“Again.”, Kallio said approvingly.
Leyla wiped the sweat from her eyes and drew her arm back to her side before snapping it out again, palm forward. Three embers merged together over a few seconds and zipped forward with a hiss as the bolt impacted the dummy for the final time in a storm of orange sparks. The dented old cuirass swung merrily back and forth from the frame twenty feet distant, singed but otherwise unchanged. She grinned happily as she returned her arm to the starting position and glanced back at her instructor.
“Ten!”, she exclaimed, “I didn't miss any!”
“Yes child, well done. After your lessons with Mirriana and Zeptik we will examine the Grimoire and discuss your first contract as I promised.”
Leyla danced a dance of victory as she threw her arms up over her head and whooped with excitement. Kallio watched with real amusement in his eyes as she kicked up a cloud of dust in her enthusiasm. Leyla turned to face him where he stood and was suddenly thankful for the wind that ruffled her simple dress and plastered her hair to her forehead. She pawed it away and gave him a simple, short bow.
“Thank you, Teacher. May I go get something to drink before my lessons? It's getting hot.”
Her instructor spared a glance upwards as the sun began to loom in the desert sky. Sand and hard-packed barren soil stretched as far away as the horizon, broken only by a few empty riverbeds and rare clumps of stubborn bushes.
He gestured for her to go, pointing the way to the spire of dark stone he called home.
She gave another short bow of thanks and then bolted, laughing happily as her feet pounded the dry soil. The wind was cooling and pleasant as she ran, though the sun was rapidly becoming overbearing. Leyla beamed from ear to ear and clawed her curly black hair out of her face without stopping as she entered the shadow of the Tower, instantly shielded from the heat.
“I’d like to go back in please, Teacher said I could!”, she said loudly but politely, breathing heavy as she approached the entrance.
Pebbles clattered off the odd dark stone as she skidded on her heels for a moment, pinwheeling her arms for balance. The enormous red eye that sat within the center of the gate snapped open at the sound of her voice before locking onto her and focusing. It then rolled dramatically and closed again, the gate swinging open just enough to admit her.
She waved in thanks and darted inside, careful to keep her dress gathered around her. She still remembered when she irritated the eye and it had refused to release her skirts after it had closed. Zeptik had howled all sorts of horrible obscenities in ever increasing volumes at it until Teacher had arrived to scold the door. She tried harder to be respectful to it these days.
The door in question snapped shut behind her with a frustrated thump and she took a moment to catch her breath as her eyes adjusted. It wasn't really dark but it certainly wasn't brightly lit either, which always confused Leyla because the light didn't seem to come from anywhere. The small chamber she found herself in had little in the way of decoration beyond a pair of pillars set into the far wall, but she thought it was pretty anyway. The shiny black stone was as reflective as a pool of water if you got close enough, and even from far away she thought the shadows it hinted at looked neat.
“Kitchen, please!”
Leyla was careful not to look directly between the pillars as space seemed to do…something that made her feel sick. Within a few seconds it settled on a short hallway that opened up into a larger room, half a wooden table visible. She waved goodbye to her reflection cheekily as she darted into the kitchen, not noticing as the shadows waved back after a moment before fading. Her shoes smacked loudly off the floor as she zoomed up to the table and pulled out a seat before flopping down.
Her feet dangled in the throne-like chairs that sat at the table but she didn't mind. They were very comfy chairs, after all. Leyla all but snatched the mug in front of her, knowing it would be full of cold water. She noisily chugged the entire thing before setting it back down and politely looking away from it like she had been taught. The fastest shiver, like tiny running feet, shook the table for a few seconds and then was gone.
She drank the second mug slower, giggling happily as she found it had been sweetened with a few berries. She ate them before drinking the very last of the water and burping hideously into the small handkerchief resting by every place at the table. Disappointed that nobody had been around to hear her, she hopped down from the chair and walked back to the doorway she entered the room from, stopping to admire the tapestries that hung from the walls as she always did.
“Thius, Xot-Nep, Anba, Kaibo,”, she sang as she looked from right to left at the row of depictions, “Kade, Santi, Varuca, Emerris.”
Teacher talked about them a lot, so she knew they were important people. Also they had big giant tapestries of the interesting stuff they did, only important people got stuff like that. Teacher had once told her that someday he would tell people stories about her, and that if she worked hard she could have her own tapestry. She knew right where she'd put it, too. Right between the smiling man with a huge sword in each hand and the pale elf woman sitting on a flower.
“I'm ready for my lesson with Zeptik!”, she called out to the door as she finally tore her eyes away from the wall hangings.
The doorway wobbled for a moment then solidified to show a five sided stone room with a multitude of benches, each set a little higher than the row in front of it. They all surrounded the center of the room, which was mostly occupied with a set of concentric metal rings set into the floor, with a few smaller circles set into both the interior and exterior of the design. Zeptik stood in the center, looking bored and focusing on nothing in particular.
Leyla skipped into the room and waved to him as her shoes echoed back from every corner of the tall chamber.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.
“I'm here! Teacher says after lessons we're going to look through the Grimoire and we're gonna talk about Contracts!”, she nearly yelled in Zeptik's face as she reached him, settling herself cross legged on the floor.
Zeptik’s ears laid back at the volume but he seemed to perk up a bit as he eyed her shrewdly. He leaned forward conspiratorially and shuffled closer, prompting her to also huddle in suspiciously. Leyla enjoyed playing along with his mischief.
“Kid, there's only one real choice for a first contract.”, he said in a whisper as he glanced over his shoulder theatrically before looking her in the eyes, “Anything but an Imp. I'm the Imp around here, I'll eat your Imp. Now, here's the chalk to get started. Impress me. Git, git, go, now!”
She laughed as he used their proximity to suddenly toss a large pouch of chalk into her hands. The imp began flogging her with his tail as he pushed and hit her weakly until she scurried off to begin her work. She ran off to one of the smaller circles and set her chalk bag on one of the benches.
“I hit all ten shots today.”, she remarked as she began to carefully mark out a few runes on the smooth black floor.
“Uh-huh, yeah. Good job or whatever.”, he hopped over and studied her work briefly. “No, no. See that one? Link it with these two, here.”
“Why?”
“It'll blow your feet off otherwise.”, he crouched on the floor as he studied the array taking form.
Leyla blinked and gave him a suspicious look that he returned with a perfectly passive gaze of his own. She realized that he was being serious and very, very carefully linked all the runes he indicated. The red chalk had begun to smudge her fingers a bit, and she had a smear of it across her nose from idly wiping her face. Leyla took a few steps back and walked around the circle to get a good look at what she had so far.
Zeptik immediately curled his tail away from her with a spiteful glare at her feet.
“I’m sorry! It was one time!”, she pouted at the imp.
“Eleven.”, he replied icily, “I counted.”
She frowned and stuck her tongue out at him as Zeptik snarled half-heartedly before resuming his inspection of her work. She added lines connecting the linked runes to the circle itself, then mirrored the design on the inside of the circle.
“Oh that was almost clever of you, yes that does work. Not like that though.”
Zeptik bounced forward and pawed greedily at the chalk until she relinquished it. He erased the lines shed made within the circle and then added them again, diagonally of the first designs. The new set of markings formed an almost swirling within the circle that Leyla immediately adored.
“There, yeah, like that see? Then it'll reinforce the entire thing with the feedback.”, the imp explained as he tossed the chalk back at her overhanded.
“Aww, you guessed what I was gonna do!”
“Yeah in the first, like, two designs. Amplification matrix. I don't remember teaching you that yet, so I'm impressed anyway. Maybe you aren't simple after all.”
Leyla frowned, then smiled, then looked like she didn't know which expression she should be wearing. So she decided to blow a raspberry at him and finish the task she'd been given. She spent the next good long while finishing everything up and only stopped to make faces at the imp while he gave good but barbed advice.
She finally stood and entered the circle. Zeptik yawned and slouched back to the middle of the room with no particular haste. Turning around he faced her with the seating framed ominously behind him. She began to slowly feed mana into the runes under her feet as the entire casting circle came alive. Red light swelled and cast her in an sinister haze as she thrust her arm forward and a blob of fire wobbled to the size of a melon.
The orb jiggled in the air before arcing like a bag of heaved garbage and splattered to the floor before it had traveled even half the distance to its target, who began to laugh hysterically. She smiled hugely and pointed at the fire burning in a blob on the ground, excitedly waving her other arm. Zeptik literally doubled over laughing before the fire lurched forward along the ground like a slug, complete with burning slime trail.
His laugh trailed off with a strangled noise of interest as Leyla's own laugh replaced it. She almost did a little jump but stopped herself as she realized it would cancel the entire spellwork.
“It can follow you! You said to pass I had to come up with a spell. This is it! Crawlyfire! I'm not strong enough to cast it without the circle though...”
Zeptik looked at her like she had lobsters crawling out of her ears before watching the fire slink towards him with increasing speed. His jaw hung slack as his eyes practically crossed with the possibilities.
“Shoot it!”, Leyla called encouragingly.
Zeptik mechanically raised a hand and blasted a tiny bead of his own emerald flame into the blob and it blew apart. The end result being several smaller blobs of fire rolling across the ground towards him. He allowed them to reach him as they futilely attempted to burn him before evaporating with a wave of his hand.
“Do I pass?”, Leyla covered her face with her hands as she let the circle power down.
“...show me how you did that.”
Zeptik's voice was wooden and disbelieving as he approached her, all snark and sass noticeably missing from his tone.
Leyla was suddenly worried that she had done something wrong as she nodded and held out her hands, slowly forming the shell of the spellwork as Zeptik studied it with an expression that went so far past avarice that she thought he might accidentally dismiss himself. She'd seen it happen a few times when Teacher was working with certain items.
“What is this mess of a bolt spell?”, Zeptik said sounding offended.
“This is it! You said to show you!”
“This can't be it, the outer shell would never solidify. Look how tangled it is, it'd just…keep reforming…a weak..”
He continued to follow the mana-patterns for a moment before suddenly smiling like a shark.
“You were just messing with a flame bolt and did this by accident, didn't you kid?”
Leyla blushed and looked away while fidgeting. She kicked her foot restlessly as Zeptik formed the spell pattern on his own on the first try. He squinted at it as he tweaked, smoothed, and prodded at the basic design before flinging it away like a handful of mud. It splattered across the ground before rubbery looking graspers burst out of the pile and began to snatch wildly at the air around themselves.
“Oh yeah kid. You pass. Get out of here, go find Mirri. I need some alone time with this.”
His eyes practically shone with madness as the next modification he attempted resulted in an extremely liquid fire that rolled across the floor in a sheet. She shouted happily and patted him on the head, not that he even noticed she was in the room anymore.
By the time she left the room to visit Mirriana he had the blobs of fire fighting each other to his screams of encouragement.