Knight: Tracks of Darkness Read online

limits the imagination somewhat.

  AA: But the vizier did other things. He laid a hand on the king’s head and peered into his dreams.

  MG: More work with the school of mysticism. The mystics from the falls of Evendara are a fascinating lot. Did you know that, among other useful skills and powers, they possess the second sight?

  AA: You mean they live backwards.

  MG: Indeed. Backwards. There’s no easy way to explain it. You find them saying odd things, like, “There’s so much I want to accomplish before I am born,” and they ask each other, “When did you die? Oh, you’re quite young.” Their youngest children are, in fact, the eldest and wisest among them. It is all very bizarre.

  AA: My head hurts.

  MG: So does mine.

  AA: This vizier had other tricks up his sleeves. He magnified the king’s voice, for example. He paralyzed a man with a snap of his fingers, he summoned a mist in the castle, and he fired lightning and missiles from his hands. With just a simple stroll through the city, he managed to uncover a vast conspiracy against the king! Above all, he had knowledge. He knew how to defeat a god, for serenity’s sake. This can only mean one thing.

  MG: Yes, it means one thing and one thing only. The Vizier was a master of the Aegean Isles.

  AA: A master of every isle. Impossible! I thought only the Wizard King of Aegea can master the isles.

  MG: Back then, anybody who wasn’t neverminded could master the isles if he or she was disciplined and ambitious enough. But too many of us died in the early days. There were too many of us mastering the isles. Too many witch-queens and dread lords. Facing extinction, the honor of mastering the isles had to be relegated. We added a rule to the esoteric law that none but the king and queen of Aegea can master the isles.

  AA: Esoteric law?

  MG: Exactly what the name implies. Esoteric law is a secret, unspoken canon of laws that protect us from ourselves. We added the law to our blood and it passes from generation to generation even today. What you think is an impulse or an instinct not to do something is probably the work of our esoteric law.

  AA: Interesting. But you still haven’t explained how you managed to master the Isles without having a rightful claim to the throne of Aegea.

  MG: It was quite simple, my boy. The necromancers of Omeneir discovered a very fantastic way to circumvent esoteric law. And the technique is not even magic! Ever heard of a blood transfusion?

  AA: Necromancy? Blood transfusions? I don’t want to know. It’s also interesting to note that you didn’t deny you are the Vizier in this story.

  MG: Why should I deny it? Who would believe it?

  AA: I believe it.

  MG: And that, my boy, is the foundation of Illusion magic!

  III. A Criminal Perspective about reading in general

  Chaos (RM): I don’t get it.

  Chef Woe (CW): The narrative, Rey? Or the moral? Its historical significance?

  RM: I just don’t get why we’re reading this shit.

  CW: (Sighs) Because it’s an old classic. Because we were born with this story in our hands.

  RM: I thought it was just a book of ambiguous paintings.

  CW: A copy was made for the neverminded with words, severely limiting the narrative. They can’t sit and watch the story unfold through the paintings. They don’t have the privilege of hearing the story told from one of the mystic child-elders, or zooming in on the battles, or adjusting the view to watch the story from different angles. They can’t feel the strength of the vizier’s magic when he strikes down the lord of nightmares, or hear the sound of the streams flowing through the forest of Manzil. It must be a terrible thing to live without the power of god inside.

  RM: Those idiot neverminded fools! How did a race so small and petty manage to lock us in this prison?

  CW: We’re leaders of the Red Herring, Rey; we deserved to be captured for what we did. Zambaur is an ancient place, built by the dwarves. The dwarves were the first to regard the elvish magic users with fear and contempt. Using science, they learned how to negate and cancel magic powers. But the discovery cost them greatly. So you see, Zambaur is the perfect place to lock a wizard away forever.

  RM: Don’t get all depressed on me, Dinadan. We would have won if we didn’t hate each other so much.

  CW: Also, we should not have underestimated the non-magic majority. Especially the general of Saroufim. The one they call the wizard killer.

  RM: Lord General Gregory Haggard. I hate that man. After all the beer I brewed for him in Waylake! But none of this would have happened at all if…

  CW: Right…if we didn’t follow Mad Glare from the start.

  .“Defiance: through myth and history”

  An Essay by Ana Thema, Associate Professor of Ancient History

  Weal University

  Presented one week before the events in Fall of the Minotaur King

  As I write, the great divide between the waking world (Eos) and the dream world (Nür) is widening. Our own nightmares are spilling out. Everything we have ever feared is here. We have placed our hope and our trust in the priestess-daughters of Zofia Hildreth, but they will no longer be able to keep the nightmares at bay without the aid of Wizard Kind, the same wizards our king is currently persecuting, slaughtering, drowning, torturing, beheading and burning at the stake. We have forced them into hiding; they are living in fear. We have taken the few among them who are criminal to judge the many that are virtuous. It is only together that the nightmares can be driven back and the divide can be closed forever. These are the desperate times that we are living in. This is the dire context in which I write this essay.

  This great divide has a few names. The non-magical majority calls it the fringe; Aegeans called it the dream scar. The priestess-daughters call it the fatra, a word meaning abandonment. For the purposes of my intended audience, I will refer to the divide as the fringe. The fringe lies along the great mountain range that runs from north to south near the Temple-Kingdom of Hildreth and all her lands. The area is filled with bleak cliffs, sharp precipices and poisonous tarns. Even the most seasoned veterans of the fringe die on a daily basis; there’s no telling what horror has drifted into the waking world on any given day. But the Hildreth women are soundly dedicated to the cause.

  The Aegeans claim that it was Mad Glare, also known as the author of the world’s troubles, who first made a way into the dreaming world in order to craft artifacts of great power from his imagination and bring them into Eos. But he never closed the door to the fringe behind him. If left unchecked, the fringe may eventually swallow the waking world whole, and we will be left alone in the dark with our own monstrous creations.

  I suppose it is easier to pretend none of this is happening. The famous villain, Chef Woe, always said that in order to cook a crab you should ease it into a pot of lukewarm water before gradually turning up the heat. The crab will never know it is slowly dying. It is the same with those among us who have chosen to be apathetic about this real and present danger to Eos.

  Since we know now that the dreaming world is a real place (simply east of here), it is important for scholars to scour the libraries of the world and search for any texts or stories or dissertations we may have concerning Nür. I decided to seek out our greatest prize in order to find a way to close the fringe.

  This essay highlights attempts by the author to track down and locate the original copy of Knight: Tracks of Darkness. I begin with both known historical and fictitious whereabouts of the book. Next, some setbacks with chasing a proverbial dream. I ran into a frustrating, yet informative dead end, together with a slew of unanticipated dangers that dotted the path along my eventual, fruitless success.

  Known historical and fictitious whereabouts of Knight: Tracks of Darkness

  As we know, the original book first appeared at Omeneir. The text states that the vizier presented it to the heroes and villains of the tale and made them swear on the book that the story of their quest was true:

 
“The four oaths seeped into the book, and all the pages became filled with wondrous paintings depicting the tale of the King who was bitten and cursed by a spider, and the heroes and villains who worked together to lift the curse and vanquish the spider forever, and all the great feats and deeds of arms that happened in between.”

  Therefore, it followed logically that I should travel to Omeneir, the cradle of our young race. We know from the histories that Omeneir, at its apex of growth and progress, was struck by a magical meteor that razed the land. It has since become a wretched place, haunted and foul, where dark and fell magicks are practiced, and even the Wizard Kings and Queens of Aegea shunned them and fought many wars against them. During a recent visit to the isle of Omeneir, I searched among the ruins of that once fabled city. Among other things, I found a castle ruin and a chamber that was magically barred. I managed to dispel the barrier and what I found inside was alarming:

  I saw the bones of an old king, a royal diadem hanging loosely around his skull, a scepter in his hands. He was lying in a chamber surrounded by four other skeletons—all well preserved and handled with meticulous care. I found a book in the king’s hand. When I opened it, it contained one page with the number twenty-eight scrawled in blood. I took the page with me out of the castle, but not before the skeletons arose as one to attack me. I encountered other oddities there, but any more detail about the