What We Do to Survive

The next week passed both far too quickly and somehow agonizingly slowly. That first class with Brenda was a true test of mental fortitude like no other. Each time the loathful girl touched me I had to restrain the urge to light her on fire or at least push her away. She must have noticed something was wrong, but seemed to have decided that I was just tired or worried or something else of that nature. Her solution was more skinship than I could have tolerated even if I wasn’t absolutely furious with her, which only made it harder not to lash out.

Still, I think I did an admirable job controlling myself, and outside the classes we shared and the one study session she managed to drag me into, the week was incredibly productive. As I always did when I encountered a problem I could not solve with my current power, I threw myself with renewed purpose into my studies. I spent long hours practicing casting and read through my backlog of books while I waited for my mana to regenerate. Every free moment was filled with one mana control exercise or another, and I spent several hours each night meditating as I worked to refine my circulations.

Between that and my classes, I had very little time to spare, but I did manage to make one trip back into the city to visit Lea. She was finally back on her feet, the last of her internal injuries finally fading away under the care of the Earthshadow’s family healer, but it was clear to see that the mental wounds from what had happened still haunted her mind.

She was even more timid than before, jumping at every shadow and flinching away from unexpected touches. Our excursion to a nearby restaurant was cut short when another patron bumped into her chair while she was distracted and my poor Lea froze up and began to shiver as though she had just taken a dip into the winter ocean. I ended up escorting her back to the Earthshadow estate, my arm rubbing gentle circles on her back as I whispered comfortingly into her ear. The next day I had even more trouble restraining myself when Brenda threw herself at me during class as usual, though I think I managed not to tip her off in the end.

I also made some more progress on my other project in the city. After returning Lea to the estate, I scouted out the wards around the last of the three homes, the one belonging to Lilac Seasong. I no longer had as much reason to go after her and the other young nobles that had ambushed Lea since I was now certain they had nothing to do with the second attack, but I concluded after some thought that they still deserved my attention. An attack on Lea was an attack on me, and neither could go unpunished.

In any case, I’d already put some time into the project and I hated to leave a job half-done. Inspecting the last set of wards didn’t take long at all, less time even than I’d originally planned to spend with Lea, so it wasn’t an issue. If I also took the time to revisit Alam and Malar’s Fine Flavors, the lovely little cafe I’d initially used to surveil my target’s defenses, then that was purely a matter of its convenient location and not the addictively delicious food I’d eaten there.

Just as with the Shieldlights and Firewalkers, the defenses around the building were nothing special. Lilac lived in the smallest and least elaborate of the three mansions, though it was still much fancier than anything I’d ever lived in, and the wards were similarly lackluster. I was almost tempted to just go in immediately, but that would have been stupid and I was trying to avoid making stupid decisions. Instead I simply noted down what I’d seen and returned back to Avalon for another evening filled with spellcasting practice.

Eventually however, the weekend came again and I decided it was about time to visit Lea again. This time I decided I wouldn’t try to take her out anywhere. Lea was improving but she still needed time before she was ready to interact with the world at large once more. Instead, I thought that maybe we could take a walk together through the gardens around the Earthshadow estate. Lea had always loved nature and it couldn’t be good for her to spend all her time in a small room buried several floors beneath the ground.

I didn’t know much about treating injuries of the mind, it was a complex discipline at the best of times and traditional healing spells were often poorly suited for such things. From what I’d read, she simply needed time and a stress-free environment. Outside of that, there wasn’t much anyone could do for her, not without the use of dangerous, mind-altering spells and rituals. I could do my best to be there for her, but that was about it.

I hated feeling so useless, but greater mages than I had spent millenia researching such things to little results. Spells that targeted the body where easy, mortal bodies existed fully within the world and could thus be easily damaged, repaired, and modified. The mind and the soul however were only partially material, making it much harder to affect them.

The easiest method to do so was indirectly, using the body as a conduit to reach the other portions of the self. For instance, I typically maintained several circulations that improved my mental acuity and most oath-type spells targeted the soul by using a person’s mana as a conduit between their body and soul. Unfortunately, there were limits to what you could achieve in that way. Healing magic, an already notoriously difficult and complex field that took decades to master, was very hard to translate over to either of the two.

It was slightly easier when you were targeting yourself with the spells, it was why I could easily maintain my mental circulations whereas to achieve the same effect with a spell required at a minimum seventh circle spells, but that wasn’t going to be of much help here. Lea may be a mage, but she had neither the knowledge nor expertise to perform delicate alterations on her own mind.

I was on my way towards the estate, a small smile on my face as I looked forward to seeing my precious Lea again after far too many days, when I felt it. I stumbled over my own feet as a profound otherness briefly passed through my awareness. It was… disconcerting, not wrong per se, but simply out of place. It was like a splotch of bright yellow paint on a dark stone wall, something that didn’t quite belong and stood out as though under a spotlight because of it.

I should have just kept walking. It was basically rule number one in Avalon, if you see something don’t say anything and move as quickly as you can in the opposite direction. If I was in Avalon, I almost certainly would have kept walking. Bizarre magical anomalies were everywhere at the Academy, and feeling something unusual with my rapidly improving mana sense was a day to day occurrence.

However, this wasn’t Avalon. I wasn’t even particularly close to the portal, I’d taken something of a winding path along the edge of the town and was nearly an hours walk from the square where the entrance to Avalon was located. There was not much reason to be out here, the road along which I was walking was all but devoid of people and lined with stout warehouses and buildings with heavy, locked doors. It was the sort of place most people tried to avoid, particularly after the sun had set.

I straightened slowly and made a show of brushing myself off even as my mind focused on extending my mana sense as far as I could in every direction. Huh, I couldn’t feel it exactly anymore, but there was a strange echo in the air. Glancing up towards the sky, I clicked my tongue as I judged the time. It was still rather early, roughly ten in the morning I’d guess. I had time and I was very curious about what I’d just felt. A dangerous combination.

I weighed my options. I should just go, I told myself. This was stupid, I told myself. Then I felt it again, a garish splash of neon color against the uniform background of ambient mana. I had to stop myself from spinning around to stare in the direction in which I could feel it. This was a terrible idea I told myself even as I briskly ducked into a narrow alleyway, the spellform for my favorite illusionary cloak drawing themselves under the cover of my long jacket’s hem.

I hadn’t made it as far as I had by ignoring my instincts. I’d clawed and scraped and clung to every scrap and advantage I could get my hands on. Whatever alien thing I had just sensed could be any number of things, but I wouldn’t never know if I didn’t go check it out. Perhaps it was some form of rare plant or animal, a mutated seed blown by the wind into a half-forgotten corner of the town. Maybe it was some mage’s secret laboratory, the disturbance coming from a flaw or unforeseen interaction with its privacy wards. Or maybe it was something else that I wasn’t considering.

Regardless, it had the potential to be very valuable. Avalon taught its mages to be cautious but curious. Many of the greatest discoveries of the age would never have happened if someone had simply ignored what their senses were telling them and moved on. Even if it wasn’t something I personally could make use of or was too dangerous to approach, I might be able to sell the information to someone who could. It was too enticing to pass up.

I spent a moment studying the uneven stone bricks that made up the wall before me, then glanced around the alleyway. My eyes pathed out a route, the mana in my circulations accelerating as I took a deep breath. Then I took two rapid steps and jumped. A thin layer of mana protected my hands from the rough stone as I twisted my body and kicked off the wall towards the other side of the alley. I caught myself and pushed off again before I could begin to fall, mana flooding through my muscles. My fingers caught the edge of the roof and I easily pulled myself up onto the gently sloped rooftop.

I glanced around briefly and found no one looking in my direction, nor could I sense any sort of active spell effects around me that might indicate magically hidden observers. There was only that same oily echo of bright color rapidly degrading at the edges of my senses.

Another spell wrapped a bubble of silence around me and I set off at a brisk walk across the worn tiles. After a few steps, I cast another spell on my shoes to improve my traction. I wasn’t that high up, but a bad fall while distracted could still kill me if I wasn’t careful. What a way to go that would be.

I quickly crossed the roof, then leapt across the gap to the next one over, my magic muffling what would have otherwise been a loud thump. I could feel it more clearly now, an odd smear in the mana flowing through the air that rippled in and out of my perception at irregular intervals. It was coming from the next building over, a low, dingy affair with boards nailed across the window frames.

As I got closer, the oddity grew clearer and clearer in my senses. It was an object of some sort, the circle of disturbed mana around it wasn’t moving as far as I could tell, but it was hard to judge the size. It could be as small as a pebble with a very intense mana signature, or as large as a boulder with a very diffuse concentration within it.

I was much more careful crossing over this time, worried that even a muffled thump would be noticed. The oddity wasn’t moving and I couldn’t feel anyone in the building, but that didn’t mean there was no one there. Three invisible panes of hardened air formed at regular intervals across the gap and I dashed across.

My foot touched the roof and the oddity winked out of existence. I froze mid step and suppressed my presence with every ounce of willpower I could muster. I was invisible, soundless, and scentless, and had muted my magic down as far as I could possibly manage. Anyone or anything that could still detect me wasn’t something I wanted to mess with.

It was just… gone, vanished between one moment and the next. If I hadn’t just felt it, I would have never known there was something missing. The formerly disturbed mana was flowing smoothly through the air, complex currents winding straight through the patch in which I’d felt the anomalous object.

My heart pounded in my chest and I twisted my head around as I searched for appropriate paths of retreat or approaching attackers. Then, as quickly as it had vanished, the oddity reappeared, its smeared outline faint but still in the exact same place as it had been before as far as I could tell. I took a cautious step forward and nothing happened. Had it been a false alarm? Just… bad timing?

I exhaled softly, gods above that had been terrifying. Once again, I asked myself what I was trying to accomplish. This was a terrible idea, but I’d come too far to back down now. I moved purposefully towards the center of the roof where I’d already noticed a large hatch set into the dark tiles. It looked like it had been used recently, bits of dirt that had been previously lodged into the seam around the heavy-looking trapdoor now scattered across the rooftop.

I sat down not far from the hatch and summoned a spectral eye, the same spell I’d used the previous weekend to observe the wards around several of Lea’s attackers’ homes. I was half expecting something to go wrong, but the eye passed easily through the thick layer of tiles and emerged into a dark, mostly open space filled with stacks of heavy crates.

Staying close to the ceiling, I directed the eye to slowly move in the direction in which I could sense the smear. The eye moved slowly, passing through several walls and dodging around crates in case they were filled with something like iron bars that could disrupt my control of the eye. Eventually, it emerged into a small room near the edge of the warehouse, some sort of out-of-use office or maybe an inventory room, and I finally laid eyes on the source of the disturbance I was feeling.

It was a person… or at least something that looked like a person. The tall, willowy man was lying on a makeshift cot, still dressed in a heavy coat, gloves, boots, and a wide-brimmed hat despite being indoors. I couldn’t see his face, he was lying face down with his arm tucked into the crook of his elbow, but at least outwardly he looked like a man, if an unnaturally tall one.

I watched him for several long minutes, noting how his chest was rising and falling with an odd, stuttering pattern. I quickly realized that the pattern was rather familiar. Each time ‘his’ chest rose, the smear vanished from my senses, leaving only an oily residue in the mana currents around him. Each time his chest fell, the smear reappeared, tainting the mana around him with its presence. Very interesting.

I closed my eyes, considering my options. I could just leave, my curiosity at least somewhat sated by my findings. That was the safe choice. Perhaps I could head back to Avalon, get Liam, and bring him back here to show him what I’d found. I was starting to suspect that I knew what it was I was looking at and if this… man was what I thought ‘he’ was, I was sure Liam would reward me handsomely for the information

On the other hand, by the time I came back there might not be anything to find. As far as I could tell, the man had some sort of disguise that was meant to shield his unusual presence, but that disguise was having some sort of issues. It was very possible that if I left, he would be gone by the time I returned and I would never find him again. Judging from how quickly that residue he left every time the disguise failed began to disperse, it would only take a matter of seconds for him to simply vanish into the background.

I opened my eyes, already knowing what I was going to do. It was stupid, reckless, and probably a bad idea, but I simply couldn’t pass up this opportunity. Even if it wasn’t directly useful to me, I was absolutely confident that his body, dead or alive, would fetch an excellent price at Avalon. This was a chance for advancement that I couldn’t ignore.

After all, true Outsiders were sources of unique, priceless reagents. I’d never seen one before, but the oddity of the mana before me did remind me of Miranda’s complex web of inherited abilities, and every description I’d read said that they were clearly identifiable as ‘foreign’ to magical senses. That was as good a description of what I was seeing as any. Well, it seemed like visiting Lea was going to have to wait. Work before pleasure, as my Father had always said, and it looked like I had work to do.