[Wizard's Thumb] I Know Nothing

[Hadrian]

"I am a scholar and a mage," he assured the man, and the hypnotic suggestion to trust was buoyed by a faint, conspiratorial smile. "I had hoped to eventually save one of those creatures from the hellworld in which they suffer, but I had thought a great deal more research would be required, and however long it would take to develop relationships with people here and on the other side to make a proper connection... "I know there are some who are more loyal to their saviors than others. I suppose, if you were to help me make a contract, I would have to depend on you to find me a companion who would not be seditious. I wouldn't want a simpering slave, but a companion with mutual respect. Would you help me?" A thought occurred to him. "Have you a familiar of your own, friend Marc?"

[Liar]

Marc smiled, apparently happy to have reached this inevitable question. The expression seemed strange on his mangled face, the muscles untrained, and yet if Hadrian dared to peer at the monk’s aura, he would not find any concealed hostility. “Mm, yes,” he declared. “Indeed. He is nothing but a boon to my power, and my study. We share the same curiosity for the worlds beyond this one, and we have explored them together for a very long time.” Hesitance weighed flat on his lips as he struggled to arrange the rest of his words. “Unfortunately... he is incredibly shy. He feels as strongly as any familiar about the plight of his brothers, but... ah, I know how to connect to Fyrden well enough to help you find what you seek.” He punctuated the assertion with an absent nod, taking a step away from Hadrian in order to survey the room, its floor, its circle-drawing ingredients. “You have a noble heart,” he admitted, less than skeptical. “And even in passing you have explained to me that you have already researched this discipline. I trust that you have what it takes, if you believe so.” He shrugged stiffly, ignoring the low scratching noise that had begun to etch its way from the mysterious door and into the lowest trenches of perception. “After all, if you do not find you companion, you may close the circle and look another time.”

[Hadrian]

"Ah, that must be wonderful," he said, smiling. Sensing the fear and weariness behind the door, his aura pushed out, through the wood as if it wasn't there, emanating calm. "I can dial into Fyrden, but I haven't managed to pull any creatures through with whom I might speak. That was my plan, anyway, to open gateways and speak to the Fyrdenese, try to find one who was a kindred spirit. Until I met you, I suppose." With no real explanation for what he was doing, he placed his hand over the door, focusing a pulse of soothing calm through to whatever it was beyond, its aura somehow not quite recognizable through the wood. He didn't want to die, and so whatever it was needed to be calm when he attempted to open the door. His hand closed on the handle and attempted to turn it.

[Liar]

The effect of Hadrian’s influence allowed him to move to the door without a question from Marc, who stepped after him vaguely, absently. The excitement was clear on his scarred, hardened face as it turned hastily within his developing plans. The door’s handle knocked against its lock as Hadrian tried to turn it, shaking against the otherwise loose-fitting door. But an instant later, an eager memory erupted from his Lykata and into the front of his mind. He saw Marc’s face, albeit haggard and thinner, peer out of a sad darkness. A door closed in front of the face and a key with a long tassel twisted within its handle, locking it. And then there was a noise, and when the vision rushed to examine it, Hadrian would see himself arriving at the hall’s entrance, careful courtesy tinging on his aura. Even though the memory lasted only a moment, by the end of that moment the door handle was shaking from the other side, wriggling desperately in the grasp of whatever lurked behind. The key from the vision sat almost patiently on the nearby table, where it had been left as Hadrian first arrived. When he finally realized what Hadrian was doing, Marc remembered his old persona. His strained smile fell flat, his eyes pulled down into withdrawn anger. But where he might have once grumbled some half-hearted disapproval, he could not give up on persuading this friend from this secret. Instead, he lingered beside the culpable key and said, “Don’t be foolish, boy. Remember what they say about curiosity and cats? Let’s get started.” He gestured toward the greater part of the hall. “Fyrden awaits.”

[Hadrian]

Hadrian blinked at the vision, and then at Marc. He wished he had the lack of scruples necessary to take the knowledge he desired, but perhaps he could get it out of Marc without breaking his own shadowy moral code. He nodded and put a friendly, albeit forced, hand on Marc's shoulder, the which made plying his hypnotic power easier for him. There was a trickle of ease that flowed through the connection, gradually growing so as not to trip off any mental alarums. Then, just before he released the contact, he sent a sudden thought into Marc's mind in Marc's voice: I can trust Hadrian with everything. But he merely noted the presence of the key and turned away. "You're probably wiser than me, Marc," he said humbly, and followed him into the greater part of the hall, presumably to begin drawing up circles that would open gateways into Fyrden.

[Liar]

He started hastily, almost shamefully, away from Hadrian’s grasp, but the damage had already been done. His hard face was carved thin by his hesitation, moving only in the eyes that darted between the summoning floor and the forbidden door. If the aurist pried, he would see more consternation than indecision blooming in the back of the summoner’s mind as he took the key from where he had been guarding it. “We cannot,” admitted the man who called himself Marc. The contempt in the statement was subtle, weak even, and directed toward the door. “Not alone. I am powerful, but not as powerful as that.” The key turned easily in the lock, and a hopeful glow rose up out of the aura behind the door. In what looked like a storage closet, behind the faint blue sheen of some magical and intangible wall, a man was rising to his feet. He shielded his eyes from the dim light that opened on him, half-naked and half-starved, but when his hand lowered it revealed a haggard mirror of the mage who had freed him. The glow wilted. Rather than gratitude, the man in the closet gave a cold glare to the creature who shared his face, and the man who called himself Marc looked back in exasperated confusion. “Fraud,” the former coughed at the latter, insisting the accusation on Hadrian’s ears. “He is a fraud.” The Fraud quite literally shrank then, sinking into the brown robes than covered him until they fell around the black stone body of a kirt. “You trust him,” the familiar said, as if he were repeating it. His voice was low and gravelly. “He is strong. Let us open Fyrden for him.” The true Marc turned his eyes from possible escape to Hadrian, and with no less an accusation on his tired face replied, “No. Never.”

[Hadrian]

The Marc that was not proceeded to buck his expectations, turning back to the door when he thought he would have to work him around to it, and then it all came clear, though he had spent time in Sahova and Alvadas and rarely trusted what he saw before him, especially after it so radically altered before his very eyes. He was the illusionist, but his Lykata did not allow him to see through this, so he assumed no illusion was being worked on him. Hadrian knew he could open gate after gate to Fyrden. What he did not know was how to go about finding his soulmate there, and to contract its transference. But like any domestic dispute, it seemed best to stand back from this one. He did not run away, nor make any obvious motions toward defense, but he knew he could channel auric energy into many things at the drop of a hat anymore. But if the man in the closet was grateful for having been loosed, it did not seem so. He gave a cool smile. "Welcome back into the world. I suppose I shall go peruse more of the records and see to my own circles, then."

[Liar]

Marc’s eyebrows floated upward at the stranger’s (less than desired, and yet hardly unexpected) response, but after some consideration they dropped with his shoulders. He leaned gloomily against the doorframe, his thin body distorted in the light of the shield that had masked him from rescue. The frantic search from Hadrian’s visions, the imprints which a desperate mind had left on this place where he had spent so many years of his life, was lost on this new man in the wake of his failures. With little strength to hold him, he fell to his knees and retrieved his robes from the floor. The broken mage had always been an internal man, of few words and fewer mistakes, much to the disdain of the ambitious creature who presumed to replace him. Even now, despite this unfortunate turn in his life, he was full of an old quiet conviction. Resigned to his fate as a vessel for his familiar, this greatest of mistakes, he seemed to cling to any decision that was left for him to make. “No. Never.” He nodded again, to no one in particular. His familiar, on the other hand, was not ready to give up. “I cannot talk to him,” it pleaded coolly from a bare, black mouth, pretending there was some new honesty in its true form. It seemed to be under the impression that Hadrian shared the trust he had implanted in it. “He will not listen to reason, not when it comes from me. Tell him how skilled you are. Tell him you will make a wise choice and practice well. Remind him that it is all for the pursuit of knowledge. Yes. He will like that.” The peculiar rock tilted its head in consideration. “Unless... unless you think we can do it together, just you and I. You said you knew how to summon?”

[Hadrian]

No, the shadow of the former Marc would have nothing to do with him, not without an unhealthy dose of hypnotism, he thought, and he was already dancing dangerously close to the edges of his self-imposed ethics as it was. Perhaps it were better to learn what he could from the books and charts and graphs, as well as the impressions Eyris helped him find, and he could broker a deal with one of the denizens of Fyrden another day, with better preparations. It was hardly possible to trust a Familiar who imprisoned its own bonded wizard in a bespelled closet like that. Hadrian had no wish to be incarcerated, and he hoped to find a true soulmate from the other world, a helper whose dreams would align with his own, but perhaps that was too much to ask. Eyris help me make the right decision, he silently prayed, because the Familiar was plying him with pretty words again. "I don't even know your name," he said quietly. Names held power, according to some texts. Certainly, Caelum said names held all power, if one knew them in the Celestial Language. But Hadrian did not. "I don't know that I should persuade him to help. I would like to trust you, but now I have no way of knowing whether you truly seek to help me or whether you have some cousin in mind who would seek to similarly subdue me. You are made of the stuff of his soul now..." He glanced at the circle-making things, the space; this was a wonderful place, though it held terrible secrets. Truth be told, he was slightly overwhelmed between the knowledge in the books, the impressions of his Lykata, and the shifting realities of who was who and what they wanted. Marc wanted nothing to do with him, and Marc's familiar wanted something from him. "I can raise a gate to Fyrden," he said, "and allow you to communicate with the people there, but I will not promise to form a bond with any of them. I cannot in good conscience do so, unless you would like to sign a Grand Oath that would allow me to trust you beyond the shadow of a doubt." Such an oath was within his powers to inscribe in ink and aura, for eyes and gods to see, but even a crafty familiar would know that such an oath was utterly binding.

[Liar]

“My name is Zet,” the familiar offered, as if it made up for everything else. Rejection warped the black stone of its face into a shadowy mess of confusion and hesitance. It stepped away from Hadrian, only now beginning to doubt the trust it thought it had earned. It took many long moments to consider the proposal, the oath before the oath, during which it glanced many times at Marc. The man had risen to his feet. His face was wet with fresh tears, but his eyes were drying in the light of newfound composure as he searched his robes for the right holes. “I am going to eat,” he said defiantly and yet with strange calm. “No,” said Zet immediately. “No, you won’t look the same. Let me go for you.” It shifted suddenly into Marc again, clothed in its own magical version of the monk’s robes and eager to prove its worth. It was true what it said: however long Marc had spent in isolation had left him two sizes too small for the brown cloth he pulled over his body, and it was Zet’s version the world seemed to recognize. Marc gave his doppelganger a curious look, but before he could say anything, it was gone. As soon as Zet was gone, Marc’s hand rose to hide his face. He looked away, wiped his eyes on both sides, and made to ignore Hadrian. He began to collect the clutter of books that been laid out and forgotten in his absence, closing and stacking them as he prepared to return them to their rightful places. But there was one he did not recognize, pausing at the sight. It was wedged between the others and protruding haphazardly from the edge of the table, as if reaching out to the main floor where Hadrian stood. It glinted like silver metal, stealing what light remained in that dim basement. Marc set down the stack in order to investigate it. He picked it up and turned it over. When he opened it, the pages flailed from their binding until they collapsed into themselves, and suddenly the book vanished. In its place stood a woman that Hadrian might recognize from his past, a little statuette now standing tall and made of flesh. She moved with the same golden grace, the beauty of wisdom manifest. She looked at the floor, the ceiling, and then her eyes rose from each man’s heart to the mind behind his brow. “Marc,” said Eyris first, and her voice was low and kind. “You have suffered much, and for that your library grieves. Years ago, I heard you often; I watched you write and collect so much knowledge that had once been lost to this city. But your prayers have gone silent, and the wisdom of the world laments your absence. Your mind is more powerful than your mistakes. Do not lose it.” Her lips touched his forehead sadly, and then she turned to the other mage. “Hadrian,” smiled she, and the room seemed to brighten with her pride. “You have come so far. Even when you were blind to my gift, you never ceased the endless pursuit of knowledge, the most sacred of lives to live. I have watched you travel and learn, and so touch the minds of so many others. You have been ready to find a familiar of your own for a long time, and your wisdom in the face of Fyrdenese cruelty further proves that. I know that you will learn from the mistakes of your brother in worship. Now,” She stretched her hand out to Hadrian. In it was a simple piece of chalk, unique only in its newness. “Let us begin.”