Sciona sat straight up in bed.
There was something she needed to check.
“Going so soon?” Aunt Winny looked forlorn as Sciona tore through the lamplit kitchen the next morning. “I’m making waffles for breakfast.”
“Next week, Auntie.” Sciona gave her aunt a peck on the cheek, “I’ve got to catch the early train back.”
“Back?”
“To the university.”
“Why?” Aunt Winny asked as Sciona crammed her feet into her boots and sat to lace them up.
“Because of windows!”
“What?”
“It’s just that I was trying to think of mentions of witches in old books. And people always wrote about witches ‘opening windows,’ which the writers thought was some kind of scrying or divination, but what if it wasn’t, Auntie? What if it was mapping? What if those windows opened to the Otherrealm?”
Aunt Winny frowned in a mixture of confusion and concern—the way she always did when Sciona talked about magic with unwomanly animation. “What does heathen witchcraft have to do with your research?”
“That’s what I’m going to find out,” Sciona said and sighed fondly as Aunt Winny made a sign against evil in the air before her.
“Such talk in my house! And so close to Feryn’s Feast, Sciona! I don’t want my precious niece incurring any curses.”
“You can’t activate a curse by reading,” Sciona said, tying off the lace on her second boot.
Aunt Winny made a disapproving noise. “You never know when it comes to dark arts from beyond the barrier, do you?”
“Magic is my area, Auntie.” Sciona stood and slung her bag over her shoulder. “I’m pretty sure I know what I’m doing. Tell Alba I love her!” she called as she rushed out the door into the misty dark of the morning.
The fourth floor of the library was blessedly empty when Sciona arrived. Under the cozy buzz of lamplight, she ran a finger along a row of spines and pulled the autobiography of Highmage Jurowyn. The eccentric traveling mage had risked Blight to map the far reaches of the Kwen shortly after Tiran’s barrier went up and shortly before such travels became illegal.
Many of Jurowyn’s contemporaries and successors had dismissed his accounts, accusing him of fabricating the more fantastical elements—the cliffside cities that rivaled Tiran in size, the shape-shifting sages with their bodies wound round with tattoos, the wolves the size of horses. But, fanciful or not, Jurowyn’s writings represented some of the only firsthand accounts of the Kwen in the Latter Age of Founders, and Sciona scanned voraciously until she landed on a passage of interest:
I would most vehemently contest my colleague’s condemnation of Kwen magics as ‘dark’ and ‘sinister.’ While there are surely sinister elements to this little-known art, so too are there sinister uses for any trade or tool. In my travels, I have found the majority of Kwen magic practitioners to be humble women who prioritize the upkeep of the home, the care of the sick, and the protection of the family.
That part aligned with what Thomil had said of Kwen magic: it was mostly mothers, daughters, and sisters using their abilities in service of the community.
I have found witches applying their skills to all manner of things good and small. A kindly crone who shared her hut with me upon a fall evening showed me a divining spell by which she received visions from other worlds. With but a few runic lines on a flattened stone, she could summon moving, breathing images from a realm beyond our own, rendering in such exquisite detail every form and figure that a man might think he gazed through a glass. What this realm was, the crone could not explain, for she had not the language.
A somewhat less agreeable witch in the next settlement told me that she used the same magic to watch over her sons whenever they struck out hunting to make sure no harm befell them. However, when I requested a demonstration, she coldly told me that such spells were for the eyes of family and not for strangers. Throughout the rest of my stay, I pressed for a demonstration to no avail.
Another book, penned a decade later by a Highmage Eristidel, mentioned a similar phenomenon:
It is well known that the witches beyond the barrier once opened clear windows, both to our own world and worlds beyond.
“Well known?” Sciona muttered in annoyance. Kwen magical practices may have been ‘well known’ in Eristidel’s time, but it took Sciona a full day of scouring the library to come up with additional sources mentioning anything more on the subject. When she finally found them, they didn’t add much. Archmage Faene the Second referred to ‘witch mirrors’ in one text and ‘scrying wells’ in another without elaborating on what they did nor whether these were two different types of magic. Highmage Hurothen wrote:
Lord Prophet Leon’s mapping spells serve a Higher Purpose than the lurid pools used by witches past to spy about, for mapping spells are instruments of God. Comparing the two is tantamount to heresy.
Sciona lingered on those lines for a long time, chewing the inside of her cheek in thought. Hurothen might not think that witch mirrors should be compared to Tiranish mapping spells, but the assertion itself suggested that someone before or during Hurothen’s tenure had drawn a connection between the two types of magic. The claim must have existed for him to feel the need to refute it. And Hurothen had lived at a time when mages had not only heard of witch magics but seen them with their own eyes.
Sciona searched the library for the next several hours, hoping to find the sources Hurothen was referencing, but the works of most of his contemporaries had been destroyed in the library fire of 252. Whatever opinions he had been so keen to quash, they were lost to time.
“Congratulations, Hurothen,” Sciona grumbled as she let another disappointing source fall shut. “I guess you got your wish.”
Despite the dearth of information, Sciona had at least confirmed one consensus on Kwen magics: women had once used spells that allowed them to see in lifelike detail beyond their immediate surroundings. Scholars might disagree on what these witch mirrors had displayed—the mortal realm, the Otherrealm, or something beyond either—but it was the imaging magic itself that intrigued Sciona. Regardless of what Highmage Hurothen thought, that type of imaging should be applicable to the mapping of the Otherrealm. If Sciona could just discover how the Kwen witches had made their mirrors so much clearer than Tiranish mapping spells, sourcing issues could be a thing of the past.
She would have hit a frustrating dead end there, unsure where to go next, if not for a familiar source she skimmed on a whim: Highmage Raeden’s History of Magic.
In short, we can be sure that there is no link whatsoever between the heathen witches of the Kwen and the civilizing magic of our Bright Haven. To date, the only mage in history with a drop of Kwen blood was Andrethen Stravos, who deserted the mountain Kwen in his youth, never to associate with his savage kin again, and fathered no descendants due to his infirmity.
“Of course!” Sciona breathed into the quiet of the library.
Founding Mage Andrethen Stravos of the copper hair, creator of Tiran’s barrier! Most sources didn’t acknowledge his maternal lineage out of respect for his accomplishments, but that copper hair had come from somewhere. Stravos had been half Kwen. Or was it a quarter? Maybe just a quarter, but even so…