Riloth and Assuine created with love, while Erebog and Bilieth were born of deceit.
Illunia the last was born out of Faust’s defeat.
Bild came far later to help in the fight and sealed the foul brother as his siblings took flight.
—
Amara, Zale, and Kole were eating a light lunch Zale put together with what they had in the kitchen—which was very little—as they discussed less historically significant events.
“I need to put more thought into my own self-defense,” Amara volunteered out of the blue, interrupting a conversation about the other two’s alchemy homework.
“What do you mean?” Kole asked.
“'I’m not an adventurer, but when has that adventure cared whose path it comes across?’ It’s a quote from Levar’s biography. He wasn’t an adventurer, but he prepared for the eventualities all his life, and when he got involved in the Last Dragon War, he was pivotal. I think I need to shift the focus of some of my projects, but we’ll see what Professor Donglefore thinks.”
“I suspect he will be very in favor of such a decision,” Professor Shalia—Trishalia, the famous adventurer—said from the entrance to the dining hall. “I see my little Azalea has spilled the family secret.”
“Only the small ones,” Zale joked—or at least, Kole thought she was joking.
“It’s fine. I’m honestly surprised Tal made it two weeks without blowing it himself, but don’t tell Doug or Runt. One doesn’t have an ounce of guile in his antlered body, and the other has too much.”
Kole stood awkwardly when Zale’s mother had entered, suddenly extremely self-conscious. He bowed, “It’s an honor—“
“Nope,” she said, and a gust of wind blew Kole’s chair in, forcing him to sit. “None of that. We don’t have time. I need you to go over everything again, in greater detail. This is the second time something like this has happened around you, and I want to know if you’re somehow causing this.”
She held a stack of fine white paper in her hands and passed it out to Kole and Amara.
“Write down everything you remember.”
Embarrassment and relief filled Kole—and a little pain, the push into the chair hadn’t been gentle. He’d been nervous at meeting Zale’s mother again and was largely happy with how that had gone. He didn’t do well with formality and was pretty sure that Trishalia Mason had some sort of noble title.
Does that make Zale a princess? He thought as he began to write down his account.
To his surprise, the words flowed from his mind out onto the page. He didn’t need to struggle to recall anything. It all came back in perfect clarity. Better than perfect he found. When writing about the cloud of snow Rakin had battled within, he could now recall some of the details of the fight he’d been unable—or too distracted—to notice at the time. The girl—for he now saw that his foes had been around his age—that had frozen Rakin had summoned ice projectiles to fight. Of the two that Rakin had slain, one had been the source of the blizzard, and the other had been in the process of covering his body with an icy exoskeleton when Rakin had broken his face in.
“What emperor could they be speaking of?” Professor Shalia said to Tigereye as they read over both accounts.
Tigereye had returned during the writing and waited patiently for them to finish.
“I do not know. There are no empires outside the seas. These did not sound like sea folk. But, these creatures could be the source of the missing students.”
“Missing students!?” Amara jumped to her feet.
Neither Kole nor Amara had hidden that they’d been searching for her sister in the recounting of events, but until then no one had made mention of it.
“The fact that we had interlopers in the school and that your tracker led you to them is pretty damning evidence the missing students are related to this,” Professor Shalia said. “I know you sent letters last year asking after your sister. We did look, but it is common for students to simply leave. It wasn’t until this week we started to see a pattern in some of the missing students.”
“What pattern!?” Amara asked hungrily.
“They were all primals.”
“How many?”
“Including your sister? Three. Your sister was the first. Then one of Tigereye’s primal students from his home. This year we lost a Spatial primal from the Hollow Peak. Students leaving is common, but to lose three primals in a year can’t be a coincidence.
The pair of college heads asked a few more questions before dismissing them.
“You two can go,” Zale’s mother said. “Don’t spread what you learned today around. We'll be acting on this, I promise, but we don’t need to start a panic.”
She led them to a door that Kole was certain had led to the kitchen, but when it opened, was a random passage in the library.
“One last thing,” she said before closing the door. “I know you are unlikely to listen, but please leave searching for your sister to us. You got lucky that the creatures you faced were within your means to defeat, but the realms are a large and scary place.”
***
Kole’s friends abandoned him shortly after they were dismissed. Zale ran out before her mother closed the door to go check on Rakin, and Amara went to get started on a new blasting rod.
“With the first destroyed, I’ll probably not be able to get the self-repairing one done this week,” she’d said before leaving.
Which, was fine by Kole. He hadn’t been able to copy the intent for the rune yet.
Alone, Kole wandered the library until he gathered his bearings and found his way back to the door to his room. Inside he found Theral at work at the desk.
“Welcome back,” Theral greeted him.
“Same to you,” Kole returned.
Theral had been gone when he’d woken up, though Kole hadn’t heard him leave.
“How’s your reading coming along?” Theral asked.
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
“It’s only been a day,” Kole answered. “But I can see it will help, and a… respected mage I consulted with seemed to think your suggestions to be good.”
Flood, Professor Shalia said don’t talk about Theral, she also said don’t talk about Tal. So, she’d probably be really mad if I talked about one to the other.
“Oh yeah,” Theral said with a forced laugh. “I only just suggested those books didn't I? Do you need the desk?”
“No, I’m going to read, and then work on mapping Thunderwave for a bit,” Kole said, walking over to his poorly repaired bag which contained the copies of Unknowable Geographies and Bridges to Power.
Kole paused before picking up the books and looked up to the newly manifested second door in the room next to the desk. He walked over, and opened it, revealing a stone wall.
“That happened an hour or so back,” Theral said without looking up from his book.
Professor Shalia must have closed it with the other doors. But… an hour ago I was in Zale’s home, and that didn’t open to here. So where had it opened?
He considered asking Theral, but he wasn’t supposed to tell Theral about meeting Professor Shalia, and mentioning having been in her home would invite questions.
Kole dove into his study, drowning out the chaos of the day with mind-bending descriptions of the Arcane Realm. He read for a few hours, and then moved to more practical applications of his education.
Laying in his bed, Kole entered his mental vault. Everyone’s vault took on its own form when created, though most were some manner of house. Kole’s was a library—which he supposed currently was his home. The library of his mental vault was a square room with books endlessly expanding up into the sky above. Most of the books were simply facades, but some were not.
As with anyone’s mental vault, Kole could access his memories within, and if he chose to, he could enhance them to preserve them. Kole had a few choice memories of his parents, preserved perfectly, and regularly maintained, though he never dared to view them. He didn’t think he could handle that.
His spellform templates too stood preserved in books, but he ignored all that as he mentally walked to his bridge, a free-standing doorway in the center of the chamber.
He threw the bridge open with just a thought and looked out in the the Arcane Realm. Like the vault, everyone’s mind overlaid some sort of familiar landscape to the undefinable realm of power used by the gods to craft the world. Kole had heard of forests, cities, floating orbs in an empty void, and more, but his was simple. It was another library.
At first, he’d been a little disappointed to discover his contained another library, but that had quickly faded, replaced with the dread of the realization that he was in fact a primal. In anyone’s representation of the Arcane Realm, the Fonts stood out as imposing beacons of power. For a primal, their Font would be visible in even a bridge-less vault as some sort of defining feature of the space.
Kole’s vault had been free of any such feature when he’d created it, granting him the false sense of relief that he wasn’t an Illusion primal. But, upon creating a bridge, he found his door opened right alongside the towering monolith of a bookshelf that was the Font of Illusion. He glanced briefly at this Font now before looking out into the expanse of the library before him.
Bookshelves spread out as far as the eye could see as if he were walking on the inside surface of a massive sphere. Describing it like that vastly simplified the true mind-contorting geometry of the place, but Kole often left the description at that, lest he get a headache or lose the attention of his audience. If he had to describe it further, he’d explain how the sphere seemed to be more than three-dimensional, but even with his recent readings he didn’t have the words to describe the place.
The vast majority of the bookshelves were not actually Fonts, but other oddities the gods created in their pursuit of persisting beauty and function. Some over-ambitious—or underly cautious—wizards had tried to draw power from these eldritch wells of power, but at best they had died and at worse went insane and took others with them.
Standing in his doorway, Kole conjured a book to appear in his hand from his vault’s shelves. He accessed the content of it and began to copy the spell template for Thunderwave from it, empowering it with his Will as he traced it in his mind. Once the spell was formed—a matter of a breath in the outside world, but seemingly the act of hours with his skewed perspective of time in a place in which time did not really exist—he sent it out.
The magic left him, flying straight for the Font of Sound, where it immediately crashed into a nearby bookshelf and fell apart. Kole let out a mental sigh, and tried again, this time leaving his vault to draw on his vast notes of spellforms to find a way to navigate that first bend.
***
Three hours later, Kole had a spell that could dodge the first two obstacles in its path to the Font of Sound. Two out of how many, he didn’t know. Being ineffable and mind-bending, he couldn’t easily wander around looking for the Font of Sound to chart a course. That would be suicidal. He could follow the path of the spell he cast, as the Font of Sound component built into it honed in on its destination, but if he tried to follow that same path without the spell to guide him, he’d quickly become lost, slipping into some other dimension from his intended path.
Luckily for him, the spell, free of any sort of need to open his bridge to a new location, and only having a small fraction of a true path built in so far, took hardly any Will to cast, and he was able to work for hours before Will drain set in. Unfortunately, this task was the work of months, and he’d reached his limit.
“Done?” Theral asked from the desk.
“I think so,” Kole answered without opening his eyes. “I’m getting a headache, and I can’t find any components that work.”
Kole pulled out his spellbook, ready to record his findings and ink the spellform for what he’d built so far, but when he opened to the last page of his book, he found it already filled.
“Flood,” he cursed. “I’m out of spellform paper. I’ll need to get some more this week.”
While it would be nice to store the spell’s progress each day, it wasn’t necessary. Spells decayed over time in vaults, but they should last long enough for him to buy more paper in the next day or two, and he could always repair them if he didn’t get paper any time soon.
Kole moved on to his other school work, deciding he’d best get it all done this weekend so he could dive into his other spellwork with all his attention on Sunday.
Theral offered Kole the desk, seeing him done with his spellform pathing—a task often done in a comfy chair or bed. At least until the spell was almost complete and at risk of doing anything.
The first thing he had to do was write an essay on the differences in Riloth worship between the extinct pre-Flood humans of Basin and their surviving orc counterparts. It wasn’t until Kole had finished the entire essay without referencing one of the required readings that he realized something was amiss.
“What in the realms?” he asked aloud, flipping back through the five pages he’d written, complete with citations referencing specific page numbers.
“What’s happened?” Theral asked, sitting up from either his own wizardly work or a nap—Kole had noticed Theral tended to bundle up under the covers when exploring the Arcane Realm.
“I just wrote a whole essay without looking at any reference material,” Kole said.
“That doesn’t seem like the best way to write an essay,” Theral observed.
Kole handed it over and glanced over the references.
“You just recalled these from memory?” he asked.
Kole nodded.
Theral waved his hand in front of him as if casting a spell, and then looked at the paper more closely.
“This is magic paper,” he said, confidently.
“This is the notebook I found on this desk when I first found this room,” Kole explained, realizing he’d never actually asked if it was Theral’s. “Was it yours?”
“I didn’t put it here,” Theral said, flipping it over to review the spine and recognizing it for seemingly the first time. “It was here when I found the room myself but I didn’t need it. I have my own magic spellbook.”
“Magic spellbook?” Kole asked.
Theral nodded.
“I have a magic spellbook. This is a magic book.”—Theral lifted Kole’s journal up in emphasis—“If you write spells in it, you will have a magic spellbook too.”
Kole took the book back and examined the paper with a new eye. The paper was the same high-quality paper he’d seen all over the Dahn, all of it exhibiting magical potential.
“This is made from the magic paper used all over the academy!” Kole said. “What else can it do?”
“I think that’s for you to find out,” Theral said, with a grin that bordered on malicious.
Theral fell asleep shortly thereafter, suggesting that he hadn’t been working on wizardry in his blanket cocoon, and then at some point in the night vanished in a rush of power. Kole once more felt the connection to the Arcane Realm as his roommate disappeared.
Kole checked the time. It was late, but it wasn’t too late, and he had no plans for the morning. With the knowledge that his journal had magical paper inside of it, he got to work seeing what it could do, and he began by recording his most recent progress in Thunderwave. He copied first the spellform Theral had provided, and then filled in the new path components around it. Two hours later he was finished and a quick check showed the paper perfectly suitable for storing spells.
“I guess I don’t need to buy more paper,” he said to himself.
But, as he was packing up his scribing kit preparing for bed, he found the vial of magical—and very expensive-ink he’d just exhausted had been his last one.
“Flood.”