The Fallen World

Lexandria - Part 1

     “Ah, here you are!” said Elmias Pastin.

      Lexandria University’s kindly old director of extra-planar studies made his way across the University’s artifact repository to where Tragius Demonbinder was sitting at a desk, staring intently at a creamy coloured flattened sphere about the size of a man’s head. “I’ve been searching everywhere for you.”

     Tragius gave a guilty start and fought an impulse to hide the spheroid beneath a fold of his cloak. Elmias had already seen it, though, so he just had to bluff it out, divert attention away from it. “You’re back,” he observed calmly. “How did your trip go?”

     Elmias shuddered at the memory and stroked his chin, a nervous habit he’d had ever since the days when he’d had a small pointy beard, long since shaved off when it began to get straggly with age. Like most wizards, he was extremely vain about his appearance.

     “Horrible, horrible!” he said with feeling. “The place is totally barren of any magic of its own. If it wasn’t for the plane stepping spells I’d carried there with me, I’d have been stranded there for the rest of my life. It’s terrifying knowing that I can’t absorb any magic until I get back, that every spell I cast is less magic left in reserve, and you have to cast spells there! Spells to learn the local language, spells to adjust my appearance to look less conspicuous. Spells for self defence. It’s horribly violent over there, you know. Every time you make the slightest mistake their law enforcers are after you, the Gods alone know what they’d have done to me if they'd caught me. They won’t even let you smoke a decent pipe of gli grass in peace! I mean, I ask you, what could possibly be wrong with...”

     “Yes, yes,” interrupted Tragius impatiently, getting up and walking away from the table in the hope that Elmias would follow him. What mad impulse had made him come down here at this time? He must have been mad! A single wrong question from the other wizard now could finish him forever. “Did you get the stuff?”

     “What? Oh yes, I got it,” replied Elmias, “but if you want any more you can go get it yourself. They have laws governing the buying and selling of those kind of things, you know, and a single slip could have ended with me rotting in a filthy rat infested dungeon. I just hope it was worthwhile, that’s all, because I don’t want to find I did it all for nothing. What’s this?” He pointed a gnarled finger at the creamy oblate spheroid on the table.

     Tragius’s heart leapt in alarm, and he almost stammered as he searched for a plausible reply. “Something I took from a Shadowwizard,” he said as calmly as possible. “We’re not sure what it is, but it’s powerfully magical and probably very dangerous, so we decided to bring it down here until we could figure out what to do with it.” He quickly picked up Malefactos’s ark before the other wizard could ask any more questions, carried it across the room and put it back in its magic proof strongbox, locking it shut with a powerful locking spell. “Now then, show me what you’ve got.” He led the way up the twisting, sloping corridor from the deep underground vault, back to the research buildings.

     They entered the Whiterose building. Once a pirate’s stronghold, it now contained most of the University’s high level laboratories. None of them were in use at the moment, but one of them was being prepared for an important experiment in three days time and contained half a dozen junior wizards bustling around, meticulously scrubbing every surface and casting antimagic spells to remove every trace of residual magic.

     As they passed it, a small, shy looking wizard wearing the blue robes of a diviner emerged, waving his arms to attract their attention. “Excuse me, Sirs,” he gasped, “but could I trouble you both to cast a spell for me, please? Any spell, it doesn’t matter what.”