Anadar IV/I

Foreword: Personally, I wouldn’t read the prologue or better the Codex too closely. I’d skim it, if at all. It’s difficult, it isn’t finished, and stylistically it hasn’t come together for me yet. Also, it’s confusing and still changing.

Prologue

When nothing else helps, and the mind is clouded by too many new impressions, then only the essential remains.

And so Slonda did what he always did when the world around him grew larger than his mind could hold in a single sweep. He sat down in the library and began to read.

Not in the library he knew, half darkened, crumbling at the edges, marked in its lower corridors by damp, dust, and quiet neglect, but in that same library on the far side of time, in an age when the shelves still stood unbroken, the spines of the books had not yet faded, and the script did not flake from the pages like a dying animal. Here everything was intact. Here parchment smelled of leather and glue instead of rot. Here knowledge was not rescued, but present.

And he began to read.

After only the first pages, unease settled in him.

Not because he did not know the tone. He knew it well enough. All his life he had lived under later versions of this text, under smoothed, shortened, adapted, altered, liturgical variants, taught in every school as though they were less written than fallen from the sky. No, it was not the tone itself that frightened him, but its nakedness. Here nothing had been softened. Nothing shortened. Nothing pressed into that later form in which even harshness still wants to sound like wisdom.

The author of this version left no doubt how the ancient age was to be understood. Not as a dark, distant epoch about which one knew little and therefore guessed much, but as a single continuous condition of unboundedness. As chaos. As an unbridled, unbound reality, in which magic was not tied to word, sign, measure, or school, but woven from power, will, impulse, blood, fear, greed, and inspiration. Again and again Slonda read the same terms. Power. Unbinding. Excess. Mixture. Corruption. Fragmentation. Boundlessness. It was as if the writer no longer had language for that time except the language of judgment.

And yet something emerged between the lines. This chaos, the text did not merely claim, it assumed as a basic truth, had brought the world and more than the world to the brink of annihilation. Not only realms had fallen, not only cities burned, not only mountains shifted and whole continents sunk, not only species and peoples had torn into one another. The order of being itself, it said in several places with barely veiled bluntness, had been ripped open. Boundaries between life and death, between body and spirit, between the present and what should never have been, between the world and those spaces beyond it, everything had begun to flow, to mingle, to slide into one another. In that time, magic had not been a craft, not even a discipline, but a state of general availability, and in that, this codex insisted, lay the true corruption. That too many worked. That too much worked. That no one asked anymore who was authorized, in what form, under whose oversight, and at what price.

Slonda sat over these pages for a long time and noticed, with growing distrust, how thoroughly the text condemned the ancient age, and how conspicuously it avoided truly describing it. Again and again it spoke of war, of species and hybrids, of free workers, wild summoners, demons, devils, dragons and angels, walking bodies, undead armies, blinding light, speaking shadows, and those who reached into time itself as if it were cloth. Yet nowhere was the whole ever explained calmly and plainly. It was named, compressed, damned. Never shown. Never unfolded in its own logic. The ancient age did not appear as history, not as a sequence of names, dates, places, or deeds, but as pure accusation, as demonization of everything that was.

That was the first thing that made him thoughtful.

The second was the conclusion drawn from this indictment.

Order, it said, had not simply been discovered or slowly grown. Order had been made. Erected. With intent, with violence, and with a will that wrote law even where the world was already in flames. The binding of magic to script, sign, and ritual was in this text not merely a clever reform, not merely a response to abuse, but the only act of salvation still possible between the world and obliteration. Everything free had to be pursued. Everything unwritten. Everything that worked without tested word, without binding form, without codified gesture and without supervised school. Not merely restricted. Not merely criticized. Hunted. Bound. Rooted out. Destroyed. Annihilated. The author spoke of this with a coldness that frightened Slonda almost more than the claimed wildness of the ancient age.

Here the codex was not yet a book of order, but a founding hammer.

The new order, it became clear, did not arise because one understood magic, but because one divided it, bound it, supervised it, and where it refused that form, destroyed it. From the immense, chaotic breadth of free magic, twelve schools were created, twelve bound houses, each meant to cover only a portion of what had previously lain unbridled and intermixed in the world. Not because there had been only these twelve paths, but because out of abundance one made a grid. One drew lines through the limitless and declared these lines the only lawful form of working.

And to prevent the newly created order from falling apart again, one gave the schools not only tasks and teachings, but places, distances, jurisdictions, and the conclave. The schools were not merely founded. They were placed. Spatially. Politically. Ritually. In a manner that revealed from the beginning that oversight and mistrust were not a later decay, but part of the original blueprint. The conclaves served not only understanding, but mutual surveillance. The schools stood close enough that each could see the other, examine it, report it, accuse it, and, if necessary, move against it with the majority of the others.

Then came the number.

There were twelve.

And they stood there in hard, old script, not like an appendix, not like a regrettable error of early days, but like the complete scaffold of order from which later times had broken out half.

Fire: flame, heat, burning, cleansing, forging, sacrificial fire, the steering of destructive energy into bound form, and the mastery of all forces that consume, purify, or turn to ash.Light: beam, radiance, revelation, dazzling, making visible, gathering and refracting brightness, drawing out what is hidden, testing the visible, and the discipline of those forces that do not warm, but unveil.Earth: stone, the inorganic, ore, but also the bodily in plants, roots, healing of the body from the material, and binding to all that bears, holds, nourishes, and resists.Necromancy: death, bone, legacy, resurrection, dealing with the dead, the order of what ends, and preventing the wild continuation of the dead within the living.Mind: consciousness, memory, dream, thought, healing and manipulation of the mind.Illusion: semblance, mirage, reflection, sensory deception, the guidance of perception, the separation of seen and true, and all that can shift eye and judgment against one another.Life: growth, blood, flesh, fertility, healing of the living, conception, decay in the living body, disease, regeneration, and the measure of all force that grows in root, animal, and human.Time: remembering, holding knowledge, simultaneity, threshold, and all that cannot be explained by space alone, but by position within becoming itself.Wind: air, storm, flight, movement of the unseen, and mastery over what cannot be grasped and yet brushes everything, over all that flies or moves through the air.Water: current, fluid, tides, cold, depth, and all that flows, drips, gathers, bears, dissolves, or breathes in water.Summoning: call, ban, binding, passage, spirits, oath, closure, and dealing with beings, forces, and entities on this side and beyond the world.Shifting: transformation, shape, fur, feather, skin, bone, changing form, the passage of the body from one state into another, and the mastery of all magic that makes the body itself the tool of becoming.

He read the names twice.

Then a third time.

They stood there without hesitation, without apology, without the slightest hint that they would later need justification. They were not noted as marginal phenomena, not as troublesome side lines, not as errors of an order too young. They were schools. Complete. Lawful. Structured. Embedded. Part of a system that did not see itself as later narrowing, but as a final act of salvation.

Slonda set his fingertips on the page and felt the trembling in them.

In this oldest form, the codex was far more than a rulebook. It was a blueprint for taming reality. Everything in it was bound. Not only spells. Also language. Place. Rank. Suspicion. Examination. Memory. Renewal. Erasure. Even forgetting was regulated.

And suddenly Slonda understood why this text chilled him so.

Because this did not sound like the late order he knew.

It sounded like the moment when order had to be created at all, with script in one hand and pursuit in the other.

Codex

Preamble

Be it made known, set down, invoked, written, sealed, and carried into the memory of all who read, teach, judge, bind, preserve, enact, or, in later times when the harshness of necessity may be softened by distance and the blood of the first setting may have been thinned by habit, might presume to judge these words, with all clarity and without any toleration of doubt or feeble interpretation, that the art which the unknowing call miracle, the fools freedom, the seduced gift, the ambitious right, and only the prudent call magic, is not free, must not be thought free, must not be remembered free, and, inasmuch as freedom in the art necessarily begets excess, excess necessarily begets dominion, dominion necessarily begets devastation, and devastation finally begets the dissolution of all order of the world and of whatever beyond the world may yet be conceived as joining, boundary, measure, and stability, may never again be free.

For in the times before the setting of order, when neither script nor sign nor tested word nor bound form nor lawfully performed ritual nor school nor rank nor eye nor counter eye held the art, but any person and any being, whether human, mixed form, offspring of old lines, bearer of foreign nature, kind, people, race, or species, worked, called, shifted, bound, loosed, raised, destroyed, mixed, and reached into domains that should not have been laid open to any mortal or immortal will, from its own power, from impulse, blood, inspiration, hunger, fear, wrath, desire, presumption, or mere whim, there grew from it not that lying freedom of which later dreamers so gladly boast, but war upon war, will upon will, form upon form, kind upon kind, blood upon blood, heaven upon earth, life upon death, body upon mind, the present upon what should never have been, since each unbound force seeks to expand, since each striving for expansion reaches toward the root of dominion, since dominion always demands increase of itself, and since power that is not bound knows neither measure nor end, until world and more than world were led to the brink of fracture, dissolution, and utter annihilation.

Therefore it was recognized, not in leisure, not in peace, not in the quiet accord of scholars, but in the last necessity, in the smoke of burned halls, over torn lands, between fallen realms, as one final insight rose from despair and inevitability, that magic may be tolerated only where it is bound, and bound to sign, bound to script, bound to word, bound to tested measure, bound to form, bound to ritual, bound to school, rank, and oversight, since not the will of the worker, not the beauty of the result, not the power of the execution, not the origin of the body, and not the greatness of the presumed benefit makes the art lawful, but only the binding, and whoever works without this binding works not merely against order, not merely against law, not merely against council and school, but against the world itself.

Thus be it set without softening, without detour, without later embellishment and without that weak speech which, from fear of harshness, corrupts harshness itself, that any free art which is practiced, taught, passed on, hidden, remembered, invoked, defended, or excused with words of pity outside the schools, outside the codex, outside written, tested, and lawfully renewed form, is an evil, regardless of what being, what people, what race, what kind, what species, or what mixed standing bears it, since not the body ennobles the art but only lawful binding, and since where there is no binding, corruption necessarily stands, since where corruption stands, spread necessarily follows, and since where spread follows, the root of the old chaos again finds nourishment.

Therefore any free magic is to be tracked down, pursued, interrupted, broken, bound, and erased, and the worker himself is to be destroyed, his workshop broken, his script taken, his implements removed, his teaching burned, his students examined, and where they are found tainted, seduced, incorrigible, or inclined toward the free art, likewise destroyed, all documentation erased, every trace removed, every place cleansed, every tool shattered, every line of transmission cut, and where memory itself threatens to become the bearer of evil, memory too is to be cleansed, since what once stands unbound in the world seeks to take root, since root again becomes forest, since forest burns, and since a burning forest does not ask whom it devours first.

Thus form be higher than will, script higher than inspiration, ritual higher than instinct, examination higher than genius, oversight higher than talent, school higher than the individual, and doubt itself be held not as nuisance but as cause for investigation, since late doubt costs a life, but early doubt may preserve realm, order, world, and the weave of reality, and since where doubt is concealed from sloth, softened from friendship, postponed from fear, or omitted from reverence for power, there already the first fissure opens, through which the old chaos, if it is not held down with script in one hand and pursuit in the other, begins to breathe again.

Slonda read more slowly.

The further he went, the more he felt that not only the content but the way of thinking behind it seized him like a cold hand. This codex did not merely regulate the art. It mistrusted existence. It was not merely order. It was siege, precaution, fetter, and judgment at once. Everything in it smelled of a founding moment so deeply shaped by fear that it never again wished to loosen itself from its own rigidity.

He turned the page.

First Part

Of the measure given to the art, and of the prohibition of dominion

Article I

Be it set, resolved, written, and never to be diluted by any future gentleness, that to none who practices the art, bears it, teaches it, preserves it, examines it, renews it, or in any lawful or even merely tolerated measure has part in it, is it permitted, granted, tacitly overlooked, or in later time eased by habit and shameless indulgence, to reach for power, since power, once desired in the heart and taken into one hand with the art, is no longer merely power but necessarily strives for increase, expansion, securing, and subjugation of its object, and since the art, where it places itself in the service of dominion, becomes no longer means but crown, no longer tool but will, no longer craft but first violence.

Therefore it is forbidden to reach for crown, to reach for council, to reach for army, to reach for court, to reach for trade, to reach for people, to reach for land, to reach for star, to reach for world, and also not for the universe itself, since between the small grasp and the great there is no difference of essence, but only of extent, since every dominion means the expansion of will, and since unbound will is the first step into that old chaos from whose womb war, mixture, unbinding, corruption, and nearly the annihilation of all order once arose.

And it is further set that every striving of the mage remain turned inward and not grow outward, so that he may research and bind, examine and write, renew and learn, measure himself and limit himself, since the art is not given to him so that he may steer people, shape realms, tame markets, secure thrones, lead armies, subjugate peoples, open gates to heaven or depth, or rewrite the world by his measure, but only so that the art itself may be bound more and more to script, sign, formula, seal, ritual, and measure, so that from force may come craft, from craft order, from order endurance, and from endurance that safety may arise which prevents the relapse into the unbound time.

For whoever bears the art and at the same time seeks outward dominion does not desire two things, but one, since dominion and unbound magic are siblings of a will that tolerates no contradiction, since the ruler soon wishes resistance also to bend, since bending demands means, and since the art, once it allows itself to be used with such intent, necessarily begets from school state, from master prince, from research command, and from command tyranny.

Therefore anyone who acts against this is to be stopped without delay, removed from circulation, hindered in his working, cut off from access to the art, stripped of his seal, deprived of his script, his teaching closed, his students taken from him, and where it is shown that he acted not from error but from will, not from accident but from striving, not from momentary misstep but from inner direction, bound or erased, since in striving for dominion the danger lies not only in the deed but in the example, since a single bearer of power with art in hand does more harm than an entire army of the unknowing without it.

And where erasure is recognized as the only lawful means, not only the body is to be destroyed, but the name also taken from the rolls, the signs of his working broken out of the archives, the instruments shattered, the texts burned, the places of teaching closed, the students newly examined or scattered, the memories of greatness and splendor of his deed weakened, and where imitation might draw nourishment from reverence for the transgression, memory itself is to be broken, since nothing so easily begets new seducers as the rumor of a mage who stood above kings and was seen therein as greatness rather than corruption.

And this applies not only to the individual, but also to school, bond, council, and association, since no school, no house of the art, no conclave bond, and no circle of masters shall reach for power and rule others, neither openly nor in shadow, neither by sword, army, and banner nor by script, counsel, dependency, healing art, weather turning, harvest, fear, or the quiet creeping into those worldly structures which, lest they be enchanted, chained, and at last enslaved, shall remain outside the art.

For whoever nonetheless reaches for power forfeits not only life, rank, school, and name, but the future, since with him not only a body falls, but a direction must be destroyed, so that what in him wished again to grow outward does not once more take root in the world.

Slonda paused.

He read the article again. Then he searched further. Yet no second article was found in this first part. That alone already unsettled him. In later codices, the parts were structured differently, more balanced, more even, almost as if one had tried to tame harshness with form. Here, however, stood only this one article, long, sharp, hammering, and Slonda wondered whether this was intent, as if the founding itself had only one true thought: no power. Never again. At no price.

He turned the page.

Second Part

Of binding, script, and renewal

And since free art, when left untested, unwritten, unbound, unbounded in term, or surrendered only to the bare will, inspiration, instinct, necessity, wrath, greed, fear, or ambition of the worker, resembles a storm that neither asks whom it strikes nor distinguishes what it tears, what it burns, what it corrupts, and what it throws together in its blind course, all magic is to be bound to word and sign, to script and ritual, so that it has measure, duration, form, and boundary, since where there is no boundary there is no craft, since where there is no craft only violence remains, and since violence, when it drives into the art, devours all that does not submit to it.

Therefore it is set that no spell shall work that has not been written, and that no written spell shall work that has not been tested, and that no tested spell shall work that has not been limited in term, since no incantation is eternal and none may be eternal, since eternity in spell necessarily ends in lasting violence, lasting violence necessarily ends in withdrawal of oversight, and withdrawal of oversight necessarily ends in dominion, which is to be prevented, indeed, as the first purpose of binding, script, testing, and the codex itself.

Thus all art shall be perishable, since only what is perishable can be renewed, tested, corrected, revoked, broken, improved, and where necessary destroyed, and therefore every formula is renewable, every binding revocable, every script testable, every duration limited, every seal dissolvable, and nothing that works set to infinity, since a working that does not end withdraws itself from correction, and since what withdraws itself from correction is already on the path to tyranny, even if in its first beginning it may have seemed useful, well meant, or necessary.

And thus it is set without exception, without pity for talent and without reverence for alleged greatness, that whoever works without word works forbiddenly, and whoever works without sign works forbiddenly, and whoever works without ritual works forbiddenly, and whoever works outside written form works freely, since freedom in the art is not virtue but transgression, since free magic always constitutes that first form of unbinding from which later excess, mixture, disturbance of reality, and at last relapse into old chaos are born.

It is therefore commanded that spells be written, preserved, compared, tested, sealed, dated, handed over, renewed, and where needed revoked, since words age as people age, since an old word becomes either weak or false, since weakness in spell begets accident and falsehood in spell begets crime, since both are dangerous, and since nothing would be more foolish than to leave the art to itself out of reverence for age, when age in a word is not wisdom but often only abrasion, crack, loss, or hidden perversion.

Therefore no spell shall be eternal, no bond eternal, no seal eternal, no writing effective beyond any term, no ritual unchangeable, no spell beyond testing, since nothing is for eternity except the duty to binding itself, and since what wishes to be eternal withdraws itself from correction, withdraws itself from oversight, and what withdraws itself from oversight has already become half forbidden power.

It is further forbidden, even in utmost necessity, even in the sight of death, even under siege, fire, plague, riot, famine, enemy assault, or threatened collapse, to resort to untested script, unsealed formula, foreign sign, free summoning, or binding not limited in term, since necessity is no right but a fire, since the fire does not justify what it devours, and since whoever in fire reaches for unbound tool does not extinguish the flame but carries it further, so that from momentary rescue there may later arise an evil of greater extent than that from which one sought escape.

And since the art must not stand still and yet must not grow freely, this too is set, that no new formula, no new spell, no new ritual, no new manner of binding, no new shape of seal, no new shortening of effect, no extension of reach, no prolonging of duration, and no alteration of the written measure shall be undertaken or applied outside testing, but every new spell, every new formula, and every new ritual shall be presented to a commission set from scholars of three schools, so that no house suffices itself, no master confirms himself, and no single discipline alone decides what within the codex is bearable, what dangerous, what suspicious, and what to reject.

And this commission shall examine with cold sense and without regard for fame, rank, age, or the beauty of the effect the force, reach, duration, renewability, possibility of misuse, tendency to corruption, danger of unbinding, possibility of hidden lasting effect, transferability to the unauthorized, resistance to misuse, and the harm that could arise from error, malice, or mere carelessness, since no spell may be tolerated because it appears great, but only because it is bound, testable, renewable, and in emergency destroyable.

Thus it holds without contradiction and without later softening: what is not tested may not be worked. What is not renewable may not endure. What is not bindable may not be. And what, though tested, shows itself in application unwilling to binding, mocking the term, resisting script, or not reliably subject to ritual, is to be removed from the body, broken, struck from the rolls, and removed from teaching, since the codex was not set to grant the art freedom, but form, boundary, end, and obedience.

Slonda leaned back.

This part was not only strict. It was almost beautiful in its cruelty. A world of barriers in which even wonder was tolerated only if one could force it onto parchment, surround it with seals, and after the term expired, lock it away again. An art of chain. Not elegant, but effective.

He read on.

Third Part

Of the schools, their proximity, and the mutual eye

And since the art, if it remains unbundled, scatters like dust in storm, since scattering begets opportunity, since opportunity grows in the hidden, since the hidden, where no foreign eye examines it, makes itself law, and since from what makes itself law unbinding again necessarily arises, which in the days before binding led world, order, and the weave of all things to the brink of irrevocable fracture, the schools are to be set, ordered, fixed in place, separated from one another and yet held close enough to one another that not freedom grows between them but oversight, not trust alone but counter sight, not only teaching but examination, since eye must watch against eye, and no error grow so far, no mistake root so deep, no transgression take shape so unnoticed that it cannot within proper term be recognized, reported, recorded, investigated, broken, and where needful cut out of the body of lawful art.

And they shall not be set far from one another, since proximity means surveillance, and surveillance, where the art is gathered in houses and not again exposed to the world, is the first condition of peace, since no house of the art may stand so far that a messenger cannot within reasonable term reach the other school, since no master may be so isolated that his error echoes only within his own walls, since no discipline may so suffice itself that it becomes its own examination, and since from such self sufficiency in older days the pride was born that reached for dominion and from dominion again drew old corruption.

Thus these twelve schools shall be, and they are not to be understood as accidental houses but as lawfully set enclosures of formerly scattered and unbound forces, since each preserves, examines, teaches, limits, renews, and secures against excess an enclosed portion of what in the days before order was free, mixed, undivided, practiced by many bodies, kinds, races, and species at once, in countless unbound forms and for countless purposes.

The School of Fire shall be set in the Fiery Fortress, since coast, stone, seclusion, and the defensible nature of the place are suited to the proper enclosure of this art, and it shall preserve, teach, examine, and bind all that concerns flame, heat, ember, burning, cleansing, forging, sacrificial fire, directed destruction, purification through consumption, and the steering of those forces that turn to ash, consume, sharpen, harden, cleanse, or through burning establish new order.

The School of Light shall likewise be set in the Fiery Fortress, since light and fire stand near to one another and therefore are better watched against one another through proximity, and it shall preserve, teach, examine, and bind all that concerns beam, radiance, revelation, dazzling, gathering of brightness, refraction, reflection of the pure, making visible the hidden, separation of semblance and dark, unveiling of the concealed, and the discipline of those forces that do not warm and consume like fire, but disclose, separate, examine, and force into the visible.

The School of Earth shall be set in Tandor, since there ground, stone, library, and permanence correspond, and it shall preserve, teach, examine, and bind all that concerns stone, the inorganic, ore, ground, weight, load bearing, root, the material, the bodily in plants and growths, healing of the body from the material, nourishment from the soil, resistance, walling, steadfastness, and binding to all that bears, holds, nourishes, grounds, and opposes decay through firmness.

The School of Necromancy shall likewise be set in Tandor, since the realm of substance and the realm of what remains of substance lie close and yet must be held strictly separate, and it shall preserve, teach, examine, and bind all that concerns death, bone, remainder, legacy, corpse, grave, voice of the dead, resurrection, boundary, passage, continuance of what is extinguished, and the order of what ends, so that the dead does not work back wildly and unbound into the living.

The School of Mind shall be set in Zoordak, since there gathering, seclusion, and the art of inner measure come together in proper manner, and it shall preserve, teach, examine, and bind all that concerns consciousness, memory, dream, thought, will, inner form, healing of the mind, protection of the mind, penetration of consciousness, connection of mind to mind, and, where lawfully done, also guidance, steering, or manipulation of the mind, since this art, where it does not remain bound, first reaches into the judgment of man and from there into his freedom.

The School of Illusion shall likewise be set in Zoordak, since semblance and mind touch one another and therefore are not to be separated but held under mutual eye, and it shall preserve, teach, examine, and bind all that concerns mirage, semblance, reflection, concealment, pretense, sensory deception, guidance of perception, separation of seen and true, shifting of eye and judgment, distraction, glamour, and all those arts that do not change substance but do change the manner in which substance, space, form, and danger are recognized or misrecognized.

The School of Life shall be set in Gontar, since there growth, fertility, waterways, and the fullness of the living come together in proper manner, and it shall preserve, teach, examine, and bind all that lives and grows, all that concerns blood, flesh, seed, sprouting, fertility, healing of the living, conception, sickness, regeneration, decay in the living body, and the proper measure of that force that grows, pulses, heals, rots, renews, or seeks to withstand death in root, animal, and man.

The School of Time shall likewise be set in Gontar, since life and becoming cannot be separated and yet must not be mixed, and it shall preserve, teach, examine, and bind all that concerns remembering, holding knowledge, simultaneity, threshold, passage, position within becoming, relation of earlier and later, term, duration, recurrence, and those hard to grasp relations that cannot be explained by space alone, but only by position within the course of things itself.

The School of Wind shall be set in Ashambrat, since breadth, desert, storm, and empty distance correspond most to this art, and since there, where few fixed obstacles stand, movement of the unseen can be better recognized and bound, and it shall preserve, teach, examine, and bind all that concerns air, storm, pressure, flight, breath, breadth, sound, carrying of sound, wave, sweeping, invisible movement, and mastery over all that is not graspable and yet effective, and moreover all that flies or moves in the air, whether from its own body, through art, or through foreign nature.

The School of Water shall be set in Soont, on the Islands of the Winds, since tides, currents, cold, depth, and the flowing are not lawfully to be taught and bound in desert and not in highland, but only in constant dealing with sea and change, and it shall preserve, teach, examine, and bind all that concerns current, fluid, tides, cold, depth, dissolving, droplet, gathering, carrying, corroding, and that life which breathes in water, is born in water, wanders in water, or can be preserved or destroyed through water.

The School of Summoning shall be set in Zindis, since this art is to be held far from more densely settled houses, far from weaker minds, and far from easily accessible paths, and it shall preserve, teach, examine, and bind all that concerns call, ban, binding, contract, oath, opening, closing, passage, coercion, and dealing with beings, forces, spirits, entities, and powers on this side and beyond this world, since no other art so quickly turns into transgression, mixture, and return of old chaos if it is not held under the strictest script, examination, and sealing.

The School of Shifting shall be set in Blekct, since there hardness, wilderness, animalness, cold, and survival stand in close neighborhood to all that changes the body, and it shall preserve, teach, examine, and bind all that concerns transformation, form, fur, feather, skin, bone, changing shape, passage of the body from one state into another, reversal, recasting of the body, and mastery of that art which makes the body itself the tool of becoming, and therefore, where it does not remain bound, easily blurs the difference between human, animal, mixed being, and other.

And since every school not only teaches but also threatens, since every discipline, where it suffices itself, first grows beyond its measure, and since the greatest safety of the art lies not in the goodness of the individual master but in continued examination by foreign eyes, every school is held to watch the other, examine its students, send messengers, compel exchange, present script, give report, and make notice where transgression, untested novelty, forbidden mixture, free application, hidden teaching, or striving for dominion is seen.

For proximity is not friendship.Proximity is not trust.Proximity is not courtesy between houses.Proximity is seal.And the seal is not set so that the schools love one another, but so that none among them again becomes like the free art which no one saw until it had already burned the world.

Here Slonda paused for a long time.

He traced a finger over the name Illusion, as if this touch alone could explain why, from old fragments and half decayed rolls, a strange echo had remained to him again and again. Then over Necromancy. Then Light. Then Time. All of it stood here open, fixed, upright. Not in secret. Not as whisper. Not as later suspicion. As order. Why some places bore two schools and others did not, where Blekct lay, where Zindis lay, the codex gave no explanation, for that there were surely other books. And order, Slonda thought bitterly, is only what has been victor long enough.

He turned on.

Fourth Part

Of the conclave, the staff, and the turnus

Let there be held in set, recurring manner, bound to star position, term, and order, an assembly called the Conclave, since the schools, though set, bound in place, set against one another, and intertwined through script, exchange, messengers, examination, and sealing, are nevertheless not to be left to themselves, since where many houses of the art exist, many interpretations, many ambitions, many border cases, many disputes, many suspicions, and many temptations necessarily arise, and since what happens between schools may become more dangerous than what grows within a single wall, since where there is no common place of sighting, reading, reporting, decision, and mutual binding, from mere difference soon enmity arises, from enmity separation, and from separation again that fragmentation from which old chaos drew nourishment.

Therein shall sit three from each school, no more and no less, so that no choir becomes a multitude, no multitude an army, no army a threat, and no threat takes the place of examination, since the number itself, when it grows unregulated, corrupts the meaning of the assembly, since not volume, retinue, age, venerability, or the number of brought students shall determine the weight of a school in the Conclave, but only set form, so that each house appears with equal measure and yet in its three faces brings forth all that is needed for the endurance of order.

Thus thirty six seats are set. Three per school.

An Over Master, who speaks for rank, house, leadership, and the interpretation of the school.An Examining Master, who judges over investigation, suspicion, measure, transgression, and danger.A Scribe Master, who reads, presents, confirms, records, corrects, and guards against falsification of what is said.

For power, examination, and script shall bind one another, since power without examination falls into dominion, since examination without script dissolves into arbitrariness, and since script without power and examination becomes mere storage of dead signs that can neither protect nor judge nor preserve.

The chair shall pass in turnus from school to school and from house to house, not by whim, not by size, not by fear, and not by fame, but by set sequence, so that no one draws precedence from habit and no one believes what is only lent to him for a term is his by essence, origin, or merit, since even the chair, if it does not wander, becomes stagnation, since stagnation begets possession, and since possession of the staff almost already means possession of order itself.

And the handing over of the staff shall be solemn, public, recorded, and performed in the presence of all seated houses, not from vanity, not for ornament of ceremony, and not so that those who crave outwardness may delight in gold, wood, stone, or formulas of handing over, but so that each who sees may hear, read, and bear witness, knowing that even the chair is only lent burden, lent force, lent voice, and lent weight, which clings neither to blood nor to name nor to place, but only to term, and that each who receives the staff receives it under the knowledge that he must give it away again.

Let there be held four times a year an ordinary Conclave at set star standings, since not whim, weather, travel convenience, or the private state of individual houses may determine when order examines itself, but only those terms that stand beyond human mood, and in urgent necessity an extraordinary Conclave may be called when three schools jointly demand it or when the bearer of the staff proclaims it, since no single house, however powerful, threatened, or convinced of itself, shall alone judge the necessity of the whole, but likewise the whole must not remain idle when danger moves faster than the turnus of set times.

In this assembly names shall be read and deaths reported, since order endures only where it is known who lives, who fell, who follows, and under whose seal an office, a school, an archive, a teaching, or a ban spell shall henceforth stand; successions shall be confirmed, since no rank passed within schools is lawful from inner agreement of a house alone, but requires public sighting and entry into shared script; new script shall be presented, since nothing new may work outside the eye of other houses; forbidden script shall be recorded, since what is forbidden is not bound by silence but by being read, recognized, named, and put under seal; investigations shall be opened and inquisitions resolved, since suspicion, if not pursued in ordered manner, either rots or turns into blind hunt; disputes between schools shall be settled, since every unguided enmity between houses serves old chaos more than the schools; messenger reports shall be heard, since order becomes blind if it looks at the world only from its own walls; and lastly the state of the codex itself shall be examined, since even law, if not read, compared, renewed, and guarded against creeping change, may be falsified by omission, negligence, habit, or deliberate hand.

Voting shall be open, hand against hand, name against name, voice against voice, so that responsibility does not creep behind silence, since hidden vote in matters of art too easily begets cowardice, deceit, back talk, shifting of blame, and the convenient excuse that one was not part of what was nonetheless enabled by one’s own withheld hand, and since each school shall have the courage to affirm openly, to deny openly, to abstain openly, and to bear the consequence of its resolve.

A simple majority suffices to open an investigation, since early suspicion is better examined under oversight than late transgression only after its growth.

A simple majority suffices to place a school, a master, a student band, an archive, a discipline, or a single teaching under provisional oversight, since not every danger must already be inquisition and yet no danger may remain unbound.

A simple majority suffices to initiate an inquisition, since where sufficient suspicion of free art, forbidden expansion, striving for dominion, school transgression, hidden teaching, untested lasting effect, forbidden summoning, necromantic release, or other deep violation of the codex is recognized, not hesitation but procedure must follow.

Where, however, a school is to be dissolved, split, distributed onto another, broken in its rights, stripped of its place, or fully bound, a two thirds majority is required, since removal of a house shall not occur lightly, since with the fall of a school not only teachers, students, walls, and books are affected, but also the balance of other houses, distribution of their oversight, the order of their proximity, and the burden of taking over what from the broken house must still be lawfully preserved, distributed, sealed, or destroyed.

The Scribe Master of the staff shall record all decisions fully, without ornament, without omission, without later smoothing, since the word spoken in such assembly and not written already falls half into forgetting. A second Scribe Master from a foreign school shall confirm each record, so that the house of the chair alone does not become lord over memory. A third shall preserve it separate from both, in sealed archive, since script is not safe when it lies in only one place or rests under only one eye.

For what is not written threefold is not protected against forgetting.And what is not protected against forgetting is already delivered to dispute over its meaning.And what is delivered to dispute over its meaning falls sooner or later from order into interpretation, and from interpretation into separation.And separation is the first fissure through which old chaos begins to breathe again.

Slonda sat still.

Thirty six seats, yes, the room surely offered that much space. And four times a year. Simple majority for investigation. Simple majority for inquisition.

The coldness of this system lay not in its wildness but in its order, not in spontaneous cruelty but in procedure. A mage could fall here not only by enemy, but by a majority. A simple majority. Slonda thought of later, softer versions, of ritualized conclaves, of protocols, of the appearance of ancient dignity. And everything he now read made them look like the polite face of a very old knife.

He opened the next part.

Fifth Part

Of investigation, inquisition, and erasure

And since no codex, however strictly written, no school, however watchfully held, no script, however cleanly tested, and no Conclave, however regularly gathered, can by itself guarantee that transgression, unbinding, hidden teaching, corrupted novelty, striving for dominion, free application, or alien working will not nonetheless grow again in shadow, it is set that upon suspicion there shall follow not silence, not hesitation, not sparing, not hope for self healing, but procedure, since unexamined suspicion rots, since rotten suspicion begets back talk, and since back talk, where it is not ordered into investigation, turns either into blind hunt or into dangerous toleration.

Therefore an investigation is to be triggered as soon as founded suspicion lies that a mage worked without bound form, or that a spell was set outside its lawful school, or that new script, new formula, new ritual, or new binding was put into application untested, unsealed, or before confirmation by the competent commission, or that a school hid knowledge, shortened archives, held back rolls, or removed evidence against its own house from shared registers, or that a master, examining master, scribe master, or other teacher instructed students outside the codex, outside approved form, or outside the lawful extent granted to him, or that a binding escaped its expiration, a term did not obey, a seal refused dissolving, or an effect persisted beyond its set end, or that a kind, a people, a race, a species, or a mixed standing practiced magic outside the schools, or that at all a form of working appeared that can be assigned to no known script, no transmitted ritual, no confirmed school, and no lawful binding.

And the investigation shall begin not with rumor, not with public shame, not with heated accusation and not with premature punishment, but with seizure of writings, reading of witnesses, securing of place, inventory of what is present, sighting of implements, counting of rolls, examining of seals, comparing of hands, counter reading of findings, and ordered separation of what seems merely unusual from what is truly dangerous, since procedure, if it wishes to be right, must first know before it judges.

The accused shall be questioned, yet not in freedom of unguided word, but under oversight, under counter reading, under recording, and where necessary under binding, since not everyone who is questioned still remains unbroken lord of his intentions. His house shall be opened, his chambers, archives, cellars, workshops, hidden rooms, writing rooms, and training places made accessible without delay. His students shall be separated, since students together find lying more easily than singly. His implements shall be sighted, named, examined, and where danger lies in their mere presence, sealed at once. His archives shall be counted leaf by leaf, roll by roll, seal by seal, since lack speaks as much as surplus. And where resistance occurs, it shall be broken, since resistance against investigation is not protection of dignity but suspicion against the finding.

If the investigation shows the suspicion is not small, not accidental, not born of error, not merely formal, but essential, that free art, forbidden expansion, striving for dominion, secret teaching, unbound summoning, necromantic release, lasting binding against the codex, forbidden transgression of the school, or other severe injury of the measure truly lies present, or emerges with such density of signs, traces, agreements, and findings that only folly would still recognize mere chance, then the investigation passes into inquisition.

And inquisition is no conversation, no dispute between schools, no opportunity for vanity of the accusing house and no market of excuses, but a procedure of cleansing, since where order itself has been attacked, bypassed, expanded, hidden, or mocked by free working, one must no longer merely examine, but cut.

Three schools step forward.One accuses.One examines.One executes.

And none of these three shall be identical with the school of the accused, since not the zeal of the opponent, not the shame of one’s own house, and not the closeness of the accomplice shall bear the judgment, but only the ordered distribution of accusation, examination, and execution, so that the same hand does not at once desire, recognize, and strike.

The accused shall be isolated.His writings shall be removed.His rooms shall be sealed.His students shall be distributed, separated, examined anew, or where suspicion reaches to knowledge, participation, or contagion of mind, likewise taken into investigation.His implements shall be removed from reach.His archives shall be placed under foreign eye.His name shall not be named publicly until decision, since judgment shall not be borne by reputation, nor by fear of the name, nor by favor of earlier deeds, nor by popularity of person, but only by finding, since the codex is not judge over esteem but over transgression.

An inquisition may end in admonition where error is recognized and improvement credible, in binding where the working went too far yet not irrevocably, in withdrawal of ability to work where the body may live but the art may no longer pass through it, in banishment where person and place must be separated, in distribution onto other schools where a house can no longer cleanse itself, in dissolution of a school where the deviation no longer lies in the individual but in the structure itself, or in erasure where the transgression is recognized as so deep, so conscious, so continued, so incorrigible, and in its persistence so dangerous that neither correction nor oversight nor separation nor banishment suffices to prevent the return of evil.

Erasure is then commanded when free magic is proven, or striving for dominion, or unbound summoning, or necromantic release, or untested lasting binding, or alien working outside the codex, or when otherwise it is recognized that the accused has not merely violated a rule but reached for the foundation wall itself upon which binding, school, examination, and order rest, and where improvement is neither possible nor credible, since not every remorse is true, not every insight deep, and not every late word weighs heavier than the trace of the deed.

Where erasure is recognized, there is no longer negotiation over whether, since the whether has already fallen with the finding, but only over form, place, reach, those affected, preservation of fragments, cleansing of rooms, distribution or destruction of script, examination of students, and the manner in which what may not further work in world, school, or memory is removed from the body.

If, however, it is not a lawfully bound mage but non mages, beings, kinds, races, species, or mixed standings who drive magic outside the schools, or bearers of free art who have neither seal nor script nor lawful ritual nor supervised house over them, then neither long investigation nor extended negotiation nor the whole course of inquisition is required, since here the duty is immediate and no doubt may be tolerated where the evil already stands in the mere existence of its unbound working.

The worker is to be destroyed without delay.His root is to be torn out.His tools are to be broken.His script is to be burned.His teaching is to be erased.His students, where present, are to be found, separated, examined, and where necessary likewise destroyed.His memory, where possible, is to be deleted or broken.And any trace of his working is to be removed from world, house, archive, roll, book, and mouth, since nothing so dangerously endures as the half uprooted example.

For against free magic outside the codex there is no procedure of patience, since patience where the unbound already works is not virtue but complicity.

Only duty.

Slonda let his hand sink.

For a long time he looked only at the page without truly reading line by line. Slowly he grasped that this codex had not been only a wall against power. It was itself power in its most concentrated form. Not arbitrary, not passionate, but legal, liturgical, almost holy in its own claim. An instrument created to save the world and therefore ready to destroy everything that did not fit its language.

He turned further pages, but now he read differently. Slonda did not close the book at once.

He sat there, the weight of the pages still beneath his fingers, and felt how reading had become gathering, not only of knowledge but of accusations, of fragments, of things that did not vanish just because later times had forgotten how to speak them aloud.

And for the first time he truly understood that the codex he had held all his life to be the foundation of order might itself be nothing more than the most thoroughly smoothed scar of a much older crime.

I

The sun did not hang above her. It pressed down on her.

It did not simply stand in the sky like a star that marks the day, but like something that had decided to test everything living by taking away water, shade, mercy, and patience until only naked will remained, the will to keep going or to lie down and stay. The sand blinded. Light sprang back from every dune, devouring edges, devouring distance, devouring meaning. Gudi ran as long as she could still feel the dark hole at her back, the one she had just escaped, that impossible gate in the sand, that cut in the world, out of which she had stumbled like an animal out of a trap. She ran until her breath burned, until her legs turned soft, until adrenaline carried her like a foreign hand pushing her onward. And when she finally stopped and turned half around, gasping, there was nothing anymore.

No gate.

No dark fissure.

No sign of the halls below.

Only sand, white glare, light, shimmer.

And then the real part began.

The worse part.

Because as long as she had been running, her body had not needed to think. There had only been flight and the raw, senseless hope that distance might equal safety. But now, as she stood and her ribcage jerked up and down, as the blood slowed and the heart did not just pound but had time again to feel fear, everything else arrived. Fatigue. Thirst. Heat. Disorientation. The realization that she had no destination, no map, no water, no shade, not even enough fabric to shield her skin from this sun.

She hunched her shoulders and began to walk.

Slower now. More carefully. Not because caution made much sense in this emptiness, but because she suddenly felt ridiculous, because she understood how glaring she must be in this desert, how wrong, how out of place. A colorful sweet against a white wall, she thought, with a flash of bitter contempt toward herself. Everything about her screamed city. Fabric. Impractical colors. Inexperience. Someone who did not belong here. Someone you could see from far away.

The sun had no intention of making that insight easier.

It kept hammering down on her, ruthless, hot, without a tremor of change, as if even pity were a kind of moisture that had no place in this landscape. After only a short time Gudi felt the first bare patches of her skin begin to burn. Her forehead. Her neck. Her hands. She tugged and pulled at everything she wore, tried to layer cloth on cloth, shoved sleeves down, wrapped what she had around head and shoulders, but it was too little. Far too little. She had nothing for the desert. Nothing for a day like this. Nothing for a night like the one to come. She had clothes for Ashambrat. For paths between wells and her plot. For courtyards, alleys, lessons, for life in a city that was hard but still had walls, shade, water, and people.

Not this.

Not this open, white hostility.

Soon she lost all sense of time.

The desert devoured that too. Minutes stretched, hours blurred. There was only step and breath, step and pain, step and the question of whether the next dune would finally hide anything other than more light. She began to think about water, first sensibly, then feverishly. A jug. The lip of a well. Damp cloth. The sound of water poured into clay. The memory alone was almost cruel.

Then she thought of spells.

Of course she did. What had she learned all of it for, if not for this. Air. Moisture. The art of drawing water from the surroundings. Tiny amounts, yes, difficult, yes, but enough to wet her mouth, to feel her tongue again, perhaps to take the hardest edge off her body. Gnok had explained it. Morgut too. Even she had seen the formulas dozens of times.

She sank to her knees in the sand.

With trembling fingers she drew the signs. A curve. A break. The small inward hook. The form that forces air to gather. She murmured the words with a throat gone dry. She felt pathetic doing it, because her voice no longer even sounded like her own.

Nothing happened.

Not a drop.

Not even that faint tug in the air a failed spell sometimes leaves behind.

She stared at the lines as if they could explain why they stayed dead.

Then she wiped them away with the flat of her hand, drew them again, more precise this time, slower, set the formula once more, spoke the words more clearly, more focused, and again the world remained mute.

She tried a third time.

A fourth.

Nothing.

She wanted to scream.

Instead she stood up again and kept walking.

Why was she here.

The question ate at her because she had no answer that did not immediately split into a new why. Why had Gnok betrayed her, if he had betrayed her. Why had she been captured. Why had they not killed her. Why had they let her escape. Why had she not come out in Ashambrat, but in this endless brightness. Why Sondra. Why this underground realm. Why her at all. She was no great master. No political mind. No dangerous enemy. She was Gudi. Gudi with her plot, her plants, her stubborn wind, her hooks placed wrong too often, her jealous siblings, her oversized brother, and her small, stubborn fury at her own helplessness.

She should have been in her plot.

With her plants.

With dirty hands and a jug of water, not here, half burned and on the best path toward withering in a sea of sand because curiosity and fear had brought her to a place whose rules she did not understand.

She marched on.

Again and again she stopped. Again and again she knelt, drew signs into the sand, murmured some formula, first the one for water, then others, small, miserable, half remembered aids, anything against heat, against fatigue, against the swaying that already sat in her knees. Nothing. Not a stir. As if the desert itself had decided her magic could only be theory here.

At last the sun began to burn less.

Not because it had grown kinder, but because it had dropped lower. The pain on her skin eased a little, but that brought no true relief, only the new realization of how exhausted she already was. Gudi sat down in the sand and felt sorry for herself, openly, honestly, without dignity, without resistance. She sat with her head lowered, lips chapped, cloth dragged around her shoulders, and felt self pity and despair take each other’s hand.

Again she tried a spell.

Again it failed.

She could have laughed at herself, if she had still had enough water in her body for laughter.

So she stood up again and walked on.

When the sun finally vanished, the cold came so suddenly she first thought she imagined it. A moment ago everything had been blaze, now the air cut. Heat fled the sand like it flees a dying body. Night in the desert was no comfort, only a different verdict. At least she was no longer burning. But her skin still glowed with afterheat, and in forehead, cheeks, neck, and hands those dull, pulling pains began, the pains that tell you the body will be red and raw tomorrow. On top of that came thirst. A thirst that was no longer merely unpleasant, but demanded attention, laid itself into every thought, every glance, every worry.

She walked anyway.

What else was she supposed to do. Sleep. Lie down in the sand and wait for morning to finish her. No. She had to keep going. Tonight. While her mind was still clear. Tomorrow, she knew with that sober fear that is worse than panic, she would already be more dehydrated, slower, duller, more prone to mistakes. Tomorrow everything would be harder. If she had a chance, it was now.

And then the next thought came like a knife.

What if she was being followed.

Gudi stopped so abruptly her knees nearly buckled.

Of course she was being followed, or could be. Her tracks ran behind her through the sand like an invitation. A blind man, she thought in surging panic, could follow that trail. Every footprint. Every pause. Every kneeling. Every spot where she had drawn signs and wiped them away. Adrenaline shot into her again, hot and sharp, and suddenly she could hear, see, think, but now with that dreadful over clarity panic gives the world.

Maybe she could erase her tracks.

A swirl. Just a small dervish, a circle, a breath, enough to lift sand and smooth it behind her. Gnok had explained that. Morgut too. She had never been able to do it. But maybe now. Maybe out of fear. Maybe out of pure necessity.

She ran on and tried to remember at the same time.

The formula. The hook. The sequence. What came first. Breath or word. In her head she heard herself failing already. What was that. Had she heard something. Horses. Far away. Only wind. The moons stood large in the sky and gave so much light that the desert lay in silvery brightness, too bright for comfort, too dark for certainty.

She ran again.

Yes. Something was there. A closing in. Maybe. Maybe not. She looked back and saw no one. Only dunes. Pale ridges. Black hollows. Her own breath. Then nothing again. Silence. She stopped, half crouched, heart in her throat, and listened so hard her own blood sounded like a foreign noise.

Nothing.

She sat in the sand.

Her hands trembled. She forced them still. Drew the signs. Once. Checked the form. Again. A sound behind her. She spun around, saw only shadows. Back to the signs. Back to the formula. Now. Now.

She cast the spell.

Nothing.

Behind her, a silhouette.

No. Two.

They came closer.

Panic did not come in waves anymore. It was fully there now, complete, cold, all consuming. Gudi hissed the formula again, far too fast, stumbled over the words, began again, kept looking up, watched the two figures draw nearer, dark against pale sand, watched how every second tightened the world. Another mistake. Another crooked sign. Again the feeling that her own fingers were too stupid for her life.

Then something happened.

Not outside.

Inside her.

A pull.

A suction.

Not like a gust, not like air summoned, but like a sudden agreement between her and everything around her. The sand beneath her began to spin, first as a flickering tremor, then faster, deeper, stronger. Gudi screamed, not from pain, but because the ground left her. The sand spout lifted her, tore her upward, and beneath her the desert began to live. The vortex grew. It bit into the sky, lashed outward, widened, strengthened, turned wild. Down there she saw the two figures, who had been about to catch her, suddenly bent under the pressure of the storm, small and weightless, pushed away.

Ten meters.

Twenty.

More.

She rose higher and higher while the sandstorm swelled into a massive column, and in its center it was strangely calm. Not silent, not soundless, but ordered. As if she were not in the heart of a catastrophe, but inside a thought that obeyed her. Her pulse, a moment ago frantic, grew clearer. Her breathing found a rhythm. She no longer felt hunted, no longer helpless, no longer lost. She felt one with the storm. Not as a ruler over it, not like a master commanding something foreign, but as its center, its meaning, its eye.

She stopped its growth.

And the storm obeyed.

It stood in the desert like a pillar of raging sand, and she sat within it, perhaps a hundred meters above the ground, carried, held, circled by a power that had slept in her as impossibility only moments ago. For an instant she wanted to laugh and weep at once. Instead she turned, looked out into the night, to the moons, to the stars, and forced her thinking into order.

North.

Gnok had taught her constellations. Not gently. Not patiently. But thoroughly. Orientation, he had said, was not decoration, it was the difference between coming home and becoming bones in the sand. Morgut had explained it more beautifully. The moons, the lines, the return of the patterns. Now those lessons came back, not as words but as shapes. There. That star. There the edge of the moons. This axis. This angle.

North.

She had to go north.

The thought was so clear it almost made her dizzy. She set the storm in motion. Slowly at first. A cautious glide. Then faster. Then faster still. The vortex obeyed, and with every second it carried her, something returned to Gudi that she had lost at the underground gate.

Control.

Only a small core of it, but it was there. She was no longer only prey. Not only a fugitive. Not only the girl who cried into the sand because she forgot a hook. She was above. She carried the desert beneath her. She moved.

Hours passed.

She knew it although she had no measure left. Doubts kept coming. Was that really north. Had she read the stars wrong. Would the storm suddenly end. Would she fall. Would the city not be where she sought it. But each time she held the course. Again and again she looked to the moons, the stars, the dark land below, and held on.

And then, after an eternity, she saw lights.

At first only a suspicion. Then several. Then the clear human geometry of a city against the night. Ashambrat.

Gudi almost screamed aloud.

Instead she forced herself into caution. She wanted no attention. No guards. No masters. No questions. Not yet. Not before she herself understood what had happened. She let the storm shrink, drew in its edges, took away its vast width until it was only a much smaller, controlled whirl. It obeyed even now. Completely. That was almost the most frightening part.

How had she done it.

And more important, could she do it again.

She did not know. She had cast the spell in panic, in the moment of total collapse, where you do not plan anymore, you only fall or fly. Maybe it had been a miracle. Maybe a breakout. Maybe something that happens only once. Maybe proof at last that all the mockery, all the effort, all the wrong hooks had not been for nothing. Or maybe it was something else. Something she could not name yet.

When she was close enough to the city, she let the vortex shrink further until it was only dense, rapid motion around her. Then she jumped.

She landed hard, stumbled, caught herself, and behind her the sandstorm dissolved as if it had never existed.

Unseen, Gudi made her way into the city.

One night before the Tricrown.

II Damned mess. How could this have happened again.

A heartbeat ago Kral had still been the captain of a damaged but floating ship that, with more luck than sense and a crew that at least obeyed him, had finally reached the river mouth. Now he stood on the same deck, and at his feet lay a dead mage with his throat cut, the blood still warm between the planks, and the only thing he could think was not pity, not even anger, but the plain, sober realization that this would bring questions. A lot of questions. Questions from dockhands, questions from guards, questions from people who wanted to know why a man was dead, and even more questions from far more unpleasant people. From mages. And questions were almost always more expensive than answers, and he had no answer.

Kral looked around.

His crew stood there like a row of badly carved wooden figures. Stiff. Pale. Useless. Nobody moved. Nobody thought. Nobody did anything a reasonable person would have done in this situation. One stared at the bloodstains, another at the spot by the rail where the two strangers had just vanished, as if they might climb back out of the water at any moment and explain that it had all been a misunderstanding.

“Do something!” Kral roared.

Nobody did anything.

Of course not.

He spat one curse, then another, this time at the crew, at the strangers, at the sea, at mages in general, and at this particular day, which, after everything he had already swallowed, now also dropped a corpse onto his planks. In his helplessness he swore with the kind of fervor only men can muster who know perfectly well that curses do nothing, and therefore say everything they can think of anyway.

“Don’t just stand there like salted fish!” he shouted again, but the sound had already changed, more habit than hope. In the same moment he knew, once again, that it would all land on him.

So he stomped over to the body himself.

The mage lay crooked on his side, the face already strangely empty, as if the cut had taken not only his life but every shred of dignity with it. Blood had run down over his chest, soaked the cloth dark, and now gathered in the seams of the deck. Kral nudged him with his boot, more out of irritation than necessity, as if he needed to make sure the man was truly dead and would not get up again to start making demands.

“You damned peacock,” he muttered.

Then he dropped to his knees and shoved his hands into the dead man’s pockets.

Paper first. Scribbled notes. A marking pencil. A small metal ring. Then something that felt like an amulet, and some rolled up thing he tossed aside without looking. None of it interested him. Not now. Not here. Mages always carried junk that looked important and was usually worth nothing, at least not to sensible people.

Then his hand found a pouch.

It was heavy.

Not a little heavy. Not just full enough to be useful. Heavy the way things are heavy that can tip a man’s life into a different direction.

Kral pulled it out, loosened the tie, opened it, and for a moment he even forgot to swear.

Gold.

Not a few coins, not the meager travel purse of some scholar, but gold. A lot of it. Coin on coin, packed tight, a rich, dull gleam in the half dark of the deck. So much that his first thought was not joy but pure suspicion. No reasonable man carried that much openly. That much meant a target, pursuit, trouble. But it also meant gold. Real gold. Heavy gold. Enough gold that a damaged ship suddenly mattered less than a long ride inland.

Why, Kral thought, stunned, why had the fool not waved this around from the start instead of introducing himself like an idiot.

He closed the pouch.

His decision did not form slowly. Not honorably. Not after weighing options. It was simply there. Complete. Finished. Within a heartbeat.

He stood, hooked the pouch to his belt, turned, and strode toward the gangway with that fast, hard purpose men wear when they hope no one will stop them. Down on the quay the horses were still there. The mage’s, or his own. No, rather, the ones he now considered his, because the dead rarely object. He hopped the last steps, landed heavy, grabbed the reins, and swung up. He took the second horse with him as well, leading it behind, without looking back once.

On deck his crew stared at him.

Stunned. Stupid. Waiting.

For what, Kral would have liked to ask. For orders. For morality. For a plan. For a man who, after everything the sea, the island, the strangers and fate had dealt him over the last weeks, would still clutch heroically at some duty.

Kral was done with them.

Done with the ship.

Done with the sea.

He had seen enough. Swallowed enough. Lost enough. Risked enough. If the sea now set a dead mage and a sack of gold in front of him at the same time, then it should not be surprised if he finally understood what the real gift was.

He dug in his spurs.

The horse moved at once, first in a sharp trot, then faster, and within moments Kral was riding away from the harbor, away from the ship, away from the crew and everything that still stood behind him on the planks in the shape of explanations, blood and trouble.

He rode until the masts behind him shrank.

Then he rode until the ship was no longer visible.

And long after that, when he was already beyond any sightline, his crew still stood on deck and stared in the direction their captain had vanished, as if sheer disbelief could pull back a man who had decided in a single second that gold weighed more than loyalty.

Formularbeginn

IIIFormularende

She could not have said how long she had been lying like this.

Time had lost its meaning under the hood. There was no light by which she could tell morning from evening, no shadows, no stars, no shift in the wind. There was only swaying, pressure, pain, and the smell of leather, cold fur, foreign hands, and that bitter draught they kept forcing into her, until even her thinking tasted like stale metal.

At first, Xian had still counted.The horse’s steps. Breaths. Heartbeats. The moments when someone tugged at her bonds, shifted her position, lifted her head, pushed something between her teeth that she had to swallow whether she wanted to or not. But the counting slipped away soon enough. The draught blurred the edges of her thoughts. It did not make the world disappear, it only made it soft, as if wrapped in dirty wool. Everything became heavier. The will. The tongue. The anger. Even fear did not stay sharp. It lay inside her like something cold that no longer had the strength to become a scream.

She only knew that they had examined her.

They had taken everything, carefully, thoroughly, without haste. Hands had searched her clothes beneath the hood, unfastened belts, emptied pockets, removed knives, tools, anything with an edge or a use. They had left her the clothes. And the amulets around her neck. That had struck her, precisely because everything else was gone. Someone had handled them for a long time, weighing the cool metal between their fingers, tugging as if to test whether it could be pulled free, and then leaving them where they were. Why, she did not know. She understood almost nothing anymore. Only that these dark figures did not make mistakes. Never. What they did, they did on purpose.

Her brother was there.She knew that.

Not because she had seen him. Not because they ever let her near him. But because she had felt his weight close by, the way he breathed perhaps, or only that stubborn certainty siblings sometimes carry for one another even when the world has blindfolded them. Where Xiodri was, Xian did not know. Whether she was still alive, Xian did not know. Whether Nigk still breathed, she did not know, except in the rare clearer moments when she thought she heard, somewhere far off, a rasping breath, a cough, the dull clink of chains, and assigned it to him because there was nothing else to hold on to.

Her wounds had been tended.That, too, had happened without kindness.

They had not healed to save, but to preserve. To keep her functional. Her skin smelled of foreign salves, bitter fats, herbs she did not know. They had cleaned her roughly, bound her roughly, and again and again came that draught, bitter, thick, vile, and each time she refused they pinched her nose shut, pried her jaw open, stretched her throat until the body swallowed from simple survival what the will rejected.

After that they tied her mouth again.Her hands stayed bound.Her eyes stayed covered.And over everything lay that mask, heavy, tight, suffocating, as if they meant to erase not only her sight but her entire face from the world.

Escape was impossible. Even resistance was impossible. The world spun too hard, the draught worked too well, she was too weak, too drained, too far from herself. The cold did the rest. It crawled through every layer of cloth, through every bandage, through every memory of warmth. The bonds were laid so that no movement achieved anything. No jerk. No twist. No hope that leather might give. No hope at all. And the figures who held her did not speak. They did only what was necessary. Grip. Pull. Step. Draught. Knot. Onward.

Hours became days.Or days became something longer still, for which there was no word.

They had thrown her over horses, lifted her, lowered her again, carried her somewhere that smelled different, damper perhaps, like stone instead of open cold, like air trapped inside walls. At some point they had unbound her from the horse and carried her. It had felt endless, through corridors or stairwells, across stone, through something echoing, until they finally chained her to a wall. She could see nothing. Under the mask the world was not black but a dirty grey brown, like old cloth held before the eyes. She could only guess shapes. Cold surface against her back. Iron at her wrist. Dampness somewhere deep in the masonry. Nothing else.

Everything was cold.For days, weeks, or a lifetime.

They had eaten nothing, as far as she could still tell. Only that draught, again and again, that draught that fed, numbed, dried her out, kept her alive and at the same time rinsed her life out of her, until nothing remained but a body strapped to a wall that no longer knew whether it was made of flesh or only of pain.

They treated them like something worthless.Like something surplus.

Not even like enemies. Enemies are hated. Enemies are shouted at. Someone tells them why they are to be destroyed. Here there was none of that. Only handwork. Cold. Purpose. As if they were not people but objects not yet thrown away because perhaps later there might be some use in them.

Then, after a span that might have been hours or half a winter, she heard sounds again.

Not the usual steps of her keepers, not the soft clink of tools or the dull quiet of waiting, but a creak, farther off. A door. Not hers. Then a scream.

Male.Cut off hard.

Her brother.

Xian snapped her head up as far as the chains allowed, and for a moment the numbness split and something clearer cut through. Nigk. It had to have been Nigk. A second sound. Metal. Then another door, closer now. Was it opening to her. Were those footsteps. Yes. Footsteps. Foreign voices. Deep, rough, gurgling, unintelligible as always, and yet there was something in this language she had come to fear as much as silence. She understood no word, but she understood enough to know that there was no pity living in those sounds.

Someone came up to her.

A tug at the mask. A pull at her clothing. The amulet.

Foreign fingers lifted it, turned it, weighed it. She did not resist. She could not have. The conversation above her hissed back and forth, alien, hard, meaningful. She understood nothing. Not a single word. Then the hands left her.

The mask stayed.The amulet stayed.

The strangers moved away again. The door closed. And as the steps faded, Xian slid back into that blunt darkness that was neither sleep nor fainting, but a third thing, mean and tough, where even dreams are too weak to take shape.

When she surfaced again, nothing was different.Still cold.Still stone.Still iron.

She began to work at the bonds, more out of spite than hope. Pressing against them, twisting, feeling with her nails, searching for the angle where metal might be wrong. Nothing. She tried until her wrists were raw, until the skin chafed and she could smell her own blood, metallic under the bitterness of the draught. Nothing gave. Nothing loosened. These people knew how to bind.

Then, after what felt like an eternity, footsteps came again.

This time slower. Not that clipped, certain walk of the dark figures, but more cautious. Almost hesitant. She heard her door open. Heard it close again. Voices. Quieter. One came nearer. Xian tensed as far as she still could.

Then someone loosened her mask carefully.No haste. No yanking. Two hands lifting the cloth off her head as if removing something fragile. Then the gag.

“Do not bite me,” a calm voice said. “Please.”

Xian went rigid.

The blindfold was loosened.

Light hit her like a blow. Not harsh daylight, not sunburn, not desert, and yet it hurt. As if brightness itself had grown edges. She blinked wildly, shut her eyes again, tears shooting painfully under her lids.

“Keep your eyes closed,” the voice said. “You need time to get used to the light again.”

Xian swallowed.

She wanted to speak. Thank you, perhaps. Or where. Or Nigk. Or only a sound that proved she had not become an animal completely.

What came from her throat was barely more than a rough scrape.

“Wait.”

Something cool was lifted to her lips. A small ladle. Water.

Fresh water.

Xian drank greedily, far too fast, nearly choking, clinging to those few swallows as if the whole world hung inside them. The water was cool and clear and so painfully good that tears nearly came again. Only now did she realize how desperately thirsty she had been.

Slowly she blinked again.

This time the light stayed.

The figure in front of her was female. Human, as far as Xian could tell. Middle aged perhaps. Dressed in white linen, clean enough but not fussed over, more like someone who had worked a long time in a place where cleanliness was duty rather than comfort. Her face was narrow. Tired. Not unkind. But not warm either. It was the face of a woman who had long ago found pity too expensive to hand out freely.

“Where…” Xian managed.

The woman gave a flat smile and raised a hand.

“Quiet. The walls have ears here.” She said it without drama, as a simple fact. “I cannot tell you anything.”

She glanced toward the door.

Xian followed her gaze and forced her eyes to open, to clear, to remember how seeing works. In a narrow slit, behind a grate, something stood. Or someone. A dark shape. No face. No eyes. Only an outline where you could guess there was a head, shoulders, a calm, attentive presence. Someone was watching. Of course someone was watching.

Xian swallowed.

The woman said, “I will bring you something to eat. You must be hungry. And something to clean yourself with.” A brief look over Xian’s condition. Not contempt. Just assessment. “If you want, I can bring you new clothes. This,” she gestured at armor and cloth, “is starting to stink.”

Xian tried to remember when she had last washed. Truly washed. A bath. Warm water. Hands that were not foreign and rough. She could not remember. Everything before lay behind a wall of riding, draught, cold, and darkness.

“The bonds?” she asked, hoarse.

“I can take them off temporarily.”

The answer came without hesitation.

Xian lifted her gaze.

“You will not harm me. Will you.”

The woman looked at her.

“I do not matter to them. You could kill me and they would not even twitch.”

She said it with such cold indifference that Xian heard more hopelessness in it than in all the chains before. No bitterness. No defiance. Only a blank finding. As if her own life had long since become something that merely continued.

“So do not try to take me as a hostage,” the woman went on calmly. “They would kill me. And you later, too.”

Xian looked at her, dry throat, burning skin, leaden limbs, iron still biting at her wrists.

The woman held her gaze.

“Still,” she said after a short pause, “they want information from you.”

IV

Slonda sat over the books of the library for a long time, and the longer he sat, the less he could tell whether he was reading, or whether what he read had begun, in turn, to read him.

At first he took up the Codex again, then again, then a third time, and whenever he thought he had finally gained a firm grip on its meaning, something slipped away from him. Not because the words were unclear. On the contrary, they had a sharpness that felt almost insulting. It slipped away because with every rereading it became clearer to him how deep the distance was between the text in front of him and the version he had taken for the Codex all his life. It was not simply the same order in older language. It was the same wound at a different stage of healing. Where later hands had smoothed scars, cut back growths, and turned what was too harsh into rite and habit, everything here still stood open, raw, brazen, without that later politeness by which, after centuries, even violence begins to pass itself off as reason.

Much had remained the same, and that was exactly what made the differences so stark. The grasping for power was condemned in the Codex Slonda knew as well, more than that, it was the underlying note of the whole work, the first fear from which all further sentences drew their justification. No mage should reach for a crown, no house of the Art should seat itself in worldly rule, no school should raise itself into a state. That was familiar. The binding of magic to script, signs, and ritual was not foreign to him either. No spell without form, no word without examination, no innovation without review. He knew that. So too the Conclave, the deadlines, the rolls, the mutual oversight of the schools, the constant assurance that order endures only where eye watches eye.

And yet the same thought in this ancient version was harder, stricter, almost inhumanly precise, as if no time had yet passed between the sentence and the fear that birthed it. The Codex Slonda knew threatened, warned, restricted, referred, and still, at least in appearance, hesitated between banishment and eradication, between inquiry and verdict. The Codex lying before him tolerated almost nothing. Where the later order still spoke of exceptions, the older already spoke of duty. Where the later version claimed to avoid human affairs and yet still sent itself, now and then, to the courts of kings and princes to heal, to observe, to advise, the original thinking already held the clear recognition that power also sits in the shadow of the crown. Where it is not taken openly, it finds its way through the ruler’s ear, through healing, dependence, or counsel. Where later the schools had become six, and the remaining disciplines were struck from memory as if they had never existed, here they still stood as twelve, lawful, upright, and set with the same self-evidence as fire, earth, or mind. Where the later world had in practice long grown softer, more eager to interpret, more negligent perhaps or wiser, depending on whom one asked, everything here was still siege, precaution, iron chain.

He read about the nature of the schools, their closeness, their mutual surveillance, the limits laid on each discipline, and even where the basic structure was still recognizable he felt that constant, fine shift that exists between a law that administers and a law that founds. In the text he knew from his own time, much had become practice, practice had become habit, habit had become a kind of institutionalized sleep. Here, everything was still intent. That the schools should not lie far from each other was not convenience, not exchange born of scholarly inclination, but supervision. That students should move between houses was not an educational ideal, but a test. That a Conclave must convene regularly was not mere administration, but a safeguard against relapse. Nowhere did one read trust. Everywhere one read restraint.

And because the knowledge in this library lay not only in the books, but also in the people who moved through it with a self-evidence as if none of this were past but simply the present state of the world, Slonda sought Drinda again and again. Drinda answered his questions with a patience that at first seemed almost youthful and later, for that very reason, even more remarkable. He accepted Slonda’s objections, overlooked his sharp remarks, and beyond that did much more that could not, in the ordinary sense, be called teaching. Drinda did not merely explain texts. He explained contexts. The flow of energy. The linear stream of time in its interaction with energy. The way, under certain constellations, bridges could be thrown, how tunneling was recognized, prepared, calculated, and, if necessary, rejected. How transitions were not simply leaps, but carefully secured corridors whose possibility did not lie in the traveler’s wish, but in the world’s own position.

Often Drinda said, half joking, half with the fine defiance of a young scholar who knew very well whom he was speaking to and yet refused to dodge the truth, that he was now taking his own master as a student. Slonda usually smiled only briefly, because he could allow the joke without missing the truth in it. It was truly so. Drinda took him by the hand, not like a child, no, but like someone whose mind was so developed elsewhere that he resisted the first humiliation of not knowing longer than necessary. And again and again Drinda added that this was only temporary, that soon someone from Gontar would come to instruct Slonda properly, someone who stood deeper in the paths of time than he himself did.

Meanwhile Slonda kept reading, as if something depended on speed that he could not name.

Again and again he asked himself what had been before the time of the Conclave, and every time some document told him that chaos had ruled earlier and that this chaos had to be erased, a resistance stirred in him. It was not born of contrariness alone, but of the sense that condemnation without description is rarely accidental. He compared, involuntarily, the deeds of his brother, his own, some things he had seen, some he had only suspected, with the old version of the Codex. And every time he carried that comparison through to its end, he reached the same clear conclusion. Under this order Anadar would hardly have breathed for long. Inquiry. Inquisition. Perhaps eradication. Certainly not toleration. And yet they lived in another time, a softer one, perhaps only more cleverly sealed shut, and the thought comforted him less than it should have. For where a law seems harmless only because it has been forgotten or softened, the question always remains what happens when someone reads it sharply again.

He found other writings, then more, and soon the abundance of old knowledge itself became a condition in which he could scarcely move freely. Instead he was driven from text to text as if under constant shifts of weather. There were days when he read about schools, others about the early laying of passages, about binding rituals, about disturbances in the linear stream, about architectural prerequisites for safe corridors, about star positions, about forms in which energy could be conserved across longer spans without derailing. And again and again he returned to Drinda, who at first still patiently discussed with him the possible implicit violations of the Codex, but soon more often waved it away with a smile. Not out of disdain, but like someone who notices that his counterpart is testing a door too often while windows stand open next door.

“Everything in its time,” Drinda would say then. “The universe still stands in its order.”

And when Slonda pressed, when he asked again about the time before the Conclave, about what might have preceded that order, about the reasons for eradication, about the disappearance of whole schools, Drinda evaded without becoming rough. He said he did not know. Or, what irritated Slonda almost more, that it did not matter. The Codex, Drinda sometimes remarked, was patient and not fixed. A remark Slonda at first took for poetic nonsense, then for an attempt to calm him, and finally for something that might contain more truth than he liked.

But he did not let go.

Drinda was young, and precisely because he was young Slonda sometimes thought, with that old, almost unconscious arrogance scholars have when they collide with a younger mind, that he knew much but could not yet truly teach what was essential. So they sat once again in the inner courtyard beneath the tree, in the shade of that crown that cut the afternoon light into green, shifting patches. Drinda tried patiently, almost cheerfully, to explain the nature of time, while Slonda with the same stubbornness kept circling back to the question of why one could not go before the time of the Conclave. Why a world that knew passages fell silent at that point, as if it had built a wall there.

They talked past each other for a long time.

Drinda spoke of flow. Of linear stream. Of energy gradient. Of the necessity that a passage find a bridge not only in place but also in time, a bridge that truly existed and was not merely wished for. Slonda heard it all, understood parts, yet he wanted the one answer Drinda could not give or would not give: why it ended there. Why order reached back but not before. Why the road of knowledge began at the Conclave like a path laid intentionally only behind a burning house.

In the end Drinda was finished with his linear knowledge, as he called it, half laughing.

He raised his hands, he drew formulas in the air, he worked with a planetary system made of light and line, shifted orbits, explained angles, hinted at probabilities, and left Slonda not less irritated, only more learnedly annoyed. And as the conversation slid into one of those quiet dead ends where both know they are still in the same place, a voice spoke.

It cleared its throat first.

Both of them jerked up.

“Order,” said the voice, “is only a state of chaos.”

And right after that, with a light, almost amused addition that did not soften the first sentence but only deepened it: “And admittedly a state that requires a great deal of energy to reach and to maintain.”

An old woman stepped into the tree’s shadow.

She leaned on a staff, a little bent, long white hair loose, not groomed, but like something wind and time no longer wished to force into shape. Her face was narrow, not delicate, but finely lived through, and in her eyes lay such patience that one could not say whether it came from kindness or from very long acquaintance with other people’s zeal. Drinda sprang to his feet.

“Master Pildara.”

His joy was immediate and genuine. She embraced him with a self-evidence that showed there was more between them than rank.

“Young Drinda,” she said, “I am glad to see you again.”

Then she turned to Slonda, bent slightly toward him, and smiled.

“My friend,” she said, and in that address there was neither familiarity nor distance, but something strange in between, “to be allowed to meet you so young is a true joy. And you told me you were a stubborn fool who did not understand.”

She did not say it mockingly. That was where her power lay. In that smile there was so much patience that Slonda almost wanted to become defiant, just to test where her boundary was.

The weeks passed.

Drinda left, as announced, and Pildara took over. From that day Slonda’s life in the library changed. She no longer let him read without pause, or only rarely, only in certain hours, as if she were dosing knowledge against the danger that he might lose himself in texts again instead of entering what stood between them. She focused entirely on the flow of time and began his training, and after only a few days Slonda understood that Drinda had given him much, but Pildara brought something else: form.

Again and again she used the planetary constellation. Again and again she made him create the image himself, not with ink on parchment, but written into the air, made of lines, points, orbits, small bodies of light that ran around one another at precise distances. She showed him how to rotate this image, how to set it at different points in time, how bridges became visible within it, which corridors could be entered and which only looked like paths but in truth ended in instability, tearing, or dissolution. She explained which passages could be taken forward, which backward, which remained bound to place and time, and which opened the same time but not the same space. She showed him that a crossing was never merely a step, but always a calculation of position, energy, direction, density, opening, and counter opening.

And she was patient.

Not gentle in any cheap sense, not flattering, not sparing. Patient in the way of someone who knows that the difficult does not become easier by simplifying it, but by forcing the other person to the right place long enough until their mind begins to grasp on its own. She corrected him, let him fail, let him begin again, forced him to write the planetary script cleanly, to not merely sense angles but to read them. Soon Slonda was so caught up in it that his academic questions about law, Codex interpretation, the vanished schools, even the time before the Conclave fell into the background. Not because they lost weight, but because time itself now occupied him in a way no reading alone could.

Only one question never fully let him go.

Why they could not jump before or after certain points.

At first Pildara answered simply, without pathos, as if explaining to a child why a mountain path does not lead further.

“What we know and depict as the linear flow,” she said, “is no longer given before and after these points. There time runs as something else, and so does energy.”

She saw that this did not satisfy him and continued, not in images alone but in her strict mixture of demonstration and formula.

“When Maohanga and the Earth draw near, realities shift. Everything that was probable becomes less probable. Everything that was improbable presses closer. The nearer they come, the greater the uncertainty.”

Then she wrote formulas into the air for him.

Glowing letters, signs, relations that hovered before him as if they had always been meant for air rather than parchment. She explained the linear flow of time in such a complex mathematical form that at first Slonda could only marvel at how cleanly she moved between image and abstraction. She showed him which factors in a transition were stable, which were only approximated, which under certain planetary proximities rose into dominating uncertainties. She showed him why some bridges remained stable while others collapsed into mere possibility. Why some corridors were safe to walk and others spat the traveler into a place where air was missing, or stone already was, or matter had not yet ordered itself the way a living body requires.

“It is too great a risk,” she said at last, when he asked again whether one could not go further back, whether one must not at least try. “If you travel back there, you might materialize in a wall. Or in a place where the space you expect is not yet space. Then you have gone back, but you are dead. Nothing gained.”

Slowly Slonda began to understand.

Not only the script, not only the signs, but the inner connection. He grasped how bridges were not found but read. How passages did not arise from wanting, but from an order that was itself not fixed, only calculable for certain spans. He understood why Pildara had patience with him, and why Drinda had sometimes smiled when he tried to push his head through that wall that was not stone, but probability.

And something else dawned on him.

Something Pildara did not say, not at first, yet it already stood between her formulas like a shadow between the planetary lines of light. If the approach of Maohanga and Earth destabilized probabilities, if it made bridges uncertain and transitions into lethal wagers, then this could not be its only effect. If time itself became more uncertain under such closeness, if realities began to drift against one another, if the calculable lost strength and the improbable pressed forward, then something else had to shift too.

Much else.

Slonda looked at the glowing signs in the air, at the lines Pildara let flare with a steady hand and then extinguish again, and felt a new unrest rise in him, quieter than the old one, but deeper.

Because perhaps, he thought, the question of the time before the Conclave was not only a question of prohibitions, eradications, and lost schools.

Perhaps it was also a question of what happens to the world itself when its order is not simply remembered, but becomes uncertain again.

Toward chaos.

V

Anadar was irritated, and irritation was never a good state for him. Not because it made him loud, he rarely became loud, and if he did, it was usually only for a moment, but because irritation in him meant that his thread of patience did not simply grow thinner like it did in others, it suddenly ceased to exist. He had neither time nor inclination to deal with vanities, certainly not on a day like this. Tomorrow the Tri Crown would stand above them. A few days later the Conclave would convene. In the west a monster still prowled, the coasts were under pressure, people were fleeing from the north, his brother remained missing, and instead of dealing with matters that actually carried weight, he now sat in a large study hall in the library of the Wind Islands and had to listen to Roto and Grot chew on words until even meaning turned tough.

The hall was tall, cool, and built with that sober dignity water people loved when they wanted to give a room the gravity of thinking. Between the pillars stood tables of pale wood, the windows were open enough to let air in, and on several lecterns lay scrolls, maps, notes, and copies about the sea monster, about the melodies, about sightings. Everything that mattered about Xoiun’s tower was being handled carefully. Nothing was displayed too conspicuously, nothing was discussed in Roto’s presence. Everything that deserved attention lay here. Everything urgent waited. And that was exactly why Anadar was close to losing what remained of his restraint when Roto, for what felt like the tenth time, began again in that self satisfied tone men adopt when they believe length can be mistaken for weight.

Roto loved to invoke common ground. Common ground between the School of Water on the Wind Islands and the School of Wind in Ashambrat, common ground of tradition, oversight, old obligations, the lines in the Codex that, he said, did not stand there for nothing, for they showed the houses of the Art the way, for they set boundaries, for where boundaries blur, ruin is never far. He spoke slowly, with his hands, with glances that traveled the room as if everyone must witness the phrasing of something momentous, though in truth it was nothing but the same accusation in ever new garments.

Grot supported him with the volume of a man who already hears his own enlightenment in every sentence the other speaks. He nodded, threw in approvals, produced words like order, review, necessity, investigation, and responsibility as if they had long been prepared in his mouth, and again and again it came to the same conclusion. Anadar, obviously, had nothing to hide, and if that was so, then an examination of his nature, his powers, his origins, his boundary crossings, and his cross school disciplines could not possibly be a problem. It would, Roto said in a particularly smug flourish of reason, be in Anadar’s own interest to dispel every suspicion.

Anadar sat in the same room with them. That did not seem to bother either of them in the slightest.

Again and again he looked over to Sinadie, and though he said nothing, his gaze spoke with a clarity she could not misunderstand. You want us to keep your rotting tower, your forbidden knowledge, your buried horror under lock and seal, he thought with a sharpness that exhausted him, and I sit here and have to listen to this filth as if we were first year students.

He snorted, contemptuously, perhaps a little too loudly.

It was enough.

Roto spun around, pleased as a man whose opponent finally does him the favor of showing his blade. “Ah, Master Anadar,” he said with that falsely polite emphasis that is accusation all by itself, “would you like to respond to the allegations now?”

“My lords,” Sinadie began, with a diplomacy that was really only fatigue, “the Conclave has decided there is nothing to investigate.”

“Not yet,” Roto cut in.

Anadar stood.

It was not theatrical. It was something else, something that changed the room at once. A brief moment in which even the light seemed to reorder itself. In his head he heard a single word.

Blood.

Naaarstr did not say it aloud. It was simply there, cool and tempting, a possibility so clear that for the blink of an eye Anadar truly considered giving in. Not really. Not seriously. But enough to frighten him with his own thought.

Roto, who at first mistook Anadar’s rising for confirmation of his own importance, began to speak again.

Anadar walked toward him.

Now even Grot fell silent.

“Who are you,” Anadar asked calmly, and that calm made the sentence more dangerous than any shouting, “that you think you can accuse me here.”

He stepped closer.

“Who are you, that you think you can stride around and make speeches while others clean up the filth this world is forcing out of every seam.”

Roto visibly lost his footing. So did Grot. Both suddenly remembered that Anadar was not only an object of talk, but a man of flesh, power, and impatient proximity.

“We have other things to settle here than your vanities,” Anadar said, and the words came faster now. “A sea monster. People fleeing from the north. My brother is missing. The Tri Crown is above us. And you? You sit here croaking and trying to distract from what matters. I no longer have time for it.”

He did not wait for an answer.

He turned and went for the exit.

Behind him he heard Roto’s indignation as something that had to gather itself again after taking a punch to the stomach. He heard Grot’s voice too, louder now, more frantic, and somewhere in between Sinadie’s short, hard attempt to hold the room together. But Anadar had already left the hall.

Shara caught up with him in the corridor.

“You could have handled that more elegantly,” she said.

He looked at her.

“You mean I should simply have burned him to ash?”

Shara smiled.

“You cannot solve everything with force.”

“I did not burn him. That was restraint already.”

“He will not stop with his accusations,” she said. “He wants to provoke you. He wants you to make a mistake. He wants to pull Sinadie to his side. And you are playing into his hands.”

“Not really.” Anadar’s voice was calmer again. “Sinadie knows what we know. She will do no such thing as take his side.”

He looked out through the windows, at the water, at the brightness of day that already carried that peculiar tense shimmer that seemed to lie in the air before great events in the sky.

“Until we have removed her problem,” he added.

Shara studied him briefly from the side. “And after that?”

“After that,” Anadar said, “we still have her in our hand.”

He fell silent for a moment.

“I would like to go to the tower again. Look around there. If possible with less of an entourage than last night.”

“Morgut is still studying the melodies.”

“Yes.”

She was speaking the truth, and he knew it. Yet in that same moment footsteps came behind them, faster than those of someone who still wanted to keep arguing. Sinadie had run after them.

“Master Anadar,” she said, slightly out of breath without it truly touching her dignity, “please forgive me for not stopping that talk sooner.”

Anadar smiled at her, and there was nothing of his previous sharpness in it.

“How could you have known it bothered me.”

Sinadie raised an eyebrow.

“When people keep implying you are a power hungry monster?”

“I am not even sure what exactly he believes he is accusing me of.”

“We would like to return to the island,” Anadar said then, without any further circling. “Unobtrusively.”

Sinadie nodded almost at once. “I can arrange that. Who would you like with you?”

“You.”

The answer was cold, clear, and so immediate that Shara looked at him for a heartbeat. Sinadie, however, only responded with a brief, almost invisible smile.

“Good,” she said. Then she cast a quick glance back at the building. “It is time I get away from here anyway.”

Together they went down to the water.

The quay lay open under the light, the sea already moved more restlessly than it had in the morning, and the high reach of the tide was obvious on the wet edges of the rocks. The Tri Crown was not yet there, and yet its nearness was already everywhere. In the currents. In the sound of the water. In the way even the gulls circled more nervously.

Sinadie spoke the spell, and the boat moved of its own accord.

It was a small, old water working, so ordinary that one almost forgot how strange it must seem to outsiders. The wood slid away from the landing as if it had decided for itself where it wanted to go. No one took up oars. No one steered visibly.

“What is it about this,” Anadar asked as they drifted out, “that Hokn’f and Fontal insist on an investigation?”

Sinadie was silent for a moment.

“It has less to do with you personally,” she said at last, “than with the fact that the two of them would like to make a name for themselves. And how is that easier than through the most famous among us.”

Anadar snorted softly.

“And you?”

“At the beginning I did not want to oppose them,” she said without evasion. “So I went along. I did not really know you.”

She sighed, and her gaze went out over the water that struck the hull in silvery lines.

“There are currents in the schools. Hardliners who want to cut others down. We do not call it a game of power, but of course it is. Especially here, in Ashambrat, in Gontar, but also in Tandor there are people who like to have weight. Rotasch knew how to steer that cleverly and set them against each other. He was never one of those who drifted. And precisely for that he was useful.”

Anadar said nothing.

It was unpleasant to admit that he might miss the old Dean of the Fiery Fortress more than he had ever expected. Rotasch had been comfortable, vain in small matters, often slow, and yet he had mastered the larger art of never quite alienating any side and nudging each just far enough toward the other that the whole building did not collapse.

“What is their goal,” Shara asked.

“They want the schools to keep to themselves,” Sinadie answered. “No more exchange of students. Or only fixed paths. They want no people who master more than one school. And you,” she glanced at Anadar, “are of course a thorn in their side. They cite old texts that are supposed to say one should learn only a single discipline.”

Anadar and Shara listened closely.

“The same texts,” Sinadie added with a trace of dry irony, “that elsewhere say exchange must happen so that the teachings can watch each other.”

Shara smiled. “So it is a matter of interpretation.”

“It always is,” Sinadie said. “That is what we call politics.”

The boat drifted toward the island.

The water beneath had turned deep black blue, unsteady, and on the rim of the sky lay that slowly growing tension that gave the coming days their strange weight.

“And you,” Shara asked after a while. “What role do you play in this structure?”

Sinadie did not laugh, but her face brightened.

“Me? I make sure I do not make a mistake. And now I make sure the mistake that has already been made does not become the subject of an investigation, or at least not until I can steer the outcome.”

“You realize this will raise questions,” Anadar said.

“Yes.” She nodded. “After a renegade who practiced forbidden knowledge, many things will seem explainable.”

Anadar looked at her briefly.

“So you already know the ending.”

Sinadie lifted her shoulders. “It is always those who write the history who can write it.”

Shara gave her a look in which respect and caution almost touched.

“Roto is deeply disruptive for you, isn’t he?”

Sinadie shrugged. “He is entirely occupied with you. He tries to provoke you, and he is so convinced he is clever that he does not notice how useful he becomes in his predictability. Grot keeps him busy, guides him into the right channels, and keeps him away from what matters.”

“Does Grot know what he is doing,” Shara asked.

“I do not think so,” Sinadie said.

Then she laughed, bright, young, almost light, and for the first time it struck Anadar with real sharpness how young she truly was. And yet in her was already that intelligence others gain only with age, if at all.

They landed.

The water stood unusually high, the tides before the Tri Crown already reached far into the rock, and they had to climb the wet stones, which none of them truly felt as effort. Salt hung in the air. The light fell. The tower stood black and unfinished against the sky, and scarcely had they entered when Naaarstr struck.

It is here, Anadar.

The voice was not loud, but it carried an urgency that made Anadar listen at once.

Under your feet. The horrible evil is directly beneath us. I feel its suffering.

Anadar stopped.

He knelt. The floor was cold. Not merely cool like stone in an empty building, but strangely cold in certain places, while others felt warmer, as if something were breathing through the stone. He drew his sword and began to tap carefully on the floor with the pommel. Here. There. Again.

“Do you hear it,” he asked the two women. “Here it is hollow. Here solid. And here hollow again.”

He laid his hand on the stone. In one spot it was icy, in another almost lukewarm. He reached out with his thoughts.

Morgut. Can you come to the island, please.

Then he pulled back a rug that was half rotten and so inconspicuous they had not even taken it seriously as an obstacle last night. Beneath it ran a fine line in the floor. Too clean for chance. Too straight. Too sealed.

He took a torch from the wall, lit it with a brief thought, and let the light skim low over the stone. Now Shara and Sinadie saw it clearly as well. A slab. Large. Precisely fitted. Sealed or hidden, at any rate not part of the original floor.

“How do you open it,” Anadar murmured. “Mechanically. Or magically.”

He focused. First he tested whether the slab could be lifted, whether there was any grip, any resistance, any response. Nothing. So he stepped into the center, pulled a piece of charcoal from his pocket, and drew signs on the floor. No great spell, only a clean directed force. When he struck the stone with his sword and released the spell, it boomed dully through the tower.

The slab jumped.

A crack ran through it.

But it did not break.

Anadar tried again. And again. The stone crumbled at the edges, took on fissures, but held. It was as if the slab did not bear the impact itself but diverted it into something else.

The two women watched at first, then both, almost at the same time, offered remarks. Too vertical. Too direct. Too much force downward instead of into the structure. At last Anadar let Sinadie take the lead. She stepped onto the slab, braced herself with her staff, gathered her version of the solution, and released it.

Again it cracked.

Again stone crumbled.

No break.

“Sealed,” Anadar muttered. “Or laid over something that gives.”

In that moment Morgut arrived, and with him Miene and Sindra, who of course had not allowed themselves to be left behind. He saw the three, then the slab, then the traces of the force already attempted, and shook his head at once.

“You are driving the force vertically,” he said. “It cannot work like that.”

He motioned them back with that shamelessly natural certainty they forgave him only because he was so often right. Then he knelt, drew a different spell on the slab with chalk, murmured briefly, focused, and finally breathed fine dust from his hand onto the stone.

Nothing happened.

Not at once.

The whole tower trembled once, deep, as if something in the foundation had answered. The slab did not move.

All six looked at each other.

Morgut raised his hand. “Wait.”

Then, with a sudden dry bursting, the slab collapsed into dust.

For the fraction of a moment Morgut laughed in triumph.

Then the smell rose.

It hit them with a force that was almost physical. Rot. Death. Fish. Old decaying flesh. Moisture that had been sealed too long. Waste. Something sweet in it, something heavy, something so unbearable, so nauseating, that in the same instant the air left all of them.

They stumbled outside.

All six.

Into fresh air, gasping, retching, tears in their eyes. Even Anadar, who could bear much, had to brace himself against the rock for a moment so he would not spill his stomach onto the stones. Shara cursed under her breath. Sinadie only gagged dryly, both hands at her chest. Miene and Sindra held on to each other. Morgut, a moment ago the victor, looked insulted as if the tower itself had answered his laughter personally.

Down by the rocks they noticed the water had risen again.

The light was dropping fast. The Tri Crown was imminent. Over the sea lay that peculiar clarity nights have just before such a constellation, as if the sky itself were preparing.

“It will be dark soon,” Shara said.

“And the water is coming,” Sinadie added.

Anadar nodded.

All of them knew what it meant. If something was hidden down there, they had to go down now. Not tomorrow. Not after the argument. Not after the Conclave. Now.

So they armed themselves.

Torches. Cloths over mouth and nose. Spells to guide light. Small protective marks against stench, against nausea, against whatever else might wait for them. No one spoke much. The time for speaking was over. Beneath them lay a hollow space that stank of death, and Naaarstr had said that the true horror was there.

Together they went back into the tower.

And this time they were no longer walking toward a riddle.

They were walking into its throat.

VI

That could not be real.

Tropil instinctively ducked lower into the sand, yanked his cloak up and threw it over his head and shoulders, just in time before the storm swept over them like a living verdict. The sand did not strike like dust, not like a rough gust, but like countless small knives searching for skin, eyes, lips, every gap in the fabric. He drove his knees deeper into the ground, pressed his forearms over his face, and shaped with his hands that small hollow in front of mouth and nose they had all learned early, long before they learned to fight. Breathe first. Dignity later.

Beside him, Sinf dropped down as well, fast, correct, brutally precise. Of course she did. Sinf never made mistakes, at least none you could see, and what Tropil could not stand most about her was not even her know it all smugness, but that unshakable, almost polished devotion to Zars, as if there were nothing more honourable in the world than making another woman’s thoughts into one’s own religion. In another moment he would have been angry about it. Here, under the furious weight of sand, there was only survival.

The storm did not last long. Perhaps minutes. Perhaps only breaths that panic had stretched. When the raging eased and the pressure released, Tropil lifted his head first, then his shoulders, then himself. Sand ran off him, out of the cloak, out of the folds of his clothes, out of his hair beneath the cloth. He spat, wiped his eyes, and stared in the direction the girl had vanished.

The wind pillar still stood in the distance.

A hundred metres high perhaps, perhaps more, in the moonlight silver and yet dark, a wandering wall of motion, and in its centre, he thought he could still make it out even from here, the little mage sat like the still point inside a weapon that had turned on its makers. The storm was moving north with terrifying speed.

He should have killed her.

A long time ago.

The thought was clear, simple, true. Zars had ordered that the child not be touched. Gnok had begged for mercy. He had obeyed, because an order was an order, and because in the dunes you only grew old if you never confused the chain of command, obedience, and responsibility. And now he was watching a sandstorm in whose heart that annoying little gardener was riding away like a saint favoured by the moons, or like a curse that had decided to grow legs.

Sinf straightened too and looked at him.

She did not need to speak. Her gaze already held everything. Now it gets serious. Now we have to hurry. Now you will get to deliver the bad news, Tropil, and Zars will take it with that silence that is worse than any rage.

He did not curse out loud. The anger was too old for that.

They ran back to where they had left the horses, half leaping, half sliding down the dunes, and of course the animals were no longer there. Who could blame them. The storm had passed over them like it passed over everything, and horses were smarter than people when it came to fleeing in time.

Tropil let out a sharp whistle, then another, higher, drawn out longer. Sinf climbed a dune opposite to increase her reach and answered with a different sequence. Nothing unusual. That was how you called lost animals, how you began to count after a storm what was still with you. The only unusual thing was why they were calling. Unusual was this night. Unusual was the image burned into Tropil’s eyes.

At last the horses came back, snorting, nervous, dusted in sand.

Tropil and Sinf faced each other across two dunes and spoke with hand signals. No time for words. No need for them.

One back to the camp.

One after the storm.

Sinf took up the pursuit without hesitation. Of course she did. Fast, straight, in her determination as always. Tropil watched her for a moment, then turned his horse and rode back. He knew exactly why he had to go. Not because he was slower. Not because he was less capable. But because bad news rarely falls to those people like.

Gudi slipped into the city at night as if she were a shadow among shadows.

She came in from the south, exhausted to the marrow, her skin burned, her mouth dry, and that wobbling weakness in her knees that reminds a person that even miracles do not prevent a body from paying for what it survives. The sandstorm was gone. It had dissolved as if it had existed only for her, only for this escape, only for that single stretch between death and return. What remained was pain. And thirst.

Her first step took her to the well.

Not to her plot, not to a hiding place, not to an answer. Only to water. She knew the city’s wells, knew the shadows where you could wait, the hours when nobody watched anyone, the angles from which you could see and still remain unseen. But now even all that knowledge was secondary. Everything in her pulled toward that one sound. Water standing in stone.

She knelt, scooped with a trembling hand, and forced herself to drink slowly.

Only one sip.

Then another.

Careful. Very careful.

She knew you could not drink greedily after such dehydration. She knew it. She hated it. The thirst was almost overwhelming, an animal in her throat that roared to pour it all down in one go, to drink the whole well, the whole city, the whole world dry, until there was finally moisture in her body again. But she forced herself. One sip. Breathe. Another. Wait.

What now.

The question arrived at once, barely had the first pain eased.

She sat in the shadow, water still in her hands, and realised she had no plan, only mistrust. She no longer knew who was friend and who was enemy. Something dark was going on here, something magical, old, forbidden, something that did not feel like a school, not like instruction, not like the orderly world in which a spell had a name, a master, and a purpose. A construct beneath the city. A lake. An apparatus older than any memory. Secret paths in walls. Veiled riders. Gnok. Betrayal. She understood nothing fully anymore, only this. Before she went to the masters with any of it, she had to know more. Much more. Because what if Gnok was tangled in it. What if not only he. What if the masters themselves knew what was happening down there. What if her brother knew. The thought hit her harder than she wanted to admit.

She wished Morgut were here.

Not somewhere in Ashambrat. With her. Beside her. Now. With his calm, better, superior way of sorting things until they no longer looked like panic, but like a problem you could solve.

She took another sip, forced herself to wait again, and then withdrew, deeper into the shadows of the alleys, nearer to her plot, without truly showing herself to it. Day came. She stayed hidden. Drank. Waited. Recovered as best she could. Her thoughts ran in circles, but even a circle is better than a complete fall into nothing. And finally, as afternoon settled over the city and the light grew hard and bright, she made a decision.

If she was going down again, then now.

In bright daylight she least expected anyone to be waiting for her down there. At night, yes. At the Tri-Crown, yes. But in the afternoon, when everyone still looked up at the sky, at the last preparations, at the city. She thought that was clever. Perhaps it was only desperation with a prettier name.

She crept to her plot.

She had not been gone long, and yet the plants already looked as if they had not had water for weeks. Leaves sagged, the soil was too dry, and an absurd pain rose in Gudi, because even now, after everything, part of her thought first: you poor things.

She looked around.

No one.

Carefully she triggered the mechanism.

A click.

And she was on the stairs going down again.

It was too easy.

Perhaps too easy.

She stopped on the top step, her heart immediately racing again. She had not thought far enough. If someone came from above now, they would see her at once. No hiding place, no angle, no excuse. She had to go further down. Immediately. Carefully, placing her feet so no sound escaped her, she slipped down the stairs. With every step she wished her brother were at her side. A single look from Morgut would have told her what was wrong with this ease.

At the bottom she stopped and listened.

No one.

The hall lay before her as it had the first time. The apparatus hung in the middle of the room, almost floating, and beneath it the lake, smooth as a mirror, still as something too old to bother with ordinary movement. Light fell everywhere into the space, slanting, bright, and now, since she was not here for the first time, she realised it had to come from shafts or openings in the garden walls, placed so that the room could breathe without ever fully revealing itself. She forgot caution altogether.

She stepped out.

To the edge of the lake.

She saw the apparatus more clearly now, its struts, mountings, glass vessels, angles and connections, old, unbelievably old, older than much that in Ashambrat was called old. And she did not know how or why or who had built it, only that it had been made with a patience and knowledge that stole her breath.

“Curious and predictable.”

The voice behind her was cool.

Gudi spun around.

A Sondra stood there, slender, veiled, armed, arms folded across her chest. Only the eyes were visible. Amber. Clear. Unpleasantly calm. No effort in her stance, no twitch, no attack. Only that irritating mixture of patience and impatience, as if Gudi were not a threat, but a delay.

Gudi felt her heart climb into her throat.

Caught.

Again.

“You are curious,” the woman said, “and apparently a powerful mage, as I have heard, if the stories are not wildly exaggerated and you did not simply slip away somehow, child.”

The figure made no move to attack. On the contrary. With a narrow motion of her arm she indicated a place further back, almost as if she were asking Gudi to step aside.

“If we cannot keep you away, Gudi, then we must let you take part. Consider it an honour. You are the first of your species to be granted this honour in a very long time.”

She stepped back from the lake.

Gudi followed, more out of confusion than obedience.

“I am Zars,” the woman said, “leader of the Sondra, and I have been chosen to ensure the harvest of the Moon Drops.” Then a brief pause. “And believe me, child, this harvest is more important to us than our own lives.”

She led Gudi up a staircase Gudi had not seen on her first visit, narrow, hidden in the wall. Above lay a room from which the hall could be watched more easily. Zars stopped at a window. Gudi stepped beside her.

While writing, I listened to “Ave Maria” (Live at Metal Church) by Tarja. I’d recommend it for reading as well.

Below, the light began to change.

Slowly at first, then more noticeably. The bright daylight died, tipped, grew cooler, and from outside that blue glow now flowed in that the moons laid over the night. Added to it was a reddish tone from Jonus, which also stood in the sky, distant and yet present in a way you could see. Gudi had not noticed when Gnok suddenly stood on the other side beside her. Other figures arrived too. More Sondra filled the room. They stood still, shoulder to shoulder, and no one spoke. All of them stared down.

And Gudi forgot time.

The blue light reflected in the lake. Then the red tone. Then both together, and suddenly a shimmer lay on the surface as if the lake itself were beginning to breathe from within. It pulsed, barely visible at first. Then clearer. Small droplets loosened from the surface, lifted for the briefest moment a few millimetres above the water, only to fall back again. More and more. Small, larger, silver blue, threaded with red, as if the lake itself had begun to exhale.

And then she saw it.

Up on the apparatus, droplets began to form. Not on the water. On the struts. They condensed there, grew slowly, gathered, slid in fine paths along the construction downward, and were channelled into glass vessels hanging at certain points. As soon as one vessel filled, it lit up bluish, with a small red core inside it, as if light itself were trapped there. A first. Then a second. Then more. Drop by drop. And as soon as one of those little vials seemed to reach a certain weight, it detached, moved on, was sealed, and finally landed neatly arranged in waiting cases on the floor.

A sophisticated system.

Old, graceful, complete.

And it worked without any intervention at all.

A murmur went through the Sondra. No cheering, no shouting, only a deep, shared exhale, as if all of them felt at once that this harvest would be good, unusually good, perhaps as good as it had not been for a long time. More and more vials filled. More and more light travelled through the struts. Below, the hall was now entirely filled with that silver blue glow, threaded with the red reflections of the foreign body in the sky, and Gudi suddenly understood why such protection had been built around this secret.

It was not only precious.

It was beautiful.

Not the small, friendly beauty of a garden or a successful spell, but that greater, more graceful beauty that almost hurts because it is so obviously older than all who look at it. The play of light was magnificent. Still. Precise. Elegant. Even the apparatus, which by day had seemed a riddle, now looked like something organic, as if it had not been built, but grown out of the interplay of moons, water, and time itself.

Gudi stood there and stared.

For a moment she forgot everything else. The desert. The captivity. The pursuit. Gnok. Betrayal. Even fear seemed to withdraw from the spectacle for a heartbeat, not defeated, but stilled.

And an endless peace settled over her.

End part I