NOVEL NEXT Cup Half Full
As you can imagine, a visit from a goddess caused quite a stir. Being the place it was, the power of the incident had been detected by many of the mages in the academy, and it was only a minute before the first of them arrived, banging on the door and demanding to know what was going on.
I sat there, on my kitchen chair, clutching my book, as a maelstrom of discussion, argument and debate went on around me, as if I were the eye of the storm. Eventually, tired, I was only one and a half remember, I crawled out of the room, unnoticed, and toddled into my own, climbed onto my bunk, and fell asleep.
~*~
The next month I was subject to intensive examination by several professors from the magic department, all the while with my anxious parents standing by next to me, to make sure I wasn’t overwhelmed. To be honest, I found in more annoying than anything. The magic incantations they used I couldn’t follow yet, especially as I hadn’t been left alone enough to experiment with anything. They did use a number of artefacts though, some of them quite powerful judging by the amount of power they were imbued with. Finally, they sent for an expert from a magic university in a land down south, who arrived, I was most impressed to see, on an actual dragon!
“Woah,” I said, peering out of the window, down at the courtyard. “Is that a real dragon mother?”
“It is son,” Rath put a hand on my shoulder. “They are powerful creatures, but not impossible to beat in battle, if you are prepared.”
“Have you defeated a dragon mother?”
“Once, when I was young and strong, and rather foolish. I wanted to show my strength, so I set out to hunt a rogue beast that was preying on livestock in a small town.”
“You beat one of those? Really?”
“Yes.” Her hand squeezed my shoulder for a second, as she thought of some past memory. “I wasn’t totally stupid I suppose. I bought some magical potions with me, and was armed with really good weapons. Plus, I chose an ambush position. Even so, I was lucky not to get killed.”
“But you won.”
“Yes, I won. It came with a cost though.”
I looked up at my tough mother, and saw her eyes, which were unfocussed, looking into the past with a sad expression on her face. She shook herself out of it though, and smiled down at me. “I’m sure you will grow up to be powerful enough to beat one, but if, when you do, please be careful not to place the lives of others in danger.”
“Yes mother, I promised.”
“Good boy. Oh, that must be the expert. I promise you Theodore, this will be the last one. I’m fed up of them prodding my son like a lab rat.”
“Thank you mother,” I said. I was also fed up with it.
I watched as the man who had been a passenger on the dragon spoke to a waiting mage, who gestured in our direction. The visitor, who was a tall, thin man with dark hair, and dressed in billowing tan robes, nodded, and the two set off across the yard.
Rath sighed. “Come on, let’s go to the living room and wait for them.”
“Yes mother.” I took her hand and toddled alongside her. Honestly, I wished I could grow up a little faster, being this young was limiting. “Patience,” I said to myself. Wishing to grow up faster was something a child really would say.
Eventually the expert was shown into our living room, and to me. He was introduced as specialist research mage Alto.
At first he did what the other professors had done, which was to examine me a little like a doctor from my first world. He took my pulse, listened to my heartbeat through a stethoscope, prodded me here and there, looked at my eyes, in my ears and felt my head.
All the while he hummed, and nodded to himself.
Then he took out a kind of magnifying glass, without any glass though. He muttered a brief incantation, and a purple haze appeared where the lens would be. Through this, he squinted at me. Frowning and rubbing his chin, he dispelled the purple haze, and brought out a piece of string with a rather horrible coloured yellow stone on the end. This he held up, so the stone was hanging down, and then muttered a longer incantation. Oh, how I longed to understand the magic!
The stone sparkled with mana smoke then, which drifted towards me. The stone also swung, very slightly, in the same direction, as a piece of metal swinging towards a magnet.
“Ah ha!” Alto said, snapping his fingers. The stone stopped moving, and the mana smoke dissipated.
“What is it?” Rath asked.
Alto stood up. “How old is the boy?” he asked my mother.
“He’s approaching two.”
“Fascinating. So long.” Alto rubbed his chin again, looked at me, then back at Rath. “He’s not full yet. That’s all it is.”
“I’m sorry?” Rath asked.
“I’ve never encountered filling at this age,” he said, more to himself, but then nodded and spoke to those present. “Very well, everyone knows that we people, all living things, exude mana,” he explained. “What people generally forget, or don’t know perhaps, is that the mana that we ‘give off’ is actually an overflow. An excess of the magic power if you will.”
“I don’t understand,” Rath said, frowning.
“Imagine that we, people I mean, are cups,” Alto went on. “These cups, we people, hold mana, but, and this is where the analogy breaks down a little bit, but bear with me, the mana in these cups slowly increases over time. Self-fills, if you will. Most people are small cups. When they are born, they hold a certain level of mana, collected from their mother over the course of the pregnancy. These cups are nearly full of this ‘mother mana’ almost as soon as they emerge into the world, so, very shortly after, they get full, and begin to overflow.”
“So they give off mana,” the university professor who had accompanied Alto translated.
“Exactly, this overflow is what you can see coming off people.” Alto held a finger up. “However, some people are larger cups. They hold more mana, and so they take longer to fill up. Sometimes, for the more powerful, this can take some months. During this time, whilst they are producing mana themselves, they also absorb mana from the atmosphere, to fill the cup, as it were. All living bodies wish to have full cups. Hence, during this time, they don’t exude mana.”
“So, you’re saying the boy’s cup isn’t full yet?” the other professor asked.
“Exactly!” Alto snapped his fingers. “It’s amazing. He’s nearly two and he’s not full! This is archmagi levels of power we’re talking about.”
Rath stepped over and hugged me. “Is he in any danger?” she asked. “He’s not going to, I don’t know, explode or anything?”
“No, no, no, all I’m saying is that people who have so much mana inside them usually turn out to be the most powerful users of magic.” He sobered a moment, and looked at me. “He will need training though, very good training, or he may become a danger to himself and others. Such power cannot be taken lightly.”
“He’s in the right place then,” the professor said.
I listened to all of this slightly dumbfounded. It seemed that Dex hadn’t been lying when he said they had given my new body power. But if I had to be that strong, how bad was my demon target?
~*~
Despite what the Alto had told everyone, I wasn’t swept off to join magic classes on the spot. Lissa had only told Rath about my reading ability, and neither of them had told any one else, I guess they instructed Myra to keep quiet about it as well. I’m not sure why, but perhaps they were worried I’d get even more attention.
In any case, I was free to learn more. As long as I was careful not to draw more notice to me, I should be left alone until I was four or five, which is when students were assigned classes.
With this in mind, my first spell was the most basic one I could find. A fire lighting spell. Yes, I imagine you would say that would create attention, setting things on fire, but we had an old fashioned fireplace in our living room, as well as the large metal oven in the kitchen, which burned charcoal or wood.
I waited until Rath was out teaching, and Lissa was busy doing something in another room, and tiptoed into the kitchen. The metal door to the oven was closed, and it took me a minute to find a cloth to shield my hand and open it. It was hot after all.
Inside, the fire was smouldering. Mother Lissa had used it earlier to bake some bread, which was wonderful to eat by the way, and since then it had just died down.
Wasting no time, I took a deep breath and visualised drawing in mana. I didn’t really need to do this for this spell, but I wanted to practice the art. At first I thought nothing was happening, but then I detected a kind of breeze against my skin. Altering my vision, I could see mana drifting towards me from a plant on the table. Very good.
Confident that was working, I held my hand out, pointed inside the oven and visualised with all my might the spark I wanted.
There was a roar, and a blast of heat, and I threw myself backwards as a giant flame erupted from the oven, singeing my hair.
“Oops,” I said. I may have overdone it a little.
Luckily the gout of flame quickly died down, it had only supposed to be a tiny spark after all, so nothing was set ablaze. I had a few singed hairs on my head, but it wasn’t really noticeable, although the burning smell was a problem. Scuttling over to the small window the kitchen had, I climbed onto a cupboard and managed to open it, to let some air in, then went back to the oven to check it was okay.
The charcoal was burning again, but other than that, it seemed all was good.
“Phew,” I said to myself. I carefully closed the oven door and scuttled back to my room.
Once I was sitting on my bed, I analysed what had happened.
It was simply, I decided, a case of too much power. I needed to learn control. But this was going to be the hard part. At my age I wasn’t allowed out without an escort, except to the nearby library for a short time, and even if I was allowed further afield, where would be suitable?
There was no obvious solution, so I was stuck with theory for now.
I carried on going to the library, at first with either one of my mothers or Myra, but when I turned two, they let me go alone. The staff there, amused and bemused as they first had been, soon seemed to get used to me wandering up alone and borrowing books of magic. As I always took them back to our apartment to read, I suspect they thought I was getting them for someone else.
Suited me.