Sciona was on her feet again, stalking the shelves, pulling anything with ‘Stravos’ or ‘Founding Mages’ on the spine. Having died when he was barely Sciona’s age, Archmage Stravos had never penned an autobiography. However, like most of the founding mages, he had many biographies, written by his peers and their students and their students. Sciona started with the one she had read during her first year at Danworth Academy, Highmage Kellen’s The Life and Works of Andrethen Stravos, written only a decade after its subject’s untimely death.
During Sciona’s school years, the introductory chapter had been a powerful inspiration:
In Stravos, we see that any person, however mean his origins or grave his infirmities, can rise to glory through God and the pursuit of Truth. For the man who grew to become Lord Prophet Leon’s right hand had the humblest of all beginnings. He was the bastard child of a Verdani trader named Doren Stravos and a mongrel witch of the Mount.
A witch of the Mount… In other words, a highmage of the Venhold Endrastae.
The boy, Andrethen, was a sickly child with poor lungs and a twisted leg that caused a severe limp.
Not hunting material, then, according to Thomil, likely to stay home with his mother, learning her arts…
In his early years, Andrethen was left to his heathen mother’s care until the witch passed on and his father, Doren Stravos, grudgingly accepted his bastard son into his household among the Verdani.
The text then went on to detail how a young Andrethen Stravos had found a mentor in benevolent Verdani visionary, Leon, thrived under his tutelage, and accompanied him on his God-given mission to the Venhold Mountains as a native guide. Every source Sciona revisited mentioned this part of the story: how Archmage Leon had plucked the unwanted mongrel from obscurity and given him a chance at greatness through God.
Conspicuously, every source also agreed on one other point of detail: while Archmage Leon had received the vision and given the order for the barrier around Tiran, he had not been the one to execute the sourcing. Nor had the other sourcer among his disciples, Kaedor. In all accounts, the mage who had sourced the energy for the barrier was Leon’s devoted apprentice, Andrethen Stravos of the copper hair.
No text suggested that Stravos had written his sourcing spells under Leon or Kaedor’s direction, and nowhere in Leon’s writings did the Father of Tiran display an aptitude for sourcing spells powerful enough to erect a city-spanning barrier. Archmage Leon had been a visionary conduit creator and a master of complex action spells, but the master sourcer had always been Stravos. Even from a young age, Stravos’ sourcing spells had been entirely his own. It stood to reason, then, that he had based them on the work of his mother, the ‘mongrel witch of the Mount,’ where women opened windows to other realms.
Sciona had to pause for a moment, holding her head between her hands as if that could keep the riot of thoughts from spilling in every direction. This was the vital connection between Tiranish and Kwen magics—Andrethen Stravos, the bastard mage who had set the barrier between their people for the next three hundred years. His compositions had never been adapted for the spellograph, but they were the key to clearer mapping spells. They had to be!
Sciona clawed through her stacks of books for the master collection of Stravos’ work, but it wasn’t there.
“Seriously?” she muttered as she registered that it wasn’t on the table and rushed back to the shelves to find it.
For her whole education in magic, Sciona had been focusing on the wrong mapping spells: Kaedor and Leon. They were tidy, teachable, and easy to apply, but they were missing visual detail. The clarity the Leon and Kaedor methods gained in their composition, they lost in their imaging.
In fairness to Tiran’s many generations of magical educators, there was a good reason no one referred students to Stravos’ writings for modern spellwork. Sciona herself had read what remained of his compositions, and they were needlessly arcane, often containing many lines where one would suffice. His spellwork relied so heavily on handwritten flourishes that no one had ever successfully adapted it for the spellograph.
And damn it, where was that collection? Sciona dug her fingernails into the wood of the shelf where the tome should have been. Who the Hell had needed to look at Stravos’ writings?
“So,” a voice drawled, and Sciona started so sharply she banged her arm on the bookcase. “Hard at work, I see.”
Renthorn.
“Ah.” Sciona turned, tugging her robes straight and pulling on a smile. “Highmage Renthorn… and Highmage Tanrel! What are you doing here?”
“We work here.” Tanrel was eyeing her in something between amusement and concern.
“Really?” She blinked. “I mean, yes. I mean—wh-what time is it?”
“It’s morning, Miss Freynan,” Highmage Tanrel said.
“Not… the morning of the third?” She squinted. It was always hard to track time with so little sunlight, but Sciona couldn’t have been here for two full days. At least she didn’t think so. She had been too lost on the page to note the sun briefly rising or sinking over the mountains outside the library windows.
“No, no,” Tanrel laughed. “It’s the second. Renthorn and I are just here to pick up a reference book to take to our meeting with Archmage Thelanra. He’s going to help us through some problems we’re having with—”
“I’ll say, as I always do, that you should join us,” Renthorn cut Tanrel off. “Better now than after the presentations. You don’t want to embarrass yourself in front of the Council.”
“And I’ll say, as I always do, that I’m doing fine on my own. Thank you.”
“Of course.” Renthorn’s smile was sour. “We’ll leave you to your, um”—he looked around at the books Sciona had stacked and strewn across multiple tables—“What is it you’re doing, exactly?”
“More importantly, how long has it been since you slept?” Past the mirth, there was genuine worry in Tanrel’s voice, but Sciona didn’t care. She didn’t need concern from someone who thought the archmages had let her into the High Magistry for political reasons.
“Not that long,” she lied impatiently. “Just doing some background reading to clear my head.”
“You didn’t get your fill of that the day before yesterday?” Tanrel asked.
“Day before…？” Sciona narrowed her eyes. Time had warped as she fell into her research.
“Faenesday,” Tanrel said, “when you were in here loading up on more books than you could physically carry?”
“Oh… Oh!” That was right! Sciona had been in here pulling old sourcing books for inspiration, and one of those books had been the Stravos Collection. She was the reason it wasn’t here!
“What are you researching, anyway?” Renthorn leaned over the tomes Sciona had left open on one of the tables.
A laugh started deep in Sciona’s body. Partly because she couldn’t believe she had forgotten taking the Stravos Collection from the shelf barely a day ago. Partly because Renthorn’s face was hungry in a way that said that he needed to know what she was up to—because he was running into hopeless dead-ends of his own. She couldn’t stop laughing, even as the sound rang eerily among the shelves and the other two mages looked on in unease.