September 13
Lunisolar Convergence 535 S-P-3
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"Alright, Fox, the eclipse is going to be starting any minute now," I said, setting down my folding chair. It was just shy of eight in the morning, which meant in our portion of the world the sun was floating only a short way above the horizon. "Standard procedure here, we record it and send the notes to the council if anything interesting happens."
Fox and I had a nice little chuckle at that.
"It is only going to be a partial eclipse," said Fox, handing me a roll of parchment and quill. "The sun isn't even going to do that thing where it looks like the moon is on fire. Why do they make us report on each of them?"
"Even a partial eclipse is a tremendous planetary alignment," I said, settling back to cast my eyes to the sky. "It may not be bring-about-a-reign-of-darkness-upon-the-earth-for-a-thousand-years-powerful but you could seriously twist the laws of nature around your little finger. Also, unlike most astronomical work, this means we get to be awake during the day, so I'm willing to put as much work into this as it takes so long as I can see the sunlight for a change."
I looked up at the blue, cloudless sky. The moon was up there, somewhere, slowly grinding its way around the earth, invisible to the eyes of those beneath the glare of the sun. I touched the small abacus I wore strapped to my right wrist. Glass is a natural inhibitor of the flow of magic, and shifting beads of it mounted on metal rails that are woven into a source of magic – such as my Shroud – altered the nature of the enchantments woven through it. It was the same thaumaturgy behind carving a rune or inking a spell, creating pathways out of stone or ink to direct the flow of magic into a pattern of one's own choosing. This device allowed for infinitely greater flexibility.
I clicked the beads into place, feeling the electric shivers down my spine as raw magic flowed through the eldritch gyres against my skin. Twin yellow lights ignited in the blackness of my Shroud. A pair of golden eyes opened to the heavens. Above my head, the blue skies peeled back like a pair of curtains, and everything became as clear as night. The moon hung overhead, as bright as if it were truly full and so clear that it seemed as though I could reach out and grasp it in my own two hands.
It was a spell I had been constantly working on for the past few years. I reasoned that, since the blackness surrounding me was totally opaque, there must be some magic at work to let me see through it. Once I figured out the nature of the curse, it was a simple matter to alter what I could see. With the right enchantments I could see magic itself, read the aura of any living thing, track the flow of ley lines as easily as following a Roman highway… I could look up at the sky and see all the stars and all the planets as though they were birds alighting on my windowsill. This was the closest I could ever come to that one, glorious moment when my life force was one with the great will of the macrocosm.
Also, it easily cut my workload in half. I barely even need to show up most days.
"I can see the moon already," I said. "It looks as though our calculations were a bit on the conservative side. It could be a full hour before it gets into position."
"I brought wine," said Fox.
"Well, we don't have to detail that in our reports," I said. "Here, let me give you a view of this."
The eclipse wouldn't actually take place over our tiny island, no, that would be far too convenient. It would only be seen in Siberia, some desolate corner of the world so far off one was likely to fall off the edge and collide with a giant tortoise before they reached it. But we have ways around that. Thankfully, the wizards who converted this dismal little shit-spit into an observatory had turned the upper ramparts of the tower into a de-localized astral reception lens. In lay terms, we could move the sky itself so that any point in the heavens was visible from our home. I touched the runes carved into the stone ramparts, and the air above began to stretch and flow like the reflections on a windswept pond. The clouds streamed by like ribbons of white, and the sun arced above our heads, sinking back down beneath the horizon to the east, only to reappear above the opposite horizon, slowly ascending back into the sky. Siberia was so far away it was still yesterday.
The sun kept rising, and the sky moved around it. The moon couldn't be seen, but it was there, hidden within the infinite blue. I could see it, though, as clear as if it were full. I could count every crater and sail every sea, know the name of the man in the moon in a dozen languages. I watched it, too, grind into position, taking its place for the celestial ballet to come, until finally all the great celestial spheres were right as they should be. I settled back in my chair and let them do their magic.
And so we sat on the top of the tower, passing a wineskin back and forth and watching the sun and the moon dancing through space, coming closer and closer together until finally the great, dark shadow passed before the disk of the sun. It was as it said in the old tales, of a mighty sky-wolf that could devour the sun in three bites.
"…Fox?" I said, suddenly sitting up straight. "…is it just the wine or is that a total eclipse?"
"That's not how it should be, is it?" said Fox, shading his eyes. Even with the enchantments on the sky, the light of the sun was far too bright to look at for very long. "Were the calculations wrong?"
"The calculations have never been wrong!" I shouted, getting to my feet. My legs were shaking so hard I couldn't even stand up. That could have been the wine. We both got fairly wasted that morning. "The Saros cycle has predicted every eclipse on the face of the earth for nearly a thousand years!"
I stared up at the sky, frantically cycling the beads on my abacus. I switched from filter to filter, scanning the moon's ambient light, ley fields, thaumic waves, every range of the arcane spectrum. One would think that the force necessary to move eighty-one quintillion tons of earth and rock and iron would be somewhat obvious to any casual observer, but my well-practiced magical senses couldn't detect a thing.
My feet slipped from beneath me and I fell to my hands and my knees. I could feel the stone of tower vibrating like a plucked string. It was travelling up my bones, across my shoulders and all up and down my spine. I could feel it from the tiny bones in my fingertips up to the tinier, ridiculously-shaped bones inside my ears.
"Earthquake," I said. Tiny flecks of stone were dancing across the floor. "Earthquake, Fox, earthquake! We have to get out of here!"
"Johnathan, you have to remain calm," said Fox. "I'm a halfling, we live underground. The most important thing to remember in an earthquake is remain calm. Now, if we can just find a doorway to–"
"Fox, the most important thing to remember in an earthquake is not to be on top of a four-hundred year old stone tower!" I said. "I don't think the Romans had particularly good building codes."
Fox slapped me across the face. For a person with such tiny, delicate hands it hurt like getting sucker-punched by a horse.
"Dammit, wizard, calm down!" he said. "You will get through this if you remain calm! The last thing you want to do is go running off like an idiot and getting yourself killed!"
"Don't you tell me what to do!"
I ran. …I tried to run, at least. I had never before tried to rapidly descend a staircase in an earthquake with a belly full of wine and cowardice, but I found out that it ends with concussions. I lay on a landing, the building shaking all about me, staring up at the ceiling until there was only one of it.
The stone was glowing. It looked as though there were a fire burning within the heart of each block of stone, softly radiating a pure white light. I could see brighter streams and passages that were immediately recognizable as rune channels, carved deep into the stone. I reached for my abacus to dispel my Vision but found that it had shut off on its own.
It had to be the eclipse, I reasoned with one of those rare, post-head injury flashes of brilliance. This was a celestial alignment that shouldn't be, couldn't be, and it was releasing an immense amount of excess magic into the world. The runes and enchantments carved throughout this tower must have been funneling all the ambient magic for miles around and concentrating it in this one place. There was so much that the stone could scarcely contain it all. I had to run or the whole tower might come down on top of me.
Leaning on to the wall for support, I somehow made it down the stairs and into the living quarters, down through the bedroom, down through the dining room, down through my extensive collection of bird's nests and into the entrance hall. That's where I saw the staircase. I saw the stone floor split down the middle and part like water, opening onto a set of stairs leading deep into the earth. I knew I had to leave, and I didn't particularly want to get crushed under five hundred tons of stone, but I knew that whatever was beneath there was at the root of this calamity. I may not have had the power of a mage, but I still had the intuition of one. I could tell when the universe thought it was being clever.
I crept down the stairs, cautiously, wishing I had remembered to pick up my staff. You can never think clearly when it's needed the most, can you? But there was no time for that. My curiosity pulled me down, down those staircases, deeper and deeper, until I happened upon a hallway. Although we were deep beneath the earth it was as bright as day in that subterranean passage, the very air seeming to glow with some strange luminous energy. I followed the hallway down until its end, reaching a chamber that was far more cave than room.
The walls and floor were rough, shaped by the flow of water over thousands of years, but carved in the center was a perfectly round, perfectly flat space, and engraved in the stone was a summoning circle and a nine-pointed star. I had only ever heard of nonagrammatic ritual circles, and even then only as a theory… to use such a complicated array… the power it must be using…
There was a tremendous, calamitous tremor and then circle flashed a brilliant white. It lasted but an instant yet was so bright as to nearly strike me blind. I saw a blurry figure appear out of the brightness, floating in space like a corpse bobbing in deep water. It was subsumed in bright light, from the bottom of its flowing gown to the tip of its streaming hair, but its eyes were like two endless black pits. It turned to me, staring at me with those twin, infinite holes, and spoke in a voice louder more resonant than the shaking earth.
"The end comes." it said, in a voice that sounded like a thousand men all speaking at once. "All men will die. The Gods will face damnation. Fire and ice shall consume the world."
I was staggered – the light from the apparition was blinding, and her voice was powerful enough to send my hat flying from my head – but not stunned. This would hardly be the first time I had treated with unknowable powers from beyond the reckoning of man.
"What is this doom you speak of?" I shouted over the din of shifting stone, shielding my eyes with my crossed arms. "Whence do you come? Who are you?"
The glowing figure seemed to freeze in mid-air, nothing moving save its slowly blinking eyes. It turned to me and spoke slowly, as if it was barely comprehending its own words.
"Bring… me… to the wizards."
The light vanished so quickly it was blinding, and the noise of the earthquake stopped so suddenly it made my ears pop. The figure dropped from the air and collapsed onto the ground. Everything went quiet, everything went still. Slowly, moving no more than a few inches at a time, no more than I dared to, I crept over to the prone figure, peering at her until my vision returned.
It was a girl. Young, slim, clad in a white dress. Her skin was fair. Her hair was blonde. Her eyes, staring sightlessly into nothing, were blue. Her face… it was a face I knew even better than my own, one I saw every night, floating in endless darkness as I closed my eyes. This girl had Witney's face.507Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ4z5ETEeXbm
