Guild Mage: Apprentice-Chapter 145 - 144. Dreams of the Past

"I'm not certain I know enough about Lucanian politics to really understand what this means," Arjun admitted that evening, once they were all gathered around the second floor landing at High Hall.

Liv had spent the afternoon tracking down Celestria Ward, to reestablish their agreement, and then giving the girl tips on casting silently. After that, she'd taken a run with Wren to begin building her stamina back up again. They'd both made an experiment of the new enchanted boots from Lendh ka Dakruim, waiting until they were outside of the town to activate them. A note stuffed inside each pair had explained that clicking the heels together would begin the magic, and that saw the two women screaming at the top of their lungs as they dashed forward in a headline rush.

"These things are dangerous if you aren't used to them," Liv observed, in between panting breaths, once she and Wren had managed to stop without running into a tree or boulder. "We're going to have to practice."

By the time they'd made it back for the evening meal, the tiny mana stones worked into the embroidery had been exhausted. Liv had swapped the new boots out for her comfortable, everyday pair, and joined her friends for a meal in advance of Archmagus Jurian's arrival.

"My father will love it," Rosamund said. "He'll see it as one less obligation to the crown, with no downside."

"Duties on foreign goods coming in through the ports will raise prices," Sidonie pointed out. "Varunan peppers, anything shipped from Calder's Landing, really. But those were luxury goods anyway. I'm not certain the amount of money raised on that shipping will really be enough to equip a standing military force."

"I'm more worried about who he's planning to use these new troops against," Liv said. "Lucania isn't currently at war with either the Eld, or Lendh ka Dakruim."

"Maybe he's taking the threat of Ractia seriously?" Tephania proposed. "By the time you shipped barons and knights across the ocean, their term of service for the year would already be up. And I can't imagine many of them would want to be away from their lands for so long. But troops who are on duty the entire year - that seems like exactly what you would use to fight over the ocean."

"You'd think that if you were going to do that, you wouldn't want to piss off the merchants out of Calder's Landing, though," Rosamund said. "That'd have to be his base of operations, at least at first."

Liv took a sip of her wine. "I'll be happier than anyone if he's going to move against Ractia," she said. But in all honesty, she couldn't see it. Benedict's supporters - such as Genevieve Arundell - seemed to be the ones most often taking the line that what happened outside of Lucania wasn't the kingdom's concern.

No, there was another target that made much more sense to Liv, though she hoped beyond anything that she was wrong. Barons and knights called upon to march against one of their own might hesitate for any number of reasons: out of personal loyalty, perhaps, or the knowledge that the same thing might one day happen to them. Whatever soldiers Benedict hired to form his army would be loyal to him only.

And yet, there was little that Liv could do about any of this from Coral Bay. Duchess Julianne would have thought all of this through from a dozen different angles that Liv would never consider, and she would already be making plans to keep Whitehill safe. There was nothing to do but trust her.

"If it wouldn't be too much trouble," Liv began, pulling herself out of her thoughts, "Would you all mind staying around this evening? I know Sidonie, Wren and Teph will be here anyway, but Rose and Arjun, could you stay too?"

"What do you need us for?" Arjun asked.

"Archmagus Jurian's going to show me something in my dreams," Liv said. "He's coming around tenth bell, and he said I should invite anyone who would help me feel more comfortable."

Arjun shrugged. "I suppose if it's to help the Archmagus do something, no one can give us any trouble, can they?"

"Sure," Rosamund said. "Classes don't begin until the ninth bell of the morning, so we have plenty of time."

After dinner had been cleared away, Arjun and Rosamund lingered around the table while Liv went to the bath chamber to scrub the sweat of the day away. Once she had a clean linen shift and stockings on, she came back out onto the landing with her comb and set to work.

"I didn't realize just how much I'd gotten used to having Thora brush my hair," Liv grumbled, working at a knot.

"Here, let me do it," Rose said, taking the comb from Liv and moving around to stand behind her.

"Where is she, anyway?" Arjun asked. He'd pulled out his notes on mana beasts from Professor Blackwood's class, and was reviewing them while they waited.

"Running an errand for me," Liv said. "She should be back in a day or two."

"Just don't completely fall apart without her," Rosamund teased. She combed Liv's hair out with long, gentle strokes; it wasn't quite the same as having Thora do it, but Liv found herself relaxing, nonetheless.

Finally, just before tenth bell, Archmagus Jurian arrived. Upon climbing up the stairs onto the landing, he looked the group over and then nodded his head. "Good. You're ready, then?"

Liv nodded. "I think so. I suppose you'll all want to drag chairs into my bed chamber."

"Yes. This is going to take quite a while, and I, at least, don't want to be standing the entire time," Jurian said. He, Wren and Arjun dragged or carried five chairs from various parts of the landing or the sitting room in, cramming them against the walls in two rows that faced Liv's bed.

"I don't know how I'm possibly going to be able to go to sleep with all of you watching me," Liv admitted, taking a seat on top of the mattress. "Can you just put me to sleep with Cei?"

"I could run down to the infirmary and get a sleeping tonic?" Arjun volunteered.

"If we can avoid either of those things, I'd like to," Jurian said. "For one thing, Nora will ask all sorts of questions, and I'd rather not deal with them. For the other, I don't like crushing students with my Authority when I don't have to."

"What is the actual intent, here?" Sidonie asked.

"He's going to show me Godsgrave in my dreams," Liv answered, lying back on the bed and trying to get her pillow comfortable.

"Which means you need to be asleep," Teph said. "Maybe we should all just walk away for a bit and come back in a bell?"

"No, then I'll just be tossing and turning waiting for you," Liv said. She closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. The room was quiet - save for the creaking of chairs as her friends shifted their weight. "This isn't working," Liv finally declared, opening her eyes and sitting up. "I think we need the sleeping medicine."

"Let me try something," Rosamund said. She crawled onto Liv's bed, moving pillows aside to make room. "Here, put your head on my lap."

Liv maneuvered herself into place, a bit doubtful this would help. Then, she felt Rose's fingers in her hair, massaging her scalp. "Oh," she said, like an idiot.

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"Just close your eyes and relax," Rose murmured.

While it wasn't enough to make Liv forget the awkwardness of the entire scenario, having someone rub her head was very nice. Even if it didn't work, she supposed that she could lie back and just enjoy it for a little while -

Images, sounds and smells buffeted Liv, as if she was being tossed about in the current of a river. The taste of ale, the sound of voices raised in a drinking song, a young woman with firelight in her blonde hair and a smile on her face. Her lips tasted of wine, and Liv recoiled when she recognized Genevieve Arundell.

"My apologies," Jurian said, and the tide of sensation receded. "I didn't intend for you to see that."

Liv spun around. She and the archmagus were standing on the lip of a massive crater - so large that she couldn't trust herself to measure the size accurately with her eyes. It was miles across, at least, and deeper than any building that she'd ever seen.

Black clouds boiled overhead, stretching out to the very limits of the horizon, and casting the entire place into a gloomy darkness. And yet, there was light - a dim, baleful red glow that reminded Liv of nothing so much as banked embers in a fire. Some sort of steam or smoke rose from the crater, making the air foul.

"This is Godsgrave," Jurian said, stepping forward to the very lip of the crater. Liv was surprised to see that here, in her dream, the Archmagus was young again. He looked like the man who'd come to rescue her at Whitehill, rather than the professor she'd learned from at Coral Bay.

Liv swallowed, and stepped up beside him. "This is where Tamiris dropped the sky on the old gods."

Jurian nodded. "The histories of the temples say that Antris, Asuris, Calevis and Ractia were all here when the city of the gods was destroyed. The power leaking from the corpses of four Vædim makes this the most dangerous rift in the entire world. Though," he remarked, "it would seem the stories were inaccurate so far as Ractia was concerned."

"Why did you ever come here?" Liv couldn't help but ask.

"I was arrogant," the archmage answered. "We were a good team. We'd culled rifts all across Lucania, and then came to Varuna for adventure. I was determined to find a second word for the guild."

"To become a master?"

"Partly," Jurian admitted. "But there was more to it than that. To become an archmage in the eyes of the guild, you need to be able to combine two words of power into a single spell. That meant that, so long as the guild possessed only a single word of power, only noble-born mages like Caspian would ever achieve the rank."

"So if you ever wanted to be an archmage, you needed to find a word that wasn't claimed by any family in Lucania," Liv reasoned.

"There." Jurian extended his staff to point, and Liv caught sight of a group of people slowly making their way down into the crater. The world shifted around them, and she found herself standing on smoking black rock. The four people descending into the rift had tied themselves together with rope, and covered their faces with cloths, to ward off the foul air.

"Is there even anything still there?" Liv asked. "It looks like a blasted wasteland."

"Most of the city must have been destroyed immediately," Jurian said. "But the Vædim built deep, as well as high. Along the edges, we found areas of wreckage. Collapsed, ancient ruins. Some of them we were even able to find our way into."

Again, the world around them flickered, and Liv saw that they were now standing in a corridor, partially collapsed. Broken lights of mana-stone were set in the ceiling, flickering with a blue glow, and the party of four people had lowered themselves down with a rope. Genevieve lifted her staff, and it shed golden light, illuminating the area.

"No mana beasts?" Liv asked.

"Those came later. The deeper we went, the more life we found," Jurian told her. He showed Liv images of great beetles and centipedes, like those she'd seen beneath Bald Peak, save that these creatures were armored in a black carapace that reminded her of the volcanic rocks Master Grenfell had once showed her in the Room of Curiosities, back at Whitehill.

The party of four people fought their way past one monster after another. Liv saw wyrms, like the one that had come through the waystone during the attack at Coral Bay, but with eyes that burned in baleful tones of red and gold.

"It was the wyrms that really started to cause us problems," Jurian explained. "By the time we found the chamber, Daniel was already poisoned. At first, he hid it from us. He was always like that - the last one to accept healing. Insisted it wasn't more than a scratch."

An image of a man, binding a wound on his thigh with strips of linen. Liv could see spreading poison already infecting his flesh. "That's what killed my grandfather," she said.

"If he'd let me know how bad it really was," Jurian exclaimed in frustration, "I would have turned back. But he was committed. He believed in what we were doing, what we were seeking. That if we came back with a word of power, it would help the entire guild."

Before she could think better of it, Liv reached out and put her hand on his shoulder.

"The chamber," Jurian said, after a long moment. The world once again moved around them, revealing a room of metal floors and walls that hummed. It reminded Liv of the rows of racks for Antrian War Machines that she'd seen at the bottom of the Well of Bones.

She saw row upon row of containers, all made of glass and metal, lining the walls to either side, and leaving an empty corridor down the center of the room. Each was connected to the walls by a variety of metal tubes and pipes; and within each was a person.

"Are they asleep?" Liv asked, stepping up to one of the containers. Frosted glass revealed the pale face of a man beyond the glass, his eyes closed.

"Yes," Jurian said. "Asleep inside nested layers of enchantments, all working together. Preserved in cold, like the meat shipped by the trading guild. I suspect your own family would recognize many of the sigils used here."

"But Cel wouldn't have gotten you what you wanted," Liv reasoned. "It would have brought you into conflict with the guilds, and my father's family. You needed a word that no one was using."

Jurian stepped forward and tapped an inscription. "Here. Cei. To be honest, I wasn't even certain what use it would be. It wasn't the word I'd dreamed of finding. As far as I could tell, the enchantments created dreams for the people sleeping inside - very specific dreams. It was like they were living a life while they slept away the years. A life of war and bloodshed, where they did nothing but hunt."

He tapped another sigil. "This one is blood. This one, growth."

Liv frowned. "I don't understand."

"How did Ractia make the great bats?" Jurian asked her. "How did your friend Wren's people come into existence?"

"She created them," Liv said. "During the war. As soldiers."

Jurian nodded. "There is no record of them before Miriam struck down Sivis - nor even immediately after. One day, a swarm of bats fell upon the field of battle, and that was the first anyone ever knew of Ractia's new children."

"Growth," Liv repeated. "Blood. Growth is Cer. I saw Airis Ka Reimis use it once - it was like the plants in the garden had passed years in the space of moments. But I've never heard of anyone using it on a person."

"She wouldn't have been able to wait decades for her new soldiers to grow into adults," Jurian said. "But with enchantments like this, she could have grown an entirely new army in months instead of years."

"All the while giving them the dreams she chose," Liv said, following the train of thought further. "Dreams in which she was their loving mother goddess, and the humans and the eld were horrible monsters. They would have come out ready to fight and kill for her."

"That is what I believe, yes," Jurian said. "I didn't have as much time to spend studying the enchantments as I would have liked. Once I'd isolated Cei, I set to trying to attune it, while my friends held the door."

The room shifted, and Liv saw a great wyrm with dark scales trying to force its way through into the chamber. Jurian sat cross legged by one of the containers, his hand on a sigil, while the other three members of the party screamed and fought.

"We need to leave!" Genevieve screamed. Her face was streaked with blood. "Lora's bleeding, and I can't stop it!"

"Give him just a little more time," Daniel said, leaning against the wall. Liv could see how pale the young man's face was. "He's almost got it."

Suddenly, they were back on top of the crater. Only two of the party that had descended into Godsgrave stumbled back up over the rim. Liv watched a younger Jurian reach for Genevieve.

"Don't touch me!" she screamed, wheeling about on him in fury. "Our friends are dead! Do you even care at all?"

"Of course I care," Jurian said. "Gen, I -"

"I hope it was worth it," Genevieve spat, her eyes flashing with golden power. "I hope it was worth it, Jurian. You got what you wanted. You can go be an archmage now. But not with me."

The dream stopped there, with a young woman's face eternally frozen in rage.

"You saw Isabel die," Jurian said. It wasn't a question. Liv nodded. "Was it worth it?" he asked her, the exact same words he'd used down at the training yards earlier that day.

Liv turned and looked out over the crater. "Yes," she said.

"This is what it means to be a leader," Jurian told her. "You are going to lose people, Liv. People you care about are going to die because you decide that something is necessary. Can you live with that?"

"I don't know," she admitted, and looked back to the Archmage. "Can you?"

Jurian wasn't even looking at her. He was standing in front of where a much younger Genevieve Arundell stood, frozen in his memories, consumed by anger. Liv wasn't sure he even knew he'd lifted his hand to her face.

"No," he murmured. "No, there's a reason I never went back. I'm done with that, Liv. It cost me too much already."

Jurian waved a hand, and the dream dissolved.