Magic caused the war. Magic is forbidden. Magic will save us. The Relic Guild is the award nominated first book in The Relic Guild trilogy.
It was said the Labyrinth had once been the great meeting place, a sprawling city at the heart of an endless...
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At the end of the Genii War there had been a mighty reckoning. No one knew why the Timewatcher abandoned the Labyrinth, but they said that, along with millions of Aelfir, the war had killed Her compassion. The retribution She vented upon Her enemies was as furious as it was merciless. For Spiral, the great and terrible instigator, She created a distant realm called Oldest Place, a prison of endless torment and suffering in which her gravest enemy was incarcerated for eternity. The Genii, those Thaumaturgists who had turned their backs upon their Mother to serve Spiral so loyally, were tossed screaming and writhing into the Nothing of Far and Deep, where their souls were lost forever to its primordial mists.
But it was reckoned the Timewatcher's greatest act of retribution was reserved for Spiral's armies, those Houses of the Aelfir who had joined the Genii in their malicious crusade.
The Timewatcher created a space, a gap between the fabric of existence and the emptiness of non-existence. Into this gap, she poured dead time, every second of every atrocity committed during the Genii War, and it became a vast realm of damnation, perversion, abomination. She called this place the Retrospective.
The renegade Aelfir were banished to the Retrospective, along with their lands. The decay of dead time corroded their realms into an uninhabitable wasteland. Their bodies were corrupted into the forms of hideous creatures, while their minds were torn and damaged beyond redemption. The hundreds of thousands of enemy Aelfir who had survived the war, whose Houses had once been great and wise, were reduced to nothing more than blood-thirsty animals, without a shadow of good or reason, left to scavenge upon each other in a landscape of poison and ashes.
There was no reprieve from the Retrospective, no chance of escape. Its doorway was set to drift aimlessly through the endless alleyways of the Great Labyrinth, as lost as the souls beyond it. It served as an example, a warning, an eternal deterrent for any denizen seeking passage to the Houses who had remained loyal to the Thaumaturgists and their Mother. The Labyrinth became a forbidden zone, and the cruelty and torture of the Retrospective bespoke a promise of what it meant to be an enemy of the Timewatcher.
Only the boundary wall kept the denizens safe from the Retrospective, and Clara shivered to recall the tales she had heard of the wild demons that dwelt within that damned House of dead time.
Under the bright glare of Silver Moon, the official tram of the Nightshade drove through the central district. It weaved through the main streets. The occasional purple spark of thaumaturgy snapped from the power line and flashed against its sleek black shell. Inside, Clara clutched the satchel of spell spheres in her lap with white-knuckled fingers. She fidgeted nervously beneath the violet light of a ceiling prism. Across from her, Samuel sat studying his spirit compass. He had not said a word since they had left the Nightshade's forecourt.
Clara had never seen a wild demon herself, but she had once had a client who claimed he had been attacked by one. His left leg was missing from just below the knee; three fingers on his right hand had been bitten off; and gouge marks and scars had decorated his body and face. Clara desperately tried not to think of what manner of monster could inflict such wounds.
