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They passed quietly under a painted sky where gilded stars twinkled, a young girl and an older man, dressed in dark cloaks. They proceeded in dignity and silence though no one else was there to see; gazes fixed firmly forward, figures upright, the girl half a step behind the man, to his left. He held in his right hand a slim oaken staff while she went barehanded. Near the end of the long hall, she noticed herself outpacing him and held back a beat, praying quietly he didn’t notice. He did. He always did.
Before the engraved bronze door barring their path, the man came to a sudden stop—as did she—and he turned back to her.
“Are you ready?” that man, Court Wizard Laukan, asked.
“I am,” the girl quickly replied and stretched out her back a little more in an effort to convey a sense of determination and preparedness.
“Are you nervous?” he continued to ask as the gaze of his light blue eyes examined her.
“No,” she lied. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not breathing,” he pointed out with an ironic smile. She inhaled deep, as if to prove him wrong. Of course, he was not wrong. She had been unwittingly holding her breath and hadn’t even noticed.
“What is the most important thing to a magician?” he asked.
“Breathing, Master,” she answered, ashamed that she should be reminded of something so basic. The basics of basics.
“That is right. So breathe. Relax your shoulders. Keep your chin up. What’s three times three?”
“Nine,” she answered the sudden quiz without blinking.
“How many arcane subelements do we know?”
“A hundred and eight.”
“And what’s that there?”
He pointed at her chest. Thinking he was talking about the academy medallion hanging on her modest bosom, she looked down.
“It was my finger,” he answered himself, lifted his hand and lightly brushed the tip of her pointy nose. For having fallen for such a childish prank, the girl sighed deep in frustration. Despite his high rank and age and a lifetime spent in the study of the volatile secrets of the world, her mentor yet retained that certain boyish glint in his eyes.
Then she realized the earlier tension had completely left her.
“Are you ready?” Laukan asked her again.
More confidence in her voice, the girl answered again: “I am.”
“Good.”
The great doorway opened without a sound.
They marched across the nexus hall of black, mirror-clear marble, their ghostly reflections haunting their steps below, and came to a door of obsidian. The knights on both sides of the door gripped its silvery handles and pushed the way open for them. Not stopping or slowing down, they stepped on, and entered the throne room beyond where the boom of trumpets received them.
The girl faced a carnival of colors and noise and her heart began to race again. The long hall was crammed full of people, front to back. Along both sides of an aisle of red marble stood dense rows of people, people, and more people. There were soldiers, imperial cadets in their black uniforms and brass buttons. There were government officials, aged men and women in their prestigious robes of eastern silk, blue, purple, and canary; viziers and counselors. There were officers of the Magic Battalion, lines of young troops in their formal, green-black robes. There were dukes and duchesses, barons, retired generals, jarls, and bards.
Why! the girl silently cried. It was supposed to be a small ceremony!
And the ceremony was small—by the standards of the Imperial Court, not so by those of a withdrawn girl from a remote province.
From somewhere up ahead, over all the noise, carried the high courtier’s voice, clear and firm:
“His Eminence, the Second Court Wizard, Laukan of Tratovia; his disciple, Ms Margitte-Sophie Beuhler!”
Hearing her own name, Margitte’s pulse grew almost painfully heavy and quick. As if she’d only now fully awakened from a long dream and regained awareness of genuine reality. She pressed her lips firmly together and marched stiffly on, as if her joints had ceased to bend, and fixed her gaze somewhere on the back wall, above the throne, to try and shut the sea of faces out of her vision. But even when she couldn’t see them, she could feel their attention on her. Those critical, questioning stares. They were doubtless all judging her, every moment they were judging her.
Who is that girl?
They knew her name, of course, but who was she, really? Why was she there? How could she be the one? Was there truly no one else, no one better qualified? Weren’t there dozens upon dozens of more accomplished magicians in this room alone? Preposterous! Preposterous!
Only her master’s presence kept Margitte from immediately turning around and running away. She couldn’t embarrass her teacher in public, not even if she had to die of shame herself. Although, death began to seem a better option than enduring those looks and the crushing self-doubt.
Thankfully Margitte’s agony didn’t last forever.
As she neared the imperial throne, she suddenly forgot about the audience altogether.
A slope of wide stairs shaped of dark stone rose before her. A pyramid assembled by nameless pagans gone in the river of time, with a grand seat for a capstone, a block of polished onyx, whereupon sat the Sovereign of the Western Continent. The Empress of Tratovia, in the flesh.
One look at her majesty cast aside all other thoughts and concerns from Margitte’s mind. In fact, she forgot there was ever anyone else around, and even the basic discipline of breathing slipped her mind once more.
The Empress was but a few years older than Margitte herself, or so she had heard, but cut from a different cloth. She was a beauty redefining the parameters of beauty, clad in a gorgeous, embroidered dress of azure and jade, which matched her divine proportions with untold grace. Cleanly braided rose gold hair reached down her majesty’s shoulders and back, and her lavender eyes followed the guests’ approach with attentive interest and kindness, a faint but good-meaning smile on her velvety lips.
Forgetting herself, Margitte nearly walked past the designated spot, only alarmed to the fact by the stilling of her escort. The halt became abrupt, but she did her best to keep her composure and smoothly retreated a step.
Trumpets sang again.
The high courtier, standing on the midway level on the stairs to the throne, struck his long brass staff on the stone, and called out loud,
“On this day, the sixth of Ostaria, in the year 999 of the 33rd Cycle of the Covenant, the following shall be proclaimed before lawful witnesses: at the recommendation of Tratovia’s Guild of Arcanists and the Imperial Army; for outstanding achievements in the field of magitechnical engineering, Her Imperial Majesty, Empress Ashwelia, hereby appoints Ms Beuhler——as the fifth Court Wizard of Tratovia.”
The announcement was followed by an even greater commotion, vicarious whispering, surprised exclamations, and subdued commentary, which rebounded off the walls and blended together in dense, unsettling hum. The guests all knew what was going to happen, of course, but the news was still a lot to digest.
Margitte had had half a year to get used to the idea, yet she kept persistently questioning if she had chosen wisely to this very moment.
She was the first civilian magician in eight hundred years to be nominated a Court Wizard. All her predecessors, regardless of how they had been initiated into the arcane, had ended up swearing oaths in the military, and were deployed to battle at some stage in their lives. In fact, after so long, the title itself had become equivalent to an occult commander in the force.
Margitte had never seen a real fight in her life. Moreover, she was only seventeen, barely of age, the youngest magician ever to be recommended to office in the long history of the Empire. Self-doubt ate her inside like an old curse. She stood stiff as a salt statue and barely heard the courtier’s voice in the background as he took out a scroll and went on to read out loud,
“Since two years ago, Ms Beuhler has led a joint project by the College of Warlhov and the Imperial Guild of Arcanists to develop a device capable of detecting the presence of daemons; a method depending neither on specialized esoteric knowledge by the user, nor inborn potential. Among the many similar endeavors, Ms Beuhler’s project was the only one to bear fruit early this very year in the form of a prototype. Initial field tests overseas have proved the work as both functional and adequate for its intended purpose. For this historically unprecedented achievement in the field of esoteric sciences, Ms Beuhler has been judged worthy of the highest available commendation the Imperial Order can give.”
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“—Eh, truly!?” the Empress exclaimed all of a sudden, interrupting the ceremony, and earned herself a reproachful scowl from a nearby vizier.
“I’m sorry,” her majesty quickly apologized, unable to help herself, and went on to question the inventor, “but did I understand this correctly: you’ve made a device that can detect daemons? No matter what appearance they take? Is this true?”
“Ah…?”
Nobody had warned Margitte that she could be questioned by the Sovereign in person. She had done nothing to prepare for such a scenario.
The room had gone completely silent and every eye was on her. She glanced at her mentor beside her. Laukan ignored her look and stared off, as if he had sent his consciousness elsewhere. He was abandoning her to the wolves.
“...Eh, um, y-yes,” Margitte hurried to mumble in an effort to save her neck. “Yes, t-that is true. Yes.”
“And do you have this device with you now?” the Empress continued to excitedly ask. “Can you show it to me?”
“Ha? O-oh, I do. I always keep the prototype with me. J-just a moment! Er, your majesty…”
With a hurried little bow, Margitte went on to rummage through her pockets with trembling fingers, feeling slow seconds crawl by like beetles. The device wasn’t in the cloak pocket. No. Then where—in the tunic pocket? Not in the right one—ah, there, in the left! Trying not to seem too flustered, she drew out the gadget and held it up high so that everyone could see.
The tool was unexpectedly small and fit easily on the palm of her hand. It resembled a large seedbud, or a dreidel, a round part with a nail-like axis going through it, by which it stood without collapsing. The central part was made up of three rings, along the edge of which coursed small inscriptions in the ancient tongue. They were not directly connected to the middle axis, yet kept together by some invisible force. When properly aligned, the rings formed between them a little arrow. The arrowhead wouldn’t point to either magnetic pole, or any singular geographic location. The rings remained in constant motion, going each their own way. As they were meant to.
Were the needle to stop and the rings align—peril was close.
“Wow.” The Empress stared at the object with an awed smile, as little as she understood it. “How does it work?”
Missing the slight cringe on Laukan’s face, Margitte cleared her throat with a faint cough, and proceeded with an explanation. She was not much of a speaker in general. Situations where the correct response wasn’t known terrified her. But when the topic turned to her work, the only subject she was familiar with, the words always came with ease. Her voice quickly overcame the nervous tension that previously restrained it.
“Your majesty,” she said, “as I’m sure you have heard, there have been a great many attempts to find a reliable method to identify daemons ever since their appearance in the world in the second century of the current cycle—chiefly by other races, seeing how men only knew these creatures by old myths, until roughly sixty years ago, when the information exchange overseas began. Most of the early methods were based on trying to attune the observer’s senses to specific energy signatures, or information structures, or vibrations of matter—and all such efforts have been unsuccessful thus far. No one has been able to identify the ‘scent’, so to speak, by which these creatures could be located and tracked. In this respect, they are completely unique and incomparable to any other life forms found on the planet. But my team and I adopted an altogether different approach to this ages-old mystery. By all we and our allies have learned about daemons over the centuries since their emergence, we came to theorize that they are perhaps not simply another ‘life form’ among the others, which have souls and minds and which generate mana in their bodies, but are, as a matter of fact, a sort of ‘antithesis’ to life the way we understand it. Pursuing this hypothesis further, instead of trying to identify the targets directly by seeking a specific physical or spiritual characteristic, we sought to locate an ‘absence’ instead.”
“…What does that mean?” the Empress asked with a blank smile.
Taking the question as an encouragement to go on, Margitte did so with pride and a smile,
“You see, everywhere in the world exists a certain ambient proto-talionic energy, everywhere where there is life. It’s what scholars call ‘Endolian residue’, a formless blanket of radiation that life forms emit as they live and move. Plants, animals, people, everything that lives emits this energy. Magicians are able to channel some of it into mana, to give spells form without expending so much of their own vitality—but I digress. According to extensive observations, it was discovered that daemons actually do not emit this energy at all. They do not generate mana, they do not use magic—in fact, their bodies repel all known arcane effects with intensity even surpassing cruleans or dragons. Based on this data, we came to hypothesize that they are not actually living creatures at all, but something ‘undead’. In other words, what this device does is search for any vacuous regions in the Endolian residue, places where life is completely absent. Such do not occur naturally, so we should assume that any entity the device points at is, in fact, not a life form at all, but a daemon.”
“I see,” her majesty remarked with an impressed sigh. “And it really works?”
“Yes. The first series of prototypes has been extensively tested in the field by our Ledarnian allies, and according to their reports, the tool has done precisely what we theorized it would. Patrols equipped with the device were able to detect hostiles safely in advance and avoid encounters at a significantly higher rate, compared to patrols that didn’t carry it. Compared to the statistics from the preceding years, enemy engagement rate was lowered by over seventy-five percent, and even in cases where battle was unavoidable, combatants were able to get ready and gain an advantage over the enemy, thanks to the advance warning. I am also happy to report that ever since the device was adopted to active use three months ago, there have been zero new fatalities reported among field operatives. Our allies in Ledarnia have already begun mass-production and are distributing the device as part of every field operative’s basic gear set. There are further plans to expand its use among the other colonies along the east coast and—”
“—Ahem.” The sound of Laukan’s diplomatic cough called Margitte back to the moment. Discussing military matters with an audience half civilian was not perhaps the best idea, even if the information wasn’t particularly disadvantageous for the Empire, if relevant at all. Margitte turned red and fell quiet, bowing her head in a wordless apology.
Whenever she got started, she didn’t know how to stop. In her academy days, teachers had gone as far as to prohibit anyone from asking anything of young Ms Beuhler during lectures. She had gotten a bit better since her younger days, but the tendency was not altogether conquered yet.
But her majesty didn’t seem to mind.
“Wow. That’s incredible.” The Empress exhaled, deeply impressed. “Do you have a name for this...tool?”
Margitte looked at the gently rotating cluster of wheels on her palm and answered,
“I call it——shadowmeter.”
Asking no more questions, the Empress stood. She ignored the alarmed looks of her counselors and went to descend the stairs, snatching the certificate scroll from the courtier along the way. As she approached the pair on the red carpet, Laukan bowed his head low, and Margitte hurried to do the same.
The Sovereign stopped in front of the girl, gazed down at her, but wouldn’t hand over the scroll right away. Instead, the expression on her fair face turned slightly clouded.
A genius—but still a child. Margitte’s inexperience shone on her babyish face that hadn’t seen much sun. Her cute copper curls had never borne a helmet, her thin neck couldn’t have endured the weight of it. Her small, soft hands couldn’t operate a sword to save her life, and her thin legs were strangers to the roads of the world.
Did a mage need helmets or swords? Perhaps not. But before her body, Margitte would have to battle with her budding heart and mind instead, and many would agree that path to be far more perilous.
“You have earned this title without a doubt, young Master Beuhler,” the Empress told her. “All the other Court Wizards have approved your nomination. I am not a mage, so I will trust in their judgment. That being said, I need to ask you one last time as a person if this is what you truly want. I have been told you applied for the open seat of your own volition. But, as I’m sure Master Laukan has told you already, power is unfailingly followed by a responsibility of the equivalent caliber. Where one door is opened, others are closed. As my Court Wizard, I may have to call upon you to shoulder duties you may find abominable; tasks that go against your own conscience and values. Even without this title, you’d still have your research and the liberty to pursue it on your own terms. Your Academy’s funding is secured. Your achievements in the Art are indisputable and will go down in the history of mankind. Even so, are you willing to place the people of Tratovia—and mankind as a whole—before your personal career and benefit? Do you wish to dedicate yourself to this fight for our future and follow me, no matter what inferno it takes us?”
Her majesty’s words lit in Margitte’s bosom a flame that startled even the girl herself. Had anyone ever spoken to her with such care and compassion? Those words lifted the childhood dream to the level of a true passion, and she had never been as sure of her choice as she was now. Margitte bent her knee all the way to the floor, the words bursting from her with emotion,
“Your majesty, it is my dream to serve you! I want nothing more in this life but to be of use to you! My research, what talent there is in me—I want to offer it all for your sake! That is my only wish!”
The Empress—Yuliana Da Via Brannan smiled gently at the girl, even as her gaze remained a little sad.
“Then, by my right, I name you Master Among Masters. Rise, Court Wizard Beuhler. From this day on, my life and my Empire are in your hands.”
Her majesty passed over the scroll, which Margitte received with both hands. The girl stood, holding that precious document close to her chest.
“Thank you!” she told the Empress with a wide smile, tears of happiness in the corners of her closed eyes. “Thank you!”
It was surely the happiest moment of her young life.
And the beginning of her downfall.