Chapter 35: A Fiery Summer
Personal System Calendar: Year 00012, Day 1-14, Month VII: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6857, 1st to 14th day of the 7th Month
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The Heat That Would Not Just Leave
The seventh month arrived and brought with it the confirmation that summer had absolutely no intention of concluding on anyone's schedule but its own.
The agricultural families had warned the council weeks prior that the seasonal extension was likely. They had their methods of reading it, the soil moisture, the behavior of birds, the way certain plants held their leaves in the morning heat, a lifetime of accumulated observation and experience that the village had learned to treat as more reliable than any calendar. The warning had been delivered with the professional calm of people who had seen difficult seasons before and understood that preparation was the correct response to information you could not change.
The warning did not make the heat less miserable. It just meant the village was miserable in an organized fashion rather than a surprised one.
The sun came up every morning with the enthusiasm of something that had not been informed it was supposed to be winding down already. The stones of the main thoroughfares radiated warmth back upward for hours after direct sunlight had moved off them. People who had to work outdoors in the middle of the day did so with the particular efficiency of people trying to get the task done before the task became a medical event. Guards on the wall rotations were cycled through at shorter intervals than usual, because standing in full armor under direct sun for a standard watch length was the kind of decision that produced heat stroke patients, and the healing center had communicated very clearly that it could manage a reasonable number of heat stroke patients but would appreciate not being treated as the obvious solution to a preventable problem.
The guards were still finding people who had apparently decided to just sit somewhere with the full might of sun bearing down on them until the sun won. Dragging them to the healing center with the resigned patience of people doing this for the third time that week had become a specific sub-category of guard duty that nobody had officially named but everyone understood.
It was, as Elder Donnel Archer had observed during a brief council check-in, like the sun had taken it personally.
The other hot topic of the month, the one that had been discussed with considerably more entertainment value than the weather, was what had happened several days ago at Master Ben's tower.
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Amanda and the Books
Mirabeth Flamespyre had arrived at the tower in Zone One and found Amanda Bloues waiting at the door.
Amanda had not been told, specifically, that the woman she was meeting was Mirabeth Flamespyre. Master Ben had framed her assignment as a greeting duty, which was technically accurate in the same way that standing in front of an oncoming cart and waving at it was technically a greeting. He had sent her out with the particular confidence of a man who had decided that someone else should absorb the initial impact of this reunion while he continued his internal preparations.
Amanda had worked out who she was meeting approximately two seconds after seeing the woman approach, because Mirabeth Flamespyre's portrait appeared in no fewer than twelve books that Amanda had read with serious intent, six of which she had read more than once. The books covered fire elemental theory from foundational principles through advanced applications and rare variants, the histories of the great fire mages across three subcontinents, the philosophical frameworks of elemental scholarship, and in several cases the personal observations of a writer who had strong opinions and the academic standing to express them in a way that got published and sold widely.
The books also mentioned Master Ben. At length, in multiple chapters, with the kind of detailed technical praise that came from genuine professional respect, layered over with something that a very careful reader who also happened to know both parties would recognize as something else entirely. The jabs were subtle. But they were there. Amanda had noticed them on her third read of volume four and had filed the observation under things she was absolutely not going to bring up with either person involved.
And now the person who had written those books was standing in front of her, and Amanda's mouth was doing the thing it did when her brain supplied information faster than her composure could process it.
"Greetings — madam Mirabeth — my name is Amanda Bloues, Master Ben's assistant — I'm here to greet you, the master had sent me here — it is a great pleasure to meet you, ma'am. Your books are truly eye-opening to read."
Mirabeth regarded the young woman with the curiosity she directed at most new situations: composed, measuring, and entirely without the social obligation to pretend she was not paying close attention.
"An assistant, dear? Not his apprentice?"
"No, ma'am, I am on the waiting list but more privileged than most of the other students. I am constantly reading his own writings and some advanced texts I could not access before arriving here."
"So he has apprentices and students now?"
"Yes, ma'am. First would be Master August and Miss Betty, then a few others who are students of magic in general, not fire users but other elements. Then by that order it would be me." She paused, careful. Benethar was not in the village at the moment. The secret was intact. She was going to keep it that way.
"May I carry your things, ma'am? I will take you inside the tower."
Mirabeth smiled and accepted, which was the response Amanda had been hoping for and the one that had, at that exact moment, sent a very distinct chill running the length of Master Ben's spine three floors above them.
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The Wizard's Tower
The tower that had been built for Master Ben by the village in Zone One was not a large structure by any external measure. Fifty feet of height above ground, circular and tapering as it rose, the spiral staircase running within the wall thickness rather than taking up floor space. What it lacked in horizontal footprint it compensated for in deliberate vertical organization, each floor serving a purpose that had been thought through rather than arrived at.
Below the foundation, accessible only via a hidden stair sealed with a rune key, sat the basement chamber. Twenty-five feet of vaulted stone space, fifteen feet across, lined with fireproof material that did not merely resist heat but had been specifically engineered to contain what happened when a grandmaster-level fire mage's experiments went wrong in the particular ways that grandmaster-level experiments sometimes went. An arcane containment circle occupied the center of the floor. Heat exhaust shafts ran upward through the tower walls. Anti-explosion glyphs covered the walls at intervals. The shackles and anchor points along the walls were for summoned entities, though if you asked Master Ben directly about this he would change the subject with the practiced smoothness of someone who had changed that subject many times before.
The ground floor was where the tower met the village, a guest area and kitchen space of approximately two hundred and fifty-five square feet with a hearth connected to the vertical chimney, a reinforced oak door with iron banding, and a hidden trapdoor beneath a storage bench that connected downward to the basement access shaft. The door's intruder alarm glyph was calibrated to Ben's preferences, which meant it distinguished between uninvited guests and Amanda, who had her own access, and was apparently also now calibrated to recognize Mirabeth, though Ben had not voluntarily done this and was uncertain when it had been updated.
The second floor was his sleeping quarters, insulated walls, a personal rune-lock storage chest, and a desk that saw more use than the bed in any given week. The third floor was reagent storage and every type of storage that master been would need, some of it even were dimensional in its aspect and would be able to hold far more than what it may seem on the outside, it was also temperature-controlled through the airflow shaft system "wind catchers", the shelves were organized by volatility with the more dangerous materials in locked cases that had additional dampening runes applied. An explosion at this level would be contained. This had been tested once, not deliberately, and the containment had held, which Ben considered a satisfying proof of design.
The top floor was where he actually worked. One hundred and fifty-four square feet of study and experimentation space built around the arcane circle at its center, with a desk against the wall and the controls for the tower's wind catcher system positioned where he could reach them without leaving the circle. The wind catchers themselves were the tower's most elegant feature, pulling cool air inward from above and running it down through shafts built into the walls, while hot and stale air was pushed upward and out. Combined with the active cooling enchantment cores on each floor, the system maintained a working temperature inside the tower that was genuinely comfortable even during the kind of extended summer the village was currently experiencing.
Or it did, under normal operating conditions.
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The Reunion
Master Ben was at the top of the spiral staircase when the door opened, which meant he had precisely no additional time to compose himself before seeing Mirabeth standing in his study with the expression of someone who had expected exactly this and was enjoying the confirmation.
Amanda was behind her, wearing a smile that she was attempting to keep at a professionally appropriate size and was not entirely succeeding.
"I suppose I could welcome you to my home," Ben said, with the particular flatness of someone choosing words carefully, "though you will recall I was quite clear in my last conversation with you that this arrangement was not welcome. Couldn't you have simply sent another message? I would have come to you, if you had something particular in mind."
Mirabeth tilted her head. "Old man. You are being extraordinarily cold to your guest." She settled into the chair beside his desk with the ease of someone who had decided this was her chair now. "I understood what your said to me last time, yes. But I decided I did not care about your words enough to let them stop me from coming here. I am here as a visitor to the village, which is a public establishment that has not barred me entry. I retired from my post as Dean of the Arabaya Tower, and I find myself with considerable free time and an interest in somewhere interesting to spend it. Doesn't this place qualify it?" She looked around the study with the assessing eye of someone who understood magical workspaces. "And there is nothing you can do about it."
"I can ask you to leave."
"You can ask."
The temperature in the room was technically still within the operating parameters of the cooling system. Technically.
"Well then." Ben stood, with the posture of a man who has run out of arguments and knows it and is not gracefully conceding but pivoting. "If you have nothing specific for me, I bid you farwell. I hope your stay is pleasant. May we not cross paths unnecessarily."
What happened next was the reason August had to be involved.
The cooling enchantments in the top floor study are good enchantments. They had handled the ambient heat of a grandmaster-level fire mage conducting active experiments across many years without failure. What they were not designed to handle was the specific combination of a decades-old unresolved grievance, a woman whose elemental affinity was plasma — a variation of fire so rare and so energetically dense that most fire mages encountered it only in academic texts — and the particular expression she wore in the moment before she stopped keeping her composure contained.
The enchantments registered the temperature spike and attempted to compensate. They could not compensate fast enough. The air around Mirabeth began to distort with heat shimmer. The arcane cooling cores on the floor began emitting a strained harmonic that magical practitioners recognized as the sound of enchantments working beyond their rated capacity.
Master Ben, who had not survived several centuries by being slow to read a situation, began moving toward the window.
"Ooyyy, oyyy. What are you doing, you crazy woman, this is a village —"
The plasma went out the window. To his credit, he redirected it — not fully, not cleanly, but enough that it cleared the village structures and dissipated into the sky above the forest canopy rather than into anything load-bearing. What it did instead was produce a visible pillar of superheated light that approximately four hundred residents of Zone Two was able to see clearly simultaneously, followed by the sight of Master Ben coming out of the top of his tower at speed, managing the redirected plasma with the desperate competence of someone who was very good at fire manipulation and was currently being given much more fire to manipulate than he had volunteered for.
The chase that followed lasted approximately eleven minutes by the account of those who witnessed it. Master Ben moved through the upper airspace of Zone One and Two with the agility of someone whose combat training predated the current era of organized warfare, redirecting, absorbing, and venting the superheated plasma exchanges while calling out objections that the village's residents found, in retrospect, quite entertaining. Mirabeth was not, it must be noted, actually trying to hit him. This was clearly a distinction she had made because a grandmaster-level plasma mage who actually intended to hit a target would not miss repeatedly at these ranges. What she was doing was expressing something with considerable intensity (a tantrum of some sort) and using a medium that matched the intensity of what was being expressed.
When August arrived, he assessed the situation with the specific efficiency of someone who had learned to distinguish between things that required immediate violence and things that required a different kind of intervention. He stopped it before it could get any worse, though the spectacle was indeed quite amusing. He brought both of them in for what he diplomatically called questioning, and what everyone in the village immediately understood to be the adult version of telling two people to sit down and stop doing that.
In the questioning room, Master Ben explained the situation. Mirabeth was quiet for the duration of his explanation, which was the kind of quiet that contained more information than the words surrounding it. August listened to the explanation and reached his conclusion before it was finished, because he recognized the specific shape of this dynamic. He recognized it because he was a man who was more afraid of making Angeline genuinely angry than he was of most beasts in the Great Forest, and that was a reasonable attitude for a man in his position, and it told him something useful about the nature of the confrontation he had just interrupted.
He offered no further analysis. He reminded both of them that the village had people in it who had not signed up to be part of their reunion, and that any further expressions of their complicated history should take place in a context where the cooling enchantments were adequate to the load. Then he left them to settle whatever it was that they were doing before.
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The Days That Followed
Since then, Mirabeth had become a presence in the village in the specific way that someone with a commanding personality and no particular schedule becomes a presence: gradually, thoroughly, and in ways that were difficult to object to because she was not doing anything specifically objectionable.
She wandered Zone Two in the mornings, stopping at stalls with the interest of someone who was genuinely curious about what a village run on these particular principles looked like from the inside. She had conversations with the residents and even visitors who were initially cautious and then, because Mirabeth at her most relaxed was genuinely engaging, found themselves talking longer than they had planned. She did not mention who she was unless directly asked. She did not need to. The people who knew recognized her. The people who did not know simply experienced a woman of evident distinction who was interested in what they were doing and asked intelligent questions about it.
She was in her early fifties in appearance, which was what grandmasters of her level looked like when they chose to, and which was not her actual age, which was a number she had not volunteered and nobody had been impolite enough to request. Asking a woman her age past thirty was already inadvisable as a general principle. Asking a grandmaster-level mage her age past thirty was the kind of decision that required a specific relationship with self-preservation.
She could also be found, at regular intervals, inside Master Ben's tower.
This was the part that Ben found most taxing, because Mirabeth in his workspace was Mirabeth in his workspace, and the experiments that he had moved to the mountain fort before her arrival were still in the fort because bringing them back out while she was present was not something he was prepared to navigate. This meant his primary research was currently inaccessible to him, and he was spending his days in the tower doing secondary work with the focused patience of a man who had decided that visible irritation was the only card he had left to play and was playing it consistently.
He was, and this was something he had not said aloud and was not planning to, also aware that the reason he had never said what needed to be said to her was still unresolved, still sitting in the space between them like a piece of furniture neither of them acknowledged but both of them navigated around. Several centuries ago, in the years when they were both considerably younger in the ways that matter rather than the ways that show, he had left without adequate explanation. He had done this more than once. He had continued doing it until one day he did not return at all, and the silence between them had eventually calcified into the specific social configuration of people who had known each other too well and resolved it too poorly.
He had never said he was sorry. Not properly. Not with the directness it deserved. He had convinced himself, across centuries of practice, that this was because the moment had not presented itself correctly, or because she did not want to hear it, or because it was too long ago to matter now. These were all convenient explanations for a man who had faced things considerably more frightening than an honest conversation and had simply not chosen to apply that courage in this particular direction.
Mirabeth, for her part, was enjoying the village with the genuine appreciation of someone who had arrived expecting something interesting and found something better. The guest quarters for distinguished visitors, where she had been given comfortable accommodation, also housed Grandmaster Miles Daemon and Count Ronaldo Bradmoore, which made the men's section of that building an accidental gathering of people whose collective professional reputation was notable enough that the village guards had quietly added an extra patrol past the building without being asked.
The summer has been extended. The heat sat on the village with the stubbornness of a thing that had made up its mind. Master Ben's tower continued to function within acceptable parameters during the hours when Mirabeth was not in it and slightly outside those parameters during the hours when she was.
It was, as the seventh month settled into its second week, shaping up to be a memorable summer by any reasonable standard.