Unless Fola wanted to watch Colm being cut to ribbons, she had to act.
The templar tore his sword from Colm and wheeled it around.Colm fell back.The muscles in his lower arms strained to match the pace of the templar’s blade.
Fola raised her left hand and made a circle with her fingers, closing the magic diagram inked onto their inner edges.She peered through the circle, positioning it so that it circumscribed the templar’s head.She braced herself—there was a reason it was better to use spellpaper for such things—and pushed downwards with her index finger, intending to cut the circle in half.
Easier to push through a plate of steel.
She grunted.The templar’s invocation had also lent him profound resistance to magic.A fascinating piece of information.Also a frustrating one.
Again, she braced herself, this time for nausea as well as backlash.
The templar raked his sword down Colm’s ribcage.Colm managed a slash of his own, carving off a chunk of the templar’s cheek.The bastard only howled the louder.His corona flared, bright as the sun.
The air Fola’s middle finger was moving through felt thick as soggy clay.Her arm trembled with the effort, which made it difficult to keep the circle small and precise enough.Accidentally stupefying Colm for a few moments would have been annoying, but no catastrophe.This, though, not even he could survive.
The templar’s blade gleamed in the light of his corona as he brought it over his head.Colm backpedalled, stumbled over the archer he had shot through the face, and fell as the sword flashed down.
Fola screamed in frustration, and felt the nail of her middle finger bite the meat of her palm.
Like a snuffed candle, the light of the corona went out.Heat flared down Fola’s arm, raising steam that smelled of singed hair.The templar’s head cracked open, spraying blood and bone.He tumbled forward, pulled by the weight of his swinging sword, to fall across Colm in a dead heap.
A Kindness
YC 1189
As of the current year, there are two hundred and seventy-nine species catalogued as sufficiently self-cognisant during at least some stages of life to warrant classification as sapient persons.Some are visually indistinct from the varieties of human being common to the City and its surrounding kingdoms.Others would appear monstrous to one who has never ventured beyond those narrow borders.None are so numerous as humanity.These species can be further classified into those, like humanity, which seem to have arisen from the natural order of animals, and those who clearly descend from the products of thaumaturgic experimentation, likely by the First Folk.
Archivist Eltan Oora, introduction toThe Taxonomy of Sapience,YC1098
Fola hugged her left arm close.A few blisters had already grown between her knuckles and a deep ache had settled into her bones.Flesh was more resilient than paper, but there was a reason the magic written into her body was a last resort.
With a grunt, Colm freed himself from beneath the templar’s corpse.Its mail rattled as it rolled, blood still pulsing from the shattered ruin of its head.More than the pain in her arm, that sight churned Fola’s stomach.She hadn’t wanted things to go this way.There must have been a path which would have left that cruel idiot alive, with a chance to—maybe someday—become less cruel and less of an idiot.Everyone deserved that chance.Now he was dead, by her hand.
She stared at the corpse, fighting down a guilty, greedy thought.The undead formed easily from the souls of those who died by violence.It would be a simple thing to draw a thaumaturgic circle and pry the secrets of the Mortal Church from the ghosts of these slain templars.Useful information for the City, both in matters of defence and as part of the Library’s broader project of understanding and mastering magic in all its forms.Enough for her to return as something of a hero.Enough, maybe, to earn a fragment of the esteem she had longed for all her life.
But she had left the City with grander designs.She didn’t want to be a hero; she wanted to change the world.To solve a puzzle that had captivated and stymied generations of her predecessors.It was an obvious short cut.Instead of lifetimes upon lifetimes dedicated to gradually untangling the mystery of the indecipherable language, the bizarre artifacts, and the powerful magics the First Folk had left behind, why not summon up their ghosts—or their immortal souls, wherever they had gone—and ask them directly?
Hundreds of thaumaturgists before her had tried.All had failed.The central problem was the nature of the First Folk soul itself.Thaumaturgy worked by complex mathematics and semiosis.The more precise the equation and symbolic meaning, the more powerful the spell.The central problem, then, with conjuring up the souls of the First Folk was that no one alive really knew what the First Folk were, precisely, and the spells designed to conjure them only gestured vaguely in their direction.
A problem to which Fola had devised a solution.One that required thaumacite, the pearlescent, hyperlucent crystal that grew—slowly, the width of a fingernail every hundred years—in the caverns beneath the Starlit Tower in the heart of the City.A substance that contained all the myriad forces of the world, including those that comprised the souls of mortals, fae, fiends, and the undead.It stood to reason, then, that it also held the secrets she would need to conjure the souls of the First Folk.She had even devised a spell to begin whittling at a sample of thaumacite, eliminating first everything that was not some kind of soul, then gradually peeling away the unique characteristics of mortals, then fiends, then fae, until she was left with a First Folk soul by proxy.Apophatic definition.Establishing what somethingisby determining what it isnot.
Given enough time, she would find the right mixture of the right properties in the right proportions.But each instance of the experiment would require a significant sample of thaumacite—one about the size of her molar, she estimated.A sample that would be transformed and rendered useless for other research when she was finished with it.
Unfortunately, thaumacite was the only resource the City could not fabricate as easily as breathing, and of vital importance to every branch of cutting-edge thaumaturgical research.Two facts which had led to the creation of an anonymous, rotating board of long-serving and well respected Archivists and Librarians tasked with evaluating research proposals and allocating thaumacite to the worthy.
Even her most sceptical detractors admitted that Fola’s proposed project would lead to an untold wealth of knowledge.The opportunity, at last, to learn the First Folk’s language and decipher the countless volumes they had left behind in the Labyrinthine Library.Perhaps, finally, the key to that most tantalising of all secrets—an explanation for their disappearance and the creation of the City itself.And with that, the ability to expand the City, to direct its energies outwards and spread its gifts of comfort, long life and abundance throughout the wider world.A wonder.An unlocking of the world’s greatest mysteries and gifts—if she could manage it.And no one believed that she could.
It was an insult.A display of tremendous lack of faith.Repeated over, and over, and over again.
‘We can’t even begin to guess if your theory will work, or even if it is possible,’ Arno had said, after that last meeting of the research board when her proposal had been, for the eighth time, rejected.He held her hands to keep her from flinging another of the Library’s countless ancient volumes at the wall.Their voices echoed through the empty vaulted space, a dozen floors deep, where few but the most dedicated scholars ever wandered.
‘Wherever the First Folk went, whether they died or vanished into some other world, they must still have souls, Arno,’ Fola seethed.‘Their memories must cling to this place like cobwebs.More than enough to conjure them.But of course they haven’t come at our call!It would be like ants trying to get our attention.’
‘And you think you can overcome their disinterest?When there has been no sign of them at all these last thousand years?’
‘If an ant wrote your name in the sand, you’d have to pay attention, wouldn’t you?I’m that ant, and I know how to find their name.’She tore her hand free, seized a book from the shelf behind her and held it over her head.Suddenly exhausted, she slumped against the shelf and let the book drop.‘I want my life to mean something, Arno.Why can’t they at least give me a chance?’
Humiliating.
