Published at 24th of February 2024 10:31 am

Chapter 10

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“No,” I said.

“No?” Father repeated.

“I don’t want to.”

“You don’t want to what?”

“I don’t want to give all my mana away,” I said. “That’s not fair.”

I had yet to see any proof this barrier the village was supposedly powering even existed. It was night. The stars were out. Moons hung in the sky. Where was the barrier? It was supposed to be activated at night, but I didn’t sense anything. I had lived inside of and personally powered the barrier surrounding the Night Vale for literal centuries, and while I wasn’t expecting much from the village of Alkerist, I could tell if I was inside a barrier or not.

This village had no barrier to keep it safe from monsters, not during the day and not at night. At best, it might come on for a few hours in the very dead of night when I was always asleep, but I doubted it. I’d counted the villagers, calculated the average amount of mana each one gave, and done the math on how long a day’s tithing could power a barrier large enough to protect just the village.

With the amount of lost mana using draw stones as a medium cost them, even the most bare-bones ward scheme that did nothing but send up an alert if something crossed it could not run on just the mana the villagers were giving up for more than an hour a day. A true barrier that prevented monsters from crossing it, sized large enough to include the fields and arbor, would run for a few minutes.

There were draw stones up in the arbor that were used to pull in mana from the trees there. I hadn’t been able to include them in my calculations because I’d never been allowed near those trees, but a hundred square miles of forest wouldn’t be enough to power the barrier full time. We didn’t even have a fraction of that size.

The barrier was a lie and I wasn’t going to give my mana away in service to that delusion.

“Gravin, everyone contributes mana, however much we can. It’s how we survive. I’m sorry that you’ll have to give more than anyone else, but that’s your responsibility as a blessed mage. Do you think Lord Noctra wants to drop whatever he’s doing and come running whenever there’s a problem?”

Maybe true, but I wasn’t going to live in a manor house bossing people around, and besides, I had my suspicions about him. The mana he was collecting was real, even if the barrier wasn’t. Assuming the draw stones were middling quality, the entire village was giving the governor something like three to four times as much mana as he could make on his own every day, plus whatever the arbor was producing. I could think of plenty of things that I would do with that kind of mana, but I suspected most of them were beyond Noctra’s skills.

So what was he doing then? More importantly, how did it impact me?

Whatever he was up to, Noctra was lying to the villagers about it. That made it much more likely that he’d try to find a way to use me instead of help me, even if it was just taking more mana from me than anyone else. There was no way I was going to allow that. It would place me under too much scrutiny to allow me to hold anything back for my own projects, and I was not interested in spending time with the one person in this village who could still seriously threaten me and just so happened to have a secret agenda.

My problem was that I couldn’t make a reasonable argument as a three-year-old. That just left magic. I had close to a full core of mana, which meant at best one basic spell. If I was going to forcefully change Father’s mind, it would have to be an enchantment. A curse to erase his memory of this conversation wasn’t going to work, even if it was feasible. He’d had too much time to think about it and collected too much anecdotal evidence. Without the time or the mana to be precise about which memories to erase, I’d have to wipe out two entire days of memories. That would definitely cause problems once he realized.

That wasn’t even accounting for the fact that I didn’t have the mana to power the enchantment and Father didn’t have the mana to keep it anchored. As a long-term solution, it fell flat. As a short-term solution, I’d have to pour everything I had into making a new storage crystal tonight, then use all of the mana I regenerated in my sleep plus everything I could get back to just barely have enough mana to make the enchantment.

Once again, I cursed the lack of ambient mana in this region. It was truly unnatural and if I didn’t know better, I’d think someone put me here deliberately. So many of my plans had been derailed due to lack of resources.

Memory wiping wasn’t a viable option, but perhaps I could pull off something less delicate. If I didn’t make Father forget what he’d learned, but instead nudged him to reach a different conclusion about what needed to be done, that would be both easier and cheaper. It would also be riskier, since he’d still know and I couldn’t predict every bit of outside stimulus that might affect his decisions after I cast the spell on him. I could make him agree that it was best to keep this quiet right here and now, but Mother could easily undo that magic in a single conversation unless I got to her too. Then I’d need to go to work on the other farmers Father worked with, our neighbor Malra, and, at some point, Senica.

It was an extremely short-term solution that bought me a day or two at most. I needed months to get to stage two. Once I finished putting a mana lattice into my core, then I could afford to take my time while I waited for my body to finish growing so that I could commence stage three. And even then, I didn’t want to do it under someone else’s thumb. I didn’t need their training, and I certainly wasn’t giving up my time and mana to advance their ambitions over my own.

“I promise it’ll all make sense when you’re older,” Father said. He must have taken my silence as a lack of comprehension. “Trust me, this is all for the best. You’ve been given a rare gift, and it’s only reasonable to put it to good use. Although… I’m not really sure how it happened. I’ve never heard of a blessing without the ceremony taking place first.”

“What ceremony?” I asked.

“How about I tell you all about how someone normally receives this blessing on the way back home?” he offered. “I’ll even let you ride on my shoulders again.”

I needed to stall for some more time so I could think of a solution. If I let Father take us home, then he’d immediately tell Mother. Maybe I’d get lucky and Senica would be asleep, but even then, that still doubled the amount of damage control I needed to do.

“I want to stay here,” I told him.

He laughed and said, “Alright, just for a little bit longer. Come here and sit with me.”

We sat down on the edge of the crater. My legs swung freely and his heels rested in the dirt below us. “Normally, the only way for someone to be blessed to become a mage is through a week-long ceremony. Everyone rests from their work, we gather together and celebrate. Each evening we pray to the spirits for guidance. No one leaves the temple, Gravin. I don’t mind admitting that things can get a bit ripe with so many people gathered together since there’s never enough room for everyone to sleep and bathe in peace, but that’s part of the ceremony.

“Sometimes, usually on either the sixth day, or the seventh, a spirit will choose one person and bless them with the power to become a mage. Their bodies will generate mana much faster than normal for the rest of their lives. Where people like your mother and I barely have enough mana to keep the strength in our limbs at the end of a long day, a true mage has mana to spare. That’s what you’ll be like from now on.” Father paused. “I guess you won’t need so many naps anymore.”

It was an effort to control my expression. That whole ceremony was unnecessary. The only part that mattered was that they spent most of a week filling their cores so that the excess would bleed out as ambient mana. Then they just crammed everyone together and hoped someone had a natural ignition from sitting in the mana cloud for about two days. I’d be willing to bet money that it didn’t work nine times out of ten. I wondered how much of that mana drained away completely, useless and wasted.

Depending on the number of people involved, I was also willing to bet I could direct the ambient mana to ignite three or four cores each time, assuming I’d had a few weeks to teach them what they needed to do first. That was an idea, I supposed. If dozens of new ignited cores showed up all at the same time, it would pull a lot of attention away from me.

That was interesting, but not necessarily helpful right now. It might be a long-term plan to keep a significant portion of Noctra’s attention elsewhere, or it might backfire and make him start really digging. The ideal solution was still to contain the fact that I’d ignited my core right now before Father started telling people.

“We’ve never done that,” I said, stalling for more time.

“No,” Father agreed. “It’s not something that happens very often. We’ve done the ceremony twice in my life. The first time was when Lord Emeto was blessed. He was governor before Lord Noctra. The second, the spirits did not answer our prayers.” He reached down to ruffle my hair. “Or maybe they did, just a few years too late for anyone to notice.”

I’d been mentally reviewing what spells I could cast right now. Other than various enchantments to modify his memories or behaviors, all of which had the same general drawbacks, the only other solution I had was to physically attack him. Killing him would certainly shut him up, but I wasn’t willing to go that far.

Patricide to keep my secrets safe was a level of inhumane I wouldn’t have stooped to as Keiran, and I wouldn’t do it now as Gravin. Though to be fair, I had never known my father the last time around. There was every possibility he’d fallen to my magic during my wild youth, and I wouldn’t know it. But that wasn’t the same thing.

What it came down to was that there were plenty of good reasons not to tell anybody about my core. Unfortunately, the only way I was going to convince Father was if I admitted that I was actually an accomplished archmage in a toddler’s body and somehow got him to believe me. Otherwise my credentials were just too laughable for my opinions to be considered.

I loved my Father, but I didn’t know if I could trust him with this. Best case scenario, he believed me and I had him backing my efforts. Things would go a lot easier with him and Mother on my side. Worst case scenario, I told him and he decided I was some sort of monster or devil that had taken over his son. I would have to flee right here, right now, and survive on my own in this weak little body.

I could probably do it now that my core was ignited. I’d have to dedicate a majority of my mana to survival instead of progress, but as long as I made a clean escape and no one managed to track me down, it was viable.

It was a gamble. Either things got easier or they got immeasurably harder. No matter what I did, everything was going to change after tonight. If I did nothing, I’d find myself under greater scrutiny and with my mana taken from me. If I told Father the truth, there was no telling how he’d react, and I didn’t have the mana to reset his memory and try again.

I made my decision.

***

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