Into The Ruins

by Blink, Bob

  Into The Ruins

  The Continuation of Ancient Magic

  Bob Blink

  Major Characters

  Three Kingdoms Characters

  Rigo's Close Friends

  Kaler: Swordsman

  Daria: Assassin{KalaBhoot}

  Ash'urn: Scholar

  Jeen: Wizard

  Branid Royalty

  Rhory: King

  Mos'pera: Queen and Seer

  Miscellaneous Wizards from the Outpost

  Burke

  Daim

  Diny

  Kirl

  Lorl

  Orna

  Nycoh

  Shara

  Tara

  Sedfair Characters

  Royalty

  Rosul: Queen

  Kall: King and consort to Rosul

  Miscellaneous Characters

  Mitty: Woman who guides Rigo in Sedfair

  Fen: Young student Caster

  Lyes: Senior student at Guild's Caster University

  Sedfair Characters (Continued)

  Guild Members

  Carif: Saltique [Head of Guild]

  Mande: Close friend of Carif and skilled Caster

  Members of the Eight

  Bonn

  Ensay

  Delril

  Juli

  Kimm

  Rynm

  Shym

  Yathi

  Miscellaneous Guild Casters

  Ardra

  Ferkle

  Kirin

  Suline

  Chapter 1

  Northwestern Sedfair

  Fen scrambled up the rocky incline as he struggled to reach the plateau that would mark the last hurdle before he had to make the steep climb up to the black stone outcropping he sought. The surface here was loose and treacherous, with chipped and cracked debris from the soft stone that liberally covered the surface of the underlying rock resulting in a climb that was slippery and difficult. The danger wasn’t great, as the worst that could happen was to slide backwards shedding some skin from the knees and hands and the need to regain the hard earned progress up the mountain that had been lost. There were no sharp cliffs or dangerous drop-offs as would be found in the mountains more to the south of Slipi, the small village where Fen lived.

  Today he was climbing alone. The task ahead of him was something that he didn’t wish to share with anyone else. His accidental discovery was his alone and what he intended to attempt today was something that would not be looked upon with approval, and represented a Casting far beyond what he should be capable of. He had studied and prepared for this day, and was confident he would be able to carry it off, but he didn’t want any witnesses to tattle on him, however it turned out. If all went as he hoped, he would return with a valuable piece of multi-colored rainbow power quartz. If he could extract his find intact, he would have a nugget larger than his two cupped hands, which would be worth more than his family’s normal income for a full season.

  Having reached his thirteenth summer, Fen was learning the importance of wealth. Many of the things he wished for were beyond the reach of his family’s limited funds. Luxuries had to be saved and planned for, and very few were approved by his mother, who, like the women of all families, controlled and oversaw the health and prosperity of the household and the distribution of the money they earned. She alone decided the direction of their business, and made all the important decisions. That was the way it should be. Everyone accepted that men were not suited to such decisions, and their inputs into such matters were never sought by the women who married them. That was the way of things and had been for all of recorded history. It was not that their spouses did not love or respect the men they married. It was simply an acceptance of the way of nature. Women had always carried the responsibility for the future destiny of the family.

  This was something that Fen struggled to accept. He thought he was smart enough to be able to plan his own life. In that, he was out of step with the established and accepted manner of things. But, being a boy, he knew that the future would not normally allow the path he desired. Only the fact he was different than most was there a glimmer of a chance for his life to be more. Most of his friends looked forward to being like their fathers when they grew up. They would hope to be chosen by a strong woman who had the ability to provide well for her family.

  Fen’s own father helped his mother with labor intensive chores related to the family business in addition to his duties as a member of the village guard. His size and strength served to keep the village and the border of Sedfair secure against the magical and dangerous Chulls that frequently appeared out of the Blasted Wastelands to the west. Fen was proud that his father was one of the most respected fighters of the fearsome creatures, and was looked up to by the other men of the village. His father’s prowess earned his family a certain respect that even his mother’s astute business dealings couldn’t match.

  Having just reached his teens, Fen was a lanky young man, but thus far had avoided the awkwardness of many his age. His blond hair was worn long as was the current style. His gray eyes reflected his intense nature and determination. As he stretched to make it over the next hurdle, his right foot slipped on the unpredictable surface, sending a number of stones clattering down the slope he had been working his way up for the past half glass. The racket they made was loud and unexpected on the otherwise silent hillside, where only the sound of the cooling breeze making its way westward through the tall fir could be heard. A couple of six-legged squal chattered at him and ran for protection up the side of a large tree a short distance away. Once they were high enough to feel safe, their bravery returned and they chattered and scolded him from the safety of branches far above his head. Their rapid scramble up the tree had frightened a purple wren, which took to flight, squawking a warning to its brethren in neighboring trees.

  Fen grinned in private embarrassment at his carelessness as he recovered his footing, and looking ahead to plot his path, he continued the climb. Soon he had reached the flat, finally climbing over the lip where he rested and pulled his water skin from his pack. He took a long pull at the warm, but refreshing liquid. After catching his breath and carefully returning the skin to his heavy pack, he started up the last barrier, the extremely hard blackstone tower.

  Once he reached the spot he sought, Fen sat down in the shade provided by the rock and pulled off his pack. He set it down in front of himself for ease of access and withdrew his supplies, which included his pens, brushes and inks, as well as his flat smooth drawing board. Then he withdrew a sheet of the fine manufactured paper. This wasn’t the paper that was handmade in the village and used for recording all manner of transactions and which Fen normally used for his drawing. This was made in the far off city of Yort and was something his mother had saved for and sent off to acquire. It was manufactured by a special process, and was thin and flat and uniform unlike the lumpy paper he was used to. The paper had been a gift and showed just how proud his parent were of him. To spend that much of the family’s hard earned money to provide him a supply of such a marvelous medium was true recognition of his skills. It was not undeserved. At his age he had demonstrated a skill that even few women could hope to achieve after a lifetime of study and practice. That he was a male with such ability was especially remarkable.

  Among his other talents, Fen was an artist. While the fine arts were another thing that women normally excelled at and men couldn’t hope to emulate, Fen had an eye for fine detail, and a hand that could almost effortlessly transfer what he had seen to whatever surface he chose to draw upon. He could scale, position, and reproduce pictorials of any object or scene he had studied almost effortlessly. More importantly, he could draw the magical runes and glyphs he had learned with a precision that
most struggled for years to achieve, some never managing to do so.

  Fen knew it wasn’t just knowing the shapes of the magical symbols, but how they were used in combination, as well as the precise positioning and orientation that lent power and even changed the nature of the spell being prepared. Even the relative size of one rune compared to another was important. He was usually able to envision what the precise layout of the symbols should be for the effect he required, and then translate that vision to his drawing flawlessly. His runes and their associated glyphs flowed smoothly from his brush, and were tapered precisely as they should be. While others had somewhat irregularly drawn boundaries, his curled and bent with a precision almost unimaginable for most. A misplaced or poorly drawn line could render a morning of work useless. Fen seldom had to deal with such mistakes. As a result, his magic was strong and precise.

  Fen had practiced the spell he wished to create until he was certain he had it mastered. His first rough attempts were drawn in the dirt behind the house. Once he had gained confidence in the new gylphs, he had drawn each separately as an individual symbol on the secret medium he used to perfect his skill. He had come into possession of a small sheet of Casting Foil the previous year. He should have turned it over to his mother to be sent to the capital and returned to the Guild. It could only have been left behind accidentally by the Queen’s Casters who had been in Slipi to support the effort at the mines when they ran into trouble with the cave-ins last year. But the foil had been so beautiful and offered Fen a chance to experiment like he’d never had before. That it was worth more than he could imagine weighed heavily on his conscience each time he drew it out of his secret hiding place.

  Most mediums used for the creation of spells were unforgiving. If the Caster mis-drew the symbols, or positioned them incorrectly, then the attempt had to be set aside and begun again. This was not true of Casting Foil. Made from gold, somehow pressed into a thin and uniform foil, then treated by a special process known only to a select few within the Guild, the runes and glyphs were created upon the surface. Once created, the symbols appeared to float upon the surface and could be enlarged, rotated, or repositioned until the precise alignment desired resulted. They could also be wiped away without a trace, to be redrawn or rejected entirely without affecting the rest of the creation. It was incredibly flexible. Once the combination was exactly as desired, the proper vocalization would fix the symbols onto the surface permanently. Then the spell was ready for execution. Once executed, the foil had to be recycled if the gold had not been irretrievably altered by the magic created, in which case the foil was of no further use.

  Fen never fixed his spells, nor executed anything from the Foil. That would have ended its usefulness. The flexibility allowed him to draw, alter, reposition and finally create exactly what he sought in a spell. Once that was done, he committed it to memory, erased the symbols from the Foil, and when ready, recreated the spell on a disposable medium. That’s what he was doing today. The spell he had worked out on the Foil, was now being transferred to the paper. He was using a sheet of the precious paper from his mother, even knowing it would be destroyed by the execution, because precision was required to accomplish this task and he worried about the small errors normal paper would introduce. This had to be exact, or the result would damage the crystal he hoped to extract.

  The spell required six carefully placed runes and a pair of glyphs that someone his age should have had no awareness of. A Senior Caster would have been appalled to see what he was doing. But among other things, Slipi was a mining village in addition to providing border patrol, and a diligent and determined boy who knew what to look for was able to gain access to the information he sought. Most everyone would believe he couldn’t know the meanings of the symbols on their mining tools anyway. Fen had been surprised at the crudeness of the glyphs the miners used, but had been able to extrapolate the true form from what he had observed and what he knew of other forms of similar glyphs.

  Finally, he set down his brush, the five symbols properly transferred from his memory to the brownish sheet he held in his hand. This manufactured paper was light brown in color, the most common widely available. Generally spells functioned identically regardless of the medium or its color upon which they were created, but there were some which were subtly altered by color. He pinned the completed sheet to the ground with a rock to dry, while he packed up his materials and retrieved the section of sticky wax he would use to affix the sheet to the stone inside the small depression. Satisfied the ink had dried, Fen took the paper into the shadowed slot in the rock. There he brushed the surface next to the crystals he hoped to recover clean, and stuck the paper to the stone using the wax.

  It was time! The symbols on the paper contained the essence of the magic he wished to call, but execution required the verbal chant that was proper for such a spell. It was a complex multi-symbol spell, which only the Caster who had drawn the symbols, in this case himself, would be able to execute. Fen didn’t know why this was so, since most common spells used around the house could be triggered by anyone. Learning the form of the vocalization had been harder than discovering the shape of the symbols. But he had managed, and had practiced for several days until he was certain he had it memorized. The combination of artistic drawing and memorization of arcane phrases were what made Casting difficult and limited those who could truly perform magic.

  Because the execution would be releasing powerful energies, Fen stood well back as he gave voice to the activation phrase required. He had built a delay into the spell, so after he had completed the vocal trigger, he stepped back placing a large section of the black rock between himself and the break in the hillside where the spell would be activated. Moments later a sharp crack and boom echoed down the valley. A flock of small yellow wings burst out of the trees near the flat where he’d rested earlier, startled by the unexpected blast.

  Fen smiled. It had worked! Whether it had done as he hoped, or whether he had smashed the precious crystal into small, far less valuable pebbles, remained to be seen. Unable to contain his eagerness, he rushed back to the slot in the rock and hurried to where he had placed the paper.

  The floor was littered with broken rock, and a large hole now existed where he had attached his spell. The crystal was no longer there, and he had to search among the rubble that littered the floor before he found the rocky section that held the multicolored quartz. A small circle of stone still wrapped around the valuable crystal, but his spell had cut a controlled shell of rock out of the mountain to free the treasure.

  Fen grinned as he hefted the results of his efforts. He would have to roughen up the edges so it wasn’t so obvious that magic had been used to extract the crystal, but now he had something special to leave his family before he headed off to join the Caster’s Guild at the end of the summer. He had been selected nearly immediately despite being a male when the Tester had passed through the village the previous winter. The leaders of the Guild and all of the great Casters were said to be women, but Fen was now certain of himself. He hoped to be the first man to rise to the top, and dreamed that one day he would become the Saltigue, the leader of the Casters, which historically had always been a woman.

  Fen was more than a little tired when he finally arrived back at his family’s home, a modest dwelling constructed from sawn timber, something that everyone could afford now that the sawmill at the south end of the village was in full production. The addition of the crystal still partially embedded in the dense black rock had added significantly to the weight of his pack, and it had been a long walk from the hills where he had conducted his experiment. The family only owned a pair of horses, one his father’s war horse, and the other that his mother usually rode to her place of business. That meant the rest of them had to walk.

  He checked the clock hanging on the far wall of the main room as he stepped into the coolness of the front hallway. He was a little later getting back than he hoped, but still early enough to be able to clean up and finish his
assigned chores before his parents returned. Almost two glass remained before dinner would be served. That was assuming it was prepared on time. His brother Ginold had the cooking chores for the day. It would be Fen’s turn tomorrow. The two brothers alternated preparing the family meals, his father far too busy these days to handle the additional task. Besides, he’d told them they needed to learn the skill for the time when they were married and had their own families to think of. Fen’s sister Nora was lucky to never need to worry about the time consuming chore. Women were lucky that way. As the hunters and gatherers in the past, men had always been the ones to bring food to the table, which included both the stalking as well as the preparation of game and grain.

  As he walked deeper into the room he looked for the perfect place to display his treasure. He wanted a spot where his mother would be certain to see the valuable find as soon as she walked into the room. Finally he decided on the stone step in front of the hearth. It was too warm for a fire this time of year, but the spot was central to the room, and even better a shaft of sunlight shone through the side window onto the step. The light would be picked up by the crystal and cause the crystal to glow with multicolored light.

  “Gin, I’m back,” he shouted toward the kitchen where he expected to find his brother after carefully placing the stone with the valuable piece of crystal.

  “Stanner was looking for you,” Ginold hollered back. “You will need to go see him in the morning.”

  Stanner? “Did he say what he wanted?” Fen asked as he headed toward the kitchen. Stanner was the village Mayor and it was unusual for him to personally come calling. Usually he sent one of his staff and requested whomever he wished to see to come to him.

  As Fen stepped into the kitchen, Ginold was covering a large metal pot with a lid.