Preface

Master the Spell not with force. Master it with respect and awe. Respect the power - be in awe of the pattern. To truly master magic, one must be ready to walk away at the first indication of trouble. Know your limits. The worst spell is one that seeks its own pattern. One of the prime indicators of life is a desire to feed. A spell seeking its own pattern, a pattern not of your choosing, is known as a Living Spell. Such a spell is alive and its first task is to Feed. - Emperor Zalkonia in his annual address to new students at the Academy of Science and Magic.

The droning of nighttime insects nearly drowned out the steady hum of the energies present within the room. High Mage Kern slowly surveyed his work. In front of him, deeply etched into the grayish white stone floor was a large square surrounded with runes, each rune glowing with a power easily seen by his trained eye. To a bystander, the runes might appear as empty carvings, but to Kern, each engraving not only had meaning but was alight with a dancing purple flame lapsing out from deep within the grooves like the flickering of air around glowing coals. At each corner of the etched square stood a slender golden pole topped with a long, slender blazing candle of darkest wax. Each candle burned at a different height, attesting to having been lit some time ago.

Kneeling at the edge of the square, he reached into his pocket and withdrew five incandescent gems, each one glowing from an inner source of power. Rolling them about in his hand, getting a good feel for each gem which he already knew so well, he reassured himself once more of his readiness. Each gem was perfectly cut and of pure color, two red, two green and one purple. Mentally testing the power reserves in each stone one last time, Kern began to finally prepare himself for the casting. With a deep breath, he took one last look around.

The candles provided just enough light to create dancing shadows at the edges of a large vaulted room. The circular room had four evenly-spaced large windows allowing a clear view of the surrounding cityscape. With moonlight flooding in and casting whitish silhouettes on the floor, a calming effect washed over Kern. Despite the rooms foreboding appearance from the spell’s preparation, the room held that comfortable sense of security the familiarity of any home possesses. Anyway, Kern truly enjoyed the night, and along with a little darkness, a little magic, and a little moonlight, the night always brought his vigor.

Mind cleared, body relaxed, stones now held in the cup of both hands with both arms outstretch before him, he cleared his mind before beginning to chant the spell of summoning.

Properly worked, this powerful spell would pull warriors out of the past. With the recent shortage of good arena fighters, Kern’s employer had paid dearly to obtain this spell. Over the past two months, Kern had utilized this spell half a dozen times with considerable success, meaning Kern’s employer was well pleased and consistently gloating about his wisdom in making such a rare acquisition. His employer fended off all coercion to offer details on the actual acquiring, not that Kern really cared. His employer lacked scruples so the less known, the better.

Normally, this spell was an easy spell to cast, requiring little energy as long as Kern didn't reach too far into the distant past. Up till tonight, Kern had never reached more than a few centuries past for potential warriors. He valued this spell for reasons beyond its monetary benefit to his employer. He saw the spell as an excellent way to vicariously study history by literally pulling people from the past for true eyewitness accounts.

Tonight’s casting would be far more taxing than his earlier efforts. After a few weeks of debating with himself the rewards of gaining otherwise unreachable knowledge against the of the weight of extreme personal risk, Kern made the grim decision that he wanted to investigate what had happened before Coalescence. The information gained would be priceless with regards to respect from amongst his peers. Such a casting would be risky, possibly lethal. It would mean pushing the spell beyond its set safety margins. This could very well exceed his limits, but with the proper power crystals to absorb the excess energy requirements, he determined the risk as acceptable. Kern was confident his calculations were correct on how to manipulate the spell. He had triple checked his calculations, waited a day, then triple checked them again. Everything would be fine. For good measure, he even ran through the calculations in reverse this morning. Not all spells reversed properly in their calculations, but when they did it implied a symmetry that assured success.

What might otherwise be an impossible spell to cast for a human mortal was made easier by the fact that whoever had formulated this spell had broken it down into ten separate cycles, all interlaced with one another. The spell would take a good hour to cast, but with each cycle slowly building on the previous interlaced cycle, the overall difficulty would be eliminated. Having developed many spells himself, a master of the trade, Kern’s best effort at spellcraft was only four interlaced cycles. It was like a song that started with a single singer, then a second would start singing a different song, but yet their voices and rhythms would mesh perfectly. Then add a third song and singer to further the fugue of music. But yet not in fugue, because each song is distinct and different, but still creating a perfect mesh with the whole.

To his knowledge, no one living had ever crafted a spell of over six interlaced cycles without it collapsing and becoming unworkable. The more cycles a spell possessed, the easier to cast as compared to the outcome, but the considerably more complex to develop in the first place. Kern’s best guess - a god had designed this spell with a mortal caster in mind. Actually, that wasn’t his best guess, but he didn’t want to give credence to his best guess as that ramification scared him. His best guess was that a god created this spell with Kern in mind as its caster. A spell is always easiest for its author to cast. And this spell was seemingly written to his strengths, avoiding all the areas of spellcraft in which Kern struggled, much like, if the musical analogy holds, a song written for the vocal range of its singer.

Finally ready, he uttered the first few syllables of the spell, opening the conduits of energy as needed to power the words that effortlessly slid from his tongue in perfect timing.

The first cycle went by quickly, as easily as all the earlier times he had cast the spell. It wasn’t until the fifth cycle that Kern even noticed that this casting was going to be a little more difficult than the previous castings. In fact, he wasn’t disappointed because he had expected the difficulty to set in by at least the third cycle.

Near the beginning of the sixth cycle of incantation, Kern began to sense something wrong. It was more than apprehension about the risks that he had foreseen, this was a gnawing worry that bordered on solid confirmation. The power matrix of the spell was starting to interface with another power source, leaching additional power into the spell. It was barely noticeable, minute quantities actually, but the power was present all the same. Kern had had this happen before in other castings, but never in a spell this major. Each iota of power that didn’t come from Kern meant another part of the spell he needed to accommodate during casting. In minor spells, the mage simply compensated through their understanding of the laws of magic and overcame these fluctuations as they occurred. However, the more complex the spell, the harder to compensate, because a thorough understanding of the spell form itself was required. This all meant that Kern currently had two choices, quit now and absorb the power of the spell or continue on.

After weighing his options and deeming his understanding of the spell to be sufficient to overcome such a minor influx of power, he chose to continue on. The first and easiest option was to ground the second source out of the spell matrix. Any intermediate text on magic stated that this indeed was the proper action. By the seventh cycle, he realized that this commonly recommended solution was not going to work for this casting.

Now worried, he decided to route the secondary power matrix into one of the warding peripherals of the spell. Upon nearing the end of the seventh cycle, Kern felt the second source starting to grow in power at an alarming rate, pumping energy into the spell patterns, vitalizing sections of spell that were now structured but meant to remain dormant for at least another cycle. Kern’s thoughts briefly wandered and mused once again the comparison of the spellcraft and song. He mused that one of the sopranos had just gone baritone on him while belting out off-key notes three volumes too high. Anxiety became full-blown worry bordering on panic.

However, this was the risk he had undertaken for this spell and these fears had already been factored in. Calming himself by allowing his discipline to grind under heel his irrational thoughts, he quickly reviewed his options. A second warding should be up to the task. A mage of Kern’s caliber always utilized the utmost safety when attempting new spells. Skill of his level did not come without great risk and it was only through strict safety protocols and precautions that Kern was still alive today. Initializing the second warding with little more than a slight mental command, Kern silently followed this in his thoughts with a quick prayer to Slinjetto, his goddess of magic. After this, he was out of any practical options that led to a safe outcome.

The second warding was a redundant set of runes he had inscribed around the room. The entire top of his tower now became part of the spells overflow. The hum of magic in the room overrode all other sounds for Kern except his own commanding voice. Anyone standing right outside the tower would have heard a high pitched whine emanating from the stones as they became charged with energy. If they were to take more interest and then peer closer, they would see the grains of the white limestone tower blocks blur as they quickly vibrated.

In the middle of the ninth cycle, Kern realized his true mistake. The second power matrix was not dwindling, only changing. He must have hooked up with a natural power source changing polarity rather than a magical one. His spell was the ground for this other power source, all he had done was further open the channel by trying to ground it out. He was almost to the point of panicking in trying to figure out what to do. It garnered him no comfort knowing that he hadn’t made any actual mistakes in his craft work. Sometimes these things just go bad.

His options were now limited if any still existed. He ruled out terminating the spell as it now had more than enough power to force the casting out of him. He briefly considered cutting himself off from the spell and letting it fizzle out, but he knew that this spell was going to finish on its own one way or another. The tricky proposition in quitting oneself from a spell once started was the risk of searing all magical talent from the mage. Such a procedure required more than a little luck to accomplish. Failing to completely sever his tie to the spell, a fortunate mage might only minorly damage the part of him which allowed the manipulation of magic. Such damage was irreversible.

But a spell of this caliber would almost certainly mean total loss of ability if not death. More than a few mages had suffered strokes trying to cut themselves off from an errant spell. Cutting oneself off from a major spell was not a skill one learned, simply because the extreme consequences limited any attempts of reasonable practice.

To complicate this matter, few mages would wish to live knowing that they had lost the ability to utilize magic, most would far sooner give up sight, hearing, or a limb if given the choice. His only real choice left was to continue and hope he could finalize the spell as intended.

By the end of the ninth cycle, Kern was sweating quite heavily as his body started to tremble. With the second source of power available as it was, his worry should have been the spell matrix overloading, not the spell ramping up its need for power as it was now doing. How could such a spell require so much energy? Glancing down briefly to the five stones he held, he despaired as two of his five gems were dull, completely burnt out. No matter, if he could just finish the spell all would be okay. Altering his strategy, he now focused and formed in his mind a full conduit into the middle of the spell from the second power source. No more would he try to ground that power source out, now he would use it for maximum advantage. If the spell was needing to feed on power, he would supply it.

With two stanzas left in the tenth cycle, the last of his stones quit glowing, all five stones looking like nothing more than smoky gray chunks of glass. Agony set in and Kern’s head and chest started throbbing with an almost unbearable pain as tears began running down his cheeks. His whole body shaking, the stones slipped from his outstretched hands one by one. Kern wanted to scream in pain. He was now experiencing the kind of extreme pain that wanted only allowed for a futile scream in attempted relief. But the spell was too powerful and would only allow utterance of itself. With one and a half stanzas remaining all four candles went out simultaneously sending the room into a darkness that not even moonlight penetrated. The lights created by the blazing runes inscribed on the floor were all that could be seen. Their purple hue had turned to a brilliant red with orange coronas as their light began to slowly flicker like some sort of mock flame that produced no actual heat.

With one stanza left, Kern's heart burst and his eyes fluttered shut. But by now, the spell was alive. Although dead, his convulsing body continued to provide the final spoken lines of the last stanza in a hideous rasp of a voice. As if a flare were suddenly lit in his mouth, a flame spurted from his blackening lips as the finals words were wrenched from his chest in an inhuman scream. A red glow illuminating the room from the runes flashed to an all-encompassing brightness. This was one spell which was finishing despite the inadequacies of the caster.

Once the final words of the spell were sputtered forth, Kern's body went rigid before toppling into the etched square. The spell was now complete, although in a manner never intended by the caster. In gathering energy for the transfer gate, the spell had reached across time but had hit a barrier at the time of Coalescence and was unable to go back any further. But this spell was designed to work no matter the resistance, and it found a way. It found a remnant power residue connected to the other side, and once the spell latched on it regained all of its intended purpose, and in so doing the spell punched through the barrier like it was ripe melon just begging to be shattered by an oversized hammer, but instead of opening one gate, it opened a multitude of gates all at once in the same spot, breaching far more than the illusion of time.

---

Admiring his newly acquired dark cherry wood desk, Corvain gently reclined in his chair and ran his hand over its lacquered top. This is the way life should always be, everything as smooth and shiny as this desk in front of me. Even the color is fitting. The blood necessary to make life interesting and fun. Picking up a quill and positioning a single sheet of paper in front of him, he pondered what his first official task would be on his fine, new desk.

The sudden explosion shook the room so violently that dust fell from the ceiling in tiny waterfalls. The sharp blast combined with his startled reaction left him seatless. Sitting on the floor looking up, he could see ebony viscous fluid from the spilled ink pot dripping over the edge of his desk as it stained dark rivulets into the wood on its beady descent to the floor.

"Life must despise happy people," he grumbled. "That better not be Kern, cause if it is, he owes me a new desk after I skin him!"

Quickly standing and rushing to the window, he gasped as he looked out, "Holy Sten!, It's pulverized." The entire top portion of Kern's tower wasn't just cracked or damaged, it was lying all over the entire compound, with a good portion of it lying on the adjoining street. Of the scattered stones, the largest piece Corvain could see was no larger than what a man could reasonably carry in two hands. Turning to leave his office, he saw his chief scribe entering through the room’s main entrance.

"Any orders?" asked the scarred and muscular scribe which no one would ever guess to be a scribe by his dire appearance. He obviously know what had happened, he had just heard the explosion and was dutifully checking on his master. Receiving his orders from Corvain, the scribe rushed out of his master’s office and headed downstairs barking orders at everyone he saw in a very unscribelike manner, again belying his job function as each of his commands were inundated with curse words.

Upon reaching the new top floor of Kern’s tower, the scribe along with about ten others found only a single man. The force of the explosion must have been immense because almost no debris from what had formerly been the top three levels of the tower remained. They were literally standing on the new roof of the tower. Looking closer at the man, they saw he was lying curled in a ball on the floor and totally naked. It appeared that not an inch of his skin wasn't blackened from burns. In several places, a shiny gloss on the black soot of his skin told of a crack where blood was seeping out.

Defying all appearances of what should count for death, the man started to stand. He made it to his feet and staggered a single step before gaining his balance. For a second his single working eye focused on those surrounding him. Letting out a meek hiss of pain, he collapsed and this time did not rise.

Keeping his presence of mind, the scribe quickly pieced together roughly what had happened. Kern had probably overextended himself, but instead of just putting himself out of commission for a few hours or days like usual, he had gone too far and killed himself. In doing so, he most likely had destroyed himself and the top portion of his tower. The man in front of him was much too big to be Kern. Whatever the cause, this wrecked thing before him was likely a warrior from the past and thus the property of his master. And being valuable property, the scribe quickly commanded that this man was going to get all possible care.