopped the mount. I could feel them. The vibrations. The perks of a clay golem. Monsters roaming the surface.
There was nothing for them outside, so why?
The answer lay with those yellow patches. My mistress' mana had washed up all the way here, and the mana lingered on that dungeon's slopes. The monsters followed. Good, there would be more mana there! Bad, there would be more mana there. More deadly creatures.
We quickly became the main attraction. Not just because yellow grass would grow at our wilhorn's hooves but because, to those starved monsters, three creatures together, not tearing each other apart, was quite uncommon.
They proved wise enough to retreat underground.
"Too bad!" My mistress boasted. "I was in the mood for some smacking."
"You should conserve your strength, mistress." I reminded her.
She gave me that tired look, hopped off the elephant's shell and caressed its trunk. We walked away, to the nearest fault, while the beast lingered behind.
Glyph or not, it would either stay and die or abandon us. Either way we would not see it again.
She discouraged me from making a torch: the system had given her a skill to see in the dark. How much mana that would drain, I could not tell. Hopefully, not much.
"We should not stay for too long." I proposed. "If leylines exist, they should be deep underground. Let's aim for the deepest part."
"Sure." She shrugged. "Eh, where is the best sight? A gothic cave, a waterfall of lava, something like that?"
"I don't know, I've never come here."
"But then, how do you know about that place?" She was confused.
"Human knowledge." I answered.
All I had ever known was the ruined city of Shiranu. All I could do here was guess. The entrance we found was large enough for a whole cart and the gallery beyond just as wide. So, just a guess: this was the right direction.
Once inside, the monsters would still not approach us.
Despite the darkness and their number, they simply watched patiently from their holes as we passed. The mana that my mistress irradiated had to be exciting them, though?
"Where are the rapts?" I wondered aloud.
"The what?" My mistress looked around.
"Rapts. They are big fluffy worms, of sort. Surviving with so little mana that other monsters don't bother with them. There should be dozens of them but I can't perceive even one."
In fairness, rapts were not the most agitated of monsters and it could very well be that they offered no vibration. But I had been around them for long enough to find this current absence uncanny.
Still, we went down, further and further.
The young lady got thrilled when crossing a large grotto on a natural hanging bridge. I was looking at the amount of creatures lurking around that could have easily attacked us in this precarious place. They kept lurking around.
Not even at the end of the bridge she covered her nose. The stench of sulfur had reached her. Then the warmth. We had emerged mid-height into a vast cavern. Natural columns bent outwards had crumbled with time and the ceiling was weighed down with stalagtites.
Magma pouring down in cascades, forming fuming pools that consumed into nothingness.
But I had only eyes for the thin broken thread of magic flowing at the center of this space: a magic stream, however tenuous. If leylines, as humans recorded, really existed, this was one.
A fork, rather.
The old path down had long collapsed, so I molded steps for my mistress to walk on along the cavern's wall, until the slope became bearable. No monster around, only the slow flow of magma that hardly inconvenienced the human.
Not because she bragged about having some fire resistance but because of how weak the magma was. Real one would have boiled us long ago and filled the vast cave in a toxic inferno.
"Wait." I stopped her.
The human froze, looked at me and noticed my mask turned upward, toward the remnants of a broken column. There was a monster after all. It was moving, yet producing almost no vibration, sliding silently over the surfaces.
A snake.
"Finally!" My mistress rejoiced and summoned her mace. I had told her not to do that! "Come here little guy! It will be quick!"
The snake stopped, high above, its head fixed on the human. It hissed, then dropped all at once and fell on the ground to roll and raise immediately after.
A good ten meters long, its head the size of a forearm, it had no eye or rather they were both closed, possibly wounded. Smooth scales with black and yellow patterns. Glyphs? Wards? The yellow scales clearly painted shapes on its body.
The beast lunged forward, maw wide open. My mistress readied her mace and a bright light emanated from the metal, making the snake freeze and hiss, recoil suddenly.
"What are you doing!?" I grabbed her arm.
"What?"
"That spell!" Luckily, her mace lost the brightness. "You were about to cast more magic than this entire room contained!"
"What are you talking about?" She asked, still confused.
The snake had fallen back, furious, hissed and screeched at her.
"Do you not realize? Have you not perceived how weak the monsters here are? Your mace alone might have more mana than your opponent! If you fought like usual, the entire dungeon would be exhausted before it even finished!"
"I was about to destroy the dungeon!?"
"No, no..." I was at a loss.
She really, truly did not understand how magic worked?
Facing us the beast had come back, ready to attack, saw the human get tense again and recoiled once more. It would not approach, would not even try and circle us.
My mistress let her mace vanish, rose her hands and started to talk to the snake.
"It's okay, calm down." She offered. "I'm not going to hurt you. We're going to leave, okay?"
Those words failed to calm the beast. Monsters talked, they understood well enough; it still meant nothing to them. This one was simply furious to not find an opening.
"We should not leave." I advised. "There is a leyline here. We could absorb its mana."
"It's okay, Kaele. We're leaving."
"This..."
"Will you listen to me?! Just this once!"
... Her words were absolute. We retreated slowly, the snake following us at first, still hissing, then following at a distance in silence. The distance grew until we reached a fault and through it, a new gallery going down.
The snake's head appeared behind, hissed once more then left for good.
Those new tunnels were a cloport's nest. I had to explain to her because the monster itself was long gone: like a bear that dug ground and would grow in strength with the more bodies it hoarded. Each eroded room we found used to be its pantry.
That was long ago. As magic faded, the most powerful monsters fell first. Those tuned for magic strained themselves before dying under their own weight.
The entire dungeon was no different. I could tell now roughly how it worked. Mana used to shoot up to the top and then flow downward. The powerful high up, the weak cowering under. Until the leyline collapsed.
That thin thread I had perceived was a remnant of a river flowing way, way deeper. Those flows were long gone. Withered.
"There is nothing for us." I concluded. "The dungeon is dead. Let's go."
"What about leylines? Let's find one and follow it!"
"We found it already." Is all I felt the need to say.
She sat in the room to think. I decided to go outside and stand guard. Then, I felt an urge. Picked a rock and approached the wall. She would hear me but at this point, it still felt like the thing to do.
Her rugged face looked past the entrance to watch me engrave words in the stone.
The leyline has dried up. Monsters vying over the remains. Is that what my mistress is condemned to do? Absorb the crumbs out of her enemies' remains? What do monsters actually do to thrive? What was that snake, what was that pattern on its body?
"You are creepy when you do that." The human behind me pointed out.
"I apologize. I feel the duty to report to... someone. Maybe my stone tablet is still broken."
And before she could answer, I turned around and approached, almost spooked her by looking at her arm.
"Sealing. That snake was wearing sealing patterns. If we draw them on you, it would stop the magic from leaving your body."
She was gobsmacked.
"You mean it's so simple?!"
"Carving your skin is out of question. I will paint them over."
I pressed her into the cloport's old pantry, had her sit in the middle, remove her tunic and stretch one arm. I would start there. Stone flowing from the ground through my body, mass turned into a thin metallic paint.
She felt uncomfortable, looked away but let me do it.
Then, the shoulder. Then, she asked me to stop.
"Just how far will you go?" She scolded.
"The whole body." I stated. "I can't seal it entirely, even if that was possible it would kill you. But you should prevent as much of your mana from flowing out as possible."
"Okay but... does it need to be directly on the skin?"
"Clothes could work too. I will make some for you instead."
"No." She stopped me. "No, it's fine." And she offered her shoulder. "Keep going. Just, be quick okay? It's a bit cold for a volcano here."
I agreed. Went back to work. Painted hope on her pale skin and bruises.
Sealing her to the realm. A complete denial.