of him.
‘I bid you both good night,’ said their father and returned to his workroom. The light burned there long into the night.
‘Lothern,’ said Teclis as if he could not quite believe the word. ‘It’s not Hoeth, but it’s a start. It has one of the greatest libraries in all Eataine. And Inglorion Starweaver and Khaladris have mansions there.’
‘The Sea Guard are there,’ said Tyrion. ‘Perhaps I will be able to find a place in one of the regiments. Who knows some day I might even become one of the White Lions, if the opportunity to win glory presents itself.’
Teclis looked as happy as Tyrion could ever remember him being. ‘At last, I will have my chance to see a bit of the world before...’
He did not finish his sentence. He did not have to. Tyrion knew he was thinking about his illnesses and the possibility of death. That always lay over his brother like a shadow even when he was in his brightest moods.
‘Maybe we will be able to get on a ship,’ said Tyrion, playing to his brother’s fantasies, ‘and go to the Old World and the Kingdoms of Men.’
‘Cathay and the Towers of Dawn,’ said Teclis naming a place they both knew he would never see. Teclis laughed. He was happy and that was infectious. Tyrion could not remember the last time he had heard honest mirth from his brother. The laughter stopped as suddenly as it came.
‘In truth, I will be happy just to see Lothern again,’ he said. ‘Just to see... there have been times when that seemed a wish beyond all fulfilling.’
‘What do you think will become of us?’ Tyrion asked, just as suddenly serious. He felt as if their lives had just come to some vast shadowy crossroads. It was like being a traveller lost in the dark in the mountains, who realises suddenly he is standing on the edge of a precipice with no idea how deep it is. Soon they would be leaving the only home they had ever known and voyaging to a land of strangers.
‘I don’t know,’ said Teclis. ‘But we will face it together.’
It came to him then that his brother was not as confident as he sounded, that he was seeking reassurance, as much as making a statement.
‘Yes, we will,’ Tyrion said, smiling. With the confidence of youth he could not imagine anything that could tear them apart. ‘You will be a great wizard.’
‘And you will be a great warrior.’ Teclis sounded as sure as if he could see it with his own eyes.
Tyrion hoped he would live to do so.
It was almost time, N’Kari could feel it. The ancient spells were weakening. The terrible ghosts were weary. Something was happening. Somewhere far off at the very edges of this great net of magic, something was beginning to unravel. The world was changing once more. In recent centuries the flows of dark power had become ever stronger. Something was happening out there in the worlds beyond worlds, something that was drawing the forces of Chaos to this mudball planet once more.
Perhaps the ancient dormant gates in the Uttermost North were awakening. Perhaps it was merely the whim of the Powers that they would return to this place and amuse themselves for a time. It did not matter to N’Kari what it was. It was the results that counted for him.
He sniffed with nostrils that were not nostrils and drew tainted magic into lungs that were not lungs. He had waited in the centre of this web of power for thousands of years, keeping still, drawing no attention to himself, accumulating tiny amounts of magic whenever he could, when he knew that it would not draw attention to his presence.
He had become familiar with the strange lines of the spell, and the even stranger paths left by an ancient race that lay underneath them. It was obvious that the master wizards among the elves had known about the presence of the ancient ways beneath the fabric of time and space made by this world’s original masters. They had incorporated elements of them into their grand design. It was both a strength and a weakness.
The strength lay in the fact that they could tap into the energy wells of the Old Ones, use their ancient grids to strengthen their own magic.
The weakness lay in the fact that the Paths of the Old Ones were corrupt and slowly unravelling and letting elements of the Realms of Chaos, the Daemon Realms