Anadar VII/I

Prologue

When the knife drove into her, deep into her belly, and the poison unfolded inside her body, her breath caught.

It was not only pain. Pain she would have understood. Pain was simple. Pain could be carried, ordered, fought, split into layers like everything else a long life teaches you sooner or later. But this was more. It was the sudden intrusion of certainty. A blade. An old friend. Poison. A body that, in the same instant, understood it had been betrayed.

She shoved Gnok away, not with dignity, not with power, not with that superior calm that was usually her own, but from pure instinct, with the last raw strength of a being that does not want to die yet. Then she looked down.

The knife jutted from her abdomen.

Her white robe was already darkening. Blood soaked into the fabric, ate into it, spread, and she knew, before her mind could grasp the full size of the moment, that the poison was fast. Very fast. The first signs of paralysis were already there. Not visible to a careless eye, but unmistakable to hers. A slackening in her fingers. A strange pull through her lower belly. A slow loss of that finest control on which her entire existence had rested for centuries.

She tried to read his mind.

Nothing.

Where Gnok should have been, there was emptiness. Not the silence of a shielded mind. Not the resistance of an equal. But erasure. As if whatever had made him Gnok had been covered, smothered, torn away. She could take hold of nothing in him. No recognition. No hesitation. No horror. No pain. Only emptiness and motion.

He came toward her again.

Not hurried. Not wavering. Simply straight on, as if the next step had been decided before the previous one was fully placed. His hand reached for the knife that protruded from her belly. With her last strength she resisted. Her hands found his wrist, she braced herself against him, she did not even know whether she meant to prevent him from pulling the weapon free or whether she was only recoiling from the thought of being touched by him like this.

For a heartbeat she stopped him.

Then he managed it anyway.

Quiet as a cliff, patient as something that knows no pain, Gnok drew the blade out of her.

She had expected him to strike again.

But he did not.

He went.

As soundlessly as he had come.

She remained behind, swaying, then sinking, and when her body hit the floor, panic finally rose all the way in her. Not first for the sake of pain. Not even because of the blood. But because of the heaviness creeping through her limbs, telling her this was not a fight in which one could still stand up again, bare one’s teeth, and turn the whole thing around. Her eyes closed.

And her life ran before her.

Not neatly.

Not like a chronicle.

More like shards of light on dark water.

First, scenes she herself had barely looked at for a long time. When she had still been a young girl. A father’s love. A courtyard. Scraped knees. The smell of grass in warm light. A swing. Small hands. Laughter that did not yet know caution. A mother calling. Siblings’ voices. Summer.

Then the day they discovered the Mark on her.

Dioneè came.

Her teacher.

The woman who would break and save her life almost in the same breath. She saw her again as she stood before the house back then, not harsh, not kind, simply tall and implacable like a truth you cannot send away. She saw the farewell too. The last look at her father. At her mother. At the siblings who did not understand why she was leaving. How she tried to imprint their faces in her memory as if memory could be a road back. How she tried now to hold them again, those faces she had not seen for so long. Tears on her cheeks. The certainty that a child can learn in a single day how large loss is.

Then the initiation rites.

How she stood young and naked in the forest, near Dioneè’s tower, full of shame, because even magic does not take a young body’s sense of exposure away. The forest had been full of beings then. Full of voices no human had invented. And then the wolf came. That enormous wolf who was always there and protected Dioneè as if he too belonged to an older pact than any spoken word. His eyes. His fur. The way he measured her and decided in a single look that she was allowed to stay.

She saw herself as a young student.

The first successes. The first nights when a spell suddenly worked and the world opened for a heartbeat. The love for her teacher, first as reverence, then as bond, then as something far deeper, beyond ordinary words. She saw the first hundreds of years they lived and grew together, and at some point she became more skilled than Dioneè. Not wiser. Not greater. But faster, more precise, farther in certain arts. They lived apart from much else, in a part of the world that no longer existed, surrounded by beings, fae and other magical creatures, by unicorns that moved with them in silent harmony through forests and clearings, as if this had been the world’s natural state.

Then came the hunt.

Then came the pushing back.

Then came the hatred of everything that was not human.

Magic ebbed from the world, slowly at first, then noticeably, and the way humans so often do when something wonderful slips away from them, they searched for someone to blame before they searched for truth. They blamed the non human beings. And from that grew the genocide. Everything that was different was hunted. Destroyed. Eradicated. What they did not understand, they burned. What they could not control, they declared an enemy. She saw herself and Dioneè, year after year, hiding everything around the tower that was differently magical, hiding beings, healing them, masking them, sending them away, always knowing it would never be enough.

Then came that assembly.

Dioneè sent her away so she could take part in something that was meant to set the course. She met other magicians. Others who shared her view. Others who still understood what was happening in the world. And they tried to stop the murders. At least slow them. At least find a language for them that was not only hatred.

When she returned, the valley was destroyed.

Everything erased.

She saw that day so clearly that even in the present her heart broke. Dioneè, staked in the middle of the burned valley, on the ruins of her tower. The enormous wolf, her companion, slaughtered, mutilated, burned. Everything else killed. Cruelly. In the most bestial way. They had let demons into that valley. Not from need. Not in battle. But out of that cold planned malice only humans can produce when they are convinced of their own righteousness.

Then she saw the years of flight.

How she hid. Not only from fear. Also from shame. Because she had not been there. Because she had been sent away and survived while everything she loved was wiped out. Years passed. Years in which she was scarcely more than a trembling will with a name.

Then Gnok found her, already then out of a different time, with that quiet gravity in his eyes that would never leave him for the rest of his life. He took her in. He healed her, not with spells alone, but with time and with his love. For years she worked on herself. Shaped herself. Improved herself. Learned how to read people, steer them, move them, deceive them, protect them, use them. Learned that power is worth something only when it becomes effective. And at some point she loved him. Not suddenly, not like a girl. But deep, old, almost silent, and because of that all the more immovable.

Then came the rise.

The world of magicians took shape. The Conclave. The writing of the Codex, in which she herself had a hand. Then, at last, the founding of the schools. A great congress. The solemn declaration that the war against the other beings had been successfully ended. Ended. That word sat in her memory like a wound.

There she swore vengeance.

Not from pain alone. Not only from love for the dead. But from that cold necessity born in her when she found Dioneè staked in the ruins. She took the School of Mind. Without scruples. With a cold bloodedness born of necessity. With the goal of taking revenge on those who murdered Dioneè. With the goal of erasing the inquisitors, every last one if possible.

She saw magic continue to fade from the world. Saw others grow less and less powerful. And saw her vengeance bear fruit. How she sowed mistrust against the summoners, first cautiously, then deliberately, then with the calm of a woman who no longer asks whether she is doing the right thing, only whether it will be enough. Until it finally happened and Sahretûn fell to an inquisition.

The war against the summoners.

It demanded countless victims. Many of the old ones died in that battle, against the city and against what it had become. The fight was not primarily against the demons, that would have been pointless. It was against the cursed summoners themselves. Into their city. Find them. Kill them. Back out again. A war led so skillfully and so secretly, so ugly and so mean, and yet at the time the only chance.

She saw the summoners strike back with their demons. First precisely. Then blindly. Coldly. Without restraint. Innocent cities were wiped from the earth. Then the inquisition struck back even harder, with more and more allies. She saw them finally attack the cursed city. Rain fire and light over Sahretûn. More and more summoners fell. More and more demons were bound, shattered, banished. And then it happened. The city burned. Was destroyed. Collapsed into itself. No summoner was seen again. No demon walked openly in this world again.

It was done.

The vengeance had been taken.

She felt that cold satisfaction again in memory, and beneath it at once the truth she later admitted so rarely. How many friends and companions she had lost in that war. People who might still be alive if she had not influenced them. If she had not planted that hatred into the world, into each heart that had been susceptible to it.

More faces passed by.

People she believed she had forgotten. Companions, lovers, students, opponents, tools, victims. And then how she became Mother more and more. How she pulled the schools’ threads from the background. How she tried to set the future, to place the switches, with the belief and the hope that magic would return to the world. That with it would return what had once been beautiful. That had been her true goal. Not power for its own sake. Not victory. Not merely influence.

She wanted to dance with fae through a forest again, to live in a tower in a wood surrounded by creatures that were unique and wondrous and full of magic.

That had been her motive.

The tender core of everything.

Then she saw how she drifted away from Gnok. How he turned more and more toward the old stories, the sky, the theory of magic, while she herself sank deeper and deeper into manipulation. How she absorbed the School of Illusion into herself and made it her own. Then the great time of prophecies. More and more foretold the rebirth of magic. They spoke of children who would carry it back into the world. She hunted these visions. Lost herself in them. Only to realize they were not reliable, that what was announced rarely arrived as one hoped. And still, in her, the conviction remained that magic would return. Sooner or later. With all its wonders.

And then that boy stood before her door.

Ages had passed. Centuries slid by like dust in light. And suddenly a man came who wanted to learn the magic of mind. In Anadar she recognized something others did not have. She had not seen someone like him in a very long time. And her attention began to return from the mere game with the future to the here and now. She taught him. She loved him. And with him came Shara. In her too she recognized something written in old prophecies. And she knew what to do.

At the latest when that presence she had believed erased, that demonic thing, moved over the world again, then she knew it for certain.

Magic was returning.

With all its evil.

And with all its good.

And now she lay on cold stone, poison running through her veins, and she felt life draining from her, blood leaving her body.

And yet, beneath pain, poison, memory, and weakness, a last core of defiance still remained.

Not yet, she thought.

Not yet, and she sent one last thought outward, a cry for help, soundless, and she hoped it would be heard before she lost consciousness.

1

And so Slonda stood with Hartra at the entrance to the Conclave.

Both of them had squeezed themselves into the clothing customary for that era, including those stiff ruffs that already felt like a personal insult to Slonda just from looking at them. Hartra had put his on with astonishing calm, as if it belonged among the lesser inconveniences of existence to submit to the nonsense of any epoch, so long as it did not become deadly. Slonda, by contrast, had the feeling after only a few minutes that the thing was strangling not his neck but his patience.

Hartra threw him one last sideways look and raised a warning finger.

“Leave the talking to me,” he said.

Then he straightened a little more, as if he first had to settle himself into the tone of this era, and continued with that grotesquely smooth long windedness Slonda both admired and despised.

“It seems to me that the people of this age are not aware that they possess this lightly exaggerated and, if I may add, painfully long winded manner of expressing themselves at times and in many places with great and lingering elaboration, and that we will be better served by respecting this custom, as heavy and laborious as it may be, since otherwise we might needlessly draw the displeasure of those present upon ourselves.”

Slonda tried to follow the sentence, lost his inner footing twice along the way, and finally paid respect with nothing more than a nod. Hartra had actually managed to say all of that in a single sentence, and probably on purpose.

With them were three mages of the Life school. The dean of this time was a vain fop who insisted on being addressed only as “Magnificence” and looked every time as if that fact alone were proof enough of his importance. At the mere sight of the man, Slonda began to itch beneath the ruff. Everything suddenly seemed senseless to him. The clothing. The language. The gestures. The whole swollen performance of a time that appeared to take its form more seriously than its substance.

Then the door to the Conclave opened.

Slonda stepped in behind Hartra into the same room he knew, and yet did not know. A room that, across thousands of years, still looked exactly as it looked now. Almost. Because he had never seen it so full. Nearly twice as many people were present as at the Conclave he knew from his own time, and yet the hall still did not feel crowded. The old lines of the place held everything in order, even a press of schools, vanities, and hostilities.

And what Slonda saw stole his breath.

Hartra had not exaggerated.

There stood mages of Transformation, as Slonda now suspected with growing certainty, upright in human bodies, yet instead of human heads they wore animal heads. A dog. An eagle. A snake. All three moved with perfect naturalness, spoke in human language, and, to the complete ridiculousness of the image, wore those ruffs around their animal necks as well.

Farther back he saw his real target.

The Summoners.

Hartra gestured subtly in their direction and quietly gave him names, functions, affiliations. The Summoners stood a little apart, avoided by the others, not openly banished but visibly isolated. They were unlike all other mages in the room. Their heads were shaved. Their teeth sharpened. Their skin, or at least the visible faces, carried a bronze taint, as if something had permanently overlaid ordinary humanity. They alone wore no ruffs. Their clothing was black, embroidered with silver or gold in strict patterns. In their hands they held staffs whose upper ends were set with a pale sphere, while the lower ends bore a black one. Everything about them said: we do not belong to you, and we have no intention of apologizing for it.

Slonda let his gaze drift on.

He saw the Light mages in white, directly beside the Fire mages, and at once it was clear that more than mere practical difference stood between those two groups. It was bickering, an old friction, almost a cultivated enmity. Each group stood in its own dignity and yet seemed to watch the other with half an eye at all times. Then he noticed the Necromancers, whom Hartra explained to him as briefly as he did contemptuously. They were pale, their hair looked unwashed, their hands bony, and there was something about them like people who deliberately wore the smell of earth and vaults on their skin because they wanted to be closer to it than to ordinary life.

“Useless rubbish,” Hartra muttered. “Underground most of the time so they can be closer to the dead. As if the dead were better company than a proper roast.”

Slonda barely heard him anymore.

Because just before the Conclave began and those present started moving toward their places, she entered the room.

Bright.

Radiant.

Golden.

She entered with golden hair, and Slonda’s breath caught. It was Mother. Not a day younger, not a step different from what he remembered. The same calm. The same light around her. The same way of not merely entering a room but owning it at once, without showing even the slightest effort.

“Mother,” Hartra murmured beside him. “You know her, of course.”

The Conclave began.

With the litany that, even after hundreds of years, had changed hardly at all. First the chair was handed over, this time from the Water school to Necromancy. The Necromancers began by recording those present, confirming seats, naming new or special delegates, all in a language so sprawling that Slonda nearly lost the thread in the first section.

When the Time mages were called, one of the Necromancers raised his eyes. Master Klot, as Hartra quietly told him, a man with that pale dignity only people can project when they consider themselves particularly profound because they turn to the dead more often than to the living.

“As we,” Klot began, in a voice that already in the first sentence promised to be too long, “with no small astonishment find ourselves compelled to note, the mages who deem themselves called to bear the workings of Time within their field of view are, contrary to their usual custom, represented not solely by Master Hartra, but augmented by a second person whom we have not previously recorded in this assembly. May we now find in this reason to hope that you have at last resolved to abandon your unseemly resistance against full gathering within this Conclave.”

Slonda had checked out internally about halfway through the sentence, and was therefore very glad that Hartra answered without the slightest hesitation.

“Master of the Dead, Light of the Underworld, Master Klot,” Hartra began, in a tone that feigned respect and yet was already insulting if one listened closely enough, “your eyes see many things correctly in this light. We have come today to introduce a new Akloven Master, Slonda, into this assembly, who shall represent us alongside us in times to come. Unfortunately I must, with sincere regret, make it known, and this, my friend Klot, you must accept as such, that we will continue to be unable to attend this most important gathering with more than one person in future. The flow of Time, the urgency of our tasks to guide and hold it, and the future itself leave us, in truth, no other choice than to act as we act.”

Hartra leaned back, satisfied.

He waited until attention moved on, then bent toward Slonda and murmured softly, “And the things discussed here are worth less than a fly’s attention for the next pile of dung.”

Slonda had to pull himself together not to laugh out loud.

After that he listened to the routine with only half an ear. Not because it was all meaningless to him, but because the Conclave’s formal administrative speech was long winded even at its best. Seats were confirmed. Disputes over rank, jurisdiction, and old obligations were wrapped in emphatically polite garlands of sentences. One school reminded another of a promise given decades ago. Another objected to a phrasing that could be read as an insult. It was, Slonda thought, as if people wanted to wrap every conflict in so many words until it either suffocated or became unrecognizable.

Instead, he was held by the golden figure almost opposite him.

Mother looked at him and smiled.

That smile told him far more than the entire Conclave. She was in his mind, he knew it at once, and before he had fully finished the thought, her smile widened. She welcomed him in her way. It was the first time she had met Slonda, and she sounded him out with a warmth and cheer that, in the middle of this stiff affair, almost shamed him. There was recognition. No alarm. No suspicion. More a quiet: ah, so it is you.

Slonda did not lower his eyes.

He wanted to know whether she saw something in him that was still hidden from himself.

The Conclave continued, and at some point the hall’s attention shifted to the Fire mages. Apparently, through carelessness, they had caused a volcano to erupt. The Light mages in particular demanded an investigation, loudly and with a vehemence barely concealed under the smooth language. The Fire mages soothed them, claiming they had nothing to hide, that only a spell inside the mountain had gone wrong and had merely brought forward an eruption that would have happened sooner or later anyway.

Of course they said all of it in that long winded language.

Slonda could follow the content only with effort, but he felt very well what lay between the words. Between the Fire mages and the Light mages there was poison. Older conflict than the incident itself could explain. Not merely a factual dispute. More an enmity in cultivated form.

At last the Conclave drew toward its end.

By the turn, the next chair was named for the Light mages, and then everyone rose. Before Slonda even knew what was supposed to happen next, Hartra was already on his feet and moving with surprising purpose toward the Summoners, who were just about to withdraw through the door.

“Master Zts,” he called. “A word, if I might ask.”

The addressed man looked at him with that precisely aimed lack of interest only people possess who know exactly that they are being watched. With a small motion of his head he indicated Hartra should speak.

“This Master Slonda here,” Hartra said, “a diligent and good student of Time, would like to ask you a few questions which you can surely answer with some satisfaction. It is of academic interest, and we would be honored beyond measure if there were the possibility of an exchange, or at least the opportunity to present our concern to you.”

Three pairs of eyes turned on Slonda, because the other two Summoners had stopped as well and were studying him as if he were at once young, careless, and possibly interesting.

Then they walked on.

Without another word.

They simply left Hartra standing there.

On the way back to Gontar, to the small area the Time mages used for themselves, Slonda was dejected. Hartra, on the other hand, seemed to judge the whole course as distinctly positive. Barely had they taken off their ruffs and were among themselves when he declared, in a tone as if a great social breakthrough had just occurred, “Slonda, my friend, they did not ignore us. That is already a great advance. Contact has been made.”

He searched for something to eat, found nothing, and simply kept talking.

“I think this is a point from which you can connect. In six months the next Conclave will be here. I think you will manage now. I leave this to you.”

He looked around.

“Oh, I am so hungry. Where was yesterday’s roast?”

The next morning there was no sign of Hartra.

Not even his noises remained. No curses. No laughter. No dripping cloak. Only the room, the clothing, the objects, and over all of it this foreign age. Slonda woke and felt as if he had been stranded on an island. A lonely island, without help and without return. In another time.

2

Morgut knew that he could not simply march into a dungeon and pull his sister back out, even if his heart pushed him to do exactly that. Everything in him wanted to act at once, to go down at once, to go straight to the place where Gudi suffered and needed him. But he was not foolish. Not that foolish. He had heard the conversation between Hokn'f and Tzadier, or at least enough of it to understand that his sister had not fallen victim to an accident. She was a prisoner. She had been mistreated. And Hokn'f was in the middle of something larger, something that reached far beyond her.

Only Morgut still had too little information to put it all together in any meaningful way.

So he waited.

In raven form he circled above the place where the magicians gathered. He knew some of them. With some he had studied, with some he had argued, others he had always taken for fools, and now he watched with a cold feeling how willingly they followed Hokn'f. They fanned out from the inner part of the city, some on horseback, others on flying carpets, and everything about their behavior said this was no ordinary ride. Something was coming. Something larger. Something they not only expected, but almost greedily wanted to bring about.

And so Morgut followed them.

At a distance wide enough not to draw notice, yet close enough that neither his eyes nor his ears lost anything essential. He flew high, then let himself drift lower again, used air currents and the shadow of scattered clouds, and the longer he followed, the more the feeling thickened in him that things were happening in Ashambrat that could no longer be explained by mere school quarrels or by the vanity of a dean.

The Sondra.

He could not get that people out of his head.

As little as he truly knew about them, they had carved themselves into him. Mysterious was the right word, and even that hardly sufficed. They were beautiful, yes, but not in the soft or merely admirable way people speak of beauty. Their grace had something withdrawn in it, something not meant for чуж eyes, and precisely for that reason it struck harder. Mysterious, Morgut thought again as he circled above the riders. Yes. Everything about them was mysterious. And everything around Hokn'f and his brood of loyal creatures was, too.

They rode through the night and into the next half day.

Then they stopped.

From above Morgut saw only a dune at first, but soon he realized something about it was not natural. The shape was too regular. Too clearly broken by lines that could not come from wind alone. The whole rise looked almost pyramidal, like the ancient gardens under Ashambrat, only far larger, deeper swallowed by sand, sunken and hidden. From below one would probably have taken it for oddly placed rocks. From above, however, Morgut could see that something lay there.

He settled on a dark projection of the buried structure and kept watching.

His animal form was a gift in some ways. He could see farther. Hear farther. Pull individual voices out of distance. Notice movements that might have escaped him as a human. Only sight itself was different, flatter, less spatial, and there were still moments when this two dimensional grasp of events made things difficult for him. But he grew used to it. More and more. So he sat there and watched the magicians dismount. There might have been twenty five. Perhaps one or two more. They pointed at a section of rock half hidden in sand, and Morgut heard one of them say they had followed Sondra this far and they had gone in there.

So Hokn'f had truly found an entrance.

Or at least believed he had.

He sent some of his people outward, apparently to search the great dune for other ways in. The search seemed to fail, because after a while they gathered again and focused on the one place where the rock hid an opening. They meant to enter.

Morgut stayed where he was and watched.

If they went in, he could hardly follow unnoticed in bird form. It would be too obvious and too risky. So for the moment he did the only sensible thing.

He waited.

Hokn'f, for his part, was convinced they had found something important.

And he mistrusted it to the bone.

He had always thought the desert folk were something that moved from oasis to oasis, from sandstorm to sandstorm, living in tents, hidden in change and motion, more myth than real power. This hole in a dune, this suspected entrance, disturbed his picture. It looked like an access point, yes. But to where. True, until recently he would not have believed one could find a strange machine beneath the city’s gardens either, or ride a spiral of sand. Yet whatever was opening here, it was tangible. And tangible things could be used.

Besides, Hokn'f had never been a coward.

They were magicians, after all. Trained in their art. What could a desert people, graceful if you liked and mysterious, truly set against them.

So he gave the order to strike inward.

The magicians began to move.

At that very moment several Sondra appeared in the opening.

Fully veiled, bows in their hands, swords at their sides. They stepped out with that calm self possession that carries more threat than any roar. This far, their mere stance said. No further.

A woman in their midst detached herself and walked toward the magicians.

"My name is Zars," she said, and even her voice held something that was soft and unyielding at once. "I am the leader of the Sondra. What do you seek, Master."

On the last word she was already in front of Hokn'f. There she stopped, lifted her veil, and looked him straight in the face.

Morgut’s breath caught against his will.

She was beautiful. Not sweet. Not delicate in any ordinary sense. More like that slender, clear grace that forces the eye because it asks no permission. Her long hair fell free, her face was proud and narrow, sharply elegant, and there was not the faintest trace of fear in her eyes.

Hokn'f fixed her as if she were a fly he had not yet crushed.

"Who you are is irrelevant to me, woman," he said, and he spat the last word as if it were filth. "What you give me matters more. I heard you have stolen something from my city. Everything made in this city belongs to me."

He remained before her now, while his magicians spread in a half circle around the leader.

"I am not sure what you mean," Zars replied, steady. "What is it we are supposed to have stolen from you."

Hokn'f laughed.

It was a cold, superior laugh that held no joy, only ownership.

"It is a liquid, I hear," he said. "A magical water. I want it from you. Now."

"You will not find it here," the leader said. "Leave, magicians, before something bad happens to you."

She did not step back a single inch.

And as if on some hidden command, more Sondra surfaced everywhere at once. Out of the sand. Along the flanks of the dune. From hollows that had looked empty a heartbeat before. With swords, bows, and other weapons. Among the magicians themselves. Ready to kill.

That was enough.

Hokn'f gave the order to strike.

And his magicians obeyed.

Chaos broke.

Arrows flew. Blades met. Wind and sand were cast, and some even called up the sand spiral Morgut knew so well. At first he thought it would be over quickly. Magicians were usually far superior to ordinary weapons.

But he was wrong.

Only moments later he heard one of the magicians scream, struck by an arrow or a blade. A Sondra had been in one place and in the next instant was no longer there, already somewhere else, firing again. Morgut could hardly believe what unfolded below. This was no rout. No one sided slaughter. It was a real fight.

A balanced one.

The Sondra struck back.

Where a sandstorm hit a Sondra, elsewhere a wave of sand hit a magician. One man suddenly lost his footing as the ground gave way beneath him and swallowed him. Panicked, he clawed back out in another spot only to come under fire again at once. Another Sondra was lifted into the air by a gust while, somewhere else, an arrow punched through a magician’s leg. The field swayed and shifted. Nothing stayed fixed. Nothing stayed where it had been. The Sondra belonged here. The sand was on their side. The air. The dune. Everything.

"Enough," the leader shouted suddenly.

She was visible again, as if from nowhere, and her voice cut through the noise.

"We are not children you can shove about as you please, magicians. I count to three and you leave this place. Immediately. Or today far more blood will be spilled than what already lies here. And it will be yours."

"One."

The magicians looked to Hokn'f.

He gathered himself. Gathered them. Prepared.

"Two."

They followed his lead. Wind, sand, stance, focus, everything aligned behind him.

"Three."

The magicians attacked.

Some at the center of a powerful sand spiral, some with everything they could wrench from the wind.

And they hit nothing.

No resistance. No counter strike. No bodies. No blades.

The Sondra were gone.

So quickly that Morgut could barely follow. They sank into the ground as if the sand opened beneath them, only to close again in the same breath. The magicians stood inside their own attack that suddenly had no opponent, and they froze, disoriented.

Then Morgut felt it.

Directly under him.

A small, fine vibration.

He sensed it clearly while the attack below faltered. At first it was only a tremble, barely more than a shimmer in the stone under his claws. Then it became a hum. Deep. Distant. Growing. The vibration strengthened. So did the hum. It sounded as if something very large beneath the sand was beginning to remember its own size.

Then he heard it crack.

Break.

Tear.

Morgut could hardly believe what he felt, and in shock he launched himself from his perch and climbed into the air.

At that same instant the rocks beneath him rose.

They burst out of the sand.

What had looked like a messy pile of drifted stones lifted centimeter by centimeter. Slow at first. Then unstoppable. A pyramidal structure heaved itself out of the desert, accompanied by humming and vibration that lasted for minutes. Sand poured from its flanks. From height, form emerged. From form, size. From size, monument.

It grew.

Hundreds of meters high.

Terraced.

And as it rose, something even more wondrous and more unreal happened. On the terraces flowers and growth began. Plants pushed up from the soil that rose with the pyramid itself from the deep. Green surged into the sun. Vines, leaves, blossoms. As if something that had lain for centuries under sand and dark now pressed back into the world with a single breath.

The magicians stood utterly stunned.

Every attack, every formation, every thought of control collapsed before that spectacle. They stared the way people stare when something happens before their eyes that is so vast that no learned worldview can reach fast enough to hold it.

Then the growth stopped.

The vibrations ended.

The hum fell silent.

For one heartbeat there was stillness.

Then Zars’ voice was everywhere.

"I warned you, humans, magicians. The times when we had to hide from you are over. We are the ones who return to the sun now, you fools."

Morgut saw her standing on one of the terraces.

She wore no veil now. Instead a fine golden armor that emphasized her slender, graceful shape. Her long hair streamed down her back. And beneath that hair long, pointed ears showed.

Elves.

Gnok had told stories.

Now Morgut saw with his own eyes how that people began its way back into the sun.

And as if on a single command, a hail of arrows burst from the pyramid. Hundreds of arrows flew from everywhere, from terraces, from niches, from gardens, from walls, from the reborn height itself, raining down on the magicians.

Morgut was high enough not to be hit.

Below he saw Hokn'f and his people run.

They ran for their horses.

For their carpets.

They fled.

Not in order. Not proud. Not with that dignity magicians so love to claim even in retreat. They fled from what had just returned to the world.

And Morgut, circling above them with a racing heart and wide, stunned eyes, knew he had just witnessed something that was not only a battle.

It was a beginning.

Formularbeginn

Formularende

3

Kral had made his peace with the sea.But the sea had not made its peace with him.

In chains they hauled him onto a ship, a beautiful ship, new, modern, the kind he could never have afforded and, if he was honest with himself, would not even have wanted to command, because a ship like that smelled of order, of plans, of provisions, of reliable men who knew what they were doing. It had a professional crew, not a heap of cobbled together bastards, drinkers, gamblers, and incurable scoundrels like the ones Kral usually gathered around him. They boarded at the Great Market. With him came these three magicians he knew by now, and with them that arrogant coldness they wore like a cloak. The scent of superiority, of infallibility, as if with every step they had decided to look down on the rest of the world with mild contempt.

Kral hated them fervently.

The way, in this moment, he hated everything.

He would have had to do nothing else than keep his mouth shut. Drink no alcohol. Buy some small hut with the gold he had once held in his hands, and live contentedly on the rest. A nice woman, he thought, or two, since fate had never punished him for not being modest in such fantasies, and everything would have turned out wonderfully. Maybe not grand, not heroic, not legendary, but good. Warm. Sun in front of the door and a mug you raised only for joy and not for desperation.

What had he done instead.

What.

Out of pride he had staged a months long drinking spree, drank away the gold, gambled it away, squandered it, and in the end he had even wanted to show off to these magicians that he knew something they did not. That had been the moment when fate, which had so often still placed an open door in front of him, must have simply turned around and laughed out loud.

They kept him in chains until they were at sea.

And they kept him sober.

That was hard to endure, but not entirely unfamiliar. Kral had never drunk when he was truly at sea. Only in harbor. In every harbor. There he had gotten mercilessly drunk, in every damned harbor, and in almost every harbor, sooner or later, he had also had a woman. And children, if he was not very mistaken. He was sure he had children. Many. Whether they were all truly his was written in the stars, and the stars had never been in a hurry to grant him certainty about such things.

So Kral waited.

He waited for fate to give him yet another chance, because fate had given him so many and he had squandered them all, each one in its own beautiful, stupid way. But, and he reminded himself of this again and again, every wasted chance had also been an experience. Every mistake. Every drunken evening. Every coin thrown away. Every wrong woman. Every right storm. A man had to be made of something, and if in his case it was not virtue, then at least experience.

So he sat in the gloom of the bow and waited for another chance to open somewhere.

At first the voyage went to Soont, the Isles of Wind.

They did not dock there. They only sailed past, close enough that the coastlines lay in the light and the waters around the islands took on that color Kral had always found deceitfully beautiful, because such waters only looked so calm and clear when they were hiding the most. Son and Indra stood on deck and looked over longingly toward their homeland. Even Kral, who had little use for the sentimental bond others had to their origins, felt that there was more in that look than mere memory. But they did not stay. The ship sailed on.

Then they drew Kral into the navigation.

Or rather, they forced him back into a role more familiar to him than chains and interrogations. The Fint Archipelago was the next destination, that small island group he had only half consciously registered in his need, and which now remained the only usable point of reference. A few days later they reached it. It lay flat on the sea, so flat one could easily sail past it, because much of it barely rose above the surface. Treacherous, flat and sharp edged, exactly the kind of region where a ship could rip its belly open on a single careless moment.

From there they went strictly east, as Kral said.

At night he stood on deck and kept the sky in view. It was work he liked better than any chain, because stars at least did not ask why a man had become what he had become. They only stood there and did what they always did, if you knew how to read them. He fixed certain stars, always the same ones, searched for relations, angles, shifts, and hoped fervently they were truly the right ones. He had little desire to cross with these people to the end of all waters, only to have to say in the end that chance had been greater than his craft.

After several weeks of fruitless travel, they finally reached a coast.

It was barren and overgrown, almost wild, and nothing about it resembled the known realms. The vegetation was stranger, more crowded, the coastline irregular, the colors darker. At first glance he suspected they had landed on Askand, that eastern continent people spoke of more than they knew. Vast. Wild. Full of cities with tens of thousands of inhabitants, cities no one here truly knew. And at that thought something in Kral began to stir. On Askand there were no magicians. The idea alone was like a warm swallow after a long dry night.

He smiled.

A dream.

They sailed down the coast until they reached a harbor, and there his suspicion was confirmed. They had gone too far east. It was also not exactly easy to search for something you had discovered only by accident in mortal need. Since communication in the city was difficult and they could take on only the bare minimum of provisions, they soon sailed on again. This time westward. That was the plan now. To cross the ocean, to sweep it, to read it, until they found what these magicians sought and Kral would have preferred to forget.

If it had been up to him, it could have gone on like this forever.

The sea. The sky. The ship. No Isles of Wind. No return to those foreign beings he had transported. No meeting again with things born of no good ending. If Kral could have chosen, he would have simply kept sailing, always with a task big enough that no one thought to drag him ashore and hold him to any responsibility beyond navigation, weather, and curses.

But wishes like that were usually left unfulfilled.

Hardly anyone knew that better than Kral.

4

He had been too slow.

Fantor knew it even before he truly understood what had happened. He had let himself be distracted. By the images. By that black city standing in the middle of fire and lava. By the demons climbing its walls in endless waves, only to be torn down again. By that impossible war in a world that was not a world. He had stared for one heartbeat too long.

And now he was trapped.

Something had grabbed him.

Not like a hand. Not like a chain. Not like a net. It had laid itself over him, soundless, complete, without resistance, and it had taken him into itself so utterly that he could no longer tell where his body ended and this something began. It had been black, yes, but the word black was not enough. It was not merely darkness, not merely the absence of light, but a density, a substance, a living night that enclosed him and pulled him inward.

Naaarstr bellowed in his head.

It screamed.

It cursed.

It wailed.

It was a pathetic, panicked raging, the like of which Fantor had never heard from it. The demon that usually spoke with cold malice, with superiority, with that quiet mockery that made even threats sound like certainties, was no longer the same. It screamed like something that knew not only pain, but fear. Real fear.

Fantor himself did not understand what was happening to him.

Strangely enough, nothing hurt. He did not feel crushed, not burned, not torn apart. It was not even truly unpleasant. Only wrong. Completely wrong. As if something had swallowed him that had no stomach, no inside, no space, and as if he now hung in a state that was neither movement nor stillness.

“Can you stop that?” Fantor asked into the blackness.

Naaarstr did not stop.

It did not grow quieter. Not calmer. It blamed everything and everyone, cursed the world, Fantor, Anadar, old enemies, laws, names Fantor did not know. Between it all something kept breaking through that sounded almost like pleading, and that was the most unsettling thing of all. A demon like Naaarstr did not plead. Not for nothing. Not ever.

Fantor did not know how much time passed.

Perhaps moments. Perhaps hours. In that black mass there was no change, no before and after, no direction, no breath of the world by which you could measure anything. Only at some point the something released him.

Not suddenly.

More as if a liquid that had never truly been liquid slowly slid off him. The darkness withdrew, layer by layer, and suddenly Fantor was standing in a room.

A dark room.

Not large, but high enough that shadows pooled in the corners. Torches burned on the walls, their light yellow and restless, just bright enough to cut faces out of the dark and leave everything else deeper in half shadow.

At that exact moment, Naaarstr fell silent.

Not slowly. Not reluctantly. Simply, completely.

The sudden silence in Fantor’s head was almost as disturbing as the screaming before it. Because now he felt something else there. No voice. Not yet. Only a cold, unpleasant presence. Something foreign that had become attentive.

Fantor looked around.

People stood in the room.

At least they believed themselves to be people, he thought in the first shock, because everything about them was so familiar and yet so wrong. Shaved heads. Black garments, tight and severe, embroidered with pale ornaments that in torchlight sometimes shimmered silver, sometimes gold. Some carried staffs. Others held their hands empty, but in a way that made it clear emptiness meant nothing harmless for them. They stared at him as if they had never seen a human being.

And he stared back.

On a table before him lay the sword.

It lay there like an ordinary sword. Still. Silent. Almost naked in its danger. That made it more uncanny. So much fear had spoken from it and now it simply lay there, as if nothing had ever been inside it.

No one spoke at first.

It was that kind of silence that does not come from uncertainty, but from shared vigilance. Many eyes on a single point. Every small movement noticed. Every breath counted. Fantor felt nervousness rising in him, not fast, but slow and cold, like water seeping into your boots.

Then a voice sounded behind him.

“Brothers.”

That single word changed the room. Not louder, but more ordered. Fantor did not turn around. He did not dare. The voice continued, calm, clear, with the authority of a man used to others keeping silent even when they are frightened.

“This something was reported to us. An intrusion into the dimension we believed sealed. A passage from outside, from the world, to here. Something we no longer believed possible. A jump to us.”

A murmur went through the room.

Not loud. More a tremor in their throats. An echo of fear, amazement, and something Fantor recognized a moment later as hope.

The voice behind him continued.

“It broke the binding at once as soon as it entered, and we arrived early enough before it vanished again. It wanted to leave. To form a passage. To open what must remain closed.”

The murmur grew.

“No one and nothing may ever leave this dimension again. That is the law. And we stopped it before it crossed over and might have made a gate back into the world we miss so much.”

Now several heads turned, and Fantor realized the men were not only looking at him but also at one another. There was more than mere shock. There was hunger. Longing. Something old. Something that had gone too long without an exit.

“Master,” one of them said at last, without taking his eyes off Fantor. “What do we do with him? He is here with us now.”

Fantor felt it was about him, and that more might hang on his next sentence than he liked.

“We ask it,” the voice behind him said, “how it came here.”

Silence again.

Fantor needed a moment before he understood the question was already in the room and he was the one expected to fill it.

“Well,” he began, and heard himself how dry his voice sounded. “I… it showed me.”

He looked at the sword.

And in an instant every eye followed him.

That was the moment the mood changed.

Not into panic. Not entirely. But into something sharper. Several of them stood up. One even took half a step back. Others gripped their staffs. Someone began drawing signs in the air at once, fast and precise, as if he wanted to throw a binding over the whole room before the next breath.

The voice behind him drew in a sharp breath.

“How,” it said.

Now the speaker stepped to Fantor’s side at last, far enough that Fantor could see him. A gaunt man with a shaved skull, a hollowed face, and eyes that had seen too much to still be kind. Yet there was no hatred in them now. Something worse, because it was so pure.

Wonder.

“It is imprisoned,” the man said.

At first he sounded astonished, then relieved.

“Imprisoned. In an object.”

Disbelief ran through the group, but it was quickly overlaid by growing fascination. The man stepped closer to the sword, leaned over it slightly, as if he were looking at a miracle that was also a weapon.

“How,” he asked again, now looking straight at Fantor. “How did it do that.”

He pointed at the sword, then at Fantor, then back at the blade.

“That is…” He searched for words. For the first time he truly seemed speechless. “That is unbelievable.”

Slowly the others calmed as well. They sensed the sword posed no immediate danger in this moment. The first binding signs fell away. Staffs were no longer clutched quite so tightly. People stepped closer again, cautiously, like animals approaching a fire they fear and need at the same time.

And right then Naaarstr began to speak again.

Not loudly. Not screaming.

Only as a hissing, hoarse plea deep in Fantor’s head.

“Tell them nothing.”

Fantor flinched, barely.

“Lie to them,” the demon begged. “Do not say it.”

Only now did Fantor fully understand how afraid Naaarstr was.

And that was almost more frightening than anything else.

5

He could not cope with this time.

Not with the clothes. Not with the language. Not with this whole inflated theatre, in which even a simple question sounded as if it had to pass through three layers of courtesy and two layers of self adoration before it was allowed to be spoken at all. It revolted him, and yet he had already been living in it for weeks. Hartra had simply left him behind, as abruptly as he had arrived, and taken his leave without many further words, except for the remark that Slonda should attend the next Conclave and would now have to manage.

Manage.

A generous word for what it truly meant, to sit alone in another epoch among people whose language felt like an ill fitting garment, and to depend day after day on the hope that patience was not the same as powerlessness.

So Slonda spent his days in the library.

He read a great deal. Not always with a plan, sometimes out of self defence, because reading was better than spending yet another afternoon raging at rain, clothing, and the slow, slimy formality of the present. Simply travelling south on a whim was a temptation, certainly. But the weather drained half the force even from the thought. It was still raining. Every day. Thoroughly. Tirelessly. Summer felt cool, the air was damp, the stones in the tower held on to wetness, and the light itself seemed as if joy had been driven out of it.

His mood was not the best.

At least, he admitted to himself, he was under no real time pressure. That was the one comfort his situation still offered. Time no longer played an ordinary role for him. When he returned. How much time passed for him until then. Whether days or years lay between. None of it had the kind of meaning that tightened heart and stomach the way it once had. At least that. So he practised patience and tried to make the best of it.

He threw himself into a smaller section of the library.

Above all necromancy and transformation.

He himself was surprised how much it gave him. Necromancy was not entirely unfamiliar to him. Not in its full extent, certainly, but in its way of thinking, in the way it worked with thresholds, remnants, traces, and the boundary relations of life, it was not wholly alien to his mind. Transformation, by contrast, was new to him. And precisely because of that it drew him in all the more. The anatomical foundations about animals fascinated him in a way that almost amused him. He began with horses, dogs, ravens, snakes, then moved on to mixed beings and special forms, and again and again he found marginal notes about older beings, ancient lines, forgotten orders of bodies, as if the books wished to preserve knowledge, yet never quite admit how much of it they truly contained.

They were the only volumes that revealed anything at all about the older beings.

Even if only at the edges.

And so one evening he sat absorbed in one of the books in that tower room he had seen in different ages and which now felt almost more familiar than so much else in this epoch. He had tea. Outside, rain poured in sheets. Wind lashed the tower, and lightning cut through the grey twilight at irregular intervals. He was reading about the anatomy of horses and stumbled upon cross references to centaurs, if he understood correctly, mixed beings, half human, half horse, and the thought seized him at once. The books stated explicitly that it was forbidden to work such spells or bring such beings to life, and those very prohibitions only made the matter more interesting. The knowledge existed. Not erased. Not burned. Only framed by warning and codex.

Lightning flashed again.

A heavy thunderclap followed, so close that the whole tower carried the blow, dull and deep, through its stones.

Slonda lifted his head briefly.

He was not sure whether he had heard a knock.

Most likely he had only imagined it.

He waited.

Then it came again.

A knock.

Down at the door.

At this hour.

Slonda set the book aside, rose, and went down. He opened the door cautiously. Rain struck him at once. The street outside lay under water and wind, and a flash of lightning ran across the roofs. No one stood before the door.

He breathed out.

He must have imagined it.

He closed the door again and was about to return upstairs when it knocked once more.

This time unmistakably.

He turned at once, went back, and pulled the door open more sharply, almost in defiance, because he was now nearly certain no one would be there and his own tension was merely playing with him.

But as the door sprang open, a lightning bolt struck in the same instant.

For the fraction of a breath it lit the figure before the door so harshly and so clearly that later Slonda would not even have been sure whether the shock came from the sight or from the light.

The silhouette stood motionless in the rain.

A hood drawn deep over the face. Black cloth, completely soaked. Silver and gold ornaments glimmered in the lightning, only to sink back into darkness at once. And then there was the smile.

Those sharpened teeth.

Not broad. Not friendly. Only visible enough to be immediately disturbing. The figure was a head taller than Slonda, and that alone made the moment unpleasant enough. Yet the grin in the rain, the silence, the calm certainty with which this stranger simply stood there as if the storm belonged to him, gave it something almost ghostly.

“Allow me, Master of Time, Slonda,” the figure said at last, “to introduce myself. My name is Marabar, and I was chosen by the Masters of Sahretûn to test you concerning your intentions.”

He paused slightly, and even in that pause there was something artificial, something too deliberate.

“Would you grant me the kindness of taking me into your tower. I must confess, to my inconvenience, that this rain and the present tempest do not seem to me the most suitable weather in which to remain outside.”

Slonda was startled enough to step back at once.

“Please,” he said, regaining himself more quickly than he would have credited, “come in. Take off your cloak. I will bring towels. And there are dry capes here.”

He helped the stranger remove the drenched cloak. The cloth was heavy like wet skin, and beneath it emerged a figure even more unsettling and at the same time more interesting than the lightning glimpse at the door had suggested.

“I thank you, Master of Time, Slonda,” Marabar said. “That is very considerate of you. The journey here on foot was arduous. We are hardly accustomed to leaving Sahretûn and travelling, least of all in such weather, in such a storm that has now raged for weeks. I would gladly have come sooner, but the road was exhausting.”

They went upstairs after Slonda had made him dry enough.

“May I offer you tea,” Slonda asked. “I will quickly put fresh water on.”

Marabar stepped into the small tower chamber and looked around.

He took books in his hands, lifted them, leafed through them, with a calm that was almost insolent, because it gave the impression he was not merely examining writings but the whole life of the man who read them.

“Interesting,” he said at last.

He was holding a book of transformation.

“Sometimes I wonder what our brothers of Varakht teach in their school. It borders on very uncanny magic, and truly, I am not sure whether this is not, at times, a transgression of the Codex. My brothers and I have been considering for some time whether we ought to petition for an inquiry on that account.”

Slonda did not know whether that was meant as humour.

Or arrogant seriousness.

He decided not to answer.

When the tea was ready, each of them held a cup. Marabar clasped his as if his long, bony fingers could use warmth. Only then did Slonda take the time to study him properly.

The bald man before him differed from every other mage Slonda had seen so far in a way that could not be explained by clothing or posture alone. His face and every visible patch of bare skin were covered with fine tattoos, so close to his natural skin tone that at first one almost missed them. Yet when the light shifted, the lines answered it and shimmered, first silver, then gold, as if they lived just beneath the skin. His teeth were sharpened. His tongue, Slonda noted with a small inward shudder, was split at the tip, and the two parts did not always move in perfect unison. His ears were pierced multiple times with rings. No merely foreign person sat before him, but a figure who had deliberately and permanently carved himself out of the rest of the world.

Marabar noticed that Slonda was studying him intensely.

It did not seem to bother him. On the contrary. It was almost as if it amused him.

“Well then, Master of Time, Slonda,” he said at last, setting his cup down with care, “I would like to speak plainly about the reason for my visit. My masters have sent me to determine whence your interest in us arises. As you surely understand, because of the power and the dangerousness of the art we practise, we are very concerned when someone expresses interest, and we would like to know more before we decide how much, and what kind of knowledge, we will permit you to explore.”

Slonda leaned back slightly.

He had expected many things.

Not a test of his motives.

But he recovered quickly.

“Master Marabar,” Slonda began.

The man addressed at once raised a finger and interrupted him with a small, almost courteous smile.

“Master of Time, Slonda. Forgive me. I am a student of Sahretûn, Marabar, not a master. I ask you, it does not befit me to be addressed as master. It would be presumptuous of me to allow it.”

Slonda paused briefly, but in silence he was almost grateful for the interruption, because it gave him a moment to arrange his answer cleanly.

“Student of Sahretûn, Marabar,” he said then. “Forgive me. I am not familiar with your customs. I did not wish to place you in an awkward position.”

He gathered himself.

“Well then, student of Sahretûn, Marabar, we are interested in learning the knowledge you possess in order to understand it better. As you may know, there is a great deal of distrust and prejudice against your school, and against the incredible fullness of power that lies in your hands. From such power grows responsibility, and we are of course aware that you guard and protect your knowledge, so that it does not fall into the wrong hands. But precisely this secrecy also creates mistrust and envy. Would it not be an opportunity, if such mistrust and such thoughts could in future be refuted.”

Silence.

Marabar tested him.

Not only with his gaze, but with a stillness that felt as if he were listening for something behind the words, for an undertone, a desire, a flaw Slonda might not even notice himself.

Then he said slowly, “Master of Time, Slonda, what you say is certainly true. The distrust and envy directed at us are surely part of our fate. You have recognised and expressed all of this correctly. Only whether it troubles us, or whether we are not long since above it, has not yet been decided.”

A very slight smile settled on his lips.

“However, we recognise in it, precisely because a Master of Time proposes it to us, a chance we perhaps should not let pass. Rather than instructing someone anew each time, it might be better to instruct a single person who could, in any age, represent our motives as pure and in accordance with the Codex. That is a possibility.”

He lifted his cup again.

“The person, however, must be beyond all doubt.”

Now his gaze rested fully, openly, on Slonda.

“Whether you are that person must now be tested.”

6

The search for the culprit cost Isidre time and effort, but at some point she was certain she had identified him.Nosra.

One of the zealots, or rather one of those men who had only just attached himself to the zealots and now behaved as if he had always belonged to that breed. Nosra had never possessed any real talent for spellwork. Not the deep, clear talent that carries a student even when diligence and ambition stop being enough. Discipline had never been his strength either. But in one area he had distinguished himself: herb lore, mixing remedies, those quiet, almost service like tasks that are easily overlooked in a school like Tandor, precisely because they are so necessary that people only notice them once they are missing.

And that was exactly where the problem lay.

Several servants whom Isidre had questioned carefully again and again over the last weeks told her the same thing. Nosra had been the one preparing and delivering Tranda’s food. Not always, but often enough. Especially because Tranda had been taking mixtures for years, things that helped him sleep and eased the various aches of age. At first Nosra had seemed reliable. A quiet student who carried out his duties without incident, friendly enough, discreet enough, almost harmless. But then something had changed.

Nosra had found new friends.

And those friends were precisely the zealots who were spreading wider and wider through Tandor and the school, as Isidre noticed with growing irritation. They were not many, but they were loud. And when loudness met moral certainty, it rarely took large numbers to occupy a lot of space. Bertagnie was likely their leader, even if no one would have openly called him that. A rude, disrespectful ass kisser, as Isidre called him in her own head. He hovered around Klaast like a fly around a fresh pile of pig dung, polished in posture and phrasing, but transparent in his ambition.

Klaast himself surprised her.

To her astonishment he actually tried to remain objective. And what surprised her even more was that, from time to time, he almost sought her proximity. It felt as if he were fleeing from those zealots who clung to him with a fervor that looked less like loyalty and more like ownership.

At first Isidre had no real interest in it.

Men in general bored her most of the time. And Klaast in particular promised nothing different at first. He was intelligent, yes. Well read. Disciplined. Not rash. But still a man, and not of the calibre of Slonda or Anadar. Those were different figures entirely. Men whose thinking and presence formed a tension that truly changed a room. Klaast was different. More solid. More orderly. Less unpredictable than many, but not the kind that made you prick up inwardly.

But Isidre had little choice.

She needed allies too.

And so it happened that she spent more and more time with Klaast. Not out of romantic intent, not even out of open sympathy at the beginning, but out of necessity, attention, and the quiet knowledge that in a school it rarely suffices to be right if no one is there to confirm you at the right moment. At some point she began to understand his humor as well. A quiet, fine, almost hidden sense of humor that appeared so sparingly you could easily miss it, and for that very reason came to be valued all the more.

Otherwise she had her hands full.

Her daily duties filled every day to the brim. People came to her because they wanted healing. Some needed it urgently. Some were probably just lonely and sought, in her presence, the kind of calm no tincture and no salve could give. She had something for each of them. A little remedy, a listening ear, an ointment, advice. And even when she remained outwardly calm, her thoughts drifted again and again.

Back to Nosra.

That poison mixer, as she called him in her head.

By now she watched very carefully what she ate. Most of the time she prepared her food in the kitchen herself, to the quiet displeasure of those who worked there, because her presence did not disrupt anything, but it watched everything. And since she could not cook well for only one person, she usually made food for Klaast as well.

Sooner or later he found out where she could be found in the evenings.

And because she could not simply run away while cooking, he joined her again and again. As he put it, he had grown up in a kitchen, and so it did not bother him to spend time there. Isidre even believed him. There was something in the way he handled pots, knives, and supplies that did not feel performed. He did not stand in the way. He did not ask foolish questions. He waited, helped when needed, and let silence stand when silence was better than conversation.

So it came to pass that the affairs of the earth school were usually handled over a cooking pot.

In the kitchen.

There they discussed many things. Which student was doing well. Who could be sent to which sick person. Who, in a difficult situation, would grind people down rather than help. Special cases. Tensions between teachers. School politics in small matters and in larger ones. Again and again the conversation returned to the sea monster and to Anadar, who in Isidre’s memory still carried that strange glow some people have when they change more than their mere presence ought to allow. Klaast, too, was impressed by him. And by Shara as well, whom he mentioned repeatedly, and he especially liked to praise her beauty.

Isidre usually listened with a mixture of amusement and quiet irritation.

Then it would return to Slonda.

To his motives. His absence. And the fact that he had changed. From a distracted master who could handle three conversations at once and remain the same in each, he had become someone who suddenly focused on his tasks with a strange hardness and clarity. Klaast saw only the surface of that. Isidre knew far more, but she held back the things he was not yet allowed to learn. The world was larger and darker than Klaast suspected, and she was still not sure how much of that size and darkness she wanted to burden him with at all.

And yet she slowly began to trust him.

So much so that one evening she finally confided what she and Slonda had truly learned at Tranda’s farewell. Not at once. Not with every detail. But carefully enough that he understood how hard that sentence was for her.

“When we said goodbye to Tranda,” she said, stirring a pot as if precision in her hands could protect her from what words could unleash, “we found out he was poisoned. We found traces of the toxin in the contents of his stomach. That confirmed what his spirit had already revealed to us.”

Klaast looked at her.

Not shocked. More quiet.

“That is disgusting,” he said at last. “Do you have a suspect?”

Isidre glanced briefly aside.

“Of course,” she said. “Do you?”

He thought.

Then he looked at what stood over the fire and asked, with a small, fine hint of humor, “Is that why you cook our food.”

Isidre gave a slight smile and nodded.

“I have become cautious.”

One evening Isidre was sitting in her quarters.

The window was open because the air that day finally carried a warmth that was pleasant rather than heavy. One of those evenings when you feel heat not as a burden but as a promise. She was reading in a book about a rare illness because she suspected a patient had caught something that was not an ordinary cold, and she wanted to compare the symptoms once more with care.

A croak sounded on the window ledge.

Absentmindedly she said, “Go away. Shh.”

But the bird stayed.

It croaked again.

Isidre decided to ignore it. Then the bird tapped its beak against the window, as if it had understood perfectly well that ignoring something is sometimes just another form of convenience. She turned around.

“What is it.”

The bird pointed with its beak at its foot.

Something was fastened there.

A small roll.

Isidre stood and went to the window.

“What have you got there,” she asked casually, as she loosened the roll from the bird’s leg.

The instant she removed it, the creature flew into almost wild agitation, croaked loudly, beat its wings, and vanished so abruptly into the night as if even one second longer at the window was already too much.

Isidre unrolled the parchment.

Only a few lines.

She read them.

Then read them again.

Then she closed the window.

Not in haste, but with that sudden, complete clarity that only seizes a person when one thing overtakes everything else in a single blow. She packed a small bag. Not much. Only what a journey needs when it allows no delay. Then she sought out Klaast and showed him the message.

“I am going to Zoordak,” she said shortly after he read it. “For the next while.”

It was not an explanation. More a decision that had already been carried out.

Then she went to the stables, demanded two fast horses, and refused to be drawn into any conversation about whether night was a sensible time to depart. A few minutes later she was already driving the horse onto the road at a full gallop, while the school shrank behind her.

Klaast stayed behind.

He watched until darkness and distance swallowed her. Then he stood there, alone again, left to himself again, and hoped intensely that Isidre would reach Zoordak at the right time. With a sigh he turned away, fully aware that he would now have to cook for himself.

7

Anadar had worked on it for a long time, and now he understood the basic structure of these spells far better.

It was not merely that he could read the light spells now. That alone would already have been progress, but it was not the real core of what had happened to him. Rather, the otherness of this magic, its order, its cautious, almost probing way of thinking about power first through boundaries and spaces, had shifted something in his own understanding. He saw spells differently now. Not only those of the School of Light. All of them.

Before, he had copied passages and memorized them, reproduced effects, set signs, summoned force, and often enough he had been only half aware of what individual parts of a spell actually meant. Of course he knew what worked and what did not, and for many magi that was already enough. But now he began to look much more precisely. Much deeper. He could look at a scroll and say which part stood for what, why exactly this limitation was necessary, where the effect was carried, where a spell received its direction, and why certain things fell apart if you removed them.

More than that, he now understood which parts could be removed at all.

And what it meant when you did.

Before, he would have had to bend over a scroll for hour after hour, transferring passages almost word for word and making sure not to commit a mistake in the inner order. Now it was different. He saw more immediately what had to be done to achieve a desired effect. Not perfectly freely, not yet, but freely enough that for the first time he became painfully aware of how often, before, he had rebuilt magic obediently rather than truly penetrated it.

He would never have believed such a leap was even possible for him.

And because he was Anadar, he did not stop with light magic.

Hardly had he gained firm ground there than he went back to the spells of the other schools, and suddenly it was as if scales fell from his eyes. There was a grammar. There were languages. There were inner architectures that had once been only partly intuitive to him. Now he recognized them. Not all of them, not at once, but clearly enough that he felt how far his own understanding had opened. It was as though he had reached another level, not in mere power, but in comprehension.

And that, in turn, helped him with the book and the writings on transformation.

In astonishingly short time he understood how many of those spells worked. The real obstacle for him no longer lay in the language of the formulas or their order, but in the anatomy of animals. And in this case that was decisive. He had to know where a bear’s heart lay, how large it was, where the liver sat, how the rib cage was built, how tendons and joints worked together, before he could responsibly transform into such a creature at all. That still challenged him.

For now.

They found no trace of the book’s origin. Not in the other documents either. It was like the summoning book. It had simply appeared, risen from a hidden stock into the wrong hands and been misused there. Knowledge had no direction. Knowledge was knowledge. It carried no conscience within it. It was whatever hands and will made of it.

Shara watched all of this.

As always she watched him, quiet, attentive, with that kind of patience that does not come from passivity but from exact knowledge of the other. By now she knew him well enough to tell when he was simply learning and when he was descending into that depth where others might already have spoken of obsession. She had seen it often enough. And each time she admired him anew for the way he could sink into something, with a precision, a calm, and an inner hunger that in others bordered on madness and in him was still simply himself.

She loved him for that too.

Not only for his strength, not only for his wildness, not only for the man others saw when he mastered a school, a monster, or a demon. But also for these quieter hours, when he was alone with a scroll and a thought and almost forgot the world around him.

She herself was different.

She did not have that absolute urge to understand. Not that abstract, tireless creativity that saw three more problems inside one and already recognized in them an invitation to something greater. Shara was more pragmatic. More precise. She knew how quickly she could take in something new. How little time she needed to imprint a spell, order it, and then cast it cleanly. She had the discipline and accuracy to apply what she had learned immediately, and that was enough for her. In that she was absolute. She could explain things, certainly, but not gladly and not the way Anadar could when he rose back up out of his depths. She simply knew how she had to take something in to understand it. That sufficed.

At the moment she was still dealing a great deal with summoning.

And she was becoming good at it.

Really good.

With growing certainty she managed to call small beings from the other world and send them away again just as cleanly, without losing clarity or calm in the process. Anadar marveled at her again and again when, from a cloud of sulfur, a small demon marched forth and performed tricks as though the room belonged to him. The larger things she saved, however, for those hours when Anadar was not with her. She did not want to unsettle him, she told herself. Pure precaution. Pure consideration.

And perhaps she wanted to keep something for herself.

Something only for herself.

The rest of the time she often spent with Miene, Sindra, and Sinadie.

Miene and Sindra had grown more mature, Shara realized. Not merely older. Truly more mature. It did them good not to chase after Morgut anymore. The restless tension with which they had once orbited him seemed to have transformed into something else. Into zeal. Into work. Into ambition. In learning the light spells the two developed a meticulousness that even impressed Shara. Once they grasped something, they would not let it go again until it sat cleanly.

And Sinadie.

Well, Shara soon understood why so many considered that woman capable. She possessed an intelligence for connections that one could envy, because she rarely saw only one problem, but always also the lines running out from it in other directions. And she got along with Manador surprisingly well. With that rather brusque, unpolished fire mage who seemed rough to many people and yet still made them laugh again and again. And she made him laugh as well. The two spent time together, and that was a good thing.

Soon they decided together that the other eight girls should receive instruction in light magic as well.

It was time.

And Miene and Sindra prepared it with a care that was almost touching. Lists were made. Sequences set. First scrolls selected. Exercises graded. It almost looked as though they had been waiting for exactly such an assignment, finally to build something wholly their own within the school.

In the evenings Anadar and Shara often sat together in their chamber.

It was a quiet hour between all the learning. Shara usually already sensed that Anadar would soon slip down into the library again, as on almost every evening of these weeks. His interest was gradually easing, because he had almost devoured the library in his hunger for knowledge, but still it pulled him down at night when the corridors grew quieter and no other gaze disturbed him.

That evening they both felt it in the same instant.

It was not a sound. Not a call. Not something one could describe with ordinary senses. More an inner jolt. A pull. A sudden certainty that reached both of them at once.

Shara looked at him.

He looked back.

“I cannot,” she said at once, before he even had to speak. “You are much faster alone.”

Anadar stood up immediately.

No contradiction. No discussion. None of the small gestures by which people convince one another that urgency truly is necessary. He stepped to her, kissed her briefly and firmly, and then ran down the stairs to the stables.

There, almost at once, commotion broke out.

Two of the fastest horses were prepared, because everyone in the fortress could hear from his voice that this was not an ordinary departure. Above, Shara meanwhile packed what was necessary. Not much. Only what he truly might need. A bag. A few things he would never take if no one reminded him. Then she ran down the stairs as well and arrived below just as he was leading the horses out of the stall.

She handed him his sword.

And the bag.

Then she rose onto her toes and kissed him once more.

For one heartbeat they simply looked at each other.

Then he swung into the saddle and rode off, immediately at a gallop, without any further farewell, because every second he lost now might later turn against someone who mattered to him more than comfort or order.

He looked back as long as he could still see her.

Until she was out of sight.

Shara remained standing.

She placed her hand on her belly, as though the touch might hold the child, herself, and what she had just sent away together.

“Mother,” she prayed.

8

On any other day she would have died at once.On any other day the blade, the blood loss, and the poison would have been enough. Perhaps in the end they still would be. Perhaps death had only been postponed, delayed by hours, by half a day, by one last surge of the body before even that had to go out. But on that day it did not happen. On that day Mother folded in on herself, felt paralysis take her, first her body, then her mind, and before even thought slipped away, she managed to send out a single thought.

No more than one word.Help.

She sent it out, probing, weakening, yet with a precision that even now was unbroken, and she found Xiodrie.

Xiodrie knew at once where she had to go.She did not need to ask. Not to doubt. Not to think. She ran, and when she found Mother she saw her bleeding on the floor, the white garment dark with soak through, the skin already too pale, the limbs too still. For a heartbeat the world inside her stopped. Then she acted.

On any other day Mother would have died at once.But the student of the Mind, who in her former life had been a witch, lost not a single second. Without hesitation she tore the dress open, bared the wound, and bent over it. Before she had even seen it clearly enough, she knew by the smell that this was no ordinary injury. There was blood. There was metal. And there was something else. Something bitter, oily, foreign.

Poison.

She pressed on the wound.Hard.Not careful, not gentle, but the way you touch a wound only when you are no longer allowed to distinguish between pain and rescue. A surge of blood and dark oily fluid welled out. Xiodrie kept pressing, forced more of it up from the depth until her hands shone red and black.

Then she screamed.

She screamed as loud as she could, calling for help, for hands, for cloth, for anything that could move. Help came. Not orderly, not clever, not immediately useful, but it came, and shock is often more helpful in such moments than thinking. People in shock do what you tell them, as long as someone is there to give commands. And Xiodrie barked commands.

Knives.Bandages.Clean water.Salves.Herbs.Blood.She needed blood.

The students around her were pale and shaken, but they ran. One after another, once they had been given an order, and Xiodrie, who not long ago had believed she did not belong anywhere in this world, now stood in the middle of a circle of obedience and panic like something made for exactly this.

She kept forcing the wound to give up what was inside it.

Mother was either already unconscious, or so deeply paralysed that her body offered no resistance of its own. Xiodrie flushed the wound, careful only where caution was still allowed, with water and cloth, again and again, further and further. Between the blood the oily substance gathered, viscous, dark, almost iridescent in the wrong light. Xiodrie filled some of it into a small vial.

She would have to examine it later.She would have to know what they had poisoned her with.She would have to find an antidote.

Because what had happened here was clear to her at once. No accident. No misguided attack. No fate. This was an attempt at murder.

The next problem was the blood.

She had not done anything like this in a long time. Not like this. Not with such meagre means. She was not even sure she could find the necessary tools in Zoordak, but she sent the students running anyway. For boiled animal intestines. For metal cannulas of certain metals. For anything that might somehow serve for a transfer. Everything took too long. Far too long. With every breath Mother’s pulse weakened. With every glance her skin seemed to grow paler.

Xiodrie made do with the few healing spells she had learned.

Not enough to close such a wound. Not enough to banish a poison of this kind from a body as if it were nothing. But enough to buy time. Moments. Minutes. Perhaps hours. She fought for Mother’s life like a she bear for her cub. She would not let her go. Again and again, when she herself was about to collapse from exhaustion, some small remainder of strength came from somewhere, an impulse, a fury, a fear, a love that made her continue.

They washed the wound out.They cut away the tiniest pieces of tissue already discoloured.Then they stitched it shut with care, more a crude boundary against further bleeding than any true healing. The transfusion helped more. Much more. They found donors. First one, then another. They channelled blood into a cleaned bladder, fed it through the thin metal cannula into Mother’s body. It was rough. Dangerous. Imprecise. But it worked. The circulation stabilised, at least for moments. She did not only grow weaker.

On any other day Mother would have died.Not on this one.

Xiodrie would not let her go.

Again and again she had new brews cooked from herbs she knew could bind poisons or force the body to fight faster against them. Salves. Powders. Liquids. They dripped them into Mother, drop by drop. They laid compresses. Cooled her. Warmed her. Held her hands when cramps came. Fought every sign of decline with what they had.

And in the middle of all that chaos, in a single minute that was not calm but only a different tempo of struggle, she went out into the courtyard and called for help. A raven came. She spoke to it, bewitched it, and bound a message to its foot.

It was a last hope.

Someone with real knowledge.Someone who might be able to do more than she could.

Xiodrie only hoped she could keep Mother stable long enough for Isidre to arrive.

At last they laid Mother on a stretcher and carried her into a room. There the fight continued. Without pause. Xiodrie kept vigil, without truly sleeping, without truly eating, countering every shift in skin tone, every tremor, every faltering pulse at once. Fresh blood was given. New herb brews cooked. New salves applied. Each hour was a battle against the next plunge.

On any other day Mother would have lost this fight.Not on this one.

When Isidre arrived, Mother had already been for three days in a state that was closer to death than to life.

Isidre herself was barely better. She had spent three days in the saddle with almost no pause, only switching horses now and then, riding as no one rides unless the devil himself is at their back. When she reached Zoordak she nearly slid from the horse from exhaustion. But she stayed upright. She remained standing. And she went to Mother at once.

She opened her bag.She saw what Xiodrie had managed.

And she understood immediately how much of it should have been impossible.

For a moment there was even something like admiration in her look. Then, without any delay, she began her own spells. Her healing craft. That deep, precise knowledge of the body that does not only support but intervenes. She worked more quietly than Xiodrie, colder, more targeted, but no less determined. At last she placed Mother into a deep coma.

It was not surrender. It was a last grasp for time.

Isidre looked at Xiodrie.

Both women stood at the edge of their strength. Both were grey with fatigue, smeared with blood, herbs, sweat, soot, and fear. But both were fighting the same fight.

And so it happened that Mother did not die on that day either.

end part 1