As the light obscured my vision, my other senses started to feel things once more. A rush of air and a scent of grass made themselves known before I started to tumble across the ground. It was not a particularly smooth or graceful landing and I had a feeling there would be some bruising. I heard several other crashing and splintering sounds as other things were tossed about me. My vision slowly cleared from being overwhelmed by the bright light. I had landed on my stomach and had to push myself over with a groan. A blue sky shown down from above as a lay on what was some kind of grassy plain. I rolled my head to the left and right and saw the debris that Ms. Jun had thrown into the portal before me scattered and broken around the field.
I felt drained and tired, although I supposed that that made sense. I had just finished a long drive when I stepped through a portal and encountered those beings which had called themselves gods and then gone through a tumble-dry cycle over the grass. Being exhausted did seem to be a logical response to it all. I was just beginning to get the urge to sit up and take in more of my surroundings when I heard the sounds of footsteps rushing towards me.
I looked over and saw a young man hurrying towards me. His outfit was a firm reminder that I was not in Kansas anymore. Although I’ve never been to Kansas … maybe they wear robes like that... I might be a bit delirious.
“Are you okay?” Were the first words out of his mouth. Which, I’ll admit, shocked me. Not only was he speaking English, but we even had the same accent. It was another mystery, but my mind couldn’t even begin to process it right now.
“Not really.” I admitted. “I think I need somewhere to rest.”
His brow furrowed. “Wait… Who are you? How did you get in here?”
“Would you believe me if I said a green goddess tossed me through a portal? My name’s Kyle, by the way.” I couldn’t even begin to work up the desire to try to hide anything from anybody at this point. My mind was still working through everything, and was honestly too tired to have the capacity to do it well. Perhaps I shouldn’t have led with the goddess, but then it did seem like the most effective way of cutting through … whatever. I was just tired and a bit overwhelmed.
It did successfully flummox the young man. “Oh … Can’t say I’ve heard that one before. What is …” His wave took in the detritus from Ms. Jun’s living room “... all this?”
I decided to keep with my pattern of ridiculous honesty as a way to keep him confused. I remembered in the counterintelligence training my job had us do that one way to get out of a difficult situation was to just be confusing. In addition, I was confused myself, so it felt natural to share the confusion. “Oh, just some junk an old lady threw through a glowing doorway that appeared in her living room. Now, where am I?”
“Huh … oh, you’re in the Garden Halls, but how could …” His unfocused answer to my question cut off as he jerked with a sudden realization and gazed at me with rapt attention. “… Glowing doorways! You’re a Hero! Quick, get on your feet, we have to take you to see the Grand Abbot! He needs to know about this.” With hurried excitement, he rushed over to me and practically hauled me to my feet. That wasn’t the exaggeration it normally might have been, he seemed to be very strong for a guy in a robe. It took me a few fumbling steps to truly catch my balance as he pulled me along.
“This is exciting! There hasn’t been a Hero this far north before. I mean, not that anybody has announced before. But people don’t usually keep Heroes silent, sort of against the whole idea. I wonder who brought you here. I mean, normally you hear about Heroes being summoned in grand ceremonies, not just popping into the middle of a courtyard. I bet the Grand Abbot will be so pleased to meet you. Or maybe not, he’s hard to get a read on.” As I followed him, I realized just how young this particular young man was. I didn’t particularly think of myself as old, but something about being manhandled to my feet by someone who probably wasn’t 18 yet was disconcerting. He looked like a superbly fit athlete, which would have made me think him older, if he had ever stopped the babbling that I definitely associated with younger people. The annoying kind.
“What’s it like being a Hero? I mean, I guess you probably don’t know all that much yet. But it’s still exciting. All we’ve got are the stories up here. They say you Heroes are from some distant place, and you come here to solve problems. Oh hey! Are you here to solve our problems?” He paused for a moment. “Wait, what problems do we have? Everything seems pretty normal. Not that anybody would tell me I guess, I’m only a Novice.” He laughed. “I don’t even know how you got here. I bet the Grand Abbot …”
“That will be quite enough, Novice.” A deep voice cut off the babbling. I had to grab the young man’s shoulder abruptly when something completely unexpected happened. Not that I really had much expectations. If I had stopped to think logically, or had the time to, then magic would not have caught me by surprise. I had seen what those who had returned had to show for their trips to this world, however that worked. Then there were the divinities. Clearly, magic was a thing here. Still, I did not expect a man to simply walk up out of the ground with only a slight shimmer of brown light around his form as he emerged from the dirt not ten feet from me. The shock of it hit my system and I felt a wave of nausea leave me light-headed. Fortunately, I managed to avoid passing out.
The kid, the Novice, I reminded myself, shook off my arm and executed a subtle hand movement and a bow. “Grand Abbot. You won’t believe it! He’s a Hero! I was making my rounds, and I heard a clatter in the Garden Halls. So I came running and I found him lying in the grass with all that other stuff.” He gestured back the way we had came at the detritus. “He says he came here through a green portal and that a goddess sent him here! Does this mean we’re going to train a Hero?” His voice quivered with the eagerness of a puppy.
It was met with silence as the Grand Abbot looked out over us and then at the field where I had fallen. His face was expressionless although his eyes seemed to me to be angry. I took in his appearance while the silence held. Like the young man who had greeted me, the Abbot also dressed in what I had taken to be a robe. But as I looked closer, I saw that this was not quite right. It was more of a coat that covered the chest but trailed down with two voluminous tails over a pair of trousers. Where the young man who had greeted me wore plain black robes, the Grand Abbot’s had multiple stripes of color laid over the black. The other thing that drew my mind was an ornate crown atop his head. Copper twisted like vines curled around dozens of pink gemstones and gem fragments centered around a giant, slightly glowing pearl. It wasn’t pretty, but it was certainly impressive.
The cold silence stretched for nearly a minute, and the man who’d found me started to fidget uncomfortably. He opened his mouth a few times to speak, but each time a glance from the Grand Abbot changed his mind.
Finally, the Grand Abbot himself broke the silence. “It would appear that I have much to discuss with this Hero.” His voice dripped derision on the title. “For now, Novice…” His hand stretched out, palm forward. A small circle appeared in mid-air, energy flowing into a symbol in the middle and then out into a spiraling circle with a few other, smaller, shapes. It all happened very quickly, and beyond the impression of shapes, all I really took in was a flash of pink energy. “You will return to your rounds, forgetting what you have seen and thought for the last 20 minutes. You will have no memory of this Hero, his appearance or of anything else to do with his emergence. Return to where you were then. When you reach that point, you will emerge from this trance as if waking up from a time of distraction and inattention. You will remember only that you were on your rounds, and continue as if nothing had happened. Continue on your rounds until the appointed time and continue on with your daily schedule.”
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I looked over at the Novice quickly, only to see a pink film over his eyes as he hurried back the way he came. Leaving me along with the Grand Abbot, who was suddenly a lot scarier to my eyes as he continued to gaze at me coldly. The coldness only lasted a moment longer before his face seemed to age with a century’s exhaustion as he sighed. “So I suppose it is on me to clean up the mess.” Again the hand went out. I flinched out of the way, but the magic was not directed towards me. This time the energy that flowed into the shapes and circles was brown rather than pink, and the circle was noticeably larger and more complex. One quadrant, however, took on a vibrant green color as it developed. A rumbling sound behind me caused me to whirl around. Brown and green circles appeared around all the various detritus from Ms. Jun’s room and it was sucked into the ground. It was as if the earth itself, and the various grassy fields parted, and items disappeared down into the depths. The earth and plants closed back over them and suddenly, there was no trace of any of the items. It was if my arrival had never happened. I looked back at the man in astonishment.
Another circle was forming in front of him, again in brown energy. It formed faster the previous one, and only had brown energy in it. Clearly, these circles had to do with the working of the magic that he had been doing. I had a moment of panic as I felt the spell fire, and an energy take hold of me. I was temporarily mollified when I saw the Grand Abbot also shine with a brown energy but then yelped as we were both sucked down into the ground. It didn’t feel like we were moving through the earth, more like I had been thrown through the air as I moved very quickly. I was probably screaming the whole way, but the ground carried none of the sound back to me. So instead, it was with an eerie silence that I passed through dirt and then stone. It was impossible to maintain any sense of direction until I was falling out of the stone into the air.
My screaming continued for a few seconds until the fact that I had stopped moving caught up to me. When I finally came to, I looked up to find the Grand Abbot walking around an ornate wooden desk. He completely ignored my screaming self until he got to a chair on the far side. I quickly hurried to my feet. My emotions were whipsawing between anger at being yanked around, embarrassment at the screaming, wonder at the magic, fear at the same, and just plain confusion.
I settled on the wonder. People usually liked to talk about what they could do. “What was that?”
“Earth Step. It’s the closest earth magic can get to teleportation, but it’s one of the easier ones to attach to someone accompanying you.” A slight smirk crossed his face, “although I can gather it is unnerving for someone who is not used to it. Or to magic at all, if you really are a newly arrived Hero.” He gestured for me to take a simple chair on the opposite side of the desk from him.
As I made my way towards it, I looked around the room I took to be his office. It was spartan. Aside from the desk and a handful of chairs, it was otherwise dominated by a wide open space in front of a giant window. There appeared to be no personal decorations in the room, only a pair of banners, one a stylized tree and the other a river surmounted by a crown.
The tension kept me from dawdling, and I hurried over to the indicated chair and settled down. The Grand Abbot leaned back in his chair, resting his arms on the chair. “You are a Hero? Your clothes are certainly outlandish enough. Who summoned you though? We certainly did not.” His voice matched his words in annoyance.
I decided to err on caution. The last few years of working in the intelligence bureaucracy had certainly taught me etiquette to cover myself with angry people. “Sir, I’m sorry if my presence here offends you. I have not had control over anything since I stepped through the door.”
“Explain. How did you come to be here?” The cold voice prompted me to a hasty explanation of what had happened in the space between the realms. When I finished, the Grand Abbot looked displeased, but it didn’t seem to be as directed at me anymore. He thought for a moment but then, as if he had remembered something important, he leaned forward and fixed a firm stare on me.
“You said that you have an artifact from the Goddess of Knowledge’s book. Show it to me.”
I hesitated. I still wasn’t entirely clear on what it was, but just from his eagerness, I gathered it was important. But, at the same time, I still didn’t understand what was going on. This Grand Abbot was clearly going to be someone important to me, at least so long as I was here. Which I had no idea where that was or how long I was going to be here, so it probably behooved me to be on his good side. But would doing this help or hurt that? On the other hand, did I have a choice?
I had no memory of putting the paper in my pocket, but I could feel it pressed inside my jeans’ pocket. As I pulled it out, the page expanded until it was the original size it had been. But … that size … Magic is weird. I had a feeling I would be thinking that a lot. I passed it over to the Grand Abbot.
He scanned it quickly but then handed it back. “Do not show that to anybody else. It displays entirely too much information about you and clearly indicates that you are a Hero. That is not something we want known.”
“Why not?” I didn’t really expect to be talking about it much. I already knew this wasn’t my original destination, that the gods had stolen me away. But the insistence was jarring.
“Because that will spoil too much. We do not train Heroes here. That has been Colvale’s stance for a century now, and I will not change it. We do not summon them, we do not host them. Heroes are a contemptible breach of our societies.” His voice grew colder and harder as he continued the rant. “Their existence is an abomination which the gods should not be tolerating.”
He could clearly see the shock and fear on my face and he calmed himself down with a long sigh. “However, from what you said, the Goddess of Knowledge directly sent you here. That token also confirms it, as it is clearly a product of her magic. That means something to us here, so I am not willing to cast aside her intervention lightly. Another reason for secrecy. We do not know why she sent you here.”
I furrowed my brow as I puzzled through that, as I didn’t think that the Goddess had been so direct about my being sent here as the Grand Abbot seemed to think. But it seemed to be working out in my favor, so I decided against protesting his interpretation.
“The token also reveals too much about your abilities.” The Grand Abbot got up and started to pace the open area by the window. “You have an abnormally high number of affinities, which is also associated with being a Hero. That will draw attention and difficulty, for both you and for us.” He stopped pacing and gazed out the window. “We will attempt to hide your affinities, at least for the moment. Enroll you as a student at the Monastery School as if you were normal, until we have some sense of why the Goddess has placed you here.”
I started at the idea of going back to school. It had been most of a decade since I’d finished college. It wasn’t that I was completely opposed to going back. Learning was fun, and I had a feeling that learning here would involve magic, which would be awesome. But at the same time, school didn’t seem very Heroic, whatever that term was supposed to mean to these people. On the other hand, I had already deviated from the Quest, the gods – and the Grand Abbot too – had made clear that this was not where I was supposed to be. So I suppose it made no difference at this stage. I was in my own story now.
The Grand Abbot turned and faced me squarely, flicking his eyes up and down my attire. “There are two final things I must do to finish preparing you. Then I will take you to the one who will actually have custody over you. It would be counterproductive to our secrecy to have the Grand Abbot take a profound interest in a lowly Novice, so we will concoct a cover story. But first, we need a change in wardrobe.” He held out a hand and yet another magic circle started to form in front of him. This one was made up of mostly light magic, although one quadrant of it was the brown color again. It filled out for a few seconds, and this time I was able to see three concentric rings of symbols before the array flashed. I felt a slight tugging at my hands and legs and looked down to see a swirl of energy blend into my clothes.
A glowing white construct formed over my clothes and then reshaped into the shape of the same robes that the others had been wearing. When the glow faded, it left me in a set of plain black robes and pants with no embroidery whatsoever. The Grand Abbot nodded. “That is a short-term, altering illusion. It will make your clothes look and feel like ours and will last for the next day or so. That will be time for them to fit you with better clothes.
“The second thing I will impart to you is a warning. I have told you that we will enroll you here as a normal Novice and hide some of your affinities. Most importantly, you must hide your Mind magic affinity. It is not illegal in Colvale as it is many other jurisdictions – no magic is illegal here – but it will make you a target of interest you are not prepared to meet. Mind magic is rare and powerful, which makes it feared.” He paused for a moment. “Perhaps we can begin your education here. Tell me, why is Mind Magic so feared?” He waved a hand and a swirl of pink energy curled around his fingertips, although it did not start to form into what I was starting to think of as a spell array.
As it faded back into the air, I let out a breath I hadn’t noticed I was holding. I’d seen what that energy had done. Which gave me an idea for an answer. “I mean, I’ve seen you cast several spells now. Assuming that pink energy was mind magic, the spell was a lot smaller than the others you’ve used, like the Earth Step and this illusion.” I plucked at my clothes. “Yet, the effect was terrifying. You erased an half hour of that young man’s life.”
“The size doesn’t matter as much as the complexity, but you are essentially correct.” The Grand Abbot returned to his chair. “Spells work by infusing concentric circles with instructions for the magic written in a runic script. The more complex the need, the more complex the spell. The more complex the spell, the harder it is to manifest and control. Now I didn’t erase that half hour, I merely hid it behind a hypnotic trance. Erasing would have been more complex, not to mention dangerous for the Novice, but that hypnotic trance was easy for Mind Magic. It barely took any direction, as it is close to what Mind Magic wants to do. So yes, Mind Magic is feared because with little control, it can do tremendous deeds. People seek to eliminate or co-opt Mind Mages before they have even that minimal control. So we will not tell anybody that you are a Mind Mage.”