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The Wrong Hero
Chapter 4 - Nope, no Heroes here

Chapter 4 - Nope, no Heroes here

The Grand Abbot stood and gestured for me to join him as he walked over to the window. “Now, it is time for me to drop you off with someone who will see you settled.”

I looked out the window and found myself sinking to my knees involuntarily. The only other time I’d had this sense of vertigo was when I’d gone to one of those really tall skyscrapers – the one in Chicago, I forget the name – and gone to the observation floor. It had that section with the glass floors and the whole city had stretched out below me.

This was worse. Maybe because at least in Chicago there were other tall buildings. As near as I could tell, we were high up in some giant mountain, gazing out at a valley. The nearest buildings had to be most of a mile away and below, and were almost comically small. The vertigo almost threatened to bring the contents of my stomach out of my mouth and stubbornness combined with irritation at the laughter of the Grand Abbot were what kept me from embarrassing myself.

“Good thing you aren’t an Air Mage, if you react to heights like that.” He chuckled. “Below, you can see the immediate area of Colvale Monastery and beyond that Colvale Valley.” He gestured at three building complexes. To the left, and also highest up the mountain, was a complex that dipped in and out of the mountains, with winding halls and large courtyards. In the middle was a single tower rising at least a dozen stories above an already several-story tall square. To the right, and lowest, was a nest of small and large buildings with a few large fields. Beyond even that was what appeared to be a massive stadium overlooking the river that meandered down the valley. “As you can see, there are three complexes. You will have no need of the highest, which is the Monastery proper. Journeymen, Magi and Masters of the Monastery live there. The middle is our library and shrine to the Goddess of Knowledge, our patroness.” He looked at me slyly, as if he thought he was making a joke. “Which is why her placing you here is so important to us.” A casual wave took in the final complex. “That is the Monastery School, where you will be educated in our tradition beginning next term. But for now... Prepare yourself; and try not to scream this time.”

Brown magic filled in a large circle in front of him and I felt myself sinking into the ground once more. A little forewarned, I focused on taking calming breaths – I wasn’t entirely clear on how or what I was breathing but decided not to question it too deeply – instead of hyperventilated screaming. This trip also seemed marginally shorter, and there were definitely fewer transitions from stone to dirt, before we popped out into a different office. This one was much more elaborate than the one we’d just left, with books stacked in piles and at least two desks covered in honest-to-God scrolls.

As I looked around the space, the Grand Abbot coughed lightly into his hand. A sense of pressure swept out from him and filled the room. It didn’t feel like much of anything aside from an awareness, not threatening or suffocating, just there. There was a sense of awareness that flashed across my mind much like someone settling onto a couch next to me. It was still quite unnatural and I whirled around the room in surprise. The Grand Abbot quirked an eyebrow at me. “Relax, I’m simply announcing our arrival.”

“Announcing … to who?” I had barely finished the question when there was a stir around a door on the wall next to me. A white substance flicked around the edges, flowing around the sides of the door. It flowed to a spot on the floor and then started to pile up. I had just started to recognize it as being like a mist or a cloud when it took on a humanoid form and then faded into a human. The woman before me was also wearing the same black coat as the other people I had seen, and for that matter as the illusion made my clothes appear. Her focus was on the Grand Abbot, although I think I saw her eyes flick over me briefly before dismissing me.

She was visibly older than the Grand Abbot, but she bowed to him respectfully and spoke in a high voice. “Grand Abbot, I was not expecting you to pop down so abruptly today. To what do I owe the honor?”

The Grand Abbot shook his head. “You can stop with the formality, Irense. I know it is a stretch for you. I have a present for you.” He gestured at me and I looked at the two of them, surprised.

Irense straightened from her bow and moved purposefully towards the one desk in the room that wasn’t covered with books. She glanced at me in surprise too. “You make me sound rude, Grand Abbot. But I must admit, I’m curious. What about a fresh Novice makes him such a present? His robe is completely unmarked, which means he’s either an absolutely atrocious student or he hasn’t even started studying yet and just arrived in time to watch the Trials before beginning his own studies. I rather doubt it’s the former, which means there is something special about him.”

The Grand Abbot smiled and appeared to hold in a laugh. “I spend so much time dealing with outsiders, I forget how perceptive other Mind Mages can be. It does tend to make conversations more efficient. Yes, there is something special about him. This is Kyle, he’s a Hero.” He turned to me and gave a brief explanation. “Kyle, this is Abbess Irense. She is the Abbess of the Shrine, which means the caretaker of the Elenehuset, our shrine to the Goddess of Knowledge and library. It would defeat my purpose to pay too close attention to you, so the Abbess will be your primary guide as you settle in. She is the only other person who should know your full story, and will help you craft an alternative.”

With that, he turned back to the Abbess. “We are going to be hiding the fact that he is a Hero. I would not be tolerating his presence except that the Goddess herself directed his placement here. He is also a Mind Mage, but you are to be his sole instructor in that until he is ready to be unveiled. We will need to obscure the full extent of his Affinities to avoid drawing focus. He has a Rare Affinity, so that can serve as an angle for you to take an interest in him. A new Affinity being revealed is something the Monastery needs to have in its records and that can serve as the focus of his time with us. I will leave the rest to you, my office will notice if I’m not in it for too long.” With a wave of his hand, another brown circle appeared and filled in front of him before he was sucked into the floor and presumably, Earth Stepped back to his office.

“Well, he doesn’t waste any time, does he?” The Abbess shook her head. “Sometimes, I wonder what his predecessor saw in him for Grand Abbot. He has such a tendency to just drop things off and dash away. I suppose I should interpret it as a sign that he trusts me to get to the bottom of this.” She stopped musing to herself and faced me squarely. “So, your name is Kyle then? He said that you’re a Hero, but that the Goddess placed you here, which means you aren’t a natural one. You were summoned, but I know we haven’t done any summoning, the Grand Abbot doesn’t approve of them. So how about you tell me your story.” She sank into a chair that was behind the desk.

I relayed the story from finding the green doorway untouched, then the encounter with the gods and finally being chucked out into the Monastery. “But what I don’t understand is what the Grand Abbot said about me being placed here by the Goddess. She mentioned sending me here as a possibility, but it seemed more like the amber or green gods were the ones to actually send me here.”

The Abbess shook her head. “They wouldn’t have done that without her suggestion. And it was an odd one. There are at least five monasteries that I know of dedicated to her which would not have persecuted you for being a Mind Mage, yet she recommended only here to the other gods. You are missing a critical understanding of the Goddess of Knowledge. Her book contains all the information knowable about our world. Information nobody else has full access to. How could she avoid using it to advance whatever cause is her desire? Therefore, she is also the Goddess of Schemes, but her schemes are often impossible to figure out in advance, and we just have to trust in her. We at the Monastery are dedicated to the study of knowledge and therefore to Goddess.” She gestured to encompass the room. “That’s why this library is called the House of Elenia and not something more banal. So we have to just trust that whatever her scheme is, it is for the benefit of Colvale, and not its harm. Since she put you here, we’ll keep you here for now.”

I hesitated in what to say next as I made my way over to the chair opposite the Abbess’s at the desk. There was a small stack of books on it that I lifted carefully and set on a spare corner of the desk. I could feel something behind my eyes tickle as I looked at the titles. The alphabet they were written in wasn’t the one I was used to, but my mind could process the information anyway. Only one title made any sense to me, Reflection on Dragon Crystal: Provenance & Purpose. The rest appeared to be journals of a few individuals whose names were meaningless.

“Why all the secrecy about me though? I get that the Grand Abbot doesn’t approve of Heroes, but that seems like a silly reason for all the effort.”

The Abbess shrugged. “Less silly than you think. It’s mostly for your protection, but also ours. Heroes are powerful, by nature you will have more Affinities than most natural-born people you meet. That means you’ll be able to be more flexible in your magic than most. Your Mind Affinity also means that you’ll be able to use what most find a terrifying branch of magic. There would be many who sought to abuse you, or possibly kill you, before you could realize that power. It’s also for our protection. Colvale Monastery doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and if we were seen to be harboring a Hero, especially given the Grand Abbot’s objections to them in the past, all would wonder what we were up to. Nobody would believe that you were here accidentally, and summoned Heroes always have quests. Other players would wonder what quest Colvale would feel the need to summon a Hero for. We would get dragged into plots and politics that could threaten the valley.

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“So we hide your identity and capacity, train you in secret until we realize what scheme led Elenia to place you here. After that, we’ll see. You said your Quest sends you to Dagva-Nor. I’m sure there is a map somewhere around that will show you where that is, but it’s not a place I can recall. You’ll have to chart your own course in life, and possibly decide to answer that Quest eventually.”

Her point about the protection struck me. Before I could respond though, a giant yawn cracked my face. A wave of exhaustion swept over me. The chair I was in suddenly felt very comfortable and my eyes reminded me that this was the tail end of a very long day. It had been evening when I’d gotten home, yet seemed to be midday here, and the people around certainly seemed to have no lack of energy.

The Abbess looked at me confused, an expression I barely had time to register. A flash of light, although this time I couldn’t see which color it was – color’s important, right? – and suddenly a rush of energy swept over me. I felt like I’d just drank a shot of over-concentrated espresso and my body was suddenly full of energy. Overfull even, as I started to get a little jittery.

“You are exhausted. I had not heard of that as a side-effect of summoning.”

“I don’t think it is.” I could no longer stay seated and got up and began to pace. “It was late evening in my world before I entered the summoning thing. The rest has just been such a shock, but I think that’s starting to wear off.”

“Yes, and that energizing spell is not a good one to keep running too long. So let’s settle a few details and get you a place to sleep for a bit.” She held out a hand and magical circle started to form in front of her. “This will take me longer than some of the others. I don’t have a strong Body affinity, so any kind of complex magic takes me more time.” More time in this case turned out to be almost a minute of standing around and watching an incredibly complex circle form in front of her. It was all one solid color, which could be described as the color of iron rust. Eventually the spell flashed and I felt a wave of energy wash over me. But something was different this time. Previous times magic had washed over me, with the Grand Abbot’s Earth Step or when he altered the appearance of my clothes, I could feel it grab me and settle into something. This time, it felt like a wave washed in from the sea but then the water dripped off of me.

The Abbess furrowed her brown and asked me to hold still so she could try something. The circle started to form and if there was any difference in it, I wasn’t able to figure it out. Maybe a few of the lines were different? Either way, the effect wasn’t any different and she frowned. “I don’t understand. I may not have speed with Body Magic, but I am skilled enough to carry out a basic polymorph spell. But it won’t take on you. Which is going to make this harder. You are clearly too old to be a Novice, but you will need to take the Novice classes. We need a false identity, and I was expecting to make it of the right age. I was going to alter your body to be the right age, but the spell didn’t take. So now we will need to explain how a man in his mid-twenties is only just now a Novice.”

“I’m in my late twenties…” I trailed off as she scoffed in dismissal.

“Fine, late twenties then. That only makes it harder. How would you have avoided being awoken to magic for so long? Most Novices at Colvale are in their mid-teens, with late teens meaning they are either lazy or somehow awoke late. Here in the valley, people from the Monastery are very diligent about going to all the various outlying villages to get as many local students as we could.”

I suggested that maybe I could have been from far away but she shook her head in rejection. “Then why come to the Monastery instead of whatever Academy would have awoken you? Your Rare Affinity means nobody would have just given you up to us. We can’t hide that too, or else people will wonder why I’ve taken you an interest in you, and that will draw attention the Grand Abbot wishes to avoid.”

I thought for a moment. “Well, a Valley implies water. Maybe I was a fisherman and was always out at sea whenever one of your people swept through. It sounds statistically improbable, but that’s not the same as impossible.”

“Especially if we add in the detail that your father didn’t want you tested for some reason. You can invent one to suit your needs later, we just need the bare bones so that anybody who asks me can get an answer close enough to yours that it would survive scrutiny. We don’t want too many details in common.”

I nodded to that, I remembered from my own intelligence community training that one of the ways to spot a prepared false story was to look for anything that had too many details, especially if multiple accounts that weren’t supposed to be super similar sounded the same. “Fair, I probably wouldn’t have shared too much. And we if say that I was awoken after my father died, it would also explain why I don’t correspond with anybody and never get visitors.”

The Abbess nodded decisively. “Well reasoned. A fisherman kept isolated will also help explain away your lack of knowledge about our world to a certain extent, especially things like etiquette. Starting tomorrow you’ll have a program of reading to help catch you up to what should be your common knowledge about Colvale and our world. The Elenehuset certainly has plenty of books about local waterways and creatures for us to flesh out the false identity and get you up to speed.

“That’s your mundane identity, now we just need your magical one. The Monastery has records of all who are awoken by our magi, and certainly any who enroll as Novices have records about their magic. I can create a false paper trail for you, once we’ve settled on what it is. So let’s see what we can make of you. I can go get a testing crystal to see what your true Affinities are and we can figure it out from there.”

As she started to rise and waved a hand for her to stop. “Wait, if you need my true Affinities, would this work? The gods said that’s what this showed, and the Grand Abbot reacted like it did.” I pulled out the paper and showed it to her.

“Oh … well then. This is better. I can’t say I’ve ever seen it represented so thoroughly before. The crystal just shows us energy glows and we extrapolate. To see it broken down so thoroughly … Truly a marvel.” The Abbess took the paper from me and carried it over to a lamp and bent down to peer closely. “This thing … it’s woven from strands of magic! A priceless treasure! How did you… oh right, the gods. Such a wondrous miracle though.” She looked at me for a moment and her brow furrowed. “You cannot have this in the Novice quarters. Its mere existence is a wonder and you will lack the capacity to store or hide it properly.” She went over to a wall in her room and with a sudden shimmer I was looking at hole where there used to be a wall. After reading the contents one more time, she slipped the paper into the hole and then the wall reappeared. And just like that, my magical artifact, a page from the book of the Goddess of Knowledge was gone, I barely had time to process everything.

“Yes, well, that will make things easier. You have five major affinities, and are the cusp of a sixth. Just so you know, most significant awoken have two to three. I am accounted an Archmage because I possess four major affinities as well as several minor ones. We have to hide your Mind affinity, so that makes four. We need to reveal your Storm Affinity, and Water is a natural enough fit for the story and a useful place to build a starting point in your training. Simple affinities are easier to grasp. That leaves us a choice of Void and Holy.” She started to pace.

“Why couldn’t we reveal both? You said you have four, and the Grand Abbot must as well. Why can’t I?” There was something in the idea of having four affinities. I still wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but it clearly imparted some status. Just because I was hiding something didn’t mean I had to be a nobody!

An amused look passed over the Abbess’s face before it fell to considering. “Ready to be an Archmage already? I suppose a late-revealed, natural born Archmage would be something I could conceivably be studying. Especially with the Affinity combinations you have. Void and Holy are seen as antithetical to each other, so that will genuinely be interesting to study. We will also not include your Darkness Affinity in the report. Interesting name, we more commonly call it Shadow here. It’s associated with secrecy, and we don’t need anybody already thinking about you and secrets.” She laughed as she shook her head in disbelief. “Although with all the secrets we have piling up, it’ll probably be a major affinity by the time you graduate.”

She sighed. “Alright, let’s get you to a bed. The door out is over there.” She waved towards the far wall and followed me out the door. “Generally, only Magi who are working for the Library are allowed to stay in quarters here. But we can’t send you out into the wild just yet, so I’m going to bend that rule. Hopefully, by the time Nevernight gets here, we’ll be ready to introduce you as a new Novice.”

She led me down a flight of stairs and then down a hallway. The room she led me into didn’t look like a bedroom. It looked a lot like the office we had just left. “This is my Third Study. I’m not using it for anything special right now, so it’ll serve as your temporary quarters and reading room until we relocate you. This way, we don’t have to draw any attention in the actual living spaces of the tower.”

A series of spells flashed out from her hands very quickly. The first held a strange light which almost defied description. Every spell I’d seen had had a distinct color signature. But this latest spell glowed, for lack of a better word, clear. There was a sense of brightness when I was looking right at it, but I could also see completely through it. It was a relatively simple spell, and when it flashed with completion the items in the room started to rearrange themselves. Books were piled up in two corners and desks and chairs were picked up and stacked off to the side of the room. The second spell was an alarming shade of lime green. A connection formed in my mind as I remembered the shade of the door that had brought me here. Again, this one took longer to form than the other, even though it didn’t appear to be more complex. When it was finished, a disk of energy in that same bright green formed and moved to a clear space in the floor. The disk warped into the shape of a bed and then the energy faded away and a bed was there. It looked like it was probably a standard issue bed of some kind, with simple cotton sheets and a thin blanket.

With a wave of her hand the Abbess directed me over to the bed. “Once you lie down, I’ll remove the energizing spell I cast to keep you awake earlier. It tends to backlash when removed, so you’ll likely fall asleep pretty quickly. I will return at …” She paused. “Actually, your sleep schedule is probably going to be difficult to time. Here, press this when you awaken and I will come get you.” A third spell formed, once again of the glowing clear energy. But this time it did not immediately flash and take effect. Instead, the spell circle completed and then detached from her hand and went to floating over by the stack of desks and chairs.

I had just enough time to take in its location before I kicked off my shoes. Despite the illusion my clothes had been placed under, they still interacted with me like my old tennis shoes and the illusion of them being anything else faded once they were off of my feet. I got into bed and then a wave of overwhelming exhaustion hit me and sleep enfolded me like a soft, fluffy black blanket.