[An image of a starry sky filled with multicolored lights between the stars. The lights and stars form the shape of Kaltis.]
F is Fonts, the pillars of the reality, they embody the concepts from thinking to gravity. They started with creation and refined it from there, and they govern the world from the seas to your hair.
-Sally Rider’s ABCs of Magic
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The classroom that had once been dedicated to the furtherment of adventuring education had been filled with dozens of devices, both magical and runed, along with the staff to man them. Armed men and women stood at the ready just beyond the door, and when it opened, Kole was trapped in some sort of magic spell, unable to move.
“Kole?” a familiar voice said from the sea of faces all staring at him.
Kole tried to respond but found it difficult to even move his jaw to speak.
“Let them go!” the same voice commanded, and the wizard who’d trapped Kole and his friends released the spell. “Get that point medical attention!”
Kole collapsed at the spell’s sudden disappearance, and only once he was on the ground did he connect the voice with a name.
“Master Lonin?” he said weakly, voice lost in the chaos.
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A blur of activity followed, and it wasn’t long after that Kole and his friends found themselves. In the medical ward of the Glade. Teleportation had been used in their transfer, but Kole couldn’t exactly remember when it had happened, nor did he remember receiving all the wounds that the Assuine Blessed halfling healer was currently tending to.
Kole and his friends—and Hawk Talon—were all in the same room Rakin had been sent to after the run-in with the ice people, only the living dividers had been set up to create a large open room with leaves able to come down to give each bed privacy. A healer was seeing to each of them, with Doug and Hawk Talon each receiving extra scrutiny.
“I’m fine!” Rakin protested, pushing away the human woman who was trying to administer some potion to him.
“It will help you calm,” she assured him.
“I don’t need ta calm down!” he shouted, not exactly helping his case, but he didn’t seem to mind. In a calmer—but still angry—tone he continued. “It will be fine.”
The woman relented, and she left, the healers tending to Zale and Kole following her. Before the friends could speak, Grand Master Lonin, Professor Underbrook, Professor Donglefore and Tigereye entered the room with two other people he remembered from the adventurer mixer event.
The dryad seeing to Doug tried to bar their entry but relented quickly as she noticed that the Arch Druid of the Glade was among their number.
Please give us the room,” the Arch Druid, a slender elf woman said gently.
Kole stared at her in wonder. He’d seen a few elves around Edgewater, but they’d all seemed rather haughty, above the measly human city they found themselves in. This elf however fit the the image of elves Kole had built in his mind the the stories of his childhood.
She was only five feet tall, but he fair-skinned delicate features drew attention from the hulking behemoth that was Tigereye who stood beside her.
“The patient,” the dryad began, but the elf waved away the concern with a graceful flick of her wrist.
“Have no worries. I will see to him personally.”
The dryad sagged in relief, and she and the three remaining healers left the room.
True to her word, the Arch Druid moved to Doug, and placed her hand on his shoulder. After only a moment, Doug stirred and then opened his eyes as if waking from a sleep. Content with her work, she moved over to Hawk Talon. After examining him for a moment, she whispered to the room-dividing plant beside her and then plucked a berry-like fruit that grew at her request.
She placed the small fruit in Hawk Talon’s mouth and massaged his throat for him to swallow. The young man’s color darkened to a healthy tan from the sickly pale, but the changes didn’t stop there. His gaunt face filled in even as his emaciated muscles grew, growing to the normal musculature one would expect for a man of his size, and then beyond to the obscured bulk typical to his people.
He woke suddenly, eyes scanning the room in a panic, calming immediately on sight of Tigereye.
In a gentle voice, the Arch Druid spoke apologetically to the gathered professors.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“I can heal the body with Assuine’s gifts, but the mind is beyond even Assuine’s purview. That will take time and care.”
Tigereye approached, quickly but somehow gently and not predatory.
“Are you okay?” he asked simply.
Hawk Talon gave a nod, and Tigereye relaxed slightly—very very slightly, he never seemed to be relaxed in non-emergency situations.
“What in the Wardens’ names is going on?!” Rakin demanded breaking the silence.
“Yeah,” Zale said, lifting herself on an elbow. “What’s with the welcoming ceremony?”
“You four have been missing for four weeks,” Grand Master Lonin said, stepping into the center of the room. “And you, young Hawk Talon, have been missing for half a year.”
The pronouncement was met with silence, which once more Rakin broke.
“Well… that explains it.”
“You four failed to return from the dungeon on the Friday of the fifth week of classes. We gathered all the appropriate staff to investigate the manner, save for the chancellor. It is now the Thursday of the ninth week of classes.”
“Why not Mom?” Zale asked, breaking the anonymity Lonin had been granting Zale’s mother, who was not publicly known to hold the position.
The news was apparently new to Hawk Talon, who gawked at Zale, lost for words.
“She’s missing as well,” Lonin explained. “A man who claimed to be your uncle said she’d left on some mission at his request, but he too disappeared, even though he insisted on joining in the research endeavor.”
Zale didn’t know what to say at that.
Of all the times for Zale’s secret legendary mage of an uncle to disappear. Kole held himself back from saying.
Instead, he looked at Zale, meeting her eyes and reading the same thoughts written there.
“Now, please,” Lonin said. “If you would be up to it, tell us what happened.”
And so they did. Zale explained their time in the dungeon, stopping when the professors asked questions, Doug and Kole often jumping in to answer.
When Zale explained how they’d used her powers in conjunction with Kole’s Thunderwave, Underbrook and Lonin both looked impressed and Kole had to hold back a laugh as he saw them each restrain themselves from asking follow-up questions.
She continued on to the cave, and Kole jumped in to stress his belief they’d left the dungeon at that point. They all listened, enraptured by the tale of the battle.
“We found a large chamber in the cave, filled with mage slayer spiders,” Zale said, getting to the battle. “Hundreds of them, from the size of rats to huge boar-sized ones up above.”
“Hundreds?” the Arch Druid asked disbelieving. “And not all infants? This can’t be.”
Kole refrained from sharing his views on calling things that have already happened impossible. Doug spoke up instead.
“It’s true,” he said. “And that’s not the only strange thing. They were drawing on the Font of Space.”
This drew Lonin and Underbrook’s attention back fully, both their head snapping to Doug.
“Explain,” Lonin demanded.
Doug wilted under the interrogation but tried his best.
“I’m a Spatial primal. I could sense their use of space magic, and saw at least one teleport.”
“How?” Lonin said, conferring with Underbrook. “Were these truly mage slayers? Or some other breed of magical spider? A crossbreed? No, never mind, let’s finish the tale.”
Zale quickly chronicled their escape and Kole’s realization they’d left the dungeon. She explained the strange sky, and then the appearance of the door.
Speculation broke out once more between the two wizards and Professor Donglefore on the nature of the experience and the spiders.
“Maybe Hawk Talon could shed some light on this,” Tigereye suggested, bringing attention to his neglected student.
“I do not know…” he began, “I… I think the spiders were drawing on my powers. I think… I think I was taken because of my powers.”
The speculation grew silent, and Hawk Talon had the rooms complete and total attention. In the simple halting ways of his people, Hawk Talon told his story. He wasn’t a great orator, but everyone hung on each of his slowly spoken words.
“I was walking back to my bunk late. I had been training alone. Something caught me near the stables.”
He pointed to a scar on his neck, two puncture marks much like Doug now bore, only much larger and further apart.
“I felt a pain and then fell asleep. I woke in a cocoon. I could not move. I struggled to escape but I could not draw on my tribe’s Bond for strength. The webs drained me of my Will. If I drew on the power, the spider’s stole it from me along with my Will.
“You say I was gone for six months but I do not feel it has been so long. I slept a lot, but not that much. I thought I would slowly starve, but then something changed. The drain lessened, and I felt the spider draw less deeply on me.
He stopped, closing his eyes as if trying to bring it to mind.
“Someone else was there with me, but I could never make out her words. I only know that her arrival saved me from being slowly consumed. When the fire came, I had my chance to escape and took it.”
Grand Master Lonin asked a few follow-up questions, but he had no more details to share. Lonin then produced a stack of familiar white paper and quills, and passed them out.
“Write down everything you can remember,” he said to them all. “Hold nothing back.”
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Kole began to write on the magic paper employed by the Academy and quickly realized the sensation of memory recall it granted was a weaker version of the enhancement his own paper granted him. While he mostly only used it now to recall class lectures and passages from books, he'd found that while doing so he could remember the most minute of details. If need be, he could draw a seating chart of the entire class of any given lecture, even if he’d not noticed consciously at the time, even the people behind him he was certain he hadn’t looked at.
This paper however only let him remember with perfect clarity the things he’d experienced. He considered taking his own book out and using that in its place, but he didn’t want to draw further attention to the book.
Instead, he wrote down all he could recall, noticing in his writing that the two celestial objects he’d taken to be moons had not actually been that at all. They’d been massive floating chunks of land, far closer to him than what his eyes had told him that chaotic night.
“Where in the realms were we?” he asked himself allowed after writing that revelation down.
“That,” Professor Donglefore said, “Is precisely what we wish to know.”