As the sun set, exhaustion had come to urge him to bed, but Tercius had a way to combat that. The Energy that he harvested from Flu had a way to combat the symptoms and the cause and he had a lot of Energy to spare. His grandfather was also a recipient of a large Energy dose and by now Amber was not shy of borrowing Energy from him through their bond while his mother, who was currently limiting herself from any unnecessary Energy, slept with his smaller siblings in her room, the three of them settled to watch the night for interlopers.
No one had shown up during the day and his grandfather told him that that usually meant that they would try at night.
Tercius had almost boiled over when he realized that these people were letting his family know when they were coming. Like a cat that kept one paw on the tail of a helpless mouse, these people were saying that his family was theirs for the taking at any point they wanted.
That boil had cooled to a simmer and now he was just imagining the various ways he would entertain these nightly visitors. His uncle did provide a lot of verbal and non-verbal knowledge on the subject and although Tercius never thought that he would actually use it, he had still memorized some of it. Maybe even more than some. His uncle’s knowledge had been surprisingly systematic enough to tickle his inner sense of order and, as Mr. Sullivan used to say, you never know when you will need something so it’s better to collect all of it, always.
Nephew, the true mark of a good hunter is patience, his uncle had advised. Always conserve your resources and let the prey come to you.
As weird as it would sound, spellwork and mana skills were not his primary reading material when he went book hunting around the libraries back at the Academy. General information was. History was. Bestiaries. Architecture. Books about flora and fungi. Texts on drawing techniques. The language of mage music. Some mathematics. Mostly dead languages. Knowledge was knowledge. He didn’t have to know how to apply most of it, but he liked to read about it and have it at the back of his mind at all times. You never know what might come in handy. A lot of knowledge was free for everyone to peruse in the many libraries based on the Pyramid, although Tercius didn’t see many perusers of the gift that they had under their noses.
He had tackled a lot of different topics, but he had been a bit more reserved around geography and politics.
Early on he had realized that the mages had pretty advanced maps of most of the places that he knew of and since then he had feared finding complete maps of the whole planet.
Ever since he realized that he was in a different world, there had been a part of him that had wanted to be a second Christopher Columbus, someone who would explore the unknown lands and chart new maps. He couldn't very well do that and call them the unknown lands if they were known to him. It was a silly notion from a silly old man. Silly old man-child was probably a better term for his case. But that was one of the beauties of this new world. The unknown. The mysterious. Even the deadly. He had to admit that he was getting a small spoiler by reading about what serpents could liquefy his insides with a single bite, or what flower released a pollen that could make him go insane on the night when both moons were full, but those topics were just too interesting to pass by...
Hells, people of the Empire knew of four continents— counting Isgea, which Tercius would call an enormous archipelago— while the first geography book he had picked up in the Librarium spoke of six continents, among which Isgea wasn't counted at all.
And politics… His old parents had been politicians. It was… complicated and not something he liked to think about at all. Not when there were so many other pleasant things to think about.
Besides, from what he was able to observe, politics as he knew it didn't really exist. Most mages considered anything other than pursuit of your magical craft a waste of precious time and they were quick to point that out to everyone else. Apparently, the Laws were quite extensive and left few things up to interpretation, so what was there to discuss or even write about? It was a solved issue. You either follow the Laws or you break them and then depending on the severity of the crime be punished accordingly. As simple as that.
The prime example of mage apolitical stance was seen in regards to the political movement that Mistress Porfira was part of. All of the senior staff at the Academy thought of them as children throwing a tantrum over a sweet that they thought they were denied, to which senior mages would only shake their heads and hope that the children would just grow up.
Now that he knew who was at the top of the Pyramid and to what goal all senior mages aimed for, Tercius finally realized why most mages were so dismissive of politics. In their eyes, it was just a distraction from real goals.
As for the politics of the major power players of the world at large, most of what he found was written down as history, some of it centuries old history. Across the ages, few mages had been interested in the subject enough to write about it.
His Quick Learner [10] was a skill that used a lot of mana and he was honestly surprised that he had managed to get it so far up without any help from additional Energy. That more than anything showed how much he had read. The usual way that he used this skill was to read a book once, trying to grasp the key notes in it, then read the whole thing once more with the aid of the skill at critical parts, while taking copious notes of important things. All of these notes were then focused on with Visualization and Quick Learner.
The hope and the goal was to eventually create a mental library of sorts.
Ever since learning how skills grew he had dedicated a lot of thought to his future skills. An interface skill, a map and a minimap skill, a skill to drain Energy from others, a mental library skill, considering recent discoveries he even thought about a specialized skill to morph your regular Energy to the neutral variant, and many, many others. He knew that he was actually shooting himself in the foot by doing that, but so what? If he got the skill that he was most set on, the one that would be able to prune the developing skill crystals, then he could just prune every single crystal and start fresh.
Were skills like these possible? It was Tercius’s firm belief that anything was possible. If young children could get a were-skill, which could transform a body completely, then a skill like Interface— a skill whose functions he imagined as centered around enhancing skill explanations and tied to live mana and Energy measurement and representation, maybe even live diagnostics of the state of his body’s health, which was mostly a purely mental and visual construct that was heavy on diagnostics— seemed in the realm of possible.
If it proved hard to get then he would just throw Energy at it, to make it work.
Maybe I should do that anyway, Tercius contemplated as his blazing eyes swept a circle around the house. There was no one near his home, his mana sense said. He had done a test with the cloak of mana hiding earlier in the evening and his Mana Sight [35] was able to spot a mana outline of a person even with it, but the major surprise was not that. Tercius was able to spot some parts of the enchantment woven into the fabric. Around a third were shielded, but most were visible and Tercius had decided to use this opportunity to practice his Mana Sight.
Sitting in the darkness of the inner garden, Tercius focused his eyes on the cloak that was spread on the low grass. Ciron sat nearby and stared at the stars while small stones around his chair flowed on the ground like they were a liquid of some kind. Amber was content to lay down and place her head onto her front paws.
From time to time, he kept checking the environment around his home.
Mana Sight [35] is now Mana Sight [36]
Just the first hour of their wakeful guard yielded results, and from the way his grandfather mumbled in disbelief, the old man was likely experiencing the same emotions as Tercius did just a few months back. This latest Energy discovery was frightening.
"I can't believe my eyes," his grandfather said his first words of the evening. "Level sixty-nine. Sixty-nine," Ciron repeated, as he ran a hand over his mouth. While Tercius was away, Ciron had only gained a single skill level with Stone Shaping and that happened quite recently, during one of his nightly scare offs.
Tercius paid another visit to Flu to get more of the untainted Energy and ten minutes later, after he checked the immediate surroundings and found it clear, he walked to the old man and placed his hand on his shoulder, and simply pushed all of the Energy through his hand.
"Let's not stop there, old man. Seventy is just around the corner," Tercius said and returned to his work after he claimed the Energy leftovers for himself.
The enchantment on the cloak was a work of art, a tangled web of commands made with morphs that he had never seen and he was only talking about the parts that were visible to him. Tercius traced each curve and bend, each straight line and a sudden dot that appeared as he tried to read what the Runes said.
The first issue was that from all Runes he saw, none were completely uncovered to him. Parts were missing, and in Magik, if a single part of a Rune was missing, then even if you try to compare the Rune to pre-existing ones, you get something like this:
From the visible part, the Rune could be:
Hide.
Shroud.
Guide.
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Obfuscate.
Sear.
Conceal.
And many, many more. The issue was that without the complete Rune, you didn't have the complete key, and without the complete key, the translation would go down the drain. Hells, he was only able to tell that the Rune was at tier two by the inner complexity, and that could very well change if the hidden part of the key told it to change. Instead of a single Rune word, it could be a Rune sentence. At best, he could make an educated guess and interpret the Rune in his own way— which was contrary to the prime rule of Magik.
Across all tiers, all Runes had a single unmistakable meaning. There was no room for translational liberties.
Mana Sight [36] is now Mana Sight [37]
Three hours into the study, and he was sure that just five Runes were embedded on the inner surface of the cloak.
Mana Sight [37] is now Mana Sight [38]
Energy kept flowing well into the night, keeping Ciron, Amber, and him wide awake.
Tercius hummed in thought as he glanced at his grandfather. The starlit old man was now making small statues just by staring at the stone. They had not spoken a word for hours and Tercius just realized how much he had missed something like this. Back at the Academy, the only one who wasn’t constantly talking was Lomera, but she was always in the company of those who never let their tongues have a breath.
There had been days when he and Ciron had worked together without uttering a single word. Neiran, on the other hand, had spoken for all three constantly. The reason why the boy got along with them so much was that Neiran didn’t mind getting his replies in grunts. In fact, by the time Tercius left Nurium, Neiran had mastered grunt-speak.
Tercius took a deep breath of the cool night air and he relaxed.
He did a once over of the surrounding area and his just gained relaxed state evaporated like a sole water drop under the midday sun.
Three mana outlines were walking just near his outer wall. All three were men, judging by their body shape and size, and most importantly, all three had cloaks that partially hid them. He saw floating faces and feet with startling clarity but the rest of the body was ghost-like, shrouded by the work of some enchantment.
Tercius waited with narrowed eyes, observing the mana silhouettes as they neared the gate of his property.
And then they stopped just outside of the gate.
“Grandfather, our guests are here,” he whispered and gave Amber a command through their bond, even as he donned the cloak and lowered the hood. The night was dark and under the dark cloak with Stealth [3] Tercius seemed to blend into the surroundings.
As Ciron went to the front door, Tercius picked up the two bags that had been near him at all times and headed for the roof.
Stealth [3] is now Stealth [4]
I should have thought of doing that… Tercius thought with a sigh after he saw the alert. Ah, well. I’m sure that with the Energy in me, the skill will climb like crazy in no time at all.
Stealth [4] is now Stealth [5]
There you go, he thought just when he climbed the last set of stairs.
***
Caeso gave a long look at the house behind the metal gate. Meter and a half of solid stone walls encircled the property, along with another half a meter of bushes that were full of razor-sharp thorns. None of these were a real problem to him and his men, merely setbacks to overcome. The problem was something else. Someone else, to be precise. One would never guess who lived in the house before him, based on its plain and utterly unadorned outer look. At the pitiful size of the house, he could only snort in utter contempt.
When he had arrived in this town called Nurium, close to five months ago, along with five men under his command, he certainly hadn’t expected to find a wielder of an Expert level skill.
Who would expect someone with that kind of a skill to be huddled in a small stone cube in the hottest Stormfather-forgotten backwater of a place, when he could have a villa or even a mansion along with a large plot of land, full of servants who would do his bidding, in the center of the whole world merely by revealing his status?
Caeso couldn't understand why. It was idiotic.
The story of how Caeso came to be on his mission in Nurium was… complicated.
One of the many privately trained household guards of the illustrious il'Drusus family, Caeso was also a bastard son of his Lord Father, Orphus Vellium il'Drusus, who one of the movers and shakers of the Capital. While most of the Great Families didn't care much for who was a bastard and who was not, as long as they were directly tied to the Family, the il'Drusus Family had a very unique view of bastards. As sexual relations outside of marriage were strictly forbidden, the family rules stated, there should not be any bastards.
But rules were one thing and although the Great Family il’Drusus had a significantly lower number of illegitimate children than other Great Families, Caeso knew of a few other bastards among the Family guards. Just because a rule was there, doesn’t mean it was followed.
Caeso's prowess had singled him out from dozens of guardsmen and women, and his Lord Father had been forced to make Caeso his hands and feet on Sogean soil and sands— to get him out of direct view of the Family. Before that Caeso had honestly thought that he had a chance to get legitimized, as unlikely as that was to happen, mostly because his Lord Father had no sons with his wife, only two good-for-nothing daughters of whom he always complained to Caeso. His Lord Father had been a true Father to him from a young age, but alas that was only in private when the two of them had been alone. If his Lord Father had legitimized Caeso, then he would lose his standing and support amongst the Family, and if he lost that, then his spot in the Council of Elders would vanish in an instant.
And among the two, even Caeso would choose the second. Probably.
But his post in Spheros had turned out much better than he anticipated. For three cycles it had been a life of pleasure and leisure, mostly spent in the city itself and the immediate vicinity with good food and good company. There had been a few missions, but all of them had passed without a hitch. He and the men under him had done their jobs as was commanded and his Lord Father was always satisfied with Caeso’s work.
Then, over half a cycle ago, his Lord Father had sent a missive with a new mission. The mission was to covertly investigate the movements of one Lux Primus il’Drusus on Sogean soil for the past few cycles. The name itself had scared and awed Caeso many a time while growing up, and when he read the details of the missive, the reaction was not different.
The man in question was his uncle, his Lord Father and Lux Primus being second cousins.
The first part of the mission was to meet up with a woman who was trafficking information out of the city of Zuros. She had information about Lux and contrary to most information brokers, she was willing to sell that information. The sum that she wanted had left Caeso laughing for a day. Still, the woman had walked away with a fortune that he wouldn't be able to earn even if he worked for four decades for his Lord Father.
The information led Caeso and his men to Nurium and the town's Commander in Chief. At first, Caeso had suspected that Lux was having an affair, for the woman was both beautiful and sensual, but in his investigation, he had uncovered a few details that had stood out and led elsewhere. One, in particular, caught his eye. The woman had no relatives in town, her records stated, yet she had ordered the guards to keep special watch of a certain neighborhood and a certain family there.
Caeso had ordered an investigation on that family, collecting their names, their descriptions, and so on, thinking little of it. It was standard stuff, after all. From the completed report he had learned that three members were absent, but his men had managed to get their descriptions and names as well.
The information about the Commander along with all the rest was sent to his Lord Father through the contract-bound Messengers.
Just over three weeks after Caeso sent that missive, the reply of his Lord Father had made him speechless.
According to his Lord Father, based on the description Caeso sent and the name, there was a possibility that the man called Septimus was one Nox Septimus il'Drusus, younger brother of Lux Primus and another uncle of Caeso's, a man who was just half a decade Caeso's senior. According to the missive, Nox Septimus had been dishonorably discharged from the Army just over a decade and a half ago and had been presumed dead for a little less than that.
Caeso’s next order had been to ascertain the veracity of the man’s identity and if he was indeed Nox Septimus, then Caeso and his men were to take the man and bring him to his Lord Father, back in Capital, with all haste. Any children of Nox were to be brought along.
Alas, the smooth mission went downwards from there. He was unable to confirm that Septimus was who his Lord Father thought he was, simply because the man was not seen at his home for a month or two. So Caeso thought to get some information directly from the source. During Caeso's first contact with the family, he had pretended that he knew who Septimus was and who his brother was but the pregnant commoner woman was tougher than she looked. His idiotic subordinate, Buur— whose hit first, talk later way of life had worked wonders on many a mission and who was increasingly irritated to have to spend so much time in a backwater place like Nurium— had snapped and tried to handle the pregnant woman to give a straight answer.
Caeso had heard of the fear that comes when death is near many times, but it was in that moment that, for the first time in his twenty-five cycles of age, that he had experienced it.
Buried up to his neck in solid stone, as he struggled to get out and wondered how it happened, the stone floor itself tried to eat them alive under the commands of the giant man that had sat in complete silence during the whole conversation.
He had thought that his end was nigh, but the Stormfather had other plans. The commoner woman fought for their lives and in doing so she verbally confirmed their suspicions. Septimus was indeed an il’Drusus.
With broken bones in both arms, he and his men had left the house under the escort of the summoned Peacekeepers. Their status had them out of the cells within two days and then they mended while the new information was sent to his Lord Father. It was the first time that Caeso had hesitated in doing a mission. That beautiful commoner woman had spared their lives and he…
But ultimately, work was work. Orders were orders.
When Caeso and his men mended and when new instruction came, almost a month later, the presence of an Expert had changed things. His Lord Father now wanted both the old Expert, his daughter, Septimus, and their children.
Caeso had been given clearance to offer absurd sums of money, treasures, and lands, but when he even tried broaching the subject, the old Expert was adamant in his refusal. Nothing Caeso offered had swayed him. Nothing.
Then the idiot struck again.
Behind Caeso’s back, Buur convinced Felios that if they took the little girl and if they held her hostage, the old man and the rest of the family would follow whatever they told them.
For a moment after Caeso learned of the failure of that attempt, just before rage had struck him, he had been left numb by the fact that someone like Buur could think that far. Buur was Caeso’s senior of over a decade, and the burly man’s skills were powerful, but he had been tempted to order his men to kill the idiot for ruining all his work.
He had been sure that something would finally sway the old man, but after what happened…
Ever since the arrest, the Head of the Peacekeepers and the town's Commander had already been subtly suggesting Caeso to leave town and after that incident, additional voices had gained strength. But he had allies to keep those voices low. The nobles of Nurium were more than willing to shelter Caeso and his men if it meant that a favor from Lord Orphus Vellium il'Drusus, or any of the many nobles below him, awaited at the end. Many of them even offered manpower for his endeavor.
He had refused them.
Now, with his hands tied to many more direct and fast options, Caeso's only recourse was to wear down this family and make them realize that they had only one way left. To bow their heads and accept his offer. These commoners should understand that.
“Evening, my good man,” Caeso hailed the old Expert, just as he saw the giant walking towards the other side of the gate.
The elder’s face was covered in darkness, but Caeso saw a frown there that told him exactly what the man thought of them. Positioned in his usual spot, clear of all grass by now, the old man crossed his arms across his sizable chest and waited for them to leave. Small rocks moved below the old man’s feet and under the hood that covered his head, Caeso swallowed in complete silence.
By the Stormfather, Caeso thought with some despair.
This exact thing had happened every single time. Caeso would talk and talk and the old man just stood there completely silent, like nothing was wrong in the world. Only when they tried to enter did he move to use his skill against them. The first time that they did try, they learned just how much stone there was in the ground. Caeso shuddered at the memory.
Looking at the statue of a man, over and over again, doubt crept in and Caeso began to wonder if his plan would ever work.
There were a few methods that he could try, but all of them were risky for both Caeso and the old Expert. Caeso had to get him to the Capital in a single piece and alive, otherwise…
He has to cave in eventually. He has to.
“Have you considered what we talked about?” he asked and only heard bugs creeping in the night.
Shit, he thought even as he gave a large smile. “My Lord is patient and I’m sure that you’ll come around eventually to his offer. After all, you know what’s best for you and your family.”