Chapter 1
Year 798 B.F. — Before the Fall
✦ ✦ ✦
"Where—" The boy's voice came out thin, barely more than breath. "Where am I?"
His vision was still blurred at the edges, shapes dissolving and re-forming until he blinked them into something solid. Slowly, the room gathered itself around him: a small chamber, modest to the point of austerity, its single window admitting a narrow bar of light that fell across the far wall. The bed beneath him creaked even at the faint shift of his weight. In a wooden chair near the door, a man in his mid-thirties sat watching him, elbows on his knees, a faint smirk at the corner of his mouth.
"You're awake," the man said.
He rose from the chair and stepped closer, the space between them shrinking. "Do you remember anything?"
"No," the boy said.
"Don't punish yourself for that. What's gone doesn't return easily." The man's eyes moved over him with something between assessment and relief. "You've healed fast — faster than anyone I've seen. Let the mage look at you before you try to move." He turned toward the door. "Martha. Get in here."
The door opened.
An older woman entered, dressed in a nun's dark habit, her face lined with decades of careful service. She moved to the bedside and looked at the boy for a long moment, her expression tightening with something that might have been relief — or grief — or both at once.
"Thank the gods," she murmured.
"Will he be safe here, Martha?" the man asked.
"We've spoken about this." Her voice was measured, but her eyes hadn't left the boy. "I'll do everything in my power to care for him. At the very least — to honour what remains of her."
The boy watched them both. Their seriousness had the quality of a conversation that had been happening long before he arrived — one that concerned him entirely and included him not at all.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"I am Supreme Mage Martha." She turned to him fully, her gaze steady and kind. "You'll be staying here for a while. This room is small, I know — but I'll check on you regularly. I need you to stay inside it. Can you promise me that?"
Before he could answer, the man rested a hand briefly on the door frame. "Leave the child to rest, Martha. He's still finding himself."
She lingered a moment longer, searching his face for something she didn't find or perhaps already knew wasn't there yet. Then she left, and the door closed softly behind her.
The man stood in the quiet. He rubbed his chin, studying the boy with an expression that was almost fond.
"You can't go around without a name." He thought for a moment. "I'll call you Boy. For now — until you find one that belongs to you."
"What's your name?" Boy asked.
"Dren Chaster."
He moved to the door, and paused with his hand on the frame.
"Welcome to Hidenheim, kid. The realm of mages." A pause — something shifting behind his eyes. "Take care of yourself. You'll need to." Another pause, shorter than the first. "I promise I'll come back for you."
"Yeah," Boy said, because he didn't know what else to say, or what any of it meant yet.
The door closed. The light held steady in its narrow bar across the wall. Boy lay still in the creaking bed and listened to the silence of a place that was entirely unfamiliar, and tried to remember something — anything — and found nothing waiting for him there.
— ✦ —
Hidenheim — The Study Hall
"What are the duties required of a mage?"
Mage Celei's long teaching rod tapped the edge of the table in a slow, patient rhythm. The study hall held perhaps ten young mages — young being relative, in a place that had seen far fewer students since the war thinned their numbers and drove the survivors into an isolation so complete that most of the known world had stopped believing Hidenheim existed at all.
"Me — pick me!" A girl near the front thrust her hand up before the question had fully settled.
"Zara."
"To protect the realm from beasts!" Zara announced, adding a growl for emphasis.
"Take this seriously," Mage Celei said, in a tone that had given up being surprised.
A murmur moved through the hall — and then went quiet as the door opened and a girl slipped inside. Her silver hair caught the light as she moved, luminous and slightly dishevelled, as though the morning had not cooperated.
"You're late, Liora," Mage Celei said, disappointment sharpening her voice.
"I'm sorry, Mage Celei."
"To your seat."
As Liora made her way down the aisle, two girls near the middle exchanged a look.
"Thought she'd tire of it eventually," one whispered.
"Watch this," the other said — and stretched her leg out into the aisle.
"Ah—!" The girl yelped as something came down hard on her foot.
"Oh," Liora said, not breaking her stride. "Sorry."
The girl shot to her feet, face flushed, hand reaching for Liora's arm — and Liora stopped. Turned. Did not step back. Did not flinch. Simply stood there and waited, expression calm in a way that was, if anything, more unsettling than anger would have been.
"Enough." Mage Celei's voice cut through the room. "Both of you — sit. When the bell rings, you will both proceed directly to the cathedral and remain in prayer until the moon rises. Am I clear?"
Grumbling rippled through the back rows.
"She stepped on me," the girl muttered to her neighbour.
"Sit."
Liora sat.
"Now." Mage Celei resumed her slow circuit of the room. "Liora — since you've joined us late, you can answer the question we were working through. A mage's duty is to protect the realm from beasts — yes, Zara gave us that much. But is that the whole of it?"
Liora folded her hands on the desk. "A mage's duty is to the realm entirely. Her devotion, her service, her life if it comes to that. The realm's stability rests on the mages who tend it — without us, the balance that keeps humanity from falling apart collapses with it."
"Good. You've answered part of it." Mage Celei moved on. "But what is the realm? There are seven of them — the gods made them so. Which one calls for a mage's devotion, and why?" She tapped a sleeping student's shoulder without looking at her. "Anyone."
Silence. The whispering continued in the back.
"Some of you have already awakened your marks. Others will, in time. Think about what that means — what it asks of you."
Bong. Bong.
The bell's toll rolled through the walls of the hall, familiar and final.
"Read through the documented accounts of Mage Arventis before next session," Mage Celei said, already turning toward the door. "And I shouldn't have to remind you — the east wing remains off limits."
The hall stirred to life. Chairs scraped. Young mages filed toward the door. And in the cathedral, the prayers began:
"Old gods, we ask for the stability of the realm — hear our prayer..."
The words moved through the kneeling rows like a tide. Liora knelt at the front, hands clasped, repeating them quietly. Behind her, somewhere in the back rows, the girl whose foot still smarted was already composing her revenge.
— ✦ —
When the prayer ended, Liora rose and slipped toward the door.
"Liora." Martha's voice came from the back of the hall, low and familiar. "Walk with me."
Outside, the half-moon hung bright and full above the courtyard. They fell into step together on the path, their breath visible in the cold air.
"How are your studies?" Martha asked.
"Not what I expected," Liora said.
Martha smiled faintly. "Do you remember — when you were very small — what you told me you would become?"
"A Völva," Liora said, without hesitation. "Like you. I said I'd climb to the very top, whatever it took."
"Do you still mean it?"
A smile broke through despite everything. "Just watch me."
"Good." Martha raised one finger and made a small motion in the air — and something dropped from the darkness above, landing with impossible softness in Liora's outstretched arms.
A cat. Black as soot, blinking with supreme indifference.
"A cat!" Liora's whole face changed. She held it up, examining it from every angle. "He's beautiful — she's beautiful—"
"He," Martha corrected. "And he's yours."
Liora hugged the animal to her chest. Then, slowly, the warmth in her face softened into something quieter.
"Martha... the others got their marks months ago. Some even before the year turned." She looked down. "What if mine never comes? What if I'm the one it skips?"
Martha stopped walking. She turned to face her and waited until Liora looked up.
"It will come," she said. "These things take the time they take, and not a moment less. You are not behind — you are becoming." She pulled her into a brief, firm embrace. "Your mother would be so proud of who you are."
"Thank you," Liora whispered.
"Now go. Before he escapes."
The cat had already jumped from her arms and was padding purposefully away into the dark. Liora went after it.
— ✦ —
An hour later, Liora sat down in the grass, exhausted, and looked up at the moon.
The cat was gone. She'd searched everywhere — the herb garden, the outer wall, the courtyard — and found nothing. She held her hand up and measured the moon against her palm, which was something she did when she needed to feel like she had some grip on the size of things.
Meow.
She turned.
The cat was at the base of the east tower, looking back at her with enormous calm. Then it began to climb.
"Come back, kitty—"
She chased it to the tower wall, leapt for the lowest handhold, climbed — and arrived through the high window in a graceless tumble, landing on the chamber floor in a heap.
She looked up.
The room was dim. A narrow bed. A small window. And a boy — sitting bolt upright on the mattress, wide-eyed, staring at her. The black cat sat on the windowsill behind him, licking its paw with total serenity.
"Who are you?" the boy asked, pressing back against the headboard.
Liora stood and dusted off her habit, and then actually looked at him for the first time.
"What—!"
"What—!"
They both shouted at once.
"You're a boy," Liora said. "How are you here?"
"I don't know," the boy said.
Liora blinked. Composed herself. The cat, apparently satisfied with proceedings, descended from the windowsill and settled onto the boy's head as though it had always intended to sleep there.
"You're him, aren't you," Liora said, more quietly. "I've heard whispers. I may have listened at a few doors." She tilted her head. "You're him, the demon boy."
"What does that mean?" His expression was unreadable. Careful. The cat began to purr.
The chamber door clicked open.
"Liora." Martha's voice was controlled, which was somehow more serious than if it had been sharp. "What are you doing here?"
— ✦ —
Martha sat with Liora for a long time that night — not in the boy's chamber but in the small anteroom below, where the candles burned low and the cold came in through the stone. She told her what she needed to know, and not more than that: who the boy was, why he was here, why the secrecy mattered. She did not tell her everything.
"Promise me," Martha said, when she was done.
"I promise," Liora said.
"And don't come back here."
"I understand."
She understood. That didn't change what she felt — the pull of a question she hadn't finished asking, the sense that the boy in the tower was a story whose first page she'd only just turned.
— ✦ —
The weeks passed quickly, the way time does when something new is being built. Liora came back, of course — Martha had known she would. And slowly, carefully, the two of them began to know each other: the boy who had no name and the girl who had too many questions, meeting in the small hours in a chamber no one was supposed to enter, with a cat asleep between them and the moon making its nightly transit past the window.
One evening, Liora dropped a book onto his lap and settled cross-legged beside him.
"Gyl... fa... gin... ning," he tried, frowning at the title.
"Gylfaginning," she said gently. "You're getting better."
"I can't take this. It's yours."
"I've read it six times. You need it more than I do." She leaned back on her hands. "How does anyone stay sane up here without going completely mad from boredom?"
The cat — Ser Rick, as Liora had named him — climbed from the floor onto the boy's lap and arranged himself with great ceremony.
"He's grown fond of you," Liora said.
"He sits on my face at night," the boy said.
Liora laughed. She flipped a page, then noticed him watching her.
"What?" she asked.
"You read that same passage every time you open it. Why?"
Her eyes came up from the page, and something in them was already decided — had been decided for a long time.
"Because I'm going to be a great mage. Not merely good — great. Known across every realm." She gave a small, theatrical bow from where she sat. "First, though, I have to awaken my mark. Until then, I'm essentially useless."
"You'll do it," he said, with a certainty that surprised even him. "I know you will."
She tilted her head. "What about you? Have you thought about what you want?"
He looked at his hands for a long moment. "I can barely remember my own name. What's the point of wanting things?" His voice dropped. "All I have are the nightmares. And what everyone's told me — that I came back from somewhere I wasn't supposed to come back from."
Liora closed the book with a soft, deliberate sound.
"Then I'm giving you a better name than 'Boy.'" She looked at him. "From now on — you're Dot. Dot the Risen."
"Dot?"
"Settled." She grinned. "Now start deciding what you're going to do with a second chance."
"A second chance," he repeated. Quietly. As though he were holding it up to see if it had weight.
Liora's expression shifted — the grin softening into something more careful, more considered. She reached out and rested her hand lightly on his arm.
"Someone once told me: there will come a time when hope feels like the cruelest joke, and living feels like something done to you rather than by you. That's exactly when you have to hold onto it hardest." She held his gaze. "That's when you have to choose to stay."
Bong. Bong. Bong.
The evening bell rolled across the whole of Hidenheim, calling the mages to prayer.
"I have to go," Liora said, already moving to the window. She swung one leg over the sill and looked back at him.
"Bye, Liora."
"Bye, Dot."
— ✦ —
She was nearly to the prayer hall when the girl stepped into her path.
"Where are you coming from?" The smile on her face had the quality of something being sharpened. "I've heard a rumour about you. About the east wing, and what you do there." She leaned in slightly. "Is it true what they say — that you visit the demon's spawn? That you lay with him?"
Liora looked at her.
Then she turned, gripped the prayer hall's heavy door with both hands, and shoved it open.
It boomed against the wall like a thunderclap. Every head in the hall turned. The silence that followed was the kind that rings.
"Liora." The hiss came from Mage Jeze, kneeling in the nearest row. "Where have you been?"
"I was—"
"Kneel."
Liora knelt.
"You're late again," Jeze continued, low and close. "You know what happens to mages who can't keep their vows? Who can't stay in their place? They are removed from it. Martha won't always be here to shelter you. You are bound to fail — it's only a question of when."
Liora stood up.
She pushed Jeze's hand from her shoulder and rose to her full height. The entire hall watched.
"You've changed," Jeze said, something ugly entering her voice.
"What is happening here?" Martha's voice came from the front of the hall — not loud, but absolute. A voice that had learned, over decades, that it didn't need to raise itself to be heard.
Liora turned. Walked out. The door swung shut behind her.
"The demon has claimed her," someone muttered from the middle rows.
"Enough." Martha's gaze swept the hall. "This is a holy place. Conduct yourselves accordingly, or I will conduct you out of it."
"The demon spawn should be removed," a voice called from the back. Others rose to join it.
"You will be silent," Martha said, and the hall went quiet.
— ✦ —
Outside, beneath a sky thick with cold stars, Liora walked beside Martha. Between them they carried a heavy wooden bucket of water, taking turns with the weight.
"He didn't choose to be what he is," Liora said, without preamble. Her voice was tight but steady. "Yet everyone treats him as though his existence itself is a transgression. As though he should apologise for surviving." She looked at Martha sideways. "Why?"
Martha was quiet for a moment. "A mage's first duty is to the realm's safety. When I brought him here, I broke ancient custom — custom that exists for reasons not all of them wrong. It was a necessary choice. But I knew the cost of it, and I'll answer for it." She exhaled. "The sisters who resent him are afraid of what they don't understand. Fear doesn't excuse cruelty — but it does explain it."
"It feels like the word 'realm' has become an excuse," Liora said. "People use it the way they use any large word — to make small cruelties sound like principles."
Martha looked at her for a long moment. "You have a good heart, Liora. Most mages lose theirs quietly over years — traded for certainty, or convenience, or the comfort of a doctrine that asks nothing difficult. The fact that yours is still intact, still asking questions, still angry on someone else's behalf—" She paused. "That is exactly what a Völva must be. Hold onto it."
Before Liora could answer, the night broke open.
Bong — Bong — Bong —
Not the prayer bell. Something else — lower, more urgent, the sound of an alarm that the stones of Hidenheim had not needed to make in a very long time.
"Go," Martha said. "The east tower — find him. Now."
Liora ran.
— ✦ —
"Supreme Mage." Jeze's voice came fast and breathless, from the direction of the main hall. "You need to come. There's been a breach."
"A breach of what?" Martha turned.
"Of the realm's boundary. It's serious."
Martha followed. They were still a corridor's width from her chambers when one of the sisters ahead threw her hands up and shouted — "Knýta—!"
Martha raised her own mark and the binding shattered before it reached her. She looked at the women surrounding her — eight of them, in a loose ring, marks lit and ready.
"Sisters." Her voice was very still. "What are you doing?"
"What should have been done the day you dragged that thing into this realm," Jeze said. "You've endangered every one of us. Every one of our order. You've had your time, Martha — it's over."
"The elder six will never sanction this."
"The elder six are being persuaded to see things differently. As we speak." Jeze tilted her head. "You're not in a position to give orders anymore."
A scream split the corridor from somewhere beyond the wall — and then another. And then something wet and heavy hitting the floor.
One of the sisters Jeze had sent to check the noise returned at a sprint — and was taken from the side by something enormous, all red eyes and slack jaws and the smell of rot. A hound. Then a second one, from the stairwell. The sisters scattered. Two went down before they could raise their marks.
"Move—" Jeze shoved Martha bodily through her own chamber door and pulled it shut behind them both, leaning against it, breathing hard.
"This is your doing," Martha said.
"He promised no one would be hurt." Jeze's hands were shaking. Her weapon was on the floor. She hadn't picked it back up. "He promised."
"Who?" Martha asked. "Who promised you?"
A figure moved at her writing desk. Hood drawn, face unreadable, hands moving slowly through the papers there as though he had all the time that existed.
"Who are you?" Martha demanded. "Answer me. I command it."
The figure gave a low, quiet laugh — the kind that belongs to someone who finds the concept of commandment genuinely amusing. "Your little tricks have no teeth here."
Martha's lips moved: "Klímata tis yis, ypakoúste sto kálesmá mou—"
The floorboards split. Thick-rooted vines erupted upward and closed around the intruder in seconds, thorns pressing through fabric and into skin. Martha stepped forward, ready.
The vines shattered. Every one of them. Dry as winter sticks, gone in an instant.
Martha stopped.
"How," she said, "is that possible? That was—"
"Weak," the figure said.
The force hit her like a wall of stone. It drove her back through the chamber wall — through the plaster and the lathe and out into the corridor beyond — and she hit the far side and crumpled, ribs singing with the impact, blood filling the back of her throat. The world tilted and went white at the edges.
"Hidenheim's time has come," the figure said from somewhere above her, already receding. "The age of the mages ends here."
He took what he had come for. Then he was gone.
Martha lay in the rubble of her own wall and tried to move. Her body refused. She could only lie still and listen as, one by one, the sounds of her sisters — fighting, crying out, falling silent — moved through the stone around her like water finding its level.
To Be Continued