They were all different. More of them than I thought too. Spellbooks are what most people use, Codexes are greatly sought after and in some cases, highly institutionalized. And Grimoires stand head and shoulders above them all. Once I learned that last bit from Cassandra’s lecture, I decided to keep my Grimoire orb secret all to myself . . . maybe. So here I go again, starting with the basics.
But this time, it was Elgar standing in front of me, holding knowledge in both of his hands. His left hand held a large, worn book with a color that glowed a light yellow that made me think of bright spring days. His other hand had that dreaded scroll. And that’s the one I didn’t want to open. I didn’t want to read it. I didn’t want to acknowledge it. I didn’t want to be in the freaking vicinity but this smooth, unnaturally good looking alien just wouldn’t drop it.
I blame my attitude on my timeline. I had a limited number of days to learn all of the good shit and my time was being taken up by the most irritating of prospects. Marriage. Marriage to a creature I had never met. Marriage to someone or something that was full of unspoken duties and high-falutin obligations, to which I internally chafed at due to being ALREADY full of shit to do that I didn’t want to do.
I was one step away from knocking Elgar out, ripping all of the wizardry knowledge out of his brain, and making off like a western train bandit into the sunset. But I couldn’t do it with Lovera standing next to her man looking at me with those damn soulful eyes and quivery lip. Fucking HELL! Biology is a bitch and a half. I scanned myself over and over to triple check that I wasn’t being magically manipulated, and yup, it was my own freaking hormones and dormant morals rearing their ugly heads, making themselves known in the most irritating of ways.
“Just hear him out!” Cassandra had already given up and left, seeing that the current course of action wouldn’t sway me. But Lovera was as stubborn as she was beautiful. I learned through idle gossip that she was on a mission to ‘get me a good woman in my life’ and that just wouldn’t do.
This knowledge gave me strength. I held my ground, looked them both in the eye and proudly stated, “You can’t trap me! Duty before booty!” I pointed at Elgar and then at Lovera. “You can’t fail if you don’t chase tail!
Lovera’s jaw dropped as Elgar politely held back a snicker, his Aelven discipline slipping for less than a split second. “See! See!” Lovera turned to look at Elgar who dropped his hands by his side. “He agrees! He just won’t tell you that because you’re his pregnant wife!”
I didn’t wilt under her glare. I promise. I simply snatched the spellbook out of Elgar’s hand, shaking it in front of everyone. “Business before pleasure people! I got zombies to kill, a world to conquer, and a half mad demi-god to placate so I’m doing this out of order. Elgar, work with me here before I do a Flesh Sorcery miracle and make sure that Lovera gets pregnant EVERY SINGLE TIME you do the horizontal tango.”
Like the cold northern wind, Elgar moved, tossing Lovera the ball and chain scroll and hauling me and the spellbook far away. As reality reasserted itself, Elgar deposited me on a tree stump. “Don’t be alarmed. Everyone’s first trip through the ‘Wind-Step’ spell is disorienting.”
I looked around. The town wasn’t even in sight. In fact, I had to use Nature Sorcery to connect with the area in order to figure out where I was. We had stopped half a mile south of New Richmond. “Holy shit!”
Elgar raised one eyebrow and slowly took the book back from me. “I’d rather do this quickly as you are correct, the Hungry Ones are a very real, very credible danger to this world. Since I have invested my lineage in this area, I’d rather make sure that it stays the idyllic paradise that it seems to be.”
Seeing no argument from me. Elgar closed his eyes, humming for a few moments. Feeling the surrounding atmosphere thicken with mana, I figured he was doing something cool so I didn’t interrupt. Instead, I began running my mind through the steps of setting up a ‘Mana-Bolt’ spell and all of its variations, practicing as if I were a second grader going through multiplication tables for the afternoon test.
Even though I was eager to get on with the lesson, I still had tons of memorized information that I hadn’t personally worked through. Cassandra had imparted pages upon pages of Centauri rune-script and several woodland boxes full of carved Dwarven rune blocks along with notes describing their meanings and uses. Memorizing all of it was the work of a sleepless night but learning it would take a few years. Knowing how to build a house isn’t the same as taking the time to build one, learning the lessons from many mistakes, gaining the experience required to build a house in such a way that it can become a home.
Elgar let a devious grin out for the first that I had seen. Opening his eyes and reaching forward to grip me by the shoulder, the world blurred past us a second time. “Speaking of idyllic paradises and the wonders to come, this is why we are here.” I opened my eyes to see all the children of the town gathered in a semi-circle around a different Sun Aelf. I was forced to comb my memory for his name but I came up short. They all looked the same, especially without their women nearby. Or their weapons.
“Elgar! Peace and welcome!” The slender Aelf called out, waving his hands in greeting. His floating balls of light that were vacillating between different shapes flickered out of view.
“May the shining sun always bless your days, Kalderan!”
At least the Aelves knew each others’ names. Less mental work for me.
The children’s teacher inspected me, keeping the grin off his face but the mirth still reached his eyes. “You’ve brought me a student I see, well, age does not denote understanding or skill.”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“Hey!” I snapped playfully. “I caught that! Besides, I got something you don’t have!”
The children hung on our words. Playing to the crowd, I conjured floating balls of ice that danced around, shifting into mystical creatures until each child held a gleaming figurine of ice. The wonder quickly devolved into furious bouts of intense negotiations.
“I WANT A UNICORN!” “BUT DRAGONS ARE COOLER!” “WHY DOES MY BIRD LOOK LIKE IT’S ON FIRE???”
I chuckled, quickly taking note of each child and their transient wants as they called out for what they wanted, completely disregarding the adults in the area giving them stern looks of disapproval. The children were a mix of heights making it hard to tell without magic exactly how old they were. The youngest must have been three and the oldest pushing twelve or so. It was touching to see how the three oldest children tended to the younger ones, shepherding them around and making sure they sat in the shade and calming down the little spats.
Quickly and carefully conjuring and molding various kinds of stone, I shaped dragons both Eastern and European in style, manticores, phoenixes, wyverns, gorillas, and a few unicorns. For myself, I crafted an exquisite copy of Spot. My little action figure had tiny rubies for eyes, obsidian as the bone armor, and other black and red elements. It wasn’t long until all of the children saw what I was holding and climbing over each other for a better view.
While they oohed and aahed over the figurine, I took a quick look around. The children had been sitting in the dirt or propped themselves up on little stumps that had been rolled out for them to sit on. Suppressing a sigh, I made a few more Spot figurines and handed them out. Extricating myself took a moment but I assured them that I wasn’t leaving. Instead, I walked to the center of the clearing and put my hand on the ground. Doing it slowly so I wouldn’t scare anyone, I pushed out my will, forcing the earth to mold itself to my command.
A large black wall of slate rose out of the ground behind Kalderan and a clean white marble podium rose out in front of him. To the sides, tables of plain gray stone grew out of the earth and chairs of varying sizes and heights pushed themselves out of the earth forming a nice outdoor classroom. I didn’t see any kind of water bottles or indication that refreshments were nearby, I took care of it by conjuring a few thin stone buckets on the table and filling them up with conjured water. Next to them, small wooden cups were placed in orderly rows by a root that grew up and around the table leg through my control. Last but not least, I made one last bucket and filled it up with small bits of conjured ice in case anyone wanted some.
It was fun to watch Kalderan’s look of disapproval at me upstaging him turn into a grudging respect as I used my magic to make the childrens’ lives better. Giving him a wink, I turned to the kids. “Okay, I’m here for lessons too and that’s important. Why? Because even adults still have learning to do.” A few kids raised their hands. “Hold on!” I said, waving for them to have some patience. “If we get through the lesson and behave the whole time, I’ll make more of those water, nature, and earth wands. I hear that some of them might have gone missing.”
Hiding a smirk, I fake glared at the kids with my fists on my hips, leaning in before suddenly jumping into the biggest chair in the second row of seats. “Called it! My seat!” Due to my sneakiness, I avoided the mad scramble for chairs, the kids clutching their figurines and holding them close. Kalderan and Elgar handed out cups of water to everyone but me and I made a ‘hurry up’ motion trying to get the lesson started.
Kalderan cleared his throat and held up the spellbook that I so desperately wanted to sink my teeth into. Not because the inside of me was begging for it, but because it was the next step to me getting a damn Grimoire and learning all of the things I’d missed out on regarding a magical education. Every single kid of my generation grew up with the Disney promise of fairy tales, of J.K. Rowling bewitching our dreams with the painful hope of receiving our letters or even the tales of exploration where monsters and adventure await just around the corner.
“Spellbooks are valuable. Valuable beyond belief.” Kalderan declared. “They’re also common. Wizards do not usually live lives filled with the trappings of wealth nor do they hold the richest vaults filled to the brim with gold and silver. Wizards treasure knowledge and yet have found that the fastest way to more knowledge is to sell and distribute all of the knowledge they find or trade the juiciest secrets for other equally tantalizing bits of understanding.”
I could tell that most of this lecture was for me.
“And in so doing, and in order to make a living where the necessities of life are provided for, wizards create spellbooks and sell them.” Well that makes sense. Elgar stepped forward and placed a medium sized box up on the table, carefully removing the top and removing its contents. Smaller spellbooks were laid out in careful rows. “Children with various elemental aptitudes are given spellbooks with related disciplines, accelerating the learning process. But spellbooks aren’t always the same product. They are crafted from reagents, bits and pieces of matter imbued with mana of different types, and then the memories of the wizard are copied and transfixed into the spellbook.”
Elgar placed another medium sized box up on the table on the other side of the podium, yet again organizing them in careful rows. As he did so, he spoke softly. “You learn magic faster by reading spellbooks, but only the magic within the book. Learning how to create a small floating orb of light, the classic ‘Mana-Light’ or ‘Light-Orb’ spell, takes a few months for people that have no idea how to do magic. But using a spellbook, it takes only a few days. The book connects you to your own mana if you have it, uses the memory of the writer to facilitate your learning, help you get to the end result faster, and teaches you the underlying theory of the spell.”
Various books were held up and then put down, showing the children what was available, presumably for them. “We have spellbooks for ‘Light-Orb’, ‘Wind-Gust’, ‘Sand-Spray’, ‘Monocle’, and ‘Mana-Bolt’. These are all acceptable starting points for children. Your mana pools are not deep enough and your control isn’t skilled enough for these spells to cause any damage. It is important to be careful as these spells will grow with you as your skills do and as you age. ‘Light-Orb’ can be used to blind someone as well and it is the base spell for ‘Burning-Ray’ and ‘Sun-Gaze’ which is a tightly controlled burning beam of light. “Wind-Gust’ is a base component of many flying spells or movement spells. ‘Monocle’ and ‘Mana-Bolt’ were requested by the adults specifically for the older children and will be held in reserve for the younger ones.”
Three books landed on my lap. “For you, sorcerer, I present ‘Monocle’, ‘Mana-Bolt’, and one unique book per your conversation with Cassandra, ‘Spellbook-Creation’. This one is written in Aelvish but we don’t have the Centauri equivalent. Don’t worry, the memories within are quite clear so you shouldn’t have any trouble.”
I couldn’t wait to get started.