An Evening in The Stacks
“I killed him, you know. I uncoupled the protections of the stone, and the weight of magics smashed him to paste. I think about that often and have regretted it almost every day for the last seven-and-a-half centuries.” The old man tugged at his long, gray beard braided with gems and bits of colored string while looking down at the child playing with wooden blocks a few feet away. “That is the curse of our kind. When you live as long as I have, you spend more time reliving your past and regrets than you do looking forward.”
The child set down his toys and looked at the old man, considering him with an intense, emerald gaze.
“You will know the pain of being an archmage soon enough. Hold on to these few years of innocence and ignorance while you can. Enjoy your life while you are stupid and simple. Before long, before you can even notice the change happening, you will be deep in the affairs of the world and having to make decisions that will haunt you for ages long after those you made them for are nothing but dust.”
The child continued to stare.
The old man stared back and nodded. “Yes, we are archmages. I am the first of our kind, and you are the youngest.” He grinned at the thought of that. “If I, Cazlandt, first archmage, founder of the archmage nation, must live in this misery, what hope is there for the rest of our kind?” He turned from the boy and looked over the railing beside him to the sea of bookshelves and racks. The Stacks stretched on forever in snarled twists and turns. Cazlandt once saw this place organized into neat rows, but that was only when the mistress of the library accompanied him.
Cazlandt stood and smoothed the wrinkles from his bright, yellow robes. He straightened the pointed hat on his head as he turned and placed both hands on the railing resembling the twisted roots of a tree. Even as he squinted, he could see no end to The Stacks. It contained the sum of all knowledge and history of every realm, information gathered by the Chronicler and set down here. Cazlandt turned his back to the wealth of knowledge and looked at the iron-banded door a few dozen paces away across the wood plank balcony. Beyond that, another fifty paces would return him to the castle he raised from the hoarfrost as a home and sanctuary for archmages.
“She is your sister, you know,” he said to the boy. “Or rather, she will be. Alishia, the Chronicler, Mistress of the Infinite Library. I am sure she boasts many impressive titles. Since I first met her centuries ago, I have learned more of her lineage. My grandson, your father, will have a child with a svarters woman. Perhaps with their princess, though she is now barely ten years old. Something will pull your father from the fascination he holds for your commoner mother, and Alishia will be born. Perhaps that will not be for another fifty years, when your mother dies of old age, as her kind does. Alishia told me that something happens between now and her birth that results in my death, though not in so many words. Perhaps it will be the svarters princess’s great-granddaughter, and I have centuries remaining.”
The boy yawned and laid down on the thick blanket amongst his toys.
“Yet knowing the hourglass of my life is possibly running low, I am still motivated to move forward as I always have. Should I live in fear of what is to come, I will accomplish nothing more in a life so full of grand milestones. Still…” He paused and looked back to The Stacks. “Still, I think of the past. Alishia was always so concerned as she used this place with power unique to her to travel across the tapestry of time, concerned about changing the past. She worried one minor difference a hundred years ago might unravel everything that came after. She as the Chronicler strove—strives—to merely observe and record the realms but not to interfere. I respect and do not envy her for that. It is impressive to know what will transpire and yet have the willpower to not change it. Yet…” He drummed his fingers on the wooden railing and tugged on his beard again. Meager light filtered across The Stacks from an unseen ambiance. “Yet, perhaps, there is more than one way of undoing the past. If I cannot go back and undo the action, perhaps, I can undo the results.” He glanced back at the boy now sleeping on his soft blanket embellished with colorful and fantastic creatures. “I will not be gone long.” Touching his amulet in the design of two overlapping crescent moons, Cazlandt strode to the wrought iron spiral staircase leading down into The Stacks.
Cazlandt’s rugged leather boots clanked on the iron steps as he descended and the library closed in around him. Wooden shelves soared several feet over his head, and he grinned with the thought of little half-svarters Alishia awkwardly climbing them to reach the higher tomes. This was her library. Why would it be constructed for someone thrice her height?
The ancient archmage wandered the twists, and soon, the staircase and the balcony behind him completely left his sight. He ran his fingertips along the spines of leather-bound books older than himself, perhaps even from before his race of humans had existed in Poas, maybe pre-dating humans in any realm. No matter, without the Chronicler working against him in this place, he could quickly find the stairs again. The Stacks was a place of potent magic, and as with all magic, intention leads to the majority of the result.
Cazlandt let his mind and feet wander, thinking of his centuries of travel across the realms, sometimes with a companion, but usually alone. Faces flashed through his mind of the countless he met. After all his travels, he never found another realm with humans until he went with the Chronicler to encounter those infuriating boys and two purple skins. Two boys, barely twenty winters old, brought him low. Cazlandt, first and most powerful of archmages, fell to a couple of children.
He sighed. Though the boys deserved what happened, he really did feel the guilt for those final actions against them. Alishia cared a great deal for the one. The archmage saw it in the months she held him captive here in The Stacks after their return. He often caught Alishia touching the features of that small stone carving or the string of wooden beads. She would tuck them away as soon as she noticed his attention, but he could be very quiet when he wanted.
What was his name? Elren? Elvan?
Cazlandt suddenly realized he lost all sense of time, not that time existed within The Stacks. As a powerful archmage capable of surviving on the ambient flows of mana within the library, he felt fine. Less could be sure about the infant left on the balcony. Letting some concern for the babe hurry his steps, Cazlandt focused his mind and tried to remember why he came down here, a lingering guilt for the necessary murder of his friend, Lavin. Could there be one that might know how to undo death?
He suddenly remembered a name. Draigh Queen. A withered, ancient woman from a realm on the brink of destruction by natural forces. Even as the skies rained fire and the ground spewed molten earth, she mumbled to him about a means of seeing beyond the veil and undoing the work of Elphame, Ascended of Death. True resurrection, as she called it, did not interest Cazlandt at the time, and he quickly forgot her words as he fled the realm and left its denizens to their fate.
“The undoing of the Ascended’s work cannot be done lightly,” she breathed in her tent choking with incense, herbs, and the ash of the village burning around them. “Each of us has our part to give in the grand flow of mana through the Trees. Were you to attempt such an act, seek the Necromancer.”
The Necromancer, Cazlandt thought as he weaved through the endless shelves. One with magic beyond the power of Lady Elphame. One that uses the release of energy that comes with death to fuel their magic.
His fingers still traced the spines of tomes, all feeling the same, until he ran over one with a rougher edge. The archmage paused and returned to the thin book, carefully pulling it from the shelf.
“The Necromancer of Urbus,” lay printed in gold relief across the dark leather cover.
Cazlandt grinned. “Alishia, you are amazing,” he said and opened the tome to a random page. He read enough in The Stacks to know there was no point in reading a book from start to finish. The information gleaned would be the same no matter the starting point.
His eye moved first to the sketch on the right side of the fold. It showed a shadowy figure looking over a lake toward an island some distance in the center. Sprouting from the left end of the island was a skeletal tree, enormous if the scale of the drawing was accurate to the figure in the foreground. Cazlandt looked to the text on the left, and as expected, most of it looked smudged and ruined. The Stacks always had an annoying habit of censoring what information it gave out. “The Necromancer of Urbus” was penned again at the top in the style common to all books in The Stacks. A mixture of rushed, looping strokes and single characters made up the text. The light down here within the shelves was too dim to read by, so Cazlandt took the book and turned to where he knew a stack of maps were laid out on a desk.
The lefts and rights made no difference if his mind focused. Within a few moments, the shelves widened to make space for a wooden table covered with a thick pile of weathered parchment. The top sheet showed a detailed, hand-drawn map of Poas. Even the southern continent of Iecil and the poisonous western lands of D’Kreti were drawn. The map faded to nothing in the east. Not trusting the magics of The Stacks, Cazlandt tucked the book about the necromancer under his arm, lest the small tome disappear when he turned his back, and flipped through the large sheets of maps. He recognized some by the shapes of their land masses, others by the names of locations or the realm name itself. Most remained smudged and stained until he flipped to one with cracked edges. “Throk’tar” was penned across the top in bold letters. The map showed far more detail than Alishia should have ever gotten in their few-day travel there centuries ago. How many times did she revisit this world?
The very next parchment was labeled “Urbus”. Cazlandt grinned, not taking it as a mere coincidence that Throk’tar sat beside this other realm. Nothing was mere coincidence in The Stacks. Rather than studying the map in that dim alcove, he tugged it from the heap, rolled it quickly, and returned to the wrought iron stairs.
A brief flash of panic crossed his mind when he saw the empty blanket strewn with small toys. “Lone?” he asked the open air. The infinity of The Stacks swallowed and deadened his voice. Cazlandt looked back to the iron stairs behind him. The boy could barely walk, he would not attempt descending those. The only other exit was the heavy door leading back to Castle Dracon, and he clearly lacked the strength to open it. There was one other exit over the balcony, but Cazlandt could not see the boy climbing and tossing himself from there to the floor twenty feet below, either.
He’s an archmage, or will be. He should be fine, he thought, with panic still edging closer.
The tiny form of young Lone lay curled on the padded seat of the wing-backed chair behind the large desk. Cazlandt blew out a sigh of relief as he set the book down and rolled map.
“Suanh be damned, you gave me a scare, young Lone.” He watched the slow rise and fall of the boy’s side for a moment. “When I met your sister, I had such… not anger, but what is the word… disappointment… to see her muddied by svarters blood. I can hardly fault my grandson. I held great affection for the mother of my only son. I saw him, your grandsire, with so many women on his forearm, but none he so admired as the mothers of his own children. Your father seems the same, maybe even more so smitten by the admiration of your mother, Lone. I really wonder what event leads him to sire a child without her.”
The boy slept on as Cazlandt unrolled the map across the table, smoothing the corners that it might lay flat. It showed a thin land mass circling a large central island. Names labeled the regions of the outer land, but only the outline of a single, skeletal tree marked the inner island.
Cazlandt opened The Necromancer of Urbus to again see that sketch of a shadowy figure looking out across the sea to the tree. Beside the map of the realm, it seemed simple to assume the figure stood on the cliffs of that ring of land to gaze inward.
“I will teach you to Realm Stride when you are old enough, Lone. I taught my son and his children how to teleport, but never to Realm Stride. There was no real reason to withhold the training, they just never seemed interested. It is a simple enough magic with some amount of practice, but is always a tad harrowing when going to a place for the first time.” He traced a finger along the thin land circling the island on the map. “Imagine throwing yourself into the void of the aether to appear in some unknown world. I miss how Kethry threw herself at it without a moment’s hesitation. She was a rare gem of a woman, such passion and fire with a mind more brilliant than I ever met in all our travels.”
He studied the map and the names penned across regions. Thin lines likely marked roads or rivers across the outer ring. It labeled two lines as bridges across the inner sea, the Roto Sea. The longer he studied it, the more details Cazlandt noticed in the map.
Finally, focusing back on the open book, he touched the massive skeletal tree in it and on the map with the middle finger of either hand. “This must be the world tree of Urbus, the center of the realm’s magic,” he said to the sleeping child. “Strange that it looks dead, but perhaps that is just the look of it.” He flipped through the pages of the book, but the rest of the text appeared too blurred, blotched, and smudged to read. He found one more sketch near the front. It showed the same shadowy figure standing on a winding road edged by tall grass. A wooden fence lined the left side of the road to keep the grass at bay while a high wall of well-fitted boulders bordered the right.
“Do I dare, Lone? I stand here depressed and lamenting an action done more than a hundred mortal life times ago and The Stacks hands me the savory, irresistible bits as this. I suppose the other question would be ‘what is the risk?’ I have gone to so many realms in my time. What threat could be any real danger to one with my power?”
Lone finally woke and whimpered the beginnings of a fuss.
“None of that. You are the proud prince of the archmages. I will not stand for crying.”
Lone sat up and took a deep inhale.
“Fine! Out we go, back to your mother.”
Lone watched quietly as Cazlandt gathered the toys and blanket into a basket. He left the book and map on the table and knelt to pick up the child in his left arm. Despite years of attempts, Cazlandt could not defeat the magics that stopped him from taking things from The Stacks. Burdened with the basket of children’s things in his right, he struggled to open the heavy wooden door. Beyond, torches lit a short hallway of exactly fifty paces. At the end, another door led to Castle Dracon. As he carried the boy and basket down that corridor, Cazlandt thought, as he always did as he made those fifty steps, about his genius for raising the castle to align so perfectly with the entrance to The Stacks.
Cazlandt climbed the steps to the main level of the castle and entered the Grand Hall. The hour was late and the statues of long gone archmages and particularly genius crystal mages looked ghostly in the cavernous space. Lone clutched his great-grandsire’s robes a little tighter.
“There is nothing that can harm you, boy. Either here or in the greater world. When you are old enough and learn to let the ley energy of the world flow through your body, you will know this truth. We are archmages, the very pinnacle of power. Our bodies and mind are as strong as the magic of the world. Let it strengthen and embolden you.”
He crossed the Grand Hall toward the east residence without another glance at the statues and paintings.
“Father!” boomed a voice behind him.
Cazlandt let a soft breath out in a sigh and turned to the hulking man approaching. Wearing deep gray quilted armor to match his neatly trimmed beard and high boots polished to a mirror finish, King Searcy kept one gloved hand on the pommel of his sword as he quickly strode across the smooth stone floor.
“What is it, son?” Cazlandt asked as he set down the basket of goods and shifted the boy to his other side.
King Searcy stopped a dozen paces from the old archmage and narrowed his eyes with something akin to suspicion. “Why do you have Lone out of bed at this hour?”
“I was just taking him back.”
“Where have you been with him? His mother asked about him hours ago.”
“I can spend time with my great-grandson as I see fit.” Cazlandt held the boy a little more firmly.
“To The Stacks again?”
Cazlandt nodded.
Searcy sighed. “I told her as much; that you had likely taken the boy again. He is a prince, Father. You cannot keep taking him as you please.”
“I like his company.”
“He is barely a year old. He has no company to give.”
“Where is the boy’s father?”
Searcy waved the question away with a dismissive flourish. “Daelin is in Eplear installing another of those ridiculous teleportation obelisks. I expect him home within a few days.”
“You do run a tight ship here. You always know where everyone is and what they are doing.” Cazlandt grinned at his son.
Searcy grunted. “I will run my castle and my nation as is needed. Get my grandson to bed.” He walked by his father and continued out the south door of the Hall.
“Why do I put up with such treatment, Lone?” Cazlandt asked the boy as he stooped to pick up the basket of toys and turned again toward the eastern tower. “What have I done for my son to treat me with such disrespect? That boy used to leap at my word and now he acts as though I am some addle-minded old fool that has strayed from his bed to get lost in the woods. I literally created the ground we are walking on, raised it from the hoarfrost of what was a frozen wasteland owned only by the snow sharks and blue wyrms.” He reached the wide, stone steps winding around the outer edge of the tower and climbed. Lone’s nursery was beside his parents’ chambers on the sixth floor and his own were another three higher. He saved his breath as he climbed and considered a quick teleport with every step. Aaislin had asked that no one teleport her son until he was at least two years old and despite having no basis for such a demand, Cazlandt felt compelled to comply with such a simple request. Something about his grandson’s wife’s pleasing face and how her raven black hair framed her calm smile made Cazlandt want to make the girl happy. Though a commoner, she possessed a very different sort of magic.
Slightly winded, Cazlandt huffed onto the landing at the sixth floor and pushed open the iron banded door. It swung into the short hallway with another three doors ahead. The boy’s mother Aaislin would likely be asleep to the left and Daelin’s workshop was to the right. The door straight ahead led to the largest room on the level. Cazlandt quietly pushed that open and set the basket of toys just inside. Stars and celestial bodies glowed on the ceiling, painted like the night sky. Guided by the light of painted stars and the two moons shining through the half-open window, Cazlandt crossed to the cradle and lowered the babe to the pillowy comfort.
“I think I must try this, Lone. Your sister may be born in a year or not for another hundred, two hundred. I have seen you as a herald of my coming demise, but I must try not to dwell on that. Since you came into this world, I have held some growing fear that my end is coming. I have seen and accomplished much. I have learned more than any other born to our race, have forgotten more than any but perhaps a scant handful will ever learn, and I will continue in that vein. I must see about this Necromancer of Urbus and what magic they may possess over the force of death. It is as much about finding a means to return a friend to life as understanding another type of magic. Perhaps also a little of wanting to get away for a while.” He leaned, brushing away the boy’s little dark locks with one hand while holding his dangling amulet with the other. “You will see me again, little one. I will return with a grand magic that will again redefine the very life of Poas.”
“Cazlandt?” a small voice asked behind him. Aaislin stood at the door, wrapped in a heavy cloth robe that she pulled tight around her shoulders. The scant light of the room glinted off the sheen of her dark hair.
“Lady Aaislin,” Cazlandt nodded and smiled.
She entered and stepped past the archmage. “Please tell me before taking Lone out of his room,” she said while reaching in to adjust her son.
“Of course, Lady Aaislin. I was only spending some time with my great-grandson. I enjoy his company.” He stepped out of the room and to the hallway beyond as Aaislin fussed over her child.
With every step up the winding stairs, Cazlandt’s vision narrowed. He reached to the ley lines, the organized conduits of mana deep within the world, and pulled the warm energy into himself.
Urbus.
He imagined a realm with that snarled, bony world tree stretching to the sky.
Urbus.
He passed the landing of his granddaughter’s floor of the tower. She would be deep in her studies at this time. She was always studying. Cazlandt saw the path surrounded by grass as tall as any tree in Poas, lined on one side by boulders and the other with a stout wooden fence.
Urbus.
He passed the landing on the eighth floor where Daelin’s mother, the Lady Brina Calmo, slept. King Searcy was too busy flitting about his castle and seeing to all the minor management of a nation to stay at her side.
Urbus.
The worries of his descendants faded with each step. The dark stairs ahead of him distorted as though seen through a lens. Cazlandt pressed against the sudden density in the air as the magic shifted around him. The effect grew until he reached the landing at the top level—his level—of the tower. A narrow crack of the purest black split the air before him. With no hesitation—for the most potent magic required absolute confidence—Cazlandt stepped into that crack of night and felt his body shatter into a thousand shards.
