Published at 24th of February 2024 10:31 am

Chapter 9

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I rode on Father’s shoulders as he walked toward the fields. His hands held my legs just below the knees and I rested my arms on his head to help me keep my balance. The village was never a crowded place to begin with, but it was different at night. Everything was quiet, and the only light came from the stars and moons overhead and the candles hidden behind curtains in the windows of our neighbors.

“Do you know where we’re going?” Father asked.

“Fields,” I said. It was obvious, given that we were practically at the edge of the village and there was nothing left to the west except for the fields. There was an arbor north of town in the mile-wide stretch between the huts and the foot of the mountain, but if we were going there, Father would have cut across the square instead of circling the outside.

“Where in the fields?” he asked.

I shrugged, not that he could see. I had a pretty good idea, but I was going to let this play out before I admitted to anything. Father had his suspicions, but there was no sense in confessing without hearing what I was being charged with first. There was no way he’d guessed the truth of it anyway.

After about ten minutes of walking, we reached a crater. It was ten feet wide and half as deep, and I couldn’t help but make a clinical analysis of Noctra’s powers. Given how diminished the reserves in his core had been when he returned and the amount of damage his fire blast had done, I placed the man firmly at the apprentice rank. I would have cast the same spell using a third of the mana.

Right now, with a full core, I couldn’t quite manage it. Give me another year, and it’d be within my grasp even if I did nothing at all to advance to stage three, where my core would grow in size relative to my body, not that I planned to sit around doing nothing. I wasn’t building a giant mana crystal just because I was bored. An external reservoir wasn’t ideal for efficiency, but it would do wonders to widen my breadth of options.

“This wasn’t here last week,” Father said. “It’s collateral damage from the magic Lord Noctra wielded on our behalf, to save us from a monster known for its ability to seek out mana. The barrier wardens are especially careful of them, because they’re tough and vicious. It’s been almost a decade since the last time one showed up.”

I was not an expert mana hunter, but I’d picked up more than my fair share of random trivia over the many centuries of my previous life. I had never heard of such a creature. Perhaps if I’d seen it before it had been vaporized, I might have identified it, but a monster that sniffed out ambient mana didn’t sound familiar. It was surprising that any monsters survived in an environment like this anyway. One of their defining characteristics was that they needed mana to live, and this part of the world wasn’t exactly conducive to fulfilling that need. They must all be extremely weak creatures.

“One of the things the Barrier Wardens do is chart the angle of the approach. It helps us figure out what the sniffer was after, gives us an idea of which draw stone is damaged. Except this time, it was heading right for the southwest corner of the village, where we live. The Collectors are annoyed because there are no draw stones over there, so they have no clue which one they need to find. They have to check all of them now.”

Father reached his hands up and lifted me off his shoulders. He set me down at the edge of the crater and looked down at me. “Do you think they’re going to find a broken draw stone, Gravin?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Probably not. That mana sniffer was probably heading straight for me. Given a few hours to generate some mana, I could have protected myself, but I hadn’t had that time. Technically, I owed Lord Noctra my life. He hadn’t killed the mana sniffer for me, but I’d benefited from it nonetheless.

“When I was a boy, I learned about mana from a woman named Larovi. She was a very good teacher,” Father said.

“Better than Cherok?” I asked.

“Hah. Probably. Couldn’t be much worse,” he mumbled under his breath. I didn’t think I was supposed to hear that last part. “Anyway, Larovi thought I was talented, said I could learn to use my mana all sorts of ways. If life had been different, if I’d gotten lucky, I could have been a mage like Lord Noctra.”

I knew where this was going.

“I’m not a mage,” Father said. “But I still have a feel for mana, and yours has felt weird since yesterday. Senica didn’t lie, did she?”

And there it was.

I didn’t have a good answer here. I could lie and play dumb, but I didn’t think it was going to work as well for me this time. Before, it was Senica’s word against mine and there was no evidence to point towards me. Now, those squash outside the window had mana burn and that monster had been coming straight for us. Father could feel mana too, though I suspected probably only at a very short range. There were some exercises I could teach him to work on increasing that, even with a dormant core.

No, that would just make things worse for me. I didn’t know how the village would react to finding out about me, but there was every possibility it would end badly for me. If I had the time to fill my mana core, I could take on anyone from the village individually, with the exception of the governor himself. I suppose if he had any other mages living with him, they could also be problematic, but I hadn’t heard anyone ever mention another person who could use magic there.

The problem there was my staying power. Sure, I’d win against four or five adults. I might even beat ten. Sooner or later my core would empty out, and then I’d be a toddler and completely at their mercy. I needed my core to reach stage two before I even considered revealing myself to anyone, which meant I needed to convince my father that he was mistaken somehow.

There were some plausible lies that involved magical theory which adequately explained why a mana-hunting monster would be heading in this direction, but no three-year-old would know them. Trying to explain away how Father was wrong would do nothing but cement the fact that I wasn’t a normal child in his mind.

What I needed was a partial truth. The issue at hand was that I had ignited my core. No, the issue was that there’d been a cloud of ambient mana, one that Senica had sensed by virtue of being at the outer edge of it and this mana sniffer had been drawn to because that was apparently just what they did. I wondered how long its sensory range was, considering the mana had only been in the air for a few minutes before I used it up. It must have been close to the village to begin with; the alarm had been rung within half an hour of my ritual.

How did I explain the ambient mana to Father? It had to come from somewhere. More importantly, did I need to explain it? Gravin wouldn’t know. It was just there. I was supposed to be napping anyway. There was no need to justify the cloud. I just had to admit that it had existed. Most likely, Father wouldn’t understand what it meant anyway.

“No,” I said. “There was mana, but she lied about me taking it!”

I felt a twinge of guilt about throwing Senica under the carriage like that, but I’d make it up to her later. Right now I needed to focus on Father’s reaction. I had no idea what the village did when something like this happened.

Father studied me under the light of the night sky, going so far as to squat down to look me in the eye. “No, she didn’t.”

“She did,” I insisted.

“Then why does your mana feel so much stronger, Gravin? Something happened to you yesterday. It’s fine. You’re not in trouble, but I need you to tell me the truth. How am I supposed to look out for you if I don’t know what happened?”

There was a big part of me that wanted to fess up. I wouldn’t tell him everything, of course, but I could tell him that I’d ignited my core. I’d have to do it using small, less technical terms, but I could describe it well enough that he’d probably get it. This was my father, after all. He loved me, and I loved him. The part of me that was Gravin did, at least.

The older, wiser part of me squashed that thought ruthlessly. There was nothing Father could do to help me except stay out of my way, and he didn’t need to know about my plans in order to do that. If anything, Mother was my biggest issue right now. She made it very difficult to get any work done with all the constant interruptions.

“Gravin, I can feel your mana. You’ve made more in your core while we’ve been talking than I do all day,” Father said.

Oh, right. That. That was inconvenient. I supposed I did need his cooperation, if only to look the other way. There was no need to tell him I’d reincarnated and awakened my previous life’s memories, but I supposed there was no getting around the fact that I was generating twenty times as much mana as I was supposed to now.

“There was a bunch of it around me when I woke up,” I said. “I didn’t do it! It was just there.”

Father nodded, like that was perfectly normal. Maybe in this desert, it was. “It filled you up, right here,” he said, placing a finger just below my sternum. Mana cores weren’t physical objects. If I cut a person open, I wasn’t going to find it nestled between two other organs. But they were connected to us, to people and animals and plants, to rocks and rivers and the air itself. It worked a bit differently for things that weren’t alive, but they had mana too. At least, they did in places that weren’t here.

The spot Father indicated was right above where my core bridged the Astral Realm and made contact with my physical body. It was as close to a physical location as a human could get. Spells used to attack cores targeted that area specifically, though it took a master of invocation and transmutation to assault a mana core like that. People who could damage another person’s mana core were thankfully rare.

“Yes,” I said quietly.

“It changed you,” Father said. “Were you scared?”

Scared that the ritual was going to fail, maybe. I nodded silently and let him assume what he wanted.

Father pulled me into a hug and said, “It’s okay. There’s nothing to be scared of. You’ve been blessed by the spirits.”

Just how backwards were these people that they thought an ignited mana core was a blessing from the spirits, ancestral, elemental, or otherwise? More importantly, what kind of expectations would my fictional “blessing” come with? They’d better not think I was going to be the village’s personal mana battery for the rest of my life. I had other things to do with my time.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means you’re going to be a mage, son. It is a great gift, but also a great responsibility.”

“Okay,” I agreed.

“I suppose the Collectors will be relieved to know they don’t need to check all the draw stones,” Father said with a chuckle. Then his voice turned severe. “Now, I understand that you were scared, but you shouldn’t have lied about this.”

“Sorry,” I said. It didn’t sound sincere, even to me.

He scowled at me. “Come on, let’s go home. You’re going to have a busy day tomorrow, so we’d best get you to bed.”

“What?” I asked.

“Lord Noctra’s going to want to meet you, of course. He’ll have to examine you to see how powerful your blessing is. You’re still pretty young, probably the youngest mage ever, but that means you’ve got to learn the basics really soon. Plenty of time for that, and I suppose you’ll have to wait until you're older to start learning real magic.”

Oh, great. A core ignition wasn’t unknown here. And Father was now busy planning out the rest of my life for me. It wasn’t his fault, really. A normal three-year-old would have no clue what any of this meant or what to do. He was just trying to be a good parent.

“I guess we won’t have to worry about the Testing,” Father said. “Mages make mana much faster than us regular folk. You’ll be a tithing machine for the next few years.”

There it was. Mana battery time. Obviously, I was going to have to be proactive about stomping that idea out before it got out of control.

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