INTERLUDE 7E: COURAGE
“What is one fire to the next? Are they not one and the same in kind? Look at their faces! Your descendants are extensions of your spirit. Forget the unbridgeable divide between manifestations of consciousness. Forget the arbitrary subdivision of entities. The same spirit flows in the veins! Did you never wonder at the worth of blood to the denizens of the lower planes? Did you never think there was more to you than pipes and tubes and meat? Of course you did. But their cold reductionism played its trick on your mind. Now you must be invited even to step outside the meat. Very good. I hope this obsession with reduction of all phenomena to meat will not be paralleled by a reduction of all ethics to the same. It has a tendency to rot and you will not understand the transcendence of the metaphor until it is too late; the scent will cloy in your nostrils, and only then will you understand.”
– from ‘The Edgeless Light’, ch. 11
18th Mortifost, 998 NE
It was strange, how you could spend months and months training for that one moment – it might only last seconds or a few minutes when it arrived – but still never know until it came down to the test whether anything you’d learnt had actually paid off.
That was how Alrior felt when he woke up in the predawn darkness, listening to the mountain wind. It might’ve been winter but the weather down here didn’t seem to pay the seasons much attention. Winter was just a somewhat less-stifling summer, and he very much doubted spring and autumn even existed in this part of the world. Certainly not like they did back home in Mund. He woke in a sweat, and it wasn’t wholly to blame on the oppressive heat. It was the knowing. The knowledge of what today held in store.
The test.
It’d filled his dreams when he’d been sleeping but there was no escape from it in wakefulness either, and Alrior lay there, awaiting the summons from Piraeas that would force him and the rest of his slumbering companions out of the tent.
Still, anything short of an Incursion had to be better than the Box, right? He’d thought he might forget the sound of the Winter Door in the weeks since the Liberator of Zadhal earned his nickname, since he was made redundant – but no such luck. The incessant hissing of the portal he’d guarded for seven months was scratched into his brain. The noise was constantly playing itself, over and over in the background of his mind.
Maybe finally after today I’ll have something else to distract myself with. Get that stupid sound out of my skull.
He wondered how the others were faring now that the Winter Door was usable once more, now that the Magisterium had declared Zadhal safe and started moving their assets in. Some of his colleagues had been in the job, guarding the Door for twenty years, and those ones had seemed little better than zombies whenever he’d tried to make small talk. Had they found alternative employment? For many of them it probably hadn’t been necessary. There was serious remuneration for Box-work. It was likely a fair number of them had enough saved to retire. Al wasn’t quite there yet, but at least the Box had been closed down before he lost his mind to the portal’s endless drone…
He hoped.
He sat up in his bedroll and pawed about for the book he was reading. The Champions’ Charter.
Alrior wasn’t a brave man. He’d come into his powers when, following the tragic death of his wife, he’d been forced to scrounge in the bins for food to feed the kids. One minute he was there, sighing to himself as he drove his arms elbow-deep in a box of vegetable shavings. The next he was staring about the alley, suddenly aware of the carcass of a half-eaten dog in the gutter, rats crawling on it, in it.
He’d had a dog, when he was young; he remembered calling it to heel. The carcass-dog – it wanted to come to heel. He knew it.
He fled, and it took him almost three weeks to come to terms with what had happened to him. It wasn’t until he visited his wife at the shrine of Mortiforn, felt the tickle in dead flesh beneath the gravestones, that he even realised he was an arch-sorcerer.
Since then he’d stayed as far away from combat as he could – so long as he could just stay alive, this would be the greatest opportunity of his life. He’d gotten himself some nice clothes; within days he had interviews at the Wizard’s Hat and some of the other prestigious companies producing the finest ensorcellments… But none of the offers beat the Magisterium.
Minimal danger, they’d said. Most boring job in the universe, they’d called it. Well, that was true until the night of the last Incursion.
He’d seen them, up close – the demons. He’d even claimed one of them for himself, when it fought against his shields, though where exactly it went and how he had to gesture to bring it back were at least partially mysterious, still, having gone untested. Al didn’t like demons; didn’t even want to think about them. But then, just as everything had fallen apart and he started to regret his choice, Timesnatcher had arrived, mowing through fiends like he was getting paid per kill. Redgate came on his wings of black iron, and the immense rush of his power alone was enough to enslave almost half of the hellspawn.
Alrior had stared at the crimson-clad champion, all of a sudden wishing they could trade places, that he could be the one possessed of such grandeur, such authority –
Hence the reading material. Since setting out on the voyage Al had been using the book to soothe his nausea, and now, a couple of weeks later, he was almost adamant he was going to take the plunge.
Today will be the first day of the rest of my life, he said to himself. Fobby and Neleine will finally have a dad they can be proud of.
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They’d known about his powers almost as long as he had, and they were sick of the long hours he’d spent working in the Box – at first when he lost his job, they’d been pleased to have him around more often, spend time with him instead of ‘evil’ Aunt Sayba. But the money dried up quickly with the expensive tutoring, the upkeep on the property… Becoming a champion seemed like the best of both worlds. If you captured darkmages regularly-enough the wages wouldn’t be much different, and you could still spend half your time at home with the kids. You could even afford to keep paying the servants.
There was just that first hurdle to cross. The cowardice. He had to be like Redgate. Had to ignore the thing inside him that wanted to curl up, give up.
Had to pass the test.
“The Charter, again,” mumbled Piraeas from his bedroll, a little sharpness in his voice – Alrior hoped he hadn’t woken him by turning the pages. “Have you even been to sleep, Al?”
“A bit,” he replied softly so as to not disturb the others sharing the tent. “Just tense, you know.”
To Alrior’s surprise, Piraeas gave a grunt of agreement.
“Oh, I’m sure this must be a tense time for you,” the veteran said. “You’ll get over it, once we get started. Maybe we’ll even see some things.”
Al frowned as Piraeas began waking the others, returning his attention to the text. He detested these outland students and their smug, knowing ways, these highborn brats with years of Maginox schooling under their belts. Sure, he wasn’t a full magister like his companions, but he’d passed the Box training without issue… It wasn’t like he was completely useless, and he was the archmage here…
I put on a mask, and suddenly I outrank them, he thought, reading the small-print of the Charter carefully. The text actually said that a Magisterium-recognised champion had the temporary authority to direct magister-bands in times of crisis, and though the magisters wouldn’t be beholden to any such requests (requests, not commands), there was no inverse rule that he could find – nothing that indicated a champion had to take orders from a magister.
But it was the content of the magister’s words that disturbed him. ‘Maybe we’ll even see some things’… The arch-sorcerer had no interest in actually seeing anything, not really, but Piraeas sounded eager.
Though I suppose it would be better experience for me, if I’m serious about putting on the mask… Am I serious about it?
Think like Redgate. He came this way, and he wasn’t scared. It was full of monsters and dragons, then, and that didn’t faze him. He strode boldly into the dragon’s lair, and killed it, even if he gave his own life in the process.
Why the people of Mund couldn’t be told his legend, why it had to be kept top secret on pain of twenty years’ imprisonment, he hadn’t the faintest idea.
Redgate – wherever you are now – lend me your courage, in the name of Kaile!
The Magisterium hadn’t told them much, but they had the basic information: adventurers had guided the champion to Ord Ylon, and Redgate brought down a city of kobolds into the bargain, choking the cave-mouth with a million tons of rock. There were a number of corpses located in the cavern beyond the boulders – the task of the expedition was to locate any corpses of interest, nothing more. Though one thing Mr. Zakimel said had confused him; at a certain point Alrior could’ve sworn the old man implied there might’ve been more than one draconic corpse down there. (How many of the creatures did Redgate slay? he had mused at the time.) He wondered whether his propensity for sensing non-human bodies had come to the Magisterium’s attention; whether this might’ve been the reason for the senior magister to show up on his doorstep rather than anyone else’s, waving a job offer in his face.
Or maybe I was the last to be offered it, and the only one stupid-enough to miss Yearsend for some quick cash.
The sum had been incredible, though. He suspected he was getting over ten times what the magisters earned for the same work, which suited him just fine.
Less work, even. All he had to do was walk around, let his sorcerous senses do their stuff. The wizards with their disintegration spells would take care of any intervening obstacles.
“Getting a read on it?” Piraeas was asking on the other side of the tent – not to Alrior but one of his subordinates, a half-elven diviner Al had come to think of as Flower Guy. The pointy-eared seer always had a lily in his belt, displayed prominently, for some reason.
“Nope,” said Flower Guy in his Westerman accent, shrugging with a nonchalance Alrior doubted he could’ve expressed in these circumstances. “Everything’s gone mad, Pir. Drovoss dreamt a bunch of drop that didn’t make sense, even on the surrealism scales –” the one who must’ve been called Drovoss looked over almost guiltily from where he sat on his bedroll, chewing on some nuts “– and I checked in with Falia; she just had the same one again.”
“And you?” Piraeas pressed him.
“Me?” Flower Guy grinned. “I dreamt of Falia.”
Chuckles rippled across the tent’s occupants. Fifteen magisters had come on the mission, so they’d brought two big tents; the women’s tent was pitched ten yards away, too far for them to make out the words that were being said.
Except for the fact that they were all magicians.
“What’s all this about Ovin and Falia?” one of the girls asked, poking her head in through the flap.
“Don’t you dare –” Flower Guy began.
“Should’ve seen this coming, shouldn’t ya?” the girl chirped, quickly withdrawing her head.
Laughter erupted, all at Flower Guy’s expense, and Alrior grinned tightly as his contribution to the teasing.
He wasn’t one of them, couldn’t even remember half of their names. But it wouldn’t matter, not for much longer.
He stayed out of the way while they cooked breakfast – well, reheated it. The fiery beans they’d picked up in Tirremuir were almost inedibly spicy when cold, but warmed-up they were tasty indeed. Afterwards they stowed their tents, sorted out their gear (both mundane and spellbound) and got ready to set off down the incline into the cavern. Alrior sat to one side on a wind-scoured rock, watching them do their thing, yet again impressed at their organisation – admiring the way one minute Piraeas would be joking around with them, and the next giving them crisp orders they were obeying to the letter.
Could I do that? Put on the wheel symbol, fight for them? Become one of their arch-magisters?
It wasn’t the first time his conscious mind had run across the possibility, and it probably wouldn’t be the last, but the unconscious mass beneath the surface wouldn’t even entertain the notion, speaking back clearly: No.
He’d seen Redgate’s silhouette sweeping across the blue flames of the portal, the razor-sharp pinions of his wings splayed.
No. I’m going to be a champion, damn it. The next arch-sorcerer champion of Mund… a champion to rival Redgate – Hellbane – maybe even the Liberator, Feychilde himself!
He held resolutely to his decision, fixed his purpose, and stared down into the jagged darkness of the sloping pit before them. Alrior was so enthralled in his own thoughts that he missed the fact they were moving ahead without him until they were almost out of sight – the magisters were plunging ahead without a care into the blackness, the coloured radiances of their light sources being swallowed by the gloom.
“Hey, arch-sorcerer!” cried one of the young girls. “You coming?”
It seemed Alrior wasn’t the only one having trouble remembering names.
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