MAGUS INFINITE

The silence that followed the Pale Matron’s sealing was filled with the weight of what she had said, and what I had become.

I stood in the crater, suddenly feeling overwhelmed with everything that was happening, and even though my body was seemingly beyond exhaustion, my soul was tired... what I wanted to do at this moment was sleep.

I had left my world, touched the void, crossed into Sovereign, become a broken Archangel, bound a fragment of a demon god, claimed the Caelith, and I had done it all in the span of a single fall from the sky.

The Caelith stood before me, whole again, its mass covering the sky and suppressing the chaotic space for miles, and I could feel the Pale Matron’s presence through the bond with the Caelith at the edge of my awareness.

The sky above me was clearing; the Caelith was broken, but one of its functions was stabilizing the region of space that it was situated in. I just knew this as if the answer had always been inside me... this function had not been functional before, but with a Warden, it was the least defensive option available.

I could feel this field of suppressive space reaching out for my domain, and I was intrigued, and I slowly pushed the tiredness in my soul aside since I would not get answers sitting on my behind while the world was ending around me.

I walked toward the Caelith. I could feel its core from here, and I needed to be inside that place to fully understand this Celestial structure when the western sky behind me caught fire, and my soul began to feel pain as if a thousand needles were sticking into it.

∞

A comet of white-gold flame crossed the ruined sky and slowed above the crater, and the fire folded back off a man standing on air. Behind him, the entire sky had changed, and I could see nothing but fire.

He was tall with red hair, and my soul could feel that he was old, even though he was not wrinkled or bent like an old man; it was in his eyes. You see, the saying that the eyes are the windows of the soul was nothing but the truth... my soul felt his great age, and then when I looked into his eyes, they appeared... weathered, as if they had watched centuries the way a cliff watches the sea.

I began to wonder in this moment, if someone looked in my eyes, what would they see?

This thought flashed briefly in my head before it was pushed to the side, because I had seen this man before- well, not seen him in the flesh like this- but I had seen his statues alongside two others everywhere in the Academy; several of our elemental readings and books had his face on the cover.

He was robed in white and gold with the high collar and the layered sash of a Master of the Academy. He had a trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, and his eyes glowed the color of a forge’s heart.

Like me, he carried no staff, and I don’t think he needed a staff for a very long time.

The breath that I was holding in my chest rushed out, and I barely held myself back from bowing towards him. This was Sovereign Caldus Thorne. Master of the Flame, and he was thousands of years old, the second Sovereign to be born in our Academy.

He looked at the Caelith with curiosity in his eyes before he looked at the shattered earth that stretched till the horizon, and he arched an eyebrow as he looked down at me, and it was as if twin suns were peering directly into my soul.

”I sense the presence of our Elemental Aegis in your soul. You will explain yourself, and what a Proto-Sovereign is doing on my continent,” he said, ”or I will render you down to ash. You have a moment; I would not waste it.”

∞

Elemental Aegis? I cocked my massive head to the side, as my mind flashed over to my Tribulation and the eyes with the cross in their center. This eye was the same insignia of our Academy, and I had always wondered what the connection was between the tribulation and the academy. Was that the Elemental Aegis, and was the Academy in some ways controlling the heavens itself?

So many questions, and I did not know where to start, so the smart thing here was to follow the instruction of the Sovereign. He needed answers like me, and one of us would have to be the one to make the first move, and apparently it had to be me.

I had sensed the power of Sovereign Caldus, and I do not think I was a match. He called me a Proto-Sovereign; was this what you called Mages who gained a Sovereign skill before their soul reached the Sovereign Tier? Hmm, so there had been others like me before who could do this?

I raised up my hands slowly, and then I cupped them and gave a shallow bow before I let Adamantium Titan go, and I shrank, two hundred feet of my body folding down, and down, the mass drawing back into me, until I stood in the crater as what I was underneath all of it... A battered sixteen-year-old boy, staring up at a Sovereign of his own academy.

This was a calculated risk, and I hoped it would lead to answers and the help that I needed from my guardians; I could not fight this battle alone.

The Sovereign paused, and I saw the shock ripple across his impassive face; he began to slowly descend until he landed a dozen feet away from me.

I repeated my bow awkwardly, ”Um, Elric Voss, Acol... second year, Cohort twelve, Lightning elemental discipline. There are many things I want to say about all of this,” I gestured to the Caelith and beyond, ”But I don’t know if I have the words, because I don’t know them... my education has not carried me that far.”

The astonishment in the eyes of the Sovereign slowly vanished and was replaced with an intense calculation, and he spoke slowly. ”Elric Voss, second year... yes, I know you, fourth Acolyte selected to assist on the survey of the Caelith...” he looked at the pyramid behind me, ”... Mourne.”