>>5813535The messenger swiftly returned, croaking in an uncomfortably-human voice:
“Proceed. The Archmage will see you.”
You exchanged a last look with Logan Pearce, and began to ascend the lengthy, LENGTHY staircase up to top of the Tower.
“Should have studied… <Levitation>… Or <Dimension Door>…” you wheezed. “Or taken Rudolfo up… On his training…”
Eventually, with GREAT effort, you made it to the Archmage’s public office—at least not QUITE so high up the ivory spire of Hawksong’s Amges’ Tower as her private quarters were. You found the door slightly ajar and, after a moment’s fearful hesitation, you approached the door and said:
“Hello?”
“Enter,” she said. “Do not waste my time.”
You gulped, and did as instructed. With one hand you slowly pushed open the door. The opposite wall was a pure, almost blindingly-blank white. It was broken up by an intricate pattern of small windows, supplemented by a <Wind Wall> to keep out the high-altitude drafts which would otherwise whistle through the space and disrupt every robe and paper…. Though the place looked hardly used at all, and the Archmage’s imposing, massive, black wooden desk sat plain and bare, perversely evocative of a coffin. She stood on the other side of it, facing away from you. Archmage Theresa Henzler was still unmistakable by her truly massive hat, out from which fell a few strands of platinum-blonde hair that verged on silver. When she turned to face you, it was a movement without any rise and fall—a fluid motion that seemed almost mechanical, and certainly uncanny and inhuman. She met your gaze with those same icy blue eyes you remembered looking at you like you were a specimen atop her experimental slab all those years ago; those eyes looked out from that uncanny, scarcely-moving face—a face that looked hardly older than that of her adoptive daughter, though you knew this woman to likely be over a century old.
What had been the cost—the social cost, the spiritual cost, the cost in human life—to keep that face so young?
