Sometimes, the adults told her, their Mother would move as if She were in another place, touching absent furniture, dancing to an imperceptible tune, following a decorum She did not share.
With blood around Her lips, dirt caked beneath Her fingernails, Her hair a bird’s nest, She would stride through an untamed forest as if it were a pantheon.
They’d tried to model their own forum after that. Seven hundred seats made of air took up the largest glade in their territory.
About half of them went to dragons, and that was all of them, six went to drakes that had acquired some measure of maturity, only two dozen to scaled deer, idle as they were, and the rest went to myconids.
Only a hundred seats were occupied this morning. Not everyone had the time to attend or was even home, but even a hundred ancient beings on invisible thrones was enough to intimidate.
They called it the Sky Forum. A place to emulate their Mother, to have intellectual discussions, and make grave decisions that affected the future of their kin.
They were ranting at each other.
“Predictions are mutable!”
“This is Ara we’re talking about!”
“So? Looking into the future changes it, you brainless baboons!”
“You say that like an insult, Ambrose. Monkeys aren’t far from humans, you know—”
“What?”
“Yeah, you pervert!” someone else shrieked over. “What do you even like about that slug? She looks like a hairless cat—”
A thick branch of purple light, like lightning hammered straight, struck across the forum with a deafening crack. The day dimmed, and pebbles jumped in the grass.
By the time her ears had adjusted, shrieks and elemental wrath flew through the air. Some against Ambrose, and more than a few joining him.
“Mother took the form of a Vat! Are you insulting Her, too?”
“You know I’m right! She won’t give you any children!”
Someone wove a spiderweb of silence into the air, covering the seats and lines of fire, and it warped the remaining voices, but the sounds of destruction faded. Then, Lisa could stop thinking about that can of worms and hear her mom’s disappointment clearly.
“I should have known she would be tempted.”
“Where all has she gone these last few days?”
“The Nest—”
“She lead the ritual.”
“The ritual is not a secret of ours,” Rose sounded calm, “nor is any of the information we discussed during it pertinent to our survival.”
“We must still see to the Nest’s wards.”
“All of our wards, for that matter—” one of her myconid uncle’s signed with a magnified illusion, though he may as well have been a grand nephew to her.
“Anyone can spy on our wards,” her dad said, “if they truly wish to. Lisa’s presence will not have made a difference.”
“I will rest when I have made sure of that myself.”
The group left. Dragons took to the sky. Myconids threw their arms up as they hopped off their seats. A few hit the earth and were swallowed whole. Others puffed as they jogged away.
A handful waved and gave her apologetic smiles.
Sorry, Lisa mouthed back. They were doing a sweep of the entire wards because of her? That was a few days’ work at least, even for the best of them with their roots.
Rose slowly turned her head to watch them with a dry look of, Did you not hear a word of what I just said?
“‘Years,’” Ambrose poked his head out of the silence spell. “Ara said. By definition, it gives us two—”
“You just said predictions are mutable—”
Someone waved a hand and the silence swelled.
“Heya, kid.” Gently, her uncle Aber touched down.
She lifted her head to look at him. A lattice of shadows covered them—an arm here, a cloud there, a moving wing. His gold veins shone in the sun and glimmered in the shade.
They should have been beautiful, but when Lisa looked at them, she saw outlines of things dancing in the edges of the shadows—formless patterns. Liquid mandalas. It made her uncomfortable, like her skin and teeth were the wrong sizes.
With a sigh, she lowered her head again. Chin on outstretched arms, wings folded over her like a blanket, tail curled around, she lay in the center of the glade.
“Shouldn’t you be on your throne?” she grumbled.
The Sky Forum was temporary, in a manner of speaking. Its outline was maintained, but everyone had to fill in their own seats when they attended, with their own liberties.
Years ago, her parents had told her she could begin to weigh in on discussions when she was skilled enough to create her own, similar to the way their myconid family members tested their children.
Today, she’d been told to lay on the ground.
Part of it was out of convenience. They also performed complex spells here focused on this plane of existence, like the one they were performing now: appraising Lisa down to every last cell of her being.
Part of it was punishment.
“They wanted me to help with the scan—my foreign power to reveal and contrast, you know? … I also thought you might want the company.”
Lisa huffed.
Her family didn’t have mana—mental magic capable of warping reality, or drawing information from the void—but their minds and mental spirits had been evolved by the Allmother Herself, which was almost as good in some ways, and better in others.
Most of them also had two hundred years of experience dedicated to the pursuit of magic. Any one of them could put any archmage from the Five Cities to shame. Working together, there was little they couldn’t achieve …
Why did they have to be so mean about it, though?
“Idiot child,” one of her aunts grumbled as she fiddled with the scan, and Lisa shrunk further into the grass, aggression bleeding away to shame.
Ten words. Ara had spoken to them in Its native tongue. It could have killed them, or worse—irrevocably changed them. Their ritual had not gone as planned, and the news It had shared was worrying. As a result, people were a little more on edge.
So shouldn’t they have been scanning the people who had attended the ritual first? As if her accepting a foreign blessing was that big of a deal.
“I remember how they reacted when I was in your position,” Aber said. “Siblings show affection in a special sort of way. They”—he nodded up at the forum—”are acting out of concern for you, out of love.”
“You’re one of them,” she grumbled, “you’ve brought down tyrants, you grew up with them, fought by Mother’s side. They respect you.”
Like another annoying person she knew, he told her the truth, “They will respect you, too, someday.”
She sighed, “Someday.”
One of her aunts gave a cry, and the spell surrounding her intensified as dozens of people joined their efforts. The appraisal spell strained as it chased something down—whatever they were looking for, it didn’t want to be found.
“That was quick,” Aber commented.
With one hand on the spell, her mom took off from her seat and glided over to them. The world shook as she touched down and spoke, “Here.” She held a hand out. “Attune to this, Lisa. It should be easier for—”
“Tower essence?” Lisa interrupted.
Using Micah’s metaphor, if magic was an ocean, her family’s spell had parted it to reveal a signal at the bottom among the sand. All she needed to do was check it with her own sense for magic—what her Path called [Magic Attunement]—to find it. She knew it well.
“Tower essence …?” her mom repeated.
Lisa winced. “It’s— A friend of mine calls it that. That’s what you’ve been looking for? I could have shown you that myself if you had let me!”
Instead of making her sit in the grass, treating her like a child.
“You knew of this?”
“Of course!”
“Then you know what it is?” her mom demanded.
“It’s divine in nature.” Essences like it—their Sparks of Life, the Heswaren’s truth essence, Seven’s rage—they all came from the divine, or sources that were close enough to it.
They were easy to mistake for spirits because they carried some measure of their source’s influence and will, and they influenced reality to become more like it. Viral, was how she’d explained it to Micah once. It felt wrong to make the comparison, but it was apt.
“You knew, and you took it in anyway?”
“It’s a blessing! It’s not like I made a pact, and it didn’t come from one of the Six. I wasn’t concerned.”
“Find it within yourself, now,” her mom said. “And devour it.”
Grumbling, Lisa did as she was told. Anything to get her out of here. She cast, “[Create Fire],” and a flame sprung to life above her hand. It was easier to notice Tower essence when it was in motion. When she cast the spell this way, silver strings puppeted her mana within.
Drawing on her spark of life, Lisa attached a strand of pink to the silver and pulled. It didn’t resist—if anything, it seemed happy to be eaten. She’d studied it enough to think she knew why: it assumed it would survive and come out of the experience with more data.
It wouldn’t. When the Allmother’s essence consumed something, it digested it root and branch. Like sinking teeth into her prey, she hauled it back and mauled it to shreds. The moment the silver essence realized the truth, it began to kick and scream, trying to flee.
Too late, Lisa digesting an … artificial flavor of fire, was the best way she could think of it, and from its dying breath and the rest of the silver essence inside her, a voice rang out:
[Spell — Create Fire lost!]
Lisa froze.
“Good,” her mom said, “again.”
“No.”
“Lisa—”
“Why?”
“Lisa, you are smarter than this—”
“I spent months getting those Skills, mom! I need them to keep up my cover and—”
“You still want to go back?”
“Somebody needs to warn them, to prepare them for what is coming. Ambrose said it himself, we have two years—”
Her mom whirled on Ambrose with such a look across the forum that he stumbled back. Her tail lashed out like a sickle and reaped a wave of grass.
“I, uh— I was wrong. We might not have two years.”
“If the Five Cities don’t know already, they will soon,” Aber told them. “They have their own diviners and agents. Ignorant their laymen may be, they are a superpower.”
Lisa tried to give him the same look as her mom had, but he just gave her a pitying sigh.
“Lisa, there is a good chance this will not come to pass at all. Do you know how many catastrophes are averted by prediction? Have you ever pushed a cup back on a table so it does not teeter off the edge?”
“Oh, I know how this goes. Have you ever had to work on a group project? Everyone says they’ll do the work and memorize their parts of the presentation, but nobody ever does! Jonas ‘couldn’t borrow the right books at the library,’ Isaak had to work on Sunday, and Mary ‘just forgot.’ The responsible thing to do is to warn them.”
“You wish to be responsible?” her mom said. “Fine. Defend yourself. If you were to return to the Five Cities, we could equip you with forged documents and treasures to keep you hidden. Why then would you keep this blessing?”
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“Because I, uh— Huh?”
What?
“You said you need it to keep up your cover. We can eliminate that need. Why then,” her mom said slowly, “would you need to keep this blessing?”
Lisa went for her first thoughts that come to mind. “It’s useful. I have no good reason to be rid of it.”
“Ignorance is not a good way to start this, Lisa,” her mom hissed. “Think. What does your so-called ‘Tower essence’ do?”
Lisa opened her mouth to answer, used to her mom’s style of teaching where she would draw the answers out from her over the course of a lecture, but she went on, surprising her:
“It controls your magic for you, it controls your body for you, it gathers information around you, it helps you connect thoughts, it speaks into your mind. Why then do you assume it will always do these things with your best interests in mind, child?”
Lisa hesitated, glancing at the silver essence within her body, and part of her feared the possibility that her mom might be right, but … was she?
“If it tried something, I would crush it.”
She was smarter than this. Or rather, she was sure of that. There was only enough silver essence inside her to boost a small part of her mental essences into mana—the part she could spare. Everything else, she dedicated to managing three separate bodies. Four, including Sam and her summons.
What was there of it wasn’t enough, and not strong enough, to make her do anything against her will.
Her mom bent down to look her in the eye. “Why do you assume you would notice if it tried?”
Lisa opened her mouth to rebuke that. No words came.
“It controls your magic, your body, your senses for you—if it fed you false information, you would be none the wiser.”
“I would,” she insisted on principle when she wasn’t sure if it herself.
Her mom shook her head and turned away. She called over to her dad in his seat, “Did you bring the projections?”
He levitated a supply sack over from the treeline and flew down to join them. The top of the sack opened on its own along the way and he brought a tin out with papers inside.
“Here,” her mom said, “are our projected notes for your growth, using your elemental spirit as a supplement for your diet while you were abroad—”
Lisa knew where this was going and stopped it. “I used my life essence while I was gone.”
She gave her another sharp look, huffed, and continued rifling through the tin. “I see. The degree of your development is not the issue, however—”
“I disagree,” her dad said and sighed, “ … though I expected you would make poor decisions unsupervised. I’ve seen it enough from the children of other species.”
She— She hadn’t made poor decisions. Lisa bristled at the off-hand remark. She could think for herself! But her parents continued on without her.
Her mom found the page she was looking for, read it, and waved a hand to conjure an illusion in the grass next to them—of Lisa.
Except, not of a red dragon. A brown forest mouse with a burning tail sat in the grass near them and stared up at nothing. She must have meant the development of a different body.
Her mom tapped into the scan and projected a second illusion next to her: the same brown mouse, but slightly heavier, with nicer fur, and a more vibrant tail flame.
Her mom adjusted the illusion and the mice both broke into layers and pieces—skin, muscle, bone, and organs—that hung suspended in mid-air. With an illusory glow, she highlighted differences in her skin, her vocal cords and lungs, parts of her brain, and their spiritual equivalents.
Then, she did the same with her dragon body, projecting two illusions into the grass:
Lisa as she would have been had she kept to her diet, her scales a shade darker, a little taller, and more muscular.
Lisa as she was … It was hard to spot the differences, but her mom highlighted her wingspan, the vivid color of her scales, and her limbs and fingers were apparently longer and more dexterous.
She dissected the illusions and again, highlighted differences in her vocal cords and lungs, sections of her brain, her spirit …
“Levels affect the body,” Lisa spoke in a murmur. She’d known that. “Somehow, I must have assumed I was the exception … The patterns of my dragon body at least—”
“Are adaptable.”
Her mom gestured at the dragons in the forum: a spectrum of colors, body shapes, wing types, wing numbers—it was a natural side-effect of their survival nature, but most of them actively tinkered with their designs for one purpose or another.
She didn’t understand. “What is there to adapt to? Mental magic can only refine the body, not— Is it using my patterns as a vector? Or my life essence? Or—”
Her eyes widened. [Mold Pattern]. The first Skill she had ever gotten. What if she was unconsciously changing the pattern of her body itself?
For a moment during her speculation, her mom looked like she might have smiled, which was reassuring. She sighed instead. “You take my meaning too literally. Have you not found it yet?”
She turned to her siblings, who were still fiddling with the appraisal spell. Lisa had assumed they were checking her for side-effects of the divine words. They weren’t?
“Found what?”
It took a moment, but then her mom showed her. The spell shifted to reveal a different signal. This one, she had never seen before but it felt … kindred.
A riot of colors with a golden sheen clung gently to her spirit. Not much, wisps and bands of it here and there.
It reminded her of the puffs of dye people threw at each other in the summers in Hadica, or confetti, with glimpses of runes drawn on them, and the swirls of the dye shifting, fluttering to form mosaic ritual circles in mid-air.
She thought of Hadica, her friends covered in splotches of dye with tired smiles as they kicked their legs in the canal. The setting sun shimmered on its surface.
She’d missed the summer festival.
“Aber, you would be the expert on ur-forms like these. What would you call this?”
“It gives me the impression of a ceremony, or a festival. And a greeting— a welcome— an opening ceremony, maybe?”
“Would,” hesitantly, Lisa spoke up as she connected the thoughts, “you call it ‘Grand Summoner’ essence?”
He gave her a look. “So you know the answer yourself.”
If she continued to stare, the ritual circle began to blur and unravel, giving way to formless colors. An ocean of potential. An ocean of insanity.
The Judge’s essence.
Looming above her, her mom sounded perfectly calm. “You said you would notice if your blessings tried anything?”
“But— Try what?” Lisa tried to defend herself. “There’s barely any of it there—”
“This is what is left,” her mom stopped her. “It flooded you like a feast, expended a portion of itself to make alterations within you, and you ate the rest.”
“I— It made alterations? That’s not— Blessings don’t work that way. You taught me, they can’t do anything without assent. Unless, are they boons …?”
A blessing was a support spell that acted from the outside in. It could exist within the body, but it never actually became part of the spirit. It had a purpose, and it expended itself to serve that purpose. Nothing else.
Aside from rejecting it, the recipient had little control, and the creator had to maintain a link to fuel the blessing or control it, too.
A boon, on the other hand, was like giving part of your spirit to someone else, and telling them they could do whatever they wanted with it—use it, eat it, discard it. It was theirs then.
Her mom shook her head. “They straddle the line, but I would not call them a boon. It is possible to grant an open blessing—a blank cheque if you will—in the same manner as a boon. Even if you did not eat it right away, it would still cling to the spirit and begin to weather it much the same way that ours adapt, or that Northern elementalists train.”
Mudbaths. Lisa thought of the explanation she’d used to explain Northern magic to Micah.
“All it takes is a moment of weakness in a lifetime of being blessed,” her mom said, “or a series of smaller concessions, for it to worm its way in.”
Then was every person in the Five Cities slowly consuming a blessing between level ups? There was no way they could consume it as quickly as she had after all …
It filled out so many of the blanks she had struggled to explain during her studies, the requirements for level ups, the pauses in-between, the effects …
“Three years is apparently how long it took in your case,” her dad said, “I thought it took about a decade for other immigrants, though there are no doubt other factors involved.”
No, Lisa realized. It hadn’t slowly wormed its way in for her, she had asked for the blessing. And she had been heard.
“That still doesn’t explain the alterations. Every new level up should be the equivalent of a new blessing. To make changes, it needs spiritual cooperation so—”
“It needs it in that moment,” her dad said. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but those people model themselves after their ‘Classes,’ do they not? In their training, their aspirations, their deeds—they attune themselves to their Class, make a connection, and if that silver essence truly is spying on them, it’s a simple thing for it to wait for the right moment to strike. They only level when the blessing would have spiritual cooperation.”
Oh.
She’d argued for the right to lead the ritual, prepared for it, gone through with it, and she could still recall how elated she had been when it had actually worked. She had spoken to a God.
Before that, she had thought herself a summoner rather than a witch or conjurer, had acted like one, studied to create Sam, trained and earned money in the arena, learned how to protect her friends with a swarm of tiny, conjured lizards.
All of her actions had attuned her to the wavelength of ‘summoner’ and ...
“Isn’t this me?” Lisa thought she realized one of the reasons why she didn’t want to give this up. It was kindred to her.
Her parents made it out to sound so insidious—the silver blessing certainly had the potential to be—but the golden one simply … reinforced what was already there. Nurtured it.
“What?” her dad asked.
“A [Grand Summoner]. Isn’t that me?”
Her mom leaned down with a guttural growl, “Are you saying that is all that you are, my daughter?”
“It’s a part of me, at least, and if this blessing really is a blank cheque, my spirit is the one making the decisions on what to do with it … within the scope of its nature.”
“You speak so confidently. Yet, a moment ago, you didn’t acknowledge any of these points, not the influences, not the mechanics, not that this is two separate blessings—”
“If only that,” her dad added.
“I have demonstrated plentiful dangers here. Even if you share some kinship with this essence, that does not negate them. Can you now reject these ‘blessings,’ please?”
Lisa hesitated. “No …? Because this is useful,” she rushed to add. “I can benefit from it.”
She was getting pure, distilled ‘Grand Summoner’ essence on every level up? She doubted her family could easily get their hands on something like that.
… She wondered if she could co-opt it somehow, so she could save the essences she received rather than eating them herself. If she gave them to someone else, could they then level as a [Summoner]?
She was already plenty powerful, but if she could help her friends …
“If you were to return,” her mom said, “we could give you funds to buy proper meals so you can use your elemental spirit to its fullest. You could resume your lessons with one of us.”
“But I worked for this, mom. Maybe I didn’t learn as much these last few years as I would have from you, but I did it on my own, and it’s mine. I even taught a little. It isn’t much, but I don’t want to throw it away.”
Her dad ganged up on her. “We understand. We do. And we’d be happy to hear all about it, Lisa, but right now, we worry for your safety.”
Dozens of her family members were listening, watching her, appraising her through and through—Lisa, the first of their children after Mother’s departure, the hope for their species.
What did they see when they looked at her? She was seventeen. She didn’t want to make herself look like an idiot in addition to being ignorant, didn’t want to get emotional but …
“Is this really the only way? Are two little blessings really that dangerous I have no choice but to reject them? You can do anything!”
It was an appeal to their good name. She had seen them pull rocks out of orbit, teleport across continents, her uncle Brum was the size of a mountain and let himself be worshipped as a fire god!
But her mom sighed. The scars on her neck flexed and rippled as she nudged her. “Not anything. Especially not in cases like this.”
Rose’s voice carried over the grass, “I can see one way for you to protect yourself.”
Her seat was close to the ground so she simply stepped off and walked up to them.
“Rose, please,” her dad said, “stay out of this.”
“Ignorance is not a good way to begin this? Lisa asked; I want to give her the tools to make an informed decision …?”
She glanced at her, checking in, but Lisa turned to her parents as if to ask for permission first.
Her mom sighed. “How?”
“The issue as I see it is that the risks outweigh the rewards. You worry these foreign blessings can spy on you, mislead you, change you. The solution is simple: put more of yourself into the blessing.”
She turned to Lisa. “Consume only part of East’s blessing. Make a conscious divide between it and your self. Coat what remains in a shell of your own mental essences; that way you can keep an eye on its activities.
“If it were to attempt anything as extraneous as altering your thoughts or actions against your will, it would have to expend energy to break through that shell first, weakening it and giving you a moment of warning to collect your will.
“If East’s blessing in any part responsible for the way your spirit shapes your Class, this would give you more control over what your spirit does with your ‘levels’.
“Lastly, this would make it easier for you to tap into whatever the essence is doing, the information it is collecting, or the way it functions so you can study it and make sure it isn’t feeding you false information.”
“That … sounds too good to be true?”
Her dad huffed. “It is. Your mental spirit is not an inexhaustible resource. If you do as she says, you’ll barely be able to use it for anything else.”
“It would make controlling your human body more difficult,” her mom said, “and you would barely have any of this ‘mana’.”
“Only at first,” Rose said, “but doing this would train your mental spirit so you would regain those abilities with time. It could be a better training method than many of our own.”
One look was all it took for her dad to know which way she was leaning. He began to pace, crushing the grass her mom had cut beneath him.
“You just weathered a foreign influence. Ten words in Ara’s native tongue. One in our Mother’s tongue created the Naysayers. Who knows what kind of an influence those had on you—on all of us who were there. Now you want to subject yourself to this?”
“I can’t do anything about those words I heard,” Lisa said, “if I try to remember, my head—”
“Don’t,” her mom said softly, “let the memory be.”
If only it were that simple. In the back of her mind, Lisa held onto a thought like a dark, cracked glass pane.
“I can’t do anything about that,” she repeated herself, “but I can do something about this? And I want to warn them, to continue my projects, to go back.”
She humored the thought of trying to use puppy dog eyes again, but she wanted to be honest, and her parents only needed a moment anyway.
Clearly unhappy, they turned to her.
“Fine,” her mom said, “do as I say, or do as Rose says—one way or another, you’re not leaving this forum until you are no longer a spy in our home. When you’re finished, you can come find us if you still want my feedback on your other project.”
“I do!” Lisa blurted out, but her mom was already stepping away, giving Rose and her some space …?
No. The appraisal spell above them dispersed, and a few more people stepped into the grass to join her mom— her cousin, aunts, and uncles who had attended the ritual.
Finally, they were letting themselves be checked for side-effects of the divine words they had heard.
That was a relief, though she did wonder if that meant they were done checking her. Had they not found anything?
She was also concerned for her parents’ feelings as they marched off but … she was happy. A little.
She’d stood her ground and won, a messy victory someone else had handed to her, but a victory. She was only grounded, in a manner of speaking, in the meantime. This was the least of what she had expected to happen when she’d imagined telling her parents about this.
With a nervous breath and smile, she turned back to Rose. Aber was still watching her.
“You know this will weaken you, right? Weaving mental magic into our elemental spirit is something a number of us having done …” He glanced at Rose as if to consult her.
She nodded.
“It offers quality of life improvements and greater fine control, but it weakens the raw power of your spells. That one percent mental magic inside of your spell is one percent that could have been additional fire magic.”
“Mana is the mixture of my mental magic and Tower essence. It’s already purely mental in nature. This is more likely to increase the cost … Although, no. It could work both ways.”
“Yes, but this ‘Tower essence’ of yours does not only infect your mental spirit, does it?”
“ … No,” she admitted, “but at a certain point, quality of life and fine control are more important than brute force, and I still gain something by doing it Rose’s way.”
He huffed out a smile. “Fair enough. Alright, I’ll get you some food, this will take a while.”
With a shake of the earth and burst of wind, he took off, and Lisa called her thanks after him, but his comment made her remember, it had taken her months to learn all of her spells, and it wasn’t only spells she had to relearn …
How long would this take?
Rose watched her with a patient smile. “Shall we begin?”