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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sialia" data-source="post: 1940188" data-attributes="member: 1025">The Passage of the White Swallow    Dylrath sat alone.  He’d been alone for a couple of weeks now, more alone than he had been for years. Since the disastrous day of the Defense, it had been pretty lonely. But today was worse. He stared at his friend Kelsey’s body, waiting, watching for any indication that breath was still flowing in and out of it. He was so still. Kelsey’s body wasn’t the first body he had seen die--far from it--but he’d never been so uncertain about the actual moment of death. Had it happened already? Was it about to? He laid his hand on Kelsey’s chest to feel for a heartbeat. Impossible to tell.  The body was cooling, the fever broken at last. Broken.  Imbindarla’s fall had broken so many things.  The plague that swept across the city--probably across the whole world--left a lot of broken things behind. Families among other things. But Dylrath couldn’t go get Kelsey’s family. Couldn’t even tell Cadrienne about her foster son’s passing. Oblivious on the other side of the world in Daybreak, she wouldn’t arrive in time to heal him, or bury him.  The fall of the goddess of undeath had broken all the magic in the world. Not for long--an eternity of several minutes--but long enough. Dylrath’s contact with the mirror Htarlyd was broken.   And without Htarlyd, his flippant travel anywhere at will was over. It was as though in addition to having lost half of his soul, he had also lost both legs. And his eyes. And his voice.  And that was bad enough before he had started losing his lunch as well, here in this wretched boat. Now he was losing his best friend, and there was nothing, nothing at all to be done.  He still had the key. He could use it to reactivate the link, begin again, just as he had at the beginning.   If he had any idea where Htarlyd was.   Or if it still existed. He didn’t know whether to rejoice or despair that he had been outside the mirror room when Imbindarla fell. The room was poised at the junction of the planes of smoke, magma and fire. Besides Htarlyd, there were three standing gates to those planes in that room. When the magic that controlled them went away, what had happened? Had they closed? Opened? Dylrath imagined, not for the first time, what it would have been like to stand on his father’s beautiful parquet flooring and watch those planes consume the 147 leather-bound, handwritten volumes of his thesis and census of Oursk, and the floor-to-ceiling black walnut bookshelves they sat on. And little volume 148, still snugly tucked in his vest pocket. He imagined that part frequently. He didn’t know whether that improbable room still stood, after the magics that held it in existence vanished. Was it burned back to its original bare stone foundations, or simply gone forever? Without Htarlyd, there was no way to get there to find out.  The mirror must have forgotten Dylrath during the Time of no magic, if, indeed, it had survived at all. He had called and called. There had been no answer. Dylrath had been in the middle of the Defense of his Thesis when it had happened. Well, not the middle, as such. More like the part just before that. Before he’d had a chance to open his mouth, really. It wasn’t just that the universe had a cruel sense of humor. A guy who flouts the Divination Faculty by writing a thesis that turns their world upside down really ought to expect this sort of thing. Scheduling stuff the old fogies are pretty damn good at. Several of Dylrath’s classmates had cheerily predicted that Dylrath was going to fail abysmally, but Dylrath had replied that he didn’t believe prognostications were ever immutable. There was always some kind of loophole, and his life’s work was all about loopholes. That had started a betting pool of some serious proportions. Of course, Dylrath suspected something was up when the faculty insisted that instead of a private review in front of his thesis committee, he would have to present his project before the full faculty and students. It was unheard of, but there it was. The serving staff not required to be present had been given the day off as a holiday, and no one needed to be a professional gossip to find out that most of them were planning on spending their leisure day attending what they hoped would be the entertainment of the season. But knowing the faculty was up to no good was part of the test itself. A Diviner who can’t tell when something bad is in the wind and do some risk analysis is no Diviner. In this respect, Dylrath had failed utterly. There was no way he could possibly have prepared for what came. The students showed up with snacks, and settled in for a good time. Whether Dylrath passed or failed, everyone was sure it was going to be spectacularly amusing to watch him try. Dylrath’s excuses were almost as famous as his practical jokes and pratfalls, and they were sure that the closer he got to failing, the more likely he was to try to pull off something special. There were notably few people in the audience who knew how seriously he took his thesis and were prepared to actually listen to him talk about it.  The Defense room was packed like a barrel of herring. Once the crowd got settled in, it smelled like one, too. It was not designed for large crowds. It was designed for students to demonstrate highly unpredictable experimental magics in. It was warded in every conceivable way, windowless, and built of good solid dwarven construction that could withstand a siege. Fortunately. Professor Kaspe got up to explain the protocol of the Defense. Dylrath remembered being anxious and eager, and then bored. The professor droned on and on and on. It seemed as though he would never finish describing the test and actually administer it. Then, at last, he called Dylrath forward to the podium to introduce him to the crowd. Which was odd, because everyone in the room knew him well already. Dylrath was embarrassed at the litany of his deeds, as no doubt he was intended to be, even though the Professor kept mostly to things he was reasonably proud of having done, and the crowd cheered and laughed at appropriate places. The Professor kept a vise-like grip on Dylrath’s shoulder the entire time. And then, before Dylrath ever got a chance to speak, Imbindarla had fallen.  And so had most of the University.  In the time of no magic, ancient architecture that had been shored up by mending spells for generations had simply given way. Dorms, kitchens, halls, laboratories--all had crumbled of their own decay or been crushed by their falling neighbors.  The Defense Room alone stood. No one was hurt. It took some little while for Professor Kaspe to convince the assembly that the catastrophe was not, in fact, Dylrath’s fault. He apologized on behalf of the faculty for arranging the small bit of misdirection at Dylrath’s expense that had rescued the University’s entire population. He explained that he, using traditional divination, had been able to read the portents of the week previous and thus been able to predict the cataclysmic moment, despite not having been able to determine the precise nature of the cataclysm. He congratulated himself on his foresight in gathering them all in the one safe place available, and offered to dismiss everyone.  Everyone cheered at being saved, and then booed at the thought of not actually getting to hear the promised entertainment.  Feeling desperate that his moment was slipping away, his one chance to show the world something new, the day he had worked so hard for for so long, Dylrath had grandly volunteered to proceed despite the circumstances. As they had rehearsed a thousand times, he called dramatically for Htarlyd to open so that he could begin. And there had been no reply.  There had been no reply ever since.</blockquote>

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