Chapter 1: The Charlatan's Ascent
Leon Hayes had been crossing the street.
That was the last normal thing he remembered - the pedestrian signal, the crosswalk, the usual Tokyo rush hour chaos. He'd been thinking about the polymer stress tests scheduled for Monday, mentally reviewing the data from Friday's failed prototype. Then there had been a sound, feelingor any warning, and suddenly he wasn't in Tokyo anymore.
He was lying face-down on cobblestones.
The first thing Leon noticed was the smell. Not exhaust fumes or convenience store fried chicken, but salt water, fish, and something cooking over wood smoke. The second thing was the noise - or rather, the wrongness of it. Cart wheels on stone, voices calling out, but no cars, no electronics, no mechanical hum that formed the constant background static of modern life.
He pushed himself up, and the world tilted.
Stone buildings with thatched roofs crowded a narrow street. People in rough-spun clothing stopped mid-stride to stare at him. A man leading a donkey. A woman with a basket of fish. Children with bare feet and patched tunics. They looked at him like he'd fallen from the sky.
Leon looked down at himself. Slacks. Button-down shirt. Leather shoes. His messenger bag still hung across his chest, laptop inside probably ruined by the fall.
"Where -" he started, but his mouth was dry. "Where am I?"
The woman with the fish basket said something in a language that sounded vaguely European, maybe Mediterranean, but nothing he recognized. Her tone was cautious, questioning.
"I don't... English? Do you speak English?" Leon tried, then cycled through his limited language repertoire. "Nihongo? Español? Uh, français?"
Nothing. The crowd was growing now, people emerging from doorways, gathering at a distance. They spoke among themselves in that same liquid, unfamiliar tongue, pointing at him, at his clothes, his bag.
Leon's engineering mind, trained to analyze problems systematically, tried to process the situation:
First; This was not Tokyo.
Second; These were not costumes. Wrong wear patterns, wrong fabrics, wrong everything.
Third; No power lines. No pavement. No plastic.
Conclusion: This was impossible.
A man in slightly better clothing - a merchant, maybe, or someone with authority, stepped forward and spoke directly to Leon. The tone was careful, probing. A question, clearly, but Leon had no idea what.
"I don't understand," Leon said, hearing the edge of panic in his own voice. "I don't understand anything you're saying."
The merchant frowned and tried again, speaking slower, as if volume and enunciation could bridge the gap of an entirely unknown language.
It couldn't.
Leon wandered.
There was no other word for it. That first day, that first week, that first month—he wandered through a seaside town that might have been pulled from a medieval Mediterranean fantasy, except it was real, and he was trapped in it.
The town was called something he couldn't pronounce. It sat where hills met the sea, a warren of narrow streets and stone buildings, fishing boats in the harbor, and a marketplace that smelled of salt cod and strange spices. Beyond the town, olive groves and terraced fields climbed the hillsides. In the distance, mountains rose blue and hazy.
No one spoke English. No one spoke Japanese. No one spoke any language Leon had ever heard, and the concept of a human speaking a completely different language seemed to baffle them as much as their language baffled him.
He tried to explain. He drew pictures. He pointed at things. Nothing worked.
The townspeople treated him with a mixture of curiosity, wariness, and pity. They gave him food sometimes - bread, fish, watery soup. They let him sleep in a storage shed by the docks. They watched him with the same concerned confusion people might show a lost dog that had wandered into town.
Leon tried to be useful. He helped unload fishing boats, hauled water, swept floors. The work earned him meals and kept him from going insane. At night, alone in his shed, he opened his laptop and stared at the dead screen until the battery finally died for good. He still carried the bag everywhere. It felt like the last proof he'd been real.
The language came slowly.
Children were his first teachers, pointing at objects and saying words. Leon repeated them, wrote them phonetically in a notebook he'd had in his bag. Apple. Water. Boat. Fish. Man. Woman. Hello. Thank you.
After three months, he could understand simple transactions.
After six months, he could follow basic conversations if people spoke slowly.
After nine months, he dreamed in their language sometimes.
After a year, he was fluent enough to finally understand what they'd been calling him all this time.
Magathar.
The word meant "speaker of magic words" or possibly "shaman who uses strange speech." They thought his English and Japanese were incantations. They thought he was some kind of magician who'd been speaking in tongues.
Leon sat in his shed the night he learned this, and for the first time in a year, he laughed until he cried.
...
"You're the magathar?"
The fisherman's wife looked skeptical. Leon didn't blame her. Even after a year, he was still obviously foreign - wrong haircut, wrong facial features, clothes that were now threadbare but still clearly not local in style or cut.
"I am," Leon said, keeping his voice steady. He'd learned to project confidence in the past few months, ever since he'd realized what his "reputation" could do for him.
"My husband says you make things," the woman continued. "Magic things that don't break."
"I do."
Leon reached into his bag - now repurposed, reinforced with local leather - and pulled out a cup. It was translucent, slightly cloudy, and felt wrong in a world of clay and wood. Because it was plastic.
The woman took it gingerly, turned it over in her hands. "What is it?"
"A cup," Leon said. "But not like other cups. Drop it."
"What?"
"Drop it on the ground."
She looked at him like he was insane, then shrugged and let it fall. The cup bounced on the cobblestones with a hollow tok sound and rolled to a stop. Unbroken.
The woman stared. "Sorcery."
"Not quite," Leon said, picking up the cup and handing it back to her. "But close enough. It won't break from a fall. It's lighter than wood, cleaner than leather. And it's yours for three silver."
Three silver was expensive. Outrageously expensive for a cup. But the woman was already turning it over in her hands, eyes wide.
"Two silver," she countered.
"Two silver and a fish for dinner."
"Done."
The plastic had been accidental genius.
Leon had been trying to make basic tools, trying to recreate things from memory, when he'd remembered a chemistry video he'd watched years ago. Basic polymer synthesis wasn't that complicated if you had the right materials. Rendered animal fat, wood ash for lye, heat and time and improvisation.
His first attempts had been disasters. His second attempts had been barely better. But his tenth attempt, months of trial and error in the back of his shed using scavenged materials and a ceramic kiln he'd built from memory, had produced something plastic-adjacent. It was cloudy, imperfect, probably full of impurities that would horrify any materials engineer, but it was revolutionary for a medieval town.
Cups that didn't break. Bowls that were light and waterproof. Utensils that didn't splinter.
He called them "blessed items" and sold them for prices that made him feel like a con artist.
Which, he supposed, he was.
But the money bought him a real room. Real meals. Respect. The town started calling him "Magathar Leon" with something like reverence. Parents brought their children to be blessed. Merchants asked him to bless their ships before voyages.
Leon blessed them with English phrases. "May the force be with you." "Live long and prosper." "To infinity and beyond."
The townspeople nodded solemnly, sure they'd been touched by ancient magic.
Glass had been next.
Leon had learned glassblowing techniques from a documentary he'd half-watched during a college all-nighter. He remembered the basics - silica sand, high heat, some kind of flux to lower the melting point. The town's pottery kilns could get hot enough, barely. His first attempts had been crude, cloudy, full of bubbles.
But even crude glass was miraculous here.
Windows. Bottles. Lenses.
The merchants went wild for it. Glass bottles that didn't leak, that let you see the contents, that could be sealed and reopened. Leon charged a fortune and people paid it gladly.
He improved everything he touched. Wheel bearings greased with rendered fat mixed with graphite scraped from rocks. Primitive shock absorbers using leather and wood springs. Better kiln designs that held heat more efficiently. Improvements to the fishing nets based on tensile strength principles. A basic pulley system for the dock that doubled their loading efficiency.
The townspeople thought it was all magic.
Leon knew it was just engineering.
And he knew, deep down, that this couldn't last. He was playing a role he couldn't maintain forever. Sooner or later the truth would come out, and he thinks someday this might come back to bite him.
He just hadn't expected it to happen the way it did.
The Summons
The messenger arrived on a spring morning, two years after Leon had stumbled into this world.
The whole town turned out to see the rider in his lord's colors, the sealed letter he carried, the formal way he dismounted and asked for "the mage Leon."
Mage. Not magathar. The upgrade in terminology made Leon's stomach drop.
The letter was short and direct. The regional lord, whose name Leon now knew was Casimir, required the presence of all warriors and mages for the defense of the realm. Leon was to present himself at Castle Ravenna within two months.
The town erupted in celebration.
"Our first mage!" the mayor declared, slapping Leon on the back hard enough to make him stumble. "Sent to serve the lord himself!"
"We'll send our best warriors with you," another man said. "They'll be honored to serve alongside a mage of your power."
Leon felt the noose tightening.
He tried to decline. "I'm not sure I'm the right -"
"Nonsense!" The mayor wouldn't hear it. "You've blessed our town for two years. Now you'll bless our sons in service to the realm."
The warriors chosen were young men Leon knew. Finn the blacksmith's apprentice. Torren, who worked the fishing boats. Marcus and Jace, farmers' sons who'd never been more than ten miles from home.
They looked at Leon with shining eyes. Their mothers pressed charms into Leon's hands, whispering prayers for him to protect their boys. Their fathers gripped his shoulders and thanked him for his service.
Leon wanted to scream that he couldn't protect anyone, that he was a fraud, that he'd never even seen combat. But the words wouldn't come. The guilt was a physical weight, pressing down on his chest.
He spent the next month making excuses for why he needed to delay departure. The wagons needed modifications. The wheels needed greasing. He needed to prepare "magical supplies."
The truth was simpler: he was hoping the summons would be canceled. That the lord would change his mind. That anything would happen to get him out of this.
Nothing did.
...
The journey to Castle Ravenna took a month.
A full month of rattling along rough roads in a wagon that, despite Leon's shock absorber modifications, still felt like it was trying to shake his teeth loose. The warriors praised the "swift" pace. Leon, whose longest trip in his previous life had been a bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka, wanted to die.
The landscape crawled past. Fields and forests and small villages, all at the agonizing pace of oxen and wooden wheels. The warriors sang marching songs. They told stories around evening campfires. They treated Leon with a deference that made him want to crawl out of his skin.
"My mother says you blessed me when I was sick as a child," Finn said one night. "Said you spoke words of power and I recovered."
Leon had no memory of this. He'd probably said "get well soon" in English and the family had filled in the rest.
"I'm sure you would have recovered anyway," Leon said.
"Humble," Torren said, nodding approvingly. "The mark of a true mage."
There was no winning.
The countryside changed as they traveled inland. More hills, denser forests. They passed other groups traveling the same direction, all answering the same summons.
Castle Ravenna appeared on the horizon on the morning of the thirty-second day.
It was massive. Stone walls three stories high, watchtowers at the corners, a keep that rose above everything like a granite finger pointing at the sky. Hundreds of people swarmed around it - camps, supply wagons, training yards.
An army in formation.
Leon had known, intellectually, that he was heading into a military situation. Seeing it was different. The scale, the organization, the casual efficiency with which soldiers moved - this was a real fighting force, and he was supposed to be one of their elite members.
He was so utterly screwed.
The warriors were sent to the barracks. Leon was escorted to the keep.
His room was nicer than anywhere he'd lived in this world - stone walls, a real bed with a feather mattress, a window overlooking the training yards, and a servant who brought him meals. It felt less like an honor and more like a very comfortable cage.
For two weeks, Leon waited.
He watched the training yards from his window. Watched warriors drilling with swords and spears. Watched supply wagons arriving. Watched other groups being led to the barracks, more warriors answering the summons.
Sometimes he saw other people being escorted to the keep. Well-dressed individuals who carried themselves with authority. Other mages, probably.
Leon avoided them.
He explored the keep when he could, learning the layout, looking for anything that might help him understand what was coming. The castle was a fortress designed for siege warfare, with thick walls, multiple baileys, and enough storage for months of supplies.
This was a kingdom preparing for serious war.
On the fourteenth day, a servant knocked on his door.
"The lord has called a meeting of the mages," the man said. "You are to attend immediately."
Leon's mouth went dry. "Now?"
"Yes, sir. In the great hall. The others are already gathering."
There was no more running. No more delays.
Leon followed the servant through the keep's corridors, his heart hammering, trying to think of any way out of this that didn't end with him exposed as a fraud or dead or both.
They entered the great hall.
It was full of mages.
The Gathering
Leon had never seen real magic before.
He knew it existed - the townspeople talked about it, used it to explain natural phenomena, referenced legendary mages from history - but he'd never actually witnessed it. Now, standing in the great hall of Castle Ravenna, he was surrounded by it.
A woman near the entrance had flames dancing between her fingers, casual as breathing. A man by the windows seemed to be standing in a sphere of slower air, his robes moving in a nonexistent breeze. Another mage had what looked like geometric patterns floating above his palm, glowing faintly.
There were perhaps thirty of them, all in various styles of robes or reinforced clothing, all carrying themselves with the confidence of people who knew they were important.
Leon stood just inside the doorway, trying to blend into the background.
It didn't work.
"You there!" A mage near the center of the room called out. He was older, maybe fifty, with a beard that was going gray and robes that looked expensive. "I don't recognize you. What's your specialty?"
Leon's mind raced. "I'm... I prefer not to demonstrate inside."
The mage laughed. "Cautious! I like that. Destructive specialty, then? "
"Something like that," Leon said vaguely.
"I'm Aldric," the mage said, moving closer. "Combat specialist, third circle. You have the look of someone from the coast. Pelenna?"
"Yes," Leon said, grateful for the easy out. "The town of- "
"Pelenna sent a mage?" A woman's voice cut in. She was younger, maybe thirty, with sharp eyes and sharper features. "I thought they only had that charlatan they call the magathar."
Leon felt his face freeze.
"I heard about him," another mage said, a thin man with nervous hands. "Supposedly does wonders with household items but won't demonstrate actual magic. Probably just a clever craftsman who learned to fool peasants."
"Probably can't even light a candle," the woman said dismissively.
"Still," Aldric said, "if he can make useful items, there's value in that. We need supply specialists as much as combat mages. Though I'd love to see his face if someone asked him to prove his power."
Leon wanted to sink through the floor.
Before anyone could press him further, a ripple of attention moved through the room. Conversation died. The mages turned toward the far end of the hall and arranged themselves in a rough semicircle.
Lord Casimir had entered.
Lord Casimir was not what Leon expected.
He'd been imagining someone old, grizzled, hardened by warfare. Instead, the lord was maybe forty, clean-shaven, wearing practical clothing rather than elaborate robes. He moved like a soldier, economical and direct, and his eyes swept the assembled mages with an assessment that felt clinical.
"Thank you for answering the summons," Casimir said without preamble. His voice carried in the hall without being loud. "I know some of you traveled far. I'll be direct about why you're here."
He gestured, and a servant unrolled a map on a nearby table. The mages crowded closer. Leon hung back, trying to see over shoulders.
"Two months ago," Casimir continued, "scouts reported the signs of a new gate forming in the Thornwall Valley, approximately sixty miles northeast of here."
The word 'gate' seemed to land like a physical blow. Several mages drew sharp breaths. Others began whispering urgently to each other.
Leon frowned. Gate? Like... a door? An entrance? The reaction seemed extreme for construction news.
"The king has issued a decree," Casimir said, his voice cutting through the whispers. "All available military forces and mages are to prepare for the gate's opening. Based on the magical saturation readings from the scouts, this will be a large gate. Potentially category four or five."
More gasps. One mage actually swore.
"The timeline is uncertain," Casimir continued, "but we estimate the gate will open within the next two to three weeks. We're assembling forces from three regions. Total strength will be approximately two thousand soldiers and thirty-five mages including yourselves."
Aldric spoke up. "My lord, do we know what we'll be facing?"
"Unknown," Casimir said flatly. "New gates are always unpredictable. We won't know what's on the other side until it opens."
The mages were talking among themselves now, their earlier confidence replaced by genuine tension. Leon caught fragments:
"- category four means -"
" - if it's like the March gate -"
" - continuous fighting for -"
"- casualty rate for the first clear -"
None of it made sense to Leon. He was still stuck on the word 'gate' and trying to understand why everyone was so terrified of what sounded like a geographical feature.
What were gates?
The question must have slipped out, because suddenly the whispered conversations stopped. Every mage in the hall was looking at him.
Leon's brain caught up with his mouth a second too late. Panic flooded through him. He'd just revealed his ignorance in front of everyone. In front of the lord. They'd know he was a fraud. They'd-
"Did you just ask what gates are?"
It was Lord Casimir speaking, his tone sharp with something Leon couldn't identify. Suspicion? Confusion?
Leon's mind raced through options. Deny it? Explain? Run? But his body, moving on autopilot, on instinct honed by two years of faking confidence he didn't have, simply nodded.
He braced for scolding. Maybe humiliation. Hopefully not execution. He really hoped not execution.
Instead, someone whispered: "Blessed light, he's greater than the stories say."
"What?" Leon's head snapped toward the speaker, a young mage with wide eyes.
"You don't even consider gates a threat?" Aldric said, and there was something like awe in his voice. "You speak of them as if they're... beneath your concern?"
"I-what?" Leon tried to process this. "No, I just-"
"He's so far beyond us," the sharp-eyed woman breathed, "that the concept of a gate doesn't register as dangerous."
The mages were nodding, murmuring agreement. Several looked at Leon with expressions that mixed reverence and fear.
"The stories from Pelenna," someone said. "They say he performs miracles without breaking a sweat. That he considers basic magic to be child's play."
"I heard he once called lightning from clear skies just to demonstrate a point to a skeptical merchant," another added.
Leon had absolutely done no such thing. He was fairly certain that story came from him explaining static electricity using a wool blanket and wasn't even sure how it had gotten so distorted. And since when did they hold him in such high esteem, weren't they raving about him being a charlatan just a while ago?
Lord Casimir was studying him with new intensity. "Magathar Leon," he said slowly. "If you truly view gates with such... detachment... would you be willing to lead the mage contingent in this expedition?"
Every eye in the room fixed on Leon.
Leon blinked. His mind supplied only one coherent thought:
Expedition to what?
But surrounded by so many watching eyes, trapped by momentum, he found himself nodding-again- because apparently that's what his treacherous body did now.
"Excellent," Casimir said, and there was satisfaction in his voice. "I'll send word to the king immediately. We march in three days."
The lord strode from the hall, leaving Leon standing in the center of a circle of mages who were now looking at him like he was either a savior or a legend.
And Leon, still processing what had just happened, could only think one thing:
What the hell are gates?