It is one of history's great ironies that the very act which liberated sorcerers from persecution brought about the end of their Arcane tradition. Why torture yourself to learn new sorcery when wizardry was free for the taking?
-Tallen Elmheart, On Mages
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The three boys stood over Kole, unsure what to actually do now that they’d caught him. While none of them liked Kole, they didn't exactly want to hurt him. Chasing and teasing were one thing, assault was quite another. One of the reasons so many were willing to join Corbyn in his hunts was that in the end, Kole always escaped any real harm. Rare were the bullies that could inflict actual physical harm, but the jagged timber in Corbyn's hand suggested he might be among their number.
The other two watched uncertainty as he brought the club down on Kole, striking him in the thigh and eliciting a cry of pain.
"Come on!" Corbyn encouraged. "Kick him!"
His two followers looked at each other uncertainly as Kole struggled to his feet. Corbyn, ever the patient leader, struck Kole again with his club, sending him back to his knees, giving the pair time to work themselves up to the assault.
Kole didn't plan on waiting. While the other boys knew it took nearly all of Kole's Will to cast even a single cantrip, they didn't know that Kole had been diligently exhausting his Will each day to ensure that already large capacity continued to grow.
The problem with Kole's magic wasn't that he didn't know how to cast first-tier spells, it was that his magical heritage made them cost so much Will that he couldn't cast them.
Until now.
Kole’s efforts delving into the forgotten depths of the library had recently borne fruit.
As Corbyn's club came down for Kole's shoulder, Kole was fighting a battle inside himself. He'd constructed the spell in his mind, tracing the pattern stored there. This had never been his issue, and he was now fighting with his bridge to get it to open the specific part of the Arcane Realm the spell needed to function.
He poured all his remaining Will into the act, until eventually, the portal flickered and reopened to the seemingly random patch of the magical realm. All that happened in less than a moment, and he sent the spell through, brought his hand up before him, and uttered a single word.
"Bo."
A translucent barrier appeared before his palm like a distortion of the air, deflecting the club harmlessly to the side.
Kole didn't stop with the spell though, and took advantage of Corbyn's surprise to rise to his feet and punch his tormentor in the face, shattering the magical glasses that made this pursuit possible, and his nose for good measure.
Corbyn dropped to the ground, clutching his face and screaming in pain as his friends stared from him to the other in terror before turning and fleeing.
Kole didn't wait around, pausing just long enough to kick Corbyn in the ribs before running away. Once safe in an alley, he pulled a small vial of a clear blue liquid from his bag and downed it. The potion tasted terrible—it was literally made from crustacean feces—but the effect was immediate and Kole recovered enough Will to turn Invisible once more.
When he got home hours later, after taking a circuitous route that led in and out of the city’s sewers, he found his family's home under siege by an army of laborers, pulling out crate after crate of his belongings.
“What are you doing?” he shouted at them.
“There you are Kohlyn,” came a familiar, disapproving voice.
Kohlyn—Kole—turned to see the disappointed face of his uncle.
“You missed the hearing,” his uncle said.
“Yeah, I knew there was something today, but I got a little held up,” Kole explained, gesturing to his torn clothes and bloodied everything.
His uncle shook his head, disappointed with only a bit of sympathy.
“If you’d relented years ago, you would be able to properly deal with these miscreants.”
“So what now?” Kole asked, ignoring the suggestion.
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“Now,” his uncle said as if repeating himself for the hundredth time, which was impressive because they’d definitely had this conversation at least twice that number, “the choice is no longer yours. You are now officially my ward, and your creditors have called in their debts. You will live with me and I will see that you are educated properly. You will be trained as a Mirage Knight like your mother would have wanted. We’ll put these fancies of being a wizard away, and you can go about continuing in the footsteps of our family.”
“No,” Kole said simply and walked inside.
Kole had no desire to be a Mirage Knight. Despite being a primal of the Font of Illusions, it was not mandated that he become one. Many in Illandrios manifested the same power as him and continued on to become bakers, artists, lawyers, or whatever they dreamed of, leaving their primal abilities as a neat little hobby and party trick.
Anything they wanted—so long as what they wanted wasn’t to be a wizard. Unfortunately for Kole, that was all he’d ever dreamed of becoming. His parents had been adventurers—still were if you asked him. At a young age, his mother—the sister of his previously mentioned and currently very disapproving uncle—had gone missing while exploring a pocket realm they’d discovered. She’d been—or still was, depending on who you asked—a Mirage Knight. Kole’s father had been a—or still was, again, depending on the source of the information—a wizard. He’d survived the encounter that had taken his wife from him, and he'd vowed to return and rescue her. Unfortunately, the pocket realm vanished on his exit, but he’d held out hope that she still lived.
Kole's father had dedicated himself to discovering the location of his wife. He’d taken the non-insignificant wealth they’d acquired in their adventuring career and set it all towards the effort. He traveled the world recruiting experts and learning whatever he could of divination and spatial magics, leaving his son at home for long stretches of time. Kole grew up alone, intermittently alongside his father, and he grew to share the same obsession. And then, when Kole was nine, his father claimed to have found her. He left his son at home yet again, gathered up his old team, and set out to retrieve his wife.
He'd never returned.
And so, Kole remained alone, in the care of his uncle, nannies, and tutors. He dedicated himself to becoming a wizard. His mother had been a Mirage Knight, but at the age of eight he'd manifested the sorcerous ability to blend into his surroundings while being chased through the sewers by kobolds that had breached the caverns beneath his home. His father was overjoyed with the discovery that his son was a sorcerer, and Kole was relieved he wouldn’t have to train to be a Mirage Knight.
As far as anyone knew, there had never been a primal born of a union between sorcerer and primal. For whatever reason, they always resulted in sorcerers, or more likely those without any innate magic whatsoever.
Kole had no desire to follow his mother’s arcane tradition. It had let her down, broken up his family, and it was his father’s magic that would reunite them. The fact that his father’s magic ultimately let him down as well was not one Kole liked to dwell on.
Kole’s uncle followed him inside.
“It’s time you give up on this nonsense. Your parents are dead. You must stop living in the past and—”
Kole cut his uncle’s rant off when he slammed the front door in his face.
That may have been a mistake. He thought as he heard his ever-patient uncle struggling to control his anger beyond the door.
Kole ran up the stairs, and into his parents' rooms to find that it had not yet been ransacked. Quickly, he gathered his mother’s locket and then to his own room to grab a bag prepared for this eventuality.
He'd long since planned for this day. He knew it would come. Once his parents were declared dead, all their possessions would be auctioned off to pay their debts, leaving Kole with whatever remained. There would be nothing left, he knew this. His father had spent everything in search of his mother, and Kole had been living on borrowed time—and money—since his disappearance. Lord Oldhill, Corbyn’s father, had been all too happy to loan money to Kole to continue to live in the absence of his parents. He had been an acquaintance of both of his parents, but Kole always wondered why, if he cared enough to loan him money, he never cared enough to rein in his own son.
Well, I guess he’s about to get all his money back, He reflected as he watched all his possessions loaded onto carts.
Kole would not consent to give up on wizardry. If he couldn't learn here—something he’d long since realized to be the case—he would go to the Academy of Illunia and learn there. His condition was not as hopeless as he’d initially believed. He had learned to cast Shield after all. He’d been hesitant to leave everything behind, but now that he’d seen real progress, it suddenly became less daunting.
The door to his room burst open as his uncle kicked open the door.
“Stop being a child!” he shouted, no longer able to conceal his frustration. “I’ve given you four years to try to learn magic and you failed. Now let’s get you help before it's too late.”
Uncle Joryn was speaking to an empty room. At the approaching footsteps, Kole had used his sole sorcerous ability to turn invisible. Another side effect of being both a primal and a sorcerer, as Kole had learned; not only was he unable to cast wizard spells, but the sorcerous spells he could innately learn were restricted entirely to the Font of Illusions.
This could have been manageable, there were plenty of stories of illusion specialists having success as adventurers, but he had the misfortune of learning a weak form of invisibility as his first spell. Sorcery worked on instincts. Instincts that sought the easiest way to resolve a situation, taking into account what one could already do. If a sorcerer needed to not drown they might manifest a spell to breathe underwater—or they might just drown—it was best not to put too much faith in one’s potential sorcerous abilities. If however, that same sorcerer had a powerful affinity for the Font of Space, they might instead manifest the ability to teleport out of the water—or they might just drown, as mentioned previously, sorcery is fickle.
Why was this unfortunate for Kole? Well, in all situations where he might manifest a new ability, he simply turned invisible and got away. Invisibility—it seemed—was far too effective at getting disobedient children out of danger, and he never really needed more once his camouflage spell evolved to that state. He considered trying something drastic, like stepping out through the dome and into the depths of the ocean but, as mentioned previously, sorcery was not to be relied on.
So, it was to a visibly empty room that Kole’s uncle lectured. He blocked the door, waiting for his disobedient nephew to reveal himself. He waited and waited, and waited until a tapestry on the wall fluttered in a breeze. Kole, as I mentioned, had been prepared for this day. As his uncle soon discovered, there had been a secret passage cut into the wall, leading to the servants' quarters, down the back stairs, and out into the city.