Forbidden Magic

Hilami did not say much over the next two days. She, of course, publicly claimed credit for my sudden miraculous recovery, as she put it. But that aside, her demeanor took a sudden shift after my last encounter with Tomosse. Whenever we made eye contact, she glared at me as if I had contracted some sort of evil disease.

A training accident in which Giorg smashed my foot with his hammer gave Hilami the opportunity to have me all to herself. As she prepared another course of bitterroot juice and mashed carrots, she asked me, “Have you sensed anything out of the ordinary lately?”

“Hilami, if I did, you would be the first to know,” I told her. “Actually, come to think of it, during the battle, there was a Lago warrior who -”

“Foolish boy,” she scolded me. “Two nights ago, I sensed an evil presence in this city. I traced it to your room. You were speaking to it, but I could not hear its replies. We are not friends, you said.”

“Tomosse? He’s not evil,” I corrected her in an attempt to defend him. “He wants to defeat the Demon Lord Ayya just as much as we do.”

“Tomosse? Definitely a demon's name.” Hilami said as she presented the elixir to me. After putting the elixir on my lap, she wandered around the room. “He wants to help defeat the Demon Lord? Perhaps this Tomosse can show himself and tell me to my face.”

Nothing happened.

“Ah,” Hilami said. “He’s scared of me. Demons usually are. Anyone who knows the Forbidden Magic, they tend to steer clear of.”

“How can you even be sure it was him?” I asked her. “It could have been an evil presence AND Tomosse in the same room.”

“You clearly cannot tell the difference,” Hilami told me. “Did he touch you?”

“What?”

“I asked if he touched you,” she repeated, “this Tomosse.”

“He did,” I admitted. “He healed… whatever it was that hurt me.”

“He's trying to mess with you,” she warned me. “You will not speak with this demon again. The next time you see him, you call for me. Understand?”

She did not even give me a chance to reply before she left the room. Forbidden Magic? That was the first time I heard of such a thing. Did she say she knew about it? That was something I had to explore. Hilami’s storage of scrolls had been destroyed when the demons attacked Andawas, but there was another location I could go to inquire about this Forbidden Magic.

•

Freehold's library had sustained some damage during the recent demon attack, but almost everything was still intact. That was good for me because I had much reading to do tonight. I tried to sleep through the day so I could be awake enough during the night. Ipas visited the library often, so if she wasn't already there by the time I got there, she would be eventually. I knew a little bit of the Ogre tongue, but more difficult words and passages could use her gift of sight.

I arrived at the library before she did, which gave me some time to snoop around alone. But I was not alone.

“Who goes there?” a man asked me. I looked around the library, but could not see anyone at first. I went around the map-table in the center of the library. There he was, slouched back against a shelf, sitting crooked on the floor with a goblet of rum in his hand. He looked like he had not slept in days, and his hair, normally long and spectacular, was a frazzled mess spreading out in every direction.

“Edagri? Your Highness? What are you doing here?”

“What does it look like?” he asked in response, barely able to string together a coherent sentence. “I'm drowning my sorrows away with some good old rum. Nice and neat.”

“How many of those have you had?”

“Just a few,” the elf king groaned, fighting the occasional hiccups. “I promise I won't be a bother to you.”

“You need to go to bed, Your Highness,” I told him as I tried to pull him up and off the floor. “You're drunk. Come on. You need to go to bed before you do something rash.”

“I wish I could have done more,” he cried. “I should have prepared my soldiers better. I didn't know…”

“Of course, you didn't know,” I tried to comfort him. “There was no way of knowing they were going to attack the city.”

Gihri, the king's son, ran into the library. Once he spotted us, he shouted, “There you are, father!”

“Go away, child,” Edagri tried to ward off his son. “I can quit whenever I want.”

Gihri pulled the king away from me. “Let's get you to bed,” he told the king. To me, he said, “I'm sorry you had to see him like this. This drinking problem has only gotten worse since arriving here.”

The two elves gave me no chance to reply, for they were both long gone before I had a chance to process anything. They left me alone to conduct my investigation. I filed through the contents of the shelves in a reckless manner. Some of the titles, despite the shelves all being labeled in the Ogre tongue, were in the common tongue, so they were easier to file through. My first thought was to look through matters of record. The fact that I was specifically chosen to defeat the Demon Lord Ayya was known across the realms, so it made sense that there would have been something recorded about it in one of those scrolls.

Court records, royal appointments, marriages, deaths, births, state visits, nothing was there that could help me with my quest. Or so I thought. After searching through a hundred or more scrolls, I found one with a title written in five languages: A Record of the Wars Against the Children of Fire. Perfect. As far as I knew, all of this Choosing nonsense happened on the very first day of their invasion. So all I had to do was open the scroll and read from the beginning:

“On the 16th day of the 3rd month of the 33rd year of the reign of King Sumar II, a company of demons attacked a granary in the Western Dorns. They were warded off by local archers.”

I had no idea who this king was, but that was definitely not the day I was looking for. I read further:

“On the 1st day of the 4th month, a company of demons attacked the same granary and two others. The King dispatched the Blue Company under the command of Tez Estariki -”

Tez Estariki? Clearly a relative of Giorg's. I decided to skip ahead a few entries. By sheer coincidence, I found this:

“On the 7th day of the 6th month, King Edagri of the elves and King Hattu of the mountain men visited Freehold. There, they met with our King and discussed visions which their seers had given to them, visions of fire and grotesque creatures the likes of which neither of them had seen before. Comparing their descriptions to those of the demons encountered in the Western Dorns provided them with a harsh truth. Demons were invading and planning to attack with a massive army.”

At last, some names I recognized, Edagri and Hattu. A record of the Choosing ritual shouldn't have been far off.

“On the 9th day, King Sumar II died of a strange illness, a mystery which sadly remains unsolved to this day. Also on that day, a raven was received from Wast, across the sea. The Demon Lord Ayya announced his intention to storm our shores before the end of the month. Fire and blood, sun and sand would rain down upon the freefolk of the world.”

“On the 22nd day, a pigeon was received from Luwas. King Hattu wrote to us that he had successfully performed the Choosing ritual, one of the forbidden spells, with the help of the Royal Archmage of Neshi. He chose his champion, Halliyah Zikatta, with the intent to challenge the Demon Lord Ayya in single combat. He also wrote to announce the regretful passing of his only brother and heir, Prince Netos-Aab.”

How interesting… The Choosing is written here as being one of the forbidden spells. And also he wrote in the same letter that his brother had died? I feared the worst, that he had sacrificed his brother, his own blood, to bind my fate to Ayya's. But who was this Royal Archmage? Normally, I was not one for reading dusty old pigeon records, but I had to power through them in order to find out the truth. The answers had to have been there.

“On the 23rd day, a pigeon was received from Luwas. King Hattu wrote to inform us that his Archmage, Hi-”

“Halliyah? What are you doing here? Ipas asked me. I had not seen her enter the library. She interrupted my reading before I could find the name of the Archmage.

“Reading,” was my immediate reply.

“Hilami, had resigned and he was in search of a successor.”

Dear gods… No, it couldn't have been true. Surely, she would have told me about this sooner.

“You? Reading? At this hour of the night?” Ipas asked as she approached the map-table.

But on the other hand, her not discussing this made a lot of sense as well. She never was one to talk about her life before the Endless Summer.

“A Record of the Wars Against the Children of Fire,” I showed her my reading for the night. “I'm trying to figure out how this Choosing ritual works. My people consider it to be a forbidden spell.”

“Well, you're in luck,” she told me. “I have just the scroll for you.” She used a levitating spell to pull a scroll from the topmost shelf, one they probably didn't expect most people to see, let alone reach. “The Treaty of Seven Havens, signed two hundred and thirty years ago, laying out the nine forbidden spells that cannot be used or learned without special permission and how to use them. I happened to find it laying on the floor during one of my reading sprees.”

I opened the scroll to begin reading. What she said was true: there were nine spells that were forbidden to be used by all parties who signed this treaty. The only one that mattered to me was the Choosing ritual. I went to find it as soon as possible.

“You don't plan on using any of these spells against the Demon Lord, do you?” she asked me.

“Oh, gods no,” I answered. “My body can barely handle what little magic I do know. I don't think I'd be able to learn any of these. I just want to know how it works.”

“And henceforth also shall this spell be forbidden for use by all parties to this treaty: The Choosing, which binds the recipient to a solemn vow against his will. Only success or death can free him from this curse. The Choosing requires the user to sacrifice the life of a dear loved one -”

“Of course, it's a wretched blood pact,” I observed. King Hattu must have been very desperate in order to perform such a horrendous ritual in response to the threat of invasion. But still, killing his own brother? Surely…

“The life force of the sacrificed becomes added onto that of the recipient as a means to ensure success in their venture.”

“By the gods…” I said, trying to fight back the tears. My worst fears had been realized. I… I was…

“Halliyah?” I found myself wrapped up in a warm, comforting hug. But it wasn't enough. Despite both Hilami and Tomosse's attempts to heal me, the pain had once again returned. Betrayal? Guilt? Confusion? All of the above? I couldn't tell the difference.

“I'm living on stolen time.”