The city of Shii-sherah had been abandoned a thousand years ago, but before that it had been one of the crown jewels of the short-lived Illustrian Empire. Unlike the capitol, or Gyyria, or Anardokopolis, which were cities of state and trade and industry, well-placed in the heartland and the oldest of the new territories, Shii-sherah was a city of worship and learning, nestled in the rocky cliffs where the River Ilus poured out of the northern mountains. Few had sought it out since Shiithaia’s Gift had failed, causing magically enhanced buildings and aqueducts to collapse under their own weight, and the black-cloaked shadowmen had begun appearing in the night. Fewer still had found it.
Now, in the tenth century since the official end of the Shadow War, when the last of the shadowmen had been seen east or south of the River Venn, Aemillian Solirius and I stood in the baren ruins and looked out over the deep green forests of the Great Wild North. The light was fading quickly as the sun set behind Mounts Kingforge and Twinspire on the far side of the forest.
Aemillian was wrapped tightly in his himation, trying to pretend that the cold mountain air didn’t bother him. My own cloak, heavy wool in the Georgi style, hung close around me over my leather trews and thick vest.
“Will this place suit your purposes?”
I nodded. I could feel the thinness of the world, here. If the moon were any fuller, we might be at risk of an incursion.
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s find someplace to shelter tonight and then set up our equipment in the morning.”
It had been twenty years since I had camped this rough, but Aemillian had never been anywhere so far from civilization, so it fell on me to pick a partially collapsed ruin – small enough to fill with heat from a small fire, with enough roof to be real shelter but enough ventilation that the smoke didn’t choke us out. I built the fire, as well, and heated water for our tea. The last time I had done this, I had owned little more than the clothing on my back. Now I had all the supplies that Aemillian and I could fit into our wizards’ chests. We had plenty of blankets, and enough food for months, and no real fear of dying of exposure.
Once tea was made, Aemillian settled into his corner, sitting on his wizard’s chest and draped in an additional pair of blankets. He watched me intently as I cooked our dinner. I tried not to show how his attention affected me.
In the morning, we began setting up our apparati. Crystal lenses and stone orbs. Geometric figures and crystal grids. Careful arrangements of tuning forks and magical tinctures.
We had chosen a high place near what we thought had been the center of the city, where we could take the best advantage of the waxing gibbous moon. We had our theories, and our formulae, and they were sound. But the shadow magic of Illustria was not Vencari blood wizardry, and we couldn’t solve the problem through obscure grammar or clever wordplay or by cutting just a little deeper. There was, to the best of our ability to determine, a tactile or embodied component that we were missing.
We hoped – I hoped – to learn something about the shape of it by examining the damage it had done to the world when it had failed. So we had come here, to a great Illustrian city far from modern civilization, where only the passing of time had tampered with the wounds that shadow-magic had left on the world. And, as I had suspected, the wound was still here.
It could not be seen clearly, or all at once, not even using every magical tool and technique at our disposal. But we could see it in bits and pieces. Segments in the past and in the present.
Our divinations gave us glimpses into the Shadow Realm beyond the veil. Of men and women with uncanny, fishbelly-pale skin who toiled under a sunless, moonless sky. Of the frightening faceless figures who held them under the lash. Of the monstrous formless things that lived in the high peaks and hungered always for fresh souls on which to feed.
And it was as if my life had come full circle. I would never have asked the question had I not come down to the lands of the Compact in search of my father’s people and answers to the question of my nature. I never would have come here had I not secured an apprenticeship with the great Obsidian Cabal and caught the eye of their Master of the Librarians. And I never would have seen, let alone understood, the answer had it not been for the arts of the priestesses who raised me.
We did not, as we allowed so many to believe, exactly reproduce the arts of ancient Illustria. How could we? We were wizards, experts in the languages of making and unmaking, in the grammar of the universe and the blood of our flesh. Perhaps had we been Shan Khul masters, or sorcerers in the traditions of the elves and the dwarves, we could have reached out a fragment of our soul to form the syphon by pure will. But we were wizards, and we formed our syphons by words of power fueled by our blood.
It was my journeyman’s quest. It was his lifelong ambition. Neither of us could have come here without the other. Neither of us could let the other go first.
We chose our words carefully, each of us meticulously balancing the influences of the various Immortal Tongues to achieve just the right voice and meter. We inscribed them on our flesh with carefully prepared inks and cannibalized the apparati we had used to find and explore the wounded Shadow Veil to better focus the energies we hoped to draw into ourselves.
It took us days. It should have taken us years. But then, it already had.
We locked eyes across the ruined square that we had chosen for our experiments, each of us surrounded by our jury-rigged lenses and tools. Aemillian drew his gold and diamond wizard’s claw across the palm of his hand, tracing the final sigil of his incantation as he spoke his words of power. I could see the power flooding into him – dark and viscous shadow-substance that glowed blue-black under the light of the moon.
I did the same. Except that I had an advantage. An Immortal Tongue unknown south of the Great Ice Wall, which I wielded with reckless abandon. And where Aemillian, my friend and confidant and teacher and rival, reached through the wound in the world to draw strength from the Shadow Realm, as the Illustrian Shadow-mages had in ancient times, I reached the other direction, toward something brighter.
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