Things are beginning to accelerate in Castelmaine now. In this installment, Marr and Folk talk for the first time and Gideon reveals a little more of the history of Evalaria. In other news, portals are quite possibly the easiest things to visualise if you've seen them, but one of the hardest things ever to describe!
It was mid afternoon by the time Folk re-emerged from Mozu-Beric's eyrie, her face was an expression of weariness. Auden Marr rose to his feet and offered the girl a hand. She took it gladly.
"Has she dismissed you?" he asked her softly. She nodded, "Did she say anything else?"
"No."
He smiled, the girl was clearly worn out utterly.
"We should get you back to your studies."
At this she smiled broadly and nodded enthusiastically with wide eyes.
"Come then!" He exclaimed, lifting her up and sitting her on his shoulder so that she sat there quietly, gently holding onto one of his horns for stability. He began to descend down the winding stairs around the tower. "What did she ask of you?"
Folk shrugged a little, "She asked me about last night. What I saw, what I felt. She asked lots about that."
"About what you felt?"
"Yes. She kept asking what I'd felt before I'd seen the monster. Had I dreamed or had I felt scared."
"And?"
"I was afraid. I've never been so frightened. She seemed really interested about that."
Marr nodded slowly, "What do you study, Folk?"
"Oh, everything. I don't turn of choosing age until next winter."
"How old will you be then?"
"Ten."
He chuckled softly, his shoulders bouncing as he did so. She giggled and held his horn tightly, "Do you know which path you'll take?"
"No." She said sadly, "Madame Lyssa says I would make an excellent adept of the Emerald Tower."
"The centaur druid?"
Folk nodded.
"She's a good woman, I'm sure you and her would get along very well. You'd make a fine Wildshaper."
"But I really like Gideon and the Sapphire Tower."
"I'm sure you'd do really well as a Chronomancer too." Marr added, "I had heard you two were quite close."
"You know Gideon?"
"I know of him and I'm sure he and I must have spoken on a few occasions in our business about Berican University, but I can't say I'm particularly close."
"Oh."
Marr bent his knees low to duck through the doorway back into the ivory tower proper.
"I really don't like this bit." Folk said uneasily.
"I didn't at first," Marr said as he lowered her carefully from his shoulder to the floor, "But it does make things considerably faster and easier."
Before them stood several large brass objects. Two curved horn-like projections rose from a small brass plinth in each, creating a circle, within each of which span a maddening vision. An image of somewhere else stretched across each circle, hanging there like a filmy bubble, except it wasn't an image of somewhere else, it was somewhere else. One showed a room not dissimilar to the one they were in, and two scholars were currently in a heated discussion. Another opened up onto a great library, shelves upon shelves of books stretching into the distance beneath a vast multicoloured glass dome roof.
Marr stepped close to one, a courtyard of soft verdant grass with little pink blossoms, and pulled a small pebble like object from his pocket, smooth, round and silvery grey. Into the stone was carved a stylised dragon emblem, the personal heraldry of Mozu-Beric. The edges of the portal in front of him flared a vibrant flash of orange and purple as the power of his stone drew close, and the filmy surface of the portal wavered and wobbled before settling so still that the portal no longer appeared an object but an opening directly onto the scene before them.
Marr smiled down at Folk who was looking decidedly displeased and anxious.
"It's alright," he said softly, "Just walk through as if it were a door, confident and calm."
He placed his hand on her back softly and gently guided her to the portal. She swallowed, closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them and stepped through. It would have been just like walking through a doorway, save for the strange tugging sensation she felt as she crossed the threshold. It felt like her entire body was being pulled in different directions. Even though it was only for the slightest of moments, it was hideously uncomfortable and she hated it. It was only when the large form of Auden Marr stepped through next to her that she realised she had been holding her breath, and let it out in one great sigh.
They were stood on the grass of the Almata Cloister, she could see her class in the distance, and Gideon was striding down the stone walk to meet them. She turned to Marr with a big smile and thanked him, before running off to join her classmates. Marr smiled back and waved, then turned and stepped back through the whirling maelstrom behind him. It went still as he approached, then span into a dervish of colour and rippling the moment it swallowed him.
With envious eyes did Mortlekir gaze upon our world. All the power of the universe was within his reach, but he could not grasp it. To enter our world he must become mortal, and once mortal he could not then wield the power he sought. For millennia he plotted, lurking in the darkness beyond the stars, until the idea came that if he could not enter our world to claim his prize, he would rend the world asunder and claim it from the wreckage. This was the first cataclysm, the First Coming of Black Fire. Onto our world he poured his fury, his rage and his malice.
Fires fell from the sky, burning rocks crashed to the lands below. Forests, cities and great plains were lost in the inferno that swept across our world, but we held on. The landscape was ravaged and torn, and onto this weakened world he threw his fury. Like trying to open a walnut, Mortelkir had tried to burn away the shell, and now withdrew for a mighty hammer blow. A massive meteor he plucked from the heavens and sent hurtling towards our world, but when the times looked darkest, the Elder Gods returned.
Laran and Estariel, incensed at what Mortelkir planned, intervened one final time, using their energies to protect us, though the force of the meteors impact into their barriers was enough that it reverberated outwards and shattered the Gods themselves into a thousand pieces. So it was that our world was saved, but at the price that we would never know the Gods by their true forms, but by those fragments that we know today.
The passionate heart of Laran became Tarak of the Sun and Fire. The life giving waters of Estariel became capricious Isobel of the Waters. The hands of Laran became the twin gods Dozu and Mezo of the mountains and earth. The breath of Estariel became Mor-Haig, the protector of the cycle of Life and Death and Lith, Goddess of the Wilds. From Laran's mind came the spiders Mir, Lord of Time, and Dir, Weaver of Fate and Keeper of Secrets. Each of the shards came to embody one of the Elder Gods great gifts.
The Light of Hope that had shone in Estariel's face, however, was lost without her beautiful visage to contain it, and so it exploded bathing the world in the luminance of hope that we call magic that the mortal races would be able to wield the powers of the gods to protect themselves should Mortelkir arise to try again.
Because he had failed, Mortelkir was furious, but beaten he slinked back into the shadows beyond the stars and began once more to plot the downfall of our world.
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