Anadar VI/II

4

Disgusting, Kral thought.

The disgusting part had been what they had forced down his throat to sober him up. It tasted like a brew of bitter herbs, cold ash, and something metallic that numbed his tongue and at the same time split his head open so sharply that the last remnants of his haze did not fade gradually but were torn out of him. After that they scrubbed him. With brushes. With cold water. With soap that smelled like something decent people used, and precisely for that reason it felt unpleasant to him. They scrubbed the stink of the last weeks off him, out of hair, beard stubble, skin folds, nails, as if a man was not being cleaned but exposed. Then they shaved him, cut his hair, and stuffed him into new clothes that pinched and itched everywhere, at shoulders, neck, hips, as if the fabric itself wanted to prove to him that sobriety was not a condition but a punishment.

After that they locked him in a room.

Not large, not small, not damp enough to be a dungeon and not kind enough to be a guest room. Stone floor. Narrow walls. A single window set too high to look out of. They sat him on a chair, bound his wrists tight, and left him there, dressed up like a bridegroom who had been invited to his own funeral.

Then three people came in.

The young woman first, or perhaps together with the two men, Kral could not later say for sure, only that his gaze caught on her. She had a foreign face, finely cut, alert, cool, and a kind of calm that did not come from gentleness but from control. One of the men was obviously a mage, you could see it before he spoke. In the clothing, yes, in the posture, certainly, but above all in that stillness at the core of his body that Kral had always detested in mages. They never simply stood there. They stood there as if, beside their flesh, they had raised a second order in the room that only they could see.

The third sat down opposite him.

“So, Captain Kral,” he said, “I hope you had a pleasant day.”

Kral stayed silent.

He looked at the man, saw the mixture of hardness and mockery in his face, and decided that silence was probably the only thing that still belonged to him.

“We are interested in your knowledge,” the man continued. “You seem to have had information that could be of value.”

Kral kept silent.

“A mage was killed, and you seem to know with surprising precision what happened.”

Still no answer.

“Has speech failed you.”

The mage behind him stepped out of his field of view. Only the sound of his footsteps, light, controlled, was enough to make Kral nervous. He tried to turn his head as far as the bindings and his pride would allow.

“Master Kolnidranooora,” came the voice from behind. “What can you tell me about him.”

Kral snorted.

“Idiot,” he said.

“Pardon.”

“If that master whatever his name was had not been such a complete idiot, he might still be alive today.” Kral lifted his head and almost spat the words. “He stands on my deck with all that pomp and demands passage as if the water belongs to him too.”

“And because of that you cut his throat and take his gold.”

“I.” Kral blinked. Only then did he understand where this was going. “I. Me.”

Panic was an ugly thing, and it rose in him suddenly and clear.

“It was those two strangers,” he blurted out. “I have nothing to do with it.”

Inside he cursed his drunken self, his loose mouth, his greed, his cowardice, the sea, the mages, and the whole damned world that never allowed a man to be stupid without making him pay for it later.

“Could you stop cursing so much,” said the mage behind him.

Kral went rigid.

“I did not,” he began, and in the same instant he understood. “Damn it. You are in my head.”

The mage stepped back into view and smiled.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” Anadar said almost pleasantly. “Anadar is my name. And I think you should tell us the truth now. Out loud, so that Nigk and Xian can hear it too.”

He did not laugh openly, but a small, barely perceptible tug at the corner of his mouth made it worse, not better.

Kral cursed, this time for real, and spat on the floor.

Then he began to speak.

It was astonishing how little a man can keep his own story to himself when someone with a calm face sits inside his head and knows every excuse before it is even formed. Kral told them how the sea monster hunted them, about the storm, the reef, the rebuilding, the two foreign figures he had taken aboard, about Kolnidranooora’s entrance, his demands, his stupidity, his gold, his last voyage. He told everything he could remember, and more besides, details he had not even known he still carried. Glances. Tones. The feeling of something wrong on deck. The way the strangers moved. The way they seemed to merge with the background when you did not look closely.

Nigk and Xian listened, spellbound.

Nigk stood with arms folded against the wall, the posture of a man who needed nothing from this room to be dangerous. Xian had not sat down, she stood half in the light and half out of it, attentive, cool, awake, and only her eyes betrayed how precisely she was placing every word.

When Kral finished, the three of them stood still for a moment.

Then they left the room without a word.

They simply left the captain behind.

He did not call after them. All at once he was too afraid of the sound of his own voice.

Outside in the corridor Xian was the first to speak.

“We should take you along more often. It saves time.”

Nigk gave a short nod.

“And reduces uncertainty.”

Anadar smiled briefly, not vain, rather a little tired.

“That was not difficult,” he said. “He is plagued by what he knows. It almost screams at you. He did not handle the impressions well. Too much for him. At heart he is simply built.”

He stopped, looked at the two of them, and then asked, “Could you do me one more favor.”

“If it can be arranged,” said Nigk.

“We need a ship,” Anadar said. “One that can sail out on the Sea of Winds.”

Nigk answered at once. “Consider it ready.”

Anadar nodded.

“And bring this Captain Kral there.”

Xian lifted her brows slightly, then nodded as well. Apparently she considered it the kind of request whose usefulness would become clear later.

Then Anadar parted from them and returned to the Earth School. There he sought out Master Roto, found him in one of those quieter rooms Tandor kept for conversations without an audience, and went straight to him.

“A ship will be ready,” he said. “With your Captain Kral on board.”

Roto rose at once.

For a moment something openly grateful crossed his face, something he did not quite know how to hide because it was neither irony nor formality. He thanked him briefly but seriously and then left without losing time, to go find Son and Indra.

Both had agreed to accompany him to track down the murderers of Kolnidranooora. The two water mages were not truly eager to return to the islands. Since Sinadie was no longer dean there, the bond to the Water School had noticeably changed. That was why this venture suited them, perhaps out of loyalty to Roto, perhaps out of duty, perhaps because in times like these it became hard to separate the two cleanly.

The next morning the three of them stood in the school courtyard.

It was early, spring already warm enough that the stones in the first light no longer looked wintry, and yet a chill lay over the scene that did not come from the weather. They said goodbye to the others. To Sinadie. To Miene and Sindra. To Morgut. To a few more who in the course of the days had drifted closer than anyone would have expected at the start. The farewells took longer than was usual among mages. Unusually long. Almost sentimental, if it had not felt so honest.

Son said little, but her gaze lingered longer than usual on the faces of those staying behind. Indra tried twice to find a light tone and abandoned it both times. Roto himself spoke calmly, collected, like someone who had decided not to start grappling with doubts in the final minutes.

In the end Anadar stepped up to them.

He carried a small stack of scrolls. Not large, not ceremonially tied, but the kind of writing you give someone when you hope words will arrive in a place where you yourself may never stand again. He spoke once more with each of them, briefly, personally. He said something to Son that only she could hear, and she lowered her eyes at once. He said something to Indra that made her laugh for an instant and then turn frighteningly serious. And he spoke with Roto the longest.

Then he produced three small amulets.

“As a talisman,” he said.

He put one on each of them, not hurriedly, not casually, but with a calm that almost felt like a ritual. Son let her fingers brush the symbol as if she wanted to understand what exactly he was giving her. Indra asked nothing. Roto looked at him directly, openly, for the first time without any distance.

Then Anadar embraced each of them.

Even Roto.

Brief. Firm. Without many words.

“Luck,” he said. “I wish you luck.”

And then they rode out in the early morning.

Not fast, not heroic, rather with the heaviness people have when they already sense at departure that this separation means more than travel. Everyone in the courtyard had a small tear in their eye, or something close to a tear. In the last stretch they had grown together more than they themselves had expected, and something in the air, in the days, in the direction of things, told them all that they would not see one another again soon.

Perhaps never.

After the three had passed through the gate and gradually out of sight, Sinadie remained beside Anadar for a moment. She did not look at him but out at the road, at the horses’ tracks already fading into the brighter dust.

“I have a strange feeling,” she said.

He said nothing.

“I do not think we will see the three again quickly. Or…”

He looked at her for a long time. Then he sighed.

“I think,” he said, “it is a suicide mission. We will probably never see them again.”

With that he turned away and went inside.

Sinadie stayed behind.

Although it was a warm spring morning, she shivered.

5

Mother gathered them once more in the tower room where, over the last few days, so much had been said, withheld, recognized, and weighed against everything else. Outside, evening was slowly settling over Tandor, and the windows were not fully dark yet, but inside the room lamps and candles were already burning, so the faces of those present seemed made of warm light and deeper shadow. Anadar was there, Shara, Manador, Isidre, Slonda, Sinadie, and Mother herself, and although they were not many, the room always carried, in these hours, the feeling of a place holding more weight than its walls should be able to bear.

Mother waited until everyone had truly fallen silent.

She did not stand by the table, not by the hearth, not at a window. She simply stood in the middle of the room, and that was enough for the room to align itself to her.

“Tonight,” she said, “there will be Conclave again.”

She let the words hang for a moment, as if giving them time to settle, before she continued.

“The last Conclave, shortly after the Tri moon, is now almost six weeks behind us. Just long enough to give the inquisitors time to arrange their report, to smooth it, to seal it, and to dress it in that gravitas people love whenever they want to claim something final.”

A restless murmur moved through the small circle. Not loud, not contradicting, more the sound of people realizing that, in those six weeks, more had happened than in other years.

Mother smiled narrowly.

“Yes,” she said. “I know. Six weeks feels short for a new Conclave and long for everything that has happened since then. But this was an extraordinary situation, and extraordinary situations produce extraordinary gatherings. Under the impression of the new events, under the weight of what has happened in the meantime, and, as the cycle now requires, under the chairmanship I will take tonight, I still have every intention of setting the distance between Conclaves back to six months.”

Now the looks in the room turned clearly more questioning. Manador frowned. Isidre lifted her chin almost imperceptibly. Sinadie looked at Mother for a long time without speaking. Slonda was already thinking in several directions at once. Only Anadar stayed silent and watched her with that mixture of understanding and suspicion Mother had come to know well in him.

She raised her hand.

“The others know nothing of the developments in the north. Not yet. News does not spread that fast. The world is large, my friends, and even fear needs a few days to become a proper rumor.”

She smiled again, brighter this time, almost amused.

“That will change in the next days, I am sure of it. And I want much, very much in fact, but I do not want to be rushed into a war.”

“Against the old peoples in the north,” Manador muttered.

“Or,” Sinadie said calmly, “against another school.”

Mother turned her head and gave her a look in which something like approval lay.

“Or against another school,” she confirmed. “Exactly. You should be clear about this. The zealots will not want to go to war themselves. If they get their way, they will try to put you, Manador, under obligation, with everything the Fiery Fortress can muster in fighting strength, discipline, and willingness to sacrifice. They will sell it as honor. As responsibility. As old duty. Perhaps even as historical necessity. Whatever they must do to keep you from noticing how comfortable it is to let someone else bleed for your convictions.”

Manador tightened his mouth, but he said nothing.

Mother took a slow step, as if she were not walking across the room but already across the order of things she intended to straighten tonight.

“That is why,” she said, “I will use my chairmanship to restore the interval of the Conclave to six months. The acute situation on the Islands of Wind is formally ended. The sea monster is dead, or at least one of them is dead enough for a report. The refugee movement in the north is over, the situation has normalized by now, since the reason most still do not know is not known. And as long as something is not known, it is difficult to use it as the pretext for a state of emergency.”

Now she smiled with full awareness of her own deftness.

“I expect your support, Manador. Isidre. And before anyone asks, yes, I have the support of others as well. Politics is, as I have tried in vain to teach you for years, made off the big stage. On the stage it is only read aloud.” She fixed her gaze on Anadar.

Shara snorted softly. Slonda looked down so no one would notice that he was smiling.

“I would love to avoid every unpleasant topic tonight, friends,” Mother went on. “So restrain yourselves. Especially you, Anadar. No fighting. Even if you are provoked.”

Now she looked at him directly.

“I want no fighting at all. No surprises. No demonstrations of power. No sharp remarks that later turn out to be historically significant. Do we understand each other.”

Anadar held her gaze. For one heartbeat it almost looked as if he wanted to say something that would set the entire evening on fire at once. Then he only lifted his brows slightly.

“If people leave me alone,” he said, “I can be surprisingly peaceful from time to time.”

“Then I hope,” Mother replied sweetly, “that the evening will be full of miracles.”

For her, the matter was decided for the moment.

Later, when they went to the antechamber before the door to the assembly hall, Tandor was in that state between solemnity and fatigue that only places know where power loves to dress itself in ritual. Servants, students, messengers, guards stood everywhere. Candles burned in wall niches. Footsteps echoed on stone. Voices dropped as soon as they drew too close to the paths the delegates walked. No one had to say aloud that tonight was Conclave. The way people stepped aside or suddenly stopped was enough.

The chamber in the library that led to the assembly hall itself was plain, almost austere, and for that very reason it felt more serious than many richer halls. No gold. No boastful banners. Only stone, height, and in the middle of the room the simple portal that opened the way into Conclave itself. It was not a gate in the ordinary sense, more a frame of white stone set into the space, without door leaves, without ornament, without anything that would explain to the uninitiated why one lowered one’s voice in front of it without meaning to.

Many were already there.

Fontal stood near one of the side walls, upright, composed, and yet the moment Anadar entered her field of view she looked, for a fraction of a second, as if she had arrived too late within herself. She did not openly avoid him, but she kept her distance, precise and unmistakable. Klasst was present, visibly nervous in that carefully controlled way of a man who knows other eyes are now directed at the seat he occupies. Beside him stood Isidre, outwardly calm, and Bertagnie, the new deputy dean of the Earth School, wound tight enough that one almost wanted to mistrust him simply because of it. Manador was there, with that heavy quiet that had grown into him over the last weeks. Anadar. Mother.

When it was time, they stepped through the portal and entered the room where the others were already waiting. From, Hokn’f, and their deputies had entered the assembly chamber through the portals of their own schools.

White arches. White stone. White floor. A circle of silent geometry. The great round table in the middle, which favored no seat and yet always knew exactly who was at the center. Behind it the black statues, tall and unmoving, dark as night set into the brightest marble. And over everything that peculiar purity of the place, radiating dignity and lie at the same time, as if for centuries people had tried to make power look so clean that no one would think of the blood behind it anymore.

The representatives took their seats.

First Tranda was officially farewelled.

Not with grand pathos, but in the cool form the Conclave reserved for the dead whose absence now became administration. His name was read. His office. The length of his service. The Conclave rose for a silent minute, and even those who had never been close to him stood with the posture of people who at least understood that more than an old man had fallen with him. Klasst then stepped forward and was confirmed as the new dean of the Earth School. Isidre and Bertagnie were introduced as deputy deans. The appropriate seals were checked, the names entered into the record.

Then came the transfer of the chairmanship.

Hokn’f stepped forward.

He held the staff with the kind of familiarity people develop with things they have held too long. He spoke the formula of transfer, not humble, not reluctant, simply correct. He named the Wind School. He named the completed cycle. He named the duties that had been fulfilled, or at least claimed to be fulfilled. Then he laid the staff on the flat white plate at the center of the table.

Mother stepped forward.

Her hands did not touch the staff until after she spoke the formula of acceptance. Not hurried. Not reverent in any low sense. Rather with the almost cheerful certainty of a woman who neither fears symbols nor is blinded by them, but who knows exactly how useful they are. When her fingers closed around the staff, a barely visible tremor passed through the air. The chairmanship had changed hands. From the Wind School to the School of Spirit. Next, as the order required, the Earth School would take its turn in time.

Mother sat.

And with her, the leadership sat in the room.

Fontal then read the final report.

She did not read like a woman who doubts, but like a woman who engraves a text so that no word can slip. Xoiun was declared apostate posthumously. His students, Tring and Tiang, as well. The events on the Islands of Wind were described as a severe failing and the consequence of a covert, derailed experimental practice. The sea monster, in origin, was assigned to Xoiun’s line. Sinadie’s actions were marked as correct in essential points, but faulty in one decisive point, since she had not informed the Conclave in time. Anadar, Shara, and Morgut were named as present and involved, but explicitly not as the origin of the events.

Fontal spoke without stumbling.

Only once, when her eyes fell on Anadar, did her breath shift almost imperceptibly. Anyone who did not know her would not have noticed. Anyone who knew her would not have been able to name it. Anadar noticed.

When she finished, Mother took the floor.

She did it without pathos, and that was precisely what made it effective.

“The Conclave takes the report under advisement,” she said. “With the confirmation that the investigation is concluded and the principal perpetrators are dead, I declare the acute situation on the Islands of Wind to be over.”

A murmured agreement, a few furrowed brows, nothing more.

Hokn’f immediately asked to speak.

Of course he did.

“Before we decide on this,” he said, “I consider it essential to speak once more of Master Anadar and his role in these events. The report may be cautiously phrased, but questions remain open. This man’s appearance in several recent incidents is striking, and I consider it grossly negligent to simply sweep this under the table now.”

Mother looked at him. Stay calm. That was in Anadar’s head.

No anger. No visible resistance. Only pure, cold order.

“The Conclave does not do that,” she said. “It takes the report under advisement. The report contains no basis for a new investigation. And under my chairmanship I will not open an additional debate on suspicion, since suspicion is not the same as procedure.”

“I request a vote,” Hokn’f said.

“No,” Mother said.

It came so quietly it almost sounded like a misunderstanding.

“The chair will not permit a vote on this.”

A few heads lifted.

Hokn’f had gone pale, not from fear, but from wounded authority.

“On what grounds.”

Mother laid her hand lightly on the staff.

“On the grounds that this Conclave is not here to build every distrust its own altar. You have your report. You have had your investigation. It is concluded. If, in the future, you have new evidence to present, do so in proper form, and not dressed in the costume of belated grievance.”

A soft, almost dangerous silence spread. Then she let her gaze pass once through the room.

“We continue.”

And that was it.

Not decided as a triumph. Not dramatic. Far worse for Hokn’f. He failed miserably because he was not even given the space to turn his defeat into a fight.

“The matter of the refugees from the north,” she continued, “is, by the present state of knowledge, not a formally registered acute situation of this Conclave. There are neither secured reports from all affected regions nor coordinated demands for an extraordinary joint measure. We will observe it. We will take note of it. But we will not turn it into panic today.”

She let those words sink and then added almost casually:

“Under these circumstances I propose restoring the Conclave cycle to six months.”

That was the real thrust.

Manador glanced briefly at Isidre. Isidre nodded almost invisibly. Klasst and Fontal seemed to have known beforehand that this was coming. Klasst straightened as if he had suddenly realized that his approval now mattered more than he would like.

“Objections,” Mother asked. “No.” She avoided looking at Hokn’f, she did not need to provoke him further. “Good. Decided.”

The rest of the Conclave passed without incident.

Names were read. Jurisdictions confirmed. Small border issues recorded. Deliveries for the Islands of Wind arranged. Tranda’s loss formally entered. The new cycle accepted by a majority. Six months. Not everyone was pleased, but enough agreed, and Mother had pulled more threads beforehand than many guessed.

When they left the portal again, it was late.

The air in Tandor had grown cooler, and yet the whole evening seemed to have carried less weight than had hung over it in the afternoon. Groups formed. People breathed out. Some spoke at once. Others stayed silent because they knew what had been said would only arrive inside them tomorrow.

Anadar was about to turn away when Fontal addressed him.

Not loudly. Not publicly.

“Master Anadar.”

He stopped.

She waited until the others were far enough away that their words could not be overheard by accident. Then she stepped half a pace closer, and it clearly cost her effort to allow even that closeness.

“In private.”

He studied her briefly, then nodded. They walked a little aside into a side corridor where lamps stood in niches and the stone seemed to swallow the sound of their steps.

Fontal did not begin at once.

She collected herself first, and that alone was unusual enough that Anadar noticed.

“I will send the recovered writings,” she said at last, “the documents from the tower, to the fortress as soon as I am back in Gontar.”

Anadar looked at her.

“That is important.”

“Yes,” she said. “And sensible.”

Then she lifted her eyes and held his this time.

“But I want something for it.”

“What.”

She hesitated briefly, not because she was unsure, but because she was searching for the right shape.

“A tacit agreement,” she said. “No oaths. No writing. No witnesses. Only this. If I need your support, I want to know you will not dismiss me from the start. That you will examine before you decide. And that, in doubt, you will not work against me as long as I do not work against you.”

Anadar was silent for a moment.

It was not a small request. And he was not foolish enough to take it for harmless. Fontal was clever, ambitious, and now also a woman who had learned her world was larger than she believed. People like that became dangerous or useful. Sometimes both.

“You are asking for trust,” he said.

“No,” she replied. “Only the chance to earn it.”

He liked that more.

He nodded slowly.

“Good,” he said. “Agreed.”

He did not offer his hand. She did not demand it. Between them, that would have been less a sign of closeness than an unnecessary gesture.

Fontal breathed out. Only slightly, but it was enough to show that this step had cost her more than she wanted to admit.

“Then the writings go to the fortress immediately after I return.”

“I thank you,” Anadar said.

She looked at him for one more heartbeat as if she wanted to say something else, perhaps about images, perhaps about fear, perhaps about the line between power and consent. Then she did not.

She only nodded.

And left.

Anadar remained standing for a moment and watched Fontal walk down the corridor, upright, collected, and yet with that barely visible tension in her shoulders that showed the conversation had taken more strength from her than she would ever show openly. Only when she vanished around the corner did he finally turn away.

Then Mother’s voice sounded in his head.

Not loud. Not sharp. More with that warm, almost amused clarity that always made him most suspicious.

You are learning, my dear.

Anadar closed his eyes for a heartbeat.

Of course you are listening in, he thought back, without bothering to lace outrage into the thought.

I am not listening in, came the immediate reply. I am only paying attention to what matters. You should be able to tell the difference by now.

He snorted softly.

Fine. What do you want to hear this time.

For a moment he almost felt her smile though she stood nowhere near him.

That you are slowly understanding how alliances are forged, she said. Not with grand oaths, not with raised blades, and not with that male urge to make every agreement look like a victory. No. Like this. Quiet. Useful. Open enough to breathe. Tight enough to hold.

Anadar leaned his head briefly against the cool stone of the wall.

You sound satisfied.

Moderately, she replied. But I do not want to exaggerate. It was only a beginning. You did not threaten, you did not boast, you did not try to bend her. I give you credit for that. It must have been exhausting for you.

He could not help smiling.

She has something we need. And she is smarter than many of them.

Exactly, Mother said. And you do not bind clever people through humiliation. You bind them by leaving a door open at the right moment and letting them believe it was their own decision to walk through.

He pushed himself off the wall and started back slowly.

So you think I am making progress.

No, came the instant reply, now distinctly sweeter. I think for a tiny moment you were almost bearable.

He laughed quietly into the empty corridor.

Then I will try to remember that moment well.

Do that, Mother said. Because tomorrow you might ruin everything again.

Then she fell silent.

And Anadar walked alone through the quiet corridors of Tandor, with a barely perceptible smile on his face and the odd feeling that he had not only made a small agreement with Fontal, but had also been confirmed and mocked by Mother again, as so often, in that almost insultingly precise way only she could manage.

In secret he wondered whether this would have happened at all if he had not, for a moment, shown Fontal the full weight of what they had lived through.

6

Anadar was restless.He did not like that Mother directed, corrected, and decided, and even more he disliked the feeling that, in certain moments, he was standing again where he had long since sworn he would not stand: like a boy in the game of the grown ups, in the middle of the board and yet not master of the rules. He sat with Shara in his chamber, forearms braced on his knees, and he was not in the best of moods. His irritation did not show itself in anger, not in open words, not even in real movement. It lay instead in those small, almost inaudible sighs that escaped him from time to time, in the way his gaze brushed over scrolls as if they were an imposition in that moment, and in the restless play of his fingers on the wood of the chair.

Shara watched him, as always.She sat in an armchair by the window, a parchment roll on her lap, and she would not have been herself if she had not long known what was gnawing at him. It was not mere annoyance. It was loss of control. Mother held the reins, tied threads, made decisions, set switches, and Anadar felt that he stood in a game whose deeper order she had known for centuries while he was only beginning to sense it. Too much had come at him in too little time. Too much had opened. And Mother moved through it all with a matter of fact ease that bothered him, precisely because she was so rarely wrong.

“Go and speak with her,” Shara said at last, more to break the pressure in the room than because she expected he would actually do it.

Anadar lifted his eyes to her, took one deep breath, and gave a soft snort. He did not answer.

Shara let him have that silence. She understood him. Perhaps better than he understood himself right then.

Because discontent lived in her as well. Quieter than his, deeper, better hidden, but present. Yes, she loved him. Long ago it had become something that could no longer be described with caution. And yet her discipline, her form, her years of practiced self control would never have allowed her, on that night of the Midwinter Turning, to take that step if Mother had not helped things along. Now she was pregnant. By the man she loved, certainly. But that did not mean she forgot how much of this turn had not come only from herself. She could carry that irritation better than Anadar could. Or perhaps she hid it more skilfully. And she trusted Mother more. Not blindly, never blindly, but enough to assume there was a plan behind all of it, even if she could not yet see its full shape.

Anadar, by contrast, was more open in his resistance. His irritation rose to the surface faster. His frustration wanted action.

There was a knock.

“Come in,” Shara said at once.

In truth she had expected Mother. Mother had that talent for appearing at the precise moment one spoke of her, or a heartbeat before patience finally broke. But this time it was not her.

Pildara and Slonda entered.

Shara lifted her head slightly and regarded them a moment longer. The brothers, she thought. So similar in certain lines and yet so different in posture, gaze, and inner rhythm that one almost forgot how close they truly were. Slonda carried that peculiar composure, as if even his weariness was orderly. Anadar, meanwhile, often seemed like someone who could hold his present together only by applying a certain amount of inner strain.

Pildara stepped first to Shara. Although the older woman usually seemed cool, almost severe, she was always surprisingly open with her. Not soft, not effusive, but open in that rare way that means more than any grand gesture in restrained people. She touched Shara’s hands briefly, asked with a look after her wellbeing, and Shara answered with the small smile she kept only for people she truly liked.

While the two women exchanged a few quiet words, the brothers began to speak as well.

It was not a long exchange. More a brief, careful checking in, as if both knew their paths would soon part again, and that not every parting becomes easier with many words.

“You know I am jealous,” Anadar said to his brother.

Slonda raised his brows.

“Really. I have more the feeling that I am walking, with remarkable calm, straight into my ruin.”

He sighed, then his gaze slipped for a moment toward Shara, and a brief, genuine smile appeared on his face.

“Freedom, dear brother, is measured in many units.”

Then he grew serious again. Not cold, but more formal, as if he were aligning himself inwardly to something that had to be said. Pildara now turned fully to the conversation as well, and Shara listened closely.

“We are here to ask you for information,” Slonda said. “You had that guest. Perhaps he left you things we can use.”

Anadar pulled his mouth slightly to one side and thought.

“What was lie and what was truth is another matter,” he said at last. “About Sahretun he said little. Almost nothing, really. I think he did not want me to learn too much about it. He taught me certain rituals and summonings, yes, but never in a way that could endanger him. He was very careful to set boundaries. Everything revolved around limitation, binding, control. And blood.”

He fell silent for a moment.

“Again and again, blood.”

Slonda nodded slowly, and Pildara folded her arms.

“That does not surprise me,” she said. “Most summoners who were careful enough to grow old built their art around binding. Not around greatness. Greatness is what kills you. Limitation is what lets you live.”

Anadar stood.

“Then perhaps we should stop only talking about that book,” he said, “and finally try to open it.”

The book lay in another chamber, the dagger beside it.

They went over together. It still lay on the table, dark, sealed, motionless, and yet so present that the room around it never felt entirely empty. The dagger rested next to it like a silent echo of the same hand that had created both, or at least brought them together.

Anadar stopped in front of it.

“Anyone have an idea?” he asked.

No one answered at first.

Then something shifted in his face. No great astonishment, more the sudden clear recognition of a man irritated that the obvious had not occurred to him earlier.

“Of course,” he said.

He reached for the dagger.

Shara lifted her head.

“Anadar.”

But he was already smiling with that tight, dangerous resolve that always meant he had grasped a thought and did not intend to let sense slow him down much longer.

“Blood,” he said.

“Be careful,” Shara said.

He had already cut his palm.

Not deep, but clean. A quick slice. Blood welled up dark, slowly at first, then in heavier drops. One fell onto the cover, then a second, then a third. For a heartbeat nothing happened. Then the dark seal on the book drew itself tight, as if something inside were waking from rigid sleep. The lines pressed into the leather began to move, not visibly like snakes or threads, but more like writing remembering its true form. A soft crack ran through the cover. Not loud, more like the opening of a very old lock within the material itself. Then the seal sprang open.

The book did not open by itself.

But it was open.

Shara let out a quiet breath, a mixture of worry, reproach, and the very precise knowledge that Anadar had done exactly what he had intended.

He, meanwhile, was already bent over the work, had opened it, and began to read.

Slonda stepped immediately to his side, tilted his head slightly, and looked down at the pages.

“Does that make sense to you?” he asked after a moment.

Anadar gave a low grunt, pointed to a place, and a narrow, almost disbelieving smile spread across his face.

“More than that. Can you read this.”

Slonda stared at the lines.

For him they were at first little more than blurred forms, lines, curls, as if something stood between script and memory, but nothing that willingly arranged itself into meaning.

“No,” he said. “Or not really.”

Shara moved closer and looked as well. Pildara bent over it too. Both saw something, certainly, but nothing they could hold. Signs, interwoven arcs, and now and then images that, on a second look, dissolved back into mere ornament.

“I think this is another safeguard,” Anadar said.

He closed the book, took a cloth, cleaned the dagger’s blade carefully, and then gestured to the cover.

“See. No blood traces.”

Indeed the leather was spotless again. No red, no edge, no stain. As if the book had taken in what it needed and erased the rest.

Anadar held the dagger out to his brother.

“Try it.”

Slonda took it in his hand with more hesitation than Anadar had. Not out of fear of the cut, but out of respect for the fact that this was clearly operating by rules that were not merely mechanical. He drew the blade across his palm, let a few drops fall on the cover, and stepped back.

Again something tightened over the leather.

Again that soft inner crack.

Then the book sprang open.

Slonda grabbed it at once and leafed through the pages. His brow furrowed, and now one could clearly see that he recognized something, but not enough.

“I can read it better now,” he said slowly. “Or rather, I can grasp the signs. They no longer slip away from my gaze. But I do not understand the meaning. Not fully. Some signs I know, others are foreign. It is as if someone has granted me the language, but not the whole background.”

Anadar nodded.

“So it is not only bound to blood,” he said. “It is a wholly different language with its own grammar, the way the other schools differ too. Only this one is farther removed. But not impossible. If Fantor managed it, it is possible for you as well, especially with my help.”

Pildara stepped to the other side of the table.

“Several seals and protective mechanisms, that is clever,” she said. “Especially for such a book. It does not only protect the content from strangers. It also protects it from being understood too quickly.”

Shara looked from one brother to the other.

“Then the question is whether you can ever understand all of it, at least in the short time you have.”

“Perhaps I do not have to,” Slonda answered.

That began a very theoretical conversation that quickly rose and fell in depth. Anadar thought they might try to transfer networks of concepts, not the language itself but the structure beneath it, perhaps through a guided reading. Shara argued that either the sense or the language would be carried across.

Slonda agreed with her and said that would require one of them to have fully grasped the sense already, and that clearly was not the case. Rather they would have to think about duplicating the conditions of understanding itself. Not the content.

Pildara added that books like this might not only want to be read, but to be answered. Perhaps the text reacted to the reader, perhaps understanding was not fixed in the book but arose only in the exchange between work and blood, work and mind, work and experience. That was too abstract for the others.

Pildara nodded.

“That is why you need an order,” she said. “No curious leafing. No jump to the first interesting demon. You work from the outside in.”

Anadar smiled.

“That sounds as if you know how to handle books like this.”

“I know,” Pildara said dryly, “how to handle dangerous things. That is not the same.”

Just as Slonda was about to speak again, the door opened.

Mother stood in the doorway.

She did not linger there by chance. She was simply there, in that perfect balance of elegance, beauty, knowledge, and mild inevitability that made other people believe she had been part of every scene long before she became visible.

“I had the feeling,” she said with a fine, knowing smile, “that someone had called for me.”

No one answered at once.

Because in truth that was exactly the case. Not in words, but in every question to which none of them alone had an answer.

7

7

Gnok was no longer needed.

At least not in the way he had been needed in the last weeks, as if everything old, hidden, forgotten, or deliberately withheld had gathered inside him and demanded to be spoken aloud. Now the first great knot had come undone. The Conclave was over. Mother had bent the evening to her will. The young ones no longer stood quite so blind before what was coming. And with that the moment arrived when Gnok began to consider the way back, not only as a thought, but as a path he was already walking inside himself.

It was time to return to Ashambrat.

He spoke to Gudi first.

Not because she was the more sensible of the two. If anything, the opposite. But he knew he would not have to drag Morgut away. Morgut was old enough to stay if he wanted to stay, and clever enough to decide for himself when his time in Tandor ended. Gudi, by contrast, was still at an age where every separation feels like betrayal and every announcement of farewell first becomes outrage.

That was exactly what happened.

When Gnok suggested that they would soon have to leave again, a storm of indignation crashed over him, so fierce, so fast, and so complete that he could barely keep his hands calmly folded without, out of sheer habit, calling on the sky for patience. Gudi threw at him everything that had collected inside her in these last days of joy, freedom, and new closeness. That he was heartless. That he always chose the worst moment. That he never understood how important something is when it is beautiful for once. That she had only just found her brother again. That she absolutely did not see why they had to leave when everything had only just begun. That Ashambrat could wait. That the world could wait. That he should wait.

Gnok let her speak.

He knew the girl well enough to know that in some temperaments resistance only grows when you try to tidy it up too quickly. So he waited. He nodded in the right places, he did not contradict her in the wrong ones, and he withdrew before resentment could harden into real misery.

He waited a few days until the storm in Gudi’s feelings had settled, or at least until it changed from open surf into uneasy water that could still be crossed.

Then he raised it again.

This time the reaction was less violent.

Not gentle. Not accepting. But less violent.

Gudi understood now that it would not remain a mere suggestion. And because she was not foolish, only young, she slowly grasped that some things remain inevitable, no matter how fiercely you rear against them. Two days after the Conclave it was time. She had bent to what could not be avoided and had already begun, with a devotion that was almost touching in its theatrical earnestness, to say goodbye to her brother for days.

Gnok watched it with quiet weariness and a trace of inward laughter.

From Morgut’s gaze he could see that the young mage had enjoyed the time with his sister very much. At the same time, Gnok could see just as clearly that it was slowly becoming enough again. Gudi had thrown herself into his closeness with such energy that even the deepest affection eventually asked for a breath of space. And there were also Miene and Sindra, whose presence around Morgut had developed its own particular comedy in the last days.

Only two problems instead of three, Gnok thought as he watched the two young women. And he laughed inwardly, while his face, as always, showed only the expression of an old man who knows everything about the weaknesses of youth and is nevertheless glad he does not have to live through them again.

He said goodbye to Mother and Pildara differently.

Longer. More seriously. Almost quieter.

They had known each other for a very long time, and although time for mages like them did not take the same shape as it did for others, that did not mean reunion and parting became easier. Only wider. Deeper. Harder to measure. They stood together for a while, spoke softly, and some of what was said mattered less than what remained unspoken.

Mother smiled at last and promised him she would take care of Danndi. She said it with that light, almost playful ease that was most dangerous in her, precisely because she did not boast. She knew very well how to make people forget things, she said, and that reassured Gnok more than he admitted openly. Danndi was not stupid. And she was too close to Hokn`f for it to be wise to let her return to Ashambrat with too many sharp memories of Gnok’s presence in Tandor.

He did not want to make a grand farewell to the younger ones.

He would see them all again, he told himself. So he avoided the gesture. No round of farewells, no last handshakes, no words that grow heavier than they should in the wrong moment. He would simply go. That should not be a problem.

He sat in his chamber, calculated the jump, searched for the angles, the currents, the inner line of the passage, and when he was sure enough, he fetched Gudi.

Drama.

Of course drama.

The moment she understood that this truly was the moment, all the waves she had painfully restrained rose in her again. She complained, she cried, she accused Gnok of being merciless, then she threw herself at him, then away from him again, and finally she stood in the middle of the room and looked like someone who hopes with her whole heart that the world might still make a different decision at the last instant.

Gnok let it wash over him as well.

He waited again.

And when the drama finally subsided, or at least when the exhaustion arrived that follows every great farewell sooner or later, he began the preparations. He spread the spell, drew lines, bound knots, set signs. The light in the room grew quieter. The air seemed to tighten.

“Wait,” Gudi said suddenly.

Gnok did not even lift his head.

“I forgot something.”

Before he could answer, she was already out of the room.

She sought her brother one last time. She found him in a corridor, half in conversation, half already with his thoughts elsewhere, and simply fell around his neck. She squeezed him as hard as she could, tears ran down her cheeks, and before Morgut could find the first sentence of a half sensible reply, she had already pressed the small vial of moon drops into his hand.

“You will need them,” she sobbed.

He wanted to say something, perhaps something comforting, perhaps something light, but Gudi gave him no time. She squeezed him once more, with a desperation that seemed far too large for her small body, and then ran off before her courage could fail her again.

When she returned, Gnok did not let himself be shaken.

He was already standing in the middle of the set lines, hands raised, voice deep and calm. The air before him tightened into a shimmering passage, no gate in the ordinary sense, more a surface opened in reality, its edges flickering very slightly, as if space itself were annoyed at having to step aside.

“Through here,” Gnok said, and pointed to the correct side. “This time it will be only one passage.”

Gudi stepped through.

Then he did.

The trap snapped shut.

Not loud.

Not with a bang or a visible burst. That was what made it so perfect. No sooner had they crossed the passage and felt the stones of Gnok’s tower in Ashambrat beneath their feet again than something crashed over them that was no ordinary binding. It hit Gudi first. Her body seized in an instant, as if someone had filled her inside with glowing needles. She could not even produce a scream, only a strangled intake of breath before she went down, twitching. A heartbeat later it struck Gnok as well.

He did not fall at once.

He tried to brace against the binding, understood at the same time what had happened, and that very understanding brought into his eyes, for a fraction of a second, something one almost never saw there.

Naked horror.

Then he crumpled too. Both of them lay twitching on the floor of Gnok’s tower, received by their own home as if by an opened mouth.

Hokn`f looked down at the two bodies at his feet.

He stood perfectly still, hands clasped behind his back, face in the dim light of the tower almost mild, and that was what made him so repulsive. He must have been waiting here for some time. Or not alone. The tower was not empty.

Marabar stood beside him.

He looked as he always did, as if even the darkness around him were only a cloak he chose to wear. Not hurried, not euphoric, not even visibly pleased. Only awake. Calculating. Ready. Behind him stood the two revived twins, pale, silent, uncanny in that way that lingers long after you have understood that a dead person is no longer dead enough.

Hokn`f looked first at Gnok, then at Gudi.

“Take the old one with you,” he said. “I never want to see him here again. Do with him what you like, strange friend Marabar.”

Marabar bowed slightly.

No submission. No homage. Only that form in which one confirms a useful agreement, as long as both sides still believe they can betray the other later.

“I thank you for your hospitality, Hokn`f,” he said. “And for your support.”

Then he lifted a small leather pouch he carried, opened it, and drew out a thin book, scarcely larger than a hand, dark bound, with no title on the visible cover.

“I hope you will accept a small token from me.”

Hokn`f took the book.

His gaze slid over it, quick, assessing, and an almost satisfied line formed at his mouth. Not greed. More like confirmation.

Meanwhile the two silent twins stepped forward, bent at the same time toward Gnok, and lifted him as if he were not a man of flesh and bone but only a bundle of clothes with too much weight. His body still twitched faintly. His eyes were open, but he saw nothing, or at least nothing of this world.

Marabar had already turned toward the hidden door.

Gnok had once concealed it cleverly. Cleverly enough that hardly anyone could find it. But cleverness helps little when the wrong person is given the right answers. The door slid open without sound, and cold night air swept in. Marabar went first. The twins followed with their willless burden. No further words were exchanged.

Only Gudi was left behind.

Hokn`f looked down at her.

She lay helpless on the floor, still shivering from the aftershock of the binding, lids half closed, breath shallow and rapid. No proud resistance remained in her, no grand speech, no anger. Only the exposed body of a young girl who had understood too late that farewells sometimes do not end in sadness, but in traps.

Hokn`f smiled.

Not wide.

Not friendly.

Only the way a man smiles who believes he finally has something in his hands that will be useful to him.

8

Farewells drew nearer.

Little by little, groups left Tandor. First Fontal and Danndi, each in her own cool manner, almost as if they had never truly stayed here at all, but had merely traced a necessary arc through the city. After them came Manador and Sinadie, heading for the Fiery Fortress, together with Morgut, Miene, and Sindra. Morgut in particular was almost impossible to restrain. His impatience to push into the new library overshadowed everything else. The thought of the sealed rooms beneath the Fortress, of scrolls whose script no one had yet fully penetrated, of knowledge that had lain hidden in stone for long enough, made him almost glow. It was a different kind of longing than what drove the others, but no less powerful.

Anadar had meant to ride with them.

It would have been sensible. It would have been simple. And perhaps it would even have done him good to be back on the road, wind in his face and a goal ahead of him, instead of sitting in a tower room and waiting for things that could not be hurried. But the work on the summoner’s book held him back. He and Slonda needed the last days they still had, and so Anadar let the others ride ahead.

Deep down, he did not mind.

Because as much as he wanted to be with Morgut and the rest, he also wanted, once more, to speak with Shara in peace about their plans. To truly speak. Without others. Without eyes from outside. Without Mother.

Mother herself had been almost unbearable in these days, so pleased with herself.

Everything seemed to have fallen into place the way she wanted, or at least close enough that she was in agreement with the world. She did not parade that satisfaction openly, not crudely, not as a triumph. But it was there. In the calm of her steps. In the tone with which she interrupted people. In the way she sometimes smiled as if she heard music no one else could hear. Anadar saw it and could not decide whether it soothed him or provoked him.

He, Slonda, and Mother kept working on the summoner’s book.

Slonda had to gain at least basic concepts, first patterns, and a feel for grammar and structure before he could leave. Mother served as medium, as bridge, as an ordering presence between what Anadar could already grasp intuitively and what Slonda could not yet see clearly enough. In this time, Anadar himself learned a great deal. More than he had expected. Yet nothing that helped them already, not right now. No sudden key. No saving formula. No unambiguous solution.

They performed simple summonings from the book and used their own blood for it.

They were small things, so small they almost seemed laughable measured against what else slept within that work. A bound light that did not flicker. A called shadow that only hinted at a form and vanished at once. A narrow presence that held at a threshold without crossing it. Anadar became surprisingly proficient, quickly. Slonda did well too, though not with the same instinctive certainty. And Mother, in these quiet days, began to understand better how summonings were built, how they thought, how they set their limits. All of it happened under the watchful eyes of Pildara and Shara, who never fully intervened and yet never merely watched.

It was a focused time.

A time of blood, symbols, quiet speech, and that silent hunger for understanding that carries people and mages farther than hope ever does. And the days Slonda still had grew fewer, until the morning came when even the work could no longer hold anything back and the word farewell could not be postponed.

Slonda had one more scroll for Anadar.

One that would help him save time in his studies, one of those bubbles in which time behaved differently, slowed, stretched, shifted, if you worked precisely enough and knew the price. Anadar, in turn, had prepared something more practical for his brother, a small book of spells and protective signs against different attacks, not beautiful, not ornate, but dense and carefully written, as if he had poured more worry into every line than he would ever admit aloud.

The farewell between Shara and Slonda grew more emotional than either had expected.

Perhaps because, in the last weeks, they had connected with each other in a quiet, peculiar way. Perhaps because Slonda saw in her not only his brother’s companion, but someone who understood Anadar and could hold him in a way few others could. Or perhaps simply because a farewell is hardest when you have grown used to a person without quite noticing.

When they finally walked beyond the city, Shara stayed behind at first.

She said she did not want to watch that farewell, and that was true. She liked the brother of the man she loved very much, and she did not like seeing him head into an uncertain future. It was easier to imagine departure than to see it with her own eyes.

So Anadar, Slonda, Pildara, Mother, and, of course, Isidre went out together.

Outside the city it was quieter than within the walls. The air was clear, spring already tangible in the world, and yet the place where they gathered one last time felt bare. As if a farewell that must carry weight always has to stand a little exposed.

Pildara talked at Slonda far more than was her way.

She gave him advice, hints, names, places, small warnings, half conjectures, old experiences from that other time he meant to enter. She gave him points of approach, possibilities, gestures he should avoid, and questions he should not ask too early. She almost seemed like someone trying to build a bridge out of words, one he could walk more safely.

And then, even more against her nature, she hugged him tightly.

Not brief, not fleeting. Tight. Some would have sworn a tear ran down her cheek. Others would have denied it, unable to imagine Pildara ever showing anything so openly. Perhaps both were true. Perhaps it was only light. Perhaps it was not.

“You are all acting as if we will not see each other again,” Slonda complained.

He looked around, half irritated, half desperate at the heaviness everyone began to radiate without wanting to name it.

“Could you please stop it.”

No one held his gaze long. No one said anything.

“Fine,” he said at last. “You are all far too impressed by Gnok’s stories.”

Mother stepped to him, stood close, and kissed his forehead. Isidre hugged him. His brother did too. Nothing about it was theatrical, but nothing about it was light.

Then Slonda turned and began to work the spell.

When he was finished, he looked at each of them one more time for a long moment. Then he stepped through the circle.

And he was gone.

The others stood in the same place for a few minutes. No one spoke. Everyone had a bad feeling, the kind that cannot be put into words because it does not come from thought, but from a deeper knowing the mind only catches up to later.

It was Pildara who broke the silence.

“He can take care of himself,” she said firmly.

No one answered.

“He will take care of himself,” she repeated almost the same sentence, as if she had to press it harder into the world so it would hold.

Then she said more softly:

“I know it.”

They started back.

Anadar fell a little behind with Mother.

They walked in silence for a few steps, until the others were far enough ahead that their voices could not easily be heard. Then he glanced at her from the side.

“And now,” he asked, “all your pieces are on the board.”

“Stop that,” she snapped.

It came fast, almost sharp, and precisely because of that it sounded more honest than any calm denial could have been.

“It is not as if I enjoy doing this,” she added, already softer.

Then she took his hand and squeezed it.

“You do not like that there are things you cannot control. I know,” she said. “But that is how it is. Focus on what you do have in your hands.”

“What is next.”

“Mhm,” she murmured and stopped.

She waited until the others were out of sight, then turned to him, looked at him, rose onto her toes, and kissed him on the mouth.

It was not something he had expected, not even after everything between them had begun to move again in the last days. That, of all things, loosened his inner tension in a single, unexpected moment.

“Do not be so defensive,” she said.

Then she laughed softly, almost like a bell.

“As for next. We ride to Zoordak. You will want to be there. We have guests you should meet. He accepted my invitation.”

She laughed again because she felt his confusion before he fully understood it himself.

Then, as they walked, she leaned into him and rested her head against his shoulder.

Something in Anadar relaxed the moment he felt her against him like that. This closeness, this walking, this quiet togetherness, called back a time that lay far behind him and yet was not lost. During his years as a student in Zoordak they had shared moments like this more often. Not in this form, not so openly, but with the same underlying warmth, the same wordless familiarity, suddenly there again. And with it returned something of the trust that had slipped from him in the last weeks.

He sighed, ran his fingers through her hair, and kissed the top of her head.

“Forgive me, Mother, for doubting.”

She answered at once.

“Anadar, you are doing everything right. Never doubt that. You and Shara, you two are the most important people in this game.”

Then she kissed him again, and for a few precious steps they sank into their togetherness as if, beyond the path, the warm air, and her closeness, there was nothing that could, in the next moment, impose commands, duties, or separations on them again.

Meanwhile Shara stayed behind in the tower.

She had said she did not want to watch Slonda’s departure, and that was not a lie. But it was not the only reason. There was a second one, quieter, that she had told no one.

She wanted time alone.

Time with herself.

And time with the book.

Every time it had been opened, something had happened to her. Not visible to the others, but so clear to her that it could hardly be ignored. Each time she had felt something, a call, a connection, something that pulled at her and at the same time threw her back toward herself. It was as if the book touched not only thoughts or knowledge, but something very deep within her that still had no name.

Now she wanted to follow it.

She stood at the window, watched the others leave the city, and waited until they were far enough away. Then she took the dagger in hand. She went to the book, drew one steady breath, opened her hand with the blade, and let blood drip onto the cover.

The book opened.

What happened next was fast.

So fast that afterward Shara could not have said at what point she had lost control. The letters and pages, the images, the shapes, all of it leapt at her, not like an attack in the ordinary sense, but like a sudden current flooding her mind without asking whether she was ready. It roared through her head. She heard no actual voice, and yet there was something that ordered, named, connected. As if a foreign knowledge continued speaking inside her, but in a way not foreign enough to be wholly rejected. It slid deep into her and anchored itself where words become memory and memory becomes certainty.

When Anadar and Mother entered later, Shara was sitting again in her chair.

A scroll lay across her lap.

She looked at the two of them and knew at once that they had spoken, and that it was good. Mistrust had formed between them, not openly, not destructively, but unmistakably. Now something of it had loosened, and that was right.

Anadar came over, stopped in front of her, and looked at her briefly.

Before he could say anything, Shara smiled.

“I missed you both,” she said.

9

At first, Xiodrie felt superfluous.

They treated her kindly, almost carefully kindly, as if everyone in this fortress understood that a woman like her was better not pressed with questions or demands, and yet that was part of what unsettled her. No one wanted to hurt her. No one wanted to drive her away. No one saw an enemy in her, and no one made even the faintest attempt to put her on a pyre, the way her fear had predicted for years. But just as little did anyone need her. She did not truly fit anywhere. She sat at tables where the others already knew what would be discussed before a word was spoken. She stood in corridors where everyone nodded politely, yet no one really meant her. She was not excluded, and perhaps that was what was strangest, because she still belonged nowhere.

Nigk and Xian were soon occupied elsewhere. Reports had to be written, messages sifted, couriers instructed, replies checked, and then there were those long conversations behind half closed doors, that serious, muted talk of mages and their allies that always meant decisions were being made that others would later live or die by. Xiodrie wanted nothing to do with any of it. Or she told herself she wanted nothing to do with it, because she could already feel that no one would truly need her for such things anyway.

So she often sat alone.

Not unhappy in the immediate sense. Just empty. She drank tea slowly, both hands around the cup, as if warmth could hold together more than cold fingers. She went for walks, at first hesitant, then with more ease, through courtyards and corridors, along small paths between walls, past gardens, past niches set into stone with books and lamps and those peculiar signs of a world that still remained half foreign to her. No one stopped her. No one accompanied her. And little by little she began to understand that being overlooked could be a form of loneliness too. Perhaps one of the worse kinds. Open rejection at least gave the heart something to fight against. This silent standing beside everything, by contrast, made you transparent.

More than once she toyed with the thought of simply returning.

Back to her hut. Back to the forest. Back to that life that had been narrow and small, but at least had been hers. One day she would die alone there, yes. That had never been hidden from her. But better to die alone in a life that at least knew you, than to sit among people who stayed kind and still never took you in anywhere. That was what she thought on some afternoons, when the light over Tandor grew still and the voices around her had nothing to do with her.

And yet she stayed.

Perhaps from inertia. Perhaps from caution. Perhaps because you rarely tear yourself free, in a single day, from everything that has only just begun. Her days filled with small habits. Tea. Walking. Waiting. Watching. Trying not to show too clearly that she herself did not know what she was waiting for.

Then, one day, she sat in the inner courtyard of the library.

That tree stood there, the one that had seemed wondrous to her from the first moment. Not merely beautiful. Wondrous. Its roots lifted the stone in places, as if it wanted to prove to the whole school, quietly, that life does not like to be smoothed flat. Its branches held a vastness that knew more about time than about seasons, and when the wind ran through them, it sometimes seemed to Xiodrie as if it told, with a thousand small voices, things no one could properly put into words anymore. She often sat there when she did not want to see anyone, and still did not want to be entirely alone.

That day she had just wrapped her hands around her cup and let her gaze drift somewhere between trunk and shadow when the light changed in front of her.

A shadow fell over her.

Not dark, rather as if brightness itself gathered before something larger.

When Xiodrie looked up, she saw that woman she had watched only from a distance in recent days. The beautiful woman with long golden hair, the faint glow on her skin, and that peculiar expression of calm, as if the world belonged to her, not in the sense of possession, but in the sense of familiarity. Mother, they all called her, and that word alone had been unsettling enough to Xiodrie. Because when adults call someone Mother, they either do not listen to her at all, or they listen far too closely.

Xiodrie rose too quickly, almost too quickly, smoothed her new clothes, which still did not quite feel like hers, and began to stammer a greeting that already felt too small to her the moment it began. But Mother did not let her get far.

She only looked at her and smiled.

Kindly. Not pitying. Not mocking. Just kind, and that made Xiodrie even more awkward.

“Xiodrie,” she said, “you feel out of place. This is not your world. Am I right?”

Xiodrie nodded at once.

“Yes,” she said, and now that the words were out, the rest almost tumbled after them on their own. “It is not that I am being shunned. It is more that I belong nowhere. I do not know how I am supposed to be. I do not know where to sit or stand or keep quiet. And I do not think I even disturb enough to be noticed.”

Mother kept smiling.

“Do not worry, my dear,” she said. “That passes.”

She motioned for Xiodrie to sit again and did the same. So they sat facing each other beneath the old tree while light fell through the leaves and lay in fine golden threads across Mother’s hair and hands.

“In fact, Xiodrie,” she said after a brief moment, “I need your help.”

Xiodrie stared at her.

Of all the things she had expected, this was not one of them. Not even remotely. She had expected to be comforted or politely placated, perhaps with a sentence about how such transitions take time. Not that she would be needed.

Mother gave the surprise room to exist.

“Could you deliver a message for me,” she asked then, “to the north. At the moment I would not know whom else to ask.”

“Just deliver,” Xiodrie stammered, still half stunned that the request was even directed at her.

“Yes,” said Mother. “Just deliver.”

Then her smile softened. Not larger, just softer.

“After that you are free to do whatever you wish. You can go, if you want to go. You can return to your hut. You can see the forest again and never set foot in a school again. That will be up to you. But before you decide, you should know something.”

Xiodrie had become so attentive she nearly forgot to breathe.

“I have a place for you at my school,” Mother said. “If you want it. I would like to take you in. You bear the Mark. And if you are admitted among us, then you are no longer an outcast. No longer a creature from the edge. No longer a woman who must keep asking herself whether the next campfire will suddenly decide she is a danger. You would be a student. Official. Visible. Protected. But only if you wish it. Not because I want to force you.”

Now Xiodrie was beside herself.

Thoughts crashed into her, so many and so fast that for a moment she did not know which had been first. She, at a school. She, among mages. She, no longer treated as a witch one tolerates as long as one needs her, but as someone who belongs. It was too large. Too strange. Too close to a wish she had never permitted herself, because wishes like that were dangerous in her life. Whoever thought too high fell farther. Whoever imagined safety often only suffered longer before it was taken away again.

And yet the thought stood there now.

Clear. Tempting. Terrible.

“What exactly,” she asked at last, “do I have to deliver as a message.”

And so it happened that one day, almost unnoticed by most, she took her old raven form again and set out for the north. Black against the brighter sky, light enough to look like an ordinary bird from below, fast enough to leave questions behind that might otherwise have followed her. She flew over forests and stone, over cool air and deeper silence, and carried with her not only a message, but something she had not known for a long time.

Possibility.

The invitation she delivered there was accepted all too gladly.

10

Miene and Sindra sometimes felt like little more than an appendage.

Not only to Morgut, but to everything that happened around him and the others. They had travelled, had seen things other students at the Fiery Fortress would probably still be talking about in years with wide eyes, they had faced danger, cast spells, watched decisions up close that people their age usually knew only from stories, and yet a feeling remained in them at times that they had mostly just tagged along instead of shaping any of it themselves. That, more than anything, began to irritate them.

And then there was Morgut.

For almost too long now, both of them had been courting his favour, though rarely openly and almost never in the same way. It had been a quiet competition at first, then less quiet, then one that hid itself again in jokes, glances, small cruelties, and conspicuously harmless remarks. Maybe the bow had been drawn too far. Maybe it had already snapped. Morgut, at any rate, could not or would not decide, and neither Miene nor Sindra had the patience to fully put themselves in his place. From his point of view, it was harder than they wanted to admit. The moment he chose one of them, he would wound the other. So he did what seemed least cruel to him. He did nothing. Or at least nothing clear enough to set a direction.

For the two young sorceresses, that became unbearable over time.

So they rode now with Manador and Sinadie toward the Fiery Fortress, and the journey itself left them little room at first to spiral through their thoughts. Manador set a hard pace, not out of cruelty but because once he had returned to motion, he could hardly go slower than his mind demanded. Sinadie and Morgut kept up without effort. And Miene and Sindra did as well. Over the long weeks of travel behind them, both had learned more than they would have believed at the beginning. Not only magic, but endurance, horsemanship, the quiet practice of bearing cold, fatigue, and long days in the saddle. Most of the work belonged to the horses anyway, and their bodies had long since adapted. The first sores, the raw burning and pulling, the painful hours after a long ride, all of that was behind them. They sat as if they had never done anything else.

And so they returned to the Fiery Fortress surprisingly quickly.

Of course the other eight girls greeted them at once, with a joy and curiosity so pure and unfiltered that even there it was rare. Hardly had Miene and Sindra taken their first steps through courtyard and corridors when they were surrounded, held, hugged, grabbed by the hands, questioned about everything at once and measured against everything, as if everyone needed to be sure they were still the same and yet had experienced enough to make the return interesting.

They had to tell everything.

And every story at least five times.

Sometimes they started at the beginning, sometimes in the middle, sometimes precisely where someone demanded more details. Naturally they left some things out. They had agreed on that beforehand. The water vortex, for example, they did not mention. That felt like something that belonged only to them, Morgut, and Gudi, and both agreed that too much attention would only invite questions they did not want to answer right now. But even with that gap, their stories drew enough astonishment. The Islands of Wind. The sea monster. Wounded Sinadie. The journey. The Conclave. Foreign mages. Old secrets. The names alone were enough to keep the girls hanging on every word.

At the same time, the Fiery Fortress itself had produced its own stories.

Who had stolen whose sweetheart. Which girls had fallen into jealousy. Who had quarreled and who had suddenly reconciled. Who had slipped through the corridors at night and who had been seen, even though she denied it to this day. Who had gone too far with one of the young fire students and now acted as if nothing had happened. It took less than three days for Miene and Sindra to settle back in, to be fully up to date, and to sink again into those fine, dense social entanglements that take shape within a group of young women faster than any outsider would believe.

And yet, secretly, both of them missed being on the road.

Out there, things had been simpler. Harder perhaps, dangerous certainly, but simpler. One thought about weather, food, spells, direction, sleep. Not about who had looked at whom for how long and what undertone a sentence might have carried. Life on the road was more immediate. Life in the fortress was once again full of small rules, unspoken hierarchies, and social expectations, and now both of them felt that tightness more than before.

So after their return they believed they could finally resume their studies, perhaps even with a small advantage in the others’ eyes.

But on the fourth day, Manador summoned them to his tower room.

Even the walk there felt strange. The Fiery Fortress stood almost in its old splendour again. Only those who looked closely could still find traces of the fight. A stone slab set too recently. A pale strip in a wall. Wood that had been replaced not long ago. Otherwise it all looked as if the school itself had decided not to let its wounds define it. Miene and Sindra noticed this as they walked the corridors and waited at his door. They exchanged a brief look. Morgut had kept himself scarce these last days. To their own surprise, they did not even mind. Both were tired of watching him and yet remaining stuck in place.

When they were called in, Sinadie was there as well.

That surprised them.

Even more surprising was how natural her presence seemed. In a short time, the two older mages had developed a friendly relationship, not built on ease but on shared experience, mutual respect, and probably also on the quiet knowledge that both had recently lost enough to understand each other better than words ever could.

“Sit down, girls,” Manador said.

His voice was almost gentle, and that was exactly what made both of them wary at once. Manador was not unkind, but he was not usually a man who loved detours out of politeness. If he began like this, something was in the air. They sat. He even waited until both were truly settled.

“Would you like something to drink,” he asked.

Now they were certain something was wrong.

Both shook their heads. Manador was silent for another moment, and in that short pause Miene and Sindra already began to wonder whether they had done something wrong. The bond between them had grown so strong in recent weeks that they often thought the same thoughts almost at the same time. You could see it in a glance, in the way one folded her hands a heartbeat before the other held her breath.

At last Manador looked at them directly.

“We found something,” he said.

He let the sentence hang.

“A hidden library in one of the fortress walls.”

Mother had told them about it. Or rather, brushed past it. Nothing precise. Nothing with the gravity that would have made clear it truly mattered. More like one of her typical side remarks, the kind of casually tossed line that only later reveals itself as a massive cut through reality. It had been the same, after all, when she had almost lightly told them they would soon go to the school of fire. A marginal note, and suddenly they were in the Fiery Fortress and the full weight of reality crashed down. Mother was very skilled at weighing information selectively.

Manador glanced at Sinadie.

After a brief moment she picked up the thread, and her voice was calmer, clearer, heavier at its core than Miene and Sindra were used to in everyday conversation.

“It is the remains of a school,” she said, “that used to be here as well. The School of Light.”

Now she looked at both of them directly.

And neither of them yet grasped the full dimension of what had just been said. Not truly. The words were big enough. School of Light. Remains. Once here. But the meaning hovered before them for a moment like something that refused to settle into the right shape.

Sinadie saw it.

“I have looked at some of these manuscripts in the last days,” she continued. “Not many. Not deeply. Only as far as I trusted myself not to read nonsense too quickly into something older and stranger than we are. And I would like to invite both of you to do the same. If you want.”

The room went quiet.

Not from reverence alone. More from the sudden feeling that a door had opened in front of them that they had not even known could exist a few days ago.

Miene was the first to find words again.

“Why us,” she asked.

It was not refusal. Only genuine astonishment.

Miene and Sindra looked at each other.

There was excitement. Wonder. A sudden bright pull in the chest, the kind that happens when fear and hope look for a place at the same time. In the last days they had felt small again, pressed back into old patterns, girls among many. And now they sat here and heard they might be allowed into a place older than the school around them.

“We would like to,” Sindra said softly.

Miene nodded at once.

“Yes,” she said, clearer now. “We would like to.”

Sinadie smiled, not wide, but visible.

“Good,” she said. “Then you begin tomorrow.”

Manador leaned back in his chair.

“And one more thing,” he said. “Whatever you find down there does not leave unexamined into the corridors. No stories. No half understood big words in front of the other girls. No fantasies about forbidden arts while you are not even sure what is on the pages. Do you understand me.”

“Yes,” they said at the same time.

That almost pulled a smile from him.

When they stepped back out, the corridor was the same as before. The walls were the same, the windows, the light, the voices from the courtyards. And yet for both of them everything felt slightly shifted.

Not because they already belonged to the School of Light.

Not yet.

But because for the first time in a long time, the feeling of being only an appendage had cracked. And through that crack fell something they had felt far more clearly on the road than here in the fortress.

Direction.

11

Isidre watched as Pildara, Shara, and Mother climbed into the coach, and as Anadar refused to do the same, although no one would truly have been surprised if he of all people had chosen the more comfortable way for once. Instead he laid a hand on his horse’s neck, swung up with a practiced motion, and in the next moment sat in the saddle with that effortless calm some men carry when they feel more at home on an animal than inside closed rooms.

Shara glanced over at him, a little embarrassed, then slipped deeper into the coach more quickly than her manner usually allowed, as if she wanted to hide from his gaze and from her own longing at the same time. Isidre understood that well. The younger mage was not far along in her pregnancy, certainly, but that changed little about the fact that the strain had already begun to reorder her body. Isidre had examined her once more. The child was well. Awake. Alive. And Shara herself as well. But she was not one of those women who could pretend such a change meant nothing, and even if she had tried to sit proudly in the saddle, it would not have been wise for this stretch. The body had its own knowledge, and it demanded its due sooner than pride was willing to admit.

So Isidre watched the last group leave Tandor, and felt a quiet pull of wistfulness in herself. The last weeks had filled the library, the courtyards, the corridors, even the quieter rooms, with a density of life she had not felt in a long time. Voices, conflicts, news, glances, departures, dangerous insights, new alliances, and even more dangerous tenderness, all of it had kept the city breathing. Now the coach rolled away, Anadar rode beside it, and with every hoofbeat it felt as if a little more of that turmoil was draining out of Tandor.

When they were finally out of sight, Isidre stood for a moment in the courtyard and let the suddenly quieter space settle around her.

Then she sighed and turned back inside.

She was hardly idle, after all. On the contrary. She had one or more murderers to find, and while she did, she also had to make sure she would not become the next dead woman. Tranda had not died of old age, that much was clear now, and the fact that his death had happened in the same school she now helped govern cast its own shadow over every friendly conversation, every quiet look, every plate set at dinner.

On top of that, the game of schemes around Klaast had already begun.

The zealots crowded the new dean with the kind of eager helpfulness that always grows most intense when what they truly want is influence. They caught him in corridors, held him after sessions, offered him drafts of order, recommendations, assessments, and proposals, each of them conveniently aimed exactly where their own interests lay. Klaast received it all with the earnest politeness of a man not yet fully certain of his new role, and therefore clinging all the harder to form.

Isidre watched with silent amusement.

Because she herself had two arguments that neither Klaast nor the zealots truly had an answer for. And those arguments were not only persuasive, but, as she admitted to herself with a brief flicker of vanity, also pleasing to look at. So she made a habit of walking through the library now and then in gowns cut a little more openly. Not excessive. Not cheap. Just far enough that a gaze lingered when she needed it to, and just discreet enough that no one could openly accuse her of it. She enjoyed how the men worked at their posture when they believed they must not reveal anything, and she enjoyed even more how, in precisely those moments, her requests or remarks suddenly found receptive ground.

Klaast was not a foolish man. But he was a man. And men remained predictably human, even in the halls of the greatest scholarship, if one knew where they most liked to reassure themselves of their reason.

Isidre smiled to herself at that thought and vanished between the tall shelves, while outside only dust was left drifting along the road the others had taken.

In the coach, the days passed only with effort.

At first Shara had believed it would be a relief not to ride, and physically it was. The soft seat, the rhythmic sway, the simple fact that she no longer had to steady her body against the horse’s movement, all of it was more soothing than her pride had wanted to believe. And yet coaches are cruel companions for people who would rather act than endure. They force passivity, and passivity makes every hour longer.

So Shara kept looking out of the window with a kind of longing.

Her gaze often found Anadar outside, riding, usually a little ahead of the coach, sometimes alongside, sometimes further back, as his thoughts guided him. On horseback he seemed quieter, clearer, more himself. The road absorbed part of his unrest, and even when his expression stayed serious, Shara saw him as freer out there than he could ever have been inside a coach. Now and then their eyes met. Only briefly. But in those brief moments there was enough to carry half a morning.

Sometimes he rode closer.

Then he rested a hand on the window frame, leaned a little toward her from the saddle, and they spoke a few words, small things mostly, nothing of demons, schools, or the future, rather the road, the sky, how she felt, the next rest, the horse that was stubborn or unusually attentive that day. There was comfort in it. It was the kind of conversation people choose when something much larger stands between them, and for a moment they deliberately choose something smaller instead.

Mother and Pildara were not unpleasant travel companions.

On the contrary. Both knew how to leave space even in close proximity, and neither felt the need to fill every silence with explanation or meaning. But they did not speak much either. Pildara often sat like someone already working on other times, other paths, other calculations. Mother, meanwhile, moved with a strange ease, fully present and yet already half inside the next step of whatever she intended. For Shara it did not make the journey harder, but it did not make it easier either. It left her too much time with herself.

And so she found herself sighing again and again.

Not loudly. Not on purpose. Just those small, long exhalations the body makes when the heart yearns for something it cannot have immediately.

At some point Mother simply drew her close.

No preface. No question. She pulled the younger mage to her, wrapped an arm around her, and began to stroke her hair gently, as she had done before, in Zoordak, in those days when the world had been smaller and threats still had names one understood. Shara did not resist. Why would she. She was tired, softer than usual, more open, and so she let herself sink into Mother’s lap, her head against her chest, while the coach rolled on and the road slid past outside.

Hours passed like that.

The carriage swayed, the wheels sang their muted song on the road, Pildara sat opposite them and said nothing, and Mother stroked Shara’s hair and temple in slow, steady motions. It was not a childish gesture, nor one that made Shara small. It was the opposite. Something old and familiar, something that allowed her, for a while, not to be strong.

So they sat there, while outside Anadar rode and inside time passed in soft, patient layers. And although the road was long and the future hardly looked kind, there was something in this small, quiet moment of travel that soothed Shara more deeply than any reassurance anyone could have given her.

12

Fantor had stopped counting at some point.

Not the hours. Not the days. Not even the breaths, and that was what truly unsettled him, because a man like him had counted all his life. Steps. Formulae. Cycles. Possibilities. Sacrifices. Limits. He had always believed that order was possible even where others saw only madness, and that knowledge, in the end, could turn any chaos into something manageable. But now he lay under stone, earth, dust, and the weight of a collapsed tower, and nothing about it could be arranged any longer.

It was tight.

Not in the simple sense that there was little space. Tight was a word for people who still walked upright, turned around, lifted their arms, and bumped into ordinary walls. This was something else. It was an entrapment in which the body could never forget that every breath was only tolerated. Above him lay tons of rubble. To one side a shifted stone slab pressed against his shoulder. His legs were half pinned, not broken as far as he could feel, but useless enough that he could barely move them without pain. The air was old. It smelled of dust, cold stone, dead wood, and that dull dampness that rises from deep earth when something that was meant to stand has fallen in on itself.

And there was darkness.

Not complete darkness. Not the absolute black of a sealed cave. Somewhere far ahead of him, or above him, there had to be a narrow gap, a crack in the load, because sometimes there was a grey glimmer, so faint he sensed it more than he saw it. But that glimmer was no comfort. It was only proof that something still existed outside, something they were cut off from.

They.

Fantor had come to hate that word.

Because he was not alone.

Naaarstr was there.

Always.

Not as before, no longer in the clean division between vessel and power, between summoner and bound thing, between hand and tool. Since the collapse, since that single second when the sword had passed over, the strike had failed, and everything had been buried under stone, something had shifted. Naaarstr was closer. Much closer. Fantor felt him not only in the sword, wedged somewhere between debris and their bodies, not only in the blade that was both prison and anchor, but inside himself. In his thoughts. Behind his thoughts. In the space between panic and reason.

At first Fantor had tried to resist.

He had calculated, tested, felt with his fingertips for the boundaries of their small hollow. He had loosened rubble where it was possible. In a low, pressed voice he had tried spells, small ones, ward marks, pressure relief, warmth regulation, every harmless technique that had been second nature to him all his life. None of it helped. Too little room. Too little strength. Too little concentration. Too much weight above them. Any stronger spell might have caused the hollow to collapse fully. Any attempt to work roughly against the stone would only have loosened more mass to bury them.

So, day after day, or what he took for days, despair had grown in him.

It did not come suddenly. It was not a single blow, not a moment when a man wrings his hands and screams that all is lost. Fantor’s despair was slower. More dignified perhaps, if one could have watched it from the outside, and for that very reason far more terrible. It came in small shifts. In the moment when his calculations, for the fifth time, produced no usable opening. In the moment when his mouth became so dry that even swallowing hurt. In the moment when he realised, on waking, that he could no longer say whether he had slept or only fainted. In the moment when he stopped correcting himself inwardly, when he no longer felt Naaarstr’s voice as foreign but simply present.

The demon was patient.

More patient than Fantor had ever thought possible.

Before, Naaarstr had burned. Raged. Pressed. His presence had been searing, full of hunger, full of the commanding certainty that destruction was always the shortest answer. Now he was different. Colder. Deeper. No less evil, no, but less obvious. He had understood that the struggle between them was no longer the same as it once had been. Fantor could not shove him away. Naaarstr could not simply devour Fantor. They were bound. Hooked into each other. Dependent on each other like two drowning men who have clung too long and no longer know which of them is pulling the other down.

Sometimes Naaarstr did not speak for what felt like days.

Then he was only there. A pressure. A suspicion. A cold, lurking awareness in the depths of Fantor’s mind. And then, when Fantor had already begun to hope the demon had withdrawn into silence, a voice would come.

Not loud.

Almost friendly.

You will die.

Fantor hated him for that more than for any earlier threat.

Not because the sentence was cruel. But because it sounded true.

“Be silent,” Fantor would murmur, or only think it. His mouth was too dry for any clear word.

Or we will not die for a very long time here, Naaarstr said another time. That is also possible. Slowly. Layer by layer. Thirst. Fever. Decay. Your magic will watch you decay. I wonder what you would prefer.

At first Fantor did not answer.

He had stopped meeting the demon with contradiction every time, because contradiction cost strength, and strength had become something that had to be treated like water. Carefully. Sparingly. Never wasted in the wrong places.

Instead he reached again for the sword.

It was not far. Sometimes he felt it with his fingertips, then not. It must have been lodged at an angle behind a jammed stone, half buried, but close enough that he knew where it was. More than once he had tried to pull it. Useless. Too much rubble. Too little leverage. And yet it remained there like a mockery.

Prison and hope in one.

There were moments when Fantor believed the tightness itself had begun to live. Not truly, not in any magical sense, but in the way long entrapment slowly convinces the mind that the things around it know more about you than they should. Sometimes he thought the stone breathed with him. Sometimes the darkness thickened when Naaarstr was especially quiet. Once he believed he heard singing, far away, deep beneath him, as if through many layers of earth and time. That was the moment he first seriously considered whether madness might be kinder than clear thought.

In those phases Naaarstr was almost gentle.

It is not madness, he said. You are only hearing more at last.

“I hear dust,” Fantor whispered.

And depth.

Fantor closed his eyes.

He hated it when the demon might be right.

But the greatest cruelty lay in the fact that Naaarstr not only drew closer, Fantor began to need him. Not as power. Not as a weapon. But as a counter voice against the silence. Against the slow fraying of his own mind. A man lying alone under rubble begins, at some point, to feel even the voice of his enemy as a form of company. Fantor noticed it and despised himself for it, but even self contempt loses its sharpness when you have too little strength left to feel.

One of those times, when he was reachable enough again to hold his thoughts together, he began to calculate.

Not the stones. Not the rubble.

Other things.

Magical range. Binding strength. Transition models. What would it mean to abandon the body completely. What if a binding did not only restrain, but also carry. What if the vessel did not remain the sword. What if the sword was only threshold.

Naaarstr sensed these thoughts at once.

There you are at last.

Fantor felt anger flare in him, dull and yet real.

“You knew.”

Of course. You simply took a long time.

“It is madness.”

That is not an objection any more, Fantor. It is only a description of your situation.

Fantor reached for the sword again, this time not to pull it, only to confirm the nearness of cold metal in the dark with his fingertips. It calmed him in a revolting way. As if there were at least something that remained clear. Dangerous, yes. Corrupt, certainly. But clear.

“Even if,” he whispered, “even if I calculate the transition, even if I hold it, to where. Under all this stone. We would end up in something I no longer control.”

You control nothing already.

Fantor said nothing.

Naaarstr let him have the silence, the way one gives a wounded animal time to test the gate of a trap with its teeth.

You think too small, the demon said then. As always when you are afraid. Not through the stone. Not against the load. Not upward.

Fantor opened his eyes, though there was nothing to see.

“No.”

Naaarstr laughed.

It was not a sound. More the sensation of a sound unfolding directly behind Fantor’s forehead.

Yes.

“No.”

Yes.

“I will not go through there.”

You will die if you do not.

Fantor pressed his head against the cold stone behind him. His throat burned. His lips were split. Every muscle hurt, and still there was that residue of pride, that ridiculous residue of summoner dignity, that resisted what reason had already begun to outline.

“The demon dimension is not a path. It is an abyss.”

A road is also an abyss when you are pursued by the wrong thing.

“There is no direction there.”

There is. I am direction there.

Fantor let out a short laugh.

Or a cough. It was hard to tell.

“And that is meant to reassure me.”

It is not meant to reassure you. It is meant to save you.

The word lodged in them.

Save.

Not release. Not free. Save.

Fantor hated that Naaarstr had chosen precisely that word. He hated even more that it worked.

“I cannot hold a full transition,” he said after a long time. “Not in this state. Not with the sword stuck. Not under stone. I do not have enough room. Not enough strength. And if I open the way and do not close it, we are lost before we even take the first step.”

Naaarstr fell silent.

Then he spoke more slowly.

Not if we do not go as flesh.

Fantor did not understand at once.

Perhaps he did not want to.

“What.”

Not as flesh, Naaarstr repeated. Not as bodies under stone. Not as summoner and demon, both still pretending they can be cleanly separated. If the way is meant to pass through my world, then you do not go through as a man holding me on a leash. That would tear you apart before you cross the threshold fully.

Fantor suddenly felt cold.

Not outside. Inside.

“No.”

Naaarstr said nothing.

Fantor was already thinking faster than he liked. Binding. Vessels. Self binding. Transition without a body. Reduction to essence, to bound form, to something no longer entirely human and yet somehow carrying continuity of self across. Madness. Gods, it was madness.

“No,” he said again, weaker.

Of course not gladly, Naaarstr said. Who goes gladly through hell. But you asked for a way. I give you one.

Fantor closed his eyes.

He saw nothing, and yet the image stood before him. Not in lines, but in consequences. They would have to bind themselves. Not only bind the demon. Not only put power into metal. Themselves. Their being. Their thinking. Their continued existence pressed into a form small enough, hard enough, bound enough to survive the passage through that other dimension at all. No body. No breath. No thirst. No weight under stone. Only vessel, binding, and the greyish path through something that was neither world nor in between, but the origin of countless corruptions.

And if it worked.

If.

Then at some point, somewhere, they would have to step out again.

Different.

Perhaps damaged. Perhaps shifted. Perhaps no longer separated in a way Fantor could tolerate. Perhaps not reversible at all.

He felt Naaarstr very close.

Now you understand.

Fantor said nothing for a very long time.

The faint grey glimmer somewhere in the distance was gone, or he could no longer see it. Perhaps only his perception had grown tired. Above them the mountain of stone pressed down. Around them the dark. In him despair. And beneath that, beneath that something that slowly took on the name possibility.

It was not a good possibility.

Not clean.

Not one a sensible man would ever choose while any other escape remained.

But under the rubble there were no sensible men left. Only survivors and what they had to become.

Fantor moved his split tongue over his dry lips.

“How,” he asked at last.

And Naaarstr smiled inside him.

Not friendly.

Not triumphant.

Like something very old that had waited for exactly this moment.

There is, the demon said, as a last resort, a form in which we can escape the stone.

Fantor felt, before the words fully reached him, that he would hate them.

For that, Naaarstr said, we would have to bind ourselves.

End part 2