Rona woke before dawn, as she always did. She lay in the dark for a while, listening to the ceiling. The tower was still quiet, but she could feel a tension in the air, as if the whole building were holding its breath, waiting for tomorrow.
She got up, washed her face in the basin, and changed. Then she went down to the kitchen. Preparing her master's breakfast was her job, and she had done the same thing every morning for four years. Warm bread, honey, two boiled eggs, and a plate of cheese. Some mornings the menu changed, but this was the usual, just as Master Ogmios liked it.
While she was setting the tray, she looked at the jar of honey. The beekeeper had been late this morning, but he had brought it fresh. Rona dipped a finger in and tasted it, then scolded herself. It was one of the habits she had brought from her village, and nobody in the tower licked their fingers before a meal.
She picked up the tray and headed for the stairs.
On the third floor she ran into Master Corvin.
"Good morning, Corv— I'm sorry, Master Corvin!"
She stopped the moment the word slipped out. Corvin's brows had already drawn together.
Rona lowered her head, her cheeks warming. "How are you this morning, master?"
Corvin muttered something and walked away without answering the apprentice's question.
I did it again. Rona chided herself. She had lived in this tower for four years, and she still caught herself calling everyone by name when her mind wandered. She knew perfectly well that master mages were owed their titles. She was still an apprentice, and she ought to behave like one.
But it was hard to get used to. There had been very few children in the village where she was born, and Rona had grown up under the fond attention of its elders, a child everyone called by name, whose head everyone patted. There, respect was shown through affection, not distance. In the tower, respect meant saying the right title at the right moment, and Rona was finding this language far harder to learn than the one she had grown up speaking.
Lost in these thoughts, she climbed the floors and reached the twenty-second. She knocked three times on Master Ogmios's door and went in without waiting for an answer. It was the daily routine; she and her master had agreed on it long ago.
Ogmios was seated at his desk, an open book in front of him. As she set down the tray, Rona stole a glance at the page but understood nothing of it. There were intricate spell circles, but the script was foreign to her. Still, she recognized a few of the marks; it was written in the ancient elven tongue. Probably something left from Sarrafim, she thought. Books surviving from that ancient elven empire were rare, and Rona had never asked her master where he found them.
"There's honey again this morning, master," she said, setting the tray on the desk. "The beekeeper was late, but it's still fresh."
"Thank you, Rona." Ogmios did not lift his head from the book.
Rona waited a moment, then could not hold it in. "Master, the ritual is tomorrow, isn't it?"
"Yes. That is the fourth time you have asked me in two days, girl."
"I'm sorry, master!" Rona said quickly, then her voice softened, taking on a note of worry. "I'm just excited. I'm going to witness the summoning of the hero whose tales I've read since I was a child." She paused. "Do you really think we'll succeed?"
Ogmios raised his head and looked at her for a long moment. Rona knew that look; it was how her master looked when he was weighing something.
"No," he said at last.
Rona did not press him. She had learned that her master could close an entire conversation with a single word. Still, she could not quite hide her surprise. If even he believes it will fail, why did he agree to all this expense?
Because Rona knew exactly how expensive this ritual was. She had spent four years in the tower and read every book there was about the hero; she had even managed to pick up a little of the language he had left behind from his own world. And every record she read said the same thing: the legend was older than two thousand years. The books put it as "long before the Helios Empire." Since then, the summoning ritual had been attempted thirteen times. All thirteen had failed. It required such enormous effort and wealth that it was rarely attempted at all.
Even so, to witness such a thing, even a failed attempt, was something most mages would never see once in a lifetime. Rona felt fortunate, and unlike her master, she carried a small hope inside her.
"What would you have me do today, master?"
"Go down to the archive floor. Bring me the ancient records from section fourteen, second row, eighth shelf. Tell Master Fessa; he will know which ones I mean." Ogmios set down his pen. "I'll be comparing them against the ritual text. If you're quick about it, I'll teach you a few things as I promised." He paused. "And Rona."
"Yes, master?"
"Speak to as few people as you can today. The whole tower is on edge and everyone is tense. None of the old masters will overlook a mistake of yours today, and earning their anger will do your record no good." He narrowed his eyes at her. "I see you're close to forming your fifth ring. Given your talent and your mind, I'd say your mastery examination is two years away at most. But those old men hold grudges. When that day comes, you'll need their votes."
Rona nodded thoughtfully. She knew this, but she had never fully adjusted to the tower's rigid rules. Still, she would do as her master said. She left the room without another word.
The archive was on the sixth floor, and the stairs were crowded that morning. Masters hurried up and down, young apprentices passed with stacks of books in their arms. Most of these apprentices had only just formed their first ring; they would not be allowed to attend the ritual, but they were caught up in the same frenzy, running errands for the masters.
Seeing them, Rona remembered her own first days in the tower. I was just like them. Not exactly, though. As the apprentice of Tower Master Ogmios, she had served only him; she had never chased after every master the way the novices here did. Over the past four years, she rarely even ran her master's errands anymore. Ogmios used the novices for that sort of thing, and Rona knew this meant two things: the respect her master had for her, and the weight that came with having reached the fourth ring. A fourth ring was extraordinary for an apprentice; it put her near the standard of a battle mage.
A mage at her level, though still an apprentice within the tower, could easily serve outside as a count's personal house mage. But those who chose that path were usually the ones who had realized they had no room left to grow, and had stalled at the fourth ring.
If Master Ogmios had never come to my village, I might have become one of them. Rona descended the stairs with the thought. She might have taught herself magic and become the private mage of some minor lord, or with her aunt's help, one of the few mages of the Duchy of Raven. Or she could have joined a temple with her healing gift. Or perhaps she would never have left her village at all, and grown old right there. Who could say.
But she might have brought more trouble on herself that way. When she first came to the tower, Ogmios had warned her in the gravest terms: whatever happened, she was never to tell anyone she was both mage and healer. She would advance along the mage's path in the tower, and Ogmios alone would train her in healing, privately. At first Rona had not understood why. Now she did. She was a kind of anomaly; a dual gift with no known precedent. It would draw attention. And curious mages might do things to Rona that she would not want done.
With that thought she reached the sixth floor and entered the archive room. Inside were hundreds of shelves and thousands of volumes, and the air was different from the rest of the tower; dry, cool, and smelling of old paper. At the desk beside the door sat the old scribe Fessa.
Rona reminded herself as she stepped in. Say master. Master.
"Good morning, Master Fessa."
The old scribe raised a hand without lifting his head and wagged a single finger. Rona fell silent and waited. Fessa wrote one last line in the ledger before him, laid his pen against the rim of the inkwell, and only then looked up.
"Ogmios's apprentice." Fessa's voice rustled like a dry page. "Tell me, what does your master want this morning?"
"He asked for the ancient records, master. Section fourteen, second row, eighth shelf, he said. He told me you would know which ones."
"Of course I know." Fessa rose from his seat, and his bones complained one by one. "He's been asking for the same records for thirty years. The same shelf, the same volumes, before every ritual." He kept talking as he walked off between the shelves, and it was not clear whether he was speaking to Rona or to himself. "It was the same when I was a young scribe. The tower master then was Halvard, and he asked for the same records. Halvard died, the tower moved once, emperors changed. And still the records stayed the same."
Rona followed him in among the shelves. They rose all the way to the ceiling, and the writing on the spines of some volumes had faded so badly that it could no longer be read. Rona paused a moment and looked at the topmost ones. She had been in this tower four years and still had not seen the whole of the archive.
"Master Fessa, are these records really from the first ritual?"
"Nothing survives from the first ritual, girl." Fessa climbed the ladder, pulled three thick volumes from the eighth shelf, and laid them one by one into Rona's arms. They were heavy, their leather covers webbed with cracks. "These are copies of copies. The originals turned to dust long ago, and even the language they were written in has been half forgotten. What we hold is someone writing down what they remembered, and someone else copying down what they wrote."
"Then how do we know the ritual text is correct?"
Fessa came down the ladder, looked at Rona over the top of his spectacles, and laughed for the first time. It was a short, toothless laugh.
"Well, we don't." The scribe returned to his desk and pulled his ledger toward him. "It's been attempted thirteen times, and thirteen times it failed. Perhaps the texts are wrong. Perhaps the texts are right and the age is wrong. Or perhaps there was never any hero at all, and for two thousand years we've been questioning whether a fairy tale is true." He took up his pen and went back to writing. "The tower master will want you to be quick. Off you go now, don't dawdle."
Rona clutched the records to her chest and left the archive. As she climbed the stairs with the weight in her arms, Fessa's words kept turning over in her head. Copies of copies. She had read every book about the hero, and she had read even more since coming to the tower. Yet she had never once stopped to think about who had written those books, or when, or how many hands they had passed through.
I wonder how different the Tales of the Hero I've always read is from the original, she thought. The books told of the hero; his sword, his battles, the city he founded, his triumphs. Not one of them mentioned that the books themselves, and the hero along with them, would one day turn to dust.
By the time she reached the twenty-second floor her arms had gone numb. She knocked three times with her elbow and went in.
Ogmios had cleared his desk. The ancient elven book from that morning had been set aside, and in its place lay the tower's own copy of the ritual text, open. Rona set the three volumes down and rubbed her aching arms.
"Master Fessa knew at once which records you meant."
"Fessa knows everything. That is why he is the master of the archive." Ogmios drew the first volume toward him, opened the cover, and began turning the pages as if searching for a particular place. Then he stopped and spoke without looking up. "You were quick. Sit down there, and we'll have the lesson I promised you."
Rona sat on the stool across the desk. Ogmios turned the volume so it lay between them, where they could both see. On the page was a spell circle; interlocking rings, marks she did not recognize between them, and at the very center, an empty space.
"Tell me. What is missing from this circle?"
Rona leaned in and looked carefully. She could not read the marks, but she could read the structure of the circle; that was what she had been doing for four years. The outer ring was a gathering ring, she knew it by its shape. The inner rings were for channeling. And the center was...
"There's no target," she said at last. "The target of a spell is defined at the center of every circle. Here the center has been left empty."
"You saw correctly." Ogmios tapped the page lightly. "Now, how does a mage cast a spell that has no target?"
Rona thought. Every rule she knew argued against it. Without a target, mana disperses; dispersed mana is wasted; and wasted mana, at best, does nothing at all. She did not want to think about the worst.
"He can't, master," she said. "If he tries, the spell either dies out or turns back on him."
"That is why all thirteen rituals were counted as failures. The altar stayed empty because the summoning has nowhere to go. The text gives us the circle, but it does not give us the center." Ogmios closed the volume and leaned back. "So now we come to the real question. If there is no address, how did the first hero arrive?"
Rona opened her mouth and closed it. She had never once thought of the question in those terms. The books said the hero came; they never asked how.
"I don't know, master."
"Neither do I." Ogmios said it not like a confession but like the plain relaying of a fact. "It took me thirty years to learn that I don't know. Tomorrow we will try for the fourteenth time, and in all likelihood we will stare at an empty altar for the fourteenth time." He stood, walked to the window, and looked down at the city below. "That is enough for our lesson. You may spend the afternoon on your own practice. And Rona."
"Yes, master?"
"Tomorrow you will stand beside me at the ritual. Whatever happens, you will do nothing until I tell you to."
Rona nodded, left the volumes on the desk, and went out. As she descended the stairs, the excitement inside her had grown strangely heavy.
She spent the afternoon alone in the small practice room on the fourth floor. The control exercise was the same as always; a thin current of mana in her palm, drawing it finer, holding it steady, letting it go, and starting again. It was dull, and Rona worked at it knowing it was dull. Her rings had come quickly, everyone said so, but her control grew harder in step with them, and her master had explained the price of that a hundred times. Power without control burns others before it burns its owner.
At one point there was a knock and Ogmios looked in. He watched the current in Rona's palm for a while without speaking. Rona held it exactly as it was, neither thinning it nor thickening it, simply keeping it steady. Her master said nothing, but on his way out he gave a slight nod, and Rona knew what it meant. You're doing well. Ogmios would never say it aloud, but she had learned to read him.
At supper the kitchen was more crowded than usual. Rona took her soup to the window ledge, sat down, and listened to the tower. Everyone was talking about tomorrow. At one table two young mages were adding up the cost of the ritual; the figure they arrived at was so large that Rona forgot her spoon halfway to her mouth. At another, an elderly master was explaining to those who would not be attending how the thing would go, and every detail he gave differed a little from what Rona had read in the books.
Nobody really knows. Rona stirred her soup. Everyone was excited about tomorrow and everyone had an opinion, but it seemed no one truly knew what it was they were about to attempt. Ancient magics like this were rarely understood, and most mages preferred to spend their time strengthening their mana control rather than studying dead languages. So no one knew much beyond the task they had been assigned and the fact that an expensive ritual was about to take place.
Even the master explaining things to the apprentices was no exception, because what he was telling them was wrong. Master Fessa was right after all. Reading books that were copies of copies bred nothing but false knowledge. And yet there were those who saw through the errors and arrived at the truth anyway. Master Ogmios, for one.
She finished her soup, left her tray, and went up to her room.
Her room was small, but it was hers, and Rona was grateful for that. In the village she had shared a room with all her siblings. She opened the little chest beside her bed. Inside were the few things she had brought from home; a shawl her mother had woven, a collection of stones she no longer told anyone about, and at the very bottom, a slim book in a worn leather cover.
She took it out and sat on the bed. The title on the cover had long since rubbed away, but Rona knew it by heart: Tales of the Hero. There was no author, no date. It was not a book of magic, nor a record; only old stories told to children. Her aunt had given it to her.
My aunt. Rona smiled. She was her mother's younger sister, and one of the knights of the Duchy of Raven. Every time she visited the village, Rona's eyes would go straight to her sword. Her aunt had taught her to read and write, had given her a few books, and once, when she was eleven, had even put a wooden sword in her hand and shown her a few forms. But Rona was hopeless with a blade, and her aunt saw that soon enough. Instead she noticed something else; she was the first to realize that Rona was sensitive to mana, that she was a budding mage.
Her aunt had planned to take her to the Duchy of Raven for magical training when she turned fifteen, the age of adulthood. But a duchy had little to offer a mage; a good wage, yes, but none of the books, equipment, or masters needed to advance. Then the White Mage Tower found Rona, and everything changed. A door opened that was far greater than anything her aunt could have offered. Rona sometimes wondered: had her aunt been proud of it, or sad to lose her so early? She must have felt both at once.
She opened the book. The pages were so familiar that she knew where every story lay without looking. She turned to her favorite; the tale of the coming of the first hero, Helian.
The story began with people at war with demons, praying to their creators. It did not say what the prayer was; only that the people knelt and pleaded, and that the sky went dark. And then came the first words the hero spoke as he set foot in this foreign world. Rona knew the lines by heart. As a child she had read them aloud again and again, trying to puzzle out the hero's language.
"Iussu custodis aequilibrii, electus aequilibrii, heros."
As he spoke them, the hero's eyes had shone with a golden light, and then he had collapsed.
Rona repeated the words silently on her lips. Over all these years she had never quite made out their meaning. She recognized some words in the hero's tongue; heros was hero, that much she knew. Aequilibrii was perhaps the balance of something, but she had never worked out the balance of what. As a child the words had a kind of enchanted sound to them, turning in the mouth like a charm, and Rona had loved them not for their meaning but for their music.
She closed the book and pressed it to her chest. Tomorrow they would summon the true hero, or try to. And Rona, with this old book of tales in her keeping, would be standing before that circle.
Perhaps her master was right. Perhaps tomorrow they would stare at an empty altar again.
But no matter how many times she read this book, the same childish stubbornness stirred in her every time. What if it's real this time?
She put the book back in the chest, blew out the candle, and lay down in the dark. The tower still hummed; footsteps on the upper floors, the noise of things being carried, doors closing. Tomorrow she would rise before dawn again. She would prepare her master's breakfast, carry the tray up twenty-two floors, and then go down to the seventeenth to watch a two-thousand-year-old fairy tale be attempted for the fourteenth time.
As she closed her eyes, the words were still turning in her mind, like a lullaby.
Iussu custodis aequilibrii...
And so she fell asleep.