Nia, after informing Rachel and Lana that a wizard named Petra had skipped town with Matt, pivoted the subject of conversation towards the torivors. She let Rachel first explain what she already knew, then they deliberated at length over assumptions of the present based on their readings of future history. The only clear connection they had yet made was that Petra, not Tassel, was in control of the torivors.

  “What was it like,” Nia wondered, “to speak with the torivors?”

  An uncomfortable twinge bit at the back of Rachel’s neck as the memory resurfaced. “You know I bargained with them during Maldor’s time?”

  “Mm.” Nia nodded.

  “It was… different.” Rachel shivered at the thought. “They were calm, then. Wise, almost detached. They conveyed no emotion. Now…”

  Rachel trailed off. Lana and Nia waited patiently for Rachel to continue. Outside, a gust of wind rattled the shutters, though Rachel saw no clouds.

  “They’re- they’re hungry,” Rachel stammered. “Desperate to a degree I can’t describe. Like hounds chained outside a slaughterhouse. They wail with the violence that comes only with the knowledge that no cage will hold them forever.”

  “Not this one, at least,” Nia said as if to goad Rachel to a predetermined conclusion.

  Rachel thought hard for a moment, then gasped. “The Myrkstone.”

  Nia smiled. “Father was a diligent hist- no, he was diligent in guiding me to study history. Have you any idea of the origins of the Myrkstone?”

  Rachel shook her head. “I shattered it. I sent most of the torivors home to the Beyond. I figured it was no longer worth studying.’

  “Fair enough,” Nia conceded. “It was Darian who warned me that the knowledge might prove useful. It was through his guidance that I managed to separate religious pretending from the true history of the stone. Even still, this story took me over a decade to piece together. I have yet to write it down.

  “Eons ago, when the great Master of the dark language created this world, he set himself three limitations. Firstly, he would only populate his creation with flora, letting sentient life stream in from the Beyond. Secondly, he limited the total amount of Edomic power accessible to Lyrian, so that none could ever contend with his mastery of the language. Thirdly, and most importantly to us, he swore never to return to Lyrian once it had been created, instead setting it adrift in the formless void to find its own path.

  “To ensure that his influence would remain, the Master channelled a fraction of his power into a great gemstone, known to religious groups as the World Stone. He then hid it at the very centre of the world, where nobody could ever risk finding it and tampering with it.

  “But the magic unraveled. The Master realized that to make the World Stone inaccessible was to render the world itself inaccessible. So, from the World Stone, he created six talismans, each with the power to anchor Lyrian to a different aspect of its magic: a ring, a tiara, a necklace, a bracelet, a prism, and a sword. The Myrkstone is the necklace.”

  Rachel sat transfixed. “What happened to the other five?”

  “Three have been destroyed, not including the Myrkstone of the future. The recent end of the Theic Age, as you call it, saw the death of the Blightstone and the Guardstone. The Blightstone held together the treatises of the world, allowing the most powerful wizards to define magical boundaries that specific races, including humans, could not cross. The destruction of the Blightstone was the opening shot of the revolution.

  “Destroying the Guardstone was the object of the largest organized rebel militia, based out of Durna. Years of attempts failed, costing tens of thousands of lives. In the end, it was not the revolutionaries who unmade the talisman - it was Pothan the Slow.”

  Rachel connected the dots in her head, letting out an audible gasp. “This just happened? When Pothan-”

  “Sunk Darvis Kur, yes.” Nia nodded. “The Guardstone oversaw the human component of Lyrian’s native magic. Without it, Lyrian is now unable to father true wizards. Adepts and charmers will continue to be born, but all true wizarding talent must now originate from the Beyond.”

  “So…” Rachel mused. “Does that mean that Earth has its own World Stones?”

  Nia shook her head. “Earth is governed by… different magic. It is the way that these opposites interact that gives rise to wizards.”

  “What would happen if all six of Lyrian’s talismans were destroyed?” Rachel wondered.

  Nia shrugged. “We can’t know for sure. Each stone holds a fraction of Lyrian’s collective Edomic power, and when one is destroyed, that power is lost forever. I would assume that once all six talismans perish, Edomic in Lyrian would cease to exist.”

  The idea reminded Rachel of a conversation she had had with Ferrin years ago. Wizards, when they engendered races, always included a failsafe that would guarantee the race’s eventual demise. The displacers had trouble siring women, the Amar Kabal had growing fertility issues, and so on. Rachel could hardly imagine the raw power required to do a similar thing to an entire world!

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  “So this world is just waiting to cannibalize itself,” Rachel summed up.

  “You could try to be a little more optimistic,” Nia chuckled, “but yes. All but one of the talismans entrusted to human hands have been destroyed.”

  “The other two were given to non-humans?” Lana interjected.

  Nia cocked her head. “Even in my birth time, no written evidence existed of the final two talismans. The Myrkstone, anciently, was housed in the Rain Temple of Ma’akemu, beyond the stronghold of Paggatar in the heart of the southern jungle.”

  Rachel raised her eyebrows. “Sounds like we know where Matt and Petra are going.”

  “It would seem that way, yes.” Nia stood up and paced across the sunlit room. “As he is accompanied by a wizard, we would have no hope of catching up with him. All we can do now is hope he returns alive.”

  Rachel shook her head. “No. Remember Zokar’s Folly? When Zokar journeyed south to eliminate Certius before his battle with Eldrin?”

  “You’re saying we must take this time to prepare,” Nia inferred.

  Rachel nodded. “Tassel is already making preparations. I will converse with the torivors. Nia, if you have Edomic capabilities, come with me. If not, go with Lana to assist Tassel.”

  “But-” Lana stuttered. “We don’t even know what Petra and Matt are planning.”

  Rachel cocked her head. “They’re going to the southern jungle to find the Myrkstone, which will give them absolute control over the torivors. Before he returns, we need to muster a force that can contend with a horde of lurkers.”

  “Impossible,” Nia muttered.

  Rachel pushed herself to her feet and joined Lana in pacing. “I agree. But we have to try.”

  The decision was unanimous, and preparations began immediately.

  ? ? ?

  Days passed. Tassel, having been informed of the plan, left immediately to gather support among the races he had already sired. Nia and Lana had begun laying the groundwork for a coordinated effort by the press to reawaken a rabid hatred of Edomic within Trensicourt. Rachel, of course, oversaw the torivors. She had quickly pinpointed the location of the prison in which they were kept, but had yet to find the aboveground access point. She supposed that, given the secrecy of it all, Petra would have placed the entrance far away from the prison itself. She certainly had work to do.

  Tassel returned a week later to little fanfare. He looked haggard and sick, and asked for time to rest and recover. He did not leave his bedroom for three days, and could not keep food down for the first two. As soon as he recovered enough to walk and eat, he left once again, silent as usual about where he was going.

  The day after Tassel left, as Rachel was sitting at the fountain above the torivors’ prison, she startled at the sight of a striking young man about her age walking directly towards her across the otherwise uncrowded square. He carried himself with a distinct grace - the air of a man who had not grown up in Trensicourt, but had adjusted quite well. Rachel found a fleeting kinship in his imperfect determination to blend in.

  She kept her nose in her book until the stranger loomed over her, then sat next to her, just close enough to disturb her distracted serenity. She looked up, needing none of her acting talent to display a disinterested displeasure with the man’s interruption, and found herself staring into an almost familiar pair of eyes.

  “Do I know you?” Rachel quipped, frowning.

  The stranger cocked his head, then shook it. “I don’t think so.” His voice was higher than Rachel had expected.

  “I could swear…” Rachel trailed off, racking her brain. “Maybe I’m going crazy.”

  The stranger laughed. “Maybe you are. I haven’t the slightest memory of you, and trust me - yours is the kind of face I would be inclined to remember.”

  Rachel almost scoffed at his weak attempt at flattery, then remembered her promise to be better. “Hm. Thanks. You seem pretty memorable yourself.”

  “Memorable enough to be mistaken for someone else, in any case.” The stranger smiled. “I like your choice of literature.”

  Rachel glanced down at her book. It was a supernatural romance novel about a dead girl whose ghost fell in love with a human adventurer. She had made it about a quarter of the way through, which was enough for her to guess at how the book might end.

  “He kills himself at the end, doesn’t he?” Rachel said, intending to come across sarcastically.

  The man frowned. “You don’t mind if I answer? It would ruin the book.”

  Rachel shook her head. “I was only half reading. I come here to people-watch.” She figured it would be a perfectly reasonable answer - much less incriminating than the truth, anyway.

  “Yes and no,” the man said. “He kills himself about a third of the way in. They live happily ever after, but ghosts are eternal. Too much of a good thing, even life and love, is poison. They end up parting in bitterness, consumed by vices and regrets, and leading other unwary lovers to their deaths to share in their self-inflicted suffering.”

  Rachel scoffed in astonishment. “Sounds depressing. I might be glad I let you ruin it.”

  The man smiled, his blue eyes glinting in the sunlight. “I found it riveting. The story isn’t meant to be taken at its value. At its root, at least in my eyes, the book is about wizards.”

  Rachel raised her eyebrows. “Those who wish for eternal life will inevitably resent their avarice.”

  “Well put.” The man turned to her and extended his hand, palm up. “I’m Astori.”

  “Elaine,” Rachel lied. She laid her hand over his, twining her thumb beneath the back of his hand. “Brave of you to accost a lone woman in an uncrowded space.”

  “I’m eighteen. I hardly know better.” Astori released her hand. “In a city this big, I may never see the same face twice. Yours is one with which I would like to break that trend.”

  Candles burst to life inside Rachel’s cheeks. “It wouldn’t hurt to pass by here again tomorrow.”

  Astori grinned and stood up, leaving her with an untrensicourtian flourish of his right hand. Rachel sat and watched him go, then strolled back towards the bookshop to return her now-ruined book, racking her brain to decipher why Astori had seemed so familiar.