The inner halls of the Willian Guild hummed with the excitement of crisis. Gaius Gore sat alone in a room made of white stone and blue plush carpets. A table of great oak stretched out before him, the only fixture upon which being the crystalline illusion projecting device affixed to the center of the table. He sat, a picture of tranquility, listening to the bustle of feet and the whisper of hushed conversation outside the door to the room. On the inside, Gaius Gore was a mixture of roiling emotion.
Things in the Passage were going poorly. Gaius felt that events may be on the precipice of a spiral, a runaway confluence of catastrophe that would escape his control if he did not strangle the problems in their cribs. On top of the table in front of him sat a case–open then–holding twenty-three amethyst crystals containing magical recordings of the recent murders. Including the one in the projection device, Gaius had recordings of twenty-four murders, far, far too many.
He had predicted that there would be an initial degeneration into anarchic resource hoarding following the first display of true danger and peril. That was how all the trials had gone before, back when the Willian Guild’s reputation had been sterling and unblemished. The secrecy surrounding the Passage, something that in the last century had morphed into a vestigial tradition, had once held a real purpose. There was supposed to be a shock to the trial takers once things commenced. Most of the participants being wealthy scions or quietly cultivated geniuses meant that most did not have any true experience of mortal danger. A shock to wake them up to the world was necessary, and so the secretiveness was also necessary.
That had backfired in a way Gaius had not anticipated. A century of guides holding the hands of trial takers as they led them North towards the coast had rendered the Passage into something more akin to a vacation or training camp in the minds of the new nobility, those that had forgotten the old way of business. The new nobility had been by far the angriest about this year’s shakeup. Gaius found their anger disgusting. The guild had warned anyone with proper influence that this year’s Passage would be more dangerous. Did they not take his warning seriously?
He was beginning to reassess the events in the first few days now. Gaius tapped the case, trying to put together the puzzle that he found himself stuck inside of.
In the old days, there might have been one or two deaths among the participants, and more often than not those would be in self-defense. Once the participants realized that resources would be extremely finite and that the Passage would take months to complete, there were those that turned on each other. This is exactly what Gaius had wanted and was why he had constructed the Passage in such a way. To weed out those of weak character and morals so early on was a clear advantage to the Guild. Identifying those that would turn on their fellows and steal or murder was necessary if you wished to make certain that the magicians you planned to nurture would not turn out to be psychopaths decades down the line.
Twenty-four though, twenty-four murders in just a few days. The number easily made it into the top five worst counts for the Passage’s history. Had the nobility of the world slipped so much in the century of his absence that there were now raising young murderers and degenerates with no sympathy for their fellows? It was an enticing thought to Gaius, to view the current state of affairs as an issue with the world. Such views were easy to fall into the older the magician, and Gaius was beginning to wear his years openly.
Something pricked at him, a sense that things were being obscured from his view. The current circumstance was not as if a single participant was going around massacring everyone. In such situations, the Guild would step in and smite such an individual. No, this was a general push towards tribalization and deadly conflict among the entirety of the trial’s populace. It was the Guild’s general policy not to interfere directly in such cases. Identifying and destroying unhinged essentia magicians was a vital part of being an essentia magician. The Guild Marshal had told him directly not to interfere with the participants for now. She had even refused his petition to extend her grace and raise those among the slain that might still be given another chance at life. That directive alone let him know that a larger game was being played.
He looked to the door of the rom. “Let them in,” he said.
The heavy ashen doors flew open hard enough to crack back into the wall as an older elven man and his two sons marched into the room. Gaius rose, greeting the irate man with a simple bow before returning to his seat, and idle hand petting one of the crystals in front of him.
“Sixteen hours!” the Count in front of him raged. Gaius didn’t know of the man’s providence, only that he came from the Windfire continent and that he had replaced his father only a decade before. The pure, almost colorless, aura of the pure nobility steamed off the man, filling the chamber. “You have kept me waiting with this news for sixteen hours!”
Gaius tasted the aura of the Count. It was fairly strong for the rank of a Count. Gaius imagined that this man must have two million or so souls on the lands he controlled, wisps of their souls empowering his own; such was the prerogative of the nobility. The Count’s aura also carried with it a slight affinity for lightning that was of slight interest to Gaius. He would place the man’s overall power as a good fifth above his own. If the man was skilled in any particular aspect of war, he might even make it to the range of a slight threat. Gaius banished thoughts of putting down this noble personage, but he savored the fantasy for a fleeting moment.
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“Your Excellency might imagine that I have been busy,” Gaius said, motioning to a seat at the table opposite his own. “Are there any refreshments that I might have fetched to accommodate you and your progeny after your long wait?”
The Count sneered, whispering, “Vulture,” under his breath, only he and Gaius capable of hearing the insult, before taking the offered seat. Being a human that had reached such a high level of influence, Gaius was not unused to hearing that particular insult. In fact, he found it somewhat tame now-a-days.
“I know that this must be a trying time for you,” Gaius said, summoning as much sympathy into his voice as he could manage. It wasn’t much. “It has been made known to me that you wished for an audience to air grievance against me.”
The Count slammed his hand on the table in front of him, glancing down with minor surprise that it did not break beneath his fist. “Last night, your woman came to me and told me that my daughter had been killed inside of your trial. How could something like this possibly happen? Are you so grossly negligent that you would allow such a thing to occur?”
“This trial is supposed to simulate a dangerous environment where participants must fend for themselves. Any danger that exists inside of the trial is real, and it was made known before commencement that this would be a particularly dangerous event. That said,” Gaius sighed, real sympathy in his voice, “this is not such a case.”
Gaius leaned back in his chair, a simple gesture making the illusion projector between the two come alive with light. A scene began to paint the air. In the illusion floating over the table, a young elven woman fought with twin rapiers against a lizard monster, her struggle endearing and righteous. After three minutes of battle, and after having sustained numerous wounds, she triumphed. In her moment of exaltation, the smile on her lips turned bloody. She looked down, fear rivenning her face as she saw a blade protruding from her chest.
The girl sputtered on the ground for a few seconds before falling still. Her assailant, a young lizardkin woman bending over and searching her corpse before meandering over to the slain monster. What really set the Count’s aura to crackling and pushed an oppressive air into the room so powerful that one of the man’s sons collapsed was the way in which the lizardkin woman whistled as she went about rifling through the corpse of the Count’s daughter.
“You will bring me that child,” the Count said, his voice low and full of threat.
“We shall not,” Gaius said. The full weight of the Count’s aura pressed down upon Gaius, a sloppy flexing of power that the nobility often used to cow their lessers. Even with Gaius’ immense experience combating such effects, the rage in the Count’s aura slashed against his soul like knives. He did not let any of the agony from the blatant attack show on his face, choosing to weather the storm of the man’s rage for the few moments the Count was capable of keeping it up.
Just a few moments later, the pressure ebbed, and the Count sank into his seat, a grieving man. “My Moonflower,” the man lamented.
Gaius leaned forward in his chair. “There are no words that I have to express how deeply unsettled I am that have the Passage perverted in a manner such as this. The Willian Guild does not condone murder, we abhor it.”
“Yet you will allow a cretin such as this to escape me?” the Count snarled, his anger returning for a bare instance. “You would recruit one such as this?”
“Regardless of whether this individual participant manages to make it to the end of the Passage in the allotted time, there is certainly no chance that the Willian Guild will ever extend an invitation to join us to them. We do not recruit those with such weak foundations. However, in the matter of interventional recourse, my hands are tied. To the noble personages that come here to take part in the Passage, certain guarantees against arrest and criminal prosecution have been given. The same guarantees that were given to your daughter. In so long as these protected individuals do not trespass against Grim itself or any of its protected citizens, we cannot directly involve ourselves.”
The Count looked back to the illusion in front of him. He was almost there, Gaius could tell. To push him over the edge, Gaius motioned to the projector in the center of the table. “Take the recording with you,” Gaius offered.
“This?” The Count touched the projector, but his baleful glare had shifted away from Gaius towards the lizardkin in the scene before him. “You would gift me this.”
“How could I not give you this? It depicts your daughter’s final moments. You will also find that inside of this recording crystal is the entirety of the journey your daughter made through the Passage. I have watched it myself; she was a fantastic talent, kind as well.”
The Count stood, bringing his face level with the projection of his daughter’s murderer. “Thank you for this,” he said.
Gaius did not have to imagine what dark fantasies the Count might be thinking of just then. Given the face of his daughter’s killer, this man’s anger towards the guild had been adequately directed in a different direction. Such occasions, where the scions of two powerful houses got into a deadly dispute, could hold serious ramifications. Wars spawned for lesser reasons. Gaius did not care about the infighting of the nobility, so long as the Guild’s reputation was left intact.
The Count and his sons left the room with as much purpose as they had entered with a short time later. At the end of his first meeting for the day, Gaius took a moment to settle his soul and bolster it against future bluster. He stroked the case in front of him–twenty three more recording crystals.
“Just what is really going on?”