Carom's Hight: At the Outset of it All

            There was a time, of course, when Henry Thall was just an ordinary young man, when he met Richard Airbright at university and perhaps the course of their lives might have gone in a different way.

            There is, of course, a vexing ambiguity about fate: even if there is no intelligent hand that guides its direction, is there simply one path that time’s arrow travels? Is our future merely ours to discover, and what appear to be our choices simply the culmination of stimuli and circumstance?

            One could imagine, of course, many different outcomes of the tragedy of Henry Thall. He did not know, and would not know, that it was his friend Richard who was first approached with the offer to become something other than what he was. Had Richard agreed, perhaps Thall would be the hero of this story. Or perhaps he would have been another victim. Had Thall resisted the offer, maybe both men would have gone on to live happier lives. What might have occurred if these young, ambitious arcanists, had not conjured up something that they truly did not understand? What great feats and accomplishments might have their friends – Chloe, Terrence, Wulf, and Astrid – been able to complete had their lives not been cut short so cruelly? Might Esmeralda Locks, the only other survivor from their group, have felt freer to pursue some other path, instead of cloistering herself within the building where her friends died, forgoing any other goal than to prevent other young students from making the same mistakes?

            When we look back at life, we only get the one story. And the story of Richard Airbright and Henry Thall is one of blood, death, and coffee.

            Richard arrived in a coach. It was traditional for members of major families to come in this archaic manner. The road to the Royal Academy had an entire lane set aside for horse-drawn vehicles, which sounded exciting and romantic until one experienced the momentary terror of speeding cars zipping past one’s carriage for the full day of travel that would take a trivial amount of time in a motorized vehicle.

            Richard was eighteen, skinny, and felt a tingle of almost electrical energy under his skin as they came to the university. His hair was cropped short and precisely parted, and, much to his mother’s horror, he had, over the summer, grown out a goatee. He had been trying to do so throughout his teen years, but now, as he had reached the technical definition of adulthood, it seemed as if his hormones had fully caught up, giving him the density of facial hair for it to look at least somewhat plausible as an actual beard and mustache.

            His hair was dark enough to almost be called black. He did not think much of his looks, and felt his nose was too large and his eyes too small. What girlfriends he had had he attributed to his curious intellect and attention to detail, though in truth it was his looks that had drawn his female companions to him, and often it was that “curious intellect” that then drove them away.

            Like many young men away from home for the first time at eighteen, he hoped that one element of his university experience would be a bacchanalian cavalcade of sexual encounters, but it seemed as if his old school friends fixated on this aspect of higher education more than he did.

            Academia, Richard felt, had the potential for greater long-term satisfaction than sex. Or rather, not academia itself – which had the potential to be dull and dreary – but his particular field of study: Magic.

            Most of the noble families eschewed the study of the arcane, considering it beneath them. In the earliest days of the country, thousands of years ago when Retrein was just a colony of Narcia, the Witches’ Coven was one of the four chartered guilds that established the fort around which the royal capital would later form. It was the soldiers who held the coin to fund the colony, and it was their descendants who would become Retrein’s nobility. The arcanists were advisors and journeymen who worked for those nobles, but the station of an arcanist was always considered at least one rung below the true ruling aristocrats.

            Which was, of course, absurd given that over the millennia Richard was probably no more of a descendant of those soldiers than any beggar on the street.

            But the Airbrights, so long the same kind of pompous, greedy nobility as anyone else, was transformed when an ancestor, Theodosia Airbright, took on the eccentricity of practicing magic. It would be another six generations before Paul Airbright, the necromancer, ruined their name completely, but their house was, after Theodosia, the flock of black sheep amongst the nobility.

            Among the nobles, the Airbrights had a technical right to a seat in the House of Peers, though that physical seat had been left empty for so many generations that, centuries ago, Parliament quietly removed it. And among the arcanists of the Royal Arcane Society, the Airbrights were banned from membership thanks to their membership in too high of a social class.

            They were the libertines, the iconoclasts, and outcasts.

            And Richard loved it that way.

           

            Richard kept his eyes fixated on the point where he expected to see the tower of Carom’s Hight as they rounded the last hill before the university, and was disappointed in himself when it was not where he had imagined it. It was closer to the other buildings, boxed in and not the true, remote wizard’s tower that he had always though it to be.

            The Hight was the site of the Arcanum, the school in which arcane physics and its various disciplines were taught. There were other students here at the Royal Academy who would learn business, the practical sciences, history, sociology, and the other rather commonplace academic pursuits, but the Arcanum was one of only three such institutions in the country, and Richard had come to the most prestigious of them.

             And Richard decided, as he arrived, that he would be the greatest arcanist to ever set foot within Carom’s Hight.

            Ambition requires a bit of arrogance, and there is no more natural time for arrogance than the outset of adulthood, when the restrictions of youth fall away but none of the burdens and disappointments of experience weigh upon a person like the one Richard Airbright was at that time.

            Here he stood, sure of his future, sure of his identity, and the world that he knew. Yet it would be hours, days, and months before he would meet the people whose dying screams and vicious betrayals would haunt him for the rest of his life.

(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2019)