Tia:

Continuing…

Tia groans, rolling over. Everywhere hurts. She tries to rub her eyes but finds that her arms won’t move.

She opens her eyes; the room is pitch black. She rolls back again, seeing a dim light below what she assumed must be a door.

She tries to move her hands, but they won’t budge; she can feel a tight rope binding her arms and hands behind her back.

She tries to cuss, but her mouth is taped. This is the worst-case scenario. She can also feel multiple burn wounds on her hands. They sting like 1st-degree burns, and her ribs are bruised.

Agonised, she shuffles across the floor, each lurching movement accompanied by agonizing pain. Squeezing her eyes shut to somehow cope with the pain.

She kept moving till, Bump.

It worked; she felt what seemed to be the walls of whatever room she was in.

Tia pressed hard against the wall, thrusting her torso upwards till she was in a sitting position. ‘Ok, now what?’ She thought to herself.

How was she supposed to get out of this situation? Her eyes were slowly adjusting to the darkness; she could make out the silhouette of a few boxes following where she came from.

She can’t hear any voices come from out the door. They wouldn’t leave her unguarded.

She tries to prop herself onto her knees, but she falls forward again, landing with a smack on her bruised ribs. She groans loudly.

Her attention quickly diverts as she hears the creaking of wood. Someone is outside the door.

The creaking turns into audible footsteps that stop before the door. It swings open, knocking the wall. Dargor stands in front of her. She curses insults at him, but they are muffled.

Dargor smiles down at her.

“Quite the spell you cast there; I knew your father could wield fire magic, but not to that extent.” He tilts his head curiously at her.

Tia attempts to look past him to give her any indication of where she might be, but her eyes need to readjust to the light, making her squint.

The man turns his head to where she is looking and laughs,

“Figuring out where you are isn’t gonna be helpful.”

He stands up, turning his back to her.

“Your brother wants to be a hero,”

He grabs onto the handle of the door, closing it slowly,

“So we’ll show him how the Shallows treat heroes.” He laughs maniacally as the door shuts completely. Leaving Tia in darkness once again.

‘DAMN!’ She thought to herself. If she could get her hands on Dargor, she’d blow him to high hell.

Now, she had to worry about saving herself and her idiot brother. He is strong, she knows, but he must be on death’s door after that explosion.

The memory of the events before her kidnapping starts replaying in her mind. Especially the gruesome scene of Tiago murdering a man right in front of her.

She got a chill down her spine; it was terrifying. It was like nothing to him. Taking someone’s life. She had spent her whole previous life trying to save lives; it just… Wasn’t right.

Has she been taking things for granted? Again, she has been so focused on what was in her way. Why is he so persistent in helping her? She has watched the Fast and Furious movies and knows the importance of family.

She rolls her eyes. Pointless ideologies are what limit people’s ambition. That’s how she managed her whole life.

She rolled her eyes. Now was not the time to be thinking about family when she might literally never see them again.

She tries wriggling her fingers. There isn’t a lot of leeway, but there is some leeway.

She pictures the spell she cast for the fireball in her mind again, moving her fingers; it’s too limiting to make any significant symbolism.

Additionally, she can’t finish the incantation by saying the name of her spell. That has to be the eye patched freaks doing.

She sits in the silence and darkness, pondering over her options. Something will come to her; after all, she was one of the greatest minds alive in her previous lives.

She shimmies across the wall to the crates. The lids are closed, and even throwing her body weight at them doesn’t make them budge.

The movements are exhausting. Tia drained her stamina so much from the fireball. If Tiago hadn’t popped it, she would’ve been out for days.

She only knows it hasn’t been that long as her wounds are too fresh. Her guess is 4 hours.

If she even used magic, would she be able to control it? Or will it just get super overcharged again and explode everything?

She probably can’t take an explosion that big again. It makes her wonder how any children can learn magic in this world.

It may have something to do with the formation of the spell.

If she’s got time to kill, she may as well solve these problems. If kids can do it, she obviously could.

The room’s darkness helped her a bit as she closed her eyes. The enveloping darkness let her perception of the surrounding mana increase substantially.

She would approach this puzzle like she did for all her others. When others would think it’s excessive to break down the fundamentals beyond their roots, it was her specialty.

When the world entered an energy crisis, the other scientists and engineers looked to what was already complete and improved.

She broke down the issue beyond its origin to the millions of core equations and complexities that were thought to be solved.

What has she established for magic?

1. Magic is formed like words in a language.

2. Spells must be closed like a circuit.

3. Must have a verbal activation condition.

First, magic is formed as words; how deep does this translation as a language follow? Can you construct sentences?

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She has memorized the formations of her earth spells,

Earth Wall, Stone Bullet, Stone Cage, she had already noted these spells share equally fundamental symbols.

But her books never intuitively noted these symbols; they are only her interpretation. She assumed the spells beyond the activation spell were necessary components, but what if there’s an additional condition. A limit.

Secondly, a circuit must be an enclosed circuit. The issue was breaking the circuit after it came into effect. Is it the method? Is it the type of spell?

She has read about mana pools. Each family’s god had a limited mana pool. But she has never read about the reaction of fainting from excessive mana drain.

Her condition is different. This means its effects are different.

Thirdly, it must have a vocal activation. An incantation. Tia already suspected this wasn’t true.

The existence and use of mana circles countered this belief. They were incantionless as the activation was completing the physical circle itself.

So what about a new approach? Grounded from these initial elements with no assumptions. No answers.

Fire, Earth, water. She knew their chemical compounds in a scientific state. How their reactions actually come about.

In a state of chaos, fire moves erratically, not in a set order or sequence.

Solid, undeterred. Earth holds firm its order and power.

Fluidity, it’s in the name. It is what it is required to be.

If that’s what the symbols represent, then magic represents precisely what she hates. Ideals. Spells were like metaphors, only as powerful as the idea they represent and the ability to use them persuasively.

So, vocal activation was just one way to relay the message; incantation is the intention.

The limit is its power; she casts the spell raw as its true wording. It was limitless and was only stopped by her physical ability to possess it.

The circuit is less of a physical circuit and more of a wording game. Where you should place one word over another, a puzzle.

She opens her eyes, the flow of mana, a tool for linear communication with the world to an extreme she couldn’t even fathom. It was perfect and beautiful. It was freedom in its purest form.

Now that the hypothesis and method have been established. Time to begin testing.

The light from under the door had long since faded; hours must have passed; Tiago still hadn’t found her. Good. She wouldn’t need him this time.

Tia then began the incantations in her head; she connected the sentence she was spelling in her head.

A fire spell wouldn’t be helpful; her hands were already burnt. So instead, a spell that had range. It’s not an earth wall, smaller than that. Something to poke through the ropes.

‘Jagged earth wall.’ She could see the mana pulse through her body into the ground.

A small jacked rock no larger than a finger poked through the wooden floorboards in between the ropes, binding her hands.

She then began aggressively dragging her wrist ropes across the jagged piece of the rock.

The first rope came loose. Tia then began frantically cutting through the rest.

Her arms relaxed automatically from the release of stress. She brings her hands to her front. Flexing her fingers, she lets out a sigh of relief.

She felt like her muscles had some severe atrophy from being in the same spot for so long, Rolling her shoulder with one of her arms.

She spins around and begins sawing through her leg binds.

Creak. Tia pauses. Creak. There was somebody outside the door again.

She looks around for her rope binds, but the ends are so frayed they wouldn’t deceive anyone. She’ll have to free herself before whoever they are comes in.

She began cutting away again. The creaking is becoming louder. It must be very late; their pace tells her they must be tired or at least not expecting her to be free.

Tia stops the cutting. It isn’t going to be fast enough.

‘Serrated Earth Wall’ She puts more energy into it. With a slight rumbling noise, a more giant rock protruded to about her stomach in height. It’s a slimmer chunk of earth,

One side of the rock is incredibly sharp to touch. It’s perfect. She carefully cuts through the remaining rope between her boots with one significant movement.

She pulls herself to her feet using the wall. She had hardly any strength; she hadn’t even noticed, but her stomach grumbled.

She was in no condition to fight. This is the best that she can achieve at that current moment.

The creaking, she could hear a pair of footsteps; they stopped before her door. A small light flickered accompanied it. Signaling the person was right in front of the door.

She heard a yawn. The person sounded young. Tia turned, moving a crate forward. The door swings open. Hiding just in time, the light from the person’s lantern enters the room; only the dark corners of the room are not illuminated.

It’s a young lady with dark black hair that fell to her shoulders on both ends. Her facial expression seemed tired as she scanned the room lazily for Tia.

She looked no older than 16 and wore the emblem of a black trident on her red hood.

The girl happens upon the blade-like rock jutting from the ground and runs her finger along the sharp end. A prick of blood drips from her finger as she pokes the tip.

Tia decides it’s now or never, opening the palm of her hand. She may be able to cast magic without incantations, but doing physical symbolism helps her cast spells easier; she then crunches her hand into a fist.

‘Iron Earth Cage.” Wincing from the pain in her burnt palms. The girl opens her mouth to shout, but it’s too late. The ground bursts around her as she is quickly surrounded by earth, trapping her in an earth orb.

Tia stands up, quite shocked at how effective that was. But she could feel a wave of fatigue hit her as well.

She could hear a faint banging from inside the trap. Tia didn’t know if the girl could escape, but she wouldn’t wait around and find out. She runs, half limping past the crates and into a dark room.

She can’t see anything and decides to take the risk.

She opens her palm, keeping her voice low, she whispers. “Ember”,

A small red flame ignites in her palm. Illuminated a small area around her. What she believed to be a small room was actually a large warehouse.

Her range of vision didn’t extend to the roof, so she walked cautiously down aisles of miscellaneous products.

Oil lamps and brooms; it seemed like a rundown storage warehouse. All the products are worn down and covered in a thick layer of dust.

Tia hated dust; she was glad the room they had her in wasn’t as bad as this. Actually, she would’ve rather not have been kidnapped at all. She reached the end of her aisle, a concrete wall.

She curses out loud. She didn’t know how long she had. The girl could escape from her earth cage at any moment.

At that moment, she could see two more lights far to her right, and she quickly shook her hand. Trying to put out the small fire, but it wouldn’t dissipate. She then shuts her palm shut, closing her eyes to avoid seeing her hand burn again.

Opening one eye, she couldn’t see her hand as the fire had gone out, bringing her back to darkness.

She looks back up to see two red-cloaked older men, bickering among themselves, heading towards where she was supposed to be captured.

She carefully darted among the shelves, hoping to leave out the door they had entered from.

She moves quickly past two rows before a misplaced broom stops her. ‘Phew,’ she thought, stepping back and standing onto the teeth of a different misplaced rake which shoots upwards and clangs into a shelf.

The noise causes the two men to turn their heads in her direction. They raised their lanterns so the light would cover more distance.

Fortunately, she was too far away, but one of the men started walking towards the noise,

“Dave, it’ll just be those damn rats.” The other man tells him,

The man stops walking, peering into the darkness. Tia doesn’t breathe, as if any movement could trigger a T-Rex-like sensory reaction.

The older man turns, shrugging and continuing to walk towards her room of captivity.

Tia knows she’s running out of time, so she picks up her pace as they get further away. She passed the last row of shelves and arrived in front of the door.

Crrrrreeeeaaaaaak, the door slowly opens itself, and she dashes right. A young man pokes his head through. He had no lantern, and she couldn’t make out facial expressions in the darkness, but he slowly shut the door again.

She then can hear footsteps rapidly leaving from behind the door, like the person was running away.

Tia slowly opens the door, peering in; the room is a lit-up hallway to another door.

She steps inside, the door closing with another loud creak behind her. She takes a deep sigh of relief, taking another step forward.

“Well, Well, Well, looky who we have here.” She gets goosebumps on her neck,

She knows that voice. She turns to her left to see Dargor standing to the left of the door. Damn it, it was him poking his head through? But she could have sworn it was someone much smaller.

“Looks like the brother isn’t the only troublemaker.” He steps towards her, and Tia takes several steps backward.

No. She can do this; she will not be looked down upon.

To be continued...