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The Grand Duchess Melissa of Old Damara, Princess of the House of Damara, was picking at breakfast when it happened. Only picking at it because her dreams last night and the night before had unfailingly turned into nightmares, leaving her with a feeling of ominous dread. With the morning light she could remember little except the ground shaking and things falling from their perches onto her, crushing her. (Which would be quite the feat in her sleep, as there were no shelves above her bed. If there had been, she might have ordered them cleared this morning; two nights of this was enough to make her wonder–)
And then she was falling. The ground dropped out from under her chair and she and it were plummeting down through the air.
Except they weren’t. The barely-touched dishes in front of her, small and elegant bits of Damaran cuisine that looked like they had been poked and stirred and stabbed more than eaten, were sitting neatly on the table. The walls and ceiling were where they were supposed to be. The whole house was falling? But nothing was shaking or otherwise reacting.
She’d have thought, after a moment, that it was entirely something to do with her, except that one of the guards had stumbled and run into the wall next to him, and the servant who had been reaching to pick up the water and pour a little more yelped and grabbed the edge of the table instead.
Her talent at magic was minimal, but she dropped her hands to her side and tried to look and feel what was going on around her. She closed her eyes for a moment to help her focus, then snapped them back open because she was suddenly no longer as certain which way was up. With the visual of the room to anchor her, she tried again.
And found it surprisingly easy, at least, to tell that something was wrong. Usually there was a feeling of order and flow to the magic in use, and generally that was all she could sense, rather than what it was specifically doing. She still was not sure what it was doing, but all of it felt strained and wrong. Still ordered, or trying to be, but something was giving way….
With a snap it went, and she gasped as the mage-lights flared and then went out, the power surging and vanishing with them. The constant background hum of wellness and contentment that sustained them was gone as well. Faint wisps and eddies of magic remained, but no more.
In the new dark, she fisted her hands lightly at her sides. She still felt like she was falling, and open eyes did not help. Two deep breaths, but she had gasped and there were others in the room with her. She made her voice steady. “The magic has failed. Teo, could you please open the door to get some light in here?” Teo was the guard who had not staggered into the wall. The breakfast hall was relatively small and intimate, an interior room; the adjacent great hall had many windows.
After a moment she had enough light to see Elita still holding on to the table, her eyes wide and white, and Dano braced against the wall but otherwise upright. If the guards could do it, she could, falling or not. She glanced down and confirmed the floor was as wholly present beneath her as elsewhere. Slightly dizzy for a moment with the difference between what her body claimed was happening and what her eyes saw, she lifted her gaze again to fix on the light beckoning from the doorway.
Carefully, she pushed her chair back, rose with her fingers resting lightly on the table, turned, and walked out of the room. “Attend me if you can. If you cannot, please get to the infirmary if you can, or sit here if you need to.” She paused, and realized there were several assumptions she was making on too little information. “I feel as if I am constantly falling, but I am obviously not. Is it like that for you also?”
At a staggered chorus of agreements from the three in the room with her and another servant out in the great hall who had been within earshot, she nodded. She promptly made a mental note to do that only with careful thought also; for some reason it added a dizzying tilt to the sensation of falling. “If this is general, we need to find and help everyone that we can, as soon as possible. In fact, we also need to make sure that there’s someone who can help - at least in basic ways - in the infirmary.”
They had a magical healer in residence, but Lady Risi was mostly there for Melissa herself and a few others of her court. Many of the tools she used might have failed, if the mage-lights had. Melissa’s concern was for how hard-hit she herself and the more mundane healers staffing the infirmary might be.
Dano, still holding to the wall, said, “I think I can manage, but I’m not much use as a guard just now. If you’d like, I can go to the infirmary and check on them, and start a search out from there if they don’t need my help. Or if it’s too bad, I can find you and report.”
“Very good. I’ll be heading for Lady Risi’s rooms, and dealing with anything or anyone I find along the way.” Struck by a sudden concern, she added, “Can anyone go to the kitchens? Fires, hot food, and falling people are a bad combination.”
The servant in the great hall was a young man barely out of boyhood. She didn’t know his name and wasn’t sure if she’d interacted with him before, but he made himself memorable now by immediately volunteering to go to the kitchens.
Three hours later, they had the situation in the house mostly under control and had begun sending people out into the city. Their resources were limited - a number of people were resting and trying to come to terms with the vertigo as they were all still falling and a few had simply been injured in the first moments. The fires and ovens in the kitchens had all gone out, so the number of people burned was minimal, but there were also those who had been using knives, guards who had been practicing weapons drill, people who had the misfortune to be on stairs….
Lady Risi was among the worst; the magic failing had done some sort of damage to her, leaving her frail and seemingly several decades older than before. Her mind was still sharp, however, and she had been providing advice to everyone else on ways to counter vertigo, and helping to treat some of the injured. Whatever had happened had broken many of her instruments, and she could no longer work the spells she had normally used to improve her patients’ health, but her knowledge and training were still top-notch, and she still knew what her spells had been standing in for and what of it could be replicated with hands, knives, thread manually sewn, etc.
The initial news from the city was mostly unsurprising, if worse than Melissa had hoped. The same symptoms and issues as in the house, but also a number of buildings made or shored up with profligate use of magic (generally among the upper classes and some institutions and guilds) had failed in various ways. Lights, stoves, and cooling rooms had all failed, of course.
But more problematically, so had the balancing spells on the architect guild’s newest tower - balancing spells? Oh yes, that was a new technique they had developed to allow for more fanciful and less stable architecture. Well, before the magic failed no one had supposed it could, so it made sense, but also she was glad those spells were new and had not caught on. The spells’ failure had brought that tower down across the road and onto a couple houses that probably would have been all right on their own, but were no match for however-much stone and ceramic crashing down on them. Several other buildings had temporary repairs held in place with magic fail and had a wall collapse, or a roof reopen to the weather, or the like.
The poorer parts of town were further away and she hadn’t heard word back on them, but she hoped that the buildings there would fare better. They were far closer to falling apart at any given time, yes, but any slap-dash repairs there would not have been made by magic.
Everyone was still falling. After several hours, a few people were still down and resting. Melissa did her best to assume that all of them actually were suffering and needed to stay down, although she did note that a couple of the most dramatically delicate flowers of her court were among those incapacitated. The rest were, generally, moving around uneasily but steadily. If Melissa had forced herself into motion very early on, most had managed the same by now. Two of the household staff were drugged to insensibility because they had not been able to stop vomiting, especially vulnerable to the vertigo from what their heart told them was happening compared to what their eyes and feet claimed.
Melissa’s perfectly-nice but rather ordinary day-gown had had only the basic spelling to avoid rips and stains. It instead now had a couple of tears, a great deal of dust, and was missing the lace along one hem where she’d stepped on it standing up from where she’d knelt earlier to check on someone. Dead, unfortunately; that bothered her far more than the dress, or the food she’d ordered released from her cold rooms and prepared for anyone who wanted or needed food.
She made a point of not employing idiots in her personal service for long. She couldn’t afford them at the best of times. No one had tried to protest her helping in the search, the damage to her wardrobe, or giving expensive and sometimes rare food to anyone who would eat it. Well, Lady Risi had cautioned regarding the last that they should be careful of giving anything too unfamiliar to those worst-overset by the vertigo.
They had protested her desire to go into the streets, with the unfortunately-relevant argument that anyone looking for directions from their Grand Duchess would expect to find her at her residence. She had settled for sending a runner (who was briskly walking, as the best pace they felt safe) to seek the garrison outside the city and ask for word from the commander of how they fared and what they needed.
Best to get ahead of any trouble there. Melissa wasn’t sure if or when they would hear from the wider-flung Empire. The Pax failing so completely was worrisome in that regard, but for all she knew it was localized and they might have someone here direct from Astandalas within days. The priests-wizard with her had assured her that if the entire Pax had not failed, their portion of it failing, especially as a holding on Zunidh, would have reverberated through the rest of the working and alerted their counterparts in the capital.
She had thanked them, somehow speaking the words smoothly and continuing to breathe evenly around the knot that the word ‘if’ had tied itself into, lumped up in her throat. She hadn’t managed to dislodge it yet, but if she felt like she was choking on it every moment, she had kept from showing that to her people. If that had happened, if, then they needed her to hold steady even more than they would otherwise.
If the Pax had failed generally, then it might take longer for Astandalas to come for them. Might take longer for the magic to be re-made and re-opened. Surely, as much as was possible, reaching Old Damara would be the priority - Melissa was still her brother’s heir, after all. It had taken thousands of years for the Empire to conquer its full territory, but simply re-connecting it if everything had failed would surely not take as long. Still, she could imagine years in that scenario.
So if the Pax had failed generally and if they were cut off, she was going to have to work out something with the local garrison before the latest pay-packet ran out. Even making sure they were fed and clothed and paid would not help at all with the sense of panic she imagined many of the men would feel. A few people in the city, a few more in her household, were from other places and not settled here long-term. A much larger portion of the local garrison would be from off-world or elsewhere on Zunidh, and it would be days or weeks before they knew the scope of what had happened and the impact on travel.
Zunidh residents who simply needed to return home would probably be all right based on the very minimal information that three hours had brought. But the gates between worlds were much larger works of Schooled magic than the simple convenience-spells that had failed all over. They were also more reinforced - it was easier to make a new mage light than protect one. It was in no way easy to make a new permanent gate, and even when they were deep in the Empire’s territory there was always at least some risk of sabotage attempts or attacks. But she was no wizard herself to know the details of how such protections worked, and the Pax itself should also be strong and reinforced by every noble, every citizen, praying and performing their rituals and lending their strength to the whole. If it had broken, what else had or hadn’t broken with it?
At least until something came up that required her to act, she would stay seated in her office and take reports. And send instructions. And never admit aloud that she was secretly grateful to be able to stop walking around while feeling so off-balance.