1Where we last left our librarian...
Book One - Seeker (Sinnifer and the Vulture)
Not long ago, I was the librarian at the wizard's school of Seven Stars. I began tutoring Louis, a young apprentice, and accidentally broke the contract that forbade me from using magic. When Headmaster Narien tried to murder me, a magical book and a mysterious vulture helped me escape. I joined the Seekers who find lost things for the Guardians and asked for the Price of reuniting my family. I discovered that I was bound by blood to the infamous House of Wells. The xiaoshin Sinnifer, Servant of Leviathan, was assigned to me. With my fellow Seekers, I recovered the most powerful weapon in the world, the Sword of the Warrior. Though I did not understand her reasons at the time, a fellow Seeker, Assimya, had chosen death as her Price. When she gave the Sword to the Guardians completing her Chain, they killed her but did not take the Sword.
Deeply unsettled by what I witnessed, I invoked the Great Pact to find the Sword's rightful owner, Captain Tarran the Bold.
Book Two - Wanderer (Tarran the Bold)
Sinnifer drug me along the Ways and abandoned me in the South, where I joined a trader's caravan, scuffled with the xiaoshin Malcit, accidently freed Prince James, my half-brother, from the Watchtower of the South, and ended up working for the monstrous Hippo "the Butcher". I escaped Hippo's clutches with his former porter, Dak, and his prized prisoner (my mother, a Tessar spy). A strange treasure we stole from Hippo was revealed to be the egg of a water xiaoshin. Reuniting with James who had a fire xiaoshin egg in his possession, I learned that Signing the Great Pact always required some kind of quest. My mission was to find and return four eggs to their respective Guardians.
Ma explained to me that the Old King, Darilyn Wells, was my father, and also revealed that leader of the caravan was her Captain, Tarran the Bold. Before he would pick up his Sword of the Warrior again, Tarran charged me with proving that the House of Wells was worthy of resurrecting. When we were betrayed by one of our companions, I returned the fire egg to the Guardian of the South and nearly died. Tarran accepted the mantle of the Warrior's successor once again. We fought my half-sister who had become a Necromancer. We acquired the third egg, air, but Tarran died in battle. The Sword passed to my mother.
Book Three - Wizard (Leviathan)
We planned to return the water egg to the Watchtower of the East, first stopping at the Floating Market in my former hometown of Sunder. There I learned that the magical book that had tutored me at Seven Stars was really the great Kisrel the Enchanter, also mentor to my half-brother James. The same Headmaster Narien who'd tried to murder me was hunting for Kisrel, and we ended up fighting him. Kisrel fled, presumably to search for our father and get into some worse trouble.
In Donander, James' aunt played magical tricks on us, hiding sinister motives. Sinnifer warned us that Leviathan intended to steal time from the water egg, rather than return to the Ways and allow himself to be replaced... which would break the Great Pact and endanger the whole world. We fought Leviathan. Dak made the Sword of the Warrior glow, and I fled to save the eggs, following the vulture.
On my way North, I reunited with my Seeker friend Hugh, met a unicorn, and ran afoul of two more of the Necromancers in my family, my aunt Vashra Sirgas, and Menenan himself (and his dragon). I delivered the air egg to the Guardian of the North and Sinnifer told me that somehow James, Dak, and my mother escaped from Leviathan, a tremendous relief to me. The water egg hatched and I named him "Pistachio" because pistachios are Sinnifer's favorite snack.
When I finally reached the War, I met my cousin, Cirat, the very same wizard I'd first fought as a brand-new Seeker in Corith, when my friends and I robbed his house. He began to teach me more powerful magic. I struggled with the knowledge that there are so many dark elves in my family, and though I've always thought of myself as human... the Signing I have undertaken is clearly turning me into something else. I also struggled with what to tell Hugh, who seems to want us to be more than friends.
I was warned by Captain Orna (my half-sister) and my brothers (all three of them - Allen, Sunny, and Flick) to stay away from the Old King's mountain, but I found myself unable to resist following the vulture once again.
Inside, I discovered the earth egg in the arms of my father, turned to stone and split across time and space by his reckless misuse of magic. Hugh and Cirat followed me. Taking the earth egg from my father caused his mountain to collapse. Hugh and I survived the mountain's collapse. Cirat did not.
For endangering everyone, I was ordered to leave the War. Hugh did not come with me, and I worry that whatever relationship we might have had is now damaged beyond repair. I am now heading West with the earth egg.
My father, who was the vulture all along, is following me.
PROLOGUE
One Year and Five Months Ago
Louis stared at the pile of salt on the table in front of him.
"How do you know if it's enough?" He asked.
"Mm," I considered. "Well, you're always counter-balancing. That's how a Ward works. Whatever you put into it, whether it be reagents or effort, that has to be equivalent to whatever you expect it to withstand. Think of it like an onion." I drew one circle in the salt of the table.
To my surprise, Louis handed me an actual onion.
"Why do you have an onion in your pocket?" I eyed him suspiciously.
"I thought it might help," he admitted. We'd been working on wards for the past two weeks, and I was sure I'd made the "onion" comparison multiple times already. I decided the particulars didn't matter. Carrying around an onion wasn't going to help the boy's casting, but it wasn't liable to hurt anything either, and maybe a visual representation would help him to understand my point. I took my letter opener, and cut a small hole in the onion's papery skin.
"Obviously, it didn't take much time or effort for me to get past that outside layer. But let's say I did this?" I stabbed the letter opener into the onion, and Louis grimaced. It didn't go completely through, "What happened to the wizard inside this ward?" I asked.
"Impaled," Louis said, terribly dramatically.
"Right. But let's say you were standing here?" I moved an empty teacup behind the pierced onion.
"The letter opener didn't go completely through the onion," Louis observed. "It stopped somewhere in the middle. So… I would be safe?" He guessed.
"Safe from my first attack, maybe," I said, brandishing the letter opener like a knife. The onion fell off the point of it, and plunked onto the table. "But you'd better have another spell ready, or you're really going to get it! Cause now I'm gonna try harder to whup you!"
I let myself sound Wester as I said that. I usually watched my words carefully at Seven Stars, but Louis loved Tessar stories. If he asked himself what Kisrel or the Old King might do, he'd have the answer he needed.
Finally grasping the actual problem in front of him, which was that he needed something capable of enduring multiple blows, Louis grabbed a piece of chalk. He drew a Clearing Circle around the pile of salt and then laid a clean little Ward inside of it (1).
"Not enough," I told him, inching forward with the letter opener. "Do better."
Louis grimaced, and managed to lay out the first part of Blaise's Unraveling. That was at least Second Year work, probably Third, and I was surprised he'd gotten it right.
I was still sort-of waving the letter opener at him when Master Elrisk wandered into the library.
My first instinct was to turn my chair around and pretend to be working, but the doddery old man had already seen that we were doing something interesting, and that meant we were in trouble.
Master Elrisk approached Louis, saying nothing. He saw what he'd laid on the table in front of himself. Plucking Louis' chalk right out of his hand, he corrected a small error in the boy's Ward and then finished the rest of Blaise's Unraveling (2).
Deciding that was insufficient, he laid a Greater Ward I'd never seen before with terrifying speed. It was far beyond the level of anything Louis ought to be studying, but Master Elrisk didn't stop there. He effortlessly lifted all of the salt and chalk patterns from the table into a particularly threatening-looking vertical orientation. (3)
Louis stared at the magnificent spell in front of him. Like every apprentice at Seven Stars, he'd been warned to avoid Master Elrisk as if his life depended on it, because it did. The Master of the Western Tower never taught boys below Fourth Year, because he apparently had some difficulty separating "teaching a spell" from "casting a spell on someone".
Master Elrisk glanced at me. He took the letter opener from my hand, flipped it around so its point was directed at my face, and very deliberatively set it on thin air, without a word of invocation.
"Your turn," he said.
Without explaining himself, he picked up the onion from the table, took a bite out of it, and walked away.
FOOTNOTES:
1. Clearing Circle: Divination (I). Air. Enables the wizard to prepare a space for a more complicated spell by detecting and removing any potential contaminates from the casting area. When cast by hedge witches/those not formally trained, it is called Sweeping. Considered an important basic safety measure.
2. Blaise's Unraveling: Transmutation (II-III). The principle reagent is an existing ward or minor enchantment, and a spool of thread (preferably spider silk). Takes apart a spell, typically a ward, and allows the caster to reshape the raw power into something different. Basic "unraveling" (sometimes also called "counter spell") is taught in Second Year, but the full version of this spell is Fifth Year work and requires a very steady hand.
3. Kisrel's Greater Unraveling Ward: Enchantment (III+, Source: Kisrel). A nastier version of Blaise's Unraveling. Any magic which contacts Kisrel's Greater Unraveling Ward destroys itself and makes the Ward stronger. The Ward itself is not inherently dangerous (hence why it is not Restricted), but it is so difficult to dispel that most wizards prefer to simply wait for it to go away. The famous duel in which Kisrel debuted this spell ended with both participants (Kisrel and Shamuramat) sitting and drinking tea, since neither could reach the other.