The Greatest Archmage To Have Ever Lived [OP MC, LitRPG]

Aldric Eryndor had always believed that power was the only honest currency.

Gold could be stolen. Titles could be stripped. Love—if such a thing truly existed beyond the poets' fantasies—could curdle into hatred overnight. But power? Power was yours. It lived in your bones, burned in your core, answered to no authority but your own will. A man with enough of it could reshape the world. A man without it was simply... furniture. Something to be moved around by those who mattered.

He had understood this at seven, watching his father grovel before a royal lord over some imagined slight. He had known it at twelve, when that same lord's estate had burned in a mage-fire "accident," and his father had wept with relief rather than satisfaction. The lord had possessed power. His father had not. The equation was simple.

Aldric had sworn, in the quiet of his boyhood room, that he would never be furniture.

And he hadn't been. Not really. He had clawed his way from a provincial academy to the Astra Institute on scholarship, without counting on his Eryndor status. Had risen from student to mage of state to assistant professor to full professor, and the headmaster's seat had been right there, close enough to taste. His name was known in the right circles. His research was cited. His students feared him appropriately.

But, and there was always a but.

Level 847. That was his ceiling. That was the wall the heavens had built specifically for Aldric Eryndor, and no amount of study, training or desperate experimentation had added a single digit to that number in over a decade. He had plateaued in his mid thirties, and now, well into his forties, he had been forced to accept the unacceptable: he would never be a legend.

Not like them.

Bran the Brave, who had held the pass at Thornhollow for seven days against an army of ten thousand.

Thyria Moonwhisper, who had bound the Elemental Spirit Kings to her will—fire, storm and stone answering her call in unison—and once, at the Siege of Veldrath, had commanded all three to unmake an army so thoroughly that survivors spoke of soldiers turned to ash mid-scream while the earth swallowed their ashes and the wind scattered what remained.

And Sael. Sael the Great, the Archmage Without Equal, whose name appeared in every history of the last four centuries like a recurring character who refused to leave the stage.

Those names would echo through eternity. Those faces adorned statues in every major city. Children played at being them, argued over who got to wield the imaginary staff, who got to cast the killing blow against whatever monster featured in that week's bedtime story.

No one would ever play at being Aldric Eryndor. No statues. No songs. He would die, and within a generation, even his academic papers would gather dust unread.

Unless... Unless he found another way.

The memory surfaced now with a clarity that felt almost cruel—as if his own mind had chosen this moment, this precise moment, to remind him exactly how he had arrived at the end of all things.

There had been defining moments.

For the first, he had been seventeen. The Astra Institute sat in the heart of Orlys in those days, before the expansion that would eventually consume three adjacent districts. The market quarter below the academy's eastern gate was a maze of crooked streets and leaning buildings, popular with students precisely because the faculty disapproved of unsupervised excursions into the city's less reputable corners.

Aldric had been walking that path with Maren.

Maren Thorne. His only real friend, if he was being honest with himself, though he would never have admitted it aloud at the time. The other boy was everything Aldric wasn't: warm, easy with people, content with his own limitations. Maren had been a solidly average mage with solidly average ambitions, and somehow that lack of hunger had never sparked the contempt in Aldric that it should have.

They had been arguing about something. Aldric couldn't remember what anymore. Probably grades; they were always arguing about grades, Aldric incensed by anything less than perfection and Maren trying to convince him that a ninety-three was "still really good, actually."

An old woman had appeared around a bend in the path, struggling with a basket of apples that had clearly just betrayed her.

The fruit lay scattered across the rocky ground, rolling toward the cliff's edge. The woman herself was stooped and weathered, her face a topographical map of wrinkles, her hands gnarled like oak roots. She wore the shapeless gray clothing of a village peasant and smelled faintly of woodsmoke and something else—something Aldric couldn't identify then and still couldn't now.

Maren had immediately dropped to his knees and started gathering apples. Aldric had stood there, not out of cruelty, exactly. He simply hadn't seen the point. The woman was old. The apples were scattered. Maren was already handling it. What purpose would Aldric's involvement serve except to duplicate effort?

But Maren had looked up at him with that particular expression—disappointment mixed with resignation—and Aldric had sighed and bent down to retrieve the apples that had rolled toward the cliff.

It had taken perhaps two minutes. The woman thanked them profusely, her voice thin and cracked with age. Maren had smiled and said it was nothing, happy to help, any decent person would do the same. Aldric had nodded politely and calculated how much time they had lost.

Then the woman had reached out and grabbed his wrist.

Her grip was stronger than it should have been. Much stronger. Aldric had tried to pull away—an instinctive reaction—and found that he couldn't.

"Boy," she had said.

Her eyes had changed. Or rather, Aldric had finally looked at them. They weren't the rheumy, faded things he had expected. They were clear. Sharp. Depthless in a way that made his stomach clench.

"Boy," she said again. "I see you."

"Let go of me."

"I see what you want. I see what you'll do to get it. I see the path you'll walk and the things you'll become." Her grip tightened. "You will reach too high, boy. You will grasp for power beyond your station, and in doing so, you will draw the eye of something primordial."

Aldric's heart was hammering now. Maren had stepped closer, uncertain, one hand raised as if to intervene.

"And when you do," the woman continued, "it will end you. You will see it coming, and you will understand exactly what brought you to that moment, and that understanding will be the last thing you ever know."

She released him, and Aldric stumbled backward, nearly losing his own footing on the treacherous path. The woman smiled—a perfectly ordinary grandmother's smile—and picked up her basket.

"Thank you for the apples, dears," she said, then looked at Aldric. "It is not too late to change your destiny. Be kinder to those weaker than you," and walked away.

Aldric had told himself it was nonsense.

A mad old woman, touched in the head, spouting theatrical garbage to frighten students. The city was full of such people, hedge witches and fortune-tellers who preyed on the superstitious. He was a scholar. A rational man. He did not believe in prophecy.

And he hadn't. Not really. Not through the decades that followed, as he climbed and climbed and found his ceiling and raged against it. Not when he first heard whispers of Corruption, of power that existed outside the System's constraints. Not when he made contact with those who served it. Not when he performed his first ritual, felt that cold otherness slide into the hollow places of his soul, and understood—finally—that there were paths to greatness the heavens could not close.

The old woman's words had faded. Become a half-remembered embarrassment, a foolish childhood moment to be filed away and forgotten.

That had been the second defining moment.

Now, lying on the floor of his cell, pressed flat by an invisible weight that made breathing itself an act of will, Aldric looked up at the figure who had just materialized from the ceiling like gravity was a suggestion he'd chosen to decline.

The man was tall, angular, with silver hair and green eyes that were—impossibly—warm. There was humanity in that gaze. Kindness, even. The sort of quiet mercy one might offer a suffering animal before putting it down.

Aldric hated it.

He hated it more than cruelty, more than contempt and more than anything this man could have shown him. Because cruelty would have meant he was a threat. Contempt would have meant he was at least worth the effort of disdain. But mercy? Mercy was what you offered to things that couldn't fight back. Things that were already broken. Things that were furniture.

The word surfaced from somewhere deep, and with it came the memory of his father, kneeling, apologizing, groveling, while a random lord looked down at him.

You will draw the eye of something ancient. Something primordial. And it will end you.

The old woman's voice rang through his skull like a bell.

His life flashed before him. And with it came the third defining moment.

Sending Shaye to kill Ilsa.

You will understand exactly what brought you to that moment.

And he understood, he understood perfectly.

"Aldric Eryndor," the primordial said. "I have been looking for you."

Aldric tried to speak. His throat wouldn't cooperate at first; the gravity was too strong, his lungs struggling for air.

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Finally, he managed two words.

"I know."

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