Chapter 13: 13 - Proposal

Guard Captain Soren rubbed his forehead as he received the brief from the City Guard’s highest-level magical consultant. At low mithril, and Institute-educated, Marcus was no neophyte mage, and indeed had a prestigious career ahead of him. Soren could trust what he said. Which was exactly the problem.

“It was mostly illusory,” the boy was saying. “If not, it would have shattered every glass pane in the city and deafened anyone below silver rank.”

And wasn’t that a sobering statement? Bronze ranks were hardly the most durable sort, but they were well above the typical civilian in constitution. A spell that could shatter the eardrums of an entire city, including the bulk of their bronze rankers, was terrifying to consider even in the abstract.

“What tier was it?”

“I could only speculate.”

“Do so.”

The boy scratched the stubble on his chin as he debated internally. “Eleventh? Twelfth?” he finally settled on.

Soren sat back in his chair, stunned. Level 1000 marked the defining line for Titled. Eleventh tier magic put the spellcaster above that by a hundred levels. Twelfth, by two hundred. Essentially a full ranking tier.

“At least,” Marcus added. “It might be higher. Maybe much higher. I simply can’t make an accurate analysis. That level of spell is way beyond me. I just know it’s something I’ve never seen before. Even my instructors couldn’t have managed it, barring perhaps one of the Archmages.”

Somehow, he didn’t think Marcus had underestimated the spell. He hadn’t seen it himself, locked up in his office, but he’d heard it. Heavens above, he’d heard it. “So we have an unknown Titled in the city. A mage of at least Institute Archmage quality.”

Titled. It wasn’t a strictly accurate descriptor, since Titled were recognized by a Kingdom—or by the elves, demons, or dwarves—but the term had become shorthand for ‘absurdly powerful individual’.

“Power,” Marcus corrected. “The power of an archmage. Not necessarily quality.”

Soren didn’t comment on the pedantry. “Do we need to be concerned?”

“I don’t believe so. The illusory aspect was intentional. He was…considerate. He wanted to impress but not cause damage. To add to the festival. A rogue element, but a friendly one, or at least one without malicious intent.”

He?

Soren realized only then that he had a suspect in mind. And it wasn’t a ‘he’. An image of bored red eyes and a slight, condescending frown filled his thoughts.

Was it coincidence? Throwing around and detaining mithril ranks was impressive, but Prismarche had at least six orichalcum-ranks and a Titled inside its borders. The feat didn’t qualify as something that woman alone was capable of. She had just been in the right place at the right time to mete out justice.

That said, only one of those individuals was a mage, and he didn’t fit the description.

Soren rubbed his temples. “At least the city got a show out of it,” he said sardonically. “If we find—him,” he corrected at the last second, “we ought to thank him.”

“I’m not sure we should approach that person at all,” Marcus said bluntly. “Malicious intent or not, Titled are dangerous. Especially one who hasn’t announced himself.”

Soren grunted. He certainly wouldn’t offer disagreement there.

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Saffra stared at the demon in the alleyway, staff raised to the sky, the aftermath of her spell still booming through the city.

It had been coincidence she’d spotted the long, sharp ears of the woman who’d helped her earlier—who she owed her life to. Saffra had been wandering the crowds, feeling satisfied from her successful mission, when Vivi’s distinctive figure had pulled her gaze. She’d felt guilty stalking her around, but her curiosity had been piqued. Just who was this woman?

She’d clearly had a few drinks. It was comically easy to follow her without being noticed. Why did the lack of alertness make her feel so much more comfortable? Probably because someone who could let their guard down wasn’t that bad of a person. It wasn’t a trait purely reserved for scum to always be looking over one’s shoulder, but it did trend that way.

So she’d prowled after the demon mage.

Then…this had happened.

An explosion of branching, prismatic fire that engulfed the sky as far as the eye could see. Whose thunder grabbed her by the arms and shook her like a ragdoll. It was cacophonous. Cataclysmic. She would have sworn that the heavens themselves had descended to demonstrate their might and wonder in awesome pageantry.

And the small demon mage in front of her had been the source.

Saffra’s mistake was instinctively pulling together a defensive spell. She hadn’t been able to help herself, not with the world ending right above her. She was paranoid and quick to throw up defensive magic. Could she be blamed? Those instincts kept her alive.

Sensing magic, the demon mage’s attention had instantly snapped toward her, and thus caught her at the mouth of the alleyway. It all happened in a handful of seconds, too fast to retreat around the corner.

They held each other’s gazes for a moment.

Saffra might have bolted in some other circumstance. Run for her life. But despite how terrifying this woman was, something her instincts recognized, she herself had never been scared. Despite how she could slap mithril-ranks around like low-bronze apprentices, this woman wasn’t dangerous. Not in the way that mattered. Saffra—the higher-order, more logical part of her brain, the part that made her her—had never feared Vivi.

So she stepped out around the alleyway’s corner, put one hand on her hip and pointed with the other, and announced:

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“I want you to teach me. I’m your apprentice now.”

The words caught Saffra herself by surprise as much as they did the demon mage.

They both took a moment to be stunned.

Saffra’s cheeks heated up, but she was in bluster mode now.

She took a stab in the dark, phrased in an ambiguous enough manner she could deflect if needed. “I know about Daisy and her cat, by the way.”

Vivi’s eyes widened, and Saffra wondered if that meant what she thought it did. Though she didn’t know what she thought herself. Had Vivi been involved, somehow, with Monocle’s rescue? She didn’t see how that could be possible.

She had only said the words to throw the woman off, to be honest.

“I’m partially Institute trained,” Saffra announced as her credentials, realizing a second later maybe she shouldn’t have, since expulsion suggested some condemning things about her. “I know a fifth tier spell even though I’m level three hundred and eighty-five.” She could likely pass the gold-rank exam. She had intended on taking the one coming up in two weeks. “I won’t be a bother, I can take care of myself. I’ve been living alone for years. I can cook, clean, run errands, take notes, and do anything else you might need of an apprentice.”

Trying to sell the idea to this woman mortified her. She didn’t know why she was. She hadn’t planned this. The words had blurted out of her mouth, and now she was just attempting to support them.

The woman stared at her, and Saffra felt the heat on her face intensify. She felt ridiculous. At least she didn’t outright laugh at her, which would have been deserved.

And really, even if an orichalcum rank—after the spell she’d just seen, she knew the woman was probably Titled, but she couldn’t digest that reality, and so settled on the more comfortable yet still incredible ‘orichalcum’—was willing to apprentice some girl she didn’t know, why would it be Saffra?

She really was talented, but not the sort of talented that would impress an orichalcum. She really was Institute educated, but she’d been expelled. The only aspect where she stood out, sadly, was the mundane one. She was much more independent than most thirteen-year-old girls. She had traveled across half the human kingdoms and knew what the world was like, intimately so.

Not to mention how rudely she’d gone about it. ‘I’m your apprentice now’? That happened a lot, where she said things like that out of—not a defense mechanism, she refused to call it that, since she didn’t need defense mechanisms.

She lifted her chin higher, readying herself for the obvious answer. Why was she so invested, now, despite not having planned this, and knowing what the woman’s response would be?

“I doubt I’d make a good teacher,” the demon woman mused. “And I’ll be leaving the city tomorrow morning. Don’t you have friends here, or teammates?”

The words were so unexpected Saffra almost failed to understand them. Because the mage’s immediate response should have been something along the lines of ‘is this a joke?’ or ‘you can’t be serious,’ even if she had been kind enough to not outright laugh at her.

“Um. N-Not really,” she responded, caught off guard. “I don’t really...” She cut off and corrected herself. “People don’t make friends with me easily.”

Which was their fault, obviously.

Even if she did have friends, she would be idiotic not to take an apprenticeship under a mage of this caliber. It might be superior to an Institute education. And seeing how that door was closed to her, this might be her only remaining hope for growth as a mage.

Which, now that she thought about it, explained why she was so desperate. Nothing in existence could make her beg, but for a second, she considered whether she should.

“What’s the tier five spell you know?” Vivi asked, again catching Saffra by surprise.

She grew flustered. Tier five was nothing. [Farsight], tier six. [Invisibility], tier seven. [Blink], tier nine. And likely some form of [Greater Telekinesis], after she thought about that encounter in the Glade. All of them silently incanted and their spell signatures masked.

Never mind how this woman had lit up the entire sky with magical fireworks, a minute earlier. What monstrous tier of magic had that been?

Her best spell was a tier zero [Illuminate] in comparison.

The self-doubt didn’t show in her voice. She announced with total confidence, “[Fireball]. A fully fledged one, not some imitation. My specialty is elemental magic, and I know tier four ice and fire spells too, despite not having reached level four hundred yet.”

“[Fireball]?” The demon considered this, then nodded. “I suppose my specialty is also war magic.”

Idly, she raised a hand, and Saffra felt magic fill the air. For the first time, she saw the woman cast without suppressing the visual indicators—which was something few mages could do anyway. A spell diagram etched itself into reality in glowing white symbols.

Circles described a spell’s function using the language of magic itself. They were disgustingly complex, and she doubted anyone truly understood every glyph and how they combined, even for basic spells. Spell circles weren’t even consistent between usages. Mostly the same, yes, but a painter couldn’t paint the same artwork twice, not identically, not down to the exact brush strokes.

One comparison her instructors liked to use was that casting spells was like ‘writing poetry in a language you only half understood’. But even with fake words, there was a sort of intuition, a feel for flow and rhythm, that made a good or bad mage.

Or another metaphor, equally preferred by the instructors: Magic was a wild beast, a half-tamed lion, and spell circles were the commands a mage barked at it. A good tamer was almost always obeyed, but that didn’t mean they understood how their words were being interpreted in the head of a wild beast.

Learning the fundamentals was important, but when it came down to it, magic was more art than science.

Saffra looked at Vivi’s spell circle. Spell circles had a certain flavor to them, a handwriting, a style. Lady Vivi’s was old. The design gave her the impression of something she would find in a dusty scroll in the corner of the Institute’s sprawling library. Not ancient, but antiquated, something her grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother might have cast.

But old didn’t mean poorly executed. Saffra wasn’t new to magic—she had developed the talent early, casting her first spell at six years old. Seven years wasn’t much experience compared to some mages, especially elvish or demonic ones, but she knew how to read and interpret magic.

She wasn’t surprised Lady Vivi’s spell was so perfectly executed as to be painful to look at, in that sort of way someone aspiring toward competency herself might look at a masterpiece and despair. First impressions of arcane diagrams were more like those gotten from a painting: there weren’t indicators that a painting was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, not objective ones, but mastery was obvious at first glance no matter the style.

The spell activated. A truly staggering ball of fire spawned in the center of the alleyway—then disappeared before Saffra even had a chance to be horrified.

“[Dispel],” Vivi said, casually flicking her wrist.

Cast in an instant, not that Saffra could be surprised at this point.

She knew the demon hadn’t done any of it to show off. She’d cast ninth-tier magic in front of her already. Obscenely complex ninth-tier magic too, since spatial magics were infamously unwieldy.

She had simply been recalling what the spell [Fireball] was like. Reminiscing, perhaps. And maybe revealing the spell circle for Saffra’s own sake. But fifth-tier magic was so far behind this mage that it was probably quaint to her.

Saffra had been so fascinated by the display that she’d briefly forgotten what they’d been talking about.

“I expect I’ll be occupied with my own business, so I’m not sure how much time I could spare,” the woman said. “And I doubt I would make a good teacher. But I’m in need of an assistant, I suppose. A trustworthy one. The world has changed while I was…occupied, for the past many decades. I believe you’re both a young woman worth training, and someone I can trust. So if it’s your request, and if you understand those limitations, I would be inclined to accept. Are you sure it’s what you want?”

She suspected the long, stunned silence and her stutter betrayed the aloofness of her response.

“Y-Yes. Of course.”

She probably should say more, but she genuinely didn’t know what.

It didn’t make sense.

This orichalcum rank—quite likely higher—had said yes to teaching her?

Why?!