Doyle Wolfgang.

***

If anything happened throughout the night, it went unnoticed by me. After the undead raised their tents and tied their hammocks, the students huddled around a fire to share stories of their encounters like adventurers taking respite for the night. Then, they tucked themselves off to bed as if they were back in the roots or the Cove.

Most of them anyway.

Zakira never slept. Duke sat perched in a tree all night and Urshure spent most of the night wedged in a crevasse along the face of the cliff. And of course, Amun sat cross-legged and stared off into space for a few hours before waking to drift through the night, spreading hints of burnbud wherever he went. As for me, there was no way I could have slept after hearing what I heard.

I couldn’t help but wonder how the rest of the staff would react- were reacting to Amun’s declaration of taking oaths from his classmates. I couldn’t believe his claim or even come to understand how he intended to train them. Or what he intended to even train them in. Neither could I come up with a definitive answer to his invitation despite the gut feeling I had.

Even though I knew and was unhappy with the outcome of continuing down my current path, I couldn’t yet bring myself to agree to his invitation no matter how alluring it was. I could either continue teaching until stress caught up with me, forcing me to dwell in the unruly empires to the south or the rigid confines of the north. Or I could pledge my soul away to the Elven Devil and uncover the countless curiosities that dwelled within my mind. It was a choice between a stagnant life that would yield nothing and a dynamic life that would take everything. A chance to explore the realms as I so dreamed, rather than live and die in the same realm in which I was born.

It wasn’t fair.

I was a teacher. I was his teacher. There was no way I could abandon my duties and swear fealty to one of my students. But after…

“Dammit!” Shaking my head, I lit another cigarette and took a walk to nowhere. It worked to chase the invasive thoughts from my mind, but not without baiting in something else entirely.

Amun was a God. Or a least claimed to be one.

Normally, such a claim would have warranted mocking laughter or cries of heresy. But Amun was anything but normal. In fact, the closest thing I could ever think of to call him was divine. It just seemed a ludicrous notion to even acknowledge. At least until now.

Deciding there was nothing I could do but accept what I knew deep down to be true, I took another drag, flicked my cigarette over the cliff edge, and then took a long look out at the environment. The Pillars of Erodes, they were called. Formed over eight hundred years ago by an Earth Djinni during this very event. Before then, it’d been a regular barren grassland that had been favored as a battleground over the centuries due to the lack of wildlife. Now, it was seen as an indomitable landscape that could withstand the test of time and the barrage of powerful mages. And the sights were amazing. It gave me the impression of a buried giant, whose three fingers have managed to breach the surface to stretch to the clouds. Although, from my current standpoint, the other pillars appeared as twin towers of impenetrable darkness that stood before the ambers and blues of pre-dawn.

It was a wonder if they would remain standing after this day was done.

“This is it!” I screamed over my shoulder before turning fully into the forest. “Five minutes!” So saying, I scurried back to the center to see the entire party corralled around Amun while he stared up into the air above. Probably at a scrying point.

“Ah!” He snapped his gaze to me. “Doyle, you’re here.”

My pace slowed at once. “I… I am.” I shook my head.

“I wanted to teach you all something before we begin.”

‘Oh, dear.’ I sighed. “Okay.”

Under the firelight, he pointed to a sheet of parchment with two horizontal lines running parallel across the width. Inside of which was a bunch of scribbles that began to elongate as they reached the other side of the page, so much so, that it eventually formed a line with but a gentle curve in it. Roughly at the center of the diagram, however, was a pair of vertical lines that were connected to a rainbow-filled wedge occupying the bottom center.

“Electromagnetism,” Amun stated.

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“That’s one of your affinities!” Scarlett eagerly, and needlessly declared. But Amun nodded as amiably as always.

“That it is!” He beamed. “It is electricity.” He paused to send streaks of lightning over his body. “Combined with magnetism.” He paused to again flex his magic by causing everyone’s armor and weapons to rattle. Then let out a small huff of laughter through his nose before pushing on. “The oscillation of perpendicular electrical and magnetic fields is known as electromagnetic radiation.” He said with a point to his diagram. “What type of radiation we perceive, however, is dependent on the frequency of said fields.

“At the higher end of the spectrum, we have Gamma Rays.” He pointed to the scribbles. “The energy is extremely harmful to life as we know it and the same can be said for X-Rays. And somewhat so with Ultraviolet Rays. If you’ve ever been sunburned, UV rays are why. As such, I won’t show you those yet.”

‘Rays. Sunburned. Yet.’ I nearly gagged. And a lot of students nearly did too. If he was saying what I thought he was saying… everything would change in about… four minutes.

“At the other end of the spectrum are radio waves.” He turned a wink at me while gesturing to the gently curved line. “It’s useful for communication. Among other things.” He snorted. Then held up his pinky. “What we know as radiant heat is infrared radiation. Infrared means inferior to red, the color. So... when more heat is applied... you get...”

He then paused, grinned, and started laughing as students began reeling away from the heat burning off his finger. It was like standing beside an oven. And then, once his finger started glowing, it became like standing within a forest fire. And then… the heat faded. But the light stayed. His pinky was glowing bright yellow and vibrant like the sun itself. But there was no heat at all. It was just…

“Light!” Amun beamed with a gesture to the rainbow on his diagram. “Visible light is but a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. Only because we use it to see do we believe it to be all-powerful.” Chuckling- laughing, Amun turned his gaze to the assumed scry point and laughed again before slapping his palms together.

When they pulled apart, the light did also. To red and orange and yellow and on through the rest of the rainbow, stretched across his hands. But what was most amazing were the feelings invoked by staring at the individual colors. Red made me feel… passionate. Orange gave me a sense of optimism. Green gave a sense of calmness and yellow almost made me jovial. On and on to the end of the rainbow, where my eyes were then drawn up to the creator of these brilliant lights, brimming wide in amusement.

“The frequency or wavelength of visible light is what determines its color.” Amun continued after a few hearty laughs. “But that’s not what I’m here to explain. I’m here to debut the unprecedented union of light and darkness.”

With the light still brimming in his pinky, a trailing sleeve of smoky darkness drew across his left arm and he raised them both high, then threw the spells downward to have them swell into a domain that encompassed the forested plateau in… nothing. At first glance. It was only slightly darker than before but was otherwise no different, save the band of auburn light that hugged the horizon all around us and the countless motes of dazzling light above that shone like… stars.

“Light and Darkness in tandem yields Twilight,” Amun said. Then I felt another swell of mana surge into his finger before he made a flicking motion at the ground.

I and everyone else turned our slack jaws and wide eyes to the ground where Amun’s gravity spell landed to see a small rock floating just above the ground. Then, the sand below it shifted. Cascaded in a stream towards the ascending ball to clump onto its surface and amass in size until a head-sized sphere was left floating above us. Another surge of energy pulled our eyes downward, only to be forced away by another deposit of light contained in Amun’s finger. Luckily, I was more on the side of the darkness pluming from his left hand which, for better or worse, gave me a clear view of him clapping his hands overhead to fuse the energies together. When he did, the light dimmed at once. Not entirely, but to a gently pale, off-white light. It was soft enough to stare into directly. Almost like the stars far above, but held in the palms of a half-drow-devil.

“The fusion of light and shadow makes this pale, silver light. I call it Moonlight. Now, with gravity, I can weave matter into these floating bodies. Celestial Bodies. Satellites. Asteroids. Moons. Planets. Worlds.” Amun said as gently as the energy in his palm. And he carried it upward. Under the pull of his strange magic called gravity, he ascended to the floating orb of dirt and stone to palm it in his illuminated hands.

The pale light flowed into the rock without resistance. Like a sponge in water, it soaked into the cracks and crevasses to illuminate the sphere from within and reveal every miniature crater, ridge, and, depression on its surface in awe-inspiring detail.

“When imbued into a floating body such as this, it becomes a Moon.” Amun gestured to the orb. Then pulled his hands to his chest as if in prayer. Looking around, all of his undead followed his motions. And so too did Zakira, who was… crying.

“And so, as before.” Amun continued. “You all have a choice. Do you want to be graced by Twilight and fight for Dusk and Gloom? Or do you wish to be blessed by the Moon and fight for glory in the pale light? You have… one minute to decide. After that.” He grinned. “Lie low and wait for the blessings to come.”

I heard him. But at the same time, I didn’t. No one did. No one but Zakira could even move past the fact that Amun, a drow sorcerer with ties to the Shadow Realm and the Underworld, could use light. It was unthinkable. Improbable. Utterly impossible, everyone believed. Up until now.

If I told you I was a God, would you think I was arrogant?

If I didn’t believe, I did now.

Even if I didn’t know it, my body knew it. It reached without me thinking. Towards the Moon, it stretched, and in turn, a gentle coldness stretched back. Enveloping me with a sense of knowing and calm. I felt like I was being watched. But not in a discomforting way. It was as if someone was looking over my shoulder from high above to show me the way forward; and the way was everywhere I looked.

It was… freeing.