Arcana Universalis: Terminus

by Chris J. Randolph

  Commencement

  The universe is vast. It’s so vast that the very concept of it–the sheer beastly immensity of it–thrashes at the fabric of reason itself, and to our mortal minds, it appears chaotic. Stars flare into existence while others perish, great stones hurtle through the empty dark only to crash into one another and be obliterated, and life pervades everywhere.

  All of this activity carries on seemingly without direction or purpose, but such appearances belie a strange truth: the veil of chaos conceals a subtle order which governs all things, a queer music that suffuses and binds, pulsing through the glittering stars and clouds of burning gas, over crystalline shores and fields of shifting sands, weaving all of creation into a single unbroken whole.

  There is harmony, though we lack ears to hear it. There is order, and in its intricate majesty, that order is divine. There is music among the spheres, and all the petty toils of men are but the transitory notes and cadence of its forever wandering melody.

  The song evolves and the gears of time churn ever onward, leaving a trail of aeons that stretch deep into the shadowed abyss of antiquity. Thus do we find ourselves now in the Fifth Epoch, called the Age of Hammer and Blade for the towering heights of its achievement and the bloody spectacle of its wars. It is the 1,106th year of his excellency, Emperor Spiritus LXX who sits upon the Throne of Thorns, and hallowed is his silent dominion over the many scattered stars.

  The Age of the Corruptor fast approaches and with it, The Lord of Shadows and Light. Legend tells us a Grim Legion will ride riot in his wake, plunging the kingdoms of men and beast into infernal war, but what may rise from those ashes simply cannot be known. At least, not yet…

  This is the chronicle of how one age ends and another begins, and it starts with a single naive boy. It begins the day he dies.

  Book I — First Fragment

  My dearest Lisbeth,

  It no doubt beggars belief, but during these long months of my travels among the stars, this is the first opportunity I’ve had to write. Much to my dismay, life aboard the Imperial Dragonslayer Ashkalon is endlessly tedious and taxing, and I find myself pressed into one mindless labour or another from the instant they rouse me in the morning to the moment I collapse at night.

  Nevertheless, the journey has been simply tremendous and I will no doubt cherish memories of it until the day I die, for though I’ve traversed only the barest sliver of the universe, I have borne witness to countless weird wonders beyond imagination. I have seen the raw essence of new stars coalesce and spark to burning life, and watched the luminous beam of a pulsar whirl about in a nebula’s roiling haze. I have climbed quartz mountains wreathed in living flame, and crossed miles-long bridges hewn of nothing but ice and prayer.

  Our vessel, the Ashkalon, isn’t at all as I once imagined she would be. I first spied her through a cramped porthole, and her three hulls appeared against the stars as a tremendous gleaming trident bound together by a wing like a scimitar’s blade. As she approached, I was amazed to discover her entire surface engraved with twisting motifs and arcane sigils, revealing her to be a potent artifact of most elaborate manufacture.

  Unlike most starships, the Ashkalon travels completely without the shimmering sails we’re so familiar with. I’ll spare you the gross technical details of her drive mechanism, but it’s enough to say that she is far swifter and more agile than any clipper to have ever made port back on Mydora.

  My quarters, which I share with another apprentice named Bibbs, are a simple stark chamber with two straw cots. Walls are featureless steel, and light comes from an oil lantern suspended from a hook. We’re quartered with the workmen a mere deck above the livestock pens, and were I not completely exhausted by day’s end, I would surely find it impossible to sleep amid the ceaseless braying of goats and squeal of pigs.

  Still, I mustn’t make too much of my hardships. This externship has proven invaluable, and I am thoroughly blessed by the opportunity to study under such masterful practitioners as the Ashkalon’s crew. Of particular note is the Physicist, Magus Henning Karst, whose immense skills of force manipulation are held in high regard throughout the Imperium. I’ve assisted him in steering the ship on occasion, and simply being in his company is both an honour and an inspiration. I would also mention Magus Delmarus, the ship’s Astrometer whose task it is to plot our course from one star system to the next. He seems to have taken quite a liking to me, and with a small measure of luck, he may just provide me with a letter of recommendation once my tour is complete.

  Only the ship’s Invictus, a man named Malcolm, has remained perfectly distant from me, but he’s a solitary sort and I doubt he calls anyone aboard the Ashkalon friend. He spends the bulk of his hours alone in his atrium and only rarely tours the ship’s halls, strutting about like a proud rooster. He’s a practitioner of frighteningly immense power and, as is so often the case, also most somber countenance. His complete isolation is evident and were he a lesser man, I might even pity him.

  Alas, it saddens me to think that my time aboard the Ashkalon is nearly complete. I will miss the vigour found within her halls, and the boundless adventure of wandering the limitless void as one of her crew. Yet, as I have sailed across this sea of stars, only one thought possessed me, and it was that of returning home to the lovely forests of Mydora and your tender embrace.

  We’re to rendezvous with the Mercy Ship Cladius at Humaira in two weeks, and that vessel shall carry me during the final week of my journey home.

  I count the days left until I return to you.

  With all my love,

  Caleb

  “So, what do you think?”

  “Well.” Bibbs stroked the stubble on his chin and eyed Caleb’s letter like some unfamiliar variety of snake. “It’s just… It’s a bit flowery, isn’t it?”

  Caleb nervously adjusted his spectacles. “I don’t… What do you mean exactly?”

  “Like here,” Bibbs said, waving his finger at a wide swath of the parchment. He kept a safe distance, careful not to let any of it rub off on his finger. “You wrote ‘mindless labour’ whereas I’d write, ‘shoveling pig shit.’”

  “That’s rather coarse,” Caleb said. “My Lisbeth’s a pressed flower. She ought to be handled with the utmost care.”

  Bibbs chortled. “Alright, alright. Precious, delicate little lily, surely. What about all the damn lying?”

  “What?”

  “The lies,” Bibbs said incredulously. “Bald faced lies. Old fashioned mendacity. Nine tenths of this thing is pig shit. I’d know; spent all yesterday shoveling the stuff.”

  “I may’ve stretched the truth a smidge…”

  Bibbs gave him a cold look. “Watched new stars spark to life, did we?”

  “The Ashkalon passed right through a stellar nursery…”

  “It did… while you and I were below decks shoveling pig shit,” Bibbs said. He shook his head in condemnation. “How about the part where you climbed a mountain bathed in living flame or what have you?”

  “Aye, we did that.”

  “Ah, but you conveniently skipped a few details, like our being half-blind in those ridiculous helmets, or being loaded down like bloody pack mules.”

  “Unimportant minutiae,” Caleb said.

  “Unimportant,” Bibbs mock agreed. He scanned further down the page. “And old Magus Karst allows you to steer the ship now, does he? Suppose you two have been sipping ale together while I’m asleep? Gabbing about girls and the latest fashions in facial hair?”

  “Minor exaggeration,” Caleb said with a grumble. After a moment of defeated silence, heavy with Bibbs’ growing judgment, Caleb added, “Look, I brought him tea once. Saw the inside of the impeller room while I wa
s there. Part of it, at least. The entryway. Sort of.”

  “I see.” By then, Bibbs’ disappointment had miraculously transformed into self-satisfaction. “And Magus Delmarus… how much of a liking has he taken to you exactly?”

  Caleb grew quiet as a dormouse. “He knows my name,” he said.

  Bibbs shrugged. “Guess that’s something. Look mate, you don’t have to try so damned hard.” He shuffled the papers idly while his eyes wandered over Caleb’s flowing cursive. “You love this girl, Lisbeth, right?”

  Caleb nodded.

  “And she loves you?”

  “Yes.” The word was simple and sincere.

  “Then you write, ‘Dear Lisbeth. Miss you terribly. Be home soon. Caleb.’”

  “That’s it?” Caleb asked.

  “That’s it. Though… I guess you could leave in the stuff about Malcolm. ‘Proud rooster’ puts a nice image to it.”

  Caleb smirked. “That’s the sanitized version. The rough draft said egotistical cock.”

  Bibbs squinted at him then exploded with laughter, his barrel chest rocking violently. He reached over and messed Caleb’s hair with his calloused hand. “Now that’s the Cabe I know, ya silly sod.”

  Caleb recoiled and began to fix his carefully composed imitation of messy hair. “Alright, I suppose I get your point,” he said. “Can I have my letter back now?”

  “This?” Bibbs asked, waving the pages in the air. “Sure,” he said. He motioned as if to hand it back, but then a small pulse of subtle energy–a minute crackle of multi-coloured light–skated along his hand, and the parchment burst into flames. With a wave of his fingers, the remaining ashes tumbled to the floor. “Oh,” Bibbs said, “sorry about that. Bloody unpredictable talent. You’re better off without it anyway.” He finished with a wink and a grin.

  Caleb groaned and shook it off. It’d taken him hours to compose that letter, and his bunkmate immolated it on a whim. The worst part–the part that truly stung–was just how utterly beyond him such a tiny parlour trick was.

  While attending academy, Caleb had done well enough with history and theory, but application had been a constant struggle. Where other boys managed to awaken their second sight after a few weeks in the echo chamber, it took Caleb more than six months guided by a gaggle of flustered elderly professors whose collective wisdom amounted to, “Just keep trying, lad. You’ll get it eventually.”

  From then on, he was always behind. Everyone else enrolled in applied studies where they learned to manipulate energies and bend the very fabric of the universe. In short order, they all became skillful practitioners and were shepherded into vocational schools appropriate to their talents, while Caleb continued to fumble, bumble and make a right mess of things. He just didn’t have the synaesthetic coordination needed to excel as a practitioner, and he eventually came to understand he never would.

  The few subjects he did well enough at–linguistics, geometry, theoretical metaphysics, energy dynamics–were the domain of research librarians. Thelosophers. He was doomed to spend the rest of his days stashed away in a musty Imperial archive, translating old texts or scribbling out equations, expanding the theory real practitioners relied on to do real work.

  Practitioners like his bunkmate, Alexander Bibbs, who proved to be an immense natural talent right from the start. The way Bibbs told the story, his second sight practically awakened itself, and he was so gifted at energy manipulation that graduate school accepted him a year early. And not just any grad school either, but the Elder Norn Academy on Kallistia, the most prestigious damned school in the bloody capital of the blasted Imperium.

  Bibbs had trained to become an Interfector, a slayer who wields destructive techniques in battle. With his talent and dedication, he’d no doubt be assigned to a respected ship like the Ashkalon, and perhaps even rise to the station of Invictus like Malcolm, conducting ship-to-ship combat as a living lightning rod for powers of almost unthinkable magnitude.

  To Caleb, it seemed an odd twist of fate that Bibbs and he should be quartered together, one a natural talent and the other inert as a pile of dust. It was a rather obnoxious twist made all the worse by the fact that Bibbs was such an outstanding fellow. Good humored, friendly, supportive. As usual, Caleb did his best to bury his jealousy beneath a few layers of self-loathing and snuff it out. As was also usual, his best wasn’t quite good enough.

  He was still deep in the less pleasant regions of his psyche when the call came. The blue-green jewel beside their door lit up; lights swirled inside and resolved into a peculiar face, angular and strangely featureless like a stone carving brought to life. It was the Ashkalon’s Synod, the synthetic persona who commanded the ship.

  Something about the Synod made Caleb’s skin crawl.

  “Apprentices Bibbs and Gedley,” it said in its chorus of voices, each as hollow as the next. “Your shift has come on the duty rotation. Report to the assembly hall for assignment.”

  There was nothing left to say. The last scrap of Caleb’s free time was gone in a puff of duty, and he imagined its ashes tumbling to the floor like the letter burnt just moments before.

  With harmonized groans, he and Bibbs got to their feet and straightened their clothes. They both wore the same uniform consisting of a simple white shirt and dark leather jerkin, loose trousers made of some coarse fabric, and a pair of buckled boots. The only difference was that Bibbs somehow made the ensemble look good, heroic even, while Caleb was so scrawny that his clothes looked as if they were still hanging on the rack.

  Caleb stepped to the door and cracked it open, and a wave of noise washed over him, thick with countless voices and the rhythmic clang of hammers. The smells of burning charcoal and hot steel scarcely concealed an undercurrent of animals and dung, touched here and there by sweat, ale, and roasting meats.

  The two apprentices stepped out into the torchlit hallway lined with black steel doors like their own, and followed it until it dumped them onto the Ashkalon’s main concourse.

  The concourse was a cavernous chamber, a road with an open level above it and a handful of thin walkways crossing the span, lit in imitation daylight by strips of faceted orange sunstones set into the vaulted ceiling. The place was a ramshackle village, a chaotic bazaar where the ship’s mundane workers–blacksmiths, carpenters, tailors and the like–went about their business. Most worked out of wooden stalls and booths, while the more successful among them rented recessed storefronts or the sumptuous suites on the second floor.

  Caleb and Bibbs cut through the shuffling crowd with practiced ease and made their way to the crossroads at the aft end. The wide chamber narrowed there and split into several service corridor, and traffic thinned enough for the two apprentices to jog the last few yards.

  They slipped through a pair of double-doors and once again found themselves in the Ashkalon’s austere assembly hall, a half-circle auditorium with row upon row of pews converging on a sunken stage. The hall served dozens of functions, from services venerating the Emperor (dreadfully boring things which Caleb attended just often enough to avoid suspicion), to duty briefings like the one currently being convened.

  It was a packed house. Mundane crewmen and apprentices with disgruntled expressions filled the bulk of the seats, while a group of adept practitioners in sharp formal robes constituted an island off in the far right wing. Conversations in hushed voices flowed everywhere, filling the hall with a churning murmur.

  Bibbs grabbed an empty seat and Caleb grumpily dropped down beside him. To his left was Kalman, an apprentice artifex who always seemed to be deep in thought and chewing on something. Noisily. Caleb briefly considered switching places with Bibbs until he noticed Salvador Rainer on the other side. Rainer was another interfector in training, but unlike Bibbs, he was an egotistical loud-mouth jackass. And those were his virtues.

  Kalman’s chewing had already begun, grind after gritty grind, punctuated occasionally by a brief suck at his front teeth which whistled tunelessly, the bloody Emperor forbid he miss a sc
rap of whatever it was.

  Meanwhile, Rainer was telling a story that the man on his right was struggling to ignore. “…and I blew the wretched thing’s head clean off,” he said, thoughtlessly jabbing some poor workman in the back with his elbow. “Didn’t skip a beat, either. Just BANG! And off it flew.”

  There would be no escape, and so Caleb resigned himself to enduring the obnoxious hell that was his life.

  He nudged Kalman. “Any idea what this is all about?”

  With a start, Kalman emerged from the deep fog of his concentration. “Oh, Gedley. Come again?”

  Caleb spun a lasso with his finger. “The meeting. What’s going on?”

  “Haven’t the faintest,” Kalman replied. When Caleb failed to immediately chase his question with another bit of intrigue, Kalman descended right back into his fog, grappling with whatever problem was troubling him and chewing on something that Caleb had begun to suspect didn’t even exist.

  After a few minutes, the sunstones dimmed and all the idle chatter died away. A green focus jewel the size of a man emerged from the stage floor, and the Ashkalon’s Synod took form within it. The luminous ghost floated as if in an aquarium, rhythmically waving on some unseen current and slowly pulsing with light.

  Its dead black eyes surveyed the room, and contented, it spoke. “In the name of Spiritus LXX, hallowed is his dominion, let this meeting come to order.

  “Our planned rendezvous at Humaira has been delayed indefinitely in order to investigate the disappearance of the Imperial Prospector Eurisko and her 32 crew. The Eurisko last made contact fifteen days ago while en route to the system designated Alendra 5742, our present location. Cursory efforts to locate the vessel have led us to the system’s second world, an uncharted planet known locally as Zayin.

  “While in orbit, we have observed five surface aberrations which could be the wreckage of the Eurisko. Ground teams will be shifted to the planet’s surface by means of the slip and will then proceed to search on foot, while the Ashkalon remains in orbit and continues to investigate from above.”