The Phoenix Unchained Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Blessed Saint Idalia, but they were so skimpy on details that he’d just skimmed them. They raised more questions than they answered, and nobody seemed to have the answers. Instead, he’d read books on Literature, Geography, Botany—even slightly-more-recent history (the kind that people could actually prove had happened). These were all courses taught in Preparatory School, and all subjects he’d dabbled in on his own time. He’d learned a lot, but it had frustrated him, too, because none of them had ever really engaged his interests. At heart, Tiercel had begun to wonder if he was nothing more than a dabbler. A dilettante. Light-minded.
    But the Compendium —which said in the front that it contained excerpts from something else called A History of The City In Six Volumes —talked about the Time of Mages not only in more detail than any book Tiercel had ever run across before, but it spoke as if whoever had written it had actually been there and understood why those things had happened.
    “In that time, all Otherfolk and Other Races were Banished beyond the Bounds of the lands claimed for the City of Armethalieh, for the High Mages saw them as a rebuke to the power of the High Magick.”
    High Magick? What was that?
    “Thus, when King Andoreniel of the Elves invoked the Ancient Treaty and called the humans to fight for the Light against the Endarkened—then called Demons—the High Mages refused to fight, or to allow their subjects to fight. It was only when they at last came to understand that they had been the first victims of the Endarkened in the Third War Against the Light—”
    Third War? There’d been others?
    “—that the High Mages were at last brought to set aside a thousand years of fear and prejudice and blend their power once more with the Wildmages and their ancient Allies of the Light to defeat the Endarkened.”
    There was more, though not much more about the Third War—the war Tiercel had thought of all his life as the only war. The rest of that chapter talked about the High Mages from before the war.
    And that was fascinating enough.

    TIERCEL Rolfort had grown up in a world with magic.
    Of course, you almost never saw it, but everyone knew it was there. Pretty much like Wildmages; everyone knew that they were there, but a person could go their whole life without seeing one—or knowing that they’d seen one, at least—because it wasn’t like a Wildmage to announce his or her presence unless it was absolutely vital to the task at hand. And—according to the stories—they often swore the people they helped to secrecy.
    And certainly he’d grown up in a world full of Otherfolk. Fauns and Centaurs and Brownies at least, and Harrier swore that there were merfolk in the deep ocean and Selkies on some of the more secluded Out Islands, though they hardly counted as magic.
    And everyone knew that far to the East was the Kingdom of the Elves, and that even though the Elves had no magic, they shared their land with numberless races that did: unicorns and dryads and dragons and the Light knew what else. But this was something else entirely. If Tiercel was reading this book properly, once, long ago, there’d been another kind of magic besides the Wild Magic. A kind that you could, well, learn . The way you learned Maths or Geography or dancing. Something called High Magick.
    And that—not the Wild Magic—had been what the High Mages who had ruled the City in the Time of Mages had practiced. They’d ruled Armethalieh for a thousand years before the Great Flowering.
    Knowing that, realizing that, gave Tiercel an unsettled feeling, like standing in a room and suddenly realizing that it was twice as bigas he’d thought it was. Of course he’d heard of the Time of Mages, and of course he’d known that the world didn’t just start on the day of the Great Flowering, but for the book in his hands to speak so casually of events that took place so many years before that, well . . .
    It was