PART I
1 - The Scholar
In a cavernous underground library beneath Ryli Tower, as the City of Yartha entered its second year of drought and 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. 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.
He’d discovered the small, cobweb-filled chamber days ago, hidden away in the corner of a secondary hall of the library which he'd spent more than a week scouring. The chamber's contents had proved fruitful, but he was nearing the end of the collection there and still had not found precisely what he’d been looking for. Muttering, he took the next book from the shelf and lifted himself from the cool stone in his filthy robes, retrieving his candle in its brass holder as he did.
His extended lanky body stood him at almost six and a half feet tall. He was thin, but his dirt-smudged face was cherubic even at twenty-three, and he could only grow a dark wisp of a mustache which he did 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 from the academy that granted lesser scholars like himself passage to the lower halls of all five towers.
In the last three years Byron had realized his full devotion to Hyne, the Earth God. His robes were soiled past the point of most beggar's, having been worn nearly every day since, often through the slums of Yartha. His hair was unkempt, plastered across his forehead, naturally black with a sheen of grime. His brown skin was stained with dirt. He’d not bathed since the classes he instructed had ended nearly a month ago, relenting to it only a few times when they’d been in session, and only then after the urging of his students, colleagues, and finally his father- less of an urge than a command. 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.
Though his father believed that Byron's poor dress and deliberate filth was a result of religious fervor or the folly of the young, to him it was an act of passive aggression toward his family and the other highborn of the city. Outside of the academy where Byron had obtained a sort of infamy, he was often mistaken for a beggar, and had developed a one-sided kinship with the poor of the city. His mannerisms and speech would almost always give him away as highborn, but he preferred the company of the underclass, and had often questioned the wealth and status he’d simply been handed all his life. He was also aware of Yartha’s tyrannical history.
The city-state had only been governed by a democratic council for half a century by the time Byron graduated from the academy. Prior to then, the rulers of Yartha had been authoritarian for centuries- cold and ruthless oligarchs. Byron’s father had been only a boy when the last noble tyrant was in power, but his grandfather had been a lesser tyrant himself, exiled from the city to later die as a traitor in the northern kingdom of Starhall. He’d been a pawn of Solomon Pyne, the last lord to sit on a throne in the city, and the last of a feared dynasty.
The Pyne lineage had kept the large majority of the underclass population in slavery for over four-hundred years, their hair cropped and skin marked with tattoos, as there were few natural differences in appearance among the people of the continent. The enslaved population had essentially built the marvelous city as it came to be in its modern age. The Towers, each massive and twenty stories high, had been laboriously constructed around the academy campus like points on a star. In present each of them were tasked with a different area of the city under their jurisdiction, and they housed the various council folk, committees, merchantry, judges, and military personnel who operated Yartha. The three magnificent bridges that crossed the River Slybos, aqueducts, dockyards, temples, gardens, and plazas- all of it. The whole city had been constructed under forced labor and servitude, and there were still those alive who remembered the tyrant king, though many were now in their twilight years.
Solomon Pyne’s reign had finally come to an end following a worker’s revolt upon the completion of the final tower of the academy- Bolom, in the year 742 of the Yarthan calendar, over fifty years ago now. The events were still a matter of debate among both the upper and lower classes, but eventually it became known that the uprising had been organized by a faction of highborn scholars. Some were executed, and shortly after that Solomon Pyne was killed by an unknown assassin and his regime collapsed. All but Pyne’s most ardent followers accepted the change of guard- he had not been well-liked- but those who may have attempted to take his place- such as Byron’s grandfather- were either exiled or killed, and the power of the king had been transferred to the five headmasters of the academy, who’d been a council from their beginning. The titles of the nobility in Yartha dissolved along with the end of Pyne’s rule, slavery was ceased, and the gates of the academy became open to anyone with the coin, but there had been scant effort by the former nobles to parcel out land or assets, and a scarce amount of prospective lowborn students had enlisted at the academy over the ensuing years. Few even had the ability to read, and so after the new government had latched into place, the existing hierarchies only strengthened in those last fifty years. The power of the highborn- economic, religious, and academic, had simply become political as well. Both a Vyntas and a Wyse, former nobles, had sat on the governor’s council for its entire existence. Tattoos faded, cropped hair grew back, but the divide between the citizenry would remain, along with stubborn ideas of class, nobility, and its terminology that would, or, Byron wondered, perhaps could not fade.
Since the courses he taught at the academy had ended for the summer solstice, Byron had chased a rumor that had circulated there among the scholars for ages. The cryptic mythologies he sought told of another world- one called Magaia, a mystical counterpart to their less magical planet and plane of existence, called Gaia. In their religions, the magical realm was said to be where the gods had gone after creating the world, and was speculated to be where humans went upon death, but Byron believed that Magaia was real- a physical space, not the spiritual one it was widely assumed to be. Another planet, perhaps, he thought- one that allowed life just as theirs did.
Among the other academics, Magaia was an idea long abandoned. In present day it was one that would be laughed at, but the mystery had dug its claws into Byron’s mind, persistent throughout the years as he’d made his way up Yartha’s stratum. He had come to believe that there were people blessed with the capability to travel there, and he thought it most likely that he was one of them. He’d first suspected when he was only ten years old, and after his graduation from the academy he’d been all but certain.
His study had led him to research what he believed to be the key to all of it- a pair of ancient stone altars, miles apart from one another. but seemingly identical but for the statues which stood behind them. The pedestals at the base of the statues, on which it was assumed offerings were made, were ten feet in diameter, perfectly round, and made of a material that was visibly like stone, but in truth was something else entirely- seemingly unbreakable, unmovable. It had baffled all of Yartha’s men and women of science, and so to Byron could be only one thing- magic.
The location of one of the altars was within the city limits- in the parkland across the river known as Hundred Trees, inside of a cave there in the foothills of the Springboot Mountains. The statue there had been a representation of Hyne before it was vandalized or crumbled away, and now all that was left 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. The statue there was whole- a depiction of Slybbon the Water Goddess, the cyclopean mermaid.
He believed that there were at least three more altars somewhere on the continent of Damursyn- one for Kytra of Fire, Vytna of Air, and Lyrwin of Time, 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 land of Magaia. He only needed to figure out how to use them.
***
Byron’s research into the natural world had revealed to him the light of the gods, and his scholarly discipline had burned his once simple faith into an obsession. As the physical and spiritual worlds in his head had gone to war during his late adolescence, it had become increasingly clear to him which one would emerge victorious. In his mind, it already had. Magic dwarfed what he now saw as the cold calculations of science, a desperate attempt from lowly beings to apply reason to the unknown, what he now strongly believed to be as real as the world around them- a magical force, unexplainable and chaotic, an absence of reason.
He’d come to Yartha’s most extensive collection of knowledge, Ryli Library, beneath the tower of the same name, to investigate the legends further, practically living in the subterranean maze for the past days, 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. 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 was aware that the sounds were likely the flow of water through surrounding cave formations, or subterranean life- most likely the rats, but he 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 took the new volume with him, back through the dim corridors. He felt the cover of animal hide, ran his thumb along its thick, weathered pages. It was a relatively small volume when compared to some of the massive texts he had labored through so far. He would likely finish it that night, or day, whichever it was.
Hastily, gingerly, he transported it through a dim corridor, through the stacks to a doorless studying nook of the library’s great hall where he had made his simple camp. Once in the small room, he cleared a place for the book on a massive oak desk which had likely sat there in the hideaway study for a hundred years or more. Its surface was 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 hall of the underground library was 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 book again, opened it gently and began to read.
***
Byron shook his head of thick, dirty blue-black hair in wonder, and looked again at the last page he’d read. He went over the same few passages again and again, as if trying to confirm that his search had just come to an end, and with far more information than he’d ever hoped to discover. As the implications of the words dawned on him, a shrill tittering and barking- his natural laughter- escaped from his mouth, loud and piercing in the chasmal space.
The library at that 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. His laughter trailed off 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 the wild laughter rise again, and stifled it. People hated his laugh- his voice, really, 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, snuffed the candle flame and left.
Where the younger 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 overtook him as he stared ahead at nothing, deep in thought. "This will change everything," 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, of a witch and prophet of Hyne named 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. The document had been transcribed anonymously in the year 114, and 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 on the nineteenth level 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, and 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 and his father in particular that the gods were real, that they had gifted him, and 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 he needed it, 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-
Following pages of dull agricultural entries had been 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, and on what many would call the ramblings of a madwoman, 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 marveled at what lay in store for him if all went as planned, the path which he would take. He would follow the trail of the witch to the other world- to Magaia- a place her writing called the Lowlands in particular, and following his return to Yartha, Byron Cecil Levant would become a hero. He would save the city, the entire countryside. He whispered the words she had shared with him- the call of the white flame- “Lytum-Sytul…”
