MAGUS INFINITE

I don’t know how the warband did it, but we were able to avoid any attention as we travelled through the wild, and despite everything that was happening, I could not help but admire the beauty of this world.

The grass, the birds… the streams. Perhaps it was because I knew how fragile all of this could be that I appreciated nature. Thurrim sang when we travelled, and the dwarf had a great voice, and what surprised me was when Coin began to hum alongside him.

His deep baritone and her wispy voice created something supernaturally beautiful that accompanied the warband as we rode through the sunset.

Then on the third afternoon we came over a ridge, and the valley below had two skies. There was a line running down the middle of the air above that valley. On the left side of it the sky was the pale blue we had been riding under all day, and on the right side it was a deeper colour with a wash of green in it.

The warband stopped without anybody giving an order.

“Ah, we are getting closer to the seam. Do not look at it for long, though I do not know if that applies to someone like you,” Ruggah said.

I glanced at Ruggah. This was the second time I had been warned about the sky. “Why should you not look at the sky?”

He shrugged. “Because it looks back. The old people called these places the seams. Where the world has been joined.”

∞

From that moment, it was so hard not to stare at the seam. This is one of my failings, and I am aware of it. Tell me not to look at something and my eyes begin to itch.

I had read in the stone tablets how Terra was built out of other worlds, gathered in and fitted together, and it was fascinating to see a part of this fitting. Terra was so massive in this time, and constantly expanding, but in the future there was not even a complete planet left, just a hemisphere.

How was all this expansion reversed?

“Ruggah,” I said, and pointed at the sky. “How many of these are there?”

“In the north?” He was watching the valley, not the sky. “Hundreds. The maps mark the big ones. That is what all the blank spaces are, and why the roads bend the way they do. If a town grows too near a seam, well…”

“What happens to it?”

“Nothing good… the power of the world. Even the gods are fearful of her power.”

∞

We went down into the valley. As we went deeper, the line in the sky came down to the ground somewhere in the middle of it, and you could not see it there, but you could feel where it was.

I could observe it as a change in the weight of the air. The grass on the far side grew in the same direction regardless of the wind, as if it were not real, and even the insects were different across these lines.

I had never seen anything like this, and it was endlessly fascinating, and I wondered what sort of laws guided something like this.

We soon came across bones lying about in the grass, very old, most of them shapes I did not recognise. There was a skull the size of a cart with no eye sockets in it at all. I was not the only one looking at all these bones with wide eyes. Ines, Tam and the Shades nearly broke their necks looking around them.

Nothing attacked us. The biggest living things here were insects, and that was what led me to notice a crow far in the distance. The black bird did not enter the valley, and seemed to be watching us, but the distance was too far for a normal bird.

I frowned, but I was distracted when my Status Screen did something I had never seen it do, twice, as we moved deeper into the valley.

[Local authority: contested]

[…]

Contested by what, it did not say. The System did not seem to know either, or maybe it was holding it back from me. It was hard to tell.

∞

We made camp that night on the far side of the valley, and I took the second watch with Ogg. I really did not need to sleep anymore, and while I was no longer trying to master a new Law, I was focused on something else.

If I was going to die in this time and wake up in the future, then there were tools I did not want to lose. My Inscription pen, the compass, and this crystal filled with lifeforce.

Of course, everything I had here could be gotten back, but there was a chance it could not. I had confidence in the connection I had gained with my Inscription pen, which had almost become a part of my soul, but this compass and the crystal had not.

So I needed to think about how I could keep certain important items with me, even through death.

This was a new concept I had not considered before, but I was becoming more powerful and coming across items that might be irreplaceable. If there was any time to figure out how to make this work, it was now.

I watched the sky as I worked out the technicalities of the problem. Around the middle of the watch, Ogg suddenly spoke. “You are leaving.”

I stopped what I was doing in my head, but did not answer immediately. He was not really asking me a question, but his observation was not wrong.

“What makes you say that?”

Ogg stared into the fire and sighed. “You have been… careful with us, these past few days. You have not complained about the food once, and I made the food bad on purpose sometimes, to see if you would complain.”

I smiled. “That’s your evidence?”

“That, and you have stopped asking the chief about the road past the edge of the map.” He turned one of the logs over with a stick. “All that is just my observation. But I know you are leaving because I can feel it. I am the oldest here, and I have seen a thousand goodbyes.”

He stared at me. “Forgive me, but I do not know how old you are. Your power suggests you are ancient, but your spirit is so… young. The way you stare at the sky, touch the grass, laugh at our jokes, tear up when the dwarf sings… your soul is young, Elric, and it makes me wonder how someone so young came to be carrying a burden like this.”

I was quiet for a while. Then I stood up and walked away from the fire, and I paused before I left, and spoke without looking back. “I did not choose this life… it chose me.”

It was not a good answer, but what could I say to him? There was too much pain, loss and despair in my heart, and I found it a bit insulting that he thought my spirit was young… My soul no longer scarred, but I still had the memories.