The study was a room of deliberate restraint. Books rose like silent sentinels along walls of blackwood, their spines a mosaic of ink and leather; a low brazier bled a steady, amber warmth into the air.
Light fell through tall windows in pale strips, catching dust motes that drifted lazily like drifting feathers. For a place that served as the nerve center of an empire, it felt almost domestic, except for the presence that made everything else submit.
There were no guards at the threshold. There never were. Elowen had no need for them, strong as he was.
He sat at his desk, a dark slab of lacquered wood scarred with the faint, patient marks of decades of use. His seal lay within easy reach; quills and scrolls littered the surface in neat stacks. He moved with the economy of a man who had practiced every motion until it had become indistinguishable from thought.
The lines of his face were decisive, his Blonde hair threaded with a single streak of silver that split his brow like a comet's tail. He was ninety-six years in count, and yet the years policed him no more than a single annotation in a ledger. To anyone who did not know his exact age, he might have been mistaken for a man in his early thirties.
That was the peculiar logic of power in their world: strength elongated life and polished youth. The most potent mages, those who climbed beyond mortal mastery into the upper echelons of the art, did not merely learn to bend mana; their bodies accommodated it, their cells refined into slower, more resilient rhythms.
A veteran archmage could appear decades younger than his birth certificate claimed. It made the passing of time a political instrument as much as a natural order. People misjudged ages with near-comical ease. They also misjudged danger with equal blindness.
He wrote and signed with a hand that rarely needed to pause. The pages were not merely bureaucratic; they were the arteries of state, war requisitions, grain allocations, border patrol orders, diplomatic replies.
Elowen's mind moved through them quickly, not because he wished speed but because his cognition operated on a scale ordinary men could not conceive: the efficiency of an intellect that had learned to split tasks into near-parallel operations, to calculate outcomes like a gamesman at a chessboard with a thousand pieces. It was the gift, and the burden, of an Archmage.
From time to time, his eye would flick up, a brief glance across the room as if following some thread of a thought to its end. Alone, without the usual trappings of pomp that might have distracted a lesser ruler, he preferred solitude.
He did not need men posted at his door because his presence itself was a fortress. If one could breach Elowen's defenses and cleave him down in the alcove where he now sat, then the attacker possessed the power to rend more than a man; they would possess the power to tear down the state.
That was not hyperbole; it was arithmetic of authority. Elowen's strength was not merely personal; it was systemic. His sword-magic, refined to the Archmage, S rank stage, radiated a suppression and a certainty that warped the calculus of open rebellion.
To kill him would require a force capable of annihilating the domain itself, or at least of carving a path through its heart. That is why there were no guards: the risk of a violent breach was subsumed by the practical impossibility of it.
A soft knock broke the composed silence. It was unhurried, respectful, the sort a son would use when stepping into a father's presence rather than a supplicant before a monarch.
"Enter," Elowen said without looking up.
The door opened, and William entered, dust of travel still clinging to his boots, a rolled folio in hand. He moved like the echo of his father: similar angles, similar posture, the same blonde hair, identical facial features, but with the latent impatience of someone still climbing toward the peak.
William's face was a map of familiar features: the same sharp nose, the same intense eyes. He was in his thirties by count, and he looked so, only slightly. In this world, where the powerful held age at bay, he could be easily taken for a man in his twenties by those who measured years by visage rather than tale.
"Father," William said, bowing low.
"William. Take a seat." Elowen nodded once and waved the motion that invited a seat. "Report."
William set the folio upon the desk and opened it. The folio's pages were dense with black strokes, field diagrams, camp layouts, casualty lists, and shorthand notations that spoke of grit and calculation.
He had just come back from the southern campaign, where a terrible beast had risen and twisted the countryside into a theatre of blood and shrapnel. The cover page read like a weathered banner: SOUTHERN CAMPAIGN — ROUTE, ENGAGEMENT, AFTERACTIONS.
Elowen's eyes tracked the first line, then the second. The reading took him only seconds: the inked arcs and statistics were comprehended as if the pages had been recited to him aloud. His mind moved with inhuman speed, parsing strategies and supply lines, measuring the efficacy of maneuvers.
The Archmage's mental acuity had saved the kingdom more than once; he could fold a thousand variables into a single, manageable decision. When he reached the casualty figures, his face did not change, but his finger traced a point in the margin.
"You kept your losses low," he said finally. "A few dozen out of two thousand under your command, against a horde of lesser and greater beasts rallied to a single will. That is competent command, William." He spoke without flourish, but the compliment held weight because it was not frequently given.
"The beast had cunning," William answered plainly. "It dominated the local beasts and even packs of scavengers. They followed it like scattered troops rallying to a banner. Reinforcements were days away. We would have been flanked, overrun. We held the line. And we eventually cut them down, though at a cost."
Elowen tapped the folio once more. "Compensate the families. Land, coin, and minor titles if you must. Honor the dead with ceremony. Return the bodies. The state must not appear callous." The tone was administrative, but the edict carried the soft moral gravity of someone who had long seen the consequences of shirking such duties.
"Already done." William's answer came sharp and immediate, the sort of practiced efficiency a prince learns when he must be both commander and conscience. He had already sent envoys, issued seals, and arranged for the transport of the fallen during his journey from the south, tasks that would have taken lesser men weeks to coordinate.
For a moment, the study inhaled and exhaled of its own accord. A brazier snapped as a breath of cold air slipped across its rim. Then William asked the question that had hollowed out the walls of the palace for the past months.
"Father, any news from the north?"
Elowen's expression hardened. His hand stilled above the folio for the first time. The north had become a land of uneasy omens: the Elven Kingdom pressing near its border, old wounds itching anew. The Emperor's voice moved lower, the words measured and threaded with history.
"The north is tense. Roderick is there; I sent him a month ago. He has made little headway."
William's jaw tightened reflexively. Roderick, another of Elowen's sons, sent prior, and the lack of firm success gnawed at the map of peace. The elves had been restless; something had altered their pattern. Neither diplomat nor routine patrol could explain the sudden gathering of their might.
William decided to ask a question that had been gnawing at him. The history books that lined the shelves in the castle library could only explain so much.
"Father, forgive me for being so presumptuous. But if I may ask."
"Go ahead."
"Why do the elves resent our kind so much?"
Elowen reclined slightly, the lines of his face catching the brazier's glow. What followed was not merely news. It was a taught strand of the past, a history that explained why the wood thrummed with the undercurrent of war.
"For a thousand years," he intoned, "since the great conflagration, there has been an uneasy peace. The Great War. involved nearly every race of the world. After the fighting, borders were redrawn, wounds dressed. But old wounds fester. The Elves remember betrayal."
He traced the arc of a memory with a finger on the desk as if drawing a line visible only to the two of them. "Your forefathers marched with the Beastmen against the Elven Domain. It was a turning point. The Elves were betrayed by those they trusted. That memory does not die simply because generations pass. More so because the elves are longer-lived than we are. It becomes a story; it becomes fury."
William listened, every muscle taut. The map of the world unrolled in the study in Elowen's voice: the Human Domain at its center, a fulcrum of politics and trade; to the south, the Fey's continent, separated by a broad ocean, a place of caprice and distant mirth; to the north, the Elven realms, their borders touching human lands and thus making hatred a practical threat; to the east, the Beastmen's domain, separated by a narrower sea but still a neighbor to be watched; farther west lay the dwarf holds and the giants' ranges, and beyond them scattered the dragon-kin, ancient, aloof, and seldom meddling; in the great seas to the far east the Merfolk kept their councils; small tribes, lizardmen, dryads, spirits, persisted in isolated pockets, obscure yet dangerous in their own right.
"There is more than politics to consider," Elowen said. "There is the memory of war itself. There are skirmishes because the world has never unlearned violence. And in the last year, the Elves have chosen to sharpen their claws."
"They are being aggressive," William said. "Unusually so."
Elowen did not contradict him. "I sent Roderick first because he has a knack for parley. But sharp words and soft diplomacy sometimes get you nowhere with an enemy that wishes to drag the world down. There is a risk now that the Elves will force the matter. They will not hesitate to push and test."
William's face set like flint. "Then I will go. I have been at war and in command. The crown will not cower."
Elowen's eyes met his son's. There was no indulgence in that look: only calculation and the implicit weight of command. "You will go. You are already a senior mage, B rank in the Guild's system, and one of our most dependable commanders. Roderick's talents are different; you are the steady hand. Prepare immediately. Gather troops as you need. Calm the border, and if calm proves impossible, force respect for the sake of stability."
William bowed and rose. "As you command."
He was leaving the room before the words had fully cooled. The study swallowed his retreating figure. When the door closed behind him, the silence that followed was not empty so much as dense: the kind of silence that holds decisions until they settle.
Before he stepped out into the corridor, William paused and let out a long breath, not of relief but of weariness. The life of the crown prince pressed on his chest like armor. He walked on; the palace's pillars and murals slipped by in stately procession. He muttered under his breath, half to himself and half as a confession to the stone, "It is a tiring thing, to be crown prince. But, it is a burden I must carry."
Inside the study, Elowen returned to his papers. He signed, annotated, and sealed with the same automated poise, but the conversation with William remained lodged like a chip of ice against the warmth of the brazier. He had set a plan into motion, a balancing of diplomacy and force, and now the gears would turn, beyond even his immediate sight.
Before the night closed in, Elowen allowed himself a small, private observation: the world's order had been forged by power and tempered by institutions. One of those institutions was the Guild.
The Guild used a lettered ranking system, a simple, brutally effective taxonomy of capability: Beginner(F), Novice (E), Adept (D), Mage (C), Senior Mage (B), Master (A), Archmage (S), and, in legend and fearful whispers, the Magus stage, a level beyond even the Archmage, more myth than map. The letters were not merely titles but signifiers of function.
Towns requested C-rank mages for common wards; cities contracted A-rank masters for siegecraft; nations petitioned for S-rankers in times of true crisis. The Guild certificated and regulated: it dispatched mages, tracked talents, adjudicated licenses and pay, and served as both an arbiter and labor market. To be ranked was to be legible to the world.
S-rank archmages like Elowen were rulers of the individual major races, like he was the emperor of the human domain. Each major race had at least one archmage as its leader; it was one of the facts that determined the territory, prestige, and position in the world.
Their very presence rewrote the calculus of power. If a tyrant or foreign power could kill an archmage in his study, then the state that relied upon him had already been rent. That truth had shaped centuries of policy: archmages often assumed roles that blurred the lines between monarch and guardian of a race.
Elowen's pen scratched again. Plans were maps overlaid with contingencies. He finished the ink and, with the seal of the empire pressed resolutely into wax, let the next act roll forward.
Outside, William's footsteps faded into the corridor. He would go north. The empire's center turned once more, as always, around the measured weight of its strongest and those it chose to send in his stead.