"There's an evil," the priest says, eyes wide and sincere. "And my order fears what it might become, in the fullness of time. Our forebears built an arcane prison for it, where it might never do any harm; but that was in ancient times, and we need — we need its integrity tested, and its doors opened, that we might bring the evil into the heart of it and close it up again."
"Prophecied evil, entering a closed-up arcane prison while keeping it intact, assessing its condition." The archer sounds almost bored. "Risk of coming into contact with prophecied evil?"
"Oh," the priest says. "Oh, no, that would — things would have to go extremely wrong. No plans of ours for you to be there."
"And what's the nature of this evil?"
"The gods ordained three dimensions for us to live in, and one of time for us to experience, and breaches of the sanctity of space are anathema. We fear the transcendental awakening of a dimension-defiling monster, to total omnipresence."
The archer and the berserker exchange looks over the berserker's tankard. "You said you'd heard of us," the archer says neutrally. "Are you aware of our wizard?"
The priest flashes a pained smile. "The lesser evil, yes," he says. "Who else to assess the prison's capacity to hold the greater?"
There's a great dome in the desert. Not smooth, but faceted in triangles, brass-walled. A tunnel cut into the face of a nearby ravine winds underground, through a crumbling temple-complex, into the interior, which proves the dome to be merely the crest of a great empty faceted sphere.
"That," says one of the elder priests, pointing to the circular stone platform at the bottom, jutting with fragmentary pillars, "is the First Gate. First of Seven."
They trek down, with the young priest in tow, and Malia starts cackling and doing things, things which unravel space and bring out additional structure from dimensions beyond, into which they've been folded. The pillars rise unbroken; a roof settles over them. An upright ring of metal appears, within the little structure, large enough for several people to walk through abreast. Finally, the interior of the ring falls away into infinity, and it begins to look, not through to its other side, but onto somewhere else.
It takes her less than a single hour-mark on a candle.
On the far side of the First Gate is a great flagstoned yard under a starless sky. On all sides, a few steps lead up to a flat and empty desert, as far as the eye can see.
"Interesting," Malia says, looking intently in the direction of nothing in particular, and paces out the flagstones, judging their obvious dimensions.
The Second Gate, when she completes it, is within a temple of dark stone; walls hide the desert from them, a tall and pillared roof the sky. Another metal hoop leads onward.
It takes her no longer than the First; the priest refuses to look at her while she works.
The Third Gate exists within a mirror-walled spherical space, twice the size of that very first bronze chamber. A wall-less tower of wooden beams, spiral stairs, and periodic floors runs from bottom to top.
Malia spends two days walking tirelessly up and down them and cursing, doing and undoing things that see fragmentary structures of steel and stone appear, hanging in the air, jutting at odd angles. Sometimes the chamber fills with heavy cogwheels, spinning or obstinately jammed in place.
"There's a knack," she says darkly, whenever anyone gets too close, and goes back to it.
"You should sleep a little," the archer ventures, finally. "Sleep helps, when you've thought yourself into a rut, aye?"
Malia deigns to sit amidst the bedrolls, carefully eyes the distance at which the priest holds himself, lowers her voice. "I never entirely finished my training," she hisses. "My teacher died. I am a feral genius but sometimes my fundamentals are — conspicuously self-taught."
"If you can't open it, we'll tell them it's broken," the archer says.
"I'm going to open it," Malia hisses furiously, and winds herself into the angriest nest of blankets ever seen.
The Third Gate opens to her, and the Fourth, the Fifth, the Sixth, in their own strange and isolated chambers. She mutters with increasing frequency about the difficulty of manipulating their space, about curvature and potentials and other things that make no sense to, possibly, anybody in the world but Malia. She irritably conveys to the others to tell the priest that it means the prison seems, so far, intact.
The Seventh Gate, a circular platform of silver metal in a mistily white void, surrounded by vast gyroscope-rings of some other substance, black and slick, takes a week. She storms and swears and sweats at it, mind-hurting configurations of mass and form flickering faster than the eye can follow, the great rings around the platform lazily spinning on their various axes as she works.
Finally she settles on a gruelling sequence of manipulations which see a temple build itself around them, in the sequence it must originally have been constructed — stones and slabs laid, walls built, roof added, all individually appearing; and then the entire thing vanishes once more, each part disappearing in the same order they arrived. And only then, finally, does the same metal ring of the gate appear, and Malia opens it onto the Prison.
The final chamber is faceted like the first. Smaller, the smallest of any of them, barely large enough to lead an ox in a circle. The walls are made of the slick black stuff, each with sigils etched in relief and inlaid with something silvery. The cupped hollow of the floor has a small plinth rising from it, with what looks like yet another puzzle in miniature atop it, surrounded by four slim vertical beams which run from floor to ceiling.
"This is built in the heart of a star," Malia says, staring at the walls as if seeing beyond them, face curiously hungry. "Space here is so hard to work, it's bent so much already. And those pillars, you see them, they make it even harder, enforce the shape of it; but if you break them, they're integral to the chamber's integrity, and the heat and weight outside will crush it instantly. And the plinth, you see, is the jailer's key: when you activate it, it begins to summon the evil, and also begins to close each of the Seven Gates, each slower than the one inside it, so that the evil is trapped here, and the priests may retreat and not be trapped with it — so long as they're quick."
"But that's another puzzle," the archer says, looking at the plinth. "Isn't it? Like the gates. So they need you to do it."
"It seems so," Malia says, smiling toothily at the tiny puzzle.
"They lied," the archer says slowly, "about needing us near their evil."
"Of course they did," Malia says, while the archer glares at the priest, standing uncomfortably on the Seventh Gate's threshold. "Let me write down my observations on the prison's condition," she adds, and wanders around the chamber for a while with book and quill, writing and writing for many pages.
"I think almost any research wizard," she says casually, finally slipping the book back into her knapsack, "would hand over a sack of gold for my notes," and raises her voice to encompass their perpetual shadow. "Hoi! Priest!"
The archer lingers, as all the others head back across the threshold of the Seventh Gate.
"Malia," she says slowly.
"Hold this for me," Malia says, thrusting her knapsack at her. "I wouldn't care to trip and spill anything in my hurry to exit, after I activate the Prison."
"Malia," the archer says again.
"Go on," Malia says, eyes on the plinth, waving her away.
"Malia."
The wizard sighs and looks at her.
"I'm not wizard, but I've seen plenty trying, or the aftermath, of summonings. This doesn't look like any summoning I ever saw." She scuffs one shoe on the black floor. "Malia—"
"The Seven Gates," Malia says, "look very much like a test. To see if I am what they fear most." She turns her gaze back to the plinth. "And this looks very much as if all it does is close the door, hm?"
"Let's just go," the archer says.
"They'll kill us all," Malia says. "You all think I'm a monster anyway," she adds unconcernedly.
The archer looks at the pack in her hands. "You're frightening," she says. "But if we thought you a monster, I don't think your neck is any impediment to an axe, the berserker's handy with one, and you snore when you're not faking sleep from paranoia."
"The money's even better split only three ways." Malia pauses. "...If they're not lying about that, too, I suppose."
"Fucking cultists," the archer says. "Come on, Malia."
"We won't make it out alive," Malia says. "Go on."
"Malia."
The wizard looks around, eyes dark and glittering. "If I am what they're afraid of," she says, low and smooth and richly wicked, "then they could not have built a more perfect meditation chamber for me to achieve it. And if I am, it won't hold me, nothing can hold me. I am a feral genius, and I do not intend to die in a pissant box."
"This sounds like the worst plan, Malia," the archer says, clutching the wizard's knapsack tightly.
"One of you always says that," Malia says, and flashes a terrible, beautiful smile.
