[A picture of a stereotypical mage wearing a pointed hat and colorful robe.]

M is for mage, a title of honor for wizards and mages but it's lost its significance through all of the ages. Once a title for the greatest of all, it is now a name for magicians great and small.

-Sally Rider’s ABCs of Magic

—

Three hours later, Kole lay in the grass, gasping for air. With the martial training yards full, Zale had made them run through the forest around the glade, and on top of being exhausted, he was covered in scratches and cuts. Everyone else was fine of course.

Kole was of two minds on his current situation. On one hand, he was glad he’d gotten out of the tournament that was being held in Martial 101, on the other, he’d learned Zale had been assigned as their group’s tutor in place of the class. She set a brutal standard.

Zale herself had informally started her mentorship with Tigereye and would work with him and check in on them from time to time and administer their final exams.

She had decided the group lacked real-world experience, they’d set out through the forest for the day, Doug acting as both guide and tutor as they navigated the woods, traveling towards the mountain foothills.

“Lunch is ready,” Doug said, pulling Kole’s attention away from his aching sides.

While he’d malingered, the rest had prepared lunch of some rabbits Doug had caught along the way.

“So, any news on yer ma?” Rakin asked Zale as they ate.

“Not really,” Zale said, covering her mouth as she talked while chewing. “She left a note. She went to get something for Uncle Tal’s project, but she expected to be back by now. Uncle Tal didn’t leave a note, which probably means his problem flared up again.”

“What exactly is his problem?” Kole asked, hoping to get an answer finally.”

“I can’t say really,” Zale said regretfully.

“Why don’t you call him Uncle?” Doug asked Rakin, earning looks of confusion.

“What do ye mean?” Rakin asked.

“Well, you and Zale call each other cousin. Shouldn’t he be your uncle too?”

“No,” Rakin said firmly. “She calls me cousin.”

“Yea.. But you let her and never complain about it,” Kole pointed out. “From you, that’s basically a roaring endorsement.”

“Bah!” Rakin shouted, “whatever. I don’t know the man. I ain’t going to call him ‘Uncle.’”

“You referred to Zale’s mother as Auntie didn’t you?”

“That’s different,” Rakin defended.

“How?” Kole pressed.

“I know her. I like her. I never met Tallen until recently and he’s a bit too much like ye for me liking.”

Kole thought he should be offended, but then decided to take being compared to Tal of Storms semi-favorably was a compliment.

They got back on topic, throwing theories around as to where Zale’s mother might be, but came up with nothing promising.

“I think it’s a pocket realm,” Zale said. “If she wasn’t the school would have found her, or she’d have been able to get back into the Dahn fairly easily. Runt even looked for her a bit an came up with no leads.”

“Well Flood,” Kole cursed, trying to lighten the mood. “Parents in pocket realms are rather difficult to find—and I’m something of an expert on the topic.”

They cleared up the makeshift camp after that and headed back to the Glade. Doug had Kole lead them back as a training exercise, a task at which he failed miserably.

With each choice, he heard Rakin snicker or snort in amusement.

“You’re rather good at navigating a forest for a dwarf,” Doug observed.

“Aye,” Rakin said. “Me ma made me learn. She learned from Zale’s sorta-da. She learned the peril of lacking the ability to travel above ground.”

They let Kole fumble a little while longer before jumping in and showing him the path they’d taken. This time, they only traveled it for a short while, before turning and taking them on a much shorter route back to the Glade. The three-hour trek of the morning had actually only taken them a half-hour’s walk back.

“Thank the gods,” Kole groaned as civilization came into sight. Then, after a moment of realization, he asked. “Were we just a short walk from the Glade the whole time?”

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Everyone save Kole broke out into laughter.

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They parted ways after returning to the Glade. Doug was going to spend time with Mouse, while Zale had to get ready for a date with Harold.

“Oh, he’s taking ye out on a Monday? How romantics,” Rakin said, earning a kick from Zale

“I’m going to go check on Amara,” Kole said, feeling the need to put some sort of plan forward for the day. “I don’t think she’s been eating as much as she should been since we’ve been gone.”

Zale and Doug gave approving nods.

“I’ll come too,” Rakin said, receiving shocked looks from everyone.

“What?” he asked.

“Why?” Kole asked.

“I got to eat too, don’t I?”

“Yeah, but… you don’t like other people,” Kole said, dumbfounded

“Whatever gave ye that idea?”

Kole gestured vaguely at Rakin’s whole body.

“Bah!” the dwarf shouted, throwing his hands in the air. “Fine, I’ll eat alone.”

“No. I’m sorry,” Kole apologized. “You should come.”

Rakin nodded, in response, and then dropped the topic. They made plans to meet at the martial dining hall and split up to get cleaned up and ready.

“I think that makes you Rakin’s best friend,” Zale whispered to Kole when the dwarf was out of earshot.

“What? Me? No. Why?

“Well,” Zale said, considering. “Him agreeing to go with you means you’re his friend. Assuming Doug and Amara are also his friends, I know he prefers you over them, which makes you his best friend.”

“What about you?” Kole asked. “And why do you think he prefers me?”

“We’re family, it doesn’t count. And you are… less aloof than those two. All four of you are yokels, strangers from far-off islands, mountain valleys, undersea cities, or the deep Torack, but you and Rakin have adjusted to life here the best and he doesn’t have a lot of patience.”

“Isn’t he a monk? Isn’t patience supposed to be sort of their thing?”

“There’s a reason he’s not at the monastery anymore.”

They parted ways at the entrances to the men’s and women’s changing rooms, and Kole went in to wash what felt like a month of grime off of him.

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Sometime later, Kole found himself outside the door to Amara’s workshop. A table stood outside her door, a new addition, with a tray of uneaten food on it.

Kole knocked loudly, and to his surprise heard a loud chime from within. A moment later, Amara opened the door. She looked irritated at first until she noticed it was Kole.

“Kole!” she shouted happily.

“What was that sound?” Kole asked.

“Doorbell!” she explained excitedly as she pulled him inside and closed the door.

She pointed at the back of the door where a series of runes had been carved.

“Professor Donglefore got angry that I didn’t hear him the first few times he came by, so I added this.”

“Clever. I came to see if you wanted to get dinner with me and Rakin, but I saw the food outside…”

“Oh, yeah. Professor Donglefore started getting that sent when he realized I… lost track of time.”

“How much time have you been spending here exactly?” Kole asked, taking in the lab for the first time.

The room was as full as ever, but there were a lot more ongoing projects. Kole saw three gourds housing ants where before Amara had only had one, and all three were set on workstations with items at the ready to be runed.

“More ants?” Kole asked.

Amara nodded.

“Yes! I got the queen to make two more so we can split the colony. I’m working on training different colonies in different techniques. So far though there’s been a lack of signs of specialization.”

Amara then led Kole on a whirlwind tour of her projects. She showed him prototypes of the chains she’d worked on for Doug and Rakin’s amulets, class projects she was still tinkering with despite not having gone to classes in weeks, and material durability tests she’d devised to test her ideas on using the Font of Life to repair runed materials.

She was most fascinated by the last one, though to Kole it was by far the least interesting. The setup was a series of dowels of equal length and diameter. Each was runed with simple Will transference runes, and was being used to channel Will in a loop from one gem into a light rune. Weights were set up on each one.

“So far ,I’m doing the controls, but soon I will start to incorporate the regenerative runes on them all.”

“What’s that?” Kole asked, pointing to a belt full of pouches wrapped around the hips of a sewing dummy.

“Oh! Thats my adventuring gear,” she explained in the same excitement with which she’d talked about the tensile strength of rune rotted wood. An excitement Kole had mentally calibrated to mean “boring rune stuff” so it took a moment for his mind to catch up with the words.

“Adventuring gear?”

Amara nodded and showed him what she’d developed.

“After the incident with Rakinar and those ice people, I realized I needed to be more proactive in my self defense, so I made all this.”

She showed him a variety of items, all made in the same manner as Kole’s rod. To keep the costs down, she would keep the rune intent in her mind, and empower them manually to use them all.

“This is my own version of the fire suppressors I used to stop Rakinar,” she showed him, holding up a dense rune-covered polyhedron the size of a grape.

“I have the intent up here,” she said, tapping the side of her head. “There’s a filament inside, which acts as an inhibitor. Once powered, the filament weakens under the stress of the intent allowing the effect to take place. It’s a three-second timer, but if I throw it, the shock triggers it early.”

Kole listened, amazed at the complexity of it all, and Amara kept going, excited to have an audience. She shoved five of the devices into Kole’s hands and moved on.

“This device I call a blinder,” she said. “It is a capacitor charged light rune that well… blinds. It flashes bright, and its great against creatures with dark vision… I assume. It can also create a loud sound, and I can activate one or both.”

These too got put into Kole’s hands, and he had to clutch them to his chest to keep a hold of them all.

“This is a shield!” she said, holding up a device that looked like a small bowl with a rod stuck through the inside. Amara held it by the rod, pointing the hemispherical part at Kole, and he saw it was covered in runes.

“This one is reusable, unlike those which I throw. It needs to be repaired with a repair intent, but I keep that stored here”—she pointed to a chest in her workshop—“not here”—she tapped her head.

“It creates a barrier, much like your Shield spell, but it’s smaller, and the force of the blow is transmitted through the device, so I shouldn’t go blocking swings from golems any time soon.”

This too she shoved into Kole’s overloaded arms. Kole looked at Gus, watching from his miniature house with what he thought was a mix of pity and amusement.

“And this!” she said, pulling out a blasting rod from a holster on the belt, “is my blasting rod!”