2 - Path of the Warlock
Long before the human population came to be there, the river had worked a bed into the earth for the city to be planted, to one day rise up and meet the sky. The City of Yartha had its modest beginnings as a settlement founded almost eight centuries earlier by migrant nobles from the northern kingdom of Starhall and their subjects- the farmers, hunters, and miners who had followed their lords or left the mountains when that country had grown too cold or its rulers too cold-hearted. In their exodus south they happened upon a great river and followed its winding path to settle in a forested valley with good soil, water teeming with fish and hills full of ore. In the near-millennium which followed, the City of Yartha became the most populated place in the known world.
An independent city-state on the Slybos River and located in the center of the continent, it was known across the land as a cultural beacon, a de facto capital of Damursyn. Rich with resources and history. The river valley where it stood was purported to be where human life had begun and so was home to a plethora of religions, said to be populated by living gods before the city came to be, as well as a now vanished ancient people, the remnants of their civilization still scattered across the land with the consensus that the magic of the ruins was long gone if it had ever been there at all.
From the viewpoint of those who cowered under the gaze of a borderlands warlord or pledged their livelihoods to a king or queen, Yartha was, in the last fifty years at least, a place of great freedom. Nowhere on the continent offered more autonomy except for perhaps the vast expanse of the wilds, owned by no person and hospitable to none but the most natural denizens of the land. To an outsider, however, the city was known above all other things as a haven of knowledge and education. It was the place that birthed ideas that changed Damursyn as a whole and continued to shape the lives of its people in the form of great machines- moving parts that could take the place of twenty workers in the wheat fields, instruments that measured time; wondrous applications that amazed the largely uneducated masses of the free city and beyond.
Yartha had only been governed by a democratic council for half a century by the time Byron graduated from its prestigious academy. In the centuries before, its rulers had been authoritarian. Cold and ruthless oligarchs. Byron’s father Oxsar was only a boy when the last noble tyrant was in power, but his grandfather had been a lesser tyrant himself, exiled from the city to later die as a traitor in the northern kingdom of Starhall. His life had been in service to Solomon Pyne, the last lord to sit on a throne in the city, and the last of a feared dynasty that had shackled the large majority of the underclass population to slavery for over four-hundred years, hair cropped and skin marked with tattoos, as the natural differences in appearance among the people of the continent were few.
The enslaved population of Yartha had essentially built the marvelous city as it had come to be in its modern age. The five Towers, each massive and twenty stories tall, were constructed around the academy campus like points on a star. At present, each of them were tasked with a different area of the city, and they housed the various council folk, committees, merchantry, judges and military personnel of those districts. The three magnificent bridges that crossing the River Slybos, the aqueducts, dockyards, temples, gardens- all had been built under forced labor and servitude. There were still citizens alive who remembered the tyrant king and had worn chains in their youth, though they were now in their twilight years.
Pyne’s reign had finally come to an end following a worker’s revolt upon the completion of the final tower of the academy, Bolom, in the year 742 of the Yarthan calendar, over fifty years ago. The events were still a matter of debate among both the upper and lower classes, but eventually it became known that the uprising had been organized by a faction of highborn scholars. Some were executed, and shortly after that Solomon Pyne was killed by an unknown assassin. His throat had been cut while on an evening stroll through the flower gardens of Lordly Tower. His regime collapsed, and all but Pyne’s most ardent followers accepted the change of guard. Those who may have attempted to take his place such as Byron’s grandfather were either exiled or killed, and the power of the king was transferred to the five headmasters of the academy, a council since their beginning.
The titles of the nobility in Yartha dissolved along with the end of Pyne’s rule, slavery was ceased, and the gates of the academy became open to anyone with the coin, but there had been scant effort by the former nobles to parcel out land or assets, and a scarce amount of prospective lowborn students had enlisted at the academy over the ensuing years. Few even had the ability to read, and so after the new government had latched into place, the existing hierarchies never truly wavered. The power of the highborn- economic, religious, and academic, had simply become political as well. Both a Vyntas and a Wyse, noble lines both, had sat on the governor’s council for its entire existence. Tattoos faded, cropped hair grew back, but the divide between the citizenry would remain along with stubborn ideas of class, nobility, and its terminology that would perhaps never fade, as if it were a trait adopted alongside human progress.
With the centuries-old writings of the witch Petrastyra held tight to his chest, Byron ascended the stairs. He didn’t sign the manuscript out in the library ledgers, a mandatory practice when borrowing from its collection, but concealed the hidebound book beneath his robes as he passed the front desk, attended only by a dozing first-year student, young and oblivious in his novice robes, paying him no mind. At the top of the steps he emerged to the chattering crowds of Ryli Tower’s lower hall. It had been almost a week since he’d last set foot on the surface level, and the light breeze from the open double doors-on the east and west ends of the massive hall was refreshing, though it also made him acutely aware of his stench.
At present all were concerned with the drought in its second year, which had been a problem for the city coffers for quite some time, and was becoming an entirely different problem for the lowborn. Starvation was imminent if it wasn’t already happening. and there was fear of uprising. A number of wealthy families had already left Yartha, braving the month-long journey it took through the lawless wilds to reach the nearest large civilization- Starhall, far to the north. It was an impossible trek for the lowborn.
The foot-traffic in the great hall was heavy and hurried. Academics and government officials came and went, some carrying scroll-cases or messenger bags. Nearly all of them were of former noble families, titles stripped in Yartha’s democratization, but scholars and scholarly things had been aggrandized and celebrated in Yartha since the academy’s hallowed and symbolic brass gates had opened over five centuries ago. The cities' first council of governors, and most of its subsequent ones were either scholars or other men and women of academia, and the inner workings and machinations of the headmasters had been secretive and elitist from their beginnings, heavily favored by the Towers.
Byron’s haggard and filthy appearance stood out among the other academics and officials. He was not a popular figure at the academy, but all knew who he was. He imagined they considered him an eccentric, if not completely mad. His colleagues had eventually come to a grudging acceptance of his dedication to the Earth God. It was an ancient practice, but few knew of it, let alone made it a habit; most religions tended toward cleanliness, after all.
There was a cult of like-minded fanatics of Hyne who dwelled across the river in the woods of Hundred Trees, somewhere in the vicinity of Altar Cave. Byron had never made their acquaintance, his worship was one of solitude. That will change soon, he thought. If only I had known. Surely they are aware of the cave and the altar. Why else would they congregate there? If they know any of its secrets, they must show me, and in turn perhaps I will demonstrate to them how it is used. He laughed his awkward laugh as he envisioned the scene and drew puzzled looks from those around him as he awkwardly joined the procession of bodies leaving the tower. They kept a wide berth of him as they made their way through the eastern set of Ryli's tall double doors to the outside city and the Byron was blinded as he passed the threshold, the city before him an undefined miasma of white gold to his dark-adjusted eyes, as if the sun had landed there.
The heat met them at the top of the wide marble steps that led from the tower to the street. Byron whimpered, putting one foot in front of another and very slowly making his way down toward Dandelion Street. Voices behind him muttered in disgust and shouted in protest. Finally at the bottom, he turned to the sparsely occupied streets of the northwest quarter and quickened his pace, transferring the witch’s journal from within his robes to the messenger bag he carried slung over one shoulder.
His shoes were worn through- the bricks hot against his blackened feet even in the shade he traversed beneath the awnings and balconies. He walked north to the highborn district of Flynoss Heights, where he'd been born and spent most his life, the only son to two scholars and educators of the academy. His mother had been taken by the sickness called Elder's Fever more than a decade before, but his father still resided there, alone now save for the servants and private guardsmen who maintained the small castle where he’d grown up.
Flynoss Heights was one of the wealthiest districts in the city. It was where grand academics and government officials of Yartha resided alongside pillars of trade and industry, a smattering of the most prominent of criminals, high priests of what Byron saw as gluttonous religions. The architecture there was extravagant- pillars of white marble, fountains and plumbing, circulated heat in the winter, terracotta arches, grand balconies and streets well-lit by ornate stone braziers in the evening and placed at regular intervals alongside the lanes, stairs and walkways smooth and paved with bricks laid and crafted by guilds of master masons.
The highborn had always lived in the north, and the lowborn the south. It went back to Yartha's first noble families. Flynoss Heights was a world apart from the slums which began only a handful of city blocks south of there beyond the academy campus.
To say that Byron looked out of place in the clean streets would have been an understatement. A hovering escort of flies followed him. His robes, once a pale blue, were now a sickly greenish-brown, blackened and tattered at their bottoms. The people who didn't know him ignored him, and the ones who did avoided him. His odd behavior had made him very much an outcast in the highborn district.
He stopped at the end of the lane to rest and fan himself. Flynoss Heights bordered the west bank of the Slybos. It was north of Quell Bridge- Yartha's northernmost and smallest bridge. The plot of land Levant Castle sat upon covered an entire city block in the northwest quarter between Dandelion and Marble Streets. He trudged up the old familiar path to his father’s castle to gather some belongings- gold, in particular, supplies for the coming days. He would have to forgo his vow of poverty if he were to save the city. As for his father, Byron did not expect their meeting to be a pleasant one. They never were.
Byron smiled as he approached the iron gate between the low, ivy-choked walls of Castle Levant. He opened his arms to the guardsman who stood on the other side of the bars. "Lynt, it is good to see your face," he said. "If I may pass…"
The guardsman didn't return his smile. "Byron,” he addressed him. “I will fetch your father.”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
"Perhaps-"
"I will fetch your father," the guardsman repeated, louder this time, turned and left Byron at the castle gate.
Byron Levant had grown up in a secluded universe of Yartha- one of luxury and socialization with adults who spoke the language of the educated and entitled. He had no siblings or family his age, and no friends to speak of. His life had been one of safety and security, but also a lonely one, sheltered from the majority of the citizens of Yartha- the lowborn, those nameless people who seemed to live a life of suffering while he and his family were the polar opposites. Before Byron's vow of poverty, his only connection to the underclass had been his family's servants, who had talked little of their personal lives. In a way, he felt shame at his family's perceived importance, and was acutely aware that no one needed the luxuries they had, even when he was young.
As a child he had attended the youth school on the academy campus. One day he'd asked his father if lowborn children also went to a school. Byron senior had told his son that they didn't need to. They don't need an education, he had said. There is plenty for them to do, and once they're grown, as long as they have their taverns and their whorehouses they are perfectly content without learning. The Levants are of a different breed. You will see this when you are older, and you will carry on our legacy with your children. This world is constructed of tiers, Byron. You will never outclimb authority, but the only sensible path will always be upward. The people beneath you must be there, or your ascent will have no support. Remember that, but don't dwell on it, and know that they are content with their lot. Just as the animals have their hierarchies, we have ours.
But he had dwelled on it, and could never bring himself to truly believe what his father had told him. Still, he’d lived the life which he was handed. He was a bright young boy who excelled at the same subjects his father had, grasping fairly complex mathematics at an early age. It was during the first year in his preliminary classroom where a classmate had told him about the gods and magic. The conversation had been seminal to him. His parents hadn't believed in either, and had done their best to shield him from the ideas of the religions.
Oxsar Levant's formative years had been spent during a period of enlightenment in the city as he moved his way up the Towers to become a high ranking scholar of mathematics and had sat on a number of lesser committees over the years. It had been his colleagues who had championed the theory of Gaia’s rotation, which had in turn led to modern astrology. He believed with stern conviction that there were no mysteries to life that could not be explained by science. Gods and magic were nothing but relics of superstition, entertained by the ignorant poor, who Byron’s father despised in every way and made no secret of it.
It had not stopped young Byron from being enthralled by the stories the girl in his class had told him- of the many gods worshiped in the city, and how they had created the river and the entire world, how they used to walk alongside humans. She told these things to Byron, who had never heard myth before, or even a word of fiction from his family or teachers. When he had relayed the classroom discussions to his father, he was reprimanded, and the girl was no longer in his class after that. It's a fairy tale, his father told him. Lies to give a sense of purpose to the weak-willed. To Byron senior, the case had been closed, and he'd said no more on the subject for many years.
As Byron waited for his father’s guardsman to return, he peered through the iron bars at the statue of the bridge builder, Helena Velias, and a withered apple tree in the courtyard where, as children, Albranth told Byron the truth about his own family. They’d sat eating apples on the marble bench. Eleven or twelve they’d been, nothing but spoiled and arrogant highborn boys when the history of the Levant’s was explained to him by a young and smirking Albranth Wyse. Byron’s parents had never told him the truth, and so he’d had to hear it first from Albranth’s arrogant mouth, already a prodigy long before he ever ascended to governor of Lordly Tower.
Beneath the statue he’d told Byron that his grandfather, Mitius Levant, had been a despised murderer, the right hand to the equally loathed Solomon Pyne, and that the Levant name had almost ended altogether following his exile and subsequent loss of sanity. After Pyne’s fall, the future of Byron’s father, young Oxsar, had been uncertain. Byron’s grandmother had been killed in the revolution which set the Towers in place, and Matias had lost his mind long before he was finally captured, unfit for the responsibility of caring for Byron’s young father.
There had been talk of sending Byron’s father to an orphanage, effectively erasing the Levant name from existence, but an old matriarch by the name of Tabitha Ysmay had taken a liking to his father, who was then only a toddler. She’d brought him to stay with her at what was then known as Ysmay Castle and raised him. The statue of Helena Velias was a holdover from her ownership. The lady of the castle was descended from the western Queendom of Havorax. If things would have gone differently, Byron could have been a Ysmay, a prince of a matriarchal line, but when Oxsar became married he revived the Levant name. A childless widow, upon Tabitha’s death, the castle and its assets were given to Byron’s father, but neither he nor Byron's mother had ever so much as mentioned the woman to their son. He had never confronted him about it, for it had shamed him as well that their wealth and status had all been dependent on the charity of some anonymous woman. It must have been shameful, Byron reasoned, if his father had felt the need to keep it a secret from him his entire life.
***
"Have you lost your mind?" Oxsar asked his son. They were standing in the flower garden of the small courtyard. A gardener dutifully watered hibiscus plants sun-bleached a pale pink, and Byron pouted before his father.
"What was the academy for," he asked, "if you were just going to discard all of the practical, proven knowledge you have worked so hard to amass?"
Byron said nothing. His head hung low. A mosquito buzzed in his ear and he flinched, jumped backward with a yelp, and waved the long sleeves of his soiled robes in the air around him frantically. When the strange dance was finished, he turned to his father. “I have been bitten far too many times by mosquitos, already,” he explained. “It announced itself to my ear, and I was forced to take action. I will not be embarrassed.”
His father stared at him, flabbergasted. "Look at you!" he bellowed, then, somewhat softer, "What happened to you, Byron?"
Byron stilled, sniffled with feigned grief. His father stared at his face for a long time. Oxsar cleared his throat and began what to Byron was a familiar lecture. "The two cannot co-exist, science and religion. Men of reason will always lose if we even acknowledge the thought without proof. All of science is debunked in the name of magic. You would toss everything we have established for 'it is so because the gods say it is so. Case closed.' It’s idiocy. This goes against everything we believe, Byron. These thoughts have poisoned your mind."
"You have it wrong, father-"
"I have it wrong. What a joke."
"You have the reasoning behind my belief wrong," Byron pleaded, before realizing that his voice was likely at its most grating tone. He paused before he went on. "It is only due to scientific insight that I should believe in any gods. The symmetries and balances. The cycles of rebirth and vastness of the cosmos. It is all so perfect and self-sustaining. You said it yourself, father. We have only begun to scratch the surface. How can it be anything other than divine creation? How do you not see it as such?"
The gardener quietly slipped away as the father answered his son, the elder's voice deep and his cadence steady, honed from his daily lectures. "Because the gods haven’t introduced themselves properly, I suppose. Byron, there is a difference between pondering the mysteries of life and parading around in the street like a lunatic, claiming to have an answer to the question which will in all likelihood never be truly answered, putting on a performance, for who?"
Byron laughed, bitterly. "Is this about me cavorting with the wretched poor people, again? Don't worry, father. No one who you wish to impress will recognize me. Why would they start? Your good name will remain unsullied."
"You are a fool," Oxsar replied.
"The lowborn have been right all along, father. We are the fools, and our confidence has made us so. Altar Cave, in the parklands, is a path to the realm of Hyne. I've long suspected it. The gods have granted me passage, father. I only needed to know the words, and now I have them. I... I know of a way to bring rain from that place, the means of which are somewhat convoluted, however. I've known about this since I climbed Ryli Tower. Since I was ten. The cottage-"”
"Stop it!" his father commanded. He put his fingers to the crease of his brow and frowned as if in pain.
Byron had seen it countless times, when he'd given wrong answers at study-drills or disappointed him in some other way. He hated it. When Oxsar said nothing, Byron spoke again, tentatively, "You must listen, father. I have studied-"
"I must do nothing, and I am done with your foolishness."
"This has everything to do with physics, father! Everything! The shape of the cave opening, for instance, aligns almost perfectly-"
"Almost! Yes yes. Almost, and the moon almost looks like a stone skipped across a great black pond, or whatever rubbish the animals think. No doubt the next time I see you, you'll be in Tabby Square or some other hellish place, coinless and naked, mad with the words of your gods. I've nothing left to say to you. Not until you are done playing warlock. You, a grown man."
Byron bared his teeth at his father. His eyes were daggers. "Praise be to Hyne!" he spat. "Praise be to Hyne and woe to the unbelievers! When I am worshiped, and they will worship me after they see my work, I will have them spare you, father. You see, Hyne is a compassionate god, and-"
"Sonya!" Vannis called to the gardener, who had occupied herself further and further away. "Fetch Lynt," he told her.
"I'm leaving," Byron said. "After I gather a few things. No need to summon your thugs. If I don't return from Magaia, know that I died to save the city."
His father didn't look at him, but barked humorless laughter, turned and walked across the marble stepping stones on the lawn in the deepening twilight of late summer, his gait maddeningly casual to Byron. "What drama," he said, not looking back. "How is it that one can return, or not return, from a place one cannot go? That does not exist? I imagine there will be things worse than mosquitoes there. Dragons or trolls, perhaps. Get what you need and be gone. I can’t stop you from pissing your fortune away, but remember, that’s all there is.”
I turn my back on you, Byron thought. Not the other way. He stomped off toward his old room, the tower on the other side of the courtyard.
***
When he left Castle Levant less than an hour later, the courtyard was empty, and no one but the guardsman Lynt saw the sight of him. Byron didn’t acknowledge him as he left with a gleaming light chain shirt affixed over his dirty robe. A clean hood and cloak of deep, forest green was pulled around his face, draped over his sloping shoulders.
He held in his hand a dagger of steel. Its handle was intertwined with ribbons of gold, and its pommel was a large sparkling ruby. He tucked it into its sheath on a new belt on his right side, where there also hung a heavy pouch of gold coins. Strapped to his back was a sturdy but worn traveling pack, in it a sack of dried fruits and meats, a waterskin, and most importantly the Book of Petrastyra, and his notes. On the pack was also tied a small gas lantern of brass, jade and gold, one of few in existence, and worth more than what many citizens of Yartha would make in a lifetime.
With a grim determination, he left the castle behind him and didn’t look back. He began a fast march through the highborn districts- one that would not stop until he had crossed to the other side of Harpy Bridge and arrived in East Yartha some two hours later. By then it was full dark.