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Spade Song
Chapter 61 Sprites, Spring, Spells and Storms Part 33

Chapter 61 Sprites, Spring, Spells and Storms Part 33

We spent some time just sitting around, holding onto one another while we read in Anna’s study. Selly stayed in the kitchen, claiming that we were being ‘gross,’ and, ‘icky,’ but I was almost sure that it was more that she wasn’t finished eating, and could use some time alone.

So we sat around and read our books, Anna’s book on some kind of guidebook to governance, and me the book on mana types. I was getting a bit confused as to why beast magic was so wacky, but Anna told me to go back and read the pretext on the natural mana types.

Plant and Beast mana was odd compared to the elements that had come before it. It was looser, more nebulous. Magelin blamed this on the immediate change in the number of component mana types. Fire, for instance, had two, and earth had components that became components. Air mana was the closest, but it had only a dozen or so at its most complex.

Plants had more components than every element together, and beasts had more. Magelin knew they didn’t know all of them but suggested that they had at least 20% of them for sure.

The complexity made them more nebulous because there were so many more things they could do individually.

A mana type, he wrote, is still all of its component mana types, just all at once. Elements as I’m sure you have noticed, dear readers, have plenty of ways they can be used outside of ‘kill that guy over there,’ and that is even more the case for the natural elements. Each of them has broad application, each has more utility, far from a big city, each has so many uses that it is easy to see why they are called ‘natural,’ even if they have just as much a place in a city as outside of one.

“That… Makes a lot more sense,” I said to myself.

The fire had quite a few different properties, but plants were so much wider and less focused because they had a much more broad base.

“Did the part you were supposed to read make the part you read make sense?” She said, a tone of a little disappointment in her voice.

“Yes. I didn’t read it properly last night, I got caught up on something else. I think I had a what’s it called… Insight? A sudden understanding about plants last night.”

Anna turned her head to look over at me while she sat in my lap, a look of intrigue on her face.

“You were too busy having an epiphany to do proper research?”

“Mhm, Mhm.” I told her, nodding with a growing smile. “Life mana, it grows so fast because of Life mana, not because it’s moving around and changing inside us. A tree grows and grows forever; there’s no way it can do that, and make sure the mana inside it doesn’t become stagnant unless life and death mana are involved. And life mana makes all the mana around it more energetic. The movement thing is probably still involved, but the life mana multiplies it.”

I saw the idea shunt into her head, just like earlier, taking it in and digesting it.

“That…” she said, “Is a rather sensible leap. Gods, maybe I should re-read that book if it’s giving you information like that.”

I shook my head, “I figured it out on my own, the part that kicked it off was the part that mentioned plants making more mana than us. I used a little the other day when I got hurt, charged up some plants, so they were full of it, and packed my wounds with it.”

Her look became a little pointed like I had just admitted to stealing her cookies, but it took me a moment to realize why.

“It might have been a bit of a long time since I read that book, but I specifically remember that there were downsides to stuffing yourself with life mana. It’s not good for you. Do not do that. Avoid doing it haphazardly in the future,” she told me in the same serious manner someone would reserve for discussion on treason.

“I read the part where you can get long-lasting damage. I don’t intend to do it like that. If I can, I would greatly prefer not having to do that ever. I only did it because… well, you saw how much blood I had on me…” I told her, meeting her eyes.

She moved one hand around to wag her finger at me, only backwards, the motion a waggle up instead of down.

“Damn straight,” she scolded, serious and chiding, “No apprentice of mine will experiment with destructive and possibly lethal magic inefficiently and without training. If you want to learn how to use life magic, I will do my part and learn it so I can help.”

She said the entirety of that very seriously, with a very serious face. My instinct told me, however, that seriousness was only on her mind at the beginning, so I put myself in her shoes for a moment.

She had been both testing me and hoping that I would take her up on the offer so we could share something, just the two of us. Life magic was rare, it was occult, taboo. Having power over life or death was the type of thing that had a social weight to it. A [Priest] in service to the god of Life was one thing, they were a servant to a god.

A mage futzing around with magic all on their own was another. Gods lent a whole lot of weight to a person’s reputation. But Anna didn’t care about that, she just wanted to spend some time with me and make sure I wasn’t doing something that would get me hurt.

“I would love that,” I told her seriously in return, “Once I figure my current stuff out, we can do a bit of that. There might be something that can help with that, but I won’t make any promises on that.”

She stared at me like I was an open book. Reading me in a way that I couldn’t pick up on. She picked me apart in a way that was very her. She still looked beautiful, beautiful and rather attractive with her seriousness, but I did my best not to let that show.

“Good,” she said, the tension of her face fading to normal, beauty softening to cute, her soft features shining through her minor but sharper features once again.

“Did I pass?” I asked, a small smile turning the corners of my lips up, a thin strip of heat in my cheeks that no doubt left me blushing.

Anna blushed a little in turn and leaned it slowly.

“I would say it was a bit below a pass. If you would like some extra credit, though, I wouldn’t be against that.”

My grin turned up further at the corners, and I exposed a small slip of my teeth.

“As an eager student, I wouldn’t mind a little extra credit,” I told her.

She closed her eyes, and we kissed, closing in on each other, hands holding books and each other. We spent a long time like that, just holding each other warm and close and kissing. We kissed so long and deep that strands of saliva twin between our mouths whenever we broke for air, only for us to fall into each other again.

The books got put down, and it got more intense for a while until the both of us were practically panting, our bodies flushed with things that I felt were better left for after marriage.

Anna looked like she desperately wanted to do something, and I didn’t know if I had the force of mind to deny it. Because despite my urge to wait till marriage, she was a very attractive woman, and we were very close, and we kissed, and my heart was going so fast that I could hear it in my ear.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

My face felt hot, my body felt hot. Her body felt hot against me. My instincts were screeching in the back of my head like a kid having a temper tantrum, but I held myself back from doing the one thing that felt right.

Because I knew it wasn’t right for me.

Anna sat there, too, staring into my eyes, but neither of us made a move for it. Anna respected my boundaries, and I was thankful for it. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, and much more so that I was a little afraid of it. I didn’t know if I could handle that, and Anna respected it.

And in a moment we shared that lasted forever, and in a second, she saw in my eyes that she knew I knew. She could have pushed, and I would have probably snapped like a fucking twig, but it meant a lot that she hadn’t done it, despite what my senses told me about her wanting that.

I had let her set the pace a lot, and here I was in the same situation, and she had let me set the pace in turn. She knew I was uncomfortable going past this point and didn’t. The fact that she was aware and didn’t push me right now made me feel an immense amount of gratitude.

There was no need for a thank you, but I said, “Thank you,” anyway.

She sighed, and a touch of the blush faded from her face while she caught her breath.

“You’re welcome,” she said softly, “I’ll add your enthusiasm to the, ahem, final mark.”

There was a twinkle of embarrassment in her voice that made me want to tease her, but for once, I held back. And instead, I thought through my words, trying to tell her at least something.

“That’s good to hear, I would hate to fall short of your expectations,” I told her, a smile spreading across my face, “Especially because we dropped our books. Now we have to find our pages again.”

Her face still flustered, took on a heartened expression, then blinked, and opened her mouth, and turned back to look down at her book.

For my part, I reached down, wiggling my fingers and managed to grasp the book with an extension of a nail, carefully getting it up and into my hand while Anna reached for her book while also not breaking contact.

I brought it up and caught Anna casting a spell, a small quick one that kicked off mana down, and with a thump, the book back up, no words required.

Of all the things in the world to use magic on, it was still a surprise that Anna used it for simple tasks like picking up a book.

I will never understand what she sees in me besides me being another woman, I guess. I suppose I can pin my luck on women like us being few and far between if every other maiden was interested. Or maybe it’s more that women like us have the means, security or a way to drive people off and not get married.

It is sad to see that the times have changed, just another turn of the wheel.

It felt disheartening that they had changed against people like us, but they had changed against so many others before already. It was just the way the world worked.

Once upon a time, clergy could marry between faiths, then they couldn’t, then marriage found a way because he got his due, one way or another, even if it went tit for tat.

Once upon a time, Kobolds were free, and the Valley was ours, and then it wasn’t, and then we died.

The wheel of life didn’t care if it helped or harmed; it just spun, for good or ill; I knew that already. I just had to cross my fingers and hope it spun weal, instead of woe.

No… No, that’s not right either. I’m stuck thinking like old me.

I have a choice; I can make choices. I can affect what direction it turns, so long as I try. Leaving things to fate is being a beggar instead of a chooser, and I’m a chooser now. If I see a problem, I can do something about it.

The wheel can be spun, the course can be changed. I just need to pay attention.

That thought bounced around inside of my head, sticking in and stopping the gears of my passive mind from turning, and with it a lot of my mentality suddenly stopped along with it. Some of my thoughts started to rearrange a bit because it was a worthy thing, and doing so would make me feel worthy of Anna's attention.

It was one of the only things that hadn’t changed all that much. I still felt unworthy.

Maybe that is some of my baggage, one of the things I need to put down. The need to feel worthy. And yet, it doesn’t feel like something I can put down, either. I just don’t bring enough to the table to feel that I am. I just feel like I’m somehow stealing something from her, like a parasite.

But maybe… If I can’t get rid of it… All I can do is try and live up to the feeling, try and live up to all the good she has brought into my life, and pay it forward. Use what I have been given, use my ability to choose, and choose to use what is now mine to do good.

Anna turned back to face me and caught something on my face. But while I could tell that she wanted to, she didn’t ask me what it was, she just leaned back into me and opened her book.

I took that as a sign that Anna was okay with me not opening up and letting out all of my neurosis at once like an alchemical bomb. And I got back to reading instead.

Beast magic was the widest by far. Literally, anything relating to animals? Beast magic. Do you want to call a murder of crows to rip and tear an opponent? Beast magic. Do you want a familiar or a bonded animal like a witch? Beast magic. You could even do stuff that was distanced from animals, spearing an enemy from afar with an amber lance with animal-level intelligence.

I put down the widest mana type for its unique bit and got off beast magic.

Heat, as it turned out, was the opposite of the rest of the natural elements. It didn’t have a ton of component mana. Heat was so prevalent that it was believed to be a fundamental mana type, the lowest possible on the pyramid. Everything besides the arcane mana types had heat in them or something with heat in it. Water, air, earth, fire, and plants each had heat. It did one thing, and that one thing was incredibly important.

Magelin also said that it was likely the reason why druids were metal averse, avoiding it where they could because a druid fighting another druid with a suit of armour on would be a rather short fight.

I put that down. And moved on to growth.

Growth was a weird one. It was present in living things and non-living things, but it was apparently the only temporary mana type. Something about existence was anathema to its continued existence.

Notably, according to Magelin, growth mana was continuously produced in a very select set of things, and those were mostly Slimes, Gelatins, Oozes, Rustites, and creatures of that nature, which never stopped growing from birth to the moment they were destroyed; they never stopped growing.

They were theorized to be connected to some form of primordial ancestor, though the lack of known intelligent slimy people implies the ancestor was likely not intelligent.

That was kind of cool, so down it went on the cheat sheet.

By the time I was done going through the natural section, I had most of the base mana types down, and I was about a quarter of the way through the book.

“I don’t know if I should be afraid that the book is only a quarter done or not, even though I’m like halfway through,” I told Anna.

“A quarter of the book is an appendix, so lucky you’re more like halfway through.”

I stared out the window to think that the second half was twice as long as the first half when I was met with the end of my reading time. The sun was starting to burn off the mist by the time I finished reading it, so sadly, I got up, and got to finishing my chores.

I went all out, moving as fast as I could to get them done, pots nearly slipping out of my hands and barrel refilled to keep up with three mouths.

By the time I got back in, Anna and Selly were avidly trying to communicate, and both of them, frustrated from a failure to do just that, were being annoyed at the table.

I interceded, sorting out that Anna still didn’t feel right accepting the dept but would let her stay until she gave a yes or no, and Selly, exasperated that my ‘lovey [Druid] was hanging her out to dry.’ I gave her an unimpressed look and checked if Anna wanted to do anything before I did a few last-minute tasks, like writing the new things down, thinking hard in the direction of the slate board, and thinking about the questions, and my thoughts, and the things that rustled in my head, and the million things it felt like I was doing before we headed south for however long we were going to be gone.

Four days, including today.

But after about ten minutes of aimless busywork, stalking around the rooms like I had somewhere to be, only to pace back and do something else, I got myself together and away from the questions and my thoughts.

I made to leave but stopped before I got to the door.

I turned to Selly, being sulky and lonely and sad. Well, sulky for Selly was still animated, but it had a sulky vibe.

“Say, Selliban, you want to head into town and see the sights? Get out and stretch your wings or whatever?” I called out to her.

She didn’t seem to catch it for a second, and I was about to call out to her again when her wings slid out from her back like a ladybug and, after a moment of stretching and buzzing, took off toward me.

“I’ll take anything but being cooped up in here with nothing to do. Aye, might as well, but I’m hiding in your hair to stay away from the birds outside,” she told me, zipping over before standing on my head, burrowing into my thinner hair and griping and complaining about how it wasn’t as comfortable.

“I’ll be back in a few hours,” I called over to Anna, who was heading into the front room, where she was probably going to spend some time painting.

She waved over at me with a wiggle of her fingers and got an agreeing tone out before she continued into the front room, and left me and Selly to go our own way.

I had some stuff to do to prepare for our outing later today, like get Strause to hand over where I can find that shop and get some flowers, probably… And maybe other stuff that I hadn’t thought about.

The things that I was too dumb to think about were so long that I could say I knew nothing about romance, and it would be accurate if you rounded down. Maybe Selly could help, tucked away in my hair.

Or maybe she would just complain to me about tall people and birds the whole time.

Either way, it would be better than being alone.