Her True Form

Yvette lightly poked the bandage on her arm and let out a soft hiss of pain.

“Why do you touch it if it’s going to hurt?” Gervas asked, glancing up from his small meal of dried travel rations.

“Shut up,” Yvette said, her cheeks going red.

“Such a mage,” Gervas said with a roll of his eyes. “’Hmmm, this hurt before. I wonder if it’ll hurt if I poke it again. Oh, it does, well, what if I do it a third time.’”

“Experimentation is an important facet of the life of a mage,” Yvette said in as haughty a tone as she could manage. “Besides, once is normal, twice is coincidence and third time is fact.”

Gervas gave a light chuckle before shaking his head. “I don’t know how you’ve managed to stay alive this long.”

“You’ve helped,” Yvette said before eyeing the bandages and wondered if she should use some of her magic to heal them now. She barely noticed the pain anymore, except when she poked it. But she also wanted to conserve her magic in case it turned out there was something bad going on and they needed her powers.

“It’s quiet,” Gervas said after a while.

“Huh?” Yvette asked.

“There’s no birds,” Gervas said. “Since we’ve gotten here, it has been too quiet.”

Yvette perked up, a grin on her lips when she realized she could explain that easily enough. “Oh, that’s easy!” she said quickly. “It’s the magic.”

Gervas paused for a few moments before looking up at her. “What?”

“Magic,” Yvette said once more. “It’s in the air. Whatever spell they used to create this mountain still has a lot of magic lingering in the air. I imagine any animals that were near it when it happened just left. Flying to another island likely wouldn’t be that hard.”

“And anything that can’t fly?” Gervas asked.

Yvette paused and looked around. She hadn’t actually considered that. It wasn’t a very big island, though. Did it have a lot of land based animals? Would they have tried to swim to another island to get away from this? “I don’t know,” Yvette said. “There might not have been any? Or maybe when we get closer to the settlement we’ll see more of them?”

“It’s not only that, though,” Gervas said before motioning further down the beach. While they weren’t very thick or leaf covered, there were a few trees rising out from the ground and some that had been toppled over or still attached to the new mountain. Just like the trees near where they had come ashore. Unfortunately, she didn’t see anything else.

“Trees?” Yvette said.

Gervas shook his head before motioning towards the ground again.

“I really don’t see anything,” Yvette said.

Gervas gave a soft sigh. “It’s wet.”

Yvette stared at him for a long, long few seconds and wondered if he was an idiot. Of course it was wet, they were on a beach. Still, she eyed the area he motioned to a bit more. Now that he mentioned it, it did seem a bit odd. The sand had was wetter in a long line up to the shore, with some of the sand pushed aside. The water didn’t go up that far, either. “Oh. That’s…”

“Someone came out of the water at some point,” Gervas said. “Recently, too.”

Yvette nodded, staring at the edge of the water before looking back out into the sea. She didn’t see anything, though. But she quickly thought back to the sunken vessels below the waves. What if they--

“Sirens,” Yvette said suddenly, giving a soft shudder. “Do you think they come this far up? They might not notice the magic in the air or, if they do, it might not disturb them like it does other animals. Maybe this mountain was created to deal with them.”

“Possibly,” Gervas said. “Seems a bit excessive, but when have mages ever shown restraint?”

Yvette rolled her eyes before glancing back towards the water’s edge. Whatever had come here couldn’t have come out that long ago. If it had been a siren, wouldn’t they have heard it by now? “What do you think it is?”

“No idea. But we’re going to try and see if we can follow any trail it left,” Gervas said. “Heal your arm before we go. If it’s something dangerous, I want you at your peak, physically.”

Yvette nodded, her stomach now doing little jumps even when she down the last of the dried meat that constituted her lunch. Their little ‘break’ from all that walking didn’t feel nearly long enough anymore and she only felt more aware of how tired she was from walking for hours. She tapped her bracer to activate the reagents before pushing her hand over the wound and letting her magic knit the wound closed. “I miss Redwood and Chestnut.”

“Here I didn’t think you liked riding much,” Gervas said, his eyes seemingly focused on his meal once more. She suspected he was watching the treeline out of the corner of his eyes. “I remember your first few days being quite rough.”

“That was then,” Yvette said curtly. “Besides, it used to be really nice. You and I would ride for the day, then we’d practice, then we’d ride some more, then--”

“We’d almost get killed by trolls, or bandits, or bears, or a necromancer, or--”

“Point taken,” Yvette said, a small smile on her lips. She inched a little closer and leaned against him. “So we run into trouble a lot. I miss being able to ride into it rather than walking around it.”

“How’s your arm?” Gervas asked.

“Better,” Yvette said. “Still a bit tender, but I’ll live. I used as little magic as I could on it.”

“It shouldn’t still be tender,” Gervas said with a slightly exasperated sigh.

“I’m not a healing mage,” Yvette said. “I turn into bears. I don’t fix bears. Entirely different things.”

“How long did it take you to learn that spell to begin with?” Gervas asked.

Yvette felt her cheeks going a little redder. “Well, err, the healing one? Not that long. A week or two?”

“I see,” Gervas said before glancing towards her arm. “Your master wanted you to learn a wide range of things, then? Outside of your specialty?”

Yvette nodded. “Yes.”

“Seems useful, how long did it normally take to learn something new?”

“Ehhhhh, the basics usually a week or two. Not counting all the practice and alterations of the spells. Really, the first bit of magic was the hardest, figuring out how to use my magic and feel it outside of my body. After that it wasn’t nearly as difficult.”

“Really? How long did that first part take?” Gervas asked.

“It took me almost a month to figure out that part,” Yvette said, her cheeks going a little red at that admission. “He did this little thing where he’d put a leaf on my hand and try and get me to move it with just my magic.”

Gervas gave a light chuckle, earning a glare from her. “Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t help myself. I’m just surprised it took you a month to get that figured out. I thought the first lessons were supposed to be the easiest for more mages.”

Yvette’s cheeks red and she gave a nod. “I wasn’t really trying that hard, I was just really upset and barely trying. That was then, now I’m much better. I can do all kinds of magic. See?” Yvette said before thrusting out her right hand and causing a small trail of smoke and flame to follow it through the air. “It’s not entirely unheard of for it to take that long at that age.”

“Still, a month?” Gervas asked in a teasing tone. “I didn’t imagine you to be a late bloomer.”

“Oh? Okay, you learned some magic. How long did it take YOU to learn your first spell?” Yvette asked before instantly regretting the question.

Gervas had gone entirely still and his eyes locked with hers. Judging by how wide his eyes had gone, she had a feeling she knew what he was going to say before he said it. “The method I was taught under was different. Less than an hour, though.”

Yvette took a slow, deep breath. Already her mind was going through a dozen different methods by which Gervas might have been taught. Less than an hour? None of those methods seemed particularly pleasant. When someone could so easily mess with the mind, altering thoughts and memories, implanting the basics such as this would probably be easy. The very idea of doing such a thing made her feel slightly ill.

Yvette couldn’t help feeling thankful that her teacher had favored such a hands off approach when she’d first started. A part of her wondered if he had believed it to be the best method or if he just hadn’t wanted to train her at all in the beginning and so putting a leaf in her hand until she could make it move was the best he had been willing to put the effort in for. Then again, she supposed he had taken a bit of time each time to also teach her how to read all of those different books, as well as different methods to study the magic itself, how rituals worked and countless other little things. Even when she’d been so certain he’d send her home any day now as her magic talent had been entirely non-existent.

Now that Yvette thought about it, she couldn’t remember any time that he had used such a hands off approach to teaching her past her first lessons. Yvette felt her cheeks turning a little redder as she began to wonder if the method wasn’t actually just the one her master had chosen because it had given her time to be alone and rest without having so much new knowledge tossed into her face. How many times had she just laid in bed, exhausted and her head hurting from all the different things that had been crammed into it? How many times had she been so thankful to see him go just because it meant she would be alone and missing home without him there to make it worse?

“I’m an idiot,” Yvette said, shaking her head.

“I’d probably say reckless, but not idiotic,” Gervas said. “Just because you were a slow learner doesn’t make you an idiot. Everyone learns at their own pace.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Yvette said, her cheeks burning once more. “You know, it’s not entirely unheard of for mages to take a while to learn such things.”

“Of course it’s not,” he said in a teasing tone. “Just rare.”

Yvette rolled her eyes before glancing towards the treeline. Now that they were sitting in silence again, she found her mind wandering back towards the water. It had been a nice distraction, but it only worked so well. “Are you scared?”

“Scared? Why would I be scared?” Gervas asked.

“Because it could be anything. It might be the sirens,” Yvette said.

“But probably not,” Gervas said. “There’s any number of other things it could be. Might even have been a person and I was worried over nothing.”

“A person? All the way out here?” Yvette asked with a snicker. “What would someone be doing all the way out here?”

“It’d hardly be the first time someone decided to sneak off for a few hours to go for a swim away from the prying eyes of home. Maybe there was a boat out there as well. There are any number of a thousand things. But for now, I want to make sure we take it as carefully as possible. You ready?”

Yvette nodded, though she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. It could have been any of a number of things. But she bet it wasn’t. Whatever it was wouldn’t be like the animals that were avoiding the island now. So all she could imagine were the countless monsters that resided under the water’s depths. Waiting and watching. She gave a light shudder when she imagined monsters out there, right now, watching and waiting to strike.