If anybody had suggested that they’d be living in a nice cottage next to a newly constructed high-rise building just six months before, that person would have been deemed insane. The world had just broken, burned in impossible flames, and everything was turned on its head, technology failing, people changing and dying, nobody would have deemed the construction of anything beyond simple shelters a possibility.
And yet, they were now living next to the impossible tower, going to literal magic school, as insane as that sounded and learning a great deal. For Jack, that last part, the school part, might just be the most insane part of it all, something straight out of a fantasy novel of some kind. But regardless of whether he deemed the situation to be impossible or at the very least incredibly implausible, it was the situation they had found themself in, holding up a deal made in fairly good faith.
He couldn’t even complain that the deal was unfair, their group received as much water as they could ever want and had the aforementioned nice cottage to live in, though they had to hunt for their food while getting some additional supplies from the nice teenager who was apparently able to magically multiply their supplies. He wasn’t quite certain how the mechanics of that worked, but the girl seemed to be able to plant a small garden one day, do some of that magical stuff around the area for a week and then bring in a full harvest, regardless of the weather. It was, just like the rest, utterly insane, so completely outside of his common sense and experience that he could only boggle at the possibilities and yet, he couldn’t deny what his eyes were telling him.
Well, he could, and he might be tempted to if it only happened once, but at some point, a man had to accept that the reality he had become accustomed to for some thirty-odd years had shifted and was no longer as he liked it to be. Otherwise, the last resort was to consume enough drugs to stop caring about the altered reality, which would be a death sentence because now, the reality was a lot more dangerous than it had been before.
Not that the area around Jademoon Tower, as they had dubbed the large stone edifice with the glowing eye on top, was particularly dangerous. The vast majority of predators had apparently learned to stay away which, amusingly, pushed the various prey animals into the area, making it easy to occasionally hunt one down. Refrigeration, provided by some magical contraption put together by the boss-lady, made it so the meat could be frozen and kept readily, without the need to smoke, salt or otherwise preserve it, just like it had been before the world went to shit. That might be what drove the mental incongruence he suffered from the hardest, the restoration of many modern conveniences created an oasis of the old normalcy but, at the same time, that oasis was only a Fata Morgana. A phantasm created by Morgana, quite literally, making it harder to retain the previous acceptance of the way things were, at least without getting a headache.
At the same time, the current situation was a little humiliating and it would be a lot worse if he was alone in it. A single woman, easily ten years his junior, had somehow managed to gain enough power to reshape the world while he, over the same span of time, had become a fairly accomplished fighter and hunter. The comparison was just humbling and humiliating, though his pride was assuaged a little when watching that same woman teach her students. It wasn’t just him who didn’t measure up, nobody could.
Plus, there were a few tales about that same woman, coming from those who held legacies, that Jade, back then known as Morgana, had quite literally reshaped, or destroyed, a world, gaining the power to do so within the span of two years. So who cared that she could reshape a small valley after a little over half a year, she had done worse before.
No, feeling humiliated by Jade Morgana’s accomplishments was just foolish and a path not to be travelled down. What stung a lot worse was that, somehow, Samantha, beautiful and smart Samantha, was receiving a lot of personal attention and lessons from Carnelia, Jade's older daughter. Attention Samantha was apparently reciprocating in ways Jack could only dream about, leaving a deep, annoying ache within his chest.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Intellectually, he knew there was nothing he could do, nothing he should do, but accept the situation and move on. His mind knew that and yet, his heart hadn’t received the message, his dreams turning torturing him with images as the green-eyed beast reared its ugly head. And the head was his, a situation making him feel even worse as days turned into weeks and finally months. There was nothing to act upon, nothing he could do about it but endure and try to get past these emotions. Well, he could just leave, and go back to Weir, Hammond and all the others, but that wouldn’t feel right. It would feel like cowardice, like he was running away because he was too weak.
Outside, in the snow, Daniel could only boggle at the sheer difference in scope and scale. He was well aware that his teacher was more powerful than he was, and likely would always be more powerful. A lot more powerful. But that didn’t change the fact that getting it shoved in his face, quite literally, wasn’t a humbling experience, watching how the woman he had come to regard with a mix of awe, fear and appreciation was wielding her magic, weaving it into an impossibly complex construct of fractal forms and streams, something he could barely sense, let alone comprehend. Creating anything like it would be a pipedream, something he couldn’t even think about, and yet, here he was, watching as she was trying something.
He, just like all the other students who were watching their teacher experiment in the gloomy twilight of the coming night, was staring in fascination and awe as snow flurried all around the floating form, rising from the ground and joining the magic in an impossible dance, the physical and the astral joining together. He could feel one infusing the other, or at least he thought he could, his head was rapidly starting to ache from the effort needed to witness the event to the best of his ability, simply because the experience was that inspiring.
It showed him what was possible, just as the tower he was standing in front of did, an edifice to the strength of Arcane Magic, while also acting as a gateway to commune with the Lady Hecate, the distant but inspiring presence venerated on the public floor of the tower. In a way, the Lady Hecate was to them, as the tower was to the rest of the world. A distant beacon, awe-inspiring but also a little frightening, showing them how small they were but, at the same time, what might be possible in the future. Or maybe he was imagining things, just as he might be imagining things within the flurry of Ice and Magic drawn together by Jade, there certainly seemed to be a lot of impossible twisting and turning going on. But whether that was simply happening in his mind or if her working had layers he couldn’t comprehend, well, that he couldn’t tell. Well, he knew that there’d be layers he couldn’t sense or understand but whether that was the source of these sensory artefacts, he couldn’t tell.
Maybe that ignorance was for the best. By now, he was a firm believer in the idea that there were things man wasn’t supposed to see, that a certain kind of mental strength and resilience was necessary, a strength he hadn’t gained just yet.
Otherwise, why would he feel the occasional echo of torment run through the uncaring stone of the tower as if a tortured soul was reaching out for him? The sensation had been especially common and prevalent at the beginning of his tutelage but now, a little over two months into his training, it had largely faded. Somehow, he was a little uncomfortable with the sensation and had never dared to ask his teacher about it, mainly because he feared that she might deny him further tutelage. And that was something he desperately wanted to avoid, the teaching he was getting here would give him the power to raise his own tower, take his own students. Eventually, he would be the teacher, though whether he would ever be able to float in the sky and twist snow and ice into the same sort of magical construct as Jade was doing now, he wasn’t sure.
Somehow, even just the idea of wrapping himself into this strange, serpentine form with large wings was sending a shiver of fear down his spine, as if he was treading where he really should not. No, that was for braver people to do, he would remain firmly grounded.