A Mage Of None Magic (Book 1) by A. Christopher Drown Page A

amongst books and scrolls, Ennalen had to concede the information created a certain intrigue. It seemed the Lord Elder had managed to decipher several key passages from the writings of Herahm the Mad. An impressive achievement, but like the assignment given to her, also steeped in coincidence: Herahm’s writings lay at the center of her own recent explorations.
    When Herahm returned to the College following his infamous encounter with Uhniethi, he locked himself away in his rooms and refused all visitors. There he remained in seclusion, accepting only the writing materials he demanded night and day along with what bits of food could be stuffed beneath his door. When he finally emerged eighteen years later, Herahm, filthy and skeletal, offered a large, rotten grin to the attendant standing guard, and then fell over dead.
    The late Lord Magistrate’s chambers had been packed so tightly with sheets of parchment that for him to exit it had been necessary to tunnel like a rodent from his desk to the doorway. More extraordinary than the mountainous mass itself was how that sides of every single page had been filled edge to edge with tiny, precise script. Though a number neatly marked each sheet, the contents were a discontinuous mayhem of arcane mathematics, illustrations both sublime and grotesque, poetry and prose in languages either archaic or unrecognizable, and minutely detailed diagrams all but impossible to follow. Even with the concerted efforts of dozens of scholars, the hundreds of thousands of individual pages required years to be reassembled into their proper order. A popular joke at the time was if Herahm’s writings represented everything he might have otherwise said aloud in his final years, then thank the gods his tongue had been ripped out.
    For a short while the intellectual community buzzed about Herahm’s great book. Back then, the College permitted academicians from all over the world access to its libraries. Professors, students, and artists made the trip to Fraal University to inspect Herahm’s work. But when the flood of pilgrims grew too deep and the accompanying scrutiny grew too uncomfortable, the Elders hid the books away and built College Gate to help cordon themselves off from the general public. The deluge of outside attention toward Herahm’s writings slowed to a trickle, and then practically to nothing at all.
    In the centuries that followed, many within the Membership continued to grapple with Herahm’s work. Occasionally an especially resourceful or imaginative soul deciphered a minuscule portion, generating a temporary resurgence of interest that perhaps the key to unlocking the secrets of the remaining volumes finally had been discovered. However, over time the Energumen —as the tomes collectively and somewhat derisively came to be called—lost its intellectual allure even amongst magicians, relegating it to the status of historical novelty.
    The pieces cited by Thaucian in his notes did seem to allude, albeit obscurely, to the Apostate. Most striking among them, a series of couplets written in an early, formal style Ennalen barely recognized from her literature courses:
     
    Amongst you shall dwell a mage of none magic;
    Amidst you shall ruin find retreat.
    Upon you shall come a wielder of exile;
    Upon you shall fall half his sight.
    Behind one shall be bridged great chasms;
    Behind many shall be bound leaf and sword.
    From two shall spill the heart forever broken
    From yourselves shall spill your undoing.
     
    Thaucian observed that the meter of the poem, when counted out and applied to a formula concealed amongst the text, corresponded to coordinates on a crude map in a preceding volume. Those coordinates indicated the geographic location of the College. Along with myriad other excerpts and illustrations, the hand-picked clues in Thaucian’s research more or less supported his belief that the Apostate would soon in some unique way distinguish himself, expose the College as a