Chapter 27 : Elemental Will
Undead Calamity was the signature of a lich. Not because an ordinary necromancer lacked the underlying spell, but because a necromancer required incantation, precise hand-gestures, and a prepared medium — bone-phosphor powder — before the magic could manifest. A lich needed none of these. The moment Evan cast it bare-handed, Raphael had his identification.
Holy light kindled along Raphael's armor in response. But the Undead Calamity never finished forming.
The tower erupted in seven-colored light. A resonant hum filled the air, immense and sourceless, and then both Evan and Raphael were simply gone, the light folding around them and taking them away before either could react.
The Blood Clan members who had been making their way across the terrain stopped. Windsor's face, already pale, went through a flush — he coughed once and brought up blood.
"Father —" Sophia caught his arm.
"I'm managing it. Raphael is worse off than I am. I've suppressed the damage for now." He looked at the tower, something sharp entering his expression. "That seven-colored light — it triggered my injuries again. Someone has entered the tower. Don't worry about me. Go. Now." He gripped her wrist briefly. "There is a book inside. A Book of the Undead. Do not let anyone else take it."
Sophia's wings spread. The air cracked and she was beside the tower almost before the sound caught up. The seven-colored light was fading; she caught the very end of it, slipped into the diminishing glow, and disappeared.
The others followed seconds later — three or four Blood Clan members arrowing toward the tower on their wings. They struck the stone and stopped. The tower had no visible entrance. It stood without seam or opening, the lava flows around its base running quietly.
One vampire, frustrated beyond patience, began chanting and sent a wave of blood-red magic at the tower wall — dozens of tendrils reaching out, each coated with the corrosive quality that was the signature of Blood Acid Touch, the spell that reduced living matter to bare bone and left it looking centuries dead. The stone around the tower base crumbled to powder at the tendrils' touch, light and thin as ash.
Then the tower responded. A layer of white light spread from where the tendrils had landed, and they dissolved on contact — like snow under sunlight — and kept spreading. The vampire screamed and fled. The white light affected the Blood Clan the way sunlight did, black smoke rising from everyone it touched, and the remaining vampires scattered away from the tower.
The mountain rumbled. In the space the Blood Clan had cleared, lava rose from the volcano and surrounded the tower in a ring of flowing fire. Not a catastrophic eruption — but impassable.
Inside the tower, Evan found white mist.
He came back to awareness in an open space, mist in every direction, nothing visible beyond a radius of perhaps a li. He was alone. No Raphael. He exhaled.
The mist thinned slowly, and the space resolved. It wasn't large — a single layer of the tower, he thought, though which layer he couldn't determine. Then, without any preparatory sound, a book appeared in the air at the center of the space. It floated at chest height, cover facing him.
He approached carefully. The paper was wrong — not paper at all, but the hide of a white water-rhinoceros, an alchemical beast whose skin formed naturally with a faint golden runic pattern in the grain. It was extraordinarily expensive, supple but nearly indestructible, and it had a faint fragrance that he couldn't quite identify. The cover was stamped in Gonishu characters:
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Book of the Undead.
He had heard of it. Every serious student of death magic had. A legendary text, supposedly containing the fundamental secrets of death and life — not death magic specifically, but the underlying principles. Most scholars assumed it was mythical. Here it was, floating in front of him.
He reached out. The book opened on its own.
The frontispiece bore a single line: From the silence of death, perceive rebirth. Only through this may the secret of life and death be understood.
His hand stopped.
Something happened in the fraction of a second between reading the words and forming a response to them. He was suddenly watching lives end — not violently, just ending, the way fires go out — and he was among them, and the sensation was not distressing. It was quiet. The fear he had carried since the first night in Nicholas Andrew's castle, the terror of true death that had driven every decision since, simply wasn't present. He felt the settled stillness of something that had completed itself. His awareness began to dim.
Then, from within the stillness, something moved. The faintest possible green push, like a seed cracking its casing underground. Life rising through death. The cycle becoming visible.
Evan came back to himself — or rather, came into something he hadn't been before.
The world felt different. Full of information in a way he couldn't quantify. He watched something that had no physical form — or rather, watched it before it had form — emerge from nothing, and then divide. Two kinds of points, both initially colorless, transparent. The thought formed whether they had color, and they did: black and white. More of them, accumulating, some fading at the edges. He found the process interesting rather than alarming, and thought that color would be better, and immediately the black-and-white dissolved into every color — blue, red, green, yellow, amber, violet, cycling and shifting in response to what he was thinking.
What is this? The thought arrived naturally. Elements?
The instant the concept of elements formed, all color vanished. Everything became black, and the black spread and deepened.
He sat with that for a moment.
Another thought formed more carefully: these are elements, but they exist in this form — responsive to awareness, changed by observation. Not material in the way stone is material. More like the boundary between what is known and what exists.
And then the black flowed all at once, inward, pouring into his body through the channel that had formed down the length of his spine, and the elemental core in his abdomen, which had condensed months ago and been stable since, underwent something that was not a gradual change.
The darkness rose along his spine to his skull. Something detonated behind his eyes — not painful, more like a wall that had been there so long he'd stopped noticing it giving way all at once — and a space opened that hadn't existed before. Vast. His awareness flooded it instinctively.
His spirit sea had opened.
He understood, in the aftermath, what had happened. The block he'd carried since arriving in this world — the rational skepticism that had prevented him from accepting elemental will as a real phenomenon, that had kept him treating magic as a technology to be learned rather than a reality to be inhabited — had dissolved. Not because he'd argued himself into accepting it, but because he'd seen something from which the argument became irrelevant.
Elemental will was not a thing separate from his will. The elements did not have will as humans have will. What practitioners called elemental will was simply the state in which the distinction between self and element had stopped being meaningful — in which magic moved the way a hand moves, not because instructions were sent to it but because it and the person were continuous. The moment he understood this from the inside rather than the outside, the understanding completed itself.
What Evan didn't realize was that what he had grasped went somewhat beyond what the designation of elemental will described. He had approached it not as a practitioner but as someone who had held the question open long enough that the answer arrived without forcing. The teachers of this world called the destination Arcanist. He had taken a slightly different road.
Elsewhere in the tower, in different rooms on different levels, two others had encountered the same floating book.
Raphael had seen it and reached a decision within seconds: heresy. Every habit of his education pointed the same direction. His lance found the book with the same conviction that had driven him through every heretic stronghold he'd ever entered.
Sophia had gone still when she saw it. Her hands were shaking. She reached out and the book opened for her.
All three of them had read the frontispiece. What each of them did with those words was entirely their own.