Chapter 224: Demonstrations of Skill and Power

Chapter 224: Demonstrations of Skill and Power

Siobhan

Month 8, Day 30, Monday 4:00 a.m.



Siobhan set aside her mind-reeling speculation about the cause of the Black Wastes and continued to read. The author of the scroll next delved into theories about why and how the Black Wastes affected the mind.

It was commonly known that the skin was a powerful and inherent barrier. That was why it was basically impossible to reach into someone’s chest with magic and directly stop their heart.

The text postulated that there was a mental barrier that functioned similarly to the inherent barrier of the skin. Just as one’s inherent ownership of their own body gave a powerful resistance to external magic, the scroll suggested that the inherent ownership of the mind—and the Will—protected against intangible external access.

The author believed that this mental barrier could be damaged and weakened, just as an enemy might cut and spill blood, thus opening a victim up to magical effects using that blood.

The symptoms that people showed on extended exposure to the Black Wastes would make quite a lot of sense if the nature of the land itself were infecting them. A human mind was never meant to be so malleable, so without identity.

Siobhan’s thoughts jumped back to one of Thaddeus’s letters, in which he had mentioned that agents of the Red Guard were attempting to create spirit world wards using mental walls and protective structures. He had thought that might allow a spirit-walking shaman to protect their mind against the erosion of the spirit realm.

‘Myrddin found an analogue for the Black Wastes inside the spirit realm,’ Siobhan mused. ‘But how similar are they, otherwise?’ She had never experienced either, but the stories suggested they shared several characteristics.

“Have you ever walked within the spirit realm, Thaddeus?” she asked.

“Twice.”

When she saw that he did not intend to explain further, she asked, “And the Black Wastes?”

He looked up from the page he had been skimming. “I have seen it from a distance, but never entered.”

Siobhan nodded slowly. The first time she had met Renaldo, Liza’s shaman friend, the man had offered to “anchor” the Archaeologist. She did not know exactly what that meant, but it was something shamans did when walking within the spirit realm, wasn’t it?

The author proposed that the mind’s natural defenses were rooted in a person’s sense of self, their identity, and their Will. It was this innate barrier that usually prevented external forces from directly manipulating one’s thoughts or memories. Like spells that forcefully bypassed the physical barriers, there were even several known spells that bypassed the barrier of the mind. The easiest way to do so was with light, taken in through the eyes, or less easily, with sound through the ears.

The rest of the scroll was redacted.

Siobhan unrolled it to the end, finding only lines of black ink so inscrutable she couldn’t even make out a depression or scratch formed by the author’s pen tip against the paper.

Thaddeus glanced over. “It looks like someone along the way decided the University archives weren’t secure enough for that information.”

“The Red Guard?” she asked.

“Maybe.”

“Is there any way to clarify what was written originally? Some sort of divination to track the way the paper’s fibers were disturbed during the course of the writing?”

“Redaction spells are not so easily thwarted. There is no writing, any longer.”

Siobhan pursed her lips with frustration. ‘I suppose the Red Guard doesn’t want even University faculty learning about a memory-erasing spell, or whatever the author was going to start talking about.’

She would have liked to keep searching for more information about the Black Wastes, but her Will had recovered and the night was growing late.

Kiernan woke easily enough that she wondered if he had really been asleep, and after returning all of the texts to where they had come from, they began to make their way back down again.

Suddenly, Thaddeus halted, his eyes lighting up. “Ah, I almost forgot,” he murmured, veering off into one of the side rooms.

Siobhan followed, curiosity piqued.

Thaddeus began rifling through a nearby stack of scrolls, his movements purposeful. “I want to find something for Sebastien,” he explained, his voice tinged with an uncharacteristic warmth. “The boy is a genius with kinetic magic.”

Siobhan had to suppress a jolt of shock and delight at such high praise from the usually stern professor, though she would never have expected a compliment for her physical prowess.

“Can’t this wait?” Kiernan asked, dragging his hands down his face.

“It will not take long. I already know what I want, I just need to find it.”

“A kinetic genius?” she asked. “Sebastien does not seem particularly athletic to me.”

Thaddeus sent her an exasperated look. “I assure you, my apprentice is very talented. He gained competence with his first gesturan spell—and not a simple one—within one week. The amount of physical and mental precision required for such a feat, surely even you cannot scoff at.”

Siobhan had thought the whole process was quite difficult. She had even wondered how someone without the ability to split their Will could ever manage to focus on everything at once. But, she supposed that trying to engrain the perfect movements, and breath, and humming tone into muscle memory, while using all of the higher level thinking to focus on casting the spell might make things take longer. Apparently, much longer.

‘I’m a genius?’ She had told herself that before, of course. But mostly when she was giddy with the results of her hard work on some project, or when she was trying to reassure herself that she could handle the long and difficult path to becoming a powerful sorcerer. It wasn’t as if she actually believed it. Myrddin was a genius.

Siobhan moved to one of the shelves and began to rifle through a random book. The diagrams inside were immediately recognizable. ‘This is a gesturan spell. Is this whole room gesturan spells?’

She began to rifle through the shelves with intense excitement, only to realize that perhaps the Raven Queen shouldn’t be so impressed with anything, and then tried to suppress the outward signs of her enthusiasm.

Most everything was written in another language and beyond her comprehension. She wasn’t sure how risky it might be to try to follow the diagrams without understanding the instructions. Her memory was good, but definitely not good enough to memorize multiple pages of instructions, write them out later, and get them translated.

She was deflating when she found a small leather-bound journal worth its weight in gold.

It was a simple primer with what might be considered the very simplest of spells, or the building blocks of more complex effects. It had a lot of pictures—and was probably meant for a child—and simple text. That text had already been translated by the original owner of the journal.

‘I can’t check books out of the archives without leaving a record. Can I steal this?’ she wondered. She was hesitating over whether to consult with Thaddeus about the theft when he found whatever he was looking for.

He looked up and noticed her watching. “This sound spell should pair nicely with some light-based work I assigned recently. I am sourcing a restricted component to help him add some modifications to the latter.”



Damien stood over her, his face etched with worry and exhaustion.

“I need to talk to you,” he whispered urgently. “Somewhere private.”

Groggily, she turned off the intrusion alarm and sat up. “What is it?”

“It’s my report,” Damien said, his voice hoarse from lack of sleep. “On the research mission. I... I’m sure now. Well, I’ve been pretty sure for a while, actually. But I’ve just finished compiling all the data I have access to.”

Sebastien realized her heart was pounding harder than it had any reason to. She threw her light blanket off and pulled on proper clothes while Damien turned his back to her and looked studiously out of the window.

Their usual classroom that they used for morning study group and plans to overthrow certain members of the Thirteen Crowns was unavailable, transformed for the upcoming exhibitions. After a moment of hesitation, Sebastien led Damien to the second-floor storage room, a space that held memories of her clandestine magical practices.

It was as dusty as ever, and had actually been expanded somewhat to make room for stacked student desks and chairs cleared from other rooms in the Citadel.

As soon as they closed the door behind them, Sebastien shoved out an empty space on the floor and began setting up wards, her movements quick and practiced. Damien’s evident concern prompted her to add extra layers of protection, drawing upon the knowledge she’d gained while studying how to safeguard her apartment.

Finally, satisfied with their security, Siobhan turned to Damien. He reached into his bag and pulled out a thin binder, its contents a half-inch stack of high-quality paper.

Damien’s hands trembled slightly as he opened the thin binder, revealing pages filled with meticulously organized data. Sebastien leaned in, her curiosity piqued by the intensity of Damien’s expression.

“I’ve been tracking the Red Guard’s magical feats.” Damien stopped to cough violently, perhaps because of the dust, or perhaps from neglecting his health to finish the report.

Sebastien dug into her satchel and pulled out a canteen of water for him.

When his eyes had stopped watering, Damien continued. “I’ve been looking for times that they do magic similar to known Aberrant abilities. And especially anything that might resemble Newton’s...effects.”

Her stomach clenched. “Did you find him?”

Damien shook his head. “No. I found...something else. You know I ran out of allowance already this term. So to fund further research, I had to sell some of my belongings. Titus has been too preoccupied lately to notice.” A flicker of guilt crossed his face before he pressed on. “I needed access to back issues of newspapers that have gone out of business. Some of them used to provide more detailed information about rogue magic and Aberrant incidents.”

He flipped through the pages in the binder, revealing complex data organized into neat graphs and tables. “To make the data-organization spells easier, I had tagged and labeled each rogue magic incident with a dozen or so pieces of relevant information. My idea was to make it easier to organize and analyze the information from different angles. I could make lists ordered by location, or civilian casualty numbers, or...time.”

Damien paused and swallowed, turning to another page. “This one shows the frequency of suspected Aberrant incidents over the past eighty years. That’s as far back as I could go with the available newspapers.”

Sebastien studied the graph, noting the gradual upward trend.

Damien explained, “There’s been about a thirty percent increase in Aberrant incidents since then.”

“But couldn’t that just be due to Gilbratha’s population growth?”

Damien nodded and flashed her a small smile. “I thought of that too.” He flipped to another page. “This graph adjusts for population growth. Even accounting for that, there’s still a ten percent increase over the same period.”

Sebastien’s mind raced, considering possible explanations, even as a sick, writhing pit began to grow in her stomach. “What about University admission numbers? Have they kept pace with Gilbratha’s population growth?”

Damien shook his head. “That’s the thing. The University has maintained a steady intake of about 3,000 students per year for the last 150 years. It hasn’t increased at all.”

Sebastien licked her dry lips. “So, there might be more rogue thaumaturges out there with improper training, since the University isn’t meeting the growing population’s needs. Lenore’s population must have increased over the last 150 years, too, right? And if other minor institutions aren’t picking up the slack, the disparity between trained thaumaturges and the general population is growing wider.”

“The country’s population has increased,” Damien agreed, “though not nearly as much relative to Gilbratha’s numbers.”

“People want to live in the city that holds the country’s only university,” she muttered.

Damien fumbled with the pages, his exhaustion evident in every movement. “I considered other explanations too,” he said. “Maybe the data quality has changed over time, so more incidents are actually being recorded rather than passed over. Or there could be lies about the causes of rogue magic incidents, saying disasters were caused by Aberrants when they really weren’t.”

“Or perhaps,” Sebastien mused, “as the stigma of the Blood Emperor slowly fades, people are more willing to experiment with dangerous magic.”

Damien’s eyes lit up with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. “Exactly! I thought of that too. But I was still worried, so I went to the University student census. I looked for all records of students leaving for ‘medical reasons’ or similar excuses. It wasn’t easy—I had to translate the data across several different record-keeping standards.”

“And what did you find?”

Damien swallowed hard and showed her yet another graph “Over the last two hundred eighty years, the numbers are slowly but steadily rising, even adjusted for the increase in student admissions one hundred fifty years ago.”

The implications hung heavy in the air between them. Sebastien’s fingers tapped rapidly against the side of her leg, and she had taken out the Conduit from her pocket without realizing. Deliberately, she put it back. “It could be that the University’s safety mechanisms and procedures have become less robust,” she suggested. “Maybe it wasn’t always normal for one in fifteen students to have a catastrophic misstep while casting magic before they reached the level of Master.”

“I agree that the University is putting too much pressure on its students. There’s also a chance that our Wills aren’t being properly trained in all facets, making them more likely to fail when unbalanced.”

He paused, his gaze meeting Sebastien’s with an intensity that made her breath catch. “But what if it’s not any of that?” The question lingered, unanswered.

“I looked up some studies about Aberrants,” he continued. “Did you know that any particular Aberrant incident only carries a small risk of catastrophic consequences?” he explained. “Most are destroyed or removed easily. And most of the ones that aren’t can still go inside a sundered zone. Of which Lenore alone now has thirteen, by the way. But some... Some Aberrants turn out like Eltrocus, Metanite, or the Red Sage.”

Damien closed the binder and handed it to her.

She took it reluctantly, for some reason wary of the the contents, as if they could harm her.

“For any single failure of Will, there is only a tiny chance of an Aberrant being created. And for every Aberrant incident, an even smaller chance that they will be beyond the Red Guard’s ability to handle. But we keep rolling the dice, Sebastien. Every time an Aberrant appears, it’s another roll.”

Sebastien had considered these same fatalistic thoughts herself, and eventually determined that the only solution was to gain power.

“You know how our Wills grow stronger with practice? How channeling more power allows us to increase our capacity even further? That’s why Archmage Zard can gain a thaum in just three hours of practice, while it takes me five.”

“Yes,” she said, wondering where he was going with this.

“Well, what if it’s the same for Aberrants?” Damien’s voice cracked slightly. “I mean, what if each incident, each break event, makes the next one more likely? I worried—no, I’m terrified that we’re headed toward some kind of inflection point. A threshold beyond which there’s no return. What if magic is becoming more dangerous?”

Sebastien felt as if some part of her were detaching from her body. She noticed a faint smear of ink on Damien’s jaw. A few pieces of dust floated through the air between them. Their wards were muffling sounds from outside, but she could still hear faint sounds from the general hubbub of the festival-like exhibition. Her hands were sweating. With a deep breath, she drew her focus back in. “If that’s true, the world as we know it is teetering on the brink of an abyss.”