Bakir’s eyes glittered with amusement as he surveyed the meeting room I’d constructed, but he kept any comments about my security to himself. I guided him to his seat and claimed the one opposite of him, then settled back and let him start the conversation.
“I confess to some curiosity,” he said. “Not to pry into the intimate details of your life, but you may be the only person to ever navigate the cycle of reincarnation and come out with your memories intact. Having experienced the process, would you say this is the true key to immortality?”
I snorted out a laugh. “No. Not at all. Maybe it could be with some more refinement, but… no, just the fact that it took thousands of years for me to come back means something went wrong. Without being able to fix that, it’s a flawed process at best.”
“You’ll continue to research it?” he asked.
“Someday, when I have the time. I’ve got a lot of other problems competing for my attention right now.”
“Yes, that.” Bakir frowned. “The lich lord is not someone we were expecting to show back up. Then again, I suppose the same is true for you. You’re specters from the past, all but forgotten by civilization.”
“I’m perfectly fine with that,” I told him dryly.
“You’ve certainly gone out of your way to draw attention to yourself, though.”
“I’m just trying to fix this broken world. If Ammun hadn’t interfered, I’d be halfway there already.”
That wasn’t strictly true, but I’d certainly be farther along if I wasn’t constantly getting sidetracked dealing with him. In his defense, fixing the world involved breaking his demesne. Prior to his little jaunt to a moon, that would have been a death sentence for him. Without an abundant source of mana to power his artificial body, he would be nothing but a tortured soul trapped in a rock. Eventually, even that magic would fade and break.
Bakir leaned forward. “It’s true, then? The world really used to have so much mana that it just filled the air?”
“Not everywhere, and with varying degrees of density, but yes.” I frowned at the other archmage. How did he not know this? Now that I looked at him, really looked, I found myself a little bit suspicious.
If this was an established group, and he was an archmage of the Fifth Order, whatever that meant, why were his robes plain, unenchanted material? Why couldn’t I sense his connection to a phantom space? Where was his staff or wand? Where was the magic?
“Tell me about this Global Order of the Arcane,” I said. “I don’t believe any such organization existed back in my time.”
“That is correct,” he told me. “We were founded about three hundred years before the world broke, though none of our founding members remain among the living. At least, not unless any of them managed to follow the path you set forth and simply chose not to reveal themselves.”
Ah, all the old-timers had died off. I was willing to bet they’d lost a lot of knowledge thanks to Ammun’s bungling. That called into question exactly whether their members were even archmages at all. There was no telling what that title had come to mean over the last millennium. I certainly hadn’t met anyone recently worthy of being called an archmage besides my former apprentice.
“Is there anyone left who predates the moon falling out of the sky?” I asked.
“I’m sure none of the leaders of the Order would appreciate me revealing such information about them,” Bakir replied smoothly. “Suffice it to say that we truly are a global organization and that no one has a stronger magical culture than us.”
“If that’s the case, why haven’t you fixed everything?”
“Some things can’t be fixed,” he said with a frown. “Why, are you saying that you can?”
“Of course I can. Either your leaders aren’t nearly as strong as they want to pretend to be, or they’ve deliberately left the world in the state it is.”
Bakir sunk back into his chair and studied me. With a helpless sigh, he shook his head. “I can’t tell if you’re delusional or if you truly can reverse even something as catastrophic as a destroyed moon raining down on the world and breaking mana.”
“Technically, that’s not what caused the breakage,” I said. “It’s more like the outcome.”
“That’s…” Bakir trailed off. After a moment’s consideration, he said, “Could you describe to me exactly what you believe the cause of the mana density shift a thousand years ago was?”
“Your global archmage fraternity doesn’t know?” I asked. “What the hell have you all been doing all these years?”
“Please? Just… please.”
This hadn’t been a long conversation, but already Bakir had transitioned from a smooth, confident member of the aristocracy into someone who looked slightly harangued, like a man who’d been called on to defend his beliefs, only to find himself losing ground with every verbal exchange.
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Maybe this group wasn’t going to be a threat, but it was also starting to look like they wouldn’t be much help, either. Then again, that wasn’t really fair. Querit wasn’t an archmage either, but his contributions to my work were immeasurable. A whole cabal of mages that were at least at the master level could be useful, once I disabused them of any notion that they were real archmages.
It would probably be better to hold off on that until I actually met them, though. Bakir wasn’t necessarily the gold standard to represent his entire organization. There was no point in making plans based on a bunch of unfounded assumptions. For now, it would be better to assume that the Global Order of the Arcane was full of potentially hostile archmages who could make my life far more difficult than it already was.
“Keeping in mind that I wasn’t there to witness the actual event, this is what I’ve pieced together from historical research and my own personal examination of Ammun’s tower. Roughly a thousand years ago…”
I outlined what I’d learned, about the faction that had figured out super-long-distance teleportation and taken over an entire moon, about Ammun’s demesne project, an enormous tower that sunk its roots all the way to the world core. I described how the tower had pierced the mysteel shell surrounding the core, and that when Ammun had used it to send a blast of pure mana through the empty space between Manoch and the orange moon known as Amodir, he’d killed off almost all of the living stone that made up the world core.
“And with the mysteel shell ruptured, it’s never been able to heal itself,” I finished. “We need to patch the shell and inject a massive quantity of mana into the world core to act as a catalyst so that things can start moving again.”
“And Amodir’s destruction, followed by the subsequent devastation of fully half the planet as it rained down from the sky, had nothing to do with Manoch’s mana density vanishing? That’s what you believe?” Bakir asked.
“That’s what happened. If Ammun had missed and fired that blast off into the endless void, it wouldn’t have changed the planet’s fate. That he didn’t miss just meant he managed to destroy the people who could very well have been our one chance to reverse the damage before it cascaded out of control.”
I gave Bakir some time while he processed that. It was hard to say whether he actually believed me, but either way, I’d certainly fed him an alternate theory than whatever it was he’d been told before. I supposed I could see how the generations of mages born after the moon fell from the sky could attribute that level of destruction to a global catastrophe that had fundamentally altered the very fabric of magic, but they were grossly underestimating the planet’s durability.
No, it had taken a deliberate act of worming his way all the way down to the core itself, one foot of stone at a time cut through over decades, for Ammun to put himself in that position. I didn’t think what he’d done was actually common knowledge at the time, though at least some people had figured it out and recorded it in historical records.
The real question was whether it was merely Bakir who was ignorant of the truth, or if it was his whole cabal. Even that was largely irrelevant next to the much bigger issue of how powerful they were and what they wanted. Now that I thought about it, I’d spent far too much of this meeting humoring Bakir and not nearly enough obtaining information.
“What else can you tell me about the Global Order of the Arcane?” I asked.
Bakir shook himself out of his thoughts and appeared to collect himself. “The Order? Yes. As the name implies, we’re situated all over Manoch. Our primary tenet is the accumulation and preservation of magical knowledge. I’m sure you’ve seen for yourself just how much has been lost. Some places are worse than others, of course. This whole continent was shattered, and I’m afraid the Order never had much success in gaining a foothold within the Sanctum of Light.”
“And since they were the only place that had any real magical tradition here, you basically gave up on this part of the planet to focus your efforts elsewhere,” I finished for him.
“Precisely so,” he said. “Archmages don’t grow on trees, and we need to focus our efforts where they can bring about the most benefits. It wasn’t until you and Ammun stirred things up around here that we noticed anything amiss. To be frank with you, we’re still not entirely sure what happened.”
He paused, apparently lost in thought, and let out a rich laugh. “The look on their faces when your name came up though… That’s a memory I’ll cherish. I wonder if you realize how much you’ve strode right out of legend.”
“I am aware,” I said. “Thousands of years have passed. The world basically ended. And there are still people eking out a living on its surface who remember my name. Some of them probably curse it. It wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable to blame me for the state of affairs once you consider that Ammun was only able to do what he did by pilfering my libraries and modifying my research.”
“That hardly seems fair to me,” Bakir said. “I wouldn’t concern myself overly much with those who hold that opinion, especially when it seems you’re hard at work trying to remedy the issue. But I’ve gotten distracted. You wanted to know more about the Order itself.
“As I said, we lack the manpower to be everywhere at once, but we do invest a great deal of effort into preserving the art of magic in any way we can. Our vaults are full of books on the subject. We take apprentices and teach them. We’re a well-known and respected organization based on the other side of Manoch, over in Jeshaem.”
Manoch had four continents. What we were on currently was the shattered remains of Olaphun. Jeshaem was the farthest away, and also the largest of the four. It made sense that they were in the best shape, considering Amodir had crashed down on this side of the world. They’d only had to deal with the loss of mana and cleaning up the dust and dirt kicked up into the air from the moon fall. The people here had also faced a devastating death toll and the destruction of their cities, their farms, and their roads. The continent itself had ruptured.
“And what does your cabal want with me, other than to hear stories about what I’ve been up to here?” I asked softly.
“Don’t misunderstand,” Bakir said. “I wasn’t sent here to demand your services or that you join the Order. I’m sure it would make a few people very happy to have an archmage of your caliber working with us, but we just need to know what’s going on with Ammun. He’s a global threat and we take his movements very seriously.”
“So seriously that he’s been active for going on three years now and you’re just now showing up?”
“Yes, well… as I said…”
“Understaffed, right.” I waved away his excuse. “Very well. Let me catch you up on how I trapped the old lich on a moon.”
He blinked. “I’m sorry, you did what?”
I grinned and began my story.