4. Mytharo
Chapter four
Mytharo
Caen had been still long enough that I had started to worry about what the stillness meant.
I had once taken a lie detector test for a graduate-school psychology study. Twenty dollars and a coffee shop gift card, nothing sinister.
The technician had attached sensors to my fingers and instructed me to relax, which is precisely the kind of instruction that makes relaxing physiologically impossible.
I had spent the entire session so acutely aware of my own cardiovascular system that I almost certainly registered as deeply suspicious despite telling the truth about everything, including my breakfast.
This felt very similar, except with a glowing pendant instead of finger sensors and significantly higher stakes than a coffee shop gift card.
Caen stood perfectly still with her eyes closed. I sat where she had indicated and attempted to project the calm confidence of someone with nothing to hide.
This was difficult because I had always looked guilty under scrutiny.
I was the person who broke into a visible sweat when a professor asked whether anyone had done the reading, even though I had. I was the person who looked suspicious at customs despite having only an undeclared pack of Twizzlers.
If Caen’s methodology involved anything in the vicinity of heart rate, pupil dilation, or the micro-expressions of someone whose nervous system interpreted being observed as a predator event, I was done for.
I was also, if I was being honest with myself, not certain that whatever Caen was doing constituted a reliable methodology. I believed in evidence. I believed in peer-reviewed research, replicable results, and the rigor of conclusions that had survived scrutiny.
I had been in this world for approximately three hours. I had not yet had time to establish whether standing very still with a glowing pendant met the evidentiary standards I usually applied to things.
The pendant pulsed once.
I tried to relax.
This did not work.
If Caen opened her eyes and said, She is lying, I had no backup plan. I was in a fortification at the edge of a war, with a dead phone and no local currency. My entire negotiating position was that I arrived here accidentally, and I would very much like not to be executed.
Caen opened her eyes.
“She believes every word of it,” Caen said.
The pendant’s glow had dimmed back to its ambient level, and something in her posture had changed. A little of the tension had gone out of her frame, leaving behind a weariness that hadn’t been there before.
“Reading someone fully takes something out of me,” she said, catching my glance. “The pendant draws on what I have. After significant work, I need some time to recover.”
She touched the spiral briefly, then looked at Skip.
“She is not an enemy agent. She genuinely does not know how she arrived here. She believes that she is from another world.”
Skip nodded.
“That is what I suspected,” he said.
The relief hit immediately.
Believes every word.
Not an enemy agent.
For the first time since waking beneath the wrong sky, I allowed myself to relax.
My shoulders settled. My hands unclenched. The exhausting vigilance of the last three hours loosened its grip just enough for me to notice how tightly I’d been holding on.
***
“Sit,” she said. “You’ve had an eventful morning.”
I sat. Skip remained standing near the door.
Caen moved to the fire, lifted a pot, and poured something steaming into a cup before handing it to me.
Tea, or this world’s equivalent.
I took a cautious sip.
It was not tea.
The taste was darker and more complex. Slightly bitter at first, like strong coffee, followed by something warm that unfolded slowly across my tongue and down my throat.
Then two impossible things happened at once.
My thoughts sharpened. The lingering fog of exhaustion evaporated. Every detail in the room seemed to snap into focus with startling clarity.
At the same time, the tension drained out of me.
The knot between my shoulders loosened. My jaw unclenched. The low, constant readiness that had been humming beneath my skin since waking beneath the wrong sky simply stopped.
Alert and relaxed. Focused and at ease. The combination felt so unnatural that for a moment I sat there, blinking.
Caen smiled.
“It is called deeproot. I hope it helped,” she said. “I imagine you have questions.”
That was an understatement, but I appreciated the invitation.
“I need to understand where I am,” I said. “Because this appears to be a radically different world.”
“This world has a name,” Caen said. “It is called Mytharo.”
Mytharo.
It sounded exactly right for a world with imposing stone fortifications, charcoal-black mountains, wizards with glowing pendants, and devastatingly handsome High Commanders.
“Myth means the flame,” Caen said. “Not fire. The flame. The living thing that burns and warms and changes the shape of everything it touches.” She touched the spiral pendant briefly.
“Aro means sacred. Held above all things. Mytharo means the sacred flame. This world is named for what it believes life is for—burning fully, warming, changing, and completing.”
I thought about Earth. From the Old English eorte.
Ground, soil, the stuff under your feet.
We had looked at an entire planet—oceans, mountains, billions of years of improbable biological complexity—and the best we had collectively managed was: dirt.
It is made of dirt. We will call it Dirt.
This had apparently satisfied everyone sufficiently that it had stuck for the entire duration of recorded human history and nobody had ever proposed a revision.
They had named their world after what it believed. We had named ours after what it stood on.
“I’m from a world called Earth,” I said.
“Earth,” Caen repeated.
She said it the way you say a word you have said before. Without hesitation. Without the half-second of processing that a genuinely unfamiliar word requires. It was the tone of someone confirming rather than learning.
I filed this. I moved on, because I had five hundred other questions and I was going to get through them in order.
“And where on Mytharo am I?” I asked.
“The eastern reaches of the Northern Continent. Near the Zhaduun Mountains.”
Northern Continent. A refreshingly honest naming convention. Fantasy cartography rarely embraced that level of straightforwardness.
“And who are you, exactly?” I asked. “Skip brought me to you specifically. You have a glowing pendant and a tower full of locked doors. I’ve been assuming wizard, but I want to be accurate.”
“I am a Mage,” she said.
“What’s a Mage, exactly?” I asked.
“Mages are a theological order. We serve Yravel. The founding god of this world. She made the world by wanting it. Desire is the founding principle of existence, generation, connection. Everything alive flows from her principle.” She touched the spiral pendant.
“This is her symbol. The living arts we practice draw on what she made. We pay an honest cost. The pendant dims, I rest, it returns. What I spend of myself is not lost. It comes back.”
“There’s an opposite principle?” I asked. I was a historian. I knew how pantheons worked. There was always an opposite.
Caen looked at me as though revising her estimate of how quickly I processed things.
“Druven. He cannot tolerate endings. His argument is that the flame should burn forever—that preservation is love, and endings are the enemy.” Her voice was even, the voice of someone who had spent a long time with a difficult idea.
“He is wrong. But it is a coherent wrongness. In the right moment of grief, in the right moment of fear, it is very easy to believe.”
“And what exactly is this fortification defending against?” I asked.
“I’ve gathered that you’re holding a line against something.
The walls are built to absorb sustained impact.
The moat has a significant skeletal population.
The density of arrow slits suggests a recurring rather than occasional problem. ”
Caen let the question sit. “You ask questions like a scholar.”
“I am primarily a scholar of military history,” I said.
From the doorway, Skip said, “Military history?”
“Does that surprise you?” I asked.
“A little.”
“Why?”
“I have never met a scholar of war who looked like you.”
I smiled.
A slow smile spread across his face in return.
The warmth that followed had absolutely nothing to do with the hearth.
Focus, Meghan Callahan.
I turned to Caen.
“The fortification,” I said. “What is it defending against?”
“Morvanna and her army of the undead,” Caen said.
I considered this.
“Do these undead happen to drink blood and have fangs?”
Caen blinked. “Yes. How did you know that?”
“We have stories about them in my world.”
“Stories?”
“Mythology. Fiction. A thriving body of fiction, actually. They’re quite popular. We call them vampires.”
“Well,” Caen said, “I wish they were fiction here, but they are regrettably real.”
“So how does a vampire army end up contained behind a military fortification?” I asked. “And who is Morvanna?”
“Morvanna was Queen of Newardia,” Caen said.
“Four hundred miles south of here, on the coast. A remarkable ruler. Intelligent. Ambitious. Beloved.” Caen took a sip of deeproot.
“She also feared aging. More accurately, she feared dying before she had finished everything she intended to finish. She turned to sorcerers who promised they could help.”
“I assume they could not.”
“Correct. They could not.” She set her cup down.
“The magic these men practiced—we call it sorcery to distinguish it from the living arts I practice—works against the natural order. What it extracts from the practitioner does not return. Their bodies deteriorated. Their souls severed from the living world in ways that cannot be recovered. Animals recoiled from them. Forests went silent. Something in every living thing recognized what they had become.”
“They knew the cost?”