Lady Talagast’s smile turns into a hard line as she walks around the back of the chair and takes a seat. Her artificial eyes flit back and forth; she is reading something off a window.

  “Why is it me that you wish to learn from?” she asks. “Surely, you have seen that the academy has history courses.”

  “Eight-nine courses,” I say. “The history department itself has almost as many courses as the alchemy college, and half of those are on contemporary topics. I pursued the catalogue. There was nothing on what I wanted to know about.”

  “And, what is it that you want to know about?”

  “The history of our people,” I say, unable to stop myself from leaning forward with the need. “The history I have been taught…it’s horseshit, I know it. People give me looks when I walk around the city. At first, I thought it was because I was bigger than most, but even the giant species here look at me warily. It’s because I’m human. They are thinking about Humanity’s Crusade. They are thinking about the terrible things that mankind did in order to expand its borders. How much of that is actually true? How much is fiction? I need to know.”

  Lady Talagast purses her lips. “If you looked at the courses offered by the history department, you no doubt would have seen that there is a class specifically dealing with the humanic expansion.”

  I shake my head at that. “I don’t trust them.”

  “You trust them to teach you the art of enchantment, but not for a simple history lesson?”

  “Is it simple?” I ask. “Would you trust them with it?”

  “What about your boyfriend? He is a Willian, no? If you want a story about humanity’s dual origins, I am certain he would be happy to oblige.”

  Again, I shake my head. “Dovik is just a friend. I trust him not to lie to me, but from what I have seen, what the Willian guild believes in is as much a religion as what the empire taught me growing up. I am looking for facts, not a story. There aren’t many of us in this city, and something has told me that you would be the one to ask.”

  Lady Talagast leans back in her chair, tapping her chin with a porcelain nail. The flowing gown of white and silver she wears would make any woman sick with envy back home, but the expense is likely nothing to this woman. It’s not a very good look; the white clashes far too harshly with the deep obsidian of her eyes. She considers me while I consider her.

  “You leave me in a bit of a quandary,” she says. “Have you asked your brother about this topic?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” she asks.

  “I don’t see how that is your business,” I say.

  Honestly, I have been putting off the idea of asking Corinth about it. The man has been all over the world in the past decade. He has ties to the Willian Guild and likely other factions that I am not even aware of. When he determined where I would need to go to find some bloody spear on a massive battlefield, Corinth seemed unconcerned with getting the Vivantee Empire’s help to allow me to go into one of the three hells. The Vivantee Empire, the most powerful civilization on the planet, is a group he could get to do what he wants. I have no doubt that he knows the exact history of our people, but I don’t trust him to tell me.

  “I don’t want to cross Corinth Devardem,” Lady Talagast says bluntly. “Maybe all of those stares you get aren’t just because you are human. Maybe people remember seeing the man who made a sun appear over this city during an altercation he had with the previous mayor. If the histories haven’t been shared with you by your brother, who am I to interpose?”

  “Even if I offer payment?” I ask.

  She can’t help but smile at that. “Do you think you know the value of the information?”

  “Two thousand suns,” I say without hesitation.

  “No.” Lady Talagast shakes her head. “I don’t need your money.”

  “Yet, when we last spoke, you had no problem taking it.”

  “That was a favor I was performing for your brother,” she defends. “He once helped me out of a bad situation, and so I owed him a favor. The money was for my time, because my time is valuable.” She taps her chin again. “However, now that I am thinking about it, I am not entirely immune to your plight. I understand the feelings of a young girl wanting to know her history. Tell you what, I will give you a brief history lesson in exchange for an unspecified favor from you.”

  “From me?” I try to wrap my head around the idea. “Why would you want a favor from me?”

  “Why would I want a favor from a relatively unknown yet incredibly gifted young magician?” She shrugs. “There are all sorts of uses for such a thing. I’m sure I can figure out a task that you would be able to perform.” The way she smiles at me lets me know that she already has a task in mind, at least the ghost of one.

  “I’m not a killer,” I lie. “I have no interest in doing anything like that.”

  Lady Talagast waves her hand. “Oh, darling, I have nothing like that in mind. Killing people is so distasteful. Even deadly enemies can serve a purpose if you push them in the right direction. A corpse is of little use to anyone. Well, unless it is a monster corpse. We both know how useful those can be.”

  I don’t take any time to mull over the offer. I already know the answer. “Fine,” I say. “I will owe you one, but I have an additional ask. I want the schematics for my eye.” I motion to the dark orb in my head. “I need the precise details of how it works.”

  The Lady arcs a perfectly plucked eyebrow at that. “I don’t give that kind of information out to anyone,” she says.

  “It is an older model, you already told me that,” I say. “Will it really cause trouble for you?”

  “The last time my schematics got out of my hands, I lost my monopoly on the enchanted interface trade. Now there are at least four different networks creating artificial eyes that are easily able to access the network like mine does. One of them is even able to read providence. I can’t imagine Hauffner jumping through the same hoops I needed to purchase that ability from Her Royal Bookworm. The amount of money and influence I have lost from just a single breach of confidence is greater than you can realistically imagine. So, asking me to allow such a secret out of my hands once more is quite a bit of an ask. Why do you want it?”

  “This eye is an artifact,” I say. “I integrated it with my soul before gaining my conflux. It is a part of me as much as my fingers are.” I speak with more conviction than I feel. For the past few weeks, the idea has been banging around my skull, but it had always been a flight of fancy. Now, I feel it is the right path. “When I attain the third rank, when I remake my body, I plan to integrate the eye with it. It will be a part of me forever, not just a part stapled to my soul but a part of it. For that, I need the schematics, so that I know exactly how it works.”

  That gets a rise from both her eyebrows, and I take it as a good sign. “Do you think you would be able to do that?”

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  “I do,” I say. “I already have experience in changing my own mana pathways.”

  Lady Talagast nods. “That is one of the hurdles of the third rank. At least, that is what I have been told. Honestly, just knowing who your brother is would give me confidence that you can do what you say. That man is blessed when it comes to mana manipulation. He can do things with a single affix that boggle the minds and would rewrite half the books on spellcraft if he ever bothered to write down his theories.” She leans forward. “I have made three attempts previously to have a magician integrate the eye during the third-rank transition. All have failed. In every attempt, the eye was unmade and destroyed. Two of the three were forever crippled and disfigured from the process. Would you still wish to attempt that?”

  “I am not afraid of pain,” I tell her. “Nor of failure.”

  “No. No, you wouldn’t be, would you?” She nods, her smile returning. Lady Talagast holds her hand out to me over the table between us. “You have a deal, Ms. Devardem. A brief history of mankind and the plans to the eye in exchange for an unspecified favor.”

  I don’t hesitate before reaching across and taking her hand in my own. “A deal then.”

  Lady Talagast wastes little time before introducing me to a brief history of humanity. A lot of the information I didn’t know. A lot of it I had heard before.

  Humans, as she tells it, have been around since the beginning. When the first six divinities found this world, they named it Arasta, a word that means sanctuary in the divine tongue. Exeter was then, as he is now, one of the chief executors of the gods, a power that could rival and overtake any of them alone. Each of the original six divinities seeded the world with life. Halga, the Bloombed, created the trees, plants, and animals, granting her favorites among them incredible power; they are the magical beasts and plants we know today.

  Tesfforidan, the Lifeweaver, created the elementals. I have never seen a true elemental, only monsters that ape their form. True elementals are people born of focused magic. They are so rare, that even the stonespeakers and firewalkers who are descended from them have rarely seen them.

  Exeter, the Imperious, looked down at the world now seeded with life and magic and decided to create a people who would naturally come to dominate the world. He made the elves. He endowed them with immortality and a natural gift for magic, the well of potency that he had already taken for himself. Even before anyone walked the world, the gods had already taken their thrones, and Exeter has never once left the Throne of Magic.

  Boxa, finding that the surface was already full, created the dwarves. They are a people of two worlds, able to live beneath the earth as well as any elemental, while also enjoying the surface. You won’t see many dwarves outside of their protected cities. Faeth is somewhat of an irregularity in that the dwarves here decided to go up instead of down.

  Viva, the Tideweaver, saw that the waters of the world were mostly barren. Given that more than half the world was covered in water, she decided to create a people adapted to that domain. She not only gave life to the Vivantee, but also populated the oceans with fish and magical beasts of such terrifying power and size that you might think she wanted her own Vivantee to perish. They didn’t, and today their ability to control such underwater titans is enough on its own to dissuade any attempts at conquest.

  Finally, Desmond, the Gambler, made his attempt. He created a people that he thought would do well with the last unconquered domain of the world, the sky. Desmond created humanity, and he placed them in the clouds.

  Here is the first point of contention in the heavens, Lady Talagast tells me. For some reason, creating humanity really pissed off Exeter, who was the leader of the divines at that point in history. She speculates that maybe Exeter felt like his territory was being encroached on by Desmond, or maybe that he didn’t take well to Desmond’s children literally sitting in the sky above his own. For whatever reason, more than twenty thousand years ago, humanity and elfkind went to war. The two people clashed not just once, but several times. Ages passed as they competed against one another, each building magnificent civilizations in their respective realms.

  The elves below were masters of magic and could live for thousands of years. The humans in the skies had a knack for invention, and their numbers grew far faster. More, humanity’s gift for bonding magical armaments helped establish them as a true force. The wars against one another were brief blips in an otherwise tranquil history, but each time they occurred, the toll would be incredible.

  Over the ages, more and more gods came to Arasta and tried their own hand at making civilizations or peoples. No one people had yet been able to totally conquer their given domains other than the Vivantee, and the world held an incredible abundance of space. Yet, the wars between humanity and elfkind forced others into the conflict whenever it arose. In the end, what did in humanity, was a freak occurrence.

  With their capacity to control the lands floating over the world, humanity brought together disparate continents to create a vast kingdom beneath one single man whose name is lost to history. Bringing all of their power together would be what spelled their doom. It was pure chance that as the kingdom drifted overland, a supervolcano down below erupted. Most of the kingdom was destroyed in an instant, and the rest of the floating lands began to plummet toward the earth as they were weighted down with superheavy molten rock and iron. The destruction was total. Everyone in the human kingdom was annihilated in an afternoon.

  Some survived, small settlements that were already established somewhere on the ground or on other floating islands. The elves didn’t give them a chance to recover. Over the course of six years, the elven kingdoms hunted down and destroyed all of the remaining settlements of humanity, missing only two. The Hanthir, the people whom Lady Talagast is descended, found sanctuary beneath the earth with the dwarves. Though the elves put pressure on the dwarven union that took them in, they were unable to get to them. The Hanthir survived in the deep, and the wild magics down there changed them. Eventually, the elves forgot about them and went back to building their everlasting empire.

  The world entered a more stable period as one of the powers constantly in conflict for territory on the land was wiped away. More divinities came to Arasta, each claiming a divine realm for their own, and most making a new kind of people to populate the world. This continued for thousands of years until roughly a thousand years ago, Exeter’s son, Parfillio, decided to make a change.

  Lady Talagast begins to dip into religious language as she describes Parfillio’s involvement. The god, by all accounts, was erratic from the beginning. He was inspired by the passing of a comet to go against his father. He recreated humanity in the world in the place that would eventually become known as Grim. Exeter hated this; he raged against it, but he did not lift his hand to stop his son.

  The small tribe of the second humans developed in the valley. Almost immediately, they were under siege by monsters. Never before had the monstrous creatures of the world shown such coordination and hatred toward a burgeoning people on Arasta, but they did here. Luckily for the young human civilization, a man emerged from among them capable of pushing back the tide. The first emperor of new humanity showed experience and skill that could outshine anyone. He personally led his people on the long march toward the sea while they were hounded by an endless tide of monsters. He saved them almost single-handedly, and when they reached the ocean, he founded a city for them to put their backs to. This, I would come to realize later, was what the Trial of Rising Tide was meant to represent.

  For a time, the new empire slowly grew. Their ability to navigate the waters was only surpassed by the Vivantee, and the Vivantee had little involvement with what happened on the surface of the water. The new human empire spread, they traded, and they began to establish themselves in the world.

  Here is where the story that Lady Talagast spins for me diverges from the canon that I know. Growing up, I had been told about Parfillio’s great crusade against the world, his push for humanity to conquer all lands. Lady Talagast tells a different tale. She claims that the second iteration of humanity never made war on the rest of the world. They traded, they expanded through diplomacy and culture, and soon they had footholds on most of the world’s continents. Lady Talagast claims that the incident in Menelva, the city that I had been told was raped and sacked by humanity as they revealed the true evil in their hearts, was staged by High King Venislav to turn the world against the humans. It worked. The world turned against humanity, and the war to dwarf all previous wars began.

  “My people still lived beneath the earth, in fear of ever peeking out and finding an elven spear in our faces,” Lady Talagast says. “Some of those stonekin that had long sheltered us turned on us after Menelva. Some of us fled to the surface and did not return. The elves succeeded in uniting the world against humanity, something they had failed to do in their first wars against humankind. They drove the new humanity out of their colonies, blockaded and starved out entire cities, and hunted all humans down the world over until only the Empire in the Cradle remained. Then, they began to land ships. The empire’s capital of Garismalla was burned. Those who survived began their long march back to where humanity was born, back to Grim. There, the emperor gave his life to erect the Wall of Grim, the final redoubt. For more than a decade, the united armies tried to dig humanity out of the wall. They tried sieging, they tried coercion, and they even began to slaughter the prisoners they captured in the war on the steps of Grim to draw out the last armies. Nothing worked. In the end, they left a contingent to guard the Wall of Grim and returned to their homes. Those who lived in the prisons that the united armies had made to house what civilians they didn’t want to kill, became paupers and peasants tied to the lands they were imprisoned in. Humanity suffered and became a servant race to greater powers.

  “It wasn’t for another two decades before Grim destroyed those that watched over the wall in a surprise raid. The elves failed to gather support for a second war, and things settled. Now, most of humanity live simple lives, poor lives. Some have begun to move up; you and your brother are prime examples of that, but people do not forget the story of the covetous and dangerous human empire. That is why they look at you that way, Ms. Devardem. To them, you are a monster from ancient history, and they feel the same way about you as you do about monsters. They hate you for what you are. You can either rebel against that or accept it and use it. The choice is yours.”

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