Felun

Felun crashed face-first into a dune, his yelp cut short by a mouthful of cold sand. He spat, retching up a stringy glob of saliva and grit as he stumbled to his feet, seeing stars for a moment—and not the ones twinkling overhead.

“Hmph,” said a disembodied voice in front of him. “Heading straight down into the castle would have saved me a great deal of work but alas, Iolite comes along with far too high of a regard for your value and says that you wouldn’t be able to handle it.”

He forced a smile-grimace in the general direction of the voice.

“Yeah, she’s right. I can’t get through the sky-shields undetected. They’re way too—”

“It is an indignity to drag you around,” Suria seethed, flickering into view as the spell-slip stuck to her chitin-paneled chest flaked off into ash. Her burnished wings fluttered with a papery sound as she hovered over him contemptuously. “Get to work, breaker-boy.”

“Where specifically along this section?”

She lashed her tail—long and unnervingly spiked, like a golden whip—and pointed with a claw-tipped finger. A square of the brickwork started to glow softly.

Warily, he placed his palms onto the stone and did his best to ignore the ominous glow, illusion though it was. The wall felt smooth and cool against his skin. He reached past the physical shell and into the steady flow of enchantments. They were braided loosely enough; he tugged at a frayed spot until it unwound. Unwound her little illusion too, for good measure. Taking a piece of chalk from his satchel, he drew a target on the spot he had unraveled. 

“It’s done.”

“Get out of the way, then.” Suria said, clicking her fingers. “You have five seconds.” Her eyes were blazing, the pupils pin-point. She raised her hand, which crackled ominously and began to glow.

Felun dived for cover and felt the shockwave resonate in his bones.

He crawled out from behind the dune, ears ringing with the echo of the blast. Sand was making its way down his collar and into his boots. He seethed inwardly. She murmured a slippery-sounding word and waved a hand; he felt a thin layer of magic wash over him. Illusion.

“Keep to the shadows,” she said. As if he didn’t already know that. 

The wall entrance-point led into an empty alleyway, heaped high with sagging bags of stinking trash. They snuck down side-streets, past slumbering clay-brick houses and empty market stalls, all the while cloaked in Suria’s workings.

He caught sight of his reflection in the window of a shopfront, a ghostly shape overlaid onto the display of soaps and flowers. He flinched, thinking it was another man. Suria’s glamour was perhaps a little too well-crafted. That was a stranger in the glass; it wasn’t just the newness of the wrinkles and close-cropped hairstyle that bothered him; it was also the little things, the crookedness of the nose and the pale, raised scar over the lips. Suria had shaped his face into something almost wholly unrecognizable; a man with a whole other life than his own. He wondered how a faery could sculpt such a distinctively human guise. Then he wondered if she’d stolen it from somewhere. The jawline did resemble his father’s…he shuddered at the thought.

Her magic—the illusory glamour, and spells for silence and sure-footedness—buzzed like a live wasp against the back of his neck. He could hear faint rumbling in the distance.

There were few stirrings about: warm light in the window of a bakery, some insomniac’s candle through the curtains of an apartment. They continued parallel to a main street until they came to the inner walls of the castle.

The South castle gateway—two great doors, flanked by walls of brown stone, and presently shut—was utterly devoid of guards; thankfully, Iolite’s gambit was working. Felun stepped closer and placed his hand onto the wall, sweeping across the stone and onto the wood panels of the lofty doors. Old material, most likely. The enchantments of the gate wall and doors hummed at far too ancient of a frequency to unravel easily or speedily. Tangled lines and bulging layers squashed together under the weight of years. The ironwood beams which were used to bar them shut, however, were probably new enough.

Felun ran a finger along the joins of the planks until he found a gap large enough to ease the end of a conduit-thread into. He held his end of the twine and concentrated; the free end quested about like a blind eel until it latched onto a beam.

His head pounded and blood trickled from his nose as he unraveled the first ironwood-enchantment through the conduit line. He leaned his forehead against the cool surface of the door for a moment as it came undone.

“How much longer are you going to take?” Suria asked.

“Not long.”

He wiped the blood off his face and threaded another conduit. The next enchantment came apart easier now that he knew the framework within. He sank into the whorl of spellwork, working against it as if it were the frayed end of a sun-bleached rope.

“Done,” he said.

Suria took the ends of the twine in her glowing hand; from behind the door came a muffled hiss. The gates creaked open to an ugly garden, brimming with desiccated flowers. Between the sand, the heat, and the giant poisonous field on the horizon, he couldn’t see why anyone would want to live here—a kingdom so backwater that the very seaside had up and left two centuries ago.

Suria took a tarnished compass from her belt as she rose a little higher into the air. The papery sounds of her flight were now silenced.

“The central structure,” she said. “I can drop you onto a ledge if you think a window is more manageable.”

He ducked into the shadow of a hedge as he rummaged in the depths of his bag and retrieved a spyglass. 

Suria eyed the shape of his spyglass, then glanced back at his satchel. He was familiar with this, the wrinkle of the forehead—which, in Suria, was accompanied by a twitch of her face-spines—and the mental back and forth comparison of shape-width-length and the moment of oh, I see.

In his experience, the look of oh, I see was often followed by how easily is this young man parted from his magical bag and I wonder how much that would fetch in a pawnbroker’s. Thankfully Suria didn’t seem to care much about that part. After all, he thought bitterly, why take the tools of a tool that you already own?

He searched for the tell-tale flash of runes on the frames; there were several. Good. He liked runes. They gave him nosebleeds on a far more occasional basis. There was little overlap between traditional enchantments and the faster-to-produce strings of modern visible rune-work, so he could only hope that further enchantments in the main building would be similarly accessible.

“Alright,” he said. “How about we try that one—”

“Shh,” Suria interrupted. She twitched the bony spurs which swept upwards from the sides of her forehead and cheekbones. “Someone nearby. No moving. Stay.”

Felun held himself still as she jetted off to his right, only slightly reassured by the irritating buzz of her magic against his skin that her shielding spell held true. 

He watched and waited. There was a decrepit rotunda off to the side. The ones back home were square, not round, and the rooftops were curved and pointed rather than domed. There had been one at his family’s summer house, a quiet retreat blanketed in grape-scented wisteria. The last time he had visited, he’d come across old Yao digging stray suckers from the ground. 

“Hey, boy,” the old gardener had said. “Your mother said this all has to come out before next summer, but I can replant a piece into a pot for you if you’d like.”

Felun had professed his thanks, but it hardly mattered anymore. Summer-houses and court attendances and fresh welts forming on his palms; it all seemed like it had sprung from a nonsensical dream now. 

Well no, not the welts. That part still felt real enough.

Suria returned with an expensive-looking blue cloak slung over her shoulder and some sort of bird-like headgear in her hand.

“One of those thaumaturges,” she said, holding the clothing out to him. “I killed it. Put them on.”

“The mask doesn’t have eye-holes,” he protested. It was pale and flattish, painted to look like an owl’s face.

“Oh? The thaumaturge seemed to see me just fine. Enchantment, I suppose. Use it.”

He did as he was told. The embroidery on the cloak reminded him of the unpleasantly heavy ceremonial winter gear back home. Night air brushed against him through a tear in the cloak, at the small of his back. He shuddered. The mask felt a little cold against his face, but Suria was right; there was a spell woven into the back surface such that his vision was unobstructed. His breath didn’t condense behind the mask, either. It hardly felt as if he was wearing a mask at all.

She grabbed him without warning and rose through the air, alighting upon the narrow outer ledge of a window. 

“Is this the one you wanted?”

It was not.

“It will do,” he said.

He saw now that the runes were visible as they darted over the frames, but turned transparent when skimming over the glass panes. He opened his satchel once more and removed a leather-bound journal, flipping it open to the latest blank page.

Flexing his fingers, he placed them onto the glass, feeling for ripples, movement patterns, surface adhesion. Removing a rune felt like peeling off a sticker; some were more stubborn than others. The ends of several strings came off the glass and onto his hand. He coaxed the sticky ends off the window and poured the shining bundle onto the waiting blank page. They swarmed around the paper like confused insects, strings for anti-breakage and anti-corrosion.

He edged to the side-most portion of the window ledge and shielded his face with the rune book. 

“Okay, go ahead.”

Suria clicked her fingers and pointed. The window blasted inwards in a shower of glass, frame and all. The debris crashed and shattered below. 

Felun grunted as she hauled him down by the collar and dragged him into the castle corridor.

“Come now,” she said, glancing down at her compass. “We’ve got a ways to go.”

===

“What fuckery is this?”

The door to the Higher Library hadn’t been a problem—it hadn’t even been locked. The foyer was similarly unstaffed: loose papers flung everywhere and not a scribe in sight. No, it was the archives themselves that looked like trouble.

Shelves upon shelves of books and scrolls twisted and twined upside-down and in all directions, built using impossible geometries. Red ropes twisted through some of them, marking out convoluted pathways. It hurt his head to try to comprehend how it all fitted together. There was no horizon in sight. Objects in the distance seemed warped and not quite real, like someone had taken all of the visible light transmitting to his eyes and twisted it ever-so-slightly to the left.

“Iolite said nothing about such a mess,” Suria continued, frowning down at her compass, tilting it this way and that. “Hmph. Worse than a Hive left to run riot.”

She dipped her wings and cruised down to the mouth of a descending staircase, an open maw in the ground which looked as though it led into complete darkness.

“I won’t be able to see you in the dark,” he said, hurrying after her as he dug a hand into his pocket for a rune-quill. “Give me a moment.”

Bioluminescent blue markings flared into life at her wingtips as she coasted into the shadow of the lower level. “You can see that, can’t you? Try to keep up, breaker-boy.” He could practically hear the sneer in her voice.

He jogged after her flickering silhouette into the darkness, glancing at the shelves to his left and right. Each shelf soared upwards to a faraway ceiling, several metres over his head. Books and scrolls flashed by, though stranger items started appearing the deeper they went, wedged between paperbacks and sheets of loose-leaf parchment: a bottle of unknown liquid here, a jar of dried insects there. The air was dry and distinctly library-like, heavy with the scent of old books: burnt almond and slow-roasted sawdust. He found it almost comforting among all the other incongruities.

He almost crashed into Suria as she came to an abrupt halt at what looked like a crossroads of sorts. The shelves stopped and split into four different paths. The clearing between them was dimly lit by a single blueish lamp, fashioned in the shape of an oversized dragonfly. The lights on Suria’s wings dimmed as she whirled round and circled the small space, face-spikes twitching.

“Little blue birds,” she murmured, using an almost sing-song cadence. She checked her compass. “Two in the way. Hmm.”

She turned her gaze onto him. “You look passable. I can take care of them while you get down there.” A glint appeared in her eyes and her tail lashed in what was probably excitement. “All you have to do is follow the arrow.”

“I won’t be able to find you.”

Suria grabbed his hand and placed the compass in his palm, forcing his fingers closed around it. “Oh, I’ll find you once I’m done.”

Her fingertips glowed white and Felun gritted his teeth as a tracker-mark burned itself onto the back of his hand. Another of those magic symbols that hurt his brain to look at: a black linework cluster of cubes-beyond-cubes—six of them enmeshed in a ring that made his vision swim.

“Go fetch,” she crowed, and then she was gone in a flutter of illusion-smoke.

Felun groaned. He pulled a rune-quill from his pocket, sketched a simple one for clear white light, and stuck it to the forehead of his mask. Then he started jogging, following the compass deeper into the library, trying to ignore the itch of the tracker-mark on his hand. He skimmed a hand along the material of the shelving as he went. Old birchwood, a few robust preservation runes flitting under his fingertips now and then, but no enchantments. It probably meant he was still far from the compass’s destination. 

He kept going. The shelves mostly contained things that weren’t books, now. Pieces of rusted armour. Taxidermy goats with far too many eyes. What looked to be parts of a giant lizard’s skeleton.

He turned a corner and caught an axe to the face.

Felun yelled and stumbled backwards, head ringing. His hand darted up and he automatically felt for blood—his fingers landed on the smooth surface of the mask. He realised, heart pounding, that the enchantments on the bird-mask had fizzled into action and absorbed most of the blow. 

Then he realised that a man was charging at him with an axe.

He cried out a shield-spell, the words rusty upon his tongue. A translucent sheet of golden shield-light flashed in front of him. It’d buy him seconds, at best. The man—tall, Songian-looking guy—was already swinging the axe down onto his pitiful barrier. 

Fuck, he was fast. Felun had to be faster.

He spoke a word that made his lips crack and bleed on the way out. His rune book flew out of his satchel, floated in front of him. Waiting, ready. He shoved Suria’s compass away and pulled out a dozen loose blades, the kind fitted into straight-razors.

The book flipped itself open to runes for blood-seeking and flesh-slicing that he’d lifted off some dungeon trap or other long ago. He tore them off the surface of the paper and bound them to the blades, launching them at the man just as his shield shattered.

A jar of preserved snakes toppled off the shelf and smashed on the ground to his left, foul-smelling liquid and shards of glass scattering across the floor. A hand darted out from the gap and fired a spell at him. He dodged, but the next shot caught him on the side. The bolt of magic dissipated across the fabric of his purloined cloak like ripples on a still pond.

Okay, he admitted to himself as several more spells pummeled against the absorptive cloak. So maybe it was a good idea for Suria to have looted that poor mage’s body after all.

Several cubes of amber and a bolt of leather clattered to the floor on his right.

Three-against-one? He thought. Not fucking fair.

A paper thing darted from the other side of the shelf at him—some sort of makeshift kite. It hit him on the elbow and exploded. The mage-cloak hissed and smoked as it caught the blast. One of Mystery-Hand’s spells snuck in through the tear at the back of the cloak and stung him, a brief burst of pain so hot that it almost felt cold. That probably took some skin off. 

Fuck this, he thought. And then his mind churned through a garbled string of impressions along the lines of cloak-not-perfect-need-shields-quick.

What was on the shelves? A stack of cracked hourglasses, a pile of blue sand, a bundle of dried lemongrass, some mirrors—perfect. He grabbed three ornamental hand-mirrors off an adjacent shelf. He pasted adaptive shielding runes onto their surfaces; they fanned out to intercept Mystery-Hand’s spells and the onslaught of paper kites. The last mirror-shield, he kept at his back, held over the tear in his cloak.

The attacker with the axe had retrieved a rune-quill from somewhere and was halfway through with the darting razors. Felun was penned in from both the front and sides, needed room to fight or preferably, to run like hell. Shelves? Birchwood, he remembered in a flash. Not enchanted. He could blast his way through.

His rune-book fanned open to a particular page, dominated by an enormous, singular snow-white rune. Ah. That old thing. 

He grimaced and flipped over to his heftiest shielding-runes first. He wasn’t taking any chances, even with the protection of the dead mage’s garb. He stuck sound-shielding runes into his ears, blanketed himself in physical-shielding ones, and threw a few spares at Axe-Rune-Man and Mystery-Hand for good measure. It wasn’t like he wanted to actually, well, kill them or anything.

The monumental rune crackled.

He had to use both hands to lift it from the page. It kicked up clouds of dust around him as it moved from paper to air. The air pressure dropped. His ears popped. A small river of blood gushed from his nose, pouring over his lips and down his chin.

Axe-Rune-Man cut apart the last razor blade with his quill, looked at him, looked at the rune under his hands and moved his mouth around words. The mystery hand darted back into its side of the shelf and the tide of kites to his right petered out. 

Felun gave them a moment to prepare shields before he shut his eyes and planted the rune into the floor. 

It dropped, connected, speared roots into the stone. The backs of his eyelids glowed red and the world rocked in what, to him, was a mercifully silent detonation.

The light died down. His head was starting to hurt and there was a burning sensation behind his breastbone. A square of his back was still stinging, left wounded by the tear in the cloak. Felun dismissed the sound-shielding runes in his ears and cracked his eyelids open. 

He was at the center of a crater. The shelves to his sides had a vast chunk blown out of them. And the ones beyond them. And the next ones too—the blast radius spanned about six shelves, from what he could see. Thank the stars they were only birchwood. Mists of dust swirled around him, making him sneeze. 

The dust cleared.

Axe-Rune-Man was hunched over in pain under a dome of shielding-runes, blood trickling from his nose and ears. To Felun’s left, a young man—the spellcaster—knelt under a golden shield that was evidently far stronger than Felun’s own. To his right, a young woman—the source of the kites—was sitting on the ground and groaning. She was covered in patches of dust and one of her shoulders looked like it was out of its socket. He guessed that her shield had failed towards the tail end of the blast. A little ways off, about three shelves down, three younger adolescents strained to hold up a flickering shield-dome. 

They all looked vaguely Songian, but awfully young to be here. Library assistants? No way. Was that one wearing a nightgown?

Mystery-Hand rose from under his shield and darted in front of Felun. “You’ll have to get past me first, foul Magician,” he cried, hands clenched onto trembling fists.

“Irfan, no,” the kite-girl croaked.

‘Foul Magician’, he’d said? 

Magician, the word said with reverence behind the fear. He supposed it was the proper title of thaumaturgy in this little kingdom. He cursed Suria’s selection of disguise and shut his rune book with a snap. The spellcaster boy flinched. 

Felun turned and sprinted leftwards—away from their motley defense, slipping into the labyrinth of shelves.