“Malivici!”

The office doors burst open and a mage with the strength of a god strode in. The earth shook and the ground threatened to break underneath the man’s magical presence. All seemed to darken and the world held still.

Yet the man known as Malivici did not stir. He sat there, staring and running his hands through a stack of papers. He was sitting at his desk and looking down with a light frown on his lips. At his side was a halfling assistant who seemed to be just as unbothered as he was and was also overly concerned with the papers.

“Mali-”

Before the mage could scream the name once more, the man held up his finger, and strangely enough, the mage paused.

“The branchways, how quiet have they been lately?”

The mage wanted to yell indignantly but held his tongue. After a minute of thought, he answered the question.

“Relatively normal, why?”

“The Mage Association,” Malivici hummed, still not looking up from his papers.

“They finally settled?” The mage asked.

“No, but they will. I have Arlin working on it.”

The mage’s anger all but disappeared at the name of the girl. His niece was his one and only soft spot and the damn assassin knew it.

“How is she? I haven’t seen her in some time.”

“You saw her a week ago.”

“A week ago for you is nearly a thousand weeks for me!” The old mage grumbled.

“You do that by choice.”

The mage grunted, watching the little halfling leave the room with a stack of papers and return just as quickly with a new stack.

“It's the only way I can study magic without locking myself up for years at a time,” the mage replied.

“Yes, yes. You’re a great mage of venerable talent…” The mayor waved. “That’s why you didn’t notice the nature of the enchantment on the pipe I gave you.”

“So you knew!” The mage yelled.

“Sir! Sir, we have an incoming call from Arlin!” The halfling spoke.

“Put her on.”

The room brightened and a young girl’s figure filled up the walls in front of them. She was young, around twenty if thirty at most. And she wore a black-fitting suit that highlighted her attractive aspects while still giving her a large aura of power and intrigue.

“Father,” the girl said, bowing to the dark elf mayor in front of her.

The man looked up making eye contact with his daughter and gave her a curt nod.

“Arlin,” he replied.

“Arlin, child, how have you been? It’s me, Uncle Reli!” The mage yelled, cutting in between the two serious individuals.

“Hi Uncle Reli, how are you!” The girl exclaimed. “I’m on a mission! I’m negotiating on behalf of the city!”

“Wow, what a tremendous task! You’re at the Crystal Falls, right? I have a friend there you know, Baddamonk the Dryad! He’s an old brown barkly fellow with a stick and he makes one hell of a chamomile tea, you should go see him about it, ask him to see take you around the city-”

“Alright,” the mayor interrupted. “Arlin, how goes the negotiations?”

“Oh, what? Right, they’re going well Father. All our demands are sure to be met if we can meet theirs,” she replied. “They’re putting on a face of hesitation for now but they’ve already started to take action.”

“Oh?” The mage asked.

“Yes. Resources are being pulled back in certain areas and professors are being sanctioned from other branches while some of the ones that are currently here are filing for sabbatical.”

Malivivci frowned.

“They’re making it too obvious,” he replied. “Anyone who’s paying attention will know what’s happening instantly.”

“ Yixivhin, Delathon, and I have taken the steps to cover that.”

Yixivhin and Delathon? Those were names from The Woven Forest.

“You’re with followers of the spider?” The mage asked.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“I am,” she replied. “They’re here on behalf of their church.”

“Oh?” The mage replied.

“She agreed to help with the transfer process, in return for creating an arachne district in a very favored place, along with establishing three churches.”

“Oh… the clergy won’t like that at all.”

“I’m prepared for their reaction,” Malivici replied. “Arlin, keep in mind the mages I talked to you about, and make sure to notify me before taking any drastic actions.”

“Yes, father.”

“Good, now-”

“Goodbye Arlin, I’ll see you when you get back!” The mage barged in, pushing the assassin to the side.

“Goodbye Uncle Reli!”

Malivici sighed before cutting off the communication mirror with a wave of his hand. Then he fully turned to the mage and spoke.

“Now about that pipe, who did you end up giving it to?”

“Some half-demon boy,” the mage replied, suddenly remembering his forgotten rage. “But you knew! You knew about the confounded enchantment on the pipe!”

“Partly, I did say it was an old artifact with unknown hidden enchantments, and you took to it quite happily.”

“Yes! While I was breaking the enchantment,” he replied. “I didn’t think about how it would interact with my dreams. Were you aware of it?”

“No,” Malivici replied. “But I did get a few reports about your unseemingly dreams, now tell Relimauth the Great Venerable Mage of Antiquity, what’s this I hear about troll woman?”

Relimauth knew better than to answer the question. Malivici could talk his way out of hell, he had seen him do it before. Reli might be older and wiser in some ways, but in the ways of words and man Malivici had no equal.

“Hmph, well how did you manage to convince that sad group of mages to create a branch here anyway?”

Malivici smiled and accepted the plea for a topic change.

“Numerous things were forfeited for the greatness of the city,” Malivici lamented.

Any other soul might have seen him to be remorseful, having made some great sacrifice to get this far. Relimauth knew better. Malivici didn’t lose and if he did he would feel angry, not sad.

“You conned them?” The mage asked.

“We had a precise and noteworthy discussion on the matter,” the mayor mused.

Then the mage laid back and listened as the man talked of all the plans and pawns he had used to secure the deal.

Relimauth was one of the few people burdened with understanding the plan. Malivici trusted him, but it was just that. Malivici also knew the mage’s power. No one would pry information from Relimauth by threat or temptation.

He was too strong to be threatened and he was too capable to be tempted. If he wanted something, he’d go and get it himself, even if what he wanted was a dragon’s head.

“I’ll be relying on you to keep the balance of power, as always,” Malivici stated calmly.

“You’re capable of that yourself,” Relimauth replied. “And what about Galdinwayne? Where has he been?”

“To the outer realms,” the mayor replied.

Galdinwayne was the third member of their party, a paladin knight and a hero, the hero. The three of them, along with three others had been the ones to destroy three of the Dark Lord’s Night Minions, including the champion of the Dark Lord, the Demon King.

They were heroes of the olden age. Malivici settled down in his old home of Asrin. It had been damaged after the war but he reclaimed it and built it to be better than it ever was. He had managed to clean out the corruption and groomed the ancient city to be a monolith of power. Over the millennia, he had brought dragons, angels, demons, and gods to the place.

It had become a beacon of magical interest and trade, that along with the properly managed roots of the Asrin Tree and confluence of churches and races, had made it one of the most important cities within the Inner Realms.

“Is he in the hells against?” Relimauth asked.

“Where else?” Malivici snorted.

“Still looking for that damned thing?” Relimauth asked.

“He’s convinced it’s still within the hells. I’ve told him that it must have fallen into the depths, off of Yggdrasil and into the void beneath.”

Then for a moment, the two became serious. A dark look full of hatred and fear passed over their faces.

They remembered it, that invader. It had been weak and it was nothing compared to the threat of the Dark Lord, but what they had seen was merely a part of it, a fraction of its being.

It was not native to Yggdrasil. Even the Dark Lord, for all his nastiness, was from the realms. This thing came from beyond all they knew.

“Don’t act like you’re any better,” Malivici spoke. “What have you been studying all this time anyway? How many mysteries could the world hold for you to lock yourself in a time enchantment for so long?”

“It interests me,” the mage replied. “And who are you to accuse me of over-preparedness? This city has the highest concentration of celestials outside of the outer realms, now why is that?”

“It interests me,” Malivici replied. “Celestial magic is the only thing that works on those things.”

Invaders weren’t unheard of. They were common in the Warlands, but those were small creatures that the celestials had been fighting since the beginning of time. That was their purpose after all.

Mundane magic, no matter how amazing was limited by the will of Yggdrasil, only gods and celestials used magic born of their own nature. It was what made them so powerful, and also what made them so feral.

Demons destroyed not because they wanted to, but because they had to. The same could be said for fae, gods, and dragons. They were all designed to uphold a part of Yggdrasil.

The demons to destroy, the angels to keep, the dragons to burn, and the fae to grow, and the gods to be their own.

Only they had the means to combat creatures not of this world, and that was by design. There were more than five celestial races and each had a counter, if they didn’t Yggdrasil would be at risk of falling.

One could gain access to such magic and become a celestial at high enough levels of magehood. Relimauth himself had crossed that threshold before Dark Lord had risen. He was an old mage, far older than even his closest friends knew.

But even he had feared what he’d seen during that day. It was long ago and they had faced worse threats many times over, but what concerned him wasn’t the power of the being he had witnessed, but rather the nature of it.

That day, he felt like a child who had peeked under his bed to find a small monster staring back. They had defeated it. They had destroyed it utterly, but they had learned that there were monsters. The likes of which they couldn’t imagine.

And none of them had stopped preparing for it ever since.

The Dark Lord was the prelude, this thing had all of time to try and come back, and even if they were not around to see it rise, they would make sure that someone was.