Leo and Heidi

Black Forest, Germany

“Do you think it is okay to touch this stuff?” Leo asked, his movie references fresh in his mind.

“We saw no traps along the way,” Heidi answered. “As it seems you hold the key or are the key that opened the door, I think it will be fine.”

“Besides, you see that uncle there has gone crazy already,” Heidi said, pointing the finger at the frantically moving Sebastian, who was trying to pay attention to five things simultaneously, not wanting to miss any detail.

“Your movie references are acting up again, are they not?” Heidi asked with a smirk and moved to join her uncle, not bothering to wait for an answer.

Leo frowned and said from behind her, “No, they are not!”

He joined them in the search, not understanding half of the things he saw on the shelves. On one of the shelves, he saw a glass box filled with various flowers and herbs that seemed to still be alive, as one of the flowers had radiant blue petals. On another, he saw a box filled with black metal ingots. He noted that they were so black that light seemed to be sucked straight in.

Leo moved to touch the ingots, but Sebastian interrupted him, “I would not touch them if I were you, boy. That is orium.”

“What is it?” he asked.

“It is metal that seals away the mana, Leo,” Heidi answered, looking up from a book she was holding. “It disconnects your core from the mana. Both from inside and outside, effectively isolating it. I have heard that it is pretty painful.”

Seb looked up from the scrolls he was holding and said, “Not just painful. Damn excruciating. Feels like stuff just straight up cuts out a part of you.” He grimaced as if remembering something unpleasant.

“How do you know, uncle? Did someone capture you and try to hold you?” Heidi asked, curious.

“No. I am too smart for that, Heidi,” Sebastian answered absentmindedly, moving to another pile of boxes, and opening them. “We used to play this game with Viktor when we were younger. Used orium rings instead of chains. Cuts off your mana flow only partially, which is good for training control. That maniac liked to see who could cast larger spells with the rings on. It was a challenge.”

Apologetically, Leo put his hand back down and turned around to inspect something less dangerous than the random items on the shelves. As he was part of the mage world for just a few days, most of which he spent in the back of the truck, he thought that it was best he did not touch something he did not know about, which was mostly everything in the room. So he went to look at some books.

The collection of books and scrolls looked straight out of a museum while still in pristine condition, preserved by whatever magic the place had. Leo could recognize some of the languages they were written in, such as Russian and something similar to German. He also could see that few books looked like they came from Asia, covered in scriptures identical to hiragana.

‘I guess the owner was collecting books from all over the world,’ Leo thought to himself before asking, “Sebastian, do you know what the books are here for?”

“Hmm?” Sebastian looked up from his stack of scrolls and said, “From the ones I managed to glimpse at, they seem to cover mage techniques from all over the world. Various depictions of mana application, crafting, and the like.”

“Like spell books?” Heidi asked.

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“No, not like our spell books. Our books are more structured and straightforward. Also, limited in the sense that we cannot add much variety to the spells described. Like shackles on our magic. These,” he gestured around him, “Are much looser. Designed for a free mage to run wild with his imagination. Having thousands of applications for any element and affinity. It looks like someone was trying to collect a curriculum of sorts. That is the only explanation why we hold so many tomes of various techniques together.”

“Why is that?” Leo asked.

“Because from what I have seen, they are put together by affinity and stacked by core level. Just as you would expect to learn something from scratch. Sure, the whole place looks messy, but I can see that whoever put this together clearly thought to come back and sort this out.”

“Right,” was all Leo could say because the room had thousands of books in it, from the number of crates he could see. The sheer amount of information they could hold made him feel hopeful and motivated to finish forming his core in whatever way possible so that he could finally cast the first spell.

Leo’s attention was pulled to a small book at the back of the room. He felt a similar pull to the one he felt from the gem, so he decided to take a closer look. Approaching the shelf where the book sat, he noticed that it looked like a leather journal bound in plain, black leather and had yellow pages. Opening it, he saw that the words were written by hand and, judging from the writing, a woman’s.

He opened the first page and read, ‘This is the story of Alea Monti. Born of nature, to serve nature. 1258.’

Leo stared at the words on the first page for a minute, not moving a muscle. ‘Monti?’ he thought. ‘It cannot be. What would a journal of a Monti do all the way out here? We had no mages in our family. It does not make sense.’

“What did you find, Leo?” Heidi asked from across the room, seeing that Leo was fixated on a book he held.

“I think I just found a diary of someone from my family,” he answered.

“What? How?” Heidi asked and walked up to Leo, taking the book off his hands.

“See here,” he pointed on the page, “It says Monti there. It is my last name.”

“I know it is, dumbass. I just think that it is not such an uncommon name. Does not mean that someone related to you wrote this,” Heidi said, skeptical, and turned to a journal page.

Before she could read a single line, Sebastian walked up to them and said, “That is not entirely true, Heidi. His last name is uncommon, really. Actually, it almost went extinct a couple of hundred years ago due to a certain individual carrying this name.”

“Who?” Leo asked, curious; who would bear the same name as him all those years ago.

“Alea,” Sebastian answered. “Alea Monti. The great free mage of old. The person who this cabin belongs to by the looks of it,” Sebastian mentioned around him.

“Viktor never mentioned her last name to me,” Heidi said, recognizing the name ‘Alea’ from Viktor’s explanations about the book in their dining room.

“Means I come from a long line of mages, does it not?” Leo asked, hopeful.

“Hold your horses, boy,” Sebastian interrupted his celebration. “The fact that you bear resemblance in name to a free mage of old is just a coincidence at this point.”

“Then how do you explain how he found the gem and activated all those arrays?” Heidi asked.

“Luck?” Sebastian shrugged.

“Really, uncle? Luck? How many years did you fumble around in this place, finding nothing?” Heidi asked.

“You do not have to remind me, niece,” he answered angrily. “Too many by my count. A touch too many.”

“I know. That is why I ask that we keep an open mind. By the end of the day, no one knows what happened to Alea Monti, do they, uncle?”

“No, they do not. At least not the full story. From what I know, she was last seen here, in the Black Forest. That is why I set out to find her cabin. It just seemed logical.”

“I think this journal will hold some answers,” Leo interrupted them. “It does not matter what we know now, does it? It is all just speculation. The Church made sure that she vanishes from history for some reason, right?”

“You are right, boy,” Sebastian said.

“Let’s go upstairs then,” Leo proposed.

“Why?” Seb asked.

“Because,” Leo began and pointed to the journal, “I am curious to learn more about this Alea Monti that shares the same last name as me, who vanished mysteriously, leaving behind a treasure trove and an encoded book.”

Leo did not wait for them to answer and went toward the stairs.