"Timeless Magicians" by Sergei Lukyanenko, summary Automatic translate

"Timeless Magicians" (2019) is a novel by Sergey Lukyanenko set in the world of a dark monarchy, where magic operates at the expense of the sorcerer’s own lifespan: each spell literally ages the magician, costing them minutes, hours, and sometimes even years. This is why magicians appear much older than their years, and the most valuable resource in this world is not gold or power, but time.

Lab hack

Fifteen-year-old mage Grisar is on night duty: on assignment from a certain Mr. Sekt, he infiltrates the mansion of Doctor Irbran, a natural philosopher who creates hybrid creatures. To evade the guards, Grisar literally walks on the ceiling: an expensive but reliable solution. Inside the mansion, he is met by a terrifying guard — a scaly creature with a child’s body and animal claws, a hybrid of man and lizard. Having defeated it with a rune of heaviness, Grisar reaches the laboratory and cracks the safe, cutting down the wall with a blade rune.

From the safe, he takes the required two-year-old journal, grabs the current one as well, and in the far corner, discovers a strange silver disk on a chain — engraved with the letter "A" on the front and an extremely complex, unfamiliar rune on the back. As the fiery web of the magical trap begins to tighten, Grisar is forced to use the rune of spatial transference — the most costly of all he knows. This leap costs him an entire year of his life.

The Magicians’ Club and the Price of Luck

Grisar materializes on the back of a cast-iron horse near the monument to the Dark Lord in Great Love Square, escapes a guard patrol with a fright, and, checking himself in the mirror of a jewelry store window, bitterly realizes: he no longer looks eighteen, but nineteen. His real age is only fifteen.

He returns to the Aks Tanri mage club, the fourth of the Six Heroes. Unlike the more fashionable clubs, Tanri’s club attracts mages who truly know how to save time. Here, Grisar meets Mira, a mage from the north, a blue-eyed beauty who looks about twenty, though she’s the same age as Grisar.

Soon, Sekt appears — an angular, lanky man in an impeccable suit from the Golden Row. He accepts the ordered magazine and pays the agreed-upon sum, refusing to add anything for the year of his life spent on the transfer rune: a contract is a contract, there was no force majeure. Grisar relents, but bitterly regrets his gullibility.

After their conversation, Grisar was dealt another blow. Regulator Emir — a non-magical official who oversees mages — casually informs him that Doctor Irbran’s mansion had been robbed without a license that night. Grisar reaches into his pocket and discovers that the patent issued by Sekt was a fake. Looking up at the portrait above the club door, he is speechless: Aks Tanri is wearing the very same amulet with the letter "A" on his chest. Grisar has stolen a relic of one of the Six Heroes.

Sect and the history of hybrids

A mishap with the amulet forces the young mages to accept Sekt’s invitation to dinner. At the natural philosopher’s home, they are served by young Venj, a smug but talented servant. Over a modest table, Sekt recounts his life story: nine years ago, the Dark Lord gathered natural philosophers with the goal of reviving the lost art of creating hybrids — creatures with the intelligence of a human, the obedience of a dog, and the strength of a bear. Sekt focused on lizardfolk as the most promising breeding ground for human interbreeding.

Three years ago, in his absence, the laboratory was ransacked in broad daylight: all the experimental results, even the lizardmen cages, disappeared, and the guards heard and saw nothing. Sekt is convinced that Irbran was behind it, and the journal obtained by Grisar indirectly confirms this: Irbran changed the subject of his experiments at the very same time Sekt was robbed. This cannot be proven, but there is almost no doubt.

Rune Tree

The path leads to the northern fortress city of Rune Tree. Here reigns Mirarek Ridor, one of the Six Heroes of the Great War, a powerful old sorceress, the only one whose strength and knowledge rivals that of the Dark Lord himself. In the mountains, Grisar meets a girl named Sennera, and her words are etched in his memory: "Make a mistake twice, standing in the center and walking along the edge, lest you make a mistake a third time." The meaning of this riddle will be revealed later.

Meanwhile, Mira burns through time faster than usual — her gray hair betrays the heavy losses. Irbran leads an army of the changed to the walls of the Rune Tree: hundreds of hybrid creatures, some of whom were once children. The assault begins. Among the monsters are a little bear with a child’s head on a bear’s shoulders, flying creatures, and snake-like beings.

In the midst of the battle, Grisar loses his left arm. Nevertheless, he continues to fight: the Aksa Tanri rune, cast from the center, fells four mages with a single blow, even those far superior to him. Cast from the periphery, the same rune devastates the altered, who are nearly immune to conventional magic.

Grisar catches up with Mirarek. She offers to "make peace," but he doesn’t believe her and burns another two years, killing the great sorceress. Only then does he realize: by killing Mirarek, he deprived the Rune Tree of its most powerful protector. In the spring, the Dark Lord’s troops will arrive and meet no resistance.

Third reading of the rune

Grisar thinks about Sennera’s words: he’s already read the rune from the center and from the edge — it’s time to read it in a third way, one no one had ever thought of. The nine component runes, in an unconventional order — Gebo, Algiz, Mannaz, Vunjo, inverted Vunjo, Naudiz, inverted Algiz, inverted Mannaz, Thurs — shouldn’t waste time, but rather reclaim it.

He leaves Mira a note: "Not from the center. Not from the edge. I love you." and goes to the club’s lobby, to the onyx rune slab where mages have poured seconds and minutes of their lives for years. Grisar begins to read the rune, pouring all the remaining time into it. The runes light up one after another, but halfway through, he feels a bottom — his own time is running out.

At that moment, Mira hugs him from behind: she’d read the note and come herself. Her time flowed into the rune, following his. Together, they reach the last rune — Tursa. The world fills with blinding light: an ocean of time opens before them, boundless and endless. They both greedily absorb it, but Grisar stops just in time — too much is dangerous.

In the morning, a waiter in the club’s restaurant looks in surprise at two patrons who, the night before, looked old and today like they were in their thirties. Mira explains that for an important meeting, she had to create the illusion of youth. They eat breakfast in silence, occasionally exchanging glances and smiling.