GLASS 4.3: SOMETHING REAL

“More champions doesn’t always entail fewer darkmages, Lady Osordei! It just drives them underground. For certain there is peace to be found in such times, the measure of which we must enjoy for as long as we may. For whether we will measure or no, it shall be measured when it ends. When they emerge, it’s accompanied by a frenzy of violence the likes of which won’t have been seen in years. I have seen it. I know the pattern and you ought to know it too. These heretics may be keeping quiet right now, but it won’t last long.”

– the First Lady Sentelemeth, in session before the High Council, Illost 997 NE

Timesnatcher used his glyphstone to contact the local magistry, then they left to transport their captive up to the surface: Mountainslide floated the netted enchanter along on a cushion of air, Wilderweird and Lovebright in tow to keep their former colleague in a relaxed state – Timesnatcher and Dimdweller led the way. It looked to me like a concerted effort to be clear that this was a non-partisan action – I saw lots of people, including the two gnome-champions and Glimmermere the elf, heading to speak to the last remaining dwarf in the chamber, Brokenskull. It quickly became apparent they were attempting to reassure the druidess that this was no example of ill-will against dwarves in general. From the frame of the conversations I overheard in passing it seemed Brokenskull was another newish champion. The young-sounding dwarf-maiden was keeping her cool, the voice emanating from behind her mask (a broken skull, obviously) slow and solemn. All the same, there was tension in her careful cadence; she would understandably be shocked by the turn of events that had taken one of her kinsfolk and branded him a darkmage, all in the space of a minute. The sheer suddenness of it all had shaken me, its chief instigator, so I could only imagine what she’d be feeling.

It took ten minutes for them to return, which I spent with Em and Killstop, speculating as to the exact nature of the power contained by the crystal tree. None of us had ever heard of a Ceryad before – a big part of me was relishing the mystery, and perhaps that was true of Em too, but Killstop soon spoiled us, her low entranced voice emanating from behind the disapproving mask. The Ceryad was, according to her vision, ‘the First Wonder of Mund’ – and a legacy of the Five Founders and long supposed lost. For all her insights, however, the seeress said that she couldn’t directly read the tree’s past or future… which was apparently strange for her as objects or simple living things were usually the easiest to read.

What was more – Em said she couldn’t touch any part of it with her wizardry, although the water swirling about its sprawling glass roots was far warmer than it ought to have been.

“Well, then,” Timesnatcher said from the doorway as he led the quintet of champions back into the cavern. “Shall we begin?”

The doors closed, and the murmuring about Neverwish ceased almost immediately. Everyone started to spread out, forming a circle around the tree.

Me, Em and Killstop slipped into the circle on the edge nearest the cliff, Em quickly clearing aside the water we’d have been stepping in; and within seconds all the active champions of Mund were in a single ring, looking out upon each other. Winterprince stood out, encased in ice as ever, and no one crowded him.

“First order of business – the Incursion. Come forward with your reports.”

The diviner moved his head, left to right, looking out across the circle. He’d gone perhaps a quarter of the way around when the champion he was glancing at took one step into the ring.

Timesnatcher halted, and the first spoke.

This went on until the whole circle had had chance to speak up, and then the arch-diviner led the next order of business, Facechanger – and then the third, the Srol Heretics…

Various mages and archmages stepped forward, relating how they’d fared in their encounters. Even though I was now the only champion present who’d been at the confrontation at Upper Tivertain, I had little to add to the narrative except that I’d successfully slain the primary summoners. It turned out that Brokenskull had been there too, only later, as part of the clean-up crew who had been tasked with finishing off the remnants once the battle at Roseoak Way had been won.

As the stories went on, I got a better picture of how the Incursion had flowed from site to site, where our forces had been distributed and why – some deployments were deliberate, others happenstance. Getting the enchanters spread out across the city was the first priority, establishing the quick-response network that they’d seemingly been using for years, perhaps decades… maybe even down the centuries…

According to the stories, champions were a feature of life in Mund even from the time of the Five and their children. Who knew how far back the traditions of our Gathering might stretch?

Whilst they spoke I looked about myself in renewed wonder.

Whether he’d been selected for it or simply stepped forward of his own accord, it was Shadowcloud who brought us to the conclusion. He explained the cause of Dustbringer’s absence in detail for the benefit of those champions who’d had to go off the rumours on the streets until now. He related the descent into the buried warehouse, the meeting with the eolastyr. He described the final fight, the last moments of Dustbringer’s life.

There was a near-silence, and those who wept did so quietly but openly – the champions did not bury their grief, nor did they let Dustbringer’s death and the deaths of the other champions overshadow their glory. There were even smiles of pride on some of those faces where the mouths could be seen.

I understood it. This was the fate we here all faced.

“Their deeds live on in the lives they saved,” Shadowcloud said at last, stepping back into place, “from now unto the ends of time.”

“Unto the ends of time,” everyone echoed him in unison.

The overly-formal wording had seemed strange in Shadowcloud’s uncultured voice, but instantly made sense once I realised they were ritual.

When it came to Facechanger, it was Lightblind at Timesnatcher’s side who stepped forward, and I was quickly brought up to speed.

My initial guesses had been right – some highly-skilled darkmage was selling anonymity, or even specific faces. ‘Facechanger’ was being mentioned in the shady corners of certain establishments, but how they operated was still a mystery. There was a chance it was a single mage, but the mastery of druidry, enchantment and divination required made this a non-starter. More likely, Lightblind suggested, ‘Facechanger’ was the codename for a cabal of three dark archmages.

Magic could reveal the truth of the disguise after extensive work but, without good cause to investigate a given subject, they would easily slip through the cracks. In the latest case of interest the bridge-guards at the Maginox, the ‘waywatchers’, had caught one Lady Arimeth Araldo trying to get in wearing the face of a missing magister, whom it now transpired had been killed purely in order to more easily sell her identity. Even the patterns of the magister’s thoughts had been copied over, allowing Arimeth to completely impersonate her. Only arch-divination pierced the transformation – and only then when it had become obvious that another powerful diviner had interfered in her past, to the point of completely obfuscating her previous life-history. It was down to the quick thinking of a lone archmage that the Maginox wasn’t infiltrated.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

The most alarming element to it was that there was nothing to give it away; there was nothing to see through. No illusions were employed in the ‘face-change’, the only enchantments being used to wipe or alter memories. (In order to remove, at minimum, the identities of the supposed-cabal’s members.) Anyone could be suspect, at any time – you couldn’t even verify that, say, Neverwish hadn’t been replaced at some point in the past with a fake dark-enchanter of similar potency.

At this point Timesnatcher interrupted to reassure everyone that he had actually checked this, and Lightblind patted him familiarly on the arm to hush him. I found my eyebrows raising momentarily.

She continued speaking, and I devoted energy to actually concentrating, sifting the meaning of her words. It was difficult to follow. She spoke with an oracle’s economy, and I struggled to make the presumptions my newness here forced upon me.

For the last few weeks it seemed the arch-diviner had been working alongside Special Investigations, but little came of it – the criminals they allowed to escape, like Soulbiter and Screamsong, they’d been forced to recapture. If any of them had sought Facechanger’s services, they’d been unlucky.

This, Lightblind pointed out, raised a few questions. Were the darkmages comprising Facechanger out-scrying the magisters and champions, aware that Termiax and Rissala and their ilk were bait? It was possible. It was also possible that Facechanger approached their clients, not the other way around as had first been surmised.

“We have no way to be sure of one another, this is true,” she said, drawing up the hem of her robe as though she were preparing to step back into place. “It’s for this reason that we diviners recently instituted a policy of regularly checking our members, and each other. We are reasonably certain none of us have been replaced, and we are absolutely certain none of you have been. We are only telling you this now that it’s been settled. We’ll continue to randomly check the champions until the Facechanger cabal is caught.”

Reasonably certain, I brooded. That doesn’t sound great.

“Was Neverwish really not one, then?” someone asked hopefully. “You’re sure?”

Timesnatcher shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

“Are there no details in the memories of these ‘clients’ at all?” I asked. “Sorry, if I’m not supposed to ask –“

“No, it’s quite alright, Feychilde,” Lightblind replied. “You weren’t here last month. We had an… incident. We followed one of the leads generated by the memories you mention – and walked straight into a trap.”

“An arch-diviner could’ve set it for us,” Timesnatcher said, as if to pre-empt my next question.

“I see. Thanks.” I lowered my head, making it clear I was done interrupting.

“It’s what I mentioned when I, hm, met you,” Nighteye called, a dozen or so places to my right. “The people, with no noses? It was –“

“Quite,” Leafcloak said with a note of finality.

Lightblind looked around the circle, or at least turned her eyeless mask as though that were what she was doing, then stepped back into place, gesturing across the ring to Winterprince.

The ice elemental stepped forward, looming above everyone, and gave his report on the Srol in his grinding, snapping voice.

He hadn’t been speaking for more than a minute when I’d learned more about the heretics than I had in a lifetime as an ordinary citizen of Mund – and the pace at which information was revealed only increased as time went on, until I was frozen in place, as though I were encased in ice along with him, drinking in the rumbled words.

The Thirteen Candles… was the home of the Srol.

It had been the home of the Chaosmakers and the Five-Fold Rebellion too, back in the day. That should’ve been obvious to me, in retrospect, but the obviousness of the target merely compounded my confusion. If their home was known, why wasn’t it under attack?

It was, apparently, impregnable. The distortion surrounding its grounds, that I’d only seen for the first time a couple of weeks back when I flew past it on the way to the Maginox – that distortion was, I came to understand, a shield of cunning deviousness. All the machinations of mortal sorcery had been combined with the spells of arch-demons, liches and powerful fey to concoct a barrier. A barrier none had yet penetrated with weapons of even the highest calibre, magical or mundane. There were some hints in what Winterprince said that, years back, a group of champions had tried to mount an assault – but it sounded like no form of attack did more harm to the Candles than it did to those launching the attack in the first place.

But the Candles had stood for centuries… which could only mean…

I gleaned that Heresy, Chaos, Rebellion, whatever name it went by – the problem went further back in history that was popularly conceived. People tended to remember distinct groups where only behaviour-patterns and labels were changing, and that seemed to be the way the Arrealbord liked it – keeping the public clueless, untroubled at the thought of a singular, monolithic enemy that was beyond defeat. The titles of the Candles’ inhabitants were shifted every now and again, branding the ‘Chaos-Lord’ archmages of a decade ago with the name ‘Hierarch’ even if they’d kept the same robe and mask. It sounded as though at least five of the Hierarchs were known to have been Chaos-Lords, and of them one might have even been an original Dark Rebel.

But five hundred years? How this had been kept secret for so long Winterprince didn’t mention, though I supposed I hadn’t really questioned the official narrative myself at any point… Perhaps we had enough on our plates, what with Incursions every three or four months, to worry overlong about the Srol Heretics – where they were, who they were, what they really wanted…

On that last point Winterprince said nothing. He covered the spider slaughter on Firenight Square, then passed it over to Timesnatcher to relate the defence of the Sunset Keep area against Hierarchs Three and Four. The identically-attired arch-sorcerers, backed by a group of heretic-mages, had come very close to killing a school-trip of Mund’s finest, richest young people. It was obvious that the established champions had received messages I hadn’t, organising them in greater numbers in Treetown.

Then Mountainslide, the dwarf whose status as a veteran belied his apparent youth, reported on Openway, where he and several others had fought an arch-wizard and arch-enchanter – possibly Hierarchs Thirteen and Seventeen.

“Doomspeaker, would you like to give our assessment on the threat?” Timesnatcher said when the dwarf wizard stepped back.

A gnome diviner half a dozen places to my left stepped forward. Her miniature mask was steel worked to resemble a ram’s skull, and her watery eyes shone through the almond-shaped slits in the metal. She had the stature of a four year old, but the hands protruding from the sleeves of her tiny cyan-blue robe were loose-skinned, and her status as a gnome of elder years was declared as much by the gristly, throbbing tone of her voice as by the leatheriness of her flesh.

“As you know, we spend much of our energies watching the Thirteen Candles,” she said. “Even if their diviners afford their movements a great deal of concealment, there are always the avenues along which we can perceive them. We have found one such avenue. Spiritwhisper, if you’d be so kind? Thank you. Look here –“

Everyone else aside from the three of us must’ve been used to this, because we were the only ones stiffening in shock as a vast, ghostly illusion sprang up in the circle, the Ceryad-tree piercing it, showing the scene for the glamour it was.

The illusion was Mund.

The entire thing, flattened down to remove the slope. Rendered in fascinating detail, floating about as high as my knee, the Stone of Amplification penetrating through it at Firenight Square.

I lost some of what the gnome had to say, marvelling at the work that had gone into this recreation. The white walls were barely an inch high; the Maginox, far off on my right, reached up as high as my waistline. I was on the side nearest the Treetown walls, looking down upon a miniature forest which ended at the Whiteflood, beyond which the bazaars of Oldtown appeared… And far off on the other side of the crystal tree I could make out Sticktown… I could trace the line of the cliff that rose from Sticktown to meet Hilltown.

I turned my head to the right again, gazing at the towers of Hightown – I could see the very Tower of Mourning beneath which we were now gathered, pulsing its cerulean light, replicated in tiny perfection…

I looked back across at Em and saw her glancing to our left, towards her home beyond the Greywater.

As I followed her gaze I noticed Rivertown was approaching us – it was coming closer – the whole thing was slowly spinning in an anticlockwise direction, delicately contracting and extending as needed to fit the space between us…

Spiritwhisper’s bit of glamour alone was worth the price of admission.

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