Chapter XXIV (24)- The Translation

In Enchanting C, he explained to Basil about his predicament. The boy (and he really looked the part today, with a face that still held a fair share of baby fat on it) waved away his words. He told Kizu not to worry about it. Anyday worked just fine. Nothing special about today.

As he spoke to Basil, he couldn’t help wondering how the shapeshifter managed to cast spells at all. From what Kizu had seen when Basil passed out, the boy didn’t have traditional blood like a human. But the more he thought about it, the more it raised questions about magical plants and other natural phenomena. How did magic work for everything else in the world? He internally bookmarked the thought and tried to focus on the lecture.

Kateshi had handed out wooden scraps to each of the students and was explaining the use of glyphs in enchantments. Glyphs were a focus point for the magic, almost like how a wand on a mage worked as a conduit. While enchantments became a great deal easier to produce while accompanied with a glyph, they also came with a very clear weakness, as the glyphs could be broken.

Surprisingly, Kateshi even allowed Kizu to practice his glyph work, passing out the wood and carving knife to him indiscriminately. But he soon realized that she likely let him work on carving glyphs only because she knew he wouldn’t have any luck actually enchanting them so long as the bracelet she’d forced on him still hung from his wrist. So carving practice was all he got from the class.

And carving proved to be a lot more frustrating than he imagined it would. Sure, he had whittled in the jungle occasionally as a child, but this consisted of actually chiseling out glyphs in wood. And he couldn’t even test his glyphs to test how well formed he had made them. In the end, he tossed his mangled chunks of wood in the burnables basket on the way out of class.

He went through the motions in Astronomy E, not really all that committed to the class. Besides, after reviewing his textbooks and matching names, he had pretty much already mastered everything they discussed. Instead of listening, he thought back to his translation work on his sister’s letter. The books and papers still remained at the infirmary. The assistants there insisted that since he hadn’t officially checked the books out, he wasn’t permitted to leave the infirmary with them.

By the end of the day, he went back to the medical wing where an assistant ran some tests and put him back in the same bed as before. Before letting him get back into his studies, they fed him a meal of fruit and solid bland bars. The same food as the day before. Kizu recognized the taste of the fruit as the same as the one his father had handed him back at the capital. What had his father said at the time? Something about restoring blood after his ‘complex illusion.’ Kizu rolled his eyes. The illusion he had created back then hadn’t been all that complex at all. Just a few images overlaid upon one another. He barely even animated them. It was nothing in comparison to what the crone used to constantly force him to weave together to hide her cottage from nosey passerbyers (not that she lived in a particularly busy part of the jungle).

Work on his translation continued at a frustratingly slow pace. When he finally stopped for the night his fingers felt frail from overuse. He flexed them and looked over his most recent copy of the letter.

Little brother, I hope this message finds you well. I have spent the last six years honing my divination in an attempt to break the barrier between us. Even still, I cannot break the barrier that hides you. Everyone assumes you dead, but I know you’re alive. I sense that, if nothing else. Recently I have met someone who I believe has the means to help. He offers me a dangerous trade.

Kizu was a little more than halfway through the translation. If all went well, it should be completed in another day. So far though, it didn’t give any real hints to where she might have gone. Though he felt a spike of annoyance at the crone for setting up such irrationally powerful wards. And it also begged the question, how had the Elites finally penetrated them and found her?

That line of thought got him wondering if it might be possible to visit the crone in prison. She likely knew spells that could locate his sister. But for all he knew, they had the crone executed moments after her capture. If she was held in a prison, Kizu didn’t know where or who to ask for access. Just one more thing to follow up on sometime in the future.

He was still thinking about where his sister might have gone when he arrived in his Music F class the next day. The class didn’t require any spellcasting or use of blood, so it played out just like it always did. With a critter in his ears, he practiced his scales, over and over and over. The repetition was killing him. But the scales definitely sounded more fluid than they used to. His improvement was slow, but still noticeable.

In his Elemental F class they were put to work again heating and cooling the stream water. Obviously unable to do so, Kizu sat down next to where Ione lounged with her feet dangling in the water. He didn’t really understand why their professor never cared about Ione’s antics in this class. She continued to blatantly disregard him and was the only student who talked openly about how he was a turkey.

“What’s your relationship to the professor?” Kizu asked her.

“That of a student to a teacher,” she answered. Then she raised an eyebrow. “Why? Are you trying to insinuate something?”

“No!” Kizu said hurriedly. “Wait, how would that even work? He’s a turkey.”

“I don’t know. Like I said, my relationship is strictly that of student and teacher. Though I promise not to be a nark if you want to try finding out.”

Kizu ignored the comment. “He treats you better than the rest of us and you spend the entire class being disrespectful.”

“Some people just want you to shoot straight with them. He probably is tired of people always beating around the bush about his current body.”

Kizu thought about that. He didn’t understand people very well, but that seemed to make sense. He hated it when people treated him differently as a result of his unique upbringing. He could only imagine how people might treat him if his entire body had been changed into an entirely different animal.

“Or it might be because I’m his best student in his Summoning S class and he dotes on me as a prodigy.”

“Oh. Yeah, that might have something to do with it.”

“He refuses to tell me how he ended up like that though,” she continued. “I’ve pestered him about it relentlessly but he won’t budge on the topic.”

“Maybe he’s actually a turkey,” Kizu suggested. “I’ve heard of animals Awakening and gaining sentience before. And all living creatures have a degree of magic. That’s why we can use their parts in different potions.”

“Ha. Fat chance of that. His aunt works for the administration. I’ve seen her and she’s as human as they get. Not a feather in sight. Nope, Oasaji definitely used to be human.”

From there, the two of them began exchanging fantastical stories theorizing what could have made Oasaji turn into a turkey. Kizu was convinced that the professor must have gotten his soul mixed up in a conjuring gone wrong. Ione though insisted that wasn’t how conjuring worked. And besides, who would conjure a turkey? No, she thought a hag must have cursed him. But Kizu was skeptical of her theory. The only reason a hag would curse someone into an animal like a turkey would be to eat him. And Oasaji definitely hadn’t been eaten.

By the end of class, they’d tossed around a dozen different options, each less plausible than the last.

Kizu considered joining Ione as she walked over to the cafeteria but decided against it. He was still on a strict diet of strange fruit and extremely dry bars. He would only be able to sit around and watch other people eat real food. Not something he was particularly keen to endure.

Instead, Kizu parted ways with Ione and headed for the library. He perused the labyrinth of shelves, looking for something on the use of blood. Thankfully, there was an abundance of resources on the subject. So much, in fact, that he struggled to find where to start. As he skimmed the contents of books, he mostly saw longer explanations of what Arclight and Kateshi had told him. Then he found a book titled Blood of the Familiar.

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Curious, Kizu opened the book and skimmed it. It explained the use of familiars, just as Arclight had a few days back, but the details it went into went far beyond what she told him. Apparently, familiars not only could act as conduits for a mage, they also could be used as a second resource of blood. As he skimmed the book he found himself fascinated by a section about cephalopod bonds. Apparently an octopus actually had two hearts, supposedly doubling their recovery time. And the blood itself was altogether different from most animals. In some specific cases, cephalopod blood could be more potent in spellcraft than normal red blood. Some mages sought the bond out particularly for the advantage.

Then Kizu found something more worrying. A section about the dangers of bonds. Bonds let animals and mages find a middle ground. Animals often gained more intelligence while humans usually gained more physical traits. Though not always. Sometimes it was more mentally straining and there were stories of mages actually losing themselves to the animalistic characteristics. Kizu wasn’t that worried about that though. What concerned him was the next caution. Familiars could also tap into a mage’s magic.

Kizu wasn’t concerned about Mort intentionally using his magic and bleeding him dry. But, if Mort did it unintentionally, then Kizu might be in trouble. He resolved to spend some time with Mort and train with him. Both with him using Mort, as well as Mort using him. But that would have to wait until after he got the bracelet off.

As much as he wanted to take the book about familiars with him, Kizu couldn’t bring himself to separate from the divination book he already had checked out. Irrationally, he felt leaving the book behind would be like giving up hope of finding his sister. He resolved to return it only after he managed to locate her.

He took note of where he shelved the book and headed off to Brewing S. His stomach growled but he ignored it.

When he arrived, the portly man was still there from his previous lesson. And again, everyone referred to him as Professor Knoff. Kizu thought he might be going crazy and just imagined the first day’s professor. He had to be brothers or cousins with the Knoff from the first day of class. Not only his looks had changed since that first day, but his entire demeanor. Maybe a magical mishap could result in a complete body change, but Kizu had no idea what type of spellcraft. Especially since Kizu had actually met this Knoff before the one from the first day of lessons.

After the class, Kizu approached the new Knoff as the other students all filed out of the cave.

“Professor?” he said.

Knoff looked up from his papers and gave Kizu a genuine smile that twinkled in his eyes.

“Kaga Kizu, what can I do for you today? Do you have a question about the lesson?”

“Not about the lesson.” Kizu took a breath, steadying himself. “I wanted to know if I could use the brewing facilities here to practice. I have my own brewing kit, but it’s very small and I don’t think it will be very efficient for most of the more challenging brews. Having a real cauldron would be extremely helpful.”

“Of course, Mr. Kaga, we have a room dedicated to that very thing over this way.”

Knoff led him over to a curtained off area at the back of the class. When he pulled back the curtain, it revealed half a dozen empty cauldrons set up in a semicircle. There were even countertops behind them with different useful tools.

“You also have access to a variety of common ingredients as well. Unfortunately, you’ll need to go out of your way to ask me if you want to use anything more unique. And I may not always approve of your request. It depends on the project.”

Kizu could not believe his luck. This was beyond anything he hoped for. He thanked the professor vehemently but Knoff waved away his thanks. He welcomed Kizu to come work there whenever he had freetime. The only caveat was that Knoff always needed to be nearby to prevent any theft by the student body.

Once Knoff left him to go back to setting up lesson plans, Kizu got to work. The first thing he did was take inventory of what resources he had on hand. Everything was neatly labeled. It felt like paradise in comparison with the crone’s haphazard organization.

After recording all of the ingredients on a spare piece of parchment, Kizu jotted down on a separate piece of parchment a list of the tools and equipment available. There were quite a few items that were missing from what he usually was able to work with back in the crone’s hut; however, on the flipside, some ingredients the crone would consider quite rare down in the basin appeared commonplace here. Fresh ingredients from the tropical ocean were especially bountiful.

Kizu set aside some sea basilisk bone, ecstatic to get to work with such an elusive material. He itched to make a depetrification potion with it. But soon that craving was forgotten with the fact they had actual chimera teeth. The possibilities were endless with an ingredient like that. He felt like a monkey in a fruit stand, constantly distracted by the next closest thing.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Kizu turned his head away from the pile of ingredients and saw Sene standing at the curtained entrance looking irritable.

“Knoff is letting me practice my brewing,” he said. He went back to trying to decide what to make first. Dried octopus suction cups maybe combined with a tree frog limb? He would need to crush both into powder and mix it with sap from a spruce.

“He gave you permission? Unsupervised?” Sene sounded incredulous.

“Yes.”

“It took me two years before I obtained his permission to work here unsupervised.”

“You can go ask him.”

Kizu wondered what the different effects of northern sea and southern sea ice were. He’d never been able to use actual samples before. It was astonishing that Knoff had some enchanted device to keep the ice forever frozen while inside. Ingenious. So many different ingredients needed to be kept cool or they’d expire. Kizu wondered if the crone even knew enchanted devices like that existed. It seemed such a simple implementation, especially with the glyph work he had studied earlier in the day.

“Even if you do have permission,” Sene continued. “I use the room on this day every week.”

“There are six cauldrons,” Kizu pointed out, still not looking up from his small pile of ingredients. “Besides, you should have come here directly after class if you wanted to discuss this with Knoff when he brought me here.”

“I needed to eat dinner,” Sene sounded indignant. “A properly balanced diet is vital for any half decent mage.”

“Hm.” Kizu finally decided what kind of potion to create. In either hand he weighed two different feathers from a sub species of phoenix. One was slightly longer. He set the smaller one aside and carefully picked the downy barbs off the rachis of the larger one. He put them in a vial and carefully added a few drops of tanned swamp scorpion venom. He had to substitute janjanbi soot with wyvern marrow. He hoped it wouldn’t alter the concoction’s results too much but he recalled reading once that the two often were switched without issue.

Sene apparently finally decided to start ignoring him again and started on her own project. Out of the corner of his eye, Kizu watched her as she poured things into a medium sized cauldron. It looked like a truth potion. He didn’t envy whomever she spiked. The pine needles she used were infamous for causing severe constipation afterwards as a side effect.

He used a small cauldron, heating it to a boil before stirring in each ingredient. As he did so, the color and consistency changed from a chunkier brown into a smooth scarlet. Kizu doused the fire and let the brew sit for a few minutes. It looked perfect. He felt a bit of pride at his work.

Once cooled, he carefully poured the brew into four vials. He slid them into his uniform pocket and then got to work on cleaning up. Cleaning, the crone had taught him, was the time when more witches killed themselves than any other. A careless witch easily might accidentally scoop two different ingredients into a dustpan, resulting in a catastrophic event. The crone liked to tell the story of how her great aunt threw out a bucket of toad’s breath on the same patch of dirt she’d previously thrown out a failed curse breaking brew. Everything in a kilometer’s radius was reduced to toads. When her relatives arrived, they were unable to discover which toad was her out of the millions in the massive crater left behind.

Obviously that was an extreme example, but Kizu always wanted to be careful just in case. He hardly wanted to eat flies for the rest of his life. Now that he thought about it, maybe that was what happened with Professor Oasaji. He’d propose the theory to Ione next time he saw her.

Again, he was required to eat at the medicine wing for dinner and they poked and prodded him. Unfortunately, Raygen, the girl who had found his book, was on duty. She jabbed him with malice as she went through the tests. The results, of course, dictated another sleepless night in their care.

However, this time they decided that Mort could leave the medicine wing. Kizu suspected that the result was more due to with the monkey being a menace than with him being completely healthy. All of their objects small enough to be moved around by a monkey were strewn throughout the wing. Mort took great delight in hiding their things. So much so that he didn’t even bother leaving after the staffed students informed Kizu of his freedom, instead opting for another night.

Kizu worked some more on the translation. He finally hit a stride with the language, only encountering a few snags for the entire night. By the time the sun began to rise, he had a complete message from his sister.

Little brother, I hope this message finds you well. I have spent the last six years honing my divination in an attempt to break the barrier between us. Even still, I cannot break the barrier that hides you. Everyone assumes you dead but I know you’re alive. I sense that, if nothing else. Recently I have met someone who I believe has the means to help. He offers me a dangerous trade. And I accepted. If for whatever reason I fail, I wanted to leave this here for you. If by some miracle you do find your way home, I want you to know- I love you little brother. And I never gave up on you. Kaga Anna.

Kizu read through the message a hundred times, looking for hidden meanings or some sort of hint as to where she might have gone, what she might have traded, who she might have met with. He even went back to certain words that might have alternate meanings to try those in the context of the message. Nothing. The letter left him with no answers and more questions than ever.