Chapter 8 - The legend of the Wizard

POV: Tomas

The morning after the village assembly, Tomas couldn’t so much as walk to the goat pens without someone calling his name.

“Spark in your blood, eh?” old Jaren chuckled as he handed over a basket of beets. “Don’t forget us when you’re a Tower-trained mage.”

“Your mother must be proud,” whispered Nelda, the seamstress, as she passed him a roll of sun-dried fabric. “Prouder than proud.”

And proud she was.

Tomas’s mother moved through the village like she’d just discovered the moon had been named after her son. She retold the story a dozen different ways—how the Weaver had come unannounced, how he’d kneeled to Tomas like he was something precious, how his hand had rested gently on her boy’s shoulder, and how the world hadn’t quite been the same since.

“He said if we wait too long, the spark might burn out,” she told the smith’s wife. “A gift like that? You can’t ignore it.”

Even his father, who rarely said more than a grunt to most people, began weighing in like an expert on arcane potential.

“He’s quiet, but sharp,” Tomas overheard him say to the baker. “Always watching things. He’s got an eye for patterns. That matters, doesn’t it?”

The village buzzed. People offered stories of far-off Towers—of young mages who’d left humble homes and returned in carriages drawn by mana-warped stags. Of enchanters who could summon rain with a word or light up an entire hall with a tap of their staff.

“Imagine,” said one of the shepherd boys, barely older than Tomas, “you could be the first mage ever from our valley.”

Tomas forced a smile. He nodded when he was expected to, said thank you when hands clapped his back, and stood up straighter when someone asked how his studies were going.

But inside, he was… shrinking.

Every word of praise pushed something tighter in his chest. Every hopeful glance made his skin itch. He didn’t feel like a mage. He didn’t feel special. The Weaver had come and gone in a blink—left behind a sentence and disappeared like morning mist.

What did that mean?

The spark might burn out. That’s what the man had said.

And now everyone looked at Tomas like he was a pile of kindling waiting for the match.

He couldn’t talk to anyone about it. Not his mother, who was already counting coins in her apron pockets. Not his father, who’d begun carving little sigils into his tools “just in case Tomas might want them later.” Not even his sisters, who now stared at him like he was a visiting spirit.

He envied them sometimes, not because they were special. But because no one expected them to be anything else.

***

POV: Eirian.

Eirian sat cross-legged near the garden wall, where the rosemary bush whispered its ancient thoughts to the wind. The leaves trembled with a pulse she could feel in her bones. She pressed her palm to the earth, attuning herself to the rhythm that danced under the surface. Life ran beneath the village in unseen streams, and when she was quiet enough, she could hear them humming.

It was morning. Pale sunlight streamed through the drifting mist, softening the lines of Sera's cottage. Dew glistened on the porch rail. Somewhere inside, tea was being poured. Eirian didn’t need to see it to know. She felt the clink of the clay pot against the rim of the cup like a ripple in the mana threads.

Then a second presence entered the house.

Eirian stilled. This presence moved like cracked wheat underfoot—familiar but brittle. Hesitant, but excited. Tomas' mother.

She shifted her focus, extending her awareness to the wooden beams of the house. The copper charms above the door buzzed faintly, and she followed the vibration into the room.

Voices.

"I hope this isn’t a bother," Tomas’ mother said, her tone polite but edged with barely contained urgency. "You’re the only one who knows anything about this sort of thing."

Sera’s voice was warm but slower than usual. "Tomas is a good boy. And the Weaver saw something in him… But magic’s not a matter of just seeing sparks. It’s how they burn."

A pause. Footsteps. Eirian imagined Sera pouring more tea.

"That’s why I came. We want to help him. We’re even thinking of the Towers, but we’re not folk with city ties. I thought… maybe you knew someone closer. Anyone who could teach a child magic."

Another silence. Longer, this one.

Sera didn’t answer right away.

When she did, her voice had shifted.

"There is someone. But it’s not that simple."

Eirian sat up straighter.

"You mean… someone near the village?"

"Not nearly exactly, but I believe he is your best shot."

The wind outside grew still. Even the rosemary held its breath.

"There’s a wizard who lives in the forest," Sera said. "Or… some call him that. Others say he’s only a story. An exile who vanished after offending the royal family, or a madman who built a tower where no one would find him."

"But he’s real?"

"He’s real. I've felt his wards before—brushed their edge once by mistake. Like walking into spiderwebs strung between trees. You don’t see them, but they tangle around you just the same."

Eirian could picture it. That tight sensation of layered magic. She had felt it before, deeper in the woods, where birds didn’t sing and mushrooms grew in perfect circles.

"He doesn’t train children," Sera continued. "He doesn’t train anyone, as far as I know. He hasn’t come to market in over a decade. He keeps to himself. If he doesn’t want to be found, you won’t find him."

"But you think it’s worth trying?"

"If you’re willing to risk it. And if Tomas is ready to understand what it means."

The air inside the house shifted. Eirian felt the unease ripple outward. Tomas' mother was already calculating routes, weighing coin, and thinking of hired blades.

Sera lowered her voice.

"I’ll say this just once, Maren. Magic’s not a ladder. It’s a door. You open it, you walk through, and you don’t get to choose where it takes you. If your son goes to that tower, he might learn things. But he won’t come back the same."

The woman swallowed. Eirian heard it clearly, like a knot in a reed flute.

"We just want to give him a chance."

Sera sighed. "Then take this as your map: head east until the river bends like a shepherd's crook. Walk until the forest grows quiet. When the birds stop singing, look for the tree with roots like twisted hands. Beyond that, if he wants you, the path will open. If not… you’ll just wander until your courage gives out."

Footsteps. A chair scraped back.

"Thank you," Maren said.

Eirian could feel her leave the house, heart racing with a fire she didn’t know how to name. Hope. Fear. Pride. It tangled around her like vines.

Inside, Sera leaned against the doorframe and stared into the garden.

"You heard that, little one?" she said without turning.

Eirian stepped out from behind the wall.

"Yeah…"

Sera didn’t look surprised. "That man in the woods is no ordinary mage. If you ever feel him near, don’t call out."

Eirian nodded.

Still, something fluttered in her chest.

A wizard who hid from the world. A tower cloaked in silence. And somewhere within it, knowledge she might one day need.

The threads had begun to tighten.

***

POV: Tomas

The morning after the meeting, Tomas awoke to the sound of clinking coins and loud, excited voices.

His parents had already cleared the long table in their cottage and laid out a stack of parchment and a battered tin box. His mother, flushed with energy, was scribbling names down with a stub of charcoal. His father counted copper and silver with the intensity of a man balancing a nation’s treasury.

“All we need is enough to hire two, maybe three adventurers,” his father was saying. “To reach the tower, nothing more. We won’t ask the wizard for charity—we’ll just get Tomas there.”

Tomas sat on the edge of the stairs, elbows on his knees. The old wood creaked under his heel.

He didn’t speak.

The Weaver’s words had taken root in the minds of the adults like ivy in cracked stone. It had turned his parents from farmers into fundraisers overnight.

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By noon, his mother had visited five households and returned with a basket of goods and a small pouch of coins. A jar of honey. A knitted scarf. Two iron nails—“for luck,” they said. She took it all with thanks and glowing eyes.

“They believe in you,” she told Tomas as she smoothed his hair. “You're not just any child now. You were chosen.”

Chosen. He swallowed the word, but it tasted like chalk.

Outside, the village buzzed with something between celebration and gossip. At least half a dozen people stopped him while he was hauling water, their words all too similar.

“You’ll be a great mage someday, Tomas.”

“Maybe you’ll cast spells to fix the well!”

“Don’t forget us when you’re famous!”

He laughed when they laughed. He nodded when they patted his shoulder. He said thank you even when he didn’t understand what he was thanking them for.

He hadn’t done anything yet.

He wasn’t even sure he wanted to.

That evening, the long bench outside the granary filled with murmurs. His parents stood tall beneath the old ivy-covered beam as they spoke to the gathered villagers.

“We’re asking only what you can spare,” his mother said, holding the tin box with both hands. “For the chance to send our boy where he might become something more.”

The crowd shifted like grass in a breeze. Some nodded. Some crossed their arms.

An old man with a bent back leaned forward. “You’re assuming the wizard even exists.”

“He does,” Tomas’s father said quickly. “Sera confirmed it.”

“That plant woman?” Someone scoffed. “She’s half-feral herself.”

“Doesn’t mean she’s wrong,” came another voice.

“But that man—if he’s real—he doesn’t teach just anyone. That’s what I’ve heard.”

“He was exiled,” muttered a baker’s wife. “Noble-born, cast out for treason. My cousin swears she saw his name stricken from the crown’s records.”

“I heard he turned into a beast and lives with owls.”

“You heard wrong. He lives in a black tower that moves.”

Tomas listened to all of it from the steps of the granary, hands folded in his lap.

He watched his mother explain again. Watched his father gesture at the scribbled map. Heard their voices stretch with hope and strain.

Everyone had a version of the wizard. Everyone had a story.

But no one had ever seen him.

No one had ever come back from that part of the forest with proof.

And Tomas?

He looked at the path leading into the woods, the one that wound away from the village and disappeared under green shade and fog.

He stared down at his hands, rough from farmwork, callused from chores.

What if I don’t want to go?

The question came like a drop of water on stone. Quiet. But real.

He didn’t say it aloud.

But it stayed.

And it grew.

***

POV: Eirian

The dreams started like smoke.

At first, they slipped between sleep and waking—half-sounds, flickers of strange color behind her eyes, a pressure in her chest like someone was calling her name in a language she didn’t know. Eirian would wake with her heart pounding, cold sweat slicking her temples, and breath caught halfway to a scream.

But she wouldn’t remember why.

Not until the fourth night.

That night, there was no forgetting.

She found herself standing in a hall of obsidian stone, black walls veined with lines of pulsing red light. The air was hot—oppressive. It was the heat of presence, like standing too close to a forge where something watched from the flames.

Above her, the sky wasn’t blue or grey or any color she knew. It was red, but not the gentle red of sunset. This was living red, molten, roiling, and streaked with shapes that twisted and flared like wings of ash. Lightning cracked across the horizon in jagged silence. Mountains floated, broken and inverted, like shards of stone tethered by threads of blood.

And in the center of it all—at the heart of the burning sky and crumbling world—was the castle.

It was vast and wrong and beautiful. Not the cold symmetry of the Empire she remembered from her past life, but something older. Its towers spiraled into thorn-like shapes, like a crown woven of bone and void. Black banners stitched with silver script snapped in the heatless wind. Beneath the banners, creatures moved—winged, horned, some slithering like shadows, others massive as siege towers.

But none frightened her.

Eirian walked barefoot through the castle’s echoing halls. Each step clicked against volcanic glass. And when she passed the creatures, they bowed their heads.

She passed under archways carved with symbols that stirred her memory. She didn’t know what they meant, but her hands itched to draw them. As she reached the throne room, the door opened for her without a touch.

There, beneath a canopy of chains that stretched into nothingness, a throne stood carved from a single tooth-white fang.

And seated on it—

A monster.

Huge. Cloaked in bone-plate armor etched with runes that pulsed with breathing light. Four arms rested on the arms of the throne, taloned fingers curling loosely. Horns spiraled from his brow, one cracked. His eyes were molten gold, but behind them—she saw herself.

Something so intimately known that she felt her body shiver, even here, in the dream.

He rose.

And when he knelt before her, it didn’t feel wrong.

It felt like something that had been waiting to happen.

"You have returned," he said, his voice like thunder across chasms. "Or... you will."

And then the dream collapsed like glass dropped on stone.

She woke with a gasp, back arched, hands clenched so tightly the fox button bit into her palm.

Sera burst into the room a heartbeat later, hair tangled, tunic half-fastened. “What happened? What—”

Eirian sat up too quickly. Her breath hitched. Her eyes burned.

“I... I don’t know,” she whispered. “It was a dream. I think.”

But the mat beneath her told a different story.

A black glyph had been burned—burned—into the wood beside where her hand had been resting. A ring of spiked symbols surrounded a central spiral. It hadn’t been there the night before.

Sera stared at it in silence.

Then, slowly, she reached forward and touched the edge with her fingertip.

It didn’t sting. But she flinched anyway.

“Was this... you?” she asked softly.

Eirian nodded.

“I think so,” she whispered.

Sera didn’t scold her. She only stood, crossed the room, and fetched a heavy cloth. She laid it gently over the glyph like someone covering a body.

Then she knelt and took Eirian’s small hand in hers.

“Tell me what you saw.”

Eirian tried.

She described the sky, the castle, and the throne. She spoke of the creatures who bowed and the way her steps never faltered. She described the monster—no, the demon—on the throne.

And the way it had known her.

Sera listened in silence, fingers tightening slightly around Eirian’s as she spoke.

When it was over, the fire in the hearth had burned down to glowing embers.

Sera finally spoke.

“Do you know what dreams are like this?”

Eirian shook her head.

“They’re not dreams,” Sera said. “They’re echoes. Shadows of something bigger.”

Memories, Eirian thought.

But they weren’t hers.

She remembered flashes now when she closed her eyes—of stone cities built in impossible spirals, of betrayal beneath moonless skies. Blood carved into language. Names spoken like vows.

Askariel.

The name rose unbidden, whispered against the walls of her skull.

The demon soul.

That night, Eirian didn’t sleep again. She sat by the window, fox button in her lap, and watched the moon trace silver over the roof slates.

She tried to draw the glyph again on a piece of paper.

But the ink refused to take.

It smeared like oil, refusing to settle.

She burned the paper quietly before Sera could see.

She was still herself.

But she wasn’t alone anymore.

And something inside her—something ancient and powerful—was beginning to remember how it once ruled.

And how it fell.

***

POV: Tomas

The forest always felt different at dusk.

Tomas stood just outside the split-rail fence, watching the tree line sway as golden light filtered between the branches. Wind stirred the tall grasses at his feet, soft and slow, but the air pressed in around him, heavy with the hush that came before nightfall. He was feeling the weight of expectation from his family and from every person in the village.

Behind him, the village was alive with motion. His mother had spent the morning collecting another round of donations—a sack of dried mushrooms, half a spool of copper wire, even a small pearl clasp someone swore had belonged to their grandmother’s wedding coat.

Everything was being saved. Stored. Offered.

For him.

“Tomas,” someone called. “Are you coming or just standing there growing moss?”

It was Lerin, the baker’s youngest, carrying two wooden swords and a grin that showed every one of his crooked teeth. Tomas smiled weakly, waved him off, and turned back to the trees.

He didn’t want to explain what he was thinking.

He didn’t want to admit he wasn’t sure he wanted to go.

The forest didn’t promise safety. Even if the wizard was real, even if he agreed to train Tomas, nothing about it sounded like the stories the old veterans told at market day. There were no golden halls or thunderclaps of power in this tale—just a tower hidden by bramble and silence. A man who hadn’t been seen in generations. A road few returned from.

What if it had all been a mistake?

What if they spent their coin, rallied the whole village, and when he stood before the wizard’s tower… nothing happened?

He didn’t want to disappoint them.

He didn’t want to be ordinary after they’d made him out to be special.

But maybe he already was.

Footsteps crunched behind him.

His father.

“Tomas,” he said, kneeling beside him. “You’ve been quiet.”

Tomas didn’t look up. “What if I can’t do it?”

His father didn’t answer immediately. He reached down, picked up a blade of grass, and twisted it between his fingers.

“Do you think the wizard will train me?” Tomas asked, barely above a whisper.

His father was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “I don’t know.”

Tomas looked up in surprise. “But you said—”

“I said we’d try.” His father met his gaze, steady and kind. “But that doesn’t mean we know what’s waiting. It could be dangerous. Could be disappointment.”

He smiled faintly. “But sometimes, you have to walk the road anyway. Even if you don’t know where it ends.”

Tomas swallowed hard.

It wasn’t the answer he wanted.

But it was the truth.