Into Yesterday

[Caden Law]

We'll see how this'ne turns out, won't we?

In the distant past there sat a man in a cell speaking words of such a weight that they would scar themselves onto the flesh of history.

In the deepest past, before time had meaning, something old, cold, and blue raged through the void at the dawn of creation.

More recently, there sat a Dark Wizard in the ruins of a country, relating a story straight from the razor's edge that separates children from adults. Later, the story came up again in a set of grim, deadly tunnels soon demolished in cataclysmic fashion.

Before that, a cantor died in the dark and only one man was there to witness it and bury him.

At some point, time lost meaning again -- and something pulled it back together through sheer force of will.

The web was tangled, the threads often overlapping and spinning around each other. Ever was the bird, the elder crow, and in the mountains of central Raiaera there stood a dwarf waiting as patiently as his tectonic father would allow.

A woman stood now, on the steps of a slowly populating academy in the City of Wizardry, Beinost. She looked up, forgetting for a moment the sound of her daughter's laughter, of one of her apprentices casting her first spell. She looked up and felt a sense that something had changed, and she couldn't put her finger on what it was or why but it chilled her.

Before that, so very long before, a man in a Hat stood atop a mountain in a storm, his long leather coat billowing in winds that should have ripped him out of his boots. He took up a liviol guitar, its strings crafted from the finest spider silk the world had ever known. Before him, a fleet of airships churned, their arcane engines leaving behind grim rainbow exhaust as a thousand took aim. The man in black grinned.

Before even him though, close to when that first Dark Wizard uttered his immortal words, before a catastrophe, before so much of that -- before.

The world split in the night. It looked like ripples on a water, complete with a spray of bubbles and everything; these faded quickly, drawn back up by some unnameable anti-gravity. What fell through with them did not. It was blue. It was blue like the idea of the color, and it was a man in much the same way. At some point in the fall, the scars and imperfections of reality ebbed back into place. Everything that should have been there soon was, as if the cosmos saw a great error within itself and decided to correct it quickly. As he fell, he -- this man -- fell, he reached out with senses new and old and far between; he became himself again, marked as ever by power and the awful responsibility to use it and use it well.

Because while much of what's been given exposition here might happen, or might not, only one thing was certain:

"There won't be any apocalypse."

[Caden Law]

The Wizard hit the ground like a bomb without fire or smoke -- the earth beneath him simply cratered outward, as if it were the only logical thing to do. He could have landed softly, he could have landed miles away from here, but no. No, this was where he belonged. Caden knew as much. He didn't necessarily remember why he knew as much, but he could leap logic like an Olympic athlete with a gun at his back.

There was a war going on in the place that would one day be Raiaera.

If there was anything in all the world with which the Wizard Blueraven was familiar, it was waging war in the land of elves and song. So he landed and left a crater, and at one extreme of the crater were men being thrown back off their feet, and at the other there were things that might -- might -- have been elves in some twisted past life, and that was all he needed to see to pick a side. In the dead of night in an age when the world was still young and magic went without a leash, Caden reached out for power and found it waiting like never before.

"Burn," was the order, and his Voice rattled the air even without Sorcerous empowerment. The spell didn't ignite his targets so much as it replaced the world around them with an artist's violent molten depiction of Hell. The ground flash-melted, the air caught fire, and the shockwave had enough force and focus to tear spiderfolk in half at the waist. Purple gore sprayed everywhere. Caden took aim with bare fingertips and conjured up lightning, unleashing a sustained bolt so powerful that its passage produced random explosions at every other arc -- fireworks gone arcane. Shrieks followed every other second as the lightning hit something and killed it, burned the body and raced on to the next target. Caden was, in effect, a one-man shock and awe campaign, completely ending the immediate battle around him as spiderfolk fled and men tepidly backed away, not knowing whether to cheer or run for their lives. Caden paid them little mind.

The sky whistled and went dark; thousands of arrow-like projectiles raining down. Caden reached out with mere wizardry and set fire to every last one of them, so hot and bright that it illuminated the battlefield for seconds at a time. Nothing ever came down below sixty feet of his head. Before him, there were endless shrieks and a language that sounded almost like Alerian, almost like Raiaeran, but truly dissimilar to both. He hadn't even heard it in the darkened crevices of the Catacombs of Scara Brae. Behind him, another language that sounded close enough to others -- modern Raiaeran, modern common? -- that he could guess at the meaning. This was going to be a real Hat trick.

"Sorry," Caden said, whipping around and freezing a wall of ice into place between himself and the rest of humanity. He turned back to find an encroaching horde of spiderfolk. "I'll deal with the lot of you later," Caden said to no one in particular as he gathered more lightning to his fingertips and readied his staff.

A spear struck the ice and went right through it.

[Caden Law]

"I know who you are," was the very first, spiteful thing that Caden heard as he woke up, an ordinary voice so enveloped in power that it cast the color of white across his thoughts without a hint of effort. "Don't think that a sudden betrayal of your allies to the East will save you."

His senses felt...less numbed, more normal. And deprived of the overwhelming rush of the Tap -- of magic, wild and unchained and incomprehensible in all its arcane glory -- Caden was able to think clearly. He was remembering things in a rush, like the feeling of the spear plowing through his lower body and obliterating three organs that were now, almost inexplicably, exactly where and how they should have been without a hint of fresh damage anywhere on them. Even his clothes were mended. A sixth sense -- his abnatural ability to tell Time down to microseconds and beyond -- informed the rest of him that he had been unconscious for less than a day and this...

This really was an age removed from what he knew.

Caden sat up and found himself isolated within a null bubble. It wasn't especially different from the fractured memories he had of one whipped up by his necrophagic bastard of an apprentice. Smaller, perhaps, and much more concentrated, but essentially the same. The bubble's designers had been thorough enough to encase it in another barrier spell and then wrap the entire thing in a pitch black orb of an illusion to demarcate its limits, but the actual nullifier...Caden recognized it. And when he dared to reach in, just a bit, he found that his Sorcerous power was still waiting like a coiled viper looking to strike. That wasn't even the worst of it -- actual magic was so pervasive at this point in history that it couldn't be shut down, the way it had been when Wormaxe saved the world. It could only be slowed down, clamped down upon, drained away to a relative trickle...and the remnant was an ambient power level close to what Caden was used to working with anyway.

He laughed.

"You guys're strikin' morons," he informed his captors, because this situation had never yet happen without a whole army of them.

"Patience. We'll kill you soon enough," a Voice informed him, sounding less humanoid and more like...talking guitar cords that had been struck by lightning. It was almost difficult to understand the damn thing.

"I'm shaking in my boots," Caden replied as he stood up. "You idiots didn't even think to shackle me. Have you ever even tried to hold a Wizard prisoner? Really?"

"Spear him, please."

"It won't do any good."

"It'd make me feel better."

The spear slipped in from the front, its arrival punctuated by a white sigh that pierced Caden's ears as neatly as the spear punctured his stomach. Magic discharged right into his internal organs and blew his guts out through the small of his back. They caught fire and boiled to ash before they could even hit the edge of the bubble. Caden collapsed with a ragged scream. His perceptions quickly defaulted to his sixth sense -- because a Wizard never stops thinking, and he had a prior hunch, and it was just a matter of Time to confirm it.

It isn't a secret, but Wizards and other magi of a suitable attunement can -- and often unconsciously do -- metabolize magic. It can heal them from the brink of death, among other things. It's almost like breathing, once a mage has advanced far enough. Caden had been doing it for most of the past few years since so much of his life during that time had been spent on the run with minimal food or water. In the era where he came from, it was enough to mend wounds quicker than a normal person might heal, and without assistance, but it did nothing about scars. Even here, his old scars weren't fading at all. But the gaping hole where his hips were connected to his upper torso by a cracked, burnt spinal column?

It took an hour.

But there were no scars and Caden clearly did not die. He didn't even really stop breathing or lose consciousness or control of his limbs. And that was all in shock, without putting effort into it.

"That explains that," he mumbled to himself as he started to stand up. "That explains a lot, actually."

Like why the first true Dark Lord, to whom all the rest were talented amateurs at best and cheap knock-offs more often than not, had to be imprisoned for so many years before they even tried to kill him. If the magic of this era were so intense as to provide a healing factor, then...

"Ah."

Things went click.

The multiple Names. Judging by the epithet the white-voiced woman had used, his Sorcerous Name wasn't unheard of. But she and the black-voiced man had been careful not to use other names around him. Warlocks, even in Caden's time, used their Names as a security measure -- and as a tool for enslaving one another. Caden briefly wondered if that began as a holdover from this era, when it was possibly the only way to get through another mage's defenses and strike a true killing blow...

And then he decided that he didn't care so much.

"I'm going to count to three and then dismantle this bubble of yours," he declared. "And after that we're going to have Words. You're going to explain the situation to me and then we're going to team up, because I'm going to help you kill the man you think I am. And we're going to save the world, can't forget that. Alternatively I'll kill everyone here. Whichever happens first. Ready?

"One!

"Two!

"Three!"

[Caden Law]

Caden was a journeyman Wizard when he scourged Tembrethnil, tapping into a font of magical power that was, for his time and place, absolutely unimaginable. The land of Raiaera was still scarred more than four years after the fact.

His power had grown considerably since then. And that's not taking into account the heightened levels of ambient energy he was able to tap into as the barrier broke.

In hindsight, he had been imprisoned on the top floor of a tower of some kind, which made good tactical sense as it isolated the damage he could have caused. The magic that flared up that morning resembled a mushroom cloud almost as much as it resembled a colossal ghostly murder of crows, each and every one of them the size of a small mansion, all of them opaque, and their feathers the size and shape of exotic kite shields. Their shrieks sounded like razor-edged thunder, blowing out glass as far as a mile in every direction. Beneath all of them, atop the decimated remnants of the tower, stood the Sorcerer Blueraven with his face screwed up in concentration as he fought off the sensations brought by having access to so much power that it was literally intoxicating.

There was good reason not to surrender himself to that power.

For one thing, he wasn't the only one tapping into it.

A white dome of power had engulfed the city below the tower, though it was cracked and fading fast. Beneath it, surrounded by what looked like ants fleeing for their lives, there stood a man in a long black leather coat wielding a liviol guitar, his free arm raised theatrically high and his cool black Hat standing a bit lopsided on his head.

Caden honed in on him just in time to see lightning strike the pick in his hand, which was suddenly going down. "Shit," Caden said.

Cue a legitimately Epic guitar riff, the kind that Elven bards of the modern world couldn't imitate if their souls depended upon it. The kind that sounds like a one note symphony of electric love and fury, and every other emotion you could ever hope to cram into music. The kind of sound that brings the walls tumbling down -- or, in this case, the tower upon which Caden was standing. It literally crumbled to dust beneath his feet and the only thing keeping him from falling right along with it was a Sorcerous nimbus. Caden gathered his wits about him, though he was nearly deafened by that one note, and he reached out with both hands and magic alike.

His tools had not been destroyed. His armor remained intact. And in this environment, it was the easiest thing in the world for Caden to literally summon them up and will them into place on his body or into his grasp; armor strapped itself snug, staff and wand crashed into palm and goggles swiftly replaced glasses without a moment's delay or a nanometer's misplacement. This, he knew in his bones, was how it was supposed to be.

Mage to mage, the laws of reality as a playground.

Caden jumped from his nimbus as the man in black began to play a solo -- which happened to produce a serpentine dragon from the head of his guitar, lunging up at the wizard with a gaping jaw large enough to swallow a house. Caden answered the only way that made any sense -- he formed an aura around himself resembling nothing less than an even bigger raven.

Spells clashed and diffused harmlessly by third party interference. Caden touched down with his staff drawn back and his wand in the other Wizard's face. The music abruptly stopped.

There was a spear's blade at his throat.

"Ready to talk now?" he asked without looking.

"You don't fool us," the white-voiced woman declared.

"Strike fooling you, ditzy, I'm just here to save the world," Caden answered and then repeated himself. For the first time in his life, he actually said the words with a smile on his face, even as the force of his Voice rattled the city from top to bottom.

"There won't be any apocalypse."

[Caden Law]

He calls himself Blueraven, and he is absolutely godsdamn insane.

I have known many a crazed mage, but this one is truly Out There. It's like he's on a perpetual caster's high, brazen and dangerous as an amateur with the skills and refinements of a prodigal master. I can't make heads or tails of him and it's infuriating to me. For the duration, I've settled on keeping him occupied with Wizard Blackaxe. They almost hit it off well enough to level the city earlier, why not? What, I ask you, dear Grimoire, what is the worst thing that could happen?

That was a rhetorical question.

She stared at the page for several long minutes, pen in hand, dripping magic where it might have, in another life, dripped ink instead. She closed the book without a word and put the pen away, sighing heavily as she did.

Her name is not necessarily important, in and of itself. Her parents were simple folk, her uncle a Wizard who knew talent when he saw it. Her Name was important enough on its own, but even that was going to be lost someday. It was already lost, in fact, as part of an extended security measure. She was the most valuable mage that the Durklanic realms of humanity had to offer. A mere three Names simply wasn't adequate protection. She had taken a new Name as a fourth layer of security, and perhaps it had taken her as well.

They called her the White Lady Anon.

She dressed the part, always in a white dress, often with stylized bits of armor that were warded to match function with form. She wielded a black shafted spear with a white crystal blade as her focus of choice. She wore her hair down in a long curtain of blonde hair, and her eyes were violet. She sported the dark red skin tone of the Eastern Durklan, a coastal people pushed inland in recent years by the elven encroachments. She looked mid-way through her twenties, even though her body language alone subtly suggested an age far greater than that. Her skin had been warded with tattoos, thick black lines that stood in stark and intentional contrast to the rest of her, suggestive of but unequal to the lines of a proper Sorcerer. This was, after all, an age when the magic of the world ran wild. The Tap was not yet closed, for all the misinformation and distortion and simple inaccuracy that later generations would envelope this period in.

And perhaps most importantly of all, the White Lady Anon was the proprietor of the White City, a misnomer for a single structure that happened to resemble an actual city if you didn't do any digging beneath its surface levels. It was her demesne. It was her locus of power, seated upon an enormous confluence of leylines, to say nothing of the power bestowed by the Lady and her devout legion of acolytes.

She stared at the Grimoire again and finally left the room in disgust. The Lady wasn't used to being so frustrated, at least not by members of her own race. She was used to the intrigues of gods and monsters, and the burning hatred of the elves and their legions of monstrous kin. She was used to fighting threats head on. She was not used to a self-imposed ally who resembled nothing if not a doppelganger of one of her city's worst enemies. And she was not used to seeing him try -- and fail -- to win a rock-off with her chief lieutenant.

All of this, by the by, paled in comparison to the monster imprisoned in the vault beneath the Lady's city.

[Caden Law]

History changes things, amplifies them. A gritty guerrilla struggle for independence becomes a titanic brawl between the aggregate forces of Good and Evil, waged as much in abstract concepts as in blood and blades. A small flood scars itself onto the memory of an entire species and the twenty or thirty deaths become twenty or thirty thousand. The death of a man changes from coldblooded murder to the skillful assassination of a larger-than-life tyrant, and that's the funniest thing. Tyrants don't look like tyrants. They are, in fact, just people. Some are short, some are tall, a few are young and most are really just frustrated bureaucrats in the right place at the right time to beat the world into a shape of their liking. An ordinary dictator is just a middling man with a flabby chest and graying hair.

Tön're Aullum-Seu was not a man amplified by history. It couldn't amplify him even if it wanted to.

Even locked away in the greatest null fields that the White Lady's coalition could devise, stripped of the vast majority of his power, literally a shadow of the might that had once vied with elder gods, their own names forgotten where his still loomed; even with all that weighted against him, Tön're carried with him the single most intimidating presence that the Wizard Blueraven had ever witnessed. He was close to seven feet tall, with odd liver spots and strange scars that almost hurt to look at. His eyes were fever bright blue, yellowing whenever he looked down, and his expression was a crooked smile that spoke ill stories without ever yielding a word to the ears of a would-be listener. He wore black silk robes and a conical hood, and a sturdy white mantle covered in sapper wards. There were matching shackles on his wrists and ankles, none of them chained.

If this is what he's like when brought low, Caden thought.

Hot blue eyes looked up at him, flickering like a kerosene lamp. "Imagine what I could do without the binds?" asked the Dark Lord -- the first real Dark Lord, of whom all others would be but mere shadowy imitations. His eyes literally glimmered as he Said it, and his Voice wavered at the brink of Sorcerous power. Caden grimaced but Tön're laughed at him, low and mocking. "Guard your thoughts well, little mage. For all the good it will do you."

"He is every bit as creepy as I thought he'd be," Caden said. Now that he was becoming properly acclimated to the ambient energies of this era, it was getting proportionately harder to not use his Voice. It was a triumph that the power wasn't literally coloring his thoughts.

"Told you," Blackaxe replied without missing a beat. The other Wizard was jittery just from being in the same room as Tön're. "Is your curiosity sated yet? Can we leave?"

"He'll be dead soon enough," Caden said. Even knowing that it was true, he wasn't sure if he believed it.

Tön're just laughed.

The sound followed them all the way to the surface.