REAPERS - Book Two: The Hunger and the Sickness

28

The arcanist focused intently on the black bauble suspended in the space before him. The lightless oddity was the size of an infant's fist or blawber's egg, stained the deepest black any human eye had likely ever beheld. Inkier than the ocean's lowest fathoms or the cruelest sandman's heart or the umbral womb of Night herself. Void of all hue or luminosity, the thing, a font of stark and cold oblivion. It was an object metaphysical, a beautiful cosmic rupture, a tear in the epidermis of reality, an unhealing wound in spacetime. The faintest glimmer of wire unmasked the illusion that the wondrous bauble levitated in the very air, revealing it to truly be a lightless gemstone that hung like an onyx spider, sable and patient, on fine taut strands of metallic wire.

The gifted thaumaturgist Amarant, who presently peered into that pitch hole, wore metal goggles with lenses fashioned from radiant stones that had been horned from the sockets of a long-dead archmage's moldy skull. The pilfered scintillating orbs were shaved down into precise slivers by the Workshop's master gearsmiths and immaculately polished and laced with minute runery. The headgear allowed Amarant and his fellows to better scry the inner workings of arcane crystals and still be shielded from the madstone's entropic emanations, for a single unwarded glance was to risk an uncoupling of the offender's body and soul. To stare too long into the once-lost relic was to have it quite literally stare back into you with a thousand-thousand phantasmal eyes. Amarant felt the powerful confluence of minds within the abyssal stone attempt to tractor his inner being into some unreal doomland for the ethereal shredding. The jet black artifact had clearly done so to countless other unfortunates for the soulsucking crystal swam with multitudinous schools of dead consciousnesses darting about in its inky depths. When looking at the thing Amarant often forgot where he was. Who he was. Why he was. But the instruments and wards were there to protect him. His employers took every conceivable measure to maintain the safety of those who handled these powerful things of wonder and woe—or so they resolutely assured.

Amarant conducted his work with a smattering of other brilliant arcanists in a room far below the uneasy streets of Camshire. The very existence of the 'Workshop,' where thaumaturgists of every known school and discipline toiled, was a direct violation of the international treaty formally known as the Maedrum Covenant. The multinational Arcanum's ironclad armistice banned all active practice of sorcery no matter how righteous or paramount the cause. 'Let the monsters slumber,' it had always been wisely and forcibly advised. But an unknown cabal of highmen—or one sole and powerful architect—ordered the commission of these secret studies outside the knowledge of their own chiefs in the name of the Nation's survival and interests. Unless that obfuscation, too, was a deceit and the High Ministers Three were fully aware of their own hypocrisy by letting this dangerous work carry on under the feet of the very people they were charged with protecting, in conscious defiance of the Arcanum's unwavering mandates. Amarant had no inkling of the truth on such matters. Those at his level were only told what they needed to know. Still, despite the opaque and unsung nature of his role, the arcanist was glad to have the opportunity to labor in the Workshop. Many exciting breakthroughs had been made in those tunnels and vaults, ones which Amarant and his peers would never have been shown outside that place. A buzz hung in the stale subterranean air. The clandestine efforts of the thaumaturgical order were bearing glorious fruits, quietly ushering in a thrilling new age of Enlightenment, as the world above marched on in mindless and bloody inertia. The great Gnaeus Egon—whom Amarant once heard a rich and engaging lecture from in the Halls of Theory (Egon's side mutterings and unraveling thoughts aside, for genius often came at such costs)—was said to be furiously at work distilling the theorems and models into a lovely and elegant set of formulas that described the underpinnings of reality and sorcery and revealed the universe to be a simulacrum emergent from some strange cosmic cauldron of leylines and impossibly small motes of energy and phantasmal waves of pure probability. Reflecting the old myths of chains of worlds devouring one another, the emerging model of All could be viewed as holograms within holograms, an infinity of manifolds and tesseracts. Unseen lattices upon which reality itself was draped like a glorious and miraculous tapestry. Everything from the impossibly blistering hearts of the stars to the mole roosting on Amarant's big left toe—if Egon's theories were true, was all fractal geometry all the way up and down. An invisible web of leyline 'strings' that formed the backbone of the material world. These forces had been manipulated and studied for untold ages but those magi who walked before the Workshop's elite thinkers were adrift in the dark, playing with fire they did not intellectually grasp or deeply comprehend. Only by building on the knowledge of those before them and piecing together the scattered lessons of the ancients could the thaumaturgists of today achieve the levels of mastery at their fingertips. The Workshop was poised to rescue the world from its troubles, so long as the emerging knowledge was restricted to those who could be trusted not to abuse its theoretically limitless power—for the dark aspects of sorcery also made themselves woefully known to those great thinkers as they went deep into its mysteries. As thrilling as their groundbreaking progress had been, the theorists and observers had also come to better understand the ominous link between sorcery and the essence of life itself. If a mage did not sap and exploit the orderly energies of other lifeforms to power his undoings of the natural order, intrinsic entropic forces would instead leech and twist his own body and mind. While the ancient masters and some modern rogue magi had learned to vampirically steal the energies from others to fuel their craft or protect themselves with runes, the majority of sorcerers who operated in secret were literally draining their own selves away to work their art, corrupting their bodies and sawing at their minds. Beyond the damage they did to themselves, those misguided and reckless outside practitioners threatened to unleash nightmares into the world if they opened the wrong doorways. Studies hinted at alien dimensions and abstract planes as real as their own, where entire other unfathomable realities were believed to thrive, and that they could sometimes spill into their own world, fueling the legendry of old. Superstitions and fears of daemons lurking in the spaces between. While some of those astral reaches promised unimaginable secrets and altered states of being to those who accessed them, other more hostile zones potentially hosted malicious forces. Pure and sentient entropy. Living shadows of awful and endless appetite.