Millennial Mage

Tala groused. “No. I don’t want coffee.” Her aura pushed out, somehow exerting enough pressure to force Thorn to step back. She was still feeling off and, if she were being honest, a bit childish.

The dwarf steadied himself, keeping the cup in his hand from spilling. “Tali. You need to focus. Coffee helps many people to do just that. You’ve been putting yourself through the sparselands for weeks now. Your mind is frayed. You need to recover, and you don’t have much time.”

Tala glared. “I’m not getting addicted to that stuff.”—Not again.—“Besides, my scripts are already working to fix me up. All this power will make it faster, too.”

He sighed. “Please. I know Pillar Be-thric just left, but we have a lot to do in the next three hours.”

“I agree, but no coffee.” She started to move, slowly. Each action was deliberate as she felt how much more power she had. Honestly, she felt faster and stronger than she normally did when her iron paint was intact. Slow and steady.

-That’s right. We can do this.-

Thorn grunted. “Fine.” A flicker of magic wafted from his hands and the cup and beverage vanished in one. “Then, I have to resort to option two.”

He looked up, above where Tala was sitting.

She immediately leaped up, moving much farther up and away than she normally would have. Her eyes were momentarily fixed above where she’d been sitting. When she didn’t see anything there, she swept her gaze around wildly. Finally, when she didn’t see anything suspicious, she turned on the dwarf. “What’s option two?”

Thorn grinned. “Vaguely threatening language.”

She glared his way. In her head, Alat cackled. ­-Oh, he’s starting to understand you.-

“Now, food awaits. Most of it is what you are used to, but some is from your sanctum’s first fruits.” He pointed off to one side.

“If food is ready, why are you pointing to my room? I will not be eating in my room like some sort of savage.”

-You eat in your room all the time.-

And if he knew my true origins, he’d think me a savage, so true words all around.

Alat had no ready response to that.

“Food is ready, but you need a bath. I’ve drawn one for you.” He gave her a level look. “I’ve included my own power in the water. You’ll lose some skin, and all your hair, but you’ll come out cleaner than you’ve ever been.”

She gave him a hard look. “You know, if I die, you don’t get to take my place.”

“That much is obvious, yes.” He returned her look levelly.

“And if you are the cause of my death, the Pillars will kill you.”

“Again, this is obvious.” He gave no hint of discomfort, even as her aura flickered and flailed around him.

Tala shook her head, trying once again to rein in her power, with little success.

Thorn waited for her to return her attention to the matter at hand.

“What of this? Your magic will trigger it.” She tapped her collar.

“I’ve exempted it, naturally.”

“How?” She narrowed her eyes at him.

“What, am I some wild human ‘Mage?’ Precision in all things.” He gave her a small smile.

She huffed a laugh and grunted. “Fine. Thank you.”

“It is my pleasure.”

She continued to wrestle with her magic and her aura as she carefully moved off the platform and pushed open the massive, heavy door to enter her room for the first time. As it swung shut behind her, she took a long moment to just look around.

A wide, nearly full-height window filled one wall, giving an unobstructed view to the west. The glasswork was perfect, its production likely enhanced by magic of one sort or other. Power still lingered in it, and Tala thought she understood the workings to be for durability and cleanliness.

Through the immaculate window, Tala could see the beginnings of her forest towards the north of that view, and the green rolling hills extended to the horizon before her.

To the edge of reality, she corrected herself.

Some animals moved about across those hills, but not many. Not yet.

The experts and craftsmen had established an ecosystem of sorts, though she’d required that they limit apex predators.

It had taken some convincing, as all the experts had insisted that the lack could cause radical unbalance.

Tala wanted Terry to have free range fun.

But that was all outside her room.

The room itself was simple in its beauty.

The walls were built of granite blocks with silver inlaid mortar, all polished to a near mirror finish.

The floor was a single slab of poured stone, streaks of dark and light gray playing with each other across the similarly polished surface.

Overhead, old-growth beams spanned the space, holding the wooden ceiling up, high overhead.

Apparently, there were several families who had holds filled with trees of various ages, all growing towards the harvest at the right time.

There were large floor-to-ceiling curtains that could be pulled across the window at need, but they were tucked back, out of the way for the moment.

The room, as a whole, was sparse to the extreme.

Aside from a few silver hooks set into the walls, the only adornments were her bed and a large stone tub.

The water bubbled and popped, and Tala could feel the heat radiating from it and the stone tub it was drawn in even from a dozen feet away.

There’s nothing in here. After a moment’s hesitation, she smiled. I like it.

She took Flow and her bloodstar sheath from her belt and hung them on the hooks. Her clothing retracted into a band around her neck, under the collar, and she slid into the water, dunking her head and staying under for a long count of ten.

Immediately, she felt the heat and whatever Thorn had done to the water, scour her, toes to tip.

The water transformed from crystal clear to murky grey in barely a moment. Her hair and iron paint joined the dirt, grime, and dead skin in the water around her.

Well, this is kind of gross. She grunted. It would be nice if I could get rid of—

She had barely started the thought when she felt Kit, through her new, deeper connection to the pouch, flex slightly.

The detritus in the water vanished, leaving it perfectly clean once more.

Tala gratefully tapped the stone beside her. “Kit, you’re amazing.”

The bath did not respond.

“It’s too bad that you can’t clean me directly, but personal magical defenses and all that.”

She sighed, sinking into the water once again.

Thorn was right. Whatever he’d done to the water stripped off everything that wasn’t part of her living body.

The dwarf had somehow exempted the collar, her nails, and teeth. She realized the last when she gargled and felt the inside of her mouth similarly sizzled clean.

Kit continued to remove any impurities that she added to the water as she did so.

That would have been embarrassing, losing all my teeth.

-We have inscriptions to regrow them at need.-

Yeah, but I’ve never had to use them. Imagine explaining to Holly that the first time I lost my teeth was in a bath.

Alat chuckled. -That would be pretty funny.-

The elk-leathers, retracted into a choker around her neck, drew heavily from her gate to remain in pristine condition.

That draw actually helped lessen the strain caused by power gushing through her.

She briefly mirrored the elk-leather’s self-cleaning onto her body, freeing herself of the last vestiges of grime, those that had tried to hide away.

That wouldn’t be a problem if my bath were as big as a pond.

-Do you want to request a hot-spring in your sanctum?-

No… She sort of did, but it seemed utterly ridiculous to ask for. Especially after the fact.

She placed that aside and simply luxuriated for another moment, letting her being settle. It had been a horrible…three weeks?

-Yes. We kept that infernal contraption on us for three weeks. By the end, the gains were next to meaningless.-

But not fully.

Alat groused. -No, not fully useless. Even so, we were getting a bit…frayed there, at the end.-

Yeah. I did let it go on a little too long, didn’t I.

The nature of the process meant that her gate wasn’t harmed, not really, but it was sore and hosting a greater-than-ever, unguided flow of power.

She sighed, closing her eyes so that she could focus on her mage-sight.

Her power, her aura, was filling the room.

Her natural restraint, hard won and long practiced, was barely enough to keep it that contained.

Any idea how much we increased our flowrate?

-Estimate?-

Sure.

-Nearly three and a half times.-

Tala sucked in a breath and got water with the air. She started hacking, coughing the water free once more. “What?”

-You heard me. We’ve more than tripled our flowrate. Why did you think our inscriptions were straining under the influx?-

Tala grunted, focused on her power, and pulled.

Slowly, over the course of about five minutes, she drew it back to be even with her skin.

She grit her teeth and held it there. I can do this.

She held it for nearly a minute before her internal grip slipped and her power blossomed outward once again.

The window flexed under the change in magical pressure.

Hey, I’m affecting the zeme in the room. I never really thought my power would be sufficient to affect the weather, let alone the currents of magic, itself.

-Tala, we’re in your sanctum. Literally all the power in here is yours, or was yours at some point.-

…spoil sport.

-But all of this is beside the point. We couldn’t keep our power in check and that doesn’t bode well. There’s no way we’re holding it in consistently in less than three hours.-

Tala sighed. She knew that to be true. Good thing we have a solution, as much as I don’t want to use it as a crutch.

She let her mind be diverted for a moment, since she knew how she would proceed.

Something had caught her mage-sight’s attention while her aura was fully retracted. It was a lingering feel of magic in the stone of her tub.

Now, she devoted some attention to examining it.

Even though her aura once again suffused the material, she could still see the traces remaining behind.

Thorn’s magic? That’s right. He’d have to have heated the water, somehow. It’s not like Kit can move heat around.

“Can you move energy around, irrespective of material, Kit?”

Kit did not respond.

Also, nothing got hotter or colder despite her desires for it to do so, so Tala assumed that was a ‘No.’

I’ll have to ask him how he did that… It didn’t matter at the moment, however.

It was near sunset, so sunlight was streaming through her window.

Tala decided to dry off in that sun, exiting the tub and walking across the pleasantly cool floor to her wall of a window.

She slowly turned in the light, drying quickly, likely due to the utter lack of hair. She’d held the regrowth scripts back for the time being.

In her brief times actually looking out the window, she noticed the crags of rock that jutted up from some of the hills that she could see in the near distance.

I’ll need to explore this place at some point.

It was an exciting prospect.

She held out her hand and her hot air incorporator came into it.

I’m glad that this is still here.

She dumped power into it, and the wind hit her like a physical force, actually dimpling her reinforced skin where it was pointed.

The flow through the device was hard to regulate down, but it didn’t matter too much.

The last of the dampness left her, and Kit took the incorporator back to wherever it had been stored.

Her last task was to repaint herself with iron. It was her only chance to meet Be-thric’s deadline, as much as that grated on her.

I won’t let it be a crutch in the long run. I will get my power and my aura under control once more.

Less than fifteen minutes after she’d entered her room, she walked back out, completely repainted save the middle of her back, and reclothed in a garment that left that area exposed.

Flow and her bloodstar sheath were once again on her belt.

“Thorn, will you please help me?”

The dwarf came from the direction of the kitchen, drying his hands on a towel. “Certainly.”

He took the brush and finished the application without needing instruction.

“I’d wondered how you did the hard-to-reach parts. Now, I know.” He laughed. “You get help.”

“Indeed. Thank you.”

The last stroke was completed, and Tala almost staggered.

It felt like she was a balloon that someone had started to blow air into. “Oh. Oh, wow.”

Thorn frowned. “Eskau Tali?”

“I’ll be fine.” Her aura was still widespread, but she was able to retract it with ease, now that it lacked the backing of her magic. “You mentioned food?”

She had to admit that she was famished. With a thought and a simple application of power, Tala reshaped her clothing into her normal outfit as Tali.

Thorn led the way to the dining area where a table was covered in various dishes.

“Oh! Thorn, you sent away for all this?” She immediately began to dig in. She found a steady pace between her old way of scarfing and Tali’s careful, meditative absorption of food and power as one.

Thorn cleared his throat and scratched the back of his head. “Most yeah, but some…Well, I…I cooked some.”

She looked his way. “This is like twenty different dishes, Thorn. Which one did you cook?”

“I want to see if you can tell.” He shrugged. “This is a really nice kitchen, and I like to cook.”

She gave him a skeptical look, but decided to give it a try. “Well, thank you.”

“It is my pleasure to serve.”

Everything was excellent, even though the raspberry tarts were a little less excellent than she’d have expected.

Thorn had, indeed, made those. He admitted with a shrug. “The food was grown here, sending it out to be prepared seemed…wasteful.”

Tala nodded slowly. She was used to cooking for herself, but Tali wasn’t, at least not since she’d been picked as Be-thric’s candidate. “If you want to learn how to cook, I think that’s a fine idea.”

He narrowed his eyes. “I know how to cook already.”

She met his gaze and smiled sweetly. “If you want to improve your cooking, I think that’s a fine idea.”

Thorn rolled his eyes and huffed a laugh. “Fair enough. I’ve never tried something like a raspberry tart before. Gallof had me cook for him occasionally, and I helped out with meals in the mines before that. I admit my skills could do with a polish.”

“If that’s what you want. You aren’t meant to be my cook.”

“I’m meant to serve, and this place can do virtually everything except cook.”

Tala hesitated. That was actually true. Kit had never shown the ability to use one item within itself to act on another. Moving water to drop on crops wasn’t the same thing as wielding a knife to cut vegetables. “Very well, but again, only if that’s what you want, and only if you promise to tell me if you find you don’t like doing it.”

“Very well.”

Throughout the meal, the magic within her continued to build, so that by the time she was done with her dinner, it had exceeded anything she’d experienced before.

In the past, the build up reached a maximum level, where the scripts in their inefficiency ate up the power as fast as it could be provided.

The level of that odd balance was now vastly increased.

She already had echoes carved into reality around her, and it had been less than an hour since the iron paint had been applied.

Her self-examinations were interrupted when a cat hopped up onto her dinning table. It walked among the dishes, taking licks of the various remnants.

Thorn’s eyes were fixed on the feline as it moved about. “Huh.”

Tala watched it for a long moment as well. “Thorn?”

“Yes, Tali?”

“I don’t remember a plan for any cats in the sanctum.”

“There weren’t any.”

“Then, am I delusional? Because I definitely see a cat, there.”

“No. I’m seeing it too. It must have snuck in at some point”

“Huh.”

“That’s what I said.”

Tala held out her hand, and the cat cautiously approached her. “That’s right. I’m not going to hurt you.”

When it was just out of reach, the feline stopped and sat down, staring at Tala with large, purple eyes.

“You have pretty eyes.”

The cat tilted its head, then turned and bounded off.

“Wait! I didn’t mean it!” Tala hesitated. “No… I did mean that, I just didn’t mean to scare you off!”

But the cat was already gone.

A moment later, Terry popped into existence on the table.

Tala sat up in surprise. “Terry?”

He leaned forward and squawked, very, very unhappily.

“Right. You’re bored.”

He shook himself.

“No? Not bored?”

He shook himself again. He was then on Tala’s shoulder in a flicker and headbutted her.

“Oh, you were worried about me.”

He trilled an affirmative.

Thorn cleared his throat. “He’s been acting… different since all the others left.”

Tala and Terry turned to regard the dwarf.

Oh… I forgot he was here.

-You were so focused on the cat, you forgot you had an audience.- Alat sighed. -Why am I not surprised?-

You could have reminded me.

-…-

The cat distracted you, too, huh?

-It was a pretty cat.-

Tala grinned. “Yeah, he’s a special bird.”

“Does Pillar Be-thric know he’s a teleporting terror bird?”

Tala froze. “No?”

Thorn tilted his head to one side. “I figured. I haven’t said anything to him. Now, is this a surprise or a secret?”

She swallowed, somehow feeling that the answer was important. “Secret?”

The dwarf shook his head with a chuckle as he walked around and hopped up on a chair opposite her. It seemed to have been built with his stature in mind. “I figured that, too.”

“Oh?” Tala had a bad feeling about this. “What do you mean?”

“Pillars can be… hard masters to serve. We need to have something of our own to keep our sanity. If we give them everything, they take even more.”

She frowned. That’s not where I thought this was going. “You sound like you speak from experience.”

“I do, yeah.” He sighed. “Thank you for trusting me with the truth. I suppose I can do the same.”

Tala leaned forward, interested in what he had to say.

“I wasn’t born with the name ‘Thorn.’ Gallof renamed me to have a moniker more suited to an Eskau.” Thorn snorted a laugh. “Not that it mattered in the end.”

She found herself nodding. “That’s what Pallaun…Eskau Pallaun was talking about. Your name is…was Thron?”

“Ah, so you were listening to that.” He nodded. “He is a scary man, that Eskau. But yes, Thron is the name my mother gave me.”

“Are you angry that they changed it?”

He shrugged. “A bit sad, but not angry. Gallof pulled me from the mines where I was little more than a slave. If he’d been raised to Pillar, I’d happily have served the House of Blood every day of my life. Now?” He shrugged again. “Now, I owe my life to you and to a lesser extent Pillar Be-thric. I’ll not betray or harm Gallof, and I’ll always be grateful to the House of Blood, but beyond that, I’m here to serve you.”

That settled like a weight in Tala’s stomach, more than she was ready or willing to bear at the moment. “That’s kind of you, Thron—”

“We should stick to using Thorn, Tali. It would be odd if we used a name not in the House records.”

Hah…little do you know…

-Focus, Tala.-

“Thorn, then. Thank you.” It felt like a lackluster response, but it was all she could think to say.

Terry…had gotten bored.

He flickered to Thron’s head, grabbing onto the dwarf’s silver hair with his talons.

Thron glared up at the bird. “I’m not playing this game again, Terry.”

Terry sulked a bit, then flickered away, curling up on Tala’s shoulder.

“The little terror seems to enjoy getting me to hit myself in the head. Only actually happened once, when I didn’t know he could teleport, but he keeps trying.”

Tala looked at Terry and sighed. “Yeah, that sounds like him.”

The dwarf shook his head. “Now, we should focus on getting you ready for your meeting. How’s your magic feel?”

Tala reluctantly looked downward at the magical manifestations around her.

They were somehow tighter, closer to her skin, and more precise. Each line’s glow not encroaching on those around it, nor casting light on Tala’s surroundings.

They were more detailed than ever, looking like nothing so much her own skin, made completely of light and formed perfectly to her. It was close enough to her contours that it was actually inside her elk-leathers, rather than being projected outside the garment.

Huh, maybe the candidate I targeted thought he saw a mirror to his own power in me. Maybe that’s why he wasn’t a jerk?

-Yup. That makes sense.-

Tala ignored the edges of sarcasm in the artificial interface’s tone, returning to Thron’s question. “It’s… a lot.”

“I can imagine. Don’t forget to feed your sanctum. That should help.”

Tala had, in fact, forgotten. With relief, she grabbed large currents of her power and directed them around her iron defense and out into Kit.

The pressure lessened just a bit, but not down to anywhere near the levels she was used to.

“What now?”

“Now? We do what we can to get you ready. Your Pillar asked me to ensure that you were combat ready, but not hostile in appearance.”

Tala looked down at her hands, clad in what appeared to be gloves of manifest power. “How in zeme are we supposed to do that?”

Thron pulled out a small box. “With a gift from your master.” He hesitated, then shook his head. “Apologies, Pillar Be-thric asked that I not refer to him in that way. This is a gift from your Pillar.”

There was far more to unpack in that bit of speech than Tala had a mind for at the moment, so she simply took the small box. It opened on delicate hinges revealing a familiar little shape, along with a simple note on how to use the item.

Thron continued. “It is apparently another prize claimed by our Pillar in his forays around the wild humans to the north. He’s been keeping it in a high magic environment to maintain its magics, or so he said.”

Tala knew exactly what it was, and how to use it, but she still made a show of reading the note before placing her through-spike back at the base of her neck.

After she had pushed it into place, she mirrored the elk-leather’s self-cleaning onto the small circle of iron paint that the through-spike had isolated.

Tala then pulled away the through-spike, blew through the hole to clear it of the iron paint, and replaced it in the proper location, using a mirrored perspective through her bloodstar to put it back precisely in the small hole cleared of paint.

That done, the illusion settled into place around her.

Thron grinned. “Well, now. That is exactly what you needed!”

Suspiciously so, wouldn’t you say? But she didn’t say that. As much as she thought of Thron in a positive light as a new acquaintance, she did not need him becoming suspicious of her for any reason. His declarations of loyalty might be meaningful, but only time would tell.

So, instead of saying anything that she wished to say, Tala simply smiled and nodded. “Yes, this is exactly what I needed to best serve the House of Blood.”