The Arc-Light Expedition

There weren’t always dragons in the valley. Can the Magi still be trusted? My doubts grow by the day as I peer across our nation and speculate on how Mother Nature twists our fate as time goes on.

Look about this land and tell me what you see. For I see something most remarkable and I yearn for your agreement. We stand atop this hill, surrounded at each conceivable angle, by enormous mountaintops that are crested by trees and meadow as they peer down at the great, winding valleys below. There is songbird whistling through the almost-still wind. A river, one can just about receive to the careful ear, being fed by a waterfall just shy of a kilometre away. The sky above turns to a delicate light shade of purple and the narrow clouds appear stretched by the magicks that seep from the land over yonder, for they dare not enter into the skies of that twisted form of nature.

And then there is the shrill cry of death piercing the tranquillity. For, if you are careful to blank out the surrounding sounds of Mother Nature, you can detect the newborn wyrms mimicking the cries or roars of their matriarch, whose roar alone makes the land upon which we stand quiver in fear with us. They do not belong here.

The Magi proclaimed our lands would be forever free of their kind since their exodus last century.

So where did it all go wrong?

They did exist here, we must remember. We can find proof of this even in Abrascian records. We can believe the Circle on this one excerpt of history alone.

Our people fell victim to these beasts for decades. Their brutal attacks on human villages, towns, and even the far more heavily defended cities, all fell to their arcade of death. So many lives were lost in each attack. The people roiled in fear. The souls of those victims weighed the already-glum atmosphere of the settlements down to a point that economies destabilised, adults feared going to work and children were kept indoors and off the streets. As if that would help. Even their homes fell when the beasts attacked. Then one day the people held an uprising, purging the voted political establishment out for their inability to quell the insatiable death inflicted upon them, and it was the Magi that capitalised on this. They vowed, through the power of their magicks, that they alone held the solution to the blight of dragons. And so we raised them up to the position they now hold: rulers of Abras Tier.

Then, on a night when the moon was half and the air was still, warm and empty. Mother Nature roared in pain to an earthquake that the entire nation felt. It was the Magi and their Greatest Solution. They bored down into the land until they found a wellspring of magick. Not much is known as to the mechanism of what occurred thereafter. All the records maintain is that the subsequent earthquake released this essence – that you can see stream upwards, into the sky, just north of here where the purple sky lies – thus ending the ruination of a hundred years and a million lives.

We know not what has brought their kind back to these once-again blighted lands. They escaped to the Northern Nations, where the lands are vast, open and mountainous, where their highest peaks are masked by cloud and snow, and air so thin that the physiology of an inhabiting species must be peculiarly adaptable to survive. Survive they did. Flourish, even, for their numbers increased multiplicatively since the Greatest Solution.

One might look at a number of reasons why animal life returns to their old nesting grounds. Pollution. Being hunted to near extinction. Dwindling resources such as wildlife for food or trees for nest construction and the like. Too much competition amongst their own kind, forcing the weaker subspecies out. Even the coming of novel subspecies, whose features lack important traits as the rest in order to keep up, may be the cause. That’s all what the literature says. But do you know what I think?

I think the answer lays within the land itself.

What strikes me as equally important to answer on our journey is the question of why their lust for destruction endures. Over a century has passed. The dragons here, while possible, may not be those same individuals who laid waste to a thousand homes before the Greatest Solution. So why, then, have they once again become murderers of our kind?

We must investigate and find out for ourselves. That was the objective of the Arc-Light Expedition. A group of ten individuals, carefully selected by the Circle of Six, who were dispatched to these lands to investigate the return of the beasts and destruction. But their communiques failed and the expeditionary force had not made contact and have now missed four planned rendezvous. Their fate is questioned. But that is not for me to answer, for I come here against the wishes of the Circle of Magi.

“What do you mean? You know this already!”

I grunt. “Fine!”

When I was young, it was clear to my parents I was born with a gift of magicks. It was destined that I join the Circle and become a mage. But, by the time I reached eleven, I was to be suppressed. Knowledge of my education, and of my future, were being kept from me, and I could not pursue my destiny. “You’re not right!” I recall the Grand Mage proclaiming as he held a pointed finger to the forehead between my eyes. He referred, of course, to you.

My earliest memories are of your whispers. No one, not even my own parents, have ever been able to see you. To them, when I talk, it is to no one, as though I speak to an image of lunacy. But I know the truth. You do exist. Unfortunately my gift of seeing gave the Circle the misapprehension that I am too odd to become a mage. And instead of removing me from the Circle, instead they chose to oppress me, to prevent me from maturing and gathering the required skills and knowledges on my own. So, at the age of fifteen, I finally escaped, and I’ve lived ever since under a new name. I joined the Arboria University and became a research fellow into the Origins of Naturality and Applied Magicks: the study of how magick affects nature, and how it might form and develop without the element of unpredictable causalities. Then I learned about the Arc-Light Expedition, and I returned to the Circle, admitting to who I was and what I had become – that I was the University’s brightest and most knowledgeable individual, who should be permitted to join the expedition, and a self-trained mage despite their oppression.

What was their response again?

They tore me of my identity and of my very existence. They threatened to imprison me for the remainder of my life. They moved my family far away, and indoctrinated my parents and siblings to react to me as though I were an enemy of the nation. I never wanted to be depicted as a monster. I’ve only ever wanted to study Nature.

Indeed, only a few people have ever taken me seriously. Up until recently, there was a male in my life whose happiness was as infectious within me as my love was for him – or so I hoped. Alas, that story was brought to an abrupt end. His need for a child was too strong for me to obey. I still recall the crippling sadness that devoured my abdomen when, just days after announcing to my love my pregnancy, my womb bled, and I knew then the fate of my beautiful child. I told him he does not need a broken woman to impede upon his life’s ambition to become a parent. Instead of clinging to me and offering me hope and care and love and affection, he agreed, and left me alone to pick myself up. I remain thankful that my insecurities and other deviant emotions of that night were genuine and my actions were not a test. Because, if it were a test, and if he had also then abandoned me for that same reason, I may have become even more broken. It was you, in fact, that saved me from jumping into that fire place. Might you have been able to stop me if that were what happened?

That was the night I lost my lover and my professor.

A tear forms in my eye. It picks the coldness up from the breezing wind and feels like ice to my cheek. I must depart from such heartfelt sentiment for the journey we now face is like to throw many barriers our way, and I cannot be made vulnerable and become betrayed by my own heart whilst headlong into an investigation that may well save countless lives.

“I have digressed enough, I tell you. Stop asking me questions!”

So why are we here?

We climbed this mountain to reach perspective of the tasks ahead. Just weeks ago, the town of Gras Abas – just a short walk west from this mountain – fell to the mighty dragons. The Arc-Light Expedition are presumed dead. The only ones capable of solving this mystery stand atop the mountain, staring in wonderment at the vast beautiful landscape before us. The answer lies within the land. And it is my time to prove to the Circle that they were wrong about me. I am no lunatic. I was born and raised to be true to myself, and that I shall remain.

Raindrops. Light, but the clouds above have darkened significantly in the last few minutes. I rather hoped to remain here with such a sight for a little longer, but we should find a spot to camp now instead. We must first descend this sheer mountaintop by the route we climbed. And tomorrow, onwards to Gras Abas, the town that died.

So, come, let us together venture into the new unknowns. Mother Nature shall be our guide. I shall describe to you the story as it unfolds, and together, we shall unravel the mystery of the return of dragons in Abras Tier, and what, I have long suspected, the Circle of Magi have been hiding for all these years.