Tiberius Townshend is an elderly smallfolk, merry in his position as professor at Old Town University. That is, until he is gifted A Rather Large Tome and propelled into adventure.
Part I
Tiberius huffed and puffed as his little legs took him further up the Runemancy Tower. He bolted through the door to Alasaea's office, grasping tightly the stitches of his side. “WHY—ON THIS EARTH—DID YOU PICK THE TOPMOST OFFICE—OF THE TALLEST TOWER!?”
He had never felt his age like this before. He had lost the count of steps somewhere around 337. Beads of sweat fell down his brow onto blushed cheeks, and his usually pristine turquoise robes were drenched. Alasaea merely smiled. “To keep the riff raff out.”
He could feel the sweat weaving through his beard. “Yes, well, you were always too smart for your own good.”
“Which is most unfortunate,” she said, “for I am not nearly smart enough.”
She offered him a seat, which he readily took. It wasn’t until this moment that Tiberius noticed a young man in the corner, inscribing notes onto a large book. He wore the violet robes of a fourth-year student and bore a U-shaped birthmark under his left eye.
“Oh . . . yes. This is John Erris Verall, Professor Townshend. My charge.” It seemed as if she had forgotten him completely until this moment as well.
Verall’s eyes barely rose from his notes. “Pleasure, sir.” He jotted a couple more words down, then stopped.
Tiberius beamed. “You know, Ms. Ashford was once a charge of mine. Dare I say, the best. I have Monette now—she’s a bit of a dunce . . .”
“Professor!” Alasaea exclaimed, as if she was not already in on the joke.
“Sweet girl. Most diligent once nose meets parchment. No intelligence of her own accord, though, I fear.” There was no sound but for the rapid scrawling’s of Verall’s quill. “What brings me up here today?”
Alasaea grabbed a couple electra from her desk and held them aloft. “John, a gift. I’m afraid we can’t continue our discussion of the Runes of Fetters’ Hollow this evening. This discussion with Professor Townshend is most pertinent. And please, John, talk to a girl.”
After frantically scribbling some more words down, he grabbed the electra reluctantly and bowed once to Alasaea, then again to Tiberius. He shut the door politely behind as he exited.
She sighed deeply. “Smart. Tragically so. The boy will die a celibate—I know it. He seems to have tricked himself into believing that his love for knowledge is a worthy substitute . . . but I am not so easily convinced.”
Tiberius frowned. It was all too familiar. “So, the boy has left. I hope that means this is something rather . . . taboo.”
“Well, I don’t quite know.” She walked over to a tall mahogany cabinet and unlocked it with a comically large key, that sported an esoteric runic symbol at the base. From the cabinet she took out a sizeable lead chest. It, too, was clamped shut, but instead of a lock there was a row of four different runes. She tapped the runes above the lock in a particular order (3-2-1-3), and the box flew open. From inside it she withdrew a massive book. With great effort, she tossed it on her desk with a plop. It had a hardy leather casing, but no markings to betray its contents. There was an undeniable notion that it was quite ancient.
“I have come into possession of this book. And what a book it is. It’s—well beyond my understanding.”
Tiberius eyed it with great interest. “May I ask where you procured this from?”
“You may.” She left him hanging on with a smile but eventually continued. “I bartered with a contact of mine. One Sabra Kafka.”
Tiberius’s eyes opened with interest. “Really?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Do you disapprove?”
“On the contrary, I think it’s wonderful. There ought to be more correspondence between us and the—you know I hate the term, but—uncivilized nations. And perhaps there’s a dose of jealousy. My friends are in lower sorts of places, not at the peak of Sky Sentinel.”
She pushed the book over to him with both hands. “Open to the first page—I know what you may think. It’s cursed! I promise you it is not—not that Sabra would knowingly send a curse my way . . .”
Tiberius hovering his hand over the black leather. “So, you’ve consulted Elphira, then?”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, the old coot. Uncursed. ‘Disturbingly so,’ she said. I wouldn’t let her open the cover, though I could tell she was dying to know its contents. But she owed me a favor—though disgruntled, she wallowed in her ignorance.”
With some reluctance he opened the cover. The tome vibrated at his touch. The binding moved effortlessly. At one point, perhaps many centuries ago, this book was well read. On the first page there were four runes, with four corresponding words beneath them.
“Titanic Runes and Elderspeech?” He laughed. “How am I supposed to be of help to you, exactly?”
“You took Elderspeech, did you not?”
“Sure. A semester of Crude and Basic each, back when iguanodons still roamed the earth. I’m not exactly an Eldertongue, Alas.”
She smiled knowingly. “Turn to the next page, if you will.”
He did as she said. What appeared on the following page was a rather complex math problem. The runes were nonsense, but he didn’t need to know much Elderspeech to understand what the header “Lumnes Faerie” meant.
“Arithmancy,” he said, a dumbfounded expression painted on his face. “Surely this can’t be.”
Alasaea still smiled brightly. Her dark blue eyes glistened with anticipation. “You took Arithmancy, no? The entire catalog of courses.”
Tiberius gave a half-hearted smile. “It was my second major, yes. All for naught, of course. I only taught it for a few years before it was rendered defunct. ‘Useless,’ to use Mayor Grumfro’s exact wording.”
“Would you like to prove them wrong? A century after the fact?”
His gaze met hers. “Why not McCants? He is the premier mind of arithmancy—mathematics even.”
“He is over 120, Tiberius. And at his wits’ end, I’m afraid.”
“I’m also 120, darling. 124.”
“Yes, but if you hadn’t noticed, one of you is gnomish.”
“Really!?” He feigned surprise, as his feet gleefully dangled from the chair. “Which one of us is it?”
She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Also, you have done something McCants has not: saved my life.”
Tiberius’s eyebrows furled. “Saved your—oh, the business with the calcatrix!? Gods, Alas, that was a gnomish decade ago!”
“Yet, still.” Her smile faded, but her face was still kind. “I never forgot about it. That’s the pesky thing about life debts.
“I’ve been waiting for some way to repay you in kind. Some people work their entire lives in hopes of paying off. I, however, believe this will suffice.” She looked at the book, then to Tiberius.
“While I care not for repayment . . . you believe this to be worth a life?”
“I think so. Can you read the title? Either the runes or the elderspeech?”
He had never bothered with runes and had never delved into elderspeech like he had with artifacts or arithmancy, but he could still manage to find the words. “A . . . Very . . . Big . . . Book . . .” He read it again. Yes, surely that was it. But it sounded so stupid.
A wide grin formed on Alasaea’s face. “In essence, yes. A Rather Large Tome, would be more apt. Regardless of what its contents, this book certainly knows what it is.”
He looked over the words again. It sounded true. “Yes, confounded by the squiggling nonsense of my ancestors—an irony that is not lost on me, I assure you.”
“Now,” she said, folding her hands beneath her chin. “I give this gift to you, without any caveat or exception . . . although, I would love it if you would—I don’t know—care to share your findings with me? There is no doubt this tome is of some obscure historical importance.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Have you . . . have you had your hand at it?”
“Of course. All last night . . . all last week, if I’m going to be honest with you. I am no mathematician, but I was able to solve the first few problems after some time. Yet, nothing. No magic. I was beginning to wonder if these are just equations, for chemistry or physics, or something else I’m uneducated in.”
Tiberius flipped the first twenty or so pages. “These are no equations I’ve ever seen. This could just be gobbledygook; however, why someone would write—gods—a thousand pages of this, I have no idea.” He flipped to the back but had to retrace a dozen pages. It was all one singular equation. He was dumbfounded at the complexity of it.
“Necromancer’s Dance,” Alasaea said.
“Pardon?”
“That’s the final spell. There’s . . . quite a lot of that ilk near the back. And other untoward nasties. Soul Bound, Shadow Self, Power Word Kill.” She leaned back casually in her chair. “Are your Autumn classes done?”
“One tomorrow. Just Crude Artifacts of Legend.” He rested his hand on one of the pages. He could feel the strange energy course through him, like a hum through a woodwind instrument. For a moment, he felt out of his body, looking upon Alasaea and himself in third person, levitating near the ceiling . . . then he returned to his mortal coil. “Why?”
“Well . . . if you could have a go at the book tonight, we could reconvene tomorrow.” She smiled, but it lacked the usual confidence. She was aware she had given him all the power.
“Yes, yes,” he said, with a wave of the hand. “Let’s meet at, oh let’s say, noon. In my office, Alas. I don’t want to climb this damn tower ever again, if I can help it.”
She gave a polite chuckle. “Yes, professor. Of course.”
He gave a sigh of relief as he fell onto his cot, book tucked closely to his chest. His feathered bed felt like an import from heaven. The walk down the Runemancy Tower had been easier than the way up, but it was still an arduous journey for a smallfolk. And the quarter mile journey across campus to the Albon District didn’t help his poor sore soles, either.
The humming of A Rather Large Tome lulled him to sleep.
He was walking with giants, his head level with their ankle bones. It was dark, wherever they were, but the hairless skin of the giants shone a pale blue, glistening in a moonlight that wasn’t present. They were speaking to one another in Titanic, but the usual harsh, guttural language was more of a sweet, melancholy song—one he found he knew the lyrics to. They were talking of riches. They were talking of gold. Triumph. Glory. They were speaking, it seemed to Tiberius, about the things that had led them to certain death.
They had reached the end of solid ground. Before them lay a rushing sea, with white-capped waves of awesome fury. The tallest giant kneeled down to Tiberius and opened his palm. Without hesitation, Tiberius awkwardly climbed upon it. The giant’s hand rose and, quite gently, sat Tiberius onto his shoulder. The giant did not turn their head, but they whispered to Tiberius as the waves met their feet. “Listen.” Their voice melted into the furious winds and melded with the clamor of the waves. “I listened not.”
“Prison,” they whispered again as their feet crashed into the rushing sea. “Prison of rot.”
For what must’ve been a mile these giants walked, now without conversation, intent on whatever it was that lay ahead. There was some semblance of unspoken reverence for the sea. They were slowly but surely charging headlong into deeper water.
Then, it came: a great beacon of golden and silver light, that clashed against the dark pallets of the sea and the sky. The giants all seemed to grunt in collective approval. The giant that carried Tiberius once again politely clasped him, and held him high, aloft in the air. Tiberius situationed himself on the edge of the enormous hand, his feet dangling forty feet above sea.
Every head of every giant disappeared underneath the surface of the black sea. Only the arm of the giant that held Tiberius remained visible, like the wreckaged mast of a great galleon.
The silver and the gold faded, revealing a most peculiar sight: a great sea serpent coiled upon a jutting blade. It must’ve been hundreds of feet long, with even more lost beneath the sea. Its face was not of a snake. It was hauntingly flat and bore the visage of a beautiful woman.
“HARK, MORTAL,” she yelled, as her powerful voice ricochet off every wave, for miles. She grinned, indulging in the theater of it all. “CONSUMPTION OF KNOWLEDGE IS KNOWN TO CONSUME EVEN THE GREATEST OF MAN. DOES ONE AGREE?”
Tiberius nodded. He should be frightened, he thought in the dream—but he was not.
“BE WARY. WITH EVERY PAGE A NEW WEAPON COMES. A NEW EDGE TO CUT ONESELF UPON. DOES ONE AGREE?” She uncoiled. A sickly sound of scales retracting from the blade filled the air as her face came within inches of his. It was apparent now that she was bleeding. The entirety of her form was being lacerated with every movement from the blade she was constricting.
“Yes,” he said, in Elderspeech. “One does.”
She sneered. Her mouth opened wide, a gaping black maw bearing hundreds of rows of sword-like fangs, of various designs and sizes. He could taste salt water, metal, copper, blood. A wail was heard—and she ate him whole.
The foray into secrets of A Rather Large Tome was not going as planned. All the multiplication and division and sines and cosines that filled half of the page weren’t the deterrent. The answer was 17. He checked and rechecked. Four times, five. He whispered “17” to the book, feeling like an absolute fool. He tried writing on the page, but the ink faded almost immediately. The title at top of the page, Lumnes Faerie, stared mockingly back at him.
“Wait!”
Tiberius scuttled over to his obnoxiously large shelf of books. It was short, of course, but it lined almost the entirety of his walls. And that was a great number of walls, for Tiberius had added a room to his house every few years or so. What was once a two-room cot was now an expansive thirty-room manor, built chaotically around the neighboring houses of the Albon District.
At long last, he found it, in a nook in his old guest bathroom, covered in a century of dust. Elderspeech Made Easy by Orner Pipsky and Elerna Dawtwood.
Surely there were numbers in it. He could remember every number up to six. He had learned it, once, but that was over a century ago. It had long lied dormant in the recesses of his mind. He scanned the tables of content:
Numbers . . . . . . . . . . 16
He flipped through the pages and landed on page 16. Ah, yes. Seventeen. Alokaeda.
With a jaunty step he returned to his office. His new new office, not the old new office or the old old office.
With a flourish of the wrist, he yelled “Alokaeda!”
Nothing seemed to happen.
He rapped his knuckles on the page in thought. He looked around at his office for some sort of inspiration. He saw a political map of Taiga that Louise Blevins had given him in ’86 that adorned the far wall; an approximate replica of the legendary Aerabad’s Whisker, mantled delicately on the southeast corner: and, an orrery with all 13 planets surrounding Terra Nova, bequeathed by his Great Uncle Ardmore, that hung precariously from the ceiling.
“Wait!”
How could he have been so stupid? Any novice, would-be wizard knew that one needed a focus—an object to channel their energy through. And if it held some modicum of sentimental value, then all the better . . .
He tried to think of a happy moment, but none seemed to be readily available. He loved teaching, and he loved his students . . .
“A-ha!”
With as much haste as a gnome could muster, he reached his old new office. There it was, setting in an empty ink pot: the large, petrified feather of the calcatrix that Tiberius and company had faced during their stint abroad in Euphore. Even in the dull glow of Tiberius’s amber lamp, the ruby-and-emerald feather glistened as if enraptured in sunlight. With a smile, he snatched it and ran back to his new new office.
“Alokaeda!” he shouted again, at nothing in particular. Only silence met him.
With a frown he went over the equation again. He was absolutely positive the answer was 17. What was he missing here? He grabbed an ornamental orb paperweight from the corner of his desk and set it just beyond the book. In his head, he went over the equation again . . . and again . . . until he once again felt confident in his answer. He pointed the end of the petrified feather at the orb and screamed, “ALOKAEDA!”
A giddy, child-like giggle erupted the likes of which Tiberius thought himself incapable. The paperweight was now more than mere glass—it was a pulsating orb of intermingling ruby-and-emerald light that dazzled the room. He snuffed the flame out from his lantern, whose light was now paltry in comparison. For an hour, maybe more, he bathed in the light. For the first time in decades upon decades, he cried tears of joy.
