Anadar V/I

Prologe

Anadar, Master of all six Circles,

I am writing to you because I no longer want to leave what we have found to the mouth of a messenger or to the unrest of my own mind. What I am about to tell you must, for the time being, be known to very few. If this letter falls into foreign hands, it will stir unease. If it falls into the right hands, perhaps more than that.

During the clearing work in the damaged sections of the Fortress we came upon something in an old wall that at first seemed like a hollow space, and then proved to be far more. Beneath the collapsed wing, where we had assumed there was only rubble, broken beams, and the remnants of forgotten foundations, a sealed lower area was uncovered. It was not a cellar. Not a store room. Not an ordinary hidden chamber. It had been closed with a care that did not serve protection, but forgetting.

Behind stone, dust, and old masonry we found corridors, chambers, shelves, rolls, boxes, and writings in a quantity that allows no doubt. I will not hide behind caution. We have not discovered a few scattered remnants from dark times. We have found the bound remains of the library of an entire school.

The School of Light.

Yes, read that sentence again. I did the same.

Not light as an image. Not light as a decorative word for insight. Light as its own discipline. Refracted, focused, guided, strengthened, veiled, revealing and annihilating. An art so close to fire in many ways that as I read, I understood why proximity does not always produce kinship, but sometimes hatred. Other things in these writings are so foreign to me that they make me doubt matters I have held complete for my entire life.

But even that would not be the worst of it.

Between teaching texts, practice scripts, formulae, and copies from the halls of Light, there were other parchments. Protocols. Opinions. Disputes. Witness statements. Resolutions. Registers. Records of meetings whose wording is confirmed in several places by different hands. Too many hands. Too many seals. Too many consistent details for this to be forgery or late revenge work.

Anadar, the School of Light was not far away. It was not hidden somewhere beyond our present world. It was here. In the Fiery Fortress. In the very place we understand as the origin and heart of fire. And from everything I have read so far, it did not fade slowly, it was not peacefully absorbed, and it did not perish with dignity in some distant decline.

It was destroyed.

The word Inquisition is the most polite term I can find for it.

Not by foreign kings. Not by outsiders. Not by enemies from beyond. Above all, by the fire mages themselves.

The accusations read with a familiarity that is hard to bear. The light mages had grown presumptuous. They strove for a purity of the Art that set them above others. They sought power, especially over the mages of fire. They mixed insight with rule. They stood too close to fire to exist peacefully beside it. From disputes over teaching, rooms, oaths, and jurisdictions, charges were formed. From charges came measures. From measures came a cleansing. That word truly stands there. Cleansing. And precisely because so much of it is recorded in cold administrative language, it is harder to endure than open hatred.

One sentence has lodged itself in me because I loathe it. The more reasonable among the light mages had sided with fire. That is what it says. The more reasonable. You know as well as I do what victors do with such words. Whoever submits is called reasonable. Whoever stays silent, insightful. Whoever remains, dangerous. Some were taken in, examined, retrained, or pressed into lesser tasks. Others were banished, eliminated, or erased by turns of phrase that sound like order and mean violence.

I have read these passages more than once. I wanted to understand them differently. I searched for gaps, for exaggeration, for the flaw that would soften it all. I found none.

They did not merely defeat a school.

They erased it, and then bound its memory.

That alone would be enough to split a Conclave and call the foundations of our own school into question. But the find reaches further. Among these writings are indications of other vanished schools. Not everything is yet securely ordered, and I am writing to you only what I have checked against itself repeatedly. But it is already enough to say one thing with certainty. Our present world did not arise from six schools, as though it had always been so. It is the result of erasure, absorption, and deliberate forgetting.

We may not live upon an order.

We may live upon the remainder of a cleansing.

You know me well enough to know that I am not inclined to exaggeration. If I tell you that this discovery has shaken me, it is not out of scholarly vanity, but because I do not know to whom one can even subject such a truth. If I reveal it openly, I will at once face those who would rather found their offices on a clean past than a true one. If I keep silent, I make myself the servant of the same old hand that laid all this under stone.

That is why I am writing to you.

Not because you are the most patient. You are not. Not because you are easily guided. You are not that either. But because you are Master of all six Circles, and because in recent years you have seen, carried, and survived things others know only from stories, and because I trust you more than a whole circle of speaking masters to bear the weight of such a truth without immediately reaching for office, possession, or advantage.

Come back as soon as you can, if you can.

So far I have let only a few into the lower chambers. Saltor knows enough to have the access points secured. Loon knows that we have found something significant, but not what it truly is. The others know even less. For now, that should remain so.

Perhaps this find is only knowledge.

Perhaps it is more.

Perhaps not everything was bound that they believed bound back then.

And there is one more thing I will not conceal from you, though I myself do not know what to make of it. For historical reasons we have almost grown accustomed to believing that our ranks have always consisted chiefly of men. Now something appears that I did not expect. From all we have been able to sift so far, the School of Light seems to have consisted predominantly of women. Not in isolated cases. Not by coincidence. But in a way that is difficult to overlook. I do not know whether this was chance, a peculiarity of their teaching, or one of the reasons they were later erased. But you should know it as well.

If the School of Light was truly destroyed here, then the Fiery Fortress is not only our origin.

Then it is also a crime scene.

And if that is true, then this discovery does not begin merely a new study, but a reckoning with our own past.

Formularbeginn

Formularende

I

“Why do you keep trying to get from A to B all the time? You’re thinking far too linearly.”

Pildara was not pleased with him. Slonda felt it clearly. His teacher was close to the limits of her patience, even if she hid it far better than most. But he truly did not understand. These concepts were too abstract for him, too far removed from anything that could be grasped, seen, or derived step by step.

“You’re thinking lazily,” she scolded.

“But if I take an intermediate step, I might have to change location. How am I supposed to know whether that’s even possible, and also the time, I am…” He faltered. “Confused.”

“You’re not confused. You simply don’t understand.” She said it without sharpness, and that was what made it worse. “If you want to go there,” she pointed to a configuration within the planetary model, “then you look for points with larger windows. For example there.”

Her finger moved to a different position.

“And to get there, you only have to…” With a small, almost playful motion she rotated the system back. Rings, paths, and points of light shifted soundlessly against one another until she indicated an earlier configuration. “…go there.”

Slonda leaned forward and looked at the point she meant. It was not Gontar. Not even close.

“But,” he began, laid his hand on the model and turned it back a little, “if I want to go here, why don’t I simply go from here?”

Pildara closed her eyes briefly, as if she had to keep herself from snapping at him out of sheer exhaustion.

“Because, Slonda, this is a one way road. You can take this route only backward in time. You can tell because the point begins here and runs toward there. We are anisotropic.”

She pronounced the last word with the kind of emphasis that was meant to explain everything. As if the problem were solved the moment one knew the proper term for it.

Slonda sighed. This was going to be harder than he had thought.

He studied the configurations she had called up again. “So that means I have twenty days to get from the area near Gontar to there.” He indicated a point on the coast, far to the south. “On foot I might need five days. What do I do with the rest of the time?”

Pildara lifted an eyebrow. “What do you normally do with your time?”

He leaned back and rubbed his forehead.

“Build yourself a buffer that is too large,” she continued. “If you plan too tightly, you can end up stuck.”

To her it sounded like a sober piece of advice. To him it sounded like a threat.

“Fine,” he muttered at last. “Then I’ll do it that way.”

“Write it out cleanly. Put the coordinates into the spell and write out the second transit as well. You still have no idea where you will go from there,” she tapped a finger against the point where Anadar would have to be in Slonda’s present, “do you?”

Slonda sighed again. “No.”

“I think it’s better if I do this one with you,” she said. “Besides, I am looking forward to meeting your brother.”

A brief smile flickered across her face.

“You know he is a legend.”

Slonda looked at her. “How in the world…”

“You. You yourself,” she finished his question before he could fully say it.

He checked everything three times. After Pildara left, he bent over every line again, reread every calculation, thought through the constellations once more, searched for other options, and forced himself to internalize everything until his head throbbed. This would be his first deliberate jump through time. The first did not count, everyone told him. That one had been prepared by his older self and was therefore almost a simple affair, at least compared to what lay ahead now.

Planning it himself and then carrying it out was something else. It sat in him like a heavy block, lodged sideways. But Pildara was right. He had to do it himself. He had to go through. And perhaps, just perhaps, he would only truly understand once he had done it.

The next morning it was time.

They left the school and walked to a point outside the city which they reached quickly. Each of them had to cast the spell for themselves. It did not help that Pildara stood beside him. He had to take the decisive step alone.

Slonda began. He gathered himself, glanced once more at the scroll, and prepared. Pildara did not seem impatient. She let him have his time. Only a faint smile played around her lips.

“If I go first now, you won’t follow me,” she said, and laughed softly. Then she raised her eyes to the sky. “And now hurry. It will start raining soon.”

Slonda drew a deep breath. Then another. He spoke the spell.

The gate opened.

For a single moment it felt as if the world did not collapse around him, but inward. Everything imploded. Space, direction, sound, thought. When he came back to himself, he was on all fours in a stone corridor while his stomach clenched violently.

A moment later Pildara appeared beside him.

“Do you need help?” she asked without the slightest pity.

He only raised his hand to signal that he was fine. Or that he would be soon.

“One second,” he forced out.

With effort he pushed himself up, managed to stand somewhat upright for a moment, and then sank back down to the floor.

“It gets better with time,” Pildara said. “Now come.”

This time she supported him. Not tenderly, not gently, but firmly enough that he got to his feet.

“We will find a bed for you. You still have a few jumps to make before you stop getting the side effects.”

They had set the jump so that they arrived in Gontar again, and there he could actually recover. It took almost a full day before his head was clear enough that each movement did not trigger another wave of dizziness.

They had jumped forward several centuries. And Gontar was no longer the Gontar he knew.

The school itself was in many ways still the same, or at least enough of it that he recognized it despite all the changes. But between the courtyards, corridors, and towers there was a different air, a different self understanding, a different time. Pildara explained that they were still in the epoch in which the School of Time had been part of the Conclave. After that, she said, one had to be more careful and could no longer use the schools quite so freely.

“But that is not a problem,” she added. “One has rooms and facilities at nodal points. You will learn them.”

Then she gave him a crooked smile.

“Also because you will have set up most of them yourself.”

And again Slonda was inwardly lost. This whole concept was sometimes too much for him. When he told her so, Pildara only smiled and replied that the secret was simply not to think about it too much.

“At least not as much as you.”

They had a few days, and Pildara used them to explain to him the outlines of the age they were currently in. To Slonda’s annoyance she was delighted by the fashion of that time. With growing cheer she showed him fabrics, cuts, and garments as if this were at least as important as the question of which century they were standing in. Slonda could not do anything with it. To him it all still felt too alien, too suspicious, too unreliable.

He waited for the second jump.

A few days before the next transit they set out. Again they traveled through a landscape that felt familiar and yet altered, as if someone had taken a memory and shifted it by a small, almost invisible amount. They reached their destination two days early. A field, open, wide, inconspicuous.

Pildara preferred open ground.

“Cities can be complicated,” she explained. “Houses most of all. I like to avoid that.”

This time she jumped first. Slonda followed shortly after.

The second transition was no less strange, but it no longer tore him apart in the same way. He did not have to vomit. He only sank to his knees, breathed heavily, and waited until his body decided again that it would allow him to remain where he was.

Then he lifted his head.

They were back in his time.

He had chosen the location so that they emerged near Zoordak. If anyone knew where his brother was, then it would be the Mother.

II

They had bought the horses at a farmer’s place, along with provisions, blankets, a sack of oats, and whatever else the man had still been willing to part with: dry bread, smoked meat, and a few hard apples. They were not good animals. The shoulders too narrow, the flanks too hollow, the hooves not in the best condition. But they would serve their purpose, and in this moment they could neither demand nor pay for more without losing time. So they rode out, northward, often in silence, each busy with themselves, each tangled deeper in thoughts than the others could fully see.

Shara was quieter than usual. Not cold, not turned away, but folded inward. Sometimes her hand slid, almost without thinking, to her belly. Sometimes she sat rigid in the saddle and stared at the road as if it might yield an answer it did not have. The morning nausea had eased over the last days, which she took as relief, but it was a small relief on uncertain ground. She did not know what lay ahead. She had little experience with such things. Women in the schools became pregnant, magicians certainly, it was nothing unknown, yet almost everything spoken about it happened in that half tone people use when they touch things they consider too ordinary to take seriously and at the same time too bodily to name outright. It embarrassed her to know so little. More embarrassing still was that she could no longer think only of herself. Every restlessness in Anadar touched her differently now. Not only as a companion, not only as the one who stood close to him, but in a deeper wordless way, because she could feel that what gnawed at him no longer threatened only him.

Morgut took the lead almost imperceptibly. He usually rode a little ahead, checked forks in the road, spoke with farmers when one stood by a field, traded a few words with stable boys when they found water or oats somewhere, and he was also the only one of them still able to radiate some warmth and a hint of near cheer. Not that he was cheerful. The situation was too heavy for that. But Morgut had that rare kind of humanity that does not need to be loud to hold a space. When they made camp, he spoke first. When the mood sank too deep, he was the one whose small, barely noticeable remark kept silence from becoming hopelessness. He did not do it consciously, not always. It was simply his way.

And Anadar rode between them like a man trapped in two places at once.

His face had become sharper. Not thinner, not truly, but worn down in a way that had less to do with the body than with the inside. The nights still lay in his eyes each morning, and sleep, when it came at all, did not seem to restore him, only to scratch him deeper. Morgut and Shara both knew what he wrestled with. They supported him as best they could, but some things can only be watched, not taken away. They saw it in the hardness of his mouth, in those moments when his gaze fell suddenly into emptiness although he still sat in the saddle and the road ahead lay open. They saw it at night when he woke screaming, drenched in sweat, his body half torn upright as if he had fought something in the dream that still clung to his throat.

All three of them hoped they would find something in Sontor. A clue. A text. Knowledge someone had forgotten or hidden. Some hint of how to bind the demon, loosen it, break it, or at least relieve Anadar.

But as they rode, Anadar learned, in a grim way, more and more clearly what he was traveling with.

His relationship to the demon in the sword had once been different. Back then, not so long ago, he had believed he might find something like a teacher in Naaarstr. A dangerous, peculiar teacher, yes, but one who carried knowledge. In retrospect the idea seemed almost ridiculous. The demon had flattered him. It had recognized his hunger for knowledge and used it. It had given him just enough to provoke him and never enough to show him the trap. It had touched Anadar’s pride, his tendency to look at the forbidden not out of mere lust but out of genuine craving for understanding, and from that it had formed a bond far older and more refined than Anadar understood at the time.

But since that hour in the catacombs beneath the tower of the water magicians, since he had pierced the stranger with the sword and old blood had come onto the blade, everything had tipped.

The demon had lost its mask.

What had previously felt like a dark kind of mastery suddenly appeared in its true shape. Not as wisdom. Not as depth. But as ancient malicious power whose only real interest was domination. Power over others. Power over the bearer. Power over whatever old blood the world still carried. That was what Naaarstr craved above all, with an obsession that went beyond hunger. Old blood. Not just blood, but lineage, depth, magic, the age of a line. Something about it stirred him in a way that was almost fanatic.

So much so that he hardly noticed other blood anymore.

Anadar had tested it.

One evening, while they rested in a thin little grove and Morgut tended the horses, Anadar took the knife in silence and opened the old line across his palm, the one that had by now become almost familiar, and let blood drip onto the sword’s blade. Before, the sword had taken it. Before, the blood had not simply clotted and run down, it had been drawn in, as if the blade drank. Now nothing happened. The blood did what blood does when it falls on metal. It glimmered dark red for a moment, gathered along the edge, ran off in narrow threads, and dripped to the earth.

Naaarstr did not even react.

No mockery. No praise. No hungry tug.

Only later, deep inside Anadar’s mind, the voice came, quiet at first, then sharper.

Not this.

No more.

He no longer sought conversation either. That was perhaps the most disturbing part. Before, the demon had talked, explained, lured, asked questions as if it meant to build a relationship. Now it demanded. It ordered. Its words had shed their cold tone and become raw. As if every courtesy had been a tool it no longer needed.

Carry me.

Do not go that way.

You miss what is meant for you.

You cling to the wrong ones.

Yield.

And again and again, with a growing rage that no longer hid itself:

Set me free.

Anadar endured much. He had long since noticed how little he could oppose it at the moment. The music Morgut had used on earlier occasions seemed to lose its effect, or perhaps it did not truly lose it, perhaps Naaarstr was learning to slip around it. That was why they used it more and more rarely, hoping it would still help at the decisive moment when everything else failed. It had become a reserve, no longer a daily remedy.

Above all the demon demanded its release. Only Anadar did not even know how that could be done.

Naaarstr was bound in the sword. Everything those who knew such matters had told him so far suggested that step had been right. Better a bound demon than a free one. Better a vessel than devastation. But that was where knowledge ended. Release, bind, loosen, drive out, those were words easily spoken and almost meaningless as long as no one could say how.

The bitter part was that even Naaarstr himself could not give him an answer. Or would not.

Anadar had used that once, half out of defiance, half out of genuine anger. He had answered the demon inside, dry and almost mocking: if you tell me how I can set you free, then I will do it. For a moment that amused him. Because Naaarstr fell silent, and the silence had something like exposed weakness. It demanded freedom but did not know how the binding could be broken, or it could not name the step without betraying itself.

What the demon certainly did not like was the direction they had taken. North. Sontor. Away from whatever it expected in the south, the west, or elsewhere. The closer they held to that decision, the more aggressive its pressure became. By day it filled Anadar’s thoughts with disgust, images of decay, false certainties, revulsion for cities, people, walls, rules. At night it grew worse.

Then the images came.

Not dreams in the usual sense, though they reached him in sleep. More like pressed visions that laid themselves over his thoughts until he no longer knew what still came from him and what had been shoved into him. Rituals. Circles of blood. Summonings. Flames that did not warm but devoured. Formulae that bored like worms into his memory. And again and again sacrifice. Morgut cut open over a marked circle. Shara bound hand and foot, her face pale with disbelief. Worse still the child.

The unborn child.

Naaarstr seemed to bite into that like a particularly dark gemstone.

It showed him images so abominable that Anadar sometimes lost his breath in the saddle even in daylight. A knife. Shara’s belly. Blood and screaming and life torn from living flesh. An offering over fire. The child in hands that no longer looked human. Then more demons, summoned from smoke and blood, rising like an army, ready to fall upon the world.

These images were not seductive. That was the one thing that calmed Anadar in his clearest hours. He did not fear he would carry them out. Nothing in him wanted that. He felt no temptation at all, only disgust, revulsion, and a nausea deeper than anything bodily. But that did not make them lighter. He had to see them. Had to carry them. Had to live with the knowledge that something in his head unfolded them in ever new variations, like a cruel artist never tired of refining his motifs.

At times he thought it was like a constantly inflamed tooth. A throbbing pain that never wholly vanished, only became duller or sharper, until the whole head turned into an aching chamber. Only it was not a tooth. It was his mind. And Naaarstr sat in it like inflammation, fever, and poison all at once.

More than once Anadar had thought of simply throwing the sword away. Driving it into the earth at a fork in the road and riding on. Or sinking it in deep water where no hand would ever find it again. But the very thought showed him how impossible it was. Something in the binding forced him to carry the sword. Not like an external command, not like an invisible hand, but deeper, as if carrying it had long since become part of a formula he himself had closed without understanding. He could imagine letting it go, but not actually doing it. The moment the thought became practical, it tangled, grew blurred, slid away, or struck an inner resistance that hurt almost physically.

He analyzed it as best he could. Precisely because he sensed he could not simply rely on willpower, he began to look at the sword almost scientifically. What had he actually done when he bound Naaarstr inside it. What kind of vessel had he created.

Slowly, laboriously, against the resistance of fatigue and inner noise, he understood more.

He had created in the sword more than a container. He had formed, as far as one could put it into human words, a small separate space of its own, a kind of inner chamber, a pocket like dimension, just large and structured enough to bind consciousness to matter without letting it wholly free. That was the true binding. Not merely metal. Not merely blade. But an enclosed space within space, an artificially made inner world into which Naaarstr had been forced.

Only in the act of the spell more had been linked than he had realized.

Their consciousnesses had intertwined.

And every time Anadar had fed the sword with his own blood, he had strengthened that entanglement, not weakened it. What he had taken for nourishment, for soothing, or for control had in truth been a deepening of the bond. His blood had laid a trail, again and again, until Naaarstr found paths within him that had not been open before.

Then old blood had been added.

The blood of that stranger in the catacombs.

And that blood had driven the demon into a state that ended all performance. Perhaps the taste intoxicated it. Perhaps it recognized something it had been made for. Perhaps it was memory. In any case after that moment every refinement fell away. The finely spun teacher and student relationship with which it had bound Anadar to itself broke, and beneath it the raw nature of the being became visible.

In those hours when Naaarstr did not only demand but unwillingly revealed something, it also showed Anadar images from its own past. Or from what it understood as its past. Anadar never fully knew how far he could trust it. But the impressions came with such force and internal coherence that it was hard to dismiss them as mere lies.

Demons, it seemed, were not primordial gods, not forces of nature that had always been there. They were creations. Created by humans. So Naaarstr claimed, and within those claims lay a hatred that almost vouched for truth. Created for war. Created to kill. Created to erase those who carried old blood, older, stronger, more magical blood than humans. Elves. Dragons. Other lines whose names in today’s knowledge sounded like rumor, or were gone altogether.

That was what demons had been made for. Hungry. Blood hungry. Malicious, if one wanted to call it moral, purposeful if one looked only at construction. They were meant to destroy. They were meant to reach for power. They were meant to break the old.

And somewhere in their making a mistake had been made.

Or an excess of daring.

They had become too independent.

So Naaarstr told it. And with bitter, almost mocking satisfaction it then showed what had grown from that independence. The creations had turned against their creators, with the love and devotion with which all poorly made tools one day strike back when one grants them too much will of their own. Demons hated being controlled. As soon as they were free enough, they themselves reached for power and wiped out everything that stood in their way. Humans, elves, dragons, whatever carried old blood or could still resist. Old blood above all made them stronger. Blood was their elixir, their food, their intoxication.

Then, the images continued, everything still able to fight had joined against them. A final alliance, a bond of all powers, born of necessity, not love. And that bond had created something Naaarstr showed only with reluctant vagueness. A closed place. A pocket universe. A sealed space with no entry and no exit, a prison outside the ordinary world. There they had driven the demons and locked them in.

This injustice.

This crime.

Naaarstr spoke of it only vaguely, yet in that vagueness there was something, as if it could not or would not touch the exact structure of that vault. Then other images came, much later ones. Humans who found ways to open that dimension again. Carefully. Piece by piece. Not wide and free, but through narrow bound passages. Summoners who dragged demons out, chained them, bound them to rituals, subdued them, and used them for their own purposes. To reach for power again. To kill old lines. To have filthy work done that no human wished to do with their own hands.

An injustice, as Naaarstr felt it. An outrage so alien and yet so fierce that Anadar sometimes, for a moment, might have felt pity if everything else about it had not been so abhorrent.

But most of the time these glimpses did not end in history.

Most of the time they tipped back into demand.

At night, when they slept under trees or in abandoned sheds, Shara sometimes saw Anadar toss his head from side to side as if he wanted to escape a voice that did not come from outside. Once he woke with such a harsh sound that even the horses startled. Morgut was at him at once, Shara a breath later. Anadar sat there, soaked in sweat, his shirt clinging to his back, his hand on the sword as if he wanted to draw it and push it away at the same time.

Shara said nothing. She only knelt in front of him, placed her hands at his temples, and waited until his gaze found her again.

“He is back in your head,” she asked softly.

He closed his eyes. That alone was answer enough.

Morgut stood beside them, the flute in his hand, unsure whether he should use it.

“No,” Anadar said at once, perhaps too quickly. “Not now.”

Morgut nodded and put it away.

They sat for a long time, the three of them, by a fire almost burned down. No one spoke much. Shara stayed close to him, and Anadar felt how much he loved her for it and at the same time how unbearable it was that she had now become the target of those images. He wanted to tell her what Naaarstr showed, but not everything could be said without speaking the filth of the visions aloud. So he said only enough that she knew what she faced, and little enough not to draw her into all of it.

The next morning they rode on.

Day after day the landscape slid past them. Fields still bare from winter, first wet green strips along embankments, naked groves already carrying a faint shimmer of coming growth. Even in the north spring began to creep into the earth, still cautious, but tangible. Streams carried more water. The air smelled not only of cold anymore, but of wet soil, of stirring, of mud.

The farther they went, the more often Anadar saw, in the shadow of his awareness, another north. The one Naaarstr tried to force upon him. A north of stone, blood, and dark power, where Sontor was not a goal but an obstacle. The demon hated the direction. That alone was almost confirmation enough for Anadar that they rode correctly.

So they held course.

And after some days, when the light of a late afternoon lay pale over the land, they finally saw the towers of Sontor in the distance.

At first only dark strokes on the horizon. Then clearer, stonier, high and still. The city lay before them like something both abandoned and awake. As they drew nearer they saw the open gates.

No call from the guards.

No busy coming and going.

Only the gates, open like a mouth that had kept something back and now no longer knew whether to speak or swallow.

III

Nothing had ever felt better than success.After days and nights of trying, discarding, repeating, and nearly despairing starts from scratch, they had finally done it. The vortex could be summoned. Not by accident, not only in one of those rare, fleeting seconds when a spell succeeds on a whim of the world and then refuses to return, but repeatable, tangible, steerable. When Gudi understood it, she simply stood there at first, staring down from the circling column of air as if she did not trust her own eyes. She lifted from the ground in the middle of the vortex, rose into the clear night, stood within the very shape they had searched for so long, powerful, clean, obedient.

In hindsight, the decisive thought seemed almost insultingly simple.You only had to leave out the beginning.

The longer she stared at it, the more often she unrolled the formula and tested it again and again with Gnok, the clearer it became. The opening of the formula had been nothing but boundary, measure, safety strap, a cautious bolt set by people who had wanted to ensure that motion did not become intoxication, wind did not become ascent, experiment did not become a fall. Gudi remembered her first unintended success, that night when she had produced the vortex more by accident than by skill. Back then she must have smudged the beginning. Now that they understood it, everything suddenly seemed logical.

You left out the beginning.And the wind became free.

Of course that was still far from everything. Calling the vortex was only the first hurdle. Steering it was the real fight. They experimented with every turn, every emphasis, every inward gesture of will. Soon they discovered which part of the formula carried control, which section meant not force but direction, where the rising lay, where the tilting, where the slowing and where the abrupt break. The spell forgave almost no mistakes. If Gudi pressed too hard in the wrong place, the vortex did not become obedient but wild. Then it grabbed her, spun her with it, shook her out of its own center and flung her back into the sand without kindness. Her arms and legs were covered in abrasions in those days, her knees bruised blue, her hands raw in several places. Gnok did not look any better. Once he landed so crookedly on his shoulder that he sat there for the rest of the evening with his teeth clenched, insisting it was nothing.

And then came the night when everything suddenly clicked together.The vortex lifted her. It obeyed. Left, right, higher, faster, slower, lower, stop. She felt it through her whole body, an answer from the air that no longer braced itself against her but could be read by her. Not perfectly, not without effort, but enough that struggle became motion. Motion became flight.

They could not resist going far out into the dunes that very night and riding there.

It was insane. It was dangerous. It was glorious.High above the sand on the slender, roaring pillars of their vortices, they glided over waves of dark earth and pale moonlight, shot along ridgelines, let themselves drop into hollows and be carried up again, until the desert beneath them looked like a sea of shadow. The wind streamed past them, cool, sharp, alive. Gudi laughed so loudly she barely recognized herself. The wind tore the laughter from her mouth and carried it into the night.

And Gnok, who usually spoke as if every word first had to pass through centuries of fatigue, caution, and memory, laughed too, with a brightness that looked almost unfamiliar on his face.

“I have not had fun like this in ages,” he called to her once, half serious, half mocking, as he angled his vortex against a dune and pulled it up again.

Gudi believed him at once.

Perhaps it was precisely that joy, that almost childish, cocky joy, that made her forget for a moment that nothing in Ashambrat stayed unnoticed for long.

Because their success did not remain hidden.They were being watched.

Not out in the desert. There Gnok was too careful. He had been a mage too long, suspected too long, surrounded too long by looks that never openly said what they were seeking and yet waited for every wrong move. Every evening he made sure no one followed them. He left the city by changing routes, paused, seemed to turn back, cut sharply away, checked sand and shadow, checked windows, checked the silence behind walls. He had been the subject of an investigation once too often to become careless now.

But leaving and entering the city, evening after evening, week after week, still had its effect.It stood out.And everything that stood out often enough was reported to Hokn’f.

Hokn’f almost always knew what was happening in his city anyway. He kept watch, not only at the gates. At crossings, in corridors, in courtyards, at the edges of gardens, in places where one stood and pretended to look into the sun or casually inspect a wall. He loved control in the way where it barely still understood itself as control, but as a natural right. Ashambrat was his school, his city, his order. Every mage within it was part of that net, whether they knew it or not.

And Gnok had always been a thorn in his side.

Even as a student, Hokn’f had disliked that pale, far too clever mage who always had an answer, a story from old times, an unpleasant remark about the present, and a look that made it clear he saw more than he said. Gnok had been old even then. At least in Hokn’f’s memory he had never been young. And he still was. The same white apparition, the same calm, the same unbearable way of being right without asking permission.

The stories about antiquity, about tales, about things no one wanted to hear anymore, Hokn’f had considered dangerous from the beginning, or at least the kind of thing others should call dangerous. So over the years he had made sure people no longer listened to Gnok openly. Whenever Gnok left a room, turned and walked away, Hokn’f spoke disdainfully of him, half mocking, half patronizing, just enough that everyone understood how to behave if they did not want to catch the same stench of taking old nonsense seriously. That was how loneliness formed in schools. Not by command. By habituation.

And now this old man was slipping out every night.And with him, a girl.

Hokn’f barely knew her name. Gudi. Morgut’s sister. Both children of a merchant, so people said. Both born with the mark. But while Morgut now travelled the world with Anadar and apparently drew attention everywhere, Gudi was considered far less gifted. Slow. Unremarkable. In some areas incredibly weak and inept. Someone you did not need to keep an eye on because she could barely hold her own against stronger names to begin with.

That was precisely why Hokn’f mistrusted the whole thing.

If Gnok of all people was attaching himself to this girl, telling her stories night after night, taking her out with him, and every attempt to follow them vanished into the sand, then something more had to be behind it than the talk of an old man no one listened to anymore.

He wanted to know what.

Gudi herself only noticed that her life grew tighter the larger her secret became. Through the nightly excursions and the long hours with Gnok, during which they worked on the spell, she neglected almost everything else. She missed classes. Was seen less often. Sometimes she appeared for lessons with a look that showed she had slept far too little. But because she always had her material ready when someone questioned her, no one asked too many questions. She learned quickly what she had to learn and saved her strength for what mattered to her.

Her garden had to serve as cover too.

She showed up there with conspicuous regularity and made enough noise that anyone within earshot would later remember it. She no longer carried water buckets. She did not need to. Instead she let rain fall directly over her plot, fine at first, then denser, with such an effort of gestures and visible delight that it looked almost ridiculous. She spoke loudly to herself as she did it, acted as if everything had to be tried and admired, and produced exactly the kind of picture that stuck in minds. Gudi at her garden. Gudi with water. Gudi, diligent and a little silly in her enthusiasm.

By now the plot looked breathtaking.It spilled from every crack. Green, blossoms, climbing forms that no longer resembled the pitiful beginnings people had once mocked. In truth Gudi had to prune rather than tend, so that nothing grew too lush and therefore too conspicuous. The plants wanted too much.

One morning she was there again, making more fuss than necessary on purpose, when she noticed she was not alone.

At a pillar, some distance away, stood Hokn’f.

He pretended to be looking at her garden. In truth he stood too still for that. Too collected. Too much inside himself. Gudi recognized him at once. The tall, gaunt body. The hooked nose. The carefully trimmed beard. The posture of a man who always walked as if every step had already been approved by the world.

When he realized she had seen him, he lifted a hand slightly and walked toward her. You could tell from his gait alone that he knew what he wanted.

“What an impressive plot,” he said when he was close enough. His voice was warm, just warm enough. “I had no idea you had such a gift for gardening.”

He smiled. Not broadly. Only enough to soften his face.

“And the magic behind it. You are making very great progress. That has not escaped my notice.”

He was lying. Gudi felt it at once, without being able to name what gave it away. Perhaps it was precisely the friendliness. Too smooth. Like someone wrapping a knife in velvet.

“Master Hokn’f,” she said, lowering her gaze slightly, more from caution than reverence. “It has less to do with talent than with diligence and work.”

Hokn’f chuckled softly, the kind of laugh he knew would lull people.

“Do not be so modest. Not every girl brings her plot to such bloom.” His eyes travelled over the lush green. “You must tell me sometime how you manage it. Perhaps you could visit me one afternoon in the citadel. I would like to hear more about it.”

Gudi felt something tighten inside her.

The citadel.The invitation was spoken politely, but it carried more weight than words alone. One did not refuse an invitation from the dean lightly. Even less when it sounded like nothing but friendly interest.

She searched for an answer that would sound neither false nor too open, but Hokn’f cut in before she could find it.

“Besides,” he said, tilting his head slightly, “I have received news about your brother.”

Gudi looked up.

It was only a small motion. That might have been why it revealed too much.

Hokn’f saw it.Inside him something slid into place with quiet satisfaction.

Yes, he thought. So that is how it is.

He knew nothing about Morgut, nothing that deserved the name news. But that did not matter. What mattered was that the name struck. That the child reacted. That beneath the surface more was moving than people had given her credit for.

He would draw her out.

Not roughly. Not at once. Not by threats. She was too young for that, and probably too skittish. No, he would open her the way you open a door you know was not built against force, but against impatience. With warmth. With attention. With apparent sympathy. And if that did not suffice, then with the kind of pressure that is never fully visible and therefore works all the better.

Because Hokn’f knew one thing for certain.Gnok was keeping something from him.And if the old fool believed he could slip out at night, lose himself in the desert and hide things from Hokn’f’s gaze, then one did not chase Gnok.

Then one took the girl.

IV

Less and less attention was paid to them.

At the beginning Xian had felt every movement of the guards, every pause in front of the restraints, every look that lay on them, every moment of listening, every brief whispering when they believed the three prisoners would not understand anything anyway. Now something shifted. The guarding remained, but it grew looser, not from carelessness, but because attention flowed elsewhere. More and more often Xian and Nigk heard footsteps, wheels, dull scraping, the dragging of heavy loads over stone. Orders were shouted, again and again in that foreign language that sounded like hissing, clicking, and the knocking together of small hard things. Then again in a language they understood, short, harsh, without any explanation. Metal was moved, devices were shifted, crates were hauled. Whole groups marched past them without turning their heads.

All of it had direction.

It pulled, as much as even they could grasp in their helplessness, toward one and the same distance.

Their conversations, too, were no longer listened to with the same stubbornness as at the beginning. Before, every movement of their mouths had made a guard slide closer to the restraint, tilt its head, or detach from the ceiling and hang upside down above them. Now it happened more rarely. It was as if someone had decided that for the moment the three mattered less than whatever was being prepared in the tunnels and behind the halls.

Xian and Nigk both noticed. Xiodri as well, but in her it showed differently.

The witch had grown quiet. Not only sparing with words, as she could be anyway, but absent in a way that even Nigk disliked. She often sat motionless in her restraint, her back leaned against stone or metal, and listened. Not to voices. To something deeper. Sometimes she closed her eyes. Sometimes she lifted her head as if she could smell something on the draft the tunnels carried from far away.

“What is it,” Xian asked her one day, when a whole line of wagons or rolling frames had passed them again and the sound still lay in the stone like distant rumbling.

Xiodri did not answer.

Nigk leaned forward as far as the restraint allowed. “You have had that face for days.”

“What face,” she muttered.

“The one people wear when they start praying or lying,” Xian said.

Xiodri raised her lids and looked at her. For a moment she seemed old. Not only old like a woman who had seen many winters, but old in that way that comes from rumors, pursuit, and too much hidden knowledge.

“I am thinking,” she said.

“Then think louder,” Nigk replied. “We are stuck here with you. If you suspect something, I want to know what.”

At first she stayed closed. The two of them had to dig, again and again, restating questions, taking other paths, the way they had learned. It had been their work, after all, to make people talk without it looking like work. But Xiodri was stubborn. As soon as the talk turned to the small figures or to those thin black guards who ran along walls and ceilings like spiders in human shape, she went curt or fell silent entirely.

So they dug exactly there.

“You know stories,” Xian said. “It shows.”

No answer.

“You have recognised what this is, or at least sooner than we did.”

Xiodri licked her lips. “Recognised is too much.”

“Then call it a suspicion.”

Again nothing for a long time. At last she said, without looking at them, “There are stories about beings who withdrew beneath the earth. Not into caves like bandits. Deeper. Into stone. Into mountains. Where humans rarely go and even more rarely return.”

Nigk frowned. “Dwarves.”

Xiodri made a small irritated motion, as if the word displeased her less for its meaning than for how easily it was spoken.

“Perhaps that is what you call them.”

“And what do these stories say,” Xian asked.

Xiodri was silent.

“What did they do under the mountain.”

Silence.

“Why do they hide.”

Nothing again.

Only when Nigk, fed up with her evasions, said more sharply that fairy tales were of little use in a prison if something was being prepared outside, did an answer come.

“Because hiding places are older than you two,” she said quietly. “Because it was not only humans who were hunted. Because it was not only those born with the mark who had to learn to live hidden. They say there was once trade. Secret. Ore for furs, metals for food, work for things that existed only on the surface. I do not know more. Or not securely enough.”

“And the thin black ones,” Xian asked. “Do they belong to your stories too.”

This time Xiodri jerked her head up.

“Not to mine.”

And with that she fell silent completely.

In the following hours the guards attention returned briefly and then slipped away again. Several of the thin black figures climbed out of shafts or detached themselves from the ceiling where they had lain almost invisible. They gathered above the prisoners restraints and argued, agitated and fast, in their language. Xian understood not a word, but even without understanding you could hear the quarrel. There was hardness in it. Pressure. Contradiction.

Then something happened none of them expected.

From a deeper corridor a voice boomed, and shortly after a dwarf came into the room, faster than the last time, almost running, his face reddened, his stride full of anger.

“You do not just kill them,” he snapped at the Thin Ones before he had even fully reached them.

The hissing that answered him was so loud that even Nigk flinched.

“No,” the dwarf said, sharper. “That solves no problem. And you do not take their amulets either.”

More outraged hissing, now from several sides at once.

“Especially not that. Have you understood nothing.” He threw his arms wide. “If you break the protective signs, we do not know what happens to them. We do not know who feels it. We do not know whether the effect goes only outward or also back. You do not want to avoid risk, you only want to give in to your cruelty.”

One of the Thin Ones lowered itself upside down from the ceiling until its face hung barely a hand breadth from the dwarf’s. It said something in its language, quick and sharp.

The dwarf answered just as quickly, but not in the same tongue. He spoke in the common speech, as if he wanted the prisoners to understand.

“The preparations are finished. Secrecy ends anyway. And we have agreed to spare as many humans as possible. Not on the large scale, not on the small. We do not begin the new age with a massacre.”

Another Thin One hissed, even more violently. The dwarf stamped his foot and the stone carried the impact deep.

“Then we settle it in the council,” he said. “And until then no one touches them.”

More protest. More frantic hissing. Then the scene dissolved as abruptly as it had formed. The dwarf left. The Thin Ones withdrew, but the tension stayed in the room like smoke after fire.

For a long time none of the three said anything.

“We have apparently just escaped with our lives,” Nigk muttered at last.

Xian did not answer immediately. Her eyes were fixed on the empty corridor where the dwarf had vanished.

“For now,” she said.

Then she turned to Xiodri. “Now speak.”

The witch did not move.

“You know more than you say,” Nigk continued. “Not everything. But enough to wear that face for days.”

Xiodri closed her eyes briefly.

“I thought they were rumors. Under mountain peoples. Hidden clans. Beings who withdrew into stone long ago because they were hunted on the surface. Like us. Like those born with the mark who never entered a school and were forgotten. Free magic, they say. Forbidden magic. Secret, always secret. I thought those were stories to explain to children why not every track in the mountains comes from humans.”

“And now you do not think that anymore,” Xian said.

“Now I think fairy tales are often only called fairy tales when long enough no one survives to confirm them.”

“And the thin black ones.”

Xiodri’s gaze flickered. “About them I know nothing. Nothing certain. Only that in old tales people do not like to say who lives with whom under the earth. If I have a name, then the name is Dark Elves.”

“That is little.”

“It is all I have.”

“And still you are afraid.”

Xiodri did not answer. Something in her was drawn tight like a wire, and Xian saw that pressing further in this moment would bring nothing.

Then a voice came from the ceiling.

“And with that you already know more than most on the surface.”

All three jolted around.

A large dark figure peeled itself out of the stone above them, dropped soundlessly, landed on all fours some distance away, then slowly rose. He was one of those Xiodri had called Dark Elves, but larger than most they had seen, and he moved with a calm that was more dangerous than open aggression. His body was narrow and long limbed, his face almost too composed, his skin dark as wet stone. Only his teeth shone white when he smiled.

“There are those here who see only danger in you,” he said. “And those who see only flesh. I belong to neither group.”

He walked slowly around the three restraints, as if he were not weighing their bodies but their meaning.

“Some want to kill you because you have seen what you should not have seen. Some want to take your protective signs and leave you to the Aversion, so the problem solves itself. Both are short sighted.”

Nigk recovered first. “Then tell us what our value is.”

The stranger stopped behind him.

“Not in what you know. You know almost nothing. That is exactly what is interesting.”

He stepped back into their view.

“You should never have reached this far. Not in winter. Not with what waits for strangers beyond the snow line. You should have turned back. You should have hated the north, avoided the stone, felt the urge to go south, away, away, always away. Instead you came. With amulets. And with this band.”

He looked at Xian.

Unwillingly her gaze dropped to the band lying on the table before her, before she forced herself back under control.

“Whoever gave you these things knew more than people on the surface should know. You got it from a magician.”

Nigk said coldly, “We are not allied with the magicians.”

“And yet you carry work that speaks of power.”

The Dark Elf tilted his head slightly. “You are not magicians, I can see that. Perhaps not even friends of magicians. But someone protected you so well that you reached places other humans cannot even enter in thought. That is why you live.”

“Because you want to know who protected us,” Xian said.

“Among other things.”

He smiled again. This time without warmth.

“Dead people do not pull threads. Living ones do. If we kill you, you end in stone and with you the trail. If we break you, we do not know who notices. If we give you back, we see who looks for you. Who reacts. Who asks questions. Who steps out of cover.”

Nigk looked at Xian. For a brief moment both understood the same thing.

We are not spared.

We are being used.

The stranger seemed almost to hear the thought.

“Spared is not a word I would choose.”

He continued, slowly, like someone who had time.

“Something is returning to this world. We feel it. The stone feels it. The old ways are becoming porous. Magic rises. Not only in you. Here below as well. Deeper than here. Beings who slept or starved for a long time are growing stronger again. With strength hunger returns. Hunger for space, for light, for metal, for water, for the right to stop living hidden.”

He stopped.

“And we must know what still exists on the surface. Not kings. Not armies. Not banners. All of that is noise. We must know how much of the old power of the magicians remains.”

“Why,” Xian asked. “If you want no war.”

The stranger looked at her for a long time.

“Precisely because of that.”

Then he clapped his hands once. Immediately several others came from the corridors. They said nothing, only moved their fingers in short sequences of signs. A moment later the restraints released with a dry crack. Not fully, not cleanly, but enough that the three prisoners could be pulled out.

Nigk nearly stumbled when his legs had to carry weight again. Xian steadied herself faster. Xiodri stood for a single heartbeat, as if she had to understand that the unseen cage had truly let her go.

“Where,” Nigk asked.

“See,” the stranger said.

They were not seized roughly, but neither were they guided kindly. Half carried, half pushed, they moved through corridors that widened and widened. The stone changed its sound. The ground fell away, then rose again. More than once Xian thought she felt fresh air, only to walk a moment later in dull warm depth again. The ceiling climbed higher. The echoes stretched longer. Somewhere the smell of stone and oil took on something else. Night air. Cold open night air.

Then they saw stars.

They emerged from a final broad passage onto a high open ledge of rock. Before them the mountain fell into a wide valley, lying in moonlight like a hidden basin between black walls.

And the valley was full.

Not only with warriors.

Not only with tents.

It was full of a people in motion.

Fires burned in rows. Wagons stood among stone buildings that seemed half shoved into the slope and half grown out of it. Forges glowed. Animals, or something animal like, were tied to lines of posts. Children ran between carts. Old ones sat by fire pits. Between them long columns of armed figures, thin dark ones, squat dwarves, other beings Xian could not place at first glance. Supplies were stacked, ropes pulled, heavy devices set in position. Whole trains moved toward a broad fortified ascent that bit up from the valley floor into the flank of the mountain.

Not a raider camp.

Not a hiding place.

Not a fighting force alone.

A hidden world preparing to move.

Nigk stood rigid. Beside him Xian heard Xiodri draw a sharp breath.

“Tomorrow,” the dark stranger behind them said, “the surface will learn what the mountain has hidden for so long.”

None of them answered.

The stranger stepped beside them and looked down with them, as if the sight were not threat but homecoming.

“You do not see an army,” he said calmly. “Or not only one. You see peoples and their armies who have lived under stone long enough. You see peoples and their armies who needed time to grow used again to the sky and the light. That process is finished now. The game of hiding can end. We are ready to take our rightful place in the structure again, or to die doing it.”

Xian forced herself not to lower her gaze. “You hid this.”

“Yes. And now we are ready to return.”

He said it without harshness. That was exactly why it sounded true.

“At daybreak you will be led back. Not out of mercy. As witnesses. As messengers. As a thread. You will say what you saw. You will say we will not remain hidden any longer. And we will see who answers your words.”

Nigk turned his head. “And if they answer you with a hunt.”

The stranger was silent for a moment. Below, lines of fire shifted in the wind.

Then he said, “Then our return becomes a war.”

He lifted his hand and pointed down.

“But tomorrow we open the mountain first. Then your world will decide what comes of it.”

V

V

Fontal was still waiting for the Inquisitor from Ashambrat before she wanted to open the investigation officially. The envoy from Tandor, Master Klasst, had already arrived. Hoknf had dispatched Mistress Danndi, and she was expected to come by land in the next few days.

Fontal had decided that she herself would be the one sent by the School of Life. There would be no discussion about that. Master Roto was also in Gontar, held there against his will at Hoknf’s explicit request, because he had been present during the events on the Islands of Wind and was needed as a witness. Son and Indra stayed with him, not out of loyalty, but because their search for Kolnidranooora made no sense without him. There was still no sign of life from Kol.

Hoknf was pressing. He wanted to draft the outcome first and then gather evidence afterward. Fontal was built differently. She harbored a deep dislike of Anadar, and yes, the man frightened her, but she refused to conduct an investigation in a way that served politics alone. The first reports about the sea monster had appeared far too early to honestly connect them to the Master of all six circles. Fontal considered it more likely that individual corrupters or a small group had been at work. Someone had to be held accountable, Hoknf was right about that, but no one should be condemned in advance simply because it benefited the Conclave.

It was still morning. Fontal enjoyed the first hours of the day with tea in a small hall of an old tower, plain, hidden in the back of the school, far from the noise of the courtyards. She was lost in thought when there came a careful knock at the doorframe.

A servant stood in the doorway. “Mistress.”

Fontal lifted her gaze and motioned for him to speak.

“Mistress Fontal, we have news from a fishing village south of Gontar. Something unusual. The fishermen caught the sea monster in their net. Dead. They ask whether you…”

“Of course,” Fontal interrupted at once and rose. “Saddle my horse. And send for Master Klasst immediately. Also for Roto, Son, and Indra.”

She did not ride alone. Beside Fontal and Klasst an entire troop joined them, first ten, then more, because the news spread faster than any command. In the end there were almost twenty magicians riding out into the drizzling spring morning. Fontal tolerated it, not out of pleasure, but because she knew she could not simply send them back without risking an argument that would cost her time.

Even from afar they could see at the harbor that something large lay on the shore. Something white, enormous, something that did not fit on a boat and did not belong in a net. The smell reached them long before they dismounted.

As they drew closer they saw torn flanks, open wounds, entrails half exposed. And they saw the feelers, two long appendages, each holding a human body, not caught by accident, but grown in and bound into the flesh of the monstrosity, as if someone had made humans into parts of an animal.

Son and Indra went pale. They moved closer, and what they said then was so quiet it sounded like a confession.

“Tring.”

“Tiang.”

Fontal knew the twins. She had seen them once. She did not contradict them. And when the water magicians added that the features of the monster’s head resembled Xoiun, the harbor fell silent, so silent that one could hear the water striking the pilings.

Roto stepped forward, studied the carcass for a long time, and finally shook his head.

“This is not the creature from the caves,” he said. “Not even remotely.”

Fontal looked at him. “Are you certain.”

“Yes,” Roto said harshly. “Down there it was a kraken. This is a spawn of hell, something else.”

Son and Indra confirmed it, with the qualification that it had been dark in the caves and everything frantic, but they held to the central statement. Not the same.

Fontal had measurements taken. She had sketches made. She had the wound edges examined, the rips, the marks in the flesh. She had the fishermen questioned one by one about who pulled when, who secured what, who prayed, who shouted. Everything was recorded, as well as one could manage in a village harbor. And she repeated her command so often that even the most impatient understood.

After three days they rode back. Fontal took copies of the drawings, measurements, witness statements, and a growing unease that could not be named but grew heavier with every step.

That same night, after the magicians were gone, something else moved in the village.

Marabar had heard the magicians had come, and he had waited until they left again. Marabar had also heard the rumors that a sea monster had been found, a dead one. And Marabar was curious and had a sense for opportunities.

He knew this kind of excitement. It burned fast, it drew people like moths to light, and it only became useful when it settled again. So he stayed out of sight, in a tent between low hills where the wind smelled of sea and the earth was damp from the drizzle. He sat in the half dark, still like a man who did not treat patience as a virtue but as a tool.

His ravens came and went.

They perched on the poles, on the edges of the tent, on his shoulder, and when they opened their beaks they were no longer bird voices but words, chopped and yet usable, names, smells, movements. He listened without showing a flicker. Twenty magicians, they said. Sketches. Measurements. Protocol. The command to burn nothing. And again and again that one image, described even by the ravens with a strange caution, as if they too sensed that something lay there that did not belong in the order of a fishing village.

He waited.

He waited until there were fewer lights.

Until the voices grew quieter.

Until the magicians rode away and the harbor became a harbor again, wood, salt, nets, and the tired habit of hardship.

Only then did he rise.

He stepped out of the tent.

The black of his garment drank the light, not like mourning but like wealth, smooth and rich, and the golden ornaments at hem and collar caught the few drops of mist as if they too had learned how to make cold shine. The band around his brow lay cool against his skin. He did not smile as he walked, but in his face was that calm expectation that is more dangerous than joy.

At the edge of the village dogs began to growl.

One yelped, short, high, panicked, as if it had recognized something it should not have recognized. Then another farther back. Marabar did not slow a step. He let the dogs see him, he let them smell what he was, and he let them understand that barking would summon no help tonight.

The first dog fell silent.

Not because it had calmed, but because its body had decided.

When Marabar reached the harbor the carcass still lay there, huge, whitish in moonlight, torn open, half collapsing, a mountain of flesh the sea had spat out. The stench was heavy and sweet, death and salt, and beneath it something metallic, as if in this flesh it was not only blood that had congealed, but magic.

He stepped closer, paused, and looked.

Not like a fisherman studying a catch.

Not like a magician searching for a riddle.

More like a merchant checking whether goods were real.

His hand glided over the ripped skin, flat and calm. It was cold, but not as cold as a dead animal should be. In the tears something dark gleamed, and where the feelers began he saw the two bodies, pale, grown in, held by a structure that had not formed by accident. Humans, yes, but no longer only humans. Parts of a greater blasphemy.

Possibilities, he thought.

Nothing but possibilities.

He went back without haste, as if he had all the time in the world, and returned to his tent. There he drew a book from a chest, bound in leather so dark it could hardly be told from shadow. When he opened it, it did not smell of paper but of herbs, resin, and a hint of burnt bone. He turned pages, not searching but knowing. He knew the passages.

He did not read aloud.

He read with his eyes.

And with every paragraph something settled into place inside him, like a key in a lock.

When he walked back to the harbor no one followed him. Only a raven circled high above, black against the pale moon. At the carcass he did not kneel. He simply stood beside the first body lodged in the feeler and drew his knife.

The blade was clean.

It did not remain so for long.

He carved signs into the air, not visible to an ordinary gaze, but palpable in the way the wind held its breath for a moment, as if even the night had decided to listen. Then he took out a small vial, opened it, and a drop fell onto the corpse’s forehead.

The sound was soft.

And yet it felt far too loud.

Marabar began to speak.

The words were old. Not the language of the realm, not the language of the village, not even the language of the schools. It was something else, something deeper, and the sound alone made the hairs at the neck prickle as if small nails were drawn across bone.

The body did not move at once.

Then came a breath.

Not the way the living breathe.

More like a vessel being filled again.

The eyes opened.

And they were white.

Dull.

Empty, and yet looking.

The mouth moved as if it wished to form a word, but only a sound came, not from a throat, but from something inside the flesh trying to find its place again.

Marabar smiled.

Now his teeth showed, a little too pointed, as if they had never quite belonged to human order.

He set his hand to the feeler and cut.

The flesh was tough. It held fast. It did not want to release what it had taken. Marabar worked slowly, precisely, and when he cut deeper he saw that the body inside was not only surrounded by slime but by something like fused sinews, as if the feeler had truly tried to possess the human.

The revenant lifted its hand.

A jerking grab.

Not helpful the way a human would help, but mechanical, like a tool that understands its function.

From within it pressed against the wall of the feeler, and for a moment a gap opened. Marabar used it, set the knife into it, and cut until the body came free and dropped heavily into the sand.

A dog barked.

Close.

Too close.

Marabar lifted his head for a moment as if the sound hardly interested him. Then he said something, a single word, clipped, and the revenant straightened, turned its head, and walked away, not running, but purpose driven, with that uncanny calm only the dead possess when bound to a task.

The dog barked again.

Then came a yelp.

Abrupt.

And after that nothing.

Silence spread as if someone had thrown a cloth over the village.

Marabar turned to the second body.

He repeated the signs, but faster now, as if the night had become familiar. Again the drop. Again the words. Again that brief unbearable pause in which one did not know whether the binding would take or the world would refuse.

Then the corpse tore its eyes open.

A twitch ran through the whole body, as if something inside protested for an instant and then understood that protest had no meaning in this state.

Marabar stepped closer.

He bent so the revenant had to look at him.

“Good,” he said softly. “You will remember.”

Whether that was true he did not know.

Whether it was a lie did not matter.

He cut this body free as well, piece by piece, and this time it was easier, as if the first cut had already taught the monster that it could no longer hold its prey.

When both revenants stood before him, pale and still, the harbor no longer smelled only of rot, but of something else as well, cold earth and opened graves, that unpleasant cleanliness the dead have when the last remnants of humanity are washed out of them.

Marabar looked at the two.

Tring and Tiang, he thought, not because he knew them, but because names are always useful even when they are only labels, his ravens had given him those names.

With a small gesture he indicated the direction of his camp.

They followed him.

Not because they wished to.

Because the binding pulled them.

On the way Marabar smiled again, very briefly, and his tongue ran over his teeth as if he already tasted what this night had opened for him.

These two, he thought, would give him pleasure.

Perhaps as goods.

Perhaps as tools.

Perhaps as keys.

And when he reached the shelter of his tent and the ravens settled again on the poles, he was awake and alive like a man who had only just begun to play.

Mistress Danndi arrived in Gontar in the late morning.

Not with noise, and not with the kind of self staging some envoys carry once they believe the world must recognize their rank in the sound of their steps. She came by land, just as Hoknf had announced, disciplined, quiet, so neatly arranged in posture and gaze that one immediately understood why she had been sent. Danndi spoke little. She took in. She organized. She stored.

Fontal received Danndi at the edge of the city, together with Master Klasst, Master Roto, and the two water magicians Son and Indra. Fontal spoke with Danndi briefly. The sea monster was dead. The sea monster lay on shore. And they decided to ride again to the fishing village so Danndi could form her own picture of the dimensions.

When they rode through the wet lanes of the fishing village there was smoke in the air. Not only chimney smoke, but heavy, greasy smoke that stank of burnt flesh. The village had changed. Not dramatically, not in a way visible at first glance, but in how people stood. In how they no longer looked, only waited. As if something had shown them that the sea did not only give food, but also truth, and truth was rarely kind.

Danndi dismounted and stood still for a moment.

Before them lay the carcass, or what had not yet been cut apart. It looked smaller now that it no longer drifted whole in the water but lay in pieces on the quay, and yet it was still monstrous. White flesh, ripped open, already darkened in many places. A stench that crawled into the nose and settled there as if it meant to force the body to retch. Fishermen moved back and forth with cloths over mouth and nose, with knives, hooks, saws. Some had the gaze of a night that had been too long.

Danndi looked at Fontal. “Report.”

Fontal nodded and spoke briefly, as she always did in moments like this. Caught in the net. Three boats. Measurements. Drawings. Protocol. Identification of the twins by Son and Indra. The resemblance of the face to Xoiun. Roto’s contradiction that this was not the creature they had seen under the tower.

Danndi listened without wasting a single expression. Only when Fontal finished did she step closer to the largest remaining part of the monster. She did not go to the side where fishermen had already made cuts and removed flesh, but toward the head.

That was where it was worst.

Not only because of the stench, but because of the shape. Up close it was truly there, that unpleasantness, that distant, almost ridiculous resemblance one did not want to grasp and yet could not deny. A mouth too human in its suggestion, a skull line familiar in the wrong way. Danndi did not kneel. She only bent forward, placed two fingers on the cold slippery skin, and closed her eyes.

One breath.

Then another.

She murmured something, soft, so soft that even those around her barely understood, and in the moment she set the spell one could feel the air around the carcass grow slightly denser, as if she had not called energy but attention.

Danndi opened her eyes again.

“It is dead,” she said.

No one contradicted her.

“It has been dead a long time,” she added, and now in her voice was something that sounded like displeasure, not at the fishermen but at the world. “And yet something clings to it.”

Klasst stepped half a pace closer. “A binding?”

Danndi let her gaze pass over the wounds. “Not clean. Not like protection. More like a trace. As if something was forced to hold this shape until it could no longer hold it.”

Roto gave a restrained snort, as if forcing himself not to fall into one of his explanations again. Son and Indra stood very still, pale, eyes fixed on the monster, and one could see that in their thoughts they were already back in the hall under the tower, in the darkness, in the stench, in the frantic movement.

Danndi straightened and addressed the oldest of the fishermen, a man with cracked hands and that weariness in his face that did not come from one day but from weeks.

“What have you burned already. Where are the feelers.”

The man swallowed. “Mistress. It stank. It drew flies. And the children. The two dead, they were the worst. We cut them off first…” He broke off and gestured helplessly toward the houses, close enough that there had been no avoiding the smoke.

Danndi only nodded as if it were an entirely natural answer.

“Show me the fires.”

Two large piles lay a little apart on an open stretch at the edge of the harbor where one could use the wind. Wood was stacked not beautifully, not neatly, but the way people stack wood when they are not thinking of appearance but of necessity. On the first a heavy restless fire was already burning. It ate through fat and flesh, belched dark smoke, and made the ground beneath it shine as if oil had bitten into the earth. On the second lay material that would be added later in the day. Remnants. Hides. Struts of cartilage that felt in the hand as if they were not made for human fingers.

Danndi stood at the edge and watched as a fisherman used a hook to drag a piece deeper into the flames so the fire would take it faster. Everything was already too much in pieces, too mixed of skin, sinew, and what had once been form. What could no longer be separated could no longer be proven, and in the smoke everyone saw only what they could see or what they wished to see.

Danndi spoke again, quietly, and turned to the fishermen.

“You will burn it completely,” she said. “Not out of fear, but out of hygiene. And because it cannot remain here. If any part of this carcass stays in the village, every dog, every animal, every scavenger will go at it. And whatever clings to it must not be eaten.”

The old fisherman nodded.

Danndi stepped closer to the fire.

“When it has become ash, you will gather everything into pits. Deep. Far enough from the water that the next tide will not take it. You will not spread it on fields. You will not dump it into the sea. You will not scatter it under houses.”

The man swallowed again. “Yes, Mistress.”

Danndi looked at him. “And you will tell no one what you have seen.”

Some fishermen exchanged looks, as if the demand were absurd, as if they themselves knew how impossible it was to keep such an image inside a village. But Danndi’s gaze was not negotiable. It said nothing of threat, yet it reminded them of order.

The men nodded.

Danndi turned away and went back to Fontal, Klasst, and the others.

“We ride back,” she said. Fontal nodded. One could see things working inside her, but she said nothing. She had not yet formed her judgment, and she would not form it before she had seen the traces, compared them, and set them against each other.

As they mounted, Danndi looked back once more.

The fire burned more steadily now, more restrained, but no less hungry. It devoured what was fed to it, and the smoke drifted in long banners over roofs, over the harbor, out toward the sea, as if the village itself were trying to spit the seen thing back out again.

Only the sea lay still.

And when the magicians finally disappeared, the village remained with a fire, and only when the magicians were out of sight did one of the fishermen dare to say it.

“The two bodies are gone.”

The others still stood at the edge of the harbor, staring at the smoking fire sites, at the cut up carcass, at the place where the bodies had been lodged in the feelers only yesterday. Now there was nothing.

“Be quiet,” the eldest said at once, looking around as if the words alone might call something back.

“But they were there,” the younger man whispered. “And this morning they were gone. Just gone.”

No one answered. The sea struck dully against the pilings. Somewhere a gull screamed.

“Good that the magicians did not see it anymore,” a third murmured at last. “Good they were already on the fire.”

The eldest nodded slowly. “And that is how it stays.”

“We should perhaps report it after all,” the younger man said, but even he did not sound convinced.

The old man turned to him. “And then what. Then they come back. Then they ask why we kept quiet. Then they want every detail and we do not have it. There must be quiet now, not more damned magicians.” He spat on the ground.

The younger man fell silent.

No one contradicted him.

“The fire took everything,” the old man said at last.

This time the others nodded.

And with that it was settled. Not because it was right, but because fear often decides faster than reason.

Where the two bodies had gone, no one worried about that. Marabar had taken care of it.

VI

The city lay abandoned before them.

Not the way a city looks after a slow dying, when windows are boarded, doors clatter open in the wind, and in every alley you can feel how long no one has been there. Sontor felt different. More as if its people had risen on a single day, had set down their work, had unfastened the animals or left them behind, had left loaves on tables, wood in hearths, half emptied wagons in front of doors, and then had simply gone. Not in panic, not under visible violence, but with a strange sudden resolve, as if something had called them all at the same time.

The closer they came, the clearer it became how much this city had been built for the north. Nothing about it was light. Nothing playful. The houses crouched deep against the wind, with thick walls, small windows, and heavy roofs that could defy snow and ice. Stone dominated everywhere, dark hard stone, with wood only where wood was needed. The streets were narrower than in southern cities, not for lack of space, but so the wind would find less to seize. Walls sheltered inner yards. Gates were set twice. Almost every building seemed raised not only against weather, but also against strangers, against hunger, against unrest and, if it came to it, against its own people.

Even the palace in the middle of the city was no palace in the true sense. No place where beauty or wealth wished to show itself openly. It was a fortress. A compact forbidding mass of stone and walkways, with narrow windows, a heavy gate, and walls meant to hold rather than impress. It stood at the heart of Sontor like a thought drawn tight.

It too was abandoned.

The gates stood open. No guard to be seen. No smoke rising. Only animals had taken the city back. Chickens scratched in lanes between overturned baskets and old straw. Sheep stood in the middle of a square and stared at the riders as if they had long forgotten that humans had once ruled here. Two goats climbed on a stairway to the entrance of a merchant house. Somewhere a cow lowed, dull and lost in a back yard. A dog trotted across the street, stopped briefly, studied the three of them, then vanished between two houses.

“If you ask me,” Morgut murmured as his gaze slid over the empty streets, “they really did just leave.”

“Or were led out,” Shara said softly.

Anadar did not answer. He only looked ahead at the fortress. He knew, or at least believed he knew, that Fantor’s tower had to lie near it. Not in some outer quarter, not off to the side. Fantor had never been someone who made himself small out of false modesty. If he had worked here, it would have been close to the center of power.

So they rode straight toward it.

In the courtyard of the palace fortress they found stables, also open, also abandoned. The animals there were long gone, or had joined the city. The hay was old but dry, water could still be found, and so they tended to the horses first. None of them wanted to go deeper into the fortress before the animals were cared for. It was a quiet, almost comforting work in the middle of all that emptiness. Loosening straps, removing saddles, drawing water, portioning oats, letting hands slide over warm necks. Simple things. Things that still obeyed.

Only when it was done did Morgut turn to Anadar.

“And now,” he asked, leaning against a stable door, “how exactly does it go on, great master. We find Fantor’s tower, hopefully find a book there, and then what. Do you have a plan, or only a direction.”

Anadar pulled his cloak tighter. The cold of the city was different from the cold outside. Thinner, but persistent. It crept out of stone and walls.

“We take the book,” he said. “Then we read it. And if it gives us even one usable hint, we may find a way to remove our most urgent problem.”

Inside his head, mocking laughter broke loose.

It was not true laughter, not the way humans laugh. It was a sound of contempt, of scorn, and of a growing nervousness that the demon hid behind all that derision only with effort.

Anadar did not change his expression.

Morgut raised an eyebrow. “So we go on only once we know what we go on with.”

“Exactly.”

Shara had not moved in the meantime. She stood in the half open stable passage and looked out into the courtyard. Then slowly higher, toward windows, parapets, dark openings.

“I have a bad feeling here,” she said. She pulled her cloak tighter, not because of the cold, but as Anadar saw, from another instinct. “It is as if we are being watched. Not by a person. More as if this whole city has eyes.”

Morgut immediately looked up as well.

Anadar trusted Shara’s instinct too much now to dismiss it. “Then we check everything again.”

They did it in silence. Protective workings, small bound layers of fire, earth, life, and wind, wherever each of them preferred them. Not the big conspicuous things. More the kind you only noticed in earnest when they caught. Morgut stretched something fine around their close space, barely visible, more a listening in the wind than a shield. Shara laid a dense almost bodily warmth into her clothing that helped not only against cold but also against sudden grasping. Anadar sharpened his perception.

“Good,” he said at last. “Let’s go.”

They left the stables and crossed the courtyard toward the inner keep. It looked smaller than it had from outside, but only because it was built so compact. Its mass was not translated into breadth, but into density.

“This will take a while,” Morgut said. “Are you really sure Fantor’s tower starts somewhere in here.”

“As far as I remember, yes.”

The laughter in his head rose again, then tipped into mocking whispering.

He does not know. He feels his way. He stumbles. Let him keep searching.

“Your friend also does not want to tell us where exactly,” Shara remarked dryly.

“No,” Anadar said, just as dry. “Today he is not very cooperative.”

They moved through several corridors, through guard rooms, through smaller halls, and finally into the throne hall. There the cold was even more tangible. Perhaps because the room was so large. Perhaps because places of power held their own cold.

The hall was long and high, with faded banners on the walls. The throne stood on a raised platform at the end, stern, heavy, more seat of defense than of rule. Behind it, set askew, were two doors.

Anadar stopped and looked at them.

“If you ask me,” he said, “one of them leads to our goal.”

The door to the right of the throne opened easily. Behind it lay a study, small living rooms, a vestibule with chest and cupboards. It had once been lived in, but not by Fantor. Everything about it spoke of official sobriety. Scrolls, books, wax, a worn table, but nothing that smelled of dark secret.

The door to the left was locked. One kick from Shara and the door was open. They looked into a passage that ran slightly downward. They followed it and came to a heavy door adorned with ornaments.

Shara studied the lock only briefly. Then she stepped forward, laid two fingers on it, murmured something, and kept her hand still longer than a mere moment. The metal began to deform under her touch. First slight, then visible. It sagged, grew soft, lost its order. The wood behind it began to char. A short kick and the door tore out of its hinges.

“One day you have to show me how you do that,” Anadar said.

Shara only smiled fleetingly. “When we have time for lessons, I will do you the favor.”

Behind it they found a round landing from which a spiral stair led up and down.

“I think you were right,” Morgut muttered. “Either Fantor’s tower. Or his torture chamber.”

“Probably both,” Shara said.

Before anyone could speak, the demon in Anadar’s head screamed. No word at first, only raw resistance.

Not down.

Anadar looked downward. “We go down first.”

They descended. One level. Then a second. Then they stood in the cellar.

And what they saw there took their breath for a moment.

Cages. Some large enough for humans, others smaller, lower, tighter. Torture instruments of metal and wood. Knives, hooks, chains, pincers, bars whose purpose you understood even if you had never wanted to. Along one wall lay bones. Along another hung skeletons with dark dried remnants of flesh still clinging. Dried blood had settled into cracks, on tables, in seams of the stone floor. It did not smell strong anymore. That was almost the worst part. Everything was too old, too dried, too often used to still stink of fresh violence. The violence had long since passed into the room itself.

Morgut was the first to break the silence.

“I think,” he said dryly, “if a real inquisition saw this, the owner would have a lot to explain.”

Shara did not answer. Her hand already rested on the grip of her sword.

Anadar looked deeper into the room and then he saw it.

It stood on a pedestal in the center. Before it, strange signs had been painted on the floor, dark circles, lines, curls, unfamiliar even to him. Burnt down candles stood around it. On the pedestal lay a book, open to a page. Beside it on a smaller stand was a knife. It was narrow, of peculiar beauty, with ornamentation similar to that in the book, and on its blade clung dried traces of blood.

They went to it at once.

For a few moments none of the three spoke. They bent over the open work, saw the signs, the curls, the images. Rituals. Formulae. Summonings, that much was immediately clear. But everything seemed readable and unreadable at once. The signs seemed to slip away from the gaze. Some resembled known forms, only shifted. Others were entirely foreign. Images stood between the lines, not as decoration, but as part of the text. A circle. An open hand. An animal head. Three lines through a star. Everything seemed to say, meaning lies here, and refused it at the same time.

Anadar was the first to begin turning pages. Page after page. Everywhere the same. New signs, unknown at first glance, and yet stirring a vile sense of kinship, as if they came from a dialect of something he had long touched at a dark edge of his knowledge.

Morgut bent lower over it. “There are patterns,” he murmured. “Repetitions. This returns. And this too. But I cannot grasp it.”

Shara tilted her head. “It is as if it warps the longer you look.”

That was exactly what it did. The text did not sit still. Not visibly moving, but never fixed enough to be truly held. Anadar felt his irritation rise.

“Everything always has to be locked, sealed, and complicated,” he snapped. “Can it not be simple a single time.”

The laughter in his head became booming.

Anadar shut the book.

In the same moment, with a hard metallic sound, a bolt slid over it. Not from outside. From the book itself. A dark seal sprang up and locked the cover. He tried to open it again, in vain.

Anadar stared at it.

Then he only grunted in anger.

“Of course,” Morgut muttered. “Of course it does that right now.”

The demon laughed louder than ever.

Anadar closed his eyes briefly, drew a deep breath, and opened them again. The anger was there, but it did not take him.

“Put it away,” he said, and handed the sealed book to Morgut.

Morgut tried in that very moment to loosen the bolt. In vain. He pressed, pulled, felt for a mechanism, murmured a small charm. Nothing.

“It will open again,” he said, half convinced, half stubborn, and put it away.

Shara pointed to the knife. “And that.”

Anadar looked over. “Take it.”

Shara took a cloth, cleaned the blade as well as she could of the old blood, then slid it into her belt.

They searched the cellar thoroughly, but found nothing else that seemed immediately usable. No further books, no scrolls, no notes, only tools of horror and the remains of what Fantor had done here.

So they climbed back up.

Above, on the round landing between the stairs, Anadar stopped.

“And now,” Morgut asked. “Out.”

Anadar hesitated.

“No,” he said slowly. “We are not finished here. Something is missing.”

He looked upward.

“If you want, you can go ahead.”

“Not a chance,” Shara said at once. “We stay together.”

The voice in his head rose again. Sharper now. Almost nervous.

There is nothing up there.

Anadar felt certainty form precisely out of that resistance.

“Then all the more,” he said.

They climbed the spiral stair up. Slowly, alert, almost without sound. After a few steps the stone was covered with a red carpet, faded but once costly. At the top they found themselves in the mage’s living room.

Compared to the cellar, the room seemed almost kept. Not clean, but untouched in another way. A deep recess was built into the wall, with chairs and a table set there. A large window looked out over the abandoned city. From up here they could see how still Sontor truly was. The streets. The courtyards. The open gates. Everything lay under a pale cold brightness, as if the whole city had been holding its breath for days.

Anadar stopped in the middle of the room.

“He must be here,” he said.

“Who do you mean,” Morgut asked.

“Fantor. Or what is left of him.”

In his head the demon burst into furious screaming.

He is not here. I killed him. Cut him apart. Burned him.

“No,” Anadar said aloud. “You did not.”

Shara and Morgut both looked at him. They had long known whom he was speaking to.

“Where is he,” Anadar murmured. “He is here. I can feel it.”

Then it became clear to him all at once.

He drew the sword.

The blade came free with a dark sound, and at once a panicked jolt shot through his mind. The demon understood first what Anadar understood.

Anadar stepped into the center of the room and rammed the sword into the floor with all his strength so it stood upright there.

“I brought you something, Fantor,” he called loudly. “It is yours. Come and take it.”

The demon screamed.

Truly screamed.

No longer as a voice, but as naked fear rushing through Anadar’s thoughts like fire.

For one heartbeat nothing happened.

Then, at the back of the room, a section of wall slid aside.

Behind it stood a figure.

Not quite human. Not anymore.

Gaunt. Naked. Emaciated in a way beyond hunger. Skin stretched over bone as if everything unnecessary had been burned out of it. Eyes set deep, shining with greed and hate. Chains ran around wrists, shoulders, hips. He was shackled to the wall like something you did not kill because you still needed it, or because you could not kill it.

Fantor.

He opened his mouth, but no sound came at first. Only his hands reached for the sword. Greedy. Trembling.

Anadar stepped closer and looked into his eyes.

“You did not kill him,” Anadar said, triumphant, never taking his gaze from the skeletal figure. “You could not. If you had killed him, you would have bound yourself.”

No answer came from his head. Only raw resistance.

“You kept him alive,” Anadar said. “You had to.”

Shara stepped forward and drew her sword. “What are you waiting for. End it.”

Anadar raised his hand and held her back.

“It is not that simple anymore.”

He pointed first at the sword, then at Fantor.

“The demon is bound. Before, it was bound to him. Now it is bound to this sword. And I think I am slowly learning what that means.”

Fantor lifted his head a little more.

“Give it to me,” he rasped.

The voice was dry, broken, but alive. Too alive.

“Give it to me.”

The screaming in Anadar’s head became panicked pleading.

No. No. You do not do this. I am bound to you.

Anadar looked at Fantor. Something in him thought fast and suddenly clear. Clearer than it had been in months. Perhaps because the solution was so monstrous that only it remained.

“Fantor,” Anadar said. “You recognize me.”

The eyes bored into him.

“Yes, Anadar,” came the hoarse reply. “And now give it to me. Transfer it. I free you from this demon.”

It sounded almost like a laugh, or like what Fantor’s dried body could still produce as laughter.

“I beg you.”

Shara looked at Anadar. Only briefly. Then she nodded, almost imperceptibly.

Morgut said nothing. But his hand was already closing around a working, ready the moment something went wrong.

Anadar pulled the sword from the floor. For a moment his own hand trembled. Not from doubt. More from the force of what would happen next.

Then he went to Fantor and offered him the grip.

The demon pleaded now. Truly pleaded.

Not with dignity. Not with power. With naked fear.

Fantor’s fingers closed around the grip.

In the same instant, everything in Anadar’s head went silent.

Not slower. Not gradually.

Just gone.

A tear. An emptiness. A silence so sudden his knees almost gave.

Fantor tore the sword to his chest. Then he laughed.

It was an old deep evil laugh. Not fully Fantor’s voice. Not fully another. Something between, as if two malices had found the same mouth for a moment.

“Revenge,” he whispered.

In the next heartbeat everything happened at once.

Fantor tore his chains apart with a suddenly gained inhuman strength. Iron sprang from the wall. Even as the links fell, Anadar already struck the stone with his free hand.

The floor beneath Fantor collapsed.

It was no long working. No delicate craft. Only raw exact violence against masonry and load lines of the tower that Anadar had felt the moment he entered. At the exact moment Fantor swung the sword at him, the stone under him sank. The blow struck only breaking rubble.

“Out,” Anadar roared.

They ran.

Not to the stair.

To the window.

Shara was the first to understand. A burst of fire hit the window fastening, wood split, glass sprang outward in cold shards. Morgut was already pulling up wind, dense and pressing, enough to make the jump not safe, but survivable.

They hurled themselves through the great window, one after the other, in the same moment the tower behind them began to collapse into itself.

The impact on the slanted roof many steps below them was hard enough to drive all air from their lungs. The first protective layer held. The second did not fully. Tiles broke, wood splintered, and all three crashed through the roof of a lower tract and struck again, this time on stone.

It hurt.

Everything hurt.

For a few moments there was only dust, coughing, the sound of falling debris. Then Morgut half raised himself and swore. Shara lay on her side, bracing on one arm, fighting for breath. Anadar lay flat on his back, staring at a shattered ceiling, feeling every single bone in his body.

Then he began to laugh.

He could not help it.

It was not a beautiful laugh. More an unbelieving release of something that had been lodged in him too long. He laughed though everything hurt. Though stone after stone still thundered down above them. Though Fantor, Naaarstr, and the sword now lay under tons of rubble and he had no idea how final that would be.

But the demon was gone.

Out of his head.

Gone.

For the first time in months it was quiet inside him.

And that quiet was so light, so infinitely light, that even the pain could not damage it.

VII

They were being watched long before they reached Sontor.Even before the first walls of the abandoned city appeared on the horizon, their steps had already been counted, their direction reported, and their silhouettes passed onward through the shadows. Between bare cliffs, beneath overhanging ledges of ice and stone, in the narrow fissures of the north where a human eye saw only emptiness, there were eyes. Dark eyes. Patient eyes.

The three riders were not inconspicuous.They moved through the land as if the Aversion were no more than foul wind. They did not hesitate. They did not lose their direction. They did not search for a way back. They did not wrestle with that nameless unease that took hold of ordinary people here until they turned around, confused, irritated, or already half broken inside. These three pressed on. Slowly perhaps, with caution and strain, yet without yielding.

And they carried magic on them the way other people carried scent or voice.The Dark Elves felt that at once. Not every one of them could have named it, but every one of them would have known these three were different. Not merely protected. Not merely prepared. Something worked within them that could not be hidden. A trained eye saw it in the way they rode, in the way they lifted their heads, in the way they shielded one another and yet remained bound together. Mages. Beyond doubt, mages.

That was precisely why no one attacked them.The first watcher reported it through signs in the stone.The second saw them at nightfall at a weathered resting place and reported their number, their horses, the way one of them grew restless in sleep, and how his hand, even in dreams, remained close to his weapon.The third tracked them from the ruins of a collapsed watch post and reported that the woman among them paused more than once and cast her gaze into shadows where nothing human could be seen. She sensed something. Not precisely enough. But enough that caution was necessary.

That same night, messengers were sent out.Not along open roads, but through those hidden routes that ran under stone, through shafts and between forgotten masonry. Messages travelled faster than people. From one watcher there became three, from three voices a report, from the report a reason for counsel. The council was convened.

They gathered in a chamber older than many of the walls above. There the Dark Elves spoke with their own, and others were present as well. Not all of equal standing, not all of equal agreement. Yet on one point there was swift consensus.

They would not attack the three.Not out of mercy.Out of prudence.

Mages, and only mages, could move through the Aversion without being broken by it. They were not prey for impatient hands. They were a message. Perhaps an opportunity. Perhaps a warning. Perhaps both at once. Whoever struck too soon gained, at best, three dead bodies and lost, at worst, sight of what those bodies meant.

So the decision was made.Observe.Without gaps.From every angle.Learn.Understand.Comprehend.

Their final days of travel were carried out under countless unnoticed eyes. When they rode over frozen ground, something moved soundlessly along the cracks beside the path. When they passed through dead thickets, figures sat among twisted branches and remained motionless until horse and rider were gone. When they camped at night, their fires were counted from afar, their voices weighed by tone, their watch changes measured. Nothing about them went unseen.

The man in their midst, the one who bore the sword, occupied the watchers most.He seemed at once the strongest and the most assailed. Something in him was drawn taut like rope left too long under load. More than once he rose suddenly in the night as if something had torn him out of sleep that had not been wholly a dream. Once a watcher heard him speak, low and brief, though no other person answered.

That too was reported.

By the time they finally reached Sontor, the city was already prepared for their arrival, though not in any open way.Sontor lay silent beneath the pale light of the north. Its streets were empty, its courtyards abandoned, its open gates like mouths that had stopped lying because no one remained to ask. The Dark Elves kept their distance, yet saw everything. They saw the three riders move through the abandoned city. Saw them pause, saw them test the surroundings, saw them finally set their course for the keep.

That was hardly surprising.

From that point on, the observation grew more difficult.The three vanished into the inner parts of the old fortress. The outer sight lines broke. There were eyes in Sontor, many of them, but not every stone could be pierced at once, and not every hidden way remained open in those upper, ancient sections. Reports came only in fragments.

They had tended the horses.They moved with care.They went deep within.Then they were lost.

The watcher who lay on a broken roof ridge above the inner courtyard waited a long time. Beneath him stretched the stillness of the keep. No shout. No fighting. No open sign. Only wind slipping through shattered battlements and, now and then, the distant clap of loose shutters.

Then it happened.At first it was not a sound, but a jolt in the stone. A tremor running through masonry like a sudden memory. Dust shook loose from seams. A crack sprang open in a side wall. In the next moment the noise came.

Not an explosion such as fire or powder would make, but the deep, dreadful breaking of structure when a building decides it will no longer be a building. A tower at the rear of the keep collapsed into itself. Not slowly. Not with dignity. It buckled as if someone had punched its heart out. Masonry fell inward, floors gave way, a half shaft of dust and stone blasted up.

The watchers moved for the first time in a visibly open way.Several slipped out of shadow, sprang to higher positions, changed signs. On neighbouring ruins more figures appeared, drawn by the collapse like crows to a fresh tear.

And then they saw the three.A high window burst, or perhaps it had already been ripped open by the collapse. Three bodies shot out of it, not gracefully, not in order, but in that pure, desperate motion by which the living try to stay one heartbeat ahead of death. The first leapt with an angle of the body that said he expected the impact. The woman followed close behind. The third was scarcely slower.

They fell onto a lower roof, struck hard, broke through, and vanished for a moment into timber and rubble.

No watcher intervened.Not out of indifference.Because it had not been ordered.

And because in that moment everyone thought the same thing. Whoever jumped from a collapsing tower while something happened inside that could break even old stone was not merely an object of surveillance. He was a bearer of meaning.

So they stayed in shadow.They watched the first movement beneath the crushed awning. Then one of the men rose. Staggering. Alive. Shortly after, the woman. Then the third. Wounded perhaps. Shaken certainly. But on their feet.

One of them laughed, loud and long and freed, and something about his stance had changed. A burden seemed to have been lifted from him, or at least shifted. The watcher could not say what it had been, but the change was clear enough to be passed on.

The council received the news before the dust had fully settled.Curiosity and distrust grew in equal measure. What had the three found. Whom or what had they sought in that tower. What had caused the collapse.

Questions were asked.But the instruction did not change.

Do not intervene.Continue observing.

So the Dark Elves remained at their posts, in window hollows, beneath roof edges, in arrow slits, behind broken battlements and in the corners of the abandoned city. They watched the three gather themselves. They watched them speak, though too softly to catch everything. They watched them move on.

And while the silence slowly returned to Sontor, something beneath that silence had changed.The three were no longer only mages who had dared the Aversion.

They were now those who had brought down a tower and touched something in the old keep that should have stayed hidden, or for that very reason must be valuable.

The Dark Elves did not yet know what it was.But they knew it mattered.

And so they kept watching.Unseen.Learning.Waiting.

End Part I