A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1649 - 1649: Swirling Fires - Part 2

The slight magic imbued in that old parchment, written and delivered by the High King himself, was likely one of the handful of things in all the Stormfront that could have properly reached him. Without higher guidance, there was no chance of a crow finding its way to a man that it had never met, all this way underground.

"Now aren't you just the most majestic little creature?" Magnus said, scratching the crow under the neck, making tame the creature. It cawed at him happily, and Magnus cooed at it in turn. "Yes, yes. I too hate these winding tunnels, and their lack of light, and their emptiness. Too long we have spent in the past, little crow. What do you say we go on a little adventure, yes? The High King has bid that we help him, and perhaps we might. But who can force us to go directly there? Certainly no mortal man."

He laughed happily at the thought, just a little too gleefully, and just a little too long. "Kekeke," he tittered to himself. "No, no, we mustn't," he admonished himself, catching himself after a time. "We'd look like a madman, cackling to ourselves in the darkness like that. Yes, time to move. There's movement to be had."

With those words, and with a grand gesture, he turned his hand to the long-piled up rubble from the cave-in that he had caused all those decades ago, and he saw it begin to move. Not by force, but by transmutation. The rocks seemed to soften, and brown, more and more, until they were nothing more than a river of grey mud, flying past the tattered old mage, and the crow that flew up onto his shoulder with a panicked flutter.

The cave system roared from the sheer mass being poured down it. Into all those caverns, and all those little tunnels that Magnus had seen dug over the years, that river of rock flowed. He watched it with a satisfied, and rather sinister expression, knowing full well that none but him would ever again gaze upon those ancient relics, and attain all the wisdom that he supposed that they had in store.

If they could not grant him the truest level of power that he had longed for, then they would grant no one it, he did think to himself.

As he walked up that final steep stretch, towards where the sunlight welcomed him, with the crow sitting on his shoulder, that feeling of failure, of having given up, and all the bitterness that came with it rather abruptly transformed.

With his free hand, he absentmindedly shaped the rock in front of him into a new stare every time he came to it. Where the slope grew more vertical, those stairs turned to a rocky ladder, and he climbed without flinching, as though there wasn't a drop of hundreds of feet below him. A smile spread across his face all the while. He knew full well it was a winter sun that warmed him, but its warmth was something he'd longed for. He closed his eyes, so that he might more fully enjoy it. Another spell he cast, to deal with the pain that naturally came in, exposing the eyes to something they hadn't dealt with in the longest time.

Failure there ought to have been, but mischief quickly took its place, and excitement. Magnus was terribly old by this point. He would never have revealed his true age to any that had the bravery to ask, but at the very least, he'd seen several High Kings ascend the throne, and several more fall. He'd been there to smile, when he'd heard the hero Arthur was sent on an impossible quest to slay the Pandora Goblin, and he'd been there to laugh, when he'd heard that both the Hero and Dominus Patrick had fallen to it.

For all his time spent underground, he still took the smallest of cares to stay up to date with the outside world. But only to the smallest of degrees. Enough to track the era he was in, and the current High King, and the highest state of his problems. Any more than that, and – by some misplaced sense of academic honour – he felt as if was cheating the restrictions that he had put on himself.

For a mage, the man had a discipline that even the most refined of knights would have bulwarked at. Magnus was no stranger to allowing himself a good deal of suffering. The path to magehood was littered with thousands of temptations in the form of what others might have called shortcuts, but Magnus had never been tricked by any of those. He slammed down his minor wants, whenever he could, and restrained everything that he was, in the pursuit of one thing.

If not for a grand impetus, like the letter from the High King, he might have never given up on his quest to find all that he'd sought in those underground ruins, even though, in his heart of hearts – in a place that he dared not acknowledge – he'd quickly realized that his road had been a foolish one, and his time was better spent elsewhere.

The releasing of that burden was evident in the smile that he wore, and the whimsy with which he moved his old body. Far too quickly did he recover from something that he had spent decades on, as if he had spent years accepting his failure already.

Now it was a younger man, the part of himself that he'd kept so restrained, that inhabited that hold body of his. After so long spent in his study, the mage wanted nothing more than to play.

In his bare feet, he made it to the top of the cave's opening, and landed firmly in the snow. The snow spared him no quarter, even after all his time spent absent from the real world. It jabbed at him with icy daggers. It wasn't just cold, it was a very real, very sharp pain. But Magnus delighted in it, so much so that he laughed aloud, startling a nesting bird that had been too light in its slumber from its perch in a nearby tree.