The First Page

Novice Lethan conducted Rishi through the lower passages.

Maeril’s footsteps had vanished upward into the warded east. Her voice went with them, and so did most of the warmth in the passage.

The lower corridor held less light. Sealed doors lined either side, stone ran underfoot, and even the dust understood permission.

Lethan walked half a pace ahead and did not speak again until they reached a narrow turning marked by a small brass plate and no invitation.

Third Reader Selanka waited there.

She stood beside the doorway, motionless and exactly on time.

Lethan stopped and bowed with the clean respect of someone handing responsibility upward.

“Third Reader Selanka. Seeker Rishishura.”

Selanka inclined her head.

“Novice Lethan.”

There was no warmth in it, and no dismissal. Only recognition, which Lethan accepted.

He turned to Rishi with a last, careful look, warning held behind his eyes.

“Seeker.”

Rishi bowed. “Thank you.”

Then he left them.

Selanka watched him go until his steps passed beyond hearing, then turned her eyes to Rishi.

She was narrow, grey-haired, and precise—neither severe nor gentle.

Her blue robe was mended at one cuff, so finely that Rishi noticed the care before the repair.

“Rishishura of Lantern Hall,” she said, formal and correct.

He bowed. “Yes.”

“Warrior of Mercy. Disciple of Ilmater. Co-author of the treatise on mercy at thresholds.”

“Am I?” he asked, caught by the title.

Selanka noticed.

“Candlekeep reads donations,” she said. “And reputations, when they arrive attached to them.”

Rishi lowered his eyes once, not in shame but in acknowledgment.

Selanka studied him for another breath, as if choosing where weight should be placed.

Then she turned from the doorway.

“Come.”

Selanka led him down three narrow turns without looking back. Rishi followed, counting nothing except the shift of air as the passage grew cooler and the walls gave less sound back to his steps.

At the last door, Selanka stopped.

For the first time, her composure shifted, though only a little.

She drew one breath through her nose and looked at the plain wood.

“Ah,” she said.

Then, quieter, “Here I am again.”

Then she glanced at Rishi, briefly but deliberately.

Selanka cleared her throat, took one of the keys from her belt, and opened the door.

The room beyond was small, round, and orderly.

Three narrow shelves held books, none of them crowded, each placed with deliberate space around it.

At the far wall stood three recessed cases, each holding a book on a slanted stand behind thick, clear glass. The panes caught the lamplight without giving back a proper reflection.

Wards had been worked into the frames in fine metal thread. They were so neatly made that Rishi noticed them only after he had already understood that nothing in the room was unguarded by accident.

Selanka did not move toward the cases yet. Rishi approached them slowly.

The first volume was enormous. It rested closed under glass, its dark leather worn smooth at the corners and its spine broad enough to seem built rather than bound.

Brass capped the edges. Old repairs crossed the binding in thread and narrow plates of dull metal. It looked often used, but never casually handled.

The second volume was smaller, but heavier in its silence. Its leather was darker, the clasps stronger, the ward-frame around its case more visible. It had been opened less often. That, too, said something.

The third volume was thin.

Rishi looked at it longer than the other two.

Its case had more seals than the others, and the narrow book inside seemed less like a volume than a blade laid flat.

Beside the cases, smaller shelves held commentaries, warning registers, reader accounts, and narrow folios tied in cord—not many, but enough to show that the three books had made a room around themselves.

Rishi stepped closer to the first pane.

The title had been tooled along the book’s edge in plain, darkened letters.

The Art of Being Struck.

He paused.

“That is interesting,” he said. “And strange.”

Behind him, Selanka gave one small nod and nothing more.

Rishi looked back at the glass and read the smaller line beneath.

A Sensate Experience of Hostile Spellcraft.

The question settled under his ribs instead of becoming words: Why did Selanka bring me here?

He moved his eyes from one case to the next.

Lesser Impacts.

Greater Impacts.

Terminal Impressions.

At the last phrase, he stepped back, only enough to let his breath return to its ordinary depth.

He looked from the thin third volume to the heavy first and the warded glass between them. The title had sounded almost like a joke. The room did not.

He turned toward Selanka.

She was looking at him, not the books.

Rishi became aware of his own hands before she spoke.

The scars across the knuckles. The old thickening where staff and road had made their claims. The nails cut short. The small pale line near his thumb where a blade had left its memory.

Selanka’s eyes moved with the same careful economy she had used on the cases: hands, shoulders, throat, breath, and the plain travel-worn clothes he had mended himself.

She stepped closer, inspecting rather than invading.

Rishi kept still as she lifted his right hand by the wrist. Her fingers were dry and cool. She turned his palm toward the light, pressed once at the base of his fingers, then once against the harder callus below the thumb.

He did not pull away.

Her thumb found the scar and stopped there.

“Right,” she said.

She released his hand and touched two fingers lightly to the side of his forearm—not enough to hurt, only enough to feel whether the muscle answered before the man did.

It did.

Selanka noticed that too.

Rishi felt heat rise under his skin, not quite embarrassment and not quite anger.

He had been examined before, by hands meant to heal and hands meant to harm. Selanka’s attention was neither, but it was not comfortable.

“You do seem like the right kind of person,” she said.

Rishi looked at the glass cases, then back at her.

“For?” he asked, carefully.

She let go of him and cleared her throat.

Only then did he notice the preparations around the room: a padded chair set a careful distance from the table, a basin of clean water, folded cloths, a healer’s roll, two stoppered vials, and a small bell placed where Selanka could reach it without looking.

Nothing hard stood close enough for a hand to strike by accident.

For a moment, she said nothing.

“The Readers who arranged your appointments considered several works,” she said.

Selanka turned back toward the cases.

“This one was recommended after your work with the guards.”

Rishi looked at her.

Selanka had already taken a second key from her belt. It was longer than the first, cut with teeth too fine for an ordinary lock. She set it into the frame of the first case.

Then she spoke one word under her breath.

Rishi heard it.

The word sounded like something impossible to pronounce, and his mind lost it as soon as it passed.

The glass gave a small, soft click.

Selanka lifted the pane with both hands, slowly and with practiced care.

The air above the first volume changed when the case opened. Not wind. Not warmth. A slight pressure only, as if the room had remembered to hold its breath.

She released two clasps, opened the heavy cover, and turned the first pages.

“Vale should speak for herself first.”

She stepped back.

“Read first. Then we will decide whether you should touch anything.”

The page was not illuminated. No border curled around the words or painted hand pointed toward the first line.

The script was dark, even, and narrow, written by someone who expected attention without asking for it.

Rishi looked once at the chair, the basin, the folded cloths.

Then at the open book.

Whatever this was, Candlekeep had prepared for it to hurt.

He read.

I have not written a book of spells.

If that is what you seek, close this volume and trouble a wizard. They have made a proud art of describing fire without burning, force without falling, terror without obedience, and death without the inconvenience of remaining dead.

This work concerns the other half.

A spell has grammar before it has consequence. The caster knows word, gesture, focus, and the shape of will.

The target knows something else.

The breath before flame enters it.

The jaw before thunder reaches the ear.

The mind’s first wrongness when another will touches it.

The skin before lightning names it.

I have been many things in my years: adventurer, witness, fool, unwelcome survivor, and at least twice a corpse whose return required expensive apologies.

I have stood where hostile spellcraft arrived and found, again and again, that the body knew before language did.

This series is an attempt to preserve that knowing.

Each entry contains two records.

The written account is mine, or one I have edited from a contributor whose experience I judged sufficiently exact.

Words are poor vessels, but not useless ones. They can warn the mind where the body is about to be taken.

The stone is the truer record.

Touch it only under proper supervision.

Do not mistake preserved sensation for safety.

A sensory stone does not burn the flesh, but it can teach the nerves to remember burning. It does not drown the lungs, though breath may still fail from obedience to memory. It does not kill unless the reader is careless, arrogant, badly prepared, or unlucky in a manner I decline to answer for after so many warnings.

Read first.

Touch only when ready.

Withdraw when the body stops observing and starts enduring.

Endurance is plentiful. Observation is rarer.

— Orentha Vale
The Witness of Impact
Civic Festhall, Sigil

For a while, Rishi did not move. Vale’s humor did not make the warning less serious.

Selanka did not ask what he thought. She flipped through several pages, each one settling with a soft, dry sound.

Rishi caught glimpses as she moved: titles, warnings, small frames set into the page, narrow marks in Candlekeep hands.

Selanka stopped near the beginning of the volume.

“This one is a sound place to start,” she said.

Rishi looked down.

The title at the top of the entry was simple.

Spike Growth.

The entry had been arranged with exacting care.

A flat sliver of green-grey stone, no thicker than a fingernail, had been sealed into the left side of the page inside a frame of fine metal thread.

It did not glow. It did not move. It looked too small to have made a room so careful.

Beside it, in Orentha Vale’s narrow hand, was the text.

Rishi read.

The ground looked innocent.

That was the first cruelty.

No blade glittered. No flame gathered. No beast showed teeth. The earth lay where earth belonged, wearing moss, short grass, and a few pale roots with the quiet confidence of things that expect to be stepped on.

The contributor stepped.

The ground answered upward.

His boot sank through the green. Something sharp found the sole. Then another. Then several more, each placed with the patient malice of a clerk itemizing a debt.

He stopped.

This was wise.

It did not solve the problem.

The body, when hurt from below, makes an old assumption: lift the foot. Remove the flesh from the pain. Put weight elsewhere.

He lifted the foot.

The other foot accepted the entire burden of standing in a place that had become opinionated.

He tried to retreat.

This was the second cruelty.

Every step out was also a step through. The ground did not care whether he was entering, leaving, fleeing, or correcting a mistake. It cared only that he moved.

The spell had made motion taxable.

When asked what he had felt, the contributor said, “It charged me for leaving.”

This was the most accurate testimony in the record.

A sword punishes the body for being struck.

Spike Growth punishes the body for trying to stop being struck.

By the time Rishi reached the end, his feet had become very aware of themselves.

His eyes returned to the thin green-grey sliver waiting beside the words. Selanka followed his gaze.

“The sliver holds the sensation Vale recorded,” Selanka explained. “Her own, or a contributor’s.”

Selanka let that sit between them long enough for Rishi to understand that Orentha Vale had not completed the work alone, and that the Readers found no comfort in the fact.

Rishi looked from her to the sliver.

“May I?”

“One finger,” she said. “Lift it when I say.”

Selanka waited.

Rishi let his breath settle low, let his shoulders loosen, and let his hands rest.

“Ready?” Selanka asked.

“No,” Rishi said.

Her eyebrow moved.

Rishi set his forefinger on the sliver.

The room did not vanish at once.

It thinned.

The page remained under his finger for half a heartbeat while another ground rose beneath his feet. Not sight. Not place. Only the fact of standing where standing had become expensive.

The memory took him from the inside.

Not pain described.

Pain inhabited.

The contributor’s balance shifted before Rishi could choose otherwise. Someone beyond the thorns shouted a name Rishi did not know, and fear arrived with it. A bowstring snapped. The body he was sharing wanted to run, and knew with animal certainty that running would buy more hurt.

So it held.

Not safely.

Not calmly.

It held because every answer the body offered had teeth beneath it.

A thought passed through the memory, absurdly clear and not Rishi’s: Well. This is inconvenient.

He stayed still inside the memory until stillness itself became work.

“Lift.”

Selanka’s voice came cleanly through.

Rishi lifted his finger.

The room returned by degrees: page, glass, lamplight, Selanka, stone beneath boots that had not been pierced at all. His feet did not believe it yet.

He looked down at his feet, then at the sliver.

“Troubling,” he said.

Selanka watched him.

“Not painless.”

“No.”

Rishi flexed his toes to confirm the magic had released them.

It had.

Mostly.

“I understand why it is supervised,” he said.

Selanka nodded and turned the page back, not enough to shut the volume, only enough to put the stone out of reach.

She waited while his breathing found its proper place again.

Then she began moving through the pages, pausing long enough for Rishi to catch each title before it passed.

Grease.

Ice Knife.

Thunderwave.

Hellish Rebuke.

The names meant something different now.

They were no longer spells heard from the outside, no longer things a caster did at a distance with voice, hand and will.

Each one had a page. Each one had a stone. Each one had waited for a body to explain it properly.

Selanka turned deeper.

Cloud of Daggers.

Heat Metal.

Hold Person.

Shatter.

Her hand paused there for one breath, then moved on.

Rishi swallowed, slowly grasping what each sliver held.

Without meaning to, he looked toward the second volume.

Greater Impacts.

Selanka followed his glance.

“Later, perhaps.”

Perhaps.

Rishi understood.

Then his eyes moved to the thin third volume, the one that looked less like a book than a warning.

Terminal Impressions.

Selanka’s voice changed by almost nothing.

“I do not recommend it,” she said. “Some readers have not returned fully from those impressions.”

Rishi nodded once in acknowledgment, not obedience.

The first volume lay open before him, heavy and waiting.

The second remained behind glass.

The third was not for him.

Rishi looked back at Lesser Impacts. Its value was clear.

Better to meet a spell here, with wards around the book and Selanka’s voice ready to call him back, than meet it first on a road where no one would say lift.