Guild Mage: Apprentice

A sudden pain filled Keri's head, so intense that he staggered from the overwhelming force of it. He felt the muscles of his face sagging, and he pitched over to one side. Dimly, he was aware that Olavi had caught him before he hit the rampart, but he couldn't make his mouth work. His Næv'bel clattered down to the stone, and an image flashed into Keri's mind:

The old woman's hand on his arm.

The pain pushed him far, far away from the battle, from the wall, from the people around him, into a dark nothing that was free of sensation, free of thought, and free of fear. How long passed in that darkness, he could not have said. What changed, he could not have said.

When awareness returned, it did not bring color, or scent, or sound. Instead, the first thing that Keri was conscious of were the great waves, pulses, of mana that shuddered through the world around him. Like a fishing boat borne upon the waves, the immensity of the rhythm swept him up, and carried him along on a great, broken current.

It was the wrongness, the way in which the flow of mana was disturbed, that he was first clearly conscious of. It felt as if a great river had been split by a chasm, perhaps the result of the violent eruption of some tremor or earthquake. Rock and soil and root was rent asunder, lifted or dropped down, and the ancient flow of the water was upset from long worn paths, and forced to seek new avenues, new ways forward.

In that pushing in striving, the water carved away at the delicate new banks, collapsing unstable earth, carrying along brush in its wake. So, too, did the mana move: seeking new pathways through the great structure around Keri. Where the mana found damage, found pieces of the structure missing, it ripped and tore, breaking more debris free. In some places, the mana pooled and swirled, growing deep and dangerous when it found no outlet, until at last it burst.

A great gathering, then, and perhaps in self defense, the structure sent a great lance of mana down, down through the cold and empty vastness. All around Keri, the mana drained and tore at him, like the sucking, inevitable pull of a waterfall tumbling over boulders into a spray of mist below. He tried to grasp onto something, anything, but all was a world of ghosts and dreams, intangible, providing neither shelter, nor safety.

Caught up in the force of the eruption, Keri was carried along, all the way down to the world below. Through the black and into the blue, where wisps of white and grey fog, heavily laden with rain, fled before him. Somewhere far below, he saw a shape, an island, surrounded by a windswept, stormy sea.

The rift opened to receive him, both Keri and the mana which carried him along. For long moments, a great pillar of light connected the ancient ruins with the ring suspended high, high above. Throughout the ruins, veins of mana stone absorbed as much magical energy as they could, but there was simply too much. Power rushed out of the ruins, down corridors of broken stone, graven with images of a time when the old gods still walked the world.

Once again, Keri was carried along, rebuffed by the mana stone and unable to find any hold upon which to catch himself, any shelter in which to hide. The depths and the shoals spilled outward, like great storm-waves crashing upon a beach, and he was driven forward upon the crest.

The shoals swept out to encompass the corpse of a wyrm, stretched out across a head of tumbling rock that stretched out into the sea, sheltering a crescent of white sand to the south. The breakers were white, but the waves were dark, and a fine drizzle descended from the heavy cloud, soaking the six people who surrounded the broken carcass, dressing their kill.

Keri gazed upon them without eyes, and recognized only one - a warrior of House Iravata. Her eyes were the green of glossy scales, her hair the sickly, yellowed-white of venom in the blood. It was cut short, especially at the nape of her neck, to ease the fit of the enchanted steel helm resting on one of the damp, slick boulders that made up the head. Salt spray from the crashing waves below had wet everything, and slicked the filthy blonde hair to her skull.

It took a moment for the name to come - he'd met her only a handful of times, when accompanying his cousin Sohvis to meet prospective kwenim. Seija, that was it - Seija, of House Iravata. She wore steel riding armor that left the insides of her thighs and her groin unprotected, the better to sit the back of a wyrm, and carried a great lance, even longer than his own Næv'bel, and clearly meant to be used from the saddle.

"Do you need help to pry the ribcage open?" Seija asked. Dark warpaint decorated her lips, her cheeks, the edges of her eyes, and the contrast made her skin appear even more pale.

"No." The man who responded was immense, with corded muscles that strained under a great effort, and massive shoulders. His dark hair was soaked and limp, plastered to his bare back, and his eyes - they looked like wet pools of blood. There was no separation between white and color, and no way to tell what he was looking at. With one last, monstrous heave, the ribs of the wyrm cracked open. Gobbets of flesh flew in every direction, spraying half-coagulated blood that sprayed out at the rest of the party.

The man in full plate, carrying a halberd, did not react. Drops of blood rung out on his carapace of steel, sounding just like the rain. The woman in dark robes, leather case unrolled along the flat rock before where she knelt, paused in examining her knives and saws, then returned to her work. The old man who wore no armor, only eastern robes, took a step back, wrinkled his brown lip in disgust, and muttered an incantation. Every drop of blood that had touched him hissed, steamed, and boiled away in an instant, leaving him clean.

The boy licked his lips, clearly relishing the taste of blood the way some other child might clean every last speck of a pudding or pie from his plate. He was a dark-haired child, and looked a bit older than Rei -

Some part of Keri shuddered and struggled. My son. I want to see my son.

With something to focus on - words and faces, the name half-recalled from years ago - everything fell into a more clear focus. Where thoughts had been fuzzy things, only half understood and mostly instinctual, now Keri realized what was happening - because he had felt it before.

When his father had taken him to Keremor, just before he was joined to Rika, to mark the final step into adulthood, his soul had been loosed to drift along the currents of mana. He'd drifted across the world, and for the first time, seen Livara's blue eyes. Long before Keri had met her, he'd been captivated by those beautiful, sad eyes.

If he'd wanted this vision to show her to him again, he was disappointed. Nothing of beauty was to be found on this rainswept, rocky shore.

"Noghis. Come here, boy," the bare-chested man with the red eyes called, lifting one arm to beckon the child forward. "This is a thing one must do with their own hands."

The boy scrambled up over the great, scaled curve of the wyrm's body, as agile as a mountain squirrel. He nearly slipped, but the man caught him with a steady, familiar hand on the back. Keri recognized that motion - he'd made it a thousand times himself. It was the movement of a father, taking care that his son did not fall.

"The magic is in the heart," the red-eyed man explained. "It is not the source of the blood, but it is the organ that moves it throughout the body. All the blood comes to the heart, and then is pumped out again, circulating in turn. Thus it is sacred to the great mother."

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"Almost as sacred as the womb," Seija commented, from the rocks below, but father and son ignored her.

"We cut the heart loose here, and here? You see?" With a great, wicked looking knife, the red-eyed man hacked and sawed, sending spurts of blood up with every cut. "We lift it out with our own hands, and bring it to the blood-letter. Help me."

Keri doubted the child – Noghis – did much in the way of actually helping, but he at least kept his hands on the gruesome organ. No doubt the father carried nearly all the weight, but together they managed to scramble down off the wyrm and onto the rocks, where they carried the severed heart over to the woman with her kit of sharp implements.

"No wings," the man in full plate grunted from beneath his helm. "It would have been better to go back to the painted desert."

"Enough, Manfred," the old man barked. Wisps of his white hair floated in the wind that came in off the open sea. "It would be a waste to lose good warriors fighting Silica. Let the old wyrm bleed to death in her lair. The form of this wyrm will be powerful enough."

"Wyrms didn't do Calevis much good at the Foundry Rift," Manfred grumbled. "That was a disaster."

"My cousin was mad from the pain of losing half his body," Seija shot back. "If he'd been thinking clearly, he'd have left with every Antrian he'd activated, then levelled the entire place on his way out. He was always too concerned about being the center of attention, and it cost us."

"Silence, all of you," the woman in dark robes said. "The ritual begins. Do not insult the Great Mother by interrupting." With a sharp knife, she carved two pieces from the wyrm's heart, and lifted them high toward the sky.

"Kneel," she instructed the red-eyed man and the boy at his side. "Great Mother Ractia, Lady of Blood, to you we offer this sacrifice and this prayer," the woman in black chanted. She continued, but in the language of the Great Bats, a dialect of Vædic that Keri could't follow.

A great pressure built, and Keri recognized it as Authority. It reminded him of when Liv and his Aunt Väina had faced off at mountain home, a contest between cold and light. But where the power of those two women was familiar to him - and even sometimes comforting, when they weren't throwing it at each other in anger - this pressure, this great weight, was nothing but oppressive.

The wind blew, and carried currents of mana out to sea, and Keri flung himself out with it, allowing his spirit to be carried along. He left the beach, and the six people clustered around the corpse of a wyrm, far behind. The island dwindled, until it was eventually lost in the endless, flat expanse of gray ocean beneath a grain, clouded sky. He found a wind that blew north, and east, toward home.

What had happened to him? Keri tried to remember anything after the pain, and he could not. The old woman had touched him. He'd killed her, sliced her head clean off from the stump of her neck, but she'd managed to lay a hand on him first. The dowager queen of Lucania had done something to him before she'd died, and that magic had proceeded along its course, guided by her dying intent.

It was the first time he could recall regretting that he had not pushed himself to master his own Authority. Keri had always thought of himself as more of a warrior than a caster, and decades of hunting the Cult of Ractia across the north had skewed his focus even further.

He knew how to station men to cover every exit from a building, to form a perimeter around an area so that no member of the cult would escape, once they kicked down the doors. He knew how to search from room to room, throwing furniture aside to reveal hidden hatches, doors, or attics. But he hadn't really studied magic since before the day of blood.

If he had, perhaps he could have ended that last, lingering spell before it struck him down.

Keri was certain that he wasn't dead, at least. He was no shade of Celris, lingering in the frozen north and feeding on every spark of life, magic or heat that came to die in that ancient Tomb. He had a body that lived and breathed, somewhere. But he must have been wounded, indeed, for his spirit to have slipped loose from his flesh and drifted out into the world. With no fasting, no ceremony, no elder to guide him – it was a dangerous thing. He needed to get back; he needed to wake.

But there was something else he needed more.

The wind howled over the beaches, along the coastal plains, and then climbed up into the foothills toward the mountain peaks, and Keri steered himself along with it. He used the flows of mana to propel himself, and then veered away from them, dropping down onto Mountain Home, where the house lay nestled across the slopes of Menis Breim.

Where the hot springs steamed, the snow had receded entirely, leaving behind only vibrant green grass. As a remove from the stone paths, where it had been shovelled aside and piled up to clear the way for the winter, shrinking ridges of dirty white powder, now iced over with a thin crust, dripped in the warmth of spring.

Beneath the shelter of the pines, Keri found his son sitting cross legged, eyes closed, opposite his father Ilmari.

"Breathe in slowly," the old man instructed, in a slow, deep voice. "Hold the breath. Feel the mana, warming your body. Let it come into you. Let it fill you. Guide it, and calm it."

For a moment, Keri was a child himself once again, living the same lesson, decades before. Half of him silently screamed that he should have been the one teaching his own son; the other half was grateful that Rei was learning from his grandfather.

Unable to resist, Keri moved closer to Rei. If he'd had a body, he would have reached out and folded his son in his arms, cradling the boy's blond head against his chest. But without arms, hands or fingers, all he could do was linger near and watch, listen, unobserved and unnoticed.

Ilmari ka Väinis cocked his head to one side, as if he'd heard something that drew his attention, or perhaps a buzzing fly had struck his ear. His snowy-white beard shifted across his chest, and the curls of his long hair pulled across his back and shoulders. The old man's eyes opened, and squinted.

"Who is there?" he asked. Once again, a great weight descended on Keri, pressing him down. "Name yourself," Ilmari demanded.

"Father…" It was a thought, as much as anything else. With no tongue to speak, no lungs to take in the crisp mountain air, Keri did not know how to make himself heard. It was clear that Rei perceived nothing, for the boy opened his eyes, frowned, and looked toward his grandfather.

"Did you hear someone? I don't hear anyone."

It was a show of great precision and control – the full weight of Ilmari's Authority came down on Keri, but not the slightest hint of it did the old man allow to touch his own grandson.

"Hush for a moment, Rei." Keri watched his father's eyes flick about, and then they seemed to fasten on him. "In fact, your lesson for the day is over," Ilmari continued. "Go run inside and find your mother. Tell her that I said you had been a very good boy today, and that you deserve a treat."

With a squeal of glee, Keri's son leaped to his feet and dashed off across the paths between the pools, headed toward the halls of Mountain Home itself.

"Now we can speak without frightening him," Keri's father said. "Is that you, son? Why have you come?"

"You can hear me?" Keri thought. "You can see me?"

His father nodded. "I can. But put aside that question for now, and tell me what has happened."

"I was hurt, somehow," Keri told his father. "During the battle at the wall. I was fighting the Lucanian dowager queen. The old woman was a worshipper of Ractia – I saw her use the word of blood. I killed her, but not before she touched me. And then –" If he'd had a body to shudder with, he couldn't have helped but do it. "Terrible pain in my head. I couldn't control my body. I remember falling over, and someone catching me – and then nothing. Darkness."

Keri's father leaned towards him. "Do you know where your body is?"

For a moment, Keri wanted nothing more than to leap into his father's arms, as he had when he was a child. "I don't," he admitted. "It's all confused. I was sucked in by an erupting rift, and there was an island." The memory of the horrible ritual he'd seen there was enough to turn a stomach, if he'd had one. He deliberately turned his thoughts aside from it, to a pair of ice-blue eyes.

"Find Liv," Keri told his father. "I've seen things I need to tell her, things Valtteri needs to know. Things the elders need to know. Find Liv, and she'll know what happened to me."