The Zi'veyn

by Kim Wedlock

  "I found a way in," Garon said as he dragged himself from the water, darkening the sand. "The ruin is split in two and tilted, dropping into a chasm, but there are more than just air pockets."

  "But is it worth the trouble?"

  He looked calculatingly towards Anthis for a long moment before turning to Rathen and nodding. "It could be. Can you do anything about breathing?"

  "I can make an air bubble with barriers, enough to last five minutes."

  "That will be more than enough." The inquisitor turned back to the water and strode easily back in. "Do it and let's go."

  Rathen frowned after him, unconvinced, but did as he was told. He was in no mood to argue, and though it irked him dearly to agree with Anthis, the irritating young man had a point: while he doubted that going in would make any difference at all from studying the magic where he currently stood, there could be something in there to narrow their search.

  With a few quick gestures, soft flashes revealed the formation of otherwise invisible spheres around their mouths and noses, and a larger formed to encompass the few jugs and bags on the ground. Then he followed the inquisitor into the lake, keeping Aria close. Eyila followed readily, as did their luggage, and though Anthis and Petra didn't hesitate, neither dared to dive without taking and holding a very deep breath.

  Though that needless breath threatened to vacate their lungs immediately. The water was warm, but its depth was beyond astounding, descending at least twice its width and stretching on into blackness - and the further out they swam, the faster their uneasy pace became, as the unearthly feeling of being watched by something colossal, hiding just out of sight, crept ever higher along their spines.

  Mercifully, the ruins themselves were close to the surface, but just as the lake was deceptively deep, so too were the ruins expansive. This was far more than a mere shrine or pavilion; there were arches, pillars and platforms rising everywhere, and in its prime would surely have been a sight to behold. But at that moment, with his attention fixed on the vast stone dome ahead of them, Rathen only hoped that its walls were still strong enough to withstand the weight of the water.

  Garon dove deeper, leading them to an opening in the rock, a crack along its lower wall rather than any kind of doorway, and despite the thick, ominous blackness that skulked inside, they kicked through and after him with the greatest of haste. But they did not swim blind for long; a new light that didn't appear to be that of the sun struck weak shafts through the murkiness ahead, and the moment they were amongst them, Garon swam directly upwards and broke through the surface.

  With gasps and grunts of relief, they hauled themselves out behind him onto the fractured, sloping ground, clawing their way over the flagstones to the slightly more level flooring beyond it. The stones were faceted, dressed in worn mosaic detail which was barely discernible in the small fragments of light, though none but Anthis and Aria tried to pay them any attention. The others simply used them as finger holds before they sought their feet and tried to ring out their sodden clothes.

  Rather than resort to a spell, Rathen decided to enjoy the dampness, grateful for the first truly cooling relief he'd experienced since stepping into the desert, and looked around himself instead, conjuring a small light to aid what little floated within. And he quickly discovered, as his bounced back from thousands of glinting details, that the light piercing the water was of the sun. Rays trickling in through the broken ceiling were caught and reflected by tiny silver shards laid regularly into the encircling walls, mirrors surely once whole, and sent it dancing around the decaying room. And room it was; its ceiling was rounded but far from whole, merely one edge of the great dome, and the break in the wall ten paces to his right was black enough to hint at another expanse beyond, one without a crack in its roof.

  Chests, tables, bookcases and chairs, most of which were broken, were scattered about the immediate chamber where the ground was still mostly level, while any that had been standing in the sundered corner they'd entered from were drowned, stained and shattered, their contents - parchments, mostly - floating face-down in the water. There were more carvings lining the walls, but these, like those in the floor, were visible only for their shadows, and their once-sharp details were indecipherable.

  But the magic - the force that assaulted Rathen's senses more invasively than the scent of musty tomes, the chill of the water and the echo of every footstep and gasp of surprise - was so strong it crept into his very bones. The unnatural tranquillity of the place, the eerie beauty of the silver lights and their glittering reflections on the water, it was stronger and more alluring than he would ever have thought possible, even from a conscious spell.

  Concerned wrinkled his face, and behind him, Eyila wore the same disturbed expression.

  "What is this place?" Petra asked, looking around herself in awe. "More storage?"

  "Storage, praise, ritual," Anthis replied quietly as he soaked up the room with wide, childlike eyes. "Though given its location, it was probably only used by the most devoted to Feira..." He turned around, looking all over the walls and floor with a single sweeping, hungry gaze. "Beautiful..." Excitement gripped him. He darted towards the bags that had floated through the water behind them, snatched his satchel and raced off without another word to begin staring closely at carvings and rummaging through boxes. The others watched him in surprise, his abrupt enthusiasm only emphasising how out of sorts he had recently been. And though it had escalated through the desert, Rathen was acutely aware of just when it had began.

  But he forcibly ignored it and pushed aside his own fault and bitterness in favour of the task at hand. Opportunities to experiment with the loose magic were few and far between, and the very foundations of the spell he was expected to construct were beyond him. He had to get something from this place; with such a strong concentration of magic, all made up of spell chains which were so obvious now he knew to look for them, he simply couldn't let himself leave here clueless.

  He felt Garon's eyes upon him.

  "I've interacted with it," he said, answering the inquisitor's unspoken question, "now I have to affect it. So far, I have pushed it - which," he added quickly, glancing sharply towards the historian, though he was paying no attention whatsoever, "is no small feat - but in terms of this spell, it's little better than stirring water in a bucket. I made it move, but I didn't change it in any way."

  "So you need to 'change' water, in a sense?"

  He nodded.

  "Mix something in it," Aria chirped with a thoughtful frown. "That's the easiest way to change water. You don't need to make a fire and wait for it to boil, or wait for it to freeze."

  Rathen nodded again. "But you can't heat up magic, nor mix tea leaves into it. There's nothing quite like magic, and so the only thing that I can mix into it is more magic."

  "Your magic." Garon looked at him steadily. "And doing that, changing the magic, will help to create the spell?"

  Rathen's black eyebrows slowly knitted together, acutely aware of the expectations that weighted the end of his voice. "It will," he replied carefully. "Recreating the Zi'veyn has just been a distraction; I realised last night that if I have to make this spell from scratch, I can disregard a lot of what the elves may have tied into it. I can ignore speculation of affecting the heart or biochemistry and put circumventing it out of my mind; instead I can just shape a spell to affect the magic directly. Unfortunately that's also left me with the hardest target: elven magic, which I don't fully understand, and loose magic at that, with no kind of container to manipulate. A heart I could block, chemicals I could separate, but uncontained magic...there are no round about ways of dealing with it. It's direct or nothing. So," he looked around, as if searching for some visible sign of the magic, "if I can affect the magic, change it somehow, then that will help me put this spell together, even if all I have to do is contain it..."

  Petra frowned warily. "You don't sound too sure."

  "I'm not," he smiled meekly. "But it's the best I can offer righ
t now. And if this magic is responsible for mages losing control, or for late awakenings, then the magic itself has done that, somehow, spell chains or not. So surely that means it can go both ways..."

  "You sound uncertain again."

  He offered the inquisitor the same smile before wandering off into the chamber under his conjured ghostly light, but it was quickly pushed aside by the usual dubious yet resigned expression these ruins seemed to evoke. No one tried to stop him. Instead Aria simply skipped along behind him, staring all around herself in amazement as she went; Petra and Garon wandered around with their eyes open for anything that might have made its home there, and Eyila watched every single one of them very, very closely. But despite her people's expectations, she refused to simply stand still and play guard, so, with a few whispered words of promise to Aya'u, she indulged her own desire to see this precious shrine while keeping the others in her sight. And it was only partly in the hope that she could block out the haunting feeling that had been forming over the past few days, pushing its way ever further into the forefront of her mind the closer they had come to sacred Ut'hala.

  For nearing an hour, Rathen wandered with eyes unseeing as he probed the magic and attempted over and over again the few ideas he'd come up with since his previous night's realisation. But, as far as anyone observing him could see, he was making no progress at all.

  Petra and Garon had lit torches and split up to cover all five rooms of the dome - four around the edges and one at the centre - but they found no signs of creatures having sought refuge. There were floods, and one room was still quite full of sand, but they hid nothing malicious.

  Eyila, meanwhile, traced the edges of the stories in the stone, some familiar to her, some not, all while tracking the mage and the historian the closest of all from between the two rooms they wandered. She smiled to herself in curiosity as she observed their concentration. Rathen's spirit appeared to have left his body and was miles away in that same room, while Anthis was a stark contrast, enthusiastically present as he hurried this way and that, mumbling to himself and chuckling every now and then in excitement. Aria, too, seemed to be drawn to his energy, and had left her father's side to scamper around the room with him, asking him questions all the while which he seemed more than keen to answer, and he was clearly pleased for her company. Eyila had never seen him so lively...

  "Amazing," Anthis breathed to himself in his wonder. "All these pictographs..."

  "But it's not the same as the place in the wild lands?"

  "No--well, yes and no." His eyes were fixed rigidly to the stones he paced alongside as Aria trailed around after him. "This is a shrine to Feira built by pre-magic elves, but the devoted here were something else, as I thought." Aria jumped aside to save her toes as he took a sudden half-step back and made a quick note in his book. "But the stories here," he continued onwards, "are more intellectual; they've not been honeyed or simplified, they tell straight and clear the importance of Feira's nature - what it does for them and what they would lose without it."

  The child thought hard for a moment as he made another quick sketch. "Like water in the rivers? That if we didn't have them, or if we let them get really dirty, we wouldn't have anything to drink?"

  "Yes, though that's only a very small part of it. This, for example," he pointed to etchings a few feet to the left. "The balance animals bring to the world. The smallest insects eat the fungi that would smother and kill the plants. These plants are food for larger animals, animals that eat the fruits and carry the seeds to spread the forests. Those animals in turn are food for larger creatures who stop them from getting too numerous and over-grazing. And when the larger creatures die, their bodies feed the earth - the forests, the insects and the fungi - refuelling the cycle."

  "People eat animals - where do we fit in?"

  "We are among those larger creatures." Anthis and Aria spun around, surprised to find Eyila suddenly standing beside them and peering thoughtfully up at the walls. "As long as we don't take more than we need."

  "We do, though," he sighed regretfully, noticing something she was looking at and making another quick sketch. "The fat and wealthy eat more than their share, and plenty of that goes to waste. And the use of crypts and coffins mean we don't give our bodies back to the earth, either..."

  "What did the elves do with their dead?" She asked, her eyes just as transfixed to the carvings.

  "Initially, buried them straight in the earth, wrapped in a thin shroud for modesty. Once the spirit vacated it, there was no need to protect it. By burying them directly in the ground, their bodies were returned to nature."

  Eyila nodded. "The earthen tribes do the same, but the rest of us return our bodies to nature in other ways. We believe that our existence contributes wholly to nature. We live and tend to the worlds' gardens, be they of grass or sand, and when we die our bodies feed the earth and its creatures while our spirits ride the Winds to protect it from above until they reach the Frozen Gates."

  "The Frozen Gates?" Anthis frowned, sparing her a glance in his growing interest.

  "The Winds die at high-north and low-south, and there the spirits are ferried into the next plane. Just as spirits are born where the Winds are, at the centre of the seas."

  "So the wind carries life and death?" Aria pondered.

  "Of course," she smiled. "The wind carries seeds, clouds and rain, it moves the seasons, guides animals - but it can also bring famine. An unfavourable shift can mean death or starvation for both man and beast..." her voice hung as she took a curious pause, and Anthis looked towards her again in the hope that she would continue. "Aya'u is both delicacy and fury."

  "Aya'u," he mumbled to himself thoughtfully as he took several steps back from the wall and looked about the chamber as a whole. "What significance does this place have for your people? It was built by the elves for Feira, not for Aya'u."

  "But Aya'u has claimed this place all the same," she replied with an impish smile. "The deserts are Her domain, as are the stillest seas and the highest mountains. But we hear Her - the priestesses hear Her - clearest in this shrine. Perhaps it is the reason the elves built here. Aya'u is not Feira, She is younger than the old gods, but She is surely born of her, as Shiya, Degon and Uq'ua are."

  "The other tribes' gods?" Anthis considered her for a moment. "You don't speak of them with any distaste."

  She frowned. "Why would I? Because other tribes are at war? It is true that many have begun to feel that their gods are above the others, that their element is the most important, but not all of us are so blind. There are still a few who realise that all the elements are intertwined - heat, for example, makes water lighten and rise as mist to become clouds, which the wind then push towards where the water is needed. The clouds release their rain to the earth, encouraging it to grow the plants the animals eat, and the earth collects into lakes what the plants and animals don't drink so that it can rise as mist and clouds once more." She sighed and shook her head. "Too many have forgotten this. And for people as ancient as the elves to have appreciated it, I can only wonder how much longer it will be valued before it is finally overlooked by all. Rain won't cease to fall, just as the winds won't cease to blow...but what will happen when no one holds a respect for the natural forces of the world anymore?"

  She looked decisively towards Anthis, who stared openly at her in fascination. "Aya'u does not make the winds blow," she said firmly, "but She embodies its spirit and it will move to Her desires. Our priestesses care for Her, we encourage Her, and we ensure that there is always someone who will recognise Her importance. Hopefully, through our actions, the rest of the world will never have to discover the answer to that question."

  She looked back up across the walls with a grave edge to her eyes. "This place needs to be restored." And with that she turned and walked away.

  Anthis said nothing after her. He wouldn't have even had she remained. He'd frozen up and felt his cheeks burning in embarrassment, and his eyes quickly flicked away from her in an atte
mpt to collect himself. Though as he turned away as nonchalantly as he could, he found Aria peering up at him with a very pensive look upon her young, sun-kissed face.

  "You've been acting very strange lately," she told him slowly after a moment, then wandered off after Eyila, leaving him feeling even smaller.

  "Have you made any progress?"

  Startled, Rathen spun around to find the tribal girl suddenly beside him and Aria skipping along behind her. There was a severe look upon her face and he felt the weight of her demands press upon his shoulders, along with those of everyone else.

  He sighed hesitantly. "I've been retracing my steps," he informed her. "I've tried a few things here that I have elsewhere and it's all worked; there's nothing different to this magic but its concentration. Unfortunately," he hesitated again, knowing Garon was listening closely despite standing several paces away, his back turned to him while Petra paced nearby, "it's been almost two weeks since I last had the opportunity to try this, so it's taken a bit of time just to...get back where I was...and I'm not really sure where to go from here..."

  "Mix your magic into it," she reminded him. "You can, can't you?"

  "Well, somehow, probably," he replied quickly, feeling the pressure of her gaze, "but I don't honestly have any idea how..."

  She stared at him for a long moment, and he shifted under her scrutiny.

  "My understanding of your culture is limited," she said suddenly, startling him again, "but from what I've been told of your mages, you see your magic as a tool - as something you own, something no other has a right to."

  "Well, in the sense that no one else can use my magic, I suppose they don't have any 'right' to it - but as for it being a tool..." he considered his next words carefully, but she took his lingering silence as completion.