We looked down upon my master’s life’s work.
This valley, its environs, and its denizens should not be. Like so many other places on Uërth, the Greensward, its towns, its people, and its life should have been swallowed by the rampaging throngs of the Abyss spewing forth from the Chaos Gate ever since Heaven’s Fall.
But, remarkably, the Greensward had held.
Each hamlet glimmered like a jewel in the dim, cloud-obstructed light of midday.
And they truly were jewels.
Magical shields shone about the boundaries of each town, each one reinforced by the living creatures within, channeled between townships, and radiated outward into a zone of general protection, all thanks to Master Nomba’s artful manipulation of magic, Life, and Light.
His skill and vision had created a means to protect the valley and her people from the demons wreaking havoc elsewhere on Maeron.
Though the valley now appeared calm and settled, an idyllic scene from a world long lost, in reality we were looking upon the culmination of generations of his work battling the advance of Chaos with his great skill in the Art.
I was here not to mark an ending, but to help with a new beginning.
His magics now fully stable and self-restoring, Master Nomba had decided to venture out from the Greensward, extending his circle of arcane protection to any surviving settlements not suitably protected that he could find.
This was to be our last look home and our first look beyond.
I was scared senseless.
A Return
My memories of my teacher faded as I raised my head from the silent moment of remembrance.
Though filled with loss, my life was now full of so much more thanks to Master Nomba. He had seen something in me no one else had—promise.
It was this promise, and my promise to him, that would keep me moving forward even in the face of the loss of the man who had given me my life and my purpose.
Standing fully erect, I reshouldered my pack and carefully wended my way off the shattered rocks.
As I walked, I took an apprising view of my surroundings. The demonic warding Master Nomba and I had created, the one intended to prevent demonic access to the area’s unique energy flows, was still standing far below at the valley’s bottom.
All indications of the second series of wards, the ones eventually intended to branch outward to begin protecting the entire valley, were gone.
Just as there was no sign of Master Nomba or the demon.
Lucius, however, was waiting patiently for me, silently rising from the rocks as I made my way down toward the portion of the mountaintop that had not been shattered by my teacher’s last defensive magic.
By most measures, Lucius might be considered nondescript, a worn gray stone of irregular shape. One that was rather anonymous in his singular representation of the breed of common rock.
Except he floated.
And radiated power like a baking oven gave off heat.
From what I had observed thus far, his appearance seemed to change depending on how and why I looked at him.
Sometimes, as I peered at him, I could almost imagine a face examining me in return.
Most often, he was a simple, nondescript rock.
But if anyone actually cared to look more closely—and who would not want to examine a floating rock more closely?—they would see the true wonders of his unique form.
At these times, he was an aggregate of numerous mineral types, his very physical nature expressing a universal commonality across geologic species. He sported distinctive wavy banding patterns indicative of the pressures of metamorphic recrystallization, though he appeared to be of primarily igneous origination. Layers of sedimentary strata, perhaps, graced one of his faces, though that may have been an affectation.
His rough faces showed a past of significant adventure and activity, a legacy that left a long and storied history writ all over each of his uneven sides. This left his facets far from perfect but very close to interesting.
Although he was primarily shades of muted gray, iridescent mineraloids, jewel inclusions, and rare metals may have added minute sparks of color to his surfaces, but such details were hard to discern. Regardless of the source, his imperfect facets showed increasing detail and character upon closer examination.
On the whole, Lucius was a bit like a good book—interesting on the surface, but more and more engrossing with further study.
Pulling me from my reverie, Lucius spoke. “You should ward yourself, Maeraeth.” Lucius’s words were faint, like the stirrings of a spring breeze before a gentle rain.
The magic allowing me to understand him was fading.
This was a problem that was easily fixed.
I nodded.
Relaxing my mind, focusing on the intention and fulfillment of my incantation, I reached for the subtle traceries of Light imbuing the world around me and gently shaping them to my vision. I would understand Lucius clearly and completely. The magic I created would be the vehicle for this realization.
I cannot explain how magic feels, what it is like to wield the fundamental nature of the universe itself, other than to say that it, too, is an act of creation, the expression of the wizard’s formulation, of an inner world made real and alive.
With the final culmination and release of my spell, my desire to understand Lucius made clear, I was surprisingly drained, sapped of vitality and vigor.
I plopped down onto the rubble strewn at my feet.
Or, rather, I crunched.
I was a rock!
Like Lucius!
I floated upward, wobbly, my orbit far less stable than Lucius’s.
How on Uërth had I managed to do that?
Why had I done that?
“That is a good ward,” said Lucius.
And then I understood.
Or at least I understood Lucius.
The butterflies flying around me erratically seemed unimpressed.
Past the Valley
One look beyond the valley’s protective veil was enough to see exactly why every step I took forward was accompanied by tremors.
If ever a storm front had been birthed in the very deepest bowels of Hell, it was now massing against the wards of our valley. The roiling black clouds blazed with fiendish hellfire, indigo bolts of lightning, and livid gashes of nacreous green flames while vast, horrific shapes moved within.
I had never seen anything like it.
“M-master Nomba, s-shouldn’t we w-wait a bit and s-stay in the v-valley until the s-storm has passed?”
My teeth were chattering.
And it was not from the cold.
“Lad, this is the world we live in. We must be ready to face it.”
I was facing it.
And I wanted to turn away and face something else.
“B-but l-look at the P-Powers massing. S-surely we are n-needed to help p-protect the v-valley.”
Master Nomba merely smiled. “So long as people live within the valley, the Lights will maintain the shields protecting them from extradimensional influence.”
“B-but look at the g-gathered s-strength of our e-enemies! T-they are m-marshaling an a-attack! O-our d-defenses could fall!”
I was still stuttering.
Bravery, like warmth before the chill wind whipping over the ridge, was elusive.
Usually it was only my brain that stuttered, not my mouth. Master Nomba always insisted I was a very talented magician, but, like my halting words, I never could get out a spell exactly as I had intended.
“They will hold, Maeraeth. Other settlements may not be so lucky.”
He would not yield.
Neither would I.
At least not yet.
“S-should w-we not w-wait at l-least until the d-demon s-storm has p-passed?”
If an appeal to the good of others would not deter him, perhaps an appeal to reason would.
In our case, the appeal was for a very good reason—that of our survival.
<
br /> “You must be strong, Maeraeth. My wards protect us. The demons within that tempest will not know of our presence, nor will we draw their interest.”
I looked past Master Nomba’s tall, robed figure, a remnant from another age, one in which man’s magic had reached the highest glories imaginable, creating a world rivaling Heaven itself. Now all that was gone but for a few relics, like my master. Behind him, framing his bearded face as he looked supportively at me, the sickly bruised clouds shuddered and flashed with unholy violence.
Beneath those clouds, a bleak landscape riven of almost all life stretched into the distance, an inhospitable plain of desolation and despair.
Such was our future.
Elemental Nature
I could see and feel patterns and waves of energy and potential unlike anything I had experienced before.
The land and sky were writ with the very forces and arrangements of Creation. I could reach out and touch them. They were all around and within, universes of possibility made manifest through the eyes of an elemental.
I was stunned, at a loss for words.
There were no words.
“Come. We must go.”
Lucius had words.
Words of warning.
Lucius floated away from me, toward the cliff’s edge.
I did my best to follow, bouncing like a fledgling not yet ready to leave its nest.
Each tumble was marked by a resounding clack, crack, or click.
“Any juel’dara nearby will have sensed the release of mua’di, life-energy, and will come to drain it dry. We should not be here when the devourers arrive.”
He need not tell me twice.
The pace of my clacking, cracking, and clicking increased markedly.
While I clattered along, Lucius asked, “Where will your journey take you, Maeraeth of the guraem?”
And that was the question.
Where would my journey take me?
With Master Nomba gone, what was I to do?
I did not have his formidable skills.
I did not possess his incomparable knowledge.
I lacked his belief in his purpose and abilities.
Unlike him, I was unable to control or guide my talents.
I could not yet claim to be able to reliably replicate his ability to protect others from the spawn of Chaos, for if I could, my teacher would still be with me.
I did not even know the way home, much less where to go next.
I was adrift, cut off from my past and uncertain of my future.
Would staying here, trying to extend the warding we had created in the valley below, be worthwhile?
Could I continue our work without destroying my own protective wards, making me vulnerable to demonic attack at any time?
Could I begin our efforts anew without ruining the magics I would craft to protect the valley, undermining my efforts as I had just done to cause Master Nomba’s death?
My master’s fall answered this question.
At least for now.
Alternatively, would trying to go home, if I could find it, serve me any better than trying to find a future for myself?
If I did go home, would sitting safely behind the shield Master Nomba had built, polished, and reinforced over generations serve me any better than trying to go out and make a place for myself in the wider world?
Could I forsake Master Nomba’s vision, one he had been willing to give his life for, just to keep my own?
He had given his life for mine.
What would I give my life for?
What was my life worth?
Surely it was worth at least repayment in kind.
Ominous clouds rolled overhead, and the rocky, barren landscape lay below.
After being an Eden, a jewel in the arc of Heaven, Uërth was now but a pale, infected shadow of its former self.
The planet was barely fit for life.
Was this how it would remain now and into the future?
I took a deep breath—or I tried to take a deep breath, forgetting that I did not need to breathe, and set my imaginary shoulders, thinking of the burden life had put upon me, of the one I was preparing to bear.
I could, I would, give Master Nomba something, if not of equal worth, then something of equivalent intent.
I would be the vision he had not been able to achieve.
And that was the answer to Lucius’s question.
“We are going to help save the world.
“Whatever that requires, and wherever that takes us.”
Apparently Lucius liked that answer, for the rotation of his slow orbit increased markedly with my answer.
“We will go north to the heart of Chaos and see what help we can bring to the Empyrean Knights.”
Or what that help would have of us.
Or something to that effect.
We still had time to work out exactly what we would do.
But for now, it involved going north.
Which meant we had to cross the Dragon’s Teeth, all three billion of them.
And hope we did not get bitten.
A Rolling Stone Gathers No Dross
I made a better avalanche than an elemental.
While Lucius hovered deftly above the steep slope, gliding smoothly through the air down the first of many hillsides on our trip northward, I tumbled uncontrollably, the world a smeared, dizzying blur of alien sensation.
Although it was disorienting, I will say this: clattering headlong down the mountainside certainly got me to the bottom faster than walking.
Despite the racket and the jostling, my butterfly halo remained unperturbed.
The butterflies really deserved a better companion, someone more like a flower. I would need to see about giving them a nicer home as soon as we found a place with vegetation.
The land here, like most of the regions I had crossed since leaving the Greensward with Master Nomba, was decidedly not green. There was, in fact, very little that might ever have been green. Whatever remnants of vegetation I had come across resembled something more like a fossil than a plant.
Demonic entities could drain the life force from any living thing, plants included.
Some distance away, at the valley’s center, a nexus of power thrummed, its complex multidimensional arrangements far more apparent to my elemental eyes than they had been when I was working here with Master Nomba. Around this vortex, a perfect sphere of blinding iridescence radiated, self-reinforcing and self-sustaining.
This was the shield Master Nomba and I had managed to complete before his passage, to prevent demons from accessing the valley’s energetic anomaly. Without him, I would not be able to extend the shield’s protection to the entire valley to create an oasis for life to return in the future as we had intended.
At least not before an army of demons decided to show up to enjoy a nice meal of wizard snacks.
“You must be quieter, Maeraeth. If a rock with no ears can interpret your vibrations, then demons can as well.”
I gave Lucius a brief nod in reply, or what I thought was the elemental equivalent of one.
Whatever the gesture meant, Lucius seemed to accept my answer.
As Lucius floated away across the rocky, weatherworn landscape, I studied him with my elemental senses. Lucius was far more than the nondescript rock he appeared to be to human eyes.
He was like a star descended from the heavens, writ in arcane constellations.
I wanted a mirror to see what I looked like.
Times Past
I almost rolled into the ruins.
I had been so enraptured by my ongoing study of Lucius’s aura as we travelled that I had missed any potential indications of the relics’ presence as I trundled across the rocky valley between mountainous slopes.
I prayed the rubble only held old memories and not any demons.
I do not know how I missed the ruins on the way down to the valley bottom, except to say that there was little I could notice as I bounced down yet an
other slope.
But, as Master Nomba had often said, I had an almost infinite ability to surprise.
Even myself.
Or, as I translated, disappoint.
“You must cease your clattering. We are not alone.”
Great.
“Until now, you might have been mistaken for an errant stone or a wayward rock. No longer.”
High aspirations there, to be mistaken for a rock.
Even higher to remain unnoticed whatsoever.
“Should I change back?”
“Only if it will help you remain silent.”
So much for that.
“Perhaps you could show me how to fly.”
Lucius bobbed quizzically before answering. “Fly?
“This is not flight. I am gliding upon the mua’di and redirecting its currents as needed.”
Interesting.
And entirely unexpected.
I had been trying to lift myself upward, as if flight were an intrinsic ability of elementals. In reality, Lucius was manipulating energy just like a magician.
I could do that.
I could manipulate energy with the best of them.
Just watch.
This called for subtlety and skill, so, after studying how the magical currents moved and shifted around Lucius, I reached out gently to the energies I could now read so thoroughly and began to work.
I pulled the arcane forces inward, trying to envelop myself in a buoyant cloud of eldritch support.
I did, however, miss one critical factor.
Well, two critical factors, if I count my unerring ability to overestimate my abilities.
I did not fully recognize the different degree to which magic responded to my direction in elemental form.
A gathering of will, one used to manipulate energy on the most refined levels during normal spellcasting in my human form, had something of a different effect as an elemental.
Satisfied with my work, I completed my spell rather proud of my accomplishment, anticipating Lucius’s praise as I followed him silently on wings of air.
The imagined smile quickly faded as I rocketed to the heavens faster than a comet falls from the sky.
Legacy of the Blade: The Complete Trilogy Page 22