Chapter 53: 53. Road Blocks

Excerpt from the Miluran folk-tale, ‘The Song of Heroes.’

“Descend upon us, shining Angel, and shroud us in moonlight.
Ascend up from us, shining Angel, and bless us with your flight.”

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After Yenna’s meal with Suee, the rest of the night passed without incident. 

The group didn’t stay in town for very long—they were still about a week out from the capital, and Aroearoe insisted they make haste. The head of House Deepstar had insisted that she not share the specifics of her plan until they were much closer to the capital, apparently worried that there was still time for accidentally—or intentionally—leaking secrets to the enemy.

Yenna was also not welcomed back into the carriage, though she hadn’t expected to get to stay in there for the rest of the ride. Evidently, the Captain and Muut were invited, though the pair declined. This left the priestess Suee and Sergeant Myuu riding with the head, and Chime bearing her usual set of passengers. They had passed through another small town without stopping, this one surrounded by a rare patch of flat land, only to stop for the night right at the edge of the fields of maize¹.

The following morning, barely after dawn, the entire crew ate a hurried breakfast and departed. Hirihiri brought out loaves of bread she had saved from their stop at Vener, having co-opted Tirk and another expedition member Yenna hadn’t learned the name of to slice and toast the long loaves. With toast still in hand, Yenna clambered back onto Chime’s back alongside Mayi and Jiin, and off they all went.

The gorgeous view of a foreign country whipping by at high speed was ruined somewhat by a strange tension between Jiin and Mayi. While the former seemed to be in high spirits, chatting amicably about this and that, the latter was distinctly taciturn. The doctor, usually insightful though sparse in her commentary, was instead muttering only the vaguest of responses—grunts, nods, quiet ‘mhm’s, while her sight drifted out and away. Yenna thought it somewhat ridiculous that the tension never bothered Jiin. Was the stonecarver that implacable, or had she simply not noticed the change? Mayi was especially quiet as Jiin recounted Yenna’s exercise for gathering magic for herself and Demvya—the mage felt like the two would need to sort out their feelings on the matter sooner rather than later.

—

The next stop for the expedition crew was not an intended one. Trailing through a mountain pass, Chime screeched to a halt with a deep, resounding gong—an expletive, as far as Yenna understood it. Their disgruntled shouts were shared by the rest of the crew, followed shortly by the nervous whinnies as the horses pulling the Head’s carriage struggled to stop in time. After everyone had calmed down and put away weapons drawn in anticipation of some attack, Yenna was able to hop up from her seat and see the issue.

The road had been relatively wide, but it narrowed down to a smaller point before widening out again—at least, it should have. Instead, a landslide from one of the neighbouring slopes had entirely buried the road ahead in stony rubble. Chime could have navigated directly over it, though at a snail’s pace—Aroearoe’s carriage would be entirely out of luck. The captain called everyone to hop off a moment, as they figured out what to do.

Yenna looked up—the sky was relatively cloud-free, the sun shining warmly on them. Midday, just like Suee’s vision. Yenna turned to her left, and tried her best not to jump when she spotted the priestess standing beside her.

“D-Did you foresee this obstacle in our path?” Yenna managed to avoid taking more than a step back from the priestess in surprise.

“No. My gift is in clarity, not quantity—if I were to foresee all, then where would be the fun in surprises?” Suee gave the tiniest hint of a smile. “You will have time to deliver your lesson. We will not overcome this obstacle.”

Right on cue, Muut’s voice boomed out—Eone was busy talking to her mother.

“Everyone! We’re stopping for lunch! The landslide’s too deep for us to clear the path, so we need to search for another way around. Stretch your legs while you can—you’ve all got an hour!”

An hour wasn’t exactly what Yenna had hoped for in a lesson, but it would have to do. The mage watched as Mysilia’s tiny form flew up into the air and all but vanished—presumably, she had until the mereu’s scouting mission was complete.

Unsurprisingly, Tirk found Yenna immediately.

“Master! It’s lesson time, isn’t it!” The boy beamed. “I already told Chime, but they can’t turn around quite yet—wait, we should go over to their head!”

Yenna gave a nod and sent the boy ahead. Calling over Mayi and Jiin, the group of them made their way down the length of Chime’s body up to the silupker’s face. Their serene expression had been fixed on the massive pile of loose stone ahead of them, though they quickly turned and greeted Yenna and company on arrival.

The mage mentally kicked herself for slacking on her studies of the silupker language—she had been rather too caught up in cross-referencing more arcane matters with her newfound magical abilities. It always felt hard to concentrate on linguistics when the puzzle of magic was sitting right there—no matter how badly she wished to learn, to facilitate her friend, her mind was hardwired to crave magic and all information pertaining to it. Yenna promised herself that her next bit of in-transit reading would be regarding the silupker ‘tongue’.

“We got a new guest!” Jiin nearly jumped in surprise when she noticed Suee, and Mayi took an unreasonable amount of time trying to see her—Yenna wondered if Mayi’s more mundane nature compared to everyone else played some part.

Suee gave a deep bow, her front legs crossing elegantly. Yenna, rather more worried about their strict time limit, hurried everyone into position. With her back to the roadblock of stone, the mage’s students sat before her on either side of Chime’s head. Suee sat to a side, perpendicular to Yenna, though closest to Tirk. The mage wondered quietly—were they all laid out exactly as Suee had predicted? The idea of this meeting, this moment, being fixed in the future as an inevitability felt wrong to Yenna somehow, as though she never had the choice to turn it down. Putting the thought aside, it was time for the lesson.

“Who can remember what we learned last?” Yenna began to retrieve her supplies, an idea forming in the back of her head as she did.

“Triangle practice.” Tirk pantomimed being sick. “Almost as boring as circle practice… Then lots of hard-to-think-about stuff.”

Their last lesson had been just before arriving in Hilbar, being little more than practice and theory. It was, as Tirk would put it, the ‘boring’ stuff—he wouldn’t be the first, and likely wouldn’t be the last of Yenna’s students to believe so. Unfortunately, it was the metaphorical glue that let an initiate of the arcane do all the fun and exciting parts of magecraft—not just casting spells, but controlling them and shaping them to purpose. Still, Yenna had a mind to do something slightly different today.

“Today, I would like to try and teach you about counter-spells.” 

Yenna placed a set of chalkboards in front of herself, conjuring a small piece of chalk for each of them. After a moment, Yenna drew out a chalkboard and created another piece of chalk for Suee—the priestess gave a nod of thanks, though she didn’t take it.

“Counter-magic is something of a self-defense measure.” Yenna picked up one of the chalkboards and drew a wide circle as she spoke. “It is also pertinent for safety when testing new spells or experimenting with unknown magical mechanics—countless lives have been saved from the simple knowledge of knowing how to bring a spell to a halt.”

“Oh! Like what I did in the barn!” Tirk gave a big grin.

“What you did in the barn was…” Yenna thought back to it—Tirk straddling the line between reality and the realm of stillness with an extraordinary array of Av symbols, a display that didn’t seem to Yenna like it should have worked at all, “... fascinating, and similar, I suppose.”

Yenna put her chalkboard down on the ground between everyone—it was a simple circle, the same one Yenna had used to demonstrate the light spell. With a few flicks of her wrist, the circle copied itself onto everyone else’s chalkboards. Another snap of the fingers, and all of them lit up with magic.

“Now, this is a very simple challenge. I want you to break this spell. Whatever mean’s necessary– ah, but don’t break my chalkboards!” Yenna gave a chuckle, and everyone laughed along at her joke. The mage wasn’t joking—she thought back to an over-enthusiastic student who had snapped her chalkboard in half as a solution some years back. “Give it a think, and then we’ll compare ideas.”

Everyone thought for a moment—Yenna used a quick spell to hover Chime’s chalkboard up, and another to momentarily affix the stick of chalk to one of their antennae. I should teach them how to manipulate telekinetically as soon as possible—I can’t even begin to imagine how Chime will do with the more complex somatic gestures!

Mayi was the first to lower her chalkboard, an idea solidified in her head. Tirk followed suit shortly after, while Jiin and Chime took a few moments more to think. Suee still hadn’t touched her board—either she had no intention of joining the lesson, or this exercise was simply below her.

“The simplest way would be to just break the line, right?” Mayi held up the board and ran one of her fingers through the chalk—the light quickly flickered and died. “The circle keeps the magic in, so a break in the circle would be an open wound for magic to bleed from.”

“Macabre description aside,” Yenna nodded, “That’s a perfectly elegant solution. Did anyone else have something different?”

Tirk nodded. “Like this?”

He tapped the board to his head, a quiet tok sound marking his horn making contact, then showed the group. The magic circle had faded, though the symbol was unbroken.

“That’s… Um, priestess? What do you make of it?” Yenna turned to Suee.

“Hmm.”

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“...Hmm?”

“Yes, that is what I said.” The priestess nodded. “Hmm.”

“M-Moving on. Chime? Jiin?”

Chime gave a series of quick jingle-jangle bell sounds—an excited positive. They drew an Av symbol right in the centre of the circle, and the light blew away as though dust on the wind. Jiin mumbled something in mock annoyance.

“My idea was th’ same as Chime’s. ‘Cept I was gonna do it like this.” Jiin drew an Av symbol on one side of the circle, prompting much the same response. The stonecarver grinned a wide smile.

“Well well! Quite the array of answers, then.” Yenna nodded emphatically, the tip of her hat bobbing with her. “You’ve all grasped the most basic concept of counter-spells… though, um, Tirk, I’m not sure tapping unknown spells with your horn is particularly safe.”

“Aw. Alright, Master Yenna…” Tirk frowned a little, putting a hand to his horn.

“Now, the basics are all well and good, until you realise that anything dangerous enough for you to consider countering won’t let you get close enough to simply break a line or draw an Av. At the same time, the principles remain.”

Yenna wiped her chalkboard clean and began to draw a more complicated circle. Placing this one back on the ground in front of her, the mage powered it with the flick of her wrist. The symbols on the chalkboard began to move, a glowing double hovering slightly above the black surface. They rotated slowly at first, but it was clear to all involved that they were getting faster and glowing brighter with every passing moment.

“As you can see, I’ve created a rather dangerous chain reaction—this spell is absorbing nearby energy to power itself into a simple, protected heat spell, yet I didn’t set any upper bounds on its collection or heat capacity. If we do nothing, it will explode.” Yenna smirked—this was one of her favourite demonstrations for new students.

“Wait, explode?” Mayi’s eyes went wide. “Yenna, are you serious?”

“Deathly. Now—don’t worry about the specifics of the spellcraft, just let me cast the spells. What should I do to stop it?” Yenna watched as the group became more animated—except for Suee, who the mage guessed could already see the outcome.

“Cut the edge of the circle!” The doctor pointed to the outer edge, and with the tip of her finger Yenna did exactly that. An ominous grinding noise issued from the circle, and a warmth filled the immediate area. “W-What? Why didn’t it work?”

“At the current level of magical collection, a hole in the side of the circle is slowing down its overall build-up but limiting its control—it will take longer to explode, but its reactions to further interference will become… unpredictable.”

“Yenna’s way too calm about this, eh?” Jiin gave a nervous laugh. “Our master mage’d be all stutterin’ and nerves if this was a real problem, eh?”

“I fear our time is running short, Jiin!” Yenna gave a knowing smile. “I can protect us from the worst of it, but it won’t be pleasant! Come now—ideas?”

The circle was glowing a dull red now, the symbols blurred in their speed.

“Would breaking the chalkboard help now?” Jiin eyed Yenna, almost pleading.

“The spell has disentangled itself from its physical counterpart—it cannot be physically interacted with any more. Perhaps if we had acted sooner…?”

Chime gave a terse set of clinks and clanks. Yenna understood the basic gist—smother it like an open fire.

“How shall I smother it? With dirt, water?” The mage looked around expectantly.

“Dirt and water wouldn’t help, right?” Mayi piped up. “You would have to… aha! A tourniquet! Stem the flow of magic into it!”

Between them, the spell was starting to make a rather disconcerting rumbling noise—it looked like a glowing orange disc, wobbling and unstable.

“How?” Yenna tried her best not to smirk too widely—she failed.

“A bigger circle ‘round it? Like a dam t’ block a flood.” Jiin hopped up into a crouching position, evidently ready to move. The entire group breathed a sigh of relief as that idea turned into a working spell, reducing the dangerous glow somewhat. Still, it wasn’t enough.

“Oh, hm.” Yenna frowned. “I’m pushing ambient magic away from it, but it’s still catalyzing from somewhere… U-Um, let’s see here…”

“Yenna, you haven’t, uh, lost control of this thing, have you?” Mayi began to back away—Jiin subtly interposed herself between the unstable spell and the doctor.

“Ah, no, I can stop it at any time, it’s just… hm, a little more active than usual.” Yenna waved Mayi’s concerns away. She hadn’t meant to ruin the illusion, but it was getting slightly out of hand. The mage used a tried-and-true method—blasting the spell away with a wave of magic. Instead, it merely fuelled the flame—Yenna squeaked in surprise as the dull red circle rattled to life and began to glow white hot.

Tirk leapt up and put his head down—Yenna’s eyes grew wide, suspecting he was seriously going to hit the spell with his horn, but Suee put a hand on her shoulder to stop her from moving. Ready to intervene if necessary, Yenna watched as Tirk clasped his hands together—this time watching as closely as possible.

A sliver of magic slipped into Tirk through his horn, almost unnoticeable in its subtlety. It travelled into his being, empowering him—a spell circle appeared around his hands like a halo, and he murmured a quiet phrase.

“Silver light of moon at midnight, grant us calm as succor’s balm.” Tirk’s voice was steady, mature, his careful cadence unlike the boy’s usual high-energy demeanour. This was definitely something else controlling him—that magic that came in, as though it had turned an unseen corner, was connected directly to the spell in his hands through Tirk’s horn.

Then, a shadow fell over the rumbling spell. The glowing disc froze in place, then fell apart into miniscule white flakes that scattered on the wind. Tirk opened his eyes fully, blinked a few times and looked around, confused.

“...Wow!” The boy smiled, and then jumped at Suee, hugging her. The priestess awkwardly held her arms up for a moment before giving him a pat on the back. “Thanks for your help, priestess!” 

“I did nothing, except encourage what is inside you. You are destined for a great purpose, Tirk of Yvild.” Suee gently pried the boy off of her, folding her hands back into her lap once again.

After a beat, a realisation clicked for Yenna. “Did you do that to my spell, Suee? That was dangerous!”

“Yes. I knew you wouldn’t recognise my intervention, and that no harm would come from it. You are possessed of a guardian angel, after all.”

Despite her annoyance, Yenna turned to look at Tirk—as did the rest of the group. This strange boy with the magic horn, with strange power flowing through him… just what was Tirk? Another day, another mystery—this time, Yenna would make sure to find out.

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¹ - Similar in appearance to the corn of your world, Miluran maize is slightly more bulbous, with finer kernels. A popular staple of the Miluran commoner’s diet, this useful crop has a variety of uses that make it ideal—it can be roasted, boiled, ground into flour, fermented, and even made into a simple glue.