Thomil had gone still, his head tilted, and when Sciona stopped bouncing to look at him, there was a strange expression on his face.
“It’s…”
“It’s what?” she asked when he trailed off.
“Why does it look so real?” A note of unease had crept into his voice. “If this is another realm, why does it look just like ours?”
“Does it?” Sciona had never seen any field in the mortal realm that sparkled like that, but then again, she had never seen snow cover the ground.
“It looks like the Kwen.”
“What?” Sciona said as Thomil’s arm went tense beneath her touch. “Why would—”
“The Forbidden Coordinates…” he murmured beneath his breath. His brows knit together. “I always thought… Do you have an action spell ready for testing, ma’am?”
“Yes. Of course.” It was the simple, low-risk pushing spell she usually used to test an unknown sourcing method.
“Could you do something for me, Highmage Freynan? Could you siphon?”
“Sure.” Sciona had obviously been planning to test her new spell anyway.
Releasing Thomil’s strangely rigid arm, she put her hands to the spellograph, targeted a dense evergreen bush, and hit the siphoning key. The bush lit up bright white—beautiful Godly flame—and then unraveled like a ball of yarn thrown to the wind, leaves and fine splinters spiraling outward. Sciona had opened her mouth to exclaim in wonder when—
Crash!
The image vanished as Thomil hurled the spellograph from the desk. It smashed into the nearest bookcase and broke. Screws and keys scattered in all directions.
“Thomil!” Sciona cried out over the ping of metal components across the lab floor. “What are you doing?”
Thomil was pale, shaking. His gray eyes had gone as wide as if he’d just seen Hell itself.
“What is it?”
“That…” He pointed a trembling finger to the bent remnants of the mapping coil. “That was Blight!”
“I, Leon of the Verdani, hereby establish this plain from the Venhold Mountains to the Gray Barrows as Tiran, which means God’s Haven in Old Verdanish. The faithful who have joined me here will now be called Tiranish, for we and our descendants will serve as stewards of God’s Bright Haven. Here we will dwell from henceforth in the Light of Truth, the pursuit of Knowledge, and the Bounty of God.”
- The Leonid, Conquests, Verse 104 （1 of Tiran）
BEFORE SCIONA COULD ask what on Earth was the matter with Thomil, the Kwen had whirled and fled the laboratory, pushing through the door so hard that it banged off the wall in his wake.
“Thomil!” She followed, but he was ridiculously fast. By the time she had picked up her skirts to pursue him out of the lab, he had vanished down the hall. “Thomil, wait!” When she rushed into the lobby, there was no sign of him.
“Have you seen my assistant?” she asked the secretary.
“The Blighter?” the man behind the desk said, sounding bored. “He ran off that way.”
Sciona found Thomil in a back stairwell between the third and fourth floors, curled up against the wall like a child. He was quaking worse than before, his head between his knees, strong arms clutched tight around himself as though he feared his body might shake apart.
“Thomil, what is it?” Sciona reached for him, but he flinched back so hard she recoiled.
“Don’t! Mage!” He spat the word like it burned in his mouth. “Don’t touch me!”
“You can’t talk to me like that,” she said, unnerved. “What’s gotten into you?”
“I told you! That was Blight!”
“And I heard you,” she said, “but what does that mean?”
“The siphoning spell you did…” Thomil’s head was still clenched between his knees, fingers digging into his copper hair. “That white light… That’s what Blight looks like when it takes a living thing.”
“That’s…” Sciona took a step back, shaking her head. He couldn’t be suggesting what he seemed to be. It was insane. Unthinkable. “I’m sure you’re mistaken,” she said in the calmest tone she could muster. “No one siphons energy from this realm. Only from the Otherrealm.”
“Call it the Otherrealm, then. Call it whatever you want. That place we saw in the mapping coil was a meadow in the Southern Kwen.”
“Thomil.” Sciona did her best to channel Alba’s soothing air, though she knew she was bad at it. “Trust me, that’s simply not possible. I promise.”
He looked directly at her, and she was disconcerted to find tears standing in his usually stony eyes, sharpening them to steel. She drew back, afraid of the edge.
“Not possible?” His voice had gone low, and Sciona was abruptly reminded that her assistant was, at heart, a predator from a ruthless wilderness where men sometimes hunted and ate each other. “I grew up on the plains of the Southern Kwen, Highmage. I know what they fucking look like.”
“Hey now, listen—”
“No, you listen!” Thomil hissed, and Sciona took another step back. “My father died in a deerskin tent pitched in a snowy field like that one. He came apart in spirals of light, just like that bush. Siphoned. It—” His voice caught, shaking with something more than grief. With rage. “It took my sister an hour to scrub all the blood off me. She didn’t cry. She never cried when there was someone who needed her to be strong. She never stopped moving forward, believing the next migration could bring us something different, something better. But even she…” He paused to take a shuddering breath, and when he blinked, tears spilled from his eyes. “Blight took her, too—during the crossing into Tiran, within a mile of the barrier.”
But it couldn’t be. Sciona shook her head, struggling for the rational explanation she knew existed—because it had to exist. Tiran was built on magic, and Tiran was an inherent good, God’s Chosen City, His Bright Haven in a world of darkness. There had to be some other explanation.
“Look…” Her thoughts, which had scattered like a flurry of panicked birds, lit on the first explanation that seemed stable. “Founding Mage Leon referred to the Otherrealm as a garden—which can also mean ‘paradise’ in Old Verdanish. If it happens to look like the Kwen to you, it’s because that’s your idea of paradise and bounty. Right?” That made sense, didn’t it? Yes. “You said yourself that our human minds might not be capable of processing the Otherrealm. Maybe God accounts for that. Maybe He only shows us the Otherrealm in a form that we understand.”
“Then what is Blight?” Thomil demanded.
“It’s what our top researchers have always said it is: a sickness that manifests in the unwashed—”
“Blight is not a sickness,” Thomil cut her off. “Pox is a sickness. Fever is a sickness. Blight is a supernatural evil that happens to do exactly what your siphoning spell did to that bush.”
“I…” What could Sciona say to that? How could Thomil be mistaken? But at the same time, how could he be right? How could that possibly be right? “Maybe you’re not remembering clearly. Sometimes, when an event is too upsetting to wrap your mind around, your memory gets muddled. When my mother died—”