So, the Field Office in the dead middle of the City, inside a construct of the same white stone the rest of the city is made from.
This is making me feel like the city is a spell array, and the original purpose of this spot was a portal. Perhaps a portal to the fey?
Siobhan flipped the page to the next story. In this one, Myrddin went into the Forest of Nod again. He was searching for something important, which the story didn’t specify. Rather than finding whatever he was looking for, he stumbled into a Circle made of mushrooms and river pebbles—a doorway to the hidden land of the fey.
Here’s the description of the planar portal:
Sebastien chose a seat as close to the front as possible, giving her a good view of both the complex spell arrays, drawn onto the floor at the front of the classroom in polished stone and precious metals, and the rare components placed around the edges. The Word for the planar portal itself was ridiculously complex, and around that a secondary barrier spell had been drawn. Both required multiple large, gem-like beast cores for power.
What do you think the Gibratha Spell Array was used for? Is it actually some ancient particle accelerator? DId it transform something in the middle?
We know the RG base is a perfect circle set under the stone in Gilbratha that somehow, mysteriously never fills with water despite most Gilbrathans lacking basements due to the high water table. Even the magicked tunnels are filled with brackish water. We know that the base is just east of Waterside market, which is dead center in the city, and the city itself is a perfect circle of crumbling white stone.
A Red Guard team had fought a running battle with a man just a few blocks east of Waterside Market earlier that evening. Some impressive spells had been tossed back and forth, but nothing like what the old Red Guard defector had cast at Knave Knoll. Several people had been injured, a jentil had died, and one person’s house had collapsed when an entire wall got blown out.
Isn’t it a bit strange that no one wonders why the circles are there, and why the area was uninhabited before Myrddin’s time - which was well over a thousand years before this book… Gilbrathans seem quite content to live inside a possible giant spell array, and the RG agents are pretty chill about the location of their base, too.
Ilma hummed. “Not bad. Several different accounts claim different things. Some say Myrddin raised these stones. Some say it was here long before that, during the war with the Brillig, meant to be a huge weapon to wipe out their race. Some say it was here even before that, meant to be a shield against the Titans themselves. I don’t know who raised it, but divination spells hint it is very old. Almost certainly it was here before Myrddin, though it’s curious that there aren’t signs of occupation within these walls before his time. Some speculate that he may not have built it, but lowered wards that were keeping it hidden.” “Could the walls have been pre-Cataclysm?” a student asked. “It’s difficult to determine,” she said. “Preservation and warding spells could have maintained the white cliffs in relatively good condition from that time period, if they weren’t catastrophically damaged during the Cataclysm. But how was such a structure created in the first place? We would find it difficult to do today, even if we had a hundred of Archmage Zard. So either humans didn’t create it, or we created it when we still knew how to do such things.”
So, what are the rings? A portal? (And, if so, for what? Travel into a different plane? Into the Fey lands? Travel through time?) A war array? Walls to prevent Titans? I know you all can come up with some more ideas, and there are probably some hints in the text that we haven’t found…
I feel like the Charybdis Gulf is an important piece of the puzzle of the spell circle of the white cliffs, though I’m unclear on what piece exactly.
Maybe the sea was a handy place to draw heat from or to dump excess heat, so the location was chosen because of that? Or maybe the Charybdis Gulf was carved in a spell backlash using the circle? Or the seaside location was just to take advantage of the plentiful supply of salt, which may have been used in making the white cliffs?
Charybdis in our mythology was the powerful daughter of Poseidon and Gaia, so if feels significant.
I feel like it also follows from what we know about Spell Circles that the bigger the circle is, the simpler the word needs to be in order for it to still be possible to cast…
And if the Charybdis Gulf was carved in the backlash of something going wrong in a spell, it would match up with one of the lines of a triangle inscribed into the circle…
My current guess is that Gilbratha as a whole was an exceedingly simple spell array designed to gather, channel, and transform energy, and then this energy was then used in an inner spell array for some other purpose. The Red Guard may occupy this inner array and power it with aberrants instead?
