Valencia’s slums were overbearing. Leaning building closing in, swaying this way and that in the meager breeze. People, horses, and wagons filled the tight corridors they called streets. Shit and piss rained on the crowds, dumped from second story windows and above.
Haslow Sparrow Clan loathed every second he spent there. Soon enough, I’ll see it all burn.
(in progress)
“You’re telling me that a Worldfire-wielding madman is on the loose in my bloody city,” Richter Benegaz sucked in an exasperated breath, “and instead of Black Robes, Pascal Doon has sent me two students and a washed up professor?”
Filling in the Archmage of Valencia on the current situation was not an easy conversation nor a pleasant one. Clearly, he was not accustomed to the notion of hospitality. His private study—though massive and sumptuous—was cluttered with no place to sit aside from the plain chair oriented in front of a massive executive desk overflowing with papers and scrolls and half-opened envelopes.
I had never seen Bastilion lambasted so, nor have I witnessed his acquiescence to such insults. The red-faced man quavering before the screaming court wizard was a far cry from the one who had rattled the walls with his demands for apology.
“Archmage, please understand,” Bastilion simpered, gesturing to Marta and me, “we are spread thin—these two are bright and they have unique insights on the gravity of our situation.”
“Really?” Archmage Benegaz fumed and turned on Marta. “Tell me, girl, what insights does a sixth-year siege student bring to in the defense of a kingdom?”
Marta stood tall, her soft face turned to stone before the wrath of a petulant superior. “I’ve studied Worldfire, Archmage, and I know how to quell it. As does my associate,” she gestured to me. “He’s already suppressed the traitor’s first attack.”
I gawked at her. She had never told me that—then again, I suppose I hadn’t asked. The surprise, however, couldn’t hold a candle to the petty sting of hearing her call me an associate.
The Archmage didn’t relent. “You quelled Worldfire? How?”
A challenge, clearly. Any court wizard would have extensive knowledge and practice with all varieties of countermagic. He wants to know if I know—which I don’t.
“Senorita de la Rosa is correct—I did suppress a full frontal assault of Worldfire within the Citadel…” I swallowed. “But I’m not sure how I did it.”
“Torloon,” Archmage Benegaz said, every word off his lips poisoned with disdain. “This is some deranged idea of a joke, is it not?”
Bastilion stuttered and stammered. Marta cut in: “With respect Archmage—Mister Lafey has gained a link with the attacker through this experience. He’s also very capable. With a bit tutelage between you and I, I believe we will be more than equipped to deal with the interloper.”
“Tutelage! There’s a war on our doorstep! Do you know the Wystrans march on us as we speak? Their forces will surround the city within a fortnight. This is not the bloody time—”
“Archmage Benegaz, that is enough,” Bastilion huffed. “If Headmaster Pascal Doon deemed these young sorcerers as adequate defense against the threat posed by Haslow Sparrowclan, then you must accept their help,” he curled his fists, his knuckles burning white, “whether you bloody like it or no!”
The thin man grimaced, rubbing his temples with both hands as if his head might implode. “Of course, you are right. Still,” he said through clenched teeth, “there’s clearly a problem beyond that of one rogue mage. For one, why I haven’t received a single correspondence on the matter.”
“That is a mystery to me, I’m afraid,” Bastilion said. “We departed on the twentieth of September…”
Archmage Benegaz glared at me and Marta. “And these two slowed you down… I cannot even begin to fathom what on earth is going through Pascal Doon’s head.”
“I assure you, he has his reasons.”
“He’d better—I’m of a mind to wipe this place of the face of the earth myself and the damned Wystrans the trouble! Never mind the renegade!”
“I think it best we revisit this in the morning,” Bastilion said. “It is late, and our journey has been arduous.”
“Yes, that would be best. I need some time… to wrap my head around all this,” Archmage Benegaz leaned back in his seat, his head lulling toward the door, slightly ajar. “Don Lopez! Escort the Archmage Bastilion and his apprentices to guest house.”
An armored knight entered the room. He towered over the lot of us, easily weighing as much as Bastilion and I combined. “Aye, sir.”
Silently, we followed Don Lopez out of the court wizard’s study, out of the castle’s royal wing, and outside into the gardens. I had forgotten just how far the rest of the world dragged behind Phrygia. Though the grounds were gorgeous, adorned with meticulously trimmed grass and ample flower gardens, sprawling in every direction (aside from the brick path, which remained remarkably tidy), the royal palace of Valencia was much like stepping through time for me.
Sure, I grew up in a tiny farming community on the fringes of civilization—but I’d also spent the last ten years of my life in perhaps the most advanced and well-thought out urban society known to man. Scholars in the School of Cultural History claim that Phrygia is experiencing an “Age of Enlightenment.” The rest of the Great Kaldean Cities, the scholars posited, remain stagnate in a “Dark Age.”
I’d written a paper—just for the fun of it, Citadel mages view such pursuits as a waste of time—arguing that Phrygia’s monopoly on sorcery within our hemisphere is largely to blame for mundane society’s stagnation. While it’s never been proven, it’s common thought that Phrygia has interceded the technological development of the rest of the world.
The classic example is black powder—several variations of hand cannons have been invented. Yet the only use for such technology is the full sized cannons that arm privateer ships and war galleys. Why, a reasonable person might ask, haven’t those devices appeared on the ground? Or in someone’s hand?
The conservative answer is that such devices could easily be countered by even the most mediocre of siege mages. My answer—a rather radical one, at that—is that the Citadel fears a world in which the common man can merely brandish an iron tube, and, in an instant, gain the same explosive powers that a centured sorcerer did through decades studying, practicing, and mastering a High Art.
Given how quickly our civilization advanced through the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age—it’s a rather disturbing prospect that we exist during an eight-hundred year long Dark Age. But that’s just another drop in the bucket, another reason to question my undying loyalty to an elitist organization that I can’t even begin to truly understand.
The guest house would have been more aptly described as a guest manor. With three labyrinthine levels filled with countless corridors, two kitchens, and a dozen bedrooms, the place was built to accommodate even the most snobbish of diplomats on this side of the planet.
As Bastilion sealed himself away in the first bedroom he found, Marta and I took some time to marvel. We wandered the house like freshman in one of Phrygia’s many museums, taking care not to creak the old hardwood floors, stained with a dark glossy varnish. Every corner of the place boasted mystery and stories and baubles. Old Empire pottery line embedded niches and paintings throughout the ages lined the walls.
We lingered at marble statue—a man of average stature, a slight slant to his stance, his right hand resting thoughtfully on his chiseled jaw. The placard ordained the piece an original sculpt by the great Astrofus (a notoriously divisive figure among artsy Phrygians).
“Contemplation…” Marta read aloud. She leaned in to look closer at the sculpture, but didn’t dare touch it. I watched as telepathic hands beamed out her eyes, running spectral fingers across the undulating musculature flowing up the man’s biceps and forearms. Her eyes flicked up to his chin, his hand. “Look here,” she tugged my sleeve, then pointed. “See how he’s accounted for the pressure the man’s fingers would apply to the skin, the man’s fingers press indent slightly into the flesh of the chin… How a man could accomplish this without sorcery—I can’t even begin to fathom!”
“Oh my…” I had never been a fan of Astrofus. Call me an elitist. Call me a shameless Phrygian Black imitator. But I supposed that’s exactly what I had done up until that point. This was the first time I’d ever seen an Astrofus up close—and it took my breath away.
Then that niggling thought came back me. “Do you think people lambast Astrofus because he wasn’t a sorcerer?”
Marta narrowed her eyes. “That’s exactly what I think. Not everyone has had the privilege to grow up in Valentine nobility—so how many of those snobs have actually come here and seen what for themselves what they blindly call ‘derivative slop?’ Not many, I’d wager.”
I grasped her hand in mine. “I’m not sure we’re on the right side of things, Marta.”
I thought she might pull away. She didn’t—but she didn’t return the gesture. “Perry, you need to leave those doubts behind. We’re on the side we’re on.”
“I just keep thinking… if he had done it different—”
“Stop thinking.” Her voice was curt, she didn’t look at me. “We are Citadel Mages, Perry, devoted to the High Art of Phrygian Sorcery. There are no sides. No debates.”
I don’t know why that wounded me so. But it did.
“I’m going to get going,” she said, pulling her hand free. “My parents will relish a surprise. It’s been too long since I’ve ventured a visit.”
“Enjoy your time,” I said, staring at the man, still thinking after his birth over four hundred years ago. “I imagine you’ll sleep there?”
“I imagine I will.” Marta said, turning and walking out the room. “Let’s meet here in the morning before we start our search.”
She left me alone in pit of rumination that clung to me like tar. Caught like a fly in amber, helpless to naught but wait for my demise, I stood with the marble man and wondered what he was thinking about. How he seemed so calm with that deluge of thoughts that clouded his mind, cast in stone though it was.
I knew I’d be thinking and overthinking that conversation for the rest of the night, that I’d be be so consumed, I wouldn’t be able to read or walk or even sit. So I just ventured to go to bed. Though only an the average length of a working day had passed for me, it seemed my body was aware of the month that passed us by while we traversed reality itself.
I was so tired and troubled and terribly hurt. By Haslow, by Marta’s sudden indifference (or her own fatigue that I mistook for it), by the world and its own wounds that cut us with the wind. I didn’t even care to take in my surroundings as I opened the door to my bedroom. I just took the three steps to the bed and my head hit the pillow hard. I drifted away.
Perriander Lafey stood on a pier. Not the pier of the nameless portal town he usually found himself on, but on one of the countless piers making up the vast Port of Valencia. Though the Golden City lay inland, it was nestled between the three Guardian Mountains—known to us in order of height as The Mother, The Father, and The Prince—on the shores of Lake Valentine, which flowed out into both the Black and South Seas.
Though the place should be bounding with activity, he stood there in the silverly glow of dusk, as the sun suspended eternally over the horizon, shrouding the dead from the living. It occurred to him then, though he knew he would not remember upon waking, that his dreams brought him to a place between Life and Death.
The In Between…
Yes, that made sense. He projected his focus, attuned his ears to the land and the air and first felt, then heard the subtle heartbeat pulsing through the ground. Empty bottles on a support rattled with every thump and now that he’d heard it, Perriander knew he might never unhear it.
It was one of those things you grow accustomed to and eventually cease to notice at all. Like the stench of manure on dairy farm. But once you’ve travelled away from the farm, smelled the aroma of fallen spruce and pine needles in the Kingswood and the musk of sodden leaves beneath early autumn oaks, maples, and sycamores… you will return to find your home smells entirely of shit, and always has.
Valencia—the city for certain, but perhaps the entire territory surrounding it—was subject to that sickening pulse. It isn’t soil in which I step, but flesh…
Perriander saw the angel’s wings in the distance, flying over the city. Leagues away perhaps, but her presence came with thunder and dark clouds and thus was impossible to ignore. He felt her eyes upon him, waiting for him expectantly.
“Follow my children.” She said, now standing behind him. “See the ruin over the horizon.”
Perriander spun round. “Who are you? Why do you haunt my dreams? Speak plain!”
“I could say what it is I mean,” the angel whispered, her black eyes seeming to steal the already meager sunlight, casting the pier into midnight darkness. “But your kind must see before you will listen. Follow my children,” her voice amplified and coalesced. “See the ruin over the horizon.”
The angel pointed into the distance, and the black clouds that loomed in east since Mount Vragognev erupted and destroyed the eastern Imperial Province of Kuzolova, becoming known hence as The Prime—The Mother’s bitter lover, long scorned. So miserable in its isolation was The Prime, that it deigned to take the lives of an entire people. Now, a culture lies displaced and yet the great mountain’s hunger had yet to be sated.
“Follow my children.” Commanded the angel. “See their home and know my quest.”