FATE\Deus Decipit

Chapter 2: Converging Winds

9:30 am, Friday, 13 hours before the first servant is summoned, The Middle of the Mediterranean Sea

Aaron Sylphus stood at the edge of his island home. From a distance, the lonely island appeared to be nothing more than a rock pillar sticking out of the blue Mediterranean, but closer inspection revealed columns carved into the rock and strange architecture that would remind one of a beaker; thicker at the bottom and becoming thinner and more intricate as it moved upwards. At the base of this tower, this strange mix of nature and architecture, he leaned on a railing carved from the same light-brown rock as the rest of his home. His baggy clothes and wavy, dyed blue hair, shaved in a mohawk, blowing in the cool sea breeze of early fall. He took a long draw of his cigarette as he looked out over the water, listening to the waves crash against the rock surface less than two meters below him. Lost in the peace of his tobacco, he only barely noticed the dark clouds forming on the horizon.

'That's a good sign'.

This was not sarcasm.

Flicking his nearly finished cigarette into the sea, he turned back inside the archway leading into his abode. His "home", as much as it was a home, was nothing more than a singular, circular room with no true ceiling as the tower bottle-necked into the blue sky above. There were no doors either, only empty archways, and circular holes acting as windows. Though simple, he didn't hate the aesthetic, perhaps because it was where he had lived all his life, and the magical wards that guarded the tower prevented both discovery and foul weather, meaning that the space was tranquil in every sense of the word, complete with even small trees and shrubbery on both the inside and outside the tower. In sharp contrast with the natural decor, various pieces of furniture: desks, a computer, couches and a simple bed, dotted the outside rim of the room, perhaps 50ft in diameter. In the center, slightly below the rest of the room and surrounded by metal railing, an intricate magic circle that stared up through the tower and into the sky beyond.

He cringed briefly, remembering when he had to share this space with his late father; there had been no privacy whatsoever. He had never met his mother, and assumed that his father, either having no interest in marriage or knowing it wasn't possible with his secluded lifestyle, probably knocked up some hooker, or else a non-firstborn daughter of a mage family, who were often sold off in a similar way for their magical circuits, and took the child the pass on his legacy, his 'business'.

This 'business', as it was, had existed long before himself or even his father. He had been taught that this tower, which had acted as the Sylphus family workshop for generations, could be traced all the way back to Aeolus, the king of winds. He had never believed those stories, but the connection wasn't terribly far-fetched either. The circle that laid in the center of the workshop had been designed long ago; so long that the records of its creation no longer existed. Neither he nor his father knew how it worked, only how to use it. The many concentric circles within the glyph represented various things, locations, weather patterns, temperatures, and by writing the right sigils in the right places the weather across the Mediterranean could be manipulated. Naturally, his family possessed similar magecraft, though it was better described as the manipulation of magnetic fields, and couldn't accomplish anywhere near this scale.

Politicians, mages, the wealthy, the underground, and anyone else who knew of the secret tower would contact him and pay him to alter the weather patterns for one purpose or another. It was often simple things like making clear skies for someone's vacation, or conjuring a thunderstorm for somebody else's experiment. One particularly seedy client, an Irish mage by the name of Artorias MacMannan, once had him conjure a violent thunderstorm to prevent an enemy of his from being able to fly out of the region. He had been paid handsomely for that feat, and it was a feat. The circle had weakened over the years, so now weather patterns had to be ordered about a week in advance, and the locations and scale were becoming less accurate, and more susceptible to preexisting climate patterns to the point where he would have to monitor the weather constantly to make sure that he could actually fulfill his clients' requests. It was impossible to know why the circle was weakening, though he personally attributed it to Theseus' paradox; that, through years of maintenance, the original components of the circle had been gradually replaced, and whatever magic or magecraft that originally held it together was becoming unraveled. It could also be that the circle was truly magical, and the lack of Mystery in the world was weakening what magic was left, including the circle his family was sworn to manage.