Among them, only one takes pride in madness. It is not granted to bring relief, though seldom does it harm with intent. Its deeds are a riddle to mortal eyes, its heart a mystery no mind can comprehend. In the bravest of souls it awakens fear, not by the strength of its hand, but by the abyss of its delirium. Wherever it treads, silence dies, and the world forgets the memory of order. It is no creature, but the blind movement of destruction, a whirlwind of chaos that knows neither aim nor boundaries. And though no one has ever seen it bear a mark, everyone who glimpsed its shadow knew they were staring at the herald of the end.
II Iron Volume
The Second Scribe
Dorian
He cut through the expanse, his only companion the darkness of his own mind. The days when kinetic magic brought him joy were gone forever. Even the thrill of travel had given way to the weight of memory and the thickening shadow of grim thoughts.
Once, he had been able to revel in it. He would hurl himself into the air like a stone from a catapult. The wind whistled in his ears, tore the breath from his lungs, distorted his face. Kinetomancy of that kind demanded precision and focus, yet in return it granted a freedom unlike anything else. Wolfwood seemed made for such a journey. Towering above Dorian rose massive crowns of trees, so dense they barely allowed light to slip through. He would spot his next landing long before his feet even struck the surface. The branches were thick and sturdy as columns, offering solid support. Perfect conditions for his weave. And yet… he could not take joy in it. Where once there was freedom, now only a chill lingered in his chest. And memories that weighed on him like stones.
He thought of inevitability. Of how, if he could turn back time – return to the self he had been before wounds and doubts – while still carrying the burden of everything he knew now… would he truly have done anything differently? Most likely not. He would have crawled into the same Madness, only without the chance of blaming fate, the role of a victim, or the fickle gaze of the gods. There would have been only himself left. His own folly and that endless tug-of-war between love and hatred.
The very same that was tearing at him now.
How many years had it been? Four? Maybe five? It was then that the truth reached him – the truth of what his wife truly was. Too late to save anything. From that moment, the cycle of hatred began. The dreams in which he held her in his arms – when the world itself seemed to vanish for a while – gave way to others… even sweeter. At times he saw himself beating her head again and again until her face was nothing but bloody pulp. Sometimes he dreamt it was his daughter who carried out the vengeance she had long been owed, while he stood beside her, clapping and offering congratulations. Never had he imagined he would wake from what once he would have called a nightmare with a smile on his lips.
Then morning came, and reality once more made itself known. Once more, he was just a passive onlooker in a struggle invisible to all but his family. He watched as memories of former happiness flickered through his mind, happiness that had lasted just long enough to graft itself onto him like scars. He thought of loss, of what he might have done differently, though he knew the answers had long ceased to matter. Then he simply sighed.
Another day. Another time he had to watch his daughter devoured by ambition, driven by anger and pain that never found release. He saw her mother, playing before the world the part of the unshaken woman, though inside she had long since crumbled to dust. He looked into the mirror and saw himself, yet could not say who he truly was. A tangle of contradictions? A mere appendage? The only reason the two of them had not already tried to kill each other? Or perhaps just a fool playing the role of sage, when in truth he was the most lost of them all.
SWISH!
He flinched. He was a heartbeat away from releasing the weave.
Damn woman.
He hadn't even raised his eyes before she flashed past him. A streak like air being torn open, a shadow slicing through space, the outline of her figure, a trace of scent, the rush of wind in flight… and she was gone. Vanished into the trees with the same lightness with which she had appeared. What lingered behind was only the sound of carefree, almost childlike laughter.
Iris was delighted with her newly learned trick. Though kinetic magic was hardly foreign to her, he had shown her this particular technique only a few hours earlier. The greatest challenge when a mage turned themselves into a living arrow had always been the landing. At takeoff, most of the impact was absorbed by the surface. But on arrival, the brunt of it fell on the legs.
That was why he had shown her his weave. Simplicity so brazen it was genius. Just before impact, he shaped a thin bubble of compressed air beneath his feet, which in a fraction of a second absorbed the entire force of the fall. It was like a brief, explosive burst that scattered the energy sideways. The only consequence was a short hiss – sstt! – like a blacksmith's bellows bursting from too much air. With such a spell at hand, no height was too great a drop. Nor was the collision with a tree trunk at the speed of a launched projectile.
The standard taught in most magical schools was to push off the ground, almost like frogs do. It was a safer solution, since it didn't require such complex calculations of trajectory, but it was much slower. Soft soil could be treacherous. It was easy to sink knee-deep and waste precious seconds struggling to pull oneself free. No acceleration shortened the path if after every jump you had to crawl out of the ground with effort. That was why, instead of clinging to the safe, familiar ground, they chose to leap through the trees like frenzied squirrels.
Iris couldn't resist giving him a look when he once again shared knowledge he had until now kept only to himself. Yet she quickly realized sulking would get them nowhere. They had repeated that same conversation so many times in the past that she reduced herself to nothing more than a meaningful glance. That was Dorian, through and through. Proud of his secrets.
He curled his lip in distaste at her at her utter lack of refinement. She was far more powerful than him, though he never thought she flaunted it. It was simply that someone as Talented as she was had no need to conserve every ounce of strength. With each leap she tore bark from the trees as if it were paper, leaving behind a cloud of splinters and dust. The wildlife in the area must have long since taken her for an apocalyptic omen. His own jumps were far subtler. Every landing came with a loud thud, but the damage was minimal. Not explosions, just signs of presence. Heavy footfalls, maybe a splintered patch of bark. Never a gouge. Never a mark that could be mistaken for an axe-blow.
He knew she simply didn't have to worry about such things. It wasn't only that she was powerful. She was instinctively brilliant. She needed no technique – she had the gift. What had taken him months, she grasped in an hour. What he had honed through dozens of failed attempts, bruised ribs and aching joints, she mastered on her third fall. He remembered every humiliation. How the ground denied him mercy, how the air ripped his lungs apart. Iris had fallen three times. Three. And he knew – with that damnable certainty – it would never happen to her again.
Cursed, wondrously gifted woman. She loved, without even realizing it, to remind him why he had fallen for her so many times.
Long ago. In a different life.
He watched her flickering silhouette in the distance with silent awe. He couldn't catch up to her. Of course – she could have slowed down, matched his pace, stopped and waited, as one does with a companion on the road.
Instead she circled around him, playing like a child with a toy it had never seen before. She leapt so high she nearly touched the birds gliding beneath the crowns, then dove down with such speed it seemed as though she wanted to seize death itself by the ankle and mock it. She tested the limits and crossed them without a blink.
He wiped away the smile that had appeared unbidden. He couldn't deny it was a magnificent sight. Iris, already in her forties, yet still carrying that spark within her, one that never seemed to fade, not for a moment. Laughing with her whole heart, dancing with the wind as if she had forgotten his presence. As if he didn't exist. And he followed her with his eyes, painfully aware that for the Dorian of old, this sight would have meant falling in love all over again.
He had met Iris only a few days after her Awakening. He had been a general in Brenor's army back then. The king – not yet an emperor – had introduced her with pride, with a spark of newfound hope. Behold their new weapon. A magess so powerful she had single-handedly turned the tide of Laris. Born of blood that no one could wash away, and of fire that burned long after the battle. And yet, even then, she did not weep. She had no tears. Only anger, seared down to the core. She had Talent that erupted from despair, but the despair itself she smothered, buried and locked away. Even then she was no longer human. She was a sword. A living, blazing blade forged for vengeance alone.
For the king she was a miracle. For the army a symbol. For Dorian she was a beginning.
At the time he did not know. He did not realize he was looking at the woman who would change his entire life. He did not know he would love her beyond measure. That he would dream of her every night, even when she slept beside him. That every decision, every choice, would somehow be bound up with her. He did not know she would give him a daughter – the only person he loved as deeply as he loved her.
But that is an old story.
He noticed the change only after a moment. He released the weaves and landed. Something was wrong.
Silence. Unnatural silence.
This part of the forest felt dead. The only sound he could make out was the familiar rhythm of Iris's leaps. No birdsong. No snapping twigs. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath. The air felt oppressively heavy.
A shiver ran down his neck.
Iris landed gracefully at his side. Seeing the confusion on his face, she glanced around as well.
"Hm," she murmured. "Was I too loud?"
"I don't think it's us," Dorian replied, scanning the surroundings. Aside from that unsettling silence, everything seemed in its place. "We should walk the rest of the way. Since we've crossed the river, Cassardis should be close."
Cassardis was a small village. Hardly more than a blot on the map, an unassuming destination for today's journey. Neither of them suspected what truly awaited them there. It had all begun with an old man, muttering half-consciously about "the wrath of the gods falling upon Cassardis." It had been difficult to get anything coherent out of him, yet when fate placed two mages of no small renown near such a tale, ignoring it would have bordered on folly. Now Dorian had no doubts left. In the old man's words there had been more than drunken rambling.
"What do you think it is?" Iris asked, hopping over a branch that lay across the path.
Her excitement didn't surprise him. He knew it all too well. It was like the tension in the air before a storm. Pure, wild anticipation.
That damn fearless Daughter of Flame. In a way, he was glad it was her here with him. He had no doubt she was the best companion in battle one could hope for, on this side of the continent or any other.
"You know, I was there just recently," Iris went on when he didn't answer. "Quite a charming little place. Nothing was happening," she added with a shrug. "That was only a few days ago. Everything looked normal. A village like any other. You don't think I accidentally set something off, do you?"
"I don't think so," he said at last, his voice heavy with resignation. "Look around. No trace of civilization. We're in the middle of the forest, and here" – he gestured at the silence around them – "nothing. No animals. Not even birds. Not even ants."
Iris fixed her gaze on some distant point.
"Not a beast, I'd say…" she muttered to herself. "Some psychomancer collecting animals? Maybe a familiar slipped out of control? A few stray undead?"
Her eyes suddenly lit up. She looked at Dorian, a roguish smile spreading across her face.
"Now that's exactly what I need! Remember Gholam? Ah, nothing lifts the mood quite like blowing up hordes of walking bones."
She pulled an innocent face and started stretching as though preparing for her morning exercises.
Dorian snorted quietly, though without a trace of amusement. He would have agreed with anyone else. Only once in his life had he fought an army of skeletons, and indeed, there had been something primitively satisfying about it. Those characteristic sounds – CRACK! – as rotted skulls shattered into hundreds of pieces, and bones crumbled like dried branches. In those moments a man could feel he was mending the world. Cutting it free from the remnants of the long dead that some madman had torn from nature. Making it so that somewhere, the great-grandson of an ancient corpse could sleep peacefully, certain his ancestor would not rise from the grave to steal life from the living.
But this was the Daughter of Flame. The undead were not even a shadow of what she had destroyed in her path. Thousands of people – not beasts, not monsters – but mothers, fathers, and children wrapped in fire that never asked about guilt. The flames made no exceptions. He remembered their screams. Especially the children. Their shrieks sounded like nothing else in this world. They soaked into the air, stayed beneath the skin, crawled into the head and refused to leave.
Sometimes he asked himself: what had she felt then? What had gone through her mind when an entire village turned into a torch? Had she registered those voices at all? Had she heard anything but her own triumph?
The Daughter of Flame. A monster among monsters.
"Something's there," Iris said, pulling him from his thoughts as she pointed at the road ahead.
Indeed, it looked as though the forest was ending. Yet instead of rooftops, they saw… nothing. Their confident march slowed until it became a cautious, almost ceremonial tread. With every step they drew closer, but there was no trace of the village that should have stood here. Only a vast, round, dead space.
They froze barely a few meters from the brink. There was no other word for it. Before them stretched an enormous gap of nothingness. It looked alien. Not a basin carved by centuries of nature. Not a natural hollow in the land. Not some forgotten valley.
Simply a piece of the world cut out of reality.
Dorian could find no other way to explain it. The earth at the edges was fresh, only barely settled, as though the wound had been torn open too violently. In places it was muddy, as if it hadn't yet dried after whatever had stripped the life away. The vegetation had not merely vanished – it had been erased. So thoroughly that even the roots looked as though they had never existed. Lower down, on the slopes of the chasm, small landslides of earth shifted, as though the crater was still not ready to become part of the world.
Whatever had happened here had taken place no more than an hour or two earlier. The silence around them felt like more than an unnatural stillness. Even the whistling wind or the crunch of soil underfoot sounded distant, like echoes trapped in a sealed jar.
He looked at Iris. Her confidence seemed to have slipped away. She was glancing nervously around the unnatural scene. Likely the same way he did. Nothing could have soothed them more now than a shred of logic in this madness.
Dorian swallowed. The best image that came to his mind – and the one he immediately forced out of his mind – was of a giant reaching the sky, kneeling here where the village once stood, and cutting a perfect piece from the earth as if searching for a spot for his own latrine. Absurd. And yet… the only thing that made any kind of sense.
Not long ago they had laughed at that old man, even mocked his supposed delusions. But now both of them stood here and saw it with their own eyes. They had each traveled far and wide. They had done and seen things most people never even dreamed of, but this was…
Madness. The very Depth of Madness.
There was no ruin. No destruction. No trace.
Every explosion – magical or otherwise – always leaves an echo. Stone can be shattered, wood burned, marble burst from within. But there is always some remnant: ash, splinters, debris, the memory of matter. The world does not know the meaning of nothing.
And yet here, that was exactly what there was. Nothing.
Dorian looked along the edge of the crater. Where the hollow seemed to reach its end, the trees were split cleanly down the middle. Those that had somehow survived appeared as though they had always grown with only half of themselves. And in a way that defied all physics – no splinters, no jagged edges. As though they had never existed whole. As if a child had molded a forest out of clay and, with a single swipe of a finger, scooped part of it away. The same with the rocks, the same with the turf that covered the ground.
He kept to a few meters from the edge as he walked. Animals did not come near this place, not even by accident. He was certain that whatever had happened here had driven the local wildlife away for a long time. Instead, he stumbled upon a fox – or rather half of one. The carcass was stale, a thin trickle of blood seeping from it. But its rear half… did not exist. Not torn. Not severed. Simply gone. As though erased from existence with a single, soundless stroke.
Instinctively, he reached for the weaves, but he already knew the result. Nothing. No trails of mana, no waves of lingering energy, no disturbance. The air was dead. This was not merely the absence of magic. It was antimagic. A void so absolute it bordered on blasphemy. So pure it would allow nothing to exist.
He looked at Iris. She stood right at the edge, so still she seemed like part of the landscape. She was staring downward as though time itself had stopped for her. After a moment she turned toward him and gave him a look that, had he still possessed hair, would have made it stand on end.
Iris… afraid?
Her eyes – so wide they seemed unnatural – were wide with mute astonishment, and her lips moved soundlessly, as if she had slipped out of reality for a moment. She stood there like a ghost, as if she could not believe her own eyes.. Dorian had seen her in fury. In the ecstasy of victory. In the blind frenzy of battle. But never… never like this.
All that was left was to look down himself. He stepped up beside Iris and leaned over the edge.
At the bottom lay a figure. Curled into a fetal position like a child in the womb, wrapped only in its own arms. Unquestionably, it was the epicenter of the entire event. Not a monster. Not a beast from another dimension. Not some thing of tentacles and chaos. No claws, no fangs, no horns, no glow. Nothing that could match the scale of the crater surrounding them.
There was nothing… except the figure.
The marks in the earth did not resemble an explosion. They gave no sign of escape. All of them converged on her. Furrows beginning wide, like gaping mouths, narrowing toward the epicenter. As if the world had collapsed into a single point. As if pain had been sown here, and from it this void had grown.
"We need to kill it," Iris said at last. "There won't be any collateral damage. Concentration of fire right in the center." She pointed with two fingers at the figure still lying motionless below.
We need to kill IT.
"Is killing always the first thing that comes to your mind?" he snapped at her, his voice edged with frustration.
"And you've got a better idea?" she hissed through her teeth, jabbing a finger toward the center of the crater as if there were anywhere else to look. "Fuck, Dorian, you always do this. This isn't ordinary magic, you know that. This is something… wrong." She swallowed hard. "You want to just leave it? Let loose on the world whatever it is that… that…"
That devoured Cassardis. Left not a single brick behind.
"That something is a human being. Just like you or me. We don't even know if they had anything to do with what happened. Maybe they're only a victim. Maybe someone who arrived here after the catastrophe. And most importantly, maybe they have answers. They might be the only one who knows what happened here."
Iris opened her mouth to retort, but he raised a finger.
"I'm going down there, Iris. If anything goes wrong, you can roast me along with him."
And he leapt. He didn't even wait for an answer, knowing well enough it would lead nowhere. If he let her speak a moment longer, she'd decide the stranger was better off turned to ash without asking anyone's opinion. He had to be quicker. Now that he was down there too, Iris wouldn't do it.
Probably.
When he reached the bottom, he wove again, shaping a thin bubble of air beneath his feet. The cushioning worked, but he hadn't expected the ground to be so mercilessly hard. Only then did he realize how far he had fallen. There was no soil beneath his boots. Only bare, gray stone, smooth and unbroken, stretching in every direction. Around him rose vertical cliffs of rock and earth rose around him, like the sides of a colossal prison. He was an ant dropped into a bucket – with smooth, unreachable sides and a narrow strip of sky far above.
And he was not alone here.
He set off with a steady stride toward the center. With every meter, his confidence melted away piece by piece, yet it was already too late to turn back. He turned and looked up. Iris was watching him intently. He waved at her in a friendly manner, though he couldn't tell whether the gesture was meant to reassure her or himself.
The closer he came, the heavier the air grew. Each breath felt like climbing a mountain. His chest tightened painfully, his throat scraped with dryness. Half the distance was behind him already, and he was wheezing as though each breath had to be torn from the grip of an unseen weight. With every step, more came into view.
The figure was not dead. Not even still. She trembled in spasms, more like convulsions than life. She was a girl, about twenty years old. So pitiful in her suffering that Dorian's heart nearly tore itself apart.
One look at her face was enough for him to understand: she had been crying. But not like someone whose heart had been broken. She cried like those whose entire world had shattered. Her eyes, now vacant and clouded, seemed blind to reality. She did not react to his presence. Not even to the shadow that fell across her skin when he stood right beside her. The flesh beneath her eyes was slightly swollen, the dark hollows giving her face a look of exhaustion and helplessness. Her lips – the corners pulled down in painful defeat – had been bitten until they bled. Her hair, once surely beautiful, a fiery red, now hung in messy strands, some of them matted together. She wore a simple yellow dress to her ankles. A plain daffodil pattern – so bright and innocent – grotesquely contrasted with the dried bloodstains scattered across the fabric in no particular order. She did not look wounded. More like a witness to a grotesquely clumsy operation.
So ordinary and yet the heart of the catastrophe.
Dorian stepped slowly toward the girl and reached out his hand, forcing a semblance of a smile.
"It's all right. I came to help you."
"Help?" she echoed dully, as if tasting the word on her tongue and unable to swallow it. "Help…?"
Before he could step back, her fingers clenched around his collar. She yanked him forward so hard their faces nearly touched, and he felt her hot, ragged breath. He shivered when her eyes locked with his.
"Kill me…" she whispered. "Please… kill me!"
They stood like that for a long moment. She – trembling, on the verge of tears – shaking him, and Dorian staring at her in silent dread. How was he supposed to answer that? He knew something terrible had happened. Something that had burned her hollow from the inside and left a scar that would never fade. A trauma that would remain with her forever.
And yet… to kill her? That would have been wrong. Evil. Even as she begged him to end her life, he couldn't do it.
"I can't grant you that wish," he said softly, "but I can promise you we'll find whoever did this. They will pay for everything."
He knew the words meant little, but they were meant to comfort. They didn't. She started pounding his chest with her fists. At first weak, then growing in fury. The sob that had been caught in her throat finally burst out – sharp, shaking, unstoppable.
"It was me!" she screamed. "Me! They all died because of me!"