Chapter 33: An Enchanted Life
Now that they had working prototypes to give to Cloverton, the past two months of effort finally caught up to everyone. They agreed on a week-long break to rest and recover before they threw themselves into refining their new inventions. After spending a few days alone with Darlene, Wil went for a ride on his Thunderhawk to check in on his best friend.
After this much time, Wil was finally getting used to the new layout of the land. He’d helped Bram fill out the new valley on the south side of the property with water, giving Bram a new lake. It had been another experiment, seeing if the addition of water would affect the leyline at all. If anything, it made it stronger.
Wil parked beside that lake and admired his work. All they needed now was to fill it with some fish and they had the perfect spot to sit with a few beers and enjoy a lazy day. He had a sneaking suspicion that the addition of more life to the land would make the leyline healthier.
He shook himself from his thoughts. This was supposed to be a day off. Wil had never been good at turning off when he had a project to complete or a goal to reach, but the enforced rest turned out to be necessary. Now, at the end of the week, his thoughts strayed back to work.
The Brewery was bustling, and Wil ignored it for now. While Bram spent a lot of time among his customers, Wil had an idea where to find him. He made for the cellar, chuckling as he faced something new.
“You really have been working hard, haven’t you?” Wil said aloud. Bram had managed to install a fairly complicated ward on his cellar doors, projecting the intent to wander off. If Wil hadn’t been an adept mind mage, it might have worked on him. He opened the doors and ventured down.
The cellar had been divided into three different stations for the three of them to work on their individual projects. The stations were in three of the corners, with the fourth dedicated to a mountain of crates and boxes with hunks of different metals and parts they’d discarded. All things considered, the workspace was normally clean and organized.
Now, it was a chaotic mess with half finished prototypes scattered along the different station’s tables. Bram sat on the ground like an overgrown kid, with a faricite battery and several metal doodads between his legs. He looked up with a wild look in his eyes.
“Uh, hi Bram,” Wil said, looking around. “I see you’re making good use of your enforced time off.”
“I have too much to do,” said Bram. His voice was strange. He always sounded anxious and breathy, but never this urgent. “I took a couple days off, but there’s just…so much!”
Oh no. Bram had cracked. Wil pulled up a stool and sat in front of Bram. “There is. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. We don’t need to do it all immediately. We’ve earned a bit of a breather, haven’t we?”
Bram shook his head vehemently. “We’ve only scratched the surface. There is no telling how far our projects will go. We only have the next month to do our best before others get their grubby hands on this discovery and start developing as well.”
“Maybe,” Wil allowed, “but we’ll still have the credit for it. No one will be able to think about leyline power without thinking of us.”
“Thinking of you and Thomas,” Bram muttered. He let the dial he’d been holding clatter to the ground. “I’ll be a footnote.”
Wil laughed and hated himself for it. Judging from the look on Bram’s face, it was one of the worst possible replies, but he couldn’t help it. “If I have my way, your name will be just as big as mine. If not bigger.”
“Yeah, right,” Bram scoffed.
“I’m serious,” said Wil. “I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this without you. We wouldn’t. We might’ve landed somewhere similar between my strength and Thomas’ experience, but it’s been your ideas that we’ve been working on. That’s not a coincidence.”
“You’re just saying that to make me feel better,” said Bram. “Which I do appreciate, but I know it’s not true. We’ve been working on mine because they’re…”
“They’re what?” Wil did his best to suppress his desire to laugh. “They’re brilliant. Even Thomas, who’s been doing this for a living for six years now, is impressed by your quick grasp of configurations. Anyone can learn arrays, but a working configuration with any degree of complexity is hard. What’s this really about, Bram?”
His eyes dropped to his lap, and his ears turned red. It took him nearly a minute to speak, and when he did he sounded on the verge of tears. “Nothing I do matters without you and Thomas there to make it happen. It doesn’t matter how smart I may or may not be when I can’t use magic.”
There it was. Wil knew his friend could be envious of him, but this was the first time it had gotten this bad.
“There are so many things wrong with that,” said Wil. “I genuinely don’t know where to start. Actually, I do.” Wil jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the cellar door. “I didn’t help you with those wards. And I don’t think Thomas did either. You set up magical wards completely on your own.”
Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.
Bram shook his head. “It took faricite batteries to make it happen.”
“With your special touch that makes those batteries refill themselves at the leyline. Batteries that we’ve developed together.”
Wil didn’t have a problem giving Bram the validation he needed, or to boost him up during a dark time. He’d do that any day of the week without question. The hardest part was making it clear he took it seriously, when it baffled him. How could Bram not know how essential he was?
“Bram,” Wil tried again. “All I’ve really contributed to this project is my brute force strength. I knew it was possible because of an accident. Thomas and I together could probably design and develop some good tools and machines together. It wouldn’t be the same. You’re creative and have the touch, and Darlene knows what people want and need.
“When it comes time to celebrate and bask in our victory and assign our credit, I probably will be the face of the group. It was my problem and project to deal with, and it’ll be me getting the focus at the end. But I promise you, my friend, that I am going to be singing your praises the entire time.”
“You will?” Tears of relief shone in Bram’s eyes.
“Bram, I’m going to tell people you’re going to be the next Ferrovani.”
He burst out laughing, wiping at his eyes. “Now I know you’re just trying to make me feel better.”
Wil shook his head vehemently. “No, I’m serious. You’re just starting out. We’re just starting out. Give it ten years and you’ll be bigger than I will be. I mean it.”
Bram was silent again. His eyes were locked on the battery between his legs, and a piece of paper with a series of runes on them, in different orders. He picked up the battery. It looked so small in his hand. “I wish I had magic too. Real magic. This is great, but anyone could do it.”
“And that’s what makes it so important,” said Wil. “Anyone could do it, because you did it. You made it clear that the gap between wizards and the nonmagical population isn’t as wide as we thought. Tell me something. What have you been working on the past few days?”
Bram looked up, a crooked smile on his face. “I was looking at ways to make my house better. And the brewery too. And potions. I want things to be cool in the summer and warm with the winter, and I think I can make it happen. If I do, that’s another thing we can give people. There’s so much around the house we can improve, to make peoples’ lives more magical. To make them better.”
He groped for a piece of paper covered in runes, with a drawing of a toilet. “Think of what we could do for water reclamation and purification! That long stretch of badlands between here and Kappala would be less harsh to live in.”
“Bob the Plumbing Wizard reborn,” Wil muttered, unable to stifle the laughter this time.
“What?”
“A wizard I knew. Made big improvements to pipes and water flow. It can be done, and he’d probably love someone to talk to about it and share notes.” Wil drummed his fingers on his knees with excitement. “I could probably contact him and get him to chat with you. What else have you got? Tell me what you’d do if you had unlimited time and resources.”
Bram thought about it. He stood up, groaning with the effort it took to heft himself back to his feet. When he straightened, his back let out a sick crack. “Wards against nightmares for children. Better boundaries for ranchers, fences that repel predators and keep livestock in. Think of what we could do for sheep herding if we had a way to collectively attract them on command.”
“That’s a hell of a start,” said Wil, but Bram wasn’t done.
“Everything we could do with electricity or coal, we could do with magic. More, even!” Bram paced back and forth, head down, words coming out a mile a minute. “All we need to do is find a problem, find a spell to fix it. And imagine what we’ll be able to do when we’re able to expand the range of leylines.”
“Whoa now,” said Wil, “not even sure if that’s possible.”
“They said changing leylines were impossible too,” said Bram, pivoting to face Wil. He manically gestured with his hands. “I started that book by Marlowe you brought back. It’s all right there, I think. How else would so many spells anchor to the same place without something breaking? We just need to crack what he figured out!”
Wil nodded along. “It probably won’t be me figuring it out,” he said. “I’d put money on you doing it. Do you see your worth yet?”
Bram lowered his hands. “I…I don’t know. Maybe? I just know there’s so much more to go, and I don’t want to rest. I want to get there before others do. And maybe I am smart and good at this, but…Once those other wizards get a chance, then what hope do I have of keeping up?”
Wil slid off the stool and went up to his friend. He put his hands on Bram’s arms and squeezed. “You’re going too fast for me, and Thomas is pleased with your progress and is mostly just checking your work and helping polish it at this point. Bram, can you do me a favor?”
“What’s that?”
“Come out and have a few drinks with me. Leave all of this behind for two more days, and we’ll get back to it. You did a lot of work already, and when we pick it back up on Monday, we’ll go over these notes and see what we should focus on next. But for now, let’s go have some fun. Let’s eat too much and listen to Lonnie talk about girls who definitely didn’t give him the time of day.”
It didn’t matter if it was his words, his tone, or the look on his face, Bram nodded. He let out a breathy laugh as he hunched and minimized himself. “Yeah, we can do that. I’m being a bit silly, aren’t I?”
“Not at all,” said Wil. “You’re driven, and you’ve got something you’re insecure about. I’ll spend as much time as you need making sure you know how much we appreciate you, buddy. But for now, let’s drink and you can talk about some of those ideas there.”
Bram smiled. “Yeah. I think I’m going to do everything I can to upgrade my house, use it as a basis for experimentation. But we need more batteries.”
“We’ll figure it out.” Wil patted Bram’s shoulder and nudged him towards the cellar door. “Now c’mon, I want some more of that coffee stout.”