Corvis Eralith
I am happy to have you at my side once again, Avicenna, I mentally told the Djinn Sage as fresh Trucewater flooded my nerves thanks to Inner Current.
The teal liquid renewed my mind after what had happened the day before in the Hearth: the Warrant of War, Cylrit and Fatima.
'Always honoured to help, Justiciar,' came the calm reply of Avicenna Artira of Ramdad, the Djinn Remnant who had been a faithful companion of mine for nearly a year.
'I must apologize for the undignified spectacle you witnessed between Fatima and myself. It was entirely unfitting for Sages of our standing to squabble in such a manner. I sincerely hope you do not think less of me—though I wouldn't blame you if you did.'
Chill out, Avicenna, I sighed, thoroughly exhausted by the topic. I already told you I don't care.
However, I have a question now. One I'm surprised I haven't asked you yet, I said. What was the name of your religion?
'Pacisophy, Justiciar,' Avicenna replied. 'The faith originally known as the Cult of Mordain.'
Knowing me well enough to anticipate my next question, he added:
'And Pacisophists was the name given to those who walked its path.'
I was standing at the edge of the Elshire Forest, on the border with the Beast Glades, wearing the clothes of the Highprince plus a flowing cloak of deep crimson, embroidered with golden threads catching the pale light to shield me from the cold.
Fiorwato hung at my hip, its hidden emerald blade a comforting weight against my thigh, and Avicenna's Vaultlamp was attached to the golden ring on the sash of my trousers, its blue glow a beacon in the pale grey of this winter morning.
Suddenly, I felt a hand reaching down and pinching my cheek.
"Alea, what are you doing?!" I exclaimed, scandalised, waving my arms around to get the hands of the Lance away from my face.
The indignation was genuine, but beneath it, there was a flicker of warmth: the familiar comfort of being cared for, even in the most exasperating way.
Berna came to my aid, wedging her oversized snout right between the two of us. She opened and closed her jaws in a mock snap, a threat so blatantly dramatic it left Alea with a comically clear message.
"My apologies, Your Highness," Alea cooed, making a stupid smile that stretched across her face, from ear to ear. "But you are so cute in those clothes! You are lucky Her Majesty is not here."
Phoenixes and their almost religious love for aesthetics, I thought, feeling like I was three years old again, cooed after by the old noble ladies who were friends of my mother.
The memory was both embarrassing and annoying. I still had nightmares about those "old boring parties for even older and more boring ladies," as Tessia called them when we were three.
"I am not a toddler anymore, Alea!" I exclaimed, the child in me resurfacing after so long—the duties as Throneholder, as Highprince, and as Arbiter having almost choked that kid to death. The words came out sharper than I intended, but I couldn't help it.
"You will always be the three-year-old kid who accepted my silly request of becoming friends with my brother, Your Highness," Alea said, but didn't elaborate further.
"Speaking of which," I said, changing the subject just as Alea was doing. "Have you thought what to gift Alwyn for his tenth birthday? It is in three days' time."
"I have, Your Highness. I have," Alea said with a knowing smile, her expression turning secretive. "Anyway. Why did you ask me to bring you to the edge of Elenoir?"
I looked up at the blue sky, grey cumulonimbuses gathering on the horizon like a faraway white wall, promising storm.
Bright lightnings sparked in the grey clouds, followed seconds after by the distant thunders.
It was rare for elves to see storms like this. Even in the many clearings scattered around the Elshire Forest, you could only look up to gaze at the clouds, the horizon was almost always dominated by the canopies of the trees.
If you wanted to truly admire the sky, you had to climb.
We weren't like dwarves, most of whom spent their whole lives underground, but we weren't humans either, who lived in the great plains that made up Sapin's territories, where the sky was never blocked by obstacles.
As always, elves were the perfect balance—caught between the earth and the sky, between the familiar and the unknown.
"What do you know about a certain flying castle that roams Dicathen's skies?" I asked Alea, hands on my hips as I observed the atmospheric phenomenon thundering on the horizon.
"You mean the Castle!" Alea exclaimed, her eyes widening with recognition. "King Alduin explained to me that's where the royal families of Dicathen meet up for formal businesses. Last time it was used, it was for signing the truce of the Second War."
"You have been there?" I asked, and got myself another pinch on my cheek.
"No! How old do you think I am?" Alea asked, annoyed, her hand retreating from my face. "I wasn't yet a Lance. I wasn't yet employed by the Crown either."
I should have thought twice before asking her, I sighed in my head. Alea had become Lance just a few weeks before my own birth; obviously, she hadn't been in the Castle. The Second War had ended fourteen years before that.
"And what about Aya?" I asked, curious. "Was she a Lance already?"
"She was," Alea replied, her voice carrying a note of distance. "But how do you want to find the Castle? Not even the King and Queen know its exact location every time, and flying around the whole continent not only risks us trespassing into foreign territory, but it will take an eternity."
"About that..." I started, as I turned my attention inwardly.
Avicenna, any precious insight you can share about the Castle? I asked the Sage. How do we find it?
'The Grand Tribunal of Focularsa, yes,' Avicenna said, his voice taking on the measured cadence of a scholar sharing a precious discovery. 'As Fatima and I explained: it was where the representatives of all Legal Bodies from Focularsa and Mausoleia both reunited. While most of its course through the Focularsan sky was random, it always had five steady points it visited—the five Pillars.'
You mean the five greatest Faircities of each Legal Body, right? Like Artira for Ramdad and Zhoroa for Sandand? I asked, the names rolling off my mental tongue with familiarity by now.
'Exactly,' Avicenna said.
I knew Zhoroa was practically located where Etistin, Sapin's capital, currently was. As for the other Pillars... the Red Gorge was where once the Dawn Prize—the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Djinnic Lifeworks—was bestowed, and it was in the Legal Body of Orvandal. Maybe...
Avicenna, the Dawn Prize, was it given in the Pillar of Orvandal? I asked in confirmation.
'Yes, Justiciar. Faircity Basangoa of the Pillars,' Avicenna answered.
"Alea!" I exclaimed, a wide smile spreading across my face. "Do you remember the dungeon you so much refused to accompany me to when I was four? The Red Gorge?"
"Yes, why?" Alea asked, her brow furrowing with confusion.
"I have a feeling the Castle will be there."
—
After all these years, I was back at the Red Gorge, the dungeon between the slopes of the southern Grand Mountains where I had first died and first gone REtrocurrent.
The ancient dungeon that had once dominated the landscape was now little more than a ruin, its stones scattered across the valley like the bones of a fallen giant.
Avicenna, when can I expect to have the Grand Tribunal above my head? I asked the Djinn.
'The Grand Tribunal's very walls were permeated with spellforms,' Avicenna started, his voice taking on the weight of ancient knowledge once more. 'It was—'
"This... is quite the sight," Alea commented, looking at the ruins of the Red Gorge. Not much had changed since the last time I had been here; the ancient Djinnic structure, destroyed by the folly of Sebastian Wykes, was still in ruins, and my presence didn't seem to trigger another Reset—the energy was probably utterly spent.
I looked up at the sky, searching for any sign of the Castle, but saw nothing. The clouds drifted lazily across the blue expanse, indifferent to my search.
"Do you want to take a look around?" I asked the Lance.
"Around these ruins you have visited as a little kid?" Alea asked back, her voice carrying a note of concern. "If someone sees me and vaguely understands I am a Lance, we might find ourselves in serious trouble."
I shrugged my shoulders. Olfred had been wandering around the Beast Glades, Sapin, and Elenoir as Damien Malaisson for longer than I had been alive; Alea was being paranoid.
"House Wykes has been revoked its previous rights for the Red Gorge, and the whole dungeon has been declared abandoned by the grand guildmaster of the Adventurer's Guild himself," I said. "This is nothing more than a vast field of debris."
Alea then raised her head, her eyes widening in amazement.
"There it is!" The Lance exclaimed, her tone one more befitting a tourist leaving the Elshire Forest for her first time than a white-core mage and secret blade of the Kingdom of Elenoir.
I looked up to where Alea was pointing, but I couldn't see anything, not even by augmenting my sight with mana. The cloaking effect protecting the Castle was probably breachable only by white cores.
"I don't see anything," I said, frustration creeping into my voice.
"I will bring you closer then, Your Highness," Alea half-chuckled as she scooped me up.
"Alea!" I whined, seeing the Lance's mischievous eyes. "Fine! Berna, you know what to do!"
My Guardian Bear, in an act of spite toward Alea, jumped on the elven woman's shoulders, using her innate gravity magic to make herself lighter, but just enough to not crush Alea with her weight.
"Maybe I deserved it..." Alea murmured before she took flight toward the Tribunal of Focularsa—the Castle where the Tri-Union Council had made their headquarters in a timeline that would never be.
We flew into the high atmosphere toward a massive fortress suspended hundreds of meters above the world, dwarfing even the floating city of Xyrus in altitude.
The wind howled around us, cold and fierce, but Alea's magic shielded us from its worst effects, creating a bubble of warmth in the frozen sky.
Parting the sea of clouds that shrouded the Castle's foundation, we caught our first sight of its defenses: a giant, wall-like barrier enveloping the Grand Tribunal in an almost seamless arc, leaving only the front approach unshielded.
Alea flew effortlessly with me in her arms and Berna settled on her shoulders, steering us toward a landing deck that protruded from the structure's base like a harbour wharf jutting out into an ocean of clouds.
Avicenna, have you ever been in the Grand Tribunal? I asked as Alea put me down carefully and threw Berna from her shoulders.
"Bad bear," the Lance said, sending daggers with her eyes to my Guardian Bear, who ignored her and padded behind me.
'I have been a member of the Djinnic parliament for some years, yes—I have been a Pacifier, the title given to members of the parliament, for little less than a decade,' Avicenna said, his voice carrying a note of distant nostalgia. 'I retreated from my position to isolate myself in my Awareroom.'
"We are so high in the sky," meanwhile, Alea said, looking down and then looking at the horizon. "You can see all of Dicathen on this side of the Grand Mountains from up here."
Following Alea's eyes, I gave a look at the horizon, and the view from here would make even Xyrus City's clearest days look like children's drawings.
If it wasn't for the massive peaks of the Grand Mountains that divided Dicathen in two, we could have seen from coast to coast; from the western edge of Sapin, where Etistin lay, to the easternmost point of the Beast Glades, a landmass that sprawled for thousands of kilometres.
There was surely some magic at work, one of the spellforms embedded in the very stones of the Castle: such a clear view was almost impossible to have in natural conditions.
No wonder the Council had used this place as their headquarters in the novel.
The view was panoramic over all of eastern Dicathen, and there was a subtle defensive magic field that I needed to focus really hard to perceive even by standing here. The temperature itself wasn't as cold as it should have been so high above.
If I turned my head right, toward the north, the green expanse of the Elshire Forest dominated below.
By squinting my eyes, I could swear I recognized Mount Ellhatan and Peak Firrod's shapes, even if it might have been just a trick my mind was playing on me.
By turning my head left, toward the south, what I saw were the Beast Glades in their wild and unpredictable diversity: forests, deserts, lakes, meadows, hills, and beaches stretching to the horizon like a living tapestry.
"Your Highness, we better hurry," Alea said. "I wouldn't want to be caught by someone in the most secret place of Dicathen."
"Who might catch us, though?" I asked. "Aren't we alone?"
"The Castle's surveillance is rotated between each royal dynasty every ten years," Alea explained. "Right now, the Glayders are the guardians of it."
"I see..." I said, and just in case, I said: "Capture."
Teal Trucewater imploded all around me, and the memory was safely stored by REtrocurrent. If the worst came to be, I would have a safe checkpoint.
"Let's visit this ancient castle, now," I declared, walking past Alea, Berna immediately behind.
—
If the first thing that caught my eyes outside was the protective castle walls floating alongside the Grand Tribunal, inside were the hundreds of markings engraved in every free wall, like names etched on a memorial.
Avicenna, I called for the ancient consciousness residing in the beaked lamp at my hip. What are the symbols I am seeing on the walls of the Grand Tribunal?
'Many things, Justiciar,' the Sage started his new lesson on Djinnic history and culture. 'You might find the names of the many Pacifiers that served in the parliament. The names of the Pacificator-Generals, the heads of said parliament. The names of those Sages that helped in the construction and continuous improvement of the structure. But you could also find the spellforms themselves.'
I stopped beside a random wall and focused on the many symbols engraved on it. The letters were completely different from those of the Dicathian alphabet, and yet... as I concentrated my sight, some of them took familiar shapes.
I saw an O between unknown letters, then an S, I saw an R and even a B. And, if I squinted my eyes, I also saw an L.
Wait! This is the Alphabet, Avicenna! Your Alphabet! I exclaimed in my head. What does it mean? Did you leave this behind?
'No, Justiciar, I wouldn't have dared,' Avicenna replied, his voice carrying a note of surprise. 'What you are seeing are the fruits of your hard-earned Insight. Your mind is translating the spellforms for you using my Alphabet; albeit I wouldn't call it mine anymore: you have progressed its research a thousand times more than I have ever done.'
I touched the wall I had been admiring for a little too long, Alea hiding a laugh behind me, but I couldn't care less.
Does it mean I can control the spellforms of the Grand Tribunal? I asked.
'Probably, no, surely,' Avicenna said. 'At least the spellforms of the Grand Tribunal I knew. The folk of calm currents built it also as a residence for the Justiciar—as a residence for you.'
Damn... was all I could say.
"Your Highness?" Alea's slightly teasing voice called me from behind my back. "Are you done staring at the wall?"
"Yes, I am done!" I exclaimed. "I would like to see the gardens of the Castle first."
"Strange, but sure," Alea said, shrugging her shoulders. "Let's search for them."
—
The Castle's gardens were far from being as beautiful as those of Zestier's Royal Palace or the Nexus Garden, but still the sign of elven touch was visible; the legacy of the elves that kept guard of the Castle when it was Elenoir's turn for its maintenance.
These gardens were located on many different patches of land connected to various sections of the Grand Tribunal, each of these smaller gardens had planted on its soil different kinds of flora from across Dicathen.
"I don't see any plants from the Elshire Forest," Alea observed while I crouched to let a Portal Frog settle in a little pond nearby.
I stood back up and, looking around myself, I noticed it too: the plants were from everywhere in Dicathen, from the Beast Glades to Sapin, but not from the Elshire Forest itself.
"We could fix it next time the Castle's ownership passes to Elenoir," I proposed, even though I feared that was never going to happen—the war would come before.
"Without proper gardeners or plant mages I can see why there are no plants from Elenoir here," Alea sighed. She then turned and offered me a smile. "What's next, Your Highness? You want to look at the living quarters?"
Avicenna, where do I need to go to activate Fatima's... Relic? I asked.
'The bestowment of Greatrunes was done in the highest spire of the Grand Tribunal, Justiciar,' Avicenna explained.
Bestowment... what a curious term, I mused in my head. This must be from where Agrona created his own bestowment ritual. It couldn't be just a coincidence.
I looked up and looming over the Castle was its highest tower, where, if I remembered correctly, a huge ballroom had been placed by the Tri-Union Council in the novel.
"We need to get there," I informed Alea. "The tallest tower."
—
"Your Highness," Alea put her hand on my shoulder as we searched for the entrance to that tower, making me gesture to be quiet.
I looked at Berna and her fur was straight on her body as she too sensed something, or someone.
I nodded slowly. We were in one of the dozens of large corridors of the Castle, the walls inscribed with the names of Djinns and Articles of Peace, indifferent to our presence, but the same wasn't true for the humans patrolling at the end of the corridor.
Alea moved behind a corner, taking me by my hand and shoving Berna to the other side with a kick—my Guardian Bear letting the Lance do it as she sensed the urgency of the situation.
Behind cover, I peeked to gaze at the corridor, to see who we needed to be wary of.
Guarding the access to the deeper areas of the Grand Tribunal were a couple of human soldiers bearing the insignia of a noble family I didn't recognize.
Not that I knew many insignias of Sapinese nobility, my knowledge was limited to the World Lion, symbol of Royal House Glayder, and the burning crossed swords of the Wykes.
This insignia was a blue caravel breaking through white ice.
"You want to distract them, Your Highness?" Alea asked, noticing me conjure a Bubblespell above my palm.
"That's the plan," I replied. "Draw their attention away and we slip through."
"What about Berna?"
"Oh, she will be our perfect bait," I said, throwing the Bubblespell toward Berna's direction. Upon contact with the floor, the Bubblespell made a loud noise, which immediately caught the guards' attention.
"What was that?" One asked.
"I don't want the lady to think we are slacking," the colleague said. "Let's go."
Alea and I moved to hide from the approaching guards as Berna moved to the other side, ready to be chased across all the Castle in case we needed her to continue acting as bait.
Once we were out of the guards' vision, Alea nodded for me to get going and we continued our infiltration in the Grand Tribunal of Focularsa.
—
I am immensely glad Cylrit and Fatima came to the Hearth, I said in my head as we started to climb the stairs leading to the tallest tower.
I don't want to think about what the Retainer would have done to get here, I sighed; Avicenna catching my last thought that was caught by the Trucewater flowing in my head, said:
'She might have seemed rather extreme for a Djinn to you, Justiciar, but Fatima has always been a strict follower of Peace. She would have never allowed harm to come to someone else.'
And yet here I am, climbing these stairs so I can unlock the Greatrune within this keystone, I said back.
'We are not proud of our methods, Justiciar,' Avicenna said. 'We have never been. But knowing that it is you who are going to use a Greatrune for violence... makes it better.'
The Justiciar was the only being in Djinnic philosophy, religion and culture that was allowed to use violence to resolve conflicts. That was also the base upon which the Warrant of War worked.
From the novel I knew that the Second Djinn Remnant—Fatima—was one of the Djinns that tried to fight back. She invented the Relic Armour, which Cylrit currently wore, but failed still.
You and Fatima were part of the same group, right? I asked Avicenna. You wanted to fight back the Asuras, one of you even invented the Warrant of War.
'Yes, Justiciar,' Avicenna said, not hiding anything. 'The Conventicle of Artira Chul told you about—that was our name. We were a think tank made of six of the greatest Sages from the Legal Body of Ramdad. Me, Fatima Artira of Ramdad, Kwarizmi Commora of Ramdad, Nayara Massea of Ramdad, Kaebir Artira of Ramdad, and Zadeum Raffi of Ramdad.'
A heavy sorrow clung to Avicenna's telepathic words, a grief that seemed to weigh down every step as I climbed the winding stairs toward the spire's summit.
If the other Djinns are alive as Vaultlamps like you and Fatima, Avicenna, I swear I will help you get back together again, I vowed.
I already knew that it was possible the First Djinn Remnant was one of them—that Djinn was said to be affiliated with Fatima in The Beginning After The End.
We reached the top of the spire, where a great chamber opened before us, ancient Manatech illuminating the vast room as soon as we stepped inside.
"And what is this room supposed to be?" Alea's voice echoed in the mostly barren space, probably the reason why it was turned into a ballroom in the original timeline.
"Ehm... I am not entirely sure," I said, but from my index finger I saw a sudden burst of light from my storage ring.
I retrieved the keystone from it, hot and luminous, and then it bathed me in Insight, the river welcoming the precious Insight and REtrocurrent dispersing it through my body.
The Insight of the Quadra-Elemental Greatrune—the base upon which the Indrath Clan created their prized Realmheart.
'Justiciar?' Avicenna called me. 'Even from within this Vaultlamp I can feel a Greatrune being assimilated. How are you faring? I would never doubt you, but even the greatest Djinns struggled with Greatrunes.'
The Trucewater, like normal water cooling hot steel, made the weight of the Insight much easier to bear as runes started to cover my arms like how Djinns were described to have in the novel.
"Your Highness!" Alea exclaimed. "What have you done?"
"I-It's alright," I said, surprised by how well my body and mind was taking the Greatrune. "Although I admit it's kind of an eyesore to have these runes covering my arms."
Gathering my focus, I invoked REmould. Hugging my arms tightly, I commanded the burning Greatrune to migrate toward my spine, taking inspiration from the Alacryan runes and Arthur's own divine spellforms.
The glowing patterns withdrew from my arms and reemerged across my lower lumbar. Without needing to look back, my mana sense flared—acting like an inward eye fixed on the miraculous craft of REmould.
Upon my lower back, the Quadra-Elemental Greatrune resolved into a lattice of four interlocked cubes, rotating like a Rubik's cube shifting into its resolved alignment.
Each cube represented a pillar of my elemental arsenal: Ars Terramorph, Ars Ariamorph, and Ars Aquamorph.
Completing the geometric array was the fourth cube: Ars Ignimorph, the forbidden craft of flame to my people.
After years of attempts, I had finally bypassed the biological bounds of elvenkind and claimed fire as my own.
"We... we can go, Alea," I said, feeling my mind struggling to accommodate all the Insight I had just gained.
"You don't look your best, Corvis," Alea said, a hint of worry in her voice.
I commanded the Trucewater to surge from the river to my skull, letting its cool currents cascade through my limbs to smother the inferno ignited by the Quadra-Elemental Greatrune in my mind.
Avicenna, is it normal to feel like I'm burning through the worst fever of my life? I asked the Djinn, my thoughts shuddering under the heat. My skull feels like it's on fire.
'It is, Justiciar,' Avicenna replied. 'Seeing how the bodies of us Djinns weren't enough to bear the power of the Greatrunes, we all translated the strain to our minds.'
Blessed Trucewater, I thanked the Fate deviant of water mana.
"I am fine, let's take Berna and return home," I told my loyal Lance.