Strands of Time and Magic: An Epic Fantasy Adventure by Platten Andrew

Author:Platten, Andrew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 46

Gideon watched Brylee Plainhand smile as she left the market, a slight swagger in her step. At the market’s gate she paused and seemed about to glance his way. Watch it, his Tuli side warned. In the years since assuming Ostryd’s empire, he had worked with several mages to perfect many of their techniques. With his significant power, it was a small matter to use hard air to overturn a basket near Brylee to distract her.

​The woman had proven extraordinarily difficult to track—and not solely because she could rapidly alter her appearance. This convinced him more than anything that she was what the time weavers called a salient. Ostryd’s Troll Lake library was fascinating in many respects, but Gideon had found it devoid of anything concerning the time weaver. Distraught, he wandered the estate in a dejected funk, believing he would never find Ostryd’s secret trove concerning the aggar and their time weavers. Several times he had visited a renovated folly that stood on a shallow bluff overlooking the lake, feeling a comfort there, away from Lu and the staff.

​The inside of the folly was laid out like a reading room with large windows, but it had no torches or fireplace, and it reminded Gideon of Ostryd’s description of his fire-safe archive where he had first encountered Levinial. That revelation initiated an obsessive search of every nook. It took him a day to discern where the hidden niche was located and two more days to locate the magic-activated latch that released the hidden door. Three weeks of devouring the contents of the ancient documents had presented him, he hoped, with the key to locating a time weaver. He would locate and follow a salient.

​Levinial had revealed to Ostryd that the blockages he removed sent turbulence back down the timeline, with the disturbance growing weaker and weaker until the nexus point. The nexus was the triggering event whose ramifications built up to eventually form the blockage. Those individuals whose lives were critically bound to the events were termed salients. Their magical link to the time conduit reverberated with the turbulence, whereas all others remained unaffected. These time tremors were how time weavers located the players contributing to the impending temporal breach. Gideon accepted he might wait centuries before a time weaver came to the world, but when one did, they would be tracking salients.

​Gideon had spent the entire journey from Sandrick to Troll Lake perfecting techniques such as shine shadowing, reading auras, slipping, and studying the links he and others had back to the conduit. During that process, he made two key discoveries. First, after hours of concentrated effort, he believed he could discern the turbulence on the conduit which, in his ignorance, he had assumed was the conduit’s normal state. If it was indeed turbulence, then a time weaver could already be on his trail.

​In two months of intensive study, Gideon had gone from discovering, then being able to see his own link, to being able to identify the conduit with clarity.

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