High on the side of the wall-city of Grim, the monolithic building where the head of the Willian Guild sees to their daily activities buzzed with the goings-on of the day. The Passage of Rising Tide was not an event that took place every year, and the monitoring of its progress required a huge sum of the guild’s resources to be employed.
In the building, carved from a single block of slate gray stone, high, vaulted, windows allowed a cascade of rainbow light to fall into the chambers of Gaius Gore. The office of the guild administrator always carried with it a domineering prestige; nearly large enough to house a marshaling of all the members in the guild hall, the current administrator had done away with the rows of tables and maps left behind by his predecessor, preferring an austere, barren approach to his own decor. A rug of lavender hide stretched the thirty feet from the office’s entrance all the way to the onyx desk at which Gaius Gore, dressed in his fine black suit trimmed with gold, scribbled away on stationary.
Mosaics dominated the northern and eastern wall, the light from the rising sun sprinkling blurred depictions of the guild’s triumphs and failures across the stone floor. Three separate purple lights competed with the prismed sunrays, given off by the three sheets of amethyst that levitated over the only table that remained in the cavernous office. At the table sat two women and a man, all of the third rank, controlling the crystalline artifacts purchased from Faeth to monitor the events of the competition. The three sat around the table controlling the artifacts, projecting scenes of far distant affairs straight onto the crystal to view. Everything, so far, was advancing according to plan.
“I ought to leave then,” a woman, Dessa Coril, said to Gaius’ disinterest.
He grunted a reply, tracking the woman who carried in her hand a deific costume with the perception granted him by his aura. His own costume hung on a manikin just behind his desk, an unfortunate aspect of the Passage but a necessary one. His senses detected another presence storming through the building toward his office before Dessa had even fully left. His recognition of the person marching his way pressed a scowl onto his face.
Looking up from the papers and setting them aside, Gaius Gore sighed, pulling open a drawer in his stone desk and retrieving three bound portfolios from inside. By the time he has set his gray eyes on the door, Dessa was there, holding it open for the approaching woman, clicking heels resounding off the stone floors of the guild hall and giving away the approach as much as the unique signature of the woman’s magic might.
She rounded the corner, marching straight into Gaius’ office without so much as acknowledging Dessa. Gabriella Willian seldom acknowledged anyone that didn’t either bear her family’s name or a noble title. Dressed in leather armor that was more fit for a ballroom than a battlefield, Gabriella shone, her clothing eating up the rainbow light, subtly glowing. Her raven hair and severe features looked down at the sitting man, trying to drive into him the fact that he was a worm before an eagle. Her Regalia was, of course, a halo of silver and gold that rested in the air behind her head at all times.
She was an outlier among the direct descendants of the Guild Master. In his stay away from the office as guild administrator, one of Gaius’ greatest enjoyments had been to no longer attract the attention of Gabriella. How unfortunate that his return to the office also included this negative benefit.
“You must have lost your mind!” Gabriella screeched at him even as she marched across the lavender rug that connected his desk to the door. The anger in the woman’s stride showed itself through the scorch marks her high-heeled shoes left in his rug. At the door, Dessa cringed as she noticed the burns in the rug as well, offering Gaius a sympathetic look before slipping out of the office. Near the wall, the three overseers continued their monitoring of the Passage without looking over, but to Gaius’ well-honed senses the unease in their muscles and auras was as apparent as chickens screaming that a coyote had gotten into the henhouse.
“Good evening, Gabriella,” Gaius said, steepling his fingers. “How have you been?”
“Unwell,” she said, putting her hands squarely on her hips. “You would not wish to hear about the day that I am having, that I have been having since you started this idiotic competition of yours. What were you thinking? Eliminating almost half of the competitors in the first day! Starting a bloodbath right in front of our city where anyone that cares to could have watched.”
“I had already erected the wall before the attack began,” Gaius said.
“Do. Not. Interrupt me, Gaius!” Gabriella stormed forward and slapped a hand onto his stone desk, no doubt planning to crack the facade.
A simple flexing of his magic prevented any damage. Gabriella was an impressive essentia magician, especially for a rank three, but at the end of the day, she was only a rank three.
“You cannot seriously expect your little magical wall to have prevented aristocratic spies and interested parties from watching. I have had mothers and sisters in my apartments for the last two days crying their eyes out, having watched their children ripped apart by murderous beasts that they were not prepared to face. Never, and I mean never, has the Passage begun with an atrocity like this! You will have serious charges to face coming from this.”
Gaius waited a while, watching the woman huffing from her tirade. When he was certain that she had finished, he ventured to speak. “You forget the first Passage.”
“Do not invoke history with me,” Gabriella snapped.
“If I can invoke it with your father, then I will speak it to you, child.” Gaius refused to raise his voice. He didn’t need to. Mentioning her father sucked a good bit of the angry wind out of the woman’s sails. “I have run the Passage for a span of three-hundred and sixteen years before I retired from my duties. A retirement that I was rather enjoying. When your father asked for me to return, what else could I do but listen to his concerns? I happen to agree with him. The current running of the guild has made us weak, and I plan to begin correcting it here.”
“Weak!” That word put the bluster back in Gabriella. “You massacred over a hundred of our applicants! If you wish to reduce the number of applicants that we allowed this year, that would have been one thing, but to kill the children of high nobility on our doorstep is something else entirely.”
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“The number of casualties was one hundred sixty six,” Gaius explained simply, touching one of the papers on his desk. “I have the numbers right here. Out of that number, eighty three were slain in the initial attack by the Dire Bears. Of those slain, seventy seven were able to be revived, and they are now recuperating in proper medical facilities. You owe your mother for that.”
Even with a large amount of the injured and slain having successfully been resurrected and healed by the Guild Marshal, Caladenna Willian, losing six promising youths in the initial outset of the competition had been something Gaius had hoped to avoid. In the first minutes of the competition, he had pushed himself to move his wall as fast as he could across the parade ground, pushing the monsters further north, officially eliminating anyone the wall passed from the competition. The healers had done the best they could for those left behind by the wall, but not even a rank four healer could return to life someone that had been completely devoured by a monster.
“It should be none dead,” Gabriella said.
“That may have been the case recently, but it will not be any longer. The Guild Marshal agrees with me on this, aid will only be delivered to those that have left the contest. It will be sparring in the future.”
Gabriella shook her head. “You really are as mad as you say. Strength, that is what you want for us? Destroying our relations with the nobility of a hundred countries by making them watch as their children are butchered will do nothing to strengthen us.”
“You worry about diplomatic strength,” Gaius sneered, his own anger seeping into his voice. “The nobility, petty landholders fat on power they did not earn. The shine of coin will clear their memories fast enough if it is required, and if that isn’t enough, all we will need to do is wait a few decades to treat with whomever deposes them.”
“Your short-sighted–”
“No!” Gaius bellowed, earning honest surprise from the woman in front of him. “Now you shall not interrupt me! When your father came to me with his concerns for the weakness spreading through this organization, an organization to which I have given the majority of my life, I agreed to return to my duties. Never had I imagined that we allowed it to infect us as severely as it has. I have been in this office for only five months now, and already I have had to deal with this sickness of weakness three times now.”
Gaius pushed the portfolios forward, holding his silence until Gabriella reluctantly took the top one to look at. “Jodis Milla,” Gaius narrated for her, speaking as she read. “He is the third son of a noble family from Reeds. Eight weeks ago, after being spurned by a commoner woman that he fell for, he decided that she did not have a choice in her being with him. He changed the woman’s mother and father into mice and held them hostage, forcing the girl to perform all sorts of perverse acts with him, under the threat of force-feeding her parents to her if she declined. Not to be denied and with his pride thoroughly wounded, he also pushed several other girls from the same small village into the same sadistic arrangement.
“Jodis killed the three people who stumbled onto his crimes before someone strong enough to oppose him found out. In the two weeks that he inflicted himself upon this small village, he forced eight girls, ages ranging from fourteen to eighteen, into his bed. Only half of the transformed peoples were recovered. We believe that the others were fed to Jodis’ familiar, a snake. One of the girls ended her own life when she discovered that her parents and older brother could not be found.”
Gabriella stood, pale, looking down at the writing on the page. “I had no idea.”
“Of this instance perhaps,” Gaius said. “I do not doubt someone so high in the diplomatic arm of the guild has needed to soothe tempers when one of our guild members has committed some serious crime before. Do not mock my intelligence by saying that you are blind to our internal troubles. Jodis Milla was a member of our guild, his atrocity reflects upon us.”
Before Gabriella could object, Gaius continued. “The second portfolio covers Nixzxa Krass, the daughter of a baron, a member of our guild for over two decades. She was on the cusp of the fourth rank before Illigar uncovered what she had been doing for well over a decade with the power that we helped her accrue.
“Nixzxa stumbled into a powerful curse when she reached the third rank, an ability that she kept hidden from us. She thought herself above her peers because of her affiliation with us. She had no qualms about abducting the children of rival noble houses, ripping their tongues from their mouths, and replacing them with those from her cursed ability. She returned them, seemingly intact, but she controlled their words and mouths from afar.
“She became a true witch over the years, bringing down at least three other noble houses in her area with her manipulations. In that time, fourteen young children from local noble houses have choked to death, presumably on the cursed tongues Nixzxa put in their heads. The chaos and instability that she sowed has led to famine, killing well over a thousand from starvation and a war between two neighboring dutchies that resulted in more than fifteen thousand dead. I won’t regale you with what she did to those in her own household, but it reads like a nightmare.”
Gabriella stood, the only sound coming from the manipulations of the monitors keeping an eye on the competition through their crystal artifacts. The young scion of the Willian guild swallowed her pride, the anger from earlier long gone. “Where are they now?”
“Suffering,” Gaius said, his aura unconsciously sucking the color out of the room.
“They deserve to suffer,” Gabriella agreed. She looked down at the last portfolio in front of her.
“Care to hear about Vedrik Thorn? Gaius asked.
“I will read it later,” Gabriella said. She sighed, leaning on the desk. “These are terrible actions that have taken place, and I agree that monsters like this should be hunted like every other monster. I still do not see the purpose of hurting our relations with the nobility.”
“We have catered to them for too long,” Gaius said. “The guild has lowered its standards for entry and worked to cultivate relations with different noble houses through entrance into our ranks. We invited sickness into our guild, the sickness of pride.” He pulled back the portfolios and slapped them on his desk. “When you court these people who have had everything handed to them their whole lives, you cannot hand them unimaginable power without putting them through a crucible. If we do not cull the weak of body, mind, and character from our ranks at the outset, we invite sickness into our ranks.
“This Passage will be different from those that came before. I intend to stamp the pride out of the participants. I intend to find the corruption that is trying to weasel its way into our ranks before it can become part of us. Some may be arbitrarily eliminated, that is regrettable, though for most, they will have plenty of future prospects to fall back upon. The numbers of those that pass this test will be far fewer than in recent decades, but they will be stronger, and they will add to our own strength, not subtract from it.”
“My father agrees with this course of action?” Gabriella asked.
“He does.” Gaius sighed, leaning back in his chair and taking the portfolios from his desk to replace them in the drawer. “These three have come to me in just a few months. That is already bad enough. There will be a lot of cleaning up the house in the future.”
Gabriella stepped away from the desk. She looked at the older man, a bit of pity on her face. “If this is the course the Guild Master has set, then I will support it through the diplomatic corp. Will you at least tell me how Dovik is doing?”
The mention of the young man brought a smile to Gaius’ lips. “Your brother fares well,” he said. “As you might expect, he has rallied a group under his banner already.”
“That does sound like him,” Gabriella said. “Thank you for sharing that with me.”
“Of course,” Gaius said. He rose from his seat, glancing back at the costume hanging on the manikin behind him. He could not be the detached administrator that he had liked being in the past anymore. He had his own role to play in all of this. “If you will excuse me, I have somewhere that I need to be this morning.”