When Restal awoke, swirling, twisted shapes fading in and out of focus surrounded her. Geometric patterns danced and twirled until settling themselves into familiar, fixed, and rigid forms. A sharp surge of pain in her back made her aware of her body as she acclimated herself to her surroundings.
She was in her bed in the wizard’s tower. How long had it been since she had spoken the charm in the cave? No matter how long had passed, she had none of the fatigue and torpor which had previously wracked her, though she was acutely aware of the wounds on her body. In this place, there was almost a preternatural, invigorating effect, and she felt as though she could leap over a mountain if she tried to.
The sunlight caught and gleamed upon a crystal bottle by her bedside containing paltry drops of water. The water emitted a soft, silvery glow and a barely-audible humming sound even as it rested in the vial. Master Elias’s apothecary cabinet contained many secrets unknown to acolytes such as herself, but this was something altogether different from the herbs and remedies she had seen him grind with his mortar and pestle. She wrapped her fingers around the humming glass vial to examine it more closely, when the towering, bent frame of Elias shuffled through the arched doorway leading to Restal’s bed.
“I almost thought you wouldn’t make it, sparrow.” Restal nearly dropped the bottle, but steadied her grip and laid it on the table.
“Wouldn’t make it? Whatever do you mean, Master Elias?”
The old wizard approached the bed, leaning more heavily upon his staff than Restal recalled him doing recently. “You were weaker than I estimated. Had I known your true strength, I would have insisted you stay behind while I handled the bandits myself. The Charm of Opening left you on the brink of death. If something like that could do so much harm to you, I shudder to think what the Charm of Closing would do.”
Restal flinched a bit when he belittled her strength. She knew he only spoke so frankly because he wanted her to reach her full potential, but it did not hurt her any less. Elias was like a mother bird who tossed her fledglings out of the nest to force them to fly. The wizard motioned with his staff toward the bottle, “Only the Water of the Singing Well kept you alive.”
Restal shook the bottle. As the droplets of water swished around, she listened to the faint humming. “What is this water, Master? It’s no potion you’ve taught me to make.”
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“That is because no one living can make it. Recall that our craft—our magic—is at its most essential level the creation of order from chaos. We reverse the cosmos’s natural tendency toward entropy. Whenever we speak a charm or cast a spell, do something to upset the decaying state of Nature, Nature compensates. She extracts her toll from our life-essence. While a blacksmith may spend ore and fuel to forge iron, we spend years of our lives in the forging of spells.”
“That is why I collapsed, then? Why I almost died?”
Elias nodded and continued, “The wise masters of our Order have discovered ways to replenish our essence and prolong our lives far longer than the natural, mundane folk out there,” he gestured dismissively out the window and toward the village in the vale, “but these methods require precious elixirs such as this one, in wells and springs known only to the highest of the Order. You are holding the last of mine.”
Restal gasped, “If it is the last, you shouldn’t have wasted it on me!”
Elias scoffed. “Before you begin your customary histrionics, I sent a bird to the Order the moment you took ill. It should return not long from now with a fresh vial.”
The aerie was the tallest chamber of Elias’s tower: a wide, circular room lined with cages of pigeons, ravens, hawks, falcons, and a menagerie of all sorts of feathered creatures that Restal could neither name nor categorize. The fowl fluttered to and fro in their cages, chirping and squawking as Elias and his apprentice ascended the stair. The aged mage’s eyes lit up when he spied a mottled pigeon alight upon a perch, a yellow parchment scroll tied to its leg. “There he is now! Let’s see what the old masters have to say.”
Elias unrolled the scroll and began to read, his eyes darting past each line, written not in the characteristically smooth and impeccable calligraphy of Order scribes, but the blotted scrawl of old men with trembling hands. Elias furrowed his brow as he read further, and Restal saw the color drain from his face as he let the message fall to the floor, his pallid face fixed on some far-away point. He hung his head and sighed hugely as he set himself upon a stool and gazed wordlessly out of the aerie window.
“What did the Order have to say, Master?” Restal picked up the message and read it to herself. She skimmed the opening pleasantries, the overly-formal and apologetic explanation for its delay, and then gasped at its last line, “We can regretfully supply no more of the elixir you requested, as the Singing Well has fallen silent.” Gone silent? Was there no more left? So Elias had wasted the last of his precious, life-giving tonic upon her, a lowly sparrow. She tried to open her mouth to speak, but no words emerged. It was as though her voice was a great river now blocked by a dam.
Elias for his part did not acknowledge her. He was silent, motionless. He kept his eyes fixed northward, upon the great, distant, and verdant mountain: Othorn.