28th Harpstring Moon, 1893 C.E.
I sat in the shade of a tree at the edge of a city. This seat was meant for customers of a nearby inventor's shop, but I no longer cared. Enthusiasts like him could be found dotted in out-of-the-way towns like this, where the surrounds are stretches of vast, flat lands that provide an excellent arena to test out their large moving contraptions. Oh, they are far more advanced than ballistas.
His hammer clamoured on the side of a large vehicle made almost completely of metal, and I looked up. Despite the cool day, he worked in a light short-sleeved top with no vest or jacket, only a leather belt full of oddly shaped tools strapped across his waist. An old bandanna kept his hair pulled away from his face, which looked a couple of decades older than me at least, and his build far more muscular, his expression hidden behind a tinted, spectacle-like shield over his eyes. In any case, he didn't seem to mind me resting there. My tired feet could endure no more walking. Blistered, aching, tingling, sore. And I had so much longer to go.
He poured a potion into a compartment of the mechanical vehicle and I glanced at the thing in detail. There were two seats: a main one for the rider, and a smaller, lower side carriage-like seat that attached beside it. A pipe stuck out from behind: for what purpose, I wasn't sure. I had been preoccupied with the heavy journey ahead. But soon I smiled slightly and felt a joyous skip in my chest. I had noticed that his vehicle was a combination of the blacksmiths', fire mages', and wizards' ingenuity: projects like this were not only for loopy home inventors like him, but were also an emerging national interest (as I said, Anna is a much better source of news than the papers). It was one of the few redeeming things we wizards were involved in that the public yet did not know about. From mere astronomers and observers of nature, we have progressed to building magic of our own: contraptions that harness both the mundane that all beings down to the barbarians know, and the mystical elemental knowledge of the sages.
I had to reach that font and destroy it.
"Excuse me." I approached the inventor, who was now oiling the wheel. "How might I reach this town?" And unfolding my weathered map, I pointed to its edge.
His neck craned as he looked me up and down.
"A magic user, are you?" His tinted eye-shield stopped level with the intricate chainmail of my armour, blue fish-like scales interlaced seamlessly between them. "That's a fine work you're wearing."
"Yes. I have business in Whitesard Grove."
"Whitesard Grove?" If I could have seen it, I would have bet my Grimoire that his eyebrows were arched high above his eyes. "That place is friendly to none but the clerics."
"They may decide whether to welcome me or not when we get there."
After a bit more nudging and a lot of praise for his project on my part, he grudgingly agreed.
"It's a few hours ride from here. I can take you as far as the town, and then I must let you go."
3rd Garland Moon, 1893 C.E.
The last few days for me were filled with blurred, passing scenery. Cities, villages, undulating hills rolled over each other like the many layers of theatre settings at the Cyrkensia Opera. Like the many acts, the curtains of night shut upon the land's stage many times, and opened every dawn on a newly made stage. As promised, my companion left me at the town, where I continued my journey to Whitesard Grove on foot. The rains of this season had not yet begun, and the journey felt much like that hot, sunny walk I had taken when I'd first set out from Arunfell Tower as its new wizard. How I'd grumbled and taken wrong turns and in the end, picked at the rubbled ruins of an old tower for gold along with the crows. The magic crackled in my blue armour. I was different now.
At last, I came to the spot from my dream, where there seemed to be only a rocky cliff face. It shimmered, and then the glimmer disappeared as I approached, but I knew better. Whispering an incantation, I waved my hand and dispelled the illusion enchantment. It revealed a tunnel, and I walked through it in several long strides. At the other side I came out into a birch grove, where the silence was so great that the twigs broke loudly under my boots.
The noon sun rose high, throwing the grass into a blindingly white sheet. It seared my vision painfully, and so I shielded my eyes and walked slowly, into the shade of the birch trees.
There was a faint path at my feet that told me others had walked this path before me. Perhaps clerics, mages, other wizards like me. I followed it deeper and deeper into the grove, the grass standing taller, the shrubs thicker and the shade darker, until it seemed to hem me in from both sides.
Suddenly, I came into a small clearing. The same one from my mind's mirage. The light was a gentle honey colour and fell in diagonal streams from above, beaming with dust, and the rays ended in a pool as clear as a blue crystal. I felt my heart race, and an immense energy already begin to seep into my veins. I saw how vigorously lush the green grass grew around it, how witch's flowers and midnight beauties, wide-cupped morning glories and deep blue lilies bloomed like gems around it.
A Font of Power.
Slowly I approached, coming to its surface. But hardly had I taken two steps when a warning voice called out.
"Halt."
It had been too easy, I knew. Underneath my cloak I rested a hand on my Grimoire, as the grove's edge rustled across the other side of the Font. Out came a fair-haired youth about my own age. From head to foot he was draped in long, white garments and he raised a gnarled, wooden cleric's staff from the thickets. The light illuminated his form like it would the through the long windows of a church.
He had an honest, solid, determined hero's face, nothing at all like mine. His eyes flashed, and his thick eyebrows narrowed at the sight of me.
"Who are you?" He said, and I thought, at the same time.
"I am the wizard Solamur the Mind, of Cyrkensia." My voice was not deep enough to produce the sonorous voice of an ancient wizard, but I tried my best. "Can a being in need of healing not come to seek it here?"
The cleric raised his staff.
"If you truly seek it, then I as the Font's Guardian can provide it." His staff glowed. "But it whispers that treachery is near, and I see none but you approaching." He walked towards me, stepping carefully around the flowers until he stood directly between me and the crystal blue Font. I sniggered.
"Perhaps you could consider places where your eye does not see," I said, "this is how things take people by surprise. Nobody thinks to look for them, and they lie unnoticed until they have grown powerful enough to come out of hiding."
I ungloved my left hand, where the sun shone on the veiny tracings that ran up my pale skin. He let out a gasp, but his fist tightened around the staff and his voice lowered into steel.
"You have been playing where Nature never intended humans to cross."
"And you are a saint, I suppose," I said, stretching my fingers out. "What do you understand? If everyone were like you, we would still be in the dark ages." I changed tack, a smirk lifting one corner of my lips. "So, does the merciful St Elimine teach you to treat all strangers thus?"
His eyebrows flew upwards and he gripped the staff with both hands, raising it across his shoulder as if ready to smote me down. The whites of his eyes flashed righteously, and I laughed. Oh, he was so easy to goad!
"Poor disciple." I wanted to provoke him more, when suddenly the air filled thick and that deep, rumbling voice filled my mind.
Eldrus, do it now! Destroy the Font!
Like a thunderclap, the worst headache I'd ever had split through my mind.
I left no time for the cleric to react. Narrowing my eyes, one arm resting the back of the Grimoire, my armour glowed deep blue as I called forth the incantation for my most destructive of my own spells: the Melodic Invocation of Lava. The air filled and heated, casting a smoky haze that made the whole forest turned dark as volcanic fumes billowed over the sky. It blocked the sun and clouds, the landscape shimmered and rippled with heat waves, and alarmed birds rose in their flocks. I was safe in my armour from the rising heat I felt from deep underground, shaking the earth from below us. It waited, the rumbling molten creature lurking in the Earth's core, for my orders. Through the smoke and fumes, another dim light appeared: I could just make out the cleric's golden sphere of protection he had cast around himself.
"No!" he seemed to mouth.
I held out my free arm, and, almost casually, pointed my fingers in the direction of the crystal-blue Font.
A torrent of lava burst out from the ground. All I could see was red and orange. It wove its way first up, high into the sky, then slowly, slowly, curved into a narrow arc, and plunged straight down into the hallowed pond. The ground shook again. Steam and mist filled the air, hissing mixed into the rumbling so loud that I thought my ears would burst. Then gradually, the cacophony quietened down.
From the tainted rubble of where the Font once lay, a dark opening yawned open. Two narrow red slits like glowing eyes appeared, and cackled.
I felt my own power suddenly surge – around me was now a clamouring choir of voices, some angelic, some demonic, and yet there was no one except the cleric and I. But I felt a jump of excitement as I realised where it was coming from.
The Realms – the other dimension where Aunt Forrest had grown up, where the Fell Grima wandered locked away from Nohr - I was hearing past the boundary that the Ley Lines had revealed to me. And Grima was right – it was overflowing with magic!
The cleric must have put everything he had into the protection spell, because I suddenly noticed he was on his knees. He said something too quiet to hear, but I have no doubt it was words of revenge. With what looked like the last of his effort, he used a Teleportation spell and disappeared. I was left alone with the Fell Grima.
Well done, Eldrus Runamere. You have ushered in a new age...my age.
Epilogue: Historian's hand-written note in the last blank page of Eldrus' journal
We know now that until the appearance of Solamur the Mind, no one in magical history had ever committed the taboo of laying a siege to a sacred Font of Power. Since its destruction, magic in all its forms, glorious and terrible, swept through the realm. The Fell Grima, of course, returned to our lands. Knowledge of magic's many natures and forms advanced in leaps rather than bounds. Elemental magicians, clerics and druids, as Eldrus correctly surmised, slowly fell into the shadows of their wizarding counterparts, who not only commanded the magical elements but harnessed its life blood into contraptions far more complex than catapults and ballistas, into things that seemed to have minds of their own. Experimentation with magic reached strange new forms as people demanded that the work of the wizards be brought out into all other spheres of life, outside from the closely-guarded towers and exclusive circles of the initiated wizards. Eldrus never lived to see the rise of his own kind, the wizards, spring out of a life of obscurity and into recognition. But who knows what his reaction might have been.
There are, of course, those who object to how this knowledge all came about. However, as Cyrkensia's humble historian, I believe that it is a matter best left to the philosopher.