So you want to… take the nickel tour of Aliavelli

Aliavelli is a very small plane by the standards of the multiverse, consisting almost exclusively of the city-state of Aliavelli and its surrounding environs.

Geographically, Aliavelli’s terrain is hilly bordering on mountainous, with a temperate climate and long, distinct seasons. The mountains themselves are rocky and snow-capped, with grassy valleys and thinly forested areas between the elevated peaks.

The central city of Aliavelli is the only densely populated area of the plane. Small farming and mining communities dot the surrounding countryside, but everybody who’s anybody lives within the crenelated walls of Aliavelli proper.

Cultural, political, and economic life in Aliavelli are dominated by the seven prominent aristocratic families known as the Great Houses. The Great Houses are quasi-statelets unto themselves and trace their ascendancy back to the beginning of the Recorded Era, beyond which no reliable historical records exist.

Each of the seven Great Houses combines the various functions of a business conglomerate, a political party, a crime syndicate, and a private army. The Houses also have an inordinately high density of skilled magicians within their ranks. Whether this is the result of inherently superior bloodlines – as the Houses themselves claim – or is simply the natural outcome of centuries of advantageous hereditary selection is open to debate, but either way it forms an important part of the narrative which the Great Houses call upon to legitimize their privileged status.

The Houses trace their membership through direct matrilineal descent, and each House carefully maintains a genealogical register, tracking births and deaths, marriages and divorces. This official record is known as the Lineage, and each Great House can trace every detail of its Lineage back to the beginning of the Recorded Era. The physical copy of the Lineage is the most prized possession of each Great House, and is kept under the tightest possible security in the House’s Manor.

Lesser, non-aristocratic families are organized along similar principles, albeit, for reasons of practicality, in a less elaborate manner.

The city of Aliavelli is divided into four districts, the first three of which – the Court District, the Guild District, and the Market District – are situated roughly atop the three hills which dominate the center of the city.

The Court District crowns the tallest of the city’s three hills, and is covered almost entirely by the sprawling, labyrinthine palace of the Court. The Court is the seat of government and center of public administration. Each Great House also maintains its family Manor outside the palace proper but within the Court District. The Guild District is dominated by the corkscrew-like tower of the Guild, which is the city’s officially-sanctioned organization of spellcasters. And the Market district is the center of trade and commerce, and is where the non-aristocratic families reside.

The fourth district – a sprawling mass of tenements known collectively as the Nameless District – occupies the low-lying areas between and around the more prosperous hilltop neighborhoods.

Social status on Aliavelli is almost entirely a function of family affiliation - life is not meritocratic in any meaningful sense. Family name more or less defines who any given person is and what they can realistically hope to achieve in life, and there is even a widespread folk belief that names have a literal, magical power, almost equivalent to the notion of a soul.

People who have committed crimes or otherwise become objects of disgrace can have their names stripped from them by the matriarchs of their family or House. In the case of the Great Houses, this is exceedingly rare because of the embarrassment entailed, and involves physically obliterating all records of the person in question from the Lineage. For all intents and purposes, it's as though the nameless person never existed.

The nameless therefore form a sort of permanent underclass on Aliavelli; they are essentially segregated in the Nameless District of the city, and upstanding members of society don't want to associate with them. The only way out of nameless life is to be pulled into a named family through marriage, adoption, or the restoration of a stripped name.

So you want to… live on Aliavelli

Given the central importance of family status on Aliavelli, the single most important aspect of your life is going to be the genetic lottery of your birth.

Should you be fortunate enough to be born into one of the Great Houses, you are more or less set for life, provided you can manage not to muck it up. Across generation after generation of economic and political dominance, the Great Houses have amassed a virtual monopoly on power and wealth, and family membership is the only criteria required for a place at the trough. With the right magical, political, or business skills, your ability to rise through the ranks of high society is limited only by your own ambition, the strength of your allies, and the cunning of your enemies. Even if you have a middling intellect or a deficient character, some comfortable sinecure can be found for you in public service or the family enterprise, where you can live out your days in wealth and security, provided that you don’t run afoul of the House matriarchs – the small circle of prominent women who serve as the unofficial leadership bodies of the Great Houses.

Because Aliavelli is such a small plane and the Great Houses face no meaningful external threats, this has allowed them to concentrate their efforts on accumulating great wealth and preserving their privileged social status. However, it also means that their natural competitive energies wind up directed against each other. While their various fortunes rise and fall over time, and while they are constantly maneuvering against each other in the battle for money and influence, outright warfare between the Houses is exceedingly rare. A premium is placed upon resolving conflicts discreetly, and the best aristocratic operators do so with a measure of plausible deniability. People who wind up on the wrong side of a power struggle may disappear mysteriously, or find a magical poison in their after-dinner drinks, or end up with a stiletto in the back, but no House is likely to start killing members of another House in the streets, because doing so would be bad for business and would invite the other Houses to band together in response.

Aristocratic life is centered around two parallel but overlapping institutions: the Court and the Guild. The Court is the center of civic, non-magical bureaucracy, such as city administration and policing, judicial dispute resolution, and other public works. Its high-level positions are filled by prominent members of the Great Houses, with appointments being determined behind closed doors by the House matriarchs, and positions frequently being traded as bargaining chips (i.e.: I'll support your cousin for Grand Magistrate if you nominate my niece as a district commander of the city watch). Pomp and manners are the order of the day, and many of the most important personages in society live in the Court's residential wing. This makes the Court a veritable hive of rumor-mongering, horse-trading, and double-dealing. Life at Court can be as stultifying or as dangerous as you choose to make it.

The Guild is Aliavelli’s organization of spellcasters, and, like the Court, its top ranks are almost exclusively populated with members of the Great Houses. The Guild is slightly more magic-o-cratic than the Court is meritocratic, and it would be hard to rise to the top of the Guild without being both a formidable spellcaster and a savvy politician. The Guild is subdivided into three schools: the Sorcerers, the Enchanters, and the Scribes. Sorcerers are the flashiest and most celebrated members of the guild, such that any ambitious spellcaster on Aliavellli desires admission to their ranks. Enchanters occupy a lower rung on the Guild’s magical totem pole, and while the practicality of their skillset affords them some measure of respect and opportunity, theirs is decidedly the least influential of the Guild’s schools, and few if any Enchanters will rise to the Guild’s top ranks. The Scribes, meanwhile, are concerned more with history and magical research than with the actual practice of magic, and tend to be the least visible of the three schools outside the walls of the Guild. The head of the Guild is the High Sorceress; since there is no equivalent single leader of the Court, the High Sorceress is arguably the single most powerful person on the plane. Again, the House matriarchs informally select which Sorcerer ascends to become High Sorceress on those occasions when the role falls vacant, and the position invariably goes to a matriarch.

While the Court and the Guild are nominally independent of each other, they inevitably interfere in each other's business. And, given the prominence of and importance attached to magic, the Guild exercises a great amount of behind-the-scenes influence over the civic functions of the Court.

If you are born into a non-aristocratic named family, then you have the opportunity to lead a successful, rewarding life, provided you have enough skill and gumption to get ahead in the relatively small world of Aliavelli. Families tend to live together or in close proximity, and many families have practiced the same trade for generations. Citizens with the right skills or connections might find low-level work at the Court, and children who show signs of magical talent may be accepted into the Guild for training. For those who make their livings as artists, craftsmen, or traders, the ultimate goal is to attract the patronage of one of the Great Houses, for such patronage brings fat commissions, stable employment, and the implicit protection that comes from association with a Great House. Those who have been so favored often advertise their affiliations by prominently displaying the seal of their patron House at their place of business.

If you are unfortunate enough to be born to nameless parents, your prospects in life are grim. Your presence is not welcome outside the Nameless District, where you can look forward to a life of relative misery and poverty. The cleverest – and the most ruthless – among the nameless may manage to scratch out a decent living, but no named individual – no matter how dire his or her circumstances – would dream of switching places with even the best-off among the nameless. Since escape from nameless life is so rare as to be almost unheard of, few people born nameless even dare to dream of ascending from Aliavelli’s permanent underclass.

Finally, if you were planning to be born as something other than human, well, this is not the plane for you. While there are old stories suggesting that sentient, non-human races lived on Aliavelli prior to the Recorded Era, and while archaeological artifacts from those non-human races remain today, Aliavelli’s humans appear to have systematically driven the other races to extinction many centuries ago, and no non-human communities are now known to exist on Aliavelli.

So you want to… planeswalk to Aliavelli

There are documented histories of several planeswalkers having visited Aliavelli since the Recorded Era began. As for why a planewalker might initially be interested in this tiny little plane, it would likely be because it houses both an unusual density of magical talent and a lot of material wealth. The Great Houses have accumulated a lot of precious metals and stones (which are locally abundant), fine textiles, and other luxury goods. Aliavelli’s craftsmen and artists are also exceptional, even by the standards of the wider multiverse. So, while no planeswalkers have made themselves publicly known on Aliavelli for several generations, the notion that other planes exist and that certain individuals can travel between them is understood within the Guild and the upper rungs of society, at least on an academic level.

As for why planeswalkers might not want to linger on Aliavelli for too long after arrival, the fact of the matter is that the Great Houses are unlikely to take kindly to any outside intrusion in their affairs. Collectively, they have a nice racket going, and were an outside planeswalker to attempt to dominate them, that is one of the few scenarios which could conceivably unite the Houses into banding together against a common foe. And, while a powerful planeswalker might be able to defeat the combined might of the Houses, doing so would probably result in the effective destruction of a plane as small as Aliavelli, and therefore would not be likely to represent a good return on investment.

However, if an individual House were somehow able to obtain the backing of a planeswalker, and especially if that backing were subtle and covert, then it seems unlikely that xenophobia alone – no matter how ingrained – would dissuade them from attempting to use this alliance to tip the balance of power between the Houses to their own advantage.

The one planeswalker believed to have originated on Aliavelli was Thineaus, a bookish sort of sorcerer who lived and died before the beginning of the Recorded Era. Thineaus claimed to have travelled the multiverse, and to have recorded tales of the magical things he discovered in his Arcanum Obscurata. But, since even Thineaus's contemporaries apparently found him to be a little batty, and since even the most learned scholars in subsequent centuries have been unable to reproduce much if any of the magic described in his book, the current educated consensus among the Guild Scribes is that, whether or not Thineaus ever really did cross the eternities, his accounts of what he discovered beyond the veil are not to be taken at face value.

So you want to… know more about some specific people and families on Aliavelli

House Trevanei (House seal: a single, open eye with a flame at its center, wreathed by a ring of starbursts) is one of the smaller of the seven Great Houses, but has a reputation for having produced some of the most formidable Sorceresses of the Recorded Era. An aptitude for pyromancy is a particular hallmark of the greatest Trevanei spellcasters. Notably, Moira Trevanei, Beryl and Astria’s mother, was that rarest of things on Aliavelli: a matriarch who was generally liked and respected, even by members of the other Great Houses. Widely regarded as the greatest spellcaster of her generation, she served as High Sorceress of the Guild prior to her death.

Astria Trevanei, Moira’s eldest daughter, is at present serving as the current High Sorceress’s envoy to the Court, a position of significant political importance which places her at the heart of the endless machinations between the Great Houses.

House Dentevi (House seal: a three-pointed crown with a jeweled bird underneath) is one of the more powerful Great Houses at present, occupying a particularly prominent place within the financial trades, and holding many of the most important civic positions at the Court. While House Dentevi has a proud magical history, recent generations have produced fewer notable spellcasters than is typical for one of the Great Houses, and the largest Dentevi presence within the Guild is among the ranks of the Scribes.

The first major note is the simple fact that there isn't enough terrain variation. You describe basically only three of the terrains for a setting. Islands and Swamps are kind of important, so, finding some source of black and blue will be important. Even then, I sort of question why there's so little variation.

Aside from that, the economics of the world, I question. Basically, we have one ultradensely populated center and small farms providing the food, but the population spread makes that very precarious. Aside from that, I wonder about what other resources that supports the economy of this world, because it seems fairly resource poor, combining with its inherent population and class imbalance. Essentially, I feel like there are too many mouths to feed with too few jobs to go around, and way too many aristocrats for a starving/jobless population to support.

The district layout I feel isn't really all that beneficial either. Simply put, for the districts and the kind of population center you have, you need a LOT more city developed by how you are describing the set up. Each district is too specialized for the kind of size you're looking at. There would have to be several tens of thousands if not millions of people living in those districts, and even then, you're talking about a relatively small population at 4 million living in the city.

The first instance we have of this plane directly contradicting with Magic is the familial heritage tied to magic. Basically, magic isn't genetic. ANYBODY that can tap into the power can use it. The best suggestion I have for you is to tie this into privilege and training rather than some kind of familial lineage.

I'm good with a humanocentric plane. Doesn't bother me one bit.

Aside from all this, I do pose a question to you: The plane is small, so what kind of structure does it have? What geographical quirk does it have to distinguish it for being so small?

Astria Trevanei’s body hurt all over. She had been standing in the reception line at the High Sorceress’s annual Ascension Day gala for the last six hours, bowing and smiling and exchanging insincere pleasantries with a seemingly endless parade of nobles, relatives of nobles, and other assorted hangers-on, and she was tired and sore from all that genuflecting.

She hated having to appear at these sorts of Court functions. Hated the forced smiles, hated the endless formalities – Gods, but the High Sorceress did prattle on this year, so much so that Astria had to stifle more than one yawn during the invocation. She hated having to courtesy to the House Dentevi matriarch, and to inquire as to the welfare of her youngest daughter – who had just joined the Guild – all while the matriarch fixed Astria with a stone gaze that a basilisk would have envied. She hated having one of her most reliable fledglings stand behind her to whisper the forgotten names of important personages into her ear as they approached and planted kisses on her proffered hand. And those ceremonial kisses – those were the worst. It was bad enough already to have a series of half-witted highborns slobbering over her delicately-manicured nails, but every year the Grand Magistrate, who had been casting indecent stares in her direction ever since she had been twelve – twelve, by the Gods, twelve! – would linger there with his lips pressed against her hand for just a few seconds longer than could possibly be appropriate.

One year, Astria actually felt his tongue slither across her knuckles, and it had taken every ounce of control she possessed to resist a strongly-felt impulse to grab hold of him by that slimy tongue with one hand while setting his hair on fire with the other. Imagining it still made her smile.

But she had maintained control, kept her composure, and beamed a perfect smile at the Magistrate instead as she said: “So lovely to see you again!” And she had kept right on smiling until after he moved down the reception line and out of sight.

Astria understood control. It was one of her strengths.

So she put up with the ceremonial duties incumbent upon her as the High Sorceress’s envoy at Court, and she waited until the last of the important guests had departed before she excused herself and slunk back towards her chambers to nurse her aching muscles and wounded pride.

Her back hurt from all the standing and bowing. Her ribs hurt where her girdled corset dug into them beneath her fitted ceremonial robe. Most of all, her feet were killing her. Wearing the azure stilettos had been a mistake – six hours was too long to be on her feet in those shoes, no matter how well they matched the color of her robe.

She briefly considered summoning her favorite fledgling to give her a foot massage, but decided against it. She needed time to recompose herself. She wanted to be alone.

Still, as she hobbled into the antechamber of her lushly-appointed suite within the Court’s residential wing, she could not fight the growing realization that she was too alone. Her lady’s maid was nowhere to be seen, and the two bodyguards whom she had recently installed outside her door were also conspicuous in their absence.

She stood there, quiet and still, and listened for any clue as to what was going on, but she heard nothing. There was no sign of any disturbance in the room itself. Her fine furniture was in its usual places, and she saw no unusual scuffmarks on either the velvet-upholstered settee or the hand-woven carpet.

“Lelina?” She called out for her maid, but got no answer.

“Sir Agren? Sir Morr?” Nothing from her bodyguards, either.

Focusing her mind and gathering up her mana, she waved one hand in a wide arc and cast a detection spell which rippled out through the air around her, sweeping across the room and into each nook and cranny. But the spell passed over everything without so much as a flicker, and she could sense no other presence in the room. Which made sense, because her quarters were thoroughly trapped against intruders, and she was confident in the strength of her protections.

Still, where were her servants?

She thought about returning to the gala and coming back with some fledglings in tow. There would be safety in numbers, but she would have to invent an explanation for allowing them into her personal chambers, some story which both concealed her true concern and did not augur a breach of the social order. She couldn’t think of a satisfactory lie, and so she put the thought aside.

Instead, she kicked off her stiletto heels and tip-toed over to the black marble door to her inner chamber. The door had no lock or knob. In their place, it had a small, polished brass plate with the House Trevanei seal etched into it – an open eye with a single flame at its center, wreathed by a ring of starbursts.

Feeling her mana still at the ready, Astria traced a thin, delicate finger along the pattern of stars. With a gentle hiss, the door slid open before her.

She took a full breath, and stepped into her chamber.

The room was shrouded in darkness, but Astria could see the familiar outlines of her canopy bed, dressing screen, and divan in the shadows before her, all in their accustomed places. Again, she heard no sound, detected no hostile presence. She started to walk across the room in the direction of her wardrobe when–

“Hello, Astria.”

Astria whirled to her left and her hand shot out, casting a bolt of fire in the direction that the voice had come from. In its reflected red light she saw a small figure seated upon a plush armchair in the darkest corner of the room. For a split-second her firebolt tracked towards the figure, before the spell slammed into a magical barrier and vanished with a crackle of noise and a flash of white light.

“It’s nice to see you, too,” the intruder said.

Astria saw the seated figure raise a hand, and suddenly the glowstones in the wall sconces around her room flared to life, filling the chamber with a warm orange light.

Astria blinked for a second as her eyes adjusted. Still holding her hand out in the air, poised to strike, her mouth fell open as she saw the scarred face of the woman sitting in her chair.

“I thought you were dead,” Astria said.

“It turns out that I’m very difficult to kill,” the scarred woman said. “I hope that doesn’t disappoint you too much. And, for goodness’s sake, put your hand down. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Astria paused for a moment, but eventually did as her sister asked. She allowed her arm to drop back down to her side, and walked over to sit on the corner of her bed.

So, Beryl was not dead.

Astria had suspected as much – her sister’s body had not been among the corpses pulled from the smoldering ruins of the tavern in the Nameless District. And, if Beryl had escaped, then it was not surprising that she had dropped off the map afterward, given the chaos she had set in motion. Beryl’s shop had been abandoned when Astria had quietly sent her agents around to inspect it, and no one had seen or heard from her sister since. As such, it had been convenient to have Beryl declared dead – doing so had diverted some attention away from Astria for a while, and had given her a ready-made scapegoat while she played for time and planned her next moves.

But, whatever might have happened to her sister, Astria had not expected to see Beryl. Certainly not anytime soon, certainly not like this – unannounced, in her personal chambers.

She had not planned for this.

And then there was Beryl herself, who seemed, well, different. Physically, the changes were marked. Her skin, always so pale, was now tan, as though she had been exposed to a great deal of sun. And the clothes she wore were strange, foreign – all white linen, with odd styling and a loose cut.

Most surprising of all, Beryl had combed back her hair so that it framed her face without concealing the scar around her burned eye.

But there was something else that was different about Beryl as well, something which Astria couldn’t quite put her finger on. Maybe it was just the fact that she was here at all. Astria had a hard time believing that her sister had sought her out in this manner, had invaded her territory – that she had taken such a risk. It was not like her. Beryl was dangerous, certainly, and even impetuous, but bold, or assertive? No. More repressed than bold. More servile than assertive.

And yet the woman Astria saw sitting in her chair did not look servile.

What was Beryl’s play? She needed to figure that out, and fast. Astria knew her sister could be very dangerous to her.

“How did you get in here?” Astria asked.

“How did I get in?” A look of amusement crept across Beryl’s face. “Astria, I designed half of your wards and traps. I enchanted the lock on your door. Please give me a little credit for being able to bypass my own work. As for the rest of your spells, well, as you yourself said, I’ve always had a knack for this sort of magic.” Beryl ran a hand up and down the chair’s velvet-upholstered arms. “I have to say, you have a lot of very nice things in here. This is a very comfortable chair.”

“And my servants? Where are they?”

“Those giant men, and your maid? Once I introduced myself, they didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with me, so I suggested that they take the night off, and they obliged. The looks I got – what have you been telling these people about me?”

Astria grimaced. How was it so hard to find reliable help?

“I don’t ever speak about you,” she said. “You have developed quite the reputation – one purely of your own making, I might add. If it becomes known that you are alive, you should know that you will be hunted down. All of House Dentevi will be after you, not to mention the city watch. You’re a criminal, a killer.”

Beryl looked up at the ceiling for a moment, and when she looked back down, Astria thought she could detect a hint of sadness in her sister’s face.

“How many people died in the fire?” Beryl asked.

“Eleven,” Astria said. “Now that we’re not including you.”

“How many of them were Dentevi men?”

“How should I know? I wasn’t the one who nearly sparked a war between two of the Grand Houses while burning down half a block in the process.”

“Please, Astria, don’t patronize me. You have feelers everywhere – around the Court, in the city watch, probably even at the mortuary. You’ll have found out what happened.”

Astria sighed. It was true – almost as soon as the embers had gone out, Astria’s network of informants had been hard at work, trying to assess what damage had been done and how it might rebound back on her. Knowledge was a weapon, and Astria made a point of being well-armed.

“Four dead Dentevis,” Astria said. “Two knights, one sorcerer, and one I’m not sure about yet.”

“And the other seven? Who were they?”

Astria shrugged. “Nobodies.”

Beryl was quiet for a long moment. “I wish it hadn’t happened like that,” she said. “I never intended to hurt anyone. It wasn’t what I wanted.”

“Then what is it that you do want?”

“I want us to talk.”

Astria laughed. “And what if I don’t want to talk to you?” she said.

“I just want to have a conversation, Astria. Please don’t turn this into a fight.”

“Or what? You’ll tattle on me to the High Sorceress? You’ll kill me?”

Beryl sighed. “No. I’ll leave, and you won’t hear what I have to say.”

“Wonderful. Fantastic. Let’s skip straight to that part.”

Beryl rubbed her forehead above her good eye. Her face scrunched up, and she looked as though she was making a concerted effort not to say something but was finding it difficult. Her eye closed, and she held her breath for a moment before exhaling slowly. Finally, her eye opened, her features relaxed, and she spoke.

“Why do you hate me so much?” she asked.

Astria stared blankly at her sister. She was surprised to realize that she was gripping her silk sheets with clenched fists. So she let the sheets go, placed her hands in her lap, and tried to keep her emotions under control, tried not to rise to the bait.

“Why do I hate you?” Astria said. “You ruined my life.”

“I ruined your life?” Beryl said. “You locked me in a room for ten years. You threw me out on the street. You unmade me.”

“You killed my mother,” Astria said, feeling her control start to slip, feeling the anger which she knew was building inside her start to smolder.

She watched as her sister stood up from the chair and took a few steps towards the bed. She fought against the urge to stand up herself and strike her.

“I killed our mother when I was eight years old,” Beryl said, “and even though I didn’t mean to do it, I’ve spent the rest of my life living with it, living with the knowledge that I killed the kindest, most caring person I’ve ever known, all because I was jealous of you. Because I wanted to be more like you, because I wanted everyone to look at me the way they looked at you.”

“And I suppose that makes it right?”

“No, it doesn’t. Nothing I can ever do, or say, or feel can make it right. It took me a long time to realize that, to stop trying to undo something that can’t be undone, to stop hating myself, to accept myself for who I am and what I am.” Beryl kept moving closer to the bed, until she was nearly within arm’s reach. “I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’m not asking you to love me. I’m just asking you to try to accept me for who I am and what I am.”

“A murderer?” Astria said. She fixed her two amber eyes onto her sister’s single green eye.

“Among other things, yes. But also your sister. A Trevanei.”

“Not anymore. Not since I had your name struck from our House. We may share blood, but we will never share a name.”

Astria was quiet for a second, then she covered her mouth with her hand as she suppressed the urge to laugh. This whole absurd encounter made sense to her now – she knew why Beryl had come. Her sister might look different, might seem different, might say all these different things, but Astria could see through her new façade, and she saw the same old game lurking underneath.

Beryl wanted what she had always wanted. She wanted her name back.

Well, she’ll never get it, Astria thought. Not while I’m alive.

“So that’s it, then?” Astria said. “You’re here to beg for your name back? Or to threaten me, maybe?”

“No.”

“No, what? You don’t want it back?”

“No, I’m not here to beg you or to threaten you. I’m here to tell you that, even if I can’t forgive what you did to me, I think I understand why you did it. I wish you would give me my name back, but I know I can’t make you. I know you have to want to do it.” Beryl closed her eye, then opened it. “You know, I used to lie awake nights, thinking about what I could do to you – what I would do to you – to get you to make me whole again. I thought about bribing you. I thought about extorting you. And, yes, I also thought about hurting you, and I hated myself for it. I spent twenty years feeling trapped by you, feeling like you had this terrible power over me, and wondering how I could be free of it.”

Beryl reached into her trouser pocket, and her hand came back out holding a small, red crystal. It was small enough to fit inside her palm, and it was the color of sunrise on a stormy day. Astria hadn’t laid eyes on it in over twenty years, but she knew what it was: a fire diamond. She had given it to Beryl, asked her to break the seals on it – a simple act which had triggered a chain of consequences that was anything but simple.

And here it was again, almost within her grasp.

Beryl looked down at the fire diamond in her hand, then held it out towards Astria. “At first I thought I would use this against you, somehow. I would come here, come to see you, and force you to give me what I wanted. I felt like, finally, the tables had turned, and I could be the one to have power over you. Instead, so many strange things happened. Your man Treddon put a sword through my heart, except he didn’t kill me, and he wasn’t your man after all. The Dentevis paid him off, and they were out to kill you, too. So I went to try to stop them, and I wound up hurting a lot of people who I never meant to hurt, and it could have just been more blood on my hands, another scar on my soul. Instead, it took me away from here, took me to places I never could have gone otherwise, where I met people who I would never have met otherwise, who helped me to learn things about myself that I might never have learned otherwise.”

Astria’s eyes had barely left the fire diamond since it had appeared in her sister’s hand. But, as Beryl spoke, and as the import of what she was saying began to register, Astria felt a cold shiver run down her spine, and she looked away from the mana stone and at her sister. Looked hard into her eye, searched for the truth, and tried to decide if she was really hearing what she thought she was hearing.

“You travelled away from here?”

“Yes.”

“How far away?”

“Very.”

“You’re saying that—“

“Yes.”

Astria could feel blood rushing up to her face. She felt vaguely as though time were slowing down, as though the room had gone cold. She felt a wince of pain and was surprised to realize that she was biting her lip.

“It’s not possible,” she said. “You couldn’t have.”

Beryl sighed. “Except that I did,” she said. “I crossed the planes.”

Astria shook her head. “It’s not possible,” she said again, more forcefully this time.

”And why not?” Beryl asked. Astria saw a little twitch ripple through Beryl’s eyelid – it was there for just a split second, then it was gone.

”Because,” Astria started to say. But she choked off the rest of her sentence before it could escape. Then she fell silent for a moment. She ran a hand through her auburn hair, curling it around her fingers, pulling on it. She turned around, so that her back was to her sister.

Because how could it be you? That was the thought which had passed through her mind, and which she had come so close to saying aloud. How could it be you, instead of me?

She didn’t want to believe it, didn’t want to believe that her sister – Beryl, of all people – had that kind of power, a kind of power which Astria didn’t have, never would.

But Astria knew Beryl, knew her face and her voice and her manner, knew how to tell when she was lying.

Beryl was not lying.

And if she wasn’t lying, then this changed things. It changed things in a very important and potentially critical way. After all, the Guild Scribes kept a historical record of the planeswalkers who had made themselves known on Aliavelli, and generally accepted history held that no such traveler had set foot on the plane within the last ten generations.

Except that Astria knew better. She knew of at least two such people who had come to Aliavelli within her lifetime. And, if Beryl was really what she claimed to be, then her sister made three. And that was a very valuable piece of information which Astria possessed, and which no one else did. Very valuable, indeed.

Astria’s mind raced as she turned back to face her sister.

“If you crossed the planes, then why did you come back?” she said, the tone of her voice subtly changed – less imperious, more cautious. It was a tone she was used to hearing, just not from herself.

“Because I realized that I’ve spent my life running from a lie: fearing you, hating you, hating the power you held over me, wanting to be free from your control.” Beryl looked straight into her sister’s eyes. “Astria, I was never under your control. You never had any power over me. You had the power to hurt me, sure, and you did. But that’s where it ended. I always thought you held the key to my future, that you had to make me whole before my future could begin. Now?” She shrugged. “I’ve come to terms with who I am. I’m already whole. And you can’t hurt me anymore.”

Astria didn’t understand. “You’re still nameless,” she said.

“Yes. But I don’t need a name to be who I am.”

“Then why do you care? Why do you keep bothering me about it?”

“Because it was my mother’s name. Because I want to be part of her again. That’s easy for you,” Beryl said. “You’ll always be part of her. You see her every time you look in the mirror. Me, I only see her in my dreams. And my dreams are not good dreams.” She pointed to her blind eye and the violent scars around it. “This is what I see when I look in the mirror.”

“You’re not trying to cover it up anymore,” Astria said.

“I’m not ashamed of it anymore. I used to hate it, because it was a reminder of what I did. Now, it serves a different purpose. It reminds me to focus on awareness and acceptance. It reminds me that I don’t have to run from who I am or how I feel.”

“So now you’re some paragon of forbearance, is that what you’re telling me?”

“We’re sitting here talking, aren’t we?”

Astria looked at her sister, tried to figure her out, but couldn’t. “You really think you’ve changed, don’t you?” she said.

“Yes. Walking the planes does funny things to you.”

“And now, what, you’re going to change me, too? I’m some sort of reclamation project for you?”

“No. I just wanted you to know how I feel, and now you do. And I wanted to know how you felt, and now I think I know that, too. Where we go from here? I don’t know. We’ll see.”

“And that?” Astria said, nodding towards the fire diamond. “What do you intend to do with it?”

Beryl held the small, red crystal up, so that it danced with reflected light.

“When you brought it to me, did you know that our mother was the one who sealed it?”

“Yes.”

“So you lied to me?”

“Yes,” Astria said.

“Why?”

“I didn’t trust you.”

Beryl sighed, shook her head. “I can just barely remember seeing her with this, back when we were very young. Do you remember that?”

Astria nodded.

“Was it hers?” Beryl asked.

Astria nodded again. “But she sealed it away, and, after that, no one seems to have realized what it was. It was just one more curiosity to collect dust in a display case in the High Sorceress’s quarters.”

“Until you stole it.”

“I didn’t steal it. It came into my possession.”

“Well, that’s cryptic. You’ll have to forgive me if I get the sense that you still don’t trust me.”

“I’m not much of a believer in trust,” Astria said. “I find life is much safer that way.”

Beryl shook her head. Then she held the fire diamond out to Astria, and motioned for her to take it.

“Here,” she said. “This doesn’t really belong to me, and I don’t need it anymore. It doesn’t belong to you, either, but I get the sense that you need it more than I do.”

Astria started to reach out to take the crystal, but hesitated with her hand halfway there, wondering what unspoken price her sister expected in return.

As though she could read Astria’s thoughts, Beryl said: “There’s no catch. Think of it as a goodwill gesture – provided, that is, you think having this thing is worth dealing with the trouble that seems to follow it around.”

Astria held her hand out, and Beryl dropped the fire diamond into it. Astria closed her fingers around the little crystal – it was warm to the touch, and she could feel the mana waiting inside it, ready to do her bidding.

She slipped the gem into the scrip she wore around her waist.

“Thank you,” she said.

Beryl smiled a small smile. “I can’t remember the last time you said that to me,” she said.

Astria couldn’t either. Maybe things really were changing, changing in ways she wasn’t sure she understood.

“So, how much danger are you in?” Beryl asked.

Astria sighed. She thought about lying, but wasn’t sure what could be gained by it.

“More than I expected,” she said. “The High Sorceress won’t be around much longer, whether she knows it or not, and I intend to be the next to ascend. Other Houses have different notions. I knew I was stepping on some toes, making some enemies, and I was prepared to deal with that. I’m smarter than the people I can see lined up against me. More powerful, too,” she said, thinking about the fire diamond which now rested inside her scrip. “But it turns out that there are other players in the shadows. Players from far away who I can’t see clearly. House Dentevi may be the tip of the spear, but someone else is guiding their hands. I have to be careful at the moment. Very careful.”

And now, Astria thought, her sister had stepped into the game, too. Her sister who had pierced the veil, and who was now in a position to help her – provided that she could be managed and controlled.

That would be a challenge, the prospect of which filled Astria with equal parts excitement and fear.

“I need your help,” Astria finally said.

“I thought you might. For the record, are you ordering me, or asking me?”

Astria was quiet for a moment. “Asking,” she said.

Beryl nodded. “What do you need?”

Astria hesitated. As she herself had said, it was not in her nature to trust. Enlisting Beryl’s help was a leap of faith, a gamble. Astria didn’t like gambles. She liked games where she knew the outcome in advance, games where she had already shaped the result.

She liked predictability. Beryl was not predictable.

But there was an opportunity here, if she could figure out how to take it.

“I need you to find out about someone for me, someone not from here,” Astria said. “Find out whatever you can.”

“Who?”

Astria stood up from the bed and walked across the room to her dressing area. Atop the dressing table was an ornate silver strongbox, fashioned in the shape of a star and covered all over with swirling, painted runes in blue and gold enamel. Astria reached a hand inside the folds of her robe and found the small, finely-made key which forever hung around her neck from a spidersilk cord. She slid the key into the box’s lock and turned it, then she lifted off the box’s top and extracted a small, folded piece of paper from inside.

She closed the box, locked it again, and tucked the key back beneath her robe, the coolness of its metal familiar and reassuring against the warmth of her skin. Then she walked over to her sister and handed her the slip of paper.

Beryl unfolded the note and read the name written on it. Her face was a blank.

“I’ve never heard of him,” she said.

“Ask around off-plane. You’ll find out something,” Astria said.

“I’ll do what I can.”

Beryl looked back down at the name for a second. Then the slip of paper on which it was written burst into flames. Beryl watched the paper blacken and curl before dropping it onto the floor and grinding it to ashes under the heel of one of her hobnail boots.

Astria fought to suppress a grimace; the rug in her chamber was almost brand new.

Then Beryl took a small step to close the distance between herself and her sister. She reached out and put her hand on Astria’s shoulder.

In spite of herself, Astria flinched. As she did, she felt a flash of anger towards herself over that momentary lapse of control, that unintentional dropping of her guise. She had shown more than she had meant to show. She stepped back abruptly, and returned to sit on the edge of the bed. When she looked back at Beryl, she saw a look of sadness on her sister’s face.

“You’re afraid of me, aren’t you?” Beryl said.

After a moment, Astria nodded.

Beryl sighed. “You know, I met a woman while I was away, a friend who told me something very important. She told me that fear is the most powerful force in the eternities, and that more evil is done out of fear than any other motive. That’s why I think I understand you now, Astria. Because I know you’ve been afraid of me for a long time.”

“I have good reason to be afraid of you,” Astria said. “You’re dangerous. I know that, better than anyone else. Better than you know it yourself.”

“Not anymore,” Beryl said.

“We’ll see.”

Beryl shrugged. “I guess we will,” she said. “Anyway, we’ve just managed to have a full conversation without either of us threatening to kill the other. That seems like progress of a sort.”

Astria allowed herself a small smile. “I did try to kill you before we started talking,” she said.

“That doesn’t count. You didn’t know it was me. Besides, it would take a lot more than that to kill me.”

“I hardly gave you my best shot.”

“I’m sure you didn’t.”

Beryl walked over again, and this time Astria forced herself to sit still as her sister put a hand on her shoulder.

“Please think about what I told you,” Beryl said, “and I’ll see what I can find out for you.”

She started to walk away, then turned back to face Astria one more time.

“Astria?”

“Yes?”

“Be careful.”

“I’m always careful. How will I know what you find out?”

Beryl smiled. “I know where to find you,” she said. “I’ll just let myself in. Don’t change the locks.”

Astria watched as Beryl walked to her chamber door, traced her finger across the House Trevanei seal, and disappeared.

Then Astria reached into her scrip and took out the fire diamond, turning it over in her hand, studying it under the light. She felt the mana inside it, and thought about how it might change the balance of power in the game she was playing.

With that in mind, Astria Trevanei started to work on a new plan.

* * *

Aloise Hartley leaned over her workbench, hardly daring to breathe as she carefully smoothed-out the creases in the ancient constellation chart she had unearthed on her latest expedition. She was using a fine-haired brush to clean away some dirt which had been ground into the chart’s folds, and she had just started to reveal the writing underneath when she heard the sound of a door open and close downstairs.

That was odd, she thought. Lys had gone out, and Aloise hadn’t expected her back for some time yet.

Aloise put the delicate chart aside and stood up. She stepped out of her loft workshop and looked down from the upstairs landing into the parlor below. As she did, she was startled to see a woman looking back up at her.

A woman with one clear, green eye, and another that was clouded and blind, ringed by red scars. A woman wearing the white linen blouse which Aloise had given her on a cold, rainy night on a lonely, far-off plane.

A blouse which, Aloise noticed with a start, was now streaked with what looked like blood.

“Oh my goodness, what are you doing here? Are you alright?” Aloise asked.

Beryl shook her head, and there was a slight tremor in her voice as she said:

“What can you tell me about a man called Fisco Vane?”