I found myself in a squarish room with walls no more than five metres long. Dusty and cobwebbed bookcases lined most of the walls, although each was broken by a solitary doorway. A phantom line ran from a ring on my right pinky finger through the doorway on my right. A rickety desk sat in the centre of the room and above it floated a dozen shards of dull-edged black glass, each a slightly different shape and size. I picked myself up from my bedroll and wandered over to the desk and sat in the equally rickety chair before it. As I focused on each shard text sprung from it.

Expedition Report 512 Northwest quadrant of level four has been cleared. Levels one through two remain safe for civil traffic although enemy raids into level three have resulted in some seven casualties, largely among the servitors. Thankfully no fatalities among the expedition members . If we push on through the crystal gardens I’m sure we can cut off the enemy command cadre from reinfor…

Family Chat …fairly simple casting formula. Did nobody pay attention during the briefing I gave? LuciGoose: To be fair to everyone Dunc, I fall asleep during your 'briefings' and I’m your sister

SourceMail: From: [email protected]

To: steering_group@new_thaumaturgist.pub

The deeper one descends through the layers of the Cronephere the further one gets from the material world and the more hazardous the environment becomes for the casual explorer. The inventory chambers appear to some sort of divinely mandated boundary . But with appropriate preparation they can be breached and the deeper layers reached. My own expeditions have led me to realise that the deeper we go the more our understanding of space, and below the eighth layer, time, become largely irrelevant. I believe that the Cronephere can be used to reach other worlds, perhaps even Earth, and with appropriate funding I aim to prove it.

One shard began to play music; the voice of my daughter singing Suzanne Vega’s Marlene On The Wall, before segueing through a forest of whistles, cheers, and applause into a cover of Bowie’s Changes. I stood and walked over to the door behind me, uncomfortable that I had my back to it, but opening it only revealed the black glass void of the Cronephere. An unnatural cold seemed to suck on my life-force, seeping into my bones. I shut the door and returned to the desk where Lucia was now performing the Kate Bush classic Running Up That Hill.

The next shard brought forth the image of a child’s crayon drawing. Three dragons of decreasing sizes from right to left against a blue sky with white clouds and a yellow sun. The right most, the largest and leader of the flight, was drawn in mostly blacks and greens while the next two smaller dragons were drawn with the same crayon as the sun. The drawing was dedicated by an immature hand “To Grampy”.

All the shards were of roughly the same thickness, but the next I looked at was probably twice that of the others. As I did so it began to vibrate and buzz. I reached out to grab it and it reacted to my touch.

“Drake,” Amanda’s voice, “It’s time to wake up. Wake up Drake! WAKE UP!”

I awoke with a start to find myself still in Merle’s oversized bed. Alone. I could hear voices outside, down in the courtyard. It was singing, accompanied by a metallic percussion. I realised that it was the smiths at work. I’m no expert but it sounded like a 4/4 beat, but with two quick beats followed by a larger third beat. It was achingly familiar and I was trying to identify it when suddenly there was a bellowed chant of:

“WE WILL, WE WILL ROCK YOU!”

I dressed myself and made my way down. First to the kitchens where I acquired a bowl of porridge analogue. There was some debates as to whether I, the earl, should be eating common food in the common kitchens. I joked that as the earl I could eat whatever and wherever I damn well pleased, and this was taken at face value. Finishing my breakfast I took myself out into the courtyard.

The courtyard was a buzz of activity. Both the mobile forge and the castle’s own forge were aglow. Bellows and hammers in sync through the classic Queen hit, as belted out by Amanda.

Leslie and Murdo were coordinating the deployment of teams of couriers. Part mail carrier, and for this initial foray part explorers, they’d be making contact with surrounding settlements and reconnecting them back to us. Leslie had estimated from Merle’s records that the population of Forfar took up an eighth the population of Manchwark. The population of Manchwark was possibly a little larger than the population of Angus, but that the area of Manchwark was almost five times that of Angus; roughly half the size of Wales. The same population over a much larger area; finding people was going to be rough.

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A third of the couriers would be slightly less adventurous, remaining in Skipingham to do pretty much the same job, but with a side order of coordinating with our town criers and us back here at the castle. One of the priorities being finding places where large groups could be catered for and setting up kitchens there for that very purpose.

I had wanted more people out in the wilds and less in the town but Leslie and Murdo had worked together to overrule me, and I had let them. I trusted their expertise and let them get on with things.

We had briefly talked after the meeting last night. About compensation for people. Specifically the ‘volunteers’ we were calling on, such as the couriers. There were plenty of coffers filled with precious looking metals and gems beneath the castle. Coins of evidently different values. But we didn’t know what those values were. Murdo had started to assign values, based on Dungeons and Dragons. But he had stalled when he couldn’t tell one silvery metal token from another, obviously different, silvery metal. Which one was silver; which was platinum? Nobody could say. Except Amanda who said that one was Primallium, the first metal, and the other Myþrilium, or “Mythril”. Literally metallised light from the grey moon. The golden metal wasn’t gold but Merhamberium, again metallised light, this time of the sun. Since Primallium was the more commonly found and integral to the smelting of the other two it would in any reasonable world have the lowest value. But because it was needed for the other two, and was thus seen as a raw material used without concern. It was, in many ways, actually the rarer metal.

My solution was much more radical, far reaching, and scary for so many people. Myself included. But I had looked at what we had and what we could do. I balanced that against what everyone around us required. I thought it could work and so I made my pitch.

“From each as to their means,” I paraphrased, “To each as to their needs.”

“Karl Marx” Leslie correctly identified, “The refuge of the politically immature.”

“It comes from the bible, Acts 4:35, ‘…And distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.’ If the apostles could do it then I don’t see why we can’t.” Amanda said, picking up what I was sending out. “We have magic.”

“We have people who can grow bio-plastic plates from dead tables. We live in living buildings,” I had said. “I see no reason that those people can’t just walk up to a field and summon a harvest every day of the growing season. Sure we probably have to maintain the nutrient levels in the soil, but field rotation, composting and other forms of fertiliser can be used. There might even be magical solutions to those.”

“And protein?”

“Almost every Tares seems to know how to hunt,” Murdo had said, “And failing that, there are probably edible mushrooms.”

“If everyone who hunts shares some of their kill, say half, with the community we should have enough to go around. And if that’s insufficient then we implement animal husbandry beyond sancers and the odd olk.” Those being the only domesticated animals I’d seen at that point.

“Which brings us to the tragedy of the commons.” Leslie looked at us. “If everyone is giving away half their kill then they’ll be hunting for twice as much. Which depletes the animal population twice as fast.” She had said.

“If twice as many kills are made then only half as many people need to go hunting to maintain the same levels of meat production,” Murdo observed.

“Civilisation is what happens when people have excess food and not everyone needs to farm, hunt, or gather.” I had said, “Any economy we create right now is going to be guess work. More importantly, right now, is making sure that everyone has shelter, food and drink. Beyond that I can’t say. ”

“That hunter seems to be the first class for every Tares is important,” Amanda said. “I can’t quite put my finger on why. But it’s obvious that prior to our arrival the Tares didn’t eat a huge amount of meat. While everyone seems to have hunted when they were low level, not everyone seems to keep doing it, either for food, recreation or otherwise.”

In the end we decided, three to one, to try the socialist approach over the short term. A little light communism, as a treat.

Still standing in the courtyard I felt surplus to requirements. Which on one hand was a good thing. Everyone knew what they were doing and didn’t need me to micromanage them. On the other hand it meant that there was nothing for me to do out there.

I wandered over to the stables to check on Midnight, but she was as happy as a shoe. She was surrounded by feed, decent bedding and a young-looking welf was brushing her coat. I left her to it.

I thought about a bunch of stuff to occupy my time. But every one of them was dependent upon a thing that was back on Earth and thus lost to me.

So I fell back to almost forgotten habits from my youth and went for a walk.

First I explored the castle. From the highest accessible point to the lowest.

It was odd. Back on Earth I had suffered from bouts of vertigo and agoraphobia. One was so bad it probably constituted a psychotic break. Back during my university days, under a glorious blue summer sky, I’d climbed a church tower to photograph the dig site in a field adjoining the graveyard. Then I disappeared for an hour. I was found in the church crypt hugging a pillar and repeatedly muttering “…can’t go outside, the sky will eat me…” Yet I stood at the top of the castle’s highest tower, at least two or three times the height of that church steeple, and looked up at an equally glorious sky. I knew with a certainty that had to come from Merle, that there was nothing up there that I needed to fear.

From there I descended down through the castle, although I avoided intruding on people's private spaces. I located numerous storage spaces; the granary, the armoury, and the vault amongst them. There were reception rooms by the castle-load. The largest being the great hall and the smallest an extremely private nook for a couple of very good friends with no intention of swinging a saz, but every intention of taking advantage of the soft furnishings.

There were secret passages. Of course there were secret passages. They were fairly easy to find from the Cronephere. Harder to access. But that’s how I discovered an entire hidden floor of the castle, below the deepest cellar, and accessible only through the Cronephere. It turned out to be a training space and refuge for the assassins. There, at the back of an archery range, I found a walled up archway that led to the tunnels I’d sensed below the town.

Again the prospect of an actual dungeon crawl in, what I had rapidly accepted as, real life was less appealing than one might think. Yet I couldn’t shift the memory of my dream. Who knew what secrets lay hidden within those passages and chambers. And how many painful and unavoidable means of death.

My home explored. I turned my heels and headed out into town.