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“Be careful, please.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Delthea rolls her eyes. Lightning crackles in her palms, dark shadows shape themselves into daggers behind her and her heart pumps fire into her blood. She’s ready – she’s SO ready to show these Rigelian losers.
Delthea is fourteen, and a force of nature. She is raw magical talent and a vital part of this army.
Luthier is seventeen, and more of a nerd. He thinks way too much, and he’s always on Delthea’s case about something or other. Right now he looks pretty cautious of the Rigelian army on the plains below them. Overthinking things, probably.
Delthea, on the other hand, doesn’t care very much. She is fourteen, and death hasn’t felt real yet. She’s with the good guys, and those Rigelians are the bad guys. That’s why she’ll win and they’ll lose. Doesn’t have to be more complicated than that, right?
A horn sounds.
“Come on, Lu,” Delthea grins, and she darts off into the battlefield, leaving her brother in the rear lines.
She’s a wildfire on the plains. Her magic takes and takes from her life-force, but she’s never once bothered. Her bloodline has always been able to handle more than most mages, and with Silque’s healing over a distance, she is unstoppable.
The bad guys lose. Obviously, because Delthea is there to fight them.
She walks the perimeter, tired but relieved. They’ll win this war for sure, and then… well, she’ll have something to do, surely. Luthier talked about travelling overseas to research Archanea’s magic because it’s fundamentally different from theirs, and blah-di-blah. Delthea guesses she could tag along. She is fourteen, and death hasn’t felt real yet.
She finds Luthier beside a whole bunch of dead enemies. Forsyth is there too, breathing hard, looking really roughed up. They’d been in quite a fight. No wonder Luthier is lying down to rest.
Forsyth looks at her, eyes watery and broken. He tries to speak, but it’s only gasps. Silque is there by his side, and Delthea shifts her attention to her brother.
He’ll call her reckless and stupid, probably. Well, it’s deserved – she kind of ran head-first into more than a few skirmishes. It doesn’t matter. She’ll leave the level-headedness to him because she surely has none of that smart stuff and he needs to outshine her in SOMETHING.
“Hey, Lu,” she says, and crouches down beside him.
There’s a weird lump in her heart, something that grows and grows, until it kills the calm feeling within her that she only now realizes… was denial.
This isn’t Luthier. This is a dead person.
“Silque,” Delthea chokes, her hand on Luthier’s cold cheek. “Silque… He needs help! Come on! Heal him!”
No one comes.
Because no one can help.
“Oh no…” Delthea’s hand is sticky and weird, and she can’t breathe. “Not you, Lu, you big dummy…” She grasps his jacket and pulls at him. “Get up! …GET UP!”
He doesn’t respond. His body is just a body, impossibly heavy and hopelessly pale.
Delthea is fourteen, and death is real.
---
The roar of wind is hollow and endless in Thabes. This had once been a city of highly sophisticated magic, and not too long ago, it had been a battlefield in an Archanean war. Delthea found pieces of cloth and broken spears and food waste. The new touch to the old ruins makes everything that much lonelier.
Duma’s craft had been a dead end. So had Mila’s crafts. Delthea had spoken to fishy dudes and former witch-husks (some of which had been very interested in her ideas). She’d had to fight her way out of some of those encounters, and she’d come out of it empty-handed. Valentia’s wells were dry.
She had to turn her hopes to Naga, to Archanea. Delthea had entered port in some place called Grust and broken into a library within an hour (the people in Grust looked like they were patching themselves together after some really rough times, which was too bad for them, but it meant that security was terrible and Delthea had free reins).
She finds what she’s looking for without much searching. She picks up a few books on magic history and soon learns that Archanea’s magic is centred in a place to the north, a desert land named Khadein where there are no kings or queens and where mages can find a haven and learn their craft in peace.
In the heart of that desert lies Thabes, a ruined city where the Staff of Aum had been created some thousand years ago – a staff meant to resurrect the dead. It’s just a few lines of text, but it catches Delthea’s interest and then some.
The Thabesians had almost succeeded – the texts were unclear on that end, but it seemed like the staff had been able to revive a loved one for a short time or something. Which was leagues better than everything Delthea had found in Valentia combined. She had to find that staff. She’d figure out how to make it work permanently. She had to.
With nothing but her backpack and one book stolen from the Grustian library, Delthea makes her way toward Thabes.
And now, weeks later, she’s reached her goal. The weather is a downright mess, like the forces of nature is trying to hunt her out of the city.
Delthea curses and fights the wind as it tries to tear at the pages of her tome.
One year of searching Valentia, delving into arts both forbidden and tolerated, and nothing— Now her throat burns with thirst, and some stupid breeze isn’t going to stop her! She yells hoarsely at the storm as she summons a blizzard, counteracting the sprays of sand.
It’s excessive and out of control. But who gives a shit.
The stunt leaves her out of breath, and her throat hurts even more now. Apparently, the thing about Archanean magic is to use the power around you instead of letting it drain the caster. Which is just nuts. Delthea has tried it, but she can’t get the hang of it. Her instincts take over, instincts that she’s honed since birth.
But Archanean magic is her only hope. She is raw magic in the shape of a person – if anyone can reverse death, it has to be her, right?
She nearly trips on a piece of ragged cobblestone. She can barely see like this, and she needs to find a place to ride out the storm and search at the same time. Most houses are just skeletons, and their walls offer no protection. The most structure-like thing is in the center of the city, which looks like an obsidian tower that once reached the skies but now is covered by layers upon layers of sand and grime so that nothing but the tip of it is above ground. It stinks of forbidden magic, like fingerprints of blood on the walls.
Its entrance is covered by rocks having fallen from its roof. Delthea melts them with a prolonged blast of fire and light, and the whole storm lights up like a beacon. Not that she cares, because there’s no-one else here. She crawls inside, letting a small sprite of fire follow her from above.
This place is the perfect place to begin. It is both a shield from the storm and it’s obviously keeping a ton of secrets, just waiting for Delthea to find them! She digs with her fingers through the sand. It is not long until she pulls a box engraved by old runes from below. It plays a taunting jingle, and the runes light up.
“Don’t open that,” a voice suddenly says.
Delthea looks up, her hands raised to lift the lid.
A woman steps forth from behind a pillar. Her hair is chestnut, just like Delthea’s, but it is long enough to reach her knees. Braided into a crown with ribbons, she looks far too prettied up to be a bounty hunter or treasure seeker, but Delthea has learned to not be mislead.
Delthea knits her head into fists. “I do what I want,” she spits. “Go away, or you’ll regret it!”
The woman smiles and tilts her head. “You’re not a Khadein student… How old are you?“
“Old enough to zap people,” Delthea frizzles and lets out a warning shot of lightning toward the stranger.
The woman raises her hand, and the lightning bounces off her and into a powdery stone wall. There’s smoke and dust from the impact. Maybe Delthea had put a bit more power in the spell than intended, but who cares—the woman had just deflected it like it was a fly, anyway.
“Rude,” the woman says, still smiling. “Lucky as you are, I don’t want to fight you.”
Delthea narrows her eyes and puts her hands on the lid of the box. It’s ragged and splintered and she can almost feel the magic within, it’s unlike anything she’s ever experienced and she wants it so desperately.
“Leave me alone!”
“I can’t do that,” the woman responds calmly. “You’re about to hurt yourself. Please, just take your hands off the box, and let me—”
Delthea would rather die than let a thief take even the slightest shred of a clue. She tears the lid open, and with the force of a stormy ocean wave, her consciousness is sucked out of her.
---
Delthea wakes to the sound of a mage’s camp; the buzz of rain hitting a ward, the crackle of a campfire, and the slow turning of tome pages.
Luthier used to make these camps when they were out camping and searching for plants he wanted to study. Delthea had climbed trees and shot fireballs at homemade targets and hopped up on Luthier’s back. And apart from a slightly annoyed grunt, Luthier had let her remain there, even though she must have been majorly irritating. His patience knew no limits, which was lucky, because Delthea required quite a lot of it.
Not a month of their ordinary village lives had gone by without them camping for at least a few days at a time, and Luthier would never go out to look for plants without his sister. He never expressed stuff explicitly, but Delthea knew that was his way of telling her he loved her very much.
Delthea’s eyes hurt, so she opens them.
“Huh,” she exhales, trying to speak.
“Thank goodness you’re breathing on your own again.” Someone moves closer, a lady with long brown hair and a slight smile. Delthea doesn’t recognize her at first, but then remembers the thief in Thabes. Did this woman knock her out and steal her box? Oh, she’ll regret that, she’ll regret that—if Delthea could only turn her palms over and—
“You can’t move,” the woman informs her with a hint of a troubled frown. “So stop trying to. Just focus on breathing, will you? I’ve been doing it for you this last hour.”
“Gh,” Delthea answers.
“You’re strong, I’ll give you that.” The woman smiles again. “But what you opened was an old assassination gadget from the time of Thabes. It contains magic concentrated to imitate the concept of death. Your muscles are paralyzed. Only for a short time, mind you. That one wasn’t very potent, but considering it’s been buried for two thousand years or so, it still packs a punch…”
Delthea stirs again. Her hands don’t respond, but her chest heaves.
“Where—? Where is it?”
The woman tilts her head. “Hm? The box? Destroyed, obviously.”
“No—!” Delthea hisses a breath. “The concept of death… I… need it!”
The woman tuts and rests her head in her hand. “You got your taste, and it wasn’t pretty, right?”
“Go away!”
The woman doesn’t. She regards Delthea thoughtfully, not smiling for once. Her eyes are a gentle brown, but raw magic pulsates behind them just like it does for Delthea. This lady is no ordinary mage.
“I don’t know your story,” she says with a serious tone. “But you seem to care an awful little about being saved from death.”
“That’s right,” Delthea huffs, even though that’s an obvious lie and the stranger can probably tell. Delthea clenches her teeth, fights against the slackness of her muscles, and manages to drag herself up into sitting. Her legs are like weird appendages – she can feel them, but not move them.
“All right then,” the woman says. She sits with her hands in her lap and turns her head to the campfire. She breathes in deeply, and the flames breathe with her.
Delthea watches the fire obey the woman’s unconscious command—she’s slightly bitter, but also reluctantly impressed.
“How did you breathe for me?”
“I know my way around earth magic,” the woman responds. “And a dear friend of me is a wind mage. He’s taught me to move small wisps of air.”
“There’s no such thing as wind magic,” Delthea objects and sits straighter.
“Oh no, there is,” the woman smiles. “It’s a rare branch of nature magic. You clearly aren’t a student at the university, or you’d known. The headmaster is my wind mage friend, you see, and he likes to show off.”
“Okay,” Delthea says, half-listening, and finally wobbles to standing. “Doesn’t matter. Thanks, I guess. For saving my life, or something. I’m gonna go, now. Don’t destroy more of my discoveries, or you’ll have to worry about saving yourself.”
“Harsh,” the woman says and arcs a brow. “And… no promises. We haven’t introduced ourselves, so I’ll start – my name is Linde, Archmage of Archanea, and I’m here to rinse Thabes of old void-magic traps.”
“Wait, what?” Delthea snaps around (very unsteadily, but she manages) and stares at her. “Why? Why destroy them?”
“Because people come here searching for all sorts of things to help solve problems they can’t solve on their own,” Linde answers, her eyes glowing with sudden darkness. “As if the people of Thabes knew more than we did. Their failures irreparably ruined Khadein and caused their own demise—and their old experiments killed a young university student just a few weeks ago. Just the same kind of box you opened, actually. And I wasn’t here to push air into her lungs.”
Delthea clenches her hands into fists. She’s not some rookie mage, she wants to protest. There’s evidence of the opposite, but she doesn’t give a rotten fig about evidence. She’s here for a reason, and this Linde couldn’t possibly understand.
“It’s worth the risk,” Delthea says and looks beyond the slight shine of the ward into the dark, rainy storm. “I have something I have to find.”
“Is it the staff of Aum?”
Delthea whirls around on the spot. Linde sits with her brow still arced.
“It doesn’t work,” Linde says gravely. “In its fully charged state, it can bring you respite… but not revival. Although right now it is not fully charged for another thousand years. And it’s not here. It’s in Archanea, safe and useless. Please don’t go out there again, because you’ll only find disappointment.”
Delthea can’t breathe. Too many words, all at once. “We are in Archanea, aren’t we?” she whispers.
Linde shakes her head. “A Valentian,” she chuckles. “Your strange magic aura makes much more sense, now.”
“Don’t laugh at me,” Delthea snaps, but there isn’t much power behind her words.
In truth, she doesn’t know what to do. There’s rain all around her, horizontal in the wind, but the ward keeps it out. The darkness outside the ward seems a bit too thick and unfamiliar. Her chest hurts, but she doesn’t want to go out there. She’s obviously not afraid, but she has someone who claims to have knowledge of the staff of Aum right there… And this someone seems gullible and helpful. No harm in staying then, right?
Delthea plops down on the ground again, curling her knees to her chest and then changing her mind, thinking it’ll make her look insecure and weak. She stretches them out instead.
“Well then, mysterious Valentian,” Linde says, her shoulders and face relaxed again. “Would you tell me your name?”
Delthea narrows her eyes. She could make something up, but her imagination isn’t the best at the moment. The contents in the box still make her dizzy.
“Delthea,” she answers sourly. “I’m from the Lumina family, not that that means anything to you.”
“I do know that this family has one powerful mage in it,” Linde smiles, unaffected by Delthea’s surliness.
“There used to be two,” Delthea snaps, and her knees curl to her chest again. Before Linde gets the chance to say anything, she continues: “I want you to tell me everything about the staff of Aum, okay? Everything.”
Linde watches her carefully. “It will not work, Delthea.”
“Not with your attitude! But it will work for me!”
Linde shakes her head. Her eyes hold sorrow as she looks into the flames.
“I don’t have much more to tell you,” she sighs. “But if you keep your end of a promise, I swear I will take you to where we keep the staff.”
Delthea’s eyes widen. “Yeah? What kind of promise?”
“A little bit of help cleaning up the traps in Thabes would be appreciated,” Linde shrugs, but her look on Delthea is genuine. “How about that? You help me, I help you.”
Delthea doesn’t grin the way she used to when Lu was alive. But that is a deal that almost makes her smile.
---
Maybe it wasn’t such a great deal after all. Disarming traps turn out to be real gruelling work.
Linde looks pristine as she blasts them with light magic or draw runes in the air or lets fire crawl into specific magical locking mechanisms. And she doesn’t even have to look to find things, it’s as though she follows a trail.
Delthea is exhausted after pouring light magic into a cellar that pulsates darkness right back at her, and the deeper into the cellar she goes, the more she struggles to fight it. And Linde keeps being unaffected, just watches her.
Then when Delthea is about to fail, Linde lets out one great blast, and the chamber empties.
Delthea breathes hard, rests her hands on her knees. She feels pathetic. In Valentia, she was so strong, and here she’s nothing at all. It dawns on her then.
“Teach me your stuff,” Delthea demands, and Linde looks at her with a surprised frown.
“Be more specific, please.”
“Archanean magic needs to be handled with Archanean magic,” Delthea explains. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“That does make sense, yes.” Linde takes one of Delthea’s hands and watches it intently. It’s sort of weird, but Delthea isn’t scared. Linde just looks like a scholar delving into a puzzle.
“Just… how different is Valentian magic, really?” Linde asks. “I need to know this in order to know where to start. What are your energy sources? Your channels?”
Delthea tries her best to explain. In Valentia, every mage is taught about the way magic is taken from within oneself, and how dangerous that can be. Linde frowns at her, tracing the veins on the back of her hand.
“You speak truly,” Linde said. “That’s why your magic aura is so… focused. We gain our magic from outside sources, which means I could use you as a source with the right kind of veil magic. Given your aura, it would be incredibly powerful. Lucky you, I’m not interested in power.”
Deltha yanks her hand back. “You can’t just take magic from somebody!”
“You absolutely can.” Linde watches her with dark brown eyes, flickering with the light magic around her skin. She’s really performing subconscious spells constantly, and if Delthea wasn’t so angry, she’d be fascinated.
“Come,” Linde says. “Sit on the floor with me. Put your hand on this tile.”
Delthea sits down with a huff and slams her hand down. It’s just as well to do as this lady says (after all, she is actually teaching her magic as per Delthea’s demand), but she’s not gonna look happy about it.
“Now, I’m going to heat this tile up,” Linde continues. “I want you to focus on that heat, and use it to create a fire spell in your other hand. And no cheating. I’ll know.”
Linde smiles, clearly finding this engaging. Or she’s just a huge show-off. Delthea glares back at her.
The heat just feels like heat to her. Nothing magical about it. Actually, her hand just feels like it's burning. Meanwhile, her heart pumps magical energy to her brain, tempting her to use it. It’s so loud, impossible to ignore.
“I don’t feel any magic at all,” she snaps.
“What’s the most powerful external force you can think of?” Linde asks her.
Delthea closes her eyes. The roars of Duma comes to mind, as his ancient power makes mountains themselves tremble. Come to think of it, Duma’s and Mila’s power always felt so unexplainable and secret, but with the tickle of magical sensation from the heated tile… She can’t help but think they influenced the world through Archanean style magic.
“… Divine dragons?”
“That’s definitely not a bad answer, but a complicated one. They operate on a different level from us, they shape the world like gods, and I certainly don’t know how. I was thinking of the sun.”
Delthea frowns. That makes sense, she supposes. It’s a never-ending source of heat and light… Its influence is everywhere, even down here in a dark cellar, some of its rays sprinkle through the ruins. And like dust hovering in the spotlight of sunbeams, Delthea feels it.
There’s magic outside her. But it is fickle and wilful and she has no idea how to reach it. How does she move it? How does she command it?
Light fire, she thinks to herself as she stares down onto the glowing tile. Light fire, come on, light fire—
A flame sprouts from her palm, and for the duration of a heartbeat she is overjoyed, before her mood plummets as she recognizes the magic as her usual fire spell. She immediately puts it out and removes her hand from the tile.
Linde does the same, her head tilted. “As much as I find the Valentian way fascinating, that was still cheating.”
Delthea’s little victory feels pointless. She feels small and dumb and she hates it. At the same time, she knows how cool Luthier would find this, and how he wouldn’t be so immature to deny himself a learning opportunity because of pride. She should try to act like him a little bit, so she could impress him when she’s gotten him back from the dead.
She clenches her fists.
“I’ll go again,” she says.
---
Delthea has spent two weeks in Khadein, and her little backpack is full of trinkets and pieces of ancient tomes. Linde has picked up a few things too, because as Delthea has learned, she’s far too curious to leave anything unfamiliar alone. Maybe that’s why she insisted Delthea stay with her to begin with. Doesn’t really matter to Delthea, it’s truly a win-win situation. Linde gets company and knowledge about history and practices foreign to her; Delthea gets both those things and a ticket to the staff of Aum. It’s worth waiting in a weird desert for a few more weeks for that reason, to be sure. Although weirdly enough, she starts to forget about the deal more often than not.
Well, Delthea is a prodigy, and she’s been so busy trying to prove that to someone akin to her level, it makes her mind kind of cluttered with other stuff than grief. All worth it, though. She’s spawned a fire tornado just out of desert heat and laughed maniacally as she did – and where anyone else, even Luthier, would go fetch water buckets or yell at her to stop, Linde stood right beside her with the widest smile and her hair curling from the roaring flames.
Delthea thinks about Luthier constantly. That hasn’t changed. The burning ache of his absence never truly leaves her, but there’s been a change in her standard setting, in a sense. When Delthea is engulfed in the sensation of Archanean magic all around her and when Linde’s eyes are shining with eagerness and accomplishment… Delthea doesn’t hurt as badly.
Two weeks she’s spent upturning rocks and imitating Linde’s runes and disarming techniques. Two weeks of making sense of Archanea (its history is so complex – why’s there so many kingdoms and royals to keep track of?), of understanding the depth and hidden horror in the buried city of Thabes.
There’s still so much left to explore – according to Linde, the tower of Thabes in the center is as deep as it is tall (which Delthea had already guessed from the look of it), but it is better not to venture down there. Even two very accomplished mages could be left with no way out. And besides, Linde’s only interested in rinsing the surface levels of death-traps. Makes sense to Delthea, plus, she’s secretly relieved to not be forced to go any further down. Who knows what hides down there? Not the Staff of Aum, that’s for sure.
Two weeks, and now it’s time to leave. Delthea is skittish and her legs ache to leave Khadein and its weird weather. They walk fast, Linde speaking of warping and how it’s done here in Archanea. Delthea shrugs and decides to show off a little bit. She can warp, easy-peasy. She’s been doing that since she was ten!
In a swirl of violet and black, she turns her body into magic, and like water sucked out of a straw, she shoots up into the sky. Then just as suddenly, she smacks down into the ground a couple hundred rock’s throws away from Linde.
She still doesn’t grin the way she used to when Luthier was alive, but she scoffs through her nose and tilts her head, daring for Linde to top that.
She kind of does. Instead of shooting up into the sky, Linde pops into thin air, leaving sparkles of golden dust where she had stood before. The sparkles pop up again, right beside Delthea, and in the next heartbeat, Linde reappears with an arced brow and big smile.
“Mine’s prettier,” she teases.
Delthea crosses her arms. “Not really.”
Linde smiles wider, clearly thinking she’s being very funny. She has the look adults get when they’re sassing back at teenagers, like ‘I’m letting you win this time’. It’s pretty annoying, but it’s also familiar and kind of nice.
Once they reach the border of Khadein, something changes. Delthea can really tell where the nation starts and where it ends, because the Archanean magic source is palpable and alive within the desert, but as soon as Delthea steps onto the plains of Aurelis that source is shut off.
She glances around, touches a blade of grass as if convincing herself she’s alive and her surroundings are real.
“You’ve noticed,” Linde smiles. “There’s a reason the university is in Khadein, and you’ve just figured out why.”
“There’s no magic out here,” Delthea gasps.
“There is, actually.” Linde lights a tiny star in her hand and lets electricity crackle like a bracelet around her wrist. “But the flow of magic is much stronger in Khadein. When the creation of the Staff of Aum backfired, incredible amounts of magical energy was sucked out of the land and then returned with full force. Kind of like when you take every droplet of water out of a potted plant and then pour it back all at once—the earth’s too dry to soak it back in properly, and instead it floods. That’s how the theory goes, anyway.”
Delthea tries to sense any trace of magic out here, and fails. It’s frustrating, empty.
“You’ll find it in time,” Linde says, but Delthea isn’t convinced.
The lack of a distraction by excelling at magic, as well as the constant travelling on long, winding roads, awakens Delthea’s former impatience. She snaps at everything and nothing and she kicks at the grass when they’re forced to take breaks. Linde tries to tell her about the bridges they cross and the battles that raged here just a few years ago, but Delthea really doesn’t care.
Like Luthier, Linde merely looks annoyed at times, but she’s not losing her composure. She lets Delthea rage and use Valentian magic to create a pillar of flame when all they’d actually needed was a campfire. She lets Delthea sit sourly undisturbed beneath a tree and try to read the ancient tomes she’s picked up in Khadein.
But everyone has a limit. Linde’s is when Delthea yells obscenities at a waiter boy who bumped into her chair at an inn. That’s when Linde stands up and firmly tells her to leave. Immediately.
It’s fair, actually, because Delthea said some very rude things. Not that she thinks it’s fair in the midst of things.
“Oh, geez, sorry for ruining your noble image, O Perfect Archmage!” Delthea frizzles.
And the look Linde gives her is one of such disappointment, Delthea wants to vomit.
Delthea has kind of liked Linde’s company more often than not, but when all’s said and done, she is in a position of dependence. Linde is someone who can show her to the thing she wants most.
That’s not the only reason she regrets acting the way she did, but it’s the reason she’s able to stop herself from making it worse. She storms out of the inn, lightning forming subconsciously at her feet. She’s too upset to even notice this.
And then she stops outside the inn, breathes deeply. She looks at the people of the town swirling about, doing their chores and playing and sharing food with one another.
Siblings and parents and teachers and students and friends… Delthea is a lonely wallflower in the midst of it all, a bystander, a stranger and a nothing.
Her chest hurts. ‘Where’s Lu?’ it asks, like so many times before, and Delthea can’t fathom how to answer. She clenches her teeth and stares into the ground.
Okay, seriously, she’s got to keep it together.
But what does she do? Her stuff is in the room she and Linde rented for the night. Does she go back? She can only imagine Linde slamming the door in her face with a wisp of wind magic. ‘You got your chance’, Linde would say. ‘And you ruined it by being a brat.’
“I’m not a brat,” Delthea whispers to herself and swallows. There’s evidence of the opposite, but Delthea has never cared much for evidence.
She closes her eyes and waits for her heart to stop beating so quickly. She replays her horrible words to the waiter boy, and cringes at the memory of the hurt look on his face. Shame tastes like bile in her mouth. She knows what she must do, but the thought is unbearable.
She takes a deep breath, and goes back in. She closes the door carefully behind her, as to show how composed she is right now, and she meets the gaze of the waiter boy. She clasps her hands and hangs her head, too scared to maintain eye-contact.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any of those things. I shouldn’t have… I’m sorry.”
The waiter boy doesn’t look too impressed, but he doesn’t yell at her, at least. That’s something. And he doesn’t stop her as she walks past him to the stairs, toward their rented room. That’s something too. Delthea wouldn’t forgive if she was him, so she doesn’t wait for him to reassure her it was fine, because it really wasn’t.
She bites her lip and opens the door to the rented room. She hadn’t called Linde any names, but somehow it was even worse to go in here to meet her. Delthea has spent many days trying to impress Linde to the best of her ability and really actually liked doing that. And then she’d go and act like a spoiled child and ruin everything.
Linde sits in a chair with a tome in her lap. She doesn’t look up.
The shame is unbearable. Delthea could just take her stuff and leave, but then she’d never have the chance to make this up.
“Forgive my behaviour,” Delthea says, trying to sound mature and sorry at the same time. But really, she just sounds pathetic.
“Have you apologized to the waiter boy?” Linde asks. Her tone is short, but she doesn’t seem angry.
Delthea tries to breathe. “Yes.”
Linde looks up from her book, still with a small, disappointed frown on her face. “Good. Where did you even learn to say such things?”
“Village kids,” Delthea shrugs. “It’s stupid, but you pick things up when you hang out… Never really had any parents, so… Just my big brother.”
Linde looks at her sternly. “And would he be all right with you slandering others in such a way?”
Delthea cringes at the pain. ‘None of your business’, she wants to yell, but she really has no energy to be angry anymore. The shame is far more powerful.
“No,” she answers honestly.
The silence is pressing. Linde still looks at her with an unbearable sad frown, and Delthea knows that she’s ruined things beyond repair. It is time for her to leave.
“I’ll just take my stuff and go,” Delthea mumbles, which has Linde close her tome with a snap.
“Don’t,” Linde says and gestures to the bed beside her chair. “Come and sit.”
Delthea weighs her options of just saying that she doesn’t deserve to be here, but then considered how that would be far ruder, now that Linde is giving her a chance to talk. So, she sits numbly on the bed.
They’re quiet for a bit, before Linde bends her head and sighs.
“I used to be like you,” she says.
‘Sure you were’, Delthea would have dismissed her if things were more normal. All adults say that at one point or another, as if they could possibly understand what Delthea’s been through.
“Since the day I was twelve I’ve been driven by anger,” Linde continues. “I was committed to revenge and nothing else.”
Okay, that is a bit strange to imagine—Linde as someone out for vengeance. She really doesn’t look the part. Delthea dares to look her in the eye, the silent question evident in her gaze.
“I realize the extent of my change by the look on your face,” Linde smiles and shakes her head. “Delthea, I have burnt rows of men to cinders without regret. I’ve put my knife into their hearts and never slowed down. They all deserved it. The world deserved it, after what it’d done to my father. I was in a constant rage, and until I’d seen justice for his death… Well, the idea of having ‘peace’ wasn’t even on my mind, honestly. I just wanted everyone else to feel my pain.”
Delthea doesn’t speak her mind. Her heart still hammered impatiently, some rebellious streak in her wanting to spit ‘I don’t care!’, but it was all unreasonable. She focused all her energy on sitting still.
“I’m not a noble,” Linde went on. “But my father was a magician of high standing, and thus I grew up hidden from the world. My father had a friend whom I liked. The two of them were fun when they bantered between one another. But aside from the friend coming to visit from time to time, there was only my father and me. He taught me so much, and always insisted I’d do what made me happy. I smiled so much as a little girl, you could never imagine. Then came the day my father’s friend warped into our home, completely distorted by veil magic of the darkest kind. Remember when I’ve mentioned Gharnef?”
Delthea did remember. An important mage to the bad guy’s side in the Archanean war, immortal to everything except an unfathomable piece of light magic that sounded made-up, but hey, it was Archanea. Every weird tale could be real.
“Gharnef was your dad's friend,” Delthea says, and Linde nods.
“My father managed to hold him back for long enough so I could escape… But after that, Gharnef killed him so easily. We had glass windows, and when I looked over my shoulder I saw his head—”
There was no pretty way to end that sentence, Delthea realizes. And it is certainly strange to hear this woman, who Delthea had thought so happy and naïve, with this much pain and darkness in her voice.
“I hid in alleys,” Linde continues. “I worked in arenas as an invisible helping hand, worked for innkeepers and farmers, all so I could eat while I hid. I don’t remember much, except that I didn’t use my magic at all. I knew Gharnef could find me if I did. When I joined the Archanean League, I could finally move against my father’s murderer, and nothing would stand between me and that revenge.”
“You said Gharnef was dead,” Delthea nods. “Was that you?”
“Yep,” Linde says with a shaky laugh. “Yeah, that was me. And guess what?”
“…That’s why you’re so happy, now?”
“Wrong answer. All I felt once Gharnef was dead was… less hunted. But I was just as furious, just as bent on vengeance. My father was dead, and killing Gharnef did nothing to alleviate that pain. Now I just had nowhere to direct that vengeance. I was angry, rude and generally not very nice. Some people understood me, like princess Nyna—Empress Nyna, nowadays—and princess Caeda, and other mages... So, basically four or five people. To the rest, I was… Well. I may or may not have threatened and insulted a few princes and princesses along the way, especially the prince Hardin of Aurelis. Past me found him terribly condescending.”
Delthea tries to imagine Linde insulting anyone, and genuinely fails.
“What did happen to make you… not that?”
Linde clasps her hands in her lap, clearly hesitating. “… The Staff of Aum.”
“WHAT?” Delthea rises in an instant. Lightning swirls over her body and the small candle on their windowsill burns down with a whoosh. Once again, she barely notices.
“You’ve used it? You said it’s out of magical energy – so that’s your fault?”
Delthea starts pacing the room, her chest close to bursting. She has to calm down, just calm down—this changes nothing. She’d learned the Staff was useless in its current state, but she knows that with her talents she’ll be able to extract its essence and succeed in bringing Lu back.
She just needs to breathe.
“Yes, it was me,” Linde answers. “Me and a few others. That’s why I can answer you so surely that the Staff doesn’t bring the dead back. All you get is a few minutes to spend with them in a place in between the afterlife and our plane.”
Delthea stares at her. She has to be patient. She can't lose hope. She knows if she’ll just find the Staff, all her problems would be solved, this empty feeling would be gone, the unyielding anger could finally die…
“Why I’m telling you this is so I can perhaps save you from making my mistakes,” Linde says. “When I found you, I saw my younger self, as clearly as if looking in a mirror. And I know that whoever it is you intend to bring back… would probably say the same things my father did to me.”
Delthea swallows her sarcastic response. “Which was?”
“Well,” Linde answers. “I believed he’d be disappointed in how long it took for me to rid the world of the plague that was Gharnef, or that he’d be just as angry as I was… But he was just happy to see me. He wanted me to once again tell a pun that had always made him laugh, he told me I looked strong and magnificent, and when I dared ask him about his dying moments and the anger he must feel he said all he’d cared about at that moment was that he’d heard me slam the door, and known I’d gotten away. That I’d lived. No resentment, just relief. But when I tried to tell him what I’d done in his name, I think he saw all I’d become... And that saddened him. The last thing he said to me was; Please Linde, I raised you to do what makes you happy, and this isn’t it… Anger corrupts everything. Open your heart. Use your power to shape the world into a place of joy.”
“I don’t think Lu would be that poetic,” Delthea mumbles, unable to keep her frustrated teenage energy in check, and that’s when she realizes it’s the first time she’s mentioned Luthier’s name to Linde.
And she also realizes there are tears on Linde’s cheeks, despite her smile.
“But this Lu… would they want for you to be this furious at the world?”
Delthea crosses her arms. “I guess not. He wasn’t big on emotion, really. Always composed and stuff. He thought I was a hothead.”
Linde chuckles slightly. “I can’t imagine why.” Then she shakes her head and wipes her tears with her palm. “Please don’t misunderstand me, Delthea. It's... all right to be angry. But as soon as your anger is targeted at someone else, be it directly or indirectly… That’s not all right. Even though every person I’ve killed had wronged me and I had reason to be furious, there’s a difference between acknowledging it and drowning in it. Do you think you understand?”
Reminded by her rude outburst to the waiter, Delthea has a sudden urge to just bury herself beneath the bed’s covers.
“Yeah,” she says, and that’s the honest truth. “Yeah, I think so.”
Linde nods at her and puts her tome back into her bag. “Now then,” she says, her light-hearted tone returned, “I believe we never got any food. I’ll bring some up here before it is time for us to rest. Stew or fried bread?”
“Stew, please,” Delthea answers. Linde nods and puts her hand on the door handle. But she hesitates again, obviously thinking about saying something else.
“This… This Lu,” she asks with a glance. “…Was he your big brother?”
Delthea bites her lip. She supposes it’s pretty obvious with what she’s been let slip during the conversation. There’s no reason to deny it.
“Yeah,” she admits, and then she smiles. “He is. You’ll meet him soon.”
---
The Millenium Court is like starlight in the shape of a home. Kind of cold and creepy, but also unfathomable and deep. It’s much smaller than the castle of Zofia, but larger than the castle of Rigel. The doors are expensive works of art, there’s statues everywhere, and the corridors are adorned with banners of light blue and white.
Those are the colors of Archanea. Linde said the legend goes that the banner of Archanea was created in Naga’s image – light blue like her hair and scales, and white like her eyes. It’s kind of cute, Delthea thinks. Even though she’s seen Duma, a Divine Dragon, in his horrifying true form, the conviction that Naga is like a gentle mother runs deep. It’s nice people in Archanea seems to think so too. For once they have something in common.
Delthea tries to look the part of someone who belongs in such a fancy place as she walks behind Linde through the corridors, and Linde introduces her as her Apprentice. It’s just a thing to keep the guards from throwing her out, but Delthea thinks it has a nice ring to it.
She imitates Linde to the best of her ability. She keeps her back straight with a stiff and professional smile on her face, and her steps coordinated and controlled. Delthea watches as Linde’s hair hops up and down, curls and moves. It looks really nice. Mature and beautiful. Maybe Delthea should grow her hair out.
That’s the kind of thinking that leisurely passes through her mind as she sees Empress Nyna, and Delthea isn’t ready.
She draws for breath and stops, her mouth falling open.
Linde has taught Delthea some things about magical tracking on their travels. How every magical person has an aura to them, and how to read those. But Nyna's aura isn’t magical. Or maybe it is. Who knows? Certainly not Delthea. All she knows is that she’s seen someone so incomprehensibly striking she can’t make sense of it.
Thankfully, Linde is able to pull her arm into another corridor, and Delthea’s thoughts are immediately on track again.
“I told you not to try and read Nyna,” Linde tuts at her.
Delthea puts a hand to her head. “Right,” she groans. “Right, yeah, you did say that yesterday. Sorry, it just happened.”
“Magic tracing happens subconsciously once you’ve learned it,“ Linde chuckles. “It usually takes years to master, but you’ve picked it up in no-time. Now I suppose there’s value in teaching you how to not follow the track every time. Especially not with Nyna.”
Delthea shudders. Nyna had only glanced at her for a moment, and yet the memory of her eyes haunts her. They were like a dark sky above the ocean on a rainy day. Just endless, endless grey.
“Noted,” Delthea says and rubs her forehead. “What’s her deal, though?”
Linde smiles and shrugs, and Delthea’s eyes widen.
“Not even you know?”
“I’m not sure she does, either.” Linde looks through one of the windows in the hallway, where one can see the cutesy hills of Archanea stretch on for miles. “Whatever has passed down the Holy Family of Archanea, the truth has been lost over countless generations. This is probably a lot coming from me of all people, but it’s best not to pry. Nyna is human though. There’s no doubt in my mind about that.”
“This is like the continent of mysteries,” Delthea sighs. “Ugh. Lu will love it, though.”
Linde’s smile fades. She looks at Delthea like she’s a child telling a fairy tale with full conviction.
“How about we get you settled into a room, first?” Linde suggests. “You’ll be at full strength when I show you the Staff. Let’s say, tomorrow?”
“Sounds good,” Delthea says, and she can barely contain her excitement.
But the look on Linde’s face makes it so that deep in her heart, she knows. She’s just not ready to acknowledge it yet.
No, she can’t accept that as an alternative. She’s come this far. She must have hope.
She must have.
---
Delthea isn’t sure what she’d expected, but her imagined storage space for the Staff of Aum definitely included some semblance of holiness and fanciness with pillows and banners and jewels.
But Linde opens the door for her and the room is just a simple stone chamber where the Staff rests on a bed of red linen. Everything around it looks coarse and old.
Delthea doesn’t get it. How can something so fantastic lay so forgotten? Maybe it’s camouflage, so people won’t enter the room and immediately suspect its importance. Yeah, that makes sense.
But really… The Staff looks like an old stick with weird runes running through it like veins. It could have been something a child made.
Delthea knows. She has known for a while, now. And yet she lifts the Staff, holds it in her hands. Breathing, waiting.
She feels nothing. There’s no magical gate, no epic reveal. Just quiet. Just Linde, standing behind her.
Breathing. Waiting.
Delthea looks down at the staff. She knows what it could have granted her, but she also knows what it cannot. The last hope she has now slips through her fingers.
The Staff is empty, and whatever it has the potential to contain isn’t enough. Delthea can see it as she’s watching through a window. The Staff is a river that dries out in the middle of a desert, a whole continent away from the ocean. The pathway is there, but it stops before it is even halfway. Delthea could study this thing endlessly, and never succeed.
There is no cure for death. Her brother left her that day on the Rigelian plains. Not willingly, not in a way he deserved, not with Delthea there to hold his hand. But there is no way to undo it. He disappeared forever.
Meanwhile, Delthea is alive, and she’s holding a useless stick.
There is no cure for death.
She puts the staff down its bed of linen. Linde is still behind her, so Delthea does the only thing she can think of. She turns around and buries her face in her shoulder. Once Linde’s arms are put around her, the tears come.
For the first time in a full year, Delthea cries for real.
---
Delthea sees no point in leaving her room, but she does so anyway.
She’s been living at the Millenium Court for a month now, and in order to be allowed to stay she has to uphold the act that she’s Linde’s apprentice.
That’s why Delthea leaves her room. Linde tells her that engaging her mind and trying to accomplish something will help her deal with the pain. And it does alleviate it somewhat. Delthea has been living for a year in the reality that Luthier is gone, but she’s only accepted the finality of it a month ago, so in some ways, she’s back on square one of grief.
It’s hard. She hates it. But she has Linde, and all her stories and experiments. They don’t talk about the Staff because Delthea doesn’t want to be reminded, but all other things are on the table. Everything between gossip and hair-care and important life-lessons.
And in playing the act of an Apprentice, perhaps Delthea has become one.
---
One night, Luthier comes to her in a dream. They are in a great white void like the one Linde has spoken of when she met with her dead father—but there is still grass on the ground. And Luthier sits crouched with his hand stroking his chin, leaning over the delicate yellow petals of a flower.
Delthea carefully crouches beside him.
“So, uh,” she hesitates. “What’s this one called?”
Luthier looks up at her and gives her a small smile that barely moves his face. “Since when do you care for their names?”
Delthea just stares back. Him saying that makes her feel so grown-up. She's actually almost an adult. Meanwhile, Luthier will never be more than seventeen, and he’ll never see her future.
Delthea gets a lump in her throat. There’s no wind in this place, but her hair rustles nonetheless.
“Do you think I’ll forget you because you’re dead?” she asks. She's very afraid as she speaks those words, because this is the one thing she's truly terrified of.
At that, Luthier laughs his soft and sudden chuckle that he used to make at Delthea’s antics. It was his laugh for everything that was HER.
“Unlikely. You have near-perfect memory, right?”
Yeah. Right. That was something she’d reminded him of constantly, whenever he’d chided her for being so lax on her studies.
“I do hope you can someday forget the pain, though.” Luthier plucks the flower off the ground, and its petals turn white. “It’s a bit much to ask of someone to only have happy memories, but I believe those are the ones that can last. I at least think it’s something that warrants further study. Don’t you?”
Delthea doesn’t answer. She hugs him, and he smells of campfires and Zofian forests.
And that’s when she wakes up. The smell lingers in her nose, and as she sits up, she thinks she sees the shape of a white flower fade into the darkness.
She doesn’t go back to sleep. She spends the rest of the night with her knees to her chest, staring out the window at the cold, distant stars.
---
The months pass by. Delthea knows the names of all the guards, now. She knows her way around the court, and eventually she hums as she makes her down to Linde’s study. She’s greeted by good-mornings and ‘hello, lady Lumina’ and to be frank, she absolutely adores that.
She doesn’t see Nyna or her husband Hardin much. She kind of forgets they’re the most important people on the continent. What is important is Linde, smiling at her and asking if she’s ready to start making light storms or whatever other whacky stuff Linde likes to experiment with. What is important is that Delthea grins at her the way she used to when Lu was alive, and tells her she was born ready.
More months pass. Delthea has dated two knights her age already. Both of them were tall and fair-haired and valiant.
Yeah. She definitely has a type.
She’s yet to figure out what Linde’s type is, though. She’s tried to pick up if there’s anyone that has caught her eye, but Linde doesn’t look at anyone the way Delthea looks at dashing knights. One day, as they sit with tomes at breakfast in one of the palace’s many dining halls, Delthea leans over the table and points at a really handsome man (too old for Delthea, but perfect for Linde).
“Do you think he’s pretty?” she asks.
Linde looks up and follows her finger, then tilts her head, confused.
“Delthea, what does this have to do with the study of Ember Flares?”
Delthea waves her hand in the air. “Oh, nothing, nothing, just curious! I mean, we’re surrounded by great people, and I can’t help but think you must have someone who’s caught your fancy? Come on, it’s gossip time!”
“Ah,” Linde chuckles and looks at the man again. “You assume I have a romantic history with anyone at court?”
“History, present… Whatever you’d like to share, it’d be cool to know. Maybe I could help you find someone?”
“It’s pretty simple,” Linde says with a small smile. “There’s no one. I’m not interested in any of that. I’ve never been.”
“Oh,” Delthea says, the realization dawning on her. “So you’re—well, that’s that, I believe. I’ll stop looking for people to suggest to you, then.”
“I believe that’s for the best,” Linde laughs and looks back down into her book. “It’s nice you care, my little apprentice. But that’s enough distraction—time to get back into Ember Flare studies!”
Delthea groans something about ‘but what about MY gossip’, but her heart isn’t in it. This has become her home, and she loves it to bits.
---
There comes a time when she has to leave. When Archanea’s politics become too dangerous, she’s sent back to Valentia. Delthea hadn’t noticed the lurking darkness, but Linde was far quicker on the uptake. And so she hurriedly puts Delthea in a wagon that will take her to the closest harbor and a ship right back over to Valentia, where it’s safe.
Delthea doesn’t think it’s condescending. She would have if she was younger, but now she understands just how little she knows about Archanea’s intrigues, and she understands why Linde would insist on this choice.
But Delthea waits. She could make a new home in Valentia, which would be the most reasonable thing to do – but being reasonable was Lu’s thing. Delthea simply wanders and lends her talents where they’re needed and even goes to visit the royalty, but her heart isn’t really in it.
No, she’s just waiting.
A few years pass by until rumors reach her that Archanea is once again safe, and she hops onto the first ship she can.
And when she once again reaches the continent across the ocean, the Archmage of Archanea awaits her on the dock. Her smile is bright and wide.
“Welcome back, Apprentice Lumina.”
The sun is bright, and there’s magic in the air she breathes. Delthea is nineteen and she has a place to call home, and before her stands a teacher and a friend.
Delthea grins at Linde, the way she used to when Luthier was alive, and runs down the dock. The clouds in the sky swirl above her, attuned to her movement, but she barely notices. She runs, with her arms wide-open.