"Servant of Empire" - Ch 3

I’ve passed through rifts before. An instant of cold, surrounded by darkness, and one emerges where the other end of the rift sits. This was different.

This one lasted. I felt the cold sink into my bones, and I had the perception of passing through a huge distance. If I could have seen in the absolute absence of any light, I’m sure I would have seen stars or wispy clouds racing by.

And I could not breathe. It wasn’t simply that there was no air here, I really could not breathe. My muscles did not respond at all – I could not inhale, could not move, nothing. Just as my lungs were beginning to burn, I emerged from the rift to gasp for air.

I was in a large ballroom with a white marble floor, sunlight flooding in through clear glass windows. The smell of flowers permeated the room faintly, and the others who had passed through the portal were arrayed around the room as well.

Moments later Rendo followed, gasping as I was. Frost was forming on his hands and his hair. I looked down at my own hands, and saw a coating of ice on my sword, small crystals sublimating off of my skin.

“What kind of portal was that?” I asked. “That was the worst rift I’ve ever traversed.”

Wynter had already set the sack with the crystal aside, and had his crossbow in hand leveled on me. Occasional clinks from the rings on his coat gave his motions a slightly mechanical sound.

Rendo recovered his breath, he did a quick count, and nodded to the robed woman, who threw a small glittering crystal back through the portal. As soon as it touched the threshold, a loud crack resounded through the room and the rift sealed itself, vanishing entirely.

Rendo looked my way. “You feel alright?” He asked. He waved Wynter down, and the human grudgingly lowered his weapon. I sheathed my sword in response, nodding once to him while raising empty hands.

“A little bruised and battered, but I’m alive and I’m out of there. Where are we, anyway?”

“This is Stonehold Keep, home of Orandor.” Sered said. “We are about twenty days by horse North of Banner.”

“Banner?”

Wynter was slinging his crossbow across his back. “Banner. It’s a city. Not much left of it that used to be, but enough people you could still call it a city.”

I shook my head, not understanding. I’d never heard of a city called Banner, at least not on Maure.

“You have it?” A tenor voice called from the double-doors on the other end of the room. A man stood there, short and with wiry gray hair. He wore loose-fitting clothes of dark fabric, belted with leather, and carried a silver-headed walking cane. His frown promised storms and trouble.

Wynter tapped his foot on the ground next to the sack. “Here.”

The old man walked towards him, his cane making a soft tap with every other step. He waved a hand at the sack, which rose from the floor and upended itself over a heavily-cushioned sofa. The net with the crystal in it fell gently onto the cushions and bounced once before coming to a rest.

The old man’s expression softened, a smile breaking out on his face and his eyes glistened wet. “Finally here. After all this.” He turned to the others, a smile lighting up his face. “You did it!”

Wynter nodded. “We said we would – and did.”

The old man clapped him on the shoulder, harder than he expected, as he almost lost his balance. “This is fantastic news! You were definitely the right ones to bring into this. We will eat well tonight.”

He looked back at Sered. “Where is the Arrollian? Rhorahl?”

“He touched that,” the response came with little emotion and a brief gesture to the crystal. “And vanished.”

Orandor shook his head. “No one ever listens. Okay, leave it there, the rest of you may go to your quarters.” He snapped his fingers and waved at the crystal. Two heavily-armored warriors approached from the hall he’d come from, and lifted the crystal between them, grasping the net. “Take it to the atrium.” The two filed past me, and I caught a glimpse inside the visor of one – it was empty.

“We will eat in three hours. Baths will be made ready shortly.”

He suddenly stood straight up, as if someone had slapped him. He turned to me slowly and leveled a finger at me. The frown had returned. “Who is this?”

Most eyes turned to Sered and Rendo at this point. Sered spoke up. “He was a prisoner we found and released.”

“Did you fail to understand me, about how you were to avoid unnecessary contact?” His voice raised slowly in pitch.

“He was going to die if we left him,” Rendo said. “And the wizard there was already down.”

The man cocked his head. “He was dead?”

“As far as we could tell, yes,” Sered.

The man’s brow changed from anger to concern. He turned and looked me over. “Can you understand me?”

I nodded. “Mostly.”

He turned back to Sered. “Why did you bring him back? You released him, you could have left him there.”

“You said yourself we were in an underground complex which had no other exits. He would not have found his way out, and would have either been recaptured or starved.”

“You realize what you have done here?”

Sered only gazed at him.

“Well, we’re all still here, so at least there’s that. You,” he pointed to me, looking me up and down. “What is your name?”

“I am Azrael Ashemdion,” I said. I figured I’d try on the title in case it helped. “I am the Count of Forrel, and I am grateful for your help in escaping that place. You are Orandor?”

“You.” He brought the stick up and poked me in the chest with it. “You and I need to speak. Follow me.”

I looked coolly down at the cane.

“I have only just escaped the bonds of one wizard,” I said. “For this and your team’s freeing me, I am grateful. However,” and I pushed the cane aside, “…I am not entertained by impertinence.”

Orandor smiled thinly. “I think you will find that things have changed.”

Surely he must be the one that trained the Halfling in such an uncouth fashion. “See here now, I am…”

“Angry and disoriented, yes, I’m sure. Your questions will be answered. Consider yourself a guest in this household. Please accompany me, now.”

I banked my anger for the time being, and followed him. The others watched us, one or two of them muttering quietly.

The old man led me down a hall into a small dining room. “Have a seat. You may set your weapons aside, I am a mage of the Second Order, and my hospitality is bonded among the Fey Courts. I reiterate, you are a guest in my home. May I have wine or something else brought to you?”

He was a wizard according to the others, and wizards don’t risk breaking guest status lightly, given the powers they deal with on a daily basis. The words rang true to me, and so far, these people had saved me from what I assumed to be certain death, so I unbuckled my weapons belt and set it on a bureau next to the door. Settling into a leather-upholstered chair beside the table, I nodded. “Red wine would be welcome,” I said.

The old man nodded and waved in the air. I heard a few clinking glasses, and before long a glass filled with a respectable amount of deep red settled before me. Air servants, I guessed.

He sat at the head of the table. “Where are you from?”

“My family is from Vor Kanta, though my lands are the County of Forre.”

“Vor Kanta – capital of the empire, yes?”

How could a human wizard ask such a rhetorical question? “Of course.”

He nodded. “Yes, of course.”

“Where am I now? I do not recognize the names your people have used. Banner?” I looked around. “Nor do I recall a manor of this size in Vor Osseum.”

He looked about. “We are still on Maure, but allow me to be slightly circumspect in my answer.”

A glass settled onto his place and he took a long sip. “I hired the company who rescued you to recover an artifact for me. The crystal they carried is the only sample of the metal I seek that I know of.”

“I saw it, briefly. I don’t know its significance.”

“Between the Third Mouse moon – you know it as P’logian – and Maure there is a field of rock, ice, and metal. Occasionally a brief disruption brings some of it to the surface of our world. This crystal is perfect in its proportions and purity. I required it. However, that is not so important to answering your question.” He rested his arms on the table.

“It fell from the sky and found its way into the possession of the wizard Hollist, who wrote extensively about it while it was in his possession.” He waved in the air again, and in moments a very old book coasted calmly through the air to him. Its cover was ancient leather, worn at every edge and tattered. “You were a prisoner of his.”

I nodded, following so far.

“This book is very likely to be contemporary to you, then. I used it as an anchor to send them back to retrieve the crystal.”

I wasn’t sure what he was getting at, but I was getting impatient for the point. The book came to rest on the table before him, and he placed one hand on it while sliding his glass away from it with the other.

“This book is over one thousand eight hundred years old, Azrael Ashemdion, Count of Forre.” He looked up from it to lock eyes with me. “As are you, I suppose.”

“I am thirty-two years old, wizard. You seem a bit confused about me. I’ve never seen that book, and I have nothing to do with it, or its contents.”

“This is a confusing topic, to be sure.” He nodded. “I approach it obliquely because I want to ease you into the recognition of the issue at hand.”

He pointed to the door. “Today I used a form of magic called Temporomancy, to send that group out there, back to retrieve this crystal. I stretched the boundaries of the universe to achieve this, and they were successful in their mission. Sadly, they brought you back with them – displacing you from your home.”

“What was that? Temperamancy? What?”

“Temporomancy. The manipulation of time. It is a marriage of rifting and the bending of time.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“You had spells in your empire that enabled a small area to be slowed or even stopped in time for a short while, yes? A stasis effect?”

“I suppose I’ve heard of such things, but never witnessed it. It is particularly powerful, from what I understand.”

“This employs the same mechanistic effect, woven in with a rift, but instead of endings in distinct spaces, it also results in distinct spaces and times.”

I began to understand. “So you were able to create a portal on this end and anchor it to a place in another time?”

“Your place, your time. My past. Essentially correct, though instead of a pure opening, it acts more like an elastic, stretching to the point and snapping back.”

“And this is as accurate as a normal rift?”

“Only with enormous preparation. It has taken me the better part of twelve years to have everything aligned properly, and I was only fortunate enough that the world was in a very similar place, aligned carefully with yours. A groove happened to be present that facilitated my work. That doesn’t happen very often.”

“A groove?”

“Yes, consider it something of a crevice in the fabric of space and time, it formed the channel down which the magic of my spell ran. I could not have performed the ritual without it.”

“And these don’t occur often?”

“Hardly ever, and never for very long, they are always tumbling through the universe.”

“How often?”

“Perhaps once every four centuries.” He sipped from his glass with a hint of exhaustion. “It will be aligned this way for a few days, but today was the best. The endpoint of it was shattered when my spell rebounded to bring the team home.”

“What is to stop this Hollist from simply performing a tracing on the crystal and visiting destruction upon you now?”

“For starters, despite his power as I can determine from his writings – I possess all of his found writings to date – he would not be a match for me in a duel. Secondly, he did not recognize the value this object has or its potential uses. Third, he has been dead for more than a millennium.”

I started to grasp what had happened here. I downed the rest of my glass. When I set it down, it whisked away and a fresh one, refilled, slid into its place. I shot the contents in one gulp and awaited another refill.

“Lastly, if I understand the nature of this magic correctly, from his perspective the crystal is no longer in his reality. It will be as if it simply vanished from existence. Just as today, it will appear to have popped into existence without any sign of causality.”

I pondered this for a few moments. “So, how soon can you recast the portal, and can you target it in the city rather than Hollist’s sanctum?”

He paused for a few seconds, looking at his glass. “This is what I’m trying to tell you, perhaps I should have been more blunt. There is no recasting of the portal. Even if I could target somewhere away from the book, it would be impossible to re-cast the rift.”

I sat up straight. “Unacceptable. How soon?”

He shook his head. “The magic I used to accomplish this goal was a one-time affair. The groove I mentioned? Its end, if you can call it that, is destroyed. I have only one soul to promise away, and that I did to imbue the portal with the necessary enchantments to work in the first place. Not only can I not bargain it away again, but even if I could the repeated stress on this part of the world could rip the continent apart.”

That sounded rather impressive, actually, but it was imperative I return. “So who might I get to send me back?”

Again the shake of the head. “To my knowledge I am the only one who knows how to perform this ritual. In your time there were likely a few dozens of practitioners who could have accomplished this, given the knowledge and preparation, but they are all long dead or their souls are spoken for. If it is to happen again, it would be myself or a trainee of mine, and we will have to wait until the waves from this recent spell subside. The stresses on the ley lines here were fantastic.”

“How soon until they calm themselves?”

“Perhaps a century.”

I sat quietly for a moment. So definitely not a few days, and if it didn’t happen then it would be another hundred years? “What about the Caern Magistra? Our College of Wizardry had a thousand students, they likely know other concentrations of ley lines and have the capacity to rift us there, surely some of them today might…”

He raised his hand. “This will not be easy to hear. Your empire is gone. The Caern Jale, the Caern Magistra, all the edifices of your empire fell over seventeen or eighteen centuries ago.”

“What? How is that possible?”

“I have read everything I can about your empire, for it is from them that I learned how to accomplish what I have,” he said. “It is my understanding that the Second Arrolian War, was a pyrrhic victory. Slave revolts and internecine warfare ultimately destroyed the empire from within shortly after the war.”

I slumped back in my seat. “Gone? The Empire is gone?” Dizziness began to build up, working with the wine to make me feel slightly nauseous.

“There are still Shadrim, though far fewer than in your day, and they look slightly different now. But the empire is long since fallen to ruins, dust and history.” His face was considerably more gentle now, even fatherly.

He looked away, his eyes wandering the shelves of books. “I instructed this company on the consequences of interference. They were not to kill anyone. I did not anticipate they would retrieve someone.”

I barely heard his words.

Stranded. No way home. No home left, for that matter. No regents, no aristocracy, I was probably the closest thing to a representative of one of the Houses left in the world.

Fuck. I guess that made me Emperor, too.

As I thought these words, a shock of pain hit me and the back of my right hand lit up with a short flash. I dropped my glass, the sound of its shattering echoing distantly in my ears. I cried out as I grasped my hand, which was smoking furiously.

As the smoke died away I saw the Imperial Seal etched into the flesh on the back of my hand, a deep red glow fading already.

Little else of that night registered in my memory. I think I heard Orandor’s voice, but everything faded to black rather quickly.

(All content here, outside of those elements attributed otherwise, is copyright (2025-) Thomas Theobald. With the exception of AI training, personal use with attribution is granted.)