Published at 24th of February 2024 10:32 am

Chapter 35

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The first thing I wanted to study was the wand I’d taken from Iskara. It wasn’t going to be much use to me personally, but it would be an excellent tool to help Father along if I could adapt it to work with him. That assumed I was able to get it working for him without breaking it. Mana crystals were far, far superior to storage crystals in terms of maximum size and efficiency, but they did require an attunement that limited their use to the mage who’d bonded with one. Sometimes it just wasn’t possible to recycle a mana crystal, especially one that was so small.

And all of Iskara’s had been very, very small. She’d made up for quality with an abundance of quantity, which had its own drawbacks. Foremost among them was access speed. It would be prohibitively difficult to draw from all six mana crystals at once, seven if her wand counted, which meant she needed to pull from them sequentially. That would slow her down a great deal, especially with that draw stone amulet she’d been wearing.

I still wasn’t quite sure why she’d come out with that as her defense. She hadn’t known she’d be facing a mage, and it wouldn’t do much good in hiding her mana from any of the predatory monsters in the wastelands. Nobody would walk around with such a thing hanging off their neck for no reason though; they were decidedly uncomfortable even to those who had dormant mana cores.

I also hadn’t retrieved whatever mana tracking device she’d used to find us. Given the state of her body at the base of the cliff, I had good reason to suspect that it had been damaged in the fall and would likely be useless to me. Even if it hadn’t been, I didn’t have an immediate use for it anyway. It wasn’t like they were that hard to build if I ever changed my mind.

The wand itself was a little thing, finger width and appearing to be nothing more than a neatly trimmed stick. It had been hollowed out and a tiny cylindrical mana crystal slotted inside. That had grown hair-thin connections that burrowed into the wood and spread through the fibers to form the enchantment that helped increase the mage’s control of any spells cast through it.

Severing the attunement to a dead woman would be a delicate task, but I thought I could probably manage it without doing any damage to the wand if I had plenty of time to work and wasn’t stingy with my own mana. That having been said, I wasn’t sure I should. The mana crystal wasn’t that big and the enchantments weren’t that complex. I could probably make a better wand from nothing for about the same amount of mana. If I’d had access to my old workshop, I could have done it for a fraction of the cost.

The bracelet of mana crystals was the same issue. First, the stones were so small that they could barely hold any mana. For some reason, whoever had crafted it had used actual gemstones, which anybody who’d made it past the apprentice stage would know was a terrible idea. It wasn’t that gemstones were worse than any regular old rock. If anything, they held more mana. But physical size mattered and it was a lot easier to find a big rock than a big diamond or ruby. The gems barely had any glow at all in them despite being fully charged. Besides, jewelry made for tempting targets for thieves. There was a reason I’d chosen a rock that weighed fifty or sixty pounds as the base object to transmute into my own personal mana crystal.

It was too bad there was no ambient mana here. It would have been nice to build an obelisk to power some big experiments. But without any way to power it, it would be nothing but a big, fancy, dead rock. I had some vague notions of building a bank of mana crystals instead, but in truth, I would probably just leave the area in a few years. The lack of mana was too big of a handicap to justify staying here forever.

“What are you doing?” Senica asked, startling me out of my examination.

“Looking at this,” I said, holding up the bracelet of garnets.

“That’s pretty,” she said. “Where did you get it?”

“From that lady who was here a bit ago. She tried to attack us, so I took it from her. Would you like it?”

Senica’s eyes went wide. “I can have it? Are you sure?”

“All yours,” I told her as I held it out.

She took it from my hands and peered at it more closely, then threw her arms around me in a hug. “Thanks! I’m going to wear it every day.”

“It’ll look good on you,” I said.

If we’d been anywhere else, I wouldn’t have given it to her. It was too valuable, even if I didn’t factor in the mana crystal aspect of the gemstones. But there was no one out here, and by the time Senica returned to the village, I planned on having dispatched Noctra and informed everyone about what he’d been up to.

I did not expect that conversation to go over well. The villagers had been taken in by a long con. Fifteen years of believing what Noctra told them was not going to be overcome with a single speech, and most of the evidence I could provide would go completely over their heads. It wasn’t like I could prove that Noctra had subjugated the village idiot. He’d always been slow. Nobody but me could measure out how much mana he’d taken from them, and everyone already believed they had a barrier protecting them despite clear evidence to the contrary.

Maybe, weeks and months after the fact when they still had no monsters come sniffing around the village despite Noctra being gone, they might accept that there had never been a barrier in the first place, that their isolation and lack of mana was what had kept them safe. Though without the draw stone harvest, they would start to fill those cores again. That might just mean better harvests as they had more mana to pour into their work. Only time would tell.

Regardless of how the village reacted to it, I was still planning on killing Noctra. Even if I ignored what he’d done to Father, I wasn’t about to excuse the torture he’d put Nermet through. That made me something of a hypocrite, but I could live with that. I’d paid for my own sins many times over already, and I didn’t care if Noctra didn’t get the opportunity to make reparations, not when he was so dangerous to me on a personal level right now.

“What are you two up to?” Mother asked as she walked over to where I was seated.

“Look what Gravvy just gave me,” Senica said, holding the bracelet up for everyone to see.

“Oh, that’s very pretty,” Mother said. “Let me help you put that on.”

Senica was distracted by the bracelet and missed the look Mother gave me, one part shock and one part disgust. Apparently, she had some hangups about looting the dead. I supposed that wasn’t a surprise, all things considered. Plenty of people new to violence had that reaction, especially those who’d never had to fight to stay alive. If she was lucky, this whole experience would be the first and last time she ever dealt with something like that. It wasn’t like I was planning on bringing any of them along when I went after Iskara’s partner.

This was probably going to do some long-term damage to my relationship with my parents. I could try to do some damage control, but I couldn’t picture that being anything more than cheap lies and justifications. At the end of the day, I was perfectly willing to kill to solve problems when the people causing those problems were evil. That was something my parents would either have to accept, or we would quickly grow apart.

Even if they rejected me and pushed me away, they were still better parents than I’d had the first time around, though that bar was incredibly low. Just knowing my father’s name was enough to put him ahead of whoever had paid my mother for ten minutes on her sweat-stained bed back when I was Keiran. The fact that my new mother did things like provide food for me had secured her place ahead of the competition. I hadn’t even been beaten by anyone yet, not even once.

It was… nice. Different. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Having any sort of affection for my new parents hadn’t been part of my original plan, but I’d found that I was enjoying having a family. I would just have to hope this new reaction to me was brought on by the shock of sudden violence coupled with the fact that I was physically three.

I wasn’t sure what I’d be willing to give up to keep them just yet. Would I need to change who I was to be accepted? If so, was I willing to do that? Compromise was a cornerstone to relationships, after all. Nobody got what they wanted all of the time, not if they wanted to have true, genuine friends. Down that route lay nothing but sycophants and toadies. That was fine for the man who didn’t want or need relationships with other people, but it could be an awfully lonely way to exist, especially for someone who was going to live for thousands of years.

It didn’t necessarily mean I needed to hold a relationship with these particular people, who, if I was being honest, were probably all going to be dead in the next century anyway, but I would like to look back on my birth family with some fondness a thousand years down the road.

After she got Senica’s bracelet attached, a feat that required it to be double wrapped around her wrist, Mother said, “Can you go find your father for me, sweetie?” and shooed my sister off. With just the two of us, not counting Nermet, who was just lurking in the corner, doing nothing but breathing, she turned to me with a serious look on her face.

“I’m assuming you want to talk,” I said.

“Gravin, I… You just…” Mother trailed off. “You understand why this would be hard for us, right? You get that what you did is terrifying.”

“I won’t apologize for defending us. She was already gathering the mana to attack.”

“I know. Your father felt her doing it, too. He didn’t feel yours, however. That’s something he wants to ask you about later.”

I waved off the question. “Just a matter of speed and practice. There’s no trick there.”

“Yes, well, you can talk to him about that later. I just… you scared me. This kind of stuff, it doesn’t happen here. It’s not supposed to. Evil mages and their sinister plots are fairy tales. People don’t go around killing each other. We can’t. We’d never survive if we did stuff like that.”

She wasn’t necessarily wrong, but she was ignoring a few facts there, namely that Noctra had been the aggressor in this fight. If he’d left Father alone instead of trying to exploit him, we’d all be sitting at home right now. Though if I was being fair, I would have come into conflict with the village’s governor anyway over his exploitation of mana.

“I guess what I’m trying to say is…” Mother trailed off while she gathered her thoughts.

It didn’t take a genius to predict where this was going. They couldn’t condone my actions. I was disruptive to the community. If they tolerated my presence, society would begin to break down. I’d heard that speech before, a long time ago.

“Doing something like that, it’s…”

Here it came.

“Just, your sister isn’t like you. She’s still a child. You need to make an effort to protect her from being exposed to this kind of stuff. That’s important.” Mother gave me a hug and added, “Go find your father when you’re done here.”

Oh. I wasn’t expecting that.

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