"Yes, it's there, but I can't grasp it. And every time I try to focus either here or to the Horizon, everything shifts too much and snaps me out. I have to hand it to them, this is a brilliant and disastrous set-up for us."

Istredd is going to assume that the people who did this are smart, not lucky. After the effort that was made to take the natives first, test them, and kidnap many powerful Summoned, meant they were not to be trifled with. He took everything very seriously at the moment, including what they were capable of from here. That is why he is suspicious of the acolyte, of why he is keeping an eye on them whenever possible.

They managed to somehow mess with their neural pathways, with their ability to connect to the Horizon and one another. Genius. It’s the sort of thing that Istredd would genuinely love to know more about, he has many questions for these people, but he’d have to survive and capture them in order to get any. That seems very unlikely, either of them.

“They’re not using academic magic. It’s different. It’s not like mine either.” Different from Chaos, different from the orderly way academic magic is used, and he would have a simpler time dealing with that as he knows it now. Both he and Kell do. He considers because he can’t possibly be New Magic, they would see more technology. So it must be Solvunn’s. Which means divine? Fuck.

“No, most of this is real. Deception on the level of touch and smell would be difficult. Sound, that’s possible, sight, very much likely. I would say don’t believe your eyes or ears, but your hands, yes. I think they’re hiding exits from us, how they get in and out, which is obvious.”

They can’t have them escaping! But it means they could have crevices anywhere in here. It’s frustrating.

“I doubt we can fight our way out.”