As far as I could tell, Mage Torvin was not a conspirator.
He would die at the instrument table when the eruption arrived, and he had died at the instrument table in every loop I had been able to track him to the end of.
He was a researcher who had been brought on the expedition to study the pyramid, and he had no idea that the expedition had been built around something other than what he had been told it was about.
Why was an Adept like him killed so easily in every loop by minor demons? Someone must have made sure they were targeted; could it be the pyramid, poison, or a spell?
That was the second thing.
The conspiracy was not the camp; it was a small set of people inside the camp, and most of the people in the camp were as unaware as I had been.
Many of them were senior mages. They would die fighting demons because they did not know that the demons were the means by which their own deaths had been arranged, and before then, they were all weakened.
Adept Torvin, Adept Varis, and Adept Fenara would die.
The Adepts at the eastern face were as much cattle as the porters. Cattle who could throw a lattice and tear a hole in the air, but cattle nonetheless.
Moving my eyes east, I saw that Adept Varis and Adept Fenara were at the eastern face, with Scholar Orath, in the configuration they held every morning.
Adept Varis was checking the calibration of one of his crystal lattice instruments, and Adept Fenara was at the side of the eastern face, marking measurements on a small board.
Both were preparing for the day’s research, and neither registered anything wrong, because nothing in their morning was wrong from where they stood.
Orath was at the pyramid’s base with his private instrument pressed against the black surface.
However, I noticed that the leather satchel at his waist, which I saw closed in my very first loop, was now open.
This was the path that I had missed before, since other things drew my attention, but I was ready to begin filling up the gaps in my knowledge.
I tried not to stare directly at them, but gathered enough information using my peripheral vision; it was rather difficult, but my senses and Observation aided me here.
I saw Scholar Orath reaching into the satchel with his free hand, and he withdrew something flat and small.
The shape was the shape of a sheet of parchment, and as the morning light caught the edge of the sheet, I noticed that it was metallic, golden to be precise, it was a golden page.
If I was not wrong, this was the same kind of object Rex had been scribbling on at the cookfire, and when I mentioned it, Rex had believed that I knew about the Ascension Ritual.
Orath held the sheet flat in front of him with both hands, and I think he was reading from it.
I could not hear the words at this distance, but I could see his lips moving, and the slight rhythm of his shoulders that meant he was reading aloud rather than silently.
Whatever he was doing was drawing attention from the other two Adepts with him, but they seemed to be confused by what he was doing; however, they had no chance to stop him due to the fact that the reading lasted perhaps eight seconds.
The air in front of him began to shimmer, then thinned, revealing something behind it that had not been there a second ago.
A red door, hanging in the empty air a meter in front of Orath, and three meters above the ground, framed by the mid-morning sky and the black face of the pyramid behind it.
The door did not seem to be made of wood, but frozen blood, and it pulsed, almost like the Pyramid was going to be pulsing not too long from now.
For a moment, I thought that Orath had just opened a door into the pyramid when I saw a sigil at the center of the door.
I did not recognize it at first. It was a six-pointed star created by placing two pyramids together, but one of the pyramid heads pointed downward, and the other upwards.
This shape was familiar; where had I seen it?
Then my mind caught up to my eyes, and one of my classes came back to me without warning.
∞
The classroom had been on the third floor of the eastern hall, and it had been a warm afternoon, with the sun coming in low through the tall windows, lighting the dust of the room in slow horizontal beams.
Master Veth had been at the lectern with a stack of charts that had been pinned one by one to the board behind him as he worked through the material.
"You will not encounter most of these in your professional careers," he had said. "Most of you will work and live and die on our continent, Aelmar. You may travel to Aurim for an Athenaeum reference, if you are talented, or to Khoreshen if your soul-craft requires it. But the magus civilization is older than any one academy, and what is taught at Aldenmere is one of seven traditions, and the seven traditions do not always agree."
He had pinned the first chart. Aldenmere’s sigil. A lidless eye with four elemental crosses inside it. I had worn this sigil on every robe I had ever owned, although the eye on my robe did not have any crosses, because I was not yet an Adept. I would gain one cross with every elemental discipline mastered.
As far as I could tell, there were very few mages in the Academy who had mastered four elemental disciplines to the greatest extent, and they were all Sovereigns.
Mages that were so powerful they were gods in their own right.
"Aldenmere Academy is here on Aelmar, and we are the masters of Elemental disciplines. The tradition you have been training in is the one this institution considers foundational, and you are correct to consider it so. But it is not the only foundation."
He had pinned the second chart. A different sigil, more austere, with sharp angles, resembling a cube.
"The Sanctum of Tessen on the Khoreshen. Mind-craft and soul-discipline. Their Anima Sensitivity standards exceed ours. Most of their graduates spend their careers in meditation chambers."
He slowly pinned the third sigil, a six-pointed star.
"The Conclave of Ysmar on Vothar. They focus on Veilcraft and Force Resonance. The disciplines that operate on the substance of magic itself rather than through it."
He had let the chart hang and turned to us.
"The Conclave is a closed institution, and its tradition is closed in turn. If you encounter a Vothari in your professional life, you will treat them with the courtesy due to a senior magical practitioner, and you will not engage them in discussion of their tradition. Their methods are not our methods. Their methods are not, in some respects, methods we would recognize as belonging to the magus tradition at all."
He had touched the six-pointed star on the chart with one finger.
"This is the sigil of Ysmar. If you see it on a transit door, you will report the encounter to your Master, and you will not approach the door. The Conclave’s traffic is the Conclave’s business. Our business is to leave it alone."