Moira leaned her metal folding chair until the back thudded against the side panel of Juan’s truck, front feet lifted from the ground. She braced one foot on the rung between them and kicked her other up over her knee. The whole idea of teaching people magic sounded thrilling whenever Derek spoke of it, his earnest determination glinting in his eyes and gesticulating hands urging people to actually listen. But, in practice, it was boring as hell to go from person to person and teach the same water spell.
“What do you mean it’s boring?” Nick said when she complained to him. “It’s so fun to see each person’s expression the first time they conjure a cup full of water and realize they don’t have to wait in the stupid line as much anymore.”
He was a good person who really liked people. It’s why he ended up in the Red Cross. He was the one to come up with the idea to go from person to person to teach the basic water conjuring spell so that they could experience for themselves that magic was accessible. The man standing on his milk crate preaching about the temptation of the devil and hell coming to earth mostly got uncomfortable glances, but that did not mean his words never resonated. The person sitting inside the water tent, offering to help people learn to conjure their own water got an equal number of uncomfortable looks.
According to Nick, people were just unfamiliar with magic – obviously – and, on top of being forced out of their homes into this transient lifestyle with no end in sight, they were not willing to experiment with any other unknowns. Some of them were, but the vast majority did not know what to think and were funneled those doomsday screechings on top of the government’s warnings that magic was dangerous. So, it was on them to go out and show people that they could use it without immediately setting their souls on fire or dropping dead.
So, he, Derek, Rose and Moira had been going everywhere there was a congregation of people – the water line, the medical tents, the lines for other necessities like food and hand sanitizer, and the information booth. And they showed each person who would listen, how to conjure a cupful of water. Then encouraged them to drop by their table, which was set up by the east entrance to the camp, if they wanted to learn more about summoning the basic elements, like fire, or basic healing spells.
The nurses in the medical tents worked themselves into a tizzy over the fact that they were teaching medical magic. Derek, who had a way with people – he always seemed like the most capable person in the room and everyone listened to him because his charisma was just that powerful – spoke to them about it. He said it was like teaching people how to give chest compressions or properly give stitches, not do open heart surgery. They should be excited that maybe it would lessen the strain on the medical tent’s resources.
They had a lot of interest. People did get excited about being able to cast magic, like the name said. Moira could understand. Being able to summon water or whip up a little ground tornado with nothing more than a thought felt like holding the entire world in your hands. Like a whole universe of possibilities had just opened up and there was more to you and the world around you than you had ever dreamed. And it was all under your control.
But she still found it dull to give the same little speech to every single person. How the man on his milk crate could get up and shout his throat hoarse each day while nobody appeared to listen was beyond her comprehension. In any case, she had come to sit behind the table with Juan for a little while.
The table was of the plain white folding variety and had a couple of stacks of paperwork on it. Juan leaned over them, elbows braced on the table as he went through one of the papers with a person who had dropped by a couple of minutes ago. He was talking about how the method they had taught to summon water worked the same for all four of the elements, although there was no visible effect with air. Once simply summoning it became something natural to a person, they could then begin manipulating it – turning the water into a sphere or conjuring a certain type of rock.
“So, I could summon diamonds?” The guy joked, pretty much the same way that every other person did at that point.
“Theoretically,” Juan told him, “But diamonds are very difficult to make in nature, no? So maybe not on your first try.”
The guy made a face like he thought that was a fair point and leaned forward again to listen as Juan continued to explain the information on the paper. Moira let her chair fall back down on all four legs with a thud and reached forward to pick up one of the papers so she could look at it herself.
It was damp and a little limp from the intense humidity that had returned with a vengeance after a series of storms swept through the area. Although they were not hit as hard as some of the places to the south, the camp was still a hellhole of churned and puddling mud. And it had not done much good since the temperatures rose pretty quickly again after the couple of cooler days that initially followed the storm.
She read through the paper with a frown. It was extremely vague, not quite as bad as Sean’s flippant advice that magic was all about figuring out what worked personally for you, but pretty close. It essentially said exactly what Juan was telling people to visualize. She stood up and walked around Juan’s seat to grab one of the lists of healing spells and frowned even harder. This one was much more specific. Beside each type of spell – closing a cut, healing a burn, etc. – was an arrangement of runes and bullet-point instructions.
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Juan finished explaining to the man that it was best to stick to the spells listen on the healing sheet, rather than try to visualize any type of healing magic off the cuff because if it went wrong, it could go really wrong and kill him or the person he was trying to help. As soon as the man left, Moira brandished the two flyers in front of Juan.
“How come you have the runes for these more complex healing spells, but you aren’t showing people the runes for the elements or for summon or manipulate?” She asked.
“Runes?” Juan asked. “What are you talking about.”
“The runes!” She jammed her pointer finger against one of the healing spells.
“Those are spells that were passed down from the experts hundreds or even thousands of years ago,” Juan told her.
Moira let the papers crumple to her sides and stared at him in disbelief. She went and sat back down in her chair and stared at the muddy grass between her feet in disbelief. These people on the council had the whole universe at the tips of their fingers, and they chose to simply practice the same basic healing spells and little illusion spells to lie or get people to do what they wanted them to. They did little card tricks to know which stocks to invest in when they could have literally been figuring out the spell for eternal life or some shit.
“You guys could have been figuring out how to live forever, and you’ve just stuck to healing the shaving cuts on your chins?” she asked.
“Well, there is a story of somebody trying to figure out how to live forever and it did not end pretty,” Juan said.
“Whatever,” she leaned back in her chair with a frustrated sigh. If they were going to teach people about magic, they really should do a better job about it instead of just passing along the vague teachings of the council. If they wanted to make it accessible, they needed to make it more structured and universal. “You guys really don’t know about runes?”
Juan braced his elbow on the back of his chair and rested his chin on it. “Some people come up with their own set of symbols in their practice, but I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Arg,” she tossed her hands in the air and pulled her phone out of her back pocket, then dialed Jeremy. Well, Caleb, but she was looking to talk to Jeremy.
“Moira!” Caleb picked up. She could hear his harsh breaths in the background like he had been running or something. “How have you been? You would not believe the shit we’ve been going through.”
She looked around the camp and thought that whatever they had been running around doing was certainly more interesting than what she had been doing.
“I’ve been fine,” she said, “Why are you out of breath?”
“We’re looking for Atticus. She’s been missing,” Caleb told her. She rolled her eyes toward the sky and wondered, yet again, why on earth Jeremy insisted on dragging a cat of all things around with him. “I was down in this gorge looking for her. You would not believe how steep some of the hills are back in these woods.”
“Hey, listen.” Moira interrupted before he could keep talking. “Is Jeremy around? I need to talk to him.”
“Oh, yeah, sure. Jeremy!” His voice grew muffled as though he had lowered the phone, but she could still hear him hollering at the top of his lungs. “Jeremy! Where the hell did you…oh, there you are. No, sorry, I didn’t. It’s Moira. Yeah…here you go.”
“Moira?” Jeremy’s voice came over the line.
“Hey, so have you figured out any more about those runes that you showed me and Caleb way back.” She rubbed her forehead when she realized that way back was less than a month ago.
“Uh, a little, I guess,” he said. “Why, what’s up?”
“Well, Derek got this brilliant idea to start teaching people magic because he got pissed off about this guy in the refugee camp preaching about how people shouldn’t practice magic. And he’s hoping to set up an organization to do that – teach people, I mean – and, like, help them get experience by clearing monsters out of neighborhoods and stuff.”
There was a long pause from the other end of the call. “Okay? I mean, that’s pretty cool of him.”
“So,” Moira glanced at Juan and saw that a couple of people had come up to the table, so she twisted away from them in her seat. “You remember how the council was all about, like, how personal magic was. And they were really vague about how to practice it?”
“Yeah,” Jeremy said, “I mean, I thought that was just Sean, but yeah, I remember.”
“Well, it’s all of them. The whole council is just…vague about it. So, anyway, I thought about you and your runes. And I thought it would be much better if we could actually show people runes instead of just telling them to visualize fire, you know? Like, if we are going to teach people stuff, we should systemize it, right?”
“I think so,” Jeremy agreed slowly. “So you want to know what I’ve figured out about the runes?”
“Yes, exactly!” Moira exclaimed.
“Okay.” Jeremy sniffed and let out a long sigh. He also sounded slightly out of breath from apparently hiking around trying to find his lost cat. “Do you have internet where you are at?”
“I’ve got data, yeah.”
“I can e-mail you what I think I’ve figured out,” he said. “I mean, nothing is for certain, of course.”
“Yeah, no, whatever,” Moira said dismissively, “Whatever you can see with those eyes of yours is better than the personalized systems of symbols that the council people come up with to help themselves or just telling people to visualize fire. Then turn around and tell them they have to stick strictly to visualizing the written healing spells that we do have.”
“Sure, yeah,” Jeremy sounded distracted, then he cleared his throat and said, “I’m ready if you want to give me your e-mail.”
Moira grinned and rattled it off.
“Cool, alright. I’ll put some stuff together for you later today,” Jeremy said. “Tell Derek I think what he’s doing is great. People need to know that they can actually take matters into their own hands because resources are getting stretched thin, and it might only be them that can help themselves sometimes.”
“Yeah,” Moira sighed and rolled her eyes, then said, “Sorry you lost Atticus. I hope you find her.”
“Damn cat,” Jeremy groused. “Thanks. She’ll turn up, but I hope it’s soon because I want to move on.”
“Alright,” Moira said. “I’ll let you get back to it, then. Thanks!”
“No problem. Talk to you later.”
Then he hung up, and Moira looked back at the table with a sigh. As soon as Juan finished with the people he was currently talking with, she was going to have to try to explain to him where Jeremy was getting these runes from without saying anything about his sight. Maybe she could just explain it away as one of those personal systems and convince Juan that it was a good idea just to teach everyone the same runes, and since Jeremy was already systemizing it, they could just use his. She nodded to herself, then tipped her chair back until it thumped against the truck, and closed her eyes.