Aware of Primage Zev’s eyes upon her, Melliandra empted the waste bin by Vadim Maur’s desk, bobbed a quick bow in the direction of the Primage, and scurried out. She pushed the cart down the hall to the next door, pausing to look back and watch the Primage reseal the wards protecting the High Mage’s room.

There. She could see them again. Those shining threads of magic.

Eld ~ Koderas

Vadim Maur walked beside Primage Grule, the Mage he’d tasked with restoring Koderas to its full, pre-Wars capacity. He’d already visited the enormous forges, where blacksmiths hammered sel’dor ingots into swords and armor, and the foundries where molten sel’dor was cast into barbed arrowheads, spears, and the like. Now, the two Mages passed through an archway and down a series of railed walkways that overlooked Koderas’s siege workshops and the various machining and assembly rooms where thousands of umagi toiled round the clock constructing the massive battering rams and trebuchets that would be used to grind enemy fortresses into dust. No less than three full rooms were dedicated to the manufacture of bowcannon and their massive, tairen-killing bolts made from tree trunks jacketed with barbed sel’dor sheaths and razor-sharp spearheads.

“You have done well, Grule.” Praising those who served him wasn’t Vadim’s strong suit, but Grule’s last centuries of effort had exceeded even Vadim’s highest expectations. “Not even during the previous Wars did Koderas operate with such seamless efficiency.”

“Thank you, Most High. There is no prize I value more than your approval.” A flush of pleasure touched Grule’s tanned cheeks. Unlike most sun-bereft Mages, who toiled all their lives beneath the surface of Eld, Grule had spent the last year aboveground, overseeing the start of Vadim Maur’s next great achievement.

They had reached the end of the elevated walkway. Grule opened the door at the end of the walkway, and the Mages stepped out of the hot noise of the production floor into a cool, dark corridor. From there, they climbed a flight of stairs that led to a pair of heavy double doors covered with swirling patterns of rune-etched silver and bloodred crystals in the sigils of Seledorn, God of Shadows. Grule reached for the heavy, intricately wrought silver-and-sel’dor handle and murmured the words of a release spell while his fingers traced an unlocking weave in the air. Unseen bolts shifted with an audible click.

“After you, Most High,” Grule murmured, and with a wave of his hand, the doors swung open.

Vadim Maur stepped over the threshold and into the gray light of the cloud-filtered afternoon sun. He squeezed his eyes closed against the brightness. It was the first time he’d stepped foot aboveground since the scorching of the world a thousand years ago, and even much-filtered sunlight was a hundred times brighter than the dim, sconce-lit shadows of Boura Fell.

“Forgive me, Master Maur.” Grule leapt forward to block the sunlight with his body and cast the High Mage in his broad shadow. “Shall I weave screens for your eyes?” He lifted his hands in anxious anticipation.

The old Vadim Maur, trapped in his aged and decaying body, would have snapped in rage. But the newly incarnated Vadim Maur, housed in a body both young and fit, was not so quick to anger.

“No need.” Already Vadim’s new, younger eyes were adjusting to the abundance of light. He lifted a shading hand over his eyes and squinted at the world around him.

They were standing on a windswept point of land formed by the confluence of two great rivers: the Frost heading down from the Mandolay Mountains in the north, and the Selas, flowing east from its source near the Rhakis. Vadim turned in a slow circle, drinking in this long-unseen world. Behind them lay the mile-long open sel’dor pit that housed the new, much-improved, Koderas. Clouds of thick black smoke boiled up from Koderas’s great fires. What trees might have once surrounded the pit had long since died away, and all that remained was thick brush, covered in heavy gray layers of ash and sel’dor dust.

Vadim’s chest swelled with pride. Some who looked upon Koderas might have seen ruin in the ash and soot and poisonous gases choking the life from the surrounding forest. But not Vadim. He saw Koderas for what it truly was: power. His power. Raw and brutal and ugly, perhaps, but indisputably great nonetheless.

He turned the final quarter of his circuit and beheld the second reason he had come: the shining glory of Toroc Maur—the first Elden stronghold to extend aboveground since the scorching of the world.

Though little more than a massive outer wall and scaffolding now, when completed the immense citadel would crouch on the banks of the Selas River like a great, horned spider, its gleaming black spires stabbing up from the center of a wide, high-walled and well-defended central keep, towering nearly as high as its foundation, the subterranean levels of Boura Maur, plunged deep. The first soaring sel’dor bridge that spanned the river to connect Boura Maur to Koderas had already been built. Flanking the bridge’s entrance, two enormous flags of Eld, rich purple embroidered with silvery moons and stars set in the exact configuration of Vadim Maur’s birth, snapped in the wind.

Emotions coiled inside Vadim: satisfaction, pride, eagerness. Centuries of planning and toil were finally coming to fruition.

“Show me,” he urged.

After touring the existing construction of Toroc Maur and examining in detail the plan for the next stage of construction, Vadim followed Grule up the stone steps to the citadel’s high, well-defended walls where cannoneers had assembled beside the bowcannon mounted on the battlements.