The Great Light (Pt. 2)

Chapter 2: Education



“No, no, no, no, NO!” Each negative was punctured by the sound of a wooden staff thumping against the table. Diesen sighed as he gazed out at the small classroom, stuffed with children of ages ranging from eight to fourteen. It had been his rotten luck to have been assigned by lot to give the introductory lecture to the year’s new intake; even more rotten that the talk had been allotted to this airless basement room. He could feel all the children’s eyes upon him and the mockery of their smirks, so he mopped the sweat from his forehead with a corner of his robe and took a deep breath. Time to change tactics.

“Perhaps this would interest you all more if there was a more... visual... element?”

The restless children finally stopped their incessant chattering and fidgeting. Were they about to see some real magic at last?

Diesen calmed himself and allowed his mind to map out the surrounding mists of ether. There! Three miles south, underneath the Bridge of San Willen, a patch of green. He coaxed it gently and felt it flow towards him. Next, he felt an admixture of blue and orange, floating above the rooftops of the New Quarter... a little of that would be perfect!

As his mind sought out the required colours, he rambled to fill in time. “Of course, it would be easier to just create an illusion by tapping the astral plane, especially as I’m a mage and not a Weaver... but as all new students must learn the basics of weaving first...”

He turned his back to his audience theatrically. Some children craned their necks to see what was going on; others crept forward to see what motions he was making with his hands.

“... it’s appropriate that your first glimpse of magic is woven ether.” He turned around, holding his palm upwards.

Above it floated a tiny ball, glowing with a fantastic brightness.

“Now, to begin once more at the beginning. Who can tell me what this is?”

Forty hands shot up in the air. At last! He had them.

“All together then... what is it?”

“The Sphere!” came back the reply of the classroom, forty voices speaking as one.

Diesen nodded, pleased. He raised a finger against the bright outer casing of the globe and ran it from top to bottom, like a knife cutting an orange. He carefully peeled off the glowing light and placed it on the table top, where it dissipated into the various shades of ether it had been built from.

Working gently at the sides of the denuded sphere, he stretched them out, making the ball larger and larger till it was two feet in diameter. He allowed it to float in midair as the children watched on, enraptured.

“You are, of course, correct. The Sphere, within which we and all living things have existence. Look, look!” He beamed with pride, jabbing his finger inside the model. “Look at the Discs, it’s a full working miniature model!”

The tiny replica discs slowly rotated on about their centres, with the obvious exceptions of Tu’lath and Azil. The giant city of Kharn straddled the centre-point where these two touched, plumes of smoke just visible from its clay factories and industrial refineries; the huge body of water that was the Azulean Ocean, stretching across the middle of the top of Azil, dropping down the side and continuing halfway over its underside. The golden cities of the third Disc, Mu’ran, sat proudly on its rim, gazing out into the empty ether, with its underside being a quilt of cultivated fields, hedges and tiny miniature villages. The fourth Disc, Timb, thousands of miles below and to the west, lay empty of obvious signs of civilization, though even the youngest child present knew of the peoples who lived inside the mountainous rock of that unkind climate. Finally, the fifth Disc, Karabal; this spun perilously near the edge of the Sphere, cloaked in a dark purple and bruise-coloured ether in a mist that no eye could penetrate, nor would it want to. Elsewhere, here and there rocks floated, some of them tiny, lonely lumps that hung in the ether, others much larger, ploughed fields giving signs of civilized inhabitation. If you squinted hard enough, you could see the ether-ships sailing majestically through the void; you might even make out the long, eel-like whales that also made their home in the ether, or the giant dun-coloured sharks that preyed upon them. Here was the whole of the Sphere, and in the sudden silence of the classroom one could almost hear it hum. For a short while, even Diesen became just another member of the audience, admiring the detail of his work.

It took a whispered conversation between two young girls and a snort of giggling that broke the moment. The reluctant lecturer grunted and clapped his hands together loudly.

“Right. So. Cosmogony. Who can tell me about cosmogony?”

A baffled silence. Diesen tried again.

“How was the Sphere created? Who can tell me?”

There followed a nervous silence before one of the older boys spoke up.

“It was the gods, sir. The gods made the Sphere.”

Diesen nodded. “Good, good. But how were the gods created? I’d be surprised if anyone can tell me, for...”

“It was the monsters, sir.” A small girl had answered from the side of the room, a child of no more than eight summers.

A group of young boys next to her began to mock her, egging on one of their number as he stuck his tongue out, growled and wriggled his hands above his head. Diesen’s eyes narrowed as he raised his voice above the mass of giggles. “That, young man, is the sorriest impersonation of a monster I have ever seen. Go ahead...” He paused to glance down at the class roll-call.

“It’s Alana, sir. My name, that is. Alana. The monsters who live in the darkness outside were fighting, and they scraped up tight against each other. This made little sparks of fire jump off them, and those sparks are our gods, sir. My mummy told me.”

At this the young boy mouthed an echo of “my mummy told me”, only to be silenced when he caught Diesen’s stern glance. “Well, your mother must be a wise woman indeed, for that, in essence, is what happened. The creatures that dwell Outside, vast beings of immortal age and the very source of all that is evil, have fought for ages beyond counting, well before any of our gods were born. Whenever they fight, they strike each other with such force that sometimes sparks fly from their blows. Usually, so we are taught, these sparks fly off into emptiness and burn themselves out. But a marvellous thing happened once, all those many millennia ago. In a horrific war between those immense and chaotic things of Darkness, there was a battle where creature fought creature, tentacle lashing tentacle, hook splitting eye and maw so fiercely that three bright sparks leapt up, and instead of dissipating, they miraculously coalesced into one tiny pearl of light. The sparks did not die out, and each of them discovered that it was sentient, that it could think and feel and create in this world of darkness. The three sparks were our first three gods, Te Basa, Otara and the Lost God.

“Of course,” he continued, “the creatures of darkness briefly stopped fighting. They gazed down at this bright new thing, shining away in the utter blackness of Outside. They each coveted it for themselves, and there was a mighty scramble towards it. As they battered up against each other to reach it, hundreds more sparks flew out, and by some unknown force of attraction they flew towards the pearl, enlarging it. Some of these new sparks were to become gods, but others became our nymphs, fauns, and demigods, and all the other beings that dwell on the higher and lower planes. The vile creatures of the dark each reached out to seize the Sphere, but when they touched it, even grazed it, the blinding light of the sparks wounded them each more deeply than they had been hurt before. Entire limbs were eaten by the light, devoured and ingested within its growing mass.”

Diesen paused and turned to the table, lifting a flagon of ale to his dried lips before he noticed the blank looks of his young charges. Perhaps I have gone too far too soon, he guessed. Gesturing to the miniature Sphere, he cleared his throat. “Well, you have here your first lesson. Do you all understand it?”

A few of the children nodded dumbly, but the precocious monster-mocker of a young boy had his hand raised. “Yes?”

“Sir, is it true you was with the Godslayer when he killed Te Basa?”

Ah. So they have heard who I am. Diesen sighed.