Okyor and Lyle chatted amiably as they wound their way back the block to the subway station. They were comparing their perspectives on the game, and how Lyle had countered Okyor’s forces and spells as well as the various options that had come up for Okyor in the game. As we arrived back at the station, Lyle declared firmly, “so you should always play a rare card if you get it.”
Okyor shrugged. “I wouldn’t say it that definitively. As a dark mage, I once got a card for an abyssal pit as a rare card. It probably would have taken me down the path of summoning demons or shadow monsters of some kind. But I hadn’t built for a summoning style campaign, so I passed on it and won anyway. You were lucky to draw your rare card in the first round.”
As Lyle stepped forward to summon the car back, I approached Okyor. “Okyor, sorry if this is a stupid question. Apparently, you’re famous for playing a dark mage, and today you were air. But neither of those is an affinity you actually hold. Do you find it too difficult to play those other types?”
He shook his head. “Not all affinities are created equal, and Dominions is a game. My major affinities haven’t been developed into card sets. Mind is too feared and too powerful, Lightning is too narrowly focused to make a good player.”
True to Lyle’s promise from when we arrived, the capsule rose up from the ground and the three of us stepped in. Lyle picked up the conversation. “The manufacturers of the game are very tight-lipped about the development. I heard your comment to Clarence about how expensive it all looked. It is. Clarence was able to get a set for Dragon Hall, but it’s the only one in the whole of Colvale Valley. It’s the only place you can play Dominions around, and the makers haven’t released any of the underlying information about the game. It’s a major source of tension among the wealthy and powerful right now. We can only know what we observe.” He flicked his wrist and a softly glowing pink marble rolled out of his sleeve. “That’s what the memory spell was for. My family is trying to learn about the game to write exactly the kind of primer you were asking about. But we don’t even have a full list of the civilization and affinity choices given to players.
“Every time I go, I play a different combination, to see what new options appear. When we get back tonight, I’ll write it up. My family is working with a few of the monks to try to reverse engineer the game itself, but we’ll also take writing books about it.”
“Is that why the Monastery doesn’t have a version itself? To keep it from being investigated.”
Lyle laughed. “No, it’s because the Grand Abbot refused to spend that level of money on a game. He views it as frivolous. I’m sure Clarence knows my family is investigating. But what are they going to do? Stop the wealthy and powerful from playing their very expensive game?”
“They’re wrong.” Okyor cut in and the two of us looked at him in surprise. “Not about the intrigue. The Grand Abbot about not buying the game. Back home, there was already talk of working Dominions into our own academy’s training curriculum. It’s a fantastic simulator of the responsibilities of being a mage and ruler. Of all places for it to be well received, I’d expect it to be here.” Even after the afternoon’s jaunt, it was still bizarre to hear the normally taciturn Okyor be so eloquent.
That prompted the two who were familiar with the game already to dive back into their conversation about playing the game and what you could learn. While Okyor had always been slated to come to the Monastery for Mind magic training, he had been around other students at the magic academies back in his homeland and had heard them talking about the requirements. Apparently, they had Dominions instruction and tournaments as a major focus on campus, and when he had left they were talking about making it part of the official curriculum and what they called ranking competitions.
Their conversation ended when the capsule arrived back at the Monastery. As the doors slid open, a lone figure waited with arms crossed on the landing. The Abbess waited for us, thunderheads lurking in the set of her face, her arms crossed.
She looked to Lyle first. “You were told to take him to your lunch gathering and then return him to the Library. What part of that involved a jaunt into the city to show off this fanciful amusement?”
Lyle tried to speak up in defense of himself while Okyor drifted into his shadow. But the Abbess’s attention turned to me. “You were also warned repeatedly about the dangers you will face. Both of the young men you accompanied are declared Mind magic users. Do you not think the town will whisper about you?” She looked like she wanted to say more but then caught herself. She looked at the two Apprentices. “You two are dismissed. I will take him back to the Library myself. He will not be joining you until he is enrolled at the Monastery School as a Novice.”
With an imperious gesture and a cold glare, she bade me follow her while completely ignoring the other two. She did not cast the spell that she had used back in the Library to help ascend the stairs and we climbed them together. She set a brisk, angry pace that had me huffing a bit to stay a step behind and we quickly left Lyle and Okyor on the platform.
“You possess agency, Kyle. This is as much your fault as theirs. You are not ready to be out yet. Did you even know Lyle was a wealthy merchant noble before seeing how people reacted to him at Dragon Hall?”
“You know that’s where we went?”
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She snorted. “First, with those two, it’s a safe bet. Eliandra also had the good sense to let me know where my Apprentice had run off to with this project of mine. Decorum is all that stopped me from coming to fetch you. But we digress. Did you know where you were going? Did you know the world you just stepped into? All of the wealthy and powerful of Colvale Valley have now seen you with two of the more important Apprentices. They’ll probably think you Lyle’s paramour. If nothing else, your friendship will invite attention. Attention you are not yet ready to bear as a Mind mage or a Hero. Anonymity would have been your friend, but you have sacrificed it. For what? A game? Which you didn’t even play, but merely watched?” She shook her head. “I thought you told me you were an adult. You should be past such frivolity.”
After her tongue-lashing, we fell into silence as she led me back to the Library and climbed the steps. When we reached her third study, she opened the door. “I will have food brought to this room for the remainder of the week. You are to remain in my third study until the Nevernight Festival begins and we enroll you as a new Novice.” She sighed. “I will prepare a set of notes on the political quagmire you’ve just landed yourself in. Be ready when you reemerge to navigate the world more adroitly.”
The rest of the week passed in an enforced isolation. It felt mildly insulting to be grounded, like they had forgotten that I was fully adult and not one of the children that they were used to dealing with. I understood the arguments that she had made for it, but it was still annoying. I went for three whole days without her allowing me outside of her “third study.” Astri was assigned to have my meals delivered to me, but beyond a few apologetic words of commiseration, she was under strict orders to not interact with me that much.
Two new folios were dropped off. They weren’t fully fleshed out books, but rather unbound folders with some notes written on them. One was the promised notes from the Abbess, whose neat and intricate handwriting presented a basic crash course on the identities of what she called the factions of Colvale. There were a lot of comments that verged on snide that showed that the leadership of the Monastery held pretty much the whole of the town in mild disdain and viewed them as necessary evils and hangers-on for the Monastery. Direct power was held pretty tightly by the Grand Abbot and his appointed mayor, called the Abbot of the Port. That made four positions termed Abbot under the authority of the Grand Abbot: the Abbot of the Port, the Abbot of the Cells who led the Monastery proper, the Abbot (or in this case Abbess) of the Shrine for the library, and the Abbot of the Scrolls for the school. Those who failed out of the Monastery School served as the backbone of the guard and the monks themselves were the core of the military when more force was needed. This concentration meant that the families were locked out of true power in the city, but they had created an entire ecosystem of wealth and prestige all their own.
Most of them, Lyle’s Karenstrauss among them, were merchant families who traded in the various products of Colvale Valley. The largest and most profitable export were the enchanted items produced by the Monastery itself. Each of the families had to have a home business though, as the Monastery made a point of rotating its export license among the great families to avoid too much power accruing to any of them. The Valley was also a source of an array of agricultural products and some specialty ores or alchemical items that all shared various arctic properties. It was surprising to see that while this was clearly an arctic area – the approaching Nevernight Festival was proof of that – and many goods were cold-themed, not all shared that theme. The Karenstrauss apparently dominated the Riverrine Confederation’s citrus trade from their orchards in Colvale. It was yet another sign of the magical nature of where I was, but I wondered exactly how that was done.
The other folio was written much more hastily and slid under the door one day. It was notes, written in a few different hands, about the different affinities and civilizations available to play in Dominions. It made me smile to see that the group had clearly worked together to copy the notes Lyle had made from his memory spell so that they could give me something other than my assigned reading to review. I made sure that I finished the assigned books from the Abbess and the parts of the bestiaries and histories that my cover story would need for the other Novices. But every night, I read up on Dominions and thought about the various combinations that Lyle had practiced or the observations that Okyor and Astri had added from their own experiences. The list of affinities was definitely constrained by the gamemakers search for balance, but it still opened my mind up to the sheer diversity of affinities that were around in this world. In addition to the Air, Fire, Water and Earth I had expected, the Dark I already knew about, and the Light that was its obvious corollary, there were only five others where the decks had been explored by the group. They said that these were the only eleven that were offered as options. The most bizarre one was Magma, but when I asked Astri on her daily visits, it was apparently a fairly common affinity for those who trained to be battlemages, and the spells it made available demonstrated that. Astri apparently usually played as Sun affinity caster whose magic focused on protection but was also powerful in combat. The mage academy card had allowed Lyle to unlock the Arcane affinity in the match I watched, which appeared to focus on runes that could either amplify or disrupt other schools of magic. The last two were Metal and Nature magic.
The civilizations were very complex, with lots of traits, but they seemed to break down into three basic categories that shared most of the basic cards with each other. One was civilizations focused on farming and building, like the Cibellians Lyle had played. Okyor’s Klajok’s belonged to the second group, which were nomads focused on raiding. The third group seemed to be a more eclectic group, but I realized they were all clustered around some specialized application of magic. My favorite of those, although a group I would never play, were the Confiteros, who used a combination of subtle magics and faith to infiltrate and suborn other cities and steal their people and assets. I could see how they would be very frustrating to play against, but I had never really enjoyed playing as those kinds of groups in the various strategy games I had played on Earth. I figured I would have to do a little experimentation as to which group I would use. Besides, I figured I had to return the favor of all this information to Lyle and help him gather more.
Truthfully, except for the fact that it was forced on me, spending three days in a room studying was by far not the worst way I could have spent the time. I was looking forward to the Nevernight Festival and my release from this isolation. I knew that I was going to be a Novice, which meant back in school and doing a lot of studying, but that didn't sound so bad. Besides, if the diversity of cards available in Dominions was anything to go by, there would be a lot of interesting things I could do with magic.