Anadar V/III

XIV

The progress that had been made in rebuilding the Fiery Fortress filled Manador with genuine pride.

When he walked the upper corridors in the morning, or when he looked from the inner courtyard at the roofs and walls in the evening, he could barely still see the place that had lain on the coast like a half open wound after the battle with the demon. That was what everyone among the fire mages called it by now. The battle with the demon. It had become a fixed phrase, short, heavy, and large enough to gather beneath it everything people did not want to say out loud in full, every single time.

Almost every trace of devastation had been cleared away.

More than that, in many places the fortress had come out of it more beautiful than before.

The collapsed edges of the walls had not simply been patched up. They had been set anew, cleanly, with better interlocked stone and stronger bindings against wind and salt. The roofs of the southern wings had not merely been re covered. They had been built steeper, so rain and sea spray would run off more easily. In two of the courtyards the old drains had been rebuilt, and for the first time in a long while no stinking water stood in shallow hollows after harsh weather. The training grounds had been given a new surface, harder, more even, with clearly marked fire circles, so that everyday practice now looked less like random venting and more like a school that knew what it was doing.

Even the forge had been improved. Saltor had insisted on it, and as so often, he had been right. The hearth drew better, the air was clearer, the space arranged with sense. Tools that used to have to be searched for in chests or on hooks now hung in fixed places. The supply rooms had been dried out. The students’ dormitories had gained new shutters, and in some rooms even proper glass set neatly into the frames. Manador would never have thought such a thing could please him, but when morning light fell quietly through panes instead of through roughly stretched hide, even a fire school looked, for a moment, almost civilized.

In the great courtyard they had closed the cracks in the paving, scraped out the charred patches, and replaced burned beams with dark, hard coastal wood. They had not simply covered the spot where the worst chaos had raged. They had reorganized it. Where there had once been only open space, two low stone basins now stood, holding water even in dry weather. A concession to reason, Rotsch would probably have said, and to the insight that even a school of fire occasionally needs something against fire.

More than the building itself, what made him proud was the way the whole school had thrown itself into it. Students, masters, old servants, craftsmen, everyone had carried, hauled, set, patched, planned, argued, and kept going. Not everything had been orderly. Fire mages took to orderly rebuilding about as naturally as they took to quiet consensus. But they had worked. With force, with stubbornness, and often enough with real devotion. And the result could be seen.

Only the find in the wall stood apart from all of it.

There Manador had had a proper door set in, solid, unobtrusive, and heavy enough that no one could shoulder it open out of curiosity. A seal had been laid over it that only he and Saltor could break. It was not a splendid or mystical door. It was a sober boundary between the visible life of the school and the silent, hidden part beneath it, a part that, the more often Manador thought of it, the less it seemed to fit his nature.

Because as significant as the find was, it was not made for him.

He had tried. More than once. He had sat down with scrolls and copies, read, gone back to the beginning, taken certain passages again, slower this time, with more patience, more good will. But his thoughts drifted. Again and again. He would read a paragraph and realize two sentences later that inwardly he was already somewhere else. At the condition of the western wall. At the next supply purchase. At the students. At the question of why one of the new weapon racks stood crooked when he had explicitly said that such things must not stand crooked.

Then he would take the same scroll in hand again, read again, almost force himself, and by the third attempt he knew it would come to nothing.

Not because he was stupid.

It simply was not his kind of hunger.

He could read, certainly. He could understand, if he had to. But that long, deep burrowing into foreign, old, narrow script, that lingering on terms, possibilities, historical branching, and scholarly conclusions, it did not awaken joy in him. Others would taste something there. Anadar, for example. The man would probably have woken up after the first scroll the way other people wake up at the smell of roasted meat.

Manador, by contrast, kept losing interest quickly, and almost felt guilty about it.

Instead he had become noticeably more practiced at being the dean of a school.

That surprised him most of all. He grew surer. More ordering. He recognized more quickly what mattered and what merely produced noise. Politics within his own discipline was even simpler than he had feared at first. Fire mages were used to receiving orders and obeying orders, as long as you spoke them with enough clarity and enough backbone. Whoever hesitated, lost. Whoever explained too long, lost as well. Whoever held their ground often won simply because the others got loud faster.

Interdisciplinary politics was something else entirely.

There he missed Rotsch.

Rotsch had been so skilled at playing the others without their noticing at once. He could read faces, pauses, vanity, small weaknesses, long habits. Unfortunately, of all people, Rotsch had chosen Anadar as his successor in spirit and had worked on him with a patience that, in hindsight, Manador found almost touching. Of course Anadar could have learned, with practice, to move diplomatically through such things. Perhaps even better than Rotsch. If he had wanted to. But Anadar had always had his own head, and as it looked, they were living in times when the old order that had stood for centuries was beginning to sway.

There were signs of it.

More than enough.

And now he was dean. Not by Anadar’s favor, he sometimes thought with almost childish stubbornness. No, he had become dean because things had fallen that way and because someone had to lead this school. Now he was trying to step into big footprints without letting them make him small.

Saltor was an enormous help in that.

It had been Saltor who showed him where Rotsch kept his notes. And Rotsch had, as it turned out, kept extensive records. Not only about events in the Fiery Fortress, but about almost everything he had found politically noteworthy. Protocols of every Conclave. Marginal remarks. Addenda. Small assessments, unpleasantly precise. And, to Manador’s growing astonishment, a dossier on every other master who regularly attended the gatherings of the schools.

Some of those dossiers were short.

Others were unpleasantly long.

And all of that, honestly, Manador found far more interesting than studying the scrolls about light from the cellar.

This was about people.

Their habits, their weaknesses, their alliances, their dislikes, their vanities, their value. He understood that. He could use that. It was a kind of knowledge that did not hide beneath dust and old parchment, but worked in daily life.

There was a knock at his door.

Very cautious.

So cautious that it sounded more like someone hoped not to be heard.

“Come in,” Manador said.

The door did not open.

He looked up, frowned, and said again, a little louder this time, “Come in, please.”

Again, hesitation.

Then the door slowly opened.

In front of him, half still in the corridor, stood eight young women. The students of spirit who now also wanted, and were meant, to learn fire magic. He knew from reports that they were not doing badly. He also knew they had caused considerable unrest among the previously all male fire students, which did not surprise him, and which Saltor found unpleasantly amusing.

Manador half rose from his chair.

“What can I do for you, ladies.”

The one in front cleared her throat. Osonde or Asina, he was unpleasantly unsure. She half turned and whispered something to the one behind her. That one whispered something to the third, who signaled to the first with a barely concealed hand motion that she should finally speak. The first was then pushed a little further into the room with gentle insistence.

“Master Manador, Dean, um…”

“What is it,” he asked, trying to sound helpful. “Has something happened. Is there a reason to complain. Has anything occurred.”

His effort did not help. If anything, it made the young woman retreat another half step into herself.

“No. Um. Dean Manador.” She held a letter in her hand. “Our Mother wants you to read this.”

She stepped forward, placed the letter on his desk, explicitly not into his outstretched hand, as if she feared getting too close, or feared the letter might catch fire halfway. Then she quickly stepped back.

“Thank you, sir.”

She curtsied, a little too deep, a little too quick, turned, and left the room almost backward, seven other young women in tow, all of them murmuring softly. One nearly walked into the doorframe on the way out but caught herself in time. None of them closed the door.

“At least they could have shut the door,” Manador muttered to himself.

Then he picked up the letter.

He broke the seal.

Manador,

times are different. Our fate is no longer only a straight path, but in motion, in the middle of change. In a few days many of us will gather in Tandor to steer our fate, and I think you should not be absent.

Mother

Manador read the few lines twice.

Then a third time, though nothing in them was in any way unclear.

He laid the letter down slowly. A whole series of thoughts ran through his mind at once. Tandor. Mother. Many of us. To steer our fate. It was just vague enough to sound like her, and just definite enough that it could not be ignored.

He stayed seated for another moment.

Then he rose so quickly that the chair behind him slid a little backward.

“Saltor,” his voice thundered through the corridors.

A moment later, louder still:

“Saltor. Saddle my horse.”

Formularbeginn

Formularende

XV

Gnok was very aware of the danger that Gudi and her inexperience represented.

Not because he mistrusted her. On the contrary. Precisely because she trusted him, because she accepted a lot, learned a lot quickly, and still did not suspect certain things at all, she was vulnerable. And Gnok was just as aware that Hokn’f was counting on exactly that. He wanted to annoy him, put him under pressure, restrict his freedom of movement, and ideally entangle him so deeply in habits and justifications that he would eventually paralyze himself.

Gnok had noticed long ago that he was being watched.

He could tell from glances that lingered too long on him. From students who suddenly developed far too lively an interest in routes, times, and his routines. From silent figures in courtyards, at windows, from a shadow in a corridor that was too often the same one. Even out in the desert he eventually felt that someone was following him. Not well. Not close enough. But enough that anyone old enough, anyone who had learned what surveillance feels like, could not miss it. After that, in the evenings in the desert he did only harmless exercises with Gudi and showed her how to keep a carpet suspended in the air, simple, unremarkable practices.

So he played along.

He could do that too.

And so Gnok became the most boring person on the entire planet once again.

He fell back into a pattern he had used before when people believed they needed to watch his hands. A routine that never changed. A man with fixed times, small walks, harmless trips into the desert, inconsequential spells, and evening after evening of fairy tales in his tower. Nothing irregular. Nothing that stood out. No careless movement, no hidden eagerness, no nightly disappearance that looked too clearly like intent.

Fortunately, Gudi played along without asking many questions.

She was young enough to find the repetition unbearable, and clever enough to grasp that her teacher had reasons he did not explain anew every evening.

Gnok knew this sort of thing.

Hokn’f had made him a target often enough, and others before him had done the same. There was always that kind of person who could not tolerate silence, deviation, and old knowledge unless it was under control. Gnok had long since stopped being surprised. He had grown old enough to know that caution was rarely cowardice, and often simply the mature form of survival.

That was precisely why Mother’s message came at an inconvenient time.

Not because he did not want to take it seriously. On the contrary. If Mother called for him, it was not on a whim. They had known each other far too long for that. And it was not only the two of them who had been waiting for exactly this moment for a very long time.

But her call meant that he had to leave.

And that in turn meant he would have to leave Gudi behind without supervision.

Hokn’f would use that opportunity. Gnok did not doubt it for a heartbeat. He would have questions asked, have Gudi watched, perhaps invite her, perhaps press her, perhaps flatter her, all in his polite way. And Gnok himself was under observation. He could not simply ride north without explanation. Mother would not appreciate it if Hokn’f, the unofficial leader of the zealots, caught wind of a meeting that was only just taking shape.

So Gnok thought for several days about what to do.

He went through the options, discarded them, picked them up again, let them lie. Conventional travel was too visible. Disappearing in secret was too conspicuous. An excuse was too risky. Above all, the question of Gudi remained.

What was he supposed to do with the girl.

She already knew too much.

Enough, at least, that someone could have pressed something out of her if they tried. Enough, too, that she was no longer just any student who played a little with wind and water and marveled at it. She had been drawn far deeper in. Perhaps that was the answer.

Why not even more.

Gnok thought that if Hokn’f later tried to squeeze secrets out of her, those secrets could be so large and so unbelievable that even then everyone would assume the girl was fantasizing or had been confused by his fairy tales.

And so he decided to take Gudi out into the wider world with him.

It was not an easy decision. Not for him. Not because of the risk. But because he was doing something he otherwise preferred to avoid. He stepped out of cover. Not recklessly. But clearly enough that afterward he could no longer tell himself it was all just a harmless continuation of their small exercises.

One evening they sat again in his tower.

Outside the sky was deep blue and already almost black at the edges, and through the tall windows fell that last light that makes things look peaceful for a brief moment, even when they are not. On the table lay maps, scrolls, and sequences of numbers. Gnok bent over them, muttering to himself, tracing lines with bony fingers, while Gudi complained ever more loudly.

“These days are boring,” she declared for what must have been the tenth time. “Boring and so boring. If I have to draw water and let it fall again one more time, I will turn into water myself and flow out the window.”

Gnok did not answer at once. He had no time for her whining. He could not afford a mistake in the formulas. Not in this spell. That would be clumsy, and he had not cast it in an age.

“Can we not sneak out into the desert tonight,” Gudi asked. “I am bored. Even if we only practice simple spells. Or nothing at all. Anything but the same wall, the same carpet, the same chair, and you with that face.”

“What face,” Gnok muttered.

“The face you make when you think everyone else is stupid.”

“Then I must make it rather often,” he said absentmindedly.

“You do.”

He nodded in her direction without really looking at her. “Yes, we will sneak out tonight.”

Gudi sat up at once. “Really.”

“Certainly.”

“Really really.”

Gnok lifted a finger to tell her to be patient for a moment. His gaze stayed on the formulas. He traced the signs once more, murmured numbers, places, directions. Tandor then. Yes. That would work.

How they got back, he could think about another time.

He had not used this spell in forever. It carried risks. Conventional travel was much easier. But conventional travel was also much more noticeable, and it could be followed.

He stood up.

Gudi fell silent immediately.

Gnok stepped into the middle of the room, drew symbols on the floor with chalk and a narrow metal stylus, and began to murmur. The lines ran together in an arc, first low, then higher, and Gudi stared at him as if he had begun building a second moon in the middle of the sitting room.

“What are you doing,” she asked.

He did not answer.

“Gnok.”

No answer.

“Master Gnok.”

Still no answer.

“If this is just another exercise, then I find it rude that you begin it so mysteriously.”

He did not let himself be disturbed. The final circle closed. The air in the room tightened. A fine trembling, barely visible, ran through the center of the symbol, and then suddenly an arch of violet light stood there. Not large, not blazing, more like a clean wound in space, silent and deep and unmistakably not meant for ordinary students.

Gudi jumped up.

“What is that.”

“Please step through, child,” Gnok said.

She looked at the arch. Then at him. Then back at the arch.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“The other side,” he said dryly. “Please through the other side. Not sideways. Not hands first. Oh, for the love of all wind, girl.”

She still stared at him.

“Now go.”

He gestured, a little impatient now, and at last she did as she was told. One step. Then another. Then the violet light swallowed her.

Gnok followed immediately.

For Gudi it felt as if someone forced her through a gap that was far too narrow, even though she bumped against nothing at all. The world did not go dark. It went wrong. Everything spun and stood still at the same time. The floor vanished, and so did her stomach, in the worst way. When she was truly somewhere again, she hit stone hard and vomited at once.

If thinking had been possible in that moment, she might have asked what Gnok had done to her.

It was dark around her. Not completely, but dark enough that everything seemed made of edges and shadows. Cold air lay in a space she could not see. Behind her she heard a thud, a curse, and shortly after that the unfamiliar sound of a man vomiting as well.

Gnok lay beside her.

“I never liked that,” he wheezed between breaths. “It is so exhausting.”

There they lay now. A student and her master, both fallen out of another reality, both with their faces almost on cold stone, both united in a lack of dignity that for a moment erased every hierarchy.

After a few minutes the world stopped spinning.

Gnok was the first to sit up. With effort, but with that stubborn dignity older men often produce precisely when they have just lost all dignity.

He stretched as if the whole thing were merely an inconvenient way to travel.

“The first part is done,” he said. “I am already preparing the second passage.”

Gudi stared at him with wide, disbelieving eyes.

Then her stomach lurched again. She turned her head and vomited once more, this time with very explicit inner resistance against everything Gnok wanted to do next.

No.

No, no, no.

Absolutely not again.

All the words of refusal were ready in her head and throat, but before she could say any of them, Gnok said, as if he could hear her thoughts:

“You cannot stay here, girl.”

She lifted her head.

He was already standing again in the middle of a second, much smaller room or corridor, drawing symbols on the floor and murmuring formulas as if nothing had happened.

“On the other side your brother is waiting.”

That was unfair.

Gudi froze in mid protest.

“What.”

“Do not act more foolish than necessary. The second passage is shorter. Probably.”

“Probably.”

“One must not show uncertainty to a spell,” Gnok said sternly. “It makes it sensitive.”

“Master Gnok.”

“Yes.”

“I hate you a little.”

“That will pass.”

“Hopefully not.”

He smiled crookedly without looking up. Then he released the spell.

The violet arch appeared again before them.

Gudi closed her eyes briefly.

Then she stood up. Still unsteady, still with the bitter certainty in her stomach that she would hate this evening in every sane memory. But also with that excited tension that pushed through all reason, because she was young enough and someone had told her that on the other side of the world her brother was waiting.

“If I die,” she muttered as she wiped her mouth, “then I will haunt you to your last day.”

“Through the other side,” Gnok said.

And Gudi stepped into the violet light once more.

Formularbeginn

Formularende

XVI

The exhumation brought the unwelcome result and with it the certainty. Kolnidranooora was dead.

The wind mage lay buried in a plain wooden box, nameless, without mark, without dignity, as if he had been some foreign sailor the sea had spat out and no one had claimed again. When the cemetery worker freed the last boards with heavy, practiced motions and the lid was lifted aside, no one stepped closer for a moment. Even Roto, who otherwise tended to chase away every silence with some sound, stayed quiet.

Sinadie was the first to move.

The smell was no longer the sharp, fresh smell of death. Too much time had passed for that. It had become duller, heavier, sunk into earth and damp wood, uncomfortably close to something that could not be undone. Kolnidranooora lay on his back, in what remained of his clothing, made almost colorless by wet, time, and soil. The face had changed, as every face changes when life has not held it for too long, yet enough remained to leave no doubt.

Roto swallowed hard.

“Kol,” he said softly, and it was one of the few times his usually generous tone sounded small.

Isidre stepped up beside Sinadie. Son and Indra stayed a little farther back, out of respect, or perhaps because they did not feel they belonged to this first moment. Miene and Sindra stood behind them, both quieter than usual, both with that awkward seriousness of young women who have met death before and still never quite grasp how uncomfortably still a lifeless acquaintance can look.

The examination of the body yielded no real insight anymore.

They looked at the throat as far as it still made sense, the hands, the clothing, the body as a whole. It had not been an artful murder, no ritual, no strange spell that still revealed itself in traces. His throat had been cut. Clean enough, deep enough, unmistakably fatal. Son and Indra held back with their assessments, and even Isidre, who usually knew how to name everything with sure precision, could only say that no great hidden truth remained in the flesh.

Kol had been killed.

Nothing more could be read from him.

At last the lid was closed again.

The men who had opened the grave shoved the earth back, first with shovels, then with that heavy, blunt sound loose soil makes when it falls onto wood again. Roto stood beside it the entire time and watched. Once it looked as if he wanted to say something, perhaps a curse, perhaps a memory, but he did not.

When the grave was closed again, they set a heavy stone on it.

Not large, not ceremonial, but solid. Sinadie stepped forward, laid her hand on it, murmured a short, matter of fact spell, and slowly the name ate itself into the surface.

Kolnidranooora.

Not beautifully curved. Not ornate. Just clear.

After that, Miene and Sindra planted flowers in front of it. They were nothing special, only those small, tough spring plants that could manage even with little mercy. Against the damp earth they looked almost too alive.

Roto finally pulled out a small pouch and pressed it into the cemetery worker’s hand. The man was already digging a new grave next to it and had followed the whole matter with the tired indifference of someone who had seen more dead than he ever wanted to.

“Take care of it,” Roto said.

The man weighed the money in his hand, nodded once, and said nothing more.

“So this is how a glorious life ends,” Roto sighed as they walked away from the grave.

It did not sound theatrical. More bewildered. Almost offended by the plainness of this ending, as if he had expected that a man like Kol would at least be granted a more fitting death than a nameless box in wet earth.

For a while they walked in silence down the narrow path between the rows of graves. From the harbor, the sea could be heard, dull and steady. A wind rose, cool and carrying the smell of salt.

Roto was the first to break the silence.

“I wonder,” he said, without looking at the others, “who cut his throat. Who is the vile murderer of Kolnidranooora.”

Son, usually the quieter one, lifted her head slightly. “Perhaps,” she said, “Kral, the drunken captain, can help you again.”

A barely visible smile slipped across her face.

“Maybe you will meet him sober this time.”

Indra nodded. “He seemed to know enough that it could not have been mere rumors.”

Roto thought it over and rubbed his face.

“The Great Market lies on your route anyway,” he said at last, looking at Sinadie and Isidre.

Both nodded.

“Miene and I can certainly help you guide this Kral toward a better statement,” Sindra added. She said it a little too quickly, as if any new task was better than too much time to think.

“Or at least we help survive his drunkenness,” Miene murmured.

It was almost a joke, and even Roto snorted once.

So they set off back toward the Great Market.

The road there was uncomfortably long enough to give thoughts time to settle. The grave fell behind them, but not the question. Who had killed Kol. Why. Why on a ship. Why in this way. And who were the two strangely slender attackers Kral had spoken of.

When they reached the Great Market again, the trail had grown thin.

Kral had not been seen for days.

Some claimed he had left the market in the middle of the night. Others insisted they had seen him that morning somewhere near the edge of a stable. An innkeeper was certain he had not truly left at all, only slid under a different table. None of it helped. No one could say which direction he had gone, and the longer they asked, the clearer it became that Kral was the uncomfortably slippery kind of man who left traces, but never enough to follow them cleanly.

So it happened that the seven of them rode on to Tandor.

Spring had brought rain by then. Not heavy weather, rather that long, thin, gray drizzle that softens roads, makes clothing heavy, and turns every horizon into a smear. On such a morning they reached Tandor.

The city lay before them as if built from wet stone, stern, large, and old, with its towers, halls, and the weight of a school that thought more of endurance than impression. Water ran in narrow lines down the walls. The streets shone dully. Hardly anyone spoke loudly. Even the horses seemed to grow quieter as they entered.

Isidre wasted no time.

No sooner had they dismounted than she went straight to the library, not out of courtesy, not to announce arrival, but because for her there was only one truly important question.

She received her answer there.

And it was not a good one.

Tranda was fighting for his life.

Not from a sudden wound, no attack, no scheme, nothing one could still face with spell or fury. It was age. Long time. The slow dimming of a man whose strength had been so taken for granted that his fading felt almost indecent.

Isidre stood for a long time after she heard the news, simply still between the high shelves, as if hoping the books around her might contradict it.

Then she composed herself.

She had rooms prepared for the others, soberly and without fuss, the way she did nearly everything. For Son and Indra. For Miene and Sindra. For Roto, who would feel uncomfortably out of place in Tandor anyway. For Sinadie, who was still not fully recovered.

Only after that did she go to her old teacher.

From then on she was almost constantly with him.

She spoke little. Sometimes she only sat. Sometimes she arranged things in his room though there was nothing to arrange. Sometimes she read to him, even when she did not know whether he still listened. Above all she tried to make his last days as bearable as possible. It was not sentimental care. More a quiet, almost relentless form of loyalty.

Outside, the rain kept falling.

And in Tandor people slowly began to feel that with these arrivals, it was not only people who came into the city, but news, wounds, questions, and all those heavy things that, sooner or later, change an age.

XVII

Anadar was in good spirits.

His mood was so excellent that, for the moment, hardly anything could have shaken it. Since the demon had vanished from his head, everything felt lighter. Not simpler, the world was still far too full of secrets, open reckonings, and looming catastrophes. But lighter. As if an iron ring he had worn for so long had finally fallen away. Thoughts came and went again without something cutting in, without mockery, loathing, or чуж greed pricking into everything like thorns. He could breathe. Truly breathe. Even the fatigue of the last months seemed to finally settle properly into his body, and strangely enough, even that made him almost glad.

They rode hard.

Not via the Great Market, not along the broader roads where one could be recognized, delayed, or forced into far too many conversations. Instead they took side paths, old trade roads, tracks between fields and woods, passed through Flund and then pushed on toward Tandor. The days went by quietly. They rode from sunrise into late afternoon, pitched their tent when the light grew tired, ate simply, woke in the cold of night when horses snorted or the wind tugged at the cloth, and rose again at dawn.

They were calm days.

And precisely because of that, all three of them knew these were the days before the storm.

No one said it out loud very often, but they felt it. Something was tightening. Too many threads were running at once. Too many people were moving toward the same places. Too many old things were coming to light for the world to simply settle back into its old grooves afterward.

Shara was quieter these days than usual, but no longer with that tormented, uncertain quiet that had sometimes seized her on the way to Sontor. She seemed more awake. Perhaps because Anadar himself was clearer again. Perhaps also because she no longer merely suspected, but knew, that something was growing inside her, something that suddenly placed all her former worries on a different scale. Morgut, meanwhile, was calmer than usual, but for him that only meant he handed out his jokes more sparingly. He was genuinely happy for Anadar’s relief, but he also knew that relief did not mean an ending.

When they finally reached the first hills from which one could see Tandor in the distance, they noticed it at once.

The banners hung at half mast.

Even from far away, it was impossible to miss. On the towers, above the outer walls, on the long halls of the library, everywhere the cloth moved lower than usual in the wind. Not completely still. The day was too cool and too open for that. But lowered. Muted. A sign that needed no explanation.

“Someone of importance,” Morgut said quietly.

Anadar only nodded. In him as well, something sank for a brief moment, not into fear, but into that sober heaviness that comes when one realizes the world, even during one’s own battles, goes on unperturbed and demands its dead.

They rode down and went straight to the library.

Tandor was full of subdued motion. No one ran. No one called out loudly. People worked, walked, carried, sorted, and yet something held over everything, as if the whole school were under a hand pressed to its brow. When they dismounted, they were greeted at once. Not with fuss, rather with the quick, alert attention that rules in places where too many significant people arrive in too short a time.

Isidre’s group had arrived three days earlier and had settled in as best they could, before Tranda died in the night.

Because of that, the reunion was more restrained than it might have been under other circumstances.

Except with Miene and Sindra.

The two spirit students rushed at Morgut as if the last weeks had consisted of nothing but waiting to be able to throw their arms around him again, and for a moment it truly seemed exactly like that. Both spoke at once, both grabbed at him, both apparently needed to be sure he was really there and not just another story someone told. Morgut laughed, let it happen, and was unmistakably glad to see them too. Within a few breaths the three of them had already drifted a little away from the rest of the group, talking over one another with that hurried, warm familiarity only people develop when they have missed each other and do not quite know where to begin.

It was Sinadie who received Anadar and Shara.

She was no longer quite as pale as on the Islands of the Winds, but her injury had not only weakened her, it had hardened her. There was something cool in her face, something newly decided. When she looked at Anadar, there was no reproach and no defense, only the sobriety of someone who has just had stripped away everything others believed to be her position, and who now looks back with clearer eyes.

“I am an exile now,” she said, almost without preface, as if she only had to set the fact in the air so everyone involved would know where they stood. “No Dean. No island that belongs to me. No office. No home, if one is strict about it.”

Anadar looked at her and smiled.

Not mocking. Not careless. Rather with a warmth that was rare in him and, for that reason, surprising.

“Then I congratulate you on your freedom,” he said.

Sinadie blinked as if she had expected many things, but not that.

Shara reacted differently. She stepped right up to her and took the former Dean carefully in her arms. No grand gesture, no empty comfort, but an embrace the way women hold other women when they know much does not need to be said.

“We will find a new home for you,” Shara said softly.

Sinadie stood still for a moment in her arms, then eased back and looked at Shara as if she wanted to remember that promise, even if she could not yet fully trust it.

At that moment, a visibly exhausted Manador rode into the courtyard.

He had driven his horse hard. You could see it in the animal as clearly as in the man. The horse’s coat was dark with sweat, its flanks worked heavily, and Manador sprang down with a haste that also revealed he had been in the saddle far too long. It was probably the first time in a long while that he himself had traveled, and precisely for that reason the broad, open smile on his face looked so honest that Anadar almost had to laugh at the sight.

Perfect timing, he thought. That cannot possibly be coincidence anymore.

Manador hurried toward him and Shara before a stable boy had properly taken the horse.

“If anyone tells me again that Tandor is wonderfully connected, I will hit him,” he wheezed, half joking and half truly exhausted. Then his hand touched Anadar’s shoulder briefly, then Shara, and for a moment there was more relief in his face than anything else. “Good to see you. Truly good.”

The first excitement slowly ebbed. Voices grew quieter. Horses were led off by stable boys. Servants and students began, with that practiced invisibility that reigns at great schools, to provide water, fresh cloths, and rooms without needing explicit instruction. Everyone was already preparing, inwardly, to wash off the road, to shake off the journey, before the real talking would begin.

Exactly then, a carriage rolled into the courtyard.

Anadar recognized it at once.

Not because it was especially splendid, but because Mother never arrived by accident, and certainly never by accident as the last. She had chosen the timing so that she rolled in at the moment when everyone was already there, or almost everyone. Of course she had.

The carriage doors opened.

To Anadar’s surprise, his brother stepped out first.

For a breath he thought he was mistaken. Then he was not. Slonda looked exhausted and a little confused, as if part of him had not quite arrived at the place where his body already stood. But it was him. He was truly here. And before Anadar had fully gathered himself, Slonda was already helping the women down from the carriage, first Mother, then an older woman Anadar did not know, and finally Xian and Nigk.

Both looked worn down. Not only from travel. Different. As if they had seen something that still stood between their eyes and the world even after days.

Last of all, another woman came out of the carriage.

She did not so much step down as creep down. Slim, cautious, with the shy tension of someone who feels terribly out of place among so many mages and who would rather vanish back into shadow, if something or someone had not assured her that she did not need to.

Mother took one step forward, looked around, and let her gaze pass over everyone present.

“Not everyone has arrived yet, as I see.”

She said it as calmly as if she were noting that the tea had not yet been poured. Then she turned slightly to the side.

“Pildara, it is a great honor for me to introduce you to Master Shara and Master Anadar. Shara, Anadar, this is Master Pildara, your brother’s teacher, whom he is slowly driving to despair.”

Mother laughed, bright as a bell.

Pildara looked at the two of them and only gave a brief nod, as if any further gesture would be wasted. Anadar did the same, while Shara immediately went to her and embraced her carefully.

“Pildara, welcome,” Shara said.

For a heartbeat Pildara did not seem quite sure what to do with the embrace, but then she returned it with a curt, almost formal warmth and stepped back again.

Anadar looked at his brother.

In a single instant, so many unspoken questions ran between them that it was almost unbearable. Where were you. What happened. Why do you look like that. Why am I glad to see you. Why is all of this so late. Why now.

In the end, Anadar only said, “The last time I saw you, you did not look this confused.”

Slonda answered without hesitation, “And you looked older.”

That was enough.

The two of them embraced. This time warmly, without the small restraints that so often stand between brothers who love each other and yet too often refuse to let each other see how much it matters. It was the embrace of two men who in the last months had probably asked themselves too many times whether they would ever see each other again.

When they parted, Anadar turned directly to Xian and Nigk.

“You two have a lot to tell.”

Both nodded.

Nigk’s face had grown leaner. Xian seemed calmer and yet more taut, as if she had carried something for days that still needed the right moment to be spoken.

“It is more complicated than all of us thought, yes,” Anadar said.

They nodded again.

“Get yourselves sorted first,” he said. “We will have the chance to talk about it properly.”

Then he lifted his gaze to the slim woman who had come out of the carriage last. She stood slightly behind Mother, almost already at the edge again, and her eyes moved from one mage’s face to the next, as if searching for the place where she could most easily dissolve into air.

“And you,” Anadar said calmly, looking at her directly.

She almost flinched.

Mother answered for her.

“That, Anadar, is the witch Xiodri.” She laid a brief hand on the woman’s arm. “My daughter.”

For a moment, even the courtyard seemed to grow quieter.

Anadar showed nothing, but he registered the smallest twitch around him. The looks. The attention. The thoughts. A word like daughter, in Mother’s mouth, rarely carried only a family meaning.

Mother, meanwhile, was already looking around again as if all of this were merely another necessary introduction.

“Not everyone is present yet,” she said. “I wonder why Gnok is always late.”

Pildara snorted softly. Whether in disapproval or habit was hard to tell.

Mother clapped her hands once, not loud, but decisive enough that even those who had been about to speak paused.

“Freshen yourselves up,” she said. “We have a master to farewell. And then let us take the future in hand.”

No one contradicted her.

Over Tandor, the mourning for Tranda still hung. The banners moved at half height in the wind. But beneath that, in this courtyard, among dusty travelers, tired horses, old women, brothers, exiles, returnees, and those who had brought something back from the North, something else was already taking shape.

Not peace.

Not order.

But the moment when enough people were in the same place that their stories could become more than rumor or fate.

XVIII

Anadar was the one who sought out Xian and Nigk.

Of course he knew that his brother would have important things to tell him too, perhaps even very important things, but he could feel that it could wait a little longer. Slonda was already tied up with Isidre, and Anadar had quickly understood that this was not just about a family reunion. It was about the Earth School. About its future. About Tranda’s death, and everything that would follow from it. A funeral had to be prepared, succession hovered unspoken in the room, and Anadar knew well enough that the Earth School kept its own rites and walked its own paths. So he did something that did not always come easily to him. He set his curiosity aside for a moment and chose priorities.

Xiodri was with Xian and Nigk as well.

When Anadar entered the room, she almost immediately tried to make herself smaller than she already was. It was not crude hiding, more that instinctive recoil of someone suddenly surrounded by exactly the kind of power they had feared all their life. She hunched her shoulders, retreated half a step, and looked at him as if she had to expect that kindness was only a more polite form of judgement.

“Do not be afraid, Xiodri,” Anadar said calmly. “I am not going to hurt you.”

He gave her a moment so the words could even land.

Before she could answer, there was a knock at the door.

It was Shara.

“I got your message,” she said as she stepped in.

“I think this is important,” Anadar replied. “And I do not want them to have to tell it more often than absolutely necessary.”

He smiled faintly, then looked at Xiodri again.

“Although I fear you two will have to repeat yourselves often enough over the next days.”

Shara came closer, but stopped in a way that did not press Xiodri. It was a small movement, almost unnoticeable, and Anadar still caught it at once. Shara understood these things faster than he usually did.

“But first, you, Xiodri,” Anadar said. “No one here belongs to the kind of mage who would put you on a pyre and burn you. Truly not.”

He paused, just long enough that it did not become awkward concern.

“There are mages like that. Sadly. But there are not many here. And before any of them got close to you, they would have to get past Mother. And I think that would be a very poor plan for anyone.”

Xiodri looked at him. The distrust was still there, but it was no longer bare and sharp like in the first instant. Perhaps it was not even his statement that worked, but the way he made it with so little fuss. Not like a verdict, not like a pardon, more like a simple fact.

Then Anadar turned to Xian and Nigk.

“Well,” he said, “you tell us.”

Xian looked at Nigk. Nigk nodded to her.

“Of course,” she said. “But afterwards we also have questions for you.”

She gestured at the stack of papers they had been working on. Reports, Anadar assumed. Notes. Attempts to force what they had lived through into an order that could survive a world that had shown very little order in recent weeks.

“To complete our picture,” Nigk said.

Anadar sat down. Shara took a seat beside him, slightly to the side, quiet, alert, fully present.

And then Xian and Nigk began to tell their story.

They spoke of their path into the north, of pushing into regions that could no longer be described as merely north, but rather as something that had detached itself from the rest of the world. Of winter. Of being snowed in. Of the bear. Of Xiodri. Anadar already knew some of it in rough lines, or had guessed it from what his amulets had signaled to him in life and movement. But all of that was only the edge of what mattered now.

When they came to their onward journey, the tone changed.

They described a spring that did not turn the land friendly, only usable. The travel onward. The capture. The interrogations. Xian described the dark elves, as she had begun to call the foreign species, with a precision born not of inclination but of caution. Anadar and Shara listened closely. Neither had ever heard of such a kind. Not from books. Not from rumors. Not from the half stories that usually anchored even the most unlikely things somewhere in the world.

“They asked us about the amulets,” Xian said. “And about the band.”

“Of course they did,” Anadar murmured.

Nigk pushed his glasses higher. “We are asking the same now. What does the band do.”

Anadar laughed softly.

“The band was for an emergency. If either of you had ever held an end in your hand and torn it, the way I instructed you to, you would have appeared with me.”

Xian stared at him. “Appeared with you.”

“Yes.”

“How.”

“Directly.” He raised his hand, a spell, a kind of protective seal, just slightly modified. He smiled. He was a little proud of himself.

Nigk lifted an eyebrow.

Anadar smiled. “It is a kind of teleportation, if the term means anything to you. Not without danger. But whoever reaches for a last resort is usually already in a difficult situation anyway.”

He leaned back.

“The amulets, meanwhile, did more than just protect you against the Aversion. Through them I also received some information about you. Where you are. Whether you are still alive. What state you are in, in broad terms. I found it interesting, by the way, that these beings seem to understand the function at least in part.”

He glanced at Shara. She met his gaze without speaking. She understood too how much attention and knowledge that observation deserved.

“Master Anadar,” Nigk said then, “it is not only dark elves. It is not a single homogenous gathering of beings. It is not merely armies that have assembled. It is peoples.”

He paused, as if he had to measure the size of the sentence once more.

“They are sending us as envoys,” he continued. “They do not necessarily fear humans and their weapons. They are too many, too organized, and, more importantly, they have the Aversion on their side. What they truly fear are the mages and the schools and the reaction. They cannot judge how powerful the mages are, or how a war against them would end.”

Xian took up the thread.

“If we understood them correctly, their living space underground is shrinking. Old powerful beings are waking down there again, or at least regaining strength, and these beings claim space. They push others upward. We have no real sense of it. We had to believe what they told us. But their account was coherent.”

She spread her fingers, as if her hand had to show how far the problem reached.

Nigk nodded.

“They have decided to claim living space on the surface again. They prepared. The humans of the north were driven away by the Aversion. They adapted to sky, brightness, and open land. Now they are building fortifications and villages. They do not want war. But they will defend themselves if they are attacked.”

As they spoke, Anadar made them describe each creature again, in detail. The dark elves. The dwarves. Other beings that Xian and Nigk could only name imperfectly. He listened not only to their words. He tested their minds. Not violently, not in the blunt way some mages believed truth finding worked. He listened deeper. He found no lie. No foreign overlay. No manipulation he could seize.

“Master,” Xian said then, and there was a certain amazement in her voice at her own conclusion, “I even think they want to trade. If I understood them, they want to barter with humans. Food for goods, for metals, for things they cannot make, or cannot make in the same way.”

Anadar sighed.

Not in rejection. More because it both exceeded and ignited his imagination. He looked at Shara. She had already carried the thought further than he had.

“You told Mother,” he said.

“Not directly,” Xian replied. “She asked questions. As if she already knew what we had lived through and only wanted to hear whether we would confirm it.”

Shara breathed out and leaned back a little.

“Basically,” she said, “it is not your problem, Anadar. Leave it to the Conclave.”

Anadar smiled.

“Right,” he said. “And wrong.”

He folded his hands.

“Manador should know first. If any force is sent, there will be fire mages among them. Perhaps above all fire mages. If he refuses, one question arises. If he does not refuse, another.”

He looked from Xian to Nigk.

“I fear you will have to endure the same questions many times over the next days.”

“This Aversion,” Shara said. “Will it remain.”

“Probably,” Nigk answered. “Or at least in a form strong enough to make a conventional human war difficult.”

“Conventional means, in this case,” Xian said, “thousands of soldiers, supply, camps, occupation, control. All of that becomes impossible and inefficient under the Aversion.”

Anadar snorted softly. “Unless someone makes thousands of amulets.”

Nigk looked at him over the rim of his glasses. “Can you do that.”

Anadar met the look with mild amusement. “No.”

Nigk nodded, as if that answer had calmed him.

“Then such a war is off the table.”

Shara thought further.

“How will the royal houses react. That can decide a great deal.”

Nigk answered at once, as if he had asked himself the question often enough on the way back.

“In principle the Aversion mainly produced refugees. There were no great unified royal houses in the north like those in the south. There were free villages, city alliances, smaller realms, loose lordships. Little to none of that remains. The refugees are scattered, settled elsewhere, begun new lives. They cannot suddenly raise an army and reclaim something.”

“That leaves the intact kingdoms,” Xian said. “They took in refugees, yes. That creates unrest. But they themselves have not been attacked directly. If they are pragmatic, and many rulers are pragmatic when trade, stability, and borders are at stake, then they will push for some form of order rather than a war they do not understand.”

Shara nodded slowly.

“Provided the mages do not drive them in another direction.”

“Exactly,” Nigk said.

Anadar leaned back.

Whoever had devised this plan, he thought, was either a genius, or the world was currently made of many coincidences that all worked together in astonishing ways. Timing. Execution. Knowledge. Restraint. The mix of threat and offer of conversation. He tapped silently on the first.

It was magnificent.

And precisely that silent admiration told him he had to be careful. Not everyone would share his curiosity.

Shara looked at him and recognized the thought immediately.

“You would like to see it with your own eyes,” she said.

Anadar did not even smile anymore. “Yes.”

“Of course you would.”

He lifted his shoulders.

“I still think you should speak to Manador first,” he said then. “Maybe with Mother present. Sinadie would not hurt either. She is smart enough to see the political side without panicking.”

The conversation went on for a while after that, but lighter. They spoke of small things, of exhaustion, of food, of sleep, of the practical problem that hardly any of them had truly rested in weeks. Anadar made sure that Xian, Nigk, and even Xiodri were well enough not to be thrown into something new immediately. Only then did he stand with Shara.

When they left the room and the door closed behind them, he looked at her.

“What do you think of it,” he asked.

“They are not lying,” she answered. “One question remains. Were they lied to, was something staged for them.”

He nodded lightly. “That, and so many other questions.”

He changed the subject. “How will the affairs of the Earth School be steered now.”

Shara thought only briefly.

“Tranda is dead,” she said. “And your brother does not look like someone who will accept succession in his next breath, even if it is placed in his hands. He has too many other things in his grasp right now.”

Anadar nodded.

“We should talk to him soon,” she said.

“Yes,” he answered. “We should.”

XIX

Isidre and Slonda would not deny themselves the last honor of preparing their teacher for his final rest.

In the Earth School, that meant far more than washing, clothing, and saying goodbye. Death was never simply an end that one mourned and then covered with soil. It was a passage, a final state of in between, in which the body was not yet fully abandoned and the spirit had not yet fully grasped that it had cast off the burden of flesh, pain, age, and duty. There were rites for those hours, very old rites, now only rarely performed in full, and one did not leave them to those who were merely pious or shaken. They belonged in the hands of those who knew what they were doing.

That was why they were here.

Deep beneath the earth lay the temple like vault of the school, a place where the chill never relented, not even in high summer. The walls were dark grey stone, worked so smoothly that candlelight ran across them in narrow, flickering lanes. Niches circled the chamber at regular intervals. In some stood small bowls of salt and dried herbs. In others rested old vessels, cloths, rods of black wood, and rolled parchments. In the middle of the vault stood a stone table. Tranda lay upon it.

He lay there quietly, quieter than he had seemed in the last months. The hard pull age had set around his mouth was smoothed away. His brow looked clear. One might almost have believed he was merely resting and would open his eyes at any moment, to look at you with that dry patience that made even a rebuke sound like instruction.

Candles burned around the table.

Many candles.

Their light was warm, but the vault remained cold.

Isidre and Slonda knew the rites. Not only from books. They had learned them, practiced them, repeated them, first under supervision and later themselves, on the few dead who were still granted the full dignity of this old school. But this time was different. This time it was not just any master before them. Not just any elder for whom they owed no reverence.

This time it was Tranda.

Slonda spoke little from the moment they entered the vault. Isidre spoke even less. Every movement was sure, and in that sureness lay something of grief, because both could do what was needed without thinking.

They mixed the pastes.

One was pale green and smelled of fresh herbs, juniper, yarrow, crushed roots. Another was heavier, darker, oily, with that cold mineral note that recalled stone more than plant. A third was almost colorless, only slightly cloudy, and the moment it touched the bowl, a scent rose into the air that felt so old it might have come from the ground itself.

With the first pastes they prepared the body.

They anointed brow, throat, breastbone, the joints of the hands, the temples, the eyelids. Not much. Only enough to mark the crossings, the places where the body still held its last memory of life. Then they took the darker mass and drew signs on the skin. Small, precise lines. Circles at the wrists. Angles at the collarbones. A closed sign over the heart. More on the stone itself, around the body, in a pattern that looked ornamental at first glance and at the second already resembled a language not made for the living.

After that they brought the parchments.

The old sheets cracked softly as Slonda unrolled them. The script was tight and dark, and in places so often retraced that it seemed to have sunk into the material. Isidre set the bowls in the correct order, laid two narrow rods of polished stone ready, and nodded to Slonda.

He began to speak.

His voice was calm at first, but too narrow. Isidre heard it immediately. She stepped closer and steadied the flow of words with her own voice, deeper, calmer, grounding. Together they spoke the working that belonged to an ancient rite. The dead were not to be brought back. Not truly. No false life, no puppet show, no crude sacrilege. Only a final loosening. A final calling. A brief opening of a window through which the spirit, not yet too far away, could speak once more.

With each sentence the vault grew colder.

Not just a little.

The air changed. It became stiller, heavier, and although no door stood open, the candles flickered as if something unseen moved among their ranks. The light gathered against the walls and threw the shadows back sharper. Even the stone beneath their feet seemed to ring differently.

Slonda spoke the final words.

Isidre set the final sign.

Then for a heartbeat there was nothing.

Nothing but cold and breath and the small sound of wax running down a candle.

And then a long, tormented sound came from the dead.

“Ahhhhh.”

Slonda flinched, though he had expected the sound.

“Master,” he said, hoarse.

The dead man’s lips barely moved. The voice was not the voice of a living man. It came deeper, wearier, as if from a chamber where words first had to remember that they had once belonged in a mouth.

“Let me sleep,” Tranda’s voice complained from the dead body.

It was not that the dead enjoyed being called back. People were not dead without reason, and spirits rarely knew they were spirits unless one told them. The first moment was almost always ugly. Confusion, exhaustion, sometimes anger, sometimes only the offended incomprehension of a being that believed it had finally found rest.

Slonda swallowed.

“Master, you have died. It is…”

He broke off. The word weighed more heavily than any summoning formula he had ever spoken.

“…we would like to say farewell to you.”

Again it was quiet.

Then they heard a long, slow exhale, an exhale that should not have been possible from a dead chest.

“Ah,” the voice said. “That is why I feel so free.”

A moment passed.

Then a sound came from the dead body that was almost like a satisfied grunt.

“Slonda.”

There was no weight of death in the address now, but something bright, almost surprised.

“You have a new purpose.”

Slonda blinked. His throat tightened.

“You have taken a different path than the one I had seen for you,” Tranda’s voice continued. It sounded accusing for the space of a heartbeat, and then something in it shifted. “And that is good, is it not?”

A nearly cheerful, unexpected little chuckle came from the dead mouth. It was uncanny and yet so very Tranda that for a moment Slonda thought his heart would break on it.

“This purpose is greater, Slonda. You are meant for something far greater than I ever saw in you.”

Slonda could not answer. Tears stood in his eyes, and he did not even fight them. He had loved this man. Not childishly, not blindly, but with that deep, difficult love students sometimes feel for those who gave them not only knowledge but direction. He owed him so much, and now, even in death, Tranda thought first of him, of his road, of what he would become.

Then the voice turned.

“Isidre.”

At once the tone changed. It became gentler, warmer, almost tender.

“You must take more care of yourself. Much more.”

Isidre lowered her head. She did not even fight the tears. She wept openly, at first silently, then with those small, uncontrolled sounds a person makes when dignity, for a brief moment, is no longer the most important thing.

“That is your great weakness,” the voice from the dead dean said. “Putting others above yourself. But it is also your great strength, is it not?”

Isidre sobbed without restraint.

A deep silence settled over the chamber. Only her weeping could be heard, and Slonda, no longer able to hold himself together, let his own tears run as well. Candlelight flickered. The cold remained, but it no longer felt empty. It felt dense, almost full of something one could neither touch nor hold.

Then Tranda spoke again, and this time every softness had gone from his voice.

“Now listen. Both of you.”

At once they straightened.

“In the last weeks without you, a new zeal has taken hold in the school. Others, who are not of this school, want influence. And they have gained influence. They have gained people, in the shadow of your absence.”

The voice paused.

“These are not good intentions. They use means and methods to reach power, and we all know that precisely this is forbidden to us.”

Isidre lifted her tear blinded head. Slonda stood suddenly still as a drawn wire.

Then came the sentence.

“Isidre. Slonda. I was poisoned. Slowly. By one or more of these zealots.”

And with that the voice was gone.

Not slowly. Not with farewell. Not with a final word. It was simply not there anymore. The cold remained for a breath, perhaps two. Then it eased. The candles calmed. The dead body on the stone became again what it had been.

Only the sentence remained.

Poisoned.

Isidre and Slonda looked at one another.

The grief was not gone. But it had changed color in an instant. What had been pain was now overlaid with another heat, sharp and bright, so bright it almost felt cold.

Neither of them spoke.

They did not need to.

Habit took over.

With a speed that was almost frightening, they began preparing the next part. Not the rite anymore. Now came work. Ugly, precise, sober work, work that did not honor the dead but used them to wrench truth from their silence.

Isidre pulled out fresh cloths. Slonda reached for instruments. Small knives. Tongs. Stone bowls. A mortar. Two shallow porcelain dishes. Salt. Charcoal. Sulfur. Fine metal powder. Reagents that were common tools in the Earth School when one needed to know what had been inside a body before it died.

They took samples.

Hair.

Several strands, close to the scalp.

Teeth.

Not many. One was enough, then a second for comparison.

Nails.

A piece of skin from the inside of the arm.

Remains from mouth and throat, though both already knew that a slow poison rarely left much there.

They worked quietly. None of their movements were frantic. Only fast. Their anger did not make them imprecise. It made them more careful. Slonda ground material in small portions, mixed it with ash, separated what could be dissolved, and noted almost automatically color, smell, behavior. Isidre tested the common poisons, first the simple ones, then the subtler. They dissolved substances in water, in oil, in weak acids. They held metal above them, heated samples, let vapors condense in cooled tubes, and tested what remained.

But only when they examined the contents of the stomach did suspicion tighten into certainty.

The sample was unpleasant. Black brown, viscous, old, and yet not too old to still hold traces. They added zinc and another metal, brought the mixture to react over a small flame, and guided the rising vapors into a shallow porcelain dish. For a long time it seemed that nothing happened.

Then, very slowly, a fine mirror formed on the pale inner surface.

Dark.

Metallic.

Undeniable.

Isidre stepped back half a pace.

Slonda stared at the mirror as if he had to read it again through hatred.

“Arsenic,” he said.

Neither of them sounded surprised. Only confirmed.

Slonda set his hands on the table and looked at the dead body of his teacher for a long time.

“Who uses arsenic to kill a mage,” he asked at last, “and an old mage at that.”

Isidre stood upright, her eyes still reddened, but her voice again completely calm.

“Someone who was in a hurry,” she said. “And with few scruples.”

Then she looked over to Tranda.

“Or someone who believed age would finish the work and no one would look too closely.”

Slonda nodded slowly.

The candles burned on.

The dead man lay still between them.

And in the cold chamber beneath the earth, grief began to change into something else. Not revenge, not yet. But direction. Intention. The first clear line of a path that would lead away from this stone table and straight up into the school, into its corridors, its faces, its alliances, and into whatever had grown in the shadows while they had been absent.

XX

Before Master Tranda’s burial, Tandor carried that peculiar tension a great house can hold when grief, politics, and expectation are forced to share one room for a few hours.

The ceremony had been set for one of the larger halls of the school. Outwardly, this was a fortunate circumstance, because Tranda’s funeral and public farewell could explain, to any outsider, in a perfectly credible way, why so many foreign mages were suddenly present in the halls of the Earth School. No one needed to grow suspicious. No one needed to ask why Fire, Wind, Water, Spirit, and the few others who did not belong here were now standing and waiting. An old master had died. The schools paid him their last honors. That was explanation enough.

And yet, of course, anyone with eyes could see that more hung in the air than mere mourning.

So they stood in small clusters, speaking in muted tones, while servants, students, and younger mages kept to the edges and pretended to be occupied with candles, benches, and cloths. Sinadie spoke with Shara and Manador. It was not an easy conversation, because too much had happened in recent days, it was one of those serious talks where people who do not think alike at least agree that they must be useful to one another. Mother stood a little apart with Anadar and Pildara, and already in the way the three of them stood together there was something that unsettled others, even if no one could have said why. Roto, meanwhile, had drawn Morgut to himself and talked to him about Ashambrat, about the school, about teachers, habits, and the soothing rhythm of life one often misses only after being away long enough. Miene and Sindra, of course, kept close, almost with the solemn zeal of two Spirit students who might not yet have admitted to themselves that they simply wanted to stay near Morgut as long as he was within reach.

Morgut only half listened to Roto. It did him good to hear Ashambrat spoken of again. He missed the city, missed the familiar routes, the garden, the fixed structure of his youth, the daily routines that had once seemed self evident and that now, in retrospect, felt almost like a lost luxury. Even things that had once bored him now seemed precious. That Roto delivered it all with a generous voice and much gesture did not even bother him in that moment.

Then the door opened.

It was not a particularly loud sound. No grand gesture, no entrance that meant to demand attention. And yet many heads turned at once, perhaps because in such rooms every newcomer immediately gained weight, perhaps also because everyone already felt that the line of arrivals was not quite complete.

In the doorway stood an older gentleman.

At first glance, Morgut found him familiar without being able to place him. Thin, old, slightly bent, but with a posture that suggested his age was not weakness so much as its own form of resolve. Then Morgut’s eyes caught the figure directly behind him.

He had expected many things.

Not his sister.

For a moment his jaw quite literally fell open. That was Gnok. And behind him stood Gudi, only she had been smaller in his memory, younger, more sister and less suddenly a person of her own who simply appeared in the middle of Tandor as if someone had pulled a thought from his head and set it into the doorframe.

She saw him.

And in the next heartbeat she let out a loud cry of joy that was infinitely inappropriate for a funeral and ran.

“Morgut.”

She threw herself around his neck with a force that showed she had developed not only in magic over the last weeks but in physicality as well, and tears were already running down her face. Morgut, who had been prepared for all manner of things but not for this, turned instantly deeply embarrassed and at the same time overwhelmed by a joy he could not fend off.

“Gudi,” he managed.

He tried to muffle her jubilation somehow, to get her quieter, to remind her of the surroundings, of Tranda, of the hall, of the many watching people. He failed. So he did the only possible thing and hugged her just as tightly, perhaps out of joy, perhaps with the secret hope of pressing enough air from her lungs that she would be unable to keep cheering for a moment.

The whole murmur in the hall fell silent.

Everyone turned toward the two of them.

Then a new, distinctly more indulgent murmuring began, offended in some, amused in others, curious in almost all.

Miene and Sindra immediately wore the expression only very young women can wear when jealousy catches them faster than dignity can restrain it. Who was this girl. Why did she hug Morgut like that. Why was she crying. Why did Morgut look at once so startled and so glad.

At the edge of the hall, Gnok slipped in with visibly mixed feelings.

He moved the way people move when they hope that maximum inconspicuousness will keep them from being noticed, while every second person in the room was already paying attention to him because of the girl’s entrance. Still, he kept his course toward Mother, Pildara, and Anadar as if that were the only safe island in the midst of the suddenly lively scene.

“So much for an inconspicuous arrival,” he murmured with an embarrassed smile.

Then he bowed before Mother, took her hands in his, and kissed them with a matter of course ease that revealed old forms of familiarity between them that no one else in the hall fully understood.

“Good morning, Mother.”

“Good morning, Gnok,” she said, and her voice softened without losing depth.

Then he turned to Pildara.

“Pildara. It has been so long since I saw you.”

He took her hands in his as well, and she not only allowed it but in return stroked his face briefly with both hands as if checking whether time and reality had shaped him as she expected.

“My old, old friend,” she said softly. “How I have missed you.”

Anadar stood beside them and for a moment almost felt excluded. It was as if three people were meeting here who had known one another across so many years, perhaps across ages, that even memory had a different density between them. There was nothing unpleasant in that old closeness, only something so large it placed him briefly at the edge.

At last Gnok turned to him.

“Master Anadar,” he said with a small bow. “Ashambrat has grown lonelier without you in our city. I miss our conversations.”

Anadar smiled.

“Master Gnok. I also associate the most pleasant hours in the city of wind with you.”

It was not mere politeness. Both of them knew it.

Mother had waited out the brief greetings, but as soon as they were done she picked up the thread of her conversation with Anadar again as if she had never let it go.

“Forgive my curiosity,” she said, “but can you tell me where you left your friend. It is not that I miss him. But…”

She left the sentence open.

Anadar looked at her.

He knew exactly that she did not want to be satisfied later. She wanted an answer now. Not just any answer, a precise one. It was written in her face. He did not even need to touch her mind.

“I think we should speak in detail later,” he said first. “There is quite a lot we must discuss.”

The answer did not satisfy her. Not in the slightest.

So he continued.

“I returned him to his original owner.”

Mother stared at him.

Anadar went on before she could interrupt.

“Fantor was still alive. I was able to hand the demon over to him.”

She opened her mouth. Once. Twice. But for a moment no word came out. Even Pildara lifted her head more sharply, and Gnok, who could usually smile past many things, now looked at Anadar with undisguised interest.

“They are buried beneath a tower,” Anadar said. “I think that should hold them for a while. Until we have found a final solution for them.”

Mother closed her mouth again and narrowed her eyes slightly. Her face held the expression that was more dangerous than open anger.

“That sword and the demon inside it,” she said slowly, “are not exactly something one should leave unattended somewhere.”

Anadar countered at once.

“And it is not exactly something one carries everywhere so it can listen to everything and everyone.”

For a heartbeat the two of them simply stood facing each other.

Then the bells rang.

Not loud, not sharp, but with that full, calm sound by which great schools mark the beginning and boundary of their ceremonies. Conversations in the hall broke off or sank instantly into whispering.

“We need to talk,” Mother said.

Then she closed her hand around Anadar’s and pressed it briefly.

“A great deal, Anadar.”

She smiled at him, not soft, but with a warmth that in that moment weighed almost more than the rebuke.

“See that you bring Shara, Manador, Isidre, your brother, and Sinadie together today. We have much to discuss.”

Then she let go, turned toward the hall, and became again that golden, old, unshakable figure who in a room full of masters immediately made it feel as though the rhythm of the entire day belonged to her.

And while Morgut finally loosened his hold on his sister, while Miene and Sindra tried to pull their faces back into a shape that did not reveal everything at once, and while the conversations in the hall now fell completely silent, the burial of Master Tranda began.

But beneath the grief, beneath the dignity, and beneath all ritual forms, something else had long been waiting.

Not only farewell.

Formularbeginn

Formularende

XXI

It took a long time before the ceremonial part was finished.

Tranda’s burial was not of the brief and quiet kind that gives the dead to the earth quickly and leaves the rest to the living. He had been too important for that, too long at the heart of the school, too deeply bound up with the paths, thoughts, and fates of others. They gave him time. Perhaps too much time, Anadar thought at one point. Perhaps, though, that was exactly what was fitting. A man like Tranda left behind more than an empty chair and a proper grave. He left behind habits, standards, fears, loyalties, memories, and unanswered questions. All of that, it seemed, had to be laid to rest as well.

Speeches were given.

Many speeches.

Slonda had prepared one, and he delivered it with that mixture of self control and visible inner movement that was his whenever he had to hold himself together so he would not fail on his own feelings. He did not speak of Tranda’s rank. Not of his position. Not of how many years he had led the Earth School or at how many Conclaves his name had carried weight. He spoke of him as a teacher. As someone who had patience where others would have long since grown irritated, who encouraged without pushing himself to the front, who was direct without ever belittling, who named mistakes without treating them as stains. And then, near the end, Slonda spoke of him as a friend, and in that single word there was more truth than in everything ceremonial before it, so much that the hall grew quieter than it had for any more artful sentence.

Isidre spoke as well.

More concise than Slonda. Clearer. Less searching. She looked as if she clung to form because form was the only thing keeping her, in that moment, from collapsing completely. She too spoke of Tranda as a teacher, as a man who never confused humiliation with instruction, who demanded more of you than was comfortable and yet always remained, in that peculiar way, fair. She told a short anecdote about how he once made her sit for three hours in front of a single stone until she finally understood that the problem was not in the stone, but in her impatience. Some smiled at that. A few even laughed softly. And that, Anadar thought, was right. Part of mourning was remembering the dead not only as loss, but as a living human being.

After that, others stepped forward.

Some meant it sincerely. You could hear it. They spoke of Tranda’s calm, of his craft, of his heavy, dry intelligence that many only recognized as precious in hindsight. Others, however, were already using the moment for something else. Not crudely. Not openly. No one was foolish enough to play politics openly at a burial. But in the background it had already begun to work. Some speeches grew longer than they needed to be. Some began with Tranda and ended, conspicuously, with the order of the school, the responsibility of the masters, the necessity of stability in difficult times. One or two speakers even managed to place themselves so neatly at the center of their words that you could almost have believed Tranda’s greatest achievement had been recognizing them in time. Anadar saw the small glances, the sideways shifts, the nodding in the wrong places, the fine sharpening of attention at certain phrases. Yes, he thought, even beside a dead man the world could not stop itself.

It took a long time.

Too long for him.

He waited. Half listened. With one part of his mind he followed the speeches, and with the other he was already chasing the question of when he would finally be able to speak to his brother alone. Slonda was pulled into small groups after each address, into condolences, memories, solemn sentences spoken only because a man in his position was expected to receive them. Isidre had the same happen to her, only she was far less compliant about it.

Only when the heaviest part was over and the hall began to dissolve into motion did Anadar finally manage it.

Slonda was standing in a group of older mages who spoke with the serious expressions of men who, in grief, confirm their own importance to one another. Anadar simply walked up to them, stepped close enough to catch his brother briefly by the sleeve, and said with calm inevitability:

“You will excuse us. We have not seen each other in a long time.”

Without waiting for an answer, he took Slonda with him.

Slonda let himself be drawn along, glanced back for one heartbeat, and then he was with Anadar, and as soon as they were out of direct earshot Anadar began without any detour.

“You find me at the beginning of the library, Slonda. Whatever that is supposed to mean. Where in hell is this. And where have you been all this time.”

Slonda looked at him.

Not hurt, not even surprised, rather as if he had expected exactly this opening. He glanced around briefly, instinctively checking the surroundings, and then lowered his voice.

“Let us go outside. I do not want anyone to hear this.”

So they went.

First out of the hall. Then out of the school. And even when they had left the courtyards and corridors behind, Slonda kept going until they were outside the city, to where the roads widened, the murmur of Tandor fell back behind them, and there was only evening air, grass, and the distant stone of the walls.

Only then did Slonda begin to speak.

“Anadar,” he said, and his voice sounded almost strange in the open air, “the schools, all of it, it is old. And even more rotten than we thought. I do not know where to begin. And I do not know how much you will believe me. I can hardly believe it myself.”

Anadar looked at him and smiled faintly.

“You do not believe what has happened to me lately.”

That was all it took.

Then they both told their stories.

Not neatly ordered. Not in calm sequence. Not with that comfortable distance stories gain when you recount them years later. They spoke quickly and haltingly and kept pushing new things at each other, as if testing how much truth another person could bear before he broke or laughed.

Slonda spoke first of his journey into the past. Of Drinda, then Pildara. Of time magic. Of the realization that there had once been not six schools, but twelve. Of old codices. Of changes that had been brought about deliberately. Of annihilation. Of erasure. Of the violence with which knowledge had been cut out of history until the world itself had forgotten what had been taken from it. He came to the point where he admitted that back then he had sabotaged them, meaning that he had done it in the future, meaning not yet, and that he did not even know the reason yet.

“It is confusing,” he finished, looking at his brother as if for help.

Anadar listened and took it all in without interrupting, except for the short questions with which he made sure he had the lines right.

Then he told his own.

Of Naaarstr. Of the demon and its growing corruption inside his head. Of the blood lust, the massacre of the raiders. Of the sea monster. Of the images the kraken had shown him. Of old blood. Of things older than the schools and perhaps still alive within them. Of Fantor. Of the binding. Of the transfer of the demon. Of the collapsed tower in Sontor. Of the Aversion in the north. Of Nigk and Xian. Of Manador’s discovery of the School of Light beneath the Fiery Fortress. And of Shara’s pregnancy.

“Midwinter Feast in Zoordak,” Slonda asked, and Anadar nodded. “She arranged it.”

“Congratulations, I suppose.” He looked his brother in the eyes, and there was so much warmth in that look.

When they were finished, evening had already fallen.

The air had grown colder. The city lay behind them in darker stone, and before them the land ran off in gentle shadows. They stood there in silence, looking at each other. Now each had been given an image of the other, a larger image than before, and that was precisely why it had become harder to form any image at all. The things they carried grew beyond imagination. It was as if you had laid two halves of a map on top of each other and only then realized that the whole was not smaller, but unimaginably vast.

They stood in wordless disbelief.

Then Mother’s voice sounded in their minds.

“If the two gentlemen are now finished ruling everything else out, they can also make their way to Tranda’s study chamber. The rest of us are waiting for you, to enlarge the picture even further.”

Both of them flinched inwardly in the same childish way.

They felt scolded at once.

Not like masters. Not like men who had just shattered the boundaries of their world view. But like two boys who had gone too far and were now being called back inside.

Slonda pulled a face.

“Does she always speak to someone in that tone.”

Anadar replied dryly:

“No. Only lately she has stopped pretending.”

“My gentlemen,” Mother said in their heads, and now it sounded as if there were a smile in it, “I am still present.”

All three of them laughed.

It was only brief, but it loosened something.

Then the two brothers set off back toward Tandor, up into the city, through its streets now grown quieter, into the school and on to Tranda’s study chamber, where the others were already waiting, and where the picture that had only just begun to show its true size would be expanded once more.

Formularbeginn

Formularende

XXII

Gnok stood in a room that was just large enough to hold all nine of them without making anyone feel cramped, and yet tight enough that no one could retreat into the noncommittal safety of a grand hall. The fire crackled in the hearth and cast warm light across walls, shelves, maps, and the faces of those present. Pildara stood slightly apart, quiet and collected, as if even waiting for words was, for her, a form of discipline. Mother had not sat down, but moved with that calm, golden self possession that made it hard to say whether she was listening, steering, or already knew what would be said. Isidre and Sinadie had come as well, and Manador, Shara, Slonda, and Anadar. All of them had taken their places around the large table, and above that table there now hovered, conjured by Gnok’s hand, a model of the planetary system.

It was not a still image. The planets glowed in different colors, paler and darker orbits ran through the air like the finest lines of light, and small points, moons or distant bodies, moved in slow, inexorable order around larger spheres. The sun hung in the center, calm and awake. To its right was Jondus, their world, muted in green and blue, and farther out, on another track, Maohanga, the sister planet, more golden, more matte, seeming larger, as if even at a greater distance it still carried weight enough to press on everything.

Gnok raised his head. His face was serious, but not heavy. Rather it carried the strange clarity of a man who has waited long enough for a moment to refuse it haste and false ceremony. “What I am about to tell you, my friends,” he began, “may gnaw at your reason. It may seem unbelievable, it may seem impossible, and some of you will think, at first, that I have grown old in a way that does not become even me. But I am telling you the truth.”

No one interrupted. Even Manador, who in other matters tended to frown and speak up quickly when something leaned too far in one direction, stayed silent. The mood in the room was too clear, and so was the weight of what Gnok had already announced with his first sentence. He lifted his hand and pointed to Maohanga. “That there is Maohanga. Some of you call it the sister planet, some of you know only old songs and a great deal of poor half knowledge about it, but it is time we stop circling things like children when they shape our whole existence. This is the current configuration of our system.”

He drew two fingers through the air, and Jondus flared brighter. “And this is Jondus. Our world.” The light paths trembled briefly and reordered themselves. “Maohanga is moving back into the vicinity of our world. Not in a way any farmer would grasp with the naked eye, and not in a way that makes our seas split open overnight or our mountains collapse tomorrow. But in the order of forces, in the relation of things, in the hidden tides of the world that lie deeper than water and wind, this approach is of the greatest importance.”

He walked slowly around the table, and as he spoke, the system turned onward under his hand, almost imperceptibly. “When Maohanga draws near, it is not simply that light changes or shadows lengthen. A mutual effect begins. A resonance. The forces of both worlds reach into one another, and with that touch more free energy becomes available in the space between. The world grows more permeable. Magic becomes easier. Not kinder, not darker, not wiser, only easier. What once had to be bundled with effort, what had to be gathered in small streams and forced into shape, stands then richer, more open, more immediate.”

He smiled narrowly. “Most people call it free magic, because people love to invent large terms when they cannot truly explain something. But the phrase is not entirely wrong. There is more freedom in it, more rawness, more possibility. And that, my friends, is why so much is changing. Not because the world has suddenly gone mad. Not because people have become strange. But because the conditions beneath all of this are shifting.”

Sinadie slowed her breathing without meaning to. Isidre had set her hands on the edge of her chair as if she needed something solid while the unseen around them widened. Shara did not look at Gnok but at Maohanga, as if she were already trying to think through consequences from the planet’s mere position. Anadar and Slonda said nothing. Both had seen too much already to answer this first blow with open astonishment.

Gnok turned the system slowly back. Maohanga moved on its path, farther and farther from Jondus, until it stood almost exactly opposite, as distant as it could be within the model. “Here,” Gnok said, “near one hundred eighty degrees, at the greatest distance, lies a time many of you would call old, though in truth it was only a phase of thinning. Magic was rare then. Not gone, but feeble. Whoever cast spells had to strain, truly strain. Not a gesture, not a word, not a pretty spark out of the sleeve, but strength, gathering, concentration. In those years, out of necessity, things were combined that were never separated again.”

He pointed at Slonda and Anadar together, as if for a moment they belonged to the model. “It was the time when Illusion and Spirit fused. The time when Earth and Necromancy were bound together. Not because it was the highest wisdom, but because there were too few students and too little force to keep the luxury of pure schools. What had grown small was pressed tighter. What was scarce had to be shared.” He moved Maohanga forward again. “Let us go farther back.” The golden light drew closer.

“Here, long before that lean time, but already in a phase of weakening, fall several of the crimes our history later hid so carefully. Here the School of Light was destroyed.” Manador raised his head at those words. Not guilty, but struck. Gnok noticed and let his gaze rest on him for a moment, not accusingly, but with the quiet agreement of a man who knows the past rarely belongs to anyone without many hands on it. “It was a struggle for power,” Gnok said. “An ugly one, unjust, and poorly disguised. Fire against Light, closeness against closeness, jealousy against kinship. Woman against man. Later they explained it with purity, with danger, with order, with everything people say when they want to turn filth into necessity after the fact. But it was what it was. An erasure.”

He let the image run a little farther. “Here, Transformation fell to an inquisition. Some later called it deserved. Others called it overdue. Still others knew so little of it that they could not even form a judgment. I have never cared much for judgments spoken afterward, when the last stone already lies on the mass grave.” Pildara lifted one corner of her mouth, not contradicting, merely showing she knew the sentence and agreed.

“Here,” Gnok continued, “the Transformers in Varakht in the north were razed to the ground. And with the city the memory of them was erased. Not only walls, not only people, memory. A crime of its own, spoken of too little, because those who erase memory always hope to erase the verdict as well.” He turned on. “And here, at about sixty two degrees, the Summoners were hunted down. Sahretûn, that uncanny city in the south, fell to destruction. Legends say hell itself swallowed the city, and it has waited ever since in another dimension to be spit out one day. I am old enough to say that legends often rest on a core of truth that has grown too hot to touch directly.”

He glanced briefly at Anadar. Several noticed it. “The Summoners grew weaker then as Maohanga moved farther away. That was their misfortune, and our luck. Had they stood in a time like the one we are entering again, the hunt might not have been enough. But I will not pretend they were innocent victims. They were warped, and uncanny from the start. Not every loser in history is automatically its lamb.”

He moved Maohanga once more. “Here, at about sixty degrees, the first school left the Conclave voluntarily. The School of Time from Gontar.” Only the older ones smiled. Gnok himself could not resist a brief dry grin. “Never before and never after was a School of Time rich in students. Not least because some of its masters tended to be present only in the years they liked.” Mother laughed softly. Pildara as well. The others looked between them and sensed they had grasped something that was a joke for the old and merely another sign for the young of how deep this story ran.

Then Gnok slid Maohanga farther back until it stood at about thirty degrees. The light in the room seemed different now, or perhaps it was only the sense among those present that they were nearing an older, denser world. “Here,” Gnok said, “the twelve schools were founded.” Silence. “Twelve,” Sinadie repeated, almost without voice. “Twelve,” Gnok confirmed. “And no, I will not promise that this knowledge will be pleasant tonight.”

He swept his hand through the air, and beside the planetary system, supported by Pildara, signs appeared, crests, stylized forms, twelve rather than six, some familiar, some strange. “By then magic had already grown weaker. Not weak, that would be a mistake, but weaker. One had to begin to shape it, bundle it, guide it. That did not happen out of love for rules, nor because early masters suddenly took pleasure in order. It happened out of necessity. The force had to be channeled before it could be released. Forms arose because the world itself demanded them. And the Codex was not written for nothing. The schools were founded so they could watch one another. Not only to preserve knowledge, but to limit one another.” Gnok and Pildara looked at each other. A brief, serious understanding passed between them, and Anadar realized that between those two there was a shared memory of things deeper than knowledge.

In the room, the words had to settle. Sinadie sat with composure that barely hid her shock. Manador had laid both hands flat on the table as if he needed something firm to keep from being carried away by this new vastness. Shara looked from the system to the faces and back again, already weighing political consequences against historical ones, and historical ones against personal ones. Only Anadar and Slonda seemed less surprised than the others, yet even they could see in the faces around them how great the shock truly was. The fire crackled in the hearth, an everyday sound, almost indecently normal, holding the scene together as Gnok went on.

“Between here,” he said and moved Maohanga to about twenty degrees, “began the greatest crime of humankind. But I think I will tell the story from the beginning.” He shifted the sister planet even farther back until it stood at about five degrees. “Here,” he said more softly, “the human was created.”

Pildara raised her hand. Beside the planetary system, images appeared, first only hazy, then clearer. Beings so beautiful and strange that some in the room drew breath without meaning to. Tall figures of light and fabric. Faces neither soft nor hard, but perfect in a way far from human beauty. Around them grew trees with silver leaves, animals with translucent fur, flowing gardens, water that was not merely water, but a sustaining part of something greater. “The human was created by beings,” Gnok said, “so mighty and beautiful that our language becomes small the moment it tries to describe them. They loved bringing new things into the world, forms, kinds, thoughts, song, color, life. And at the beginning the human was pure. Good. Beautiful. It fit into creation, because it too was a magical being, like those created before it. Magic was abundant in the world, overabundant.”

Pildara’s images continued to grow. Elves appeared. Dwarves. Unicorns with skins like liquid moonlight. Dragons, vast and effortless, making the room feel smaller. Angels. Devils. And beings for which even Anadar would have had no names, though he had seen more than enough. For moments an entire early world hung in the air, carried by Pildara’s art, and all listened as if they had been granted the flare of a lost creation. Gnok spoke on as Maohanga drifted slowly to ten, then fifteen degrees. “Then humankind began to create in turn, first out of curiosity, then out of ambition, then out of habit. It made beings to serve, to help, to carry work and burden. Spirits. Goblins. Djinn. Other creatures, some still with us today, others long forgotten. And it made something else.”

Pildara’s images darkened. “The demons.” The air in the room changed, not in truth, but in everyone’s perception. What had been wonder became tension. “At first they were creations too,” Gnok said. “Not born of themselves, not ancient in the sense of a beginning without origin. They were made. For battle. For hardness. For violence. As tools. As weapons. As beings meant to intervene precisely where humans believed the beautiful was no longer enough.” Pildara showed halls, circles of signs, shapes in the making, woven from light and darkness. Then the images tipped. “But serving was not enough for them. Not for long. They were given strength, will, hunger, and the task to overcome, and so they wanted, sooner or later, not to serve but to rule. If you let yourself be made into a weapon and still keep awareness, you will one day think of biting the hand that guides you.”

Pildara’s pictures grew cruel. Demons breaking chains. Gates collapsing. Cities under fire. Humans fleeing from their own creations. Demonic figures, in all their splendor and horror, grasping for power, first over their makers, then over everything. “They freed themselves,” Gnok said. “And once free, they wanted to subjugate the world. They did not want to live, they wanted to dominate. Everything that carried power, everything that resisted, everything beautiful, old, or great, became for them both target and nourishment. Old blood lured them most, the blood of the old peoples, of the elves, of the dragons, of others whose names no longer exist in our clean chronicles.”

Maohanga stood at about fifteen degrees. “Then came the great war.” Pildara widened the images: a coalition of peoples, banners and armies, sorcerers, not mages, for that was what they were called in a time when there was still enough force in the world for the word to sound larger. Dragons beside humans. Elves beside dwarves. Beings of light and those of earth. Everything that still understood that demons had to be bound, not merely beaten, because their full unchaining could tear the universe itself. “It was nearly the annihilation of the universe,” Gnok said quietly, “and I do not use that phrase lightly. Forces were unleashed that none of you could responsibly command today, even if you could gather them. Continents suffered. Seas were opened. Skies were broken. And in the end, only through a union the world never saw again, the demons were bound.”

He fell silent briefly. “But after that, nothing was good.” The images showed no victories, only exhaustion, mistrust, scorched world. “Even when the demons were trapped, mistrust remained. Peoples who had fought together turned against one another again. Magic grew less. Resources grew scarcer. Humankind multiplied. It needed space. And not every human was still a magical being. Some called it corruption. Others called it punishment. Still others merely recognized a consequence of a world that had seen too much blood, too much betrayal, too much spent force.”

Maohanga slid back to twenty degrees. Gnok’s face hardened. “And then the greatest crime of humankind occurred.” Pildara let the images go dark. No beauty now, only betrayal. “Mages appeared again who managed to summon demons. Again. They bound them. They forced them. They made them servants and used them. Not against vermin. Not against bandits. Not out of need. No. Against the older blood.” In the images were elven children, dwarf halls, fleeing beings, burning forests, demons trained onto specific old lines like hunting dogs onto a particular scent. “Here the true genocide began,” Gnok said. “Not the war against the demons, but the time after. Humans took the very creations that had helped end the great evil and set new evils upon them. They used demons to destroy the old peoples one by one or drive them away, to hunt elves, to bring down dragons, to press everything out of the world that was older, stronger, or deeper in magic than themselves.”

Pildara’s pictures were almost unbearable. Cruel images of betrayal, alliances ending in blood, old halls collapsing from within, beings retreating into the last corners of the world, flight across burning plains, hunted beauty, vanishing lines. “Magic grew weaker. The old peoples were few. Humans were more, louder, greedier, and so the old ones lost more and more ground until they vanished. Some entirely. Some almost. Some so thoroughly from memory that only stories remained, stories people later laughed at by the fire.” No one laughed.

Maohanga moved back to thirty degrees. “No old blood visible in the open,” Gnok said. “Humankind had made the world its own, but magic had nearly withdrawn from it as well. So the schools were founded, not from wisdom alone, but from lack. And when the Summoners were finally erased at about sixty two degrees, they had long since done their work for humankind. The human is not a grateful being.”

Pildara’s images slowly dissolved. Only the planetary system remained above the table. No one spoke. The first birds were already calling when Gnok and Pildara finished. The fire in the hearth had shrunk, the candles had burned low, and morning light began to seep through the windows with great caution. They had stood and sat there all night, hearing, seeing, understanding, and not understanding. Everything in them was overfull.

Manador stared at Maohanga as if his whole life had just been set on a new axis and he did not yet know whether he would stand or fall. Sinadie looked paler than at the start, but also clearer, as if she loved truths most when they were dangerously large. Isidre sat straight and still, both hands in her lap, and in her gaze worked that relentless order with which some people force the monstrous to not fall apart, at least in thought. Shara had folded an arm over her body and looked from one face to another, as if testing which future each of these people could still carry. Slonda and Anadar stood beside each other, and neither tried anymore to shrink with words what had been opened before them.

Then they heard noise in the courtyard. Not loud at first, more like a disturbance in the morning, wheels on stone, calls, the kind of movement that did not belong to a house where the night had just ended in shaken silence. Anadar went to the window, squinted down into the early light, and saw what had arrived below. A carriage. Doors opening. People stepping out. And among them three figures he disliked at once. “The inquisition has arrived in Tandor,” he said. He did not need to add whom he meant. Below, Fontal, Form, and Klasst stepped out of the carriage.

End book 5