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“Eide are what the guards of Gloom strive to keep in their darc in order to become stronger!” the Great Tooth explained.
Tararakh minced words, “Great! I adore you, Deni! You have the ability to analyse and pigeonhole so understandably. Imagine, I don’t know what such a thing as a ‘mouse’ is and I ask you. You answer, ‘Dear Tararakh, they catch a mouse with a mousetrap.’ ‘And what is a mousetrap?’ I ask. ‘A mousetrap is what you use to catch a mouse.’ Now I understand why your students dread your lessons.”
“Eidos, which guards of Gloom hunt for, is this nucleus, the essence of spiritualization of material, the ticket to eternity, the key to immortality, the soul. The most essential and important thing there is in each moronoid, in you, and even in Yagge, although she’s also a goddess. Everyone only has one eidos. One that can’t be counterfeited or copied with the help of magic. A moronoid who has lost his life and body but preserved his eidos loses nothing. But a person who has lost his eidos loses everything even if his body, reason, and life are out of danger,” explained Sardanapal.
“Hmm… And how does it look?” Tararakh asked.
“Almost not at all. Eidos doesn’t have a weight, a form. Or it has. Magicians have been arguing this already for several thousand years. Absalom the Flattened considered that eidos is an invisible precious stone thousands of times more valuable than any diamond, even the largest. Ekril the Wise was certain that it’s the second, the main heart, which governs the beating of the first heart. Hugo the Sly foggily asserted that eidos is ‘that is, which is not.’ In other words, eidos does not exist until each concrete individual is aware of its existence. Only then will it appear. However, the majority of scientists, including your humble servant, concurs that everyone has an eidos, independent of whether he is aware of it or not. An eidos is like a small bluish spark or a grain of sand. This spark has enormous incomparable power, precisely attaches us to eternity, and doesn’t leave after death of the flesh that rots. Eidos is the eternal element of existence, in a word, a part of The One who created us. It can’t be destroyed by either a division of gargoyles or nuclear explosion or loss of the Universe – nothing. And even one eidos has this power!
“Specifically, this is also how guards of Gloom earn their living. The more eide in a guard’s darc, the greater his ability and, therefore, the higher he stands in the hierarchy among his own. It troubles the guards not in the least that they take away eternity together with the eidos from the moronoid. To them it’s the object of the hunt, nothing more.”
“They take eide away by force?”
“Eidos ca
“And the guards of Light? They don’t need eide?” the pithecanthropus asked.
“Guards of Light are summoned to protect the eide of mortals and not to steal them! They don’t obliterate someone else’s eternity. The Ancient One, however great he was, never encroached upon a single eidos. Although now and then it seems to me that he was not simply a white magician. I do think that…”
“…he was one of the guards of Light?” Slander finished for him.
“Possible,” Sardanapal answered evasively. “Guards of Light rarely shout about themselves in everybody’s hearing. They respect the freedom of choice and prefer the role of observers.”
“But why is this boy so dangerous, Sardanapal? Why must we fear Methodius Buslaev?”
Sardanapal sat down at the table and, after dipping a goose feather into the ink, made an intricate flourish on the paper. “What do you know about The Ancient One? Not as the wisest magician, the founder of Tibidox, but about the man of flesh and blood? Not much, right?”
“Very little. He didn’t like to mix business and private life. And generally, when I was acquainted with him, he behaved like he was out of the body. He could pass by a half metre from you and not even notice you. It seemed that all the time his thoughts were somewhere in astral,” said Medusa.
The academician nodded, “Approximately how the matter stood. Especially in the last years, when The Ancient One reached such enlightenment, when he saw both the past and the future. And when you see both the past and the future at the same time, the present somehow comes up short. And you, of course, didn’t know that The Ancient One had a son?”
“I, no,” said Medusa.
“But I knew. However, what became of him is unknown to me. The Ancient One never mentioned it,” a
“It happened on a fall night in the last year of the magic wars,” remarked Sardanapal. “The world was so overcrowded with evil that it already began to tire. The Ancient One and his son were returning after some meeting. It so happened that the two of them found themselves in a remote forest. Suddenly they were attacked. Evil spirits and guards of Gloom surrounded them forming a continuous wall. They could not teleport or summon aid or use incantations – the attackers foresaw everything and provided themselves with strong artefacts. Then The Ancient One plunged his sword deep into the tree. The magic of his sword, the magic of the tree, and the magic of the earth, which the tree was co
“And here the evil spirits attacked him?” Tararakh asked anxiously. Forgetting about the shashlik, the passionate pithecanthropus waved Marshal Davout’s sword, splashing Professor Stinktopp with hot fat. “You out of your mind! You zrow your bad shashlik at me!” Stinktopp began to squeal.
“No. I think that the battle was actually honestly fought. There was no point for Ares to violate the oath, and it’s also not his principle,” continued Sardanapal. “While Ares and the son were fighting with cold steel, a tired Ancient One was sleeping inside the circle, seeing and hearing nothing. I think that his sleep was intensified by witchcraft of the Gloom magicians. The son of The Ancient One handled the blade well, but nevertheless not as good as the best sword of the guards of Gloom. A minute had not passed when Ares beheaded him and spilled his blood on the ground… The evil spirits, sensing blood, completely broke loose. They went for the sleeping Ancient One, but could not kill him because the magic circle though weakened, nevertheless sustained; indeed the tip of the sword had remained in the tree trunk… After a day, a detachment of white magicians, having gone through the entire area, found The Ancient One. I was also there, in that detachment. The Ancient One was still under the power of the sleep spell. None of the serious guards of Gloom was there. Only the evil spirits, whom they drove away sufficiently quickly, and whom, rumbling, crawled away along the burrows and the ravines… The Ancient One buried what the evil spirits had left of his son. In complete solitude he dug out the grave with a dagger.”