158. The Last Will (Patreon)

Teaching was, according to Mistress Kalina, the most commonly used inspiration for spells of mind magic.

The skill's variations had been a study case for millennia now, most of them revolving around the temporary bond that was formed between the student and the teacher by the skill. A mind Magos was reliant on those kinds of temporary or permanent bonds to affect someone else, his Mentor revealed. These kinds of bonds provide easy access to the mind of another…

When he learned that, a kind of unpleasant feeling took root in him. It settled in his throat and belly, like a hard stone, appearing when he thought that Familiar Bond had likely formed as a result of him Teaching Amber tricks and behaviors regularly— every day, for over eight months, he had played with Amber a little bit at a time and each time he had tried to teach her something.

How was he different from that woman who had tried to wipe his mind of that encounter at the Courthouse of Chameos? In his favor, he didn’t try to wipe anyone’s memory but rather teach people and animals new things, but…

Leaving his conflicted feelings on the skill’s involvement aside, Tercius unclenched his jaw, cleared his mind, and then he took to Visualization.

Mistress Kalina told him that simple was best here— a simple shape with some color to it was recommended, something that was easily imagined and yet had strong symbolic value to Tercius. With the shape clear in mind’s eye, he had to think of the skill to which he wanted to bind it.

He imagined a grand polygonal prism, a tall pylon with a deep color that reminded him of one of those old school boards that had been written on with chalk. In fact, he made a point to imagine a piece of white chalk hovering and circling the crystal pillar.

Slowly, he started thinking of Teaching. He imagined the Energy inside the Core responding to his mental alterations and, as the skill's current Core melted away into a malleable goop, the resources of the Core came to be reformed in his new image. He imagined the shape of the crystal, the smooth flat sides it would have, edges and the color, the piece of chalk that would hover around it… he thought of each detail, going through a mental list over and over.

This was just like what he had done seven or eight years ago, back when he had broken "boundaries of change" as normal folk did. He had even termed these imaginary shapes as "effigies" but he had only once used them for the purpose that the rest of the world did.

He felt no change occur, but that was the norm.

Honestly, after Mistress Kalina’s revelation about the nature of Teaching, Tercius had had trouble choosing the effigy for it. He had struggled with it before he fell asleep and then he dreamt of a tail-like spinal cord going upwards, curving itself slightly to form a letter of a writing system that he had long left behind. At the top, that spinal cord flowered outwards, forming ridges of gray and white matter, finally settling down into the familiar form of a brain. Visible arcs of neon blue electricity started jumping around, blue sparks flaring, appearing, and disappearing without any damage done to the brain itself. There was, perhaps, even a glass tank in his dream, one filled with a liquid of some kind. Yes… he remembered it now, there were bubbles rising around the brain…

That dream had almost ended up being the effigy, but with the number of skills he had gathered Tercius had made it a new rule that having some kind of uniformity across the skills was necessary and he had chosen crystals to be that unifying element.

Crystal was one of his affinities, after all, and all new skills that grew inside his Anima were also crystalline in appearance.

Tercius already knew how the Core of Quick Learner looked, but the dream of the previous night made him strongly consider adding a little alteration. He imagined the crystal pylon slowly changing color to a mix of white and gray, with arcs and sparks of neon blue jumping between different spots on the irregular crystal surface. Here, though, when he pushed for the change he felt some resistance. Something pushed back, but after a fraction of a moment the feeling gave way. He repeated the process a couple of times, going over the details one at a time, and the resistance didn’t happen again.

Finally, Tercius shook his head and Meditation closed around him, cutting him off from the world and giving him a minute of quiet preparation for the next part. Before he let the skill fade away, he thought that the dark void of the skill would have served as an excellent staging ground for this kind of venture, if only he had a way to monitor his pain from there.

Tercius opened his eyes, releasing a breath he held for a while. Green treetops were below them now, as Mistress Kalina speeded towards the mountains.

Gently, he closed his eyes. A crystal pylon of gray and white appeared in his mind, zipping snakes of electricity swimming around. He focused on that pylon, on the Energy and Mana inside, on the functions that the skill had, and then he tugged on it all, intent on sending all that he took from Quick Learning to Teaching. A snake of blue and gray and white left Quick Learning and headed directly towards the deep emerald pylon of Teaching, the gray fog of his Anima unable to block Energy from finding its mark.

Nothing pushed back at first, but then as he repeated his intent the pressure came in, ballooning outwards and making him feel as if he had overeaten. Again he focused and repeated his wishes, imagining himself as a blacksmith who kept hammering on a glowing piece of heated metal until the work was done. The pressure climbed steadily and his insides started telling him that enough was enough, that he ought to stop eating now, lest he burst and release all that he had ingested so far. He waited for the pressure to fall down, and only then he continued. The pressure climbed again, only it seemed to do so faster this time. The blue, gray, and white snake went onwards through the thick fog, slithering towards Teaching—

His left hand clenched, assaulted by a thousand needles from a thousand directions all at once. Immediately, he abandoned his part in the transfer and took a few deep breaths through his mouth. The pain hadn’t been that bad, but the suddenness of it… it was like a switch had gone off.

“Slow and steady, Tercius, slow and steady,” his Mentor said.

“The pain simply came out of nowhere…” he said. The pressure hadn’t even built up again…

His Mentor nodded. "It happens… That's why it's commonly done with two skills that are at the boundary of change because that's when they are most prone to accepting new things and letting go of old ones. Tell me, where did the pain manifest?"

Tercius raised the hand in question and she peered at it.

“No damage was done, as far as I can tell… you did well in letting go in time,” Mistress Kalina said and then held up her hand like a claw. “I think that it's time to use this,”

Tercius stared at the empty fingers and palm in question for a moment until it occurred to him to take a quick peek with Energy Sight. Even that little peek made him dizzy, but he saw it there, hovering like a miniature white sun between the tips of Mistress Kalina’s fingers, a large sphere of familiar Energy.

“That was a gift, Mistress,” he said sternly.

“Don’t be stubborn, Tercius. It’s a useful quality to have at times, but only to the point where it doesn't harm you,” she said, her green eyes narrowed with admonishment. “Besides, you gave it to me, and now it’s mine to choose what to do with. I chose this.”

Tercius shook his head. “No, no. I can’t take it.”

It was already getting a little uncomfortable for him to suspect her words and actions and this woman just kept on helping him and giving him excellent advice. Now, she even wanted to give back that which he had given her, a token that had made him a little more comfortable that the balance of exchange wasn’t too far tipped on her side. That would not do, that would not do at all.

“It might ruin the Seal,”

“It won’t if I release a small amount at a time, and you keep it far away from the Well. A hand or a foot as the entry point would do,”

“No, Mistress, I can’t. I will just try until I succeed this way. Besides, I have other avenues that I might try…”

Without waiting for an answer, Tercius immediately closed his eyes and his surroundings faded as Meditation took him away for a minute of rest before he continued.

*** ***** ***

They traveled for an hour more at high speeds, heading north-north-east through the mountains, following the upwards slope of the relief. Even when they arrived at their destination Tercius was still struggling with his skill, so Mistress Kalina left him on a raised ledge on a cliffside of a large mountain. A sharp fall off the cliff was all that divided him from a veritable sea of green below him, a forested valley enveloped on all sides by cliffs and rocks. Above him and around was only stone.

He made himself comfortable on the warming stone, protected by a barrier that both hid from all senses and shielded him physically should anything with wings wander close accidentally and disturb him.

His Mentor jumped and dived down the cliffside and he saw her fly away, intent on finding him the best of the best, a beast that checked a couple of boxes that Tercius needed checked while at the same time it had the skills necessary to run and jump like the wind if only to survive the predators of these mountains.

For his part, Tercius was persistent.

Time went by, the pressure inside him waning and waxing like the tides, accompanied with an occasional stabbing of pain as if to surprise him. The randomly placed stabs appeared all over his body, but he was always ready to let it all go at the first poke of the pins. Many times he wished to use Meditation to help him, only to think otherwise. Being stubborn was one thing, damaging his channels another.

He pulled again and again and the closer he came to completion the more Quick Learning pushed back against him.

Mistress Kalina returned with a dark gray mountain ram in tow, the beast significantly bigger than a horse so much so that Tercius wondered how he would mount it without help from certain skills. A saddle of some kind would be needed…

When she first broached the subject of a mount, Mistress Kalina mentioned getting him an adult tigerfox or a lionbear. Tercius declined the options as politely as he could. While for Mistress Kalina both animals were a little more than a nuisance, for the rest of the Sogea the beasts were the cream of the crop of wild predators. Entire villages were known to vanish where a single of these infamous beasts passed through…

Mistress Kalina lacked a little bit of perspective. How would anyone with two watermelon seeds in their head believe that a kid had tamed one such bloodthirsty being and on top of that that someone allowed a kid to keep such a beast for himself?

The implications of having such a beast as a mount would easily paint him as at least someone found in the Empire’s lower nobility, and just judging based on how his semi-integrated grandparents thought of that class of people, he could only imagine what those who had only known war with the Empire might feel like and think like. Being seen as an outsider and as a citizen of the Empire would be hard enough, but being labeled as a noble would definitely cut the story off abruptly. None of the mountain tribes would ever allow him near, let alone let him speak a word. Arrows and spears would be his greeting.

With a giant mountain ram, on the other hand… Well, he had seen and heard of people with a strange beast of burden, here and there.

Horses and bovines were prevalent in the rest of the Empire, especially in Zogea’s vast grasslands, but in Sogea things were a little bit different. Boats of all kinds were the main transport vehicle from south to north of the continent and most of the population chose to sail Hippotion over the alternatives, and alternatives did exist. Septimus had spoken often that the desert dwellers used huge land birds that walked on two long skinny legs and were able to carry a large man effortlessly through the shifting sands. Tercius had read in Perdinar’s book collection that some mountain folk of Izmittor kept some kind of a beast that looked like a giant mongoose for transport and as a guard that easily dealt away with giant snakes. The tribes that inhabited the lands to the west of Nurium and south of the desert were known to use all kinds of weird wild animals…

A mountain ram would fit right in with the mountain people, he felt.

The wild beast itself acted the role of a living statue, with spells of paralysis or sleep likely keeping him as still as a rock, perhaps even both at the same time.

Mistress Kalina checked on Tercius and seeing that he had yet to succeed, she offered him the Energy again, but again Tercius refused. He would do it soon, he knew. He just had to persevere. He knew that time was of the essence here and that accepting further help would make things go faster and smoother, but… he didn’t want to owe anything to anyone, not even to Mistress Kalina, his Mentor, just in case he failed and died in the process. That was, he knew, a possibility.

Tercius shook his head a little. He wasn’t that afraid of dying now, knowing what he knew, but he would still like for his accounts to be debt-free.

Besides, with the timetable that Mistress Kalina calculated to make it appear as if he had traversed the entire mountain chain with the help of a fast beast, he had time to finish this and get himself acquainted with the beast and learn to ride. Perhaps even a couple of other things that would better prepare him for what was ahead…

While he tried to get Teaching over its first barrier— or first boundary of change, which he had to agree was a better name— Mistress Kalina gave him space and silence, moving away from him to cast a multitude of cleaning spells at the ram's filthy and smelly rock-colored fur. Things, both living and dead, fell out of the previously stuck together hairs and the ground below the magnificent beast became littered with mud, branches, leaves, bugs and parasites, hairs, and more, all of it falling out as if escaping and running away from the beast. The beast had never been cleaner, the dark gray hairs of its body now glossy and uniform, seemingly combed and cut to the same length. Mistress Kalina moved around the statue-still beast like a stylist, adjusting the appearance with a spell here and another there, all the while reading something from a small book. The great curling horns were cleansed as well, a healthy earthy yellow and a little bit of white showing through, even making the keratin shine like some strange crown.

Where before the beast had looked like a powerful guardian statue, what with its stone gray color, wild look, and immense size, now the only word he could think of to describe the beast was noble.

But Mistress Kalina was not done even at that point.

With the beast asleep from the spell, the mouth opened and a few rotting teeth flew out and tinged against the stone below the beast's mouth. Again she consulted the book in her hands and with a wave of her hand a single leg was raised backward from the knee, overgrown pieces of hooves falling off. One by one, she visited each leg—

Tercius found the ram’s step-by-step transformation more than distracting and a little bit disturbing, so he moved a while away, so that both his Mentor and the ram were out of view and earshot.

Taking the beast in this way unsettled him deeply and seeing it being… remodeled like a little girl's toy only made things worse. He didn't want to separate this beast from the environment it grew up in, nor did he want to involve it in his problems. It could get hurt and die and his insides knotted themselves as a vile sensation grew in him for the actions he approved of, but he knew that he needed its help. It was one of the rare herbivores capable of traveling up and down the rocky mountainous terrains that awaited him in Izmittar with ease and it was capable of achieving great speeds at flat ground, all the while it would be capable of carrying him, some more traveling gear and even two more people if need be. That the beast was a herbivore guaranteed that it would have a way to feed itself easily and that its first instinct wouldn't be to attack someone when hungry. He was going to a populated place, after all.

It wouldn’t do for a person to go missing due to a hungry beast…

The sun reached its zenith and Tercius hammered at Quick Learning to let go of its accumulated resources. The pressure in him grew and fell, the pain appearing occasionally, but he was always ready to let go in an instant. When he remembered how easy this was with two barrier-bound skills… It was no wonder why people waited for two skills. Doing it this way was not pleasant at all…

Tercius sighed as he considered using the heavy hitter from his arsenal. Perhaps if he got Mistress Kalina to watch over him?

He stood up and his legs tingled as his muscles tightened with hours of stagnation. Walking over to his Mentor proved, but a single thought later and he was hovering over to her. Spring of Crystal Thoughts was useful that way. Too bad the cost got prohibitively expensive the larger the weight and distance from the caster… That was why telekinesis was almost exclusively used for shields and other defensive purposes by all Magi who still weren’t near-endless Wells of Mana.

“Mentor, can I have a moment of your time?”

“Of course,” she said as she left the ram alone and walked towards him. “I was wondering when you will cease letting your stubbornness get the better of you…”

Tercius shook his head when he saw her raise an empty hand upwards. “No, Mistress, I am still stubborn about that. I just want to try something. I have a skill that I think will help me immensely but the problem is that I won’t feel the pain or the pressure and now I was wondering something. How fast can you put me to sleep if I start damaging my channels?”

Mistress Kalina's red mouth pressed into a thin line, her bronze nostrils flared and dark brows gloomily coming together. He knew that look by now. She was troubled, or at least she appeared so. Was it by choice, that troubled face? That was something he had wondered about often, but less and less now that he spent more time with her.

"Foolishness," she said. "Utter foolishness on your part, Tercius. You would take risks when an easy way exists?"

A breath hid itself in his lungs and refused to leave. “Mistress, please, I won’t take the Energy back. I gave it to you…” he sighed and shook his head. He shouldn’t be saying this, but… “I only planned to tell you this just before we parted at the border, but…” he cleared his throat, “now might be a good time. The reason I gave you that is because I’ve been considering something. If my Theory of Mana Metamorphosis serves me right– I went over the bloody book nine times from cover to cover in detail, so something should have stuck– and then atop that, I draw a couple of parallels between Mana and Energy– and you assured me that certain parallels do exist– then I can tentatively conclude that if you have that type of Energy to serve you as a guideline then you can perhaps learn to make that kind of Energy someday."

Mistress Kalina’s breath sped up a little at his words.

Tercius’ shoulders slowly rose and then fell. “Well, then. I can’t guarantee that you will get more of it from me, Mistress. With that much Energy, at least you might have a way to solve the problems you intended to train me for. Well, you might have a little bit more than that, but at the very least with that, you can have someone else take my place. Anyone else. Someone whom you can choose from the start.”

Something about saying it all released his shoulders of a pressure he didn’t know he had.

All these months that he had lived in fear of being discovered, he had somehow somewhere forgotten one basic principle of things. A thing generally tends to become less valuable as more people produce it. The Magi wanted him because he had a font of a special kind of Energy… perhaps if they all learned to make their own, then they might consider him… obsolete. Perhaps then they might not bother with him so much. He had been foolish not to see something so simple earlier, but then again even if he had he would have surely weighed the possibility of success and eventually found it lacking.

Some people out there would surely think like him, and they might just come to the conclusion that him giving up something so valuable was only a ploy to hide underneath something even more valuable… Which would kinda be true. He almost chuckled at that.

“I see…” Mistress Kalina said and then closed her mouth with an audible click, breathing deeply through her nose. “You gave that option more thought than I did and…”

“Out of purely selfish reasons, I assure you. Four reasons, to be precise. Maybe calling them requests would be better…” he said.

It took her a while but she nodded for him to go ahead.

“If I don’t return— and let’s face it, Mistress, it is a possibility— I don’t want anyone else to learn of me in any way, shape, or form. If you choose to reveal the Energy at some point then you must say that you discovered that type of it, you and no one else. Let me fade into obscurity completely and utterly.”

“It’s not proper that I take your discovery—”

“Mistress, I don’t care much about whether it’s proper or not. I don’t want people to go poking around my family and disturbing them on my account, now or ever. I am not to be associated with it in any way. You should also know that I never shared with them anything else but the fact that I have that Energy and that I can share it with them. At the time I thought it would be prudent for them not to know any details…”

"Well, that's barely a request. It's something I shouldn't do, not something to do…" she cleared her throat, "and I can keep quiet since that is your wish,"

“Thank you. Then, if I fail to extract my father and grandmother, please try to find a discreet way of getting him out at some later point,” he said, then smiled a little. “I’m sure that grandmother would agree with me on this,” he added, not knowing why he did it.

“We can try that now, Tercius,” his Mentor said hopefully, getting a little closer to him. “We can try and hire some mortal mercenaries and they can—”

He backed away a few steps. “They might get my father, but they won’t have a chance of getting my grandmother. And I can’t leave her in that—” he swallowed a lump that gathered itself in his throat. “I can’t leave her to suffer a year or two of that kind of pain. Two years of that pain, Mistress. You might remember it vaguely, but I know what it’s like… and if it was for me that way… I can only imagine what it is for her…

“Perdinar told me of cases where it can take close to three years for the Well to form. Assuming that she survives that long. Her heart might fail midway and I’ve read that some people are known to just… give up after a while. They refuse to eat and drink and… It becomes too much to bear. Worse, some survive it all but come out of it with a twisted mind…” he hissed the words, thinking of what someone like that could look like.

“To use your options would be tantamount to letting her up to the chances! A woman that had taken care of me since before I could walk or even crawl! There’s no way I will allow—” his pitched voice broke. He broke out of the state he found himself in along with the voice and realized how fevered he had gotten.

His Mentor looked at him with new eyes.

Taking deep breaths rapidly and blinking his eyes to clear whatever it was that blurred his vision, Tercius corralled the boiling emotions back and got himself under a semblance of calmness. “My actions put her into that state and the very least I can try is to get her out of it as soon as possible. Do not speak to me of other options again.”

"I… I'm…" she said, stumbling with her words. Tercius recovered from his outburst quickly, panic rising in him. That was no way to address a senior Magos.

"Mistress, I'm sorry. That was… completely out of line of me," he said quickly with a stony voice as he looked down at the stone near his feet with a frown of self-disappointment on his face. He shouldn't have let himself boil over. "It won't happen again. Please, if we could return to my requests…"

“I was just… surprised. I knew that… well, I didn’t know…” his Mentor said, stumbling. Then she took a breath and collected herself visibly. “Look at me bumbling about. Go ahead, Tercius. I’m listening,”

"As it happened with Rona, some of the other adults in my household might start forming their Wells. Petra's is a certainty within the year, as you've told me, maybe even Septimus and Ciron soon after. They will all need regular and powerful sleeping potions and potions to keep the pain away. If you can somehow get it to them, without anyone finding out… There is one person in the Capital of the Empire also. Lux Primus il'Drusus, my father's eldest brother. I think that he might be currently forming his Well because of my actions. If you can…"

“I will make the potions personally and find ways to deliver them tracelessly to all of them,”

Tercius sighed. “Thank you. And… Well, the last one is a bit strange. If any of my siblings ever decide to join the Pyramid… please steer them towards a Mentor who will not be afraid to push them repeatedly to the breaking point and show them the true ways of the world, the good, the bad, the ugly,”

His Mentor shook her head. "I told you this already, Tercius. Both the Mentor and the Mathethes need to be willing for Mentorship to form properly. Otherwise, it is not binding before the Laws. I cannot influence someone to take on a Mathethes, nor would it be proper of me to mix into something so personal,"

"I am sure that you can arrange something similar then," he said. "Just open their eyes, if they come to you, and please don't choose any of them for the spot that I might soon vacate. Having my siblings take my place would defeat the purpose of my obscurity, after all,"

“Yes… I can see that. Have you got anything else to add?”

Tercius looked down, thinking hard. “No… I don’t think so…”

“I’ve never done this with a person so young and… never with a Mathethes of my own, but…” Slowly, Mistress Kalina bowed her head towards him. “The last Will of Tercius of Nurium, Neophytos of the Repository of the Magi and Mathethes of Kalina Zorya, heard and witnessed. On my path of magical craft, I swear that your Will shall be honored should you come to pass.”

Tercius went startled for a moment at the mention of a will, but then he nodded. It was something like that, after all. Another weight fell off his shoulders and suddenly he smiled.

"I don't intend to die, Mistress," he said to the pale-looking woman.

She had lost one Mathethes already and now he might be going the same way and she had little recourse to it but observe. Well, she might knock him out and drag him away against his will…

Changing the subject might clear a little bit of the gloom and prevent a possible kidnapping…

"How fast can that spell put me to sleep if channel damage starts, Mistress? And can you wake me up quickly afterward…"

*** ***** ***

Teaching [20] is now Teaching [21]

It was Meditation after all that ended up tipping the scale and doing so with the speed of light without any kind of damage done. It worked flawlessly and almost instantly and now he felt like a stubborn shit for spending an entire morning on something that he could have finished a lot earlier…

At the same time, maybe to comfort himself, he considered the possibility that the entire morning’s worth of trying had, to use a metaphor, loosened the jar’s lid. Perhaps over the hours of trying he had even gotten a bit stronger at doing it. Perhaps Meditation only finished off what had been nearly over.

In any case, Mistress Kalina did not need to put him to sleep. From her perspective, all that she noticed was that his brain had lit up with a swirl of mana colors for a mere moment, and then it all settled down quickly as if nothing had happened at all.

Quick Learning was gone for now, though, as was the fate of all sacrificial skills. No matter how much he focused on the skill, there was nothing there to answer his call. People thought that the skill disappeared entirely, but Tercius knew that that was not the full picture. From personal experience, he knew the skill's core should currently be a shriveled mess. It was like a fruit that had all of its insides drained with only the deflated skin remaining. To restore the skill, the normal way was to do what you did to get it.

He had another, more active way to restore the skill, but he would need some help and for that help, he had to wait.

“If it’s done,” his Mentor said, waving a hand at the sleeping ram, “then shall we see which one of you two is more stubborn?”

************************************

AN: I made a Discord server: https://discord.gg/A3qQAFCz 

Edit: here's a permanent like: https://discord.gg/TkFwdc6BQB

If that's something that might interest you, join in. I don't rightly know how other authors go about managing it, so I guess that you can expect some growing pains on my part. Advise me, if you see that something should be changed.

An to end this brief note, I have a reminder: the next chapter is in 10-11 days from today. See you all and stay well.