Thardwin Everheart's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Thardwin Everheart found the skeleton nailed to the workshop door at first light. Someone had wired the bones upright and pinned a small wooden sign to its ribs. The sign read: I am watching you. Thardwin set down his satchel of river reeds and river stones, the first two components he had gathered for the staff. He had crossed half of Everland to collect them. He would not lose them to a thief on the doorstep. The workshop was a borrowed tower with narrow windows and a runed door, loaned to him by an old teacher who no longer climbed its stairs. Thardwin had chosen it because the walls were thick and the stairs were few. He was trying to forge a staff that could channel the natural magic of Everland itself, and he needed a place to keep the pieces safe while he worked. The skeleton on the door told him the place was no longer secret. The thief had been trailing him since the salt flats, and now the thief wanted him afraid. Thardwin did not wait. He pulled the bones down, carried them inside, and set them on his workbench beside the reeds. Then he climbed to the top floor and opened the shutter that faced the road. He could see a figure at the tree line, half hidden, watching the tower. Thardwin lit a lamp in the window so the figure would know he had been seen. Then he went back down and prepared a trap. He laid the reeds in plain view on the ground floor table, near the door. He hid the river stones in a locked chest upstairs. He rubbed a binding sigil into the threshold, one his teacher had drilled into him for years, and he waited in the dark behind the stair. Near midnight the door eased open. A thin man stepped through, reached for the reeds, and crossed the sigil. The binding snapped shut around his ankles and dropped him flat. Thardwin came down the stairs with his knife drawn and took the man's tools, his map, and the knife at his belt. He walked the thief to the road at dawn and told him to leave the kingdom. The thief limped off without a word. Thardwin burned the skeleton and the watching sign in the yard. The reeds and stones were safe, and he had two components secured. But the map in his hand was not a thief's map. It was drawn in a careful hand, marked with the sites of every remaining component he needed, and sealed at the corner with a small purple mark he had seen once before, on a poisoned cup in the capital. The thief had not been working alone. Madness Everthorn knew about the staff.