Book 4, Chapter 9: Personal Practice
Etienne had watched as the energy pulsed around my body, up and down my arms, all the while the magic dampening iron was sitting in my ears. He couldn’t do that. Nor the grand magister. The mere touch of the metal would shut off their magic.
Yet he hadn’t said anything. No chance he missed it, he was too perceptive for that. Morry had warned me to tell no wizard of my ability to escape the iron imprisonment, but I didn’t know how Etienne would react because I did not know what my distinction here meant.
Yes, the perseidian iron could not stop my magic, only hinder it or perhaps help me control it. But what did that mean? I had no idea. So, I couldn’t predict Etienne’s reaction. Nor did he offer me any explanation.
Maybe I should have been upfront with him. Should be. Though I’d have to weigh that against his geas. What if this oath he took, if it was such a thing, signaled that I was somehow dangerous to all? Something he couldn’t let survive? Then, I’d lose my sole teacher. Or my life if he prevailed.
Secrets, so many damned secrets!
I couldn’t reason this out because none of it made sense. How did perseidian iron block magic? What even was magic? It violated all kinds of physics, certainly. Magic seemed to me like a gun. At least my laser firing, hole blasting, lack of defense kind.
If you have two people and one of them is an expert marksman, a sniper even, that person is clearly the more dangerous with a gun. But if the other person is holding it point blank, safety off and pointed at the marksman, no level of skill in marksmanship helps him.
And that’s what I felt like. A toddler with a loaded and ready gun. Dangerous when holding it, but otherwise inept. Whatever Etienne’s endgame was, when the other mages came for me, I wouldn’t last long without knowing more about defensive magic and how to use it.
A good half hour after Etienne left, staring into the table, my tea was cold. And I was a person from a society that invented microwave ovens. And theory of the atom. The energy had stopped pestering me, but I was about to wake it up.
I started by imagining the water molecules in the tea moving more quickly. Heat, after all, made atoms and molecules move faster. Whatever that means. Bounce around? Vibrate? I vaguely remembered diagrams describing this, liquid and gas expanding, that sort of thing.
A little yellow aura appeared around my hand. Not a flame. Different, scintillating as if waves moved across it. Not as obvious as my regular energy, barely visible, perhaps because the iron blocked it some.
I then stuck my finger in the teacup and, ouch! It was hot. Blowing across the surface, watching the ripples, pause, took a sip. Nice and hot plant infused water.
Then I tried the same on the firewood in the fireplace. Whoosh! The flames rose much higher, heat palpable even where I was sitting. I got up, to move the table back, the chairs, but the heat subsided to a normal flame as I stopped concentrating on it.
After I’d been cut by Bechalle, and recovering, and the grand magister had come to look at my back, he’d casually waved his arm and lit up the fireplace.
I guess I could do that now without needing the gesture.
But learning defensive magic was a problem on a different level. For one thing, I had no one to practice with, so no way of knowing whether whatever I came up with would work. For another, I didn’t know what magic was, nor how to go about defending oneself from it.
Though, if it could be used to heat up molecules, if it wasn’t electromagnetic, it likely shared qualities with that force. That was testable with some iron, since running electricity through iron could create magnets.
However, magic also seemed to be a physical force. When I blasted the assassin, he was pushed into the ceiling. I haven’t got a clue how to calculate the energy used, but were it simply EM radiation, I’d imagine he’d have been cooked, us blinded and maybe irradiated. So, it seemed to hold different properties.
Taking stock, let’s see. I could fire energy beams, create little whirlwinds that could lift pieces of wood, heat stuff up. I could sort of push and pull items toward me, but the last time that happened, it happened by accident with a broom, which then exploded. Not exactly a Jedi force master.
Alright, I could set up experiments. Test the energy output. Heating up a liter of water one degree Celsius is equal to . . . not having a thermometer. So, that wouldn’t work. ‘It’s getting hotter’ isn’t exactly accurate. But I could go from ice to boiling. That’d be a change of 100 C, or 180 F if you bend that way, then I could do some math and figure out, I don’t know, the units involved.
I’d just need a stopwatch or someone very accurate at counting seconds. A musician! We had those.
Ugh, never mind. At best, I’d get some equations out of the exercise. And one hell of a frightened musician. But since I didn’t know much about physics beyond what I was just now thinking, equations wouldn’t mean a lot to me. And they wouldn’t stop a magical attack.
So, that left me back at the beginning: practicing on my own. All of what I could do, from firing lasers to creating whirlwinds, was better for attacking than defending. In game terms, I was a glass cannon. No protection but a powerful offense. I therefore had to stop would be attackers fast enough to not worry about defense. Unless I could somehow figure that out.
I wasn’t quite ready to test defensive shields. From what I’d seen of mages, their protection, those shimmering fields, were incredibly dangerous to the living. Just being in the field, or whatever that blurring was, cooked my horse. I wasn’t eager to cook any of my friends by accident.
I needed to get the cooldowns smaller to blast faster, create vortexes faster. Work on my strengths. But that was secondary to gaining control. I headed back to our practice room, sat in the middle of the floor and, taking my bracelets and rings off, leaving the other jewelry on, practiced directing the energy as it rotated around my arms.
When I figured out how to not blast a hole through the castle walls, I’d take more of the iron off.
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