Chapter Text
Magic died, and there was no warning.
Even now, he remembered the feel of it; that moment when something which had been so close, so thoroughly entwined around every thread of him, had been sheared utterly away. No herald, no hint, not even a scream – and then there he had been, sundered beyond anything that mere flesh could achieve; split open down to the basest splinters of his being as magic tore apart, leaving nothing but half-hallucinatory echoes in its vanishing wake. And Rythian himself, crumpled and gasping against the cool bricks of his already-shuddering shared tower.
Exactly what happened after that was less clear. The tower had collapsed, surrendering to the now-uncompromising forces of geometry and raw gravity, and he had dim recollections of dragging himself step by shaking step, along corridors already bucking and heaving against their own architectural absurdity. Of hands on his own, arms across his shoulders – other dazed figures, some weeping, some crying out, some terrible in their broken silence – and of the final rush of hot dust and awful cracking as the teetering structure had come down just behind them. So close. Too close, in many cases.
Magic died, and so many of them died with it.
Even those that got out – that hauled themselves free of breaking stone, dodging shattered crystal and now-unfettered flame, or managed to angle an abrupt descent into a more forgiving impact – were little more than ghosted shells at first. Drifting, lost in the unfamiliarity of themselves, as much as he was. They wandered, each suddenly a stranger in a world so changed and all the worse for how familiar it otherwise was. His undirected footsteps took him to the shoreline, and he stayed there, staring out across the ever-changing emerald of the ocean, shifting from ink to slate to a turquoise so brilliant that it hurt to look at.
Even now, he wasn’t sure how long he had remained there, while his flayed mind had slowly drawn itself back together, weaving shaky threads of reformed thought across the yawning voids where something should have been – but even the memory of those memories had become so uncertain. It was all clearly impossible, now, but his idling brain wove careful stories of metaphor and imagination into those raw-torn gaps, until he could pretend, just enough, that he had really known it all.
He had, finally, come back into himself; half-starved, bloody from the trailing roads and close escapes that he had barely even noticed – but he had been a wildling even before the magery in his blood awoke and that, at least, remained.
Later, Rythian realised he had been one of the lucky ones. Many never did return, and he didn’t like to wonder how much of that was the price of the Wilds, where inattention could be so swiftly deadly; or more deliberate choice. Worse still were those who had never left at all, physically, but whose eyes remained empty; still lost, deep within the hollow echoes of a life so vanished that it might never have been.
Magic died, and the world changed.
The Wilds were less… wild, now. Monsters still roamed, night still fell with that self-same shocking suddenness, but something underlying about it all had shifted. Rythian had ventured out again eventually, tracing half-mapped routes and rumour, seeking out the places where the old magic had burned so brightly – but that was gone too. Ancient trees, once the great guardians of secret doorways and deep wisdoms, now nothing more than relics of forests long-dead, already bowing to the new weight of time, or the vigorous attentions of insects and creeping fungi.
He found groves turned to sludge; great old temples and twisting ruins sunken into themselves, all shattered stone and encroaching vines that twisted with a slow floral patience through roof beams and across the lifeless limbs of construct guardians, the empty shells of elementals now crumbling into the hungry earth. Empty portal frames, like blinded eyes, staring sightless across a world now lost to them – but open, so suddenly it seemed now, to others.
There had always been travellers – visitors and adventurers alike from across the waves, seeking glory, wisdom or escape in these unbroken lands – but they became more frequent. And different. It was on one of his visits back to a town – a thick-walled ring of houses and localised mine shafts that sank into the earth below, like so many of them were –that Rythian really noticed the change. More new faces, more new accents on the breeze, but the most common thing about them was the now-familiar haunted look in each pair of eyes.
Mage-kind – or at least, those that used to be. Almost all of them, at first. He had thought he understood; after all, his own painfully-hopeful wanderings had stretched well into years now, and he mostly stayed away from the new enclaves, wanting to avoid opening the wounds of memories yet unhealed. It was only later that he realised he wasn’t meeting the same influx of weary pilgrims on his own roads - yet the towns grew ever more, spilling over their own walls, spreading little knots of settlement further out into the open lands.
They kept coming. More arrivals, every time; more slow-filtering rumours that at first he couldn’t avoid, and then he began to seek out, pushed on by mounting horror of what he had heard.
Magic died, and it seemed that out across the sea, there was a new darkness in its wake. He heard the stories then, listened to tales of the bloody turnabout, as the city-states had twisted the fragments of their broken war back and down, onto those who had once wielded a power now blamed for its own destruction. So many had fled, out across the roiling waves to seek shelter in these lands, but the poison followed them. He saw the changes in the crowds; the hardening glances, the half-hidden whispers as rumour began to take hold, began to grow barbs. Began to bite.
The first assault hadn’t come as entirely a surprise. There had been three of them – young goons, emblazoned with logos of one of the companies that had sent more and more recent manpower out into the opening wildlands. They had jumped him in a narrow street, each liquored up and drunker still on self-important bravado, as they spat insults and brandished their weapons. But Rythian had had some skill with defence even before, and his wanderings had at least honed his nerves, if not his techniques. Nothing lethal on either side, although he had taken a few deeper strikes than he might have preferred for himself – but it felt like punctuation.
Magic had died, and the void of it was spilling venom of accusation and aftermath out across the world from some rotted heart. New ports rose, new docks – branded with foreign industry and unfamiliar names – that spat out greedy machinery to rip deep the tamed earth, brazen under the wildlanders’ own baleful attentions. Rythian could feel the pressure, the tension curling tight around fragmenting loyalties as back-alley tussles became whole-street brawls, and whispers gave way to rising denouncements. It was a blackened storm, building everywhere at once, teetering to come crashing down about them all.
Like a falling tower. He had stared down at his own wounds then, as he carefully cleaned the sharp lines left by a lucky strike that had opened his arm, and felt the acid that burned in his throat mirrored up against his thoughts.
Whatever he might once have been, he was a mage no longer. That had ended, in that one moment of soul-rending horror as the world had sundered and taken so much of him with it. But he was still here, and he was damned if he was just going to sit there and watch, while whatever of this life that remained tore itself further apart. His gaze fixed on his own remaining blade – a simple katar, found months ago in one of the crumbling ruins – and his lips thinned as he squeezed the wound edges together firmly.
This couldn’t happen again. Drunken idiots in an alley could no longer be a close-run thing. When the thickening storm finally broke, he needed to be ready - and if being a mage wasn’t going to work anymore, he had to become something else.
I am Rythian.
It was time to find out what that meant now.
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