A few weeks later, quiet noises somewhere between a grunt and a whimper could be found in a quiet corner of the family home. Otonia ◐ sat there, back against a wall, eyes squeezed shut in concentration as a single finger moved lazily in front of her.
Shortly after the history lesson with her mother, Otonia ◐ had relayed the same to Krateros ◮, who found the story as upsetting to his worldview as Otonia had. History, religion, politics, the System, magic: Almost every field of knowledge now had to be re-examined. But there was one immediate revolution that was even more disturbing.
“Crap,” Krateros moaned. “Everyone’s a mage.”
“What?”
“Whether its greater magic or lesser magic, the System clearly enhances melee fighters with magic. I’d thought for sure there was some fundamental difference between the two.”
“Maybe there’s a third type of, uhh, empowerment?” Otonia offered sheepishly.
“Horus’ rule,” he replied, invoking the god of knowledge.
“Oh. Okay, fine, two. Well… there is a difference between being a spellcaster at range and using body-enhancement magic for melee.”
“Ugh,” Krateros sighed in resignation. “I suppose.”
“Should—should we practice mana-based magic?”
Krateros crooked an eyebrow. “I thought you just said the Fell didn’t use lesser magic?”
“Right, but not because they couldn’t. They just don’t see any reason to do so. But the grounds of both are supposedly the same, so practicing lesser magic might be helpful in preparation for going to magic college when we’re five.”
“But what do you need practice for? How many lives were you a [Mage]?”
“That’s it though. I was a [Mage], not a mage. I don’t have the System preparing my mana to make it easy to use and I don’t have the System assisting in making magic. Enough of what the System was doing stuck through the loss of the System that I’m sure I can do something, but I’ll actually need a lot of practice.”
“I see. What about me? I don’t care much for spellcasting, as you put it, and assuming the Fell even have melee combatants, I’m not sure what skills I’d need in order to enhance myself.”
“I got a lot about spellcasting from that history lesson. Maybe you can do the same with your parents, but frame it towards melee?”
With a plan in mind, Krateros went home to see what he could learn from his parents about the nature of Fell melee combative styles, if they had any. And Otonia began practicing “lesser” magics with mana.
Or she would, just as soon as she had trained both her mana to be thinner and easier to work with and her manipulation so that she could actually do something with her mana.
And so she found herself sneaking off to dark corners and making some (unfortunately funny) noises. Exacerbated, she was sour to note, by how cute toddler Fell were.
Alas, as Amelia, she had spent almost an entire year solely training her mana and her mana manipulation before she had even begun studying how to spellcast. Even with 18 lives behind her, many as a [Mage], without the System, there was just no substituting for practice. A few weeks simply wouldn’t do.
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A year later, and Otonia was finally ready for a serious attempt. Unlike Amelia, who had the luxury of a firing range, Otonia would not be starting with a Fireball, but rather Lightball, which despite its name was a utility spell, not an offensive one. Curiously, it had never been offered to her as a Skill, and while she rarely needed it in light of her [Dark Vision], it was one of the simplest spells and so was fairly easy to remember the spellform.
With her parents out of the house, Otonia took several deep breaths, calming down and picturing the spellform in her mind. Then, pulling out just a teensy bit of mana, she began to fill in the edges of the spellform. In just a minute, she was satisfied that the spellform was correctly edged in and started pumping mana into it. In just a moment, the spellform flared to life, spinning itself around into a tight ball, glowing brightly, and hovering itself in front of her.
She might not be able to be a [Mage] this life, but darn it if she wasn’t a mage.
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By the time they turned five, both Otonia ◐ and Krateros ◮ had become competent natural mages. They had both trained their mana sufficiently to be pliable. Their mana manipulation was improved enough to allow them to actually manipulate it. And Otonia remembered just enough spellforms in full that they had material to practice casting. Indeed, most of the last two years had been spent with Otonia helping Krateros memorize and practice the intricate, complex spellforms for [Fireball], [Firebolt], [Fire Manipulation], [Mana Bolt], [Icebolt], [Ice Manipulation], [Gust], [Wind Manipulation], [Stonewall], [Stone Manipulation], [Water Manipulation], and [Lightball]. Those dozen spells represented the sum total of what Otonia could recall well enough to cast, but little did they know that in itself was a tremendous accomplishment.
Their study though was fraught with the risk of being discovered, particularly with the more destructive spells, for which their actual practice was minimized in favor of mere memorization.
“Yeeeess!!!”
But today? Today was the day Otonia and Krateros started at the college of magic, which, despite its name, was the primary school for Fell children.
“Aaaaaahh!!!”
And Otonia was excited.
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” she cried out, hugging her father and jumping up and down. At nearly fifty centimeters, she was half of her father Hipponeus’ adult size, but her mood was enough to move him, even if her strength wasn’t.
“Alright, alright, we’re going,” he replied with a smile, then turning towards the back of the house. “We’re off, dear!”
“Have a good time!” her mother called back.
Otonia bounded out of the door and into the street at that, as her father descended the front steps and followed after her. “Otonia! Do you even know where you’re going?” he called at a distance.
Otonia came running back, tackling one stubby Fell leg. “Of course I do. The College! Today, I become a true mage!”
Hipponeus laughed. “Maybe not today, but soon!”
“How soon!”
“Was that even a question?”
“How soon?!”
“Hmm, I’d say it’ll be about 18 months or so before you cast your first spell.”
“Seriously?” That’s a coincidence.
“Indeed. But don’t worry. You’ll hear all about it today at orientation!”
“But I know where I’m going,” Otonia fake-whined. “To be a mage!”
“Who put sugar in your breakfast?”
“You did!”
Her father sighed. “So I did. At least you’ll give Circe a good headache today.”
“Circe?”
“Yes, I heard that she’ll be the primary tutor for your cohort. She’s quite skilled.”
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“Welcome, children, to the Trope College for the Advancement of the Magical Arts,” announced an elderly Fell.
I always forget the town is called Trope, thought Krateros ◮. That’s Trope with two syllables.
“My name is Aeetes, head tutor for the College. And while my role is more administrative than instructional, I look forward to getting to know each and every one of you and seeing you grow over the next decade. Circe, you have the floor.”
Krateros had jumped Otonia ◐ in a [Bear] hug just before the orientation, and they had just gotten seated before the old man began speaking.
“Thank you Aeetes,” Circe responded as Aeetes left the auditorium style classroom. “As the head tutor said, my name is Circe. For the first five years of your time here, I will be your sole tutor. Thereafter, I will continue to function as a primary instructor and homeroom supervisor, though more specialized instruction will come from other tutors. But that’s far in the future,” Circe paused with a smirk.
There were 28 children in the classroom, in 14 pairs of soul bonds, a few notably split up, likely due to clashing personalities. New classes of young Fell students entered the college twice a year and, altogether, the children of the town of ten thousand Fell all went through the college.
“What is first though? Well, at the highest level of generality, what is magic? Does anyone know? You. Yes, you, please introduce yourself before answering.”
“My name is Alector. My mother is a baker, and my father cares for myself and my siblings,” the young boy Fell began. “Umm, magic is… well you take experience and you shape it in a way, and umm… it makes magic.”
“Yes,” Circe replied upbeat. “That is a good description for a novice. Magic occurs when experience is shaped in a specific design—usually called a spellform—and imparts a change upon the World. Very often, this is done freestyle and is called a spell. An enchantment is where a spellform is bound unto an object and may or may not be empowered.”
“And so, magic fundamentally depends on being able to manipulate your experience. This is the first and often considered the hardest part of learning magic. But we’ll be dedicating the entire first year to just learning how to manipulate. And so I’m sorry to say you won’t be casting any magic soon.”
Where the children’s rapt attention—well mostly rapt—had been on her before, a chorus of disappointment now followed.
“But don’t worry. You’ll have loads of fun doing it. So, here’s the schedule. Five days a week, we will have two and a half hours of instruction or practice in the morning. Then, lunch, playtime, and nap. Then another hour and a half in the afternoon. We’ll do this for a year until you have all learned how to manipulate your experience. And from there, we can move on to learning to cast spells. Who loves lunch?!” Circe asked in a chipper mood, which about half the class responded lukewarmly.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“Who loves playtime?!” she asked even more excited, which got most of the rest of the children excited themselves.
“Great, before we begin, I want everyone to come down here to the front and introduce themselves and tell us a little bit about yourself. Then, we’ll move on to our first exercise.”
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Soon, Otonia ◐, Krateros ◮, and the other 26 children of their class fell into a regular rhythm. Circe would talk to them for a bit, then they would all begin to practice, often assuming a quiet meditative position, while Circe circled about assisting where she could.
First, they began with the most basic. Sensing their experience. It was down deep inside them, but not inside them, instead it was inside their souls, and so they found that they had to dive in through their mind, then their mind’s eye, and locate the interior of their soul.
Needless to say, this was far different from sensing mana. Well, yes, sensing mana was about sensing something inside you, but mana had a far more tangible connection to the body itself and could often be initially sensed by considering the core of your torso. Otonia and Krateros, with centuries of experience sensing mana, had some trouble doing this almost entirely different process and fell behind most of the rest of the class.
Second, they moved on to manipulating experience. Experience, of course, was the clay with which magic was formed. And so it was important to be able to take the experience and shape it as needed.
This was even more difficult than mana. Well-trained mana, like Otonia and Krateros were used to having, was like a thin liquid, or even gaseous, easy to whip around and shape into the needed shape. Even untrained mana, like they had been born with this life, was only about as thick as a syrup or honey.
Experience was far worse. Actually, if it had been like clay in Circe’s metaphor, they would have probably adapted quickly enough. But no. Rather, after struggling to even sense their experience in parallel to mana, Otonia and Krateros found that manipulating experience was like manipulating taffy: gooey, sticky, and if you stopped for even a second too long, it would harden up and you’d need to start all over. The pair continued to struggle and fell even further behind.
Third, they moved on to refining their manipulation to be very precise. The spellforms for true magic were exacting, so they were told, and so experience had to be precisely laid in order for the spellform to succeed. Further, they would also need to learn to intuitively understand how much experience they had and they were manipulating in the standard unit known as the hecate.
Otonia and Krateros’ woes continued from the second step, especially for Otonia. For all that they were both skilled at mana manipulation, the intuitive understanding they had for the former did not translate over to experience manipulation. As such, they struggled to unlearn what they had learned. Given how complex lesser magic spellforms were, they were beginning to be deeply concerned.
Half of the class had passed these three units of instructions by twelve months, and the last by fourteen months. The weeks slipped by as the pair struggled to catch up. Finally, at fifteen and a half months, Krateros and Otonia finished.
“Wonderful!” Circe exclaimed as she finished her testing of Otonia. “Now you can begin studying spellforms. I’ll give you two your copy of the Lightball diagrams soon, but first watch carefully as I demonstrate.”
At that, the pair watched as Circe pulled experience from her own soul and began to shape it with the mature dexterity of an old hand. Though the pair knew what Lightball looked like for lesser magic, they peered closely in interest at a close up demonstration of the parallel spell for greater magic.
The experience slithered out of Circe’s chest, wrapped around her arm, and then began inscribing itself in the air as she slowly and meticulously began the spellform. The spellform began as a thin toroid, with one point smashed inward and twisted, then the toroid grew eight spikes. Four terminated, but the other four grew into thin wires, which twisted around the toroid twice before matching up with another of the wires. Quickly, Circe filled the shape with experience and the spellform flared to life, spinning itself around into a tight ball, glowing brightly, and hovering itself in front of her.
Circe looked at the pair with a grin on her face, expecting the two to be astonished at seeing a spell so close up now that their ability to sense and manipulate experience was sufficiently refined to appreciate it.
Instead, she saw the two glance at each other, confusion on the boy’s face and frustration or possibly anger on the girl’s face.
“That’s it?” Krateros asked, turning back to their tutor, as Otonia bit back her lip.
Circe frowned a little. “Even the simplest of spells have complex shapes. You’ll be spending months just on this,” she replied a little petulantly, gesturing at the glowing sphere.
“What?!” Otonia replied in disbelief. “No, I got this.”
As with her test just before, Otonia began to pull her experience out of her in a thin trickle, forming it in front of her into the beginning of a spellform. Her control was irregular and rippling, as Otonia’s anger interfered with her concentration.
Circe sighed internally, as yet another student thought to jump ahead and try shaping a spellform without actually studying the spellform, and she was soon vindicated as the spellform fell apart.
“Wait, no,” Otonia said harshly before Circe got even a word out. “I got it this time.”
Otonia took a calming breath, and then the trickle of experience out of her resumed though under significantly better control this time. Circe’s attention drifted for a few moments, before she refocusing on the girl, surprised to see the spellform half-completed and correctly. Over the next twenty seconds, Circe grew increasingly astonished as the spellform was layered and shaped just right, until, at the last moment, her student filled it.
The spellform flared to life, spinning itself around into a tight ball, glowing brightly, and hovering itself in front of her.
Most of the rest of the class soon focused on the duo and the tutor, as a second Lightball lit up the room. Jealousy and incredulity at Otonia’s beginner’s luck ran through the other apprentinces.
Circe though—the instructor, the mage—was speechless. Never had she had a student cast any spell on the second try, and certainly not after only seeing it demonstrated once. Nor has she ever even heard of it happening.
Criminy.
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An hour later, and the entire class was playing in a yard at the College set aside for such playtime. Otonia and Krateros sat in a quiet corner, whispering to each other.
“But what does it mean?” Krateros asked desperately. He may have been a mage a few times, but he still deferred to Otonia when it came to any higher understanding of magic.
“I don’t know yet,” Otonia admitted. She had just explained to him how, seeing the true magic Lightball, it was the same basic shape as the lesser magic Lightball of mana. More importantly though, it was an order of magnitude simpler.
Whereas the true magic version was a thin toroid, slightly dented, with eight spikes and a little wire, the mana magic version was three toroids of different sizes nestled within each other at right angles, with eight spikes each, with each spike containing two sub-spikes, a plethora of even thinner wire connecting various spikes and subspikes together, and all of it wrapped in two cardioid hemispherical shells floating slightly apart from each other.
After almost sixteen months of struggling to manipulate experience, the sheer audacity that true magic had such simpler spellforms just ticked her the fuck off. That drove her to try casting the spell immediately. While she wasn’t the first to do so in the class, she knew she had been the fastest and was worried about how much an outlier she was.
“We only have a sample size of one, Lightball,” she continued. “Maybe it’s simpler for some and more complicated than others. Or maybe it’s always been equally complicated but Fell are just that much better at simplifying their spell forms.”
“Well, what if you push mana into the true magic spellform?”
“Uh, I don’t know, obviously.”
“I meant why don’t you try it now.”
“Do we really need to be making another spectacle?”
“They already saw one Lightball from you. Let’s leave me be the normal one.”
“Ugh, fine,” she relented, then switching mindsets to mana manipulation, quickly pushed it into the shape. The spellform held, but when she filled it with the usual amount of mana for the mana-based Lightball,” all that came out was a faintly glowing ball of air barely brighter than the surrounding sunlight. “Huh,” she commented. “I guess the true magic version is much less efficient. That much mana in a lesser magic spellform would be very bright.”
“Okay. So, what about if you push experience into the lesser magic spellform?”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“…Yes?”
“Then you’re an idiot and we’ll attract way too much attention on the playground. I’ll try again later.”
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After school, the pair walked to Krateros’ home, which was rather close to the school. After suitably greeting Krateros’ mother, the pair sealed themselves into Krateros room to do naughty things.
Picking up where they left off, Otonia took her experience and began shaping it into the spellform used for mana-based magic. It took a few failed tries—her experience manipulation was barely refine enough to make the detailed nuances of the far more complex spellform—but, eventually, it locked into the right shape and she began pushing into it the same amount of experience as the true magic spellform.
A blinding glare lit up the room, whiting out their vision entirely, and Krateros started whisper-yelling at Otonia to end the spell quickly. Disoriented, it took her a few moments to do so, and when she did, they both were blinking furiously trying to get their vision back as dots danced across it.
“Okay, miss mage,” Krateros eventually spat out, bent over slightly in lingering discomfort. “So what did we learn?”
“That the hypothesis that the Fell are better at simplifying their spellforms is questionable. Yes, they are simpler, but they are clearly far less efficient and, given that experience is not as easily renewable as mana is, the economic pressure would push them to develop more efficient spellforms, even if they have a general social policy of sharing power with each other.”
“So, continue study? Expand our considerations to additional spellforms for purposes of comparison?”
“Exactly.”
“And what should we be doing this life?”
“What?” Otonia yipped, jarred at the sudden change in subject. “What do you mean?”
“You know,” Krateros said, leaning in to whisper. “We’ve been growing up now for a while. And now, well, we’re in the mage college. But what are we doing? Are we going to reincarnate? Is this the end? If so, what do we do with this life?”
Otonia sighed. “I don’t know… still. How do we even answer some of those questions? The rest, are they ever answerable?”
“I—no. I suppose not.”
“Can’t we just be kids? Magically gifted kids in a quiet, peaceful utopia? Away from the noise and the trouble?”
Krateros sighed. It had been a sigh-heavy conversation. “Do I have a choice?” he asked wearily.
“Do you have [Magic Growth]?” she teased.
“Ah, no,” he replied sheepishly, scratching his headquills. “Wait, was that a sex joke?”
“Maybe?” Otonia giggled.
“We are way too young for that shit.”
Otonia fell down on the floor laughing uproariously.
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The next day, soon after class began, Aeetes the head tutor visited the class and, together with Circe, approached the practicing pair of protagonists. “So,” he began without introduction, “I heard you can cast Lightball?”
Otonia glanced at Krateros briefly. “Yes, head tutor.”
“Would you show me?”
Otonia nodded, then began a repeat of yesterday’s performance. As Aeetes looked at the floating ball of light, a pensive look crossed his face. “And had anyone shown you the spellform before yesterday?”
“No?” she responded, uncertain about whether the question somehow encompassed 19 lives’ memories.
Aeetes hummed as he continued to study the Lightball. “Here, watch as I cast this spellform and try to learn it.”
As yesterday, Otonia watched carefully as experience skittered out of Aeetes’ stomach, then around his arm, before inscribing itself into the air. He worked carefully and methodically, at a slow pace, with half an eye on the young girl. The spellform began to take the shape of a caltrop, with swirling helical ends. A dozen twists of a thin wire wrapped itself around the center of the shape. When the spellform was done, he let it float there for several long seconds before filling it with experience and a Waterball was conjured.
“Well, what do you think?” he asked gently.
Otonia had never learned [Waterball] in a prior life, but she saw clear similarities with what little water magic she had known and of course the very broad base of ice magic she was intimately familiar with. And, continuing yesterday’s theme, this true magic spellform was an order of magnitude simpler than almost anything from lesser magic.
“It’s not familiar, but the shape isn’t that complicated. I could probably get it in a few tries,” she finally responded.
“And you Krateros?”
“Me?” he raised an eyebrow in mock surprise, still playing at normality. “Otonia’s got a far better instinct on this. But I’m sure I could get it in a day.”
Otonia side-eyed Krateros at his failure at remaining normal.
“Maybe it is related,” Aeetes muttered under his breath. Then, speaking up, “Well, I’m glad that you two have found your advantage in magic. Work hard and catch up with your classmates, yes?”
“Yes, head tutor,” they replied in unison, as Aeetes walked away from them.