Published at 24th of February 2024 10:32 am

Chapter 38

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“Raro aevinta temin,” Father said in time with the mana swirling through him.

“No. Not temin. Temun,” I corrected.

“Does it matter? You said the words were just for the tempo?”

“Not just for the tempo, and while you can get away with saying the wrong runes now, being slipshod isn’t going to help you in the future. Verbalizing runes has some leeway for novice spells; that’s why they’re novice spells to begin with. You can make mistakes and still get more or less the result you want, even if it costs more mana and time for an effect that isn’t as strong. But it’s better to learn it right from the start, especially since when you get to the point where you’re inscribing the runes onto physical objects, you can’t make even the slightest mistake there.”

The mana slipped away from Father’s aborted magic while I lectured him, and by the time my explanation had finished, there was no trace of a weight reduction spell to be found. I frowned at that and made a mental note to show Father some exercises aimed at increasing his ability to hold mana into a specific shape for longer periods of time. Sometimes it was important to have a spell completed and ready to be unleashed in an instant, like a crossbow pointed at a doorway, finger on the trigger, just waiting for someone to walk through.

“I need a break,” Father said as he flopped down onto the rock he’d claimed as his chair. The frown on my lips deepened, but I forced it away. It wasn’t fair to expect Father to be able to handle as much mana manipulation as any of my previous students. Even beginners who’d never done any spellwork normally had the advantage of living in an environment rich in ambient mana. Their bodies adapted to that and provided a stronger foundation when it came time to consciously use that mana.

Becoming a true mage in this desert would be a challenge, but it had its benefits to balance out the drawbacks. Without ambient mana in the background, it would be much easier to practice new spells, at least until Father’s internal mana ran out. At that point, he’d have to wait all that much longer for it to naturally regenerate.

Now that I thought about it, his mana core was getting dangerously low. We couldn’t afford to let it empty out completely, not with him needing to supply a constant stream of mana to Nermet in order to maintain the subjugation override. I needed to account for that both in terms of his total available mana and how quickly he would get worn down. Maintaining the link while practicing was somewhat like wearing weighted training clothes while lifting weights.

“I suppose we could rest for a few minutes,” I said.

“I was thinking an hour or two,” Father shot back.

“You’ll never get anywhere if that’s the limits of your discipline,” I told him, to which Father rolled his eyes.

“You’re worse than the overseers in the fields,” he said. “Half an hour?”

“I suppose, but then we’re back to practicing until it’s time to eat.”

“Deal,” he said as he leaned back and put his weight on his hands. “Spirits save me, I can’t believe I’m back out in the wastelands again.”

“You never did tell me what happened all those years ago.”

He sighed and said, “No, I suppose I didn’t. It’s a painful memory.”

“I don’t want to press you, but I got the impression that the barrier was real back then, that it actually protected you from monsters.”

“Oh, it was. Why do you think the entire village believes in it? The previous governor, Lord Emeto, maintained it by himself. When Noctra arrived, he claimed that it was broken, that he’d repaired it, but it would need much more mana to function now.”

That was a reasonable claim in my mind. If something had been broken and the repairs weren’t up to standard, mana leakage was entirely possible. It wasn’t necessarily a difficult fix, but given what I knew of Noctra’s skill level, I would be more surprised that he managed to get a broken ward stone functional at all than that his patch job had holes in it.

“I was… oh, twelve or so,” Father said. “My ego was as big as could be, all puffed up because Lord Emeto was teaching me rudimentary mana control. I was special. I was going to learn how to cast spells. I was going to be better than everyone else.” He paused and shook his head. “I was an idiot, even for my age.

“I thought that because I could sense mana in others, that it would be fine to go out exploring. If any monsters started coming at us, I’d know they were there. And I was young and strong. I could run for miles without stopping. So I went outside the barrier, and I convinced my two best friends to come with me. Your mother was one of them; the other was a boy named Teno.

“Things were fine the first time we did it, and the second, and the third. We kept going farther and farther away from the safety of the village, spirits bless me if I know why. It’s not like there’s much to see out here, right? You’ve seen one patch of barren, scorched earth, you’ve seen them all. I guess we all thought we’d find some buried treasure or something out here. But we never did.”

Father paused to collect his thoughts while I waited. It was hard for me to empathize with that mindset, probably because I’d never had a time as a child where I felt safe and invincible. I’d learned at an early age that I didn’t even need to go looking for trouble. In the city of my birth, all I needed to do was stand still long enough and trouble would find me, even in my own home. Nowhere was safe.

Of all the things I regretted in my past, burning down the mansions along Golden Row was not one of them. The only thing that would have made it better was if I could have locked those noble pricks inside while I did it. The way they ran that city earned them death a dozen times over.

“It was a snapmaw that found us. I don’t know if you know what those are?” Father shot me a quick glance, and when I shook my head, he continued. “Imagine a lizard as big as a man, brown and orange to help it blend in with the wastes, but able to run three times faster than a human infusing his body with mana. They’re ambush predators, hard to spot and quick to close their jaws around their prey, then drag it off to whatever rock they like hiding under to eat it.

“Snapmaws aren’t magical, not any more than the rest of us, at least. And their mana gets spent helping them hide. My oh-so-brilliant plan of just knowing when something was nearby by sensing its mana failed completely, and who lived and who died that day was decided by one simple factor: which of us was standing closest to the snapmaw’s hiding spot.

“Teno was probably dead before we even knew the snapmaw was there,” Father said, his voice heavy. “Just… snuffed out. Because I was stupid and careless, because I thought I knew better than those boring, stuffy adults. Your mother and I ran for the village. I don’t know if it was the fact that we were running that encouraged the snapmaw to chase us, or if it just didn’t think Teno was enough of a meal by himself, but either way…

“We ran screaming all the way back, and by the time we crossed the barrier, it was right on our heels. Lord Emeto knew, somehow. He was a mile away at home, probably enjoying his breakfast, but he knew. He reinforced the barrier just as the snapmaw crashed into it, caught the beast halfway. It got stuck there, and some of the farmers rushed it with shovels and hoes to drive it back. I don’t know what happened to the barrier. Honestly, you’d probably have a better idea than me, but that encounter broke it.

“The snapmaw must have decided it wasn’t worth the fight. It ran off, took Teno as its meal, and disappeared into the wastes. We never found the body,” Father said. “Cherok blamed us, rightfully so. It was my fault most of all. He’d hated me ever since, and I don’t blame him.

“Lord Emeto… I don’t know. He was an old man. They said his heart gave out trying to do whatever magic he did, and the barrier broke. In one morning, I got my best friend and my mentor killed. And then Noctra came a few years later, and told us he needed mana from everybody. He set up his draw stones, and the whole village hated me for that too, because it was my fault they had to do it.”

“You were a child,” I said quietly. “You made a mistake, but they’ve been hanging that over your head for fifteen years now.”

“I was old enough to know better. I was supposed to have a bright future ahead of me. If things had gone differently, I might have been the next governor once Lord Emeto felt I was ready. But that wasn’t good enough for me. I had to go see all the scrub grass and sand with my own eyes.”

I didn’t have any words to refute that. At least, there weren’t any that I hadn’t already said. He’d made a mistake, the kind that in my old life would have gotten someone ostracized and resulted in them packing up to move somewhere where no one knew their name. That was an impossibility here, where exile was just an extended death sentence. So he’d lived with it, with the daily reminder to the entire village that he’d cost them a measure of peace and security that they couldn’t get back, not ever.

I imagined that cold civility was probably about the warmest a conversation got for my father, at least among those who remembered the time before his mistake. In all fairness, the loss of the barrier was completely Emeto’s fault. It sounded to me like he’d overwhelmed the ward stone by trying to push too much mana through it in an attempt to strengthen the barrier. He should have known that what he was doing would have consequences.

I doubted the villagers saw it that way. There probably wasn’t a single person within a hundred miles of here who understood enough about magic to grasp how a ward stone even functioned. All they knew was that a child had gone beyond the barrier, which apparently wasn’t strong enough to keep out monsters in the first place, and brought trouble back with him.

I had my suspicions about the purpose of the barrier. It seemed to me that it was probably more to deflect casual interest away and hide mana usage that might draw in monsters than a hard wall that prevented anything but humans from crossing it. That would have required far too much mana to keep running in this environment.

Somewhere near the end of Father’s tale, Mother had heard what he was saying. As he fell silent, she moved in to wrap her arms around him and hold him tightly. There were no words between them, but something in that hug seemed to comfort him. Maybe it was their shared experience, or maybe it was just knowing there was one person in the world who loved him anyway.

An archmage had many talents, but in my case, comforting others wasn’t among them. I could only watch as Father took a minute to pull himself together, give Mother a quick kiss, and then turn back to me as if nothing had ever happened. “So there you have it,” he said. “That’s the story of how I broke the barrier, got a child killed, and became a pariah.”

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