She couldn't kill me here. There were protections against such things in an arena. My magic was stronger.
From the pendant I took the power, the pure magic. I rode the crest of her feeble strength back to her source, where her spirit waited. She ran from my attack, ran and didn't turn back. I reached for her, for the final response, stretching all my strength to finally strike her down.
Dumoss's creature snatched its claws forward. The head of my mantis fell to the floor. I forced magic into the spirit, but it was already gone. I knew the body at home was dead. Everything was gone. The pendant was empty. There was nothing left.
Weak and sweating, I couldn't stand. Dumoss was already gone-the spirit of his mantis returned. The arena cleared, bodies shuffling, shadows moving. Annise was the last of them to leave the building. I never saw her face, but I heard the sound of a door closing, leaving me inside, alone. Empty and alone. Everything I had done, I had done for her.
The Gold Border
Loran's Smile
Loran died ten years after the devastation-after Urza and Mishra destroyed most of the world with their war, after the tumultuous explosion that eliminated Argoth and altered the rest of the world forever.
Loran died in part because of that devastation. She did not die in battle, for she was not a warrior. Nor did she die in a duel of magical forces, for though her lover Feldon had mastered the study of magic, she found she could not. She did not die of intrigue, or of passion, or of some fatal flaw.
She died in bed, weakened by wounds suffered over a decade previous-wounds inflicted by Ashnod the Uncaring, Mishra's assistant. She was weakened by the lengthening winters and the cold mountain air, weakened by her own great age, weakened, and eventually defeated, by the world that the brothers, Urza and Mishra, had created.
At first she just winded easily when in the garden or cooking, and Feldon would put aside his own work to help. Then she had trouble working in the garden at all, and Feldon did the best he could, under her direction, to substitute for her.
Later she could not work around the house, and Feldon brought in servants from the nearby town to aid. When she could not get out of bed, Feldon sat beside her and read to her, told her stories of his own youth and listened to hers. After a time he had to feed her as well.
At length she died in bed in her sleep, Feldon sitting beside her, asleep as well from his long guardianship. When he awoke her flesh was cold and pale, and the breath had long-since left her body.
He commanded the servants to dig a grave behind the house, among the now weed-choked garden that Loran had begun with Feldon's grudging, grumbling aid shortly after they first arrived. She had kept it going through several seasons by sheer force of will, but when she took ill that last, final time, she had to surrender the garden to the weeds and the cold rains.
It was raining when they laid her to rest, wrapped in her bed sheets and sealed within a coffin of thick oak planks. Feldon and the servants uttered a few prayers, then the old mage watched as the servants methodically piled the dirt atop the lid. Feldon's tears were lost in the rain.
For days afterward Feldon stayed by the fire, and the servants brought him his meals, much as they had brought Loran hers. Feldon's library and workshop stood empty for the nonce, the books closed, the forges cold, the various reagents and solutions settling quietly in their glass jars. He stared into the fire and sighed.
Feldon remembered: the touch of Loran's hand, the Argivian lilt to her voice, and her thick, dark hair. Most of all, he thought of the smile that she gave. It was a slightly sad, slightly knowing smile. It was a soft smile, and it wanned Feldon whenever he saw it.
Now, Feldon was a practitioner of the Third Path, the way that was neither Urza nor Mishra, charting a new course between the two warring brothers and their technological miracles. He could pull from his mind great magics, fueled by the memories of his mountain home, and work wonders with them. He could cause fire to appear or the land itself to shift or summon the strokes of a lightning storm and bend them to his will.
Yet he could not heal Loran's body or dying spirit. He could not keep the life within her. His magics had failed him and had failed his love.
The old man sighed and raised a hand toward the fire. He unlocked a part of his brain that held the memories of the mountains around them. He pulled the energies from those lands, as he learned to do in Terisia City with Drafna, Hurkyl, the archimandrite, and the other mages of the Ivory Towers. He concentrated, and the flames writhed as they rose from the logs, twisting upon themselves until they finally formed a soft smile.
Loran's smile. It was the most that he could do.
For five days and five nights Feldon sat by the fire, and for a brief time the servants wondered if they would soon have to tend the master as they had tended the mistress. Indeed, Feldon was never fully healthy himself, overweight and walking only with the aid of a silver cane he had rescued from the heart of a glacier. His dark beard was now streaked with silver, and the corners of his eyes drooped from grief and age. The servants wondered if he would ever rise from the fireside again.
On the sixth day Feldon retreated from the hearth to his workshop. Soon afterwards a short note appeared for the servants-a list of items that they were to procure as soon as possible. The list called for thin sheets of copper, iron rivets, cords made of various spun metals, brass gears if they could get them, steel otherwise, glass blown into a variety of shapes (with illustrations and dimensions). And there was a letter to be delivered to a place far to the south and west.
For the next two months the workshop clattered. Feldon brought the forge to life, and the small anvil rang with ear-splitting blows. Fire was within the domain of mountain magics, and Feldon was its master. He could cause it to heat a precise location with the exact amount of heat needed merely by ordering it to do so. Such was the nature of the old mage's magic.
The wire arrived, and the gears (iron, not brass), sheets of copper, and some of bronze. The glass was substandard, and Feldon had to resort to teaching himself how to blow it to form the shapes he needed. More wire arrived, this new amount spun with horsehair to form thick, long cords like braids of human hair.
At the end of two months Feldon looked at his work and shook his head. The joints were stiff, and the arms jutted in the wrong directions. The head was too large, and the hair looked like what it was: a collection of wire and horsehair. The eyes were little more than badly-crafted glass spheres. It was too tall at the shoulders and too large in the hips.
The creation looked nothing like Loran. Only around the mouth, where there was the ghost of a smile, came the hint of a memory.
Feldon shook his head, and thick tears gathered at the corners of his eyes. He took a sledge and knocked the automaton to pieces.
And he began again.
He pored over Loran's journals in the library. She had studied with Urza himself and knew something of artifice. He restrung the wires and ligatures through the arms and legs, building first miniature models, then full-fledged mock-ups before proceeding to the final version. He worked in animal bone and wood as well as metal and stone. His glasswork became better, so he could provide a glass eye for an old woman in the village that matched her good one. Slowly he built the automaton in the shape of Loran, sculpting her out of myriad materials.
After six months she was finished. The statue missed only the heart. Feldon waited patiently for that organ to appear. He spent his days in the workshop, polishing, testing, and rebuilding the automaton. When he first met Loran, she had use of both arms. Later she lost the use of one of them, crippled by Ashnod. He went back and forth, removing and replacing the arm. Finally he restored the statue to its complete state.