The time mage smiled. “You hold onto to it for now.”
Elias exchanged a glance with Teah and then set out after Rasen as he picked his way through the sycamore trees. He led them out of the grove and across the central balcony of the upper keep that led to Rasen’s study—the central chamber that Elias had come to know so well in his time on the isle. Once in the study, Rasen cast open an oaken door bound in cast iron bands.
Elias did a double take. “I don’t remember that door being there.”
Rasen shot him a sly smile. “That’s because it was hidden from your eyes.”
The time mage led them up a spiraling staircase which deposited them atop the central tower of the keep. Elias stepped onto the roof. this was the very ground where he had faced off against Mordum when he was slipping through time. Wind rustled through his hair, and again Elias thought it odd that he never felt wind on the isle before today.
“I’ve never seen a form quite like this,” said Teah. “It contains scripts and symbols the likes of which I’ve never encountered.”
“It is a dedicated spell for binding powerful magic.”
Rasen cast a glance over his shoulder. “Or for unbinding it. Elias, lay the Grimoire upon the nexus of the spellform. Open it to the three-hundred and thirty-third page.”
Elias complied without uttering a word. As he set the Grimoire down he felt a surge of power race through the spellform as he closed the circuit of the spell. Golden light poured from the arcane tome. Elias spared the artifact a final look before turning his back on it.
When Elias turned around he saw a golden, doorway-shaped portal standing beyond the perimeter of the spell-circle. “Teah’s passage home,” Rasen said.
Elias approached the Enkilder, whose eyes were fastened on him. His legs carried him to her, but, as if snared in the depths of a surreal dream, he couldn’t feel them. He had grown fond of Teah during his arduous ordeal, and he was loathe to say goodbye to her for he knew well in his heart that he would never see her again.
She must have seen something written in the lines of his face for her delicate eyebrows drew down over troubled eyes. “Come, Wayfarer, let’s go save my daughter.”
“I’m not coming with you to see Nyla,” he said, and when he did something cracked in his heart.
Teah blinked. “You promised you would save her.”
Elias took both of her hands in his own. “And so I will. Give me the soul-knife.”
Teah held his hands for several beats as she searched his eyes. She pulled away from him and drew the obsidian blade from her belt and handed it to him.
Elias took the soul-knife and laid it on the floor of the tower. He drew his sword, the distinct ringing of the enchanted steel the only sound in the quiet gloom of the Wandering Isle. He rested the point of his sword against the soul-knife and summoned his power. The runes on his forearm burned as he drew on his connection to his sword; in kind, the like runes etched into the base of his blade glowed and a blue-white light poured from them.
He felt a pressure in the soul-knife, the gravity of the potent energy it had absorbed—the very light of Nyla’s spirit. With his arcane sight he saw her life-force bound to the enchanted obsidian, which he perceived as a crackling green nimbus. He called to Nyla’s essence and willed it to take up portage in his sword. Calling upon the native power of his blade he also absorbed the magical energy that empowered the fell, dedicated spell bound to the soul-knife and broke the enchantment, destroying its hold over Nyla’s spirit.
With gritted teeth Elias wrestled with the amalgam of arcane forces and mastered them, freeing Nyla’s spirit from entrapment within the cursed soul-knife. The obsidian dagger crumbled to dust.
Teah’s eyes went wide. “Elias! What have you done?”
Elias sheathed his sword. “I have destroyed the soul-knife, but in the process I have bound Nyla’s spirit to a new, temporary host—my sword.”
Teah shook her head. “By what spell could you do such a thing?”
“My father taught me that magic isn’t all incantation and geometry,” Elias replied. “I’ve a few bits of my own Arcanum, you know.”
“I thought of you as an apt pupil, but it seems that you have been my teacher in some things.”
Elias reached into the pocket of his duster and pulled out the fist-sized seed that he had recovered from Atya’s ashes and pressed it into one of her hands. “Give this to Nyla for me. I think she would have wanted it.”
Teah cocked her head. “Elias, you can give it to her yourself.”
“Teah,” said Elias, “it is time for us to say goodbye.”
Teah looked up at Elias. Tears shone in her eyes. “But you’ll come. You’ll come with me, Wayfarer. You’ll come back and save Nyla.”
“No,” said Elias, “I cannot. He held her by the shoulders. “My mere presence will disturb your timeline further. It is fragile, and I’ve already destabilized it enough. I dare not risk it.”
Elias pulled his arms back. He loosened his sword belt and took it from off his shoulders. He ran his right hand loosely over the scabbard. He held it out to her in hands that betrayed him by trembling, if but slightly. “Here, take it.”
Teah shook her head, momentarily dumfounded. “No, Elias. I can’t, you’ve only just taken it back.”
“You know how to use it,” Elias said. “You can restore her with it.”
“It’s your father’s sword.”
“And if he was here he’d tell me it was just a sword. Measured against life it is but a small thing.” Elias’s expression turned wry. “I’ve come to rely on that blade far too much in any case. It is not the source of my power. I am the last time mage, don’t you know.”
Teah embraced him, the sword pressed between them. She whispered against his ear, so that he alone would hear her words. “You’ve helped us find our fire again, and that is a lesson we shall not squander. I won’t forget you, not for a single day.”
Teah took the sword, and then was gone, vanishing into the portal in a burst of golden light.
Elias swallowed and turned to Rasen who said, “Time can be rewritten, as you know. You may yet cross paths with her again, somewhen.”
“Mordum is gone. It’s over.”
“I know.” Rasen stepped out of the spell-circle. “And yet something troubles you.”
“When I defeated Mordum once and for all something changed, in my mind. I can remember everything that happened now—the memories that I lost when I was thrust from my original timeline and the memories from the other timelines I glimpsed during my whiteouts.
“It’s like there’s a hidden doorway in my mind that has unlocked. It seems that I can open and close it at will now, so to speak. Rasen, what does this mean? How is such a thing possible?”
Rasen gave Elias a knowing smile. “No longer are you a creature bound to a single time stream, as you have traveled across the timelines. The boundaries of your mind have been expanded, in a manner of speaking.”
“What does this mean for me?”
“New opportunities, and the potential to access new and deeper Arcanum. As your gift progresses just be sure to remember what ends you serve. Power and possibility blinded the time mages, let it not blind you as well.”
“And what of you Rasen?”
The time mage shrugged. “This place is not needed anymore. It has served its purpose.”
All the seemingly disparate signs suddenly made sense to Elias: Rasen’s peculiar manner, the strange wind, the hidden door, and why he had named Elias the last time mage. “You mean to destroy this place, and yourself.”
Rasen looked past Elias and into the pulsating door of golden light. A wistful smile lit his face. “It is high time that I moved on.”
“They are waiting for you, those that you left behind. Your wife, and your child.”
Rasen cocked his head and shot Elias a quizzical look. “I never told you of them.”
“No,” said Elias, “but you told me that your order f
orbid the taking of spouses or the fathering children. I saw the look on your face when you said that. It was the same expression you had when I spoke about my own father. It told me everything.”
“Even after nine-hundred years, mankind still manages to surprise me. It is because of you, Elias, that my long watch is at last at an end. Yet there is one more thing I must ask of you.”
Elias flexed his hands, knowing Rasen’s mind. “Let’s destroy this book once and for all.”
At either pole of the spellform platinum disks were situated that touched upon the perimeter of the outer circle. Rasen stood upon one, and Elias upon the other. The master of time magic and his student both raised their hands palms-up toward the sky and chanted the litany of unbinding in unison.
Elias poured all his will and all his magic into the spellform. Silver light sprang up from the sigils and drew around the circle like a curtain. Rasen had done the same and in the center of the spellform, amidst the intersection of lines and scripts of the time mages, their magic joined.
The Grimoire Infinitum shot into the air. A golden beam of light arrowed from its open pages and speared the sky. The platinum alloy of the spellform likewise turned golden, as did the light that poured from it. The spellform melted into molten ore.
Ripples of golden light emanated from the spell-circle like shockwaves. They lifted Elias from his feet as if he were an iron filing caught in a magnetic tow. The keep rumbled. Mortar turned to dust.
Rasen glided toward the pillar of golden light, which had become dense like liquid fire. He waved his hand and Elias was drawn toward the portal that had taken Teah back to Illedium. “For good, or for ill, you are all that remains of our legacy, of our art, kopta. The last time mage. Good-bye, Elias.”
“Good-bye, Rasen.”
The time mage bowed his head and Elias was pulled into the time gate. He blinked against the surge of golden light. When he opened his eyes he was back at Lucerne, standing in Bryn’s apartments.
To a man the Sentinels stood where he had left them as if not a second had passed since he had gone.
Elias Duana felt no shame at the quaver in his voice when he said, “I’m home.”
Epilogue
For Once and For All
Elias studied the cast-iron and gold wrought seal.
At its core was the infinity blossom bound by the spell of sealing that Rasen had taught him. The gold anchored the time wards and the iron anchored wards that would repel any magic born of Agia.
Outside of the central spell-circle Elias had drawn all of the dedicated wards he had learned from the Grimoire and those his father had taught him. Even now memories were still returning to him from his father’s lessons, which he had interred deep in Elias’s slumbering mind.
To say that he had been changed by his sojourn through time was something of an understatement. Ogden and Phinneas had concocted a series of tests to ensure that he had not suffered any ill effects from wrestling the entropic energies of time magic, which he endured without complaint.
For his part, Elias felt at peace. As he had told Rasen, a doorway had opened in his mind, and with it he experienced a reconnection with the spark of the arcane that dwelt within him. Building upon the lessons of his father and Teah, Elias had taken to entering the meditative state of the void twice daily to harness his focus and strengthen his connection with the tapestry.
In one such exercise he imagined that there was a strongbox secreted away in his consciousness, not unlike Rasen’s Infinity Chest. Into the strongbox he stored the volatile scripts and spellforms of time magic that he had learned. He found that the exercise had worked well for him and the Temporal Arcanum that he had amassed slept in the deep of his mind like a half recalled dream that lost much of its significance and meaning upon waking.
In the weeks since returning to Lucerne his thoughts were often drawn to Teah and Nyla. He hoped that Teah had restored Nyla to the world. In his heart he knew that she had, but he still lost sleep over it, and he wished with a longing ardor that he could have seen the girl that had dragged him from the ruins of Peidra and to salvation again, if only once more.
He stole as many moments with Bryn as he could, and he cherished each one. Every time he saw her cobalt-eyed gaze peering at him, into him, he thought of all the times he had thought that he would never see her again. He wanted to crush her against him and never let go. And yet he did not.
As the queen had told him, it was complicated.
Eithne had taken him into her private sitting rooms. “It is no secret that my cousin loves you,” she had said. “She was as grief stricken as Danica when you disappeared and seldom left your sister’s side.”
“That having been said,” the queen had continued, “she is a princess of the realm, and my heir, until such a time as I mother a child. While I have titled you and given you lands, you are not a high lord, and the gentry will not take it well if I allow you to wed my successor. I have spurned much tradition in recent months, and I dare not push the tolerance of the court further at this time. Since she’s come of age Bryn’s hand has been a much sought after prize for suitors from all corners of Agia. A union with Bryn is tantamount to becoming a prince of Galacia.”
“I understand, Your Grace,” Elias had responded. What else could he say?
Eithne’s features softened. “Elias, we are alone. Call me Eithne. And don’t look so dejected. Give it some time. Let the gentry become comfortable with having you at Lucerne permanently. You are First Marshal and a titled member of my court. In time, and after I take a husband and bear an heir, the climate may be right for you to make a proposal to Bryn, should that be your wish.”
It was a bitter-sweet fate, but, as Elias often reminded himself, it was a far better one than suffering an eternity in exile, separated from all the ones he loved by the vast chasm of time.
A knock sounded at the door, snapping Elias from his reverie.
“Come,” he said as he turned his eyes from the seal.
The door opened from the royal hallway into Bryn’s former breakfast room, which now served as his study. Elias smiled warmly at the page. “Seven Winters. Have you come for more stories, or for a trip to the stables, perhaps?”
Seven stood tall and knuckled a fist to his heart. “Not this time, First Marshal. I come bearing an official message, from the queen herself.”
Elias sat up. The runes on his forearm warmed. They hadn’t done that since he had given his sword to Teah. “What is it?”
“There is someone here to see you,” said Seven. His eyes went wide, and Elias could see that the lad was brimming with excitement despite his best efforts. “I think you had better come with me.”
Elias grabbed his duster. “Lead the way.”
Seven took him on a straight course to the throne room. As they crossed from the royal wing to the main thoroughfare that connected the throne room, great hall, and council chambers they met with a breathless Lar.
“Word came to me in the barracks,” said Lar around a gasp for air. “All Lucerne Sentinels summoned to the throne room.”
Elias laid a reassuring hand on Lar’s shoulder. “Catch your breath. We may well need our wits about us.”
“That’s your department, not mine,” said Lar.
“Oh, I don’t know. More than one man has told me that you were a brilliant First Marshal.” Elias’s expression turned wry. “That, and the men trust you.”
“Twice Marshal Fletcher saved the palace, single-handedly,” said Seven, who still veritably twitched with anticipation. “They say he even fought like you.”
Lar eyed his oldest friend. “They trust you too, Elias. More than you can know.”
Elias nodded. “They also fear me.”
Lar shrugged. “Thin line between fear and respect at times. Men become nervous around all these arcane mysteries. It changes a person. Still, the people of Peidra love you well.”
Elias looked at Lar with new eyes. “I’m not the only one who has changed in th
e last year, old friend.”
Lar drew himself up and wiped at his brow with a handkerchief. “Well, you’re not the only one with a magic sword, don’t you know.”
“At times I feel that we are playing at being leaders of men with all this Marshal business,” said Elias. “But until someone pulls the carpet out from under us, you’ll always be my second in command.
“You ready?”
“Let’s do this,” replied Lar. “Lead on, Seven.”
Seven was only too happy to comply. He set off down the hallway on legs that wanted to run, though he wrestled his ardor down to halting trot. Elias and Lar exchanged a glance and burst out in ill concealed laughter. By the One God’s beard, thought Elias, it felt good to laugh again.
Elias nodded to the two Whiteshields who stood guard at the doors leading to the throne room. Without ceremony they cast the doors open and then knuckled fists to their hearts.
Elias felt the charged silence in the air as soon as he entered the throne room. All of the Lucerne Sentinels were present—Danica, Ogden, Phinneas, Blackwell, Josua Antares, Bryn, and the queen. Though his eyes paused a beat on Bryn, the others escaped all but his most cursory of attentions, as his eyes were drawn like magnets to the woman standing in the center of the room.
She had hair like spun gold, which seemed to glow like liquid fire under the focused sunbeams cast from the skylight. It was pulled back from her brow by two ornate braids. Her skin bore the unmarred cream of youth, yet her emerald eyes contained an ageless depth. She stood tall and straight and wore a child’s smile.
“You have a caller,” said Eithne. “She was very contrite when she said daren’t give us her name, but told us that she was an emissary from another land both far and away. She said that she could only speak to you, First Marshal Duana.”
“Do you not recognize me?” asked the elfin woman.
“You’ve not changed that much, Nyla,” Elias replied.
A gleeful, sprite’s laugh escaped Nyla’s lips and the two friends rushed together and fell into each other’s arms.
Elias pulled back and held her at arm’s-length. “How did you come here?”
Wayfarer (The Empyrean Chronicle) Page 47