Chapter 15. Authority

A fireball came down from the eastern lip of the bowl before I’d finished my breath.

It was huge and unlike any of the tidy combat-scaled shapes the candidates around me had been throwing at each other for the last twenty minutes, but a round ball of compressed heat half the size of a cart, and it fell into the bowl trailing its own column of smoke behind it. Surprisingly, it was from Eydric, seemingly trying to kill everyone in a thirty-pace radius, myself included.

Did I hallucinate the no-killing rule?

The eleven candidates encircling me scattered in eleven different directions like a flock of birds. Two of them dove sideways, three threw barriers that were not going to be big enough to matter, and the rest just ran. I dropped flat and rolled hard to the south, the flag still clamped against my ribs under my tunic, and the fireball hit the centre of the bowl and went off almost immediately.

Heat washed over my back, but I kept rolling.

A boy on the far side of the bowl had been mid-cast when Eydric’s fireball arrived. His hands were halfway through a wind spell, and either the shockwave or the panic or both had torn the shape out of his control, and I saw the spell collapse in on itself and the mana go wrong.

It happens to any caster who loses focus mid-form. The mana doesn’t disappear and has nowhere to go but outward, and it went outward into him. He caught his own cast across the front of his tunic and the air around him ignited, and he started screaming.

Four of his teammates reached him at the same time, tackling, stripping at the burning fabric, throwing water glyphs and smothering with their cloaks.

I came up onto my knees and started to stand.

“Howl! Your hand!”

That was Rael, from my left, closer than he had any right to be. He had one arm extended toward me and the other already locked on Eydric’s wrist beside him, and in his palm was something I had never seen in my life: a small hollow lantern shape, carved from something pale, holding a single cold flame at the centre of it that was not behaving like fire.

The flame was blue and still.

“Give me your hand, now, Howl!”

I lunged for him when the spell from a glyph hit me in the ribs from the right. A push spell, crude but strong, and it threw me sideways off my feet and sent me skidding across the dirt of the bowl about five paces from where Rael was standing. I rolled, got my hands under me, and looked up.

The boy who had done it was already forming a spell. Fire this time, orange and bright, compressed between both palms, and he was aiming it at my chest from about ten paces away. Close enough that I was not going to dodge it and far enough that I was not going to reach him before he released it.

Rael looked at him.

I had never seen him irritated before. Amused, yes. Theatrical, constantly. But the expression on his face in that second was something else entirely and then he spoke.

“STOP.“

…The word came out of Rael’s mouth but it was not… Rael’s voice. Something deep underneath it carried a resonance that hit the air and kept going.

For a fraction of a second I thought I was hearing what a lion might sound like if a lion could speak, though I had never heard one and was guessing from what I had been taught about house Solenne.

The boy immediately stopped. His spell died in his fingers and he stood there with his mouth slightly open and eyes unfocused, looking down at his own hands as if he could not remember what he had been doing with them.

Every other candidate in the bowl had frozen too. Not as completely, but enough that the spells in the air guttered and the shouting died and for about three seconds the only thing moving was the smoke.

I knew what that was. Every student of the great houses knew. Lionspeech. The Authority of House Solenne, carried in the blood, rare even among the family.

Rael’s words had landed on that boy’s will and pressed it flat, and the boy had no other choice but to obey.

Every great house carried something like this. The Vashren had their Combustion Sight. The Kaelith had their reading. These were the Deep Magics, Authorities that lived in the blood and could not be learned or stolen. You either carried one or you did not.

I had one too. The Aridis Authority was called Dreaming Eyes, and gave visions of probable futures, vivid enough to inhabit. I had even dreamed, once, when I was younger. Strange dreams full of places I had not been and faces I had not seen. And then, around ten or eleven, the dreams had stopped. I was not sure when exactly. One season I was dreaming and the next I was not.

“Howl, now!“

Rael’s voice, his real voice this time. The Authority’s effect was ending, and the victim’s hands were twitching, the confusion already clearing from his face.

I lunged. My fingers closed around Rael’s, and the lantern’s flame came up in a wash of white light, and the bowl around us filled with noise.

A dozen spells were firing at us at once. I saw the braid-girl’s fire lance and the redhead’s pale concussion and someone’s earth spear all moving toward the space I was standing in, but none of them were going to arrive in time, and I saw this because the light from Rael’s lantern was already lifting me off the ground.

The bowl stretched sideways around me. The fireball’s afterglow stretched with it. The eleven candidates stretched into long pale streaks along the edges of my vision and then dissolved, and then the trees stretched, and then the sky stretched, and then all three of us were inside a noise like wind moving through a crack in the world.

I could still feel Rael’s hand in mine, and Eydric’s arm pressing against my shoulder on the other side of Rael. That was all I could feel.

The world rebuilt itself around us in the space of a breath.

We came down hard in a patch of moss under a low stand of pines. My knees hit first, Eydric’s shoulder caught a root, and Rael landed on his feet. The lantern in his palm guttered once and went out. Whatever had been in it was spent.

The sound of spells was gone, and so was the chase. The air here smelled new, and the only noise was the three of us breathing.

Rael looked at me, then at the bulge under my tunic where the flag was.

“Well,” he said, slightly out of breath. “Hello, Howl Aridis. Welcome back. It seems we have a great deal to talk about.”

The gold text bloomed in front of my eyes the moment I’d caught my breath.

[+15 Mana Pool]

[Level Up!]

Level 22 > Level 23

+15 Mana Pool

[Mana Pool: 98/415 > 208/415]

A sudden jolt ran through me, my pool came up on its own, a steady rising weight behind my ribs that did not stop until it was more than halfway full, and at the same time the tiredness in my limbs simply lifted.

The ache behind my eyes was gone. The thinness in my channels was gone. My legs felt like legs again instead of the worn-out ropes they had been a minute ago, and whatever fatigue I had been carrying out of that bowl was simply gone.

Every level up felt like this.

I let out a long breath and felt my shoulders drop for the first time in twenty minutes.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“Catch!”

Something sailed at my face right after the voice.

I caught it without thinking and saw it was a small glass vial, corked, heavier than it had any right to be, with a faint blue glow moving under the glass like a slow tide. I didn’t ask. I pulled the cork with my teeth and drank the whole thing in one swallow.

It went down cold and then hot, and my pool climbed in a steady line I could feel behind my ribs. Two-twenty. Two-fifty. and finally: [Mana Pool: 328/415].

It stopped there, and the warmth spread once and faded. I closed my eyes and let my head tip back against the moss.

“…Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Eydric said.

“Aah, don’t sweat it,” said Rael.

I pushed myself into a sitting position against the base of the nearest tree and realized I wasn’t panting anymore. Eydric was and Rael somehow even more. Both of them had their hands on their knees, and Rael’s hair was sticking to his forehead.

He straightened enough to look at me and narrowed his eyes.

“Could’ve sworn you looked worse than me thirty seconds ago.”

He turned his head toward Eydric without fully straightening.

“Eydric. That elixir, what grade was it again?”

“Low.”

“How low?”

“Low enough that I wasn’t sure it would actually do anything. I had two of them, and I was saving the better one for an emergency.”

Rael looked back at me. I’d gotten my breathing all the way back under control by then, and I could feel the last of the warmth from the vial still settling into my channels.

“Axiom perks,” I said.

The Solenne boy laughed loudly, and dropped the rest of the way down onto the moss beside Eydric with both arms out at his sides.

“If I’d known that, I would not have done what I just did to come save you. Absolutely not. I would have let you walk home on your own two perfectly recovering legs.”

I let him have that one. I was too comfortable to argue, and while I was grateful for the save…