Skylands Legends

13.1 Questions and Answers

Jet Vac landed on the academy grounds, his fury from Fizzland still burning strong. That beast, that... monster was going to take everything away from him. His vision had been right. He was seeing that now.

First it had been correct about Eruptor's death, then the giant traptanium crystal. And when he had met the beast's eyes back there, he had recognized them. He recognized the anger and hatred from his dreams.

He now knew that what the King of Chaos had shown him wasn't a trick, but the truth. A horrible truth. From what he felt in those visions, it meant the end of the Skylanders. An end that came because of the beast. An end Jet Vac had to prevent.

But how? As of right now the beast was unbeatable. They had thrown most everything they had at him only for it to fail miserably. Killing him didn't work, trapping him didn't work, and brute force sure as hell wouldn't work either. They needed a new plan, a new way to win. The one thing holding them back was their lack of knowledge.

What they knew about the beast was very limited. He was extremely strong, seemingly immortal, immune to traptanium, and was quick to rage. He was possibly from the Lowlands — maybe even from the dark rift — but evidence was still inconclusive. Before Fizzland he had only bothered to attack the Skylanders in the Lowlands and Bushwhack and Knight Light near the Junkyard Isles. Since then he had left all populated islands alone and kept to a relatively straight direction — meaning the beast was after something.

If it weren't for Hedgefog and Bushwhack's testimonies, Jet Vac would assume the beast would only attack when provoked. This left many questions.

Where was the beast going? Why was he in the Lowlands? Why did he attack Eruptor and his team? And the biggest question of all; How could they kill him?

Another point worth considering after Fizzland was the beast's power to tap into the arcane. The fact that he had summoned hundreds of creatures from shadow showed that he was extremely talented at dark elemental magic.

Jet Vac had never had a talent for arcane abilities, able to only scratch the surface, but he still knew plenty about it from the days he studied at the academy. The arcane was a force outside their reality that stabilized most everything in the natural world. Most believed it was the arcane that kept the Skylands from plummeting into nothingness.

Even if it wasn't, every being was still connected to the arcane in some way or another. Most, like Jet Vac, were able to sense the arcane, but unable to tap into its power. The academy termed them Inritus.

Then there were the ones like Spyro and Bushwhack who were capable of lightly tapping into the arcane. They were known as Feids. Feids had a very limited reserve for arcane powers, they were typically limited to one or two arcane abilities. But those few abilities, if focused on, could be stretched to levels of power far beyond their station, even with their limited arcane ability.

And then there were the Draocht. The Draocht were capable of holding much larger reserves of the arcane within them. These were people like Stealth Elf and Knight Light. Draochts had the ability to strengthen their arcane reserves, making it possible for them to tap deeper into its power.

There were different power levels within Draochts too, information that Jet Vac had never learned, but he knew that Stealth Elf had originally been a lower tier Draocht when it came to arcane ability. When she'd first joined the academy, she had only been able to summon veils and turn invisible. Now she was a middling Draocht level capable of summoning multiple illusions at a time.

And finally, there were the Arcanomancers. These were the beings capable of tapping deeply into the arcane, accessing up to one hundred times more power than the strongest Draocht. These were beings like Ninjini, Starcast, Ro Bow, Enigma, and Kaos. But the most powerful Arcanomancer of their time had been Eon. Hugo had even believed that Eon might have been the most powerful Arcanomancer to ever exist. Even with that power, Jet Vac didn't think that Eon could have ever summoned an army of shadows that big.