Page 146 of The Sundered Realms

Liris abruptly froze again, gritting her teeth in frustration but managing not to smack herself in the face and disrupt the dispelling.

That was the question she’d been missing all this time:

How does a demon know whether they can fit through a portal?

Shry had said it before, magic pained demons. The idea that they could sense the presence and strength of magic seemed like an obvious step, and from there—

Obviously, demons could sense ley lines and nodes, and thus the location of Gates.

That was how Jadrhun located them. He could just voiding ask, and pay demons for answers with portals.

And the shape of each spell, the arrangement of the Thyrasel within them—the perfect language she’d just handed to him, void everything—was to convey the location to the magic.

Each spell wasn’t a circle because it was a magical map of the realm it targeted.

Liris spat out the remainder of the translation in fury, and she picked up her pace even faster.

She finished the outer edge and took down the barrier. Jadrhun glanced her way, but that was all. He didn’t have time to think about her anymore, which was his mistake.

Liris didn’t stop.

She was never stopping herself or waiting for anyone, not ever again.

“You may not know this about me,” Liris called, “but I have a secret.”

With a swipe of her hand, she dispelled the first demon portal.

Jadrhun did look her way at that, and she bared her teeth at him.

“I never lose what matters,” Liris told him.

Least of all herself.

Jadrhun’s expression twisted, and demons descended her way.

That was the moment Liris realized that Special Operations had arrived at some point, by the multiple barriers that popped into existence around her. Vhannor couldn’t have managed them all.

She turned back into the spells, her blood singing, believing they might have a shot at this after all.

When she glimpsed a particular spell further inside the tapestry, Liris made a brief detour from her whirling massacre of the demon portals, taking over a transportation spell, so innocuous Jadrhun had probably expected she’d ignore it, given all the actively harmful ones she had to deal with.

But it was anchored elsewhere: an emergency escape.

With Special Operations here to apprehend him, Liris wasn’t letting him get away, not after this. And definitely not with this tapestry.

She couldn’t afford the time to dispel it entirely, so she changed it instead: a lower risk than taking too long. In less than a minute she viciously reversed the spell’s anchor rather than dispelling it entirely—let Jadrhun believe he still had an escape route until he didn’t.

Then it was back to the immediate problems, and Liris’ righteousness and certainty of success rapidly faded in the face of her increasing awareness of the evidence.

Which was that, despite having—she thought—figured out his secret trick, none of this made sense.

What it came down to was that all things considered... she was still dispelling this too easily. She might have believed that Jadrhun had underestimated her but didn’t.

And the faster Liris got at taking down these remote demon portals, the more of her mind was free to notice that none resembled any of her theories of what she’d thought to expect, and she had thought a lot about what to expect.

She knew Jadrhun was planning to sunder Serenthuar to try to reconnect it differently, and none of the spells she’d seen had anything to do with that. Since she was able to dispel them at all, their activation couldn’t have been critical to his main purpose. Jadrhun wasn’t stupid enough to situate them on the outside if he’d needed them close to hand.

That was it.

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