Wander, Blind
Maggie and her father could have traveled forever, and she’d never have thought twice about any other life. If Aamon had succeeded, that would have been exactly their fate. It was, in retrospect, rather telling of how much Aamon loved her; it was by his hand that Maggie wanted for nothing, that their life, as they worked song into the air around the roads they traveled by, could have beguiled her soul for a lifetime. Fortunately for Maggie, many things turned toward a singular purpose are often their own undoing, and the very song that had kept them hidden all this time was also the key to their discovery.
On the eve of Maggie’s 10th birthday, their caravan was stopped under a clearing surrounded by trees on all sides. Typically, Aamon would celebrate the occasion by bringing her a present of some sort, then produce a pastry he’d bought in a town while she wasn’t looking. Tonight, he had other plans; they’d stopped along the highway just inside Elderfell, one of the ancient forests used by the old king and his men before the uprising. It was pocked with small caves, dugouts, trenches, and hidden tunnels that once served knights and highway guard volunteers. In fact, the whole of Elderfell had once been the primary training grounds for new recruits looking to serve the old king. Evidence of this old purpose could be found in remnants scattered throughout the forest; relics of training grounds stood covered in moss and vining plants, waiting for the forest to take them. Aamon had chosen this place because it was particularly well suited as semi-permanent lodging. For what came next they needed solitude, and there was no telling how long they would be forced to remain. An Awakening could take minutes or days, and this one would be different from any other.
The Awakening, as it was called by practitioners of spellcraft, was something of a misnomer. Though the process was what allowed prospective practitioners to attach themselves to the powers that governed magical applications, only a handful of spellweavers left the awakening with memory of what passed; still fewer felt the true nature of the forces that could manipulate the world. Most took for granted that the power was simply a tool, and the Awakening was the means to attain it. Aamon knew from experience that the connection ritual signified far more than a simple entry into governing the forces of the world. Magic was not a mere joining of words, concentration and esoteric connection; it was a contract, and one that required much from its applicant. Among those rare few who sent their consciousness into that plane to return with their memory intact was Aamon’s old master.
"To describe the Awakening would be to tell a blind man of color," his master had told him. "The experience can be described, but until it is felt you can not truly grasp it. It is a knowledge of this world so keen that you become part of of it, even as you remain an observer apart from it. Your own senses are of the mundane world. You know what it is to be warm or cold, to wash in a river or hear a bird song. You sense these things within the sphere of your own mind. Within the Awakening, you feel the heat of the day and the cool of the night as the rocks and earth do. The sounds of the world echo in your mind the way a tree feels the echo of the forest around it. Touch is as the wind and water when they move across the earth, and you are all of these at once. All that is of substance — all that moves and does not — all of these are filtered through the many facets of our world and fed into your mind. Among all of this that makes our world, yet also inside that other place, there are what I can only call a population of light. Immaterial and without purpose, these lights attach themselves to things of life, weaving themselves into the workings of life. They are the non-agent; beings without sentience that hunger for consciousness. It is with these beings you make your contract; in this place devoid of all but thought and truth, you give yourself over as a servant to the lights of that world. Once one experiences that place, the change is irrevocable, and one is bound by the laws which nature laid forth from time immemorial. Should a practitioner ever break these laws, the lights with which they are gifted would turn upon their sentient partners, and twist them to a darker nature."
This was the sum of all knowledge Aamon had of the ritual. Indeed, the recording of those words composed a great part of all the knowledge practitioners had available to them. The written words had once been stored in the script vaults the old king hid away. Back then, only mages of the highest rank and of noble lines had access to such texts. In the fallout of the uprising, mages of the overthrown court had hidden the scrolls away for fear of their destruction. They had, of course, been hunted down, and the scrolls were reclaimed for the people. The once exclusive information was now housed in the free city of Gildergate, and access was granted to anyone who undertook the study of magic enough to graduate from a gilder. Aamon’s education predated the uprising, and since he was not welcome in Gildergate he would never read the scrolls whose knowledge he lacked. This loss did not trouble him much. His goals were singular in nature, and for them he was already well equipped.
They spent longer than normal seeking a campsite that met Aamon’s approval. Maggie grew more impatient to stop and explore as they trekked further away from the road; the woods were filled with creeks perfect for catching minnows and trees with low hanging branches. Still, she knew better than to make a fuss over where they stopped; Aamon would only chuckle and keep to his course.
For his part, Aamon was eager to locate a patch of woods perfectly suited for the imminent Awakening. He had first found a stream whose path was straight, and, as luck had it, following that stream produced a clearing deep in the woods. Leaving Magrose with only an instruction to “be careful and stay within eyesight of camp,” Aamon dove eagerly into preparations. He wandered about the clearing, occasionally looking up at the sun’s position. Now and then he would pause and meticulously lay out chimes. When he finished there were eight sets of chimes surrounding the campsite, one for each of the eight directions the wind could take. That task complete, he dragged a very large, flat stone into the stream. The stone was easily large enough for a single person to sit comfortably, but still small enough that the stream’s current could channel around either side of it. On this he prepared kindling for a small campfire, which he left unlit. Looking again at the position of the sun, Aamon took note of the time and said to himself, unable to contain his excitement,
"Soon, my Song. Soon."
Maggie did not waste much time herself. She’d have needed to be blind to miss that her father was in one of his moods; he would not have attention to spare for his daughter for quite some time. Her entertainment was entirely up to herself, and, whatever it was, it needed to be out of the way. For a while, she patrolled their camp’s perimeter as a rookie recruit of a forgotten king, saluting superiors and practicing with her pike (an impressively long stick found among bushes). Of course, this was all a ruse to gauge her father’s attentiveness with certainty; after an especially silly flourish of her pike without even a glance in her direction, she was certain her father was completely absorbed, and so she felt safe venturing further downstream. It wasn’t long before she came across a small, round, wooden door, nestled into a steep embankment. She could see the embankment was fortified with an exterior of river stone, made no less solid by decades of moss growth into every crack and hollow. Naturally, such an exciting discovery could not go investigated. Possessed with ideas of dragon’s hoards deep in the earth, or tunnels and crypts with old spectres eager to be vanquished, Maggie entered without a second thought. She was engulfed by darkness as she stooped to enter, and the stagnant air that met her nose made it clear this burrow was very disappointingly uninhabited. As her eyes adjusted, she saw that the space was little more than the size of a room; it was dominated by a cooking fire and spit in the center, over which a narrow opening served as a chimney. Peering through the gloom, Maggie thought she could make out wooden planks lining far wall, and directly to her left was a wooden shelf built into the river stones. Though the lack of dragons, spectres, or otherwise magical inhabitants counted as strong marks against it, Maggie could see some potential. She set about claiming the small space for her own.
She had intended to start by kindling the fire, but after walking into several cobwebs hidden in the dark she decided a cleaning was in order. Several surreptitious trips to and from the cart produced the necessary tools: a broom, a scrubbing cloth, a small cup to fill with water from the stream, a candle, a stool to be used as a table, and a small supply of vegetables and bread (hovel cleaning works up quite an appetite, and she imagined the shelves were lonely after so many years of being abandoned). Her father was, unsurprisingly, still immersed in his work, so Maggie found it relatively simple to continue her furtive remodeling of the small, imaginary home.
Aamon, like many parents before him, was familiar with a child’s version of “clean,” and on a typical occasion Maggie was not one to break molds. But then, typically, adults tend to pick very boring things to clean, so it’s not surprising 10-year-olds rarely display much dedication to the tasks adults assign. By the time she was finished, even Aamon would’ve been impressed. Maggie spared no effort, making several trips to the stream for new water and soiling the scrubbing cloth thoroughly. The shelves were wiped down, the hearth cleared, and the plank-fortified wall freed of as much dirt as she could manage, though it suffered from a sizeable crack at its base. If the hovel were capable of sparkling, it would have. She found the dirt floors slovenly next to her gleaming walls, so she scavenged wooden planks from the nearby training grounds to create civilized flooring. When she lit the campfire with dry kindling and the flame from her candle, she quickly learned the chimney was blocked by years of spider webs and debris from the forest above. While smoke billowed out of the open door, Maggie, coughing, climbed the embankment and cleared the blockage by shoving the broom’s handle down through the small opening in the earth. The detritus and cobwebs that didn’t cling to the broom handle ended up stuck to Maggie’s hair, and that which was too far down into the channel to end up in her hair fell into the room below, smothering the fire. The heat from the room’s interior wafted into Maggie’s eyes and face, all the while filling her nose and lungs with the sweet, choking smell of smoldering forest. She enjoyed the smoke that lingered on her skin and hair, and so she held her clothes out over the small chimney one piece at a time so that they would catch the billowing plumes drifting up from the opening. When she returned to her work she did so as a spirit of wood smoke, building her nest in the wilds of the world. What debris hadn’t been eaten by the campfire was swept out the door, and with the room well cleared she returned to lighting the fire. This time her kindling caught and grew quickly.
’Any fire started by a nymph of woodsmoke would always light perfectly’, she thought to herself. The blaze brightened the small area considerably, and, cheered by her success, she sang to herself a song of her own invention as she worked at cleaning the new floors:
"This is a home for smoke and fire,
to roam from home is my smoky desire,
and when I am done I will smolder and tire,
and sleep by my creek behind stone.
This is a home for fire and smoke,
to wander on winds is the path that I took,
and so I shall wander ’cross hill and ’cross brook,
til I yearn to return to my home."
Once the floors were clean she set her small table for lunch, the last piece of her hideaway. Then Maggie took in her work with satisfaction; the entire room was spotless from wall to wall, and her table and place setting wasn’t too shabby either. She was basking in the glow of her triumph until, by the light of the new fire, she noticed two glistening eyes on the wall opposite the shelf. Something was watching her.
Startled, she jumped back and cried out, falling—flailing—onto the shelf behind her. She grabbed for support and the old shelf promptly dislodged from the wall, which caused her to lose balance and land painfully on it’s corner. Through the panic her eyes remained glued to the creature. Abject fear transformed to rapture as she recognized the shape of her observer. It was rare to catch a glimpse of a wild rabbit; as a species, these creatures were usually extremely timid. Maggie was surprised to find it there considering the commotion and noise she’d been making. Excited, she noticed for the first time the small hole that had been dug near the ceiling of the camp’s right side, across from the shelf; it was no bigger than her father’s clenched fist, and the tunnel leading into the room couldn’t have been very long being so close to the top of the embankment. Looking around the top of the room, she noted three more entrances of a similar design and realized this was the creature’s home. The rabbit had apparently been observing her from the safety of its tunnel, and though Maggie didn’t know it, the creature had been drawn out by her singing. Her violent reaction had caused as much fear and bewilderment in the rabbit as its sudden presence had on her. Now, it stood stock still, anxiously awaiting what Maggie might do next. Maggie had asked on more than one occasion for a pet from animal dealers, though it was one luxury her father denied her, saying she was "too young to be caring for another life. Wait until you’re a bit older, Magrose."
As she watched the rabbit she began thinking of ways she could leverage her birthday against her father to allow her to keep the small animal. She was, after all, older by a whole year today. The two sat staring at each other for a while, one clearly anxious and the other attempting to emanate an aura of calm. Slowly, Maggie pretended to fall asleep to see if Harmony (because every pet needed a name) would come to smell her. With her eyes closed just enough for her eyelashes to only mostly obscure her vision, her imagination ran wild with the places and things she and Harmony would see and do. A rabbit could be a speedy messenger, with Maggie’s most important missives tied ’round her neck; or a trusty guard, always on alert for lurking monsters which her superior hearing would detect from miles away! These invaluable utilities could not be refuted by her father, she was sure of it. After a while, the short-haired creature hopped delicately and silently down onto the new wooden floorboards. Impatient with waiting, Maggie thought perhaps she should “wake up” and attempt to offer it food. Careful to yawn loudly and stretch very slowly so as to make her intentions clear, she still managed to startle the poor thing and it froze again in clear terror. But Harmony did not flee; she looked at the hole she’d emerged from, then to the wall of boards, then back to hole again as if unable to make up her mind. Slowly and with great purpose, Maggie reached up onto the stool where she had set her small meal and retrieved a green, leafy vegetable which she placed on the floor. Then, in a swift and quiet motion, she rolled it towards the animal, where it landed barely out of reach. Maggie then resumed pretending to sleep. After what felt like an age, the rabbit sniffed the plant, nibbled just a bit, and, goodwill established, began again to creep toward the wood-planked wall. Goodwill or not, she kept the maximum possible distance from Maggie (much to the birthday girl’s dismay), and continued to move incredibly slowly. Harmony approached the wooden planks along the wall in the back of the camp and disappeared into the large crack near the floor. For a long while Maggie thought Harmony had left via some other tunnel behind the wall, but after half an hour had passed she re-emerged. Harmony began to slink back towards the tunnel she’d entered by, the one furthest from Maggie, but halfway back to her exit a small noise whined from the wood-lined wall. Moving only her eyes to see, Maggie’s patience was rewarded beyond expectation; a ridiculously downy looking kit emerged from the hole, hugging the wall and chasing it’s mother as quickly as the tiny thing could crawl.
Maggie’s delight was profound. She could barely keep herself from rushing right over and screaming with delight. But, in what Maggie did not know were the first seeds of adulthood, she suddenly realized that now she could have no claim on the animal, or her young. It wouldn’t have been right to separate them...
A strange sense of loneliness settled over her. All at once, and for reasons she couldn’t articulate, it became very painful to watch as Harmony carefully nudged her child back into the hideaway. As Maggie waited, still pretending to sleep, Harmony replaced her child quietly and then came back for the vegetable, dragging it through the burrow entry as she left. After Harmony had gone, Maggie desperately wanted her father. She decided to leave the home for the small family as a gift. She put out the fire, gathered what was left of her meal and her cleaning supplies, closed the door up against intruders, and hurried back to camp.
Aamon had just finished the last parts of the ritual’s placement when Maggie came hurtling back, visibly upset. He immediately set down with only a little care the last piece to the ritual, a perfectly smooth ball of glass, and hurried to greet her, calling out as he went,
"What’s wrong my Maggie? Has something frightened you?" He examined her to be sure it was indeed her and not some trick, then the forest behind her as she approached. He was relieved to see no sign of injury or pursuers. As she drew closer, he knelt and she walked into his arms while rubbing her eyes with her forearm, her hands full of the things she’d used to clean the hut. She held tight to them as she buried her face in his shoulder and cried in small sobs. Noticing the leaves and webs in her hair and smelling the smoke, he asked, only marginally worried about the hints of pyromania, "Now what have you gotten into Maggie?" While calming down between sobs, she managed to say something about nymphs and living by the creek bed. "Shhh, shhh little sprite, there’s nothing the matter. All is well, love," he said as he stroked her hair, cleaning the forest out of it. As he had done many times before, he stood and hefted her up onto the side of his hip. This time the weight of her seemed novel; how long had it been since he’d carried her, he wondered? She was getting to be so big. Holding her gently, he walked them back to the camp.
"I have a surprise for you tonight Maggie, one I know you’ll like," Aamon said by way of an attempt to distract her from whatever it was that had bothered her. Aside from smelling of smoke and river water, she’d had in one hand a small satchel of things and the other a broom. "Hullo, what’s all this? Have you opened a cleaning business? And picnicked without your old father?" He asked playfully. He needed to cheer her up so she was in a place of calm.
For her part, Maggie took no notice of the strain with which her father held her, nor at the slow pace he walked as a result of the extra weight. The second she had embraced him, she sank into the comfort of his presence. She focused on how happy she was to have father, and one that loved her very much. Too embarrassed to admit she was longing for a mother, and not in the mood for another evasive song, she simply held onto her father and let her emotions simmer. Avoiding concerned his questions, she shook her head and sighed, declaring she was tired and ready for bed. She’d completely forgotten her birthday, though Maggie sniffled and then chortled a bit and at the idea that her father was old, a joke she often teased him with, she cheered immediately.
"I found a small house. I cleaned it and was going to keep it, but it turned out there was already a family living there," She explained.
Aamon tensed. He’d already checked the nearby tunnels and nooks before setting up camp, and had been absolutely sure no other people were inhabiting this place. Any distraction could ruin the Awakening, and people were the worst sort of distractions.
"A family? Out here in the woods?"
"Yes, a very small, furry, floppy family."
Aamon suppressed a sigh of relief.
"Well," he continued, "we must reward all that hard work, especially today: do you know how old you are now Maggie?"
Remembering her birthday, she rolled her eyes and moaned "Dad, I am well past old enough to know my age."
"Well humor an old, forgetful coot like your father."
Maggie, feeling obstinate at her father’s penchant for pedantry, reluctantly said "I’m turning ten tonight."
"That’s right, and something I never told you before, not til now, is that your 10th birthday is the very soonest any child can begin to use magic."
Maggie immediately lost all her senses to excitement.
"Really?! You mean I can sing like you do now, that I can conjure up spells and turn people into trees and-" on and on she babbled over their dinner, and Aamon let her. When she was done asking questions (for which there was no space in the conversation to answer), he answered them in order.
"Yes, you can sing as I do after tonight. Conjuring too, though I wouldn’t advise you turn anyone into a tree; spells like that have a way of backfiring." He continued to, as his master had for him, impart upon her the way of their magic. They talked at length about the sorts of things you could do with magic, some of the things that you shouldn’t, and then went on to it’s basic principles: "Can you guess the key element in any magical working Maggie?" He asked her, and after she thought a bit, she shook her head. "It is love, above all things. You must, for any magic to be worked to a standard of quality, imbue it with great love and attention. I can not relate to you fully the properties, patterns, or structures that govern our magic in a more complete way; when you work a spell there are indeed several properties that affect its outcome, but none more so than your dedication to its outcome; the strongest form of dedication, of devotion to any craft or discipline, is love. It can be love in any of its forms, but the most accessible form of love for most people is usually a dedication to an art or skilled craft of some kind-"
She interrupted, understanding causing her to nearly shout, "That’s why you sing isn’t it? Because you love music so much."
Smiling and raising an eyebrow, Aamon paused only briefly to emphasize the interruption and continued:
"Yes, for me it comes easily; I love the work and dedication it takes to make beautiful song, particularly sung music. I spent many years training in the company of my master, perfecting the art of song. But this alone isn’t enough."
"The bones, you need bones too don’t you?" Maggie had always wondered why her father was a bone worker, now she assumed it was a magical requirement.
"You are partly correct; Any medium or material can do for working spells, so long as it too has been imbued with a form of love. A ring made with great care by a master goldsmith could easily be enchanted with a decent song, while a simple whittled wooden figurine made idly by a small boy would have a much harder time holding on to the interests of magic even if a Master Songsman tried to enchant it. Bone is a material that is both abundant and well suited for enchanting; since it was once part of a living being, it is far more likely to have been imbued with love, and it holds the interest of magic forces more permanently having been a living thing once. When a client of mine gives me a bone to work for them, there is usually a great deal of pain or loss associated with that bone, and that, too, imparts more than enough magical capacity for me to work with. Bone magic has great potential, and is very malleable -erm- is easy to work with."
Maggie thought on this, and Aamon let her. It was important she enter a thoughtful place, a place of consideration. It made her more open to the ritual’s magic.
"The bones that made the cart, how do those have love in them?"
Aamon was pleased. He had raised her well enough to ask good questions, and this was something he valued highly as a parent.
"The organ is a relic of an illustrious age. At one time, these lands were ruled by the old king. That organ was commissioned by one of his Masters, who was the man who taught me my craft. He arranged for the families of favored Elders to be given exotic pets, and when they died he recovered the bodies. Not every pet was well loved, but those that were went in to the making of that organ."
As Maggie had once been saddened by imaginings of more grim tales of the bones’ origins, this relieved her greatly.
"And the cart too?" She asked.
"No. I crafted the cart. It is a much cruder fashioning, but it is imbued with love. Can you guess how?"
Maggie turned and looked at the cart. She knew the beasts whose bones made it up, and how their shapes and features made them well suited for the mechanical tasks they performed. Still, she had never seen these beasts and knew very little about them. She shook her head.
"These are animals I hunted and killed while living off the land, gathering them in order to fashion them around the organ’s magic. I lived another life once, in a time before you can remember, and in that time I was an outcast. I disagreed with my Master, stole the organ from him, and hid in the wilds of the Northern lands. It was there I killed the beasts that made the cart. It was to them I owed my life, and that imbued them with love to a small degree. Having a deep respect for the life you take when you hunt adds to this. Still, the greater portion of power I borrowed from their parents; these are the bones of the young, and the sorrow their parents felt at their loss was recorded into them with my magic."
This completely surprised Maggie, now feeling very guilty remembering Harmony and her young. Frustration and disbelief flushed her face.
"How could you do that? Couldn’t you have hunted something else, something without a family? "
Aamon was glad she was asking this and not about his past.
"I could have, but I surely would have been killed to hunt an adult bear or whale. Hunting the young is difficult enough. And I had a purpose to serve; I had to survive, to build a shelter and to eat. I could never have hauled the bones of the great whales had they been adults, and again, I can’t impress this upon you enough Maggie, never try to hunt an adult bear. It would end poorly for you."
Maggie thought about this, and was eventually pacified. After all, she had to admit she loved rabbit stew despite her feelings about the family of food now living a short walk away from the camp site. Pacified, she continued her line of questions.
"Do I have to use bones as my materials then?"
"No, your medium is your choosing. It would be wise to study many mediums before perfecting your craft, and to find one that is easy for you to shape and speaks to your interests. And remember, the most important thing is not what you do, it is how well you do it and with how much dedication and care. Arts, crafting, and love are just the most easily accessible paths to this state of mind."
"So I don’t even have to sing?"
This question left Aamon quiet, and Maggie could see his age in a way she’d never noticed before.
"You may not know this Maggie, because you haven’t heard much song aside from the music we make along the road, but you have a perfect voice. It would be, in my opinion, a terrible waste not to pursue that at least as an option. Only once before in my life have I ever heard the quality of song that lives on in your voice."
"My mother?"
Another pause.
"Yes."
The two sat in silence for a moment, until Maggie noticed her father was crying. Surprised, she hurried over to him and started wiping at his tears with her hands, and then, not knowing what else to do, she gave him a kiss on each eye as he sometimes would her, and said as he sometimes did "Everything is well, Dad. You don’t need to cry. I’ll sing with you for my magic."
Aamon, moved by this, confessed to her "I have never heard a voice more beautiful than the one you possess, my Maggie, truly. Even so, I can not make you choose that path for your art. Do not think of these tears; I am only lost in the past. You must make the choice of your art for yourself or it will not come sincerely from your heart, and could not hold any magic."
Maggie felt so badly for her father; he was someone whose love was sincere and strong. He had never shown so openly how his lost love affected him, and before now Maggie had only truly considered the loss of her mother from her own perspective.
"What do I need to do?" She asked him. As if waking from a dream, he shook his head slightly and looked at the position of the moon.
"It will be time soon," he said, "We must begin."
With that, he led her into the clearing and bade her sit atop a second rock he had positioned, in front of the one bearing the means for a small fire. As he began to work the fire to life, he sang a strange, wordless song in a key an onlooker might have described as alien, but was to Maggie comfortable and familiar. As he sang and worked the fire, he met Maggie’s eyes and beckoned her to join him. As Maggie sang the same, repetitive tune, he lowered his voice in such a way that he was merely enforcing the rhythm. The fire kindled to life. Maggie’s nose filled again with the smell of wood smoke. She began to feel thin and light, as if she were going to rise up any second and spread out like a cloud. Her father closed her eyes with his hands, she didn’t notice at all. With all of the pieces in place, and with the moon at it’s highest point in the sky on the first night of Summer, he brought forth from his coat the clear orb of glass. With great care and love, Aamon stood opposite Maggie, the fire between them, his feet in the stream. Aamon drew back his hand and, pushing away a sharp sting regret, took aim at Maggie’s face through the fire, and waited. Only a few moments passed, then the chimes Aamon had set out all chimed at once, the wind gently converging on the circle. Ammon knew he only had one chance to get this right; he watched until the rustle of the converging winds upon the grass was just out of arm’s reach. Regret tearign at him, he pitched the orb with as much force as he could. It hurtled towards the young girl’s face, but as it passed through the fire it disappeared with a small eruption of prismatic light. The still night air split with the sharp, high-pitched wail of a woman crying out, but Maggie did not hear the cry; she was beyond consciousness, lying with her back in the stream now.
When Maggie awoke from her state of deep thought, the night was blanketed by absolute darkness. She could feel the stream coursing across her back, and she realized she was lying flat. She moved as if to sit up, and though she thought she felt herself rise she could still feel the water coursing down her back.
"Odd." She said aloud, but no sound came to her ears. This worried her, and after a few moments of trying to orient herself Maggie called out, "Dad!" She repeated this call a few times, and still could not hear herself. Panicking, she tried to reach about the ground for something, anything, to guide her back to their campfire... where was their campfire? Shouldn’t it be lit? She struggled to gain control of her limbs; no matter how she directed herself, her only sensation was that of water steadily streaming down her back. Then, like remembering something you never really new, the smell of wood smoke entered her mind; it was brief but definitely on the periphery of her senses. Maggie had a strong impression she was supposed to do something, but could not remember what. She realized she had just been looking for someone, but all her memory had escaped her. Suddenly, something like gravity began to draw her down the stream, as if it were suddenly beginning to tilt into a slope. She desperately tried to make her hands move, to grab onto something and prevent herself from sliding forward. Still, she had no control here. She was beyond the Veil, and at the mercy of greater powers. She began to slide, faster and faster as the incline rose and soon she was falling as if she had gone over the top of a small, endless waterfall, into a bottomless pit. She tried to scream in fear, she tried to flail in panic, but nothing happened and instead she plummeted on into darkness.
Five leagues from that camp site, along the old road towards Elderfell from Nithel and approaching from the direction Aamon and Maggie had entered, a cloaked figure on horseback turned to look in the same direction; whatever source of power had been protecting Aamon, it had finally broken. The sudden twinge of power raised a cry from him, and he sped his horse onward. After ten years of dutiful tracking, the Freekeepers would destroy the last of the old king’s court and recover the lost magics he had stolen.