PART ONE: NEWCOMER
PROLOGUE 1: CRUCIBLE DREAMS
“The word cannot be permitted to die. If it will fall on deaf ears then I shall give it to the blind to read.”
– from ‘The Book of Kultemeren’, 1:1-2
The city of Mund sleeping restlessly far below her like a flea-infested dog, the young mage behind the blue-tinted glass of the tower looked down and sighed. While others slumbered in their beds or revelled into the night, her work was just beginning. Her spells were most-easily, most-accurately cast under starlight, and the constellations of the gods were bright tonight. The wall of windows was constructed from glass that had been ensorcelled to better-magnify the radiance of the stars. This Lounge of Seercraft in which she stood was a place of shadows, unlit by lantern or light-spell, but the front by the windows was bathed in a glow that almost floated perceptibly on the air, a silver sheen of mist that seemed to part and ripple as the mages moved through it.
She wasn’t alone in here – the lounge occupied a full floor halfway up the tower, and hundreds of comfortable seats faced the windows, many occupied by her fellow diviners sitting in the trance, breathing deep of the star-mist. But right now she was the only one on her feet, the only one looking down. The only one sighing.
Two weeks, Tialya said to herself. It’s only been two weeks.
She already hated it.
She’d looked at her options when she graduated in the spring. Mummy and Daddy wanted her to go back home, of course – but leave Mund? That was hardly something she could do now. Returning to that life, that rural existence, after three years in the biggest city in the world? That would be like dying. Even the atrocities, the demonic invasions… it was worth it to witness the champions soaring on the morning breeze.
She’d already seen that course in her visions, the future-lines that took her on the three hundred mile journey back to the town of her birth, back to the manor-house, the same old people, places… She rejected the option by instinct, the same instinct that rejected vomit and made you retch.
All the same, the school had produced more graduates in divination than any other magical discipline this year. Everyone knew it was the best of the five magics. The postgraduate courses in further diviner-studies were filled by those who’d gotten the top grades, so Tialya wasn’t going to be able to improve on her education, seek an eventual teaching position. She had to find work.
And of course, the best guilds hired the best graduates who didn’t make it onto the advanced classes. Now, months later, this had left her with the options of either taking a sucky job working as a grunt in a factory, producing seeing-balls and prophecy-cards for sale to the idiot public, or working for the Magisterium themselves.
The Magisterium took those with middling grades like Tialya’s, insisted on seeing you as an ‘asset’ to be ‘cultivated’. The fact they paid peanuts for such a seemingly-prestigious occupation might’ve had something to do with it. But becoming a magister, joining the mage-police, didn’t have to be as dangerous as it sounded. You didn’t have to go through field training these days – you could take roles like Tialya’s current one, in which the only danger was the ever-present risk of throwing yourself through the glass at the sheer monotony of the tedious, laborious, overwrought nonsensicalness of it all. Nothing interesting ever happened in the visions.
On the surface, things seemed fine. She hadn’t even had to leave the magnificent school premises – the Magisterium owned many of the floors of the Maginox and used it as their headquarters. The glass needle was the pinnacle of Mundic architecture, and in the city of mages that was saying something. It felt good to Tialya that she could still come here every day, enter the Maginox like everyone else who’d found positions in the advanced classes, her former friends and rivals. She could pretend at being someone, still.
But she spent her nights cataloguing all manner of tiny incidents, passing the information up the chain, never finding out if it all made a difference in the end. A lord discreetly sliding an envelope into a gloved hand. A fisherman down at the harbour of Salnifast-by-the-Sea, a red fish dangling from his hook. An elf hanging upside down in an empty warehouse while someone busies themselves shearing off his pale-gold hair. She was never allowed to perform research, follow the future-lines backwards and forwards, even if she’d had the time to – or the ability. She had to just let it run its course.
“Record the vision, in exacting detail, and return to the trance.” Those were Zakimel’s words, and she intended to follow them to the letter. She would never admit it around her colleagues, who seemed to regard him as something of a joke, but the older man terrified her. He was the head of their sub-department, the way she understood it, answering only to Mistress Henthae herself. Even the sight of his thick moustache twitching with displeasure made her shrink into herself, feeling her face flush with colour as she lowered her gaze. Even the memory of it as she stood by the glass looking out over the city made her cheeks feel hot.
Permitting herself a final sigh, she stepped back into the shadows, settled into a cushioned leather seat, and tried to slip into the trance.
At least this part was easier nowadays. This was the first night of her third week, and she’d gotten herself into a rhythm over the last few shifts. Eight hours of off-and-on trance-work, with unlimited short breaks and three of twenty minutes to be taken at her leisure. Cheese and biscuits and water, paid for by the Magisterium. It wasn’t so bad. She was making enough to save a little aside each month, and her prospects would improve in a couple of years. She’d seen it. And, once she’d been here six months, if she could get that promotion they’d mentioned at the interview…
Zakimel approved promotions, and he was an arch-diviner. None of them could see his decisions before he made them – someone like him had marked their exam papers too, of course.
There were worse, far worse jobs to be had in Mund, she knew. She was well-acquainted with reality, with every one of those nasty fleas infesting the dog; that was the curse of the diviner. She had insight into the small moments of human truth many were forced by dint of distraction or pure ignorance to miss. She’d seen the poor crawling in the muck the nobles rode through, seen children feasting on roasted rats. Sometimes when she went home in the morning to her tiny Oldtown flat she was forced to avoid areas where murders had occurred through the night. But she just had to remind herself of the oft-repeated mantra amongst her undergraduate classmates: Follow the future-lines to success, and success is inevitable.
She’d never been a believer before, but now she had to believe. That her work meant something, somehow, to someone. That her future-lines would converge, bring her the prosperity, the success she deserved. She’d worked hard, damn it. She deserved it.
Going over the mantra again, going over her prior visions of her destiny – it made it easier. The chill beauty of the blue starlight. The frozen quietness of the fate-heavy room. Time itself seeped through the motionless, radiant mist. It flowed through Tialya’s nostrils into her lungs and then out again, carrying something of itself with it through her flesh, her mind, a sensation like breath but breath that brought images, sounds, impressions – a sliver of Truth, a nick in the veil of reality through which the trained eye could peer, trained fingers reaching in and peeling back –
At first the visions were as meaningless as ever. A snail on a broken bench, in one of the camps outside the city walls. A homeless man covered in the drop, the filth of the city, laughing a toothless laugh. A young man or boy, tall and skinny, lifting his booted foot, kicking out at a gravestone –
And then for the first time in her life Tialya felt the tug of time, felt the undercurrents pull her deeper, show her what she wanted, what she needed to see…
She sensed the power crackle as the boy lowered his foot once more. The way the things in the earth – the corpses in the ground all around him – seemed to rattle in their coffins, eager to do the boy’s bidding.
An arch-sorcerer being born, she realised with a dry throat. A mage with instinctive control over the creatures of the other planes. Spirits and eldritches, the powers of the unknown.
She shuddered. Sorcerers gave her the creeps.
The vision slipped away but didn’t break, didn’t change – it merely flowed into a new form, and she followed the young new sorcerer into a different time and place. Now his identity was suddenly hidden behind a horned mask, his body swathed in a dark robe, but he still claimed her focus – thanks to the trance-spell she knew it was him, despite all the others in the room in similar apparel.
He was standing in a great hall lit by blazing hearths, separated from the others by the undulations of a vast, spiral-shaped table. Upon strange thrones carved of crystal, lords and ladies were perched, arguing with those like him who were clustered in small groups all around the room. The champions, the protector-mages of Mund, each of them masked and robed.
He’s going to be a champion?
Some of the champions she recognised, by their chosen masks, the sigils worked into their robes. Many of them she did not. And, after years in the city, she knew them all.
How far into the future am I seeing?
She swallowed in a throat of sand and rocks, her attention fixed on what she saw. She couldn’t hear anything, but her eyes followed every detail she could discern. It was hard not to become distracted from the relevant events by staring at the trivialities.
This must be it… the Arreax, in the Arrealbord Palace…
The chamber of the High Council of the Realm. A vision few could hope to come by.
The boy: the arch-sorcerer. His mask, like many of those worn by the champions, doesn’t cover the lower part of his face. His lips move, then his lips are still.
The sorrow of the boy, emanating out of his body in waves as that body grows.
He seems not to even notice as the wings protruding from his back take on vast dimensions, rotten feathers dripping yellow ichor – his clothing distorts, living shadows rolling down over his mask, hands, robe. The horns atop his head swell into dark branches, an unholy crown of antlers. He turns aside from the argument and walks away, unconsciously bending to better fit through the doorway, enter the black-glass tunnel beyond. As he goes he pulls at something on his belt, drawing a sword that springs into flame.
His explosion in stature and change in shape have not been missed by the others. They move to impede his escape, pin him, hem him in, but none of their actions can restrain him, even slow him. Those who oppose him are thrust into the black walls, crushed by the invisible, impenetrable force that surrounds him.
He is dangerous. He is darkmage.
Greychilde.
She follows him out as the sorcerer finally exits the dark passageway, leaving the bodies of those who’d tried to stop him like puppets with their strings cut, lying bloody and broken against the walls.
He steps out onto the sunless hillside. He spreads his wings to fly.
She gets a glimpse beyond the palace grounds. Just one glimpse of what is coming.
Mund. Hightown. A city of ruins, a field of stones. A pair of sinuous shapes, deep black against the grey, smoke-filled sky.
Gargantuan.
Tialya almost fell out of her chair as the chronomantic spell came to an end, then dug into her pocket with nervous, nearly-unresponsive fingers.
Paper and pencil… paper and pencil…
She hurried to the back of the room, breathing heavily as she let herself out through the door into the corridor, into the light of the glowing stones set into the wall. Thankfully no one else was back here, no one to notice and comment on the state she was in. She turned the corner into the seating area and flung herself down into one of the utilitarian, hard-wood chairs.
She knew the vision had to be kept secret. She knew it wasn’t normal; it was one of the dark visions they whispered about at the academy – chaos, apocalypse… She could only thank Yune that she hadn’t been driven mad! But there hadn’t been a dragon in Mund for… she had no idea how long. A long, long time. The report would go to the clerk, and then to Zakimel – no one else would get to see it.
With her paper and pencil she wrote it down – everything, every detail she could remember. She quickly sketched the likeness of the boy who would become an arch-sorcerer – the enchanters would pull it from her memory later, she knew, recreate his face in illusion-form for better study, identification… He was like a hundred thousand other Mundian boys: lowborn, going off the state of his clothing, the need for a decent haircut; barely an adult, by the ineptitude with which he’d shaven. A distinctive scar on the right cheek – curved, like a little moon or a banana.
She wrote down all her impressions of the time and place each event would occur, for deeper scrutiny from her superiors. The boy was going to visit this graveyard, kick the gravestone soon; he was going to come into his powers within the week, that was certain… She couldn’t see the name on the gravestone, but her report would just have to go through without it… A greater seer would be employed to investigate.
Then the far future: the masks of the champions she knew – the masks of the ones she didn’t… The details of the room, its spiral table, its flaming hearths…
She pressed her pencil too deep when describing the dragons, broke the end off. The damned things were supplied by the Magisterium but they must’ve been made on the cheap by goblins or something – as amazing as pencils were, they were forever breaking in her pocket.
She found her little knife, resharpened it, and finished her work.
Once she was certain she’d captured every facet of the vision, editing it twice to add more detail, she went to the desk, trepidation in every footfall.
The clerk had the third volume of The One Who Prophesies; A New Analysis of the Mage Wars open on his belly, and was leaning back in his chair. It was a big book, so she couldn’t see his face, but she could tell who it was. Movaine was the man’s name, she was pretty sure. He was short, round-faced, always smiling; a little bit off-putting. He was wearing a robe that’d been woven for someone bigger than him, presumably in order to accommodate the sizeable gut upon which the book rested, but the sleeves were way too long and he’d been forced to roll them back.
Nerveless fingers dropped the paper on the desk in front of him.
He lowered the book, smiling amiably at her as usual as he slowly climbed to an upright position.
“I…” She whispered the word, glanced back over her shoulder, then back to Movaine. “I think you need to see this.”
“Tia, isn’t it?” His voice was needlessly loud, almost making her jump after the stillness of the Lounge of Seercraft.
She stopped herself and merely nodded, trying to avoid his appraising eyes – she looked down at his desk. Four folders, one covered in runes. A glyphstone, the translucent chunk of crystal being used for a paperweight. The sheet she’d dropped…
She heard him sigh, then saw him lay down his book and reach for her report, lift it.
He was professional enough to take her seriously, or he’d noticed the way she was acting. Either way, he immediately picked up the glyphstone, his communication device, and retreated to the back room to consult privately with their superior.
It took only fifteen minutes for Zakimel to arrive, but it felt like fifteen hours. Tialya was actually pleased to see him, the angry quivering of his moustache. It didn’t matter. Zakimel was someone who would take control of the situation. Make it so that everything was alright.
She and Movaine were taken up to the magicrux, and made their report in person to Mistress Henthae herself. The Head of Special Investigations. She got to see, speak to, the Head of Special Investigations. In person. Herself.
In the morning Tialya went home to bed, and at first she found she couldn’t sleep, thoughts dark with the nightmarish vision, the arch-sorcerer and the dragons. But after a time the horror melted into an incredible sense of serenity, a kind of soul-deep peace she’d never known before.
Or so she thought.
The young mage slept with a big smile on her face that only disappeared as she awoke.
* * *
The city of Mund sleeping restlessly far below her like a flea-infested dog, the young mage behind the blue-tinted surface of the glass tower looked down and sighed. The Lounge of Seercraft in which she stood was a place of shadows, unlit by lantern or light-spell, but the front by the windows was bathed in a glow that almost floated perceptibly on the air, a silver sheen of mist that seemed to part and ripple as the mages moved through it.
She was the only one on her feet, the only one looking down. The only one sighing.
Two and a bit weeks, Tialya said to herself. It’s only been two and a bit weeks.
She still hated it.
Becoming a magister, joining the mage-police, didn’t have to be as dangerous as it sounded. You didn’t have to go through field training these days – you could take roles like Tialya’s current one, in which the only danger was the ever-present risk of throwing yourself through the glass at the sheer monotony of the tedious, laborious, overwrought nonsensicalness of it all. Nothing interesting ever happened in the visions.
She spent her nights cataloguing all manner of tiny incidents, passing the information up the chain, never finding out if it all made a difference in the end. A lord discreetly passing an envelope into a gloved hand. A fisherman down at the harbour of Salnifast-by-the-Sea, a red fish dangling from his hook. An elf hanging upside down in an empty warehouse while someone shears off his pale-gold hair. A young man or boy, tall and skinny, lifting his booted foot, kicking out at a gravestone. She was never allowed to perform research, follow the future-lines backwards and forwards, even if she’d had the time to – or the ability. She had to just let it run its course.
“Record the vision, in exacting detail, and return to the trance.” Those were Zakimel’s words, and she intended to follow them to the letter.
Permitting herself a final sigh, she stepped back into the shadows, settled into a cushioned leather seat, and tried to slip into the trance.
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