The following morning, Tenebres returned to the Grand Central Repository of Knowledge of the Arcanis Order of Correntry, or, as he and the rest of the group had promptly started calling it, “the library”–a habit shared by the majority of Correntry’s residents, including most of the Arcanis members. Allana, looking bleary, reluctantly followed after him, casting distrustful looks around the shadowy, shelf-lined room.
Windows were few and far between in the library, with cleverly positioned walls and decorations keeping the light from reaching most of the books, making the stacks a maze of disorienting and misleading shadows. Lights came from several Arcanis mages who, like Tenebres, insisted on getting an early start to their studies, browsing the library’s shelves with small, dim glowstones. Once they found the volumes they needed, the scholars would return with their materials to one of the more well-lit study rooms that studded the periphery of the large central hall.
“She’s with me,” Tenebres explained to the doorkeeper. The young wraith had spent enough time in the library over the past weeks that he didn’t need to present the Arcanis credentials he had been provided, and the large, dour-faced woman waved them both through.
“So why exactly did I have to come with you?” Allana asked, her voice a mutter. “I just had some questions, you didn’t need to drag me in here.”
Tenebres rolled his eyes. “A little time in the library won’t hurt you, Lana.”
“You don’t know that. And it’s such a nice morning!”
The group’s time in Correntry had lasted through the rest of the summer, and they were now deep into the fall. In the heartlands, that meant a surge of activity, as communities geared up for both the last harvests and the ensuing monsters that spawned more frequently in winter. In Correntry, the pleasant chill in the air had brought a liveliness to the streets, as merchants stepped up their efforts to make a profit before winter stifled trade and everyone began to look forward to the end of year celebrations.
“You’re asking me to look into obscure magic for you, Lana. That’s going to require days, if not weeks, of research. The least you can do is humor me. I have something I want to show you.”
Allana huffed, Tenebres smirked, and they proceeded deeper into the library, to a grand set of stairs at the far end of the yawning building.
The Repository of the Arcanis Order was a large, two story rectangular building, with the central library taking up a square portion in the center of the building’s ground floor. On the ground floor, the wings to each side held two large study rooms a piece. Designed to comfortably hold thirty working scholars each, the rooms were generally used for independent studying, but classes were held in them occasionally as well.
The second story was open air in the center, with a mezzanine looking down on the library floor below. On that floor, the wings contained private workrooms, small but comfortably appointed chambers built with clever artificing to dampen all sound going in or out. To the right, the chambers were reserved for established, permanent members of the Arcanis Order, but Tenebres led Allana to the left.
“The vast majority of the Arcanis Orders members are like me, what they call guest scholars,” Tenebres explained to Allana while they walked. “We pay a fee to the Order to make use of their facilities, but we don’t hold the same organizational benefits and voting rights in the group that established members have.”
“Fascinating,” Allana said dryly. “So are they all casters like you?”
“Mostly,” Tenebres replied. “Mage gifts are required for Order membership, but very few are battle-gifted. Most are scribes, scholars, or professional tradespeople that joined the Order for its political benefits in the city. A large number of Professional, Artisan, and Artist gifted all pay for facility access like I do, too–there’s larger workrooms in the basement levels for them.”
Allana didn’t need to ask why Tenebres hadn’t rented one of those instead. With his share of the reward from killing Hellesa and ending the Flax Road attacks, he no doubt could’ve afforded one of the larger basement workrooms, but it wasn’t much of a mystery why he wouldn’t want to spend that much time underground.
Instead, he finally led them down a hall and into the small chamber he had rented for himself. It was a single room, a little larger than Allana’s whole apartment back in Emeston. A few glowstones dotted the walls, but they were dimmed for the moment, with light instead coming through the gauzy curtains pulled in front of a slightly cracked window, which allowed a trickle of cool autumn air into the chamber.
Half the room was dominated by a large desk, which had several scribbled pages still laid out on top of it, where Tenebres had left them when Cadence and Allana had come calling the night before. Above the desk was a small shelf half-filled with a few haphazardly stacked volumes of some obscure magical encyclopedia.
“The Umbral Lexicon…” she read off one spine. “Didn’t Olivia have one of those?”
“She had the abridged, collected edition,” Tenebres said. “Very heavily edited down. That’s the full Volume II, and the most recent printing, too. Considering everything going on, I wanted to study up on Chained World outsiders.”
“I thought you were here to practice your evocations?”
Tenebres shrugged. “I did plenty of that, too,” he said, somewhat defensively. As if to refute the point, his gift’s experience floated across his vision.
[Gift of the Evoker]
Level: Novice
Experience: 68%
“The extra studying is just a side project,” he lied. “If we’re going to go up against more hags, I want to know what we’re getting into.”
Allana gave him a speculative look. Tenebres winced. He never could lie to her, and it had only gotten that much harder since the gift of the trickster had given her a charm boon. “What are you hiding, Seo?” she asked softly.
Tenebres sighed. He should’ve known better. “Well… Okay, that was why I picked up that volume. Just some light reading to get ready.”
Allana’s eyes flicked to heavy-bound tome. Her pointer finger couldn’t have reached from the bottom of the book’s spine to its top.
“But I found this reference in there to something called a ‘void hag.’”
Allana drew in a sharp breath and looked back at the book, the alarm obvious in her eyes.
Ever since Tenebres had received the gift of the void in what amounted to a magical accident, he had puzzled over its origins. Kellen’s books, where they described it, were so mired in philosophy and symbolism to be all but useless. They had told him the Void was a force of darkness and chaos, but that told him little more than he already knew. Allana knew how important that question was to him, and could take a good guess at how distracted it would make him.
“Seriously? What did it say?” she asked.
Tenebres shook his head, a familiar frustration rising up in his voice. “Nothing, really. A couple vague allusions to void hags being the worst hex of the breed, and likely the most powerful outsiders of the Chained World.”
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“But?”
“But nothing. That’s it. Not even a description of one, much less an accounting of their abilities or origins.”
Allana frowned. She knew he wasn’t voicing something–but she also knew better than to ask for more details.
“It’s complicated,” Tenebres told her with a hand wave, not wanting to share his current theory. “It doesn’t matter today, though.”
“Okaaay…” Allana stretched out the word speculatively. “Let me know if you need anything, alright?”
“Always.”
Allana looked around, clearly searching for a new topic, and her eyes fell on the workstation that took up the other half of the room. “So what’s that?”
Tenebres’s eyes lit up, and he went over to the table eagerly. “This is my newest training exercise,” he explained.
When Tenebres had first come to Arcanis Order to discuss his need to gain experience for his gift of the evoker, they had eagerly offered their help (for a price), providing him not only some volumes on the principles of force and energy conversion, which were the foundation of evocation, but an assortment of exercises meant to sharpen his focus and understanding of the equations involved.
The first few exercises, which included forcing water up a slope and juggling without moving his hands, Tenebres had mastered easily enough, producing much of the experience he had gained so far, but this exercise had proven much more difficult.
He picked up the wooden mallet on the table and handed it to Allana. “Hit the disc,” he told her.
Taking up no small amount of the work table was a disc of simple burnished copper, suspended from a small framework. Allana looked from the disc to Tenebres, who gestured for her to go ahead.
With a shrug, the girl swung the mallet at the disc, and a loud, percussive noise filled the room. It echoed loudly from the disc, which seemed to vibrate from the impact, while its own weight kept it from swinging more than an inch or so in place.
The noise was startling enough that Allana dropped the mallet, falling into a combat-ready crouch and reaching for one of her daggers, before she noticed that Tenebres hadn’t moved–aside from placing his hands over his ears.
It took a full ten count before the noise finally faded away. “What in the Rogue’s name was that?” Allana asked, once she could.
“They call it a copper clang,” Tenebres explained. “Believe it or not, it’s not even magical–just clever artistry.”
“But what’s the point of it?”
“Watch.” Tenebres picked the mallet up and turned toward the clang. He lifted the mallet, ready to swing, but froze, closing his eyes and focusing. Equations and principles floated through his head. The idea was simple enough–a conversion of sonic to kinetic energy, dampening the sound waves by increasing the force of the strike.
It took Tenebres a few minutes of concentration to line up the forces involved. It wasn’t really a spell, not like his typical ones. Those were designed for his level and mystic pool, converting the magic in his soul into energy–kinetic force that shed excess light and sound, forming the projectiles he generally used to fight with. This was an order of magnitude more complex, without a clearly defined structure to use, and he’d be an Initiate before the principles involved would be useful to his spellcasting–but knowledge was knowledge, and if he could master this trick, it would go a long way towards getting him to Apprentice level.
Finally, Tenebres felt as ready as could be. He swung the mallet as hard as he could, and this time, Allana was the one covering her ears. But it proved unnecessary. The noise was loud, of course, but it was the metallic thud of hitting a secured piece of metal with a hammer. The clang went flying on its suspension, raising more than 90 degrees before falling back down, but it didn’t make the loud, continual vibrating noise that Allana’s hit had caused.
The wraith girl raised her eyebrows as she lowered her hands. “Okay so… Yeah, I still don’t get it.”
Tenebres smiled. “Sound is nothing more than another expression of force,” he explained.
“What?”
“It's complicated. Suffice to say that what we think of as sound can be manipulated the same way as force. Actual sonic magic is beyond Novice level, but the principles are still the same. The clang’s design turns force applied to it into sonic vibrations, which is why it moves so little when you hit it.”
“But it moved farther when you hit it,” Allana said, “and made less noise. You changed the sound into more energy.”
“Exactly.”
“But what’s the point? It took you like five minutes to do it, and it only kind of worked.”
Tenebres simply shrugged. “It’s hard. But if I can pull it off, it’ll get me closer to Apprentice. It might even get me over the line.”
Allana frowned, but nodded. “And your other gift?”
[Gift of the Void]
Level: Novice
Experience: 78%
Tenebres shrugged again. “Calling on imps to attack things is normal enough for me when we’re in the field. It’ll get there.” That was the opposite of a concern to Tenebres–if anything, the gift of the void gained experience too fast, for how little he used it, as if it wanted to grow stronger as quickly as it could. “Okay, so let’s get to what you actually came here for.”
Allana blinked. “Right, right. Okay, so yesterday…”
#
Tenebres darted a look at his books thoughtfully as Allana finished her story. “You’re being hunted?”
“Not important right now.”
“I kind of beg to differ.”
The girl rolled her bright violet eyes. “It’s fine, Seo. Whoever the guy was, he might be hot shit in Correntry, but he can’t keep up with me.”
Tenebres narrowed his eyes. He couldn’t shake the feeling the girl was hiding something–but he wasn’t quite as good as Allana at picking up on lies, and he couldn’t guess what.
“Okay, so this… whoever it was, the guy who helped you. Are you sure it was a guy?”
Allana shrugged. “Given our allies, I’m never sure about that stuff anymore. But the voice seemed masculine enough.”
“Okay so the person who helped you. You’re sure they were under a veil, like the kind you used to make?”
Allana shook her head. “It was similar, but better. We were standing on an open rooftop in broad daylight and I still couldn’t see anything. They weren’t just concealed, they were invisible.”
Tenebres thought carefully about that. Admittedly, that did sound different than Allana’s old gift of stealth–but she had only gotten her ensouled gift to Apprentice before it was transmuted. It could be a higher leveled version of the same gift, or it could be something else entirely.
“Doesn’t sound like any magic I’ve ever heard of,” Tenebres admitted. Maybe sorcery? The summoning arts were rare, and their secrets ill-defined to those without their gift. That could be it.
“I’ll look into it,” he promised. “But it could take me a few days. You’ve got to promise to lay low until then.”
Allana made a sour face.
“Go hang out with Cadence or something,” Tenebres suggested. “I’m sure she can keep you busy.”
Allana’s face quickly changed to one of lazy satisfaction–one much more familiar to Tenebres, and the same she had worn for most of the morning before Tenebres dragged her to the library. “Mmm, you’re right on that front.”
Tenebres rolled his eyes. At some point, he had expected himself to get jealous of the time Allana was spending with the celestial, but that hadn’t happened. After all, their time together hadn’t changed his relationship with Allana–if anything, it had only made it stronger.
“I know,” he told her. “So go have fun, and leave me to look into this for a few days. I’ll let you know as soon as I find anything, okay?”
