The Making of a Mage by Ed Greenwood

Author:Ed Greenwood [Greenwood, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7869-5961-7
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast Publishing
Published: 2011-07-11T16:00:00+00:00

“Look ye!” The rough whisper held awe and wonder aplenty; even the veteran Blades had not seen the likes of this in their adventures before. Time had touched the tower, but it seemed enchantments held wind, cold, and damp at bay in some places. At the end of a crumbling passage whose very roof blocks fell at his cautious tread, a Blade might step through a curtain of magical gloom into glory.

One room was carpeted in red velvet: a dancing floor ringed with sparkling hanging curtains crafted of gems threaded onto fine wire. Another held smooth whitestone statues, perfectly lifelike in their size and detail and depicting beautiful human maidens with wings arching from their shoulders. Some were speaking statues, who greeted all intruders with soft, sighing voices, uttering poetry a thousand years dead.

“Such shouldst be my only joy, to behold thee, but yet mine eyes see the sun and the moon and cannot but compare them to thee … and thou art the brightest ennobled star of my seeing.…”

“Look to find me no more, where silent towers stare down upon the stars, trapped in still pools of dark water …”

“What is this but the mist-dreams of bold faerie, wherein nothing is as it seems and all that one can touch, and kiss, are but dreams?”

Marveling, the Blades stalked among them, careful to touch nothing, as the endless, repetitious sighing of the unfeeling voices echoed all around them. “Gods,” even the unshakable Tarthe was heard to mutter, “to see such beauty …”

“And not to be able to take it with us,” one of the thieves murmured, voice deep with loss and longing. For once, the priests felt as he did, or so their nods and awestruck gawking said, if their mouths did not.

The room beyond the chamber of speaking statues was dark but lit by a rainbow of tiny, glittering lights—sparks of many hues that darted and soared about the chamber like schooling fish, a riot of swirling emerald and gold and ruby that never went out.

Lightning, they all thought, and hung back. Tarthe finally said, “Gralkyn … your foray, I fear.”

One of the thieves sighed eloquently and set about the long process of divesting himself of every item of metal, from the dozen or so lockpicks behind his ears and elsewhere on his person to the small forest of blades tucked and slid into boots, under clothes, and into nearly every hollow in his slim, almost bony body. When he was done, he stood almost naked. He swallowed, once, said to Tarthe, “This is a very large thing you owe me,” and strode forward on catlike feet into the midst of the lights.

They reacted immediately, darting away like frightened minnows and then circling about, faster and faster, until they rushed in on him from all sides with frightening speed, clung—the watching Blades saw Gralkyn wriggle, as if tickled by many unseen hands—and cloaked him in glittering lights.

He looked like an emperor robed all in gems, and stared down at himself in wonder for a time before he said, “Right.

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