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Abacus
Syuufarin felt that there was something strangely therapeutic in sitting by a window, the warmth of the sunset cascading inside as she finished her homework.
She turned her gaze over to Clauren, he usually was occupied with other things, and left whatever education Samyra believed she needed to Samyra. But today, when he noticed her sitting there with a pile of papers he volunteered himself to help her.
She nudged him to catch his attention, waving her papers politely to inform him that she had finished.
“Hm? Oh, you finished already? that was quick.” Clauren was surprised.
He fixed his glasses. “Sometimes I wonder if all this scholaring that Samyra is giving you is even necessary with how quick you go through everything. Now let’s see here… Huh?... Wait… what?...”
Syuufarin was beginning to feel worried and nervous. The homework was just some simple math questions, as she and Samyra had finished most of her lessons on their language, Samyra gave her a list of mathematical questions to have a measure of where she was regarding it.
Clauren suddenly stood up, startling Syuufarin.
He walked over to a cabinet that sat in a corner of the room, pulling out a board with rows of free moving wooden disks set in rows of iron rods.
Syuufarin found the strange object familiar, an abacus, she remembered. Though she was still confused about what was happening.
With dexterity befitting an experienced user of the tool, Clauren quietly sat beside her with her homework papers. The sound of clattering wooden beads being repeatedly flung across the abacus filling the room.
“These… Where have you learned these mathematical structures?” Clauren asked Syuufarin, he could take a good guess on how they worked, based on how the tiny towers of numbers filled the margins of the pages.
He thought that using an abacus was both faster and more economic since it used no ink, but he could see the ingeniousness of Syuufarin’s method. He had never seen such a neat way to do calculations on paper.
Syuufarin could only sweatdrop at his questions. Just how would she even begin explaining this?...
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‘I did not sleep well.’
I turn left and right trying to get a crack out of my spine, unfortunately, my bones are flexible.
I was so excited to start today’s magic lessons that I completely missed the time and didn’t manage to get any shut eye. And even before that there was the situation to clear with Samyra. ‘Ugh… Next time… let’s leave the giddy-jumpy imagination for anytime that isn’t right before I go to sleep…’
The most I get from stretching is a small satisfaction from loosening my stiffness. I don’t really have the best sleeping postures. ‘I miss coffee…’ The closest thing I have found around here is a weird plant that looks like eyeballs when ripe, but they said that eating one of those raw will make you unable to sleep for 3 days. The elves don’t really have a name for caffeine.
“Ready?” Clauren asks me.
Right now we are in a backyard area behind Clauren’s shop, nobody ever used the space in years aside from Clauren to dump unknown chemicals whenever he wanted, so he had cleared the area from tall grass while Samyra wasn’t looking when she was tutoring me. There are three totem looking things covered with layers of wood and leather set at different distances apart from me, and I’m standing in the middle of a chalk circle he told me to stand inside.
There are weird gray spots in the ground devoid of any grass and life that I assume is his fault, but he clarified that there isn’t anything to worry about since he had already dealt with everything.
“Yeah!” I answered him. ‘...Honestly, no.’ Despite all the preparation we had until now I couldn’t be more nervous.
I briefly remember the first time I “tried” to do something with mana… without any instructions… That day I went to sleep with more blood outside my body than inside. ‘Thankfully, I lived.’
“Okay! Now, just like I told you. This foci you are holding is a simple beginner’s one, and we will be performing a simple spell that creates a harmless stream of water, I will channel mana through it once together with you, focus on that feeling.”
According to Clauren… Only masters are able to cast magic without a focus of some sort. Focus being a tool that can come with diverse shapes and sizes that Clauren insisted it is required to cast essentially any spell unless you want to rupture your own veins and die of hemorrhage.
‘Which… um, yeah… Maybe I shouldn’t tell him that that already happened once.‘
Clauren firmly grips a hand around my hands holding the wand, his other hand is placed behind me near my abdomen. “I’ll begin now. Empty your mind and relax.” He commanded.
There is a… not fuzzy feeling, but an indescribable sensation of presence invading my senses around the areas his hands are in, invisible through normal senses, but I can still feel it being there with my being, like a phantom feeling to the phantom feeling, it superpositions itself and spreads through my body like a sticky, but coarse vapor that leaves a inexplicably weird sensation of sweet chafing in my bones. As if I could put a flavor to the mana.
“You feel that?” Clauren asks.
“Y-yes,” I awkwardly squeak out “It feels funny.”
“Yeah.” He noncommittally agrees. “What you are feeling is me purposefully disrupting your channels. Now, pay close attention, I will be activating a spell with the wand.”
Suddenly, like a strange sense of vertigo, but instead of dizziness it is focused and directional. An ephemeral sort of pull runs through my limbs that gives out a satisfyingly stretch on phantom muscle that has never been used before. A breath I had been holding leaves me as I feel the mystical energy inside me flow through my body to the wand in my hand.
“𝓐𓏲ָꮺ𓂅!” Clauren shouted a word that sounded like garble to my ears, fundamentally different from any other time when he spoke normally. It was as if I heard him speak, but the sound itself bounced off the walls of another reality.
And just like that, a glow emerges in the space in front of the wand. From it a small gush of water started to come out from seemingly thin air like a faucet. The conjured water splashing harmlessly onto the ground.
“Look, we did it!” Clauren celebrates, even though I didn’t do anything.
“Whoa…” I mouth, amazed. Though a thought hits me. “How come you cast the spell, but I felt the effects?”
“Ah, you see, because of this particular way we are holding the wand, and because of my amazing skill.” Clauren boasts, saying that very few people can do a thing like this. “Essentially, I’m not really holding the want proper, but I am still able to somewhat access it’s foci, so because you are in the path between me and the wand, I used your own body as a pathway to channel my mana to reach the wand, and complete the spell.” He lets go of my hand. “But because I am, in a way, channeling a spell using your own body, there’s a significant amount of resistance since I am pushing my own mana through you that ends up dragging an amount of your own mana in the process, which is what you felt when the spell was cast.”
I pause at that. “Is it possible to cast spells inside people?” I say with a disgusted grimace.
“Erm.” Clauren is visibly uncomfortable with the subject. “No, not quite– Have I explained what foci are to you?”
I run through my memories. “...No I don’t think you did.”
“Well I will have to rectify that.” Clauren begins explaining “The mana that is present inside us, just like the mana in most other living things, wasn’t really made to be extracted, expelled, or moved around willy-nilly, despite our abilities to interact with it, and being able to directly manipulate it with our own will…”
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“...It’s an energy that coexists, and sometimes enhances, the anatomy of the subject. While it’s not an essential element to sustain life, its presence in the atmosphere has at least some impact on all lifeforms. In this case, mages are individuals who can harness this energy. The problem is, because it’s such an intrinsically intertwined essence with the being, drawing it out can take a toll in the body. Forced extraction can lead to lethal consequences…”
“Foci, or focus gemstones, were created to serve both as a faucet that puts a hard limit on the “flow” that a mage uses on their spells, preventing them from simply gushing mana all over the place and wasting it all, and as a catalyst or lens that makes spellcasting more efficient and easier to handle.” Clauren explained that focuses are like using a quill to draw instead of trying to write from spilling drops directly from the ink jar, and that only experienced masters are able to do the impossible without the metaphorical quill, at a great expense of control and power.
“Does that mean you are a master?” I ask, recalling that time he produced a small flame in the tip of his fingers.
“Ha! Of cour—”
*Bonk*
“Lying is a bad habit you know.” Samyra, who had been silent so far, said in a tired voice. She turns to me “He has very tiny versions of his magic staff hidden on his sleeves.” She explains.
She didn’t want to miss my first lesson on magic… and also she was here as a safety measure. So she had been observing from afar for a while now.
“Poo.” Clauren childishly grumbles. “But you must admit that there is a high level of skill required to pull off my tricks. The spells may be pitifully tiny but making them appear on my hands at will needs no shortage of hard work.”
“Hmm.” Samyra hums. “Dear, you are going on a tangent again… what about the lesson?”
Clauren sheepishly breaks off from what he was going to say. “Oh, right.”
“To answer your question, yes, spells can be cast inside people, in fact there are many healing arts that do exactly that. They are specialized spells specifically made to bypass or penetrate the natural resistance living beings have against intrusive mana, so that they may reach inside and heal something.” He avoids mentioning that healing spells aren’t the only thing you can cast inside people.
“Now… wizardry. The quintessential and traditional way of spellcasting…” Clauren begins pulling out diagrams from somewhere deep in his pockets. “...Utilizes incantations and magic matrices, all in a formulaic structure with a robust and well tested system that leaves little room for error, if a spell fails, more often than not it’s the user’s fault…”
‘...Formulaic?’ I question, beginning to sense dread.
“...All spells I will teach you have a basis on arithmancy along with a thirty-two glyph set layered into a magic matrix. The simple spell we just did only uses three glyphs with a simple single dimensional matrix without much math, for now though… let’s practice manipulating your own mana pool.”
‘Math?! What do you mean Math??’
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# Artist rendition:
image [https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/drive-viewer/AKGpihZbIbQ0IK6rSh4npEzBRGO-dIvUxGCI3qu9vE8xnNdgiFb0x0__mn1xTBKcYSU6qPI7XxLKF0eJZC_XQ6fuoXBz5mJreWzUJQ=s1600-rw-v1]
。。。
“Aq… um… agkü… A—” The chanting part of the spell, arguably the last piece of the puzzle, is a real tongue twister. Despite the diagram that feels like an overcomplicated physics question being annoying, it was doable, this however… It's not only partially a language in of itself, which I have to train to even pronounce the words correctly, but it is also like a muscle, something to take all that built up mana and ignite it, in a way. It is a bridge made out of meaning and word, built on the fly to deliver intent onto the material world.
“ａｋｖｏｂｏｌｔｏ!!!”
I jump, suddenly startled, when water starts to spray like a hose from the wand. Like a heavy click from an old CRT, or a piece sliding into place, the chant triggered the spell sending a jolt through me.
“You did it!” Samyra exclaims.
I stare dumbfoundedly at the spraying jet of water.
‘Math… was not something I had ever thought I would need to be reacquainted with in a world of magic.’ I had to dig up some deep and obscure experience, including the things I had breezed through when Samyra was tutoring me. ‘So much for thinking I wouldn’t have to deal with it again… I honestly thought it would be more along the lines of using my imagination…’ I certainly had to use my imagination a lot… for diagrams that is.
Instead of the sort of instinctual magic I had in mind, the fundamentals of their magic follow formulaic rules of logic backed with principles of knowledge. Like understanding how to make water boil because of the scientific principle.
The process Clauren uses to cast spells consists of using a power source, namely mana, to power a magic circuit, the spell’s magic matrix, which then runs through the runes inside the circuit that, when put in a certain arrangement and orientation, produce various effects, and finishing it all, a chant that function as both a “trigger” and focus structure to give the spell life. Theoretically, everything someone needs to do magic is mana and knowing the spell, the downside of this method is that there is little to no room to control the spell itself, only its output.
‘...Though that isn’t to say imagination plays no part at all.’ Strangely enough, I’ve found that using intent and having a good vivid imagination of what the spell is supposed to do helps to make it more easy to cast.
‘And then there’s a whole new other lexicon of words that magic uses…’ I internally sigh. Not only there are a bunch of new symbols, each one with meanings and special effects, but also a sort of “language” that the incantations use, Clauren referred to it as “words of power”. A sort of separate language that holds the evocation power needed to spark the spells to life, and also to prevent accidental magic, apparently because using the language you habitually use to speak and think to cast spells can lead to spontaneous conjuration when your head is full of spells if you are not careful.
The feeling of something being shoved under my armpits throws me off my thoughts. “You’re amazing Syuu!” Samyra shouts in front me.
“Huh?—”
“—AHH! W-WAIT DON’T THROW MEEEeeeee!!!” lifting me up in the air she happily starts spinning around, the world around me blurs into a mess of colors. I feel my legs swinging wildly in the end so I try to tuck them to my chest in fear of hitting something.
I feel my tail hit something as we are spinning and a distinct wet sound somewhere behind me. ‘AAH, my tail!’ I dismayed.
Eventually Samyra places me back on the ground. I wobble on my feet dazedly. “Casting your first spell on your first day too! It took me weeks to get my first attempt right!” she happily tells me, hugging me from behind. I feel uncomfortable from the sudden contact and try to squirm out from her grasp.
I manage to escape once, but she grabs me again and begins to affectionately pet my head. I end up relenting. ‘It’s not because I like it, it’s just that I’m afraid of hurting her if I use too much force…’
“I-In less than an hour…” Clauren mutters, astonished. He is standing, but there is a very distinct red blemish on his face and dirt on his clothes. “...I was planning to demonstrate meditation routines to you when you eventually failed.” He admits, a little guilty.
I give him an upset glare.
I had no problems manipulating mana, once I got down the sensation of having a fourth dimensional fifth limb. Though, right now I can’t do much more than “push” and “pull” with it.
He coughs “You see, well, when I first started my path in the arcane a long time ago, I had struggled to properly cast my first spells, and my mentor had instructed me how to feel the flow of mana and create the proper mental image of the spell’s formulas.” He sighs. “Forgive me, I was honestly expecting you to struggle at least a little on your first attempt, what I had in mind was that when you first didn’t succeed I would then proceed to teach you the meditation routine that I had learned to help me get a good grasp of my own mana.”
I make a face of distaste. ‘NOT a fan of sitting still… much less sitting still and letting my thoughts simmer inside my head. I always end up going to weird places when that happens.’ Sleeping was all fine and dandy, but sitting to think for the sake of thinking is something that I had been fed up with and out of patience for some time now, because when I have idle hands my head always returns to the past.
“However, now I see that it wasn’t necessary…” He sighs. “I will still make you meditate, however. So that you at least know how to do it.”
I groan. ‘I never found meditation to be fun, maybe a little interesting as a concept, but stilling my thoughts was never something I ever put much effort in before, neither ever succeeded at… Maybe I can fake it?’
。。。
‘No, I can’t fake it.’ I sigh morosely.
As it turns out, the “meditation” Clauren was referring to, while it involves clearing your own head and all that, his version of it also involves stilling your mana. Something that I, despite having a moderate handling of my own already, really, really couldn’t do no matter how much I tried.
Apparently having too active thoughts makes my mana “waver” or something, and despite me not being able to actually make my mana more “quiet” he could tell when it was even more erratic than usual when I started to have tangent thoughts without intending.
It’s also, much to my suffering, something he can perceive. So he knew I wasn’t meditating at all, everytime he noticed I was beginning to deviate he… stuck a piece of paper in one of my horns, and I couldn’t tell you enough how much it bothered me ‘These horns are sensitive, you know?!’ It was like having an earring, they got in the way and I constantly felt them rustling in the wind and I spent more time trying to ignore them than actually meditating.
They were distracting, and uncomfortable. I said that they were getting in my way more than helping me actually finish this training we were doing, but Clauren just gave me a cheshire grin, justifying that it was a “trial of patience and tolerance”.
“Well, it looks like my little prodigy has something she isn’t good at after all. Don’t worry though! I’m sure you’ll get it sometime!” Samyra tries to cheer me up, plucking the dozens of different pieces of paper out of my head.
I glare forwards, silently grumbling more at myself than her.
“I assumed that you had a prodigious amount of control to cast your first spell so fast at first… but it turns out you simply have an exceedingly large quantity of mana that you did not have to worry about efficiency at all,” Clauren tells me. “Normally a mage would need at least a degree of finesse and clarity to do that simple spell but you simply shoved so much mana on it that it managed to fill all the empty spots in the spell’s matrix that it ended up working… somehow.” He says, rubbing his chin while intently staring at me from the chair he sat on backward, arms over the backrest. “I’m jealous…” He sighs. “I wish I had ridiculous reserves that I could just throw around unconcerned like that.” He whines, gesturing widely at me.
Not knowing how to respond to that I just hum while looking away. ‘It’s not… I’m not complaining... But I didn’t have a choice to be this way.’ I was grateful for these talents that I seemingly have, but no matter the praise they gave me… it felt hollow, I wondered if I was even worthy of these things.
“Jealous of little girls now? Oh Clauren, how low have you fallen?” Samyra half-heartedly mocked.
“Hmph. As if you’re better” Clauren turns to me and starts to talk in a conspiratorial manner. “In my days as an apprentice she sulked and ignored me for weeks after she found out I was way better at magic than her. Despite what she looks like, she still flounders some spells to this day, it just isn’t her strong point.”
Samyra throws a dangerous look to Clauren. “Hah? No way, it was because your arrogant younger self couldn’t stop themself from pushing their accomplishments onto people’s faces, you were insufferable.”
“See? She doesn’t deny that I am a way better mage.” Clauren points a thumb to himself, proudly.
“Hmph.” Samyra scoffs “Two can play that game, sir who can’t even draw a bowstring, even Syuufarin is stronger than you.” She begins to idly comb my hair “Did you know that he can’t beat me in an arm-wrestling match unless he uses both hands?”
“I am a mage, and then a healer, muscles are not something that concerns me when I have magic and tools by my side.” I notice that Clauren doesn’t deny Samyra’s claim.
Samyra rests her chin on top of my head, she is just high enough to comfortably do so without it being uncomfortable. “Please don’t turn into a deadbeat like him Syuu, it’s bad for your health and then only weirdos would want to be friends with you.”
“Hey!” Clauren yells, affronted.
‘I… what?...’ I turn my head upwards to look at her, confused. ‘Ma’m… you married him. What does that even make you then?’
The rest of that day was filled with the lights of magic and the brightness of their shared banter.
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