Missive to Council

  Season of the Hot Sun Second Quarter Fourth Horn’s Day

  According to Omar’s described encounters with several itinerant spell-casters that demands from march lords are on the steady increase, and our collegiate have already begun to pick and choose between supplicants, have been refusing to provide further arcane to maintain the oldest wards, and even the strongest of Arcory Stones will have shown signs of noticeable decline. He believes without access to more restricted and powerful wartime codecs are the only hope is to concentrate our protections.

  I must add this is only hinted in his chronicles, and I am beginning to wonder if the worst our fellows are encountering have been downplayed to at least a small degree. As we all know, none of us have been granted such high positions amongst the collegiate care to admit to facing challenges we cannot bear.

  Caithness beamed as she led me from the bustle of the Grand Duke’s great domed Hall of Exception. At least, for the first few steps, before my staff began making things difficult for her. The first time it attempted to pull away from her the girl, she turned to me an alarmed look on her freckled face. To her credit she held fast.

  “Worry not,” I told her. “It’s just playing with you. You have to show it whose master and whose staff.”

  She didn’t appear to believe me, but was did not let go, and was clearly straining to keep her grip.

  “Are you certain, magister?” she asked, her voice raising a tone.

  “Absolutely,” I replied, smiling. “There’s nothing it respects more than concentrated willpower.”

  The courtiere nodded, tightened her grip on the bonewood and returned to her task. I knew the staff was still resisting her, but the girl held fast. If anything it confirmed my earlier suspicions about her.

  She then led me far from the noise of the supplicants though twisting corridors to a more quiet part of the citadel – a richly adorned chamber which spoke, not surprisingly of gaudy Vaeranshi tastes.

  It was there I found my former apprentice, the black bearded and well dressed (for a wizard, anyways) and now rather rounded man of magick waiting for me. Obviously, his service to Nevis and the Grand Duke’s circle had been good to Omar. I recalled the thin as a willow branch cooper’s son who had been entrusted to my tutelage with a smile.

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  That, I reminded myself, was a different era, had been but a decade after the fall of Arcoya, and the true end of the Riven War. There were now silver strands in his mop of black hair. We all grow older.

  “Ah, master, it is good to see you,” he told me as he stood up, then his expression changed, darkened, as he saw the girl was in possession of my staff. Omar held up a finger. “One moment.”

  He gestured to the girl and she stepped over to him. They spoke a few words in Catha1i, his reproachful, hers almost protesting then turning contrite as she glanced twice back to me. She then stepped back from him, then carefully leaned my staff against the near wall then retreated from the chamber through a side door, not glancing back. Once she was gone, Omar turned to me, thick lips grinning. He stepped out from behind his carved ebony table to offer his big, wide arms. We embraced for a moment before he released me, then invited me to his balcony for food and drink.

  “Tell me, master, what could have possessed Council in having you travel again?” he asked me later as we lounged by a cherry tinted window while chewing on sugared Vaeranshi dates. “I thought they permanently ensconced you in the great library, given your advanced years, and of course, wisdom.”

  I smiled at his joke.

  “Council has never been ones to let their rogues completely settle and ossify,” I told him. “They prefer to surprise us elders with the odd furlough, lest we have the idle hours to begin to question Council’s own accumulated wisdom.”

  Did he suspect my underhanded act to be so enquested? He should remember what I was capable of. But then, we had gone our different ways after the end of the Second War of the Alliance and the subsequent erection of the Fourth Council.

  “Although, they should have warned me what routes I would be taking,” I added. “I passed through the Bardelaisch Marches on my way here and found them regressing terribly. I heard from Margravine Galeata, that her husband intended to speak to you about aiding in the restoration of the march’s failing Arcory Stones.”

  Omar rubbed his neatly trimmed beard. His dark eyed gaze remained stead.

  “Somewhat out of my purview, I thought, to be honest,” he replied in a measured tone. “More lessons that not even the most powerful of us is eternal, eh? Those of the Bardelaisch would not be the first ones to succumb to the weight of the dark powers they were placed to keep at bay, as you know. It is still sad, in a way. I remember you telling me his power would endure, even splintered; that it would outlast even the densest of battle hexes. Outlast us all, I believe were your very words. A pity you turned out to be wrong.”

  A pity it had been, at least four other stones had declined to worthlessness in the last decade. But I knew well the dark marches those had been set in. As did Omar. It had had been agreed by all they were the most irredeemably corrupted. The magicks that beset Bardelaisch were a shadow by comparison. Could his years of entowered obligation, his great load of wizardly work in the Donlands, caused him to forget such details?

  ***

  Just Launched on Royal Road:

  (new chapter every other day - scifi comedy)

  Iain Compton never planned to be abducted by an alien spaceship. It just… happened. And now he’s been awakened 22,000 years in the future and half a galaxy away by a pair of oddly human seeming beak nosed aliens and a space ship A.I. that seems to have more than a few screws loose. Oh, and then there's this gorgeous alien woman who he probably shouldn’t trust at all. His plan is to find a way home to Earth, even if its unlikely to be remotely the same; to find a better class of companions among an often strange and inexplicable galactic community, at least one who won’t use him or sell him out at the first opportunity; and to do something about the parasites in his brain who are supposed to connect him to a library the size of the galaxy, but seem to only be telling him that almost everyone and everything he comes across wants to kill him.