I barreled through the door, every step shaking the foundations of the mental construct. My reincarnation wasn’t perfect– it was almost like a possession rather than an actual reincarnation. I wasn’t complaining, though, it had allowed me to keep most of my memories intact. As I got stronger, hopefully my mindscape would stabilize a bit more. For now, though, I’d have to be fast.
I pushed into a room and glanced at the walls. Nothing of use– magical formations and potion recipes. I made a note of them for later but continued on my path. I checked room after room as the building shook, threatening to come down on top of me. I wouldn’t actually be hurt, of course, but Magnus’ Sapience would likely perish. I paused for a moment and focused, reviewing what I knew about mindscapes. The knowledge was there, but I hadn’t called upon it in millennia. It wasn’t often that I invaded others’ minds, and when I did they were usually powerful enough to put up a fight or contain me.
Personal memories wouldn’t be close to the door. Traumatic memories would be buried underground. Practical knowledge was usually close to the walls and doors to guard against intruders. Conceptual knowledge and ethics would be the next layer, isolating the deepest parts of the mind against the things that couldn’t be stopped with fire and brimstone. I ghosted through the building, my theoretical mapping of his mental construct allowing me to move much faster towards what I wanted. I passed his fears and his hope, his courage and his dread. I found the bedrooms, where he kept those people most important to him. I burst into one room and memorized the names and relevant personality details of his family members. Another room and I had his childhood friends. Another couple rooms and I had the staff members he’d been close to. Another and I had a summary of personal history and important memories. I went to enter another room and the wall cracked beside me. Time to go.
With a thought, I was back at the entrance and thanked a cowering Magnus, his hunched form rocking back and forth as his construct suffered the strain of my presence. Time would heal him. Probably.
----------------------------------------
“Siegfried…” I groaned and opened my eyes as my loyal manservant patted my cheek with a wet rag.
“Oh, thank the Divines!” He gasped.
“I was concerned, milord. You mustn’t scare me like that!” He admonished me, and I gave him a rueful grin. From the few key memories I’d gotten, I knew this wouldn’t be too out of character. Magnus was a bit too caught up in his own ego; he was arrogant and without fear, confident that he could conquer any foe that made its way in front of him. Nothing like me in that regard, nothing like me at all, my present predicament excluded. Other than that, though, I really wouldn’t have to change how I acted much I didn’t think.
“Relax, Siegfried. It was a nasty little bugger that got me, but I’m alright. It just sealed off my mana for a bit. How long do you think it’ll be before we reach Avalon?” I didn’t know if people normally left off the ‘Academy’, but I didn’t really feel like saying it every time it came up in conversation and Siegfried was a safe place to try it out.
Siegfried considered the question, rolling his eyes at my laissez-faire attitude. The worry remained in his gaze, but he voiced nothing more about my condition.
“Just a couple hours, sir, if I get the horses moving again. How did your, ah, expedition go?” He queried, brows raised. I had no idea what he was talking about. Why did Magnus go into the woods like that?
“Ah… It went alright, suffice to say. Perhaps not the exact result I was looking for, but it’ll do,” I fudged, and cringed as Siegfried’s face scrunched in consternation.
“I have an awful headache, Siegfried. If you wouldn’t mind getting us started?” I prompted the older man to head to the front seat and drive us towards our destination. His face smoothed over and he nodded once.
“Right away, sir.” And we were off.
I pulled out the identification badge I’d received from Avalon some time ago. Magnus Blackwood, it said. Fifth Circle Mage, it said. Wrong on both accounts. Damn. Practical Applications of Magic, it said. I guess that was true. I cracked my knuckles and massaged my temples. The fog that had come and gone since I’d awoken was coming back fierce, exasperated by my meddling in the mindscape. I looked inward again and swore. My tower was teetering on the brink of collapse as I entered. The few memories I’d made here and copied from Magnus were causing massive disruptions. My new brain simply didn’t have the ability to make new rooms of non-euclidean geometry for my construct, and it was throwing the whole thing into jeopardy. There was nothing for it, I supposed. I’d have to do something drastic.
I split my mind from two pieces into three, a feat impossible for someone who’d lived half as long as me. It was excruciating pain, but I sent the deformed new rooms into their own house with copies of memories of the past week and my journey to godhood, a summer villa for myself to cut down on the strain on my mental tower. My memories of the past 10,000 years vanished, locked behind the door of isolation. It wasn’t enough, though. Now that the structure had been disrupted, I needed to cut down more. I fought to figure out what I could remove that wouldn’t be useful. Obviously nothing that wasn’t copied somewhere. My high circle spells? I had hundreds of twelfth circle spellbooks and scrolls in my domain. No, in order to reach godhood here I’d need them. My alchemical knowledge? Potion recipes? Dammit, I’d need those too most likely.
I settled on my experiments and isolation. With a wave of my hand, a number of bricks sloughed away and the strain lessened. It wasn’t enough. I could no longer remember the decades spent wallowing in self-pity or the exact creature born when splicing together a sheep and a wolf with magic, or an owl with a bear–actually, what did happen to that one?--or any of my other experiments. I kept many of the successes without the remembrance of the failures. The minions I’d sacrificed in pursuit of power, the billion small interactions I’d had with faceless automatons and sycophants coming to offer gifts in exchange for magical knowledge or Divinity, everything that wasn’t immediately relevant to the task looming over me was evaluated clinically and discarded if found wanting.
Nearly 9000 years of memories were discarded. I kept no more than a month of every year of the last 30,000 of my life. I kept no more than a half year of everything else from godhood, cutting down as much as possible. As much as I dearly wanted to keep ahold of everything from before godhood, I was still several hundred years old before I’d Ascended. It wasn’t a drop in the bucket, not when so many of those memories held the majority of my purpose and my happiness. I’d been a god for who know how long at this point, at least 40,000 years. It was irritating, but I had to cut down a lot of that.
Finally, I finished. I moved much of my relevant spell knowledge of the first five tiers of spellcasting to my new construct, building it from a hut to a house to a villa to something more akin to a mansion. I moved in alchemical knowledge and potion recipes and enchanting and Magicke, and then I paused, my mind overwhelmed by the influx of returned knowledge. As my godly mental tower stabilized, I severed the connection back to it and retreated to my new hut. Even now, my mind felt relatively full of the first 749 years of my original life. It felt weird to have no memory of my time as a god, but it couldn’t be helped. I needed the space now. As I grew I could remember more.
My arduous task completed, I laid my head down and actually slept.
I awoke an hour later, the pain in my head vastly reduced. A good night’s sleep would likely relieve the rest of it. I took out a journal and looked for some kind of lesson plan that Magnus had concocted. I hadn’t found any memories related to the school, unfortunately, and it wasn’t safe to go back to snooping around yet. I flipped through and swore as it was filled with nothing but illustrations of creatures I’d already seen before. Granted, they were pretty good, but not what I needed right now. I flipped through a second journal and grimaced. This second journal was an outline of Magnus’ future goals and plans. It pricked my heart slightly to see it, but I’d restore the man to a body at some point and aid him.
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
I chuckled as I read through the goals. Some of them were ones I’d once shared: Tame a dragon. Slay a demon of Fourth Circle or higher. Discover a spell. Slay a dragon. Rescue a maiden from a dragon. Recover a dragon’s hoard. Stuff a dragon and make a decoration for a cool house.
The dude clearly had a thing about dragons. I stretched and then closed the notebook. Alright, what would be on the curriculum for a class like this? I didn’t even know what circle they might be. Would they even have cores formed? I felt like they would, but I couldn’t be sure. And how the hell was I supposed to instruct them without a single demonstration? Not for the first time, I swore at Loki.
With just an hour before I got to my new job, I would need to develop something workable quick.
----------------------------------------
An hour passed and we rolled through an ornate gate onto cobblestone roads. The carriage rolled to a stop and Siegfried clambered back into the coach and informed me that we’d arrived. As if I couldn’t tell from the windows and the noise outside.
“Thank you, Siegfried,” I thanked him, and he nodded politely. I made no movement to climb out, though. These things had a certain procedure to them. Minor as my family was, I was technically nobility in this realm. By no means was I extraordinarily wealthy, but I had a bit of weight behind my surname and I needed to respect that. Siegfried climbed down from the coach and announced me: Professor Magnus of House Blackwood. I grimaced at the introduction but stepped down the steps with a stately manner. A portly man in a black suit hustled over from some building near the gate and bowed to me. He pulled out a device that looked very similar to a pocket watch and clicked a button on it.
“Professor! We’d received word you’d arrive today, welcome! My name is Mayor Potts of District 6 of Avalon! I’m very pleased to have another accomplished mage in the city!” He graciously welcomed me, putting a loud emphasis on each sentence so that the ending was louder than it had started. It was annoying as all hells, and I hoped he’d stop it soon. I went to respond, but I was cut off as a shimmering purple portal appeared in the air next to us. I took a step back and my hand went up in the air in a defensive stance, as though I could actually do anything if something attacked us.
The portal solidified and a man with a neatly trimmed white beard stepped out. He wore indigo robes that flowed around his body, poorly made gold leather stars sewn into the rich fabric. His hat was a pointed wizard’s hat with no brim, similarly adorned with gold leather stars. On most any man, the look would have been comical. On this man? It said that he was above the petty fashions of lesser minds, and the piercing blue eyes that peered out from just beneath the hat looked right through the people and world around him. Those eyes peered at me and crinkled as he smiled. I shivered and cursed Loki for the umpteenth time since yesterday. It was a man whose description I’d read multiple times over the millenia. Why had he not been wiped from my memory? His was a description firmly lodged in the Magicke part of my mental construct.
“Merlin, I presume? A pleasure to see you in person,”I greeted him.
----------------------------------------
“Mr. Blackwood! A joy to have you here at last,” Merlin greeted me warmly, striding forward to clasp my hands in his. I didn’t know anything about this Merlin, and I avoided meeting his gaze. Instead, I focused on the tip of his long, crooked nose. It could be dangerous to look a mage in the eye who practiced a certain kind of magic. Those who meddled in Magicke took on certain qualities, their gaze one of them. It was a piercing thing that saw things you often wanted to hide, and I had plenty to hide.
I smiled in greeting and shook his hands back.
“Thank you! It’s an honor to be welcomed as a professor at Avalon Academy, of course. I’m looking forward to getting started with the classes. Do you happen to know how long before my first class? I don’t have the time at the moment,” I chuckled after the last statement as though it were a joke. A calculated statement designed to throw all parties involved off. If my class was today, god forbid, the last part would make perfect sense. If my class was any time in the next month, my chuckle would make it seem like a joke.
“About 27 hours, my good man,” Merlin informed me, a twinkle in his eyes, “And I’ve prepared the troll you requested as well.”
Fuck.
“Excellent,” I said, smiling and hiding the sinking feeling in my stomach. I didn’t continue, and Merlin continued to speak.
“I must say, I’ve never had a professor of Practical Applications of Magic start the class off with a combat demonstration before. I shall be there to watch the students’ reaction to their professor slaying a troll in single combat. I know, of course, that a man of your credentials will not struggle, but it’s always a treat to see a professor’s combat style,” He continued.
Fuck.
“Oh, I doubt you’ve seen anything quite like this. I’ve got something special planned,” I thumbed at my nose and Merlin looked delighted.
“Oh? Dear me, would you let a poor old man in on the details?” He pressed, and I shook my head with a rueful grin.
“No can do, Merlin, that’d be spoiling it. Suffice to say, I think it’ll leave an impression on the students,” I said. I’d have to think of what the hell I’d do or the only impression I’d leave was that of the traumatic death of their first professor. I continued, “Speaking of them, professor, I was curious if you had any records I could peruse or if you could tell me of any standouts in the upcoming class?”
Merlin nodded his head.
“No records, I’m afraid. That’s proprietary, you understand. But when it comes to standouts, there’s several in that class of yours. You’ll be able to tell them, I’m sure,” his eyes twinkled again.
“Hmm, could you tell me what the highest circle in the class is at least?” I pressed.
“I believe the girl, Morgan Faia, is approaching the third circle? Almost a full circle ahead of everyone else, she’s definitely one to watch,” Merlin tapped his nose.
“Almost third circle at this age? Definitely impressive, I’ll have to keep an eye out for her,” I swore internally. Merlin as headmaster and an impressive young mage named Morgan? Things were looking grim.
“And the boy, Arthur? How is he doing?” Please be confused. Please be confused. Please be confused. If there’s no Arthur, this task is ultimately tedious but doable. Please be confused.
“The golden-haired boy? I see someone’s done their research,” Merlin chuckled, “He’s only first circle, but I’m confident he’ll end up fairly strong. But enough chit-chat! I’m sure you’re tired from traveling. Let’s get you set up in your room and I’ll see you tomorrow!”
The heretofore ignored mayor, wilting at said ignoring, perked up at this.
“I would be happy to guide you to your accommodations, professor!” He offered, and I graciously accepted. Merlin handed me a silver pendant in the shape of a fox head. Interesting. The shape sent my thoughts in directions that left me missing a certain familiar of mine, and I shook the thoughts away. They wouldn't be helpful to think about now.
“I would be honored, Mayor,” I bowed now, mirroring the respect he’d shown me previously, and the rotund man swelled with pride. Merlin bid me farewell and exited through another portal, leaving Mayor Potts to guide me around town. It was a fairly straightforward route, and I was grateful for the nice accommodations. It was a two-story apartment with a bedroom for myself, a small study, and a pair of guest bedrooms for guests or staff. The kitchen and family room were modest, but I felt that was to be expected. I honestly had no idea. The mayor retrieved an iron key from his pocket.
“We don’t tolerate the Fey here, Professor, as I’m sure you know. These Iron keys help to discourage the trickster faeries that sometimes get into mortal abodes. Prick your thumb with the spike on the end, and no one but you will be able to use the key for a year and a day!” The mayor said enthusiastically, passing me the small key. I dutifully pressed my thumb to the back of the key and licked my thumb to get rid of the glob of swelling blood. The mayor smiled and gestured back towards the door.
“If you have need for anything, feel free to call! As is standard issue for professors, I have set up a set of signal bells near your door–though, of course you can set them anywhere you want! One bell goes to my aide to let me know that you’d like to meet, one bell goes to the Headmaster’s aide to let him know you’d like to meet, and one goes to a local courier to let them know you’d like to make purchases,” He rattled off the list, ticking off each bell on his hand. Bells? Seriously? I could think of at least three dozen better ways to communicate. I rolled my eyes. I understood that time was cyclical and that I’d seen at least a half dozen Cataclysms in my lifetime, but it really was annoying the way certain innovations always took too long to get anywhere. Bells?
I thanked the mayor and entertained his small talk for as long as I could before sending him on his way. The moment he was gone, I slumped against the door and slid down to rest on the ground. How the fuck was I going to kill a troll in a little over 24 hours with no magic?