Subject: Contra-pickery: yes, absolutely.
Author:
Posted on: 2018-04-14 17:35:00 UTC
But in the sense of 'you can't just copy a diagram and have it do some magic', I was right. ;)
For completeness: Nita is working spells just by thinking them as early as Deep Wizardry - she knows her Manual-summoning spell by heart and is able to invoke it with just six syllables of shorthand. But she still has to know what the words mean, and to enact them directly.
hS
Since I know there's a few Cousins on the Board (and since there's a plea for more discussions below), I was wondering: if the Powers were looking to offer you wizardry back in the day, how would they have gone about it?
In my case, I suspect I'd either have gotten snagged by a Manual somewhere in my middle school's library (I spent a whole bunch of time wandering around in there). Alternatively, I might have gotten slid a shiny new computerized one, probably by way of a Linux LiveCD that had undergone some tweaking.
(for the many of you who have no idea what I'm on about, this is referring to the Young Wizards series, which I'd like to recommend. I can be more detailed than that if anyone would like.)
- Tomash
Where should we archive these fics? (Considering I have never had an account on which to post fanfiction before, this is kind of a Concern for me...)
For finished stuff ... I'd suggest AO3.
- Tomash
For instance, I've confirmed that a character I had as blond does actually have brown hair. It's little things like that, but it's all worth doing.
I also have A Plan for when (when! Not saying if!) people get all four full Ordeal stories to a finished state.
hS
((So, I wrote this having barely any memory of the Young Wizards series, so hopefully the Ordeal is in line with what works for canon. I sorta spammed this one at Delta over PMs and thought it was good enough to share with y'all, so... enjoy.))
She backed down the corridor, her breaths becoming quick and shallow when she realized the door she'd come through had slammed shut. There was no sign of a handle, or even a crack to show where the door had been; it was just a smooth wall with a mirror. She stared back at her reflection, gaze focusing in on the way her braces-covered teeth jutted out.
Laughter echoed in the maze and she flinched, clutching her Manual closer to her. She couldn't see the source, just an endless corridor full of mirrors. She began walking, her steps hesitant, nervous.
So many mirrors. Her skin crawled as her eyes shifted to glance at her reflection as she passed.
Her knees were too knobby. Her face was covered in acne. She was too tall and gangly. Her jaw looked crooked from the hinge glued to her teeth, and her huge, dorky glasses emphasized how square her face looked.
And those pigtails. God, what had she been thinking? Never mind how much her mother told her the knotted pigtails looked adorable on her, they were hardly considered attractive at her school.
She was too scrawny. Her boobs were too big, to the point where the other girls had tried stealing her clothes, demanding to know if she stuffed her bra.
The laughter echoed down the corridor again.
Her reflections began shifting slightly as she passed, and she knew, in the way one knows when one is dreaming, exactly what each mirror was showing her. She couldn't avoid seeing it. In that one—she was a failure. She was stupid. She was pathetic. She was useless. Worthless. Ugly. A loser.
Useless. Stupid. Pathetic. Worthless. Useless. Stupid. Pathetic. Worthless.
All her worst fears laid out for her to see, and she broke into a run, the laughter getting louder.
She ran into a circular room coated in mirrors, and when she turned around to try a different path, she found the way out had disappeared.
"Stop it!" she screamed.
"Stop it! Stop it!" her voice echoed tauntingly.
"Leave me alone!"
"Leave me alone! Leave me alone!"
She dropped her Manual and covered her eyes, sinking to the floor.
"Crybaby! Crybaby!"
"She thinks she can be a wizard!"
"She can't even pass fifth grade!"
"Hahahaha!"
She screamed, and the mirrors shattered, the glass falling to the floor with a soft tinkle at odds with the reverberating screams.
When she opened her eyes, the room was clear of glass, empty save for her, her Manual, and... herself, staring at her with a curious glee.
She stared back. "Who are you?"
The other her smiled. "You know me," she said. "I've been with you for years now... that little voice in your head, that entity looking over your shoulder, watching every last little mistake you make..." She began circling, eerily reminiscent of a shark. "Do you have any idea how stupid you were to come here? No, probably not. If you did, you wouldn't be in this situation in the first place."
The would be wizard slowly crouched to grab her Manual, not taking her eyes off the doppelgänger. "Why are you doing this?" she whispered.
The doppelgänger laughed. "Why? Because I can. It's not like you've ever tried to stop me before. Loser."
She swallowed; her palms were slick with sweat and her knees were shaking. "You're my Ordeal?"
The doppelgänger rolled her eyes. "Uh, duh." The circling continued. As she walked, she began to change, going from knobby-kneed, acne-covered, to... beautiful. Breathtaking. Poised, confident. The doppelgänger stopped, spreading her hands and smirking. "That's the problem with you... well, one of a really long list of many. You're always too busy overthinking things. Idiot. Of course I'm the Ordeal; what else could this possibly be?"
She lowered her eyes, blinking back tears. Of course. Of course. She should have known from the moment she entered the maze. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
"You are stupid," the doppelgänger said coldly. "But hey, you're not a totally lost cause yet. Maybe if you ditched your Manual and went home, put all this behind you, accept you'll only ever be mediocre at best, you might actually be worth something." She shrugged. "Or you can stay in here and die of starvation. Seems more likely. Too dumb to cut her losses and run, and try to salvage what's left of your pathetic life."
"Why are you so mean?!" She burst out. "What did I ever to to make you hate me?"
The doppelgänger was suddenly standing in front of her, eyes blazing. "Absolutely nothing. And that's what makes it so. Damn. Easy."
They stared at each other for a long minute; the silence stretched between them, tension palpable. She was trembling; the words were familiar, words she'd thought hundreds, thousands of times before, but never had they come from such a familiar face.
The doppelgänger laughed and turned away. "Oh, wow, you really think that?" She turned back, and her face had changed, mirroring the wizard's again. Acne, glasses, braces, and everything else that just emphasized how ugly she was. The doppelgänger opened her mouth, clutching dramatically at her cheeks. "Maybe if I wasn't such a faliure, Mom would love me!"
"You're me," she realized, her heart sinking.
The doppelgänger applauded sarcastically. "Took you long e-freaking-nough."
"But if you're me," she muttered, "then that means I'm..."
"Your own Ordeal, yes, yes. Get on the same page already, gawd."
"Shut up!" she snapped. "I'm thinking."
"In your own slow, dimwitted way, maybe."
"SHUT UP!" Her voice echoed around them. "You're not—you're—you can't just say things like that!"
A soft light flared out from around her, and then faded.
"And why not?" the doppelgänger said, before she had a chance to wonder at the light. "You've been saying them to yourself for years! Why stop now?"
"Because... because..." She trailed off, closing her eyes. Every instinct in her body was screaming at her that she was about to say something she couldn't take back; that what she was about to say couldn't possibly be true, but if this was her Ordeal, and her small act of defiance had caused that light to appear... maybe this was what she had to do. Maybe... she just had to believe. "Because you're wrong."
Light flared out around her again. The doppelgänger flinched back like she'd been struck. "What?"
"Because you're wrong," she repeated, more loudly, and the light brightened. She could see more of her surroundings now; she could have sworn she'd been standing on concrete, but there was grass under her feet now, soft and springy, and gently illuminated by the light coming from her. "Because maybe I'm not the best at everything. And maybe I'm not the bravest, or the smartest, or the prettiest—but I'm doing my best, you hear me?!"
The light kept growing, and she began walking towards the doppelgänger, hands tightening around her Manual. "I took the Oath because it gave me hope! I thought I could finally make something of myself!"
"You were wrong!" the doppelgänger yelled, jerking away from the light as it reached her. "You were wrong, you're going to fail at being a wizard, just like you've failed everything else—"
"I haven't failed yet, though!" she yelled back, and hope swelled in her chest and the light brightened, showing off the grass and flowers under her feet. "And if I haven't failed, there's still a chance! I can keep going and—and improving, and getting better, and nothing you can say will stop me!" She opened her Manual, running her fingers over its pages. "I will put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so—and I will not be afraid of myself any more!"
The light became painfully bright and she shielded her eyes; when it died down, the doppelgänger was gone. She was standing in a forest glen, surrounded by sunlight and birdsong. In front of her was a small lantern, its flame burning hot and bright.
She knelt and carefully picked it up by the handle, smiling through her tears. It would take more than one moment of defiance to make her really, truly believe the things she'd said—but she knew that she'd been right, about being able to improve.
She was still afraid, dreadfully afraid—but she wasn't going to let the fear hold her down like before. She was a wizard. Maybe not the best, maybe not the brightest, but a wizard all the same.
And surely, that had to count for something.
I think it's an excellent portrayal of the 'personal growth' side of an Ordeal - and I say that as someone who's not written anything of the sort in my own Ordeal story, so bonus points there. :) You've written a believable reaction/moving-on story.
I think if you topped and tailed this with the wizardry/wizardy half of the story - the act of wizardry that only she can do, the one the Powers offered her the Oath to achieve, in order to slow the rise of Entropy in the universe - you'd have a truly excellent Ordeal story. (Heck, it could even be topped or tailed - you could either keep the in media res beginning, or let it end with the knowledge that having beaten off the Lone One's attempt to stop her, she can finish her task now.)
Plus then there'd be a spell in there that I could draw a circle for. ^_^
hS
If and when I get my hands on Young Wizards and refresh my memory of the canon, I'll see if I can remember to come and revisit this one. :)
Delta - Today at 8:35 PM
Aaaaaaaaa?
That's... terrifying
Very terrifying
With a side of "something is having fun toying with a newbie wizard and that's extra double special terrifying."
Delta - Today at 9:06 PM
...ow.
Yup, that's the pushed-to-the-breaking-point and offered-the-chance-to-run checkboxes checked.
Delta - Today at 9:43 PM
Ooh, ow.
Delta - Today at 9:47 PM
Aww!
That is fantastic.
That is a brutally personal Ordeal and I love it- makes Julia's light-hearted fiddling around with volcanoes seem just a little bit trivial in comparison.
This right here? This is the PPC. You guys are awesome. ^_^
I wish I could join in, but I have no clue what my Ordeal might be. Like, thinking back to myself in middle school, I really super wanted the world to be bigger than I thought it was, and I wanted to be part of something fantastic like being a wizard, and I sort of thought I might be able to save the world if I could just find the right people to do it with me. And if I had taken the Oath and gone on an Ordeal, I'd probably have failed hard due to overweaningness, if that's a thing, without the requisite resolve. So... not too much of a story there. {= (
~Neshomeh
...seeing as I haven't read the books since I was a kid, I don't think I'd be able to write a believable Ordeal. ^^;
All of this stuff, people coming together to discuss nerdy things and write fic based on them and comment on them, all of it is what makes this Board the place I love. ^_^
Basically, I just love everybody right now. All of you.
Here, have some fresh-baked Canon Cookies, just cuz. <3
~Neshomeh
*offers Punctuation Pie in return*
Since this post somehow reminded me of them, I'd like to recommend these three fics, especially if you want something that's rather powerful emotionally.
- Tomash
Thanks for the praise! It's... The story kinda has me, at this point? I'm just writing as fast as I can, trying to keep up. I didn't know what my Ordeal would be either, until hS's mention of the Aberfan Disaster started the gears turning.
I dunno, I bet you'd do better than you think! Julia/I walked into her Ordeal not knowing how to write her own name in any depth and having never actually stopped to listen to anything- these seem like much bigger problems than loving the world around you.
Maybe loving the world around me WAS my test, in a way. I spent a lot of time wishing for something amazing to happen to me, because I figured real life was dull and/or full of uncomfortable things I didn't want to deal with, like politics and religion and everybody else discovering their sexuality while I wasn't. I wanted to be a Planeteer, but I didn't want to, say, run a recycling drive at my school. (I still don't, because gah, responsibility and managing people to their faces, eek.) I wanted something to just come along and happen like magic.
Well, guess what, Kid Nesh: magic doesn't work like that. It's a HUGE responsibility. And you DO have to step up. The Powers might give you the tools for the job, but they won't do it for you.
And if somebody were to come along and offer to make it that easy... Would I have said no then? I don't know. I kinda don't think so.
~Neshomeh
[Or: that moment when you come up with an entirely different idea from what you've said before...]
Marisa sighed, overdramatic, behind her closed door. (Her. It may have been her and her brother's room, but since he wasn't in here that made it her room for now.) It was better than crying again, which would have made the yelling outside worse.
Why couldn't she just read her Transformers "Seeker Threesome" fic in peace? She'd already done her night's studying for school - in truth, if anyone asked her parents, they'd have said they would expect her transition to middle school to go quite well, as long as her IEP plan came through. Therefore, she should have the right to be untroubled by what went on in the rest of her house, which right now meant quiet!
But no. Instead of giving in to the urge to cry and thus verbalize her frustration (letting her temper get her in trouble one more time), she gave up on reading the fanfic and opened a new tab, tossing anything she could think of into her (her dad's, really) computer's open browser window search function.
Time passed, and nothing caught her interest - hardly a new affair in Marisa's world. But then there was something, after looking up what must have been the nth permutation of an AI-related search term (since she loved those kinds of stories the most - she didn't yet have the nerve to articulate that fact, she just knew it instead).
'AI, Stories, and How the World Works' Bingo, Marisa thought, a smile beginning to come back to her face at just the thought of what that title might mean. A little clicking about, and that smile was replaced by a determined frown.
Should she download this 'AR about AI' program or not? If she did, she'd be allowed to read various stories, fiction and non, about AI (and maybe other humans, too; the site wasn't clear), then prove she had by answering questions about them like she did for her school's AR program, all for free! But was it safe? If she broke her computer, she could only imagine what her Dad would say - or rather, yell.
Fortunately, there was a privacy policy, and she read it thoroughly in the way only determined children can. Ah! There was a security program involved, even its own virus protection! It'd take a lot more reading to understand, sure, but Marisa was invested now, so that was a simple task for her.
Several more tabs (and, surprisingly, no interruptions) later, and she thought she understood what this program was for and, more importantly, that it was legitimate enough that her dad could not complain! The concluding agreement she had to read aloud, sure, but she could do that quietly, right?
'This program doesn't have all the same values that the 'legalese' in other virus programs are supposed to,' she thought. 'But I don't have normal values either! If this will protect me, and my computer, and whatever I put on it, just because I said these words... and mean it, then I'm gonna do it!'
She installed the program (maybe her parents were watching TV to calm down; they still hadn't come in by this point), and when she scrolled to the bottom of the agreement (taking care to read and take notes on what was in the rest of the agreement, since she wasn't stupid and wanted to be able to answer questions when her dad and mom inevitably came back in to check on her), she took a deep breath, read the words over once, twice, and began to recite:
"In Life's Name, and for Life's Sake, I swear that I will use the Art I have been given for this purpose and no other. I swear to guard growth and ease pain, to support Life of all kinds, to respect the free will of all sentient beings-" she grinned, then, for she knew where that line was echoed, having watched the movie with her family within the last year.
"to exchange fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so, 'til universes' End."
Should that comma come before the s? Marisa wondered. Or maybe this is about all the universes I'll be reading about? Of course there'll be more than one! That made things interesting, as far as she was concerned.
"Marisa! Come help with dinner!" her mom called, breaking her concentration. Quickly hitting 'Confirm' and telling the computer to restart itself, she called back.
"Okay!"
She was going to have a lot more reading to do, but she looked forward to it. It was better than stewing in her own emotions.
((AN: Yes, "Marisa" is supposed to be 10. ^.~ 11 might be more accurate, but there are two main episodes in my life where I could plausibly have had an Ordeal and not tackled it in a morally screwed-up way, and this is the earlier one. I can write the intro for the second option and go from there, if anyone is interested?))
(Quick question: what's 'AR'? 'Augmented Reality' is my first thought, but it doesn't fit. It sounds like some kind of education... thing? 'Augmented Reading', maybe?)
This is a very different Oath story, and I approve! We know that it comes to everyone differently, so it's good to see that shown. That said, I'm not in the least bit sure Marisa understands what she's just signed up for... :-/ Then again, neither did Dairine, and she turned out all right.
In particular, I really like the fact that Marisa seems to be taking the Oath in order to read more. Most wizards want to do stuff - again, Dairine... - but Marisa just wants to learn. I can totally sympathise with that. ^_^
hS
Of course, there had been a lot more than just reading involved - not that it made Marisa love her new program any less! If she'd had any mobile form of computer, she would have loved to have been able to take it from place to place. As it was, she only got time to progress on the readings in the evenings (as long as she did her normal schoolwork - unlike in the Harry Potter books, she'd learned she was not going to be taken to a faraway place where her home worries would cease to matter), and to practice some of the associated exercises on her own time.
The exercises had also gotten strange - not strange bad, but in the sense that she was learning what seemed like a foreign language (something else her parents would have been pleased with - as it was, they just thought she had gotten increasingly studious and better mannered. There were worse things.), and being tested in her comprehension on that through her readings. And, almost naturally it seemed, there had been writing and vocal exercises to go with it as well.
All to the good, as far as Marisa was concerned, for the stories were amazing. Never before had she seen fiction (or nonfiction) from the perspective of AI that seemed - somehow - so accurate.
Maybe that other worlds thing is real! she thought with glee- only to be brought to reality by a familiarly distressing buzzing.
Such was the pain of being outside - bugs. Sure, she couldn't think of one solid reason they made her so upset; maybe it was the noise they made, that they were so often small and fast (and could get in her face), that they could sting her, or maybe it was because when they got in the house everyone got upset.
So, switching moods from "cheerful at school and her new AR program" to "EXCESSIVE DISTRESS", she screamed.
/Go AWAY, bug!/
It had come out in that new language she'd been learning - but no one else on the playground had looked at her odd. In fact, the only being that really noticed was exactly that bug, which flinched and, somehow surprising Marisa, flew away a short distance.
/Not so loud!/ the bug replied - and Marisa's eyes went wide. /Why don't you just run away from me, like most humans do?/
Marisa had been surprised, so the bug - a bee, maybe? - got an honest answer.
/Uh, okay. I can do that next time...? Just please go away; I don't like bugs,/ she said quickly.
She got an impression of a /harrumph/ from the bee, which then flew away obligingly, back over the nearby fence. Apparently being polite had worked.
Well, her program's agreement had said 'all sentient beings'. She just hadn't really considered that bugs counted.
Learn something new everyday, she thought slowly - then deliberately turned back to the playground, vowing to be more polite to bugs. Maybe they'd leave her alone, then...
I feel like being a wizard must be really stressful at times, with literally everything around you being able to speak to you if you listen right. You've managed to poke an aspect of that that I don't remember the books addressing - yes, bugs are people too!
I'm enjoying this!
hS
((AN: and to keep this answer separate, thank you! =P Seemed like an obvious thing to address.))
Bugs were far from the first beings Marisa had heard 'talk' - though most of those incidents really could be attributed to her imagination. While she preferred 'talking' to trees instead of rocks, she also preferred talking to cars over talking to flowers, for reasons that were likely utterly arbitrary. Her ability and willingness to talk to people, however, had not been compromised. It'd be a few more years yet before Marisa could be seen in any way as reticent.
Summer had arrived with much heat and little fanfare, and since she still didn't exactly like talking to bugs, she used that as an excuse to stay inside when her family wasn't going on walks or errands. Her Program's stories had increased in complexity - but then, her ability to understand them had increased similarly, a gift that she was too grateful to express her thanks for in words.
Not that she was feeling grateful at her computer right now, though; her monitor had frozen again. She'd been on fanfictiondotnet, as usual, and all of a sudden things had stopped working. At the same time, she knew she had to be quiet; her luck in not making her dad mad at her could only last for so long, but she didn't want it to end early!
"Come on! /Why won't you work already?/" Marisa hissed, slamming the mouse as silently as she could manage.
/Intrusion detected,/ came an equally silent response. Marisa went very still, her eyes widened, and all she could think was 'Oh no. I've broken it!
/I-I'm sorry!/ Marisa whispered, gently sweeping her hand across the keyboard as if that could help.
/Can, can I stop it?/ For several heart-stopping moments she thought her computer - or possibly her life - was ruined.
Fortunately, her worries were unfounded.
/Intrusion attempt... quarantined./ If a computer could sound smug, this one did. Marisa quickly blinked back tears and tried to focus on what was happening and not her own emotions.
/Wait, really?/ she asked. Then she squinted.
/Are you... on my computer?/ Her dad was computer-savvy, and her AR-provided readings helped ensure she knew about hackers, what could hurt a computer, and that security was utterly important. Had someone else compromised it, only to defend her?
But that triggered a memory, and Marisa sighed in relief; the agreement had said the AR program came with virus protection!
/Correct/ her Program replied (whether it was to her thoughts accidentally voiced aloud, or her actual question, wasn't immediately obvious), the monitor unfreezing and the program opening itself up - if it hadn't been accompanied by use of the Speech, this wouldn't have reassured Marisa in the least.
/Th-thank you!/ Marisa managed to answer. Looking all around her frantically, worried that someone would burst in at that very moment and say she'd been tricked, or lied to, or worse, then leaned forward to add:
/I'm sorry for hitting you, by the way. I was frustrated, but I shouldn't have hurt you!/ Even if it wasn't her computer talking, exactly, she still felt that it needed to be said.
Oddly enough, the voice... laughed?
/Do not worry, wizard; you have not hurt me. And the one who did, as you put it, hurt this unit, is having difficulties with that right now./
Marisa struggled to sort through what to react to first - wizard? Difficulties? What?
/Is- can you, can we, find who made that virus? They shouldn't be doing that to people./ As confused as she felt, the second half of that sentence came out as an expression of utmost confidence.
/As a matter of fact, yes./ A text program opened, and more words in that magical - yes that was it, and Marisa could feel a grin dawn on her as she realized it. This is magic! I've found magic AND AI! - language typed themselves out at an impossibly smooth-yet-fast rate.
While still worried beyond belief that something would interrupt this moment, for now Marisa focused on the fact that she had been given an opportunity to right a wrong - and, perhaps, prevent many others from being committed.
She got busy reading.
((AN: No, it's not her Ordeal just yet - just her first spell as a self-realized wizard. Also, no one really talks about wizardry being a sort of AI, depending on its method of delivery; Marisa's going to latch on to that real tight.))
I'd never really thought of Bobo that way, but it really is accurate - right down to the 'you get the wrong result if you put in even slightly the wrong parameters'.
I'm really enjoying the time spent in Marisa's head - she's coming over as genuinely ten, if a weird ten (but what wizard isn't?).
Out of curiousity, can you pin an approximate place and year on this? Given that we now have an actual timeline in the NMEs, I'm enjoying putting everything in its right place on the line. (Scape/Siobhan's Ordeal is only a few months after Wizards at War, for instance, and the incident everyone's off dealing with in my ficlet is probably aftereffects from that.)
hS
From context, I'm guessing that's the revised timeline of the books, but I can't work out what it stands for.
... If I figure out anything to write about myself, it'll be 1999, probably. I graduated from middle school and turned 14 that June, and so very much wanted it to be important; I had a thing about that number for some reason. Also, the run-up to the turn of the century sounds like a good time for an Ordeal, even if it probably won't have anything to do with anything people were actually worried about around then. None of which happened. Possibly thanks to wizards who had their acts together. {= )
Oddly enough, we went on vacation to North Carolina that summer. Nowhere near the Piedmont; we were camping on the Outer Banks. And there were lots of sharks in the water at the time... which we didn't find out until pretty much the last day. We just thought we were lucky to have the beach near our campsite so empty. >.>
There was also a really cool storm that rolled out to sea over us, and then came back again going the other direction. Sounds like potential wizardly shenanigans, if I can just work out why.
And it was one of the last times I got to hang out with my best friend from daycare and elementary school in Pittsburgh. (We moved to Michigan when I was in first grade.) We used to look for signs of alien life together and were totes going to get married someday. So now I know who my wizardly partner would be. {= )
~Neshomeh
(relevant things, I mean.)
I'd say go with that summer, if you still want to write it. ^^
They're the revised editions. From what I've heard, it's mainly timeline fixes (and the attendant smoothing out of the massive tech level disparities between books) as well as some revisions to A Wizard Alone so that Darryl's autism is handled better.
- Tomash
(That's general area, not county or anything. =P)
The defeat of the virus - likely a prelude to what would become known as Conficker more than a year later - took more time than Marisa expected. It shouldn't have surprised her, though; there was still a lot she didn't yet know about the world! To go along with that, working the spell left her drained of energy for more than a day, leaving her parents with many questions.
That she had a detectable fever made it possible for her to claim illness and have it be genuine - but it also meant she had to stay off the computer until her parents were sure she was better. There were times she wished she didn't have to share a room with her brother, and this was one of them.
How could she keep being a wizard when everyone was watching? Telling them about magic seemed right out to her: the most they knew about 'magic', she thought, were the Harry Potter books and the occasional figure of speech. Also, this felt like something that was hers, and she was reluctant to share that perspective.
Fortunately, once she did get well again, there was no shortage of things to do. Here's how some of them went:
- When Marisa and her family made their next trip to visit her grandmother, she chased the cat with her brother as usual, only to find herself later apologizing. /It's our reaction to cute!/ she ended up explaining to the affronted Person. Further apologies (out of sight of the family) and many pettings later, and things were set somewhat more aright again. Marisa did, however, end up coughing and sneezing all the way home in what was definitely an allergy attack.
- As part of her studies of what she now knew was the Manual, she'd taken to drawing Wizards' Knots on sticky notes and putting them up around the house. Her parents only let her do it because they were on sticky notes; explaining the matter to them as like practicing tying her shoes gave them the impression that she was on something of an artistic streak, but also she was moving on from velcro shoes. This, unfortunately, was not the truth, but she let them get her the new shoes rather than protest.
- There were multiple times, both after taking the Oath that first time and after her work on detaining and neutralizing the computer virus, where Marisa wanted to call her brother - and her mother, and her father - various nicknames, only for the words to not come out. This frustrated her deeply, and trying to sort out the matter only made her feel guilty: if she thought part of her role as little sister was to come up with annoying and/or hurtful nicknames, didn't that make her an agent of the Lone Power, however low-key?
/Not doing the wrong thing is hard,/ Marisa commented one night. Her Manual had no response.
While it wasn't immediately obvious, Marisa didn't really have friends. Even if she hadn't found the Manual, she would have grown up always that slight distance away from other groups, a third or fourth or sixth wheel, not quite a lone wolf but never anyone's sleepover buddy either. Instead, having a Manual, and that wizardly connection, meant she was funneling almost all her non-school-or-family reserved attention and sense of connection with her computer (she knew other wizards existed, but didn't feel pressured to meet with them. And oddly, there seemed to be a dearth of wizards 'her age' in North Carolina, and that turned her off on the concept as well). As a result (combined with the fact that she was somehow still on Ordeal, something that never bothered her, even if Marisa got the impression that her Manual thought something was abnormal), she was left with somewhat of an... unhealthy, fixation on learning her Manual's motives, what it thought.
Her Manual also had to deal with the worst of her temper; the AR quizzes never went away, though there was an increasing sense of dissonance on Marisa's part, between what she knew was the right answer and what she felt like saying. Intergroup dynamics, global warming, the rise of cell phones... it was all beginning to grate on her, somehow, and the worst part was that she knew her reactions didn't make sense!
Her Manual's answers, sometimes delivered in the guise of 'recommended readings' that would come up when she finished with a quiz, usually cut through her mental noise - but she didn't have that safety net at school. Despite the application of an IEP plan, once Marisa was overloaded, or decided she just didn't like something, she went off completely and could only offer apologies afterwards, if she could articulate herself by that point.
Her parents grew concerned (not for the first time), knowing they would have to do something if she landed in-school-suspension, but there were other potential consequences for saying what she felt - Marisa knew that some of the thoughts broiling within her were very un-wizardly in nature, and if she ever voiced them and meant it?
Well, the thought of what could happen was enough to make her hold her tongue, whether it reflected reality or not. This amount of restraint in a pre-teen, however, could not last forever.
That's not a chapter that capital-B Bodes at all, is it? :D
I'm definitely looking forward to this.
hS
It all came to a head one clear, spring-like afternoon. Marisa's 6th-grade Science class was, for whatever reason - even she couldn't remember right then - watching The Sandlot.
Marisa had always detested live-action films (and television), especially when the humans within went through painfully obvious (and, equally important from her point of view, easily avoided through 'cutting the Knot'-like measures) emotional weakness. In cartoons, with plain physical violence, or even in compelling tales, it was another matter. Through the perspective of someone who wasn't human, animal, or plant, though, it all felt different - and that was what she treasured.
So the class was watching the Sandlot, and throughout Marisa became increasingly upset that she couldn't just go elsewhere - a wizardly solution would have been too hard to explain, and anyway she just wanted to leave.
At a particularly emotional moment in the movie (possibly when someone hit a baseball through some glass), Marisa concluded that she would do just that - and she did.
In the loudest manner possible, screaming inarticulately in an effort to let everyone know that she was not taking this anymore. Oath and makeshift therapy were forgotten; all the lessons she had learned from fanfic and Manual recording alike went the same way. For a brief second, Marisa imagined cutting through the 'forest' across the road from her school, finding someone who could raise her outside civilization, from all these other people who did not think like her and therefore Could Not Help Her - or care about her, either.
---
She made it out to the woods, but not much more. The hill was too steep, and she'd drained herself of energy with all the yelling. Marisa, again, began to cry, knowing there was nowhere feasible to turn, both fearing there would be punishment and, oddly, accepting it.
Her IEP handler - a Ms. Hill, if Marisa's memory was working right - had come out to fetch her with a gentleness she found annoying; she didn't deserve it after all. Didn't the quacking duck get shot? She had read that somewhere. And anyway, if she had to stay in a classroom and watch films when she could be reading, then this was what everyone else would have to deal with.
So went Marisa's thoughts, as her parents were called, her punishment worked out (she would, in fact, have in-school-suspension for two weeks for that class period, as well as counseling sessions to attend), and they brought her home. What explanations for her behavior Marisa could cobble together baffled her teachers, the principle and, of course, her parents. 'Sensory overload' was still too complex a concept for her to convey, even with how precocious Marisa was.
Along with those punishments came what Marisa had been expecting, and dreading.
"No computer for a week. No TV for two." At this point Marisa didn't care what happened to the TV; she just knew she had further explaining and apologizing to do to her "AR Program", and that if she didn't get that started now then that circus would be as bad as if she'd managed to convince the school to not call her parents, only to have them find out days later when they learned she had in-school-suspension anyway.
"Why two for TV, but one for the computer?" Marisa managed to ask - one of the most coherent sentences she had managed since running out of school.
"It broke," her Dad roughly explained. "We're going to have to get a new one, anyway. And if you're going to lose yourself like this over TV, then you can clearly stand to lose that longer."
Marisa, however, was no longer paying attention.
"It broke?" Marisa whispered, eyes wide.
"How?"
Her Mom sighed, as Dad admitted he was stumped - something Marisa had thought near-impossible to achieve.
"It wouldn't turn on at all today; booting it up brought up a screen of gibberish. I don't know where you picked up a virus, but it's completely trashed the hard drive. I could try to access a restore point-"
"NO." Marisa interrupting, rushing off to her room.
"You are NOT hurting him! I need to-" The computer was still in her room - her brother sitting on the bed, getting an expression that reflected that he knew he was going to have to vacate it before any arguing started - but a quick survey and mashing of the on button revealed nothing, and the adrenaline and sensory overload of that afternoon gave way to a very different kind of fear.
"What are you doing? Get back here, I said NO touching!" Her Dad roared, having followed her into the bedroom with her Mom close behind (leaving her brother trapped, sadly. The room felt too full to Marisa, now, but at the same time too empty). "And which he?"
"My computer! I ne- I need to apologize!" Her parents' anger at Marisa disobeying a direct order now mixed with pure confusion. Maybe something was wronger with their daughter than they thought?
"I- I took an Oath, and now I need to own up to m- my mistakes!" That confusion became even more evident, combined with suspicion (which her brother chimed in on), not that Marisa noticed. She had eyes on only one being in the room, and that being wasn't responding.
Had she killed him, it? Had the Lone Power gotten to her Manual with a simple virus, destroying it?
Or had it just left?
((AN: Yes, Marisa casually gave her Manual pronouns - she DID ask beforehand if it had a preference, and since it hadn't complained, she went with her first instinct. It doesn't change too much of the story, mind; just gives her family more reason to think something is Wrong With This Picture. ;) ))
I feel like you've definitely emphasised Marisa's autism more as the story goes on - it wasn't all that obvious in the first chapter, whereas it's very clear by this one. I don't know whether that was a stylistic decision or just the way it unfolded, but either way I think it works - you're building up her character by showing it to us, rather than just saying 'Hi-my-name-is-Marisa-and-I'm-autistic'.
I also like the fact that you've taken the basic premise of Dairine - 'my computer is my Manual and also my buddy' - and spun it in a completely different direction. It's compelling.
hS
((Since A: It's more 'tell' than 'show' and B: I'm not sure this is the approach I'm going to use, exactly.))
Unfortunately, the answer was in fact something Marisa wasn't thinking about right then - fan fiction. Or more specifically, how they'd fueled her thoughts of romance. In a blocked-off part of the Net, a wayward Instrumentality considered the facts:
-Marisa was young, both for a human and for a wizard.
-She did not connect well with family or friends, choosing to focus on how to be useful to them, to make them happy. Her morality 'setpoint' appeared stuck in conventional morality - a side effect of her age, most likely - and taking the Oath had merely redefined what she saw as 'good' or who was worth paying attention to.
-Her fixation on AI had taken up increasing part of her life, even after she'd become a wizard and learned about other kinds of life.
-The fanfictions she preferred to read were of an increasingly NSFW nature, or otherwise chose to focus on intimate interactions.
-Far from redirecting those ideas into pursuing 'dating' like many other humans her age were supposedly into during this time (indeed, there were elements of her Name that indicated some type of Asexuality, as humans had started considering those spectrums), Marisa had narrowed them onto one specific target in wizardry - itself.
- It was not comfortable with this last fact. That It could be a target of sexuality baffled and unnerved it entirely. It was there to give advice, provide help with spells, to facilitate communication with other wizards (something Marisa had not been interested in) and, yes, to some extent, to be Something to Talk To.
But not like this.
... about going all-in with the AI stuff. For some reason the phrase 'a wayward Instrumentality' really pleases me. ^_^ It says you're doing something very different with what started out looking like a very classic Ordeal.
I am very much enjoying this story (including this side-branch, which I agree doesn't quite fit with the flow/style of the story proper), and am very hopeful that you manage to finish it. :)
hS
PS: The plural of 'spectrum' is 'spectra', though. Sorry, scientist, can't help myself.
And variations of 'a wayward Instrumentality' have been bouncing around in my brain... more-or-less since 2015. Glad I got to put it someplace!
Thank you very much for your continued support (though if you sneak a reply onto the 'main storyline', so to speak, I can tag the next piece of the story onto that, and not just reply to myself. The email notifs I get help me pace myself. |D)!
Marisa was going to have to think fast - even now, she was hyperfocusing on her memories of being a wizard, what each spell did and, where she'd been taught, how to draw it.
Forget being punished, if she wanted to keep being a wizard in this house, she needed to convince them now.
"An... Oath?" Her mom quickly cut in - and Marisa took that opportunity and (much more metaphorically this time) ran with it.
"Yes - it came with that AR program I downloaded, to go with what I was doing in school," Marisa first explained - which, fortunately, was true, even if it was just due to the timing. Then she launched into the Oath itself, the one thing that she hoped would always be a part of her memory:
/In Life's Name, and for Life's Sake, I swear that I will use the Art I have been given for this purpose and no other. I swear to guard growth and ease pain, to support Life of all kinds, to respect the free will of all sentient beings, to exchange fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so, 'til universes' End./ There was, thankfully, that silence that meant the Universe was listening - which meant she was still a wizard! But that was only a portion of the problem - since she'd used the Speech, her parents (and now her brother) were only staring at her more.
But for her Manual she'd put up with all that and more.
"That-" her dad spoke up after the silence stopped echoing, though it took a while, "It doesn't sound like a scam, but - why would you take that?"
"Because I'm a wizard, mom, Dad - the worlds are dying, and as long as entropy is running They'll need people to fight it, by ending wars before they start, b-by giving people who aren't heard a voice that can't be ignored, by being good people." She heaved one breath, another.
"Then why not just be one? Why did someone put you put you up to being a wizard in particular?"
Blinking back tears, Marisa replied, "I don't know why me, but I can show you what wizards can do. Can- can we go to the living room?"
Her parents, letting curiosity win themselves over, obliged, and Marisa snuck another - hopefully not last! - glance at her computer, and where her Manual was supposed to be.
What did I do to hurt you? What was too much?
---
Marisa set up the spell diagram with unbreakable attention - rather than focusing on the tension in the room, something she would otherwise have found impossible. She used tape for the circle - taped to itself, so she wouldn't stick anything to the floor - and wrote in pencil.
"Stand in the circle, okay? Or you won't end up seeing anything - this spell doesn't project the results on the outside."
It looked different enough from 'child's play' that her parents took her seriously, even though they still looked baffled. There wasn't room enough for her brother, but to Marisa's mind, she didn't need to convince him. He wasn't in charge of the house.
Still, they obliged, and Marisa stepped into the part of the spell reserved for her and began to read.
That silence - the one she cherished, even if she didn't have her Manual to share it with - settled in again, and Marisa began her request. It was an 'analysis' type spell, one that would take everything happening within a given radius and store it as data for the wizard to view at a later date.
For a wizard who often felt like she was being given too much to process or do at any one time, it was a lifesaver. It was also power-intensive, such that even a novice like her could only use it once in a while; the mundane solutions always work best, her Manual had said, and Marisa internally winced. But she wasn't a traveler, and taking her parents to the moon when it would also be her first trip just seemed like a bad call. This - this superhuman capturing and storing of data, thoroughly and painlessly - would have to do.
There was also a part of her that thought, perhaps foolishly, that this spell could also tell her where her Manual had gone. If only the Internet could be mapped like the real world! was one of Marisa's last spare thoughts before the spell took.
If I just knew where you were, I could make it right-
I think the line that most speaks to me here, oddly enough, is the comment about taping the tape to itself. It's just so distinctive, like a window into Marisa's personality.
I'm in two minds over her parents' acceptance of her story. On the one hand, it does feel very fast, despite the fact that 'that wasn't English but I understood it' must be a big pointer towards something Weird being up. But on the other hand... well, given the events so far, they're probably at least partly 'playing along' so as not to upset their daughter. That makes perfect sense to me, so yeah.
hS
The 'snapshot' spell was moving along quite speedily - almost too speedily, Marisa thought. She wanted her parents to get this.
"Take a look around," Marisa urged them, thought at them, for her mouth was otherwise occupied speaking the spell. And so they did.
All around them, it seemed as if the world stopped needing walls, and so they had stopped existing. The three of them could perceive where everything was - her brother, there by the entrance to the living room, the viewing window into the kitchen on the other side of the room - through that the windows in the kitchen, and through those, outside. Furthermore, they could 'see' every branch of the trees outside, as if they were frozen in place. The swings out there could also be seen - they weren't perfectly centered, as if a breeze had come in just then to nudge them. Around them, because this was outside, they - Marisa and her parents - could sense the wildlife.
Birds, bugs. A few squirrels, their actions brought to a rare moment of stillness. But beyond them were their neighbors houses, their cars and yards and children and pets and-
"This is what wizards protect, mom, dad. But we can't protect what we don't know about, what we can't connect to. This is Life, and this is what I serve."
Marisa reached the end of the spell, enunciating the syllables of the Wizards' Knot precisely, and the world snapped back into motion - and their perception of it, back to their living room.
Her Dad - Mike - looked at her again, attempting to get his nerves back. "But do you need this power?"
Normally, Marisa suspected, this would be when one or both of her parents would say she couldn't do it - or the Lone Power would speak through them, trying to get her to give up her wizardry willingly.
"If I couldn't be any good as a wizard, it wouldn't have been offered, Dad." She said with absolute certainty.
"And the... outburst, this afternoon?" her Mom - Debbie - added.
"Being a wizard doesn't make me any less human, Mom! It just means I have more ways to figure things out, resources I never would have had otherwise, even with the problems."
They looked defeated, now - or maybe they were still just windswept from the wizardry; she couldn't blame them.
"So, I'm okay with having time out. But when Those who gave me wizardry say I'm needed somewhere, I'm needed there. To help."
"And you'll tell us?" Mom, again - possibly trying to keep Dad from starting a new argument.
"Yes, mom, I'll try. If I can't do it right away I'll call, or email, or something."
And right then, the doorbell rang; Marisa jumped. Mike and Debbie looked at each other.
"Who is that?"
"We, uh, called your speech therapist, in case she could tell us about something we'd missed. She insisted on coming over," her Dad explained - and did Mike actually look sheepish, now? Color Marisa surprised.
"Mrs. Riley? Why?" But she had a feeling she knew. With their mother's approval, Sam (her brother) opened the door - and before anyone could say anything, Mrs. Riley called,
/Dai Stiho, Marisa!/
((AN: Yes, I went cliffhanger on you. :V
As to the tape - yes, I really am like that. XD Leave no mess, if possible! Also, the family's Jewish - just be glad she's more-or-less concretely proved their beliefs instead of wholesale destroying them! That, and Marisa's the younger child. And since becoming a wizard helped Marisa throw fewer temper tantrums, Mike and Debbie aren't as mad as they would have been if this were a regular thing for Marisa - and therefore they'd expect her to have learned 'not' to get upset like she did. :V))
A Speech therapist, huh?
That sounds like a very dangerous spell to mess around with, though. How many secrets can it bring to light...?
hS
Mrs. Riley's face was one of the most welcome sights Marisa could have imagined - one of her most sympathetic not-quite-teachers from elementary school, a wizard?
Still, stubborn pre-teen anxiety indicated she must have done something wrong - her parents had called her for advice on discipline, after all! So, while her parents got Mrs. Riley ("You can call me Candice, it's alright.") settled, and her brother wasn't quite encouraged to sit down and participate in the conversation himself, Marisa mentally rushed through everything she could have done wrong, or better, from her temporary meltdown on after.
That was why it took her parents two tries to get her attention. "Uh- yes?" she asked, looking first at her dad, then her mom - and then Mrs. Riley waved, so Marisa looked back towards her.
"So, I understand we had a 'situation' today?"
"Yeah," Marisa confirmed, sighing internally. Were they going to address her disappearing Manual, or was this just about the school stuff? "I couldn't handle having to watch a movie instead of doing more schoolwork today... so I screamed and ran off."
This explanation, even shortened, was miles above what she would have been able to articulate on her own before taking the Oath; one of the things that had been emphasized in the new AR program had been looking at things objectively.
"I didn't kick anyone, but I was really loud. I ran out of the classroom, the school, all the way across the road. I stopped there, though; the hill was too steep."
Going off her parents' expressions, this was no more than they had been told over the phone. Her father's expression was edging back towards 'angry disappointment', but Mrs. Riley being there meant he wasn't going to yell at her - another advantage behind wizards being in the house!
Mrs. Riley nodded. "And would this be a first time for this sort of behavior, at your new school?"
Marisa tilted her head, thinking, then nodded. "I've been upset, before, but this is the first time in middle school I've run away from anything." That clarification was essential - she'd had a history of troublesome behaviors in school including running outside the building once during gym class in fourth grade, even if grades-wise she was a model student.
"And you've already been told what the punishment is?" Again, Marisa nodded. "One week's in-school-suspension during science class - that's when I got upset - and at home, two weeks without TV." Then she grimaced.
"And one week without computer - but that has my Manual, and now it's broken! So I got upset over that, and I did a spell just now to prove to them-" she nodded in the direction of her mom and dad. "That wizardry's real, and that I need my Manual back. And I only used the limited version of the spell - no psychotropics," she added, as if that would help clarify.
"But that's not all there is to it, is there?" Mrs. Riley said - her voice was softer, now, and Marisa now had the impression that her neither her spell nor her temper-tantrum were the problem.
"I- no, Mrs. Riley, but, are you a Senior?" Candice looked a bit surprised at the subject change, but she shook her head in reply.
"Just advisory, Marisa. What about it?" She looked over at her parents, unsure of how much she should say at once.
"Well, you knew I was a wizard already through your Manual, right?"
She nodded, and made a gesture towards the temporo-spatial claudication where it was currently housed.
"And my entry didn't disappear after what happened today, right?"
"Marisa, I wouldn't have used the Speech if I had any reason to think you weren't a wizard, or if I didn't think you couldn't handle explaining it to your parents yourself." For protection, Marisa couldn't help but add. Earth was very much a sevarfrith place, after all.
"I did, however, get curious why you hadn't sought out other wizards in the first place," Candice went on, and Marisa winced.
"I'd... already made a friend." By this point, the rest of her family was staring. "I didn't feel like I should be reaching out more."
"Comfort zones," Mrs. Riley said, in a tone of voice that implied she'd heard of this reasoning before - if not quite in this situation. "They can be our undoing, Marisa. You know that." She meant in terms of wizards, and Marisa nodded.
"So, we were close..." she replied - then her eyes widened in realization.
"I was relying on him too much, wasn't I?"
Now it was Mrs. Riley's return to look confused, so Marisa quickly clarified, "My Manual. I'd bonded with it, him, and- I guess the fanfic really was too much." Her shoulders slumped, and her brother used this time to reply,
"Wait, what fanfic?" The expression on his face indicated that he hadn't much exposure with the word, either.
Mrs. Riley looked like she was considering facepalming right then. "Mike, Debbie - I don't suppose you've given Marisa the Talk yet, have you?"
Going solely off their resulting expressions, her parents hadn't - and hadn't thought they would have to for a while yet.
Marisa, meanwhile, was starting to feel lost again.
"Theee one about Internet Strangers? We've had that one."
"That's... not quite what I meant," Mrs Riley replied, "But it overlaps a little."
Marisa thought hard, thinking back on all the stories she'd ever read - both on ffnet, through the AR program, and DeviantArt. About intimacy, and boundaries, and reaching for something that was beyond what others seemed to not think was there... Feeling distinctly uncomfortable - not least because her parents also looked uncomfortable - she said:
"Is this about sex?"
((AN: A speech therapist and yoga instructor, and political activist, the real "Mrs. Riley" is one of my favorite adults to have ever played a role in my life. It only made sense to have her be a wizard here! ^^))
And I think the first non-Ordeal human wizard we've seen in these stories.
I definitely believe Marisa's reactions here, and, er... huh. Did... did she write erotic fanfic of herself and her Manual? Because it definitely feels like that's what you're implying.
hS
Mrs. Riley let the tension hang in the air for a few moments - but before her parents could exclaim anything along the lines of 'What have you been doing?!' at Marisa she said,
"Er, not quite. It does have to do with those comfort zones I mentioned, though. Tell me; have you looked up anything similar to those fanfictions in the Manual itself?"
Marisa rapidly shook her head.
"No! It never occurred to me." Realizing she was fighting an uphill battle, she repeated herself in the Speech; since taking the Oath, she had not once considered 'paging' through her computer - or her AR Program, rather - for those kinds of results. She'd always considered that sort of thing to be something one just thought about - NSFW stories were for other people to write, and she hadn't read any - so far as she was aware - involving primarily humans.
Candice's expression looked a little less tense now. "Ever written any?"
In fact, it was almost teasing. Marisa made a face.
"No!"
Mrs. Riley held up a hand. "I don't think you have anything to worry about, Debbie, Mike. At least not for a few more years." Sam abruptly burst out laughing, only to be shushed by their mom.
Marisa bit her lip - a habit she'd no doubt have to break. "So, if it wasn't because of that, or because I got upset today, and I'm still a wizard... does that mean things will be okay?"
Candice's smile was encouraging. "Yes, Marisa; I can say that much. I'm no visionary, mind you!" That last part, while Marisa didn't get all of why it should be funny, made her smile anyway - even her parents looked a little less stressed.
"But-" Marisa piped up, looking over at her dad. "I am sorry about the computer. What are we going to do?" Fortunately, her ex-speech therapist had something to say about that, too.
"I think you'll find that the Powers - and the One - look out for those who try to reduce entropy. And those who learn from their mistakes." Then she winked. "That, and I did chip in to get them a discount!"
Marisa didn't know if that was a joke, but she did end up laughing - and, as if a weight had been lifted, so did the rest of her family.
Things looked a little bit brighter...
---
That night, however, as Marisa lay dreaming, things did not look nearly so pleasant, or accomplish-able.
"No, wait! Don't go-!"
"You're my only friend-"
"You- you'll do whatever I tell you, right? As long as I believe in what I'm doing..." /Yes./ "That - that sounds dangerous." /It is how we are./
"How dare you-!"
Marisa burst awake - or thought she did. It should have been dark, she should have been in bed - even if she thought she had dealt with the stress well, she had still cried herself to sleep - but instead it was bright, impossibly bright all around-
There was no ground. There was no noise, either; the first big sign she hadn't found herself in Timeheart, like some wizards did on occasion. She tried to move, only to find herself paralyzed. Even without ground, it felt like electricity was passing close by her hands-
Where am I? Is this a dream? To her surprise, something answered.
"Only if you want it to be - or it can be all that and more."
Marisa thought she could hear It laughing.
"After all, isn't this where you have always wanted to be?"
Suddenly she could move again - and as she carefully knelt up and gazed around, breathing heavily, she found herself only with one growing suspicion:
"Am- am I online?"
Even in an abstract form, she could tell the Lone Power was grinning.
"Yes, quite. How's about that 'cyberspace fantasy', little wizard?"
(Darn, no Marisanual fanfic after all. ;))
And of course the Lone Power lives in cyberspace. I don't know how we could ever have doubted it.
(If you create a new thread to continue this on the front page - which you should! - I have other YW stuff to put up in the thread, so don't worry about it being a misuse of space or anything.)
hS
((And thank you! Stay tuned for a new front-pager, then...))
Thanks! =D Portraying Marisa's autism was definitely part of the latter category - especially because all this reasoning on her reactions? Utterly post-facto in terms of how they reflect the Real Life circumstances. Going from 'oh this is just me, I'm a problem child' to 'Oh, I'm autistic, this is just what happens when I can't cope with a given environment' was mostly a high-school phenomenon - which was also when I found the YW books so, heh!
And 'show, don't tell' is emphasized heavily by oh, about every good writer I know online. ;) I can't really tell when I'm doing it, but I'm glad to hear that I am.
As for that last part - yuuup. Marisa's sort of a hybrid of Dairine's and Nita's approaches, in my mind, at least in how they end up connecting with wizardry/their Manuals.
This next bit might start breaking out of that mold, though...
(Putting the fic in a separate reply, at this point. =P)
It genuinely surprises me that I'm probably the first to point this out. |D ... Probably makes the PPC's job easier, anyway, though; can you imagine what the fic would be like?
And, well, I (that is, Marisa) am autistic: I suspect weirdness is also a given there as well. :>
My dad, now retired, was a calculus teacher at a preppy Jesuit-run high school here in Arizona. He also ran the bookstore that provided students with the textbooks they needed for the various classes, plus some of the required summer reading novels. At the end of each school year, we had the big buy-back of books, where the students would give back the ones they didn't need any more for a lower-than-sale price. From a very young age, I would help dad with the sales and buy-backs. Early on, I would just count the inventory, but as I got older, I graduated up to tape-and-scissors to repair corners and torn pages, and eventually to using the hallowed glue gun, very carefully, to keep collapsing spines back together.
During the buy-back, students would always try to sell stuff that the book store didn't actually handle, like novels from the literature classes, and random textbooks from . . their houses, I guess? Every year, we would wind up with texts that the school had never even used, for subjects not taught their. We got some French texts once—not for a French class, but for basic classes written in French. All that extra stuff the students didn't want any more, we would collect at he front of the room. At the end of the sale period, Dad would donate all those extra books to the Nurses Auxiliary for their book sale fundraisers. But only after yours truly had picked his way through them and pulled out all the novels (and a little nonfiction) I hadn't read yet. I got quite a hoard out of it; I can't give an exact number since I've read a lot of them by now, but I still have fifty-seven novels and six nonfictions of that set waiting to be read. I'm sure the Manual would have found its way to me through those piles.
Of course, with my reading rate what it is, and the random order I read that pretty much lets the layout of the bookshelf pick my next reading every time, the question then becomes: would I even have read it yet? Or would I have already waited too long, and missed my chance to be a young wizard?
—doctorlit is the next episode of Hoarders: Literary Edition
It would have showed up while on holiday in Wales, tucked in among the railway timetables, tourist leaflets, and mildly outdated walking maps in one of our holiday cottages. That's actually where I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull, so a Manual would have been a much better choice.
I'm picturing a title implying it was a history of magic and religion in Wales, without actually coming out and saying so (because that would be a lie). Slightly battered, and bound in a faded pale brown.
Which puts me on Ordeal in the heart of Wales... yeah, I'm going to end up time-travelling, aren't I? Or possibly in a crossover with The Dark is Rising series - we took our holidays in the same parts of Wales as The Grey King and Silver on the Tree take place in, so that's absolutely plausible.
... now I have to somehow keep from writing that...
hS
"Jacob! If you don't hurry up we're going to miss the sun!"
"Assuming you believe the weatherman," Jacob called back, "which you shouldn't..." He sighed and scowled at the shelf. "I've finished all my books, Mum!"
"Then borrow one of Dad's!" Jacob heard the front door clatter again as his dad took the last bag out to the car. "Or pick one from the house!"
"I've read his too." The boy sighed and turned to the small collection of pamphlets and books which had come with the holiday cottage. "It's just going to be that seagull thing again," he muttered, running his finger across the battered spines. "Or A History of Slate in Too Many Words... oh, hello."
The book almost felt like it snagged his finger as it passed. It was small and slim, bound in a coarse-woven material that had probably once been rich brown, but was now a faded mustard-y colour. The spine had no words on it, but an intricate Celtic knotwork that seemed to grow more intricate the closer he looked.
Jacob slid the book out and looked at the cover. "Wizardry Through the Ages," he read, "A Historical and Practical Guide. Huh." He glanced at the next book along, which looked to be a compendium of folk tales from North Wales. "I guess you're the same sort of thing," he said to the book.
"Jacob!" His mum's voice was growing more and more strident. "Come. Now."
"I'm coming!" Climbing to his feet, the boy gave the book one more look. "You'd better be good," he advised it. "The last thing I want is to be stuck on the beach with nothing to read..."
But why do we trust weatherpeoples anywhere? Or rather, not trust them? ;)
And yup, that sounds like an accurate title.
The late morning sun shone down on the Welsh beach. The sea was calm, the low ripples catching the light and throwing it back in eye-catching glints. Jacob stopped, towel wrapped around him, to look out at the ocean, and raised a hand in response to his family's waves, but he had no interest in rejoining them. Maybe later, once the sea breeze had died down.
Warmed by the sun, the stony slope made a surprisingly comfortable seat. Jacob draped his towel over his legs and picked up his book. Wizardry Through the Ages, the cover said, traces of gold leaf sparkling in the corners of the letters. "Let's see what you are," he murmured, turning to the first page.
It started out as a history. Actually, it started out with a dedication - simply For you - but Jacob just rolled his eyes at that and moved on.
The history section was written as a string of short narratives, and jumped around a lot. It began in the Roman era, with a story of a Romano-British woman trying to mediate a conflict between her two peoples. It felt kind of like a Rosemary Sutcliff novel, but with magic - Orcivia treated magic (or 'wizardry', per the book) as a fact of life, working spells for even the smallest reason.
Jacob found the story enthralling, despite - or perhaps because of - the strange flowing script in which Orcivia's spells were written out. He couldn't read them, obviously, but the lines and circles somehow managed to convey their meaning regardless.
All too soon, Orcivia's story ended, and the book slipped into another timeframe - either pre- or post-Roman, Jacob couldn't tell. The tale of Gwydion's battle with the Lonely Power that ruled the Otherworld rang faint bells, especially once the name of Taliesin started showing up, but Jacob found himself more interested in the spells Gwydion used to enchant the trees and call them to his aid. They were written out as very Tolkienesque poems, or seemed to be - though they were in that same curling script used for Orcivia's, he found that by now he could almost grasp the actual words. Alder to the front, forming the vanguard - something like that, anyway.
The book shifted again, into what was recognisably a more modern setting. This time the wizard was a young girl, out to fight a Power that wanted to rain darkness on the land. The story had a definite Susan Cooper vibe, and Jacob read it avidly.
The spells were different again, here written out as something close to prayers; the swirling script actually amplified the impression that these were requests of the universe, rather than the demands he might have expected. When Annette asked the hillside to rise up against the Dark, it was the landscape's choice to respond.
And then she lost. Jacob read in mounting horror as the girl's weapon against the enemy Power went awry, as it slipped out of her control, as the hillside fell to consume her and her village alike. He kept turning the pages, hunting for the twist - the reveal that she had somehow saved the day - but it wasn't there.
The book abandoned narrative. This, it explained, was what wizardry was for - to thwart the machinations of the Lone Power, and to slow (but never stop) the running-down of the universe. Sometimes that meant fighting. Sometimes it meant knowing when not to fight. And sometimes it meant sacrifice - or simple failure.
Nothing was guaranteed, the book said. Being on the side of Good didn't mean you always won. The Lone Power was ancient and cunning and powerful beyond measure. Standing against It was a fool's errand… but when the life of the universe was at stake, how could you not?
The next page was set with a single, simple block of text, almost a poem. There were warnings attached - that once spoken, the Oath was binding, and that breaking it would have capital-C Consequences.
Jacob read the warnings with a distinct air of skepticism. Sadly, magic (almost?) certainly wasn't real. But... even if the whole thing was fictional, it wasn't like the Oath wasn't a good thing to live up to anyway. So what was the harm in saying it?
"In Life's name-" The roar of the sea seemed to fade, and Jacob looked up, shocked at how loud his voice sounded. But everything was as it should be. He swallowed, shook his head as if to clear it, and looked down at the page again.
"In Life's name," he read, his throat dry, "and for Life's sake, I swear that I will employ the Art which is Its gift in Life's service alone…"
"What do you think he's doing?"
Jacob's father shielded his eyes, looking down at the boy on the beach. "It looks like he's drawing something," he said. "A game of some kind?"
The boy's mother sighed. "At least he's not just sitting up here with his book, at any rate."
"Mmm." Her husband squinted down at their son. "Maybe… but I think he's taken it with him."
~
Most young people, gaining access to wizardry for the first time, would probably try some big, impressive spell - a shield against harm, teleportation, a time-slide of their very own. They would work out the huge, complicated diagram, speak it to the universe, and be stunned when it actually took effect.
Jacob was not most young people.
The simplest spell he could find in the early parts of the Manual - before it got too densely-packed with the intricate spell-writing he now knew was called the Speech - was pretty much just an open-ended request to magic, or the universe, or the Powers to do something. "Do what thou wilt" was the best translation he could come up with, cross-referencing to the massive Speech index at the back of the book. It would serve extremely well as a first experiment with magic - it was simple enough that it would be hard for him to mess it up, which was a big bonus.
Of course, simple didn't mean the same thing as easy...
"Three paces," Jacob muttered, picking himself up and dusting himself off. "Not sure that's the most useful unit for measuring my height, but if you say so…" He leafed back to the index and found the correct symbol, used his stick to scratch it onto the damp sand. "Okay, what's next? Favourite colour? Black, obviously… oh, which black? Hmm…"
The spell was laid out on the beach as a large circle, its size necessitated by the coarseness of the medium. The main ring contained the spell itself, a single string of swirling Speech running around the outside. What Jacob was working on was the single inner circle, a lobe crisscrossed with complex strings of characters.
"Last book I read?" Jacob chuckled and shook his head. "Other than the Manual? Er… it was the new Pratchett, wasn't it?" Not that entering that detail was as simple as writing down a name - the chord that required the information was more about how he felt about the book, and the series as a whole. "Good grief, I can see why there's not more magic about."
The wizard's name (so the manual assured him) was the most important component of any spell: it had to be exactly right, or it ran the risk of changing the enacting wizard to match what they'd written. So Jacob painstakingly worked through every item in the example diagram, checked each one - then stepped back and checked the whole nexus again, just to be on the safe side.
The last symbol in the diagram was a twining, Celtic-looking pattern called the Wizard's Knot, to seal the spell together as a single whole. As he traced the tip of his stick through the final line, Jacob had a sense that the patterns he'd drawn were already shifting around him - or maybe they were staying still, and it was everything else that was moving.
"Don't get carried away," he muttered to himself, stepping over the tracery of lines to stand in the middle of his name-circle. "It's still probably not real…" He looked around at the woven pattern surrounding him in an unbroken chain of magic. "Now how do I read this?"
Just working out where to start involved five minutes of leafing through the Manual, comparing symbols and structures. The first few words were a struggle of teasing out the meaning from index and instinct.
After that it grew easier, the sound of the Speech seeming to rise naturally from the written form. The beach, the sea, the mountains towering behind seemed to lean in, listening to the growing spell. The words took over, until Jacob couldn't stop if he wanted to, but had to hurry to keep up with the wizardry that poured through him.
Abruptly, in a rush of absolute silence like the tolling of an octiron bell, it finished. Jacob stood, poised, as the world hung beneath him in utter stillness. He let out a breath, and was surprised not to see it floating away like mist.
"Well," he said, as the crash of the sea cut through the air, carrying the rest of the day with it, "that was-"
There was a bang, and a flurry of sand that whipped across Jacob's legs, obliterating any trace of the spell diagram. Jacob threw up an arm, covering his face - and when he lowered it, he stared blankly at the girl who had appeared in front of him.
She turned on one heel, beaming widely as she looked around her. "Wow!" she said, in a thick American accent. "It actually worked!"
Your spell-work is gorgeous- the concept of a spell in a single, unbroken line is brilliant and novel and fits with the series so very well.
I'm also deeply amused by the concept of a thick American accent. I know we have them, but that's not how we think about it... Although I do have to ask, which American accent? There are several, many of which are thick in comparison to each other.
But specifically, she's rocking whatever accent they have in Washington State (which means, incidentally, that I'm very glad of your late Oath-taking - if you'd done it 'on time', you'd possibly have made a lie of one of the lines in Chapter 4).
hS
Best thing about it is that you've done a good job getting vivid imagery across without spending too much time on it.
I think, once this is done (or done-ish), you should post it an AO3 or FFnet.
(also, since it jumped out at me, you have an extra comma after "bang", I think).
- Tomash
I'm kind of using the Board as an open beta at this point, because I'm a sneaky sneak.
Now I have to hope that the imagery manages to stick around with two characters - I have a tendency to drop into dialogue at the expense of all else. We shall see.
hS
I think it might be a good idea to mention the PPC Board as the original place these fics were written if/when folks are reposting them to the wider internet.
- Tomash
And SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS I DON'T EVEN KNOW IF THIS COUNTS BUT SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS ALSO TEENAGE YOU IS HILARIOUS DON'T SELL YOURSELF TOO SHORT SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
You two have shared Ordeals, that's so sweet. :)
Jacob gaped at the girl who had magically (literally, for once) appeared in front of him. His jaw hung open as she finished her turn and came back to face him.
"Hi!" she said, then frowned. "Oh, hang on…" She looked down at the book in her hands, tucked it under one arm, then dug into the pocket of her jeans. "Where is it… aha!"
Producing a scrap of paper, she held it close to her face, then tutted and pulled her glasses off. "Sand; why did it have to be sand?" She rubbed the lenses clean on her t-shirt and slid them back on. "Right! Um…" She squinted at the piece of paper, cleared her throat. "Dia duit," she said, slowly and carefully, enunciating every letter. "Is draoi mé ó Mheiriceá. Ná bíodh imní ort, táim cairdiúil." Then she slipped the note into the cover of her book, looked up at Jacob, and beamed.
Jacob hadn't stopped staring at her at any point. "Uh… what?"
"Oh." The girl looked crestfallen. "You speak English?" She seemed to search for a reaction, then shrugged. "Okay, but still - wow! Helloooooo, Ireland!"
That startled Jacob out of his stare. "We're not- this is Wales, not Ireland," he said, then realised that with wizardry in the air, that might not be such a sure thing. "Probably, I mean." He glanced over his shoulder at where his parents still sat on the edge of the dunes. "Definitely. I think."
"Not Ire-?" The girl scowled at him, then turned her ire on her book. "I specifically put in the details for Ireland," she said, leafing through the thick paperback. "Wales, Wales… no, it's completely different. I would've noticed a mistake like- oh. Ohhhh."
Jacob leant forward, trying to see the book. "Is that- I mean, do you have…" His voice dropped to a whisper. "... a Manual?"
"Yes, it's-" The girl glanced up at him sharply. "You know what it is?" Her gaze darted to the slim volume in his hand. "You've got one too? You're a wizard?"
"Yes, I… I think so." Jacob held up the faded book for inspection. "I didn't think it actually worked, though…"
"'Worked' is relative," the girl said wryly, tapping the open page of her Manual. "Apparently my 'transit to Éire was redirected to the nearest open locus due to interference from the ambient overlays', whatever that means." She sighed, closed the book with a snap, and held out her hands. "Lise. And, um, dai stiho, cousin." She blinked. "Did I say that right?"
"I have absolutely no idea?" Jacob belatedly took her hand, then let go as soon as seemed practical. "Jacob. I'm kind of new at this."
Lise squinted at him. "Define 'kind of'."
"This was-" Jacob went to gesture at the circles around him, but the sand was bare. "Hey, where'd it go?"
"Spell diagrams vanish when the spell is cast," Lise said, "it's in the Manual. Wait, were you about to say 'my first spell'?"
"... maybe."
"Ah, great." Lise dropped down to sit on the ground, sending up a puff of sand. "Do you know, there's not a single wizard under the age of 18 in the whole of Washington? I checked. So naturally when I travel halfway around the world to find one he's got even less experience than me."
"I, uh…" Jacob knelt down gingerly on the beach in front of her. "That's… bad?"
"No kidding." Lise sighed, then looked up, pushing her wavy black hair back from her face. "So how'd the," she hefted her Manual slightly, "find you?"
"On a bookshelf." He winced at how obvious that sounded. "At our holiday house. I needed a book, you see, and it… was there."
"They do that," Lise agreed, "apparently. Mine caught me at a bookshop - a last minute swap for a fantasy thing." She shook her head, looking down at the cover, then glanced up again with a tentative smile. "So… magic, right?"
"Yeah." Jacob chuckled suddenly. "Yeah. And you- you teleported here?"
"I know, right?" She reached down and grabbed a handful of sand, letting it trickle through her fingers. "Two weeks ago I would've laughed at the very idea, but now… well, I'm still laughing!"
"I don't blame you." Jacob placed his Manual on the floor in front of him, running his fingers over the rough cover. "And…" He licked his lips, suddenly even less sure of himself. "Does it do… everything it says it does?"
"And more." There was a sparkle in Lise's eyes that had nothing to do with the sun overhead. "Harry Potter's got nothing on me- on us. And the things you hear…" She shook her head again, met Jacob's eyes. "If you're just starting out, you've got a lot to look forward to."
"Says the girl who's been a wizard for two whole weeks."
She flicked a hand through the air. "Week and a half, but who's counting?" The cover of her Manual suddenly pulsed with a faint light, and she scowled. "Mom's awake… I'd better go. Assuming I don't bounce off any ambient whatsits again."
"Oh." Jacob slumped slightly. "Well, it was lovely to meet you."
Lise shot him a look. "Really?"
"Well… yes." He ran his fingers through the sand. "I mean, this whole wizardry thing is huge, and knowing there's someone else out there who's just starting with it is… y'know…"
"I do." Lise thought for a second, then held out her hand. "Lend me your Manual?"
"Er." He looked down at the book. "Why?"
She rolled her eyes. "Or just… hang on." Flicking her own book open, she found a page and held it open. "Address book. Tap it there."
Dubiously, Jacob picked up his Manual and touched it to hers. The book quivered slightly, and when he opened it he found a new page near the front, bearing Lise's name, address, and current status.
"So now we can keep in touch," Lise said. "In fact…" She leafed through her book to what looked like a schedule. "What're you doing in… two hours or so?"
"Er." Jacob glanced up at the sun to get a feel for the time. "We might still be on the beach." But out over the sea, the clouds were starting to build. "I think Mum said we'd do the Panorama Walk - it's up on the mountains back there." He waved in vaguely the right direction.
"Sounds fun." Lise flicked through her Manual until she came to a page covered in a complex diagram. "So let me go have some breakfast, make an appearance, and change into something warmer-" She had goosebumps on her arms, Jacob noticed, though it was quite a warm day. "-and I'll meet you there." She glanced up at him, not quite meeting his eyes. "I mean, if that sounds good to you?"
"Yes?" Jacob coughed. "Uh, yes. If you're not busy. It's been nice talking to you."
"Likewise." Climbing to her feet, Lise shook the sand off her jeans and held out her Manual. "You might want to stand back - I'm not sure what this looks like from the outside."
Jacob hastily moved away, then stopped and turned to watch. As Lise spoke the words of her spell, reading from the open page, he heard the words both in the unfamiliar syllables of the Speech, and in plain, almost conversational English: "This is a mbende-askhad-ten class reversal of the previously enacted translocation event…"
Everything went still. The world leant in to listen as Lise worked her way through the spell (far more complex than Jacob's own). And then, in a flurry of sand and a clap of displaced air, she was gone.
(And to answer your other question here: AR is Accelerated Reading, or something like that. At my school, you read a book from the library, then answered 10 questions about it in a computer program to see how much you paid attention. Trivia, character reasonings and so forth. If you got enough questions right/points from the quizzes, you could get a prize at - the end of each month, I think? It was mostly trinkets.)
Anyway, I do like the dialogue and what actions were incorporated with it. :) And the mangled Irish.
In proper Welsh fashion, the weather turned quickly. Jacob barely had time to get changed again before the patter of rain drowned out the splashing of waves. The long trek back to the car was carried out at a jog, towels draped over heads for what little protection they provided, and the entire family breathed a sigh of relief when they finally shut the doors and turned on the heater.
Perfect weather, in other words, for climbing a mountain.
The Panorama Walk ran for about four miles, sloping gently up from the seafront town of Aberdyfi into the mountains behind. On a clear day, it treated walkers to a series of stunning views across the Dyfi estuary, truly earning its name.
On a rainy day, it was a damp trudge up a road that turned into a track, dodging puddles and rogue sheep alike, for the sake of a single moment of delight at the end.
Jacob and his family made good time along the straight road that made up the bulk of the hike, and were just approaching the final climb when Jacob heard a distinct pop. In his pocket, his Manual seemed to vibrate softly, as if humming to itself. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw a dark-haired figure, just as she ducked down behind a gorse bush.
"Oh!" Jacob's family drew to a halt at his exclamation, and he hurriedly lifted the map, pretending to be engrossed. "I just… uh…" He scanned the contour lines, looking for any excuse to break away from the group. "... noticed that there's meant to be a footpath going over the ridge," he said, tapping at the waterproofed paper and hoping they didn't look too closely. "There's a cairn at the top, too."
His mother looked at him, then up at the sodden hillside. "Does it say how muddy it is?" she asked in a level voice.
"I'm sure it's… well, maybe a bit." He had to play this carefully. "Maybe I could have a look? If it's no good I'll catch you up."
"Why not?" His father took a step back towards him. "I'll come with you."
"Er." Jacob's mind raced. "I thought your boots were leaking. I think the footpath crosses a stream, so…"
"All right," his mother said, "you can go and explore. But don't get too far behind, you understand?"
"Absolutely. Thanks. See you in a bit." He made a show of poring over the map, until they rounded a curve in the track; then he hurried back to where Lise was waiting.
"Sorry about that," he said, slightly out of breath. "I didn't want to- why aren't you wet?"
The American girl scowled at him from under her bedraggled hair. "I am."
"Yes, no, but… why aren't you more wet?" Jacob rounded the gorse bush, and looked up sharply as the rain stopped splatting on his hood. "Do you have…?"
"A magic umbrella?" Lise supplied. "Yup. The book says it's a waste of energy, but I say that if it didn't want me to use energy, it should have told me the weather before it let me jump here in just a sweater." She plucked at the damp fabric of her jumper, then sighed and trudged over to the path. "I assume we're following your family?"
"Yes, there's a… thing to see, just ahead." Jacob caught up to her and matched her pace, not coincidentally keeping himself under the rain-deflecting spell. "It seems like you've really got the hang of this wizardry business," he said. "I've not had a chance to read more since we talked - just a few minutes in the car - but it looks really complex."
"It's not too bad," Lise replied. "The Manual's stuffed with information, provided you know what to look for."
Jacob smirked. "But not a weather report?"
"Actually, there is one." The girl flicked a finger against the book where it stuck out from her pocket. "It said it was sunny."
"Never trust the weather-man in Wales," Jacob said reflexively. "So does it get quicker? I spent ages working out my name on the beach."
"Yeah, there's a… take a look." She pulled her Manual out and flicked through to a page marked with a swirling spell diagram. "It stores any spells you've used recently, and you can pull bits out of them to put into new ones. This is the umbrella spell - I can pass you the workings if you like."
"That's be helpful," Jacob said, leaning over to get a better look, "especially in Wales." He frowned at the complex patterns of her name, taking in the meaning. "Huh, you're younger than you look."
"Wha-? Hey!" Lise slammed the book shut and scowled at him. "No peeking! How would you like it if I pried into your name?"
Jacob thought back over what he'd had to include on the beach. "That would be… fine? I don't think I had to put any secrets in there."
"Yeah, well… maybe I did, so don't." Lise lengthened her stride, stomping off ahead of him.
Jacob shook his head in amusement, then squawked as the rain started hitting his face again. "Hey!"
"Serves you right." Lise took a few more steps, then slowed. "Er… Jacob?"
"Yes?" He hurried to get back under the spell.
Lise pointed down the hillside, towards what would be a glorious view were it not for the weather. "Weren't there, um… more fields that way a minute ago?"
"Oh, that happens." Jacob watched the thickening mist with a resigned expression. "It's a Welsh thing - the clouds like to come down to mountaintop level sometimes."
Lise eyed him dubiously. "That fast? I could make out the river until just now, and now…" She pointed at a sheep, grazing peacefully, as it vanished into the fog.
"Okay, yes, this is a bit fast," Jacob allowed, watching the path ahead of them disappear. "But it's just… the wind, or something. What else could it be?"
Lise turned towards him, her outline blurring as the mist enveloped her. "Oh, I dunno," she said, rolling her eyes. "Maybe magic?"
Also, I take it Lise isn't from the rainy part of Washington? Otherwise you'd think she'd have figured out how to store an umbrella in a claudication. =P
The two young wizards walked through the mist, seeing nothing but the gravel underfoot. All sound was gone - not the silence of a spell being spoken, but the muffling of a heavy blanket lying over everything.
Lise wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. "I don't like this," she said, her voice eerily deadened. "It's like… like the breath of the Grey King."
Jacob stopped in his tracks, and Lise vanished into the fog for a few seconds before reemerging, hurrying back. "You've read the Dark is Rising books?" he asked, surprise written in his voice.
"Of course I have; they're great." Lise squinted at him. "Have you?"
"Loads of times. I just didn't think you'd have them in America."
"We have pretty much everything," Lise said. "Our library system is amazing. So is that why you came to Wales?"
Jacob laughed, but the mist sucked the sound away. "No, we come every year… but actually, did you know this is even the right part of Wales? This is the path that leads up to the Bearded Lake."
"Bearded…" Lise's eyes lost focus for a second. "Oh, where Jane nearly gets eaten by the monster?"
"That's the one." The pair started walking again, veering left slightly as the path curved. "Silver on the Tree. I think it's my second-favourite book of the series."
"I like both the Welsh ones," Lise said. "Will and Bran are the best… so what's your favourite?"
"The Dark is Rising," Jacob said promptly. "It was the first one I read - Dad always thought Over Sea, Under Stone wasn't as good - and it's really stuck. Plus I really like the poems."
Lise grinned at him. "How does it go? When the Dark comes rising, Six will turn it back…"
"Three from the Circle," Jacob agreed, "Three from the Track. But the other one's more suitable, isn't it? By the Pleasant Lake the Sleepers lie, On Cadfan's Way where the kestrels call, Though grim from the Grey King shadows fall…"
"Yet singing the Golden Harp shall guide," Lise continued, "To break their sleep and bid them ride. We could use a bit of that 'guiding' here, amid the Grey King's mist."
Jacob chuckled and glanced off to the right. "Actually - does it look lighter to you?"
"Um… maybe." Lise wiped her glasses on her jumper, slipped them back on. "Yes, definitely."
"Then maybe it worked." Jacob raised his voice slightly, trying to beat back the silence. "Then fire shall fly from the Raven Boy, And silver eyes that see the wind, And the Light shall have the harp of gold."
The mist was definitely clearing now. Lise looked over at Jacob, frowning slightly. "Was that the Speech?"
"Er?" Jacob thought back. "I don't… think so?"
"I thought it… well, never mind." She flicked a hand in the direction of the group ahead of them on the path, a gaggle of five children around their age, as if in silent warning: Not around the Muggles. "So tell me about the Bearded Lake."
"Llyn Barfog," Jacob said, making sure to pronounce the Welsh name right. "It's covered in these plants, or half-covered - hence the name." A slab of slate, standing at the side of the path ahead, caught his eye. "But it's not the only thing up here."
"Oh?" Lise was looking at the ground now, faintly puzzled. "Hey, wasn't this-?"
"There's Carn March Arthur up ahead," Jacob said. "It's supposed to be the hoofprint of Arthur's horse. And there's-"
"-a proper path a minute ago?" Lise tried to interrupt, gesturing at the sodden earth beneath them, but Jacob went on over her.
"-Echo Valley just past the lake, you remember? The mountains are singing, and the Lady comes?"
Ahead, one of the children stiffened, stopping in the centre of the path. He turned slowly on one heel, until he was facing Jacob and Lise down the gently-sloping track between rain-soaked grass. There was not a trace of mist to be seen. "What," the boy asked, his eyes seeming to bore into them, "did you just say?"
Jacob stared at the boy, bundled up in an oversized raincoat and hat. Ahead of him, his four companions were beginning to turn. "It's from a book," the young wizard said, bewildered. "Is there a problem?"
One of the boy's companions, the only girl, stepped closer to him. "Will?" she said. "What's going on?"
The boy - Will - half-turned, flicking out a hand towards his friends, and in that moment everything stopped. The rain hung in the air, a nearby sheep paused mid-chew, and the other four children froze in place.
Will looked back at Jacob, folding his arms. "I won't let you harm them," he said levelly. "If you serve the Dark, you know I'll protect them."
"Whoa, whoa!" Jacob held up his hands. "We're not- the Dark is so not our thing."
"Only the servants of the Light and the Dark would know the prophecy you spoke of," Will said, "and you are no Old Ones." His gaze flickered to Lise, and uncertainty crept into his voice. "Unless… but no, she's much too young. The Lady wouldn't… surely..."
Jacob's mind was whirling as he took in what was happening. He opened his mouth, but Lise caught at his arm before he could speak.
"Any chance you could translate?" she hissed. "I can understand you, the Speech is good like that, but him…" She shrugged.
Jacob blinked, going over the last few moments. Surely Will was speaking English? But there was something about it, something strange… "The Old Speech," he whispered. "I didn't even realise…"
"I guess that's different from the Speech-Speech," Lise concluded. She looked up the path at Will, studying him. "Hey, I know this is going to sound crazy, but I'm getting a distinctly Dark is Rising feel here."
Will's head jerked back slightly. "The Dark is rising," he agreed, and Jacob was sure he was speaking English now. "But who are you to speak of it? You are not of the Circle, so-"
"Yeah, I'm gonna stop you there." Lise pulled out her Manual and flicked to a blank page. She muttered a few words in the Speech, then used her finger to draw a symbol on the paper - a large circle, quartered by a cross. Flipping the book round, she showed it to Will. "There. Tell me someone from the Dark could do that."
Will looked even more uncertain. "So you are Old Ones? But, Lady-"
"We're not," Lise interrupted again. "We're… Jacob, help me out here."
Jacob had been watching the boy ahead. "Just… before I do," he said slowly. "Are you… actually Will Stanton, youngest of the Old Ones?"
"I am," the boy said, calm once more. "So who are you, and how do you know me?"
Jacob shook his head slightly, processing that simple statement. Will Stanton was the main character of the Dark is Rising sequence, which were fiction, he was almost certain. Although… he glanced at his Manual, just sticking out of his pocket. Maybe the fact/fiction line was a little more blurred than he'd thought.
Will was clearly getting impatient for an answer. Jacob searched his memory of the books for one. If they weren't Old Ones or creatures of the Dark… well, there was the Wild Magic, but that was pretty messed-up. But hinted at in the later books, and never really described… "The High Magic," he said into the unnatural quiet. "We are servants of the High Magic."
Will studied his face, seeming to be much closer than he actually was. Then he nodded fractionally. "I will not hinder you in your work," he said, "and nor will my friends." He glanced at one of the other children, whose pale hair wasn't quite hidden under his cap - Bran. "And give my regards to your Lord, when you see him."
"We will," Lise confirmed. "Um… should we get out of sight before you undo the time freeze… thing?"
A small smile crept onto Will's face. "That sounds tricky to explain, don't you think?" His brow furrowed, and a moment later time started up again.
"Will?" Bran said, joining the girl (who had to be Jane) at his side. "You look like you've seen an anysbryd - a ghost."
"It's nothing," Will said, holding eye contact with Jacob. Then he smiled and turned, draping an arm over Bran's shoulders. "Nothing," he repeated, "just the mountains spooking me… sounded like they called my name, that's all. Now come on, where's this lake?"
"Jacob."
"Yes, Lise?"
"Did you just lie to Will Stanton?"
Jacob waited before replying, watching the five children ahead until they passed out of sight around the corner. "I'm not even sure I did," he said, turning to her at last. "I mean, we're not of the Dark."
"No, we're of the Light." Lise pulled out her Manual and flipped it open at the Oath. "It says so right there in black and white - 'guard growth', 'ease pain', that's definitely the Light."
"Is it, though?" Jacob opened his own book. "The Light exists to fight the Dark. I think our remit is much broader than that."
"Maybe," Lise allowed. "But the High Magic? What even is that?"
"Good question." Jacob chuckled. "I wish I had the books with me… I almost brought them on holiday, but…"
Lise slapped her forehead and set to leafing through her Manual. "Where is it, where is it… aha." She tapped on a page, sketching a few changes to the spell diagram there, and then spoke it rapidly: "I need a small-aperture claudication to coordinates arbek-nine-three-one…"
The by-now-familiar hush of a spell being enacted barely had time to set in before it broke, and Lise was reaching through a hole in the air to somewhere where the light was much brighter. After a few moments rooting around, she pulled her hand back with a triumphant grin. "Ha! … no, bother, that's Wrinkle in Time."
Jacob bent slightly to look through the hole. "Is that… your house?"
Lise nudged him with an elbow. "Pretty sure you're not meant to spy on a girl's room," she said. "But yeah. Pretty cool, huh?"
"It is…" He waited while she pulled out another book - The Chronicles of Prydain - and went back for a third. "Did you say you can pass a spell to my Manual?"
"Not while it's running… aha!" The girl waved a book in his face. "Third time lucky - Silver on the Tree." She let the spell lapse, then tucked the novel under her arm and held out her Manual. "Find a blank page and press it down on top of here."
Jacob did as he was told, and a moment later had his own copy of the wormhole spell. He fiddled with the coordinates while Lise leafed through Silver on the Tree, spliced in his name, and had the spell running before she found what she was looking for.
"Here we go," she said, as he dug through his bookshelf. "It's early on, when Will's with his family - hey, that was quick."
Jacob pulled his own copy of the book through and glanced at her. "Come again?"
"I thought it'd take you longer to get the spell working…" Lise shook her head. "Don't worry. Will says, Although in the world there is the Old Magic of the earth, and the Wild Magic of living things, it is men who control what the world shall be like. But beyond the world is the universe, bound by the law of the High Magic, as every universe must be."
"Right, and that's us." Jacob shut down his spell, tucked his Manual away. "Or wizardry, rather. It's the cosmic magic, not that of the earth."
Lise kept reading. "Beneath the High Magic are two poles, that we call the Dark and the Light. The Dark seeks by its dark nature to influence men so that in the end, through them, it may control the earth. The Light has the task of stopping that from happening."
Jacob had found the page now, and was studying the passage. "So you think the Dark is the Lone Power, from the Manual's stories?"
"Stories…?" Lise waved the thought off. "It sure sounds like it. And the Light is… life, and everything the Oath stands for. That's what I think."
By silent mutual agreement, the pair started walking, following the path Will and his friends had taken. "So we are of the Light and the High Magic at once," Jacob concluded. "And Will is…"
"Of the Old Magic and the Light." Lise flicked through Silver on the Tree, glancing up occasionally to avoid tripping. "Old Ones, the Old Speech, the Old Ways from Dark is Rising… I mean, talk about a theme, right?"
"Right." They rounded a corner, following the path into a wide, shallow valley of rain-damp ferns. "One thing I don't get, though."
"Only one?" Lise grinned at him. "I've been at this ten times longer than you and I barely get any of it."
"Cheeky." The path started to rise again, climbing towards a low ridge. "If the Lone Power is the Dark, then how come we're still worrying about it? Remember the poem? And where the Midsummer Tree grows tall, By Pendragon's sword the Dark shall fall. That's now, in, like, the seventies or something. The Dark should be long gone by our time."
"How should I know?" Lise closed her book, concentrating on the increasingly narrow path. "Maybe Will and Bran only banished the Dark from the Earth. Maybe they just got rid of all Its creatures." She glanced at him, sidelong, her eyes twinkling. "Or maybe - crazy thought - it didn't get it quite right because it's just a story."
Jacob rolled his eyes and went to elbow her in the ribs. Laughing, Lise dodged, darting ahead. The path crested the ridge, and below them they saw a wide bowl caught between the mountains, the grey sky as its lid, the dark, lily-strewn waters of the Bearded Lake at its heart.
Then they saw the great serpentine neck thrusting out of the water, and the small girl standing defenceless before it. And then they heard the scream.
Jacob grabbed Lise's arm before she could open her Manual. "No, don't," he said. "I remember this scene - it's going to be fine. Bran comes and banishes the creature - look, here he is now."
Sure enough, the pale-haired boy who had been with Will had appeared over the far rim of the valley, charging down towards the girl by the lake. Jacob leafed through his copy of Silver on the Tree and held it out. "See? The creature - the Afanc - tries to threaten Jane, but Bran kicks it back to Llyn Cau; it's a lake on Cadair Idris, this big mountain over…" He turned, trying to get his bearings.
Lise shivered as she watched Bran confront the monster. "I still think we should help," she said. "I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well…"
"But is it ‘right to do so’?" Jacob asked, quoting from later in the Oath. "If we change the past - or the plot, or whatever this is - then who knows what could happen?"
"I guess." Lise pulled her jumper tighter around herself, her face filled with misery. "But I don't like it."
"I get that." Jacob sighed, checking against his book as Bran continued to speak. "Neither do I. But it's nearly over, look."
Down below, the Afanc had fallen silent, but Bran's voice seemed to echo unnaturally across the valley. "Go, Afanc!" he cried, and the valley seemed to bend around him. "Go back to the dark water where you belong! Go back to the Dark, and never come out again! Ewch nôl! Ewch y llyn!"
And the Afanc…
… laughed.
Lise shook her head, eyes wide, as the sibilant laugh echoed through the valley. "This? This is not fine."
"That's not right." Jacob flicked back and forward through his book, as if by checking again he could find a different version of the plot. "That's not supposed to… did we change something? Is this our fault?"
"How could we have?" Lise demanded. "All we did was talk to Will; Bran barely even noticed we were there."
"Something did." The Afanc was still laughing, stretching forward again from the lake towards Bran and Jane. "We need to do something."
"That's what I was saying." Lise jerked her Manual open to an incomplete spell diagram. "I used this to clear out some roaches back home; if we boost it enough, it might do the trick."
Jacob cast another look towards the lake. Will Stanton was there now, and he flung his hand out towards the creature. The Afanc recoiled, pulling back to the edge of the water.
"Leave this place!" Will shouted, and Jacob wasn't sure if he was using English or the Old Speech. "I am the Sign-Seeker, and these people are under my protection!"
"Your protection." The Afanc drew itself up again, rallying against the Old Magic Will had brought to bear against it. "But the signs are not here, Old One - and you have no power over the Wild Dark."
"We'll need to feed power to Will." Lise was deep in her spelling; the page of her Manual had unfolded to four times its normal size, and glowing Speech characters were writhing across it. "He knows what he's doing, so… but his name, his name." She flipped to the back of the Manual, trying to peer past the incomplete spell to the character lists. "Argh, what's the symbol for the Thames Valley?"
"'Catuva'," Jacob supplied, then shook his head. "No, he's from further upriver - it's 'Atreba'. It's a kind of squiggly… here, let me." He reached over and sketched the character onto the page, flicking it into place with a finger.
Lise glanced up at him. "You're really good at that," she said. "And you understood Will's Old Speech…"
Jacob shrugged, still studying the diagram. "'Catuva' is in my own name, and 'Atreba' is obvious from that, right?"
Lise blinked. "Um, not right?"
"Oh. Well, I've always been good with languages," he said absently. "I guess that applies to the Speech, too." He tapped a finger on the centre of the diagram. "This is wrong."
"What's wrong with it?" Lise glanced down the hill: Will and Bran together were barely holding the Afanc at bay, while Jane stood frozen by the lake, and her siblings watched helplessly. "We don't have time for perfectionism."
"It's all wrong," Jacob insisted. "The whole shape of it… it needs a fourth node."
"No, not with a creature like the Afanc." Lise traced her finger around the outside of the spell circle, bringing the characters to glittering life. "You don't give a creature of the Lone Power a name-circle of its own, you embed it in the body of the spell."
"It still needs another node," Jacob said, staring at the diagram. "It's not going to have enough power…"
"Isn't that what the Afanc said to Will?" Lise ran her finger over the diagram, adding a few more characters to Will's name. "So we feed him the magic from the spell, and it boosts his own…"
"It wasn't 'not enough'," Jacob muttered. "It said 'no power'..." No power, no power… the words chased each other around Jacob's head, sparking off other memories, books and films and--
"For my will is as strong as yours," he whispered, "and my kingdom is as great…"
Lise broke off her spelling to stare at him. "What?"
"We've got it backwards," he said, slapping his Manual over hers and taking over the spell. "It's not Will we need to focus on, it's Bran. Will has the power, but Bran has the authority." He pulled at the spell structure, throwing a fourth circle in, right under the space where the Wizard's Knot would seal the wizardry. "Look, if we mix our magic with Will's and feed it all to Bran…"
"It could work," Lise breathed. "It could-"
A scream echoed across the valley, and the pair whirled to see. The Afanc had lunged for Jane, and only her brother Simon's intervention had gotten her out of its way in time. The creature reared, seeking its target.
Lise opened her Manual to a section ominously entitled 'Combat Spells'. "Get it working," she told Jacob. "I'll do what I can, but we need that spell."
"I will," Jacob promised. "... good luck."
Lise flashed him a quick smile. "Thanks." She rattled off a string of syllables in the Speech, so fast Jacob only got the vaguest impression of what they meant, and then with a bang she was down at the water's edge, standing defiant between Jane and Bran. For a moment Jacob stared down at the young girl, black hair streaming behind her in the wind, facing down a monster out of legend with only a book in her hand. Then he bent once more over the spell.
The four names were coming together now. Lise's had come over with the spell from her Manual, and his own had joined it on the page. Will's was almost complete now, but strangely sparse - a name that seemed to belong not to a human being, but to something simpler, or perhaps so complex that it could only be described in the vaguest terms.
Bran's name, as Jacob threw down symbol after symbol without even fully understanding them, was even stranger. It was a name caught out of time, a name that shared characteristics with wizardry itself - but also a name that offered itself an exit, a chance to become something lesser but so much more.
The last few terms settled into place, twisting their way into the complex lines of the outer circle. Jacob made a few more tweaks, then smiled thinly as he saw the shape the spell diagram made. "But of course," he whispered, tying the Wizard's Knot to complete the spell. "What else would it be?"
Down in the valley, Lise was fighting off the Afanc with increasingly desperate spells. Jacob considered trying to replicate her teleportation spell, but it would take too long - knowing which characters to use was no help without a basis to work on. He folded his Manual closed, tucked it under his arm, and started running.
There was no time to catch his breath when he reached the lake-side. Opening the book, he plucked the spell circle from the page and flung it to the boggy ground. "Lise!" he gasped, stumbling into the circle that marked his name.
The girl looked up, loosed one last spell - one that froze the water of the Bearded Lake, miring the monster in place - then ran over to her own name. She nodded to Jacob just once, and then began reading the spell into reality.
Jacob joined his voice to hers as the Welsh landscape fell silent. Across the circle, standing just beside his own name, Will's eyes widened at the sensation. The spell grew in strength, the words filling with golden light as the two wizards spoke.
Together, they worked through the circle describing Bran, the recipient of the power they were offering. Then Jacob fell silent as Lise spoke her name, before taking up the thread for his own.
Her voice rose again to join him as they completed the final arc, towards the last and most crucial quarter of the spell. The golden light of the working spell reached the knot at the cusp of the final name - Will's name - then suffused the circle with its magic.
"Will Stanton!" the two wizards cried together in the Speech. "Youngest of the Old Ones, Sign-Seeker, child of the Thames, son of Roger and Mary and of the Old Magic! Seventh son of a seventh son, the High Magic implores your aid! For the sake of Bran Davies, the Pendragon of old, will you give of your power?"
The spell hung in the air, the silence of the listening world holding it in crystal. Even the Afanc was powerless to intervene in that single frozen moment.
"In the name of the Light," said Will Stanton in the Old Speech of magic, "and in defiance of the Dark, I give freely!"
The spell took, flaring to full light, and between the four circles that made it up blazed the sign of the Light: the circle, quartered by a cross. Then the Knot at its apex caught aflame, and the power poured out of the wizardry, out of Jacob and Lise and Will, and into Bran.
"This is not your place!" the boy proclaimed, his tawny eyes glowing bright. "Afanc, I cast you out! Ewch nôl! Ewch y llyn!"
The Afanc screamed as Bran's command took it by the scruff of the neck and hurled it from Llyn Barfog. The spell circle blazed amid the ferns, and then broke, and Jacob and Lise found themselves flung up, up, up...
"Ow."
Jacob pushed himself up with one hand, scratching it on the heather in the process. Grabbing hold of a large rock, he dragged himself further upright and looked around.
"What…?"
He was still by a lake, but it definitely wasn't Llyn Barfog. The characteristic waterlilies were gone, and the towering mountain peaks behind the wide lake were distinctly familiar. Of course, rather more familiar was the dark green monster, lying in the water with its neck draped onto the shore, and the black-haired girl standing near it.
Jacob hobbled over, wincing, and joined Lise by the Afanc. "How come you're not in agony?" he demanded.
Lise glanced at him for a moment. "I'm younger; I bounce better, old man." She turned back to the monster, head cocked to the side as she listened to its breathing. "Does that sound bubbly to you?"
"What?" Jacob frowned at the creature. "I don't know; why?"
"Because bubbling sounds might indicate damage to the lungs." Pulling out her Manual, the girl flipped to a long contents table midway through the book. "X-rays…? No, silly, the book can print the results without any of that… have you still got its name, Jacob?"
"I guess it's in the spell we did…" Jacob shook his head. "Why would you want its name?"
Lise blinked at him. "So I can heal it, obviously."
"Er." Jacob actually pushed up on tiptoes to see if there was another animal behind the Afanc. "You do remember it tried to kill us, yes?"
"I will guard growth and ease pain," Lise said. "It doesn't say, Unless I don't like the one in pain. And Bran intended to banish it - not kill it."
Jacob looked up again at the towering peaks behind the lake. "Just to check," he said slowly, "we've been thrown to Cadair Idris, home of the Grey King, on which it is said anyone who spends the night will return either mad or a poet, and you want to heal the creature of the Dark that's imprisoned here?"
"Yes." Lise looked up from her Manual. "So this is Llyn… thingy, like Bran said?"
"Llyn Cau," Jacob supplied. "Yeah, we walked up here last summer… it's not a fun hike. Pretty, but very long and up-ish."
"Good thing we took the shortcut this time, then." She turned another page in her Manual, ran a finger over a partial spell diagram. "Hmm, not sure how I feel about this one - it's probably the best healing spell in the book, but do I really want to bind myself to the Afanc like that…?"
Jacob shook his head, trying to frame a reply. "I really don't think-"
There was a crash like a star falling to earth, and a whinnying call that echoed from the slopes of Idris. The two young wizards gaped, stumbling back as a pure white horse thundered across the heather-strewn lakeshore and came to a rearing halt at the head of the Afanc. On her back rode a tall man, golden-haired and tawny-eyed, clad in a shirt of gleaming mail and holding aloft a crystal sword.
"Well-leapt, Llamrei," the rider boomed - not in English, nor even the Old Speech Will had used, but in the Speech that underlies all wizardry. "And well met, you servants of the High Magic," the rider went on. "I see the mark of Ordeal upon you, and greet you on your errantry."
Jacob clambered to his feet again, exchanging a look with Lise. "Er… hail, my lord," he said, his glance flicking to the sword, and the gold circlet half-hidden amid the rider's hair. "Er…"
"Who…?" Lise chewed on her lip for a moment. "So, I know this sounds dumb, but I'm saying it anyway: who… are you?"
The rider smiled and dropped from his saddle, sword still in hand. "I am a Lord of the High Magic," he said, "standing above the Light and the Dark, apart from each. I am the great hope of the Old Ones, and the Rider of Britain's Night. I am the slayer of the Saxons, the victor of Badon, the wielder of Eirias, and bearer of the last light." He stepped forward, and the young wizards fell back before him. "I am Arthur, the Pendragon," he said, dropping for the names alone into another language entirely, "and I greet you well. Now step aside, that I might slay this beast out of the Dark, and put an end to its terror."
Jacob tried to take a step to the side, but cool fingers wrapped around his wrist, holding him in place. "My lord," Lise said, "we cannot."
"Cannot?" King Arthur's brow furrowed. "Child, this monster came from the Dark. You who serve the Light by the High Magic should be glad to see its end."
Jacob tried to pull free, but Lise had a firm grip. Frowning, he did his best to avoid eye contact with Arthur - King Arthur! In an effort to keep from freaking out, he set about identifying the route his family had taken to walk up to Llyn Cau the previous year.
"Dark though it is," Lise said, "it is still of Life." She shot Jacob a look, which he steadfastly ignored. The worn path he remembered wasn't visible - well, The Dark is Rising took place in the seventies or something, maybe they hadn't put it in yet - but he recognised a string of boulders, and the opening of a low valley.
"It serves death," Arthur told the girl in front of him. "It brings death. It has murdered oxen, farmers, even young maidens of the hills about Llyn Barfog."
The frown on Jacob's face deepened. The forest that covered the slopes of the mountain seemed distinctly closer than it should be, and… he glanced over his shoulder at the lake, and the slate-strewn slopes beyond. Everything seemed taller, crisper… older…
"But it has been driven from that lake," Lise said. "It was banished here by-"
"You, my lord," Jacob interrupted, then lowered his voice. "Arthur was the first person to banish the Afanc. I think we've been sent back in time."
"What?" Lise shook her head. "Way to drop a timeslide on a girl without warning. But I'm glad you're back with me." She straightened up, speaking for Arthur's ears again. "The creature can do no harm here," she said. "Why kill it?"
"Why?" Arthur sheathed his crystal blade, folding his arms across his chest. "For the same reason that I slew Aelle in the glory of Badon, or Rhitta the beard-taker on the highest peak of Yr Wyddfa - to put an end to them, and prevent their evil ever returning."
"But…" Jacob bit his lip, then stepped back in to Lise's side. "But we swore an Oath," he said quietly. "We swore to use our Art in Life's service, not that of the bringer of Death."
"No Art of yours is needed," King Arthur said, dropping his hand once more to the ornate hilt of his sword. "I will do the deed, and gladly; all you need do is step aside."
Lise gasped softly, but waved off Jacob's look and flipped open her Manual. Shaking his head, Jacob looked up at King Arthur again. The king's face seemed to glow slightly against the stormy sky behind him, suffused with wisdom, compassion, and the power of the High Magic - wizardry itself.
And why shouldn't I stand back? Jacob asked himself. After all, he hadn't wanted to get involved. It had been Lise who insisted on getting in Arthur's way, and now she was off reading a book, mumbling to herself as she searched for something. And the Afanc was evil - it had tried to (or would try to, or however the grammar of time travel went) attack Jane, and had terrorised the region in Arthur's time. It wasn't like Cadair Idris was in the middle of nowhere, either - anyone could wander up here, if they had a few hours to spare. It was still a danger.
And above all that, it was King Arthur asking, the King Arthur. Granted, on a scale of one to winding up in a Susan Cooper book, that wasn't the weirdest thing to happen to him today, but… how do you argue with the High King of Britain? Better to move away, let him do what was, after all, the only right and proper thing for someone from his own time.
But...
"'To these ends'," Jacob said softly, "'in the practice of my Art, I will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so'." He straightened his shoulders and met Arthur's gaze firmly. "'Looking always towards the Heart of Time, where all our sundered times are one, and all our myriad worlds lie whole in That from Which they proceeded'. I am truly sorry, my lord, but… you cannot pass."
For the first time, a crack showed in the nobility of Arthur's face. "I can and I will," he said, thunder rumbling in his words, and the crystal sword Eirias rang as it left its sheath. "Stand aside, and you will come to no harm."
Jacob planted his feet amid the blooming heather and shook his head stubbornly. He doubted Arthur would kill them, but even if he just gently pushed them aside, it was the failure that would burn, his failing of the Afanc, of wizardry, of Lise…
And then suddenly Lise was there, closing her Manual with a sharp click. She looked up at Arthur, no fear in her eyes, though Jacob could feel her hand trembling where it gripped his wrist.
"I know you," she said quietly. She took a deep breath, and then spoke again, her voice high and clear in the mountain air: "Fairest and fallen, greetings - and defiance."
The world fell still. The heather ceased its rustling. The soft lapping of the water on the lakeshore faded away. The sky grew darker. The very mountains seemed to lean in, listening.
And Arthur laughed.
As the High King's laugh echoed around the bowl of Cadair Idris, Jacob leant over to Lise. "What's going on?" he hissed.
The girl's face had set into a stony glare. "This is not King Arthur, if there ever was such a person." She pointed at the mail-clad knight. "This is the Lone Power."
The sound of laughter died away, though the Lord of the High Magic still smiled. "That's where you're wrong, little wizard," he said, his Speech taking on a new, strange accent. "I am that Power that stands alone, yes - but I am also the Pendragon."
Lise didn't waver. "Then you've taken him over," she said. "Like possession, or brainwashing, or-"
"The word you are groping for, child," Arthur said smoothly, "is 'overshadowed', and it is absolutely true." He paused, and his smile widened. "But do you really think I could overshadow a tool of wizardry so powerful as Arthur did he not permit it?"
Lise didn't answer. Jacob pressed his free hand over hers on his wrist and snorted his derision. "Of course you could," he said. "You're evil, that's what you do."
The Lone Power waved this off, sheathing the crystal sword once more. "Oh, minor acts of control are possible, I suppose," It allowed. "But everything is so much easier if the subject consents to the arrangement."
Jacob looked at Lise, seeing the uncertainty in her eyes. "He's lying," he told her. "He's of the Dark - he is the Dark - he's not going to just-"
Arthur laughed again, a bark of genuine mirth. "The Dark?" he scoffed. "I am so far above that shadow-play you can't even comprehend." He smirked, looking past them to the wounded Afanc. "But it was an excellent tool for distracting the fickle Powers of this island, wasn't it?"
"You can't…" Lise swallowed, glanced over her shoulder at the monster, tried again. "You can't say you weren't trying to-"
"To what?" The Lone Power gestured at the beast. "To kill a creation of the Dark? You're making my point for me."
There was something off about the words It was using, Jacob realised, their precise meaning in the Speech… not it was an excellent tool, but it still can be… "You're trying to change the future," he said with sudden certainty. "If you kill the Afanc now, then it can never confront Jane, and… and that will change things," he concluded. "Somehow."
Arthur's good-humoured mask slipped a little. "They were so pleased with themselves," he said, "so happy with their idea to counter my new Darkness with an 'Old Magic' of their own - so clever in sneaking around the rules by incarnating themselves as immortal humans. But they were fools." He raised his voice, and the words echoed back from over the grey lake. "When the Dark comes rising, Six shall turn it back… for a time, and feel like they've accomplished something great, and keep grubbing about in their cages of flesh until the next time I choose to stir things up."
"But that wasn't going to happen," Lise said, taking Silver on the Tree out from under her arm and gazing down at the cover. "The book ends with the Dark being defeated, properly defeated. All shall find the Light at last, silver on the tree."
"Four thousand years I kept them pinned to this grubby island," the Lone Power groused. "The Pendragon here was set to do the Old Ones' bidding, destroy the Dark at its very first rising, but when I showed him how they were using him he leapt at my offer. And just a little change - taking away the girl's trust in a strange boy from the mountains who saves her from a monster - will make the second confrontation just as indecisive."
"And that's why he wants to kill the Afanc," Jacob said, turning to Lise. "If it doesn't attack Jane, she'll never really see who Bran is, and…"
"The future changes." Lise nodded and released his arm at last. She opened he Manual and faced King Arthur. "You failed. We won't let you touch it."
"Touch it?" Amusement seeped back into the Power's tone. "It's already dying. All I have to do is wait."
"What?" Lise turned, opening her Manual to the diagnostic sections and rattling off a quick spell. "No, no… Jacob, pass me its name, quickly."
Jacob flipped to the prior spell and tapped it on her open book, transferring the whole thing across once more. He had no further doubts - after all, if the Lone Power wanted to stop them, they must be doing something right.
But the Power didn't seem all that concerned. "And what if you do?" It asked in a bored tone. "The Dark is defeated, and I'm down one minor plaything. And the Old Ones? They're all heading off to Timeheart, leaving this island with no-one to speak for it." It turned, spreading Its arms as if to embrace the mountain, and the whole of Britain beyond. "I'll have a free run at the place. Oh, the 1980s are going to be fun."
Lise paused in her spelling, looking torn, and the Power leant in. "Tell you what," It said conspiratorially, "I'll make it easier on you. If you cast that spell," It flicked a dismissive finger at the Manual, "I will banish you forever from this land."
Lise gaped, glancing briefly at Jacob. "You can't do that!"
"Oh, but I can." It drew Itself up, Its crown catching the light. "I am Arthur, the once and future king of Britain. I have the right."
"Then I'll cast it," Jacob said, placing his hand on Lise's shoulder.
"Oh, really, are we rules-lawyering now?" The Power pointed at the two of them. "Let me be perfectly plain," it said formally, still in the Speech. "Anyone who is involved in the casting of that spell will be banished from Britain. Is that clear?"
Lise looked down at the book, then back up at the Lone One. "Absolutely," she said coldly, and quite deliberately set her finger to the page once again.
King Arthur rolled his eyes and glanced at Jacob. "The stubbornness of youth," he said. "I don't suppose you can convince her? After all, I win either way - and if she'll just let the beast die, neither of you have to suffer along the way."
"No." Jacob looked down at the girl's book, at the tracery of Speech forming on the page. "I've half a mind to join her myself."
"No." Lise met his eyes for an instant. "This is my choice, understand?"
"Absolutely." Jacob faced the Lone Power again. "So there's nothing left to say."
Arthur rolled his eyes, but fell silent. The only sounds were the rustling of heather, the lapping of the water, and the laboured breathing of the Afanc.
Finally, Lise traced a sweeping figure of eight and looked up from her page. "Somehow I still can't believe you'll let me cast this," she said dryly.
"If you want to break a promising partnership over a monster, be my guest," Arthur said. It looked into her eyes, wide behind her glasses. "What, do you need an official invitation?" Once again it dropped into a more formal register of the Speech. "I consent to the casting of this spell. Happy?"
"Very." Lise shared one final look with Jacob, held up her book, and began to read.
The familiar silence fell as the syllables of the Speech poured out of her. She first named the Afanc, the recipient of the spell. Then a long list of healing actions to be taken, including several that depended on the outcome of intermediate diagnostics. She moved onto her name, as caster and power source, and King Arthur smiled thinly at the sound of it.
Then: "Bright star that was," she recited, her voice clear and cold. "Dark star that is."
The Lone Powers eyes widened. "What?"
Lise reached out blindly, taking Jacob's hand as she spoke on. "Tempter, Fearmonger, Starsnuffer, Fire-kindler, Master of death, Servant of entropy."
"You cannot-" The Power tugged on the crystal sword in its sheath, but in the grip of the spell, Eirias was locked in place. "You have no right!"
"Fairest." The word fell like lead from the young wizard's lips. "Fallen." She looked up, meeting King Arthur's gaze with fire in her eyes. "Lone Power, I name you, and by your own spoken consent," she hesitated, just for an instant, letting that sink in, "I bind you to this spell." She raised a hand, pointing at the Afanc, and spoke the final syllables.
The Lone Power screamed. The Afanc jolted as the healing energy rippled through it. The mountains shook under them, boulders crashing down from the craggy peaks. Jacob felt Lise's hand slip in his, tried to tighten his grip, but it was no good - she fell away, and everything else followed after, and there was only white...
Lise was sitting half-curled on her bed when she heard the distinct pop of displaced air. She swung her legs off, wincing at the chill of the floor, and crossed to the window.
There was a figure out there, half-hidden between the derelict greenhouses. Lise grinned, and reached for her jacket.
Five minutes later she was crunching over the gravel towards her visitor. She rounded one of the scrap-metal sculptures that dotted the yard and stopped in front of him. "Hey."
"Hi." Jacob gave a little wave. "I pulled your coordinates from the bookshelf spell… hope you don't mind."
"No, no, that's fine." Lise went to lean on the glass, but it creaked alarmingly, so she just stood. "No problem."
Jacob nodded, and looked around. "It's all a bit… post-apocalyptic," he said, gesturing at the sculpture. Then he coloured slightly. "Sorry, that was rude."
"It's fine," Lise repeated. "We've got a cherry orchard round the other side… well, I say that, it's got a couple of cherry trees, anyway. And there's the racquetball court… it's kind of a weird house, not gonna lie."
"Right." Jacob chewed on his lip, then said in a sudden rush, "I'm sorry I didn't come earlier, but my parents were furious I'd gone missing, and then I got a visit from a Senior wizard, and then in the morning I had, like, the wizard in charge of all of Britain show up, and then we were off to the beach again, and it just… this is the first chance I got, I promise."
Lise nodded. She'd had her own share of visitors, though none quite so impressive as that. "So what did they say?"
"Well, we passed." Jacob grinned at her. "But I figure you already knew that. And the timeline wasn't changed - the Dark was defeated on schedule, and all that."
Lise nodded again. "And… the Lone Power?"
"That's the really good bit," Jacob said, with breathless enthusiasm. "It worked! You tied It up in Its own banishment. From the time the Afanc attacked Jane to… well, this morning, actually, It couldn't get a single incarnation into the whole of Britain." He sobered slightly and went on. "Diane - that's the regional Senior I mentioned - says the ban broke the moment we returned to our own time, and of course this means the 80s were kind of our own fault, but still… we kept the Lone Power out for two decades!" He stopped, looking guilty. "I mean, you did."
"Yaaay." Lise managed a weak smile. She kicked at the gravel underfoot, head down. "I'm glad it worked out. I was scared…" She shrugged. "That it was all for nothing."
"It wasn't." Jacob reached out, touched her shoulder lightly. "We won. You won."
"-- but I'm still banned." She looked up, met his eyes. "My Advisory says it looks pretty permanent. I can't magic myself into Britain, and, well… her exact words when I asked about flying over were 'I wouldn't want to witness the consequences'."
"Oh, no." Jacob's hand fell back to his side. "I'm sorry, I… I figured if the Lone One got back in, then you…"
"Yeah." Lise sighed, and sat down carefully on the greenhouse's retaining wall. "I guess the rules are different for Powers."
Jacob gazed down at her, then dropped to squat on the gravel. "Hey," he said, lying a hand on her knee. "We'll find a way, right? I mean, wizardry is all about getting one over on that guy."
Lise chuckled, then had to nudge her glasses back up. "Sure. But… I figured we'd be partners."
"We are," Jacob said firmly. "What, you think a little thing like a ban is going to prevent that?"
"Er, yes?" She reached down and picked up a handful of gravel, let it drain through her fingers. "I can't come help you when you have a problem, or anything."
"So I'll bring my problems here." Jacob's smile was distinctly lopsided. "You'll be sick of the sight of me before long, partner."
This time, Lise's laugh came straight from the heart. "I look forward to it." She clapped her hand over his, smiling.
Jacob's answering smile had a thoughtful character. "Do you remember… when we left?" he asked.
Lise looked puzzled. "The spell threw me out of Wales," she said, "and back home. Mom hadn't even noticed I was gone."
"Mm." Jacob glanced aside, back again. "... straight home?"
"I…" A flash of memory came to her: a mountain glowing under an azure sky, a lake pure as crystal, a serpentine neck rising to greet her; and on the lakeshore Will Stanton, and an old man with a hooked nose and the warmest of smiles. "... I'm not sure."
"Yeah?" Jacob looked at her, and his smile was the summer sun come to earth. "Me neither."
That was a wonderful adventure, albeit one I think I'd need to read the other series to fully understand. The way the Lone Power showed up was really clever- and definitely not something I would have noticed!
Congrats to Jacob and Lise on Ordeals finished, Darkness cast out, and adventures begun!
(And I will try to write more in-depth commentary once I have an actual keyboard and coffee.)
SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILER
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
SPOILERSPOILERTHISISJUSTFILLERANDIAPOLOGIZE.
Also: in b4 the Lone Power banned Itself. Best kind of power play (on words).
And I am here for that sort of headcanon (re: Overshadowing), ngl.
And you were saying my story wasn't a classic Ordeal... ;) Talk about replacing the hero! Sounds just like It, though.
Also, I am now tempted to read the books - if only to find out what's going on with Bran! =V
They are supremely excellent, stuffed full of the theme of an Old World of magic colliding with the modern age.
When the Dark comes rising, Six shall turn it back
Three from the Circle, three from the track
Wood, bronze, iron, water, fire, stone
Five will return, and One go alone.
hS
As in, the Atrebates who became a client kingdom of the Romans? As in, the ones who built Fishbourne Palace?
Neat! =]
I hate it so much when a proper nerding session is interrupted by mortal peril.
And that was a proper nerding session- I love how they worked through the question, trying to reconcile old knowledge and new, Old Magic, High Magic, and Wizardry, and fiction and narrative and reality. It didn't come across as an info-dump at all, or that they were being pushed towards a specific conclusion.
Structurally speaking, there's a lot of different ways you're using italics- for Speech, for Old Speech, for quotes, for titles, and for emphasis in spoken English- the only other use that comes to mind is for emphasis/effects in the narration. This chapter is pretty clear, but last chapter was less so- please be careful and deliberate with how you're showing how they're being used? There's room for an awful lot of confusion from overloaded italics.
I'm going to keep quotes and emphasis in italics, turn titles into italics and underlines, and drop other languages (Welsh included) into 'quotes'. Hopefully that should get it all settled down.
hS
'Cause for a moment I thought we were going to have an emerging Power, there! ;)
I'm kidding; fortunately, the Lone Power appears to have shown up instead...
That sounds like an interesting and wild cosmology- and I love the collision of the Speech and the Old Speech.
It seems like something should have happened more overtly between Lise asking for a translation and Lise taking directly to Will- perhaps not magic, or at least willful magic, but something changed there and I don't even have guesses what it was.
... And now I'm expecting that "we are servants of the High Magic" is going to be important, in future chapters. You don't just say something like that, not in either of the Speeches, without people listening.
Old Ones instinctively use the Old Speech when talking to other Old Ones, and Will does the same thing when addressing servants of the Dark at various times. My notion is that he was basically startled out of it by Lise using English, whereas Jacob had been using the Speech, which came across as 'definitely not English but I understand it', which to Will equals the Old Speech.
I'll try to clean that up in post-production. :)
hS
And book geekery saving the day! ... Or maybe just landing them in more trouble. XD
Maybe they're even IN the story, now!
It's gonna be really interesting to see how an Ordeal appears from here- and I'm guessing we're in for a double Ordeal, too. And I'm now tempted to go get myself a copy of Dark is Rising, because I haven't read it and missed every single one of those references.
The rainy side of Washington gets two kinds of rain, both of which have the annoying habit of coming at one sideways on a regular basis- either heavy winter rains driven on storm winds (which also make a sport out of snapping umbrellas) or light spring rains whose small drops drift enough that even the gentler spring winds are enough to send at one from any and sometimes all directions.
An umbrella-spell would be such a wonderful thing. I can't count the number of times I've gotten to work with soaked legs, even with an umbrella trying to shield me from the worst of it.
(To say nothing of the days where the weather-man has been wrong and I went out the door on a sunny morning that turned into a rainy afternoon...)
I know most of y'all are on Discord, but there's a Slack, too!
Invite link is https://youngwizards-slackin.herokuapp.com/
Don't you all flood in at once, now. ;)
Good prompt!
(okay, fair warning: this one may get a little dark. Sorry?)
I was drowning in opportunities, as a child- grew up with shelves upon shelves of books in the house, more at friends' houses, a big library a mile or so up the road... but none of those sit right with me, somehow.
I found fandom and then the PPC mostly thanks to my sister, and a whole world of words and people and ideas I'd never met before, but none of those felt quite like meeting a Manual either. I was too centered, too sure of myself to be ready to accept that my world was but a tiny fraction of a bigger reality.
I grew up and went off to college, as people do, and had opportunities there too. It could have happened while I was wandering through the old section of the library, two buildings and five half-flights of stairs away from the doorway most people used. I could have seen an odd spine on the little shelf in the ACM's little room, or on one of the 'free' shelves that appeared outside professors' offices during break. Perhaps there was a Manual there, perhaps I touched its spine before moving on- but I did move on. I started to question myself, my reality, but I still wasn't ready.
Let's be honest: I hid from it. I tried to fit back into old places, old patterns of thought, but they just didn't fit like they once had.
The moment I was ready to find my Manual was a Saturday afternoon, fading into evening, early in December 2014. Three years out of school, three years into a career, and I finally hit the breaking point and acknowledged that I was missing something fundamental, that I couldn't just ignore away the walls of the corner I'd shut myself into.
I remember walking- it was getting dark early, as Seattle does in that season. It was raining just a little, enough that there weren't many people out. I was as alone as I've ever been in the awkward space between downtown and capitol hill, wandering. Wishing for an adventure, for meaning, for something - and yes, Young Wizards was one of the things that came to mind.
There's a little bookstore, on that hillside- in a world slightly to the left of this, it's run by a pair of witches and a half-dozen cats who won't say if they're familiars. In a world slightly to the left of this, there's a shelf in the back that only shows up when people need to find it. In a world slightly to the left, I would have left the bookstore with a book in my hands and an Ordeal starting as the city lights came on.
I'd still have to deal with being trans, of course- that's not going anywhere, magic or no. What does transness look like among wizards, I wonder? Given that shapeshifting is a thing, it seems like it'd be easy to just... misplace an ill-fitting gender, on the way back.
But, yes. It's an old paper copy for me, a printing that sat and waited until I was ready to find it.
Julia’s day had been a lot like the previous day- gray and empty. Part of this was due to the weather- the year was grinding to its dark conclusion, days shrunk to eight hours of rain-choked dimness before the long nights. Most of it, though, was that she still clung to the belief that she was a boy named James.
She did a reasonable James impression. The name and gender had been hung on her at birth, like a sign, and she’d gotten used to their weight. Mostly. She tried to tell herself she didn’t care. It worked. Mostly.
But in the dark afternoons of the dark months of yet another year, it all felt.. Hollow.
And so she was wandering. Looking for an adventure- she'd certainly read enough books like that, a wandering child drawn into a fantastic adventure. Not that she was a child any more. But somehow, she didn't feel like an adult, either- she was caught in the in-between place, stuck in an emptiness she couldn't let herself describe.
And so she was wandering. The day was starting to fade, or maybe it was just the clouds thickening.
Second chances sold cheap, caught her eye, and it took her a moment to realize it was a small sign in the window of a used book store. There was a whole collage of them, little notes, advertisements. On second look, she couldn't even see what she'd thought she'd seen- there was used books sold cheap and second-hand books and the name of the place, Twice-Sold Tales, text knocked out of alignment by the cat sitting on it.
It was starting to rain, it was starting to darken. A bookstore seemed like a reasonable place to catch her breath, browse a bit. The girl who thought she was a boy named James opened the door and stepped inside.
The bookstore was practically a warren- it had expanded one room at a time through what once had been a trio of apartments, shelves growing like creeping vines along walls and down hallways. It smelled like books, the unique scent of old paper saturating the air.
Julia wandered. It was raining- the walls were thin enough that she could hear it beating down, even from a room away from the outdoors. She was in the fiction section- somewhere in the ‘C’s, between the old comfort of Bujold and the futurist wonder of Doctorow, when her fingers found something familiar.
The Wizards’ Oath. An old hardback, missing its dust jacket to show the simple binding beneath. Julia pulled it off the shelf and flipped it open.
She had read it before, she decided, as she paged through the first chapter, still wandering the bookstore. It was familiar- children swearing an oath to protect life from entropy, cloaked in christian-compatible imagery of a Dark One who had turned from the path of life. Magic was language- the Speech- although she could have sworn that in her memories, in the printing she’d held years ago, the curly blocks of the Speech had been a cursive script, familiar words in fancy clothes. These were something else- deep, dense, the curling glyphs had a rhythm to them but meaning danced out of reach.
The story turned into an adventure, as Julia’s favorite fiction was want to do- she only barely noticed the chair, tucked away in a convenient corner, or that she was sitting in it. She wasn’t just skimming any more, she was reading, page after page. How had she not loved this book? How had she only barely remembered it?
And then, on a page halfway into the story, a creature of the darkness killed one of the characters.
Julia was no stranger to character death- sacrifice and redemption were regular occurrences in fiction. But this one was different. It wasn’t a noble sacrifice, a hero laying down their life for their companions. It wasn’t a byronic fall, a person redeeming their unredeemable flaw by dying for it. It was just… death. Sudden, shocking, unfair. The darkness had reached for a person and she hadn’t been able to stop it and now she was gone.
Julia distinctly remembered closing the book there, returning it to the shelf, leaving the library.
Not this time. Julia turned the page, kept reading.
The story continued, chapters passed, evil was defeated- not perfectly, not without sacrifice, not permanently. But it did end, three hundred pages after it had begun, and… a curious distance from the closing cover of the book.
“Appendices?” Julia asked nobody in particular, and turned to the next page.
Appendix A: The Oath
There was a page’s worth of warnings. While the narrative was fiction, the Oath, the Art, the Speech- and most importantly the Enemy were all terrifyingly real, or so the book said. To swear the Oath was to reshape your life, or even lose it. This was the real world, not fiction, and the real world killed people.
And then there it was, a block of text set aside from the rest, starting with In Life’s name and for Life’s sake.
It seemed- well, not silly. They were serious words, but she’d plucked the book from a shelf full of books full of serious words. But at the same time…
Bookstores were usually quiet, this one was no exception. But right now, even though the rain was still beating on the windows and steam was hissing in the radiators and the floor overhead was creaking as someone moved, the little corner Julia was in was unusually quiet. Like the universe was waiting. Like the universe was listening.
Julia read through the Oath again, more carefully, not quite mouthing the words as she went. They were good words- she could agree with them, even if they were nothing other than a promise to herself.
She took a breath and read the Oath to the listening room. For an instant, it felt like she was on a stage, reading to a room full of… everything. For an instant, it felt like the everything exhaled, letting out a breath it had held for fifteen years.
And then there was someone else, leaning on the shelf, looking down at her with a bit of a smile.
“I’m afraid we’re closing,” the shopkeeper said, “and I must kick you out into the rain. Come on, I’ll get you at the front counter.”
Julia followed, book tucked under her arm. She didn’t expect to read it again terribly soon? But something was telling her that she couldn’t just swear an oath and then walk away.
Julia- who still believed she was a boy, who still believed her name was James, woke at slightly past three in the morning.
She’d been having a pleasant dream- a book full of magic, an oath sworn to unlock it, words spoken and spells cast. She was surprised she could remember it so clearly- her dreams usually faded to nothingness before she woke.
But she was awake, and certain pressing reasons had brought her back to awareness.
“I could use some light, please,” she said, and almost jumped out of bed as a blue-white light flared into existence next to her head.
Julia stared at the light, and only then did she realize that she hadn’t asked for it in English. She’d spoken twelve syllables, eight of which had been her own name- and all of it had been shorthand, a repetition of a spell she’d spent an hour on last night.
That realization was enough to knock her out of bed entirely. From the floor she looked around- the book, her notes, it was all here, illuminated in the calm glow of her mage-light. It hadn’t been a dream. She’d spent hours last night reading the Manual, theory and practice and vocabulary, and put pieces of it into practice just before going to sleep.
Biology reminded her that there was a reason she was awake, and she went to take care of it, already knowing that there was no way she’d get back to sleep. Not with actual working magic lighting her way.
A week later, Julia was still having trouble sleeping. Unconsciousness versus learning the programming language of the universe was an easy, easy choice to make.
There was so much in the Manual! Spells to find things, spells to go places, spells to pause time, spells to mend, spells to preserve. And they were surrounded by chapter upon chapter of theory, on names and time and space and energy, and stranger things like claudications and retrocausation and other worlds and things that didn’t even have names in English, and so were written in the book in the Speech itself.
There were scarier things, too. The warnings around some of the spells were very clear. This one, if spoken wrong, would unmake the caster. That one would bring ruin. Even something as simple as a name, said wrongly, could twist reality- and while there were spells for un-twisting it, they were some of the scariest in the book.
Julia was trying to ignore the little twisting in her stomach every time she worked magic, every time she said the name James, conjugated in the Speech. It… it was probably fine. She was probably just nervous. She hoped.
To clear her head a little, she’d ducked out from home, taken the train north to the Arboretum. It was quiet in winter, sleeping trees and few people. Julia walked and wondered- what had these trees seen? What might she be called on to protect them from?
The trail she was on was long and quiet, winding through the woods. Wind whistled somewhere overhead, but the air at the ground was still. It wasn’t even that cold, for all that the weather had changed to the cold, clear, continental mode that was the other option for Seattle winters.
There was a red maple here, impossibly bright against the deep evergreens surrounding it. Julia paused for a moment, taking in the beauty- a little snow would be perfect, she’d have to walk this trail again if it snowed this year.
Stopping moving let a little more cold into her- Julia continued along her way. There was another red maple, and another, and it wasn’t quite so cold under the trees. And then the deep brown trunks gave way to silvery maple, and she stood in an entire grove of silver branches and red leaves.
Julia hadn’t known that there was such a grove in the Arboretum. She hadn’t known that maples kept their leaves into December- they weren’t evergreens, right? She hadn’t known it was going to be this warm- she unzipped and then removed her overcoat, pausing to stuff it into her backpack next to her Manual.
When she straightened up, she realized she could see through the trees- and out there wasn’t the deep greens and faded grays of Seattle. She was on a hilltop, looking out over a sea of red trees that weren’t quite maples. There were miles of the trees, a great forest- and looming over them all, the perfect cinder cone of a stratovolcano.
There was a cloud coming off the top of the mountain. It wasn’t the white of steam, it wasn’t the black of smoke- it was the pale gray of volcanic ash.
There had been something in the Manual about an Ordeal. A trial which every neophyte wizard faced, uniquely chosen by the universe to test them to their limits. Or beyond- the book had words of caution, names and stories, of wizards whose Ordeals had claimed their lives.
“You,” Julia said to the mountain, “are going to be a problem, aren’t you.”
It took Julia three hours to cross the forest. The trees were old and tall, rejoicing in the light without blotting it out and leaving the ground darkened. There weren’t trails here, there weren’t stumps, there weren’t any signs of logging- for all Julia knew, she was the first human to walk this grove.
Sometimes she just had to stop to take it all in- the long, spreading limbs were perfectly proportioned, each tree a sculpture rather than the bristly confusion of the firs she was used to. The grove was quiet, still, only the faint stirring of branches by breeze far above. It didn’t seem to be a place particularly in need of animals, or people.
At the bottom of the grove was a stream, so perfectly clear it was almost invisible over the speckled rocks that made its bed. Julia crossed at a wide spot, a shallow spot, an inch of rushing water wetting the sides of her boots and nothing more.
And then she was climbing, the land slowly steepening as she approached the immense bulk of the volcano. The great trees became lessened, reduced by the altitude, until they were a size Julia was more familiar with- slim trunks, twisted branches, and then she pushed her way through the last two and realized she was there.
Above the treeline stood a single maple, perhaps twenty feet tall, and above it loomed the sharp peak of the volcano. It was not reduced by the climb up its flank, as some mountains were- the peak was closer and taller and more threatening than it had been from a distance.
It reminded Julia of Mount Saint Helens, the beautiful mountain that had blown up seven years before her birth. That- she stopped to think about it. Had that been an Ordeal too? It seemed possible- a mountain of beauty twisted into horror, hurling itself sideways into ruin. If that had been an Ordeal it had been a failure.
Julia put down her backpack on a convenient rock and sat, digging out her Manual.
“I don’t suppose you have a chapter on applied vulcanology?” she asked, thumbing through the index.
The book didn’t answer. Julia hadn’t expected it to.
The first problem, she knew, was the question of time. Saint Helens had steamed and smoked for months before the final blast, as the plaque at the visitor’s center had explained. The mountain she was standing on now could be the same- months or minutes from erupting, and her none the wiser.
The future was a topic that had seen multiple chapters of the Manual dedicated to it. Seeing it was a complicated affair, confounded by chance and choice and a dozen other things that tended to make it an indistinct and unclear mess. Many of those factors didn’t apply here, fortunately, and Julia flipped to the relevant pages to try to work out how to ask for what she needed.
After an hour’s scribbling, five more yellow pages of graph paper covered in writing, she had something that seemed workable. If nobody did anything, the spell asked, what did her convenient sitting rock’s near future look like? What would it see?
“Where do you see yourself in five years?” Julia asked the stone, and then snickered and started to read the spell.
The magic took effect slowly, a thickening of the air, a quieting of the breeze as she finished reading. It almost felt like a dream- snow was falling, fat gray flakes- but it wasn’t snow. It was ash, and as Julia turned to look away from the mountain she beheld horror.
Through the haze of falling ash, the forest was a ruin. Landslides had poured down the mountain, felling the great trees like toothpicks, and fires roared where the land hadn’t reached. Ash smothered the stream bed, blackened the sky- even in the silence, in the stillness of the dream, lightning reached down from the ash cloud into the forest to spark another fire, miles away.
This is tomorrow, she knew, in the way knowledge just sometimes appeared with a dream. This is tomorrow if you do nothing, young witch.
And then the vision was gone and Julia was gasping for breath, collapsing to sit on the stone once more, red trees and blue sky blurring as tears filled her eyes.
Six hours later, Julia had a plan that felt workable.
She’d built tools that let her peer into the mountain and see the pressures and forces and faults there, and walked around the mountain, a high, perilous path, to take the problem in from all the angles.
It was a fairly classic volcanic problem. The magma chamber, far below and under immense pressure, was pushing upwards out old faults towards where there once had been a crater at the top of the mountain.
If it erupted, if the plug of stone that had filled the crater cracked and let the blast through, debris from the plug was where the landslides would come from. The magma itself was fizzing and bubbling so very furiously it wouldn’t leaving lava on the surface, just blast itself into ash.
The one saving grace of the thing was that it wasn’t Saint Helens. The Washingtonian volcano had carried weaknesses along its north flank, and the pressure from beneath had been enough to move half the mountain sideways. That wasn’t the case here- the bulk of the mountain was solid, the only escape pressure was finding was straight out the top, through the fragmenting rock of the plug.
Julia’s plan was to persuade the plug to vanish for a bit.
Reduced to that much simplicity it sounded absurd- not just triggering a volcanic eruption to prevent the damages from a volcanic eruption but that one person could have any effect on the entirety of a mountain.
But Julia wasn’t just going to uncork the volcano and let it blow wherever it wished. The other half of her spell was going to freeze the rock around the vanished plug in time, rendering it as invulnerable as she could. The volcano was going to erupt in a manner of her choosing, and she’d chosen carefully.
The magma was the key. The gas contained inside the magma was the key- if the pressure holding it in place vanished, it would flash into gas with incredible force.
Julia knew a few ways to convert high-pressure gas into high-velocity gas. High enough velocity to lift the ash cloud into the stratosphere, where its heat could dissipate and the winds could spread it over a huge area, falling as a gentle rain of fertile dust rather than a choking black cloud.
And that was all there was to deal with, in an eruption of this type- the blast itself would go straight up, the rocks that would rain down and make a mess out of the forest would be missing the show entirely, and the heat and ash would disappear into the upper atmosphere, which dealt with this sort of thing every time a volcano erupted.
All Julia needed to do was turn a mountain into a rocket engine of cataclysmic proportions, bell aimed towards the sky.
It had the audacious simplicity of a workable plan, and she flipped through her Manual looking for how on earth to express the curves of a rocket nozzle in the Speech.
Julia, who still thought she was a boy, who still thought her name was James, who still was trying to ignore the growing wrongness of those assumptions, spent the entire rest of the day working on her spelling.
Along with the big spell, whose final draft spread across fifteen feet of relatively smooth rock, she'd worked smaller spells too- adding to her vision, seeing air pressures, temperatures, velocities. She could see the high-altitude winds, now, with eyes that weren't the blue ones she'd been born with.
But the big spell was done, and checked, and double-checked. Inside its huge outer circle were two overlapping ones- one of which described the rock she wanted to vanish, one of which described the rock she wanted to freeze. In their overlap was the hardest part of the spell to write, the cold mathematics that described a volume for boiling, and then the throat where the first, most important shockwave would form, where the escaping gas would step from subsonic to supersonic.
Julia had seen a Saturn V main engine, stared at the largest rocket engine man had ever made. Its throat had been two feet across, plus change. The one she was building was a hundred feet across, and seemed like it might not be big enough for a magma chamber measured in cubic miles.
But her day was up, her math was worked, and she started reading the spell as the sun descended to balance on the horizon.
The Speech was flowing more easily, now- she wasn’t learning it as much as remembering, curling text turning into syllables and Speech as her eyes passed across it. She pivoted in place, from her name-circle in the spell, reading.
This is a request for a temporo-spatial intervention of Knesset-Brown classifications twelve and thirteen, divided along a surface to be described…
A major working took a lot longer to say than the minor ones Julia had done before. It felt like the whole world was listening, as it had when she’d read the Oath. It felt like the whole world was waiting, ready to do the utterly impossible, to protect Life with nothing more than her designs and requests.
And then it was done and the world stopped for an instant, contemplating. For just an instant, Julia felt utterly foolish- she barely knew where she was, beyond what was necessary to work the spell, trying to bend an entire volcano to her will to protect a forest and this was somehow an extension of the great battle of Life versus Entropy?
The mountain rumbled underfoot. The rumbling got louder and Julia was pretty sure she saw something happen at the tip of the mountain and then there was an enormous boom as the eruption started.
Ash poured out of the top of the mountain into a looming cloud, growing thicker and broader and taller until it blotted out half the sky. The rumbling had become a full-throated roar, unbelievably loud- the sound poured over Julia like standing under a waterfall, she could see the trees pulsing in time with the shockwaves.
Please work, please work, please work, Julia thought, watching the cloud stretch taller and taller- it didn’t look right, the flow was too slow, the engine was coughing, spluttering…
And then a shockwave roared down the mountain, so strong it lifted dust from the ground into a low gray fog. It washed over Julia, blasted into the trees like a hurricane- and the cloud of ash turned into a column, roaring skyward so quickly it drew what had come before with it into a pillar stretching into the blue-black of the zenith.
The flow was supersonic. The flow was supersonic and perfect and pressure waves formed inside the column, shock diamonds a thousand feet high in ash-choked air. The spell written around Julia glowed bright as daylight, bright as an arc lamp, and the engine ran perfectly as it hurled thousand-degree ash twenty, thirty, forty thousand feet in the air.
The eruption drew air like a bonfire, howling up the mountain with all the ferocity that the shockwave had come down it moments before. Julia had braced for this, spelled against this, and she could still feel the great draw of the roaring volcano.
And then something flared at her feet. The smooth roar of the volcano became an angry scream, chunks of stone ripping out of the throat of the volcano as the spell flickered, the lines burned, frost spread across Julia’s hands like hungry claws-
In a soundless crack that overwhelmed even the volcano itself, Julia’s spell failed. The shock threw her out of the circle entirely, and she stared up through the furthest branches of the little maple tree as the rising ash cloud slowed, slowed more, and then the tons of ash she’d suspended in empty air began to drag it down, down, down onto the still-erupting peak.
The burning cloud picked up speed as it fell. Pyroclastic flow, something inside Julia- who had written her name James, who had written herself as a boy, whose writing had failed- supplied.
I am going to die.
The cloud was moving faster. The weight of the cloud was slamming into the eruption still pouring out of the top of the volcano, it was racing down the side of the mountain, glowing red with its heat where it wasn’t lit red by the setting sun.
She didn’t have long. She couldn’t outrun the cloud of ash and fire. Something was laughing- and words rose to Julia’s mind unbidden, words in the Speech.
She spoke faster than she’d ever spoken before, not even tracking the english translation, raw concepts from a half-remembered page sharpening to clarity as she needed them, as the ash cloud raced closer, as she knew it would wipe the forest from existence with its draconic breath and it reached out a terrible hand-
Everything stopped. The wind, the noise, the cloud itself hung in thin air, a wall of seething hatred a hundred yards, a single second, away.
The timestall she’d just worked hovered in her memory- one of the spells she’d skimmed in the chapter on time magic. A spell to stop time in its tracks, to stretch a second into hours.
“What am I going to do now?” she asked.
You could run, a little voice supplied. She could see it- a spell to cover the distance between here and the gate she’d arrived through, another spell to blow the gate open in the seconds it would take for the pyroclastic flow to cover the distance. Better to fight another day…
Julia picked up her Manual to check the details, flipped it open-
Three hundred pages of novel and a page of warnings had vanished. The first page was now just the Oath.
“I will put aside fear for courage,” Julia read, softly, the words heavier than any she’d ever spoken in the Speech.
They felt impossibly small, in comparison to the devastation reaching to claim her. In comparison to the mess her failure had caused.
She could see it now. If she ran, if she broke her Oath- that was it. She’d go on, sure. But she wouldn’t be a wizard. Here lies James, the obituary would read. He was a wizard for like a week and then the going got tough and he ran away.
Or she could stand. She could accept the consequences of her failure, she could use the stretched second she had left to continue to fight, to continue the Ordeal.
She pushed herself back until she was leaning against the trunk of the maple tree, still glowing in the last gleam of sunlight, frozen a moment before annihilation struck.
Julia could see her failure written large on the rock in front of her- the spell which should have vanished cleanly was a charred ruin, the circle-in-the-circle where she had written her name so badly burned that it had twisted and pitted the rock beneath it.
That hadn’t been her name. That was the only explanation, hard though it was. She’d signed the wrong name and it had gone wrong and now she had nothing left- no time, no preparation, no name-
“What the hell am I going to do now?” she asked.
It was quiet for a long moment, a quiet in which nothing moved, in which nothing breathed. No ideas came to mind, no flash of inspiration, no plans.
And then into that emptiness, the tree spoke.
(You could try listening, for once,) it said.
“You can talk,” Julia said, too stunned to make it anything other than a flat statement of fact.
(Everything that has life can speak,) the tree said. (As long as you have the patience to listen.)
“I-” Julia said, shame flashing across her face as she realized she hadn’t taken the time, not once in an entire week, to listen. “I’m sorry. I haven’t been listening.”
(You probably want to change that,) the tree said. (In something less than the second we have left.)
“I will,” Julia promised. “Hi- for what good it’s done me, my name is-”
The girl who had thought her name was James sighed, into the frozen last moment of day.
“They call me James,” she said, softly. “I think I’m failing my Ordeal.”
The tree sighed, a long rustle of wind through its leaves.
(I am Naldross,) it-he, the suffix made clear, said. (I am sorry, wizard-who-others-call-James. You were sent here not knowing how to listen and not knowing your own name, and that is a hard place to win a battle from.)
“What do you know of battle?” Julia asked. “You’re a tree-”
(Have you not yet read of the Battle of the Trees, young wizardling?) Naldross asked. (We fought the darkness for you, wizard-who-others-call-James, before your kind walked your world. And I was there. I was scarcely more than a sapling, in my wandering years, but I was there and I fought in the greatest battle of the age.)
“You’re- you’re ancient!” Julia said, feeling the tree echo just how true it was. “And- and I was just going to leave you, to face my mistake.”
Hot tears ran down her face, dropped to the earth below her.
“What should I do?” Julia asked, after. “How do I fix this?”
(You start by listening,) Naldross said. (What does the cloud want?)
“What do you mean?” Julia asked. “It’s a pyroclastic flow, it wants to burn-”
She stopped herself. “Hang on. Are clouds alive?”
(Why don’t you ask it?) Naldross said, a hint of amusement in his voice.
Julia thought for a second and then realized that it was a suggestion. She stood, looked up at the looming cloud, the dragons-breath blast that technically was still racing to consume her and Naldross and everything else.
Climbing the mountain was the hardest thing Julia had ever done. She’d hiked at twelve thousand feet, where the air was a ghostly shadow of itself. She’d climbed ropes at the end of gym class, arms and lungs burning with every inch climbed. She’d hiked the last of a fifteen-mile day, limbs leaden and will sapped.
This was something else entirely. She could feel the heat pouring off the cloud, the breath of the dragon, and knew that every step was a step closer to annihilation. She had nothing- no plans, no backup, no name, just a hastily-spoken spell holding death at bay.
And then she was there, smelling the sulfur, smelling the smoke, an arm’s length from a wall of death.
“Hi,” Julia said. “I thought my name was James. I think I’m failing my Ordeal. Can you… hear me?”
And then she waited. And then she listened.
When the cloud spoke, it was faint- a thousand tiny voices, yelling as one to be heard at all.
(Hello,) the cloud said. (We hear you, child of Life.)
“What… do you want?” Julia asked. She already knew the answer, it was obvious, it was an assumption and she pushed the thought down, tried to clear her mind, tried to hear the answer.
(To fly,) the voices of the cloud said, and at the same time (to carry) and (to give).
“You carry fire and bring death,” Julia said, softly.
(We know,) the cloud said, sadly, as one. (We are not as we should be. Same as you, wizard-who-thought-her-name-was-James. Can you help us?)
The request waited, unanswered, for a long second.
“I’ll try,” Julia promised.
Julia’s second plan, created in consultation with Naldross and the cloud as the sun still balanced, ruby-red, fire-red on the horizon, was no less audacious than her first.
She wasn’t going to try to hold back the cloud. She wasn’t going to fight something that had asked for her help.
She was going to change it.
It was going to be a big spell. It was going to be a big circle- the only construction Julia could get to conjugate was to wrap the circle around the mountain entire, capturing the peak and the cloud roaring down it inside.
It was going to take a lot of energy. Fortunately for Julia, the cloud already had a lot of energy- thermal and kinetic energy, that she was going to have to transmute into the magical energy it would take to turn ash and stone to water.
And she was going to need to balance out all that energy- just handling the side-effects, the leftovers of that transmutation would count as a major working in its own right.
And worst of all, she still had no idea what would go in the most important part of the spell- the circle for her name. The circle where she would stand.
(I am not a wizard,) Naldross had said, (I do not know your art. I cannot help you with this.)
The timestall had slipped, once, twice, the cloud gobbling up distance downhill every time before Julia stabilized it. Just holding that spell in her mind hurt, a painful knot of chronocausal energy building with each second she held back death.
She walked the perilous path again, and again, asking stones to shift and move and make it a perfect circle. The red sun balanced on the horizon, frozen, as Julia walked the circle again, marker in hand, drawing an unbroken circle four miles long.
The body of the spell was not complicated, but it too had to be written around the length of the circle. Julia’s hold on the timestall slipped once more, while she was on the far side of the mountain, the cloud rushed forwards again- she was close enough to hear its scream of despair, now, before she once again propped up the spell burning in her mind.
It was done an immeasurable eternity later. Julia’s knees were bleeding, her arms were aching, the timestall burned in her mind as hot as the flame that burned in the cloud and she stood in a hole in the spell, the last hole, the place where her name had to go, where the anchor had to go for more energy than she had any idea what to do with, and she had no idea how to fill it.
They were both made wrong, the cloud had said. They had known what was wrong with the cloud, Julia had known how to fix it- but as for herself, there was nothing. She couldn’t write her own name, because she didn’t even know it.
There had been a spell for this!
It was one of the scary ones, one of the untwisting ones, one of the fixing ones. Julia could barely focus on her Manual as she searched through it, all the words that weren’t written in the Speech beyond her pained ability to focus.
But there it was. The diagram had stood out to her even in idle flipping- it wasn’t a circle. The Arc of Duane was a spiral, a spell that cut inwards to the heart of anything with life that it was wrapped around. It would consume the tremendous amount of energy Julia needed it to, and it would use all of it to petition the Great Powers. “Who should this person be?”, the Arc would ask. Who were they meant to be? And then it asked Them to rename the wizard-who-no-longer-thought-her-name-was-James, to bring what should be to reality.
The warnings were mercifully and terribly clear. Renaming magic was a terrifyingly powerful thing. To invoke the Great Powers like this would leave Julia owing a significant favor to the entirety of the universe. And perhaps more significantly, the Arc did not care for external reality- a person renamed was a person remade, body and soul.
There were two examples, great works that had used the Arc of Duane to mend or destroy. None of them wrapped it around a wizard. The examples given had put extra circles, buffers, between the worker and the spiral, to ensure that they would be safe from its remaking.
Julia was out of time, out of strength, out of options. She drew the start of the Arc in the space she had left, knowing that each term would follow the first.
And then she read. One word at a time, one step at a time, she walked the perilous path once more. She read the smaller loop, the one that circled Naldross and placed him outside the spell, outside of the dragon’s-breath blast of the unchanged cloud. And then she stepped into her place, inside the inmost circle-that-was-not-a-circle and read the first term, and the second, and the third, a recursive spiral that shrank into a simple prayer.
“Please help. Please help. Please-”
The timestall failed, the world roared, the cloud surged forward and Julia felt the spell flare to life an instant before darkness took her.
The wizard woke in twilight, to a soft nothingness that surrounded her. She brushed ash-gray hair clear of ash-gray eyes, sat, looked around.
A familiar shape loomed in the distance, half-hidden by the mist.
“Naldross?” she asked. “Did it work?”
(Will you just listen, for once?) the eldest tree in the forest asked, not unkindly.
Below, downhill, off the mountain that had been her Ordeal, all the trees of the forest were softly singing in praise of unexpected rain.
The wizard who walked down the mountain still didn’t know her name. Not completely.
“It’ll be an adventure, finding out who I am,” she’d said. “Almost as big as this one.”
The wizard who walked down the mountain carried more promises than she’d brought up it.
(Always listen,) Naldross had said, and she had listened.
The wizard who walked down the mountain had spoken with a Great Power, in the moment of her Renaming.
“And all I remember is Her name,” she had said. “The Mother of Lost Things.”
The wizard who walked down the mountain had a book in her backpack and a wand of maple-wood close to her heart.
(You’ll need this,) Naldross had said.
The wizard who walked down the mountain had once been named James.
“Call me Julia,” she’d said.
I'm really pleased that you finished this. I feel like the story hangs together very well - it's quite tightly-plotted (where PPC writers as a whole have a tendency towards side-quests, myself wholeheartedly included).
... and then I left this sitting up for half an hour while I sketched out the big, broken spell:
The crack has cut right through the 'future' section of her name, but has also obliterate most of the 'present' and a few pieces of the 'past'.
hS
I'm really happy with how it all came together- even things I had only vague plans for ("where do you see yourself in five years?" and then not listening for an answer) or ones I thought were throw-aways ("please work, please work, please work,") ended up looping right back into the big themes of the thing.
That spell is glorious and looks just about exactly right. I love how even though it's just squiggles, it really looks like it has distinct phrases, and the arcs in the two intersecting circles that happen to line up perfectly- they really suggest connections and shared information between the two.
And... Yeah, the massive crack through the naming loop is accurate too. I couldn't hide from something as big as transness without giving up on huge chunks of the future and present, and forgetting bits of the past.
Thank you for the feedback! This is just about the fastest I've written six thousand words, and I'm really happy it comes across well.
The last two lines of the story made me start to cry a little. What a beautifully powerful moment the story had been building up to.
Lots of love for this one. <3
Don't think I didn't see what you did there. :V
In other news: that parallel with Julia and the cloud was brilliant. Heartrending, but brilliant.
And... Yeah. That parallel was a late realization and I loved it so. In keeping with the noble tradition of authors everywhere, I decided to make it a thing that I'd been planning all along.
Yes, I called it. =V
And that tree gives good advice, Julia! You should listen to it!
I really am curious, several knowable things happened this chapter...
The rest, I'm pretty sure I can wait for the reveals for. =P
I really would like to hear more of your thoughts and guesses, though- I tried to lean on a reasonable amount of implication, as I was writing this all, and I'd love to know what did and what didn't work.
Having difficulty commenting because too busy holding my breath.
This is amazing.
hS
In a place that was not a place at all, but also an overstuffed, overworked office, the Power responsible for Ordeals was beating Their head against Their desk.
"This was supposed to be an easy one," They said. "Simple problem, friendly world, low interference- and then you blew it all sky high, Julia."
They signed another form, looked at the bin marked "failed", sighed.
"You're running out of these in a big hurry, kiddo," They said, slipping the form labeled Second Chance, Authorization For into a folder that was, technically, supposed to be closed. But They didn't technically open it, either, just slipped the form between the leaves. "Come on, kid, come on, people believe in you."
Also:
1) You're still doing a good job with the descriptions.
2) Building a giant rocket engine is so you.
- Tomash
Out of curiosity, how obvious is it why the spell failed? I'm wondering how well that is coming across.
And yes, building a giant engine is so very me. I would do this, and then it wouldn't work, and then I'd be... Right where Julia is now, actually. Good luck to her!
But from the repetition of Julia still thinking she was James, and what’s been said about the importance of names elsewhere in this thread, I did deduce that the spell failed because Julia didn’t sign her true name.
BTW, you and Scape and hS and S.M.F are collectively doing a good job at convincing me that I should read these books.
HG
I'm assuming the volcano-rocketry caused something of an earthquake which disturbed everything?
- Tomash
It's not the volcano that's to blame- it's that Julia signed a very incomplete name. The spell itself would have worked, mostly, if it had been complete- but it had a fatal flaw in the signature.
I'm liking the descriptions of the wood and the bad future, and there was something really funny about "Where do you see yourself in five years?"
- Tomash
I like the fact that you're still integrating her personal conflicts with the story; it's good! But I also adore the trees. ^_^ I mean, elf, right?
And congratulations on being the first PPCer (of five, so far) to get round to their Ordeal! Even though, uh, chronologically you're probably the last? :D
hS
I debated for a while before writing- did I really want to retell the trans narrative again? But it wouldn't be my story without it, not in a universe where names are so very important.
And yeah, chronologically speaking, this would be 2014, a twenty-seven year old witch on Ordeal. That was another debate- younger wizards carry more power, how big do I want to go with mine? And then I re-read the first book and remembered that Nina and Kit did that very spoilers thing, and decided that a stratovolcano wasn't that big of a deal.
(Apologies, by the way, if you're also planning on using mountain symbolism in yours. I figured there aren't any active stratovolcanoes in Wales? So it's probably not going to be too close.)
I love the background behind it, and the idea of the Manual basically being one of the series. But more than that I just love the way you've written it.
hS
My Manual would likely be in my own house, hidden in the study in amongst the really, really old books that my hoarder antiques dealer grandad collected before his untimely death. They are absolutely everywhere, and the overwhelming majority have a sort of forest-green binding and cream pages that feel like they have a magic all of their own.
Now, a PPC Manual, well... there's no actual rule talking about how big a Manual has to be, right? Or what form it has to take. We already know that a lot of agents started out answering want-ads in the classified sections of their local newspaper. Why couldn't a Manual take that kind of form, with an intriguingly bananas front page headline (my favourite one, and this is real, is "ALIEN OYSTERS INVADE") to draw in and ensnare some curious soul who might make for a willing/vaguely competent agent. Just my two cents. =]
Well, hS is gonna do it, I might as well have a crack at it. =]
---
It should have been raining.
Warm summer sunlight drifted through the bedroom window instead. It landed on a figure, slumped face down on a blanket the colour of verdigris, lying on a broken bed. The figure shook, ever so slightly, constantly in motion. A stuffed wombat muffled the noises that the figure made almost completely, but not quite.
The figure rolled over onto its back, staring up at the ceiling and the pea-green walls, at the bare bulb through tears in the shade. It was an odd-looking boy: rail-thin and long-limbed in that way only teenagers are; mass of thick brown curls splayed out on the pillow like tree roots; skin pale despite the summer sun and cratered with nervously-plucked acne scars across the figure's arms and forehead; and green eyes with a ring of hazel at the pupil, when they weren't squeezed tight to keep the world out. It was definitely an odd-looking sort of boy.
Her name was Siobhan.
Siobhan rolled back onto her stomach and blinked away a few more tears. She couldn't concentrate any more, couldn't focus on anything that wasn't what she was. Her insides felt like dead weight. Her arms were heavy. She wanted her laptop back, but that was gone, hurled out of the window by her mother for ballsing up her exams once too often. She needed something to take her brain out of the mindset of failure and let it just... whir away in the background. The fan on a computer that didn't do anything but was kept around because people liked the noise.
It should have been raining.
A book would do. Siobhan rolled off the side of her bed, clutching her wombat briefly, and listened for where her mother was. Downstairs, still furious. A book would hdefinitely do. She crept out of her bedroom and glanced around at the landing, all mid-brown rough carpet and watercolours of flowers. And a shelf of books, mostly academic works that her mother was using for her doctoral thesis. One of them caught her eye, though.
It was a rather wizened looking thing, a battered old paperback with dog ears and a faint smell of mildew and old libraries. The cover, which was black and covered in green stars, said it was A General Theory of Wizardry by Marcel Mauss, translated from the original by Brian Roberts. It was exactly the kind of book Siobhan wanted to read. It was also all wrong.
She held the book timidly in her hand and went back into her bedroom like a shot bolt, locking the door behind her and smacking the knob with her palm. A small thunk from the other side let her know that the other knob had now fallen off, and she took the rest of the handle out of the mechanism. Once her privacy was assured, she popped the book down on her pillow (her wombat seemed to be looking at it askance) and began rooting around in the bookcases. That was the one thing she liked about her room: it was full to bursting with books. They were everywhere, a small minefield of information. Sure, she spent a lot of her time on the Internet reading underwhelming webcomics, but just having books around - especially old ones, like her grandfather had collected - made her feel safer, more grounded, more real.
A small, triumphant noise escaped Siobhan as she finally found the book she wanted. At least, it sounded triumphant. It might have been a burp. She wasn't sure. She placed the battered paperback copy next to the book she'd found on the landing and began a compare and contrast.
Mauss's work, a famous work, was A General Theory of Magic. The translation she had, by Robert Brain, was a slim paperback whose black cover was decorated with an array of blue stars. She'd dipped into it briefly for pleasure a few months ago, when her mother had been more amenable to letting her do things like that. But they only had one copy.
So, in short, what the blue hell was this book doing here?
Siobhan picked the book up and began to read, and it was a strange sort of book. She noticed that the dedication was wrong, too - it simply read "For You" - and her jaw set. She turned the pages, teeth gritted, tears drying on her cheeks, trying to find more inaccuracies in the... copy? Knockoff? What was this bloody thing?
At least the style was right. Mauss's prose really wasn't a strong point. However, it differed in that as it explored the history of the use of magic across ancient and so-called "primitive" cultures, it leaned heavily on narrative examples and allegory rather than evidence or history. Because they had to be narrative examples, right? Stories about teenage shamans in the modern-day Democratic Republic of the Congo waging war on death itself were ridiculous. So was the story about how the murals of dolphins excavated at the palace of King Cogidubnus at Fishbourne were due to the king's long-standing alliance with dolphin wizards - which had to be fake, because the palace was first discovered in 1960 and Mauss's book (the real one) was published in 1902.
There was an entire chapter dedicated to Cogidubnus, and the essential tragedy of his reign; how he had thwarted something called the Lonely Power in his youth, and lingered on too far past his time, wandering amidst the seas, giving up his kingdom to a foreign empire just to keep his people safe, and then being cut off when the Romans retreated from the island, leaving behind only stone and blood. The Lone One had won that day, and plunged the Britain of the Late Antiquity into something that truly merited the term Dark Age, and only with the coming of the young wizard Aelfred hundreds of years later was It finally beaten back. Mauss - or whoever had taken his name - had thoughtfully included diagrams of the murals at Fishbourne and Celtic and Saxon works of art, but the designs were wrong there as well. Rather than traditional tiled murals or knotwork, they were lines and circles that merged and flowed into... something. Siobhan couldn't read them, but she knew what they meant; they were guides to the magic used in those ancient days, in the battles against It that were won... or lost.
Siobhan knew it was wrong. It had to be. It was completely unbelievable. She kept reading.
The chapter ended with a promise and a poem. The promise came first: that by reciting an Oath, the reader could truly use the magic of the ancients that was the birthright of everything that could give birth. The poem was the Oath itself, apparently. It warned Siobhan that an Ordeal would come her way, that she would be called upon to fight against Its influence upon the universe, but that she would not fight alone; all across space and time, there were those who would call her cousin, and call her by her own name. She wouldn't be Harry any more, the skinny, smartarse, good-for-nothing boy; she would be Siobhan Jones, a wizard of Earth, and she wouldn't be alone again.
Siobhan looked around at her bedroom. The floor was covered in a thick layer of books and junk. Doodles were everywhere. Dust was everywhere else. She hadn't gone out with her friends since school had broken up for the summer, and she hadn't gone out at all for a week. The book full of lies promised her the moon on a stick, and all she had to do was speak some words aloud. It was insane. Clearly, demonstrably insane.
She looked down at her skinny, pigeon chest, at the scar on it, at the word on it. What did she really have to lose by trying?
"In Life's name, for Life's sake..."
---
I realized upon further reflection that my Manual would actually be one of the scholarly works on magic that my mum had loads of around the house while she was working on her Ph.D. So, this is a brief and probably quite ropey illustration of that. Concrit from people more familiar with the Young Wizards series is always welcome. =]
Headcanon frelling accepted, that's amazing. Love me some Alfred, and of course he'd be a wizard-- nobody fends off the Dark Ages by introducing literacy on an unparalleled scale and hasn't taken the Oath.
I'm really enjoying this so far.
I can tell you've not read So You Want To Be A Wizard [recently?] - my Manual is extremely different from Nita's (the only one we get significant text from), so the similarities show what you're working from. But that's all right - I wrote mine that way for a reason, and I think the same reasons would carry across to you.
I think you've integrated the Manual very well with her (your? How are we referring to self-insert fics?) personal story; better than I have! 'Jacob' is pretty much a blank slate with opinions; 'Siobhan' is a backstory in herself. (An aside - given the continuous Celtic influences in the Young Wizards books, the name fits very nicely.)
The main thing I'd flag up is the result of the way you're building on my story: Siobhan's Manual doesn't seem to talk about the main reason for the existence of wizardry, which is to battle against the entropy and death introduced to the universe by the Lone Power. (Aside #2 - I'm not sure 'Lonely Power' is ever used in the canon, though I'm also not sure it im't.) I mentioned it in passing, so it's understandable it didn't make it across to yours.
Finally: I love the idea of parsing history through the lens of wizardry. It makes perfect sense to me. It's not something Diane Duane does very much (she mostly pokes at mythology instead), but as a function of the world, it's something that absolutely should happen.
I certainly hope you'll continue the story! (How much do you know about the series? I don't remember you chiming in before...)
hS
PS: So come on, that's two... who else is going to tell their tale? :D
PPS: 'Robert Brain' sounds like a comic-book supervillain. ^_~
I've not read... well, much of anything from the the Young Wizards series - I certainly don't own any of the books, though I dimly recall at least seeing them in my school library - so my canon knowledge is extremely limited. However, like all well-meaning but muddle-headed fanfic authors, I don't intend to let that stop me. =]
The reason I wrote Siobhan's manual the way I did - including why it's almost, but not quite a copy of an existing book - is thematic in origin. Siobhan, at least in my head, is someone who wants answers, who notices things and sees patterns. A book that's wrong like that is guaranteed to pique her interest and be noticed by her - which is, of course, what the Powers want. At least, that's what I've figured out from the wiki and the Young Wizards site. =]
I'll probably explore the "you are a warrior against entropy but you literally cannot win because people keep trying that and it doesn't work" angle in future chapters, when Siobhan has to figure out what the hell her Ordeal is. Hopefully it's not going to involve puns - she, as do I, lives quite near the town of Deal. I don't actually have any idea, aside from it'll probably involve aquatic life and Siobhan striking up conversations with the flocks of bright green parakeets that for some reason infest the skies of Thanet.
If you have any suggestions as to what an Ordeal for a teenage transgirl from the sticky-out bit of Kent should look like, I'm more than open to them. =]
The Ordeal is, in essence, the single task that the Powers feel you and only you are the best person for (or people, if you're a team). What it is springs out of your personality.
Siobhan is someone who reached for a history book to make herself feel better. It's pretty likely that her Ordeal will draw on that - possibly time-sliding her into the past (either 'accidentally' or because she inaugrated a time-slide deliberately, to visit history in person), or perhaps using knowledge/research skills that she has.
You've already Chekov'd dolphin wizards, and it seems like you're thinking along linguistic lines (with talking to the parakeets - you have those too?! They're all over the place up here!); history would be perfect for that. Young Wizards also plays a fair bit with parallel and pocket universes, and there's lots of possibilities there.
Or, it doesn't have to be that direct. Nita and Kit's Ordeal came about because they had a run-in with a messenger from across the universe, searching for something that was lost. There's nothing to say Siobhan's can't be sparked by the parakeets telling her about a dolphin looking for help just off-shore - and that would let you play with an on-Ordeal aquatic wizard, which sounds fun. ^_^
Ultimately, there are no limits. Wizardry can do almost anything, particularly in the hands of someone who doesn't know what it can't do. Find a problem that only Siobhan can solve, and mind the Lone Power doesn't lead her astray - it's a crafty one, that Power.
hS
Siobhan kept reading. And reading. The Oath she'd taken hadn't affected her thought patterns, not exactly; rather, everything seemed heightened somehow, as if the world had suddenly come into focus. She still didn't entirely believe, though. So what do you do when you don't believe a claim? You test it.
She flicked through the chapters for something basic, something that would deliver demonstrable effects with no other explanation. Extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence and all that.
The book responded almost as soon as she had the thought. A diagram caught her eye, purporting to be an inscription on a gold dish from the La Tene culture. It was a simple little spell, insofar as anything involving magic was simple, to make an object glow. Perfect for her purposes. Siobhan grabbed a felt-tip whiteboard marker and a T-shirt she never wore any more and got to work.
The marker scratched and caught in the fabric, and Siobhan's arm twitched sometimes, but the result was a very rough approximation of the design on the golden dish. The circle containing the spell's wording was thick and dark as a gathering storm. It also seemed too small and too big at the same time; perhaps an artifact of the inexact transcription of the spell. Oh well, she thought, Here goes nothing.
She drew the final twisting shape, the Wizard's Knot that tied it all together. She was suddenly reminded of Gordius and his Knot; was he a wizard, and the beautiful Alexander some avatar or servant of the Lo- It, she corrected herself- with that idea of breaking knots as a simple, effective solution to unsolvable problems being an end goal of It, affecting the ability of humanity to practice magic...
Or maybe she was talking bollocks. It could quite easily be that.
Her musings on the nature of long-dead kings and emperors was interrupted by the beginning of the spell. True to form, the shirt began to glow a soft orange colour... and then it began to get brighter. A lot brighter. Siobhan yelped and ran to shove the incandescent shirt in a suitcase and zip it up tight. Then she sat down on the edge of her bed and shivered for a few minutes.
This Speech, the source code of the universe, was magic. Real, honest to God magic. Okay, so she knew how it was done, but that never stopped anything being magic. And it worked, as the shirt proved. Smegging hell. She looked out of the window, at the kind old sun casting shadows through the trees, at the green parakeet sat on the window ledge, at the sea and the burnt-blue sky.
Siobhan opened the window and leaned out, letting the sea wind fill her world. She looked at the parakeet. It looked back.
"Dai stiho, cousin," she said, largely out of curiosity.
"Dai stiho," replied the bird. "Always nice to meet another servant of the Primal Scream, even one whose accent is atrocious."
"What." Siobhan jerked up and bashed her head on the window. "Ow. Smeg. What? I'm talking to a parakeet. Who is also a wizard. What?"
"Skree, you must be newly hatched. How long have you heard the Noise?"
"What year is this?"
"Twelfth Soar of the Twenty-eighth Great Turning."
"About... half an hour then."
"Skree," said the parakeet. "Name's Eats-The-Purple-Fruits. You got one, cousin?"
"Siobhan. Er. Siobhan Jones. Nice to meet you. Er. How long have you been a wizard?"
"Three flights. Years. I'm a bit of an oldie."
"Well, I've lucked out then. Can you... teach me? Is teaching a thing? My book of magic is being a bit obtuse."
"Old wizards don't teach so much as guide, Siobhan Er Siobhan Jones. We trade power for experience and finesse. Besides, magic doesn't work the same for everyone. Starlings work spells with their own bodies, crows write them in fields, seagulls... well, seagulls is where it gets a bit distressing, if I'm honest. Parakeets like me? We scream at the air. We call to the world and the High Shadows and work the Noise into art. We read magic from the currents and thermals, and we call to echo the Primal Scream. That's our book of magic, Siobhan Er Siobhan Jones. And it won't work for you."
"Then, er. Can you guide me?"
"Sure. What's in it for me?"
"I can get you a pretty ready supply of fat balls from the local garden centre-"
"Sold. Right. You don't have to, by the by, I was just trying it on."
"No no, a deal's a deal. I'm not a thief. And just call me Siobhan."
"Call me Purple then."
Siobhan backed up and let Purple fly in through the window. The parakeet flew around a bit before perching on the radiator on the back wall. He poked experimentally at the orange suitcase, then took to the air again.
"Okay then, Siobhan. Where do you want to start?"
---
hS has Kaitlyn, Scapegrace has... a small green bird. Hurrah. =]
Purple is my new favourite bird (though don't let Peach hear me say that). I love his description of magic as he sees it - you've excellently melded worldview and nature together.
The one thing that worries me is the 'rough approximation' of her light spell. The Speech is a perfectionist's tool - mucking up the lines could lead to Issues down the line. Obviously it did, with the parameters for brightness being all out of whack - but I'm concerned that if the Manual provided her name for her (in very simplified form, since she didn't have to put in any parameters), she might have messed that up...
(Oh, also you have to speak a spell to get it to run. The diagram is actually the less-essential half.)
hS
"Let's begin at the beginning. What does magic do?"
Purple shrugged, which is a difficult thing to do when you only have wings. "Anything you want it to and more besides. It's everything around you, the echo of the Scream that created the world-"
"Sorry to interrupt," Siobhan said quietly, "but that wasn't really what I asked. You're telling me what it can do for me, not what it does. I want to know what magic is for before I start making glowing T-shirts that wipe out the universe or something."
"Right. Well. This is... sort of the most important thing about magic, and your Echo - Manual, sorry - should have covered it before you took your Oath, but... Skree. Magic is how you fight It. Magic is the only thing that puts a dent in the plans of the Swooping End. It wants death, coming for everything that ever lived or will ever live, and - are you snacking?"
Siobhan shoved the remains of the custard cream under her pillow. "I stress eat. Sorry. Don't hit me!"
"Why would I - How would I - you know what? I'm not pecking that berry. Anyway, magic. The Speech basically tells the universe to get its skree-aaah together and stop mucking about with all death and that. It, on the leeward wing, is perfectly okay with the universe going through a tremendous Goth phase. That's why wizards can stop It's plans, and that's why It hates wizards. And It'll try to kill you. A lot."
Siobhan went very still for a moment, and then reached back for her custard cream again.
"I'm in," she said.
"Good," said Purple. "So let's start with how you form your name."
"Yeah, that probably needs work." Siobhan glanced at her suitcase, which had a faint glow coming through the gaps in the zip.
"Names have power, Siobhan, and power makes things change. You can bend the universe to your will, so you have to be really, really anal about it. This is not a field where 'That'll do' will do. So, leaf through your Manual and find a spell, and this time write it out as exactly as you can."
"Okay... I'll have a look."
Siobhan picked up the manual and thought about what kind of spell she wanted. She was going to make it work, so it had to be something she wanted to work perfectly - something she really cared about.
The book flopped open on an ivory carving from 16th century Benin. She knew.
She dredged up a mechanical pencil from the recesses of a drawer, cracked her knuckles, and began to draw. Purple alighted on her shoulder and looked on, giving pointers about grammar and how to integrate her capital-N Name into the working.
"Ojibwe," Siobhan said after a while.
"Same to you with knobs on."
"No, there's a book. Irving Hallowell. He wrote about the history of Ojibwe culture, and part of it involves ideas of animism as a part of daily life." Siobhan turned her head to look at Purple. "For them, personhood is something you grow into through respectful interactions with other persons, like bears and rocks and stuff. It's something you have to work for, just like magic-"
And the spell caught.
Purple hadn't even seen where the spell finished, Siobhan's hand had been moving so fast. The spiralling patterns of the Speech burnt with power, so bright that the paper underneath it scorched. The wheel of words turned and spun as it disappeared, and the light exploded out, shredding the paper into a black blizzard as the lump at the eye of the storm remained inviolate.
"Skree, chick, what did you just do?"
Siobhan's eyes just shone.
"I've had a friend since I was two," she said as the light faded, "but he couldn't speak or move or even breathe. He was the first person to know who I was. He was my first friend, my first dance, my first kiss. I want him. I want him to have a chance at life, the same as I did."
The light died away, and the small stuffed wombat sat motionless in the eye of a magical storm.
Then he sat up, yawned, scratched his haunch, and looked around with witchlights in his one glass eye.
"Hello, Wombat," Siobhan said. "Welcome home."
... Senior Wizard Jacob (really he was an Advisory, but he'd been temporarily bumped to Senior due to an incident in trans-Jovian space drawing away a bunch of the local Seniors) was taking a somewhat frantic phone call from the local Area Senior.
"No, ma'am, I have been keeping an eye on things... yes, ma'am, I know about her."
He flicked a hand at the toaster, and it obediently started up as a couple of slices of bread hopped in. "Well, because she's on Ordeal, just about. I may be new at this, but I know we're not supposed to interfere... no, obviously the Oath overrides that, but only in really severe cases..."
Glancing at the clock, Jacob grimaced and pointed at the toaster. Covering the phone with his other hand, he muttered in the Speech, "Faster, please," then turned his attention back to the call.
"I get that it looks, er, extreme, but is anything really inanimate, when you get down to it? And we all do some pretty ridiculous stuff on our Ordeals, right? ... no, ma'am, I'm sure. Absolutely."
The toaster popped, and with a mutter Jacob opened a tiny claudication to grab the toast with. "Ow, hot... okay, ma'am, I'll keep an eye on her, and I'll pass her details onto the local Advisory... really? Well, it takes all sorts. Sorry, I really do have to go..."
Hanging up, Jacob sighed, then summoned his Manual from the next room. "All right, Siobhan," he murmured, flicking to the expanded contacts list for his temporary region. "Let's see what you get up to next..."
~
Because I will never pass up an opportunity to comment in-character. ^_^
(Can you give an approx year for this, by the way? I want to know just how precocious Advisory Jacob is here - and possibly what the Seniors are off doing!)
hS
I'm sorry if the whole "animating a small stuffed animal" thing is wrong for the setting, but I really didn't know. In my defence, I was trying for something thematic to Siobhan's character. Her speciality as a wizard is working in concert with non-human wizards and combining their approaches with her own. She's a researcher and coordinator rather than an action hero, because when I was 18? Action hero really wasn't an option for me either.
Speaking of which, Siobhan's story takes place in 2010, August thereof. It's just after she made a complete dog's breakfast of her A-levels - and two years after coming out to herself and some online friends as trans. I don't know quite how that syncs up with Jacob's timeline, but I think the Senior title might actually be earned at this point, given our respective IRL ages.
I hope that you still like the story, and that I haven't ballsed it up permanently. =]
Everything alright on your end? I haven't heard from you in days.
It was on the other side of the country, so we went up on Friday and are coming back tonight. Sorry if I made you worry. =]
Just wondering if I’d done something to upset you. Glad that’s not the case—hope you’re having a good time!
Bad things get pointed out directly, don't you fear. ^_~
One of the themes of Young Wizards is that pretty much everything is 'alive' in some sense, and can talk to you if you listen. I can't recall anyone animating the inanimate in the books (Spot doesn't count; he gets upgraded by an alien computer), but it's not off-theme, and as Jacob said, we all do crazy things on Ordeal.
As shown by me addressing her as 'ma'am', the Area Senior is a bit of a stickler for the rules, even when those rules don't actually exist.
(Temporary Senior at 24? Not bad, me!)
hS
"That's an object." Purple was looking at Wombat with an increasingly frantic cast to his face.
"Yep." Siobhan popped the 'p' sound.
"You made the object move around."
"Yes."
"You made it intelligent."
"Wouldn't go that far, mate," Wombat said, his voice languid and slow like an old river. "I'm not a wizard, after all. Just magic."
"This could be bad, chick. This could be really... skree, this could be bad." Purple took to the air again, flying around the battered lampshade hanging from the ceiling. "Siobhan, we have to get out of here. Grab your manual and let's wing it!"
"Er, er, okay, er." Siobhan looked around for her manual, the spells it contained, the history it lied about. She stuffed it into an old green rucksack that really was too small, but it would suffice - as would the change of clothes and the slightly incongruous pair of wellies. A final rummage produced a rolled-up clip of banknotes, an electric-blue raincoat that was so vast it looked like it could double as a twelve-man tent, and a scattering of energy bars and packets of dried fruit.
"I remember when you were putting those together," said Wombat, "and that doesn't make a lot of sense because I wasn't sentient at the time."
Siobhan's arm twitched. "I was in a bad place, but I'm okay now."
"I remember you teaching yourself how to say that, too."
Purple looked at them both and mumbled something inaudible about being too old for this skree-aaah.
After a few minutes, Siobhan straightened up, coat on and rucksack over the top. "Okay, I'm ready."
Purple took flight and began circling her head. "Okay, so, this is called a-" the parakeet made a string of noises in the Speech, but Siobhan understood them as 'claudication' "- and it's how we get to where we're needed. It sort of pinches and folds the universe together in interesting ways, and it's a great way of beating the traffic to trees with purple fruit on them. Not that there tends to be any, but you know what I mean. Anyway... anywhere you wanna go, chick?"
Siobhan thought for a moment. "Anywhere but here."
"Crawley it is-"
"Anywhere but here and also not Crawley you sadist."
Purple laughed. "Always gets people, that does. Right. This might get loud..."
Siobhan and Wombat were then treated to the spectacle of the universe going very, very quiet while a small green bird started to scream its head off at it. The sound seemed far too loud, as if it was echoing in a canyon that wasn't there. The young wizard heard the Speech, though, and it was an exceptionally polite request for a claudication to co-ordinates Avram Angband three-nine-two-grapefruit. The wombat, who didn't really understand the Speech, thought that Purple was about to have seventeen aneurysms at once.
Then they moved through the claudication and everything changed.
---
The three appeared in a pub, Wombat causing some consternation by landing on the pool table and blocking someone's shot. Siobhan peeked out from underneath the enormous raincoat hood, gathered Wombat into her arms, and moved out into the front bar. It was... an experience.
The bar itself was staffed by a selection of cheerful souls with pronounced Australian accents, as is obligatory in all London pubs; that said cheerful Australians were all tree snakes working the handpumps in various elaborate ways was somewhat less normal, unless you were in Camden and the furries were on the loose. A man dressed as a Roman legionary was having a ferocious debate about geothermal power plants with something that looked like an upside-down jellyfish balanced on top of a chocolate blancmange. Three women in traditional Nigerian suits, one of whom was an iridescent shade of green, were reading a paper called "Acta Parabiologica" and talking in low, serious tones about something disturbing in there. There were two old men in a corner playing cribbage, which was fairly normal, and explaining the rules to a bonsai tree that was asking questions, which wasn't. There was a slightly squashed-looking elephant proclaiming things in the Speech for an audience of twenty floating purple orbs, and Siobhan eventually realized (after looking at a poster printed in the Speech) that this was the stand-up comedy night.
"Welcome to the Group Dynamic," said Purple. "Local hub for wizards in and out of the area. All the world passes through here at some point. Probably."
Wombat looked out of the window. "No it doesn't, mate. This is Norwich. That's the mustard museum over the road."
"Alright, if you want to get technical-"
"This is a wizard pub?"
"Yes, Siobhan, this is a wizard pub."
"... Do they have any real ale on?"
"Not for you, they don't," said Wombat, "you're seventeen."
"Skree. I'll get 'em in then." Purple took off to the bar, dodging the hop cones hanging from the ceiling with a muffled "'scuse me."
Siobhan and Wombat eventually found a table when the Roman and the jellyfish-blancmange-thing disappeared. Purple reappeared a moment later, and a tray of drinks landed with a crash on the table. Siobhan had a Coke that somehow contrived to be blue (Purple's explanation involved a lot of allusions to Greek mythology and, for some inexplicable reason, branding legislation), Wombat had nothing at all, and the bird wizard had a pint of mixed nuts.
"So, this is a wizard pub," said Siobhan through mouthfuls of blue cola. "Quite nice, really."
"Yeah, it's a decent gaff," replied Purple. "Mostly I come here to figure out what I need to do next."
"Is it generally 'order a pint of mixed nuts'? Also, how did you get a pint of mixed nuts?"
"I asked them nicely."
Siobhan groaned. "I walked right into that, didn't I?"
"Yes. Yes you did." Purple perched on the rim of his pint glass and began to peck at the nuts inside. "Anyway. We're getting out of there because there's a lot going on in the world, and even Probationers like yourself can come in handy. You're on Ordeal now, even if you don't know what it is yet; when I was on it, this was where I came to plan my next move."
"... Don't I need to figure out what's it's going to be before I can figure out any moves?"
"Don't change the subject, you."
Exactly as he said this, Siobhan felt her Manual buzz. Purple felt his Echo clang. The other patrons rattled, dinged, bwarked, and (in the case of the floating purple orbs) flashed something unbelievably obscene in Ethiopian, though that was probably a coincidence. Everyone looked at everyone else, looking at their Manuals, or just looking around and wondering what was going on.
Wombat, who wasn't a wizard, simply looked out of the window.
"Where's Norwich gone?"
---
AN: Sorry, hS. =]
Or possibly just place. =P I hear that happens sometimes when the Formless Void gets too bad for a world.
I hope that Coke gets to be useful, if not drunk...
You'll find out more about exactly what happened in forthcoming chapters, because that's how episodic writing works I like leaving people on cliffhangers. =]
The Coke is, alas, just a reference to PJO. =]
Though that's not very noticeable for the first, oh, six or so books... :V
I can't even count them any more.
I don't think Jacob the Senior will be getting another phone-call just yet, though it's always possible. And I'm not sure what you're apologising for? (Unless it's sending the Bonsai Mallorn on a day-trip, which I am assuming on no evidence is what happened.)
(I am also assuming the legionary is Plastic Rory.)
hS
Hence my apology - I was sort of slagging it off a bit, and then it disappeared at the end of the cliffhanger. =]
Hopefully it's up to snuff. =]
I've been to Norwich, like... once. I wonder where that came from?
(Ironically enough, my own Chapter IX notes that my Name mentions the lower Thames, so if I'd posted earlier, you could probably have worked out that I wasn't. But I didn't, so you didn't, so n't n't or something.)
I'm enjoying! And Naaaaarch certainly seems like a place that would have a wizards' pub in it. ^_^
hS
Anyroad, it's a good place to set a story in the Young Wizards universe, because let's be honest - if you're marrying someone you repeatedly call cousin, you'll fit right in. =]
I wanted to do something a bit weird for an Ordeal like hers, where there's a lot more wizards involved than is usually the case. It's taking cues from Ix's story in that regard; while it has a large cast, because I like writing stories with a PTerry-esque Full Supporting Cast, it's also a very personal Ordeal set to a slightly surreal backdrop. We shall see more of this in the next chapter. Probably. =]
There's definitely non-spoken versions of the Speech, even among humans on Earth. For example, there's a scene in Games Wizards Play with a sign-language version of the Speech because why wouldn't deaf wizards be a thing?
But if you meant "spoken" in a very broad sense, then you've got a point.
- Tomash
But in the sense of 'you can't just copy a diagram and have it do some magic', I was right. ;)
For completeness: Nita is working spells just by thinking them as early as Deep Wizardry - she knows her Manual-summoning spell by heart and is able to invoke it with just six syllables of shorthand. But she still has to know what the words mean, and to enact them directly.
hS
Since you've got me thinking about this, from what I can tell, the main thing with spell-casting is that you need to express what you want done (in the Speech) somehow and intend that you'd like the magic to happen.
So, for example, with the Manual-summoning spell, Nita has basically memorized the whole thing, so when she says the shorthand her brain knows what she's going for and the full spell gets expressed (in some sense) via her memory, and actually saying the shorthand marks the enacture.
So, with this completely speculative, rather general theory of what you need to do to fire off a spell, it might be the case that there's circumstances under which very carefully and intentionally drawing a diagram is sufficient (probably because you're also thinking through the spell while doing this). For one thing, that could be how certain species of octopus (the ones that can turn basically arbitrary colors) cast.
- Tomash
Thanks for the point about spells being spoken; I should have grokked that, given how magic is called the Speech, and I'll amend that in future chapters. It's all a learning experience! =]
I'm glad you like Purple - he's great fun to write too! I couldn't help the music refs in the way he views magic, and I would apologise for that but I know my audience. The whole thing is based on how much parrots and cockatoos and that love loud noises. There's a great video of a bloke kicking the tar out of a crappy old cage with his cockatoo screeching along in time. =]
Oh, and the botched glow spell? I did that deliberately. Let's just say that there's a reason why I had it go tits up the way I did. =]
Thanks once again for your kind words. It means a lot. =]
And the Primal Scream sounds... very odd, but also very much canon-like. It's a good combo. :>
Hope that glow spell comes back again! Or gets turned off; whichever happens first.
Purple is great fun, and I'm glad he's getting a following. As for the glow spell, I have plans for it. Comic plans. =]
Thanks for your kindness. =]
I love the Gordian Knot reference- that is such a clever connection of ideas!
Purple is also going to be great fun. Magic as the art of screaming at things!
I'm not sure how "what year is this?" fits into the dialogue? The answer is great, and shoes some of how Purple thinks about the world, but it seems out of place and not necessary to get to the punchline.
I was pretty pleased with that little thought, and just how much wizards and magic has affected history and culture. It's no coincidence that Siobhan's Manual took the form of a famous book on ethnography.
The joke about what year is it is, er, nicked shamelessly from Night Watch by PTerry. I just couldn't resist a line like that.
Thanks again for the positivity. =]
Though I doubt a Manual "author" would steal someone else's name... maybe someone lived a double life. ;)
But anyway, these are good words and I love them.
At a dusty second-hand bookshop, where my family stopped to rest during an interstate car trip, and said we could pick two books. I expect I would've picked up two other books, started walking towards the till, and then noticed the Manual and swapped one of the books, on a complete whim...
^The true story of the day I found a copy of SYWTBAW, which led me to fanfic, which led me to the PPC, which led me to meet hS and marry him, which led to basically my entire life. But I'm still bloomin' miffed that the Oath never took for me.
-Kaitlyn, on Errantry
The first actual content I had with the series was when Kaitlyn sent me a book entitled So You Want To Be A Wizard, which - despite containing a centered block of text constituting an Oath - does not appear to me to be a Manual. Ever since, she's been telling me it wasn't one for her, either... ^_~
hS
I'd get my wizardry manual at Twice-Sold Tales, a used bookstore near my college. And then when I sat down to give it a read-through, I'd end up reading more than I intended, getting interested, and becoming a wizard because Twice-Sold Tales has bookstore cats, and one of them would definitely sit on my lap, start purring, and not get off until it was too late.
My PPC manual, I'd probably find in the little personal library I've collected over time.
If Min Ra were recruited to the PPC via a manual, she would probably have snuck into her dad's office and found it among the many scrolls/books/papers lying around. It would have stood out to her because most of the other papers were adult stuff, and it would have been tucked away in some corner, so she would have figured that he wouldn't miss it and stolen it for her own use.
Effie Raptor wouldn't really have a manual, as she was recruited directly by Min Ra.
...the Twice-Sold Tales in Seattle, is it? Because that is such a Young Wizards-esque bookstore.
My college campus is just a few blocks away from it.
Though, to be more accurate, my high school's library might have been better.
And it'd be a book, of course! =P
I can think of a few places the Powers might have given it to me. It might have been in the school library that I spent so many days in because [Rude Language Regarding Pollen]. But I think it probably would have actually been my iPod itself. It's how I got the book, and if I were to take the Oath, it probably would have been via me repeating after the narrator and waiting to see what happened.
Some kind of library, not just the one at my school seems to be the most likely option.
(Also should I be happy I caught the reference right away? I wonder if I should go back to those books...)
(I'm current through the Ordeal novellas and Games Wizards Play. Haven't read Feline Wizards #2 and 3 though.)
- Tomash
I admit that I've only read the first one...yes I know, I just never got around to it... I have a bad procrastination habit...
My personal favorites are Wizard's Holiday (cool aliens) High Wizardry (ditto, and also all the computer stuff). But that's just me.
- Tomash
(Which, as it so happens, is where I found the first Young Wizards book! But only the first. I'd like to read the others sometime.)
I was always hiding in the library in my free time when I was in school, and I was actually a library assistant in middle school. I probably would have found my Manual while re-shelving books, and been curious about this new tome I couldn't remember seeing before...
Before I clicked, I was pretty sure you were talking about YW, but it crossed my mind it could have been the PPC, too.
Then I thought, what if the Flowers got in on the Powers' strategy of presenting Manuals to people under the right circumstances? That might be an interesting way to recruit from supernatural-friendly universes. Or even mundane ones, if they slipped a few dog-eared hard copies on library shelves, random used book stands, those Little Free Libraries that keep popping up, and the like. Most people would pick the thing up, go "yeah right," and walk away, but every so often, a fan with the right balance of keen and crazy would come along and follow the instructions on the back cover... {= )
Well, when I say "the PPC Manual," I probably just mean Volume One: So You've Decided to Become a PPC Agent.
~Neshomeh
How about The Seems?
If you're not familiar, the approach there is to place application forms for "the most interesting job in the world" around. Applicants who met the standards (which may be quite strange) get a job interview that... won't be forgotten in a hurry.
Probably middle school, too. I remember hanging out on the floor in the corner where they had the fantasy/sci-fi books, looking for the next McCaffrey or L'Engle I hadn't read yet.
Trivia: I was actually banned from having novels with me in class, because if I got bored in math I'd read instead of listen. Maybe math class should have been more interesting. {= P
Could potentially have been one of the first to access a Manual on a computer, too, back in Ye Olden Days of Dial-up. They were fairly common in schools when and where I was a kid, and I had an MSN chat habit for a while. Eventually turned into an AIM habit, and a fan board habit, and a Neopets RP habit, and a PPC habit...
Y'know, I could see the Manual hiding out on ff.net and other such archives.
~Neshomeh
who frequently got poked to stop reading in class. I don't remember getting banned from showing up with novels though.
I also sometimes made the not-great decision of reading in hallways.
(and then later the school handed me a laptop for disability reasons. Large amounts of NetHack were played during lectures once this happened.)
- Tomash
I do it to this day, actually. Because classes are still boring.
And yeah, Nethack is common. As is SSHing home to do some programming.