‹ Prequel: Ninety Days of Water
Status: Active.
Tundra
Chapter I – Bleak – Part I
On the last day of autumn, I saw the bleak, white grasses and the howling winds of Tundra. The fields crystallised, becoming a carpet of needles that crunched beneath my soaking shoes. Sliced air blew my fringe into eyes the colour of chipped ice, and jagged like the faraway mountains. Confronted with the breath of frost, my cheeks first reddened and then lost all blood, surrendering their complaint like a warm heart to the teeth of the snarling wolf-wind.
The Tundra suffers no resistance. It is the ultimate leveller, the cold that sweeps through you. It takes you not only off your feet, but away from yourself.
In was the last day of autumn, and soon it would be winter.
In the distance, I saw from my high up vantage point, the serrated hills cut grim daylight. Dead leaves, curled and bleached, accumulated in skeleton beaches beside the Academy’s dirt fortifications. The gnarled trees that shed them stood bare, growing only crows for the Morrígan. Outside, all the warmth in the earth was fading. The cosiness of libraries was fading, too. I shunned the crowded aeries full of grimoires and Apprentices, choosing instead to haunt the lonely, Arcane Tower. The titles in this dustier, deserted book conclave held were not what I found most interesting. Indeed, many were penned in lost tongues, and so illegible to me, but the windows of the Tower had wide sandstone arches for windows that were good for sitting in, and the books radiated comforting knowledge even when I couldn’t read them.
I handled each volume in turn, splitting oyster shells and sometimes gleaning pearls. I always inhaled deeply, savouring the musty smell of paper. I cradled books in two hands, feeling the weight of words and centuries compressed. Sometimes when I held them, my eyes would glide over the endless plains outside, or towards the sea in the other direction. There, leopard seals and selkies might have been the subject of the muted passages. Limpets, sea squirts and salty seaweed might have been the unreadable spells’ ingredients.
While the rituals in each tome no doubt enabled mystical things, compelling kraken and other beasts with words etched in the ink of giant squids, I never browsed to borrow or even to read. I was merely searching for the concept of a book. I was looking for my book, a book that had yet to be written. I hoped to find in those amber-lit shelves some ancestor text, born of an earlier blood-letting ritual than the one in which I desired to spill my soul. I had only just clambered out of the lost pit of Dream, where realities blur, and so I did not yet know my book’s totems or purpose.
I only knew, as all Rune Adepts do, that there was something about words. Something called me to my journey from Adept to Master. Words live to be older than we do. To become an ancient, immortalised in words, was something truly rare, but to be a part of the tapestry of history was something I wanted more than a place in the present. I belonged to the past; of this I had always been certain. It was why I favoured a nameless school over Blackmouth, Lightshale and Firepeak combined. I liked the timelessness of this land and the primal druids’ magic. Those things had been in my veins throughout my ancestry, and so I naturally wanted to be in them. History was my home, and narrative was a lever I could use to put myself there.
Thus, I had come to this silent, crumbling Academy with no significance in to historians elsewhere in the world, but which weaves its memoirs through the minds of those it teaches. An Apprentice here is not a vessel for magic’s journey into the future, nor is he a free agent imbued with skill and made to obey through promises. He is a container for all the fantastic things that have come before him, for the mounding of the barrows and the building blocks hauled up from the fossil beds, the crows with their gift of voice, and the selkies whose cryptic nature is mirrored by the water’s sky and reflected in the faces of the leopard seels that loll about the rocky isles.
A graduate of our Academy likewise has no need of a Journey, such as a newly made mage from Blackmouth might take. What is the point of wandering? We all stay here in the old part of the world, to which the civilised world turns a blind eye. Ours is the Tundra, and the black, sentry forest that stretches into uncharted oblivion. Ours are the sapphire fjords and the playful waterfalls jetting over rocks. Ours is the sweet melt each spring that fills the river beds with cool crystal, and the barrows and standing stones whose worn sigils remind us we have youth enough. None of these things persist in the future, where industry marches and cities are aberrations. Tranquillity is always backwards-looking. Order is imposed through memory, and thus in one other way– through books.
This is the burden I carry as an Adept of Runes without political allegiance, dedicated to preserving truths. Words are the oldest knife I wield in the ritual of history-making, surer and more sharply honed than any athame.
Yet, there is still one thing, or group of things, older than words. There is still one practice taken lightly by mages when it ought not to be. There are still some people who prove how far even mages of our nameless school have fallen in their pursuit of purest, most natural magic. We call them druids.
The Tundra suffers no resistance. It is the ultimate leveller, the cold that sweeps through you. It takes you not only off your feet, but away from yourself.
In was the last day of autumn, and soon it would be winter.
In the distance, I saw from my high up vantage point, the serrated hills cut grim daylight. Dead leaves, curled and bleached, accumulated in skeleton beaches beside the Academy’s dirt fortifications. The gnarled trees that shed them stood bare, growing only crows for the Morrígan. Outside, all the warmth in the earth was fading. The cosiness of libraries was fading, too. I shunned the crowded aeries full of grimoires and Apprentices, choosing instead to haunt the lonely, Arcane Tower. The titles in this dustier, deserted book conclave held were not what I found most interesting. Indeed, many were penned in lost tongues, and so illegible to me, but the windows of the Tower had wide sandstone arches for windows that were good for sitting in, and the books radiated comforting knowledge even when I couldn’t read them.
I handled each volume in turn, splitting oyster shells and sometimes gleaning pearls. I always inhaled deeply, savouring the musty smell of paper. I cradled books in two hands, feeling the weight of words and centuries compressed. Sometimes when I held them, my eyes would glide over the endless plains outside, or towards the sea in the other direction. There, leopard seals and selkies might have been the subject of the muted passages. Limpets, sea squirts and salty seaweed might have been the unreadable spells’ ingredients.
While the rituals in each tome no doubt enabled mystical things, compelling kraken and other beasts with words etched in the ink of giant squids, I never browsed to borrow or even to read. I was merely searching for the concept of a book. I was looking for my book, a book that had yet to be written. I hoped to find in those amber-lit shelves some ancestor text, born of an earlier blood-letting ritual than the one in which I desired to spill my soul. I had only just clambered out of the lost pit of Dream, where realities blur, and so I did not yet know my book’s totems or purpose.
I only knew, as all Rune Adepts do, that there was something about words. Something called me to my journey from Adept to Master. Words live to be older than we do. To become an ancient, immortalised in words, was something truly rare, but to be a part of the tapestry of history was something I wanted more than a place in the present. I belonged to the past; of this I had always been certain. It was why I favoured a nameless school over Blackmouth, Lightshale and Firepeak combined. I liked the timelessness of this land and the primal druids’ magic. Those things had been in my veins throughout my ancestry, and so I naturally wanted to be in them. History was my home, and narrative was a lever I could use to put myself there.
Thus, I had come to this silent, crumbling Academy with no significance in to historians elsewhere in the world, but which weaves its memoirs through the minds of those it teaches. An Apprentice here is not a vessel for magic’s journey into the future, nor is he a free agent imbued with skill and made to obey through promises. He is a container for all the fantastic things that have come before him, for the mounding of the barrows and the building blocks hauled up from the fossil beds, the crows with their gift of voice, and the selkies whose cryptic nature is mirrored by the water’s sky and reflected in the faces of the leopard seels that loll about the rocky isles.
A graduate of our Academy likewise has no need of a Journey, such as a newly made mage from Blackmouth might take. What is the point of wandering? We all stay here in the old part of the world, to which the civilised world turns a blind eye. Ours is the Tundra, and the black, sentry forest that stretches into uncharted oblivion. Ours are the sapphire fjords and the playful waterfalls jetting over rocks. Ours is the sweet melt each spring that fills the river beds with cool crystal, and the barrows and standing stones whose worn sigils remind us we have youth enough. None of these things persist in the future, where industry marches and cities are aberrations. Tranquillity is always backwards-looking. Order is imposed through memory, and thus in one other way– through books.
This is the burden I carry as an Adept of Runes without political allegiance, dedicated to preserving truths. Words are the oldest knife I wield in the ritual of history-making, surer and more sharply honed than any athame.
Yet, there is still one thing, or group of things, older than words. There is still one practice taken lightly by mages when it ought not to be. There are still some people who prove how far even mages of our nameless school have fallen in their pursuit of purest, most natural magic. We call them druids.