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Two years ago – no, three years now, before it all started – a man appeared in Mysidia. He had pale hair and pale brown-grey eyes almost mistakeable for violet. He was huge, had lived half in the wilds for years, and his appearance was best described as “unbecoming.” When cleaned his skin was tanned as dark as tea but his nailbeds and the inside of his lips were pale blue. He was courteous but out of his mind, ranting and raving about the gods only knew what. And he was a powerful black mage, which made all who approached him nervous. But he asked for help, and the white mages of the holy city took him into their Tower for care.
He said his name was Theodore Harvey, and looked at the Elder as if hopeful he should recognize the name. But Theodore wasn’t a remarkable name near Mysidia, and he had a second, family name like people from Baron. Not too unusual. The name "Harvey" itself pulled at the Elder's memory, perhaps connected to someone connected to the Baron king. It was too thin to know.
He had just escaped from his mind, Theodore said. This was in doubt, as all the sad faces of the white mages agreed, because he also said he felt the four Archfiends calling to him, and he foretold extreme and unnatural doom coming to what he called the Blue Planet. It was a classic apocalyptic paranoia, not unknown to them. The spells to reveal the sickness of possession or haunting as the Tower understood it said he was healthy. He said he didn’t know how long he still had free before a vile anger overtook him again. He needed help to climb Mt. Ordeals while keeping his real mind and seek the memory of Kluya. He wept while pleading, explaining he hoped he did not even need to go into the tomb, as he knew it was not a real tomb.
This was a strange thing to think, as people always asked to climb for the chance to absolve themselves, or become the paladin of legend. Few people even knew a powerful sage who answered to the name of Kluya had died in a rural village, hosting something of an experimental mage commune near the holy city, some eighteen years ago. This Kluya had kept so private and taught so few because he did not want to answer to the near-mythical stories of periodic returns of the fabled Kluya, father of magic. Kluya was a rare name that generation but not unheard of. The Elder was one of his students at the time, not in magic but philosophy. They never met, conversing by letter. To explain why he wanted privacy so deep he was all but in hiding, Kluya said he had two treasures he wanted to protect. In his last letter, he had written with unusual excitement that he might soon gain a third.
The Elder was at the time a young man and too-literal minded. He observed the then-Elder, the one before the one before him, take care of Kluya’s funeral arrangements and thought everything accounted for. How this mortal Kluya had died was unclear. The Elder was perhaps the only one in Mysidia today who remembered the details. The commune had fallen due to infighting. At least one member did not come out due to grief. Kluya had been immolated haphazardly by a child student. In long-ago instructions to the then-Elder, Kluya had asked to be "returned to high space" if he died. He said a way would open from Mt. Ordeals. This was not such a strange expression of belief, but it was a very old one. So he was given the honor of ashes spread on Mt. Ordeals, carried by a penitent challenger later that year.
Most knew a stone hutch of sorts was at the top of Mt. Ordeals, and had been for centuries. Dragon knights long ago had once flown near while protecting the mountain. They tested their dominion of the skies with how close they could approach, until the trial pulled them clean out of the saddle, tying them forever back down to earth with the other undead. It was called Kluya’s Tomb. Only the Elder of Mysidia knew it was empty, one of the secrets passed down to him. The few children who over the centuries had reached the peak of the holy site lived, as the trial would not claim them. They reported it was empty. Not an empty sarcophagus, truly empty. Just four stone walls, a stone roof, and a dirt floor. Once, a boy on the brink of manhood had approached after his father disappeared inside. He said at the corner of his eyes he could see a different room. A beautiful chamber, lined with mirrors that made the small space seem infinite. Unending.
All this was why the Elder of Mysidia, as he peered at hulking Theodore Harvey, asked why he thought the Tomb was empty.
“I killed him,” Theodore said. He had cried some of his panic out, and calmed even more at confessing this. The Elder was about to ask more, then Theodore added, “And I burned the body, because there was no one to bury him.”
There were many questions the Elder could have asked, but the first that occurred to him was, “And were you not able to bury him?”
“No,” said Theodore. “I was ten.”
No one said anything, as the Elder was again thinking what to ask. Theodore’s behavior towards others had been nothing but kind and near groveling, almost like a beaten dog. But when he stood his head brushed the ceiling, and there was power behind his eyes and hands like nothing the Elder had ever felt. If Theodore had a harmful side, if he had killed someone, and that someone had been Kluya, whether the mortal or the immortal? Then there was little the pacifist Mysidians could do to stop him, even their black mages in self-defense. Yet the story made little sense, aside from childhood accident or cover-up. How could a boy, who didn’t realize he had failed to not just burn but immolate a body, the heat needed quite a bit higher than a fire spell for injury or cooking, be able kill a sage?
“Please believe me,” Theodore said.
“I believe you,” the Elder said, too fast.
The white mages with them had kept their bedside manner until then, when some could not hold in a gasp or stare.
“Who was Kluya to you?” the Elder asked.
Theodore met the Elder’s eyes, and the Elder knew then he had failed somehow when he didn’t know the name Theodore or Harvey.
“My teacher,” Theodore said.
“I see,” the Elder said. “You may go up Mt. Ordeals. Tomorrow I will accompany you.”
The room erupted into arguments against this. Theodore protested because he felt he did not have the time before his true madness returned. He perhaps did not realize that the white mages protested because an Elder did not ever climb the mountain with the doomed pilgrims, as the trial could pull in anyone who approached. But there were no trained up enough children strong enough to go, or defend themselves against Theodore if . . . If.
The Elder told Theodore he had important things to complete, and could not go until tomorrow. “Besides,” he said. “I would have you rest and eat good food again before leaving. I will not go otherwise. And if you are worried about your fears returning, would you . . . accept our help to sleep? A medicine or spell?”
Theodore said, “I don’t think sedation or a sleep spell will help. Natural sleep doesn’t. But I have never had the chance to try before.” He had drawn into himself after learning he had to wait further, and spoke with little emotion.
The Elder thought Theodore was referring to nightmares waking him and did not think to ask if Theodore was worried something else would happen while sleeping. Theodore fell asleep fast enough with a sleep potion after he proved immune to the spell. He was under constant observation. The Elder had not told him that they would would need to lock away his ability to warp, if he knew how, or drain his mana. He might have refused otherwise. It was a standard part of treating those with an ill mind in Mysidia, and they sometimes forgot how much it would sting of betrayal.
The Elder then had to spend the rest of his day struggling to explain to his staff and students why he wanted to go, making fewer practical preparations than he would have liked. He forbade them from telling anyone what Theodore had said or what they were doing tomorrow. He wanted to respect Kluya’s wishes, worried there was a widow somewhere or an eighteen-year-old child with untapped magical powers, unprotected. He did not want to be told the mortal Kluya could still be unconnected to the great sage who reappeared throughout history. He had made a leap of logic and wanted to call it faith, knowing full well Kluya himself in those letters all those years ago would chide him.
He felt giddiness instead of dread or confusion, and remembered the past Elder telling him some in their position over the years had failed to be proper guardians of their Tower and Mount. They thought they had found the paladin and were guilty of hastening the Mysidian prophecy. He tried to be reasonable, he tried. His thoughts did not stop racing for a long time that night, hearing the muffled voices of desperate friends outside thinking how to stop him. They will wake Palom and Porom at this rate, and they will be uncontrollable tomorrow, was the last thing he thought before he fell asleep, instead of prayer or meditation.
A huge noise like a failed thunder spell right next to his ear startled him awake. He lay stunned in bed for a moment, wondering if that was a dream he had. No storm was outside and black magic except in self-defense was forbidden in the city, much less the Tower. Then he remembered their guest sleeping downstairs. He hurried to get dressed. He was near the top of the Tower and scared people crowded the stairs between him and Theodore, but his authority helped clear a path down. It was still too slow.
“He is gone,” the head healer said.
No one was hurt. But the white mage and black mage observing Theodore during the night said he thrashed in his sleep on-and-off, until a series of bad convulsions made the white mage worried he suffered from epilepsy as well as religious paranoia. At worst, it was mischievous fey pretending to be Archfiends. The white mage approached, and the black mage moved to Theodore’s other side. Both were leaning over him when his back bowed upwards and his eyes snapped open.
The black mage, skilled but inexperienced, cast a stopping magic. It did not work. Theodore gasped and lashed out, shoving her back. She fell to the floor. The white mage cast a paralysis spell and it too failed, alerting the white mage – and the Elder, listening – that there was something even more unusual about Theodore. He was all the while telling Theodore they weren’t attacking him. Theodore at the same time was moving out of the bed towards the stunned black mage, so the white mage lunged across the bed and grabbed him around the arms. Theodore brushed off the white mage like so much a shawl, sending him to the floor. The black mage recovered and cast weak lightning from her fingers straight at Theodore’s chest, to incapacitate. It did nothing.
At that the Elder’s heart sunk for Theodore and an even deeper fear than before took its place, as no ordinary human had such a wide variety of innate magic immunities. He had no blessed or cursed items with him while in bed to give such powers. With all their best scrying and diagnosis spells unable to find what was hurting Theodore, anything to cause all these symptoms was anathema outside their understanding. A true demon, or perhaps a rogue eidolon. The white mage in the room knew it, realized halfway into standing back up to cast a spell, and threw up a magical reflection between Theodore and the black mage before he could drain her mana.
But Theodore stopped, freezing while looming over the black mage, the light of her readying her strongest lightning magic throwing everyone’s face all in flickering shadow.
“I - ” Theodore said. “I don’t – ”
“Help!” the white mage screamed. An ordinary or nurse was always nearby and he knew many people were still awake in the Tower after the strange events of the day, keeping an ear out for trouble from the healing ward. “Help!”
Theodore drew back, hunching even further over and sinking to the ground against the wall. He curled into his chest and grabbed his head with his hands. “Just go,” he said, slurring his words. “Just run.”
The black mage had not seen Theodore’s explanation of his insanity earlier, or yet realized how dangerous the true problem might be. A rogue black mage, traitor of her order, was in the Tower of Prayer and was her responsibility to stop. It was absurd to try lightning again, she knew, but her training had drummed into her head that a lightning spell was the preferred way to subdue if less blunt magic failed. She scrambled backwards from Theodore on the floor but bared her teeth, screeched some wordless battle cry, and raised her hands for her spell.
The thought Gods save us from young black mages popped into the white mage’s head. He grabbed her by the cloak, heaved her over his shoulder so the reflection magic was between them and Theodore, and ran. The lightning spell, great and fulminous Thundaga in the old language, arced up into the stone. There was a complex series of little magical adjustments that were supposed to protect the surroundings, by guiding such a strong spell into one target to fold open and multiply within, thus narrowing the power to a single pinpoint instead of a wider spray of weak energy. It was a process that only seemed instant. This time, it instead detonated all at once against the wall.
The whole Tower shook.
They both agreed less than half a minute passed between when others arrived to help. When they reentered, Theodore was gone.
*
Two years later the dark knight of Baron returned to Mysidia in disgrace.
Among a number of self-flagellations he told the Elder, he said, “I will do whatever you tell me. I have nothing, now. No family, no country, no friends. I don’t even know if my name is true. Cecil Harvey. It was probably given to me by the King.”
The Elder was sure to hide his reaction, as he had known only the first name Cecil as a near-prince ward of King Odin. The dark knight could reveal only his face in the accursed armor, locked tight to his skin since the admissions of guilt began. His eyes were lilac-grey, his skin and hair pale, his lips and eyelids blue as if freezing cold.
“Go to Mount Ordeals,” the Elder said. He told Cecil nothing about what was up there or what would happen. “Prove yourself.” He said nothing about Palom or Porom’s true role, or that the mountain would deliver children back down to the bottom instead of killing them. “Repent of your sins.” And Cecil Harvey said nothing to the Elder if he had expectations of his own. “Do not wait.” It was the Elder’s duty to protect Mysidia of all threats, and to let the prophecy unravel as it would on its own, in his lifetime or not.
The Elder told himself it did not matter if Cecil seemed very unlike Theodore. That made him even more scared.
*
The Paladin-king of Baron found it easier to return to Mysidia as an ordinary white mage pilgrim, dressed in the cloak and slipping out of the Devil's Road and into the Tower with the hood pulled up. The Elder appreciated this discretion. Cecil Harvey the first three times he came to Mysidia - as conqueror, then supplicant, then paladin - had created riots just by entering.
“You said you are looking for someone?” the Elder said.
“Yes,” said Cecil. “Have you ever heard of a Theodore Harvey?”
“Ah. I must first ask you a question of my own,” the Elder said. “Would you believe me when I say I have terrible regrets, too?”
Cecil was quiet for a long time. “I see,” he said.
“Do you still wish to know?” the Elder asked.
“No,” Cecil said. “Sometimes . . . I am still . . .” His eyes avoided the Elder and his hands went for the naked air at his hips where a sword might be. “I feel . . . ”
The Elder said nothing.
“I am not strong enough,” Cecil said.
“You do not mean strength of the body,” the Elder said.
“No,” Cecil said. “I want to look for reasons to be kind, not angry. Let’s talk about something else.”
And they did, over basic tea and what many nobles at a court would call peasants’ food, which the king seemed to enjoy. They talked for far longer than they should have, about helping Mist, Damcyan, Fabul, Troia, Eblan, Agart and the Dwarves. And about choosing to share reasons for kindness between their own homes, Mysidia and Baron, bridging the ocean between them.
At the end of the meeting Cecil broke all of the remaining protocol left between them and hugged the Elder. The Elder was shocked, then touched.
The tall Paladin-king looked down at him with a grave longing. Then Cecil smiled, sunshine breaking through the clouds. “Maybe next time,” he said.
“Maybe next time,” the Elder agreed.