The rest of the day was quiet until an hour before sundown when Vaozey woke up. Contrary to my expectations, she didn’t immediately burst into a destructive rage and instead tried to hop out of the back of the wagon she was riding in without alerting anyone. Only after being caught did she put up a fight, beating back the two nameless guards with her bare hands while they tried to hold her down. Zhervaol stopped the caravan, then had Koyl take up the reins of her beast while she brought Vaozey into the back of the wagon to speak to her.
While they spoke, I learned from the two other guards that their names were Aedey and Yaayowjh, for the female and male respectively. According to Aeday the pair grew up in the far west of Uwriy, a province called Kehrehkiy, and had come east in search of work. The small talk I made with them mainly served the purpose of disguising my attempts at listening in on Zhervaol’s conversation, though I wasn’t very successful at the latter. She and Vaozey spoke quietly to each other until the sun finally set and the driver instructed Koyl to stop.
Zhervaol exited the wagon first and instructed Aeday and I to go look for some food to supplement our reserves. Since there didn’t appear to be any animals nearby, instead I looked for edible plants and found some of the strange “juice pods” I had encountered west of Vehrehr. According to Aeday, they were called taanpaozeyl and used as one of the ingredients for ihv, the mildly psychoactive drink served in many taverns. We gathered a few of the pods, along with some fruit from a nearby tree, packed them up in a bag Aeday had brought, and transported them back to camp.
----------------------------------------
Vaozey had come out of the wagon when I got back, and was milling around away from everyone’s fires. Her remaining armor and chainmail was nowhere to be found, and it appeared that she was wearing clean clothes. After I dropped off my portion of the foraged food at Zhervaol and Yaayowjh's fires, we made eye contact briefly, but nothing came of it. Grabbing a bit of fruit and one juice pod for myself, I walked over to where Koyl was and sat down a meter away from him.
“Want some of this?” Koyl asked, handing me a piece of re-heated jerky. I took the food and bit into it, noting that its taste was getting stale. “You think she’s alright over there? Looks angry and hungry.” he asked with his mouth partially full. Glancing over at her again, I saw Vaozey was sitting down about ten meters away.
“She doesn’t appear overtly hostile at the moment,” I replied, then I took a sip from one of the juice pods. “Did you manage to catch what Zhervaol said to her? I didn't hear any of it over the chatter.”
“Nah,” Koyl sighed. “It’s been a long time since I’ve driven a wagon, I was focusing on the road. That beast is well trained though. Only tried to pull off a few times, didn’t jerk me around or anything. Much better than the ones I learned with.” I’d never want to trust my safety to an animal, I thought.
“Others can be more challenging?” I asked, mildly curious about the subject. Koyl shrugged and grunted in the affirmative, then began eating one of the fruits I had foraged. For a while, we didn’t say anything, content to simply eat in silence.
“Say, this is going to sound a bit weird, but do you want to have a spar before we go to sleep?” Koyl asked. I looked at him, trying to tell if he was making a joke but delivering it poorly. “It’s just that, I need to know I can still do it,” he added more quietly. “We might get into a fight as guards, and I haven't swung a sword while sober in months.”
“Just to be clear before we start: no overtly lethal techniques, no dismemberment of any kind, and we should probably remove our shirts so we don’t get blood on them,” I said, summarizing a few baseline rules.
“Yeah, let’s not have a repeat of Thaajh,” Koyl chuckled. “I don’t think I could really kill you or anything, but I’d appreciate you not cutting any bits of me off if you can help it.” He stood up, pulled his shirt off, then tossed it on the ground beside him. I did the same, putting my gambeson where I had been sitting, then drew my sword. I suppose I should try not to overpower him with magic, I thought, I’ll fight about as well as a typical human opponent, that should be enough to help him gauge himself.
“Just over there then?” I suggested, pointing to a spot with less grass than average nearby.
“Can we also agree not to use anything too unconventional?” Koyl asked. I raised an eyebrow, prompting him, and he elaborated. “The light magic thing, and anything fire related. Oh, and let’s keep this to swords only, no fists, please. I think we both know how that would go.”
“I hadn’t intended to use magic,” I replied. “If this is for your benefit, I’m going to attempt to fight like an average person would.” I walked to a spot about three meters away from Koyl, watching as he drew his weapon and got into a ready position, then waited for him to begin the match.
Koyl sprung into motion, and I moved just an instant later to counter him. The opening move was a straight stab at my chest, something that would have been lethal on Earth but was more of an annoyance in my current situation. Koyl knew I wasn’t the best at parrying, and intended to take full advantage of that weakness. As I twisted out of the way, my first instinct was to try to kick him in the chest, but I held back since we had agreed to only use swords. Koyl’s stab struck the tiniest amount of my abdomen, drawing a single bead of blood.
In response, I made an overhead chop for his shoulder, a move that was easy to read but required him to commit to avoidance or blocking due to its force. Koyl chose a combination of the two, deflecting my blade on the way down to allow himself to move out of the way. Since he was out of position, I chopped again, this time for the opposite shoulder, and got a similar response, though Koyl stepped backwards after avoiding the second strike to make distance between us.
Avoiding two light ranging slashes, I stepped in and made a simple right to left horizontal cut, which Koyl deflected up and over his head. As he brought his sword down, Koyl slashed at my wrists, then my chest, drawing thin lines of blood along them. The wounds were superficial, even by Uwrish standards, but he could have made them deeper in a real fight. Unfortunately, striking me had left him open because he underestimated the speed that I could reverse my blade at, and my follow-up downward diagonal left to right slash caught him in the collarbone and nearly knocked him to his knees.
“Shit,” Koyl hissed, stumbling backwards and grabbing at his wound with his left hand. It closed in seconds, as usual, but Koyl's pain resistance wasn't nearly as high as mine. I don’t want to push him to the point of mental breakage again, I thought, better be careful.
“You want to continue?” I asked.
“You could have powered right through my parries if you wanted to, couldn’t you?” Koyl asked. I didn’t need to reply because the answer to the question was obvious, so instead I shrugged. “I’m going to try something different,” Koyl said. “I don’t think it’ll be too dangerous, but just be ready.” Ready for what? I was about to ask when Koyl began mouthing something under his breath and dashed at me again.
Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.
Instead of his normal, technical style of fighting Koyl began with a series of chops that were much more like my own attacks. Unfortunately for him, that also meant they were simple to block, so he didn’t even get close to damaging me. Seems stronger than before, I thought as I felt the weight of the strikes in my wrist. As he brought down an overhead strike with a grunt, I blocked it and pushed against the force with my legs and core, briefly throwing him away from me. I expected Koyl to stumbled backwards, but instead he kept his footing and threw a low horizontal slash, surprising me and cutting fairly deep across my bellybutton.
“Interesting,” I thought aloud, recalling his footing. “That was force magic, holding your feet to the ground if I’m not mistaken.” Koyl couldn’t help but smirk as he stepped back. “You weren’t able to do that before, where did you find the time to learn it?” I asked. We didn’t technically agree not to use force magic either, I thought with a hint of amusement, Very sneaky of him.
“I don’t know, actually,” Koyl replied. “Last night, in a dream, something about it just… came to me. It’s just like a hand, you know? I can’t really levitate things that well, but grabbing onto something like you did with that board in Pehrihnk, I think I can do that. I tested it out today with the reins on the wagon.” Like a hand? I wondered, Force magic isn’t anything like that. “All I did was just make some hands on my feet and grab the ground. I was doing it during the chops too, or else I’d probably have pushed myself back with them.”
“It’s decently effective,” I admitted. “I did notice that they seemed heavier than I would have expected for someone your size. However, I don’t understand how you’re using force magic like that.”
“What?” Koyl asked, looking confused. “You do it all the time, I’ve seen you-”
“No, I mean it’s not like a hand at all,” I interrupted. “It’s more like opposing forces, joined by invisible bars acting as levers.” Koyl looked at me, brow furrowed and mouth half open, and I knew I had said something he didn’t understand at all.
“That doesn’t make any sense to me,” Koyl said.
“What part?” I asked, genuinely curious. Magic never works for me unless I have the proper visualization, I thought, so how can he be using one that’s so different than mine and still get similar effects?
“Just… all of it,” Koyl replied. “Invisible bars? Opposing forces? What does that even mean?” By now, our conversation had attracted the attention of Vaozey, who was watching us. Since Koyl's back was facing her, he couldn't see her.
“For every physical force exerted, there is an equal and opposite force produced,” I explained. “When you push a pebble, it pushes back on your hand with an equal amount of force. What makes it move while you remain still is an imbalance between the other forces involved, mainly friction. Your body has far more friction with the ground than a comparatively small rock, so the force pushing back on you cannot move you against that friction.”
“That just does not make a single bit of sense,” Koyl replied. “What does that have to do with magic anyway? You used the word ‘force’ in there, but I feel like you might be using the wrong word. What you’re describing sounds like some kind of philosophical theory from a book. You've never struck me as intellectual enough to read that sort of thing.”
“When you use force magic, you have to produce equal and opposite forces at two points,” I explained further. “For example, when you grab something, you’re pulling it to you, and you to it, those are the forces involved. If you don’t produce both forces, the magic simply won’t work.” Koyl scratched his head, then pouted and blinked a few times.
“If you say so,” he shrugged. “I think you’ve ruined my mood for sparring though. Where did you learn that kind of magic theory? Were you some kind of ztawvay back home, in addition to being a solider?” Koyl began wiping the blood from his torso with his hands, then wiping his hands on the grass. I did the same, though I had far more blood to wipe.
“I said I was something similar to a soldier,” I said, “and I don’t know what that other word means.”
“It means someone who pursues knowledge,” Vaozey said loudly, drawing both of our attention and making Koyl flinch. “You sound a lot like one when you talk like that.” Scientist then, I thought, no, probably something more like scholar. The scientific method is likely unknown to these people, or at least not yet formalized. It's the only way to explain the gaps in their knowledge.
“Everyone knows these things where I’m from,” I replied. “It’s common knowledge that most forces work in-” I stopped abruptly as a realization flashed across my mind. It can’t be that simple, I thought, was that what I was doing wrong with the electric magic? Koyl and Vaozey both watched me as I stood, wide-eyed and halted midway through wiping my hand on the grass, waiting for me to continue.
“Are you alright?” Koyl asked.
“I think I may have come to an important realization,” I said, immediately sitting down. I pulled two coins out of my coin pouch and laid them near each other on the ground, then touched each one with one of my hands. It’s not about the electrons, I thought, it’s about the electric field. Electrons move all the time, transferring virtually no energy as they do so. Moving electrons around like I was trying to do, or maybe doing, is just like shifting infinitesimal masses around. What I need to do is create a difference in electric field that clusters electrons in one spot, and forces them out of another spot. That’s what gives electrons their energy in the first place.
My visualization was clear, tiny grains of sand vibrated and jittered around inside the coins. Those were electrons, even though their number and scale was completely off. In fact, they were everywhere, including in my own body. Slowly, and carefully, I began pulling them out of one of the coins and up my left arm, then pushing them out of my right arm and into the other coin. The visualization changed, so that the coin under my right hand began to glow, and the coin under my left turned dark. Unlike the previous visualizations, I began to feel the sensation of magic power use, and I couldn’t help but smile. Now, how much do I have to do to make a spark? I wondered.
Koyl watched on in silence, and I saw Vaozey get up from her spot in my peripherals to walk over as well. Koyl heard her coming and tensed up, but she ignored him, and he relaxed a moment later. After two entire minutes passed I knew Koyl was staring at me, but I didn’t want to break my concentration to say anything. Why isn’t it working? I wondered, It’s still using energy, but nothing much is happening. Even though my visualization showed the right coin as pure white and the left as pure black, I knew the state that the visualization represented was impossible. Maybe I’m doing something else by accident? I wondered, I couldn't possibly have moved every electron from the left to the right.
“Uh, is something supposed to be happening right now?” Koyl asked finally, and Vaozey grunted out a vaguely mocking chuckle. I frowned, tilted my head, then looked up at him.
“It’s supposed to-” the instant my concentration broke, there was a loud cracking sound and both my arms went numb for a moment. Koyl and Vaozey both jumped back, and I looked down to see that a few blades of grass had been charred to embers in between the coins. Why did it- I began to wonder, then I winced and crunched my eyes shut as I figured out the problem. I was holding the system in stasis, I thought, the equalization only came when the magic effect broke, and everything could move again.
“What the seyt was that?” Vaozey asked, sounding halfway between angry and surprised.
“Looked like a little bolt of lightning,” Koyl remarked. I picked up the two coins and held them apart, separating their charges magically once again and letting them snap back five seconds later, unleashing another spark between them and prompting two more flinches from my human observers.
“That is electricity,” I said, using the English word. “This is what the Rehvites call ‘Rehv’s Binding’, just applied a bit differently. More specifically, that was a small discharge of static electricity, which is the same kind of phenomenon that produces lightning.” In hindsight, it’s good that I didn’t seem to make a very large charge differential, I thought, if I had managed to pull as many electrons out as my visualization indicated, I might have killed myself with the discharge.
Koyl looked at me, wide eyed with an open grin of amazement, while Vaozey stared at the coins like she was trying to will them to suffer and die. I expected her to make some remark, perhaps even lash out, but after turning her glare on me for a moment she merely turned on her heel and walked back to where she had been resting without a word.