The green spellbook from the vault was entitled on the back side of its cover Choice Remedies for Surviving the Ruination of Civilization and the Downfall of Mankind, by Kelestinaz of Zinkirohom. It described rituals for purifying water, seeing in darkness, putting attackers into a sleep-like trance so that the magician might flee to safety, and manipulating a victim into forgetting the recent past. Only the latter held much interest to Eris. These were not the spells of great power she had imagined finding in a vault of magic left for a governor, by Magisters, defended by countless traps, within the heart of a mountain.
Several of the pages were dim anyway, the magic in their runes expended. Either someone had used this spellbook already or its author never finished inscribing the magic within its pages. In any case she now found herself with copious free time to study from within her room in the human quarter of Kem-Karwene, and so that was what she did. Three new spells: Hydropneumonic Purification, a use for mana to render any water source potable; Embering Eyes of the Lynx, which amplified even the dimmest lightsource into that to rival the sun; and Lover’s Bane—to wield mana like a quill, that it might rewrite the memories in a person’s mind.
The first two were trivial enough to master. Within three weeks she could hardly imagine a life without having either spell at her beck and call. She turned wine into water—admittedly a use for magic of dubious value—and explored the ruins without the Dwarven Halls late at night with no need for torch or lantern, through pitch darkness and pouring rain, and all this she did with nothing but a snapping of her fingers.
The Lover’s Bane would be trickier. She learned its technique, but found no opportunity to use it. The consequences of a miscast might be significant. Once the basics of a spell were learned, its principles absorbed, a magician could do much to enhance its power. It was something like tightening a knot on a pair of sandals to make them fit better, or loosening them again as easily. But pull on the wrong lace and everything fell apart. That was the difference between true spells like those in books and destructive magic that Eris prided herself on using so well—a true spell was a knot, while a fireball was a strap. Two expressions of the same idea, yet so different in effect.
When playing with water, or holding doors shut, the consequences for failure with a spell were low. Her worst miscast of Hydropneumonic Purification came on her second use, while distilling a vial of Dwarvish nog back into water. She sat in her room, focusing, threading mana through the liquid with her mind. Yet instead of clearing away from honey-brown to pure transparency, the nog within the vial bubbled. She had been too hasty with her magic. The bubbling grew worse by the second. Presently the glass shattered; boiling alcohol spilled across the stone desk, onto the ground, covering her sandals and scorching them, her skin spared by a tenth of an inch.
The spilled nog sizzled on her desk for another hour before finally evaporating. No further harm took place.
Such light consequences were not the case for enhancing her eyesight or changing her appearance, but at least neither was designed to hold. When it came to the Lover's Bane, to permanently remove a memory…were she not careful, she might create an amnesiac. Or remove the wrong memory, leaving the one she needed excised in place and instead taking away a man’s capacity to talk, or ride horses, or walk upright.
Just like Hold Portal, her time to experiment with Lover’s Bane would come. But it was not yet here, during their sojourn in Kem-Karwene.
As for Kem-Karwene itself, it was a surprisingly agoraphobic home for the Dwarves. It was an underground city built of stone, carved from tunnels in the mountain, yet the oldest of these were not in dwarf scale. Indeed the human quarter where Eris now found herself was, in fact, human, as were the ancient Regal and Forge districts. Cramped, perhaps, but nothing like the miniature village of Kaimas. It seemed the Dwarves built everything at the same scale as man.
That, or Kem-Karwene’s oldest quarters were not built by dwarves at all.
Growing up Eris learned of fantastical stories of the Mountain People’s home. Lairs within caverns. Mountains of jewels. Hollowed out mountains, not unlike the core for the Archon’s Vault. But Kem-Karwene was not so. In truth, it was quite humble. It spoke of a people who enjoyed the company of stone more than that of the sky. The shops were small and set off of narrow tunnels, most lined with steps. Arched rooves hung overhead. Rather than building tall, or for conspicuous consumption, or grandiose appeal, the Dwarves dug deeper, constructing more rooms, always, somehow, keenly aware to never break through the stone into a neighbor’s business.
There was no mistaking their craftsmanship, however. Of all the inheritors of the Old Kingdom, only the people of Kem-Karwene had maintained the secret knowledge of how to operate the great Manaforges. Deep within the mountain they use their Manaforges to turn magic itself into objects of magnificent craftsmanship. So long as the Forgemasters knew the right commands, they could literally weave aether into any artifact of their imagining. They could conjure gold into existence. Print fantastical jewelry. Forge mighty weapons, mundane or magical, and make suits of armor all but impenetrable to mortal weaponry.
At least so the Magisters of old claimed. Eris believed the stories to a certain extent, though she wondered why more of such artifacts did not exist if they were so easy to conjure from nothing but mana. Whatever the case, the Manaforges were what truly enabled the Old Kingdom to reach its magnificent heights. It was a testament to the Dwarves’ humility that they had such technology and used it only for, as far as she could tell, lights.
Manalights. Many of them, new, for they bore the seal of the Prince of Kem-Karwene. No torches anywhere in the entire underground city; manalights illuminated all. Convenient, for when she entered into her room to read and study, there was no need to worry about an open flame. Touch the manalight and it would be bright enough to see until the light was touched again.
So it was by those blue lights that she studied the Archon’s Orb, night after night, trying in vain to decipher its true purpose.
She turned it in her palm. Eyes gliding across the gilt band about its equator. The golden scene was magnificent, but miniscule. Each galloping horse carved small enough to fit in a fingernail trimming, yet with the detail of a colossus. Beyond that there was nothing to it. Just a cold stone ball. Light for its size, perhaps. Could it truly be nothing more than a decorative symbol of rank? Was all the power described in the tome nothing but metaphor?
She devoted hours to contemplating just that. Pure focus. Reviewing notes in free time, and when away from her things, lost in deep thought. She knew she was missing something.
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“So what’s our next take, witch?” Kauom said. They ate dinner at a table carved from stone, on seats made of stone, in a room with four stone walls, in an establishment with ground so hard Eris dared not go without sandals for fear of breaking her feet. But that was like most places in Kem-Karwene.
Eris held a hand to her forehead. “‘Our’ next take?”
“We made a good steal from that vault of yours, but we’ll need more before long.”
“If your coffers have run dry, you may return to stonemasonry,” she said. “Mine are yet full.”
“Adventurers should always be on the look-out for more work,” he said.
“I hope you do not intend to trail me about my business like a vulture from here-on?”
“Why? Don’t you want to share what you find? You still haven’t sold that orb of yours!”
She sighed. “Nor will I.”
Here he became overexcited. “We’re owed a third of that orb’s sale price, me and Robur both!”
“I think it may be more valuable in our hands—” Robur, who was apparently present at the table, began to say, but Kauom wouldn’t hear it.
“Can you trade an orb for mead? Bolts of ammo? Staying at an inn? No? Then it’s not as valuable as hard gold.”
“You have strong opinions on the topic,” Eris said, “for a dwarf who did nothing but sputter and complain for all our last expedition.”
Kauom’s eyes narrowed. “You know that’s not true. I carried my share out of that place, like anyone else." This was apparently a conclusive statement. "I’ll prove my worth when we get into a stand-up fight, witch. No more of this magic-pagic nonsense. No more statues!”
“If that is what you desire, then you would do well to pursue your own leads and not rely on me for mine.”
He folded his arms. “Maybe I will.”
Silence followed. Eris returned to contemplation, visualizing the Orb…
“Eris,” Robur said. She glared up at him. “I’ve been meaning to ask—about what happened in the vault…”
“And?” she said, exasperated.
“Well, I—I’ve been thinking back on lessons, from when I was a student. At Pyrthos. And I remembered my mentor instructing me on what demonic possession looked like under the effects of Supernal Vision…”
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“And you believe that my Essence is tainted with that of an aethereal demon’s. Is that so?”
He averted his eyes, but then he never made eye contact, and nodded.
Eris growled. She harnessed her latent maliciousness in her heart and prepared a retort, but then, surprisingly, found no will to wield it. The Manawyrm was a serious issue. It would return. She needed to deal with it, and she would be a fool to turn down Robur’s assistance.
“‘Tis not a demon,” she said quietly. “Not precisely, though the word might be used for it. The creature is known as a manawyrm. It is terrestrially bound and dwells within caves of Manastone. When we met last year it…cursed me, with a shard of itself. It has laid mostly dormant since, but I suspect the ley line we discovered beneath the vault energized it enough to attempt whatever it planned. Your intervention disrupted its plans.”
“Are you saying you’re possessed by a dragon?” Kauom butted in.
“Would it shush you if I answered yes?”
This question clearly confused him, and Robur answered in the silence that ensued. “I did little but drain it of energy; it will return.”
“I believe that a safe assumption, though it will likely be months before it attempts such a thing again.”
A moment of thought. “We know it can be subdued with simple mana tapping,” here Robur almost sounded excited, “but if I can’t reach you, or something went wrong, the consequences—we should look into a more permanent solution.”
“An exorcism?” Kauom said.
“I’ll have to do research. I can earn access to the libraries of—”
“Why should we risk traveling with a girl who’s possessed? What if this dragon takes over, tries to turn on us? What if he tricks us and tries to backstab us, get us killed? Would we even know?”
Eris rolled her eyes. “You would know, after a point.”
“Seems risky.”
“You are free to find new company.” She stood. “I am returning to my studies. If I do find a ‘lead,’ you shall be the first to know”
But the weeks of study melted away as no progress was made. Soon the Orb was left on the bed of her room, disregarded in frustration, as the remainder of Eris’ funds were squandered. It was rare for her to spend so much time in a place so civilized, while so simultaneously good in health. She liked to explore. She watched the people, or dwarves, do business in the markets. They spoke a strange language unlike Kathar, very distant, with almost no shared vocabulary. She observed the guards of the city in their scalemail armor and delved into dark alleys and went for hikes around the exterior of the underground portcullises. She sold all the jewelry they had plundered, but with the proceeds bought a pair of silver earrings, which she wore regularly, flaunting, hoping to attract attention whenever she went out on the town.
She rarely did. Dwarves, it seemed, were not interested in human women.
She found Robur waiting for her outside her door one night. He clutched a book in his arms.
“I think I have a solution. A temporary solution, I mean to say, but a solution that might prevent further risk to you—if we’re right about the cause of this curse, this manawyrm’s Essence clouding yours—”
“Pronounce,” she said.
“Oh. Well.” He tried showing her the book, which was rather difficult, and so he gave up. “There are many disease that can afflict a magician, and elves, too. Diseases for the Essence. I found this whole tome of them, described since the oldest days—see.” She couldn’t see. “If a cure isn’t available, one solution might be to concoct a potion that would function as a manashunt.”
She stared at him, waiting for him to step out of the way or get to the point.
“The ingredients for such a potion are described clearly here,” he flipped through the pages, “we’d only need time to gather them—it would, oh, of course, a manashunt—well, it would affect your Essence, stop it from interfacing with mana. Freeze it in place. But any maladies attached to it would be frozen as well. I’ve read about it before, it’s a very effective diagnostic tool—”
“You wish me to drink a potion that would ‘freeze my Essence?”
“Well—yes.”
“Then I could not cast spells.”
“No.”
“The mana in the blood would dry up.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
She could hardly believe what she was hearing. She put the back of her hand on his shoulder and pushed him to the side. “Move.”
“It would only be temporary, until we devised a better solution—”
She squeezed past him, opening and unlocking the door. “You may try feeding such a potion to my corpse. Until then, be off.”
The door slammed in Robur’s face. For all she knew he stood there with his mouth open, waiting for her to come back out, for the next twelve hours. She didn’t well care.
But she did consider his suggestion. Voluntarily sever her connection to the aether? Rob herself of magic, to stop the spread of the manawyrm?
Death seemed a preferable fate to that. She would never give up her power. No, she decided, this time with conviction. There would be no such procedure. However they were to deal with the wyrm, it would not be like that.
It was those thoughts that clouded her mind for the rest of the night. So it was those thoughts, too, that led to her decision to start thinking things over clearly. She emptied her backpack and sorted all her possessions. Her notes organized. Every item itemized. The Orb, clearly, overlooking everything. What might she possibly be missing…
It was only then, that night, she noticed something obvious. The black onyx of the keystone to the Lightning Wall, which she had taken back from Robur after her failed betrayal, was the same as the black onyx of the Orb of Power. The parallel hadn’t occurred to her until now, for the keystone emanated mana—it was enchanted—while the Orb was not. Yet now for the first time she picked one up in one hand and one in the other, and she brought them close together.
They were magnets for each other. She had to fight to keep them apart. It wasn’t the band along the edges, nor the bottom, but the top that attracted the keystone, so she let it pull itself there.
The keystone inverted itself, so its narrowest edge balanced by magnetic force on the Orb’s top like a dancer in a handstand. When Eris looked closer she noticed then what she had perhaps seen before but not thought on: in the Orb’s top there was a tiny, miniscule indentation, a slot, into which the keystone’s point now slid like a key. It was so microscopic that if she had noticed it earlier she thought it a mere blemish, but its positionality, right at the orb’s top, clearly reflected intention on the part of the craftsmen.
She twisted the keystone. It turned easily. The slot turned with it. Ninety degrees. Then, she withdrew the stone and placed it to the side.
And…
Nothing.
She didn’t know what to expect, but it wasn’t what didn’t happen—which was to say, anything; or, in other words, she stared at the Orb for another hour, in expectation of some grand magical chain reaction, but none came.
This Orb was proving far more trouble than it was worth. She grew frustrated. Perhaps Kauom was right. The idiotic toy, this piece of decoration for a princeling, was useless. No more an artifact of power than a gilt scepter. She grabbed it with her hand from the top, ready to discard it entirely, when she felt something wobble in her grasp.
She stopped.
Sat down.
She stabilized the globe and grasped the golden band with her right thumb and index finger. Then she rotated.
The band, which was solid before, turned easily, like a screw being undone. Coming looser with each rotation. After five rotations it stopped, then locked in place. She heard a click. A ticking barrage followed.
The Orb expanded upward. The top and bottom halves of the globe, seemingly solid, separated at the gold of the band, revealing thin metal legs. They extended at both hemispheres simultaneously; the band remained at the center, even as the top reached inches farther toward the ceiling. When the extension stopped the Orb had transformed into two halves of a globe, suspended sixteen inches apart from each other, held in place by beams, bisected by a golden strait.
Silence reigned for a brief moment. Enough time for Eris to scramble for paper, but she had no quill or ink. By the time she realized—something else began.
A panoply of metal concealed within the halves of the globes folded outward. They clicked into place like pieces in a puzzle, moved by some unseen mechanical force, slowly extending toward the band on either side. Before long they made contact. Now the Orb—which was no longer an Orb at all—appeared as a kind of cylinder, capped with solid stones at the ends.
Once she was certain the mechanism was finished, she closed to investigate.
The cylinder was hollow. Now very light for its size. And the panels that covered it…
A map. The most intricate, complicated map Eris had ever seen. As a cylinder it connected back onto itself like a globe, but clearly it depicted Nanos—Thermopos to the south, by the bottom half of the Orb, obvious for its painted clouds. Yet Naons was not spherical. The manner of depiction seemed to suggest that Nanos was all the world, that it was a planet unto itself, that walking through the pass to Rytus would see one step through the Great Divide at Dakia.
Arcane symbols stood in place of trees and mountains. There was no clear legend. But it was a map, it could be nothing else.
She gritted her teeth in frustration. Always the Magisters teased her. They played with her. Dragging her along. Was there no end to their enigma? Deciphering this thing into a readable guide would take weeks, and who was to say it led anywhere at all?
Yet there was one thing she noticed after study. Through a cloud of confusing symbols and poorly marked terrain, she saw what must have represented hills; and within the hills, the symbol of a beautiful circlet.
----------------------------------------
Of course she worked out the details in time, after the fact. She spent two more weeks studying the map, making notes, deciphering the legend, referencing her notes on the tome, and thinking more on the reason for the Orb being as it was. Once she was content with her state of understanding she turned the gilt band once again, a single rotation, and the process of the Orb’s unfolding repeated in reverse: it folded back into itself, shrunk, and contracted down into a single globe.
Everything made sense to her now. The Orb of Power was a symbol of rank—its magical abilities were, indeed, metaphorical. The point of confusion came after the fact that it was made in a Manaforge, which could be used to make anything. She hadn’t understood why such a device would be used to manufacture a mundane artifact, even were it nothing but a representation of status.
But the Archon’s Orb was not ‘nothing.’ It was a mechanical device made. It did not operate on principles of the aether, but it had a purpose. What it led to…Eris couldn’t say, but as weeks passed and her funds dried up, she realized she had no choice but to soon depart toward its ultimate destination. This time, with any luck, she would find a magical item, some artifact of great power. Whether it was a Magister's or the Archon's she no longer cared; she just wanted the power, to have it, to carry it with her and feel it thrum against her, to study it and wield it. It was long past time for such a thing to be hers.
She explained the situation to Kauom and Robur.
“So it’s a map,” Kauom said.
“Yes, that is what I just said.”
“And how do you know there’s money at the end of this—thing? Maybe it’s been looted? Maybe it doesn’t exist at all?”
“I do not.”
“Seems like a bad deal to me.”
“It may well be,” Eris said.
“We should go somewhere else. I don’t like the smell of this place. Secret orbs? Ancient magic? Confusing magisters?”
“You are free not to come.”
“That’s just what you want, isn’t it!?”
“Now you mention it…”
“You won’t ditch me that easily, witch! I won’t fall for your tricks. I’m coming! All right, I’m coming. Let’s go.”
This was giving her a migraine. “Very well. And you, Robur?”
“It sounds like a fascinating expedition, I’m sure—” he started, but she cut him off.
“Yes, yes, very well. Now let us finish stocking our things; we may depart well-provisioned tomorrow.”
“And you’re certain you know where you’re going?” Robur said.
“Of course I am certain,” she snapped. “Worry about yourself, not me. I have with me a map. I will not be lost."