by P. R. Adams
“It’s terrible, but it doesn’t justify this. Could Meriscoya have lashed out and done this himself? I suppose. But it’s my belief that he’s too busy for such actions.”
“Busy doing what? What can be more important than destroying a place like this?”
“You heard Alush. Meriscoya has sought out greater power. Other power.”
“What does that mean? The Chaos Abyss? What other—?”
Quil whistled. He waved them over from maybe a quarter-mile away. The drone hovered beside him, sparkling a bright blue in the gloom.
Riyun hobbled down the steps. “Looks like they’ve found something interesting.”
The wizard matched his pace, jaw set hard. But partway to the pseudo and drone, her nose crinkled. Riyun smelled it a few seconds later, too: not fire-blasted flesh—rotting flesh.
And something more.
As they neared Quil, Javika approached from the west, a cloth covering her mouth and nose.
The pseudo looked uncomfortable. “You will want to see this, Lieutenant.”
There was unmistakable impatience in the assassin’s body language. Riyun had seen that enough to know she was upset about whatever she’d found. “Take us there.”
The drone actually took the lead, casting the ruins in its pale blue glow. “Never before seen, never to be seen again.”
Riyun was already missing the relative quiet they’d enjoyed after exiting the abyss. Alush had been transformed by what it had seen shortly after rising from those depths, but some of the fear—if a prophet-drone could know fear—had apparently started to fade.
Javika was waiting for them just beyond a wide intersection. She wrapped an arm around Riyun’s waist to help him along. “They did not leave here unscathed.”
“They? The dragons?”
But she didn’t have to answer. The smell that had hit even his sinuses since finding the black crater became almost overwhelming. She turned them down a side street that had been partially blocked by rubble piled particularly high, and the source of the odor became obvious: a dragon body.
This one was more than fifty feet long, closer in size to the one that had crashed into the quarry than to Niyalki, but it was still huge.
“Oh.” Riyun’s legs felt weak.
The thing had dug a trench with its impact, tearing up deep, dark soil littered with the charred remains of dense vegetation. There was among all the destroyed structures in the area a look of what might have been grace and serenity. Far off to his left, a huge shape—like a giant, ornate planter—had tumbled from somewhere up high to crack in half.
A garden. Tarlayn’s garden. Shattered and burned.
He turned his attention to the corpse. The top of the wedge-shaped head was gone—from snout to eyes. One of the wings was similarly disfigured.
Riyun pushed free from Javika and shot a glance at the prophet. “I thought you said they couldn’t be killed?”
Alush hummed as it breezed past. “Death as you understand it is not the end for such creatures. What you see here is but the shell of one of these beings. A very old one. Whatever caused this, was only possible due to the destruction of its power.”
“Yeah? One of my people tore a hole in the gut of one of these things, and another cut that hole wider. You want to tell me how that destroyed its power?”
The prophet hovered near the ruined head of the dragon. “It is a puzzle yet to be solved. Most likely, only the shell died.”
A puzzle. It sounded to Riyun more like refusing to accept what was right in front of them.
He circled the blasted monster, noting several wounds beyond just the head and wing. There were fist-sized holes on its flanks. Up close, he caught a whiff of whatever it was that went beyond the stench of rot: the smell that came just before the dragon-fire.
He squatted beside the right rear leg and poked at a wound that might run beneath the corpse.
Javika’s familiar stride caught his attention. She stared at the wound. “They have a vulnerability.”
Riyun rapped the scaled beast with the back of his glove. “A soft underbelly.”
“Soft to our weapons. Not to theirs.” She kicked the corpse. “Six more of them, four of them small. Two not much smaller than this.”
Seven dead dragons. Did that mean there were others with weapons like his?
As if sensing his question, Tarlayn scraped closer. “There were wizards here. They must have come to try to defend the Lyceum.”
That sounded convenient to Riyun. “Why would they come here? Why not fight the dragons earlier?”
“There was always the hope the dragons would break free of Meriscoya’s influence.”
“And everyone’s onboard now with the idea that they won’t, is that it?”
The older woman closed her eyes. “Inevitability. It is the acceptance of what we see before us. Even avatars can learn, assuming that is in our destiny.”
Riyun leaned against the corpse to stand. The rest of the team huddled around the high mound of debris at the entry to the gardens.
Naru shook her head. She seemed on the verge of tears.
Guilt? Shame? Did she somehow blame herself for what happened, for the bitterness in Tarlayn’s voice? He would have to talk to the young hacker. This had nothing to do with her.
But she would have to contend with those emotions alone for now.
There was no making sense of the city’s layout when it was in such a ruined state, so Riyun set aside any pretense of knowledge. “You said you would take us to the Lyceum. Now seems like a good time.”
The wizard’s lips pinched into a tight circle. “This way.”
She spun on a heel and stormed away.
Javika harrumphed. “Spry when she wishes to be.” She offered a hand, which Riyun wrapped around his waist.
He wasn’t sure what to expect in this Lyceum, but he hoped they might finally find some answers.
40
The devastation of Garelan quickly grew monotonous. Rain turned the ash to mud, worsening already slick and treacherous roads. Whole sections of walls lay across streets, forcing Riyun and his team to divert time and again. Lightning and thunder rolled in as they neared the Lyceum, flashes occasionally lighting the city despite the gray haze of the downpour. The lieutenant took pride in the way his team handled the challenges without complaint. They were cold, wet, and tired, yet they never said a word and never stopped.
Tarlayn’s staff splashed with each strike against the cracked flagstones. “Not far now.”
Riyun almost snorted at that. She had assured them twice before that they did not have much farther to go. After the first time, they ran into a pile of debris too high and unstable to pass through. That sent them back nearly a half-mile. The second time, the road they were on ended at a wide, water-filled crack in the ground. Somehow, the dragons could shatter the earth with their fire.
So they had reversed again, eventually passing through the grounds of temples and manors that must have once been a sight to behold. Now they were seared, blasted, and broken.
His foot slipped, and Quil rushed over to provide assistance. It was galling to be such a drain on everyone else, but Riyun accepted the help with a pinched smile and a thank you.
The pseudo didn’t seem to catch the frustration in his leader’s voice. In fact, Quil seemed excited.
That piqued Riyun’s curiosity. “Want to tell me what I should expect from this Lyceum?”
“There is no way to know.” Quil squinted into the rain. “However, if you are asking me to speculate—?”
“I’m asking you to speculate. In fact, maybe you and Naru could provide some answers.”
“Answers are most likely beyond our comfort zone.”
“I’m asking you to speculate, Quil. Remember?”
“Yes. That we can do.” The young man twisted around, and when he spotted Naru, he waved her over.
She came to them at a dangerous sprint and supported the opposite side of Riyun. “Did you hur
t yourself?”
Riyun couldn’t remember feeling so feeble. “I slipped. But I wanted to talk to the two of you.”
The young woman relaxed a little. “About this Lyceum? I was waiting for you to ask.”
“So, I shouldn’t know about it? Because all I know is what Tarlayn has said—it holds a lot of answers.”
“It should. In a lot of entertainment forms, it’s a university. In fantasy, it’s often the place where wizards go for training. There were something like three or four big games when I was a kid that had one.”
“A wizard school? Isn’t that just a little silly?”
A huge jag of lightning flashed somewhere ahead of them, revealing a partial wall that stood higher than any Riyun had seen since entering the city, higher even than most sections of the outer wall.
Emerald light pulsed at the end of Tarlayn’s staff, then stabilized brighter than any flashlight. She held the staff over her head. “There! I told you!” It sounded as if she might have tittered. Perhaps she had lost her own faith until that moment.
Naru adjusted her grip on Riyun’s belt. “It might be silly, but entertainment is always adjusted to what the audience wants. The most successful creators see what appeals to the consumer before the consumer even realizes that’s what they were looking for. Somewhere years ago, someone had the idea of combining ancient universities with the study of magic. I figure Beraga had to integrate the concept.”
That made the idea sound even sillier to Riyun. “So this place holds wizard books and things like that?”
“I guess. It really comes down to the kind of fantasy Total Rewrite was putting together.”
Quil nodded. “Based on what we have encountered so far, it would seem they draw from a mixture of older expectations and newer ones.”
There were rare times where Riyun hated being so far out of step with the people of the Inner and Outer Spheres. He had always assumed that the people of the Outer Sphere—arguably his people—had more in common with him than with those who exploited them. Hearing Naru and Quil talk about entertainment as if it stretched beyond the division between poor and wealthy, Onath and Tuos…
Riyun wasn’t sure if it was reassuring that such commonality existed, or if it was dismaying. He had always assumed that other Tuos felt the way he did, resenting their status as lesser.
But they embraced the entertainment—the stories—of those who looked down upon them.
Dismaying, he finally realized. There was no reassurance in it at all.
He sighed. “Explain it to me. Small words, to the point.”
The hacker frowned. “About the magic? I-I guess it comes down to the modernizing of legends?”
Quil screwed up his mouth. “Yes. That is probably the best way to describe it.”
“Because, in mythology and most of the stories that came from them, magic was more…implied. You didn’t really see wizards until it became a need in legend for someone to do things greater than a human could.”
The pseudo stole a glimpse of her face, then looked away. “There were witches and spirits and primordial forces, obviously. Supernatural monsters. Wizards are a refinement of those concepts.”
Refinement seemed an odd description to Riyun. “Mind explaining that? I thought a wizard was a witch?”
“Oh, no.” The pseudo seemed annoyed at the idea. “Witches were channels for the spirits and energies from supernatural beings. They made pacts and gave sacrifices in exchange for favors. It was all quite primitive, a means of bartering for power through a proxy.”
“And wizards are different?”
Naru shot a glance at Quil—she wanted to answer, and did, when he bowed his head. “Wizards are generally more structured. Going back to the earliest sources, they were a window into the mysteries.”
“The what?” Riyun thought for a moment that they might be pulling his leg. Mysteries?
“Stories about witches simply assume the witches have a connection to these powers. The first wizards in legend could at least explain how these powers operated. But more recently, creators have been focusing less on using wizards as fonts of knowledge and more as a practitioner of some sort of pseudoscience. Maybe they consumed chemicals, or perhaps they manipulated certain minerals, other times they memorized words of power.”
“Pseudoscience sounds about right.”
“Going back a long ways, entertainment has been focusing on defining these systems.”
Now Riyun knew they were playing with him. “Systems? What does that mean?”
“Well, wizard college.” The hacker dragged wet bangs from her eyes, annoyed. “My hair is ruined!”
“I’ll pay for another dye job.”
“Thanks. Anyway, your wizard has to actually spend time and energy learning magic. There’s structure and sacrifice. It’s not enough to just say they know it.”
Quil pointed at the wall as they passed through what must have been the Lyceum gate. “A creator must specify how these walls survived fire that destroyed thicker walls. The consumer expects details and delineation between capabilities. Just as the witch was transformed through retelling to become the wise wizard of old, now a wizard must undergo training that produces consistent and believable results with their vast array of magic. Some actually demand a real accounting of these concepts: detailed abilities.”
Riyun snorted. “Believable results? Accounting? We’re in a world where giant reptiles fly and spit fire that can knock things down.”
“And yet, even that has been explained within the framework of this world: magic.”
“So these creators are fine with absurd nonsense, so long as it can be explained with ‘magic,’ and the consumer accepts it?”
Quil nodded. “That is the unspoken contract, yes.”
They came to a stop at a wall that held an arch. A splintered and charred door hung loosely from heavy, black hinges. Beyond the door was a large room with broken furniture and stained tapestries. The floor was largely dry.
It hit Riyun almost immediately: The roof was intact. Mostly. They had shelter!
He smiled. “You know what? For just this moment, I’m fine with magic.”
Tarlayn led them beyond the room, where water trickled from cracks in the ceiling above. She took them to a smaller chamber that held an overturned banquet table that seemed mostly intact. Hirvok and Lonar flipped it upright and set their backpacks on top with satisfied grunts.
The wizard slowly circled the room, studying the ceiling through squinted eyes. “They must have made a stand here as well—within these walls.”
Riyun couldn’t see any indicators of battle in the room, nor had he seen anything in the outer room. But the structure seemed large. There could be whole sections filled with corpses for all he knew. The important thing was that sections of the building had survived.
He tested a wall with a firm push. “Can we stay here?”
“For now.” The old woman removed her cloak and hung it from a hook on the wall, ignoring the pitter-patter of draining water. “Our presence here will be detected before too long.”
“And they’ll come again?”
Hirvok pulled a chair upright and settled onto it. “Let them. It’ll take time. And a place with walls that don’t melt when that fire hits? We can make a stand here. How many buildings does this place have? Set up overlapping fields of fire, put some explosive surprises together? We’ve got Tawod’s backpack.”
Naru scowled. “We don’t have him.”
“Don’t need him, Neon. I know a little about explosives.”
Lonar tore a tapestry from the wall opposite the door and set his autocannon on the table, then carefully dried the weapon with the old material. “They had to have food in a place like this. Didn’t they?”
Tarlayn glared at the big man, then she seemed to realize how silly it was to worry over a tapestry. “There was a kitchen.”
“Food that’ll still be good? Smoked meat? Pickled vegetables? Honey? Dry grains? Beer?”
She nodded. “I will take you there.”
As hungry as Riyun was, he knew sleep was just as important. “What about a place to sleep?”
“The dormitory is on the western side of the compound, along with some of the workshops.” The wizard pointed to an exit on the left side of the room. She curled a corner of her lip at Lonar. “It’s connected to the kitchen.”
Riyun glanced at the exit. “Weapons? Would they have had anything here we could use?”
“The answers I mentioned—my hope is something survived that we can use. The one who trained me thought he knew more than anyone else about artifacts, and he did know a good deal.”
Javika smirked. “What good would a weapon be if it failed those who knew how to use it?”
“I—” The wizard sagged. “Not every wizard has the same capabilities.”
“Then what you seek here is not for us, but for you.” The Biwali warrior arched an eyebrow, challenging Riyun. She didn’t see value where he and Lonar saw it. For her, rest and food were just part of survival in the blasted lands.
But not everyone was as self-sufficient as she was, and Riyun didn’t believe in pushing the team unnecessarily. His body ached, and if there was even a slim chance of a hot bath to break the chill… “Let’s see the kitchen.”
That was enough to silence Javika, but she replaced Quil and Naru at Riyun’s side. And when Tarlayn escorted them to the eastern side of the room and out an exit that led through a series of mostly intact halls, the Biwali warrior took the opportunity to pull him to the rear and get into his ear.
“Staying here invites attack.”
Riyun tried to pull away from her but couldn’t. “You hear that? The way our steps echo? It’s a solid structure, even after attack. It survived the same attacks that blew down walls that could’ve stood up to artillery rounds.”
“I hear our steps. And I hear water trickling. And I feel cold from the wind. This place survived but was not left untouched. Another attack, and it falls.”
“We weren’t here when it happened. I think Hirvok’s right: We could hold this place.”
