5920 words (23 minute read)

Towerfall

Raiders of Nosgoroth

A Drakenlands Novel

Mat Oliver

Chapter One:  The Road to Somewhere        Twentieth Day of the Third, 1203 – Dawn

        The sun broke over the eastern horizon of the Vernal Plains, though it had a greasy brown hue thanks to the violet miasma of the Mael.  The storm had overtaken the Arcane Tower four months prior and, during that time, had grown from an overcast a handful of miles wide to a fearful tempest that Cyra, a dwarven druid of the Sleeping Shallows, could see even a hundred leagues from its thinnest perimeter.  In the many mornings she’d had waking to the sight, she’d finally asserted to view the dawn without a sense of dread creeping up her lower back—but only barely.  She closed her eyes and folded her hand over the right side of her face.  “No,” she whispered to Karsten, the yellow-haired human knight to her side.  She worked to convince herself that her gesture had nothing to do with the Mael.  

        Karsten frowned and whispered more aggressively, but still quiet enough to spare the wizard, scout, and monk from an early rousing.  “He’s shown that he’s at least perceptive.  He might have a plan that’s worth listening to.”  

        “Loke,” the dwarf asked abruptly, turning her head from Karsten to look at the small statured halfling across the dying campfire, “what d’you think?  What’re you picturing right now?  In your head.”

        Loke cocked his head, a smile brimming across his face as he turned from the wrongly russet sun to his two conscious companions.  He kept his voice uncharacteristically low, briefly eyeing the other three.  ”Well, you see, Cyra, if I were a vampire wizard, I’d get all my other vampire wizard friends and we’d just hold hands in one big circle-line all over the world, you know, from one end to the other, and we’d use our vampire magic to make a storm cloud show up and it’d never go away and it’d just cover the whole entire sky so that the sun was just always hidden and it’d never come out.  Then, you see, it’d be just like it was night so I’d be able to read and do magic and vampire stuff without a bed time or a morning time or whatever I’d call it.  And, also, no shoes.”

        Cyra blinked and flailed an arm at the human in a gesture that meant nothing unless one had seen a frustrated dwarf.  Anyone who’d ever seen a dwarf had seen a frustrated dwarf.

         “... Why shoes?” asked the knight, pausing from his work to connect the leather straps of his breastplate over his shoulder.

        Loke’s face contorted as though he’d smelled something foul.  ”Because.  Shoes.  Blech.”

        The dwarf’s eyes had gone wide somewhere around the words ‘vampire wizard friends’ and remained as such as she jerked her head between Loke and Karsten several times before looking direct to the man’s azure eyes.  ”That,” she asserted, pointing sideways at the hearthling.  ”That is why we don’t ask Loke what he thinks about the plan.”  

Chapter Two:  Towerfall        Third Day of the Eleventh, 1202 – 11th hour

        In the early morning of the day that the Arcane Tower was lost to the people of Nosgoroth, the Trial Tested wizards had woken to the same comfortably secured walls of their dormitories and went about the precise activities they had planned for the previous night.  The apprentices had been awake an hour earlier to begin preparing meals or research space for their mentors.  The mere novices studied texts so they might be named and marked an apprentice.  By the ninth hour, the Masters sensed an unexpected elevation of the energy that had been thrumming for centuries far below the Tower’s foundation—the same energy that had begun to slowly well in the last decade.  Just before the tenth hour, the Masters had called for all untested to be secured for teleportation away from the Tower and for all capable Mages to gather in the Divination Chamber so they might stop a calamity.  

        In the reliquary of the library, Athais had not been sent with the rest of the untested.  Gharut knew better—both in terms of the rules he was obligated to abide by and the fact that he would need at least Athais’ legs if not his acute mind.  More importantly, Gharut knew that the novices gathered at the coast were not there for dismissal but to keep them out of the way.  Evacuation was no longer an option.

        “—And these; go.”  Gharut hurriedly stuffed a third book under the chin of the young apprentice.  Athais, a human nearly in grasp of his second decade, darted his eyes in a haze of worry over the room where he’d primarily spent his last six years.  He felt his teacher place a flask into the hand that was hugging the tomes, then closing his fingers around the glass neck.  The customary sense of order was gone from the library reliquary, though he couldn’t spare a moment to clearly identify what precisely was missing.  Phials of pure elemental water were still carefully fastened in a cloth lined grip.  A wounding blade was still firmly held in place by examination forks to ensure neither he nor Gharut could nick themselves to death while identifying the relic.  The curious speaking tome still latched shut by a magical lock.  He looked next to Gharut and attempted to inventory the items that laid upon a hovering plate of golden energy:  seven other texts, most of them larger than any of the three in his own arms, though only slightly; several potion phials crated together; two wands wedged in the small spaces between potions.  A normal delivery from the storage rooms to a classroom of the tower, perhaps, but from here?

        “Athais!”  

        The sound of his name shocked his attention back to his master.  He nodded.

        “Go!  The first—” he gestured to the bottom of the stack where Athais’ hand and forearm grappled the burden, “—it needs to go to the north wing.  To Theurgist Donin.  Dull brown robes.  She’ll be babbling about planes—other realms—with the sages.”  He locked eyes with Athais, his own gray irises shining more sharp steel than the aspiring mage thought normal.  His backside muscles contracted and he swallowed dry.  The wizard thrust his index and middle finger at the second and third books and tapped the hand holding the flask.  “These to the Geometer…”  

        Gharut trailed, his eyes dulling as he looked through Athais’ forehead.  He wordlessly mouthed a few syllables before violently shaking his head and growling.  “… The Geometer—his name.  He needs these to finish the circles.”  

        Athais nodded, aware that he was holding his breath, though it did little to still his racing heart.  His clenched jaw thankfully had halted his teeth from their chattering.  He mentally ran the corridors he would take from the main library through the studying halls and Trial-Ready dormitories, then up the stairwell to the divining chamber.  He attempted an inhale though it came in staggered and left in a tremble.  His leg pulsed and shook as though the Tower had felt a minor quake.  He stepped backwards to make his way.  His left heel met his right toe and his awkward dance nearly ended except for Gharut’s sudden grasp on his shoulder.

        “Athais.”  Gharut’s voice was stern and grappled Athais as well as the man’s steadying hand.  If he’d made an effort to hide his urgency, he’d failed.  “We have no time to fear this if we are to circumvent it,” he said through clenched teeth, “just go deliver these and all will be well.”  

        Athais spun on his heel and started out.  When he turned through the open stone doorway, he saw Gharut pushing away a stack of tomes and leaning over the desk to where Athais knew an unseen vault had been mystically concealed.  His next step would not come.  He tarried, watching.  Gharut muttered words of magic and put his hand up, fingers locked together, abruptly forcing them apart as his words finished.  The false portion of the wall faded away, revealing a spinning orb which shimmered prismatically.  Gharut reached towards it, releasing tendrils of energy towards the relic.  It slowed its rotation and then stopped.  The ‘orb’ was polyhedral, faceted glass or gemstone.  Gharut hesitated in taking it into his hands and while Athais knew nothing of what the object might have been, he could not decide what gave him more anxiety:  the urgency with which Gharut had spoken or the eerie sensations he felt emitting from the artifact.  Reason returning to the apprentice, Athais concluded it should have been the repercussions of his delayed departure so he rushed forward, embracing the items to his chest as he attempted to calm himself by imagining that his footfalls matched the beat of his heart.  

        The study halls were barren.  The dormitories all closed, barred by sudden edict of the sages.  Athais rounded the hall to the main stairwell and found his pace slowed as he came to the exterior windows of the Arcane Tower.  Wind gusts tore outside, worse than any he’d imagined, screaming so loud that Athais might have sworn it had been the crashing waves along the cliff face of the tower’s island.  It was approaching mid day, but the sky threatened twilight.  He ambled closer, peering up to see what sort of storm clouds had formed, but sudden excited voices and rapid footsteps had him press his back to the wall instead.  A quartet of Trial-Ready mages—three humans, two female one male, and a male elf—rushed into the chamber and up the stairs that Athais was himself about to ascend.  He observed the twin silver crescents forming a circle embroidered on their robes and resisted the impossible want to rub his hand down his own right arm bearing only the single bronze, instead firming his right-handed grip on the flask’s neck.  He nodded in assertion and followed several paces behind, clearly calculating that his speed was slower, hindered by his carried inventory.  

        A cacophony of wizard disputes drowned out the nearly steady sound of Athais’ shoes on stone as he followed the stairs into the divining chamber.  The room had always seemed larger than necessary, featuring a circle of polished mirrors around the perimeter a full thirty-five feet from a ten-foot diameter scrying pool.  The distance between was left empty except for cloth-covered wooden support pillars.  Divinations were not a calm process, often resulting in violent fits or at least blind or exhausted wandering.  His previous visits here had left Athais waxing poetic about the metaphor of this room’s openness reflecting the mind of a would-be diviner, casting his mind into the ether in search of insight.  Such imagery was distant this day as the room was uncomfortably full.  Wizards showing robes and designs from all different wings of the tower stood in fervent debate, making the chamber seem more like a hostile conference than the room’s intent.  

        Athais moved through the crowd as would a mouse among a host of tomcats.  He shrunk down, holding his parcels—his only reason for being allowed entry, here—ever-tighter.  The few wizards who gave him any notice at all did so with a raised brow, though most were far too involved in impassioned arguments that only added to Athais’ anxious confusion about the strangeness of this day.  

        We should have dissolved this energy when we first detected it!

        Well, it is grand that we have Chronomancers in wait to reflect that hindsight!

        The energy well is dispelling both teleportation and transmutations, now.

        We can still siphon this energy for our own use.

        Athais tried to fall back on Gharut’s training.  He imagined kneeling in a still, empty room with patterned tiles about the wall.  He pictured a soft breeze cycling through the room, ticking the tiles each second, changing them one by one in a seeming chaotic array.  “All things have order,” he whispered to himself as he gently pressed his body between two more groups of wizards.  His imaginations refused to manifest a calm, however, as the combination of dissenting wizards and the howling of wind outside the tower were far too real.

        We should abandon the tower now, before it is too late.

        These energies have been here since we were in apprentice robes.  It is why the tower was built here in the first place.

        Sarcasm and abandonment are equally futile right now.  We must focus on shielding ourselves.

        Our duty is to the rest of the realm—we must contain this!

        Athais came finally to the center well where he could see a neat-cropped half-elf knelt over a chalk inscription.  He sighed in relief, noting that the other wizards were careful to give the Geometer a wide radius lest they mar his arcane circle.  The mage held a triangular instrument in his right hand and magically reforming chalk in his left.  Athais watched and waited for an opportune time to speak, carefully watching the wizards surrounding him in case he needed to dodge a set of flailing arms from one adamantly defending ones position on ‘the crisis.’  The half-elf was methodical.  He placed the protractor to the circle at two or three angles and then drew more of the circle, added lines, or precisely scripted a runic marking, then repeated the process for the next segment of the circle.  Athais attempted to resolve for himself what the circle was meant to do, though it was all well beyond his comprehension.  

        “Geometer?” Athais tried, his voice completely devoured by two wizards debating between self-preservation and their obligation to serve the non-mage population of Nosgoroth.  Both wore markings of advisory to the sages—a full golden moon surrounded by crescents, all of it bordered in silver-blue—the five retired Master wizards who served as the Arcane Tower’s oligarchic government, though neither of these two had any similar markings of decisive authority.  They were also far from the sages who stood near the northmost side of the divining room atop a five-foot dais with the largest of the seeing mirrors.  He spoke louder, earning scornful looks from the two who departed.  Athais thought he recognized a semblance of relief from each that the debate had been so interrupted.  “Master Geometer?” he tried more loudly.  “I have—”

        “Yes.  It is about time,” the half-elf said.  “Give me the text—the equations.”  Athais moved to kneel and allow the mage to take the top two texts, though the mage hissed.  “Careful!”  He nearly threw his own body over the circle and reached as if to ward the flask from falling, though Athais wondered if he worried more for the liquid inside or the drawing below.  Still, he froze in an awkward half-courtesy.  The mage extracted the phial from Athais’ hand first, setting it carefully at the center of the circle, and then settled back and extended his hand for the tomes.  His skill in Elvish was poor, though he understood the importance of the top text:  Diffusion.  

        Athais stepped back and hovered as the wizard wrenched open the two texts.  He cringed at the treatment of the binding, but he restrained himself from reciting any of Gharut’s words regarding the proper handling of old research tomes, especially to a wizard who wore markings of school mastership.  The false calm Athais had found standing near this small circle where the bulk of the debating wizards had strayed began to fall away as he recognized a hurried panic in the Geometer.  Paging quickly through the primary book, he consulted the other only scarce times as he looked over the circle he had been drawing.  “No,” he muttered, ripping through another few pages, looking over a diagram and back.  “No,” he said again, repeating the process.  “No!”  He slammed a fist, whatever calm he’d performed no longer of importance.  He licked a finger and swiped away pages, one after another, and then quivered upon one.  He nodded, reading quickly, captivating Athais to remain and watch whatever the master had come upon, eager to discern anything of the chaos spreading throughout the tower.  His nod grew more fervent until he blinked, and stared back at the circle that he had been creating for what must have been well over an hour.  He mouthed words as his eyes darted aimlessly, a physical tick that Athais was quite familiar with, himself a calculating sort of mage, though it was evident that the arcane equations the Geometer considered were not adding properly.  

        He stopped and glared to Athais.  “What?” he barked.  “Get on.  Go… do something!”  Athais started, falling back a step and sheepishly nodding.  He looked to the dais where he saw amidst the tower’s leaders a woman in the simple robes of a vestal.  Confusion welled in Athais again and he took a second step back, watching still the half-elf looming over the library texts and circle.  The Geometer swallowed hard and looked back to his hands, picking up the protractor and chalk once more, this time trembling as he held them.  “Not enough time,” Athais heard the man mutter and he turned back to stare, meeting his drooping, resigned eyes.  “Not enough time in the world.”  

        Athais rushed away, then, concern for propriety the furthest thing from his mind.  Brushing and jostling against mages years ahead of him all in skill, training, years, power, and authority, Athais clutched the final book to his chest as though it were his most comforting childhood toy, his heart pounding against them as his feet met the stonework of the chamber.  The voices around him seemed as if part of a dream, ethereal voices haunting the fringes of his perception.  

        Master Bergelin will diffuse it and we’ll either claim or disburse it from there.

        What about the Chronomancers?

        We should still have claimed it all immediately.  Letting it grow was greedy.

        But, at the time, we thought it necessary.  

        Hindsight.  

        Athais found his way to the steps up to the dais.  Four of the five sages stood with the plain-robed Theurgist, their faces locked dozens of feet away to the Geometer who knelt still, chalk and straight-edge still in hand but no longer scribing symbols into the floor.  His own sight diverted, Athais’ foot found the stair’s edge too quickly.  He stumbled, catching himself with his shin and a quick hand, causing him to lose grasp of the book which sprawled onto the stone platform and slid to the feet of the gathered mages.  His pisiform took all his weight.  Shocks of pain ran up his forearm and nestled in his elbow, but his frantic heart culled it to a quiet throb.  The sages turned, their somber discussion interrupted.  From the midst of them, a human woman gracefully wearing just over fifty years knelt to collect the book.  Her eyes widened for a moment, though her whole form seemed to deflate as she took the book to her breast just as Athais had earlier.  She approached to help Athais to his feet.  Averting his eyes from her gently aged features, he focused instead the text of the tome she carried.  Abjuring: The Banishing of Rifts.

        “…Soraiya Donin,” Athais whispered, willing himself to believe that he was only afraid to add to the chaos of the room, though he could not break gaze from the title.  “Master Donin,” he corrected only slightly louder, “Lorekeeper Gharut sent—”

        “Good.”  She held out her hand, taking a step down from the dais to take Athais’ shoulder and prod him into standing.  “You best find a quiet place to stand out of the way.  Things are about to get disorderly, here.”  She stood taller and held Athais in her gaze a moment longer, pressing her head forward and flaring her eye to better assert her want.  Athais complied and stood, though he remained hovering on the stairs as Donin turned back to the sages.  

        Athais’ throat went dry and his voice cracked in ways it hadn’t since his middle years in the tower.  “M-master Theurgist,” he tried, “w-what is happening here?”  Athais couldn’t tell if he should have thanked his panic for its insistence that he inquire or flee from the room in abject humiliation.  The rest of the tower’s wizards were speaking as though they had months of knowledge of this impending event.  Even as a mere apprentice, he’d heard whispers of invited fae envoys from the secreted academy in the Sylfin forest, plans for magical experiments to test the pseudospiritual ancestral magic of the Galarian nomads, even word of reclusive draconic magi from which the tower’s sages had hoped to barter.  A place with such a cloistered population, whether students only beginning their education, novices who’d started to prove their magical potential, apprentices who’d taken vows to become wizards, those Trial-Ready to earn their names, or even fully developed wizards and masters who preferred hermetic lives of study to worldly exploration and practice, the Arcane Tower of Nosgoroth saw little travel neither from nor to its solitary island and that made for a swift breeding ground of gossip.  To have heard nothing of something that had caused such alarm meant it had either arrived too quickly to form a plan of action or was so dire that the sages had sought to spare others concern towards an event that offered no solution.  His chest quivered.  His breath was an undulating thing low in his lungs, smothering his heart.  “Master,” he tried again, though the woman stopped him.

        She pivoted only slightly and looked to his nearly barren robes.  Her stare looked through his upper arm where his meager mark regaled him as nothing more than a library cataloger, apprenticed but still a long route from becoming Trial-Ready.  She panned up to his face and Athais felt flush.  He could feel her calculating his age, deducing that he was nearer to twenty than his Trial.  And, then, her kind face softened to hated pity.  

        He stood taller.  “Master, what can I—”

        “Nothing,” she asserted, her face grandmother-stern.  “Return to the library.  Assist the Loremaster with all that he seeks to have done.”  

        “I know more than I—”

        “Go,” she said, this time looking beyond him and back to the stairwell that would lead Athais back to the dormitories, studies, and the library.  She turned away, still embracing the banishment text with one arm as she slipped another under its back cover.  From this unique angle, Athais saw a glint of silver and gold as Donin grasped hold of the supposedly holy trident of the Goddess, otherwise hidden by robe and text, and walked the few paces back to what had become only three of the sages.  She nodded to them, whispering in elvish something that Athais could only partly gather.  The task should be mine.  

        Athais’ head would not hold still, then.  His breath grew heavy and returned to its assault on his throbbing heart.  He turned and rushed along the perimeter of the room, the arguments of the wizards heard as through only through deep water, their questions and boisterous claims unrelated, half-missing, entirely insane.

        Tunnels?

        Ships?

        Sea creatures?

        Dragon allies?

        Are chronomancers even real?

        Donin’s voice called for calm and she spoke of the duty of wizards, of faith and perseverance, though her carefully chosen words had likely fallen as pointless to the rest of the wizards in the divining chamber as they had to Athais who felt he could scarcely walk much less remain attentive to the Master’s “guiding” words.  His legs joined in the shaky undulation of his breath, weak and petrified.  ‘Diffusion and abjuring,’ he thought, trying to piece together the relationship.  ‘A theurgist studies where divinity meets the arcane—where our magic meets the heavens and hells.’  The only security he felt in this entire ordeal was knowing that none would see him roll his eyes.  

        Athais stumbled, almost into one of the seeing mirrors, and he cursed his fear, his timid nature.  Had he been another mage, he might have taken the coincidence as punishment for his irreverence of the divine.  He picked himself up and glanced to his side, expecting to see a crowd of his betters hiding smirks at his uncharacteristic awkwardness.  Instead, he saw several others picking themselves up as well.  His pulse still throbbed, but he began to search outside himself for the cause.

        Athais was new to actual wizardry.  Young and clever, he had picked out nuances of theory that many of the Trial-Tested might have overlooked, though his fingers were still awkwardly placed and his annunciation lacked precision when it came to putting any of his knowledge into practice.  By right, Athais should have been outside the Tower walls with the other novices, excepting that his attention to detail had long ago caught the attention of the Lorekeeper, Gharut, and earned him the frustrating honor of working as his assistant.  Now, moving through the crowds of wizards who had earned the right to be in this chamber and the clearer specifics on what was occurring, Athais felt all the more lost.  They, at least, had background on what was occurring… not that it appeared to be doing his betters any good.  Still, Athais’ mind raced.  This tremor and the energy that the mages discussed must be related.  If there was any correlation between the two, it would be that the energy was rising and coming to a breaking point.  The shakes were a… warning!?  The rising thrum in his ears, his deepening heart beat.  ‘Resonance,’ he thought, his eyes wide.  He wasn’t alone.  Whatever the wizards had hoped to diffuse was upon them.  

        Athais reached out and took hold of the pole of the nearby seeing mirror and hoisted himself up.  He pushed himself off from it, hearing clatter behind him but giving no more thought to its importance.  He locked his eyes to the stairwell and ran.  

        His breath steadied despite his stomach and chest falling to this unknown pressure.  He focused only on it and his path.  The rolling in his chest intensified once more and he slammed himself left into the banister of the stairwell, grasping hold tightly as he took in a sharp breath.

        He waited.

        Seconds later, a silent tremor quaked through the tower, sending dust in all directions in the stairwell.  He heard cries of shock from the gathered wizards in the chamber and Athais was certain that they had felt the same sudden stumbling at the first time.  Athais felt a tightness start in his shoulders and spread chills through his body.  He clenched his jaw again to nullify the chattering he was sure would have otherwise started.  Waiting only a second longer, Athais released the banister and ran once more.  Down the stairs, through the entry chamber, right down the dormitories, beyond the study halls, and into the library where he ran through the isles until he burst back through the open stone portal and into the Loremaster’s reliquary.  “Gharut!” he called.  

        The welling in his breath began once more.  ‘Faster, this time,’ Athais reasoned.  He frantically looked through the room.  The failed order was more prevalent.  More books were missing, additional phials and wands.  The golden carrying disk still hovered there, meaning Gharut had not gone far away.  Atop it rested the prismatic polyhedral.  Athais’ breath felt heavier as though the air was becoming vapor.  “Gharut!” he yelled, “where are you!?”  He looked for a sturdy frame to hold and stepped closer to the examination table where Gharut had taught him to investigate hidden details of seemingly simple tokens and his eyes went wide as he saw Gharut’s form crumpled on the ground, a small puddle of blood formed, still being filled by a trickling wound on the Lorekeeper’s leg.  A few feet from him rested the wounding knife.  Athais looked to its proper place and he realized the surges through the tower must have disrupted the carefully placed forks.

        Athais fell to his mentor’s side.  The Lorekeeper’s eyes fluttered weakly.  “Gharut, that cut?”  He looked to the knife.

        Gharut offered a wry smile for his pain.  “Appropriate,” he growled, his voice a gruff whisper.  Athais looked about the room for the crate of phials, but Gharut narrowed his eyes at the man.  “Don’t disappoint me now, Athais.  It’s hardly the time for it.”  Athais’ stomach lurched again, though he could not decide if it was due to the pulsing energy or his inability to admit there was no accessible way to heal a wound from such a knife.  Gharut glared harder in spite of his failing constitution.  He restrained a cough and repeated, “No time for that, Athais.”  He raised a hand and pointed behind Athais to the polyhedral.  “There.  I’ve saved all that I could.  It might—”

        “Save you!?”

        “—Get us out of here.”  Gharut grunted and used Athais’ strength and the examination table to push himself to a near stand, though he quickly faltered against each.  “Damn it, all!” he moaned.  “You do it.  Take hold of the thing and compress it.”

        Athais’ eyes grew wider than he knew possible.

        “Or,” Gharut offered, “we could stand here until I’m a dry husk and the tower buries us both.”  His breath wheezed despite his strong words, but they were enough to jostle Athais to action.  He settled Gharut fully against the examination table and hesitantly took the multihued spheroid object in his hands.  It felt cool to the touch, like glass, though its surface gave just enough flexibility that it seemed as though it had a thin layer of gelatin.  In spite of the urgency, between Gharut’s irreparable wound and whatever chaos was about to engulf the tower, Athais found himself filled with questions of the material.  Intended or not, a gristly wet cough from Gharut dismissed those thoughts.  

        Athais held the artifact between both hands and understood well enough that Gharut had not meant for him to physically compress the device.  Theory, he knew.  He stood near Gharut and focused what little practical magical energy he had harnessed to press into the item.  The glow of magic began to respond and Athais did his utmost to control his breath and hide his excitement.  It was futile as he felt the same undulation begin once again.  Gharut leaned forward, his eyes eager and sharing the same knowing fear as was in Athais’ own.  

        “Almost there,” the Lorekeeper encouraged, though Athais felt a deeper meaning behind his eyes.  They had moments.  Whatever was coming for the tower, coming for them was happening.  And, it was happening now.

        His eyes widened and he jerked his head over his shoulder to the chambers that he’d resided in for the years of his apprenticeship.  “Wait!” he cried and the Tower shuddered again in response.  Athais’ body shivered and he bolted across the reliquary and through the open door to his chambers while cringing at the sound of Gharut’s wheezing shouts from the former room.  The relic still in his hand, Athais climbed over his simple framed bed and behind his bed side drawers until he felt fabric.  The Tower again lurched and Athais nearly fell to his stomach, but he strained his arm hard against the headboard to hold his weight.  Nerves taking him, Athais crumpled the soft cloth in his hand and used his elbow to push himself back and to his feet.  He rushed back to Gharut, already crying out apologies, and stuffed the bit of silk into the inner folds of his robes.  

        “Boy!” Gharut hacked, “are you trying to kill us both!?”

        The Tower pitched.  Debris crashed just outside the reliquary as some section of the upper floors had given out.  Dust poured into the room and Gharut covered his mouth to prevent his breath from growing even worse.  He pursed his lips.  “Stupid,” he spat.  “Stupid!”  

        Athais put his head down wordlessly and reaffirmed his focus on the relic both to reenact the magic and also to avoid the glare of Gharut.  The relic responded again with a soft glow.  He focused further but the process only gave him clear vision of the look upon the Master Geometer Bergelin’s face as he felt time slipping away.  The need for a vastly greater and more specific circle where no such time would ever be again felt.  And this artifact, now, demanded more energy than Athais had ever before commanded.  He looked to Gharut, pleadingly, but the man’s fierce look was going gaunt.  

        Both inhaled deeply as the tower thrummed once more.  Athais felt his own breath feebly unstable.  Gharut reached out towards the relic, but either strength, willingness to live, or ability to act failed the man.  “Redeem us, boy,” he whispered, “make this worth it all.”  His eyes began to darken, the only color yet in the man.  “Go, Athais,” Gharut said a truly final time as he gestured outward with a pulse of magic as the energy below the tower rose ferociously to meet them both.  The tower yawned and buckled and light flared across the horizon for leagues.  

        But for a long while, Athais ambled, lost in a confusing darkness as he called out for any who might hear him.