Always pass on what you have learned.

Pre-Fall sage

The sorceress didn’t look quite as old as her mother, but she wasn’t young either. And right now, she was slowly looking her all over, maybe trying to find something. Johanna stayed silent, fearing she was passing some kind of important evaluation.

“I was told you were young, but that’s understating it. You are Johanna Milton, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m Elena Worchester, not ‘maam’. I am not going to insist on awkward formalities and titles.”

“Yes, m… Mrs. Worchester.”

“That will work.”

Then the sorceress shook her head.

“Let’s take it as it goes. Come and sit,” she gestured toward a chair, before taking the other in the room and bringing it next to the first.

“You are a sorceress, versed in the element of fire, or so the Adjutant told me.”

“I am,” Johanna confirmed.

She hesitated, then asked.

“They told me you were…”

“A sorceress. Of the mists or fogs. You sometimes add ice to the title, but that does require fairly cold weather, not just my magic. Show me.”

Johanna startled, then raised her right hand, calling upon the flame. Worchester looked at the unnatural flame steadily burning over her palm, before a small smile came at her.

“There’s always the idea you could be a fraud, some kind of faker managing to swindle a gullible soldier. But no. That size of a flame… that’s what you’d expect of a real sorceress, not some adept faking it. Billy Jo would approve.”

“An adept?”

“How much do you know about magic, Milton?” Worchester asked back instead.

“Not much. What you hear about, stuff you see mentioned in the novels.”

“If you get your ideas about sorcerers from that, you’d better forget it immediately,” she laughed, before explaining.

“I’ve lived most of my life in the Montana, but I traveled a bit. Notably back when I found out I was a sorceress. And I learned a lot about magic. Adepts… basically, that’s the stage before a full-blown sorcerer. A kind of lesser sorcerer.”

“That exists?”

“Well, nobody is going to write a novel about a lesser adept. If you want a sorcerer in your story, it’s going to be a legendary archmage with half a dozen spells or more, even if they don’t really exist. Fire isn’t that common for some reason. There’s something like three people you can consider fire sorcerers in the entire territory of the Union. Four, now, once we account for you. But for every true sorcerer, there are maybe twenty or more lesser adepts. People who could call a small tiny flame in the hand, rather than the rather impressive one you have. Billy Jo Weirky has this one too, and his flame is about the size of yours, I’d say. But an adept, you’d have to check very closely for the flame.”

“Oh.”

“Yea. The other telltale is that you’re immune to fire. Or at least mostly. Sufficiently powerful fire may burn you, Milton, but not most flames. Am I correct?”

“Yea. Hot food or drink… I don’t really notice anymore. I can pick up burning logs with no trouble. I just need to be careful with my clothes, because they’re not fireproof. Unlike me.”

“Same difference for adepts. Any real fire will burn them. They can just tolerate hotter temperatures than anyone else. At least the fire ones.”

“There are others? You mentioned mist.”

“We – sorcerers, that is – tend to classify ourselves by what type of effect we have. Fire is rare, as I said. Water-associated abilities are more common. Fog and ice, and stuff like that. You get nature and growth too. The weirdest one is usually metal. People whose touch can rust even the best Ancient steel, that kind of thing.”

Elena stopped, then took a deep breath, and blew. Fog poured out. Not just the small foggy breath one could see in winter, or in a colder room, but deep dense fog, which enveloped the sorceress in a second. She stopped immediately, though, and the fog quickly dissipated, leaving only faint traces.

“See?”

“Weird.”

“That’s magic.”

“No, I mean, weird. I didn’t see you doing it.”

“Well, the breathing should be obvious, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s just that… I can see mana. And when people or beasts use magic. But not you.”

Elena Worchester blinked in surprise.

“You see magic? Like Jade does?”

“You don’t? Isn’t that something, you know, a sorceress does?”

“No. There are things that go together, like all fire sorcerers being immune to fire. Myself, I’m immune to cold, which is usually associated with water-type magics even if they don’t deal in ice directly. I can go barefooted with a light gown a mile across a heavy snowfall in winter, and it’s a simple walk for me. Well, except for the snow being a bother to stomp upon. But mana sight? No, that’s a completely separate talent.”

Elena frowned, then said, “There is an item with magic here. Find it.”

Johanna startled. She hadn’t spotted any trace of magic anywhere. The usual splashes or ribbons of manalight were entirely absent. She stood up and carefully looked around, seeing nothing out of the ordinary. The mist sorceress remained seated, watching her carefully.

Is this a trick question? Is there a real item?

She moved around, watching all the corners of the room. The tapestries looked normal, faded but not Ancient. She looked at the table, the books on it. The oil lamp looked mundane. She doubted the rugs were magic.

Johanna almost missed it when she looked at one of the shelves, but at the last moment, she noticed that one small stone on it shone a bit strangely. It was faint, at the limit of her perception. But now that she was aware, she could see that it was like the lightless light, the strange not-quite-there glow of manalight, hovering like a small could of fog barely visible. The collection of stones of all kinds of color looked fairly normal, but that one, in particular, was marked by magic, just very, very faintly.

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She picked it, rolling it in her hand, trying to get a feel for it.

“You know, I wasn’t even sure it wasn’t me in fact,” Elena’s voice came from behind her.

“What? That’s not it?”

“This stone came from deep in the northeast wastes. An expedition went to try their chance, bypass the Kootenai gap, and find some trail to get at the Northmen behind their lines. Nine scouts went, and only two came back after they’d found themselves trapped in a Murid lair. That’s where the stone came from. From deep, where mana had grown the monster, fed it fire and earth. I’ve always wondered if it was really magical, if what I felt when I was handling it was a self-delusion or real. But it was always a bit too polished, a bit too clean…”

“What does it do? We… we found a sword, back west. A sword that cuts anything like it’s a light food wrap. That one, I could see its presence from near half a mile away.”

“I’m not even sure. But when I’m nearly out of mana, it does feel like I can quickly get some back with it. When I carry and use it, it extends my fog breath endurance to over two hours.”

Elena laughed, adding, “so much for being a repressed tier 7.”

Johanna rolled the small stone between her fingers, trying to feel something.

“You won’t feel anything. Not unless you’ve really spent mana and need it back right now. By the way… how long can you sustain your fire?”

“It depends. The flame in the hand, over an hour or so. The flame blade, it’s half as much. Half an hour?”

“Flame blade. The only person ever recorded with it was Juan Suarez, and he died thirty years ago. Show me that one, Milton.”

Johanna ended up demonstrating her ensnaring ability as well. Elena Worchester trying – and utterly failing – to lift her feet from the carpeting was a sobering experience, at least for the mist sorceress. Johanna knew the limits of that magic effect now.

“I can’t even begin to describe how many rules you are breaking, Johanna,” she finally said.

Mid-point through the exchange, Johanna’s so-called teacher had broken up and started calling her by her first name. She still couldn’t steel herself to use her mentor’s first name yet, though. Right now, the sorceress was drumming her fingers on a heavy leatherbound book, looking flustered.

“Nobody, I mean, nobody, ever had four different confirmed abilities. Including two fire ones. Even among the Erlang, which I think are the ones with the most mages in the entire world given their weirdness, you’d see dual sorcerers but always with a wood element and another. Triple ability? There is currently one, just one, arch-mage in all of the northern Americas, and that’s Jade Winward, who has somehow manifested more abilities than anyone else. Oh, you hear stories, legends from back after the Fall, but nothing was ever confirmed. It’s all stories, repeated and embellished, until you get the Chosun, the so-called Wonder of the World, able to use tens of Earths’ talents. But that one’s a story.”

Johanna raised her finger.

“Who are the Erlang?”

“Changed people. They come from over the western ocean. Asia, if you know what it is.”

“I remember the basics. Large land, that touches ours in the North?”

“Correct. If you count fifty miles of straits ‘touching’, that is. They’re very tall, and have three eyes rather than two like us.”

Johanna’s face must have expressed her shock because Elena shrugged.

“There are a lot of Changed around. The northwest of the Union is very isolated, and not at all cosmopolitan. The Changed ones around here aren’t nice people. I had a severe shock when I spent a year south, in the Great Plains. There are cities with significant Changed populations down there.”

“Oh. Well, I met a Dwarf once, in Valetta.”

“You can mistake a Dwarf for a very small human. Not so with Erlangs.”

“Are there… more?”

“Oh, yes. There are some weird Changed around. There are stories from the Fall about even weirder ones, but unless there were enough Changed around that they could start their own population, they got extinct, I think. No Changed can breed with unchanged humans. Or a different Changed.”

Johanna shivered. The idea of being Changed wasn’t something she associated with that. If… if they were Changed… then they might never have kids. No, grandkids.

Well, the Bible said all people came from just two. But that was undoubtedly harder than that.

“And they have lots of sorcerers, you say?” Johanna asked instead.

“At least those that leave their home country often turn into adepts, at least, if not outright sorcerers. Among humans, you can find some sort of adept for every three-four thousand people on average. Erlangs we know about, it’s rumored to be like one in a hundred. Almost always sorcerous and nature-oriented.”

Johanna hesitated, then asked.

“How do you become a sorceress?”

“Becoming a sorceress is a dream. It’s literally that. Ask any Talented. You get a Talent because you dream of it.”

Elena noticed Johanna’s frowning.

“Some people actually remember dreaming of this. The world, as it is, beyond what we see, the hidden edges of the real. For us true sorcerers… we dream about magic. We once dreamt about mana. For that one precious time in our existence, we swam in the ocean of mana before sleep ended. The endless blue and its light lines that make angles no one can picture, and its half-unreadable, half-unremembered words.”

Elena reached, uncorked the small flask of southern fortified wine she always kept in her room and drank a small swig. They called it Moonshine and swore that only the best products were made under the light of the full moon. And, well, it worked as advertised. Whenever she remembered the dream that made her a sorceress, she needed that. Remembering the Mana, the real magic… that took a strength that was hard to get.

“And you wake up, and you are a sorceress. And you spend the next eight years of your existence chasing that elusive moment in your sleep where you became more than old little missus Worchester, and your fame is assured in the history books.”

Johanna stayed silent for a while.

“That wasn’t like that.”

“Not everyone remembers it. You go asleep, you wake up with magic.”

“I – we – didn’t get it that way.”

Elena frowned. Johanna hesitated, then started, “we found this place in the ruins…”

The drumming on the book had increased. Elena Worchester couldn’t wrap her head around the successive surprises that Johanna Milton had brought her.

“I know, I’m supposed to teach you all about magic, how it works, how to best use yours. But you’re not a sorceress. You’re an enigma. An anomaly. A legendary power, although probably not Changed, I think. Despite that blow-out of magic, you don’t look Changed, at least, and all Changed… aren’t human. And your saint friend has four abilities as well, you say. That’s even worse. I’ve never heard of a saint with more than one miracle. Although that dreadful gaze… it’s supposed to be a sorcerer ability.”

“I’m not sure the term saint applies. At least one of her healing abilities, I can spot when she uses it. I think that’s all just… well, magic. A different category, maybe, like the elements you spoke of.”

“I don’t think even Jade ever said that,” Elena said, sighing again.

She finally reached a decision.

“We’ll have other talks later. I need to write some letters now.”

She pushed forward the book she’d been toying with, and Johanna looked at it.

“That’s basically the best reference about sorcerers and magic you can find. It’s the last edition from three years ago. I suspect the next one will have to include you. With a very, very large chapter. Read it, it will teach you a lot.”

Johanna grabbed the leather-bound tome before looking back at Elena.

“The usher will escort you back to your quarters. And yes. I’ll probably have more questions later. We’ll be seeing each other often.”

Elena Worchester watched the girl leave her suite’s main room, drumming her fingers on the table now.

I don’t think Maistry even realizes what he’s got there. He’s never ever going to let them go, term of service be buggered. And I can’t really fault him. Maybe she’s not that much of a game-changer in battle, but from her description, her friend might be.

Elena shivered.

A Most Holy Saint and Mind Sorceress?

The whole exchange between the two women had been frustrating, as usual, as Moore could only infer some of what was going on. The Water Shaper had been some kind of examiner, he guessed, and despite all, the two had never touched each other, so he had been unable to use Johanna as a conduit to peer into what she did. The fog breath effect was impressive, though. Fog Cloud, based on the skills he had in his list for her spec. With a multiplier of 3, she could probably cover most of the keep if she pushed it all out, and keep it up for 80 to 90 minutes, if not more.

Johanna had been asked to demonstrate her entire repertoire, including finding the small mana battery her inquisitor had hidden to test her.

Bestowal

Tier 2

Effective: 34/34 mana (+30/hour)

Passive: Increase your regeneration by 3 mana per hour

Active: Transfer 3 mana per second

Active cost: 1 mana per 3.4 second

That was a minor healer skill, with just 16 Empathy and a pre-existing 20 mana pool required, but one he couldn’t see himself granting to Laura ever. Not with limited skill points. And adding a twenty percent – or skill-divided-by-10 per hour, as it was written on the skill version – of mana regeneration was definitively not making it worth the expense.

But when the older woman had handed Johanna the large book, he had wanted to get a fist to pump it up.

The Mages of America and Beyond was the title. The glorious title.

Now, I do hope Johanna likes reading late at night.