1:015 on the 65th day of Winter

I asked the waiter for another cup of tea. Food was being rationed for the siege so the stadium's box menu was fairly spartan. But none would starve for want of tea so I felt fine asking for another cup. I was sitting alone looking out at stands that were filled to bursting. There wasn't anything going on in the arena yet so I waited while contemplating the last couple of days.

I sipped my tea as my mind wandered back to what I had been working on now that I had my artificial core back. The natural cores were a brilliant invention of evolutionary biology, and I was sure it was doing a lot more than I understood, but my core was optimized for raw mana output. It produced energy in two forms: electric energy, and electromagnetic or light mana. There was an interesting interaction between the two as light mana could be 'stored' in electric fields. As far as I could tell it was a type of particle that would sit orthogonal to both electrical and magnetic fields without interacting with either. Anyway, I was using this to enhance lasers as the light mana riding along would greatly increase how much power I could get out of a reaction.

The artificial core generated tons of electrical power and light mana. I had been redesigning my lasers to make use of all that power but I was running into a wall. That's what led me to this event. Well, I guess that research was not the only thing that led me here.

"Welcome ladies and gentlemen!" called a loud voice enhanced by air magic. "For many years the iron skin legion and its mage core has kept Cinder safe. The best of their number are the iron blood mages who take on the most dangerous missions, fight the greatest foes, and crush the demon hordes. Today a new batch of iron blood hopefuls will be testing their might in the arena against our stable of summoned and captured monsters."

These were the entrance trials Arin talked about. The announcer was really hamming it up today to get the crowd cheering. Anything to keep the masses hopeful and not thinking about the siege too deeply.

"We have a record number of applicants this year so we will move quickly." said the announcer. "First up is Caozperht from house Ember."

A young man in bright red robes walked out into the sandy arena waving to the crowd. Opposite him a set of gates opens to reveal a gigantic black ooze. It rolled across the arena toward Callahan picking up a shell of sand along the way. He seemed surprised for only a moment before turning to the monster and unleashing a jet of thick red fire.

The flames engulfed the ooze but did not slow it. I winced as it rolled straight through the fire and over Caozperht. The jet abruptly cut out and the audience booed.

"Caozperht has been incapacitated by the tar slime." said the announcer.

Two older mages on the sidelines moved in one trailing a stream of water. With a gesture the ooze lifted off the ground and the water flew in to pull the young man out. He was screaming in pain as the fire spell had actually heated the tar slime before it reached him. The water cooled him down quickly and he was carried off to the healers.

The announcer called the next hopeful and the next after that one. Only about one in five actually beat the monster they had been paired against. It seemed as if the organizers were actively arranging bad matchups that would not favor the applicant. Earth mages faced flying opponents while air mages faced burrowers. There was even a lightning mage that was pitted against an armadillo monster clad in copper plates. He actually won by stabbing it in the eye with a dagger before cooking its insides with electricity. There were no light mages, even though they were much more common than lightning mages.

"Next up is Arin of no house." said the announcer.

I sat forward in my chair. Arin strode confidently out on the field in studded leather armor. Her hair was glowing with a deep, dangerous looking red and she was utterly focused. She ignored the crowd entirely. When she got to her spot she drew her sword and dropped into a fighting stance. The gates opened and out walked not one but two trolls. They were as tall as a tree and thick with corded muscle. More closely related to mushrooms than humans, Trolls had language and could sometimes be reasoned with but they generally saw humans as food rather than something worth talking to. These two seemed enraged and even a bit disgusted. Their reaction gave me the impression of two cruel farmers being captured by their chickens. Then they saw Arin and green drool started dripping from their lips. One said something to the other and then they both ran forward, clambering to get ahead of each other.

I gripped my chair harder wanting to shout a warning to Arin. Still in her fighting stance she pointed at the leading troll. There was a loud pop, and then the troll's body fell limp to the arena floor, his head still rolling toward Arin. She sidestepped the head and pointed at the second one only to have him throw a handful of sand at her. She took off at a sprint around the arena with a flash of light there were two more Arins running in different directions. It was clear which one was real from my perspective but I wasn't looking through a cloud of sand. The troll picked the wrong one and stomped on it before Arin dismissed the third and came up behind him holding out two fingers this time.

As soon as the troll spun around to find her, she let loose her spell. The troll roared and clutched at his eyes. Then she swung her sword at his right leg like she was chopping down a tree. It didn't cut through but it hurt him enough to cause him to stumble back limping. She waited for one mark and then another pop severed his left foot at the angle. The Troll fell onto his back now clutching at his surroundings in pain and anger. Ten more marks and both the Troll's arms were severed by lasers, though I could already see the leg beginning to regrow.

Arin paused then to look at the announcer. He looked utterly confused.

"Are you declaring that your opponent is incapacitated?" he asked.

She just nodded.

"Very well!" he seemed to get back his normal cadence as he talked. "Arin of no house is the winner!"

***

1:118 on the 65th day of Winter

"Theod!" someone called.

I stood and turned to see Arin navigating the mostly empty stands to come my way. When she got close I gave a deep bow.

"Thank you for agreeing to see me." I said.

She grabbed me by my shoulders halfway into my bow and hugged me.

"I'm so glad to see you're okay!" she said. "I mean, I figured you would be okay, but you're looking a lot better."

"Thanks to you." I said with a smile. "I am glad to see that you are also well. Now please sit and have some tea."

She sat across from me and was beaming from ear to ear.

"I saw your performance today." I said. "Extremely impressive. I hope that will put you near the top of the list for applicants."

"Oh, yeah." she said before looking from side to side. "The head of recruiting came and spoke to me personally about what spell I was using."

"What did you tell him?" I asked.

"That he would have to accept me to learn any more about it." she said, confidence was rolling off of her.

I laughed out loud.

"That's fantastic!" I said.

Then a thought occurred to me.

"I don't imagine they get a lot of light mage applicants." I said.

"You're right about that" she said. "There have apparently only been a handful in their whole history, and all of them were specialized at other things like rifles or the spear."

The waiter arrived and we ordered. After he left I turned back to Arin with a smile.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"If you are going into the ranks of the iron blood mages then I have something that could help." I said. "Unfortunately I didn't bring it."

"Really?" she asked. "You want me to come with you somewhere after our meal?"

Her smile had gone sly. She was clearly teasing me but I could feel my blush anyway.

"Yes." I said, followed by a cough to clear my throat. "I am hoping that you may agree to help me perform a few more experiments."

"Oh really?" she said with a wink.

"Oh come on, be serious." I said.

"Fine, fine." she said. "Why do you need to run more experiments? Your light magic was good enough to convince your sister. Hell, I was half convinced and I know you're faking it." She whispered the last past but I still checked our surroundings again to be sure we were alone in the box.

"Yes, but everything I have made so far lacks the control you have." I said. "Further, there is something about how magic, all magic, is controlled that is … concerning. For example:"

I picked up a fork from the table.

"Can you make this fork glow from where you are sitting?"

She just raised an eyebrow and before long the fork started glowing.

"Exactly." I said. "Thank you."

As the glow started fading I explained.

"That shouldn't be possible. As far as I can tell you are projecting light mana from your skin. Once it leaves your body you should have no way to control what happens to it. There is a bunch of air between you and the fork so why does the mana wait until it hits the fork to interact with something. To illustrate the point, can you make the air between us glow like the fork?"

She furrowed her eyebrows at that but again, after a bit more time, wisps of glowing smoke started moving and swirling in a small sphere between us.

"That's a lot harder, but it's basically just a simple illusion spell." she said.

I nodded and the glow faded.

"I want to understand what the limits of magic control are. More importantly I'd like to figure out what the underlying mechanism is." I said.

She gave me a strange look.

"You're weird." she said. "But whatever it is that makes you so odd, helped me become a combat mage. So yeah, I'll follow you a bit further. What do you have in mind?"

***

1:119 on the 65th day of Winter

We entered the workshop. Arin immediately crossed to Schrodinger's bed and started petting him. Schrodinger let out a happy yowal.

"There you are cutie pie." Arin said sweetly, then she turned half toward me. "Hey, I never asked. What's his name?"

"Oh him. That's Schrodinger." I said.

"What does it mean?" she asked.

It took me a second to realize what she was getting at.

"Oh, it's the name of someone brilliant." I said. "Someone who figured out some really important things about how reality works."

"Really?" she asked. "Like what?"

I tried to think of how to explain the Schrodinger equation but came up blank. Quantum mechanics were just so non-intuitive compared to everything we could normally observe that I couldn't think of how to simplify it. Then I remembered one of the experiments I had planned.

"What I have planned today involves something he figured out." I said. "I'll try and explain it when we get there."

She shrugged.

"Great. So, what is this mysterious gift you got me?" she asked.

"I think I'd better wait to give it to you. I think, when you see it, you will want to try it out right away and we'll get nothing else done." I said.

She pouted a bit but recovered quickly.

"Fine, what's first?" she asked.

I opened a drawer and pulled out a dark cloth and marble.

"The first thing we are going to check is how control drops off with range." I said. "You stand where you are and make this marble glow different colors when I say go." I set the marble on the table next to her and pulled a measuring string out of my pocket to mark the distance. I took out a small card shaped crystal out of another pocket. This was a stop watch I had built to work with the marble to time how long it took to start emitting light within a specific band.

"Ready?" I asked.

And at her nod we began. We ran twenty trials switching between colors at random. Then I moved the marble twice as far and ran another twenty. I kept moving it back and testing how long it took for her to switch. After making it to the other end of the workshop I turned around and ran a few trials moving closer until the marble had reached its original spot on the table.

After all the data was in, I took a few measures to do the math and then I plotted the average time at each location.

"A clear exponential function." I said after I was done.

"Expected shape but the rate of increasing difficulty is surprising." I said. "It takes twice as long to enact control to the same degree for every ten meters of distance away."

She was happily staying busy by petting Schrodinger who was in her lap now. We ran a few more tests to establish baselines for control. She made beams as narrow as she could, then as wide. Nothing terribly surprising.

Then we got to one of my favorite experiments.

"Next up is the double slit experiment." I said with a grin.

I got a wire loop attached to a base and set it on the table. Then I closed the shutters on the bright-leaf lanterns around the room and stuffed a black cloth in the frame to block as much light as I could. I pulled a long hair from my head and tied it across the loop so that it would sit vertically. Then I got out a small crystal rod and set it up in a sturdy frame to point at the hair.

"This is a ruby laser crystal." I said. "It will shoot a weak laser at the hair. The hair will split the light and create what's called an interference pattern on the back wall. Your goal will be to shrink the beam small enough to be fully blocked by the hair, then expand it to the size of the loop."

She snapped her fingers.

"Oh yeah, I remember seeing that interference thingy when I hit the edge of something." she said. "It looks like the beam splits, but not just in two, in like twenty. All in a line. Whatever was just past what I was aiming for gets a bunch of evenly spaced burns in it. I remember thinking that was super weird."

I raised my eyebrows at that.

"Ya, it's one of the ways that light acts like a wave." I said. "As it spills past an obstruction it tends to spread out like ripples in a pond. In between the beams are where the ripples cancel each other out."

"That makes sense." she said. "Wait, was this the thing that Schrodinger guy figured out?"

"No, interference patterns in light were discovered long before his time." I said.

"But it turns out that light has a minimum amount. You can turn down a light source until it sends out only one unit of light at a time. But then something really weird happens. Instead of spreading out, each unit of light only hits one spot on the wall. But how likely it is to hit each spot is still wave-like with some spots that get hit a lot and others that almost never get hit."

She looked incredulous.

"That's really weird." she said.

"Ya it is." I said. "Schrodinger figured out exactly how to predict where the unit of light would be likely to hit based on how much energy it has."

The Schrodinger equation actually describes how the wave function of a particle changes over time but that was close enough without getting into complex numbers.

"Well, let's get started." she said.

She held her hand over the crystal and focused. A narrow beam of light extended through the dusty workshop, hit the hair, and split into many beams just as expected. After a moment of waiting, nothing changed.

"Are you trying to grow the beam or shrink it?" I asked.

"Grow it." she said, notes of frustration in her voice. "But it's not working."

Interesting. I recorded the observation in my notebook. The crystal was built with a fixed lens about a millimeter across so the test was to see if she could change the direction of light that she had not emitted herself. I was about to tell her to stop when I looked up from my notes to see that the interference pattern had changed. It was now much narrower with only three beams.

"Got it." she said.

Then all the side beams came back. There was clearly more light in all but the center three beams did not get brighter or dimmer, bigger or smaller. I cocked my head to the side in confusion. Then it returned to just three beams, then only one that jumped from side to side, then it blinked out. I looked at the hair and sure enough it still had light on it. But the light spanned about a millimeter along the hair.

"What the hell…" I said trailing off.

"This is really hard." she said, clearly struggling. "Are you even timing me?"

I held my hand up in front of the beam right next to the crystal and a thin, hair shaped line appeared in my palm. She let out a breath and the line turned back into a round dot.

"What is going on?" I said under my breath.

I took my hand away and tried to wrack my brain for what could possibly be blocking the light like that. Was her mana canceling it like with the darkness spell? No, the crystal would get dimmer if she did that. I walked over and pointed to the third beam to the right in the interference pattern.

"Can you eliminate only this beam?" I asked. A second later the beam winked out, having no effect on the rest of the pattern. Okay, what is she actually doing?

Hypothesis 1: she is bending the light. I held up my hand in front of another beam so that it was blocked but Arin could see the spot on the wall where it would have hit.

"Now can you move this beam so that it doesn't hit my hand?" I said.

A second later the beam flickered and then there was no dot on my hand. It moved a bit to one side instead.

"Good now try and bend the light around to hit behind my hand." I said.

The beams flicked and jumped and sputtered for a measure before she gave up.

"I don't think I can bend the light." she said.

"That's fine, thanks for trying." I said. "I have a few more experiments in mind for now so bear with me." I took out a specialized light sensor marble I had made for this.

Hypothesis 2: she is shifting the light outside the visible spectrum.

I held up the mable to one of the lines. I turned it on and watched the little blue lights on the side for the level of light it sensed.

"Please eliminate this line" I said. Sure enough, when the light went away the sensor stopped picking up almost all of the light it had been. No shifting then. What else could it be? Then I had a crazy idea that could explain just about everything. But it was completely impossible. I pointed to a dark spot between lines far to the right where the pattern was already very dim.

"Please try and concentrate all the light from the laser on this point." I said.

It took her a few tries but eventually she managed it.

"That's a lot harder." she said.

"Can you hold it for a bit?" I asked.

She nodded and I moved around her to where the hair was suspended. I held my hand over the hair.

"Try and hold it there if you can." I said.

And, after another nod from Arin, I pulled the hair away. The light immediately jumped back to a spot directly in front of the crystal.

"Can you get it back to that spot?" I asked.

After another measure of trying she shook her head. I sat down on the stool and put my head in my hands. Then I started laughing.

"That's… that shouldn't be possible!" I said.

Arin took her hand away from the crystal.

"What are you on about?" she asked. "What's so weird about that?"

My mind was racing but I couldn't find an alternative explanation. It was so clear but so totally impossible I couldn't wrap my brain around it. She was controlling the outcome of wave function collapse.