Page 16 of Beds and Blades

Caen smiled.

“It is called deeproot. I hope it helped,” she said. “I imagine you have questions.”

That was an understatement, but I appreciated the invitation.

“I need to understand where I am,” I said. “Because this appears to be a radically different world.”

“This world has a name,” Caen said. “It is called Mytharo.”

Mytharo.

It sounded exactly right for a world with imposing stone fortifications, charcoal-black mountains, wizards with glowing pendants, and devastatingly handsome High Commanders.

“Myth means the flame,” Caen said. “Not fire. The flame. The living thing that burns and warms and changes the shape of everything it touches.” She touched the spiral pendant briefly. “Aro means sacred. Held above all things. Mytharo means the sacred flame. This world is named for what it believes life is for—burning fully, warming, changing, and completing.”

I thought about Earth. From the Old English eorþe. Ground, soil, the stuff under your feet. We had looked at an entire planet—oceans, mountains, billions of years of improbable biological complexity—and the best we had collectively managed was: dirt. It is made of dirt. We will call it Dirt. This had apparently satisfied everyone sufficiently that it had stuck for the entire duration of recorded human history and nobody had ever proposed a revision.

They had named their world after what it believed. We had named ours after what it stood on.

“I’m from a world called Earth,” I said.

“Earth,” Caen repeated.

She said it the way you say a word you have said before. Without hesitation. Without the half-second of processing that a genuinely unfamiliar word requires. It was the tone of someone confirming rather than learning.

I filed this. I moved on, because I had five hundred other questions and I was going to get through them in order.

“And where on Mytharo am I?” I asked.

“The eastern reaches of the Northern Continent. Near the Zhaduun Mountains.”

Northern Continent. A refreshingly honest naming convention. Fantasy cartography rarely embraced that level of straightforwardness.

“And who are you, exactly?” I asked. “Skip brought me to you specifically. You have a glowing pendant and a tower full of locked doors. I’ve been assuming wizard, but I want to be accurate.”

“I am a Mage,” she said.

“What’s a Mage, exactly?” I asked.

“Mages are a theological order. We serve Yravel. The founding god of this world. She made the world by wanting it. Desire is the founding principle of existence, generation, connection. Everything alive flows from her principle.” She touched the spiral pendant. “This is her symbol. The living arts we practice draw on what she made. We pay an honest cost. The pendant dims, I rest, it returns. What I spend of myself is not lost. It comes back.”

“There’s an opposite principle?” I asked. I was a historian. I knew how pantheons worked. There was always an opposite.

Caen looked at me as though revising her estimate of how quickly I processed things. “Druven. He cannot tolerate endings. His argument is that the flame should burn forever—that preservation is love, and endings are the enemy.” Her voice was even, the voice of someone who had spent a long time with a difficult idea. “He is wrong. But it is a coherent wrongness. In the right moment of grief, in the right moment of fear, it is very easy to believe.”

“And what exactly is this fortification defending against?” I asked. “I’ve gathered that you’re holding a line against something. The walls are built to absorb sustained impact. The moat has a significant skeletal population. The density of arrow slits suggests a recurring rather than occasional problem.”

Caen let the question sit. “You ask questions like a scholar.”

“I am primarily a scholar of military history,” I said.

From the doorway, Skip said, “Military history?”

“Does that surprise you?” I asked.

“A little.”

“Why?”