Published at 24th of February 2024 10:31 am

Chapter 18

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Mages had a lot of tools, which could make it hard to know which one was best used to solve the problem at hand. There were a lot of factors to consider too, things like who and what the target is, whether it mattered if anyone knew they’d used magic, and whether the environment could bear the weight of their spells. Conjuring up fire might be an excellent way to kill a troll, but not if it happened to be in a library the caster cared about preserving.

In my case, my primary concern was cost. I knew how to make the two Garrison members forget they’d ever been here, how to make them wander off in a daze, how to make the ground open up and swallow them whole, and a hundred other things that would make my immediate problem go away. However, I suspected that short of assassinating the governor himself, those would be temporary solutions at best and could very well end up making things worse.

I needed information before I made a choice. For all we knew, this might not be anything bad. It sure didn’t seem likely, but the possibility remained. Maybe Father was just going to be told off for fighting and put on notice not to cause any further trouble. That was technically a possibility, however remote it might be.

“How you doing, Sellis? Back feeling better?” one of the Garrison members asked. Tsurai, I thought.

“It’s fine. Little sore for a while, but Karad’s a soft touch,” Father lied.

Nianta snorted. “Don’t let him hear you say that. He’ll whip you extra hard next time.” She paused, then added, “Not that there should be a next time.”

“As long as Cherok isn’t … himself… to my children, I won’t have to punch him in the face,” Father said.

“Tall order,” Tsurai told him. “Look, everyone knows Cherok’s an ass, and normally I’d say to just ignore him, but, well… Can’t say that I’d have done it differently if he was being like that towards my boy either.”

“Yeah, but you’d still beat me with a cane if the order came down to,” Father said.

“I would, but it wouldn’t be anything personal.”

“That’ll take the sting out of it then,” Father said dryly. “Probably wouldn’t even feel it at all.”

Things got awkward for a second there, but I didn’t have it in me to feel much sympathy in my heart for the two Garrison members. I’d seen firsthand the kinds of tragedies people committed when they were “just following orders.” The soldier’s battle cry, there. All it took was a single monster wearing a man’s skin to orchestrate atrocities that would make any demon cackle in glee.

Perhaps I was being unfair to those soldiers. I did not care. As a boy, I’d made arguments for soldiers who were just following orders. I’d believed that excuse. It was their job. They had to do it. Then I’d seen the aftermath of soldiers committing atrocities because someone told them to. Those excuses were small comfort to the broken men and women left behind. I knew that from personal experience.

I shook myself out of dark memories and refocused on the conversation in front of me. Next to me, Senica was watching with scared eyes. Mother was behind us both, silent and tense. We couldn’t see Father or the two Garrison members through the curtain that served as our door, but it was easy to imagine Father’s defiant posture in his words.

“Hah,” Tsurai said. “Ahem. Anyway, Lord Noctra wants to talk to you, so we’re here to escort you over to his manor.”

“Ah. About what, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“You think he’d tell us?” Nianta replied.

Father heaved a sigh. “No, no. Of course not. Alright, give me a minute.”

He came back in through the curtain and looked at us. “Hopefully this won’t take too long,” he told Mother. “I’m sure it’s nothing serious. I might not be back before you go to sleep.”

I scrambled to my feet and raced across the hut to Mother’s sewing kit. “Gravin? What are you doing?” Mother asked, surprise in her voice.

I ignored her as I snatched a button out of the kit. My mana was going to be stretched by this, but I was pretty sure I could make it work if I sacrificed a large chunk of the duration to cut down on cost. I debated on sacrificing other aspects, but decided it was better to have as much information as possible. Quickly, I wove a scry beacon spell into the button, one that would transmit both sight and sound back to me, then encased the enchantment in an aura of untraceability to ensure that Noctra wouldn’t notice it.

“Here,” I said, rushing back to Father and presenting him the button. “It’s for good luck, so don’t lose it.”

“Good luck, huh?” Father asked as he accepted the button from me and slipped it into his pocket. “Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of it. I might just need all the luck I can get tonight.”

While Mother gave me a shrewd look, she said nothing. Instead, she took my place and wrapped Father in a hug. “Be careful,” she said. “Give Lord Noctra whatever he wants and come home safely.”

“There are some things I can’t give up,” he told her, his voice soft. “You know that.”

Then they split apart so that Father could give Senica a hug. “I promise I’ll be back soon. There’s no need to worry,” he told her.

“Will you still tell me the story?” she asked.

Father laughed and said, “Sure. How could I not if you’re going to be so persistent about it? Besides, I did promise.”

Then he was out past the curtain and walking away, flanked on either side by a Garrison member. Mother watched him go from the doorway while Senica pushed a chair over to the window. I sat down on my pallet and started trying to recover my mana as quickly as possible. I was going to need it for this next spell. Scrying was quite expensive, after all.

The governor’s manor was about a mile away from the center of town, so I expected I’d have at best half an hour to recover mana. Hopefully Father would be kept waiting for a bit once he got there, because I was going to need at least twice that long.

***

Technically, it was nearing our bedtimes when the two Garrison members had shown up. Senica had been about to get her good night story from Father before the interruption, and though the excitement had kept her eyes open at the time, now that Father was gone and there was nothing to do but wait, she quickly fell asleep. Once she was tucked in and snoring softly, Mother looked over at me and said, “Are you ready to talk about it?”

“Why don’t we sit in the garden?” I offered. “It’ll be nice and cool.”

We relocated outside the hut and watched the sun dip behind the mountains beyond our village. After getting settled, I said, “To put it in layman’s terms, I enchanted the button so that I could look through it with magic.”

“To see and hear what your father is doing?” Mother asked.

“As long as he keeps it with him.”

“Are you watching now?”

I shook my head. “Not enough mana. In another half an hour, I’ll have enough to keep the spell going for about fifteen minutes. Then it’ll just be checking in and hoping I don’t miss anything important.”

“Tell me what you find out,” Mother said. She leaned back against the side of the hut and closed her eyes while I settled down on my incumbent mana crystal. I could have finished it first thing in the morning if not for this whole fiasco, but an empty mana crystal wouldn’t help here and information about what exactly was going on just might.

“I can share the scry with you if you’d like,” I offered her.

She cracked an eye open and peered at me. “You can? Wouldn’t it cost more mana?”

I shook my head. “More complicated, but not more expensive.”

Mother thought about that for a second before nodding. “I’d like to see, too.”

“As soon as I’m ready to start,” I promised.

Mana generation being the issue it was, I’d put some thought into the best ways to enhance it. My options were limited without ambient mana, but I could still manually replicate what a stage two core did naturally. It wouldn’t be nearly as effective, but with every minute being important, I couldn’t leave it on the table.

The difference between a dormant core and ignited one was that dormant cores only produced mana at the point where they joined the Astral Realm to the physical body. Since there was no physical manifestation of a mana core, that meant the point was singular, somewhat like an island that connected to the mainland through a single bridge. All mana had to pass through that bridge.

Once a core ignited, mana could pass from any point, and it did. With so much more space available, it generated far faster. In stage two, a mage constructed a permanent lattice inside their core. There were a lot of different patterns, some of which worked significantly better than others. Differing schools had spent centuries arguing over which lattice structure would provide the best results, and some clans had their own family lattices that were closely guarded secrets.

This was the point where my advancement was going to differ significantly from my previous life. I’d grown up impoverished and with no one to advise me. Igniting my core had been an accident, and when it had come time for me to advance to stage two, I’d been largely on my own. My original lattice had been decidedly subpar, and some choices couldn’t be taken back. Despite my best efforts to modify it as I grew stronger and wiser, there were limits to what I could do.

Now I had a blank slate, and I would construct the lattice I would have made if I’d known back then what I did now. My mana generation would be fifty times faster than a dormant core’s, more than twice as fast as it was now. At stage two, my core would go from empty to full in under three hours.

For now, I needed to agitate my core manually with a specific technique I’d developed when experimenting with lattice designs. It allowed me to generate a sort of temporary lattice that required a great deal of mana and concentration to maintain, though if done properly, it would cause my core to generate mana as if it were stage two already.

It would also put a great deal of stress on my core, since it didn’t actually have the lattice in place to reinforce it. Doing so for extended periods of time was an excellent way to cripple myself permanently, but for twenty minutes or so, I’d be fine.

I closed my eyes and concentrated on the pseudo-lattice. It formed slowly, each line painstakingly imagined in my core like a picture I was stenciling, just waiting for me to come back to fill in the real colors. My core reacted and mana started to flood into me.

It was a strain, and I immediately revised my time frame. Perhaps I hadn’t properly accounted for my relatively small core properly, but at the rate I was going, twenty minutes might be too long. I’d see where I was at with ten.

The mana poured in, swiftly at first, though a portion of that was immediately cycled into maintaining the lattice stencil. It was still almost twice as much mana as I could generate normally. By the time the ten-minute mark passed, I had enough to cast the scrying spell. With a pained groan, I let the stencil collapse. My poor, battered core almost seemed to throb, though of course such a thing wasn’t actually possible.

I moved from my mana crystal to sit next to Mother. “Hold my hand,” I said. “It’s time.”

Her fingers wrapped around mine, and I cast the spell that would scry upon my beacon.

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