Beware of the swear words...

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Magic.

When hearing this word you imagine fireballs spewing out of hands, blizzards appearing out of nowhere, amazing special effects… and the list goes so on. In my world magic is non-existent, so imaginations of many, seeking such miracle a change in reality, turns it into a show, a pretty attraction, a work of fireworks and CGI. The boring concepts are usually thrown away as no one entirely interested in something that does not seem cool. There are exceptions to this, such as mysticism and magic connected to myths and reality, but such concepts usually walk by religion, non-existent effects and extreme rituals, obviously making it unattractive. Nevertheless, what I am trying to convey he is that the magic is not necessarily what it seems but what it is in actuality. Well, in truth, all I’m trying to do, currently, is complain about my world showiness about the thing that use daily, well it is jealousy, really.

Let’s recall a well-known for us spell fireball. Make a fire shaped of a ball in your hand and then send it flying in the directions of your enemies. Hazah! They burn and/or explode in many pieces, making fireworks.

In many games/books/manga/movies there are thousands of ways to activate this spell and thousands of explanations on how this spell works. In this world there is no such concept as fireball. To be precise there is no concept of visible magic, well that is unless you have consumed magically dense artefact, were born with such ability to see it or have an enchanted item glowing with the colour of your magic. As the saying goes there are always exceptions, pretty much.

To summarize, magic is invisible but the effects are visible. You won’t see the fireball or fire or explosions but you’ll see the effects of it: burns, torn flesh, flying limbs and etc. There are telekinesis-based spells existing but spells such as creation and direct magic manipulation tethered together are invisible- fire, electricity, magically created water and earth. Direct manipulation and telekinesis on levels further than creating basic elements and lifting feathers and pencils are almost impossible to perform. A failure usually leads to…

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The night I accepted her task, I confronted Illiador. Confrontation would be an overstatement as I actually told him that I’ve accepted his daughter’s request. He was eager to tell me everything. First thing he told me his whole life story. It was kind of intertaining in the beginning as I had nothing to do, but midway through it my boredom returned making me cringe all over.

To put his life in relevant dot points:

1. He was born in this village.

2. Was a soldier.

3. Got sick of it.

4. Returned.

5. 400 years later he left for the village on the border.

6. There he married and made 2 children.

7. One of them is the witch.

8. When she matured her talent she left to the forest village to learn from the witch-doctor there, eventually becoming one.

9. Before she left she established some sort mental connection between herself and her family.

10. Their son also left them for the village, aspiring to become a warrior.

11. Illiador’s wife died 40 years after they left.

I smiled at the fact that he tried to deceive me, telling me that he asked the guards to call for the witch. Or about the forest being protected by spirits, that is unless he was a fool or had another agenda.He lied to me but I decided not to tread on it, for impression sake.I already had my own suspicions about the things he told me before. Good impression is worth a block of gold. Good impression also brings doubt to those that plot against you. Perhaps I was being too harsh accusing him, as I didn’t know how their bond worked, as the whole idea of telepathy. Overthinking was one of the bad traits I always had after all. It wouldn’t change anything, as he was far from my trust list, well so did all the people I’ve met in this world so far.

When the spirits has left them, his daughter contacted him and sent his brother to keep them safe, from what he didn’t quite explain. 5 months later he received another message from his daughter. She was asking him to find a woman with a snake shaped birthmark, under her shoulder blade and bring her into the forest. That same day they’ve got attacked.

Ironically, the girl which I transported was the one with dead eyes that was staring at the fire. Her name’s Kirrie as Illiador said to me. It was of no importance for me. Knowing her wouldn’t give much benefit points and I was not planning to ‘hang out’ with her after the transportation either, pretty much summing up my point here.

The witch did tell me that khanate needs her heart for some ritual of theirs and she is the key to bring the spirits back to the forest. It was of no interest to me though. But the details around it, made it semi-relevant. In general, the girl was a package and I was the delivery man. Plus there was a high chance that the witch was feeding me bullshit. Me accepting this task, was more like treading in the mist on the side of a cliff. Not an activity anyone would find pleasant.

Once I was done with him, I wasted the rest of the day chatting with Xia, who had almost perfect timing in his arrival, as I was really getting bored from Illiador’s speech, which escalated to him praising his son’s sword skills and how he just woke up a couple of hours ago. Apparently he spent 5 days in coma from the cure, not that it matters. A conversation with Xia saved me from boredom only for a couple of hours. I didn’t want to disappoint the kid so I listened to him. I trust children as they are easy to see through. There are exceptions, but I strongly doubted that Xiatel was part of them. I made a good evaluation of both Illiador’s and Xia’s characters – they were the kind sort or extremely calculative and proficient at lying. Nevertheless they were one of the people that I will say goodbyes too. Maybe the thief as well.

There were 5 people in the team, except the package. 4 of them were men and 1 was female, all of them looked like competent fighters, then again the witch did say that their strongest are either sick or dead, meaning I wasn’t expecting much of them.

The next day and really the next 3 days I spent learning magic and some small info about the world. Well ‘learning’ magic consisted of me having crash course on the basics of the basics, realizing my ‘deffectivity’ and being subjected to a weird ritual of initiation. I didn’t bother to interact with my future ‘companions’. Nobody liked meddlesome people and they didn’t like humans.

Now in detail, the ritual was taken in place for me to choose my sigil, an association with one of the stars of the magic flow, something like an introduction to magic or awakening. She didn’t quite explain what it would achieve, which made it somehow suspicious. I tried to intimidate her a bit, by saying couple of unpleasantries, it seemed to work somehow. I didn’t go too far as to say something like “I’m going to skullfuck you until your eyes are going to pop out”, which is harsh and I’m not the kind of man to say this, the situation wasn’t quite that bad either… So I settled with simple and short “you’ll regret this…” line. I couldn’t care less about losing friend points with her as I was to leave the village in less than a week.

Retracting back, the choices of stars somehow imitated Chinese zodiacs, with its twelve animals, representing each star of the magic flow, respectfully.

After setting up about a hundred of candles placed in scarab shape, she invited me to stand in the middle and started to stare at me. Her plain dress changed its colour to golden and the wind inside her house started to blow the lit candles, one by one that is, slowly vanquishing the fire making its way from the edges towards the center, me. My cape started to pulsate with deep dark blue, violently.

As the gust reached me, I felt tips of my fingers being set aflame, burning them and my whole body starting to slowly dissipate into the smoke, becoming the surroundings. I wasn’t anywhere but there in the shadow treading nowhere but everywhere, lightweight with an agility unknown to me. As I slid through the dark, I reached the deep dark blue space with light straight ahead of me. Fascinated by the beauty of the light just like a wolf by lone sight of the moon, I felt the urge to make my way towards it. It was of no knowledge for me how exactly I was doing such activity, where I was in a space filled nothing and felt nothing but weightlessness, not my body nor warmth nor dull pain of my bruise. As I almost reached the light something started to pull me back, forcibly dragging towards my heavy form.

The blue space disappeared and I was back in the room full of dim candle light.

She was standing in front of me, eyeing my cape and asked me what I felt during the ritual. After telling her, she made a confused face but then announced my sigil. It was snake.

It felt anticlimactic. I expected something like a tattoo or glowing light everywhere.

‘Oh well, hallucinating is good enough too’- I thought while giving a smell to the air and checking all me belongings, mainly to humour myself.

Right after the ritual she asked me to feel ‘the energy’ inside me and try to visualize a ball in my hand. It was vague. These elves tend to be really vague about everything as I learned.

I closed my eyes and visualised energy seething through and inside my body. I stretched my hand and focused at my palm creating a ball in my imagination sitting on top of it.

My cape started to glow and I felt something light and soft touching my hand but no actual ball in it to be seen. Afterwards she told me to levitate couple of sticks she prepared beforehand, twist them, turn them, throw them, focusing my magic at certain points of the stick. It may sound simple from the way I describe it, but believe me the first hundreds of times doing so would tire the living shit out of me and most of my effort would go in vain as my focus would disappear as the stick was about to levitate.

Next she tried to teach chanting. Chanting is a subconscious shortcut to activating the spells. All mages have this ability, all except me. Reciting in subconscious takes moments where the ‘old ways’ seemed to be unknown to her.

After extreme set of meticulous lessons that she gave and wasted hours, eventually she gave up, teaching me only one spell that she knew, that didn’t require chanting.

It was ‘replacement’. Replacing one object with another. Ironically, I couldn’t do it either.

She said that it’s ok and that I just need to train my manipulation skills with the sticks, giving me a whole bunch of those magic sticks that she has.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

Despite the magic, she taught me some trivia about this world. Such as how many months per year, name of this world, types of creatures, what human heroes do and so on. Most of explanations were kind of Q&A thing, she didn’t feel particularly motivated either so I had to ask her, while cracking a condescending grin.

She told me that this world has 20 months per year and 5 months per season. They have similar names for seasons as my world, but months are all different – Seartis, Forros, Mirdos, Nallis, Keeres, Cias, Tuares, Rolis, Setralis, Erilinas, Kavnis, Qaznis, Junis, Gallos, Fevnos, Kheros, Byrius, Oras and Aartis. We’re in the middle of Seartis, the first month of the year and winter.

This world is called Furein, in the name of the god that made it. It is one of the planes, layers of the whole existence, which they call Aartis. Apparently my world is also considered part of Aartis. I came into conclusion that she is trying to throw me a concept of multiverse, which ironically was proven to be correct in my world, mathematically though.

The creatures in this world are mainly divided in 2 ranking systems.

One of them, which is used by governments/settlements divides them in 13 types - domesticated, trainable(wolves), wild(deer), harmful(wolves, boars), dangerous(direwolves, bears), metaphysical(ghosts, evil spirits), multi-dimensional(monsters from other planes), cursed creatures(undead, werewolves) , night creatures (creatures that are similar to metaphysical but have bodies and appear only under certain conditions night being one of them), magical beasts(beasts mutated/imbued by magic), celestial creatures(demons, angels), hybrids(mixes between types) and abominations(creatures that distort reality around them).

Another ranking system is used by guilds and associations to rank rarity and danger of a monster – G,F,E,D,C,B,A,AA,AAA,S,SS,SSS, with respectable “-“ and “+” depending on condition of the monster. Also these rankings go not for both rarity and danger but only for one. For example undead dragon would have rarity S and danger AA+, together S/AA+, rarity always being first and danger last. This somehow ticks me off.

The closest human settlement is on the other continent and the trip there going by the witch’s route would take 5 to 7 months – 2 month on the secret path of hers to the south, and 4 months on the boat.

She also told me about my cape. Apparently it resonates with my magic and the colour it glows is actually the colour of my magic, a dark blue, navy blue. She said that it has something like an auto-repair and climate control enchantments in it, sounds almost like a car.

She didn’t know as to what heroes were specifically summoned for, but she did know that they protect humans and are revered by them like gods.

I still needed more information to jump to any possible conclusions, but so far that sounded appealing as well as extremely annoying.

Despite small trivia I got details on my trip. It was not supposed to be overly dangerous on that enchanted path, that is with the spirits protecting the travellers. Now that they’re gone all sorts of pleasant creatures are going to pop out, or so she says.

So I spent my 3 days like this learning about this world and procrastinating around village as well as getting to know my team. It was rather pleasant. None of them liked me and looked at me like at the bag full of shit. I was definitely looking forward to the trip.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“Fucking hell, it’s so cold.”- said Reit while sneezing and throwing in some wood into the fire.

“Shut the fuck up, you’re annoying”- I, yet again, told him, with a tiny bit of frustration, while focusing on the stick on top of my palm.

He was a funny lad, Reit. Second day tried to kill me and ended up spiting his teeth on the snow. Third day tried again and ended up with a broken nose. Eventually I had brawls with him almost on daily basis. He didn’t pose much danger as his job was to set up protective wards and not to actually fight. His aggression, no matter how straightforward it was, allowed me to judge his character, unless it was all one big play. Others weren’t as open, or should I say simple as him, deeming them as dangerous and somewhat unpredictable, at least I thought so before they demonstrated their combat abilities. They never spoke to me no matter how hard I tried. Well, hard, as in not torturing or forcing them to speak, but being nice and so on. They ignored me on the contrary. They listened to my orders, which was good enough for me already.

The package was giving me the side glances every now and again during the trip, but whenever I asked her something she wouldn’t answer. When asked by others she would either nod or shake her head. She isn’t voiceless, I was told by Illiador that she lost her husband and child in the fire and the shock made her loose her speech and well obviously want to kill herself.

Now that I looked at her, she didn’t quite seemed like someone that wants to kill themselves. She looked a lot more healthier and didn’t have dead eyes anymore. She was still staring at the fire, but now not with emptiness in her eyes but with determination. Still I doubted her determination would lift her status from counterproductive. I instantly corrected myself, that I shouldn’t judge though. I mean, I’m sure that they were not happy sitting with a human and cooperating. Being saved by one also probably hurt their pride. It’s like putting both democrats and republicans in one tight box. Except, I was also playing on their strings.

My judgement, no matter how prejudiced it was, was true. As we got attacked by strange looking mumbo-jumbo snowmen, my ‘comrade’s’ counterattack ended as a clusterfuck. I disposed of the snowmen that attacked with beauty and bliss, as far as punching can be called beautiful and blissful. Package also tried to assault the snowmen by swinging around some random wooden stick she found somewhere. In the end, I couldn't bear to watch her as she found herself being surrounded by those things. As the only person treating me not like garbage, I felt obliged to her, or at least I deluded myself into thinking so. I helped her out nevertheless, yet only her. My team mates in contrast didn’t differ from her combat capability much either, resulting in gang rape.

Those golems/snowmen were weak in power, but swift enough to dodge their lousy attacks. No matter how silly it was, a single punch was enough to collapse the snowmen in their surroundings, rendering them immovable or ‘dead’. Their ‘slaps’ reminded me the attacks that I used to receive from my friends back in the school, it felt more annoying than hurt. At some point I and the package simply made our distance from this mess and I decided to entertain myself, looking at this chaos, which in this case were my companions used as punching bags.

The sight was truly humorous as they were falling over the snow, and in desperation trying to punch back, reminding me of 90’s comedies, where ‘the guy’ would fall on the slide, over and over again. Snowmen, on the other side simply sidestepped most of their attacks and returned it with a majestic bitchslap. Some golems fell, but most remained. Eventually you could hear a quite laugh mixed with gnarls, moans and gusts of wind in a quiet thick of the forest. The package didn’t quite share my sense of humour and just looked horrified, I’m not sure if not me or the sight. While casually ignoring her, I was looking at this all from the side and with all honesty it was making my day.

I love winter and all, but walking with the people that don’t talk to you and see you as shit, while dry snow flies in your face and eyes, makes you somewhat ‘grumpy’. When my companions completely lost their shit and their moans turned into cries I snapped out of it and helped them out. They looked semi-glad. I put a bit of an act fighting snowmen, so that I wouldn’t look that suspicious. A good act in the end would stay as the truth. Which it did in most of my companions eyes. That night the package wasn’t giving the deathstare only to the fire.

And so due to reasons stated, I considered my team fairly and utterly pathetic. An aggressive ward-mage, nameless useless co: warrior number 1, female warrior, warrior number 2, archer and dead weight. Lady warrior had a very unattractive face, yet again breaking my stereotype about elves, while warrior 1 and archer seemed to be relatives and they were as I learned later, indeed cousins. The last guy was missing an eye, had a scar across his face and eye in particular and had short hair, looking the most intimidating and most warrior-stereotype-like. Unfortunately he was equally useless as the rest of them. All of them had leather mixed with iron armour and iron swords and daggers. Archer had the lightest armour and his bow was of greenish brown, colour of swamp.

As Reit’s whining continued. My focus was diverting away from the stick that was, now, spinning just above my palm. It was not one of those magic sticks that witch has given me, it was a real wooden stick and I tell you levitating this one and spinning it was a lot harder. Therefore, when stick has fallen on my palm, obviously because of Reit’s pointless chatter with himself, I had a sudden fit of irritation. I could even call it a tantrum of a sort. A silent one that is. Still the fit was not strong enough to make him choke on his own fist, but enough for him to fertilize more snow with his teeth.

He was quiet afterwards.

I continued spinning my stick in all sorts of directions. I tried to rotating it, throwing it in the air and then catching it with magic.

As each day passed I started to be more proficient at these activities. Faster more efficient and less focus consuming. I switched to spinning 2 sticks on both hands, but that ended as a screw up. Despite that I saw it only as a challenge and it became my close term goal.

Three weeks in the trip I told my team to start collecting wood. Reit was much more diligent now. He didn’t try to kill me anymore and therefore I stopped treating him like shit. He was actually fairly proficient as a mage. He could use heating and flame magic as well as heal. His healing especially was fairly decent according to him. I believed the man as he had a full set of teeth, that I remembered fertilizing just a week ago.

I, well we, needed wood as we were about to enter a different climate zone a lifeless tundra. Though, lifeless, is saying it too far. We could catch the food there, but things like campfire and such would be a pain in the ass. Tundra had far less ‘fuel’ than forests.

This trip was about to get more pain in the ass then it already had been.

‘I need more snowmen’ – I said as I started to spin a stick in my palm from irritation. A new habit I gained.