Anadar VI/I

Prologue

It had grown warmer.

Not suddenly, not in a single baleful night, but over years, so slowly that you noticed the change first only in small inconveniences and could therefore too easily have taken it for imagination. The air in the lower halls had become heavier. Water that used to run cold down the walls came in some places only lukewarm from the stone. Old shafts that had been considered safe for generations began to steam. Metal won deep below could in certain chambers barely be stored without quickly turning dull. And with the warmth came the sightings.

At first only isolated.

A charred passage where the walls had suddenly melted glassy. A squad of guards who swore they had seen, for a heartbeat, a red glowing eye in a fissure of rock. Claw marks in basalt. The sulfurous, dry smell of something that should not have been there.

Then the reports became more frequent.

Lava dragons were seen again in the deeper regions. Great, hungry creatures whose scales looked like hardened crust and in whose cracks a smoldering red pulsed, as if they carried fire in their bones. They were not particularly reasonable, and that was their saving grace. They followed the flows, the heat, the veins of molten stone. They burrowed toward whatever was warm and open, and if you avoided them with enough skill or lured them in another direction, they often moved on.

The devils were worse.

Zarard knew that well enough, because he had seen both. He was prince of the dark elves, brother of King Neida and older than Neida’s children. Not next in the line of succession, and grateful for it. Neida wore the crown, Neida also endured Dwiad’s unshakable gaze at his side, and Neida had the task of holding the future together. Zarard, by contrast, was allowed to do what he did better. Observe. Assess. Fight when necessary. Run when running was the wiser form of survival. A prince who did not have to inherit could be more honest than a king.

He knew when a fight was worth it.

He knew when hiding had a chance of success.

And he knew when you had to run for your life.

The lava dragons were danger.

The devils were intent.

They were cleverer than the dragons, crueler, and far more curious. Their tails lashed behind them. Horns grew from their skulls as if out of some ancient malice. Their feet ended in hard, cloven hooves that did not stumble on stone but hammered it. Some were slender and fast, others squat and ugly in a way that was almost insulting, but all of them shared that malicious alertness that Zarard at once associated with enemies who did not merely hunger, but took pleasure in spreading fear.

And it did not stop with them.

Again and again reports came up from the lower zones about other creatures. Beings that had previously appeared only in the stories of old guards or in the unpleasantly precise notes of ancient scouts. Ember people. Lava people. Figures half stone, half molten mass, slow, unstoppable, unpleasantly hard to kill. Not seen for millennia, and now they were appearing again.

The lower halls finally had to be abandoned.

Not all at once. Not by one great, ceremonial decision, but section by section, corridor by corridor, level by level. First they closed only the deepest extraction shafts, those zones where ores, rare metals and black crystals were mined. Then the storage chambers followed. Finally entire side halls and connecting tunnels. Those areas had never been meant for living or for growing food. But they had been valuable, and losing them hurt. Worse was the realization that the creatures would not simply remain below.

They pressed upward.

Slowly, but steadily.

The dark elves had retreated into the underground long ago and built their cities there, not as humans did in straight streets and open squares, but in a mesh of passages, halls, niches, bridges, shafts and high vaults that could be inhabited even along the ceilings. Their way of building was different, as everything about them was different. Dark elves could hang upside down from stone surfaces as if gravity were only a polite recommendation. Their feet were almost hands. Their toes gripped. Their tails kept balance, supported turns, helped in jumping and holding fast. Where a human saw an abyss, a dark elf saw only another direction.

So they lived.

For millennia.

Not alone, but alongside others.

The dwarves had their halls deep in the rock as well, vaster, broader, more angular, full of pillars, metal rails, conveyor tracks, workshops and that stoic craft of building that aimed for endurance rather than beauty, even if it often achieved both. They mined ore, gemstones and metals, and near the upper strata they kept gardens under lamps, moss blankets and warm fissures. There they raised root vegetables, onions, dark varieties of cabbage, and those hard, earthy tubers that only dwarves could eat with genuine enjoyment. The dark elves, by contrast, preferred mushrooms, roots, lichens and everything that grew in moist darkness. Both peoples liked meat.

Besides them there were other beings in the underground.

Some intelligent, some only with great generosity could be called so. Some solitary, some in small packs or family bands, many unpleasantly hard to judge. But real nations, cities and larger political orders had in truth been created down there by only two peoples. The dwarves and the dark elves.

The devils did not belong to that.

They were no nation. They were hunger with horns. The females raised their little devillets, but after that everything fell apart again into individuals, loose pairings, fleeting bands of violence and greed. You could not make peace with them. You could only keep your distance, or kill them.

Farther away, deeper or sideways into regions hardly anyone still traveled regularly, gnomes, orcs and goblins lived in their own unions. People knew it. There were stories, old trade signs, rare messenger routes, but hardly any reliable connections. The underground was no country with fixed borders. Paths changed. Earthquakes, lava flows, collapses, new clefts, old tunnels that sank, others that suddenly opened again. A route that was safe in one century could be dead in the next.

Of course they could have gone across the surface.

But that was exactly what they did not do.

Or more precisely, they did not do it openly, not often, and never without a death wish or the courage of those who had already decided to die. Since the oldest records it had been forbidden to go up. Too great the fear of being discovered. Too great the dread that humankind might notice them again, might hunt them, might find their cities and place their whole people in danger. No one risked that. The ban was strict, almost sacred, and its breach was punished by death.

So they made their lives underground.

Until the world changed again.

Magic grew stronger.

Not in a way everyone could name at once, but clearly enough that it did not escape anyone trained in the arts, in old perceptions, or simply in the physicality of this world. Spells took hold more easily. Old routes responded again. Writings that had long been mute began to answer. And it was not only the peoples of the underground who felt it. The beings of the deep grew stronger too. The devils became bolder. The lava dragons larger and faster. And sightings of lava people multiplied.

That was the point at which they began to talk.

Not only within their own cities. Also with the dwarves.

For a long time a kind of armed truce had existed between their two peoples, never true peace, never true war. Some grievances were too old, their ways of thinking too different, both peoples too proud for anything warm to come of it. But both were wise enough not to spill blood unnecessarily. And in the last centuries under King Tokr, ruler of the most powerful dwarf clan, the truce had slowly become more than the mere absence of violence.

Tokr was old, wise, and unpleasantly uninterested in spending resources on pointless war when they could instead flow into walls, forges and trade. He recognized synergies before anyone had a word for them. Under him languages were learned. Messengers became more cautious. Agreements clearer. No friendship pact formed, no, neither dwarves nor dark elves went that far in their trust. But something formed that was solid enough to be more than polite distance in a crisis.

So they spoke.

About the devils. About the dragons. About the lava people. About sealed levels and lost metals. About the lower halls that could no longer be held. About the question of how long until the pressure from below reached everything else.

And then they looked upward again.

Carefully.

At first only hesitantly. Scouts who went just far enough to see light and return. Then farther. A little farther still. They understood that the human north was thinly settled. Truly thin. Too cold, too vast, too full of snow and empty expanses. They saw no dense armies. No constant border watches. No magicians standing guard at every clearing as in old tales. No demons hunting down anyone who stuck their head out of a cave.

On the contrary.

For decades they tested the surface. Again and again. With greater courage. Greater range. The dwarves were especially good at it. They could roll themselves up and from a distance look like a stone. Motionless, gray, inconspicuous. The dark elves too understood concealment. In darkness they were hardly to be found, and in daylight they knew how to use shadow, rock, earth and movement so that you could look right past them.

Only the sky was a problem.

And the sun.

Not as danger in the strict sense. More as imposition. As excess. As something eyes, skin and mind first had to remember. So they accustomed themselves slowly. Very slowly. With cloth over their faces. With brief walks. With half days. With patience.

And while they did so, they gathered information.

They realized that humankind in the north was only weakly present. That the old horrors from the tales, the hunts, the demons, the great extermination marches, all of it had vanished. Perhaps not from the world, but from this part of the world. And suddenly a truth showed itself to them, as simple as it was dreadful.

They had spent centuries underground, in fear of an enemy who no longer watched above.

That realization alone might still not have been enough.

But from below the others pressed.

Again and again incidents occurred. More and more often devils broke into fringe halls. More and more often whole troops had to be sent to drive back lava creatures. Walls were reinforced. Watches doubled. Weapons improved. Spells spoken more frequently. Life became tighter. The way up, by contrast, became more worth the risk.

So King Tokr and King Neida began to speak.

Long conversations.

Not in a single sitting. Not in a few words. But over years, in steps, in tests, in cautious considerations that were checked and rechecked. Zarard sat in many of these talks. Not as ruler, but as someone needed because he was neither blind with hope nor paralyzed by fear. He knew when an opportunity truly was one. And when it only looked like one.

They agreed to draft a plan.

Not to return openly to the surface at once. Not foolishly. Not with drums and banners. But prepared. Slowly. Thought through. They wanted to make space without being discovered. They wanted to find out whether the north could be emptied without armies, magicians or kingdoms immediately pushing in. They wanted to accustom their peoples to light and weather. Secure routes. Test borders. Test reactions.

And at last they understood how to develop an aversion.

Something that drove humans away without killing them. A pressure in the mind, an inability to remain, a need to leave so deep that even will and habit shrank before it. The aversion became their invisible vanguard. With it they could empty land without being discovered. With it they could prepare.

The boundaries were carefully guarded. The passages controlled. Patrols tightened. Messengers checked. Scouts reported. They trusted the aversion.

And while the north emptied, while villages turned to flight and flight to silence, a certainty grew under the earth that their time in hiding had to end.

Not from longing.

From necessity.

Zarard knew that.

But then something happened that did not fit the plan.At first it was only two riders.They came up from the south into territories that the aversion was meant to have cleared of human presence long ago. When the first watchers reported it, people assumed a mistake. Perhaps the boundary had weakened in one place. Perhaps the aversion had not taken hold cleanly there. Perhaps they were simply two fools riding on in ignorance of their own fate, until with every step the urge to turn back should have grown unbearable.

But it did not happen.The two rode on.

They were untouched by the pressure that drove other humans south in rising panic, by that unseen hand in the mind that kindled homesickness, restlessness, and disgust so strongly that whole villages left their houses behind and fled, later unable to explain why they had gone at all.

From that moment Zarard had them watched.With eyes. With ears. With every silent scout, every hidden spy, every narrow opening in stone, every shadow on snow and rock. Dark elves were patient when patience was required, and years of preparation had taught them that the first glance almost never sufficed. One had to see how someone rode, how someone slept, how someone looked around, when someone stopped, what words they murmured half asleep, and which object they reached for first when danger came.

So they watched.For days.Then for weeks.

And they found something.

The two carried magical objects. Not merely small protection marks or the usual pitiful talismans humans used against bad weather, illness, or imagined spirits, but artefacts of tangible craftsmanship. Things that carried an aura. Things that had been made, not merely collected or inherited. Things that reacted to their bearers and perhaps also to those who had created them.

That made the situation dangerous.Not because the two were mages themselves. Precisely that they were not. Zarard’s most skilled observers were certain of it after some time. They worked no art from within themselves. They carried no innate magical presence the way true mages radiated it with every movement. But they used objects that spoke of great power, which meant that somewhere in the world there were humans who still worked like that, who still bound like that, who still created like that.

They argued for a long time about what to do.

Some wanted to end it quickly. Two riders, they said, could be killed, made to vanish in the snow, their objects buried or burned before more questions grew out of them. Zarard was not blind to that option. A clean death was often the simplest solution.

And it almost came to that.

The bear had not been an accident.They had driven it mad, steered it toward the pair, stoked it until hunger, pain, and rage made it nearly blind. It would have killed them. Both of them. If the witch had not been there.

The witch in turn was not unknown to them. They had watched her for some time and could eliminate her if needed, as Tokr put it dryly. An old free power of the north, not a school mage, not the ruler of a people, more an exile, a hermit, not dangerous enough to act, yet not insignificant enough to ignore. She knew little, at least not what they needed to pull from the two riders. Her interference ruined the attempt.

So they kept watching.They listened in. They waited. They tested every opportunity again. And when the three finally moved on, they struck.

They were taken.Not roughly. Not with pointless cruelty, at least not in the first capture. They wanted knowledge, and knowledge rarely improves under blind rage. So they began subtly. They reached into their minds, careful, probing, testing, and fed them images.

The two outsiders proved shrewder than many had expected.They thought quickly. They spoke little. They protected each other even when they did not know how closely every glance was already being watched. The witch truly knew nothing of value. About her they had not been wrong. She was not part of a larger web, only an old survivor of her own kind.

But the other two were something else.

As the interrogations continued, they understood the objects they had brought better. Not completely, but enough. They recognised that the outsiders were not mages. Not in the true sense. They carried power that others had made for them. In the eyes of the more cautious, that made them more valuable, not less.

Because if two non mages carried such things, then behind them stood people who knew them, trusted them, and possessed abilities that had to be taken seriously.

Then the clever ones understood what chance had presented itself.

They did not have mere intruders.They had messengers.Or they could make them messengers.

Again they argued. Again some demanded their deaths. You could not simply let humans go back out, they said. You could not hope they would not tell everything. Zarard listened for a long time and then said that this was exactly the point. They should tell. Just not in the form the fearful dreaded, but in a form that was useful.

So they treated them accordingly.Not as friends. Not as guests. But no longer as slaughter stock either. They instructed them. Showed them just enough to create seriousness. Just enough to bind fear to credibility. They hinted at trade, well knowing that trade was a fine lure, perhaps the finest one to dangle before humans. Trade meant reason. Trade meant order. Trade meant that not everything was war yet.

And so they brought them to the boundary and let them go.

Not out of mercy.Out of calculation.

In the same period, farther east, a second incident occurred.

This one was different.

This time three mages crossed in.Before anyone saw them, they were felt. Not all with equal strength, not in the same way, but clearly enough that every watcher in the north understood these three were unlike the two riders before. They did not carry foreign wrought objects through the aversion. They carried their power inside themselves. And with one of them came something else.

Something evil.Something dark.Something demonic.

Not openly, not freely, not in a shape one could name at once. More like a rotten heat in the mind, like a corrupted shadow that walked with them, listened in, and hungered for something that even Zarard’s seasoned guards did not like to touch in thought.

The three went into the abandoned city that had once belonged to an old ruling house and now served only as an observation point, a warning place, a stone knot in the new border lines. What happened there remained partly hidden even from the keenest scouts. They only knew that the three entered the fortress. That they brought down one of the towers. And that the dark presence did not leave with them afterward.

Instead a tower collapsed inward.Stone fell. Dust poured from windows. The three mages leapt out, alive, perhaps injured, certainly alive, and moved on. Under tons of rubble remained whatever had come with them.

A rotten spot in a loaf, Zarard thought later. Buried, but not gone.

After that, the dark elves and the dwarves held council again.They spoke long about what should be done with that presence now lying under the ruins. Some wanted to look. Others demanded the entire structure be flooded, melted down, or sealed with stone. In the end they agreed it was buried well enough and that it was better not to touch it. What lay dead or bound or trapped under such weight did not need to be dragged back into the light out of mere curiosity.

But everyone understood it as a warning.

Evil was not gone.It still moved through this world, not only deep below in heat and darkness, but also above, under an open sky, in the hands of those who carried magic and touched things that should never be touched again.

And so the message was twofold.The surface was open.But it was not harmless.

1

None of the nine said it aloud, but all of them knew why the three inquisitors had arrived in Tandor.

Anadar.

He was still standing at the window, looking down into the courtyard where Fontal, Danndi, and Klaast had just stepped out of their carriage and were stretching their legs after the journey. After everything they had heard that night, their arrival felt almost offensively ordinary. Wheels creaked below, a horse snorted, a servant took the baggage, and yet with the three of them something cold seemed to have slipped into the morning.

“This is more than ill timed,” Isidre said.

Her arms were folded, taut, almost hard, and you could see that it was not only Tranda’s death and his poisoning gnawing at her, but also the scale of what Gnok and Pildara had revealed to them in the last hours. The six younger ones wore the shock even more plainly. The night sat in all their bones, and beside it fatigue seemed like something small. Nobody had truly processed what they had heard yet. Not the twelve schools. Not the erasures. Not the demons. Not the crime of humanity. And now the next ones were already standing there below, ready to ask questions and shape verdicts as if the world were still manageable and could be pressed into old reports.

Isidre straightened.

“Good,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

She got up and went to the door. The others rose as well, slower, still half tethered to the night, to the fireplace, to the hovering image of the world that had only just gone out. One by one they left the room. As they went, Slonda briefly put his hand on Anadar’s arm and held him back for a moment.

“Tranda,” he said softly, but loud enough for the others to hear. “He did not die a natural death. He was poisoned.”

It was as if the sentence itself changed the air again. After the revelations of the night you might have thought nothing could gain additional weight, and yet this did. A murder in Tandor. A poisoned master of the Earth School. Suddenly everything that would follow felt even less like mere administration and even more like reaching into a nest of wasps.

The three inquisitors wasted little time.

On the day of their arrival they summoned Shara first, then Morgut, and finally Anadar.

The room chosen for the questioning was plain enough to pretend impartiality, and solid enough to remind you that power sat here. A table of dark wood. Three chairs on one side, one on the other. A high window, little light, no unnecessary carpets, no distractions. Anadar entered, let his gaze pass calmly through the room, and took his seat as if this were an unpleasant but completely ordinary duty.

The introductions were polite.

Of course they were polite.

Anadar had no reason to react openly aggressive or dismissive. He knew the report. He knew the others’ statements. He knew what was coming, at least in broad strokes. He had prepared. What he did not expect, and yet noticed in the very first instant, was the fine, practiced pressure inside his mind.

Fontal.

Careful. Skilled. Unhurried, and without those clumsy touches by which you recognized an untrained spirit mage at once. She did not come with force. She slid in, tested his reactions, measured statements against sensations, laid words and inner response on top of each other. It was well done.

It was just not good enough.

Anadar noticed her immediately.

He showed nothing.

The questions began broadly. Grot. Son. Indra. The crossing. The first meeting on the Islands of Wind. The tower. The staircase in the floor. The vault. The interrogation slowly and deliberately turned toward the night they had gone down.

Fontal’s presence pressed a little deeper.

Anadar allowed it. Not far. Just far enough that she could believe she was testing him successfully. He did not close everything. That would have looked suspicious. Instead he did what he could do better now than before. He showed surfaces. He gave up real memories. He kept the demon, Naaarstr, the inner entanglements, and everything he did not want to share behind locked areas that felt unpleasant even to a trained mind probe.

He was skilled enough to tell the truth where it helped him, and to leave gaps where gaps were better than lies.

“Describe the descent,” Klaast said.

Anadar did.

He described the stench. The water. The cramped turns. The hybrid bodies. The surprise. The two attackers. Sinadie. The first fight. All true. All surface clean enough to stay clean. He left the demon out, as if it had never been there.

Then Danndi reached the point she had wanted all along.

“When the kraken attacked you,” she said, “what happened then?”

Anadar felt something tighten in him.

Not much. Just enough that Fontal noticed.

“It wrapped around me,” he said. “I was pushed back. It disarmed me. Shortly after, Master Grot and the others arrived and attacked the sea creature. Then it was driven off.”

That matched Sinadie’s statement in essence.

“Not so fast,” Danndi said. “Why did you give the order to destroy the hybrids. Why did you instruct Sinadie to do it.”

Anadar held back for a heartbeat.

“Did I.”

He let a frown appear. Not acted. More like he was truly trying to recall a chaotic moment.

“I am not sure. Maybe I thought they would attack us. It was dark, it stank, we were already under attack. Whatever I said, I do not remember it in detail.”

“There are witness statements,” Klaast said, “that suggest you were connected to the kraken. That you negotiated with it.”

Anadar looked at Danndi, then at Klaast, and then very deliberately at his arm, which looked healed.

“How is your wound,” Danndi asked unexpectedly.

He lifted his arm and showed them the long closed spot.

“So this is my thanks,” he said calmly. “I am almost strangled and poisoned, and now I am declared the partner of a monster.”

His gaze returned to Klaast.

“With what was I supposed to negotiate. How do you negotiate with a kraken.”

Klaast held his gaze.

“It was entered into the record that your attack, when the kraken was engaged, did not strike it, but the wall behind it.”

“Really.” Anadar kept the surprise small, but clear. “Well, it was dark. I was being attacked. Probably poisoned. My student was in the creature’s grip and Sinadie was on the ground. Everything happened fast. You know, we did not expect an attack when we went down. We did not even expect such a discovery. And we certainly did not expect to encounter a sea monster and other creatures in a place like that.”

He paused, then shifted the weight exactly where he wanted it.

“I am grateful to every mage who helped in that moment. Master Grot included. Without his intervention, and the others’, we might all have died down there. For that he has my thanks.”

It was a clean turn. Grateful, controlled, without stubbornness, without open attack. He did not know whether it satisfied them. But it was what they would get from him.

Fontal closed her eyes briefly.

Then she looked first at Danndi, then at Klaast. Both signaled with barely noticeable movements that the frame of this questioning was fulfilled for now. Finally Fontal looked directly at Anadar again and smiled faintly.

And in that exact moment, as she wanted to withdraw from his mind, Anadar did not let her go.

It was not a crude grab. Not a violent act. More a holding at the inner contact, a closing of the door before she could slide all the way out. He held her on the very threshold where a mind understands that its counterpart has not only noticed what was happening, but could have intervened at any time.

He looked her in the eyes.

Now she knew that he knew.

For a fraction of a second her smile fell. A flicker of shock crossed her face, tiny, almost invisible, but for Anadar clear enough. And in that instant he dropped the curtain.

Only briefly.

Only enough that she saw.

He let everything he had gathered in the last weeks crash onto her at once. The demonic blackness. The thirst for blood. The reeking depths under the tower. The sea creature. The kraken’s images. The north. The aversion. The halls under the earth. The hint of other peoples. The collapsed tower in Sontor. Twelve schools. The ancient age. The hunt. Stone, sweat, blood, pressure, fear, magic, darkness, the closeness of things older than their names.

Only an instant.

Then he shoved her out.

Not enough, he followed her retreat. Suddenly it was not only her inside his mind, but him inside hers. No long probing, no reading, no stealing. Only presence. Enough that she felt how effortlessly he could invert the distance. Enough that she understood her power was far smaller than she might have hoped.

He was furious, irritated, and at the same time perfectly aware that what he was doing was childish, reckless, and dangerous.

He did it anyway.

He looked her in the eyes, and now he smiled.

He saw the shock in hers.

Then he withdrew.

Completely. Cleanly. As if nothing had happened.

He stood up.

“I hope,” he said with the same calm courtesy as at the beginning, “I was able to help you finish your report.”

Then he left the room.

He did not turn around again. He did not see the hidden tear sliding down her cheek, or her hands trembling.

2

“What has gotten into you lately, really.”

Mother stood before him like a golden statue that had suddenly caught fire. Not loud in the usual sense, not shrill, not out of control. That was exactly what made her anger dangerous. Her eyes had narrowed, her voice was soft and cutting at once, and every word struck more precisely than any scream could have.

“First you leave a demon lying around out there, carelessly, in the middle of nowhere,” she said, taking another half step closer to Anadar, “and then, then you attack an inquisitor inside her own mind.”

Anadar stood there and listened.

Of course Mother had monitored his interrogation. The way she seemed to monitor everything right now. The thought crossed him only briefly, because he knew that even that thought rarely stayed unseen around her for long. Right after the interrogation he had gone back upstairs, to the room where Mother and Shara were already waiting, and she had grabbed him the instant he arrived, before he had even fully closed the door behind him.

Now he let her speak.

He knew her well enough to know that resistance in the first moment only poured more oil on a fire that was already rising on its own. So he stood there, hands steady, gaze alert, and waited until most of the heat had been spoken out of her.

“Just you try,” she said at last, with an emphasis that might have sounded almost childish, if there had not been a power behind it that made every word heavy.

Anadar waited another moment. Then he looked at her.

“That I left the demon behind bothers you. Right.”

“Yes,” she snapped.

It came fast. Too fast not to be true.

“A thing like that,” she went on, “whether it is trapped or not, should be controlled. Especially when it is back together with its summoner. No matter how bound it may be inside its prison.”

She snorted in irritation, turned away as if she wanted to shake her own fury off, and then came right back.

“But I understand,” she said at last, reluctantly. “I understand it was necessary. I need you with your mind intact. Here. Present.”

That was the core. He heard it immediately. Not the demon alone. Not Fantor. Not the strategic danger. Him.

Anadar knew that if he gave her enough time, she would find her way back on her own into a composure larger than her first anger. So he looked at her and smiled. Deliberately. Not wide, not mocking, just enough for her to notice.

“Stop it,” she ordered at once.

“Stop what.”

“You are trying to manipulate me.”

Shara, who had been leaning by the window and watching with barely concealed amusement as Anadar got dressed down, raised an eyebrow.

Anadar answered with practiced mildness. “As if I could.”

Mother stared at him.

“That is exactly what you are,” she said. “And you know it.”

He lifted his hand and, before she could dodge, brushed two fingers gently along her cheek. It was a small motion, almost too light to count as a challenge, and yet it carried just enough audacity that Mother drew a sharp breath.

“Mother,” he said.

Shara giggled.

It was a short, bright sound that disarmed the scene because it showed so openly that she saw exactly what was happening. Anadar was wrapping Mother around his finger, or trying to at least, and Mother knew it, and Shara was entertained because she knew them both well enough not to decide anymore which of the two was truly steering whom.

Mother shot Shara a look that in another room would have been enough to silence a servant. With Shara it only made her smile wider.

“And that you showed Fontal so much, like that,” Mother said, snapping straight back to the real point, “why did you do it. She was completely lulled. She would have swallowed anything you gave her.”

The anger returned, finer now, more concentrated.

Now Anadar grew more serious.

“I found it outrageous,” he said, “a disrespect, to just slip into my thoughts and spy on me.”

That was true. The anger about it was still fresh in him.

“Besides,” he said after a brief pause, “we will still need her.”

Mother and Shara looked at him.

“She is clever,” he went on. “And she is not blindly zealous. Not really. She understands now that there is more than many believe. That can help us.”

He sounded almost proud of his own measure, and that was exactly what made Mother narrow her eyes.

“If you are not mistaken about that,” she said at once.

“That will cost me work to correct,” she added, as if she needed to make clear that his small triumph did not impress her.

Anadar nodded, accepted the rebuke, and then switched the subject with a decisiveness Mother knew so well she immediately recognized it as a deliberate dodge.

“Tell me instead what the School of Illusion is about.”

She looked at him.

“You always kept that from us.”

“No,” she said. “I did not.”

Then she looked from him to Shara, as if she meant to pull them both into the answer at once.

“I simply never mentioned it explicitly. In principle I taught you both. The School of Spirit and the School of Illusion. Because illusion is born in the mind. At least most of it. We no longer separate these two schools cleanly. Not inside ourselves. Not in how we think. It is deeply anchored. Surely there are areas I have not shown either of you yet.”

She straightened a little.

“Areas I should have shown,” she finished, almost defiantly.

Then she raised her hand and gestured into the air as if this needed to end now.

“And now be quiet. I have to deal with the inquisition and the report.”

With that she turned away and shifted her attention to other matters, as abruptly and completely as only she could. For her, the conversation was over, even if its consequences were not.

Later that same evening, the three inquisitors sat over that very report.

The room Tandor had placed at their disposal was large enough to feel important and sober enough to force focus. On the table lay neatly arranged sheets, ink pots, copies of earlier statements, notes from the tower, interrogation records, margin remarks in different hands. Three candles burned. A window stood open a finger’s width, and the cool evening air drifted in, along with the distant sound of footsteps in the school’s corridors.

Danndi sat upright, as always, already formulating in that crisp, clean manner that tolerated no wasted motion. Klaast bent over a list of statements, comparing, striking, sorting, entering, weighing formulations against one another. Fontal sat opposite them, looking at the paper and yet not seeing it.

Again and again the images came.

Not as a coherent story, not ordered, not helpful. More like splinters. A dark pressure. Stone and damp. Blood hunger. A collapsing tower. The sense of deep halls under the earth. A breath of ancient hunt. Of things she could not name, and precisely because she could not name them, they pressed on her all the more.

And within it, worse than any single impression, was the realization of power.

Not the raw power of a man who blows a wall apart with fire or throws a creature down by force. Fontal had seen that, understood it, fought it herself. No. What Anadar had done to her was something else. Something far more intimate. Far more terrifying. He had not only noticed she was there. He had held her. Turned the gaze. Shown her for one heartbeat that the boundaries she had relied on all her life were not solid walls for him. It had not been a crude attack. And that was exactly why it had been so dreadfully effective.

She had never experienced anything like it.

Not even close.

And the fact that this man had done it so easily, as if he were playing with a mouse, made it worse. It was as if something in her world view had slipped in a single moment, and no discipline could slide it back into place.

“Fontal,” Danndi said.

Fontal raised her head.

“Hm.”

“The formulation about Anadar.”

Fontal nodded, though the sentence Danndi had just read aloud had barely reached her.

Klaast looked at her briefly. It was not a suspicious look, more the assessing look of a man who noticed a colleague was not fully present, but did not yet know why.

In that moment Mother was in the room, and everyone noticed her.

Not announced. Not apologizing. She was simply there, the way she entered rooms as if she had always been expected, even when no one had called her. She wore bright gold and warm light into the room, and for a brief moment even the air seemed to reorder itself around her.

“I hope I am not interrupting,” she said, and the tone alone made clear that the answer would not have changed anything.

Danndi rose halfway. Klaast nodded. Fontal did too, a touch too late.

“Just a moment,” Mother said. “I thought that since you are incorporating the last statements now, it might be useful to sort a few things out once more, very cleanly. It would be a shame if, in times like these, a report of all things were to suffer from blur.”

It was not harsh. Not commanding. More like help. Very clever, very polite help.

She stepped up to the table.

Fontal tried to gather herself. But in the moment Mother’s gaze touched her only briefly, something spread over her thoughts. No compulsion. No painful intrusion. Only a gentle scattering. The images Anadar had shown her did not grow smaller because of it, quite the opposite. They drifted farther apart, pulled her attention, made every sheet in front of her less important than that one instant in which he had shown her what she did not understand.

Danndi and Klaast noticed nothing of it.

They listened to Mother.

And Mother began, almost, to dictate the report to them.

Not word for word. Much more cleverly. She asked questions that already contained the answers. Reminded them of formulations that “sounded so very reasonable.” Emphasized that one must adhere to protocol. That one could only write what was supported. That any stretching of an accusation harmed the report more than it helped.

“The essential points remain, do they not,” she said in her warm, calm way. “Xoiun and the twins are the true origin of what happened. The experiments in the tower prove grave wrongdoing. The sea monster most likely traces back to these events. Sinadie acted correctly in parts, even if it remains to her discredit that she did not inform the conclave in time. And as for Anadar, Shara, and Morgut, you now have their statements. They were present. They were involved in the discovery. But according to everything that lies before you, not in the origin of the whole matter.”

Danndi nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “That is the core.”

Klaast was already refining a formulation.

“By current assessment their role appears subordinate in relation to the origin and construction of the events.”

“Exactly,” Mother said softly. “That is a good formulation. Very clean.”

Fontal nodded too.

She heard the words. She even understood them. But she was unfocused, scattered, caught in the echo of Anadar’s mind, in the dark astonishment he had left behind. And so she nodded at sentences she might have tested harder under other circumstances, might have weighted differently.

Mother saw it.

Of course she saw it.

And while Danndi wrote and Klaast smoothed the final version, Mother kept Fontal’s thoughts just active enough that she did not regain the one clear, sharp grip she usually had in matters like this.

“Then like that,” Danndi said at last.

Klaast set the pen aside.

The report was finalized.

Clean. Formal. Fully defensible. And yet shaped in a way Mother liked. Not through a lie. Not even through crude manipulation. Rather because at exactly the right places she had shifted the weight, while one of the three writers lost herself in images she could not shake.

When Mother finally left the thoughts of the others again, the report was finalized and all three inquisitors were satisfied with their work. None of them could remember she had been present. Not a breath of influence.

Mother played all three inquisitors at once, effortlessly.

3

The days passed, and Anadar began to see how different things were slowly crystallizing. Some questions grew clearer, others more urgent, and still others seemed to move toward him almost by themselves, as if they had only been waiting for the right moment.

One day Master Roto sought a conversation with him.

Sinadie was present as well, and so were Son and Indra. Roto approached Anadar with a politeness that was almost excessive. He bowed carefully and spoke with that controlled formality which revealed how much his attitude had changed over the past weeks. What had begun as arrogance, rejection, and undisguised hostility had turned into something else. Respect, perhaps, certainly, but also distance. For Anadar’s taste, Roto had become almost a little too submissive. Son and Indra, on the other hand, were as they always were, quiet, attentive, and carrying that fine humor Anadar liked in them precisely because it usually struck in the least expected place and did so with a dryness that made everything else in the room feel unnecessary.

“Master Anadar,” Roto began, straightening again. “I would like to hear your assessment. It seems that Master Kolnidranooora has been killed. His throat cut.”

He paused briefly. It was obvious he was searching for the right phrasing.

“I would like to pursue this. After all, we were close.”

Anadar said nothing at first. He let him continue.

“It seems to me,” Roto went on, “that the description of the beings that were said to have accompanied the kraken, and the description of Kol’s killers, might show certain similarities.”

At those words Sinadie lifted her gaze. Her face took on that sharp attention she always showed whenever something began to assemble itself into a larger pattern.

“And I,” she said calmly, “would also like to pursue it.”

It was Son and Indra, however, who supplied the decisive addition.

“There seems to be a captain named Kral,” Indra said, “whom we met at the Great Market. He seemed to know more than he said at first.”

“Unfortunately he could not be found afterward,” Son added dryly.

Sinadie folded her arms.

“Can you describe him.”

They could.

And rather well.

They described his narrow, weather worn face, the way his movements seemed at once swaying and watchful, his voice, his manners, the impression of a man who liked to make himself look smaller and drunker than he truly was. As they spoke, it became clearer and clearer to Anadar that Kral had been less a random side figure and more someone who knew exactly how to survive in places like the Great Market, one of those men who were dangerous precisely because it was so easy to underestimate them.

Anadar then sent for Nigk and Xian.

The two of them were now staying in the keep with Aldemar of Tandor and had apparently already begun to spread their information in every direction. From the number of messengers riding in and out it was obvious they had hardly been idle. Reports went out, answers came back, names were gathered, routes checked, and things were beginning to move on that front as well.

When Nigk and Xian arrived, they listened to the description attentively. Nigk asked a few terse follow up questions, Xian had every detail confirmed once more, and both of them came quickly to the same conclusion.

Images of Kral should be made.

And he should be sought.

Nigk thought it would not be an especially elaborate endeavor, provided the man was still somewhere along the trade routes, harbors, and taverns that typically lay between them. Xian was more cautious, yet even she seemed to believe that Kral lived too much on habit and coincidence to keep himself truly invisible for long.

So this lead, too, suddenly gained direction.

Not much, perhaps.

But enough that no one in the room believed anymore that Kolnidranooora’s death would simply vanish into the fog.

Others in the keep now seemed to avoid Anadar.

Fontal, for instance. More than once he had the impression that she stepped out of his way before he had even decided whether he would have sought a conversation with her. Sometimes he saw her at the end of a corridor, on a stair, in a courtyard between two groups of students or servants, and every time she seemed to turn off into another direction shortly after, as if she had only just noticed him and had suddenly found it urgent to be elsewhere. For a moment it had almost amused him. After that he simply let it be. He did not need to chase her. What had happened between them now lived in her, and that was enough.

The Inquisitors, in any case, wanted to wait for the conclave in Tandor before making their return. Almost everyone else had begun to use that pretext as well to justify staying. No one said openly that the world was shifting beneath their feet and that no one wanted to leave too early. So they spoke of courtesy, of the need for consultation, of the wish to see Tranda’s succession settled. All of it was true, and none of it was the whole truth.

Gudi, meanwhile, could hardly let go of her brother.

She clung to Morgut like a burr, and that caused difficulties not only for him. At first Sindra and Miene had looked at the new arrival with a jealousy that was barely concealed. Who was this girl who so naturally pressed herself into Morgut’s side, tugged at his sleeve, cut into his words, whispered with him, laughed and whispered again, as if she belonged there as a second voice to his first. When they realized, however, that she was his sister, their behavior changed quickly and in an almost comical way. Jealousy turned into a peculiar competition for Gudi’s favor. Who could show her something first, who could pull her into a conversation first, who noticed sooner when she was bored and when she wanted to talk. It was not a malicious contest, rather one of those young, half serious struggles where everyone pretends it is about nothing while in truth they pursue it with surprising zeal.

Soon the four of them spent a great deal of time together.

Gudi apparently told Morgut everything.

A little too much for Gnok’s taste, who endured it with the silent composure of a man telling himself very precisely that these were problems for tomorrow. Today’s problems lay elsewhere. He allowed the closeness of the siblings because he understood that some things cannot be prevented without causing more damage than they prevent. If Gudi thawed out at Morgut’s side, then for the moment that was not a disadvantage.

Of course Danndi asked the obvious question of why Gnok was present at all and by what route he had even reached Tandor.

The old mage gave her a slightly different answer each time. Never crudely contradictory, only irritatingly imprecise enough that the question could not be pinned down. Once he spoke of old obligations, another time of Tranda’s death, then again of a route he had intended to take anyway. He kept Danndi at as much distance as he could. He knew well enough that she was loyal to Hokn’f and would report to him as soon as she found opportunity. That too, he told himself, was a problem for the future. And there was still time for problems of the future. For now.

In Tandor itself the earth mages met about Tranda’s succession.

This was purely an internal matter of their school, so the others officially stayed out of it. Unofficially everyone did what people always do when power is redistributed. They watched. Listened. Waited. Weighed faces and alliances. Slonda made clear early, and with no enthusiasm at all, that he did not want the office. Officially he let it be known that he would soon have to travel west again, and for an indefinite time. He said nothing more than that. It sounded irritatingly plausible and was therefore not easily attacked.

One evening Isidre, Mother, and Slonda sat together in a tower room and conferred, before Anadar joined them as well. Outside, Tandor lay quiet in the evening, and inside the light of a single lamp fell on maps, notes, and faces that had long since stopped believing in coincidences.

“We need Isidre as Dean of the earth school,” Slonda concluded his argument. “Otherwise the zealots have the majority in the conclave. We cannot allow that.”

Isidre nodded. Not because she wanted the office. It showed in her that she was interested in almost anything other than burdening herself with dignity, administration, and the irritatingly greasy mechanisms of a conclave.

“I am not eager for the post,” she said dryly. “Especially since I do not want to spend all my time paying attention to what I consume.”

The murder of Tranda was still too fresh. None of them had forgotten that one or more from that faction had been patient and methodical enough to poison an old master.

“The other candidates are all zealots,” Slonda said. “And in an alliance with Hokn’f, Fontal, and From. One of them, or several together, have Tranda on their conscience.”

Mother sat quietly, fingers loosely interlaced, and listened. Then she said, in that casual calm with which she often made the most unpleasant proposals:

“How about we make a candidate dean who belongs to no camp.”

The others looked at her.

“If he is poisoned,” she added with the faintest smile, “it will not hit us so close. Do not misunderstand me, I do not support murder. But if it must happen, then better to someone I have not taken to my heart.”

As she said it she looked very clearly at Isidre.

“My daughter.”

Anadar, who had been silent until then, lifted his head.

“I like the idea,” he said. “It takes you out of the line of fire, Isidre. And if our new dean is not accessible to our arguments when we need him, or not accessible to your abilities, Mother, then we simply replace him.”

His tone was so matter of fact that for a moment it was easy to miss how outrageous the sentence actually was.

Slonda looked back and forth between them.

“You surely already have someone in mind.”

In truth everyone already knew the answer.

“Klaast,” they said almost at the same time.

And that was that, in reality, before it had even officially begun.

At one of the following internal assemblies Slonda introduced the proposal. Isidre supported it at once, with the kind of sobriety that made her approval heavier than many a passionate speech. Klaast himself at first looked as if he trusted neither the proposal nor his good or ill fortune, depending on how one chose to see it. But there was no one left who seriously opposed it. So Master Klaast became the new Dean of the earth school, with Isidre and Bertagnie, an irritatingly repulsive zealot, as deputy deans.

Manador, too, had much to chew on from what had been revealed to him.

Yet he digested it better than Anadar had initially expected. Perhaps because fire masters, when faced with something they dislike, are quicker to see a task than a crisis. Perhaps also because the scale of it did not weaken his knees so much as it strengthened his desire to finally seize something that could be moved. In the evenings he often sat with Shara and Anadar. Between him and Sinadie something cautiously began as well, something that did not yet need to be called friendship but pointed in that direction. Both had reasons to meet each other with reserve. Both also had enough sense to recognize they would need each other in the coming months more than they would need suspicion.

One evening Mother sat in that circle as well.

Manador asked Anadar what his next step would be, and Mother looked at him so probing that even Anadar could tell how much she cared about the answer.

“Brother Manador,” he said at last, “I think I will return to the fortress. The libraries of Light interest me. In addition we still have the book we found with Fantor. That too must be studied.”

“The summoner’s book,” Mother asked.

“Yes. That. I think we have to prepare. Naaarstr and Fantor will not remain imprisoned forever. And who knows what they intend. The demon must be bound.”

“That is also my opinion,” Mother said.

“And besides,” Anadar began, and looked toward Shara.

“No, Anadar,” she cut in stubbornly. “You will not simply lock me away in the fortress just because I am pregnant. I decide for myself what I do.”

“And that would be,” he asked.

Shara was silent for a moment. Then she lowered her eyes.

“Perhaps I should stay in Zoordak for a time,” she said, without looking directly at him.

Before Anadar could form an objection, Mother intervened at once.

“That is an excellent idea, my daughter.”

With those words she took away any possibility of immediate contradiction. He stared at her. Angry, though not uncontrolled.

“My dear,” she asked sweetly.

“I,” he began, broke off, and then only finished, “nothing.”

He knew when a discussion made no sense in the moment. He would speak about this later with Shara in private. And while the anger still stood in him, he noticed at the same time that part of it came from a quiet assumption he had never fully admitted to himself. He had simply assumed Shara would go wherever he went. When that became clear to him, he steadied himself again.

“Something else,” he said, changing the subject. “This school of Light. What, dear Mother, is your plan for it.”

He asked directly.

She avoided his gaze.

That told him enough.

“You have an ulterior motive.”

Now she looked at him, then at Shara, then at Manador, then at Sinadie. At last she shrugged and began one of the brightest smiles she was capable of.

“Of course, my dear. Why do you think I smuggled ten of my students into your stinking fortress.”

She laughed, bright as bells, while the others stared at her, dumbfounded.

Manador recovered first.

“That was…”

She cut him off at once.

“We have sensed for some time that things are changing, and I wanted to be prepared.”

She was visibly amused at having led them all around by the nose for so long. Then she clapped her hands.

“Oh, Rotsch, my friend, if only you were here. I would so love to see your face right now.”

“And who, in your opinion, is supposed to be master and lead the school,” Manador asked.

Everyone except Mother looked at Shara.

Shara immediately took a defensive posture.

“No. Out of the question,” she said. “I will soon have another task.”

As she spoke she looked down at her small belly and laid her hand over it protectively.

“I cannot raise ten children at once.”

“I have already been working on that too,” Mother said, in a tone that dripped with self satisfaction.

Then she looked at Sinadie.

Anadar asked his brother one evening, as they sat with Pildara in a secluded tower room and for one rare moment were neither disturbed nor immediately pushed into the next urgency.

The fire was small, the air cool, and outside the wind struck the narrow shutters in uneven bursts. On the table between them lay Fantor’s book, motionless and sealed, and precisely because it lay so still it felt like something that carried its own weight into the room.

“What will you do next?” Anadar asked.

Slonda did not answer at once. He sat slightly hunched forward, his hands folded together, and he looked not at his brother but at Pildara, as if he first had to admit to himself where his thoughts had been circling for days.

“I think we need more information,” he said at last. “You mentioned we should bind our friend.”

He glanced briefly at Anadar, then back to Pildara.

“Do you think we will find something that helps us. In one of the libraries.”

“Possible,” Pildara said.

For the moment she said nothing more. She stood at the window, her arms loosely crossed, and she looked at the book as if she had already decided she disliked it.

“The summoners liked to keep their knowledge to themselves,” she added then. “They were never generous. Not with words, not with writings, and certainly not with things others could turn against them.”

She nodded toward the book.

“And that thing there only confirms it.”

Anadar reached for it, lifted it, turned it in his hands, then set it back on the table.

“Do you know by now how to open it?” Pildara asked.

He gave a quiet snort.

“No. But we also have not really dealt with it yet. Not properly.”

He sighed.

“It is one of the things we now have to do.”

Pildara stepped away from the window and came slowly to the table.

“Summoners did not keep their knowledge sealed out of scholarly vanity, the way some other schools did,” she said. “They kept it sealed because the slightest mistake could unleash a chaos that was hardly correctable. That was the difference. Other schools hid their knowledge out of pride, mistrust, or hunger for power. The summoners did it also out of caution.”

She looked at both brothers.

“As you have learned by now.”

For a moment none of them spoke.

Then Anadar picked up the thread again.

“If it is as you say, and they barricaded their knowledge so well, why does this book suddenly appear after millennia.”

He tapped the cover with two fingers.

“And in a condition as if someone wanted to preserve it on purpose.”

Now all three of them fell silent.

A moment later Anadar spoke again, more slowly than before.

“That is one of the questions I should pursue.”

Pildara pressed her lips together.

“It is more than a question. It is a truly important question. Why does this knowledge surface. Why now. Why in such good condition. Who kept it. Who passed it on. And who had an interest in making sure it did not get lost.”

Slonda nodded.

“We really have two problems. Maybe more. But the first is clear. Can you tell us more about Sahretûn.”

Pildara lifted her brows slightly.

“I think we should bring Gnok into this,” she said. “He generally knows more about it. I can only tell you rough outlines, and in this case rough outlines are dangerously close to worthless.”

She straightened a little, like someone deciding to speak anyway even though she would prefer to avoid the subject.

“The summoners withdrew after the founding of the schools to their city in the desert. Sahretûn was less a city in the usual sense and more a mountain. An entire mountain full of caves, chambers, shafts, halls, and inner rooms. They lived there together, almost completely closed in on themselves, and they mixed only little with others. The place was not made for visitors. Not for joy. Not even for ordinary life, if by that you still mean something bright.”

Her voice was matter of fact, yet it carried clearly enough that she felt no desire to remember further in that direction.

“They focused on their demons, their bindings, their summonings. Only a few ever saw the city. And knowledge left that place even more rarely.”

She paused.

“At some point they refused to accept students from other schools. That was one of the stated reasons. Or the pretext, if you want to be unkind. In any case it eventually led to the inquisition. The destruction itself was a brutal war. As far as I know, almost all the other schools took part. They leveled the city, or the mountain, to the ground, as it was later said, and erased every memory of it.”

Slonda listened very carefully. Anadar did too, but you could see he was already thinking in several places at once. About Fantor’s book. About the light library. About the transformation writings of the water mages. And about the question of whether anything ever simply “appeared.”

“Others claim,” Pildara continued, “that before it came to that, the summoners shifted the city into another dimension. No one remained behind to bring it back. However it happened, Gnok can surely give you a better overview. He keeps these stories in his head better than I do. I have to tell you honestly, I avoided ever visiting that time, or that place.”

She said the last part with a plainness that carried more weight than any more dramatic phrasing could have.

“So it looks like you have a task ahead of you, brother,” Anadar said.

Slonda nodded slowly.

“I think I start structured. Slowly. Let me first talk to Gnok, as soon as I find the old man again.”

As he spoke, you could already see an idea taking shape in his face. Not clear yet, not finished, but present.

“I hope you find the information we need,” Anadar said.

Then he turned back to Fantor’s book.

“Any idea how we open this.”

Pildara did not think long.

“Was there anything else with it.”

“A dagger,” Anadar said.

“Then that will be the key,” she replied. “How you use it, you only still have to find out.”

Anadar considered it and concluded that this, presumably, would not be the hardest part.

“What interests me more,” he said, “is how this book got into Fantor’s hands at all.”

He looked again at the cover.

“In such a condition. That is almost even more interesting. The water mages also mention old writings, writings of transformation. That cannot be a coincidence.”

No one contradicted him.

Dean Fontal of the school of life had been a driven, self assured, disciplined woman.

Or rather, she still was, if you took the outward impression she offered the world. She held her posture, her voice, her steps, her gaze, her whole presence together like someone who had learned all her life that composure was not merely a virtue but a tool. Yet what had happened a few days earlier had shaken something in her that ran deeper than composure.

She was no longer the same.

Something had been uncovered deep inside her, something she had not seen in herself for so long that she barely recognized it. Fear was not quite the right word. Too small. Too simple. It was more like a breach in her own internal order.

First there had been the ease with which Anadar had held her, when she had tried to withdraw from his mind. The effortlessness with which he had not only noticed her presence but turned it back on her. She had angered him, she felt that immediately. She had believed he would not even notice her touch. She had underestimated him.

And he had paid her back for it.

Yet almost worse were the images.

Not even images, if she was honest. More like impressions. Blows of memory. Feelings, perceptions, fragments, states that had collapsed on her in a fraction of a moment and since then kept returning. She did not know what she had seen. She still did not know. But she knew with terrifying clarity that it was vast. Greater, older, darker, deeper than her world view had ever allowed for.

Since that incident she had been changed.

Again and again in her mind she was thrown back to that moment. Again and again she replayed the instant his gaze changed and her own certainty caved in. Again and again she thought of the way he held her, the way he looked at her, how easily it all seemed to come to him.

Whenever it could be arranged, she avoided him.

And so far that had worked remarkably well.

That evening, after another meeting with the new dean of the earth mages, Master Klaast, she climbed the stairs to her quarters in one of the library towers. Klaast was no zealot. Not yet. But he would be useful to the cause. Fontal had more influence over him than Hokn`f ever would, and she intended to use it. Dean From of the islands of the winds also stood close to her. For a brief moment she even allowed herself an inner smile. This game of plots was developing quite well for her.

She turned the last corner.

Then she saw him.

And she shuddered in spite of herself.

Anadar stood directly in front of her door, leaning against the wall, as if he had been waiting there a long time, and as if any other possibility, than finding him there, had been nothing but weak hope.

She stopped.

Only for a small moment. A tiny crack in her otherwise precise movement. But he noticed it at once.

“A word, Dean Fontal,” he said.

She forced herself to keep walking until she stood before him at a proper distance.

“What is so important that you seek me out.”

He fixed her with his grey eyes. She looked away, only briefly, but it was enough to bring back that cold feeling in her that had never fully vanished since the interrogation.

“I think you have something in your possession that I would like to look at,” he said.

She hesitated.

Then she looked at him.

“What do you mean.”

“The documents you found in the tower. Those transformation papers, as you described them in your report. I am interested in them. And if I am correctly informed, you took them to Gontar. Correct.”

“That is correct,” she admitted. “And why do they interest you.”

“I am interested in knowledge,” Anadar said. “But actually not in the content itself. Not first. I am more interested in where it came from. Did you find hints where these writings came from.”

She shook her head.

“No. We did not pursue that direction. It was of secondary interest.”

“Is it.”

She did not answer at once.

“That is what I would like to know,” Anadar said.

For him the conversation seemed finished. He pushed off the wall and already turned to go, when Fontal, against her first impulse, spoke again.

“These images,” she said, hesitating.

He stopped.

“Was that real.”

He only turned his head, smiled at her, and walked on.

He had not gotten far.

After the great market, Kral moved from settlement to settlement, or rather from tavern to tavern, from mug to mug, from drunkenness to drunkenness. The gold he still had did not last long. He drank to forget. And the worse that worked, the more he drank. The betrayal of his crew weighed heavier than he ever would have admitted, and so he did what men of his kind liked to do when they were alone with guilt. He drowned it, at least for a few hours.

The days passed.

At some point he could barely remember which day it was, let alone the hour. Sometimes he stumbled out of a bar and was surprised it was still day. Or day again. Sometimes he sat in a dive and swore he had only just walked in, while outside the light had already shifted.

So it went, until one day he sat at a counter in a nameless village and someone addressed him.

“Are you Kral.”

He lifted his head and blinked against the light, the smoke, and his own condition.

“Who wants to know.”

Three people planted themselves in front of him.

One looked at the other.

“That is him.”

“I said, who wants…”

He did not get any further.

They dragged him off the stool, rough and without the slightest courtesy. He tried to fight, but the three were too strong, and he was too drunk, too softened by days of doing nothing. Outside the door an entire bucket of water already waited.

Then another.

“The second one was for the stench, Captain,” one of the men said, and all three laughed.

Kral cursed, coughed, spat water, and tried once more to wrench free. Useless. They bound his hands.

“Someone important wants to see you in Tandor.”

Then they practically threw him into a coach, climbed in beside him, and the moment the door shut the vehicle tore off at speed.

Formularbeginn

In a few days, the Conclave would convene again, and for almost everyone that was reason enough to remain in Tandor. Or at least the pretext they used outwardly. In truth, hardly anyone wanted to leave while things were shifting so fast and so deep.

Gnok had a problem.

He knew that Danndi would report his presence to Hokn’f. She did not know that he had not actually been allowed to be here. At the latest, when she returned to Ashambrat, it would come out that he had vanished without leaving an explanation that could be entered neatly into the ledgers and corridors of the Wind School. And he still had not decided how exactly he would present that little disaster later.

With Gudi, his being here could hardly be concealed anyway. The young lady had no talent for restraint, not even the desire for it, and so he was slowly resigning himself to his fate. There was little point pretending that a girl like her could be called inconspicuous in a place like Tandor.

In those days, Anadar, Shara, Mother, and Slonda kept seeking out old Gnok. They asked him about the stories of earlier times, about things no one else seemed able to piece together coherently, and he gave them willingly. It helped that most people, his whole life long, had believed his stories were fairy tales, odd fragments from a grey prehistory, more fit to provoke a smile than to be taken seriously. That this time four people sat before him who understood very well that his words carried more than old chatter seemed to enliven him rather than tire him.

“Sahretûn,” he began one evening as they sat with him again, “was not a school. Not in the sense of the other schools. And not a city, the way one imagines a city. It was a place in a place so unreal you could only think it. Nothing but endlessly hot desert sand around it, and that was a good thing.”

He said it with the dryness that showed he did not mean it poetically but precisely.

“The summoners formed a society of their own there. Very secretive, very closed, very focused on themselves. They did not share their knowledge willingly, but not, as so many later claimed, merely out of greed for power. Some of it, certainly, also out of pride. But more than that, out of fear. Out of the justified fear that something would be done that could no longer be controlled. Or worse, that something would enter the world that could never be removed again.”

His gaze slid, almost involuntarily, to the book on the table.

It still lay there, sealed, heavy and mute, and that very muteness made it unbearable. Slonda had taken it up more than once, Anadar as well, but none of them had gotten any farther than the clear sense that it was not sealed by accident.

“They were cautious,” Gnok went on. “Not kind. Not open. But cautious. And very withdrawn.”

Slonda leaned forward a little.

“If I wanted knowledge about summonings,” he said, and pointed at Fantor’s book, “where would the best place be to get it?”

Gnok visibly recoiled.

It was not a large movement, barely more than an involuntary drawing back of shoulders and neck, but it was enough to show how unpleasant the subject was to him. He looked at the book, and for a moment he did not look like the old mage who could usually save himself with a story, but like someone who had recognized a sound from a very old memory.

“It would be better,” he said, “if this thing were not in the world.”

“But it is,” Anadar replied calmly. “And under a ton of rubble far up in the north lies something that is ancient, evil, and hungry for power, and will probably walk this world again one day. Better we are prepared than surprised.”

Pildara went to the table and took the book in her hands.

Even she seemed more cautious than usual. She held it not like a book, but almost like something that could breathe or bite if the wrong pressure were applied.

“It is sealed,” she said. “And there is a reason.”

It was obvious that both she and Gnok approached the matter with far more caution than the younger ones in the room.

“You will not find a work of the summoners in any ordinary library in the past,” Pildara began slowly. “They were meticulously careful that their knowledge did not enter the world. Even exchange with other schools was reduced to the minimum. If they took students from other schools, they taught them nothing that was truly powerful. Summoning small spirits. Binding such beings. Harmless stuff. Tricks, if you want to be unkind. Nothing a person would need who truly wanted to change something.”

“Did they send their students out to visit other schools,” Shara asked.

“Rarely,” Mother said. “And if they did, then only in the absolutely necessary number. They knew our abilities and shielded themselves as well as they could. That very thing eventually led to distrust, and distrust finally to the first inquisition and eradication.”

Gnok clicked his tongue softly, as if he could still feel how sharp some memories were.

“The fight,” he said, “was immense. The mages did not attack the demons summoned for defense. That would have been pointless. They concentrated directly on the summoners. It was cruel, efficient, devious, and costly on both sides. If a summoner is killed while holding a demon under control, it can happen that the demon breaks free. And a free demon can become dangerously lethal, the more powerful it is.”

“Where do demons draw their power,” Shara asked. “How do they become stronger.”

Gnok’s mouth tightened slightly.

“That is hard to answer cleanly. It depends on how they were summoned. With which limits. With which bindings. With which conditions. Most often I would say blood. Blood and what lies within it. The more strongly it is enriched with magic, the better.”

“The older,” Anadar murmured.

He had said it barely audibly, and yet they all heard it. He gave a faint smile when he noticed the eyes on him.

“I had a teacher,” he admitted, dryly.

Mother looked at him, but there was neither rebuke nor surprise in her gaze. Rather that old, bright knowing she often had when others thought they had just revealed something.

“I have to thank Naaarstr again and again,” Anadar said. “He proceeded very carefully. Why.”

“Probably for the same reason as everyone else,” Mother said. “Because of a lack of information.”

She sat a little straighter.

“It is not easy to be thrown into a world and a time and not know what is, who lives, and how dangerous everything may have become. Caution is not a sign of weakness then, but of intelligence. When he finally dropped his caution, our master here bound him. Into an object. He likely did not expect that.”

Gnok raised his brows.

“A masterpiece, by the way,” he said. “I did not even know something like that was possible. At some point you must tell me how you managed it.”

Anadar was surprisingly restrained.

“It took an entire school,” he said. “And the fight was close and not over. He had a certain dangerous influence on me.”

For a moment something dark passed across his face. Not openly. Only a fleeting shadow. Perhaps he thought of the massacre among the bandits. Perhaps of the visions in the north. Perhaps of things he did not like to speak aloud.

“There seems to be only one way we get information,” Slonda said, and stood up.

The whole room’s attention snapped to him.

“I will probably have to go to Sahretûn. Right. Otherwise everything remains theory.”

He focused briefly, and the planetary system rose before him, first small, then larger, sharper, clear. He turned it to a position where the two planets stood at an angle of roughly sixty degrees to each other, then back to thirty. Pildara watched him with undisguised attention.

“You are getting more skilled at it, Slonda,” she said. Not without recognition.

He moved the system back and forth, finally held it at roughly forty degrees, and then, with a second motion, created an overlaid model, just as Drinda and Pildara had shown him. The present system lay over the old one. Transitions became visible. Lines formed. Possibilities opened.

“Here,” he said. “This seems to me a sensible transition.”

Pildara stepped closer, studied the alignment, and nodded slowly.

“You recognized that quickly.”

Then she leaned a little toward Mother and said with a small smile, “That is the man we know.”

Slonda did not notice. He was already deeper in his thought.

“Now, you two,” he said, looking to Pildara and Mother. “I need every bit of information you have about this age.”

As he spoke, he pulled the two systems apart and made the overlap clearer. Then he enlarged both worlds until their surfaces were visible enough to suggest regions and routes upon them.

“Here, near Tandor, in two weeks, a route leads directly to here. Gontar.”

He pointed to a spot on the world from the past.

“Stable transition,” Pildara said.

Then she lifted her gaze and asked with that practical hardness that immediately pulled all her recognition back into the sober.

“But how do you intend to get to Sahretûn. And above all, be taken in there.”

Slonda kept the model hovering for another moment. His fingers remained slightly raised, but his eyes were no longer on the system, they were in the distance, where a mere possibility had to become a plan.

“I will think about that when I am there,” he said at last. “Probably by staying as close to the truth as possible. Whatever that ends up looking like.”

No one contradicted him.

Not because it was a good answer.

But because everyone in the room knew there would be no better one until then.

Gudi was happy to be near her brother again, and she claimed him completely for herself. Morgut would sometimes have liked to be closer to Anadar again, but it seemed the older masters had a great deal to discuss, to weigh, and to decide at the moment. He would surely be needed again, he told himself, and they would tell him everything important once the time for it came. So he let his sister keep him occupied, and it bothered him far less than he wanted to admit.

The affection was not one sided. He liked his lively, sometimes exhausting, always slightly too vibrant sister just as much as she clung to him, and so he allowed himself to be distracted. That Miene and Sindra were almost always with them did not bother him either. They were all still young, despite everything that had swept over them in recent weeks, and so they spent a pleasant, almost lighter time together than the walls of Tandor or the weight of events should really have allowed.

They did not stay only inside the castle or the school. Again and again they went on excursions into the surroundings, because Gudi had never seen forests, not real forests at least, not ones that spread cool and green over hills with light falling through moving leaves. Not once had she seen rivers that were not tamed in canals or basins, and she knew snow only from far away as a white sheen on the peaks of the northern mountain chain. For her, all of it was new, and she drank it in with the greedy attentiveness of someone who suddenly realizes how much larger the world is than childhood ever suggested.

In the process she let Morgut in on everything. She told him about the Sondra, about the Tri Moon, about her abduction, about the Moon Drops, about Hokn’f, and of course about the vortex, with a speed and enthusiasm that hardly left him time to breathe sensibly between two of her sentences. Morgut listened attentively and took all these stories in, and yet a part of him almost wanted, at first, to dismiss what he heard as fantasies. It sounded simply too unbelievable, too much like one of those tales that grow out of a real occurrence until at some point they drift so far from it that only wonder and embellishment remain.

Gudi noticed his doubt. And because she noticed it, because she felt very clearly that her brother believed her and still did not quite believe her, she wanted to impress him. She wanted to show him. Not in a story, not with words, but in the way that ends every argument.

So one day she went with Morgut, Miene, and Sindra a little outside the city, to an open, unremarkable spot where no curious eyes could watch them from the paths, and she began to cast the spell. She spoke it with eagerness, with the whole excitement of wanting to prove herself, with that inner tension that usually makes magic unpleasant when it becomes too obvious.

And nothing happened.

Not a single vortex. Not even a hint of what she had expected. Only wind, as wind is there, and the stupid, unmoving ground beneath their feet.

Miene and Sindra smiled at once, not maliciously, rather in that barely veiled way in which friends recognize that something very human has just happened. Gudi, on the other hand, was crushed instantly. She had wanted to impress her brother and now stood there with a scroll in her hand and a spell that refused to perform properly.

Morgut stepped closer. He did not say anything comforting. Instead he took the scroll from her almost without comment and began to study it.

He read.

He furrowed his brow.

Then he began to grunt, and shortly after to chuckle, half amused, half thrilled.

“That’s brilliant,” he said at last.

From that moment on he was sunk deep into the scroll and almost forgot the three girls entirely. He began to talk to himself in a low voice, as he always did when something really seized him and his thoughts moved faster than his courtesy.

“Here,” he said, pointing at a line. “Here you define the material.”

He looked around, raised his head, saw the ground, the bank, the grass, the damp edge of the path.

“This can’t work here.”

He said it with such self evident certainty, as if it were obvious, though for Gudi it was anything but.

“You’re trying to conjure a vortex out of sand,” he said, pointing again at the scroll, “but you don’t have any sand here. Only dirt, soil, roots, stones, and far too much water. A whole mixture of substances. Of course the spell won’t take cleanly then. Mmm, water.”

He was already in his own world. He no longer thought about Gudi, not about her disappointed face, not about Miene and Sindra, but only about formula, substance, carrier medium, and adaptation. He was already walking back toward the city, still bent over the scroll as he spoke, and when he noticed the others were not beside him, he was already several steps ahead.

He turned around.

“What is it,” he asked.

The three stared at him.

“We want to see a vortex, don’t we. I need to make a few modifications here and here,” he pointed with his finger to two places on the scroll.

And he was already moving again, with Gudi, Miene, and Sindra forced to follow.

It took two days until he was satisfied.

Two days in which he wrote, crossed out, rearranged, tested materials, reconsidered water behavior and form binding, and nearly drove Gudi mad because in between he would spend hours forgetting entirely that she was waiting for an answer, not merely for a miracle from his hands. But in the end he stepped back outside with a newly written, carefully revised scroll, wearing that expression of bright concentration that usually meant something would either work magnificently or fail just as magnificently.

They went to a spot on the Bricht, a little downstream, where the bank was wide enough and at the same time hidden so well that no accidental observation from the road or the paths was possible. The river was strong there, not wild, but active enough that water visibly worked beneath its surface. Morgut spread the scroll out and began the spell.

Seconds later the three women stood at the riverbank, staring with open mouths at what was happening.

Morgut rode a waterspout.

Not tall and destructive like a storm over the sea, but slim, powerful, clearly shaped, a rising vortex of river water that he guided as if he had done nothing else all his life. The water obeyed him. It lifted, it spun, it carried him, and Morgut was plainly enjoying himself. He laughed out loud as he pulled the vortex upstream, tilted it, straightened it again, and let it glide in a wide arc across the surface of the Bricht.

Gudi cheered so loudly that even birds burst out of the riverside brush.

Miene and Sindra looked as if they had just decided they absolutely had to master this too.

And that was exactly what happened.

In the following days Morgut and Gudi were busy teaching the two of them the basics of the spell. Or rather it was more that Miene and Sindra pestered Morgut, pressed him, begged him, mocked him, coaxed him, and would not leave him alone until he finally took pity. So they practiced. Every day. Again and again. First with the scroll. Then with the material definitions. Then with steering. Then with that terribly difficult question of how much of one’s own will one may put into a spell before it suddenly decides against you.

It took time.

Of course it took time.

Miene was too sharp and wanted to understand too much too quickly. Sindra was too cautious at first and kept braking the form at the last moment. But little by little both found their way in. First only messy, twitching water cones appeared, then splashing, short attempts, then something that at least looked like a real spell for a heartbeat. And finally they too managed to conjure a waterspout and ride it.

From then on the four of them often spent their days at the river, far enough from curious eyes, and clearly took joy in it. The bustle of the elders did not bother them. Nor did the fact that they were excluded from the big conversations and decisions. On the contrary. They had found something of their own. Something that belonged only to them, that challenged them, bound them together, and filled them.

And perhaps that was precisely why it was so precious. Because between all the dark things gathering in Tandor and far beyond, something else was still allowed to grow on the banks of the Bricht. Not politics. Not inquisition. Not ancient guilt.

Just joy.

And in those days that was almost as rare as magic.

They spent a great deal of time together. Every hour, every minute, every quiet gap in which they did not have to speak with others, confer, explain, or listen, they sought the other’s closeness. Anadar and Shara hardly moved away from one another anymore. They did not always talk much, and yet they were constantly around each other, as if a silent orbit had formed between them that neither of them left. As they passed, their hands brushed. Their eyes met when Anadar looked up from a scroll or when Shara gazed out of the window, lost in thought. Often it was only a brief glance, scarcely longer than a breath, and yet more lay in it than words could have managed in these days.

Perhaps it had begun on the way to the Islands of the Winds. Perhaps even earlier, in those weeks when something had already thickened between them, something they both sensed without quite naming it. But now it became truly conscious to them for the first time. The demon was no longer with them. That dark, gnawing, ever listening presence that had laid itself between Anadar’s thoughts and every kind of rest was gone. At last they could focus on each other. For Anadar it was healing. For Shara no less.

Her morning nausea had vanished as well. Her body had become calmer, surer, and at the same time she felt the life beneath her heart growing ever more clearly. It was no longer only an inkling, no longer merely knowledge or a healer’s confirmation. It was there. Truly there. Now and then Shara reached her thoughts toward the child, cautiously, almost reverently, and every time she was astonished anew by what she found there. It was still small, scarcely more than a faint, forming spirit in warm darkness, and yet fragments reached her already, stirrings, feelings, the first indistinct currents of something one could, with goodwill, already call thoughts. Not ordered. Not linguistic. But present. An early joy. A startle. A tentative sense of closeness and shelter. So early already, so delicate and yet already its own. Shara began to build a bond with the child she carried within her.

To her daughter.And to Anadar.

Sometimes she simply sat there, her hand on her belly, and let her thoughts wander to both of them, to the becoming life inside her and to the man who, only a few steps away, sat over scrolls, books, and the tangles of the world, and yet was bound to her with every fiber of her inner self. Then, now and then, a quiet sadness came over her, no great pain, more a soft, long sigh for something that might never fully be her reality. An ordinary life. A house. A daily rhythm not constantly threaded through with magic, danger, travel, inquisitions, demons, and old secrets. She thought of it and knew at the same time that such a family life was probably never truly meant for them.

She sighed.

Anadar raised his head and looked at her.

“What is it?” he asked.

Shara lowered her gaze.

“Nothing,” she said.

And thought of so many things.

He remained seated for another moment, studying her, then set the scroll aside. Without haste he stood, went over to her, and held out his hand. She took it without hesitation. He drew her gently up so that she stood before him, and he gathered her into his arms. There was nothing questioning in this embrace. Nothing hesitant. Only closeness. Quiet. The silent certainty that he was there.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

Shara rested her head against him.

“For the moment,” she said after a moment, “safe.”

She fell silent briefly.

“When I think of what is coming, it does not frighten me directly. But this uncertainty. It is so immense.”

Anadar said nothing to that. He simply did not let her go. His hands stayed on her, calm, warm, as if their touch alone could take some of the uncertainty out of the world.

“It stays exciting,” he said at last.

He knew himself how uncomfortably open that sentence was, how many things it could mean, how it held comfort and warning at once. Perhaps he said it for precisely that reason. Because in this moment there was no honest, simple answer.

After a while he spoke again.

“You do not want the child to be born in the Fortress.”

It was no reproach. More the renewed touch of a subject that had long stood between them. They had spoken of it more than once. He knew her arguments. And, what pained him almost more, he shared them as well. The Fortress was no place to bring a child into the world. Not with its walls full of history and half hidden violence, not with the archives of Light beneath the stone, not with the open questions, not with the unrest one could feel everywhere in the corridors. Zoordak was more suitable. Safer. Warmer. More sheltered.

Anadar knew that.

And yet he also knew what it meant. That they would no longer be able to spend time together, not like this, not in this quiet self evidence. And that knowledge hurt him more than he showed outwardly. A part of him wished, in these days, with an almost dangerous force, that the world might stop turning for a single moment. Might fall still. Might allow him to leave all of it behind and simply be with his family. The temptation was great. Greater than he had ever thought possible.

He held her tighter to him.

Then he kissed her.

It was not a fleeting sign, not a half, shy kiss, as might once have stood between them. It was an open, clear, quiet confession. Something he had never shown like this before, at least not in this way. Shara closed her eyes and savored every second of it, knowing she could not stop time to keep this moment forever, and for that very reason she took it in all the more deeply. His closeness. His warmth. His lips. The quiet despair and the great happiness, both rising in her at once.

When they parted, they remained standing close.

Outside, the world kept turning. People conferred. Masters planned. Old hostilities stirred. New schools still sought their shape. Messengers rode. Reports were written. Beneath rubble in the north, a bound hunger lay and perhaps waited only for its hour.

But here, in this one small, precious moment, they held each other as if they could at least claim this against the movement of the world.

And perhaps that was exactly enough. For now.