Silas Greyshott's study was on the second floor of a small house near the Marketplace; looking out the window, the Mage could see the crowds each morning and even hear the faint, tinny cries of vendors calling out their wares. The location provided lively distraction and, at the same time, the solitude that the solitary creature required and enjoyed.

His notes were organized, bound with ribbons and tagged with little notes, placed on little shelves all over the small eight-by-eight room. Most of his books were relegated to a larger set of heavy wooden shelves beside the window and his desk, and those he used more frequently were arranged in three stacks on the floor, within easy reach for the rising scholar. A strange astrolabe stood on another triangular shelf designed for the corner of the room, standing out among various devices for locating, anchoring, and otherwise manipulating ley lines and energies. It was a simple workshop, more modest than those of most in Silas Greyshott's field, and yet here he had discovered six significant and profitable cross-realms rifts, one of them assumed lost for good.

The door into his apartment was spell-locked and opened automatically for ranking House members and others the Mage was close to. It opened into the tiny kitchen, with doors leading into the bathroom and the study. Another door in the study, a little one easily overlooked among the desk and shelves that cramped the space, went to his bedroom. The young man himself sat at his desk with a heavy elven book held open in his lap. He puzzled quietly over the words, but already he had an idea of how to use these arcane ideas...

Channeling the power of the Fallen Triumvirate to unmake the Seeds of Ruin would be a simple enough procedure, once he constructed the proper anchor.

Raziya would not have checked the door beforehand. Imagine her utter surprise, when she lifted a hand to knock, and the door swung open for her. Pale blue-grey eyes went wide, and propriety bade her knock on the door jamb anyway before gingerly stepping in. "Hello?" Calling that out in a voice that could be called nothing less than musical. As was usual, she was dressed simply enough, this time in a black pencil skirt and a blue-grey sweater a few shades darker than her eyes. Low-slung heels and pearls, and the House insignia, of course. With the long coat she wore, likely she had her sword with her as well. She looked as if she'd come from something important.

"Gale Raziya?" Silas called in reply once he turned his head and saw her. Out of habit more than any need he clutched his staff as he got to his feet and took it with him; Renna's arcane tome was left on the chair at his desk. He was dressed in a long but warm coat evocative of the robes he often wore, a simple homespun button-up shirt, black wool trousers and his boots. He stepped out into the little kitchen and greeted her with a reverent bow of his head. "It, ah, it's a pleasure to meet you..."

"I am she, yes, and you must be Silas. I apologize for the little notice, the door--" Letting her words trail off as she gestured to it, then, a little frown curvetting her lips before it passed, like a storm blowing out. She smiled at him, and then nodded once again. "It's a pleasure to meet you, as well." With that, she offered him her hand, and took a step closer. "It's a rare pleasure to meet someone as talented as I hear you are." Corny as it might sound, the emotion behind it was genuine, as was the smile that remained.

The compliment was still enough to make him blush, perhaps because of its sincerity. He shook her hand and found it hard to make eye contact with his freckled cheeks so red, and explained it away: "Ah, I just... you know, nothing big, I've just... been lucky with ley lines, I guess..." But he grew quiet, though, remembering the sense of purpose she had walked in with, the sense she still retained. He raised his eyes to her timidly. "...The House has decided?"

"They have, yes. You have been chosen to go, of course." A nod, then. "I have the luck to be a messenger, I suppose. Ancestral duty and all, I suppose." She chuckled wryly, then, and shook her head. "It's been your work on ley lines that brought the ideal to light, after all." And the hopes as well. Her expression softened at his look. "What can I do for you?"

Silas frowned suddenly and shook his head at the offer of help; he stepped away, into his study, hiding from her sympathy and searching for something as well. The door cracked open into his bedroom, and he returned with an item from the trunk at the foot of his bed, wrapped in cloth. Within were four knives, each with a gently curved blade and adorned with faint runes. "Daggers of Norras," he explained as he handed them to her, and bit his lip. "They belonged to Aberth, who always said they would be useful one day..." It made him wonder, briefly, if the old man had somehow known.

"Form the Triumvirate... and bless them."

"The daggers, you mean? And--how did you know? That is the plan. Forming the Triumvirate, that is." She accepted the daggers with care, tucking the cloth-wrapped weapons in a corner of her arm, as she had no sheaths for them and they likely would not fit in her pockets. Raziya would have treated any weapon with care, regardless of who had given them to her, but while she did not know a great deal about this Aberth, she'd formed the impression from Silas' few words that he meant something to the young man. "I will do what I can for you, Silas. I promise this." Because that was what she could promise. The Triumvirate took two other people, after all.

"Alain, ah, gave me the information he felt I needed... and I figured out the rest on my own," the young man added with a sly little smile. He could be crafty, when he set his mind to it. Then, at the promise of Raziya, Silas bowed his head. "I thank you, Gale Raziya."

"Your best thanks will be success, Silas Greyshott. I hope to get these back to you as soon as I may, and certainly before you leave." At least she knew where to find him, likely. Brief musing, there. She rested a hand on his bowed head a moment, equally brief, a prayer muttered beneath her breath. He could have faith in his abilities and knowledge; she would have faith in a higher power for him. "Blessings and luck to you."

Grateful and reverent, however nervous the young man was, he kept his head bowed until the end of the blessing. "And to you..." Still so young and naive... this quest, if it did not kill Silas Greyshott, would turn him into a man.

(Adapted from play with Gale Raziya)

For a five-way "intermediary" realm without anyone to regulate traffic, the Five Points Intermediary organized itself nicely. A high, strangely curved stone wall surrounded the little pocket, leaving a twilit sky hanging forever above them, dotting with strange stars that shifted often...

"Watch it, kid," a dwarf growled as he bumped Silas, who looked apologetically back and stumbled forward. He was ten feet from the Noirmont Gate in the 'outgoing lane,' the right half of a broad stone pathway that descended from the gate to a broad, smooth, circular road, with a strange garden and a little pool in the middle. The flowers, the water, everything but the roads and the people on them seemed to catch the starlight somehow. Traffic turned right from the outgoing lane once they were given a turn, and a sign before each gate advised the circle traffic to let one traveler or group pass before they advanced, and not to interrupt any groups, including families and convoys.

In twelve different languages.

Traffic moved at a stroll, which suited Silas Greyshott well enough; he could observe his handywork as long as he minded the dwarf behind him, still grumbling and tugging his beard. "Arcebel," read the Norras runes carved into the gate now directly across from him, and beside the traffic advisory sign was another with the name of the realm, also in twelve languages. He had a chuckle to himself, just a quiet one, and yet that was enough to draw a stare, because he felt it.

When a certain form of consciousness focused its attention on another, and the first had an influence on the ley energies around him, the subtle energies emanating from or otherwise tied to the first would reach out to the second with a quiet tug or 'pulse.' Some referred to the lines as 'sub-lines,' and while Silas certainly had them, so too did the person who had spent the last seven seconds staring intently at him. The eye contact was abrupt and frightening. The pair that stared back at him were yellow and malicious, and he was aware of that before his Sight shifted back into sight.

She was short and dressed like a vision from Arabian Nights, wearing a headscarf and clutching the end over half of her face. She felt like a devil, and Silas could only stare for so long before he shuddered, and when he looked again, she had turned away. It was all too suspicious...

Six times before he passed through the Arcebel Gate, he felt the woman's eyes on him again. He was sure of it now, that the wrong people had already found out where he was going... and he could only pray they had not figured out the rest of his plans.

Scarecrow, was Silas' first thought as he looked up from the corner of the room where he had just been hurled. His vision had taken a moment to swim back into focus, and when it did, he saw a tall, impossibly thin figure who brought a hand-crossbow to point at him. His legs were as thin as his slender arms but looked twice the length, and his sallow face would have made him an old man if not for the absence of lines and the defiant fire of youth. He had long, almost brilliant blonde hair, and so the shock of white hair in his bangs stood out all the more.

"I'll ask again, slowly this time, and if you don't answer me..." The slender man was wearing his weapons in the open, several knives and a short sword, and whatever his job, to the young Mage, at least, he looked professional. "...we'll just have to turn you into a pincushion."

"It was a blind jump," Silas blurted out, and the man blinked and lowered his weapons. He looked around, then climbed to his feet again with the help of his staff. He ached all over, but steeled himself to defuse the suspicious stranger, even when he realized he had said the wrong thing -- said too much, anyway. "I was... just, uh... well, my name's Silas Greyshott, and -- "

"Blind jump?" the other said incredulously. His eyes narrowed. "From here? In Arcebel?" Silas hesitated and nodded. "...You could've been killed. What are you running from?"

The Mage did not look like he would answer, but when the man raised his crossbow, Silas angled his staff; he searched for his courage and found it, and narrowed his eyes at the stranger. "...I have done nothing to wrong you, sir. I beg you to let me go -- without trouble."

"You could be a criminal," he retorted.

"And you would care?" Silas shot back, and the other smiled. They stared at each other like this, in a stand-off, and the air began to crackle, gathering the power the Mage silently prayed to luck he would not have to use.

"Zar?" A red-headed woman burst into the room, dressed much like her apparent roommate in light armor, with a giant sword on her back. "What's going on?" She drew immediately, seeing the weapons, and Silas was distracted long enough for 'Zar' to spring on him, cuffing him in the jaw with the hilt of his knife.

Silas saw stars and fell to the floor, groaning as he clutched his jaw. "An intruder... Claimed it was just a blind-jump, but that bag..." He kicked at his satchel. "Probably a thief. Either way, the guards will sort him out."

Late last night...

"Silas!"

The gate to Heathron was over fifty meters ahead, the shimmer of the portal illuminated by violent flashes of red and white and fluctuating with each boom that thundered across the length of the valley, rattling through the abandoned city of Greyfast and whipping the sea into turmoil.

The woman who cried out over the storm was the healer Daeona - she clutched her staff in both hands, anchoring it into the ground with every ounce of her being; her long red hair whipped about her face, obscuring her view of the flickering shield over her head, and over Silas', who remained resolutely at his task.

"Silas, he's gone!" Deona called out. Hellish wraiths flared in and out of the rumbling black clouds, flashing in anger, bursting the last of their hateful energy, and divebombing the pair near the gate every other moment, only to richochet off of the healer's steadily weakening defenses. A venom had been struck into their heart, into the Seed in the depths of the city, and the poison was eating its way through the roots and into the monsters that had plagued the realm, whose fury had sapped Greyfast of all life. "There's nothing we can do for him - we tried - Silas, we have to go!"

It was a rare moment when pure, righteous rage had wrapped its tight and terrible fist around the young Mage's heart. He seethed over what had happened in the depths of the city, even now as the Seed destroyed itself. She tried to breathe new life back into it, to prepare this final marker for the Evil that wanted into RhyDin... and she had failed, but at what cost - what terrible cost! How could she!

His own staff was held aloft, angled towards the city, and in the flashes of magickal light there were glimpses of the ley energies arcing around him, arranged into ritual pattern by the exertion of his will, and it formed a vague but broad, straight path down the valley into the old city. Along it lightning flashed, bolts erupting from the ground, striking any wraith that strayed too close in a brilliant explosion.

Come on... the way is clear for you... if you're still alive, you can escape...

"He's dead, Silas," Deona called out, and even in the chaos the Mage could hear the graveness of her tone. Her energy was nearly drained, and once he was dragged back to reality, Silas realized his was ebbing, too. If he kept this up for much longer, he'd lose himself to it... and Deona would die, undoubtedly. But just a moment, just one...

The healer let out a cry as another kamikaze wraith finally shattered her defenses, and she was thrown backwards as if struck. Silas' head turned, and he swung his staff around, seeing the invisible energies that ebbed and flowed as if they were tangible - the strands arranged themselves into a thick line, and a series of bolts ran up them to strike down a trio of spirits swooping in for the kill.

"Nnh!" He grunted, falling to one knee as he released his hold on the magick and ceased to be the anchor, feeling as if his organs had just been dragged out through his feet... and, on top of it, feeling terrifically drained. He pushed himself to his feet and ran.

Deona was stumbling towards the gate, too, and Silas seized a hold of her hand, half-tugging her along with him. He could hear the screaming of the wraiths in his ears, growing shrill as another dove close to the ground, pursuing them even in its death throes.

A shockwave from its sharp cry at their backs as it perished mere feet short of them struck them, and they tumbled forward the final stretch, through the gate to Heathron.

Greyfast would be purged.