Young Writers Society

“So there, now you know the truth behind the Black War, the truth about the Zagans, and the truth about the gods,” Azar said. Darius was still rendered speechless by the accounts Azar related.

The three – Azar, Darius and Viknor, were sitting in Azar’s secret room, where his most secret scrolls and books were, and where his most brilliant ideas were conceived. It was dark in there, but these three men had far more light than almost everyone else alive. “That boy, then, Lex Leo, grandson of Kizer… He is the reason… the world is still here?” Darius asked.

“And he is critical for keeping the world alive, though in the war to soon come, we will have a much stronger force on our side. The seven Zagans are with us.”

“Yet, our enemies are those who have unimaginable power,” Viknor said, “And we will need every bit of strength on our side should we win the war. So tell us, Darius, about this Crystal Eye you mentioned. The name sounds familiar, but back in my days of research, looking into the Crystal Eye was like chasing after a ghost.”

“Even knowing about its existence is very impressive, wizard,” Darius said. “Information about this item has been top secret for decades. I myself, with the king before the last, created a task force that was goaled with finding and securing this item.”

“What about my father?” Azar asked.

“No, he didn’t know about it. His father, King Omichron, gave me orders never to tell anyone, including his own son, about this artefact. Also, I had the heavy task of eliminating every surviving member of the organization that researched this item. After doing that, I was well willing to kill myself as well, but the king had me know that there was a purpose left for me. His last words, before dying, was to continue to protect to the secret of the Crystal Eye, and to launch another attempt to get it into Magmalian hands when were strong enough, and when I saw a king that was fit to wield such a power. Your father, Azar, was unfit, so I withheld the secret from him. He, I hope, unlike you, was reckless and ruled by his love for power.”

“Whatever this item is, you were right to withhold it from my father,” Azar said. “But this power, the world needs it now.”

“Tell us more about the Eye,” Viknor said, sounding hungry for knowledge of this strange and powerful thing.

“I have been watching you, Azar,” Darius said. “You and your father had never quite seen eye to eye, and that is good enough reason to trust you. Though you are still inexperienced, you remind me quite a bit of your grandfather.” Darius laughed a little.

“The Eye,” Viknor reminded.

“Right. Now Omichron was a better scholar and explorer than he was a king. Always in search of scrolls and books, he often let his underlings run the country without even realizing it. I was his right hand since his kingship, and he always shared his greatest secrets with me, even things he hid from his father, from the high generals. He had discovered a very power creation, one that could give Magma Town the power to conquer the world.”

Viknor and Azar eyed each other.

“A few hundred years after Oga had died, tenth-generation sorcerers, powerful arcanines, formed a faction called The Elders. This group was a rogue society hunted down by the Ogal Council. Some literature suggest that this faction was even as strong as the council, but their goal was never to prove it. They never once made an attack on the council, but they were outlaws. They researched and even practiced forbidden magic. They fooled around with spells that were strictly illegal, and dabbled in theories that pointed toward resurrection, time travel, planetary travel, blotting out the sun, destroying the moon, terribly powerful things! These men were brilliant magicians who took the art form to a level that even the council was afraid to get involved with.”

“I always knew I was born in the wrong era!” Viknor complained.

“The Elders, I have read,was led by a prodigy who had stepped down from being the head of Ogal Council after leading the war that ended the Ionide race.”

“Sage Lukia,” Viknor said.

“Yes. Sage Lukia, also known as the Pegasus Knight, along with the other arcanines, after decades of work, finally created something that would long outlive them, the crystal eye. This artefact… since the day it was created, it has been absorbing magical energy from everywhere.”

“What? How?” Azar asked.

“The science behind it is difficult to explain, especially since I’m not sure I understand it fully myself. The crystal eye absorbs suspended mana, waste mana. Each time a spell is cast, a bit more mana than is precisely necessary is used. The crystal eye has been gathering all the leftover magic from every spell for the last twenty thousand years. Each time you spaceshift, the mana that disappears from the cloud-like burst somehow becomes eaten up by this thing.”

“Then… This item must house more magic than every magician alive combined now possess! Imagine the spells that could be performed with that item! All the limits of modern magic could be easily broken!” Viknor said in realization.

“Correct,” Darius said. “By now, the eye probably possesses even as much raw power as Oga himself. I am not sure why The Elders created it, but for certain, if this lands in the wrong hands, the world could end easily. Maybe even by touching this stone, even a normal child would become as powerful as Oga.”

“Imagine… Imagine if Oga gets hold of this,” Azar dreaded.

“I cannot. That is beyond the reaches of my imagination,” Viknor said. “Darius, did you and Omichron ever get a location on this stone?”

“… Yes.” There was a heavy silence for a little while.

“Have any maps close by, Azar?” Darius asked.

***

“Icemaker, we’re heading into a blizzard here!” one of the guards Lex forced to take him to the Ice Palace shouted over the howling of the stinging, snowy wind. Lex held tightly to his horse.

“We move forward!” he shouted back. He and two of the guards from the detention centre had been riding for three hours without stopping. It wasn’t entirely that Lex had no sympathy toward how cold the men were, but he simply could not remember what it felt like to be cold. The horses trotted sturdily through the cold. The snow beneath them was six inches thick. “We will ride until sundown, and then take short break!”

“Are you insane?!” the same guard shouted back.

“You can survive the blizzard!” Lex said. “What you most certainly cannot survive is going against my orders!”

***

Darius pointed to a dot on the map that was only a few hundred miles east of Libson. “In the sea?” Azar asked.

“Nah, there’s a small island there that isn’t on the maps. Its name is Ghost. I read that the Elders created this landmass and hid the item there.”

“They created an island?” Azar asked in disbelief. Azar had imagined that only Oga and Kizer had such powers.

“Yes,” Darius continued. “And we found it.” The man smirked on seeing the looks on Viknor’s and Azar’s faces. “That’s right. Almost half a century ago, Omichron and I and seven other men found this island that had kept itself hidden from the world for thousands of years. The island was covered with a veil by the Elders, a covering that made it invisible until you were less than a mile away from it. It’s almost impossible to encounter by chance, but with Omichron leading us, we weren’t relying on luck. The island was only about five or six square miles. In the centre of it was a cave, and of course, within that cave was the most powerful weapon in the world, a weapon that could make a man into a god.”

“Did you retrieve it?” Azar asked, hoping badly for a positive answer.

“We tried. There was a powerful seal guarding the stone. As soon as my king reached to touch it, there was utter chaos! A massive earthquake struck immediately, and the cave began tumbling down on us. I grabbed Omichron and we managed to make it out of the cave. But that wasn’t all we were in for! The island began to sink! Also, we were sure we saw shadows, spirits, rushing about! Spirits cannot be fought with swords!”

“But wasn’t Omichron a wizard of the fifth grade?” Viknor asked, “Couldn’t he have done something?”

“Yes, he was a wizard, but for some reason, his magic was gone while he was on the island! We had to leave the stone and make a run for it! We made it back to the vessel just in time. We moved as fast as we could. We watched as the island sunk and the deathly spirits, the guardians of the stone sunk with their treasure.”

“So these spirits are the spirits of the Elders, you surmise?” Viknor asked, sounding quite sceptical.

“Must have been!”

“Were any of you hurt by the quake or by the spirits?” Viknor asked.

“That’s the strangest part!” Darius said. “Even though stones fell down on top of us and some of us were even struck by the spirits, none of us had any injury whatsoever! By the time we reached back to Magmalian shore, our country was under attack by the Herculean army. Again. After the attack was neutralized, Omichron called a meeting with us who had sought the eye. We had planned to make another journey to search for it, but before that could happen, then king fell ill and died. Just before his life left, he charged me with silencing the team that went after the eye.”

Something’s not quite right about this guy’s story, Viknor thought. Suddenly, he was distracted by another thought. “You were tricked,” he said.

“What?” Darius asked.

“I know why none of you were injured by the quake.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because it never happened.”

“Are you… suggesting that I’m lying?”

“Not really,” Viknor said. “I’ve read quite a bit about The Elders as well. There was one amongst them by the name of Vis, Lukia’s favourite. His specialty was illusions, dreams.”

“Are you saying…”

“Yes. All that you saw happen when you got on that island, it was a shared dream triggered by your closeness to the stone. Vis must have set the trap before he died to deter anyone from using the stone. Even the island being invisible until you are right upon it, that sounds like a technique Vis would be able to use. Even from beyond the grave, these arcanines have been protecting their treasure.”

Darius’ eyes widened and he gasped. “Could it be…”

“Azar, I suggest we set sail to Ghost immediately,” Viknor said. “This power, it is our only hope of winning the war to come.”

***

There was a thrill on Oga’s face as more of the old scrolls and tablets he was reading confirmed an ambitious suspicion. “Oh dear… They really did make it,” he marvelled, very impressed with the work of his seed. “And imagine, these ‘Elders’ were deviants from the Holy Council.” Oga looked up from the old documents.

“Oga,” Kizer said promptly. Kizer was close by to Oga, keeping watch on the significant players in his game through the crystal balls. “Things have become interesting. It appears we are not the only ones have learned of the crystal eye.”

“The Magmalian prince?” Oga asked.

“Yes.”

***

Because of how quickly the horses were moving on Lex’s command, and due to the white blizzard that nearly froze the guards’ feet through their thick rubber boots, Lex passed through several villages of Iceland without even realizing it. By the time they broke the blizzard, it was night, and they were in the middle of what seemed to be an abandoned community. “Why are we stopping?” Lex asked annoyed as he saw the guards slowing.

“Even if you threaten to freeze our blood again, we must stop to rest for the night,” one of them said.

Lex hissed.

“Remember, we are only men.”

“What is this place?” Lex realized that he was surrounded by rubble. Some of the buildings there were still in place, just a few of them. Even in the darkness, Lex noticed a bronze statue a few meters away.

“This place was the Snow Village,” one of them said. “This was where they icemakers used to live.”

“Before the Black War,” Lex added.

“Only four Icemakers survived the war,” the same guard said. “Icilda, the daughter of the leader of the village of icemakers, was one of them. To honour how the icemakers defended Iceland, the government built a massive tower of ice for the four who remained. Icilda and the other three now live there, within the quarters of the king.”

“But some people blame the icemakers for the attack in the first place,” another guard said. “They said if the icemakers weren’t around, the demons would not have attacked the continent.”

One of the guards pointed to the statue Lex had noticed earlier. “That is a statue of Asuri, Icilda’s father. This entire village is a relic. It isn’t even legal to trot these grounds anymore. We should find somewhere else to rest.”

“How far from here is the tower where Icilda lives?” Lex asked.

“Around five hundred miles north.”

“That would be an easy flight,” Lex said to himself, “but none of them have been responding to my thoughts since they encountered Oga. I can’t even access a little of their power.” Maximo… is your fear for Oga so deep?

“It’s a tower, so I won’t miss it,” Lex said. “Thanks for taking me this far. I’ll go alone from here,” Lex said, and jumped back on his horse, immediately riding off, quickly disappearing from the guards, thanking them by leaving breath in them.

***

“My level of shifting could get us within just a few miles of the island,” Viknor said, “But that would be careless movement.”

“The king said the same thing,” Darius said.

“The king was wise. Vis might have left some kind of trap that would respond to spaceshifting close to the island.”

“You mean one similar to your friend’s that threw us in that abysmal underworld?” Azar asked.

“No, one far worse,” Viknor answered.

“This simply means we have to take a vessel then, like what was done before,” Darius said.

“Yes,” Viknor agreed, “Azar, what will you do? I’d like to go to the island myself, and I want Darius with me.”

“Of course I’m coming too!”

“So you will leave the state kingless to go on an adventure?” Darius asked, “Just like your grandfather!”

“Ha! Those greedy old underlings will be happy to wreak whatever havoc they can in the few days I’ll be gone,” Azar said.

“Don’t worry, I know a few men who will keep things running smoothly,” Darius said, “Men from my time.”

“Go deal with the formalities then,” Azar said, “I will ready us a ship to leave in an hour. Viknor, go get whatever we will need for our trip.”