Chapter 8: Our Cloak
“Smeg! Get off us!” We growled, pushing at the heavy weight with my feet, leveraging my back to get the figure back.
“We have visitors Bella, you need to wake up.” The voice was female, slightly annoyed. Loco’s wife, Luna. Good person. Morning person. More sleep needed. Sleep experiment failure.
“Tell my brother that we are sleeping then.” Who else would be here so early?
“Your brother is not the only one here, your father and even your older brother is here, with his master! Are you not excited to see the other mage in your family?”
“No,” We said coldly, settling back into our comfortable sleeping position. There had not been a serious need for me to wake up early for over a decade, including my previous life. I liked sleeping in and my child-self agreed. Especially my room was actually apart of the laboratory and only a madman would smoke near an alchemist’s lab, making this place the cleanest smelling in the whole smoky village.
“Bella, what did I tell you about respecting your father? I will toss out your candle experiment results if you do not get moving.” Luna threatened.
We stood quickly, “We are- I am up!” I needed those results so I gave my child-self a little hormonal boost to clear her head and I tried to analyze what went wrong with the sleep compression spell. The theory was more accurate than anything that had existed in my previous world, so there was no obvious reason for it not to work.
While I pondered how to correct my spell and cut my sleep time in half, my child-self got dressed into her more casual protective outfit. I had 4 whole sets of clothes with me now, my regular robe, my field mender uniform, my light protective outfit, and my total protective suit. The first two were basic robes, with the only difference being the extra fabric and the red circle on the front of the mender’s outfit, which were for emergency bandages and distinction respectively. The second two were just chemical protection, one for known potions and the heavier suit for experimental potions. So far my favorite set was the one my child-self was currently wearing, namely because it gave me an excuse to wear a mask over my nose.
It was bad enough that my reaction to traxico smoke was borderline allergic, but when I actually analyzed what the stuff did to a person I was so astounded that I had to confirm the results 3 times before I managed to believe it. I barely managed to convince the pregnant woman to stop after my child-self screamed at one women while crying non-stop.
Regardless, when I walked around the village and wore my mask, I reminded the villagers of what I thought of their habits while keeping myself safe from the side effects of such habits.
As my child-self finished preparing we quickly snuck over to the journal that Luna had used to record the test results. I was fascinated by the gaps Anton had left in my knowledge, so after I confirmed the state and tendencies of mana in this world and began practicing control over my own body, I naturally started investigating other things. My latest experiment had come up after I managed to bisect a candle’s flame with some enchanted glass and realize that it was hollow. I had done it on a whim, but the effect was very interesting. It meant that something was coming into contact with the outside of the fire and somehow sustaining it.
While Loco had been impressed he also pointed out that everyone knew that in a way as everyone knew to smother a fire with dirt or water. Officially, this was because the god of fire, Heh, was the brother of Hoh, the goddess of water, and fought with her whenever they met. Co-kar-fe, Hoh’s husband and the god of the earth, always took her side and smothered Heh as well. It was also said that Heh was in love with Nefon, the formless goddess of wind, so chased her wherever she went and felt saddened without her and lost energy.
I ignored the whole religious explanation based explanation because my home world had a similar, but still fairly different, explanation where the water god was fire’s lover who, unable to control her desires, tried to become one with fire wherever she found him. Instead, I put a nearly spent candle inside an upside-down glass cup that Loco usually used. The candle quickly went out. After repeating this a few more times I determined that the fire must be drawing a specific part of the air in to fuel itself like the human lungs took in oxygen and expelled carbon dioxide. However, before I could explore exactly how long the candle would last under different sized containers, Loco told me about the firegrass and we had to get ready for the morning journey.
Luna had been kind enough to take the measurements herself, even adding in different objects with the candle to see how they affected the results. I had however been distracted by the bloodlust I sensed last night and the subsequent discovery of my older, magical, brother.
Luna and my mother had also taken the time to, between the two of them, expand my vocabulary immensely, although I still had trouble telling people how I knew that something was wrong. Telling a sick man that he needed to stop fertilizing his land with human excrement was fine, explaining how I knew it was making him sick usually involved me making up tales of little demons trying to kill him. The important thing though was that in both verbal and written form, my comprehension of the local language was good.
Although, I had yet to solve the mysteries of the lord-mayor’s mansion or get anyone in my family to tell me why my mother could read. Luna made sense since, as an alchemist’s wife, she would need to know what ingredients and potions were mixed into certain potions. However, no one explained why my mother, who was born as poor as any other villager could read fluently, even without many books in our house.
Leaving the mysteries of my new life until another time though, I concentrated for a moment on the results. It looked like the candle with a rock went fastest and the candle with a leaf lasted longer. Although I would have to look more into it myself, it would be something interesting to think about while dealing with my brother and his obviously incompetent teacher.
I heard Luna calling me as I closed the book and went out of the house, making sure that my mask was tied on. Even if my brother’s teacher was a fool, a magician of any level could tell a complete spell and experienced mages could tell the ability of the magic castor by their spells. Therefore I did not cast my spell to keep the traxico smoke away from my nose like I had gotten into the habit of doing. Contrary to popular opinion, there were old fool mages and I was not going to be tripped up and chased out of the village because of my older brother’s teacher decided that I was less than normal.
I was barely lucky enough with the Healer on the evening of the lord’s party. Until I was old enough to protect myself, with my new body’s full power, I had to be more careful.
Remember your cloak, I thought at my child-self, if the mage acts up I will have to pull myself back and let you just react
I will carry our so very fine cloak, she responded, he will not learn of our secret.
I believe in you, our so very fine cloak is in your hands, I confirmed.
We were talking more recently, dialogs of thought usually, but occasionally we spoke to ourselves when no one else was around. We were a part of the same, but separate, it was strange and fascinating.
I walked outside and saw Luna and Loco standing with Nathan, a rapidly growing Carlatus (who I had started calling by his real name after the lord’s party), and two other men. One of them was enthusiastically speaking to Nathan and looking at them beside each other I could see the family resemblance. Both were fairly tall at what I guessed was somewhere around 175cm, with dark hair, well-defined faces, and jovial expressions that said volumes of how close they were. The two biggest differences were age and the fact that the younger man was clearly a magician of the 5th circle or so, unable to hold his power in check enough to hide it.
He is our brother I thought to my child-self clearly not at the point of experience to be called a full mage, (at least by my standards,) but still a noticeable magician in his own right. I tried briefly to remember if I had been like that with any of my sons, but Regus had been one of my closest and even he tried to kill me in the end. In fact, he succeeded, with the help of whoever manipulated him, though I did escape Gorith’s judgment in the end.
The other man was clearly an outright mage. He was older, in his late thirties if I were to guess, with light hair, an average face, and a lean look that I had learned to equate to a traveling mage, but he was hiding his power. He was also smoking like a chimney while he was speaking to Loco.
If I had met him in my previous life I would have ambushed him with iron bolts and then run away while he tried to heal himself. Traveling mages were odd like that, in well-provisioned groups they were the most dangerous threat on a road, for bandits like myself. Without provisions however, one or two ambushes would have them on the verge of starvation, assuming they could heal themselves at all. That said, his presence had already taught me one thing, I should learn to hide my own power. It was as much a matter of talent as of practice and I did not have enough mana to bother with practice in my previous life. It would however, be something to work on in the future.
Carlatus was the first to notice me and ran over to give me a hug while asking me a variety of questions. I tried to placate him as I went over to the group and studiously ignored the look that Luna was trying to discretely give me. She had insisted that behaving in public was necessary to keep Nathan’s reputation intact. She even briefly explained why my sudden haircut before the lord’s party had seriously hurt his local reputation and his business by extension. I could care less about Nathan’s reputation, but the idea of hurting my food source – his income – did not appeal to me in the slightest.
The old man and my brother both stopped and stared at me and my ears when they saw me, although I was sure that at least part of their surprise was that I was obviously a 6th circle magician at the least. Given the fact that I was still growing and mostly alternated between storing energy and expanding my mana when I cultivated. It turned out that compressing my mana had less effect when I was will developing it, so I postponed compressing my mana for the moment.
“Greetings sir.” I intoned to Nathan for the sake of my food supply. Avotatos were calorically packed, but I still needed quite a few to cultivate for most of the day. Not that I was going to bring up the amount that I ate with a mage, who would start asking annoying questions about what I was doing using that amount of mana. I could try and pass it off as my talent helping others heal whenever I was nearby, but if the question did not come up I was certainly not going to volunteer that information.
Nathan nodded to me, clearly trying to keep a neutral face in spite of the nervousness he must have felt internally. Then he spoke “Xiphos, this is your sister Bella, she is quite talented at mending. Bella, greet your older brother.”
I nodded my head politely and greeted Xiphos. It was much harder to keep myself in check when Nathan announced my specialty like that with no reciprocating statement for Xiphos. Since we were supposed to be blood it would be fine, but if he had been anyone else I would have been plotting more escape routes than the 2 I already had mapped out in my head. Although between the fact that his master was a stranger and the that everyone in the area already knew I had a healing talent, I was still left with mixed feelings.
At this point, before Xiphos could say anything, Carlatus piped up and declared “Bella, you are acting weird!”
Since he was right, in a way, I pulled him closer with one hand and rubbed my knuckles across the top of his head for a bit. “I am trying to be polite Carlatus, now hush.” Carlatus yelped and then jumped away as I let him go to rub his slightly sore scalp.
I turned to the older man and inclined my head politely before introducing myself. He, to my surprise, seemed very annoyed with me. I checked and made sure that my favorite cloak had not slipped on while I was not looking, but I had behaved appropriately.
The old man however, did not respond and merely looked me over, poisoning himself with traxico some in silence. Xiphos ended up stepping in to fill the void of silence, “Bella, this is my master, Jalon. Master, it appears that this –”
Jalon cut him off, “I heard your father boy. I was just wondering if this was the young one who thought that my barrier was less than perfect on the dagger we recovered.”
I spoke up directly “I felt a disgusting and perverse feeling after I got back yesterday and complained to the inn owner, nothing more, Master Jalon.” I finished smoothly, giving him the title of Master, although he did not deserve it if he could not even notice the bloodlust leaking.
Jalon scowled slightly less, “I have yet to earn the title of Master in the eyes of the church courts girl, you may call me mage Jalon, but not Master. Now, what is this about you feeling such a thing when I did not?”
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Typical mid level mage, I thought, powerful enough to be arrogant, but not strong enough to be truly important.
I again answered as smoothly as possible, although diplomacy and reverence had never been my strongest talents, I could at least not say belligerent things when I put my mind to it. My child-self was actually better at it than me, which helped out quite a bit in this case. “I can only tell you about what I felt mage Jalon and that I do not feel it anymore.” I almost added an insult concerning his intelligence, however my child-self resisted. Our cloak, I thought, not just mine. Our cloak of pride.
Pride is the finest cloak a person can wear, they can wear it anywhere they please and at any time they please. It is the cloak they can use to stand out, even in the night soil of the city gutters. It was also a dangerous hazard. Something that could get caught in mud, branches, and carriage wheels of life. A brilliant cloak that could weigh you down and make you suffer or elevate you above those around you. The key was to know when to take it off.
“Of course. Now girl, take off that mask and come over here, I want to measure your total mana, if that is alright with you Nathan.” Jalon still seemed annoying and rude, but calmer now, so after Nathan nodded I walked forward and held my breath while taking off my mask. With the amount of smoke that he seemed to be giving off, I was worried about suffocating to death.
Jalon grabbed my wrist and tried to push his mana through me. It was unpleasant and I did not need to show my child-self how to fight back as it was instinctive and near impossible for someone of her age anyway. Humans conducted mana, it was the reason I loved the snip spell so much, the only effective way to stop someone from pushing mana through your body was a protective spell that blocked spells. Physical contract however, allowed someone to ignore most defensive spells, with only very specific spells blocking attack spells. Non attack spells like snip or mana implosion – which was more mana than spell – tended to slip by.
My teacher Anton was taught to shake hands when greeting someone, but mages tended not to touch each other, especially if they were strangers. More than a few women had tried to kill me like that in the past too. A kiss or touch were far more deadly when a person was so used to them that they started concentrating on other things.
Jalon grunted, “Around 10th or 11th rank in pure mana power. Though I do not think she will be able to use elemental spells easily, she might make a good combat mage in the future. If she can gain some weight.” He looked me over carefully and noticed that I was not breathing, which made him laugh slightly disdainfully. “Scratch that, she would not survive long as a combat mage if a few days smell from the woods bothers the girl.”
At this point Luna stepped up behind me and gave me an excuse to pull my mask back up as I stepped behind her. Loco had not said anything, but he gave Nathan a quick look that cued Nathan to clear his throat. “She reacts badly to smoke Jalon, rather like Carlatus does to nuts, but not as extreme.”
Jalon’s head jerked as he looked from Nathan before looking back at me. “Really now? I have never heard of an allergy to a smoke. The Histones will want her name.”
“Histones?” I asked, wondering what they were. Anton had told me about the proteins by the same name, but they probably had nothing to do with each other.
Old Jalon smiled at me, “You do not know the Histones girl? I might have to get you some of their books. The Histones are the one and only cult of history.” I blinked, a cult of history? The old man smiled even wider, to the point where he seemed to be showing off his rotting teeth instead of actually smiling, perhaps enjoying his ability to lord my lack of knowledge over me. “Yes, they are obsessive about recording everything from market prices to criminal trials to great battles. As a result, even Kings and Queens respect them and a pair of them will be here in the next few days with your lord-mayor to survey the area on behalf of the king of Zootrofí.”
Oh joy, I thought internally, more people to watch out for.
Suddenly Jalon jerked as he remembered something. I wondered for a moment if he suddenly realized that he seemed to be trying to talk down to an 8 and a half cycle old little girl, but apparently not. Jalon turned back to Nathan and spoke quickly. “I apologize, Nathan, I seem to have gotten distracted from our original conversation. Do we still have time to look at it?”
Nathan also jerked and he glanced at the sky before nodding and speaking. “It is still early enough, as long as we take the horses we can be back by nightfall. I assume Xiphos can stay and teach Bella some things?”
Jalon waved his hand dismissively, “of course, but let us get moving already.”
Together they gave a brief goodbye and practically ran off, leaving me wondering just how heavy their own cloaks weighed on their shoulders.
* * *
Inside tower 447 in the Wizard's Tower Desert:
Being in the Tower Desert was both exciting and incredibly boring at the same time.
On one hand, no one interfered with any experiments that the inhabitants wanted to test. Indeed, the Towers themselves were ancient and so strongly warded that the priests from the nearby holy capital insisted that the god had built them, though, not even the Histones knew for sure. On the other hand, if you were experimenting in the Tower Desert, your experiments were too dangerous for other people to be around, so there was no one else there!
As it was, the man was trying everything to create a stable BOTI chest for merchants and mages alike. He should have been heralded as a genius for the advances that he had already made in time preservation spells, which already had a large impact on the holy mega city of Kenosis. Instead, he had been banished here for a few minor mistakes that had not even caused more than the destruction of his previous tower.
It had been his tower originally, so why should he have to be sent out here? Granted, if the experiment had gone wrong with more mana invested in it the city might have taken some damage, but really now, the priests were overreacting. Even with all of his mana fed back into the spell’s mana storage again there would only be a few thousand deaths. By the gods, that should be even more incentive for them to hail him as a hero!
It was called a mega city for a good reason too. Only basic food preservation spells could ensure that inhabitants in the sprawling place survived. The tops of parts of the city were just large stone covers that did nothing except grow food for the masses who moved under them.
Originally 8 different cities that were dedicated to the 8 gods of the land, they had merged into the megacity itself only a few centuries ago.
The man himself had been born in the city’s nobility quarter and originally planned to be given over to the church service, but after his magic manifested, the man had fought for his own path, practicing and expanding magical theory at his own pace while trying to keep his own independence. In a way, he even succeeded beyond his original intentions. The Tower Desert had granted him virtually complete independence, however it has also restricted his last decade of work to purely magical pursuits.
Only with live subjects could he finish his research into a magical bounding contract. Oh sure, there were contracts currently in use, but they were based on the incomplete versions that he designed just before he was sent here! The ones currently used depended on the contract creator’s strength being able to bind the individual to their word. In other words, a 12th circle mage’s contract would bind anyone of lesser magical strength. If they managed to bind, the person’s own mind would decide if they had broken the terms of the contract and activate the contractual curse. They were wonderful and had broken the minds of thousands of vagrants, thieves, and slaves in their development. Not to mention that it was incomplete! If someone could self-justify that their contract had been broken, even when the contract itself said otherwise, they would be free from all effects of the contract.
Just remembering was painful for the man, but now his BOTI spell seemed to be almost complete. BOTI stood for “bigger on the inside” and if it worked, it would be his greatest accomplishment to date, much larger than things like the gender switching spell or the incomplete contracts that he had previously designed.
Finishing the long process of inscribing his exact spell, the man left his record in the nearly indestructible stone record room and sealed it off. A large magical beacon and a coat of blue paint made sure that others could find the wall. With no other humans around and the nearest tower at least 2km in any direction, there was a reason that all of the most dangerous spells were restricted to the Tower Desert.
Again though, the man did not understand why he himself had been forced into the desert. After his last experiment failed so spectacularly and destroyed his tower he was prepared to restructure the spells to be less dangerous. By the guiding light of the gods, he even followed proper safety steps to ensure that others could meticulously retrace his work if he died from organ failure or starvation if the food supplier died. He had made it safe soon enough afterwards, yet he was still stuck out with the mad experimenters.
Entering the experiment room he found himself in annoyed and forced himself to stop and take a few deep breaths. Calm down, he thought, you need a calm mind for magic.
Then, concentrating on his spell, he systematically worked through all the steps of magic. First, the magic circle to contain mana, second the instructions for what you wanted the mana to do while within the circle. In this spell, the man was forcing the space within the circle into a chest and trying to instruct the mana to trick the chest into believing that having that much space inside of it was fine and that it did not need to expand or change or explode because of it. This part lasted for quite a long time as the man slowly and carefully built up his system of inner wards in the spell to ensure that the chest would last for some time.
Finally, he terminated his spell casting by dissolving the mana circle. As soon as he did that, the spell casting was finished and the spell activated, following his precise instructions, his mana executed his will and the air in the room shimmered as his spell worked.
Then everything stopped as the spell finished. The man blinked and slowly approached the chest, which appeared to have his wards still intact. Opening it up slowly he looked inside and saw a vast, open, area that was barely lit by the torches and magic based light orbs that were mixed throughout the room. The man backed away from the chest and quickly wrote the words “Limited success, now testing.” On a piece of parchment before going back to his record room and performed the unsealing process before leaving the piece of parchment with the rest of his notes and resealing the room.
A researching magician’s 2 greatest assets were fear and paranoia. Fear of explosions and paranoia that his notes might be lost. This man, in particular, had one of those traits in abundance.
Returning to the chest, he started filling it with sand that he had collected from outside. This sand was not magical either, unlike in some other areas of the Tower Desert, so he hoped that it would make a good testing material. After several buckets full were emptied into the chest, he lowered an empty bucket and collected sand from the chest’s bottom before bringing it back up. Already shaking in excitement, he closed the opened the chest a few times before removing more sand and finally losing it.
After 8 cycles of research, he was finally done. Letting out a shout of joy and casting the notification spell that would bring others to see his discovery, the man smiled and wrote his final confirmation of success into his notes, explaining what materials he had used to test it and stating that the materials neither disappeared when the chest closed, nor became stuck in the chest and become unable to be retrieved.
The man happily wondered what to test next when a thought jumped to the front of his mind, namely, to check the weight. Writing the idea down, he quickly went back to his experimenting room.
At first, the man carefully tried to move the chest, but discovered that it indeed weighed more than it had originally. Using a bit of his internally stored energy, the man tried to pick up the chest. Unfortunately, when he did, the wards destabilized and failed, causing the chest to expand rapidly and explode.
The man named Leonardo died with a smile on his face, unaware that an entity with a similar name watched from nearby, after having planted the idea that killed the man in his head.