Original post here.
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The snow had begun to fall early over the academy.
In the dining hall of the academy I had heard the metereomancers discussing the ramifications of the inclement weather, as they shovelled down their steaming lunch. Outside, the incessant snow piled up in huge drifts, converting the cobbled squares and walkways of the academy into a frigid and damp crypt. All the students and tutors of the academy bustled about in the bitter cold, rapidly preparing for the year’s final exams.
Hopes and fears ran rampant amongst the cohort, as well as speculations as to the nature of the tests, the proctors, and potential grades. For those in my class, this would be our third year of tutelage, and a passing grade meant we would be granted our first titles; Mage Third Class.
For my part, I ate with a reserved languor. In my pocket I had a note, which had been slid under my door while I slept last night, and stapled to the back was an unsigned academic transcript upon which every box had been ticked “outstanding”.
The note was handwritten, and simply read:
Come see me.
Regards,
Dara
The Archmage clearly had a job he needed doing, and this informal greeting, as well as the underhanded, and quite frankly blatant bribe it was stapled to, told me that whatever this job was, I probably wouldn’t like it.
This had become a regular occurrence, much to my irritation. Though I had to admit it had its perks. Every now and again I would get some surreptitious message requiring my help, with some trivial proposed payment attached. Recover my horse that I lost after a night of gambling, find a waylaid student who had gone missing after an ill advised field trip into a dangerous cave system, pay off city officials who were interfering with academy business, kill the rogue mage who was set on disgracing the institution with his necromantic dabblings. In return, you can skip that mandatory arcane cooking class you hate. You can have your own room on the better floor of the academy. You can peruse the restricted area of the library between midnight and dawn every other Sunday.
Poor fare for any bagman, assistant, or assassin. But for an aspiring mage learning under an unscrupulous Archmage, the potential blackmail material would have been payment enough. That and the fact that the unexplained favouritism irritated my rich, arrogant classmates to no end.
And so I left my cooling broth in the dining room, and went to find out my fate.
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The archmage was seated behind his large mahogany desk as I entered.
“You took your time,” He remarked, not deigning to look up, “Close the door please.”
I did so, and took a seat opposite him. The roaring fireplace in the corner of the room filled the room with warmth and light.
“The food was marginally better than usual today,” I replied, “I felt obliged to actually finish my plate.”
This provoked a small smile from Dara. In the flickering firelight I thought for a moment I saw stress in the archmages downturned eyes.
Not quite fear, I thought, but something close.
Concern. Worry.
I decided to fast track the conversation.
“How can I be of assistance today, Sir?”
The archmage looked up from the paper he was intent on, and passed it across to me.
“This is a hunt.” He stated plainly, “Your target is a former student of this academy. I’ve marked several likely locations on that map, and I’ve imprinted an image of him on the back. He’s to be killed.”
“Any special requests?” I asked, “An accident like with Le Flien? Or like that time in Hastenbrig?”
He glared at me. He hated when I brought up Hastenbrig.
“No. Just kill him.”
I always appreciated the directness with which Dara framed these jobs. No silly euphemisms or surreptitious descriptions. However there was one element that usually accompanied these missions that he had omitted.
I stared at him across the cluttered desk.
Why? My eyes enquired.
He met my gaze intensely.
Don’t ask. His eyes insisted back.
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The first two locations were a bust.
An inn outside of Tverok was practically abandoned, as no-one besides me was crazy enough to be travelling the roads in this weather.
Likewise, the target had not been at his home in the city. There was no evidence there to suggest where he had gone, though I had found a fine bottle of brandy, stuffed down the back of a drawer.
I swigged from that bottle now, as I worked my way on horseback up the winding mountain trail.
The third location was a lodge, high up in the mountain ranges. It had taken four days of brutal travel in the cold to reach the foot of the mountains, and two more to ascend to the lodge's location, which was saddled between two of the range's peaks. The mountain passes were clogged with snow, and the monotone grey skies seemed to possess a limitless potential for more. Flakes drifted down slowly, swirled around in the wind. My bones ached in the cold, and I wished fervently that my chase would end here.
As I came around a bend, and into sight of the lodge, I finished the last of the brandy and tucked the bottle back into my saddlebags. The lodge was a small building, tucked against the leeward face of a rocky outcropping.
The lodge appeared abandoned. No lights shone in the windows, and no footprints marked the snow to the door. I tied off my horse in the adjoining stable, and went to make my way inside. If nothing else, the lodge would accommodate me for the night, and with any luck there would be another bottle of brandy or two to keep me company.
As I cracked open the front door of the lodge, I felt the slight tug against my mind of a magical effect triggering. It was the slightest thing, like a breeze stirring through the branches of an evergreen.
I froze, waiting to see what furious surprise came my way. When nothing eventuated I slowly inched the door open and stepped inside. A quick examination revealed that sigil that had been painted across the door and the frame, which had been broken by my intrusion.
The sigil was complex and artful. Unlike the rigid, geometric sigils used by many mages, this was a graceful piece of art. I traced the sweeping arcs and curves of the diagram and determined two things.
This was an alert sigil, painted as an early warning system to alert the mage who wrote it of intrusions.
Secondly, and more concerningly, it wasn’t powered by human mana. Instead of the usual arcane symbols for the self, the symbols for wind and the stars were present.
Very clever.
Whomever had crafted this had tried to make it long-lasting and quiet. Out here in the mountains, the winds and the stars were omnipresent forces, and subtle. A spell crafted by human mana would require constant maintenance in the form of energy, and would leave behind an indelible trace of the maker.
I realized my quarry was competent, careful, and one of the rare mages who mastered elemental forces in lieu of utilizing their own mana.
The use of one’s own mana was a fundamental tenant of most magical spells. It was the building block upon which all of a mage’s skill was based. As an internal force, one’s own mana was reliable, and very difficult for another mage to interfere with. Most mages found that sufficient, however for some, very few mages, that was not enough.
The stars, the wind, the sea, all possessed an enormous potential of energy from which to draw. For the typical mage, mana was a thing to be rationed. For the mage who could harness elemental mana, it was a thing that needed only be controlled.
I smiled.
A fight amongst kin then.
My methods, which I hid thoroughly at the academy, were much like this mage’s. This battle would prove to be interesting, if only I could find him.
The interior of the lodge appeared as empty and derelict as its exterior. I paced the room in search of any clues as to my quarries location. As I walked the exterior of the main room I noted that upon each window-sill, a sigil was painted identical to that on the door. As I checked each window in turn it occurred to me.
All sealed from the inside.
He was here, somewhere. My heart-rate began to quicken, and I began turning over rugs and furniture until I found it. A trap door hidden under a dusty rug.
I did not open this one like the door. Instead, I placed my hand flat against the hatch and extended my mind out. Beneath my hand I could feel the pulsing circular energy of a sigil. Where before the tripwire sensors had been thin silver threads of mana, this one was a coursing discus of white-hot energy.
I left my awareness focused on the sigil, and willed my body to move back. I saw myself step away from the hatch in my mind's eye, and I focused my will, and gave the sigil a mental squeeze.
The hatchway detonated in a conflagration of white-hot flame, and the lodge and all furnishings within two meters of the hatch vaporized instantly. I let my consciousness snap back into my body, and saw the dissipating smoke in the room.
A precise circle had been cut into the floor and ceiling of the room by the column of flame, so quick and so fierce that only the edges of the circle still smoldered. I peered over the edge and looked down into the room below.
I smiled, and dropped down into the darkness below.
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The drop was longer than I thought.
I channeled an air current to slow my descent, and I touched down into a dimly lit room, that was, by all appearances, a library. Walls of bookshelves covered the edges of the circular room, and a pedestal stood in the center, above which hung a vein of crystal, which scattered pure light for illumination.
In a small vestibule on the other side of the room, a middle aged man sat quietly reading a book.
“Be with you in a moment.” The old man remarked, seemingly unbothered. “Just have to mark my place.”
I watched as the man stood, slipping a bookmark into the pages of his reading. He paced slowly to a nearby bookshelf, and slid the book back into its place. The spine of the book read, A taxonomy of the fauna of the N’Cosh region.
The man dusted his hands off on his robes and turned to face me.
“Before we begin,” He smiled warmly, “May I make a reading recommendation?”
I nodded slowly, and he walked over to a flat wooden panel along the wall. He placed his hand gingerly against the wood, and the panel split and shrunk from his touch, revealing a hidden compartment which contained a single weatherbeaten chapbook bound in cloth.
He picked the book up and brought it to the centre of the room, where he placed it on the illuminated pedestal.
The man turned to face me.
“I know he sent you.” he spoke quietly, “It’s his way to resolve issues when they become bothersome.”
“Then you know what happens next.” I said quietly, “And I hope you know it isn’t personal for me.”
The man sighed and nodded a weary nod.
“ I know.” He whispered, “I bear you no enmity either.”
His next words gave me pause.
“If you live, just make sure you read that book afterwards.”
Before I could discern his meaning, he was already attacking.
A savage wind whipped the dusty books from the surrounding shelves, and the hardback books impacted my side, head and hands as I desperately tried to maintain a clear line of sight on the target.
I focused my mind and imagined the eye of a tornado. I imagined the wind circling, but never touching the safe, calm center which I focused on my body.
It was a defensive spell I had perfected and used many times.
Not this time.
The winds disobeyed my will. Instead they whipped away to coalesce around the man, who was now moving slowly forward towards me, wreathed in armour of wind and air.
I felt a panic rising in me.
I braced my feet against the stone floor, and felt down deep for the heat energy that lay beneath the earth. No sooner did I feel the flames wreath my arms and hands, then the man made a curt gesture with his hands, and the flames swirled away to form a white hot blade of fire in his hand.
The panic was choking me now, and I began to back away, until I felt the unyielding wall pressing into my back. The man was striding now, closing the distance between us, wreathed in swirling wind and flame.
He had stripped away the elements from my control. It was an unbelievably singular power. Perhaps one in a thousand mages could draw upon elemental mana. An even smaller number of those could form those powers into offensive magicks. A mage who could overcome the will of another, and strip that mana from them…
It was unthinkable.
I looked around the room, desperate. There was nothing. Nothing that could even remotely challenge his borrowed power. The power of fire and air. The power of the Earth itself.
He was mere meters away now, and in seconds I would be dead.
Instead I looked within and found… something.
It was a spark, small and malnourished. Sleeping and dormant.
I woke it up.
Instantly, the anger burst forth through my body, flooding every cell and nerve ending. The pain was excruciating. I think I may have screamed, though I can’t be sure.
With a desperate effort I wrangled it, and forced it into my outstretched hand. It formed a beam of pale white light that stretched out and collided with the oncoming figure. It sizzled as it impacted the mana-infused air swirling around him.
I felt my arm burn and blister as the light scorched my exposed flesh.
My mind reeled as the power coursed through my body. Unbidden, I tasted the bitterness of being sold as an infant. The loneliness of being traded to the Academy as a property. The humiliation and ridicule of the scornful looks of my classmates. The degradation in the eyes of Archmage Dara, as he sent me on another midnight murder, confident that the orphaned servant of the Academy had no-where else to go.
The beam began to ablate away the wind shield of the older mage, and he took a staggering step back as the beam began to sear his flesh too. I saw the fear in his eyes, as my vision began to tunnel, and grey out.
This was death, I knew.
The mana death of exhaustion that mages fought so hard to avoid. The lost battle of attrition that saw mages die, alone and exhausted before their foes. I struggled to draw the mana back, but it would not. It flowed out from me in a raging torrent, and as I saw the beam finally pierce my rival's shield, the lights began to fade out.
We fell to our knees almost in tandem, and as I slid sideways to the floor, I saw the smoking hole the beam had left through his chest.
Darkness closed in.
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When the world came back, it was only agony.
I screamed, and reflexively jerked my arm. The pain of my burns worsened, and I lay as still as I was able, panting and confused on the cold cobblestones.
For a long time I lay there, the smell of burnt flesh filling my nostrils, and tears coming unbidden to my eyes.
Eventually, I struggled to my feet, and surveyed the scene.
On the floor next to me, the man lay dead, in a pool of his own blood. The beam had carved a hole straight through him, and I could see the seared remnants of his lungs and internal organs.
On the pedestal in the center of the room, the little chapbook remained.
I opened the cover page and read the title.
Personal recollections of the Archmage Dara, written by Mage Earntle
I turned the first page, feeling dread sinking into my stomach. I briefly looked over to the still smoking corpse on the floor. I flipped, more and more aggressively through the pages, until I couldn't bear it anymore.
Tears of anguish welled in my eyes as I tucked the book into my robes. I would finish the rest later.
I buried Earntle beside his lodge before I set out on the long journey back.