Book 2, Chapter 54

I settled into my new hideout on the north side of the city, ironically only a block away from an enforcer tower. The whole quadrant was far more heavily trafficked for some reason, but this was only a temporary base for me, so I didn’t worry about finding something perfect for my needs. It just felt pointless after how much care I’d taken with my original spots in the eastern district, only to end up abandoning them in the end.

Once I’d raised a short-duration set of privacy wards to help keep my presence hidden, I started my morning rituals. It was a few hours late, but I wasn’t keen on skipping them, especially the part where I slathered myself in the ointment of aging I’d made. It was still too soon to get a definitive read on it, but I strongly suspected it was working at a slightly slower pace than what my original recipe would have done. In another week or so, I’d know for sure.

I spent another few hours just pushing my mana regeneration as hard as I safely could. That wasn’t a practice I’d gotten into the habit of doing in my past life, and even now, knowing how badly I needed it, it was hard to just sit there and focus on doing nothing else. The extra mana gains didn’t scale very well with my stage two core, and as much as every little bit helped, I quickly gave it up in favor of something a bit more productive.

The book I’d taken from Velvet’s personal library, On the Rise and Fall of the Kingdom of Ralvost, was still waiting for me to read it. Since my other big project was working on decrypting Velvet’s journals, and I didn’t much feel like doing that, I opted to have a more relaxing afternoon of just absorbing information and hopefully teasing out a few answers in regard to my own situation.

I didn’t recognize the calendar being referenced, which wasn’t terribly surprising to me. I hadn’t found one I could use as a frame of reference yet, and I’d been on the lookout for that, too. My soul invocations should have dragged me through the reincarnation cycle within a handful of years at most, but it seemed to have taken longer. I was guessing that, at minimum, I’d been gone for a few decades. Something like this huge mana desert would not have escaped my notice during my first life, but it also couldn’t grow overnight. Fifty or sixty years having passed me by would not surprise me.

Once I’d skimmed the book for any calendar conversion references and come up blank, I flipped back to the front and started reading. Most of the text was fairly generic to any kingdom’s creation. There was a war, of course, and one set of people lost territory to another. It was slightly interesting in that several times, large scale magical tactics were used, which proved at least that these people had some concept of the heights to which magic could take them, even if they themselves didn’t have a chance of getting there.

That was followed by the reclamation step where people established new towns, built roads, beat back the monsters encroaching on them from the wilderness, and eventually became a full kingdom. There wasn’t much of interest there, though admittedly I might have missed a detail or two at the speed I was skimming through the text. It wasn’t the first history book I’d read, not even the first one since being reborn, and so far, it hadn’t held any of the answers I was looking for.

I only stopped when a particular name caught my eye. There was an archmage associated with the kingdom, or at least someone the book claimed to be an archmage. We weren’t that numerous at any given time, but the name sounded familiar. I searched my memories, trying to figure out where I’d heard it before. “Ah,” I said softly.

I’d had an apprentice for about thirty years, one who’d been moderately successful, as far as apprentices went. I hadn’t expected him to ever reach the rank of archmage, not on raw talent alone, but he was clever enough that all he really lacked was time. That wasn’t saying much, of course. There were plenty of people who had the drive to succeed, but would get old and die long before they reached their goals. Ammun Nescect was one of them. He’d been a third or fourth-born son of some minor noble when he’d entered my tutelage.

If the archmage mentioned in the book was the same Ammun I’d briefly taught, that meant Ralvost had been created after my death, which also meant it had fallen after my death. The kingdom had a six-hundred-year history, if this book was to be believed. Either the name was a coincidence, or I’d been gone for the better part of a millennium.

Worse, Ralvost hadn’t disappeared yesterday. I might not be able to map its timeline to the calendar I’d been using when I’d died, but it was possible to figure out how long it had been between the kingdom’s collapse and today. I flipped back and forth, trying to line up the date on the currently used Galvashian calendar.

If there was any overlap, I wasn’t able to confirm it. That wasn’t terribly surprising, but I wasn’t happy about it. It was still possible that I might dig out the odd reference somewhere in the text that helped me place the kingdom of Ralvost on a timeline, but like so many old history books, they were written with assumptions of common knowledge at the time.

I went back to reading, though at this point, it was more curiosity about this archmage who shared a name with my former apprentice than because I expected to find an answer to any of my own questions. If I could confirm it was the same person, then it would tell me that I’d been gone for at the very least a few centuries. That shouldn’t have happened, so I was hoping the name was just a coincidence.

I was still flipping through the pages, scanning them for keywords relevant to my interest, when I spotted something that chilled me. Hurriedly going back to the beginning of the passage, I read it more fully.

At this point, the splinter faction in the Royal Academy for the Sorcerous Arts had gained enough mystical might that they were ready to claim independence from the kingdom and the draconian oaths it placed on its mages’ souls. Archmage Ammun, now a feared figure in the political landscape due to his legendary unwillingness to compromise on even the smallest matters, was finally made aware of the brewing insurrection and moved quickly to quash it.

Some scholars argue that the archmage was well aware of the splinter faction long before they made their move, perhaps even that he was secretly behind the insurrection. As feared as Ammun Nescect was, he was not the ruler of Ralvost, and he did not enjoy absolute power. The splinter faction, now calling themselves the Liberators, provided the archmage with the perfect excuse to seize even more power by quelling their rebellion.

No written accounts survived the conflict detailing exactly how the Liberators managed to do it beyond that they raided the forbidden vaults of the Night Vale to obtain the knowledge of how to use their secret weapon, but they managed to enslave the moon core of Amodir with their magic and used it as a boundless font of energy for their super weapon.

Whole towns were wiped off the map in an instant, and the Liberators made it very clear that they could do that as often as it took to see their demands met. Ralvost was left with almost no choice; either they capitulated, or they unleashed the archmage to protect them. Perhaps it would have been better to surrender, as Ammun’s actions were arguably far worse than leaving the Liberators in possession of the moon core.

Sources claimed the archmage promised a moon core of their own to use in their defense. It is conceivable that he even planned to do exactly that. Perhaps he later changed his mind, or perhaps he simply could not duplicate the methods used by the Liberators. Either way, with the mana of the celestial heavens barred to him, Ammun turned to the mana of Manoch itself.

Whatever magic he found in the Night Vale’s vaults must have been sealed away for a good reason. With it, Ammun bored a hole to the world core itself and attempted to enslave its mana the same way the Liberators had Amodir’s. We are left with only speculations as to how it was accomplished, but Ammun successfully used the mana he took to fire a lance of mana into the night sky, fracturing the Liberators’ stolen moon into pieces that rained down on an unsuspecting world below.

The kingdom of Ralvost survived the bombardment, though many other civilizations were crippled or even outright destroyed that night. Ammun’s actions would have far-reaching consequences for Manoch as a whole, however. Something in his ritual damaged the world core, and mana soon began to disappear, used up and never to be refreshed.

The political backlash ended Ammun’s career as the archmage of Ralvost, but he was not content to go gracefully into the night. He seized power instead, ruling for another forty years until he was forced from control when the waning mana levels left him unable to hold his position through sheer force. At that point, with Ralvost’s ruling family destroyed or exiled, the kingdom itself unraveled into warring duchies and eventually collapsed.

I set the book down. That was a lot to unpack, and I needed a few minutes to come to terms with the implications. First and foremost, if everything I’d read was correct, the mana desert I was trapped in might be a global phenomenon. I desperately hoped it was speculation on the author’s part, but it was disturbingly plausible. The world core itself being broken was just about the only reason I could come up with for mana disappearing everywhere. The living creatures crawling across its surface generated pitiful, insignificant amounts of mana compared to the entire planet.

Once again, the timeline for these events was an issue. I just couldn’t fathom how I’d messed up my soul invocations so bad that it had taken me centuries to work through the reincarnation cycle. Even if I’d done nothing to speed the process up, every source I’d been able to find agreed that souls never spent more time being disembodied than they did being alive. I’d lived longer than most, but two thousand years of life balanced by two thousand years as a soul was hard to believe. And again, that assumed the invocations I’d put on my soul prior to my death had failed somehow.

The text also implied that my vaults had been discovered and my research turned toward making planet-breaking spells. It was true that I’d briefly looked into altering lunar orbit in order to force an early convergence for my own spell, but I hadn’t done any research on taking over the core of an entire moon. I had no idea how that was even possible. Though if it was, perhaps I’d be better served tapping into one of the remaining moons as a source of personal mana.

The book hadn’t straight out said that the Night Vale had been destroyed, but the possibility remained. Whether Ammun had done it directly as a result of tapping into the world core, or if it had just been one of the many, many casualties of having pieces of a moon crash down to the ground wasn’t really all that relevant. It was just as possible that the Night Vale had been spared and was still waiting for me, but I doubted it. Even if it survived, my defenses had obviously been breached, if for no other reason than time’s inexorable march.

If I believed this book, I now knew where the missing moon had gone, and why there was no mana anywhere. That just left narrowing down exactly how long I’d been gone, though it hardly seemed important at this point, and what I was going to do to fix these problems.