Ringwall's Doom. Wolf Awert

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      Chapter 1

      His back ached. His neck was stiff and his wrist screamed in protest at being leaned on for so long. Nill, the youngest archmage in the long history of Ringwall, had been crouching in the great hall for hours. The hall had been carved into the very core of Knor-il-Ank countless generations ago.

      Knor-il-Ank! The pathetic, wind-worn remains of the first mountain in the world. It had boldly forced its way out of the deepest depths of the world to reach the stars, connecting earth and cosmos for but a heartbeat. Or so the legends claimed; their habit of toying with truth and imagination had puzzled not only the archmages of Ringwall, but also the wise women of the Oas and the eldest druids since time immemorial. But even if the legends were, for once, true this time, it was all far in the distant past. Today Knor-il-Ank was no more than the rounded skull of an old man, the mysterious city of Ringwall perched atop it like a crown. Ringwall, city of the mages, was like no other city in the Five Kingdoms; no sprawling web of houses and streets surrounding a regent’s palace in hopes of gaining meaning by closeness. No, Ringwall itself was a gigantic double wall. Behind the wall there was nothing but the old mountain’s soft peak. The wall was the city.

      Nill’s neck gave a cracking noise as he raised his head to cast his gaze across the breadth of the hall. What lay here would never cease to amaze him.

      One half of the hall was bathed in a light so glaring that the countless dark markings seemed to dance a wild dance. The other half swallowed the light entirely, covering itself in darkness. Only the shimmering glyphs, whose gold sank deep into the rock like a vein of ore, gave life to the shadowy half. Nill could not stop marveling at the light: white like the center of the sun, from which people usually turned away for fear of blinding. But even more than the light, the darkness captivated him. It was more than just the absence of light. It was a force of its own, and Nill wondered whether that was not the thing that decided where the light may shine and where not. Light was light, but darkness did not mean shadows.

      Pillars around the room held the ceiling aloft with unshakable strength. There they stood in austere grandeur; leading away from the hall, eight further chambers had been hewn from the walls. And each of those chambers had two of its own, and each of those two had two more. The outermost circle counted one hundred and twenty-eight chambers, gathered around the great hall.

      All of this, the chambers, halls, floors and ceilings, even the pillars themselves, was covered in writing, as if their only purpose was to give these markings a home to run rampant in. Or so Nill thought, at least; the symbols were grouped together like words, but they formed circles, spirals and bizarre zig-zagging patterns, never content with a single direction. Straight lines, the way academics knew them, were as rare down here as an archmage’s good-natured smile.

      “What use is it,” Nill wondered, “to have learned to read the symbols if I cannot understand the rules they are ordered by? It feels like opening a random page in a book of spells, putting my finger on a random word and trying to make sense of it! It would take the rest of my life to read all the things the generations of arcanists wrote here, and two more lives to understand.”

      The markings themselves were the least of Nill’s problems. What shook him far more was the magic of light and darkness, that it even existed. The powers that Knor-il-Ank provided to Ringwall and which filled all of Pentamuria was the magic of Fire and Earth, of Metal, Water and Wood. How could two magical worlds coexist, if magic was the nature of all things and there was only one world to house them?

      Dakh-Ozz-Han had taught him that the opposite of truth СКАЧАТЬ