4 The Mage

CHAPTER THREE

He was a young Mage. Though he was lacking in experience, a wealth of knowledge lay behind eyes that plumbed depths most people wanted kept hidden. Currently, his gaze was focused on the old pockmarked, wrinkled jawed face of the man sitting across from him. Sitting in the common room, hunched over a roast of rabbit, greens, and potatoes, was the only other person in the room: a man who would occasionally look up from his platter to direct quizzical glances there way.

            “Another like you some years ago came. He wanted to know too, but instead came back from the forest with a foolish tale of his own,” the older man said, cackling an imitation of laughter. The Mage gave an encouraging smile, inviting him to continue as he ordered another round for his newfound friend.

            “It began with the storm,” he continued. “Though some say it began earlier, with the Lady.”

His voice softened and his eyes lost focus and jowls slackened even more. There was something winsome in voice, almost childlike, when he continued. “I saw her that day. She was beautiful.”

The tavern maid came over and replaced their empty pints. The Mage had not touched his. He had given it to the other man after he had quaffed his first. They were not the only ones sitting in the common room of the tavern. There was another man who sat over a side of roast rabbit and occasionally cast quizzical glances their way.

            “And the child?”

            The older man shrugged, taking a deep draught from his cup. “It was only at a distance, but there was a swaddling. It’s said he’s the fey spirit that haunts these parts. Few have ever seen him, though.”

            “And what of this hunter?”

            “He came, much as you, asking after things best kept secret. He found more than he wanted. Just as you will. It’s best not to go rousing things best left to their rest.” The graybeards stare was straight and true, unflinching.

            “From what I’ve heard, and what you’ve said, it is a thing roused long before my coming. Just tell me what I need to know, and I’ll be gone.”

            He measured this young, fresh-faced Mage, resenting his youth and his confidence, but hopeful that someone had finally come to investigate. It was long past time the School had taken notice, but he would have hoped for someone with a bit more leg of years on him. “It lies deep in the forest . . . whatever you seek.”

            That was all he would get from the man. He left coin for their pints and got up to take the stairs to his room.

He rose to the cold crisp light of morning banded through shuttered windows. The fire had burned away in the night leaving only ash, but he took little notice of the cold. Training and discipline made it of little note. He took his relief in the chamber pot, had a cold wash from the basin by the door, and clothed himself in dark somber colors except for the quilted cloak of brightly colored patches clasped at the neck with an intricately worked broach of silver and brass. Most believed his cloak forfeit to vanity and whimsy. There was some truth to that, but not the whole of it.

            Departing the tavern he headed toward the forest with its ancient trees whose branches and leaves formed a canopy through which light fell to dapple the ground. No one knew how far the forest extended for no one had ever dared to explore its breadth. What was known was that it was blocked by the harsh climes of rising mountains to the east and the plains to west and north. Its southwestern expanse was unknown except by the Dine and they would not discuss its reach.

As he moved through the forest, he sensed traces of power, long dissipated, but still potent. The contour of power’s dissipation was circular and its hub was somewhere up ahead. However, the sweep of destruction was intermittent. Like gaps made by the spokes of a wagon wheel there were wide swaths where trees were bent and broken, and swaths where the trees grew tall and green and the earth was fertile and ripe, and then another swath of destruction.

            Following the edge of one of the swaths he came to an area where ash and scorched trees blanketed the ground. He reached across the line separating unblemished forest from desecrated earth to touch a charred, splintered treetop. He had his finger sliced open for his trouble. He stopped the flow of blood and quickened the mending of flesh to aid the healing process.

He was unfamiliar with such manifestations of power, and he wondered what force of mind could have wrought such a pattern of ruin on the earth. Thought manipulated adamant and ephemera. Adamant was of earth and fire, and ephemera was of mind, light, and water. Here was a strong manifestation of adamant. Normally, an individual was stronger in one or the other, but the strength and power to do the things he witnessed was unfathomable.

Moving deeper, the residue of power grew stronger, and the devastation began to collapse until everything around him was burnt ash. Each step delivered a puff of dust.

The dust clogged his nose and covered his clothes in a layer of soot. He took careful measure to avoid the splintered stumps as he stepped over shattered tree trunks and broken branches. Then, slowly, the blasted landscape began to change, to become overrun by clinging vines, moss climbing the face of burnt trees, shoots pushing up from beneath gray ash until the charred landscape became green and verdant once again. Soon the very air shimmered, danced, as if light itself were alive. He recognized the effects of power not properly focused, the result of a mind not properly trained. Some effects of power’s lingering he was able to dissipate so that that energy could never be used consciously or unconsciously, though some were too well fixed to be so lightly harnessed and he did not have the time to expend on their dissolution. Moving even farther into the devastation, his head began to throb and his eyes to tear. The pain was incessant, numbing as he continued, but he ignored it, did not focus on it. He needed to be sharp, focused.

He paused when he came to the ring of fallen trees. He could not decide if ephemera or adamant had been employed to fell them. Beyond the ring of fallen trees were a cluster of tall slender elms and a clearing beyond that. Taking a deep breath, he continued.

When he stepped into the clearing, the pressure on his mind ceased, but he was witness to a new wonder. A slash like the iris of cat floated just above the ground. It was dark at the center, and at its edges glowed brighter than the day. It loomed over him seductive, hypnotic, a cold subtle breeze flowed around him into the dark abyss as if the thing were drawing breath, and with that breath drew heat and life from the world. He could even feel it drawing his ki. He let it, but when his ki touched that gaping maw, his consciousness, his very being was shot through with a million fractured prisms of thought and feeling. He staggered from the contact, almost falling forward into the iris. In that brief touch he had sensed a confusion of emotions, as well as other mysteries his mind could not encompass. Swaying there as if drunken, he realized he had wondered dangerously close to the slit in the air. Severing the link, he moved from the dangerous lure of that gaping hole to inspect its breadth.

It was a good thirty spans wide with colors rippling across its shimmering edge brighter than the eye could look upon directly. He skirted that edge and came to the back of the thing. From behind all looked normal. He could look to the far side and see the ring of tress surrounding the clearing. He wondered what would happen if he were to walk through and come out the other side that transected the gap floating in the air. He doubted that it would be anything pleasant.

He turned his attention to the small cottage he had seen upon entering the glade. It was overgrown by weeds and vines, its roof collapsed, and its walls bowed outward and sagging. The door had fallen in with only a rotting leather hinge attaching it to the bottom of the jamb. Wards, lines of force and will, ringed the cottage protecting it against trespass. The seals were strong but whoever had placed them had little skill. Poe severed the connections to the cottage and the lattice of force that walled the house collapsed.

When he crossed the threshold of the door, his feet were the first to touch that untrammeled floor in a long while. Leaves and dust had collected in the corners of the room, and cobwebs spanned the legs of an overturned chair and roughly made table. Against the far wall was a small bed, and beneath the tattered, moth-eaten cover was a thin, desiccated body. From the long hair and delicate bone structure, he guessed it to be a woman.

            He stood there a moment studying the room before a prick of sensation at the nape of his neck drew his attention from the body on the bed. Something was coming, moving swiftly toward the cottage. He thought it best not to be caught within when it arrived.

Stepping outside the air was thick and oppressive from resonant ki charged with the weight of tangled emotions: rage, resentment, doubt, and worry. He strengthened his own protective wards as the prickling became a near unendurable itch.

Then the itching ceased.

That was his only warning before he was captured in a grip that forced the air from his lungs, constricted the blood in his veins, and pressed him so that his tendons and ligaments were stretched from bone and joint. He needed to quickly repel the force pressing upon him before it popped him like a grape. Using the roil of emotions around him, he traced them back to the mind that wielded power with such desperate intent.

He locked with that mind and the shock of the melding nearly caused the other to release him. In that brief contact, the Mage glimpsed limitless reserves of power before the other recovered and his grip stiffened.

The Mage realized he could not match the other’s raw power. The attempt would be foolhardy. Instead, he absorbed the other’s ki, his ability to manifest power, until he felt it spilling from his mouth, his nose, his ears. When he could take no more, he flung those stolen energies back upon his attacker and was able to breathe again.

            In the lull, the Mage searched the area for sign of his attacker and found a blur of light and coil of shadow twisting and shifting, merging and retreating until a boy stood where there had once been nothing. Beneath the grime covering that slim, naked body marked by the sun and elements muscles writhed and tightened as the boy tried to master his own power turned against him. This was the woman’s son. There were the same arched cheekbones, the same raven hair.

The Mage directed another probing, prodding thought at the boy, touching his mind, invading his thoughts. The contact intensified the boy’s fury until it became a white-hot magma of power. The Mage recognized rage was the trigger and a lens through which the boy channeled his power.

Earth erupted beneath him, and he was sent spinning end over end catching glimpses of the blue of heaven and brown of earth in his tumble. He bruised his shoulder when he slammed into the ground. Pain, sharp and blinding, shot from his shoulder to his neck paralyzing his left arm. Then another lens of thought caught and flung him through the air once again like a rag doll. Landing battered and wearied he slid across the ground until came to rest against a tree. Luckily his momentum had slowed enough that bone was not shattered when he hit. Panting for breath, cloak covering him like a brightly covered shroud, he collected his thoughts and vanished. He moved quickly from the spot where he had come to rest. The boy could not touch what he could not find.

            Earth began erupting form craters as dirt cascaded into the air. Around him winds howled, ripping deep rooted trees from the earth to send them smashing into others snapping them at their base. Shafts of splintered wood shot through the air from the deafening, concussive impact that could be felt to the bone. He had to ward those splintered shafts, some more than a man height long, and set deep shafts of thought into the earth so as not to be caught up in the maelstrom of winds.

The boy had power in abundance, but no skill, bludgeoning might, but no craft. Holding the illusion tight around him, the Mage readied himself while the boy focused on rage and ruin as he tried to flush him from hiding.

Fastening the cloak to his neck was the curiously designed broach. It was a black gem set in gold with eight elliptical bands, also of gold, encircling the jewel. Through the sharp pain that shot up his neck, he was just able to work feeling back into his left arm. He grasped the broach with that hand and thrust his splayed-finger right hand toward the boy and began making hand signs as he had been instructed by one of the Brethren. Each motion was accompanied by a word in a language he did not know. On the eighth pass of his hand, he unfastened the cloak. Snapping and billowing from the rushing currents of air, it floated aloft by the power of sorcery. Wrapped in the same illusion that concealed the Mage, he directed the cloak toward the boy. Keeping himself and the cloak concealed was a strain, if he had had to levitate it as well, he doubted he could have accomplished all three.

His plan required deft precision and timing. He would only have an instant because when he dropped the illusion on the cloak he would be exposed also. He hoped that moment would be long enough.

When the cloak was positioned above the boy, he released the illusion and let the cloak fall. His shields were instantly breached, shattered into shards of light, but the final, killing blow, did not come. The boy was distracted by the cloak which held him wrapped him tight in a smothering embrace.

            The youth strained against the fabric, pushing and tearing at the cloth with hands and mind. With his remaining strength, the Mage unhinged the moorings that kept mind and body bound as one and sent his consciousness into the boy’s mind and his limp, unprotected body fell to the ground. It was a dangerous gambit, but there was little resistance from the boy who had no mental shields to ward just such an attack.

The Mage plunged into the heart of that mind, its chaos, its power and found a keen intellect and understanding, but little knowledge. Here was a will of indomitable might, malleable and impressionable, but also a yearning and loneliness pitiable in its need.

Buffeted by the turbulent currents of the boy’s emotions and threatened by the undertow of the boy’s raw power, he was at risk of being pulled beneath those churning swells of force. As the Mage delved the boy’s mind, the youth was initially unaware of the Mage’s intrusion so focused was he on struggling to free himself from the suffocating hold of the cloak. When he became aware, the Mage felt the boy’s mental scream, his clenched-teeth fury, his seething frustration. However, before the boy could turn his focus to the invading presence, the Mage touched the pain centers of his brain, causing the boy excruciating agony.

            The boy spasmed, lips stretched wide, teeth grinding together, neck straining to release the scream trapped in his throat. He flailed about unable to shut out the pain. Drool rolled down the sides of lips and chin while pieces of the tattered cloak still clung to his body. Falling to his knees, he grasped at his skull as if to peel back the scalp and rip the intruder from his mind.

It had been a mistake to let rage consume him in a rush of vengeance when he had sensed the other invading his home. This one was different from the others and would require different methods. But first he must deal with the pain. Remembering the lessons of his mother—pain only reminded him that he was alive—he blocked the appeals of the flesh and began to focus his concentration inward, turning it toward the invading presence, and the forces, chaotic like the heart of a thunderstorm surrounding the Mage, became ordered and measured as the boy searched for him like a hound questing after a scent.

The Mage plunged deeper into the multiple layers of consciousness that comprised the boy’s mind. The boy followed, trying to fashion crude barriers to trap and crush the Mage. Some of those attempts the Mage turned away with a brush of thought while others required more attention. But with each failure the boy adapted and learned. 

Finally, the Mage came upon that for which he searched: the source from which the boy’s power flowed. He sensed it as a white-hot magma of force that would consume him if he tried to touch it. There was no hope to set seals on the boy’s power and he nearly gave up in that moment. But there were other levels of consciousness, far more dangerous and more open—he hoped—to his manipulation. So, he plunged even deeper into the wellspring of thought and volition.

It was near the limits of strength and crossing into despair when he discovered that for which he searched. In each mind, in each consciousness, there was a dark area, a shadow through which flowed secret desires and forgotten memories, things dark and disturbing that we hide from ourselves. A Mage was taught to master those emotions and desires, to control them so that they could not be used to create fears beyond all proportion. In this boy, being so young, what should have been a miasma of unformed layers flowing one into the other out of the dark hole of the unconscious, which only become more hardened and differentiated with age so as to blunt those unconscious desires and emotions, was only a small dark point before the greater glare of consciousness surrounding it. It was as if the boy had access to the full spectrum of conscious thought and perception. This was more the mind of a fully trained Mage, but unlike a fully trained Mage there were no wards on that dark place.

What was trapped within that dark place the Mage did not know, nor did he care. It could be remembrance of pain or loss, joy or sorrow, or a deed or horror to shatter the mind. He had heard of such. Though he did not want such a consequence, he had no choice as he reached toward the taint like a salvation for a drowning man.

Touching that darkness, he threw open the gates and the beast came rushing forth, freed from its chains. Here was rapacious hunger, here was indiscriminate rage unbound and unchecked. A dark spirit that would leave no room for anything as it rushed from its place of captivity to consume the light once denied to it. This dreadful, foul spirit was not what he had expected, and he ran before that shadow as it swelled filling the spaces of the youth’s mind and his body.

The boy was racked with agony from the shadow’s onslaught, and the Mage threw himself from the boy’s mind, barely escaping capture by the dark ravenous spirit that hungered after his ki.

The Mage returned to his body with a physical jolt and picked himself up from the earth. Some distance away the boy writhed on the ground, arms flaying about, mouth stretched wide showing teeth, screaming. He fought the shadow that rippled beneath flesh twisting muscle and sinew as if to reconfigure the boy’s body into a form better suited to its desire, but the boy would not relinquish control and the two indomitable wills battled for ownership of that body.

The Mage ran, then, knowing that no matter the victor he did not want to be there when the battle was done. He stumbled once but did not look back. There were unknown manifestations of mind and power for which he had no answer or knowledge. However, having sounded the depths of the boy, his mettle, his pain, the Mage believed there was something salvageable here—if the boy survived the struggle taking place within him--but he would need all of the School turned to this struggle.

And as he fled, the boy’s scream of rage and despair followed him and even after he could hear it no more it lingered, a haunting wail he would hear all the days of his life.