The stone circle that Navar had created as my new cage sat within what was little more than a glorified barn. No sunlight reached me for all the time I was within it, and the only glimpses I had were when the doors swung open in the mornings to admit him and the gaggle of apprentices and students that trailed after him, exuding excitement and a lust for the cruelty to come. And it was cruelty, although he called it an education.
Whichever lesson he purported to use me for, whether it be history, geography or the sciences, it always ended with his favourite students being rewarded with the chance to unleash whatever spells they had been practising on me. He’d correct their technique and cast them himself and they’d cheer as I bucked and twisted under the impact.
Every day was a new torment. If I resisted, they wouldn’t stop until I collapsed so as to punish me for my aggression. If I didn’t react, they increased the intensity and frequency until I screamed to punish me for my contempt. If I screamed too much, they bound my throat with chains so that I didn’t disturb their lessons. I bled so much in that first year that the sawdust covering the cold stone beneath the circle had to be replaced every few days. Every now and then the rage and hate that was festering in my heart boiled over and I killed one or two of the workers tasked with that unenviable task, at which point Navar would smash me into unconsciousness and the cycle would start over again.
Eventually, however, the rage that burned inside me reached a new peak and sharpened into a cold knife permanently wedged in my chest. I spoke when I was commanded to, ate what I was given, and performed like the circus attraction that they wanted me to be. Days became weeks, weeks months, and months eventually became years. The cruelty continued unabated despite my compliance, and actually grew more vicious as his students grew in knowledge and power and lost any last vestige of empathy for me.
You can learn to endure anything with the right motivation. I waited for my chance behind a facade of submission and a hide that was fast becoming more scar than skin. They took this to be a sign of my submission to their will, feeding their contempt and sense of entitlement.
I nearly bit my own tongue the first time that Navar stepped into the circle. I felt the pressure of the wards he wore and forced myself to remain as I was, my mask of submission firmly in place, all too aware that leaping upon him would squander the careless arrogance that I had paid so dearly to foster. I hid my frustration behind a show of cringing subservience as he approached, hating that I was in fact genuinely afraid of him. That was the first time I truly smelled the taint within him, although I had no reference for it then and ascribed it to some of the pungent oils and potions that they occasionally threw at me.
Everything changed a month later. The day before it happened I had taken a particularly severe beating from one of Navar’s senior apprentices who had finally mastered a form of lightning manipulation and wanted to show off his newfound skill. It had ended with him and Navar vying to see who could throw me furthest across the arena. Navar had won after striking me so powerfully that I had actually pierced the veil that usually prevented me from touching the standing stones and cut my face on its sharp whorls, leaving me unconscious for the rest of the day and most of the next.
I had dreamed as I lay there. Normally my mind conjured memories of my life with Anakhara, offering me a blissful refuge from the chaos and pain of that existence, but the dreams that day were different. They began with me in a darkness that had lost all memory of light, gripped by a formless dread that grew stronger with every moment that passed. I spat fire until I could see that I was in a labyrinth of sorts, and so began to lope along its seemingly endless passages, occasionally spitting further gobbets of fire to light my way until I came to a great stone door. I knew that something terrible lay beyond it, and stood paralysed with fear as it began to open before me, the grind of the stone lost to the sound of the keening wail that rose from within.
I spat a stream of fire into the mist that hung within the chamber, but the cold within suffocated the flame, reducing the blaze to a mere candle’s glow. But that was enough for me to glimpse what waited within the chamber as it swung towards me. It was a dragon’s skull, glittering as if rimed in frost, its hollow eyes lit with a light as red as heart’s blood.
‘Stratus.’ The voice that issued from it was little more than the echo of a whisper, but I knew that it better than my own.
Before I could reply, the skull sank away into the oily darkness, and I felt a lurch of vertigo as that same featureless dark broke and rushed towards me in a great wave. I had not spoken my love’s name out loud since the day Henkman slew her, but I screamed it as I woke there in my cage, my mind afire with remembered pain.
My scream was met with a squawk of surprise. I had woken whilst Navar was in the pit with some of his cabal, and it seemed that I had just interrupted a discussion about the probable density of my bones. My mind hadn’t quite caught up with my body yet, or perhaps it was the other way around. Either way, I jerked back in surprise in much the same way they did, except that one of the rear facing spines on my upper arms promptly skewered a red-haired mage who had been lurking to my side. He squealed as I shook him off and flopped about on the ground gushing blood.
Navar reacted with his usual measured calm. I felt and heard his magic snap into life, and a moment later a trio of hissing bolts slammed me sideways. The rest of Navar’s cabal ran for the perimeter as I skidded to a halt. I felt Navar’s magic quickening again, but more than that, I heard it.
I stared at him as I tried to understand what had changed, but he was paying little heed to whatever I was doing or thinking. He was raging at me, but I was paying as little attention to him as he was to me because I had realised that he was using magic within the circle. Within the ward stones.
The wards in my cage had allowed magic from the outside in, but had universally stymied any use of it within the boundaries. I kept retreating as Navar’s magic lashed at me. I knew he was hurting me, and quite badly too, but at that point my mind was still racing ahead of the pain.
The wards in the stones had allowed me to sense the flow of magic in a very muffled and cursory way, but had effectively cut me off from the Songlines, making me deaf to the harmony that lies at the heart of all magic. But I heard echoes of it now as Navar set the air alight in his anger. Why could he could still call on them?
I waited for the next barrage to strike, then made a show of collapsing; I’d done a lot of it since I had met him, and I must have done a good impression as he ceased his assault. I lay as still as death, the twitching of my abused muscles adding to the quality of my mummery, and for once it seemed that luck was with me.
Their voices trailed away as they strode towards the doors but I didn’t move. I was bleeding from several wounds, but thankfully it had only been Navar who had attacked me; had the rest of his students joined in I might really have collapsed and lost my train of thought. I quickly packed the wounds with sawdust once they had left and settled back into my original position. I took some time to calm my racing hearts and mind.
Only once I had some modicum of control back did I dare turn my thoughts back to Anakhara. What had I seen and heard? Was the dream some fever phantom brought on by the traumas I had suffered? I didn’t feel ill; in pain, yes, but not ill. My mind was still my own, despite Navar’s brutish efforts. Had it been the contact with the magic of the ward stones? It had to have been her.
I knew her voice, and it had felt like her. There was no coming back from death, but we had shared our true names, our Words, with each other. We had been attuned to each other’s being at a level that not even the gods could know. Had that allowed her to reach out for me? I fought against the weight of the emotions that threatened to overwhelm me, digging my thumbs into my wounds until the pain made me gasp, forcing the memories back until it no longer felt like they would crush me. I held them in, caging the pain within my soul, and slowly the torrent subsided until I felt stable enough to try begin digesting what had just happened to me.
There was one constant to all of what had happened that day: magic and sorcery, two sides of the same coin. Magic was the key, both to understanding my vision of Anakhara and to my freedom. I replayed the moment I had sensed and heard Navar’s spell sparking to life in my mind a hundred times in an attempt to ascertain why the wards hadn’t reacted. The answer, when it came, was as shocking as it was simple. All magic, whether the formulaic approach that humans took or the sorcery that flowed through me had harmony at its heart. Vibration. Music.
And like music, it has many forms. Some musicians sing, while others play instruments. Some of those use lutes, others harps, and each has its own range of pitches and resonances that it can achieve. The ward stones were quite simply attuned to react to anything outside of the range that humans operated in.
From the skills I had seen displayed by Navar and his students I doubted that any living mage retained the knowledge or skill to craft ward stones with sufficient precision to target any specific source of sorcery. Thus it made perfect sense that rather than try to target anything that they didn’t want, they would simply deny everything except the one source that they were familiar with. I listened to Navar’s magic again in my mind, and smiled in the darkness as an idea took root.