He knew where to go, for it seemed that he could remember things better than he thought. He just needed a reminder, and the Academy environment was more than enough to give him his destination. And so, he stood at the entrance to the cellars. Just like he had back then, but without Yirn this time. Now it was just Yviev—and of course Oidus and Roslyn who'd join him in this descent.
He opened the old wooden door, breaking its lock, not caring that someone would have to fix it one day. And past them, he could see the stairway. The steps were as narrow as ever, and he could smell the familiar whiff of air, damp and cold.
"You know, you could ask for a key," Oidus muttered from behind him, but Kanrel ignored her and hid away his slight embarrassment by conjuring a bright flame that would guide their way through the darkness. At the sight of it, Roslyn stepped back, but having noticed that it was just a normal flame, she calmed down.
Yviev scoffed. "Must we go back down there? I'd rather not get lost in some old, cold, damp, disgusting part of a forgotten, half-buried, narrow corridor..."
Kanrel took the first step, and urged the rest to follow suit. His steps echoed against the cold brick around him; at first a single pair, but soon enough a whole quartet.
"In Jersten, I began work on a more efficient way of coding," Kanrel said as they reached the first corridor, down which they'd have to walk before turning right. The floors were covered with dust, the ceilings hung with spiderwebs. He made sure not to make any mistakes with his flame.
"I managed to create a system that worked for me; far easier than imagining a pair of hands lifting a stone. Instead, I could imagine a line of numbers and letters to do it all for me. Using this new system, I've become faster and more precise with my magic. Though it took a while to get used to."
"Notation," Oidus's voice cut in from behind, so sharp that it was almost a hiss, as though she might have resented the notion of such a thing. "You reduced careful visualization to notation. Scholars...priests much wiser than you have tried that for a century and produced nothing but headaches and dead ends." A pause. "Did it work, truly, or did it merely feel clever?"
"It worked," Kanrel said.
"Of course it did." She did not sound convinced, but seemed to indulge him either way.
Behind them, Yviev summoned another flame to keep her and Roslyn in a constant guiding light.
Kanrel stopped at a juncture, then turned right, leading the party that way.
"I had hoped I might find the very essence of magic through my studies. To explain what magic actually is... a law governing even the laws of physics."
"The essence of magic." Oidus snorted. "Do you know how many decades I have given to that question? How many theses I've written? And you—tavern conjurer—hoped you might find it in Jersten, between coding a system nobody asked for." She waved a hand. "Go on, then. Amuse me with your juvenile trickery."
"There was no breakthrough," Kanrel admitted. "The information we humans have is limited. Perhaps by design."
"Of course! It is by design," Oidus snapped; Kanrel had, after all, only stated the obvious. "The curse keeps us small. Any fool who has conjured a code and felt the disgust knows that much."
"But at the time of my disappearance, from your perspective, I had found myself in a convoluted web of visions and lies. I came across an ancient being who claimed to be the warden of a prison. His prisoners: the Otherkind."
Kanrel turned, seemingly at random, to the left. "In these visions I was forced to live through many lives. First I was one of the Sharan, one of the Angels, in their city of dreams. I witnessed the overpowering talent of their magic..."
"The Angels." Oidus had stopped walking. When Kanrel glanced back, she was staring at him with an expression he had not seen on her before. It wasn't contempt, at least. Perhaps greed? "You're telling me you saw the Angels use magic. Not something written in scripture, or depicted in a religious painting, but instead saw it?"
"I lived as one of them," Kanrel said. "For perhaps a hundred years, in the vision. I had no memory of being Kanrel. I lived as Ignar, a child who would one day become the Angel of War and Peace."
Oidus said nothing for a moment. Then, quieter, just loud enough that Kanrel could hear her: "What did it look like? Their magic."
"Beyond understanding," Kanrel said. "They did what only nature should. Imagine the sea's storms wiping settlements away with their waves; a mountain full of fire, burning forests to ash. Now imagine a creature could do worse. That a creature could slaughter thousands of its own kind in the space of seconds." He walked on. "I saw such beings. I lived as one. And I saw the downfall of the first Empire of the Angels, and the demise of the godlike Kalma."
They passed doorways to rooms full of ruined things, chairs and tables a hundred years old, books already lost to mold and damp.
"But I also saw something we have never conceived of, let alone achieved," Kanrel said. "Magic that could nullify other magic."
Oidus seized his arm, bringing them all to a stop. "What did you say?"
"Magic that stops a code before it activates," Kanrel said. "That removes it from existence... Without simply killing the one who cast it."
"That's impossible." She outright denied the possibility. "Magic cannot unmake magic; it can only overpower it. Every principle we have–" She stopped. Her hand was still on his arm. "You're certain of what you saw."
"I managed to recreate it," Kanrel said.
Oidus let go of him slowly. And again Kanrel walked forth, the rest of them following right behind.
"I didn't know where to begin," Kanrel went on. "How could such magic exist? What even is magic?"
"No need for rhetorical questions." Oidus's voice returned to its usual sternness. But her gaze, if only Kanrel were to look behind him, must have been sharper than ever, as though she were anticipating something which might satisfy her long search. "Stop prefacing and needlessly irking my curiosity; stop withholding information that you certainly know. Enlighten us, lest I turn around and return to the laboratory."
"I played with it," Kanrel quickly said. "I asked: what if I wrote a code that held all the information, every attribute, every ability of magic that I knew of? What would happen?"
"Nothing," Oidus said at once. "It would do nothing. A code needs an object, an intent–"
"Nothing, at first," Kanrel agreed. "But I could feel it... Something waiting to be released. So I failed many times, but when at last I succeeded..."
"...you made the flame we saw," Oidus finished. Her step seemed to hesitate, but she managed to keep walking.
"The Holiest Form of Light, I called it at first," Kanrel said. "I believe it is the very essence of magic. Though Unholiest Form of Light might suit a priest better; for using it is nothing but nausea. A thing you never grow used to."
"The essence of magic," Oidus repeated. She had spent a life circling the question, and a man she'd called third-rate had walked into the answer by accident and called it disgusting. "And you can... what? What does it do?"
"It nullifies magic. But it goes further. It can remove existence itself; burn a thing so that nothing remains of it but the memory. It can burn magic. It can burn people." He paused. "It can burn the Shadows that came for us from the clouds."
Oidus was quiet.
"It is disgusting," Kanrel said. "It is inhumane. It is... magic."
He stopped at a doorway and gestured. "Yviev. You might remember this room."
Yviev stepped past Oidus and Kanrel to look. She nodded. A small room, bookshelves lined with jars of strange substance; a chair long collapsed under its own weight; a fragile table, a couple of jars upon it.
"This is where you, and I, and... Yirn found the eyes. Isn't it?"
Kanrel nodded. He turned and led them another way. Roslyn followed after, staring at the jars a moment longer, her mind perhaps lingering on a memory.
"There are other kinds of magic," Kanrel continued as they turned right. "Ours... the magic the Angels bestowed upon us. What we feel when we use it is disgust, by design; it keeps us from desire, keeps the priests loyal to the Angel who cursed us–"
"Yes, yes," Oidus said, now impatient. "First-year theology. The curse binds the priest. Get to the part you saw."
"Then there is the magic of the Angels themselves," Kanrel said. "Far more powerful than ours. You can see an Angel's strength in what it looks like. The scales, the wings, the grotesque faces. All of it is a sign of magical prowess. To them, magic is life. Their lives are bound to how much of it they hold. Run out, overextend, and they die... like a fire starved of air."
Oidus had stopped waving him off. "How is it measured?" she murmured. "If ability is visible in the body, then it is quantifiable, then it can be–"
"Harvested," Kanrel said. "Yes."
"Some Sharan are simply born with more," he went on. "But that is not the end of it, for one can take more. Kalma ascended to godhood by slaughtering another race the Sharan warred with, and taking what was theirs. And our own Angels, our gods, harvested magic to live as immortals. When they rebelled against Kalma, the rest of the Sharan poured their excess into them."
It was Roslyn who spoke, for the first time since the descent began. "They took it." Her voice was small in the dark corridor. "Our gods. They didn't... they weren't given their power. They took it... From the dead."
Kanrel did not answer her.
Roslyn said nothing more. But her flame, Kanrel noticed, had dimmed a little, as though her grip on it had loosened.
He turned right, and what met them instead of a room was a wall that should not have been there. Kanrel frowned. "Yviev? Oidus? Has anyone been down here since?"
Yviev cleared her throat. "I have not."
"No reconstruction I've heard of," Oidus said. "No one talks about the cellars these days."
Kanrel sighed and formed a code. A slight disgust ran through him as he melted the stone away with an intense fire; he felt its warmth engulf him from every side as he stood without fear and watched a new doorway appear. The three others had stepped back, faces covered.
Afterward, he made sure the melted stone regained form and would burn nothing around it. He stepped through the doorway of his own making into a familiar room, like any other in these damned, never-ending cellars, but for one difference. The brick in the middle of the floor was newer than the rest.
Roslyn, Yviev, and Oidus entered behind him. Roslyn and Oidus looked about, confused, but Yviev knew exactly where they stood. She stared at the new brick at her feet and frowned.
"Don't we need the eyes, or something?" she asked.
Kanrel shook his head. "Just the right words. Nothing more."
He formed more codes, gentler than the brute fire before, and slowly, brick by brick, lifted away the newer section of floor, uncovering what it had hidden. A different stone altogether... much older and darker. But there were no words engraved upon it, none like the ones he had seen back then.
Kanrel sat a while and stared at the stone. "What did it say?" he muttered.
Yviev sat beside him. "Don't ask me. It's been far too long."
Oidus crouched at the stone's edge, running a finger along the worn surface where the carving had been. "Whatever it was, it's gone. Removed, probably at the Herald's command..." She looked at Kanrel with a blank expression. "So you don't remember. All this, and the door won't open because you've forgotten the password."
Kanrel's jaw tightened, and he found himself wanting to argue against her deduction... but it made sense; it was something that his mother was more than capable of either doing herself or commanding someone to do in her stead.
A sigh escaped him. "I could use the Unholy Light to remove the stone and its magic from existence. But that would be a pity." He closed his eyes, reaching back: the room, the petals, the eyes, the chamber below, some of the carvings down there.
The manifesto. He remembered it, sort of... the harping about truth, the true god, the true magic. His eyes opened. "Truth," he muttered. He rose, laid his eyes on what he knew to be the entrance to the chambers, and pronounced, as clearly as he could:
"Veritas sub terra."
The moment he did, the stone began to shake, then move, forming brick by brick, step by step, a stairway down into the dark.
Roslyn exclaimed, and Oidus let out a long whistle that echoed through the room. The old professor leaned close to inspect it; first the stone, then the stair that had built itself and now held its form. "Wonderful." All the contempt had gone out of her voice. "I thought you'd dragged us down here to lecture on things we can hardly confirm. This... this is more like it!" And she took the first step onto the staircase.
Kanrel scoffed and pushed past her, making sure that he might be the first one down. After all, today, he was their guide; and he was the only one who knew what the engravings on the walls truly depicted... The rest followed after him; only Roslyn hesitated, while the other two women simply walked down, as though it was just any ol' staircase in the Academy.