Hommlet Dark (576 cy)

THE END OF APPRENTICESHIP

This is the beginning of the rest of your life

With the Slaver’s Stronghold finally reached, a place I’ve actually tried to avoid, the haunted memories of why I am actually here talk to me constantly.  This is my honorable death, considering the size of the stronghold and its inhabitants.

 

 Balan Xos never saw his own death coming. He never hurt any humanoid in his unstable thirst for knowledge.  He lived peacefully in a peaceful city he looked over and they hated him for it.

 

Yet I yearn for that one last lesson.

I have long pondered this question, as one does when standing at the edge of this power not yet claimed.

When does a Magic-User know the hour has come to walk alone, to sever the tether of tutelage and step beyond the long shadow of a master’s tower?

When does the schooling truly end?
Is it when the last lesson is spoken?
When the final spell is memorized?
When the hands no longer tremble while perfectly writing the scroll?

And if one is fortunate—truly fortunate—to be chosen by a Master who deems them worthy, how does the student know the judgment is true?

Yes. Yes. I hear the old answer whispered by every academy hall and dust-choked library:

“Your Master will tell you when the time is right.”

But what if—

What if the student is forced to become the master not by readiness…
but by survival?

Then there is no ceremony.
No farewell.
No blessing of staff and sigil.

Not even the essential spellbook!
Ash.
Memory. And a silence where a voice once stood.

 

Here is but a smidgen of my story.

 

The night the world broke, it did not do so with thunder. It broke with chains, as it came in chains.

Alhaster burned in quiet colors—ember-red windows, guttering wards, spell-light dying one sigil at a time. The slavers did not come as raiders. They came as customers of fiends. Silent. Precise. Cloaked in bought magic and stolen prayers, bearing sigils older than Hommlet’s first stones and darker than anything whispered in Greyhawk’s libraries.

I felt them before I saw them. The mana I learned to sense screamed.

Balan Xos of Alhaster—Archmage, spell-jammer, dark sun seeker, planescape forger, my master—stood at the heart of his tower when the first ward fell. Not afraid. Not surprised. Furious. The kind of fury that bends reality.

“Run, Silversun,” he said calmly, his eyes black as pitch, his hands weaving.  “They come to kill me and will do you no such honor young apprentice.”

I didn’t listen, my 1^st time ever.  What did he mean they wouldn’t do me “such honor”? I didn’t run. That was my first sin.

Chains of binding burst from the floor like iron serpents, ruined in languages I had only seen in forbidden margins. Prismatic-fields collapsed the air. My feeble weak spells died in my hands like drowned birds. I tried to cast them, all of them. The words turned to ash in my mouth.

Xos did not waste time on defense. He became a storm.

Fire and void tore through the chamber. Two fiends ceased to exist—no bodies, no ichor, no memory in the wraith of inevitable death. Just absence. A third screamed as its soul was ripped from his flesh and fed into a containment sigil like fuel into a furnace.

But there were mage killers that had come prepared.

A black spear of anti-magic punched through Xos’s shielding and buried itself in his chest.  Then another spray or rainbow colors.

He staggered. Not fell. Staggered.

He turned to me then, blood already burning through his robes like liquid rubies.

“Remember who you are,” he said.
“Remember what they are,” as he pulled the black spear from his chest, screaming in defiant pain.

Then they executed him. Not quickly. Not cleanly. I was left alive & forced to watch.

They carved the sigils out of his body while he still lived, harvesting spell-anchors from his bones, ripping living runes from his skin, draining his mind into crystal phylacteries like wine into goblets. The Archmage of Alhaster died screaming spells, his last finger of death took out two of the warlocks standing over him, this last act shattered the stone of his tower—but not his will.

When his heart finally failed, the city’s destruction went silent.

 

 

That silence was worse than the screaming. I was grabbed by the hair as some beast dragged me outside, the skin on my legs shredded along with my robes and dignity.  Stripped completely bare black iron shackels closed around my throat and wrists. My vision went white. My magic went dark. The world collapsed into pain, iron, and shadow.

Dragged.
Bound.
Catalogued.

A slave.

As they hauled me through the burning streets, I watched my master’s tower crumble behind me, its upper spire collapsing in slow, terrible grace—like a king bowing.

That was the night the slavers stripped me of my name.

That was the night I learned theirs.

And that was the moment the war truly began. The fools did not kill me, their 1^st mistake in my presence.

Because they did not take a student. They forged an enemy.

And the blood of Balan Xos of Alhaster did not soak into the stones of Hommlet in silence. It wrote a debt into the world. One I will collect.

 

As soon as I’m out of these chains…