Excerpt from Yenna Bookbinder’s ‘A Travelling Mage’s Almanac.’

“Ah, what I wouldn’t give to find somewhere quiet, kept away from the hustle and bustle of other people, to catch up on my reading. Perhaps after tomorrow, after our mission.”

Given the circumstances, Yenna would like to have said that she woke with a start, leapt into action and solved everything with applied spellcraft. In reality, Yenna awoke from a groggy sleep to the sensation of deep aching pain. Her head pounded as she wrenched her leaden eyes open, blinking away blurring tears as the machinery of her mind attempted to reassemble itself. The haze of waking from a deep and unfulfilling slumber clouded over even the sharpest tools of mental discipline, her memory refusing to supply answers to the conscious mind until it addressed the blaring alarms of damaged tissue.

Yenna could feel something over her eyes, blocking her sight—her arm moved instinctively to remove it but did not obey. The inability to move washed away her haze with the potency of a bucket of ice dumped overhead, her mundane physicality taking over where the magical mind couldn’t by injecting a copious dose of adrenaline to kick-start the process of discovery. The added energy, the sudden terror of realisation that she was still in danger, brought Yenna’s focus back to where it needed to be—emotional compartmentalisation techniques straining under the panic, the fear, the bone-rattling urge to scream for help, for friends, for the ancestral herd that Yenna had never been a part of. Cool logic flooded her, carefully ignoring the pounding at the gates both mental and physical.

The room she was in was cold and quiet. It was dark, or her blindfold was particularly effective—Yenna could feel it bound around the back of her head, tied tightly enough to hurt. Her hands were similarly bound, wrists crossed over one another and bound close together. Another moment of mental processing and she realised she was also lying on her side, the ground under her cool, slightly dirty stone. Her legs were bound uncomfortably together, all four tied with some rather creative rope-work. It explained some of the pain she felt—kesh legs weren’t meant to maintain a position like that, not for long.

Apart from the bindings, the overly optimistic logic centre of her brain reported, things weren’t so bad. Yenna had a moment of sincere relaxation, the satisfaction of a problem analysed moments and the anticipation of solutions. However, the walls that kept her feelings from her reasoning weren’t impenetrable—logic had moved into the next room and locked the door behind it, but panic and fear and anxiety were not so flimsy as to be unable to break that door down should an emergency arise. Worries crashed into her—over-active imagination bolstered by volumes upon volumes of information to guess at what could possibly be outside of her tiny bubble of sensation. If she screamed, would the silent, slavering monster looming over her snap her up in a single gulp? Or was a shout for help all that stood between her and sudden doom at the hands of some horrid machine?

Yenna whined, kicked and struggled against her bindings. The more the ropes cut into her flesh and the more she smacked her shoulder and elbow and head against the stone floor, the worse her panic got. A crackle of lightning caused her muscles to tense, and silenced the room inside her mind like the boom of cannon fire. Pain, fear, panic and terror turned to face logic, knowing that it was the source of answers, that it would alleviate their issues if only it had room to think. Yenna needed to solve this puzzle, lest logic lose the leadership of her mind. Yenna needed to see.

Her first instinct was to cast a spell. However, whoever had bound her had clearly had the sense to preclude such a thing—the rings on her hands were absent, the bindings around her wrists tight enough to numb sensation in her fingertips. Held as they were, Yenna could barely coordinate a simple spell circle, let alone anything as complicated as displacing her sense of sight. She was still for a time, attempting to ply her other senses to their fullness, but it achieved little—Yenna needed to free her hands before anything else.

With her wrists bound so tightly, Yenna couldn’t hope to squeeze or squirm her way out of the bindings, and she was not likely going to be able to burst them with sheer muscle. Wracking her brain for a spell she could cast like this, something that didn’t rely on the delicate positioning of magecraft or the emphatic gesticulation of witchcraft, the answer hit her like a brick. Ugh, idiot. Yenna almost wanted to curse aloud—of course she had a way to remove a rope on her hands, something no amount of magic could prevent. Yenna bid the quicksilver dagger to appear in her hand.

The dagger, Yenna reminded herself, was an extension of herself. It didn’t appear in any of a number of possible awkward positions—some of them useless, some of them actively dangerous. Instead, it appeared exactly how Yenna wanted it, the blade up between the coils of thin rope that bound her wrists, balanced perfectly in her hands. The stiletto dagger wasn’t designed for rope-cutting, or very much in the way of cutting at all—still, its sides were sharpened, all the better for it to glide through flesh. A cruel and wicked thing that Yenna still wasn’t comfortable having as some unusual part of fate’s design on her, now turned to peaceful aid. Sharpened metal cut the rope strand by strand, the miniscule up-and-down motion of Yenna’s wrists easing the bindings apart bit by bit.

An eternity passed, filled with Yenna’s rough breathing and murmurs of ‘come on, a little more.’ When the mage finally sliced through the last thread, she accidentally dropped the stiletto in surprise. Her body cringed in anticipation of the clanging of steel on stone, but no sound came—the extension of her being had landed right back in Yenna’s hand. A kind of desperation overcame her as her hands came free, and Yenna reached up with her free hand to tug away at the blindfold. The tightness of the fabric was too much for her to get a finger under, too tense to even tug at. Desperation blossomed into panic and, in a moment that would make Yenna cringe to remember in a more lucid future, she brought the dagger up to the back of her head and simply sliced the knot free.

The motion of the blade came with a flood of light and an awful pain in the back of her head. For a dreadful moment, Yenna thought she had cut open the flesh. Strands of long, red hair heralded a far less dire result—she had cut a chunk of hair away instead. Self-conscious thoughts of the state of her hair were swiftly shoved away, to be examined later when it wasn’t completely irrelevant. Yenna blinked, adjusted her eyes to a surprising brightness and looked around.

The light she had been blinded by was no more than a lantern, built or enchanted in some way to reflect its light more evenly around the room but still a small flame in a glass housing—Yenna guessed she had been blindfolded for some time if her eyes had so solidly adjusted themselves to darkness. The lantern sat atop a table in the middle of a circular room, on the other side of a set of metal bars. Yenna herself was in a jail cell of some kind, the floor dusty with disuse and made of dark, impenetrable slabs of stone. The walls were also stone, seamless conjured material that smoothly transitioned into a low arched ceiling above. The metal bars that kept her inside were thick and sturdy, set perfectly into the stone. A thick locking mechanism set on one side of the bars brought Yenna’s eye around, and she saw that the entire set of bars was a hinged door—they likely would not have been able to fit a kesh inside the tiny cell otherwise.

Back out in the circular room with the lantern, Yenna could see a couple of other cells. Some lay open, used as makeshift storage for boxes and barrels, while others were shut. The mage couldn’t see the contents of those around to the sides, and could only barely tell that there was a cell adjacent to her on one side—the other seemed to be a doorway, though there was no telling what lay on the other side. Yenna also noted the curious absence of her captors—no gruff guard watching over the cells with a dangling set of keys on his belt like the adventure stories she had grown up on, just the table with its lantern and a pair of empty stools. At the very least, it meant that no one was around to stop her from attempting to break free. Almost as an afterthought, Yenna cut the bonds around her legs and pulled herself into a more comfortable seated position.

The kesh heart was a delicate thing, disdainful of tightly enclosed spaces. It was said that all kesh secretly yearned to roam freely on the Aulprean plains, to bound and hop between the trees of sparsely wooded forests, to bathe in mystical waterfalls and eat berries and leaves like woodland fairies¹. The modern kesh was not afraid of being indoors, not even narrow and cramped rooms. Yenna even had the idea that she quite liked to be tucked into a comfortable little nook, somewhere warm and full of books and treats. This cell was everything the kesh heart abhorred, and it was most certainly not warm and contained precisely no books or treats.

On that last note Yenna realised that she hadn’t just lost her rings, but also her bag. It wasn’t strictly necessary for her magic, but it was also the entirety of her worldly possessions bar the clothes on her back. A feeling like anger started to bubble up at that thought and, amidst fear and distress, logic was forced to put its foot down once more and assert control. There was all the time in the world for curling into a ball and crying when she was safely out of this place.

Yenna reached out with her magical senses. As she had suspected, the walls were conjured stone—very old, but still bearing the tell-tale traces of uniformity both mundane and magical that pointed them out. The Milurans were big on crafting things by hand, not often resorting to foreign conjury—whoever owned this place had no such qualms about using magecraft or something similar. The bars were not conjured, mundane iron with faint rust scarring, crafted to be strong and maintained regularly for the past few hundred years. The only new thing here was the lock.

The lock was a thick chunk of metal, the insides disturbing the flow of magic with some kind of anti-tampering enchantment. Yenna didn’t have a set of lockpicks handy, not that she had the faintest clue how to use them outside of the vague suggestions she had seen in illustrations of brave and cunning adventurers breaking into and out of fantastic vaults. Fortunately, Yenna did not need to interact with the lock whatsoever, for the designer of this cage had rather kindly neglected to ward the hinges of the cell door. They were nestled deep in layers of metal protection, impossible for a bare-handed prisoner to pry apart, but they may as well have had a tag on them that said, cast spells here to be freed.

Once again, Yenna felt herself lost in the simple solving of a puzzle. What spell would be appropriate for removing this hinge, so that the door will simply fall open? Could it be done silently, to avoid alerting any hidden observer? Would it be best to break it, or temporarily circumvent it? In her head, Yenna turned over designs and configurations, made estimations of forces and energy requirements, debated over implementations and ran simulations before coming to her final conclusion. 

With the quicksilver dagger in her hand, Yenna scratched miniscule magic circles into the iron hinges. More circles graced the top of the material, inertial dampeners designed to grip the air and slow the metal’s descent, to avoid a harsh clanging alarm that would let everyone know a prisoner had escaped. Within a matter of minutes, Yenna had her spell ready—with a flick of the tip of her dagger, the circles began to glow.

The set upon the hinges began to glow a dull molten red as they leached through the metal and turned the pins within into molten liquid. The door was irrevocably ruined, not that Yenna felt particularly bad about such destruction of property as she pushed the entire thing forward. It fell in slow motion, as though dropped deep underwater, and Yenna crept forward to soften its fall even further. It still managed to make a loud clink as it hit the stone floor, enough to make the mage cringe—her head whipped around, ready for her comeuppance, but no one came. The mage tentatively stepped out into the central room.

The doorway beside Yenna’s cell was a staircase, steep and narrow, the exact kind of passage that kesh loathed. At least she didn’t have to climb down it. To take her mind off whatever lay beyond, Yenna quickly surveyed the cells she could now see into. Two were empty, one dusty with years of disuse, another with a concerning scuffle written in the dusty floor. The final cell had an occupant, and Yenna’s heart nearly stopped. Bound into a small ball with ropes, the researcher Valkh laid on the floor unconscious.

Yenna repeated her trick with the cell door, this time using telekinetic grip to avoid the heavy metal falling in or out—instead, she lifted it to one side and leaned it against the wall. She was thankful to already have the circle designs—the distraction of Valkh’s unconscious form was too much to ignore, her breathing so shallow, the dark stains on her coat bringing all forms of unwanted conclusions to Yenna’s mind.

With the door out of the way, Yenna dropped down and set about releasing the lizard-like woman. Her mind had trouble even looking at her—on one hand, she looked almost peaceful in her sleep, the flickering eyelids of a deep dream. On the other, Valkh seemed to be barely clinging to life. Her face bore a deep, dark bruise where someone had hit her, cracking some of the scales there. A trail of blood dripped from the side of her wide mouth, and old, mundane training prompted Yenna to hold her up and let it drip out rather than slide back down her throat to drown her. As soon as Yenna got her up, Valkh instinctively coughed and sputtered, rasping an uncomfortable breath. Holding her there, the front of her robes now speckled with tiny droplets of blood, Yenna grappled with the fact that she really didn’t know what to do with her next.

Valkh was heavier than she looked, sturdy of build despite her size, and simply carrying her out was going to be near impossible. Yenna’s mind whirled through memories looking for mundane tidbits—how did one safely wake an unconscious, injured person? A total failure to find highlighted a worrying gap of mundane and magical medicine in her knowledge base. She had ideas, but they were from story books, likely as fanciful as their colourful descriptions.

Yenna shook her a little, and softly whispered her name.

“Valkh… Valkh! You’ve got to wake up, please!” The mage noted with detached professionalism the quaver of fear in her own voice, the tiny hint of desperation that crept through. “C’mon, get up!”

With an exasperated huff, Yenna looked around—as though to confirm there was no audience for the embarrassing thing she was about to try. She leaned forward, bringing her face right up to Valkh’s. The woman’s breath was hot, and Yenna could feel a burning in her own cheeks as she wet her lips. Leaning forward, ever so slightly more, she made to press their lips together.

Valkh’s eyes shot open, and Yenna nearly screamed in fright. She gave a mortified gurgle instead as Valkh’s slit-pupil eyes stared back at her. The researcher didn’t react quite so strongly. Instead, with widened pupils that saw nothing, she murmured out a singular phrase.

“The word is the totality of totality.”

¹ - There exists many creatures in this world that are known to exist, despite seeming fantastic to you and I. However, fairies are one of the few creatures that defied confirmation for many long centuries. Sentients in their own rights, fairies come in all manner of shapes and sizes and are defined by one singular characteristic—if they do not wish to be found, one will never find them. Fickle, skittish, occasionally spiteful creatures, fairy culture is extremely insular. However, legends say that those who perform an act that a community of fairies appreciate will forever hold them in her debt.