109th of Nemulum, 198 EA
Castle Umbreanu, Athal
Grigor would go mad before long. That much, he knew. He felt himself drawn in all tangle of directions, constantly pulled this way and that. There was something to the deep recesses of his mind, something that sifted through the world on some strange and unknowable insight.
He took that knack stoically, as one of many he had developed in the aftermath of that fateful day in the aether.
It was a constant and resentful feeling, like an itch left unscratched. It was the certainty that he had forgotten something, or that there was something he was missing, that he needed to find it even though he had no idea what it even was. It was like there was some other person occupying Grigor’s consciousness, some otherworldly seeker.
Over the years that had passed, while Sophia and Radu rose reluctantly to the throne and came to know their own sorceries, Grigor had been driven into intermittent mania. He would ignore the seeker, until it would be ignored no longer, and then he would tear the castle apart.
His stints in searching were frantically directed. He’d confine himself to a room, and then turn every bit of furniture, every painting, every stone in the walls if he could. Sometimes he would find things, small treasures that had been lost or inscriptions that nobody else knew about.
He thought that those minor discoveries would abate the seeker, but they seemed only to drive the compulsion on further.
Radu had found him in that state once, in the ruins of a parlor, inched up against a loose sconce blasting out vain aetheric pulses to see if there were any secret magics to its function. It had not been the first time Grigor had felt the hand of one of his siblings breaking him from that stupor, but it was the one that mattered.
“You’re looking too closely, brother.”
The words had been like a lantern to Grigor, like a spark of lightning. He put himself away, composed himself in that moment to assure his brother that he was well, and he held off until the time was right.
Days later, he had not been noticed as he slipped out of the council chambers. He was one of many, and though he had grown into a man of many skills statecraft was one he engaged in only sparingly.
Instead, he now allowed himself to wander somewhat aimlessly. He was moving through tall towers adorned in tapestries, display rooms of antiquities, banquet halls left cold and empty. He strove to take in all of his surroundings at once, to feel the sensations of the stones passing under his feet and the light hitting his eyes and the sound of his breath up against the breaths of everyone who had ever walked this castle.
He lent himself over to the seeker, and was guided.
When he came to, in the dissipating last of aetheric fog which he had not realized was wafting off of him, he found himself in a nook of a stairwell. There was a cutout from the wall, wood-lined, leaving one side open to a window which snuck between the various towers to catch a rare view of the knolls below. A fresh breeze wafted in through it. It was the perfect sort of space to tuck oneself away, and to write.
There, behind where Gregor’s head was resting, a board creaked out a cry that it was loose. He reached behind him slowly, reverently. Prying it up, an envelope fell out into his hand.
He let out a soft gasp, as for the first time in years that feeling that the seeker had put into him was satisfied.
In his hands then there was a small ink-penned letter. It had been written by one Miacyne Ranavar, consort to king Llywelyn Ranavar in generations long past, and what secrets it contained would spell the eventual fate of the Ranavar family’s line.
The Etra Anthology 