The Archmage: Intermission (Assorted, Part Three) (Patreon)

Trenton Elide was sitting in his wheelchair, turning over four potion bottles in his hands. All four were for the magesight arch-star, and each one had been an incredible resource. 

But he couldn’t give all of them away. The other noble houses would never allow that. 

That was the real reason that there were so few archmages in each house. Not due to a lack of resources – even the smallest house commanded billions upon billions of crowns.

It was to counter balance. 

Things had gotten risky in the last war with Bradlewyr, where a house had briefly had three archmages. It had taken them almost a century to recover from that, and even to this day, there were still ripples of that instability. If the Roark house hadn’t risen to help rebalance things…

Well, there was no sense in dwelling on ancient history. Only the elves, rare they were, remembered that directly. 

He needed to make a decision. All three of his potential heirs were within the safe threshold to take another potion. He could have given it to them right away, of course, but it was too risky. Better to spend a few more months pretending he was too weak to be of any use than risk one of his heirs dying like street trash. 

And it was a game of pretend. He was crippled now, his legs so damaged that even with the help of a faerie healer and the best mortal healing a person could buy, he only had the strength to take twenty steps before his legs gave out. Often it was less than twenty steps. 

It had been a tragedy, but he’d turned it into an opportunity. He had persuaded the council to let him go into early retirement, and raise another archmage, even though he was only in his fifties. 

But the attack hadn’t crippled his magic. He was still a strong force sorcerer, and even though his combat strategies had needed to change, and it had taken him some time to reset and redo contingencies on his arch-star, he was confident that he was as powerful as ever once again. 

Once he had raised another archmage, Trenton could become the secret weapon of the house, using his magic at range to strike at the other archmages. 

He really needed to thank whoever had killed his cousin, though. Trenton had competed with the man before for the archmage title, and it was well known that Edward Elide would have become the archmage if Trenton hadn’t just barely beaten him out in their duel.

But if Edward had taken the title, it would have been far worse for the plan. Both were force sorcerers, so the use of force magic would have been too easy to trace back to Edward and himself. 

Now he had the opportunity to select someone else, and thus slowly remove himself from even being thought about by the other noble houses. 

Trenton let out a sigh and shook his head. He was allowing himself to get distracted once again, and so he forced himself to hone in on the decisions. 

He didn’t want to give the potion to Travis, but the man was so… Competent. That was always the problem when dealing with Travis. Had the man been born ten years earlier, then he might have been able to stand up to Trenton and Edward and become the archmage head of the house, even though he was just a witch, and barely even a real mage.

For some time, Trenton had thanked the stars above that Travis had been born in between the archmage competitions, and to such a small subsidiary house to house elide. 

Now, he was having trouble justifying choosing either of the others. 

Belle was a good earth mage, and if the Chantals hadn’t been such monsters with their chosen element, he might have been happy to pick her. But the trouble was that if she was selected, she’d always be thought of as nothing more than the second place earth mage.

That might have been fine if it was secondary to House Heenling or Hasting, but the Chantals were too military-focused. Serena Chantal’s goals were only focused on keeping Paerús as impossible to invade as possible. She’d stab them in the back if it kept the military running smoothly, and she was already furious at all the dissent going through the ranks. She could make too many political gains from being known as stronger than the head of House Elide. 

Wesley, on the other hand… Well, he was decent as a body mage. He’d be able to take the title of strongest body mage without problems.

But that was it. He’d be the strongest in that field, but he wouldn’t be strong compared to any of the other archmages. Byron would squash him from a thousand feet away, Hasting would pepper him with feathers until his aura ran dry, and Dormer would be able to burry him in roots too strong to break through. 

That was the trouble with body mages in general. While they made amazing soldiers and duelists, they lacked the scale that an archmage shood. It wouldn’t be a problem if Wesley was a healer, because then there could be the justification that he wasn’t a direct combatant, but Wesley was quite publicly a duelist. If he couldn’t even beat one out of the three weakest archmages, then he couldn’t make a reasonable heir. 

He shook his head and wheeled back from the desk to give himself time to take a break.

Then his mental shielding exploded as light poured in from the windows.

Trenton had the best magical mind shielding that money could buy, directly purchased from Chris Heenling. It could stop just about anything that he didn’t allow through. Even full ritual attacks on his mind had failed more than once. 

Not only that, but he was in his house. The wards here were on medium power, with all the attacks going on, and should have acted as a second layer that were almost as impenetrable as his personal shielding.

But the sheer weight behind this psychic pulse didn’t feel like an attack. It felt more like someone had laid a hand on him, but they were simply so strong and massive that the weight had crushed him with no resistance. 

Then it was gone, and the ambient aura began to rush out of the room, flowing away from his mansion.

Then the magic that bound all of the archmages together in the council, ruling Paerús, the magic that kept nobles sealed to silence, and dozens of other oaths and bonds… began to crack. The tethers on his aura started to fray at their edges.

Trenton stared, completely caught off guard, then used a force spell to lift his wheelchair into the air and rush down the hall. 

“High alert!” he shouted. 

He spent the day trying to figure out what had gone on. His staff tore apart the clock towers, until they finally found the spell, and started taking it in for analysis, but they quickly determined that it was only one third made with human magic, and was near indecipherable. 

It was only hours later that he’d slipped away from his general staff and checking on the ritual chamber. 

The crystal had exploded. Years of work with earth magic, growing the crystal and bathing it in specialized aura pools to get it to take in magic, gone in seconds. There were only a few replacements in the entire country, and it was going to be a blow to his already limping along house to need one. 

It took him a long time to finally get to sleep, especially with him needing to lower the power of the wards to compensate for the suddenly average aura density. And when he did, he saw the child. 

He recognized the boy. He’d been the one who killed the old king, or at least had been involved. 

As the boy lit his aura, Trenton swore like a sailor. An archmage, with two stars that Trenton didn’t even recognize. 

As he began to talk, Trenton’s heart started to plummet. The boy lay bare the secret of the aura pillars.

“No…” Trenton whispered. 

Then he began on the council’s existence, and how they used the supposedly meritocratic parliament to act as a puppet for the nobility, leaving only the senate as a way to appease the people under the illusion of choice.

“Some of you may say Zheren is no better. They have ten princes,” the boy said. “That’s true. But their ten princes are voted in by their ten largest population centers. Their parliament is voted in based on land. Their senate proposes laws, and their princes vote on them. Our convoluted and obfuscated system only allows us to be at the whim of a few powerful people. Archmages are powerful assets, I don’t deny that. But does that mean they deserve to run the country? Because they’re strong?” 

Trenton paused before he let out a deluge of curses that would have made the hardest of sailors blush.

All the effort of banning books from Zheren and Elderglass and Igmanis and Tracktath. Suppressed rebellions, constant work and fight and control. It had been slipping, slowly but surely, but… Not this fast.

Years, no, centuries, of work were crumbled into dust in a single night of sleep. 

Then the message gave him one last slap in the fact. 

“And for the archmages who think that the nobility can keep your power after this, you should know that if you really want to try and keep a stranglehold on the people of this nation, you’ll need to go through me. I assisted in the death of an archmage as a novice. Then, at a party, I defeated a Faerie Queen. Then I assisted in the death of two other archmages. I would be willing to bet that I’ve defeated more archmage level beings in my four years as a mage than most of you have in your entire life.”

Evander stepped closer to his dream form. 

“And you can’t kill me in any way that matters. The truth is here. Adapt or fall.” 

Trenton drove his fist through the dream image of Evander.

… 

In an office in Elderglass, one of the high ranking members of the Ligature watched as a pile of ritual components that fueled the ligature’s knots, which should have lasted years, began to light up. The foreign network division was a small one, only commanding a small fraction of the nation’s resources, but they’d been working to destabilize Paerús for over two centuries now. Regardless of if you worked for the ideals, or if you simply acknowledged their stone mines were too valuable for such an isolationist country, it needed to open its borders, and freeing its people would be nice too.

And it seemed like someone had finally gotten the truth out. The next few years would be chaotic.

But they would be interesting.

…

On a mountaintop, too high for any mortal to scale, a mountain that had killed countless archmages, the nest of a hundred or more ley lines, an old woman sat. 

Sat and watched the future. 

The future was a funny thing. In the short term, it was relatively predictable. Any archmage of charm magic could sense incoming danger or the like.

In the long term… The future changed quite often. There were glimpses of paradise on earth snuffed out because a man stepped on a bug, and glimpses of totalitarian dictators who rose to power blown away by the act of a woman turning left, rather than right, at an intersection. 

It was a protean mass of chaos, and one she watched at all times. There were always millions or billions of possible futures, and they always changed. They also all were different levels of likely, and through long practice, the old woman had learned to identify the most and least likely threads to come to fruition.

Which is why she took notice when the fates of the entire northern half of the continent shifted radically in an instant, and the projections that had been stable and most likely for centuries began to shift. 

The old woman cracked a smile. It had been a long shot, but it had happened. 

She always loved it when someone beat the odds.