Page 79 of Of Empires and Dust

He stopped and pressed his fingertips into his temple. The sensation had grown to the point that it roared in his ears and clouded his thoughts.

“It will balance out.” Garramon rested a hand on Rist’s back, guiding him past two women arguing over a loaf of mouldy bread.

“How can anyone function…” He squeezed the bridge of his nose to the point he thought the bone might snap. “It’s… deafening.”

“Not all Spark wielders can feel it as viscerally as you and I, and the vast majority barely feel it at all. You’re more sensitive to the Spark than others. As your strength grows, so too does that sensitivity. It takes time to filter it. Give yourself a distraction. Focus on your breathing. Slow in, slow out. Feel your lungs and chest expand.”

Rist did as he was instructed, focusing on the air as he pulled it in through his nostrils. He closed his eyes for a moment, continuing to walk forwards with Garramon’s hand on his back.

People knocked into him, bumping his shoulder or clipping his leg. He heard dull voices, admonishing shouts. He ignored them. He had no choice. The thrum had grown so intense it had consumed all else, a storm raging in his mind.

“Druids, a Magic Lost,” Garramon whispered in his ear. “Page two hundred and eleven.”

“What?” Rist grunted, moving his hand back to his temple and pressing in his fingers.

“Read it to me. Tell me the first line.”

“I…” Rist made to argue, but all logical thought abandoned him. His mind was chaos. He pictured the book, flicked through the pages, and settled on page two hundred and eleven. “From the collected research of Angmiran Skarsden, Katja Landira, Indinam Muhdeeb, and other admittedly less reliable sources, I have composed a list of over one hundred and twenty-nine druidic gods. Some older texts suggest there may even have been more, but much of the pages are worn and frail, the ink blurred beyond legibility. Some have been transcribed, but I trust their accuracy as much as I do that of a blind goat. It appears that the druidic bloodlines began to dwindle somewhere around the year four hundred After Doom, taking many of their gods with them. By the year one thousand After Doom, the number of recorded gods had plummeted to no more than fifteen, and by the end of the Age of Honour, accounts ofdruidic histories had all but vanished. The only mention of the druidic gods are of Dvalin, the Stag; Bjorna, the bear; Vethnir, the hawk; Fenryr, the wolf; and Kaygan, the kat.”

Rist paused, realising he had just spoken three full paragraphs aloud. But the sound had dulled to the edges of his mind, the thrum of the Spark ebbing, his pulse slowing. He opened his eyes to people flooding past him and Garramon smiling.

“Better?”

“Much.” Rist drew in a calming breath. His mind still thumped with a dull ache and a thin whistle sounded in the back of his head, but he could think. “Thank you. I’ve never felt anything like that… Even in Al’Nasla.”

“That’s because Al’Nasla doesn’t have the High Tower and all the mages within. The first time I came to Berona, I curled up in a ball near The Leaping Salmon in the western quadrant of the city,” Garramon said as they carried on through the street ahead, which was full of hawkers peddling everything under the sun. “I lay in that alley for hours, people stepping over me like I was a diseased rat. Some of the initiates taken in at the same time barely felt a pin prick in the air, others could feel it tickling their skin. Most felt nothing at all. Once you get used to it, it changes… transforms. If you had felt the power at Ilnaen before it fell, by the gods, the air in that city was like breathing lightning. It was something special, something beautiful.”

A few moments passed as Rist weighed his next question, mulling it over in his head. “I’ve sat through Brother Pirnil’s lectures, and I’ve read eight different books on the liberation – though that still feels like a strange word – but if I’m honest, it all feels… curated. It’s too simple, too black and white. I enjoy black and white. I enjoy numbers and rules. But if the past year or so has taught me anything, it’s that human nature is as grey asstone and murky as mud. Why didyoumake the choice you did? What actually happened?”

It was a question Rist had wanted to ask for a long time. He had hoped to find more honest answers in Orduro Alanta’sThe Forging of an Empire, but it seemed to him that the original volume had clearly been destroyed after the man had been sent to work the mines at Dead Rock’s Hold, an edited account left in its place. There were only three people Rist would have trusted to tell him the truth. Anila was dead, and Magnus had a tendency to exaggerate far past the point of believability. That left Garramon.

Garramon’s step faltered and he turned his shoulder, unable to avoid crashing into a giant of a man with a thick beard, the chest of an ox, and a bloated, hanging gut. Garramon held up an open palm, apologising as the man rolled back his shoulder and made himself seem as large as possible.

It was only when the man gave Garramon a second look and glanced at Rist, his eyes falling to the lionhead pommel of the sword at Rist’s hip, that he stood back and carried on his way.

“Subtlety will never be something you master, will it?” Garramon said as he patted himself down. He gestured for Rist to follow him as they drew closer to the tower. “That’s a conversation that would take a lot more time than we have, but one I think you deserve. For now, I will say that I came to a crossroads where I could no longer reconcile The Order I had joined with what it had become.”

In the time it took Rist and Garramon to walk from the main gates of Berona to the walls that surrounded the base of the High Tower, Rist was certain he could have walked most of the way from The Glade to Milltown. The thrum of the Spark slowly bubbled in the back of Rist’s mind, constantly threatening to overwhelm him. He moved through the pages ofDruids, a Magic Lostin his mind’s eye, focusing himself.

Rist and Garramon moved through the gates in the wall, entering a sprawling courtyard that looked as though it ran around the entire base of the tower. The symbol of the Circle was inlaid in jet into the white stone ground at the yard’s entrance, black and white banners with the Circle’s insignia hanging from golden poles.

Many buildings lined the inside of the walls, with hundreds of mages, porters, guards, and tower staff moving between them. Mages of all ranks and affinities occupied the yard, from Consuls in their green robes and Lectors in their grey, to Exarchs and Master Craftsmages in robes trimmed with silver. Apprentices, acolytes, and initiates moved in groups, the brown of their cloaks mingling with the colours of their various affinities.

The crowds made Rist realise just how unique his own experience had been in Al’Nasla.

Garramon led Rist across the courtyard, greeting several other mages as he did. They passed through an arched doorway in the tower’s base that rose higher than The Gilded Dragon’s roof, two enormous golden doors framing it.

The tower’s antechamber opened into a vast hall that held as much life as a bustling village. The ceiling stood hundreds of feet above, ornamented with delicately carved panels depicting the faces of people Rist had no knowledge of.

Beautiful red carpets threaded with gold sat atop white stone, while all manner of tapestries, paintings, and mosaics adorned the walls. He paused for a moment to examine a truly gargantuan depiction of a battle, worked entirely from gold, that was set into the curved inner wall on his right. The piece stretched for at least fifty feet, dragons soaring through the air, armoured warriors doing battle on the ground, Uraks tearing through everything that moved.

Never in his life had he seen such opulence, not even in the imperial palace.

Rist stared open-mouthed as he followed Garramon through the antechamber and up a winding set of stairs on the northeastern side. Ten-foot-tall alcoves lined the right-hand wall of the staircase. Within each recess stood statues hewn from bronze, gold, marble, and all manner of other materials. Rist even spotted two carved from solid obsidian, dark as night and shimmering as the light moved.

They spent what felt like the better part of an hour traipsing through winding corridors and climbing steps. Every floor was as busy and grandiose as the last, mages hustling from room to room, gilded red carpets lining the floor, artwork and ornaments adorning the walls. Even the door handles were made from solid gold.

Garramon stopped before a large gilded door with the symbol of the Circle worked into its front. In any other place, that door would have marked the entrance to the grandest chamber in the wealthiest of houses, but there, in the High Tower, it was as unassuming as any other – simplistic, almost.

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