The Falsrott

Tales from the Woldwood - Story 25

Today we meet Ardis Flynt, a man who borrows, steals and buys the illusion of magical gifts. He calls himself Augmented while those around him point at the Falsrott. His story begins in a house of domestic vows and ends somewhere colder, where love becomes collateral, and sight becomes a key.

Faelen’s Watch kept its dead carefully. Most places buried or burned them, but the Watch filed them away. The joint council had decided Crill’s belongings were neither sacred nor safe enough to destroy, and so they sat in a storage chamber below the teaching rooms and corridors where apprentices learned how to make the world more, or less, orderly. It was the kind of place that insisted on containment so fervently that to some it looked like an open invitation.

A steward had escorted Ardis down and spoken the council’s stern instructions.

Make a list. Match the handwriting to the objects. Note the dates where dates exist. Do not open anything sealed inside glass. Do not touch anything that feels damp without gloves.

The steward had ended with the same line the council always ended with, the one that absolved them of imagination. Crill is dead, and this is debris.

Ardis had nodded, pen poised, grateful to be trusted with debris. He watched the steward leave and heard the locks turn from the outside. Then he had sat alone with a dead man’s work and realised how simple it was to make a life out of being underestimated.

As a Hidren, Crill should have written of water as a relationship or gift, an element with temperament, but he wrote like someone who expected the world to obey if it were commanded carefully enough. He wrote of hydromancy as a system, not a calling.

Ardis read. He made his list as asked, with neat columns and tidy references. Then he found a folded page at the back of a bundle, rougher paper, the ink bled at the edges. Along one side ran a faint tide mark, and when Ardis held it to the chamber light, he saw a shimmer within it. It revealed a basic sketch of a tin on the page, which matched one of the objects in front of him. Well, it was not made of glass, so he opened it and unwrapped the cloth inside. A large black disc looked up at him. It was the Eye of Ghesh, although he did not yet know it.

He should have just left it there, added a note in his ledger and let the council lock it all away again. Instead, he folded the page into his own coat, put the tin in his pocket and walked out of the chamber at the day’s end, telling himself that the theft was only another form of filing.

At home, Liora lay curled on the bed with her hair spread across the pillow and Iseva, her sister, had fallen asleep in the chair by the hearth. He waited until the candle had burned low and then unfolded Crill’s page and read it again and again until it made some kind of sense to him.

Iseva had stirred and silently moved to stand behind him, saying nothing for a while, and letting silence do what accusation could not. “That isn’t Verdicrence,” she said.

“No,” Ardis replied.

“It’s Hidren,” she said. “And it was sealed for a reason.”

“It was sealed because the council has no imagination,” Ardis said.

Iseva looked closer, eyes moving over the page. “What are you doing, Ardis?”

He wanted to tell her he was building a way out, that he was tired of being told to wait his whole life for a twig to decide whether it liked him. He wanted to tell her he would not spend another ten seasons standing politely at the edge of other people’s power.

“I’m making something usable, Iseva,” he said.

“Liora is not a tool you can shore up with cleverness, Ardis.”

“I know,” Ardis replied. He never thought of Liora as a tool, but he did believe he could keep her separate from what he was doing.

Liora stirred in the bed, looked at Ardis at the table, and then at her mother standing over him. “What have you found?” she asked, yawning.

Ardis felt the deep love he had for her. Fire fascinated her these days, not in the wild, hungry way of fools, just the way a person studied something that could change them. Iseva helped her with what she could, but Liora’s true instruction was elsewhere and not yet fully decided. “Nothing you need to worry about,” he said.

“That’s what men say when they’ve already decided,” she replied.

Ardis let the exchange sit and returned to Crill’s page. He worked, in the days that followed, with uncharacteristic patience, collecting water from different sources and measuring how it behaved in different containers. He wrote down small results, attempting to build toward the augmentation he believed he had been looking at. He did not have a natural gift for anything, let alone the Hidren path, but that was the whole point. He had method.

When he finally made the liquid, by leaving the eye in rainwater, it sat in a small phial, a black and vaguely oily liquid. He held it up and watched the faint swirl within it and felt his stomach turn in fear that it just might work.

Liora watched him from across the room, arms folded, and Iseva stood by the hearth.

“I don’t recommend it, Ardis,” Iseva said.

Ardis uncorked the phial anyway and drank. It nearly came back up, but he held it down, despite the nausea, then staggered, gripping the table. A piercing cold rose in his right eye and intensified as the light dimmed and his sight faded. It made him want to tear his own face off to stop it.

Liora took a step toward him. “Ardis,” she said.

“There,” he said as the cold receded, and he rubbed at the left side of his face, blinking twice, but there was no return. The room simply lost its left side, so Ardis turned his head slowly, mapping what his right eye could cover. He walked to the door-frame and touched it, then the wall, then the table again, confirming his balance. Nothing else had been stolen, only that one portion of his sight.

Liora felt angry, hurt and frightened all at once. “You did this without any discussion with me,” she said.

“I did it because if I waited to be allowed, I would never do it,” Ardis replied.

Iseva took the phial from the table and corked it. “You’ve meddled with Crill’s experiments,” she spat. “He never told anyone why his eyeball went black, and now your sight is lost. The experiment failed.”

“I’ll judge that tomorrow night,” he said. “Things should be... clearer by then, if his notes are accurate.”

At first, he could not live with the eye uncovered for long without feeling discomfort, so he made a simple patch and learned to move with it covered. The following night, he removed it, and Liora recoiled at the glistening black eyeball now in the socket. Ardis doused the lights, plunging the room into blackness.

For Ardis, the blackness was not empty. It was now full of edges and distances. He stood up without touching the wall and crossed the room unaided. The left eye saw nothing but shapes, but the right guided him anyway, reading the space with ease. He stopped at the door with his hand hovering above the latch and laughed in disbelief at the simplicity of it. Day took the eye. Night gave it back and gave it back with improvements. This was true augmentation, despite the lamentations of Liora and Iseva. And yet, Ardis being Ardis, the eye alone was not enough. He needed more structure for the good eye to compensate for the daylight loss. Forget spell-work, schools of magic or season upon season of practice. He needed infrastructure. Something worn or embedded that would make the world around him mean more. He knew exactly what he wanted and exactly where to get it.

He found Emma Short close enough to the Watch that its influence still sat in the air, but far enough that council rules did not feel enforceable. Her house was small and thick-walled. She opened the door before he knocked, and stared out. Her eyes were pale and unkind, and she looked at his eyepatch.

“You’ve done the first stupid thing then,” she said.

“And now I need help with the second,” Ardis replied.

Inside, she had a coat laid open on a table, seams exposed, needle and thread waiting. On a shelf lay a wand of bone, altered beyond its origins, channels cut and filled and cut again, its wielder never satisfied with what nature had offered. Ardis was sensitive to magical objects somehow recognising his intent, and he kept his eyes off it.

“You want stitch-work,” she said. “You want an augmentation that pretends it isn’t one, don’t you, Flynt?”

“I want alignment,” Ardis replied. “I want to sense where the world is connected elsewhere and beyond sight.”

The witch smirked. “Realm-sense. And you think you deserve knowledge of the realm tides, do you, Falsrott?”

Ardis winced a little at the insult. “ We prefer the term Augmented if you don’t mind and I rather think the world will never care what I deserve,” he said. “Only what I can do.”

Emma reached for her wand and turned it in her palm. “What are you giving me?” she asked.

“An orb from Faelen’s Tower,” he said.

This caught her interest. “You’d steal from the Watch?”

“I already have,” Ardis replied. “I’m simply making the theft worthwhile.”

The witch laughed. “Show me,” she said. “Then I’ll stitch. I’ll lay a lattice into your seams that will make the world press against you in readable ways. But understand this, Falsrott. When you wear a net like that, you don’t only feel the world. The world feels you also.”

He did not correct her use of the insult again. There was no benefit.

Ardis had walked into Faelen’s Tower on a day when senior figures were occupied, moved like a man who belonged, took what looked interesting, and walked out again with the same confidence he had used on the way in.

He produced the orb, but she did not praise him beyond a raised eyebrow. He laid his own coat on her table. It was plain black cloth and unremarkable. Emma ran her fingers along the seams, listening through the fabric.

“You’ve started marking it yourself,” she said.

“Attempts,” Ardis replied.

“Clumsy,” she said, and pressed the tip of her wand to the seam. Seprichar should fix this.”

There was no glow or theatrical fire, just a fizz at the various points of contact. Once satisfied, she began to stitch, her needle moving with a speed that did not quite match her years. The thread looked ordinary until the wand touched it again, and then it held an emerald glow which settled quietly into each stitch.

Ardis sat still and watched his coat become something else. When the witch finished, she slid the coat toward him. “Put it on,” she said.

Ardis shrugged into it, and at first it felt like cloth. Then the sensation changed, and the house seemed to reveal where it had been mended and persuaded to hold itself together. In theory, he had wanted realm-sense, but in practice, it felt like being made into an instrument.

“Listen,” the witch said. “Listen and learn.”

Ardis stood and listened with his body. The world pressed and receded in patterns he could now feel, and a name came into his mind. Ghentalus Mountains. It meant nothing but made him nauseous and euphoric all at once.

The witch watched him with expressionless eyes. “That will bring you attention,” she said.

Ardis swallowed. “Everything brings me attention,” he replied.

“Not like that,” she said.

He left her house wearing the coat like a new skin. At home, Liora saw it immediately. Not the stitches themselves, which were subtle, but the way Ardis held himself and moved.

“You’ve done more,” she said.

“I needed it,” Ardis replied.

Liora stepped closer and pressed her hand to his chest, over the seam work, trying to feel something. “You keep saying you need, Ardis,” she said. “And yet you never say what you’re willing to lose.”

He looked at her and felt the urge to tell her he was doing it for her, building himself into something that could protect her. But in truth, he did not trust that claim any longer. “I’m willing to lose the version of me that waits for permission,” he said instead.

“And what about the version of you that comes back to our bed and is only mine?” she asked.

Ardis had no answer that did not sound like betrayal, so he kissed her forehead and let silence do what cowardice always did.

The eyeglasses were the last piece he sought before everything broke. He had heard of them long before he ever touched Crill’s paper. A legendary piece among the Augmented, spoken with a mixture of envy and disgust. They were said to have been commissioned by a legendary Falsrott, now elderly, and designed not to grant power but to see further. The glasses were not meant for anyone else. That they existed at all implied a kind of arrogance Ardis understood too well.

He found the daughter through careful inquiry and approached her with politeness and the flattering softness of a man who knew she lived under a father’s shadow. He offered her a task that seemed like an opportunity, and he let her think she had chosen him when, in truth, he had chosen the outcome long before speaking to her.

When she finally produced the eyeglasses, she did it with trembling hands, handing them over wrapped in cloth like some kind of relic. “They were never meant to be worn by another,” she said.

“They were made to be used,” Ardis replied.

Her eyes flashed. “You’re just like him,” she said.

Ardis did not deny it. “I’m the future,” he said and winked.

He took the glasses and left before he could soften and have her mistake his restraint for kindness. He did not want to owe her more than he already did.

That night, he sat at the table with the hearth low and the house quiet. Liora slept in the bed with her back turned toward him, and Iseva’s room was dark. He placed the eyeglasses on his nose. The right lens was clear, admitting the unsettling truth of his eye. The other was amber, set into a brass ring with tiny adjustment arms like spokes. He adjusted them with small, precise movements and felt the change in his perception, knowing that seeing further would take practice. He went and lay beside Liora without touching her, because he did not trust what might be revealed through need.

Two days later, the house broke. Ardis returned from the market to find Iseva standing in the centre of the room with a knife in her hand. He looked quickly to the places Liora’s presence should have been, but she was missing

“Where is she?” Ardis asked.

“Taken,” she replied.

“By whom?”

“A demon,” Iseva said. “It didn’t need the Watch or permission. It just took her and left this.”

She set a strip of pale cloth on the table, and stitched into it with thread that looked like dried blood, was a line of terms. Not an explanation or a threat. A bargain presented as inevitability. Ardis read it and felt the world settle into a new reality around him. Iseva watched his face, and in her eyes was a question she would not grant dignity by speaking aloud. Is this your doing?

Ardis did not answer it or apologise because in his mind he knew this was not a mistake. It was a consequence.

“It wants you,” Iseva said.

Ardis lifted his hand and placed it over the stitched seams of his coat. He could feel the world pulling there. This demon had already touched the edge of his work and decided it was useful. “It wants what I can do,” Ardis replied.

“And what can you do?” Iseva asked, her voice conveying a grief she refused to indulge.

Ardis reached for the eyeglasses and put them on. He adjusted the amber lens and also felt the coat tug, but now with direction. He looked at Iseva and saw fear there, not only for Liora, but for what he himself had become in so short a time. “I can find things now,” he said. “I can tell where a place is weak, and I can sense where the world might be pushed.”

“Then push it,” Iseva said. “Break it. Burn it. Do something. Get her back”

Ardis shook his head. “Some things turn fire into hunger,” he said, and he read the terms again. Access offered under supervision. Work demanded in return. Liora held as collateral. She did not matter to the demon as a person. She mattered to Ardis as the one tether he would not cut. And a name. Draegel.

The demon understood him so clearly. He stepped toward the door, but Iseva’s voice stopped him. “If it tells you to betray her,” she said, “what then?”

Ardis stood very still. He saw Liora’s face in his mind and the way she had looked at him when she realised he would not stop. “If it tells me that,” he said, “then I will find another way to lie.”

Iseva stared at him, then nodded, acknowledging the desperate truth of it. “You always do,” she replied.

Ardis walked out and stood alone. Stitched, lensed and altered, and felt the cruel simplicity of his new direction. He must accept Draegel’s terms and do whatever kept Liora reachable. And beneath that purpose ran the colder truth that even if Liora were freed tomorrow, he would still feel the itch for another layer, another device, another augmentation.

At this point, he was a man who had learned how to become useful enough to be held hostage by it, and he also knew that this would not be the last piece he added to himself.

Ardis Flynt discovered the hard way that when a man refuses to accept the limits set upon him, the world will not stand in his way. It simply starts charging interest and makes you pay, pay and pay again.

Listen on YouTube: