The fire at the Merchant's Forum had long since died, but for Praxus, the smoke still seemed to cling to the very air of the city. In the week following the First Purge, Aethelburg had transformed. The chaotic, fearful energy had been replaced by a grim, martial order. Royal Guard patrols were a constant presence, their silver-inlaid armor a symbol of the King's unyielding law. The surviving Covenanters had been driven underground, their public sermons replaced by seditious whispers in dark alleys. The city was quiet, but it was the quiet of a coiled serpent.
Praxus's life had also transformed. He was no longer a simple scholar. He was the Magister, the First Advisor to the Crown, a title that felt both absurd and terrifyingly heavy. He now occupied a suite of rooms in the royal library, a space that would have once been his personal heaven. Now, it was his command center in a war he felt completely unqualified to fight.
Parchment and scrolls covered every surface, but he was no longer just a reader; he was a hunter. His task was to find the key to a hypothetical weapon, the First Magic, while the city outside his window tore itself apart. He felt like a man trying to solve a complex riddle while his house burned down around him.
A knock on the door broke his concentration. Titus, the young acolyte who had remained loyal to Theron, entered, balancing a tray with a loaf of bread, a wedge of cheese, and a cup of watered wine. The boy had been assigned as his personal assistant, a bridge between Praxus's scholarly world and the ecclesiastical archives of the now-emptied Observatory.
"You have not eaten today, Magister," Titus said, his voice soft but firm. He had lost the fearful uncertainty of his acolyte days, replaced by a quiet, somber competence.
"There is no time for food, Titus," Praxus replied, not looking up from a fragile map of the Progenitors' era he was trying to cross-reference with a modern one. "Ouen has a week's head start."
"And you will not find him any faster with an empty stomach and a weary mind," Titus insisted, placing the tray firmly on a small clear space on the desk.
Praxus finally looked up, a flicker of gratitude in his tired eyes. The boy was right. He took the bread and cheese, his first meal of the day. "Any news from Commander Eva's patrols?"
"The southern road is a dead end. They found the trail of his party, but it vanished near the border of the Sunstone Wastes. The trackers say they scattered, likely to be smuggled across the border by sympathizers in the caravans."
Praxus sighed, a low, frustrated sound. "Zahram. Of course." It was the perfect place to disappear. A fractured land of independent tribes and city-states, a place where the King's law was little more than a whisper on the wind. "He will find fertile ground for his poison there. Desperate people make for desperate faith."
"That is for the King and his diplomats to worry about," Titus said. He pointed to the scroll Praxus had been studying. "Our war is here. Have you found anything?"
Praxus gestured to the chaotic mess of his research. "Only more questions. More fragments. The Progenitors were not one people. The Lament speaks of a city of 'singing crystal' and a society of 'stone-shapers.' It's all allegory, poetry. Nothing concrete. Nothing that tells me how to awaken this… First Magic." He said the term with a mix of reverence and frustration. He was a man of facts, and he was now chasing a king's desperate hope.
Their conversation was interrupted by the sound of heavy, armored boots. Commander Eva entered the library, her face set in its usual mask of stern duty. She gave Titus a brief, respectful nod before turning to Praxus.
"Magister. The last of the Covenanter safe houses has been cleared. The city is secure, for now. General Kyrus has begun training the first recruits for the Civil Defense Force at the House of Defiance. The sailors are… proving to be enthusiastic brawlers, if not disciplined soldiers."
"Good news, then," Praxus said, though he felt little relief.
"It is a temporary peace," Eva countered, her flint-grey eyes serious. "But it has given us something. An informant. One of Vorlag's lieutenants, captured in the final raid. He was more coward than fanatic. He talked."
She placed a small, rolled-up piece of parchment on Praxus's desk. It was not a royal document, but a crude, hand-drawn map.
"This is a copy of what he drew for us," Eva explained. "It shows Ouen's intended destination. A place deep in the Zahram wastes. A forgotten oasis-city called 'Qar-Teth'. The informant claims Ouen was not just fleeing. He was on a pilgrimage. He believes this place is a source of great power, a place where he can commune directly with the Tyrant."
Praxus unrolled the map. The name meant nothing to him. But as he looked at the crudely drawn landmarks, a trio of rock spires, a dry riverbed shaped like a serpent, a flicker of recognition sparked in his mind. He scrambled through his piles of scrolls, his movements suddenly energized. He found the ancient Progenitor map and laid it beside the informant's drawing.
The landmarks were different, warped by ten thousand years of wind and sand. But the core geography, the bones of the land itself, was the same.
On the Progenitor map, at the location of the oasis-city of Qar-Teth, there was a single, terrifying symbol. It was a jagged, black rune, a symbol he had seen in the darkest passages of the Lament.
It was the sigil for the Carver of Silence.
"My God…" Praxus whispered, a hand going to his mouth. "It was not a temple. It was his prison."
Eva and Titus stared at him, confused.
"This place, Qar-Teth," Praxus explained, his voice trembling with the weight of his discovery. "It is built upon the ruins of an ancient Progenitor site. According to the texts, it is the place where the Carver of Silence was chained after his first defeat. The place from which he was cast out into the Unwritten Void."
He looked up at Eva, his eyes wide with a new, dawning horror. "Ouen is not going there to worship. He is going there to try and open a door we never knew existed. He is going to try and bring Ghra'thul's full, physical presence into our world."
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The Chronicle of the Fallen
Time Period Covered: Approximately Days 73 through 80 of the Age of Fear
Victims of The Reaping: 2
Victims of the Covenant: 11 (The number of bargains has plummeted in Aethel but is beginning to rise in the outer territories as Ouen's ideology spreads)
Deaths from Civil Unrest: 3 (Lingering casualties from the Purge)
Total Lives Lost: 16
Of Note Among the Fallen:
— A master cartographer from Aethel's Royal College, slain in a Covenanter reprisal attack.
— The Elder Matriarch of the Bright River tribe in Verdane.