Chapter Text
There was a Tower.
A very old, hulking, pitch-black tower, ringed by a high thicket of wickedly sharp thorns. The kind of tower that you would expect to be inhabited by at least one ghost, but this one was disappointingly ordinary. The only things haunting it were the wild ravens that roosted in the area, which could be seen nesting under the wooden eaves and perched high on the peaked tile roof at all hours of the day.
To the locals this place was known as the Rookery. This was doubly fitting, as it was where Crow the Sorcerer made his home.
The Rookery stood on the very edge of the Waking Wood. Deep within the Wood, a scant few miles away from the tower, ran the ancient, high stone Wall that made up the border between Apollyon and Empyrion. In short, the tower was about as Northwards as you could get while being properly on the wrong side of things. Definitely not Southwards enough to be proper by sorcerer society standards, but also not quite Northwards enough to raise too many eyebrows. Avoiding raised eyebrows was key to living in Apollyon. It wouldn't do to give the impression of disloyalty, or worse, treason, and have the sorcerer Council breathing down his neck.
If Crow’s tower was of a more elegant design than you would expect for a sorcerer of the Dark Arts, well, that was not his fault. He hadn’t built the thing. Legend had it that the tower had once been the home of a certain golden-haired princess, centuries ago, and at age sixteen Crow had simply purchased the unwanted place on the cheap. Money had been tight. He’d done his best to fix it up to a properly sorcerous standard, but there was only so much that a coat of black paint could do.
Currently, Crow was in his chambers, the large room at the topmost floor of the tower. Outsiders would have thought it a surprisingly ordinary looking room, all things considered. No skulls, no flickering green flames, no sinisterly scowling portraits. No bloodstained weapons on the walls. Only a single large, well-furnished circular chamber with a roof that bent to a sharp peak. Thick crimson carpets covered the polished wood floors; a single elaborately carved chair stood before the large stone fireplace; a small table beside it held a solitary card game. A small oak armoire, a narrow bookcase stuffed with books. One side of the room was dominated by an enormous canopied bed draped in black silk.
Crow sat slumped over the mahogany desk that took up an entire six-foot section of the curved stone wall. The desk had been pristine when it belonged to his father, but after twenty-two years in his possession it was pitted and scarred with an entire landscape of small scorch marks. He could have repaired it with a simple spell, of course, but he rarely bothered. He thought it gave the desk a certain intimidating ambiance that was all his own. And his ambiance could use as much help as it could get.
Much like the room, there was nothing remarkable or, to his chagrin, particularly sorcerous about his appearance. Tall, but only enough so to be gangly versus intimidating, and too skinny and angular to ever be truly menacing. He had the tawny yellow-gold eyes that marked all sorcerers at birth and made them so easy to spot, set under thick dark brows that were currently knitted together into a scowl. Thankfully he had not inherited his mother’s curly, flaming red hair, but had instead settled into a kind of straight-ish, dark russet compromise that hung nearly to his shoulders. Still, red hair of any kind was not a very properly sorcerous colour, as Father had always taken pains to remind him. On more than one occasion he had said flat out that red hair looked stupid on a sorcerer, that no man with red hair could possibly be taken seriously.
At only thirty-eight Crow had not yet even developed any distinguished grey streaks, so fully red it was. He had, at least, ended up with a bit of Father’s hawklike nose, which lent him a decent sneer when he needed it. He considered it his best feature.
He tried to compensate for the rest with good clothes, and strongly favoured black. Black had a certain gravitas to it, in his opinion. You couldn’t help but take someone seriously if they were dressed all in black.
At the moment he was not thinking about his clothes. He was nervously eyeing an unopened letter sitting on the silver post tray, massaging with one long finger at the headache brewing above his left brow. The letter had been delivered by raven just that morning, and bore the Council’s seal: dull black wax, stamped with the design of leaping flames pierced through with a dagger. Melodramatic bastards. It was rare that such missives contained good news. He had a decent idea of what this one was about.
He squeezed his eyes shut, then cracked one eye open and squinted at it again.
The letter just sat there. Waiting.
He sighed. Might as well get it over with. He leaned forward and scooped up the letter, licked his thumb and pressed it to the wax seal – it dissolved in a puff of smoke and the envelope sprang open. He removed the single piece of heavy parchment, braced himself and began to read:
Sorcerer Crow-
It has come to our attention that a certain scheme of yours, your much-talked about kidnapping, has not gone according to plan.
We are very eager to hear your detailed explanation. You are summoned to appear tomorrow morning before the Council at eleven o’ clock, to provide a full accounting of yourself.
Do not be late.
Signed,
-Lord Belz, Council Head
Crow groaned and dragged a hand down his face, and pulled the nearby decanter of dark red wine across the desk. He poured a measure into a silver goblet and downed it in a single toss, then poured another.
Shit. The Princess Adelina job. What a spectacular cock-up that had been.
It was supposed to be the score to end all scores, he reflected wretchedly, something to drastically increase his finances and solidify his standing as a force to be reckoned with in Apollyon society. The one time when he tried to impress, a desperate attempt to finally, finally get the Council to leave him alone for good.
It had all started so well. He had successfully travelled incognito above the Wall to one of the least important kingdoms of Empyrion, and kidnapped the lovely dark-haired lesser princess from her tower without incident. He’d transported her back to his own tower and put her in one of the spare rooms for safekeeping until her ransom could be secured. Everything had gone astoundingly smoothly. His fortunes were looking up.
Then it had all gone wrong. Spectacularly, horribly wrong. Unbeknownst to Crow, the girl was on very bad terms with her parents, and his ransom note had been returned with a small note of their own, simply stating, “You may keep her.” His increasingly frantic return letters had gone unanswered. Meanwhile, the girl had just sat there in her (very comfortably appointed) room, wailing and crying and begging for mercy at all hours of the day and night while he lay in his own bed a floor above her, glaring at the canopy ceiling and feeling extremely put upon. He’d finally stomped down the stairs and hollered at her door that he had no intention of incinerating her, or poisoning her, or turning her into a toad (not that he even could), so could she please just eat the damned dinner and stop all that bloody racket?
He’d finally managed to fob her off onto one of the would-be Heroes that sometimes came gallivanting onto his property, and not a moment too soon. He had never been so glad to see someone trying to kill him in his life. But the damage was already done: no money was forthcoming, and his grand, much-puffed-and-bragged-about plans were in tatters. He supposed it had been too much to hope for that the Council wouldn’t want to talk about this; he’d been half-waiting for the axe to fall, and now here it was at last.
He seized a fistful of his hair and yanked in agitation, a boyhood habit he had never been able to break. This was what he got for being ambitious! Now he would have to make the trip down to the capital city where all the other sorcerers lived, Pandemonium, and he hated it there. It was set in the most unpleasant swamplands one could imagine, for reasons he could never understand. He had nothing but bad memories of the place.
Frankly, he hated most places in Apollyon, the stinking bogland and fallow hard earth, and the further South you went the worse it got. Awful weather, loads of mosquitoes, no decent food to speak of. It was the type of place that no one in their right mind would want to live. Except that all the other sorcerers did want to live there, or at least insisted they did, loudly, and had made it a point of stubborn pride to eke out a living in the most inhospitable places imaginable. Barking mad, the lot of them.
A distant clanking noise outside the window distracted him, and he groaned. Speaking of barking mad…
In any other building a clanking sound would not have been so remarkable, but his quarters were at the top floor of the tower – seven stories off the ground.
He sighed, heaved himself resignedly to his feet, and went to the window. Here we go.
Most windows in the enormous circular room were narrow and slitted, paned with heavy glass and delicate metal latticework, but this one arched taller and broader than a man. It had a great wooden windowsill and elaborately-carved shutters that opened to face North. A person could stand here and look out across the entire Wood, if they liked. Crow wasn’t interested in the view right now; he leaned out and peered straight downward, scowling.
Sure enough, about thirty feet below, an armored figure was determinedly climbing up the stone wall, grasping at the vines with gauntleted hands. He was making surprisingly good time.
Crow grabbed a rock from the basketful he kept for just such occasions and chucked it down at him with all his strength. It bounced off the helmet with a clang, to no visible effect. “Sod off, you stupid bloody bastard!” he hollered.
The man looked up. The helmet’s visor was raised, revealing shining blond hair, piercing blue eyes, cleft chin, jawline like a cinder block. Typical.
“Prepare to meet thy doom, villain!” he boomed, in a resonant baritone. With a grunt he seized a fresh handful of creeper vines and hauled himself up another couple of feet.
“Gahhh.” Crow rolled his eyes with a groan and ducked back inside.
The damned girl had been gone for months, but that hadn't stopped over a dozen clueless Empyrion Heroes from continuing to trek down past the Wall and trying to rescue her from him anyway. Living so far Northwards had always put him squarely in the path of a certain number of glory seekers, just one of the occupational hazards of being a sorcerer living in the middle of nowhere, but ever since Adelina the issue had spiraled truly out of control. Now instead of a few times per year he was fielding multiple intrusions a month. He wasn’t sure why people were still so certain that a lady was being held captive here. But then the high and mighty idiots of the Northlands never needed an excuse to assume the worst about sorcerers. The two sides had been sniping away at each other for three hundred years, and that wasn’t likely to change any time soon.
And when the virtuous Knights and Princes and plucky farm boys of Empyrion finally ran out of hags to chase down or wolves to fight nearby, every over-muscled, hidebound idiot with delusions of grandeur or something to prove eventually wandered down past the Wall, through the Wood to Apollyon. Far too many of them made their way to his tower.
He had tried to discourage them over the years- oh, how he had tried. He'd put up signs, painted the entire tower black from cobblestones to roof tiles, and had a special plaque done up with the words “The Rookery: Keep Out” emblazoned on it in sufficiently menacing lettering. In a fit of desperation he’d even planted the high wall of sharp black thorns all around the tower grounds, and used a drop of magic to make it glow a sinister green at night.
None of it had ever made the slightest difference. Nothing he ever did or said would convince them that he wasn’t worth the trouble to kill, or that he wasn’t planning to burst through their precious Wall and burn their cities to dust. Not that it wasn’t tempting, sometimes, but he couldn’t have even if he wanted to. No, those dimwitted chunks of muscle and overconfidence only seemed to be made even more determined by all the obstacles. The harder the journey, they apparently reasoned, the more certain and spectacular the prize at the end of it. Casual adventurers were put off by the hedge, but the truly vainglorious ones ignored the signs, hacked their way valiantly through the thorny growth, waved off the occasional territorial attacking raven, and, finally, climbed the tower. They didn’t even try the stairs, which was doubly baffling because there was a door round back. No, the idiots climbed the damned thing in various unoriginal ways while he shouted down at them until he was hoarse, ignoring his threats and warnings and pleas and flung missiles, until he was forced to blast them off the side of the tower.
If he didn’t, those large, angry piles of muscle would eventually burst in on him at the most inopportune times, determined to heroically kill themselves an evil sorcerer and bag themself some treasure (or a wife, though that part had always seemed a little presumptuous to him, frankly). When that happened, he had no choice but to incinerate them into small, angry piles of ash. Like all sorcerers, he was very good with fire.
The final straw had been the time when he stepped serenely out of the bath and straight into the path of a wild-eyed, sword swinging, screaming Knight who had made his stealthy way into his bedroom. Crow had been forced to defend himself dripping wet and stark naked while barely avoiding getting his head chopped off.
After that he’d started greasing the last twenty feet of the tower walls below his window. The problem had diminished significantly after that.
He didn’t even bother trying to reason with them anymore. Anyone with any sense quit long before they got to this point, meaning only the most pigheaded of them made it this far. It was like talking to a boulder. An enormous, axe-wielding boulder.
He had learned from long, painful experience that there was no use reasoning with a Hero in the final leg of his Journey.
Crow poured himself another, larger goblet of wine, then slumped into the high-backed gold chair by the fireplace with a groan. The chair had also once been his father’s, and in his typical dramatic style more resembled a throne than a chair.
There was another clank, and the sound of more hollering and bluster outside.
He dragged a hand down his face again. People were bloody exhausting. He put his feet up on the little matching tufted bench, sipped at his wine, and amused himself by flicking different coloured balls of fire into the grate while he waited for the inevitable.
True to form, a couple minutes later he heard the telltale long, fading shriek as gauntleted hands met greased stone, followed by a clatter of plate armour far below. He winced and shook his head resignedly. He did try to warn them. That was three this month alone. Maybe there was something in the air.
“Hastur!” he hollered loudly, nose buried in his goblet.
“Yessir,” croaked the answer only a second later. Crow flinched, but managed to only turn his head calmly to look at the open doorway.
Hastur, his manservant. Sort of. The stooped, decrepit old man had served his family for two and a half generations, and was kin to one of the Council families, so they were more or less stuck with each other. He couldn’t fire him any more than he could fire an uncle. A frightening, unpleasant old uncle who almost definitely spied on him for the Council. Even at a distance, those nosy busybodies kept one watchful eye on him to make sure he wasn’t stepping too far out of line. It was the only thing besides loyalty to his father that had kept Hastur around, he was sure. It certainly wasn’t from any particular affection for him. Mostly they avoided each other like a plague.
Nowadays Hastur more closely resembled a reanimated corpse than anything else, but then he had looked like that for as long as Crow could remember. Deathly pale, with sunken cheeks and baleful black eyes, skin blotched with liver spots and a thatch of pale hair that looked like straw glued to his scalp. He had the uncanny ability to be just around the corner at the most inopportune times, and was without a doubt the most terrifying thing in the tower.
Crow mused that he could probably eliminate his Hero problem by simply propping Hastur up on a post near the property boundary, if only he would agree.
A pity.
“Go on down and collect the armour and such from our visitor.” He waved a hand vaguely towards the window. “You know what to do.”
“Right away,” Hastur said with relish, revealing crumbling teeth as he smiled. Crow managed not to cringe. Just.
The creepy old bat. Hastur always took far too much pleasure in dispatching the remains of the various fallen Heroes and Knights, while Crow hated to even look at them. An embarrassing trait in the son of a necromancer, but there it was. He disliked killing, if he was honest with himself. He knew better than to admit that to Hastur though, who took after his father (and therefore the Council) in all things. Both parties were eternally disappointed that the apple had fallen so far from the tree.
He reached the bottom of his wine goblet, and refilled it.
At least every adventurer death added to his (at this point pretty impressive) official Northlander body tally, he brooded glumly, which was the only reason the Council left him alone as much as they did. His reputation with them was already weak, and after this recent debacle it would be in shreds. He groaned. To the Council, appearance and reputation were absolutely everything, and they would not be amused. They were rarely amused by anything, as a matter of principle, but this in particular was going to go down like a lead boat. He groaned again, imagining the many ways they would doubtless express their disappointment.
“Sir?”
Crow jumped again. Curse that man. He turned with slow dignity to look. “Yes?”
Hastur stepped into the room, moving as silently as the corpse he resembled, and held out his hand. “He was carrying this.”
On his open palm lay a wrist cuff, worked silver with inlaid green stones. Pretty, and very old, but otherwise nothing special- except for the faint aura of ancient magic he could feel emanating from it.
“Hmmm.” Crow picked it up and examined it with great interest. He prodded at it with his magical senses, feeling the hum around it. Definitely an Artifact. Powers to be determined. “Good, very good. Well done, Hastur.”
The tower had one stairwell, a tightly spiraling thing that ran directly up the center of the building like an apple core. A small landing and heavy brass-bound oak door provided entrance to each floor. As a result, every floor below the top was not a single large open space, but more of a circular hall.
Crow trotted down the staircase, down steps worn smooth with the years, to the fourth floor, to the room where he kept his Artifact collection.
He found an empty display nook and set the bracelet in place, turning it carefully to show it off to its best advantage. He could examine it at his leisure later, see if it was worth keeping.
Every item in this room was an Artifact, one of those precious sorcerous items imbued with long-lost magics. Three hundred years ago, during the Great War, the Empyrion kings had burned the sorcerer’s enormous Hall of Knowledge to the ground. Centuries worth of spellwork and study, books and scrolls, poof. Lost to history like chaff in the wind.
As a result, the sorcerers of today were reduced to a pale shadow of their ancient counterparts, though woe betide anyone who tried to tell them that. It was embarrassing, really. Reduced to several dozen or so cantrips, mostly practical, the commonplace spells that every sorcerer man, woman and child had already known anyway. But all the specialty artisan work, all of their most powerful (and interesting) spellwork and artificery skills, all that legendary power was now the stuff of stories, forgotten arts. Artifacts were all they had left of those arts, and any that had managed to survive the centuries were as coveted as they were rare. They were usually passed down as family heirlooms, by rich Northlanders too, the hypocritical bastards. They’d kill a sorcerer on sight, sure, but were perfectly happy to hoard their things.
And a disproportionate number of those heirlooms made their way down to Crow. Knights certainly didn’t need them anymore once burned to a crisp. It was turning out to be one of his more lucrative ventures, actually. Once a month Hastur made the trip down to Pandemonium to sell all the windfall armour and magical items at the Dark Market. But the truly interesting, useful, or just plain weird things Crow kept for his own amusement.
He took great pride in the collection, which was a hodge-podge of inherited and found items, but if he was completely honest with himself he was a little frightened of half the things in here. Particularly because he wasn’t entirely sure what all of it was. Sure, there was the standard magical jewelry, talismans that glowed whenever danger was near. That sort of thing. Very popular with Heroes, those. Some of them were glowing now, in fact- but then they were always glowing. It made him nervous, so Crow chose to believe they were picking up on his own dangerous presence. But some items...well, he honestly had no idea what some of it was supposed to do. For example, there was a suit of armor that had once been Father's that seemed entirely normal except for the fact that he sometimes caught the plumed helmet turning to follow (watch?) him out of the corner of his eye; there was a tattered leather book of bad poetry that emitted a low, contented hum at all hours of the day or night; there was a clock that kept perfect time but refused to run any way but backwards. Things like that. Perhaps most ominous of all, there was a perfectly innocuous looking, polished wooden breadbox (found buried in an ancient pre-War ruin) that had simply let out an ear-splitting shriek loud enough to crack glass the first and only time he had dared to open it. Crow eyed it warily as he skirted around its little display alcove.
The ancient sorcerers had possessed a very strange sense of humour.
Crow turned and left the room, stopping as usual to look at the enormous painting on the stairwell wall.
It showed a portrait of a slender man of middle age. Lank black hair combed back from a high forehead with a widow’s peak. Menacing gaze, yellow eyes, intimidating scowl. Classic hooked nose. Impressively winged eyebrows.
“Afternoon, Father.” He toasted the picture with an ironic lift of his wine goblet.
His father. Vladimir the Vile. The only necromancer sorcerer born in three hundred years, the first necromancer since the War. Head of the sorcerer Council, celebrity in his own right, and a die-hard patriot of The Cause.
And die hard he had, going out in a blaze of glory in a skirmish with Empyrion armies twenty-two years ago. Every few decades or so the sorcerers got it into their thick heads to try their hand at another coup, to take back what was “rightfully theirs”. They always lost, of course. Sorcerers, it turned out, were very bad at coups. It was part of why the population was so small. But that didn’t stop all the other sorcerers from hailing Vladimir as a hero and martyr, something Crow had no desire at all to emulate him in.
It would have made his life much easier if he had emulated Father just a little when he was alive. The red hair itself wouldn’t have been so bad, or the lack of physical resemblance; for the Great Necromancer Heir everyone would have been happy to overlook just about anything. But no, it was far worse than that: as Crow grew older it had slowly become apparent that he had not, in fact, inherited his father’s powers of necromancy.
The Council had kept testing him for years starting in childhood, over and over again with increasing desperation, as if the damned powers would simply manifest overnight. Or as if he only needed to try harder. Sorcerer magic was eight parts willpower, that was what Father had always said, so get on with it. But as the years went by everyone had finally been forced to accept the bitter truth: he was merely a sorcerer like any other, and not a very powerful one at that.
It had made for a very slow, painful fall from grace.
Under the shame and embarrassment, Crow was always secretly relieved. Why, he wondered, would he ever want to summon the dead? The living were aggravating enough.
Father, of course, had been as disgusted as everyone else, and made no secret of the fact.
“As my son, I expect better from you,” he had always said, glaring that frightening glare. “We” - here he would thump his chest and fix Crow with that piercing stare – “we sorcerers are the natural rulers of both these lands, not those holier-than-thou Northern mundanes. It is our birthright, our grand Destiny. Just as it is your Destiny to follow in my footsteps, to help us work towards our glorious victory and return to power.”
“But,” Crow had protested in confusion as a child, “It’s been three hundred years since we lost the War. Why aren’t we ruling yet? When does Destiny start to help?”
Questions like that had not gone over well. No questions involving ‘why’ ever went over well. Unfortunately, he’d been a very inquisitive child, and that had made life even harder than it needed to be.
The entire experience had soured him on the whole patriotism thing.
Then of course, Father had gone and got himself killed. It had all gone downhill from there. Their ancestral mansion was repossessed due to unpaid back taxes, leaving Crow orphaned and homeless at the age of sixteen, and suddenly lacking the protective clout of a famous father. He’d managed to scrape together enough funds from his inheritance to purchase the Rookery, washed his hands of the entire sorcerer society, and that was that.
Now he simply wanted to be left alone, but it seemed fate just couldn’t damn well leave him be.
But who knew. He thought dubiously of the letter. Maybe with a little luck, he could talk his way out of this and turn things around.
Not that luck was exactly his strong point.