Raistlin Upadesa in the style of Egon Schiele, as interpreted by DALL-E in January 2025.

  Raistlin Upadesa had never been a morning person, and the Energy Blight was not helping. He briefly opened his mind to the ether. Almost ten thirty. He groaned and got up.

  His tiny apartment had a few small windows facing the backyard, but it was only on the 12th floor of the 300-floor circular tower and not much light got in. It was the kind of place one could get without connections and employment status, though, and he could live here anonymously.

  He skipped breakfast but drank a cup of stim while considering his next move.

  Quite a few of the people living in this rather unglamorous tower, at least below floor 200 or so, were Devotees of the Citadel, which generally meant that they spent their time investigating, speculating and – especially – arguing about the nature and purpose of the Citadel rather than engaging in any straightforwardly productive work.

  Raistlin had joined the Devotees and were indeed quite like them in some ways, although he was also very different from them in some other ways. Joining the Devotees seemed like a perfect way to do his work while avoiding attention.

  Raistlin had become very good at avoiding attention, which was indeed necessary for survival. Rule number one was to survive and carry on the work. He was the only one left from the group. If he did not complete the work nobody would.

  In order to survive, he first of all had to avoid the detection magics that kept scanning the population for suspicious behavior. Such scans sought to identify unregulated magic use in particular, which meant that Raistlin, who was something of an adept in unregulated magics, had to be circumspect.

  His work was complicated by the fact that he always had to hide what he was doing behind several layers of obfuscation – one hiding the thing from present-day observers, another hiding it across time, a third hiding the concealment effort itself.

  So many things to pay attention to. No wonder he was feeling a bit worn down lately.

  He also suspected that there were scans for renegade thinking – that certain thoughts or combinations of thoughts might set off alarms. Indeed, he had good reason to believe that was the case, and therefore he needed to avoid certain subjects altogether.

  The best thing was to not think very much at all, because that minimized the chances that his mind would accidentally stumble into dangerous topics. Maintaining such mental silence required high levels of discipline, which used to be hard work. But over the years he had been getting better at it and it was now second nature to him.

  Although he had to be careful not to spell things out in his mind, there was another layer of mind where he could know things, could see how something related to something else, without having to engage in the ponderous activity of spelling the knowing out in linear thinking.

  Raistlin found that this more subtle level of mind provided him with better understanding and insight than the ordinary thinking mind. He also believed – it had worked this far, at least – that this subtle level was too quick, too slippery, for detection by the scans.

  Scans took many shapes and forms. Most common were the iterative scans that worked their way through every individual on the planet to check if they were up to something suspicious.

  Usually such a scan would reach him around early afternoon, and then again at some point in the evening. They were predictable and not, or so he believed, any great danger to him.

  Occasionally there were also deeper scans that stayed with him for a longer time in order to probe his mind more thoroughly, but those spent quite some time getting through the populace and they only reached him once every two weeks or so.

  He never had any problems dealing with those probes, but then again, they had never reached him while he was fully occupied with something else. If the probe arrived when he was in the middle of a major magical project, he wasn’t sure how things would turn out.

  Finally, Raistlin suspected there were passive scans involving activities rather than individuals. He was sure some of those searched for nonstandard magics and suspected others would look for specific topics of thought.

  Raistlin believed the passive nature of these scans might render them invisible to his own detection magics, but so far mental silence and obfuscation magics had always sufficed to keep such scans in the dark – the proof of that being, of course, that no one had not come for him yet. He was pretty sure that whoever was running these scans did not have him in their sight.

  Today Raistlin was meeting with his Devotee friend Genry, an old Transmuter who had grown tired of his manufacturing duties and quit his job in order to, as they say, investigate the secrets of the Citadel.

  To Genry, as to so many other Devotees, this mainly involved being in the physical proximity of the Citadel and talking to other people who were also hanging around in the same area while reveling in its beauty. So that was where Raistlin was going.

  The Citadel was the greatest mystery of all time. This, of course, meant that most people saw it as a waste of time, while a vocal minority spent every waking hour formulating theories about its purpose and nature and arguing over those theories with other people of similar inclinations.

  Raistlin had never heard any such theory that interested him, but he also did not agree with the majority opinion that dismissed all concern with the Citadel as a waste of time. There was something to be gained here, even if everyone who tried was going about it in confused ways.

  He did not believe there was any particular benefit to being physically near the Citadel, at least not every day like most Devotees tended to, but going with the flow afforded him with a way of staying out of sight while preparing his real work.

  And the Citadel was undisputedly beautiful. To get there he went to the nearest Conveyer node, and after queuing for some time was transported to a similar node just below the Citadel.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Looking up the hill it rested on, he was once again transported, this time emotionally, as he gazed upon its inscrutable shapes and curves. It was a structure of some kind, or at least appeared to be, made of a material that no one had ever been able to replicate.

  In sunlight, it positively glowed and might blind your eyes if you gazed upon it directly, while on cloudy days it shimmered like a gemstone in a half-lit room. You could see it clearly even on dark nights, although its color was something in the vicinity of black and silver.

  In some ways it resembled a defensive structure, but then it had inspired architects of such structures throughout the ages, and it was impossible to intuit its purpose without being influenced by this history of architectural tributes.

  More than anything else, perhaps, it was the perfect example of a thing you had to see for yourself. No description could ever give it justice.

  While it glittered like something constructed only yesterday and not yet the least besmirched by dust or mud, it was in fact the oldest structure – probably the oldest constructed object – in the world.

  Ancient tribes settled these lands because they wanted to be close to the Citadel, or whatever they may have called it back then, and their settlements eventually became the city of Mikla, which is today the capital of the Confluence because the Citadel has always been regarded as somehow constituting the center of all things.

  No one knew where it came from or who had built it, if indeed there was someone behind it. Modern society knew as little about its purpose as the earliest hunter-gatherers, or in a sense even less, since those early people undoubtedly believed that they knew the Citadel was a message from the gods or perhaps itself a divinity, while modern people were not quite sure about such things.

  It was the unfathomable mystery at the center of everything, a brute fact of the inexplicable that simply lay silent on its hill for millennium after millennium, resisting every attempt to penetrate into it and doing absolutely nothing.

  Would the Citadel one day awaken? Many people believed so, not least its Devotees, most of whom saw it as the world savior.

  This line of thinking had gained traction with the arrival of the Energy Blight, but historians noted that similar revivals of devotion had accompanied the Demonic Wars, the Glitter, and the Virus Wars back in their day. In the end, these crises came and went while the Citadel remained as silent as ever.

  There had been endless attempts at penetrating into the Citadel, using physical force or magic or elaborate rituals or any other thing you can imagine, and not one of them – that anyone knew of, anyway – had so much as scratched its surface.

  Idioms saying that something was as impenetrable or silent as the Citadel had been in widespread use in various past eras and expressed a fundamental truth about the structure, although today such language was regarded as flowery and quaint.

  The same might be said for being interested in the Citadel in general – most people believed the Devotees and anyone sharing their curiosity should just accept that no answers, reasons, or explanations would ever be forthcoming, so maybe invest your energy in something useful instead.

  Normally, Genry would be engaged in lively debate about something Citadel-related with some group of Devotees, but the Blight had dampened peoples’ enthusiasm for such activities.

  Instead, he spent his time resting on the ground while gazing longingly at the shimmering structure in the distance. There were lots of other people around, but Raistlin knew where to find him.

  “Greetings, Devotee of the Citadel,” he said half-jokingly to the prone Genry who had not yet noticed him.

  Genry looked up. “Raistlin! How are you?” Without waiting for an answer, he pointed towards the Citadel. “I was just looking at that odd bit there on the left side. Doesn’t it seem different somehow? Like the shade of color is not exactly the same as the rest.”

  Raistlin gave the appearance of studying the specified bit for a while. It looked weird and beautiful like the rest of the structure, but otherwise he saw nothing noteworthy about it. However, he never challenged his well-meaning but overly enthusiastic friend very much.

  “I think your eyes are better than mine, Genry. Perhaps you are right, but I can’t really put my finger on how that part is different.”

  “Ha! Always the diplomat, aren’t you. Well, sit down, I think you will notice it if you look more closely.”

  Raistlin spent the early afternoon sitting next to Genry, listening to his ideas and not saying much in return, although he remained generally agreeable. As always, he paid just enough attention to Genry to follow the conversation, while otherwise being engaged in something entirely different.

  In this way, the first scan of the day would usually find him listening to some novel and often fanciful theory about some aspect of the Citadel, his mind giving the impression of being a pretty dull place.

  Beneath the surface, he was experimenting, learning new ways to do things, honing his magical skills. It was subtle and complex work, especially since he had to hide everything behind several layers of obfuscation magic.

  And on top of it all he had to maintain his detection magics, which in turn also needed obfuscation. So many things to take care of.

  Whenever one of his detection magics alerted him to an incoming scan, he dropped everything he was experimenting with, maintaining only obfuscation.

  As long as he was just practicing and experimenting, he could afford to let go of his experiments at any time, because none of them were doing anything important.

  It would be different if he were doing something for real, something that mattered, especially if the incoming scan was not the ordinary surface thing but a deeper probe.

  It was never not funny to Raistlin that so much of his time and energy was spent dealing with scans, and he didn’t know a single other person who so much as knew that scans existed. True, he did not know many people – not many who were alive, anyway – but still. He was a nation of one.

  Had it ever occurred to him that he might be suffering from psychotic delusions? It had.

  Mostly as a sort of intellectual exercise, because it was interesting to him to consider how, if your understanding of reality is fundamentally different from everyone around you, you might prove to yourself that you are not under the spell of psychosis, which is what those other people would say that you are.

  It seemed like a very difficult thing to establish. There were certain facts that did not fit the notion that his whole understanding of everything was delusional, but these facts mostly related to past events. How can you prove to yourself that your recollection of past events represents – probably not exactly so, but in an overall sense – something that actually happened?

  It amused him that such proof generally seemed elusive. Nevertheless, there was one thing that would prove that his understanding of the world was, in a fundamental sense, more correct than other people’s understanding, but for reasons of practicality – meaning survival – he could not actually establish this thing. How convenient, no?

  The thing was this. Raistlin had once been a Conjurer. He had training in the field of Conjuration, which involved manifesting energy or matter.

  This was his field of magic, and according to the general understanding, it was impossible for a person to access other fields of magic than the one they had an affinity for. But that was not impossible for Raistlin.

  He could for instance do obfuscation and detection magics, which belonged to the fields of Abjuration and Divination, respectively.

  But these magics worked on a mind level and were therefore unconvincing as evidence, since a psychotic person might imagine their effects. Now Raistlin could also do other forms of magic that had more material effects – something related to the field of Transmutation, for instance – but he hesitated to prove to himself that he could do so, because he was afraid the scans might register such magic use.

  Proving to himself that he was not psychotic seemed too frivolous a reason to engage in magic use that could, if he made a mistake or was unlucky, threaten his survival.

  Anyway, it was not exactly true that conventional understanding held it to be impossible for a person to access fields of magic outside their own. More precisely, conventional understanding held that a person doing so would go insane.

  Corto Pratt, Conveyer, in the style of Egon Schiele, as interpreted by DALL-E in January 2025.