PART I

  The Scholar - Path of the Warlock - Altar Cave - The Lowlands - The Moon People - The Ritual Complete - Dark Prophecy

  1 - The Scholar

  In a cavernous underground library beneath Ryli Tower, as the City of Yartha endured its second year of drought and in the first days of the summer solstice, Byron Cecil Levant sat cross-legged on the stone floor. Hunched over in the candlelight, his long fingers gently turned the pages of an aged book in his lap. His dirty hair hung in strands over the words. He held his breath as he read, exhaled at the end of a passage, then closed the tome and replaced it on the low shelving built into the rough stone wall.

  Days ago he’d discovered the small room hidden away in a secondary hall strewn with cobwebs and clutter. The dusty volumes he’d found in the chamber had proved fruitful, but he neared the end of the useful offerings and still had not found what he sought. Muttering, he took the next book from the shelf and lifted himself from the cool stone in his filthy robes, retrieving the candle in its brass holder as he did.

  At full height he stood six and a half feet tall. Long-limbed and thin, his dirt-smudged face was boyish still at twenty-three. He could only grow a dark wisp of a mustache which he would not shave. Although he was highborn and owned a wide array of fine clothes and jewelry, he had taken to simple robes and a vow of poverty since his emancipation from under his father's roof. The only sign of wealth on his person was a ring- a gold band with the city's insignia, given to him upon graduation by the headmasters of the academy. It granted lesser scholars like himself passage to the lower halls of all five Towers, the vertical structures that stood in a curve on the western bank of the Slybos River and housed the governmental bodies that operated the city-state.

  In the last three years Byron had come to realize his full devotion to the Earth God, Hyne. All non-violent religious practices were protected by law in the free city, though Byron's convictions were a level of dedication most followers of the Earth God did not adhere to. His robes were soiled past the point of most beggar's, having been worn every day and often through the slums of the southwest quarter. His hair was unkempt, plastered across his forehead, naturally black with a sheen of grime, his dark skin scuffed with filth. He’d not bathed since the classes he instructed ended nearly a month ago, and had relented to it just a few times when they were in session after the urging of his students, colleagues, and finally his father- less of an urge than a command.

  Oxsar Levant was convinced that his son’s poor dress and deliberate filth was a result of religious fervor or youthful folly, but to Byron it was an act of bridled aggression toward his and the other highborn families of the city. Outside of the academy where Byron had attained a sort of infamy, he would often be mistaken for a beggar or destitute and had developed a one-sided kinship with the poor of Yartha. His mannerisms and speech almost always gave him away as highborn, but he preferred their company to that of his peers and had long questioned the wealth and status he’d been handed his entire life, furthermore being aware of Yartha’s tyrannical history.

  Since the courses he taught at the academy had ended for the summer solstice, Byron chased a rumor which had circulated there among the scholars for ages. The cryptic mythologies and peasant tales he sought in the depths of Ryli Library all shared a common subject- they told of another realm of existence- one called Majaia, a mystical counterpart to their world, known as Gaia. In their religions the magical plane was a realm that the elemental gods had made for themselves following their creation of Gaia; it was said to be where human souls went upon death, but Byron believed that Majaia was real- a physical space, not the spiritual one it was widely assumed to be. He thought it perhaps a conflagration of the physical and incorporeal, either another plane of existence or simply another planet, accessed through ancient gateways of powerful magic.

  Among the other academics it was an idea long abandoned, laughed at in the present day, but the mystery of the other world had dug its claws into Byron’s mind, persistent throughout the years as he’d made his way up Yartha’s stratum, no matter how many times he’d been told that what he chased was a dead end. His eyes were opened to see truths in what were common children’s tales, stories of mages with the power to travel between the realms. He had become convinced that he was one of them- a warlock.

  He’d first suspected so at the age of ten years old, and after his graduation from the Academy of Yartha he had been all but certain. His further research of the natural world only strengthened his belief, and his scholarly discipline burned his once simple faith into an obsession. As the physical and spiritual worlds in his head went to war during his late adolescence it had become increasingly clear to him which one would emerge victorious. Magic dwarfed what he came to see as the cold and pompous study of science; what he now viewed as a desperate attempt from lowly beings to apply reason to the unknown.

  His searching had led him to what he believed to be the key to all of it- a pair of ancient stone altars, miles apart from one another, seemingly identical but for the statues that marked them. The pedestals, on which it was assumed that offerings had been presented by a largely disappeared native people in ages past, were ten feet in diameter, perfectly round, and made of a material that was visibly like stone, but in truth something else entirely- seemingly unbreakable, unmovable. It still baffled the men and women of the academy, and Byron could only accept it as magic.

  The location of one of the altars was within the city walls- in the parkland across the river known as Hundred Trees. It was there inside of a cave in the foothills of the Springboot Mountains. The statue had once been a representation of a moon person- a race of kind, pale-skinned giants who in the folklore of the elemental deities were servants to the Earth God, Hyne, but the statue at Hundred Trees had been vandalized or crumbled away, and now all that remained behind the pedestal was a pair of squat marble feet and calves. The other altar was in a town along the Slybos called Calton, many miles north of Yartha and halfway to the Kingdom of Starhall. Its statue was whole- a depiction of the cyclopean merfolk who in myth served Slybbon the Water Goddess.

  Byron was sure that there were at least two more sites somewhere on the continent of Damursyn- one for Kytra of Fire and Vystan of Air, respectively, but their exact whereabouts were unknown. His thought, which he had shared with no one else, was that the pedestals were portals to the gods' respective kingdoms in the world of Majaia. He only needed to figure out how to use them and had come to Yartha’s most extensive collection of knowledge, Ryli Library, beneath the tower of the same name, to investigate the legends further. For the past few days he’d lived there in the subterranean maze, reading any and all texts on Hyne the Earth God and the early settlement of Yartha, and doing little else besides his basic human functions and daily prayers.

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  He sustained himself with a waterskin and dried fruits and dozed off for small amounts of time always to be startled awake by the occasional clacks and clatters which occurred down in Ryli Library even when no one was there. He thought that the sounds were likely the flow of water through surrounding cave formations, rats or other subterranean life, but Byron had also heard tales of Ryli Library's haunting and had always believed in ghosts despite the practical and scientific outlooks he had been urged toward in his upbringing.

  He snuffed the candle flame and left, taking the new volume with him through the dim corridors. He ran his thumb along the animal hide that bound its collation of loosely bound pages. It was relatively thin compared to some of the massive texts he had labored through so far. He thought that he could likely finish it that night, or day, whichever it was. He took it through the stacks to a doorless studying nook of the exhibition hall where he had made his simple camp. In the doorless chamber he cleared a place for it on a massive oak desk which had likely sat there for a hundred years or more, its surface cluttered with the scrolls and books he had gathered, lit by the oil lamps and candles he had arranged there amid the mess.

  The main halls of the underground library were illuminated with hundreds of torches in brass sconces, tended during the day by students, but most of their flames had died away at the late hour and the gloom throughout the less-frequented corners of the library was deep. Byron himself had been assigned to torch duty only a few years ago. In the time since he had graduated from the academy to become a scholar of mathematics just as his father had done at his age. He examined the cover of the book, opened it gently and began to read. It was penned by a witch and prophet of Hyne called Petrastyra. She had lived over six-hundred years ago in the place where Yartha now stood, a place that would have been close to unrecognizable to Byron.

  ***

  He looked again at what he’d just read, shook his head. A dirty lock of hair fell across his forehead and he brushed it away in absence. He went over the same few passages again and again, mouthing the words, tracing them with his finger, reluctant to confirm that his search had just come to an end, and with far more information than he’d ever hoped to discover. The implications of the words dawned on him, and the shrill tittering bark that was his natural laughter was loud and piercing in the chasmal space.

  The library at the late hour was empty of all but he and the observing rats- huge, pale and pink-eyed, unafraid of the few docile scholars that would frequent the place. They watched him from the darkness that permeated Ryli Library, all but his small study where the candlelight had grown dim. His laughter trailed away as he held the book before him. "Is this real, oh great Hyne?" he asked in the stillness. "The gods have smiled on me. No, the gods have bedded me!"

  He felt his merriment rise again and stifled it. People hated his laugh, his voice. Of that he was aware. Some people, mainly colleagues, just seemed to hate him in general. He held the book tight to his chest. "They are jealous of the purpose I have found," he muttered.

  Where Byron was now, his station in life, had been planned for as long as he could remember, by his father and his mother before she had died, but as he sat down at the desk in his unwashed robes he could sense it all unraveling before him. I was meant for a far less trifling purpose, he thought. A rush of panic and excitement overtook him as he stared ahead at nothing, deep in thought. "This will change it all," he said in the empty chamber, then composed himself to read more.

  If the sun could have reached the subterranean library Byron would have seen it rise and go down again. The torch-bearers came and went, and when night fell once more on Ryli Tower he was unaware, as he'd been more often than not since the summer began. His hand cramped as he pushed aside the quill and his leatherbound journal, now filled with notes, the parchment spotted with onyx starbursts where his shaking hand had pressed too hard. He capped the inkwell, stood and stretched his arms. His joints cracked. He was light-headed, an ache of hunger in his stomach.

  He'd read the entirety of the journal, entries spanning the better part of a century. It had somehow been lost in the stacks of Ryli Library, for how long he did not know. They must have believed it to be fiction, he thought, if they read it at all. This manuscript would be hidden away if they knew.

  Once he'd put the book down he felt as if a mystery of himself had been solved. Byron had found in the witch Petrastyra a kindred spirit. She had been like him- blessed by the gods, immune to the sickness which radiated from the objects which now sat in dusty isolation at the top of Ryli Tower. He wanted nothing more than to prove to the non-believers, to his father in particular, that the gods had gifted him, that the legends he’d been ridiculed for believing his whole life were true, but for all of Byron’s awkward excitability he was also capable of incredible patience when needed, able to measure out a situation and take the steps necessary for his vision to be realized. To him it was not dissimilar to the backward working of a mathematical equation.

  The writing of the witch was antiquated, and the journal read in a rambling and confounding narrative or lack thereof that was one part innocuous fable, one part wilderness survival guide and one part "spell book." She had left instructions for a number of rituals with alleged effects that were at once miraculous, practical, odd, and terrifying, but there was one entry which had set his heart racing. He could not believe the fortuitousness of it, and took it as fate, or destiny, a magical order of things.

  Following pages of dull agricultural entries was the process for a spell which could summon rain, a spell the witch herself had used to alleviate a drought spread across the land centuries ago. It would not be simple, but the first step was so easy that it would be foolish for him not to try, he reasoned. He needed only to prepare first. He was aware that he was in the process of acting very drastically on what many would see as a madwoman’s ramblings, but deep down he knew otherwise- this person from another time had been the same as him, and she had not been insane.

  As he closed the book he pondered the things that lay in store for him if all went according to the text, the path that he would take there and back. He would follow the footsteps of the witch to the gate and to Majaia, a place in the realm that her writing called the Lowlands. He would be greeted by the creatures of Hyne known as the moon people, and Byron Cecil Levant would return to Yartha a hero. He would save the city, the entire countryside. He would return rain to the land. He whispered the words she had shared with him, the call of the white flame, “Lytum-Sytul…”