Surviving Arkadia

I was still staring into the invisible void when I heard someone clearing their throat behind me. I spun round, badly spooked in spite of knowing that literally dozens of people from the Citadel had already travelled to the plateau.

The person behind me was Osred Kaye, the Chief Priest of the Temple of the Source. He was a slightly pudgy, fair skinned, middle aged man, with a clean shaven head. I had only ever seen him wearing the fine, flowing robes associated with his job title. He wore them well but you didn’t have to know much about clothing to know that those robes were ruinously expensive.

Before I met him I had, rather uncharitably, put him in the same mental category as the kind of megachurch pastor who always needs one more private jet. When we ended up on the Emergency Council together I was surprised to find that we agreed on most things. I had begun to suspect that wearing the fancy robes was more about reassuring people than his own vanity.

“I see you’ve found the Source Well,” he said.

“I thought it resembled the Temple,” I said. “Or rather that the temple resembled it.”

“You have a good eye for architectural details,” said Osred, “This is where the Source was held until the founders stole it and used it to power the Citadel. When they built the Temple to house it, and to seek its forgiveness for their presumptuous actions they chose to model the Source’s new home after the old.”

There was a long and slightly awkward silence as I tried to digest this new information and re-engineer my mental image of how this world worked.

“All this time I’ve been assuming that the Source was just a metaphorical name for the origin of magic. Does everybody know the truth except me?”

“The Founders of both the city and the Temple stole the Source and triggered a war. Do you really think that’s something we like to share widely?”

I thought about that for a moment but I couldn’t see a hole in his logic. “Then why are you telling me?” I said.

“I think the time for hiding things from the people of the Citadel passed when the Ostians declared war.“

“So what is the Source then?” I said.

“I’m afraid that I must leave the theorising to the Arkanists. The best explanation that I’ve been able to come up with is that it’s the hole in the world where the magic gets in.”

It was a very compelling phrase but my mind rebelled immediately.

“That doesn’t work,” I said, “all the source winds would be flowing away from it with so much force that everyone would know where it was.”

Osred smiled at me as if I was a puppy that had just surprised him by learning the whole trick in one go instead of in stages. “The thing you’re forgetting, and don’t worry, most people forget it, is that most magic isn’t destroyed when it’s used. The quality and the form of it changes but very little is lost. Some of the magic that fills the sails of boats and powers mills, has been sloshing about the world since before the first founding. The flow of magic from the source would be noticeable on its own but it gets lost in all the other magical tides and currents. Well, perhaps not completely lost. Moonstone has always attracted the greatest magical theorists, brightest Arkane masters and most gifted Artisans. Perhaps the Source is the thing that draws all that skill and brilliance to the City.”

Something about the thought of a hole in the world worried me. I thought back to the Sailor’s tale and the void squid. That was a thing that existed outside of the world and hungered for the source. It also hungered for children infected with the Fever. I could feel an idea forming but I couldn’t see the shape of it yet.

###

I left the Chief Priest to explore the fine marble buildings around the plaza and went further afield. As I wandered around I was surprised at the number of people who were just hanging about. I’d assumed that a lot of them would leave but many of them were just relaxing in the sun or grinding some skills while enjoying the change of scenery.

The abandoned town was starting to feel more like it had been a city, and an eclectic city at that. There was no unified building style. Overwrought confections fronted with statuary and decorated tiles stood next to brutal, blockish buildings that resembled a concrete bunker on one side and austere, white neoclassical structures on the other. None of the buildings fit easily into the schools of architecture I was used to. It shouldn’t be possible to be austere and neo-classical at the same time but there was a style of building there that pulled it off.

At first I felt like the people of the city were incapable of sticking to one architectural form. Then I began to wonder if perhaps it had more to do with where the people came from. Some of the buildings had the flat roofs common to hot dry places and some had the steeply pitched roofs common to places where it rains or snows a lot. Some looked like they were built to keep the warmth in and some were built to keep the heat out. I began to wonder if this was a city of strangers, a city built by people from all over the world, all bringing something of their place or origin with them.

My speculations were halted by the sight of a huge building with an ornate metal and glass front and an arched glass roof. It was very different from the rest of the city but there was something hauntingly familiar about it. For the first time since arriving on the plateau I stepped inside a building.

The one thing that I did not expect to see on that remote mountain top was a train station but there it was. My instinct was to deny the evidence of my eyes. It couldn’t be a train station, it was some other kind of building that my mind just interpreted as one. However there was no getting around the fact of the train.

My first impression of it had been a Victorian train station, such as most big British cities had. I think it was the tall metal pillars and all the glass that did it but that initial impression was almost immediately shattered because the scale was so drastically wrong.

The engine of the train was so much larger than anything from back home that it was impossible for me to reconcile it with the actual size of earthly transport. It was easier to imagine that I had been shrunk than that it could be so large. Much of the scale of the building was wrong too. The ceiling was high but not as high as you would expect given the size of the train. The Victorian train stations had high vaulted roofs because the trains gave off huge gouts of steam and smoke and they needed space for those to dissipate. This train had to be powered by magic because, now that I looked closely, there was no chimney.

The space between the platforms was far too wide. Not just because of the size of the train but because of the gauge of the track. I don’t mean that the gauge was scaled up, either. It was proportionately far wider. Whoever the local equivalent of Isembard Kingdom Brunel was had obviously won the gauge argument*. Which tended to suggest that this would be a gloriously comfortable ride at least.

As I drew closer to the train I spotted some of the foragers who’d gone ahead. Seeing them standing next to the train finally helped me to understand the true size of the thing. It was terrifying.