Galar Kayle was going out of his mind with anxiety. The trek to the garrison, herding a dozen idiot villagers along with their nattering wives and squalling children, had tried his patience long past what he had previously considered to be its breaking point; it was downright miraculous that he'd managed to avoid stabbing anyone over the course of the two days involved. Upon their arrival, he had pawned off the peasants to the local commander with almost unseemly haste and requisitioned their fastest horse, wasting no time before setting off again immediately for the seat of the province. By the time he arrived, he was so sick with fatigue that he almost collapsed while making his report; but the task was discharged at long last, and he slept for nearly sixteen hours afterwards.

When he awoke, everything was in a flurry of activity, and no one would tell him anything. He had spent nearly three days pacing the floor of his temporary quarters, and was actually beginning to contemplate simply taking up his spear and bashing heads until answers fell out when the summons came. He forced himself to calm down, dressed appropriately, trimmed his beard, and cleaned his glasses. At the last moment, he decided not to take his spear with him, in case the content of the meeting was upsetting; this would later prove to be one of the most important decisions he would make in his life.

The chief marshal of the province of Dans-Inuth was a large, solidly built man, with a shaved head and a very large mustache. Galar had seen him before, but only from a distance, usually at parades and similar functions. In better circumstances, he would have been quite flustered with the honor, but at present he had other things on his mind.

"Come in, Corporal Kayle," the marshal rumbled. He gestured to a chair opposite him. "Have a seat."

Galar sat, but not calmly; his knees jumped and bobbled like eager puppies beneath his robe as his calves twitched restlessly. "I'm only a reservist, Lord Marshal. What is going on?"

In response, the marshal produced a map and unrolled it across the table between them. "Our intelligence is still sketchy, but a picture is beginning to form. I've had riders out for the last four days." He pointed to the easternmost portion of the map, where the banana-shaped section which represented Haelid lay. "As you can see, your fief has been right in the middle of things."

Galar blinked. A large arrow had been drawn in red, coming in from the east, and cutting deeply into Haelid. "So it was an attack. By Onima? But why would they attack their own countrymen?"

The marshal let out a befuddled gust of breath, ruffling his mustache. "It doesn't seem that way. All reports from Onima indicate that this force slipped through their borders without being noticed. What we do know, however, is this." He tapped the easternmost section of Haelid's border, where a tiny dot marked Morhelm had been scrawled hastily and then crossed out. "They hit Morhelm first. No survivors, not even women and children. From there, their force seems to have split into two - a larger group going north to Sweetbough, and a smaller one bound south to Dray's Hill. Sweetbough was razed to the ground as well, and the force which did it went on to attack Polsa Sedis, which might have gone the same way if not for your actions."

"Not mine." Galar didn't blink. "Robard Pols gave his life to protect his citizens. I want that on the record."

The marshal nodded, shuffling some papers. "Of course. His bravery won't go unrecorded. I know he was a friend of yours."

"I wouldn't say he was my friend," Galar demurred, "but I served him for many years. He gave me an honorable post, and I did my best to be worthy of it."

"Nevertheless," the marshal continued, "I'll see that the Principiate hears of it, and the Praetor as well if I have any say in it. But we have more pressing concerns."

Galar nodded anxiously. "Lord Marshal, I am certain that we do. But I cannot sit here and wait to be commanded. I need a swift horse, rations, and the freedom to find my son."

The marshal sighed. "I ask your patience, Corporal. We have not yet discussed the southbound incursion."

It was at this point that Galar began to realize that something was very wrong. The human mind, however, is quite good at ignoring these sorts of signals, and he spent the next thirty seconds in mounting denial while the marshal spoke his next few sentences.

"The smaller force, as I said, made for Dray's Hill", the marshal resumed, "and it was there that they ran into meaningful resistance. Although reports are very confused, a small number of salient facts have emerged. Two soldiers, already present in the village on other duties to the crown, met the enemy forces in a tavern. Although many of the villagers were wounded, none were killed, due to the heroic efforts of the two soldiers. We have identified the first as one Tebes of Reth, who I understand was serving under Pols as a reeve."

Galar wanted to stop the marshal from talking, but he couldn't make himself move. He wanted to close his ears, to turn away. This couldn't be real.

"There was one bystander who saw the end of the battle. Although our picture of events is incomplete, he does know that Tebes wounded the enemy commander before being killed. The last thing our witness saw was your son taking up Tebes' sword and going in to finish the job. There was some sort of explosion, and..." The marshal spread his hands helplessly and sighed. "I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Corporal, I really am. But your son died a hero, and that's more than most of us get." He paused, giving Galar a chance to speak, but the other man just sat there.

Uncomfortable, the marshal shuffled his papers again. "I wish I could leave you to your grief. But your king needs you, and your own actions at Polsa Sedis have not gone unnoticed. Robard, Tebes, and your son are dead. You're not, and that makes you the best resource we've got right now." He pulled a piece of paper out of the pile and place it on the desk in front of Galar. "This is a brevet promotion to Sergeant, and notice of your reinstatement to active duty. His Majesty, King Atrís the Fifth, requests and demands your service to the nation of Temurin. You'll report with me to the Legatus in Eldton tomorrow." He stood, gathering up his papers and maps, and paused to lay a hand on Galar's shoulder as he departed. "There's nothing I can say, Sergeant. But together, there's something we can do. We can make their sacrifices count."

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Galar Kayle sat in the empty room for many minutes afterwards, feeling every one of his forty-one winters. At some point, he got up and left, packing and stowing his few remaining possessions for travel mechanically, but he did not rest or sleep. When, hours later, he found himself trudging through the rain, unable to remember where he was or how he had gotten there, he felt too numb to even be shocked. And when the doors to the temple of Santorana loomed up out of the darkness before him, it seemed surprising, but also, somehow, fitting.

***

The first four months of Linduin's apprenticeship passed him by like a bright summer afternoon. True to his word, he was diligent, stoic, and careful -- having seen firsthand both what magic was capable of and what sorts of things happened when it went wrong, he needed no further urging to keep his hands to himself and his nose out of things which were not his business. Cheis, likewise, gave her role as a stern taskmaster a good-faith effort, but her heart just wasn't in it; it didn't take long before she started throwing books on mathematics to Linduin to keep him out of her hair each time he finished a task and asked for another. Eventually, the two of them settled into a routine; Linduin would make the meals, clean the cottage for two hours a day, tend the grounds and their vegetable garden for another hour, and make such trips to the village proper for supplies as were needed. The rest of the time he dedicated to his two core passions: daydreaming and studying, in that order. Cheis spent the bare minimum of effort guiding him on his scholastic path, but most of her attention, like always, was elsewhere -- tinkering with new spell structures, maintaining the energy reserves of both the cottage and her personal enchantments, taking various natural phenomena apart to see how they worked, and reading voraciously.

To say that Linduin was a diligent student would be to do him a disservice; he was a fanatically devoted one, who threw himself into his education both for the pure joy of learning and for the potentially unlimited power of sorcery that it might apparently unlock. In two weeks, he'd mastered algebra; in another three, he managed to fumble his way through geometry. He struggled with statistics for nearly a month, but devoured trigonometry whole and triumphed with ease over discrete mathematics before beginning the long, hard ascent into calculus. Cheis, to her unremitting horror, soon found herself becoming fond of Linduin in a motherly way she detested -- twice she caught herself tucking him into bed when he'd fallen asleep reading a book, and once she quite seriously entertained the thought of taking him into the village to get him a nice girlfriend before she followed the logic to its conclusion and realized what a massive disruption of her living circumstances it would be if it worked. And so it was that out of sheer desperation, she resolved to put his talents to the test; if, at the end of winter, he still hadn't managed to piss her off or do something sufficiently stupid to get them both killed, she'd give him some rudimentary magical aptitude tests. If he survived them, she'd teach him enough to turn him into a respectable mage and kick him the hell out of her house so he could go have adventures and stop pestering her. So resolved, she relaxed and snuggled back into her blankets to read another chapter. Outside, the snow fell in thick, fluffy white flakes and settled into deep drifts around the cottage while Linduin, in the basement, solved another theorem and started on the next.

***

The villagers called it the Black Oak. To them, it was a sort of curiosity; it ate birds and crickets occasionally, but seemed quite content to let children climb on it and otherwise live in harmony with nature. The undulating tentacles which erupted at strange intervals from its branches never lashed out or did anything similarly untoward, and the staring eyes which occasionally opened in its knots and boles just looked around for the most part. There had been that one incident, of course, where Turod the Woodsman had lost his best axe when he'd made an experimental stroke at one of the branches, but everyone agreed that that was just sensible self-defense and he'd been lucky the tree had only eaten the axe instead devouring Turod along with it. If anyone had had any idea whatsoever about the true nature of the thing, they would have fled the village shrieking long ago; but farmers, being rational and stolid folk, are not wont to abandon their livelihoods over strange but apparently non-hostile black trees that keep to themselves. And so for many months, the igg found a convivial environment outside of the town of Dray's Hill.

It had bored feelers into the tree early on, and been quite taken with the emergent dendritic structures within its genetic code; it devoured small reptiles and plants, and learned the tricks of photosynthesis and endothermia to augment its deep repertoire of energy-manipulation tactics. It grew more mass, spreading itself out over the tree and making such changes as seemed fitting; it repurposed xylem and phloem, converted cellulose to polyisoprene, and ditched the leaves for more efficient, hyper-absorbent vantablack scaling. Seeding neural clusters as it went, it delved down into the tree's roots and assimilated the complex behaviors of ants and the chemistry of nitrates; through alien eyes it examined the electrodynamics of sunbeams and lightning. Humans fascinated it endlessly; it loved watching children play, and although they looked delicious, it never sampled any of them, having reverse-engineered enough rudimentary prospection from the brains of mysteriously vanished pets and prey animals to understand the concept of biding its time. Instead, it took notes; it observed, recorded, and analyzed the myriad patterns of their movements, their communications, and most of all their mastery of the environment. It took note of how they held dominion over the land to farm, triumped over the rivers to fish, and harnessed the air to drive their windmills. It watched children and adults bully and cow one another, and derived the concepts of force and preeminence quite handily. And, of course, it remembered its own history; from the patterns of thaumaturgical control Cheis had asserted over its bones (when it had had them) it extracted the underlying concepts of locomotion, remote execution, and animation. Like a great processor, it ruminated over all these things, turning them this way and that in its formic alien mind and experimenting with different configurations in which they might fit together.

In another story, it might have done so forever; a curious and grotesque, but otherwise harmless, little idiosyncracy of a village on the edge of a fief comprising a province in a district which made up a kingdom in a world full of such peculiarities. But, eventually, one configuration began to show promising results in its contemplations, and it began the slow process, riddled with trial and error, of finding a feasible implementation thereof. With hundreds of little independent brains, all swarming together on the problem, it was the work of only a few hours; and so when the village awoke one morning to find the Black Oak striding rather nonchalantly through the village square, expelling an apparently-infinite horde of bipedal but otherwise tremendously biologically divergent demonic spawn that attacked and devoured everything in sight, they were understandably taken quite by surprise.

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END OF PART ONE