Stunned by this revelation Vaunce just stared at his father. This was not making any sense to him, and he couldn’t even process it properly. Seeing the look on his face, his father burst into laughter so hard he started to have tears run down his face. A look of annoyance flashed onto Vaunce’s face before he waved to get his fathers attention. Looking up and wiping the tears away his father started to speak.
“Okay sorry. That’s technically true however” he took a shaky breath to calm himself down “ We are the only humans in Burklies, and it’s true that only humans can wield void aligned mana” pausing he added on more like an afterthought “Although the empire has tried to erase that part of its history” exasperated he signed “I know you have questions, but they will have to wait until you can speak properly”
Vaunce nodded, fidgeting with the pencil. He had so many questions with no outlet to ask or figure out the answers to them. It was frustrating and irritating. It felt like he was about to explode from curiosity. He was burning with excitement on how to speak and all the things he could know. If they had been collecting knowledge about void mana and all the uses it had, he could find all sorts of things he could incorporate into his smithing techniques. Maybe they even had a Master Manasmith in the stronghold that he could apprentice under.
“Anyway, for today I’ll just tell you the story of how this all came to be” snapping Vaunce out of his thoughts, his father moved around in his chair getting into a more comfortable position.
“So let us start at the beginning. At the beginning, no one had access to mana beyond humans, except we could only use Void mana. After some time humans discovered other races and being how humans are, we eventually tried to conquer them. After one fell, the rest banded together as a form of defense against us. It didn’t matter however, and we strolled forth along our path of slaughter and eventually took over the continent we have currently. That is when the humans formed our empire ‘Regalia’, with Queen Life and King Death as the rulers. To clarify, that isn't their actual name, but their titles. We don’t know their actual names, but have been searching for them.”
Standing up, he walked out of the room to return with glasses of water. Handing one to Vaunce he sat down and sipped at it before setting it down and continuing.
“Anyway, once we started exploring beyond the continent we discovered other races had been doing the same thing we had on other continents. The only difference was that they had different types of mana. Some of them had united all of the races on their continent instead of slaughtering them all as we did, which caused them to view us with fear and hatred. Eventually war broke out between some of the other continents and we managed to take advantage of it to steal mana crystals that were of other types. Mana crystals can only be the same type of mana as the wielder has. So because humans could only use void, we had to steal other types of crystals for us to be able to wield those types.”
Pausing to allow Vaunce time to process everything that had been said so far, the only noise in the room was the shuffling of some owls that Vaunce had forgotten were even there. He was enraptured with the story, as it portrayed a vastly different picture than what he had learned in school. He thought of a question and started to write before his father waved him off.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“It'll take forever if you write every question you have down, just save them all for when you are able to speak, or go and look them up in the library we have down here some time after you learn void transport.”
Perking up at the name of the spell his father had used to get them here, he started to write a question before stopping and sighing deeply. He motioned to his father that he was ready to continue on with the story and took a drink of his water.
Laughing, his father resumed the tale.
“Once we got the mana crystals, we were attacked by pretty much everyone else. They even stopped fighting each other to fight us instead. All they demanded was their crystals back, claiming that no one race should have access to more than one type of mana. The empire,, of course, didn’t agree and it eventually led to the ‘Absolving War’. The empire was losing at one point and that is when the king and queen decided to swallow the other mana crystals. This led to the mana scarring in the throats of those that swallowed them. They were suddenly able to wield massive amounts of other types of mana, but no longer could use void mana. After this, we managed to push back hard enough that the war became a stalemate and they don’t intrude upon our continent as long as we stay within it. Now that we had pushed back our enemies, peace flourished for us and after a few generations, we noticed that the genes of the people who had swallowed mana crystals and lost access to void mana had changed and they were closer to the races that we had taken the crystal from. Hybrids of the two races, that we void mages just call Kin. For example, your little friend Lilith would be a ‘Lightning-kin’ since she primarily uses lightning mana.”
Vaunce nodded and thought he understood the story. He wasn’t sure how true any of this was, but he trusted his dad and knew he had no reason to lie to him. Plus, he had teleported them to wherever this was. He had never seen his father use mana before, so he was somewhat convinced he also had void mana.
Standing up from his chair, his father motioned for him to follow and started walking. Vaunce hurriedly got up and started walking slightly behind, looking around in amazement as he saw more and more of the stronghold. It looked like everything he could see was made out of the same grayish stone. There was no marring as if someone had dug it out by hand, so it must have been formed through the use of mana. He wondered if it was done using void mana, or earth mana. Either way the entire structure was very impressive to him. He bumped into his father who had stopped walking and had been talking to him; he wasn’t sure how long.
“-rea where we teach people to speak, normally it's just the younger kids. Anyone your age would already have been taught how to speak. The stronghold has an entire populace of people who are either void mages, children of void mages, and other family members. Starting on your next day off, you’ll spend at least 2 of your days off here learning how to speak and once you have that down, we can finally get started with void mana.” Finishing up he glanced at Vaunce, who nodded to show he understood. “But first, I’ll teach you how to use the void transport spell to travel to void anchors we’ve set up”
Leading Vaunce back to the original place they entered, they spent the next several hours memorizing the spell shape and how it worked. Vaunce had never used so much void mana as he did when teleporting to the anchor. He eventually started to feel like he was about to collapse, but he managed to push through it until they were finished. Finished for the day, his father cast the spell again, moving them into the closest void anchor to their house. Feeling that empty feeling of being nowhere and then suddenly somewhere, Vaunce blinked a few times and then realized they were in the forest near the hideout. Surprised, he looked around and saw that they were on the other side of the forest from where the hideout was. Realization dawned on his face as he remembered several times that he had run into his dad while walking back from the hideout. It always seemed weird to him that his dad was just in the forest occasionally. Seeing his dad had kept walking, Vaunce jogged a bit to catch up before slowing down and walking behind him.
He had a pretty full schedule now that he was being made to go to class to learn to speak. He would only have one full day off now, but that didn’t seem too bad considering he was excited to learn all he could from the stronghold. He just hoped that he could handle it all.