Arcane Exfil-Chapter 68: Ashpoint

Cole slept better than he had any right to, given the circumstances. Maybe it was the onsen finally catching up to him, or maybe it was the sloop itself – the thing was practically a cruise liner, minus the tonnage to actually stay still. Not that the rocking had ever bothered him. He was out within minutes, and didn’t wake until morning light crept through the porthole.

He found the others at breakfast. The food matched the décor: some kind of smoked fish, eggs that had been done in butter rather than oil, bread still warm enough that it hadn’t occurred to Cole to check if there was a toaster involved. Overall, he couldn’t really complain; it was about as good as what he could get from a decent diner, which was high praise for a sloop.

They were halfway through when the ship’s annunciator kicked in – brass tubes running along the ceiling, flaring into bells at the ends, the whole thing looking like someone had crossbred a gramophone with a pipe organ. The glyphs at the joints pulsed green as Fenwick’s voice came through, clear despite the tinny edge.

“Attention all hands. We shall be making port at Ashpoint before the hour. Those going ashore will have their effects in order.”

Cole finished his meal, gathered his things, and headed topside. The coastline had already resolved into something more than haze. He could make out the shape of the harbor now, the grey bulk of fortifications behind it. He found a spot at the rail and watched it come into focus.

Istrayn, from what he’d read in Alexandria’s libraries, had been the most advanced nation of its era. Ahead of Celdorne in both science and magic, with electrical infrastructure that predated anything the current age had managed to rebuild. Given that, he felt it reasonable to expect something between Victorian Celdorne and Cold War America – factories, power lines, the utilitarian bones of industrialization, plus whatever influence magic had on all that.

But what lay before him now was none of that.

The harbor’s shape was familiar enough in function, alright – two piers, a dry dock, cranes, moorings, all the infrastructure a naval port required. But familiarity stopped at function.

The first structure to resolve clearly was a pier, extending out from the harbor in a long, sweeping arc. It didn’t jut straight into the water the way piers were supposed to, but instead curved, following a line that had more in common with a seashell than with any dock he’d ever seen. And it was pale – not painted, but actually pale, as if the material itself had been poured from milk. Or rather, glass.

Which was extraordinary because the whole thing was made of one continuous, unbroken, seamless piece. The flowing, curvilinear form that rose from the ground looked like it had been grown there, rather than been assembled on it. As if the Istraynians had simply never been limited by engineering and scale, and had figured out a way to mold entire buildings the way a kid molded sandcastles. Except sandcastles fell down after a few hours, and these hadn’t after a few centuries.

Elina joined him at the rail as they entered the harbor, shoulder brushing against his.

“Have you been here before?” Cole asked.

She gave a somber shake of her head. “No. I know them only by description. Before the Fall, the coastal cities – Ostreva and Velanth among them – were much remarked upon for their use of glass, which was contrived to take the light and pass it through their buildings, so that it shifted with the hour. What stands now gives little notion of that effect.”

Cole glanced at the structures along the waterfront. “Wouldn’t that have cooked everyone inside? Or blinded them, at least.”

“So it would seem. Yet the accounts insist otherwise. The light was said to be gentled as it passed through – drawn across the glass and scattered, so that the rooms within lay always in a kind of calm daylight, never harsh, never hot, even at a summer’s noon. How they managed it, I’ve no notion. Whatever craft they possessed did not survive them.”

The glass was clouded now, centuries of salt and neglect hazing what had probably been perfect clarity. But even through the grime, he could see what she meant. The way the morning sun hit the curved surfaces, diffusing through rather than reflecting off.

“Well, I’d say it still looks pretty good for a few centuries of demonic occupation.”

“A mere shadow,” she said. “There are elves yet living who remember its splendor – well, those who did not lose themselves to madness, nor choose to hasten their end.”

“I can imagine.” He turned his attention back to the pier.

Given the lack of support, the thing should have been drooping at minimum, if not torn from its foundation entirely. By all rights, the thing should have tipped over centuries ago, but whatever enchantments they’d woven into the material, or whatever material they’d used to begin with, still held strong to this day.

The buildings along the waterfront were no different.

See, a normal civilization would’ve built rectangular warehouses, because rectangular prisms were geometrically stable and easy to calculate. The Istraynians had apparently considered that and decided it was boring. Instead, the buildings’ footprints followed shapes that had nothing to do with right angles.

Cole stared for a long moment, trying to make sense of it.

On Earth, buildings were boxes because boxes made sense. With simple shapes, builders could calculate the stress, pour the concrete, and know that gravity would cooperate. When architects got ambitious – cantilevers, curves, dramatic overhangs – they did it with hidden steel and internal reinforcement, engineering tricks that let form cheat function.

The Istraynians cheated differently. If modern architecture was a guy toggling his wallhacks to avoid detection, then this was a rage hacker running blatant aimbot. The result was an architect’s fever dream and an engineer’s nightmare – insane shit that design students sketched in their notebooks and then quietly set aside when someone asked them to explain how it would actually stand up.

“The mind rebels, does it not?”

Cole turned. Graves had joined them at the rail.

“Yeah. Just wondering how the hell they even did all this. Really advanced earth magic, I’m guessing?”

“Earth magic had its place in their works, certainly; yet it was not that alone. The Istraynian schools wedded their sorcery to an art of materials far beyond anything now practiced. How they drew strength from stone beyond what nature affords, how they fashioned metals so light, how they wrought their enchantments so deeply – these remain mysteries we cannot yet answer.”

He drew a quiet breath. “Even in ruin, their craft endures where lesser hands would have left naught but dust.”

Unlawfully taken from novelbuddy, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Cole only nodded as the Redoubt cleared the breakwater and swung toward shore.

Ashpoint resolved into detail as they closed the distance. The walls were the same reinforced concrete as the Great Wall of Flak Towers back home, just scaled down. It seemed counterintuitive at first, especially for a base right in demon territory, but it honestly made sense. If anything bigger than the occasional demon came knocking, wall height wasn’t going to be the deciding factor.

The harbor was the real asset: piers big enough for modern supercarriers, a covered basin with a destroyer sheltered inside, infrastructure better than anything Celdorne could build for decades. A second destroyer held station past the breakwater, running picket duty along the coast.

Most of the base was Istraynian. The Celdornians had added tents where they needed flex space and fabricated a few structures with earth magic, but mostly they were living in someone else’s buildings.

Cole waited alongside the others as the Redoubt inched toward the pier. Deckhands handled the mooring lines, and the gangway was down within a minute of them securing.

Stent met them at the gangway, considerably more composed than he’d been yesterday. “Captain Mercer. It has been an honor to have you aboard.”

Cole shook his hand. “Appreciate the hospitality, Lieutenant.”

Up on the bridge, Fenwick caught his eye and gave a short nod. Cole returned it, then went down the gangway.

A Royal Army lieutenant in khaki waited on the dock, a sergeant at his side. The lieutenant stepped forward as everyone hit the planks.

He was a gray man if Cole had ever seen one – slightly above average height, definite sleeper build, more accountant than soldier. Just… without the glasses and middle-aged dad stache. And from what Cole had learned, it was guys like this who ran ops better than anyone.

The sergeant beside him stood about five-four, but with thick barrels for arms and legs. He could’ve been a normal guy who'd spent too much time in the gym, an abnormally tall dwarf, or maybe a legit half-dwarf – Cole genuinely couldn’t tell, and it didn’t matter enough to ask.

“Sir Cole and Heroes. Sir Warren. Sir Gideon.” The lieutenant inclined his head to each in turn. “I am Lieutenant Axal Langston, aide-de-camp to Major Eddard Harlone. Commander Stroud extends his compliments and requests that you three attend him at headquarters. Sergeant Dunmar shall conduct the rest of your party to quarters; I will escort you thither once your audience concludes.”

Cole glanced back at Walker. “I’ll leave the team to you.”

Ethan nodded. “Sir.”

Langston turned and led them up from the waterfront. The route took them through the base proper – past a row of Istraynian structures pressed into service as storehouses, past a Celdornian-fabricated barracks block, past an artillery emplacement where a gun crew ran drills. The mix was everywhere: old architecture, new additions, tents filling the gaps – a working military installation assembled from whatever was available.

The one exception was headquarters.

The building stood apart from the rest of the base – a spiral tower of glass and pale stone that wound upward like a frozen waterspout. The Celdornians hadn’t added a single brick. Probably couldn’t figure out where they’d even attach it.

Langston brought them to the entrance, held the door, and led them inside.

The lobby was Istraynian from floor to ceiling – literally. Walls curved into floor without seam, pale stone polished to a soft sheen. Elina hadn’t been kidding about the light, though it was hard to judge with generations of muck on the glass.

A reception counter rose from the floor in one smooth arc. The couches and other furniture were freestanding, though – upholstered in some velvet material that might once have been vibrant, faded now to a dull elegance. Even in their age, they still looked more comfortable than anything the Celdornians had brought in.

Their touches consisted of a wooden desk planted in front of the counter, manned by a clerk who looked up as they entered, and a row of filing cabinets along the wall that looked about as natural against the curves as a toolbox in a cathedral. Someone had added a notice board and a coatrack as well, which were just as alien in this sort of environment.

Cole looked around a bit more. An elevator shaft occupied the center of the lobby, enclosed in glass. The platform sat idle at the top.

“The engineers have yet to restore power,” Langston said, noticing Cole’s glance. “The stairs suffice for now.”

They climbed four floors before Langston stopped just outside the second door on the right.

“The Commander awaits you within.”

Cole approached the door and knocked.

“Enter.”

The office was about what he’d expected – the massive open space of typical Istraynian architecture, Celdornian practicality fighting back with a heavy wooden desk and filing cabinets that hardly filled the room. The Istraynian elements were all dead: some silvery appliance inlaid into the original desk, some kind of communications terminal in the corner that probably hadn’t seen power in decades. The only exception was a very sleek Scrying Pane – presumably Istraynian – sitting beside Stroud’s desk, hooked up to a metal box that pulsed blue.

Two maps dominated the far wall. Back home, something like this would’ve been decoration – color to keep the plaster from feeling bare, or some officer’s attempt at looking cultured. Schools had them. Bases had them. Random guys hung them up because empty walls felt wrong. But Istrayn had apparently figured out aerial cartography, and in a world where everyone else was stuck with ground-level surveying, that made these things practically priceless.

One showed the country as it had been before the Fall. The other was local: coastline, Ashpoint, and about twenty miles down the shore, Ostreva. Stroud had already put them to work – grease pencil marks, pins, the operational picture layered on top of premier cartography.

Cole would have to take a closer look at that later.

The officer rising from behind the desk wore commander’s stripes. Navy frock coat, brass buttons, gold braid at the cuffs – he rocked the standard senior brass presentation, immaculate down to the shine on the buttons.

He was also a wolf.

Cole’s brain needed a second. He’d seen elves, dwarves – normal enough, admittedly – but hell, he’d also seen a minotaur running an entire forward post. None of that had quite prepared him for this.

The man who rose before him was what this world called ‘wolfkin,’ though he seemed considerably more man than wolf, standing to receive guests like any normal day on the job. Contrary to what furry conventions might suggest, the face was mostly human in structure – normal forehead, normal cheekbones, jaw only slightly extended into something that wasn’t quite a muzzle. He had gray fur rather than skin and a dark canine nose, sure, but the overall proportions wouldn’t have looked out of place in an X-Men comic.

Even his eyes seemed fairly human, aside from the amber color and the slit pupils.

The mutton chops were the real kicker, though. They gave him the exact visage of a Civil War general or Victorian admiral, except Stroud’s were trimmed close rather than exploding off his jaw. Whether that was a natural growth pattern or deliberate grooming, Cole couldn’t tell, but the result was more Wolverine than werewolf.

Shit – how long had he been staring? Cole locked in before it could get weird. Or rather, weirder, considering the wolfman had probably already clocked the hesitation.

“Commander Stroud. Captain Cole Mercer.” He stepped forward. “Thank you for seeing us directly.”

Stroud didn’t seem bothered by the hesitation. Either he was used to it, or he understood where Cole was coming from – which, given the whole isekai thing, was probably literal as much as figurative.

“Sir Cole.” The handshake was a bit unorthodox, given the padded palm and faint rasp of fur, but otherwise professional. “Sir Warren. Sir Gideon.” He shook their hands as well. “Ashpoint is at your disposal. I trust the passage caused you no undue hardship.”

“Smooth sailing,” Cole said. “Fenwick runs a tight ship.”

“That he does.” Stroud gestured to the chairs arranged before his desk. “Be seated. I shall not detain you overlong, but there are matters to be set before you at once, and you may take your rest thereafter.”