The Exiled Duke's Lottery system

Alliance Headquarters — The Choosing

The first candidate

Karrek did not go to his guild halls to ask for volunteers instead he descended to the fourth level of the lower workshops, where a dwarf was arguing with a heavy lathe.

"Vashek."

"Master." Vashek Durn did not look up from the cast-iron bed. "This guide rail is out by half a hair, and the smith who turned it has been lying to my face about it for a week."

"Leave the lathe, we have something important to discuss,come here and sit."

Vashek suddenly stopped the argument he was prepared to do and turned towards his master and sat where he pointing.

Karrek laid the captured steel linkage on the bench between them and said "Pick them up and tell me what do you see"

Vashek picked it up ,turned it over twice in his broad hands, held it up to the torchlight, ran a thumb down the pin seat, and then went motionless.

"Where did this come from master?"

"That is the question."

"High Smith,No Master—I mean where did it come from?" Vashek held it higher, his fingers tracing the immaculate tolerance. "Because whoever turned this cut it against a rigid gauge and then made four hundred identical cousins. I have never seen anything like this."

"Aye," Karrek said quiet-like. "That’s why I came to you and not to an elder who thinks his own eye is the standard."

Vashek laid the bar down carefully. "So what is the job?."

"I want you to go somewhere, I am asking and before you answer, I am required to say a sentence to your face by order of the High Council." Karrek did not soften the hit. "We cannot bring you back."

The workshop fell silent, save for the hum of the lathe belt spinning on its flywheel.

"How long?" Vashek asked.

"One year ,two ,or maybe hundred or forever."

Vashek looked at the linkage bar on the bench for a long, quiet moment then made his mind.

"Will there be a workshop where I am going?"

"Can’t guarantee there will be something. Nobody knows what exactly will it be."

"Then Master,i would like to have my tools," Vashek said, unbuckling his heavy leather apron. "Not standard guild issue. My own gauges and the hardened tap set and materials."

The second candidate

Threll did not choose from a personnel ledger either.

He walked down to the low-altitude staging yards, passed four hundred tethered transport hulls, and found a goblin lying on her back inside a deflated gas envelope with only her scuffed boots sticking out.

"Skarrow."

"Busy, Skymaster."

"Step out."

"I am inside a manifold that has a micro-tear eleven riggers failed to spot," her voice echoed out of the canvas. "I’ve found it, and if I crawl out now, I’ll lose the seam."

"Step out, Pib."

She slithered out, hands and forearms covered in black sealing resin and lastly angry at losing the opportunity to add another achievement to her prospect.

She then looked angrily at Threll but threll gave her the reality in forty words. Where. Why. That they were melting down three centuries of soulsilver for it. That the barrier might swallow her whole and refuse to spit her back.

"Nobody comes to retrieve us?" she asked.

"Nobody comes to retrieve you. That is the council’s sentence,." Threll looked down at her. "We cannot bring you back."

Pib wiped resin off her palms onto her trousers and weighed it for four seconds.

"Do they fly, wherever this place is?"

"Nobody knows."

"Then somebody ought to go and take a proper look," she said. "And it should be somebody who knows the difference between good joinery and pure luck. Give me an hour with my kit."

The third candidate

Vaen did not have to look far, though she took the longest over her selection.

Elenwe Sarath was not the most destructive archmage in the Alliance ranks. She was the woman who had spent forty years reading ancient wardings in unmapped ruins without once triggering an explosion she couldn’t contain.

"They need someone who can examine a foreign matrix without touching it," Vaen said, standing in the doorway of the sanctuary.

"Then they need me, and you knew that before you crossed the threshold." Elenwe folded her hands into her wide silk sleeves. "Say the sentence, Warden. You have been holding it in your mouth since you stepped off the stair."

"Vaen told everything then at last added we cannot bring you back."

"Ohh I see ."

Vaen waited, observing her face.

"There is a boundary working over a continent that no living scholar has ever read," Elenwe said, her voice soft with long-held obsession. "It has stood since before the first stone of this hall was cut. I have wanted to examine its lattice since I was thirty, and I have never had a conduit that could pierce it." She stood up. "You are not asking for a sacrifice, Warden. You are handing me the only prize I have ever wanted and calling it a tragedy. I would cross for half the silver."

The fourth candidate

Ugarr Mok did not send a herald for his choice.

He walked into the high training ring, took an unsharpened iron practice blade off the rack, put a Grand Knight flat on her back in front of forty onlookers, and extended an arm to haul her up.

"Ghara."

"Uncle."

"You are going through the barrier," Mok said in the same tone he used for troop movements. "Eight will be going. It costs the whole vault of soulsilver. And lastly nobody brings you home. Not me. Not the High Council. Not in your lifetime."

Ghara Mok-Sûl wiped sweat from her eyes and retrieved her steel helmet.

"Who else?"

"A dwarf who reads metal. A goblin who reads hulls. An archmage. Four vanguard."

"Who holds command?"

"A human," Mok replied. "Vale."

"The Peak Knight."

"Yes."

Ghara tested the flex of her gauntlet. "Then it is an enterprise, not a political gesture. Good. When do we march?"

Venn selected the remaining four himself. He said the mandatory sentence eight times before dusk, having pledged to the council that a member would deliver the warning to every individual face.

The fifth candidate

Torrin Vale, Peak Knight, heard the sentence standing, and asked a single question: "Do I command the forge-master, or does he command me?" He received the direct truth—"You command the expedition, and he commands the forge"—and accepted it without a word of protest.

The sixth candidate

Renna Coil of the beastmen, High Knight, who could track a four-day-old scent over dry shale, asked only whether there were forests on the far side of the sea.

The seventh candidate

Aldis Ferren, Master Knight, who had managed field supply lines for six years and understood logistics better than any scholar, spent the remainder of the evening systematically filling the team’s spatial rings with grain, salt, oil, and spare boots.

The eigth candidate

Sevik Thorne, Grand Knight, built like a stone buttress, who was assigned to break, carry, and hold, listened to the sentence, nodded once, and said, "Aye."

The Fourth Thin Point — Eleven Days Later

They initiated the crossing at the fourth thin point, situated on an isolated stretch of rocky coast.

The anchor formation took three days to lay. It was cut into basalt slabs by nine master mages working together from an ancient schematic retrieved from the central vault, checked twice by Elenwe Sarath.

Then arrived the soulsilver from the central vault inside a reinforced iron box carried by four armed guards each ready to lay down his life should something happen.

Two hundred and sixty-one ounces. The archive officer weighed out one hundred and sixty ounces on balanced scales before witnesses, logged the precise figure in the permanent ledger, and presented the parchment for Venn’s signature.

Then they melted it.

Three hundred years of Supreme Archmages’ left-behind essence, gathered grain by grain across generations, was poured into a crucible. It emerged as a glowing silver conduit thread that the mages drew along the channels of the basalt circle, rising up in a shimmering mantle that lined the invisible portal frame.

Pib Skarrow watched the molten silver flow with her jaw set tight.

"That is a terrifying amount of dead wizard," she muttered.

"It is," Elenwe agreed quietly.

"Does the passage work better if I refrain from thinking about it?"

"It functions identically regardless of your thoughts."

Venn walked down to the wave-washed stone. He offered no speech.

He shook eight hands in turn. He spoke the binding sentence to each of them one final time, as the record demanded.

Then he stepped clear of the array.

"Take positions," the archive officer called out.

Soon all of the chosen eight stepped into the circle Elenwe had charted: the archmage at the apex to read the spell, then the dwarf and goblin in the center where the silver mantle was thickest, and the armored knights forming the outer ring.

"Rings," Aldis Ferren called out, moving down the line. "Check your spatial bands one final time."

Eight rings glinted in the gray daylight.

"Rations for twelve months."

"Secured," Vale confirmed.

"Tools, forge kit, spare fittings."

"In the ring," Vashek said.

"Water for forty-eight hours, in case the anchor room is dry."

"Packed, Aldis."

"Then we have what we need" Aldis said

The nine mages struck the ignition.

Soon the array surged in ascending sequence humming faster and faster. The molten silver in the basalt channels came alive as the spatial stress hit it—standing erect in shimmering vertical veils.

Soon the spatial pressure crashed down on the basalt array. The ocean surf behind them seemed to go silent as reality stretched thin. Elenwe Sarath thrust both hands into the silver mantle, spoke a single ancient syllabe, and the far end of the rift ripped open.

It revealed an interior chamber—high, dust-choked stone vaults, lit by a single shaft of gray sunlight from a far ceiling vent.

This was caelrith Anchor. Silent and completely empty.

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