Mercury Mind (The Downfall Saga Book 1) (26 page)

“You’re looking ... well,” said Donovan flatly.

“I ... look ... He’s the. I didn’t intend—”

“Things were said that we didn’t mean—”

“I wish I could take it back.”

“It’s okay. Let’s forget about it and move on.”

Kort gave a nod, trying to clear the lump in his throat. “Sign it,” he said, raising his right arm, with his forearm parallel to his body. He saw the look of confusion on Donovan’s face. “It’s something me and my brothers do. You see, where we come from, most people sign their names with an ‘x’. Pressing our arms together like this is our way of making an unbreakable promise. So don’t do it unless you mean it.”

“I meant every word.” Donovan raised his right arm and bumped forearms with Kort.

The two of them broke into smiles, and gave each other a tight hug. When they released each other, they saw the other people in the room staring at them.

“That’s it,” said Ravyn. “You can make up just like that, after what happened. Shouldn’t you talk it out?”

Donovan looked at Kort with a wry smile. “No words are necessary.”

“W
hat did I miss yesterday?” asked Donovan.

Donovan sat beside Kort, across from Delaney and Ravyn at breakfast the next morning, a stack of pancakes piled high on his plate.

“Nothing much,” said Kort, shoveling food into his mouth.

“Nothing much?” said Ravyn incredulously. “Professor Moncha spent the entire class lecturing us on how unrealistic our beliefs about magic are, and what would happen if we tried to do some of those things in real life.”

“There was that,” said Kort, “but otherwise nothing much.”

“What was the craziest thing that someone did?” asked Donovan.

Kort snorted and nearly spray partly chewed food all over the table. “She wouldn’t mention names, but apparently one student lost control and literally leveled the entire city.”

“How can you think that’s funny?” said Ravyn. “Think about how many people died.”

“None, by my count,” said Kort.

Ravyn gave him a glare which he missed while popping a sausage into his mouth. When it became obvious that he was too engrossed by his food, she gave up and turned back to Donovan.

“Most students weren’t too bad,” she said, “they just exaggerated what could be done, and kept it up for longer than is possible.”

“How do we know what’s possible?” asked Donovan.

“She’s going to talk about that in class today.”

***

“P
lease take your seats, class,” said Professor Moncha.

After everyone had settled down into their seats, Professor Moncha let the silence hang in the air.

“I have received some disturbing news,” she said. “There was an incident earlier this week. A student lost control of his gift which caused two students to get seriously injured. Now don’t worry, both students were healed and made a full recovery.”

Donovan and Kort slouched down in their chairs. Professor Moncha may not have mentioned them by name, but their missing hair made it obvious that something had happened, plus Caddaric had already spread the story of their fight to everybody in the class.

“Now, this was not the first time that a student lost control this year, but was definitely the worst case,” she continued. “I had planned to move on to more advanced topics, but clearly we need to spend more time on learning control.”

Kort started gently banging his head against the table. He knew that the rest of the class would give him a hard time for preventing them from doing something more interesting.

“This incident highlights an interesting phenomenon. Losing control allowed the student to do something more advanced than anything they could consciously make happen. Your magic comes from within, but your mind help regulate its use. Without this filter, you put yourself and those around you in danger. This uncontrolled release of magical energy usually takes an elemental form. The person who loses control also risks ramifications from overexerting themselves.

Ravyn raised her hand and waited for Professor Moncha to acknowledge her.

“How do we know if we’re exceeding our limits?” asked Ravyn.

“Excellent question. As you practice with your magic you will learn what effects it has on your body. Generally you’ll feel cold or weak, a headache may develop and you’ll have trouble focusing your thoughts. These are all warning signs. As strange as it may sound, your physical body will tell you when you’re overexerting yourself. If you ignore these warning signs and keep using your magic then you risk permanent consequences like a debilitating cough, holes in your memory, falling into a coma or even death.”

With these sobering thoughts still bouncing around in his mind, Donovan headed to the library after lunch. He found a book which mentioned the creation of Clachwards which he had been putting off reading for a while because it read like a two hundred page long recipe on their creation.

He took the book over to one of the small tables under the blue glowing light and started skimming through the pages. Twenty minutes later, he realized that he hadn’t retained anything that he had been reading and, with a groan, flipped back to the first page. Taking out a piece of paper from his pack, he forced himself to take notes to make sure that he was actually paying attention to what he was reading.

The first thirty pages gave intricate instructions on how to identify the proper bowl to mix the ingredients in, and how to clean the bowl before beginning to mix them. He marked the page he was on, and flipped through the book hoping to find a summary or at least a glossary, but had no luck.

A dull ache grew behind his eyes as he read his way through the next chapter discussing historical changes to various measuring systems and how to convert from each one to the system used in the book.

Finally he reached a point in the book where it outlined how to gather and identify the necessary components for constructing a Clachward. Donovan didn’t recognize many of the components but felt it unnecessary to take the time to look up each one individually at this time. He did find one entry of interest. Each Clachward required a crushed diamond. Ignoring a complicated looking diagram of a contraption used to check the clarity of the diamond, he read about how large of a diamond was required depending upon its shape. After staring at a formula which included the temperature and buoyancy of room temperature water in the location where you were measuring the diamond, he closed the book in frustration and returned it to the shelf. The one thing that he had learned was how complicated and expensive it must be to create a Clachward, let alone an army of them. With that in mind, he waited until he was doing the Vanora with Osmont the next morning to broach the subject.

They stood out in the courtyard which they scraped free of snow at the start of every one of Professor Severn’s classes. Osmont was finally satisfied with Donovan’s technique and graduated him to an intermediary Vanora. They both held a long, uneven stick in their hand, which threw off his balance during every movement.

“I was reading a book in the library about the creation of Clachwards,” said Donovan. “Are you familiar with their creation?”

“Not in any great detail,” said Osmont, making a quarter turn while stabbing downwards with the stick at a relaxed pace. “I know that it’s complicated and expensive to create one.”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking about. Who has the resources and time to create so many of them?”

“The question you should be asking is why they were created. Some of the older students have been sent to patrol the forest at night as part of their training. I’ve lost track of the number that they’ve managed to eliminate. You could buy most of the country for what it must have cost to create them and yet we still haven’t figured out their purpose.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

“No more than when they head out into the real world. There were a couple of broken bones during the first Downfall, but the Clachwards are docile otherwise.”

“Unless you’re me.”

“Unless you’re you.”

They focused on their movements for the next minute. They were doing a series of short stutter steps while blocking attacks from both sides which would take a few seconds at a normal speed, but took a full minute to complete.

“This is going to sound arrogant,” said Donovan, “but could someone have created them to attack me.”

“I can think of many easier ways to kidnap a young boy, but I can’t deny that they seem to have a connection to you.”

“If they attack me again, how should I defend myself?”

“Run.”

“Very funny.”

“You won’t be able to kill one. It takes an intense light to destroy one. I’d be lucky to be able to kill a dozen of them before I had to rest and regain my strength. If you can’t run away, then you need to create as much light as possible. Sunlight works best. A rich, white magical light works almost as well, but firelight will work in a pinch.”

***

T
he next few months passed routinely. As Kort became comfortable with reading, he started coming to the library with Ravyn and Donovan on Saturday nights. He found a book on helping sick animals which he planned to finish reading by the time he went home to his family’s farm. He signed the book out of the library and carried it with him everywhere he went, and regaled them with the medicinal properties of various herbs and plants that he could find around the farm.

Professor Cleary’s class finally reached modern times and they learnt about how Richard Kelvin had won the throne during a rebellion some three hundred years ago, ushering in the most peaceful reign in the history of Rourke as the crown continued to be passed down to his descendants. Caddaric basked in the attention that the other students gave him, and never missed an opportunity to tell a story about his ancestors.

It took Ravyn awhile to learn the fundamentals of Arithmetic, but once she did, she quickly became one of the top students in the class. Kort started asking her for help with his homework, which freed up more of Donovan’s time which he spent down in the library.

Professor Severn’s class became almost bearable as the weather warmed up. After spending months having to scrape the snow off the courtyard before they could begin their lessons, and then alternating between performing intense activities which left them covered in sweat and shivering from the cold while he slowly explained what everybody was doing wrong, the warm weather was a blessing. They had finished their basic training with the staff and had moved on to learning how to work together as a single unit. He had scheduled a tournament for early March, where the students would spar with each other to determine who was best in the class. Ravyn and Caddaric were excited since they were the favorites to win the tournament, but Donovan dreaded being shown up as one of the worst in the class.

The school had also scheduled a ball for early March. As wizards, many of them would spend considerable time with society’s elite and would find themselves in a variety of social gatherings. Students were required to attend classes taught by Mama B on the weekends to learn about etiquette in various social functions.

On the afternoon of the tournament, Donovan headed to the library while the rest went to Professor Higgin’s Arithmetic class. Despite all the time that he’d spent in the library, he’d only read a small fraction of the books. With no detailed reference system to guide him, it was difficult to find books on a specific topic. He had found nothing on Blood magic, not that he had really expected to find any in a library accessible to first year students, but he had looked nonetheless. He had spent a considerable amount of time trying to find anything related to the odd ways that his Gift worked, or didn’t work as the case may be. He also learned about the creation and use of Clachwards, and could not find any reason why they seemed to be attracted to him, unless someone was building them specifically to find him and bring him to a specific location.

The weakness of his power was nothing extraordinary, but he hadn’t found any mentions of a wizard scrambling up a shear wall, nor resisting another’s healing.

The books consistently talked about how magic has an outward focus. The books described how the Brothers had created magic, along with the rest of the world, to allow its inhabitants to continue their endeavors. It could be used to create or alter the world around you, but wouldn’t effect yourself, nor could it be used to unmake anything. You could lift somebody else off of the ground, but never yourself, not even if you tried pushing against the ground below you.

Healing worked the same way. A healer could close up a serious wound on another person, but couldn’t heal even a shallow cut on themselves.

Taking a break from his normal routine, he walked over to a small section of the history books which focused on famous wizards. A red leather book with a golden dragon on the spine caught his eye. The title on the front said
Fantastic Tales of Famous Wizards
. Hoping for an enjoyable read, he retired to his usual table. Opening the cover, he skimmed through the table of contents and decided to read about Geoffrey the Glutton, hoping that it was a humorous tale. Flipping to the appropriate page he began to read about Geoffrey.

Geoffrey had a hard life growing up in a town called Gallant until one day he found out that he could become a wizard. Heading to Haven to study, he quickly found that he was the worst wizard in the class. He couldn’t do any complicated spells and even the simple ones had a tendency to fizzle out on him. All the other students made fun of him, but he continued to approach each day with an unbridled enthusiasm because he knew that this day would be different from the previous ones.

The one thing that Geoffrey couldn’t stand was bullies. So one day, he came across Harold, who was the best wizard in the class, making fun of a poor waif of a boy. Geoffrey intervened and told him to stop, and Harold pushed Geoffrey to the ground. The book went on to explain in great detail, how Geoffrey kept standing back up only to be knocked down again in a different way by Harold, sometimes with his fists, but usually using magic. Each time Geoffrey would pause while he was on the ground, and his wounds would miraculously heal, before standing up again.