Morgan trudged across the damp loamy ground, water filling the footprints he left behind. The day had been a long one, and he’d learned so much. His mind was spinning with the possibilities that the revelations about his cats and his magic now afforded him. Since he’d left Trevor’s shack, he’d tried to use his magic at every opportunity. He levitated leaves, branches and small rocks; he’d tried to levitate himself, but his mana dropped precariously low in a handful of seconds, while lifting him only a mere centimetre off the ground.
Harl turned to greet him as he entered the clearing, the lumberjack clearly tired from a day swinging at trees in the rain. “Hey Morgan, how’s it going?”
Responding with a grin, and keen to show-off, Morgan looked about for something to levitate, “Hey Harl, you should check this out. See that small rock to your left?”
With a puzzled look, Harl turned to face the rock that Morgan had pointed out, “OK...”
With a flourish, Morgan held out his arm and willed the rock a meter off the ground. It broke free from the loam, floating into the air in a cascade of dirt. As it hovered there, he spared a glance at Harl, who was staring at the floating rock, eyes wide and jaw slack.
“What...” Harl started, “What is this?”
Morgan released his hold on the rock, and it tumbled back to the floor, landing with a light squelch. “I found a wizard in the woods. He’s north west of here, about three kilometres away. He taught me magic, and I asked if he’d teach you too. He agreed to teach you exchange for some busywork, so if you're interested, I can take you there tomorrow.“
Harl looked conflicted, “I’m not sure I have the free time. I still feel like I’m behind my target. Though, magic could be really useful. Maybe I could find a use to speed me up. Is it air magic?”
Morgan nodded in response, “Apparently humans are better at air and earth magic. Trevor, the wizard, is an air mage.”
Harl let out an amused snort, “Trevor?”
Morgan nodded again with a grin, “Yeah, Trevor the wizard.”
Harl grinned back, “OK, I’ll think about it tonight and let you know in the morning. Got any other cool tricks?”
With a shrug, Morgan replied, “Not really, all I can do is make stuff float at the moment. I’ve no idea how to acquire new spells, but at least it finally gives me a use for this mana bar. I’ve just got to make this new talent work for me, somehow. I’m sure there's a useful application for it somehow. I’m going to head back out; I’ve still got a lot of work to do.”
“I can appreciate that for sure.” Harl replied, “Take care out there.”
He found the whole idea of remotely moving objects with his mind to be too alluring to ignore. He’d tested his capacity with a fist sized rock on the walk back, having it hover beside him as he walked. He could float it for around 30 seconds. He found he could float a small stick for much longer, so there was obviously a relationship between the weight of the object and the mana it took to manipulate.
It was late evening by the time Morgan got back to Caslon, and he’d almost begged off the guards training to play with his new found magic. Rollin had other ideas, and pressured Morgan as he dithered indecisively outside the town gates. Before he knew it, he was trading blows with Reggie while wading around in the mud. By the time the session was over, they were both filthy, having slipped in the mud several times. With a wave to the guards, he headed into town to clean himself.
He sat in his room at the inn, the cats playing around him as he attempted to levitate objects around the space.
“Scrap! I’m going to make you float, OK?”
The black cat stopped mid-dash and stared back at him, unblinking. He’d take that as consent. With a wave of his arm and a push from his mind, the beast floated half a meter off the ground, meowing piteously as its feet left the floor. As Scrap wriggled and bucked against the mysterious force of the air mana, Morgan could see his mana start to drain at a faster rate. After a second, he floated the cat back down gently. Scrap touched down with obvious relief, and disappeared under the bed.
He dwelled on this for a moment. A live target seemed to cost more mana to lift. He idly wondered if he could levitate something in a different direction, or whether the levitate skill only applied to up. He’d managed to make the stone float along with him, so lateral movement wasn’t out of the question. He set a gold coin on the dresser, and focused on it. It would levitate easily, and once it was aloft, he could slowly manoeuvre it sideways, the shimmering disk of air tilting slightly.
He let the coin drop. Perhaps he could visualise the disk sideways. He tried, extending his arm and willing the disk of air to appear to one side of the coin. To his surprise, a vertical disk appeared and the coin was pushed along the dresser.
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A prompt floated into his vision,
[You have learned a new spell]
[Spell : Air – Push]
[Do you wish to keep this spell?]
With a heady grin, Morgan accepted. He could learn new spells on his own. Now the possibilities were only hampered by his dubious magical strength, and limited imagination. After another half an hour of pushing and floating, he headed to bed.
The next day was cloudy, but dry. Morgan spent the morning in the forest with the cats running around his feet, harvesting and spellcasting as much as he possibly could. He discovered that range mattered greatly to his mana consumption. He had an effective control range of about 10 meters, but the mana cost seemed to increase exponentially the further away he tried to cast. His experiments went on until midday, when he put the cats away and went to share lunch with Harl. The lumberjack was still undecided about whether to go and see Trevor, but this changed as Morgan shared his experiences and experiments with him, the lumberjack gawking in poorly concealed awe as Morgan made various branches and stones mystically move.
The pair set off for the wizards' hut. When they arrived, Morgan ushered Harl inside the shack. Trevor greeted them with a warm smile, inviting them to take a seat. Harl took the invitation while Morgan made his excuses and headed back into the forest. He continued his trek, heading north from the hut, weaving through the forest in a wide zig zag pattern, scanning the forest floor for anything he could harvest.
After an hour’s walk, he’d found a bumper crop of the Valoplant alongside handfuls of Sunblossom, secreted in a shady glen flanked by rocky outcroppings. Whistling a cheerful tune, he headed between the rock faces and set to harvesting, the cats frolicking around the glade while he worked. He was so focussed on the harvesting that he failed to notice the movement near the rocks at the far end of the glade.
Tom was the first to react, turning to the disturbance, and laying low to the ground, his quiet growl catching Morgan’s attention. The whole pack turned to watch, their hair raising, as rocks lifted from the ground, stacking themselves on top of one another. The whistle died on Morgan’s lips as he took several steps back, the Sunblossom he’d been harvesting now forgotten.
As the pile of rocks reached half the height of a man, Morgan knew he should leave, but a stunned curiosity kept him rooted to the spot; the ethereal sight of the freely floating rocks organising themselves into a cairn captivating him. Rocks just didn’t do that, yet here they were.
He was still admiring it when the rock that had just floated to sit on the top of the pile flew out towards Morgan. He felt his agility kick in, and with supernatural reflexes, he reacted quickly, diving to one side as a rock the size of a basketball shot past him, smashing into a sapling a few meters behind him, shattering it to splinters. Wide eyed, Morgan watched the now mobile cairn as it loaded another rock on to the top of the pile while slowly floating towards him.
He turned and sprinted behind a large boulder, calling out to the cats as he ran, “Take cover!”
A silent moment passed, and he popped his head up to get a view over the boulder, only to cower almost immediately as a rock crashed into it, breaking apart with the force and peppering him with chunks of stone and grit. He grimaced and poked his head back up to identify the threat.
[Identify – Rock Elemental- Level 15]
[Race - Elemental/Earth]
[HP - 950/950]
[SP - 850/900]
He watched as it loaded another stone to hurl at him, wondering how he would even go about damaging this moving pile of rocks. He glanced around to find the cats, spotting them huddled together behind another large boulder to his left. He’d have to put them away for their safety; no amount of biting and clawing would damage this enemy.
Ducking down, Morgan readied the Bag of Cats in his hands. A large cannonball of a rock struck the top of his cover, glancing off the top face of the boulder and carried on. He watched as the rock crashed high through the forest, bringing down a rain of woody debris in its wake. After a moment, when the dust from the elemental's projectile had cleared, he opened the bag, and the cats flew across the clearing to safety.
Almost as soon as the last cat was in the bag, another resounding thump sounded, echoing between the rock walls. More dust and gravel showered down, the result, he reckoned, of a frontal hit on his own boulder. He counted the seconds until the next one. Thump. A jagged stone, broken and thrown up in the collision landed a handful of centimetres from him and stuck into the ground, point first. Four and a bit seconds. He hunched closer to the boulder as he waited for another rock to strike, and wondered what to do next.
Attacking the animated pile of stones seemed a terrible option, he’d need something hard and blunt, like a hammer, to even think about chipping it a bit. As the only other options seemed to be to cower indefinitely or flee, he looked at the cover around him and planned a route away. Another crash, more debris showered him. After the next hit, he’d make a dash for the boulder that lay in front of him and to the right, perhaps 25 meters away. He could make it in the gap between projectiles, for sure.
Thump. Morgan leapt into action, sprinting out of the cloud of dust towards the next cover. As he ran, he looked to the elemental. Slow though it was, it was much closer than he’d assumed. His eyes were drawn to a small cloud of pebbles and rocks had formed in the air in front it, and they widened as the stones careened towards him, like shot from a giant blunderbuss. In a frantic dive, he jumped towards his destination. Almost in slow motion, as he sailed through the air, he felt a rock the size of his fist hit his left leg.
Suddenly the dive turned into a tumble, agony flaring in his leg as it broke. He lost consciousness briefly when he landed on the broken limb, a meter shy of the welcoming safety of the boulder. He came to, screaming with the white-hot pain of his leg. He saw the white of bone sticking through the skin. The elemental kept on floating towards him, impassionate and inevitable. Another stone had just made its impossible journey to sit at the top of the pile. Crying with the pain, scrabbling desperately in the rocky dirt with his hands he pulled himself toward the cover of the boulder.
Thump.