Chapter 9: Magic Lessons

Chapter Nine: Magic! Lessons (Edited)

The clamshell lay still: offensively inert.

I stared at it, lying in the dead grass like it was mocking me. It was a pretty shell, threaded with streaks of blue with the faintest rainbow hue. A single, circular sigil was lightly scraped into it with an old iron nail.

I was rather proud of the sigil, too. It had some asymmetric flourishes on the right which would have been easy to get with something like a charcoal stick, but this had to be in the shell itself.  Trying to get that down without the lines going all wiggly or jagged was hard with a nail and a little craftsman’s hammer Mom gave me. I’d screwed the sigil up time and time again, which prompted Mom to point out the exact issues with the sigil and how it strayed from the one in her book. Mom accepted nothing less than perfection with the project, so any flaws, no matter how minor, meant starting over. Given what we were trying to do, I suspect Mom was probably right to make such demands, but it didn’t make it any less annoying.

I ended up ruining three much less pretty shells before I’d gotten it right with this one. It didn’t even detract from the shell’s beauty and instead gave a little mystique, kinda like a rare find in an antique store, or maybe an oddity displayed in a museum from an old archaeological expedition.

Pretty or not, it also wasn’t doing what it was supposed to be doing.

A part of me wanted to blame the faint scent that’d been bugging me all day. It was a bit like freshly cut mint leaves yet not quite, like something was just ever so slightly different even if I couldn’t identify why it was different no matter how much I sniffed around like a mutt. It’d also been driving me nuts since I woke up trying to figure out what I was smelling.

I’d already asked Mom, and she couldn’t smell it. She claimed her sense of smell had been a bit deadened in her youth by an accident. Heck, she sometimes relied on my sense of smell when foraging for plants as it was, so it wasn’t like she was a ton of help there. All I knew was that it felt like the scent was seemingly everywhere around the sea fort we called home, but no specific plant I checked, and I checked a lot today, smelled like it.

This was all doubly frustrating given I would have liked to make some tea. I think Mom would have liked some tea as well. I caught her sometimes wistfully looking at a tin mug she sipped water out of in the mornings with a shake of the head.

Still, though, at this point I could tune it out. It was still there, but I could focus on other issues. Like breakfast, sewing with Mom, or helping her clean rust off of gear and doodads. But all of that only brought me back to the present issue driving me crazy: the sigil carved into a clam shell and how frustratingly inert it was.

I looked back at Mom’s own clam shell. It was similar, although she’d gone for a more plain shell with a lesser blue. I’d asked why we were using shells and she’d shrugged, saying it was as good as any lesser material and, lacking alchemical metals or gold, we might as well use “organic resonance”, whatever that meant.

The startling thing about it, her technobabble aside, was that the sigil itself; it was glowing under her hand. I definitely hadn’t gasped aloud and squeed at seeing real magic stuff in action, nor had I grumbled later as I failed repeatedly to get my own sigil right. It wasn’t a steady glow, nor was it all that bright. Instead, it was ever so slightly visible in the daylight, pulsing to an unknown beat

Mine wasn’t.

I did my best to scowl knowing it was just a pout.

“Mama, it’s not working,” I said, staring back and forth between my hand, the shell, and noting the conspicuous lack of glowing magic goodness.

Mom sighed. She didn’t quite pinch the bridge of her nose, but she looked like she wanted to. “Gwen, you have to  focus. It’s a simple exercise. Breathe in, out, and try to project your will through your crest and into the shell.” She proceeded to do just that. She breathed in, dimming the sigil to almost nothing, before exhaling, causing the sigil to suddenly brighten.

This exercise was supposed to be simple. “Simply channel your will into a sigil carved onto a shell functioning as a catalyst, supply mana, and boom. Magic lights.” Except, I didn’t even know how to begin! I might as well be told it’s easy to fly, just use your nonexistent wings!

To say I had been excited to learn about magic was an understatement. With my birthday over a week in the past and Mom mostly recovered from the…incident,  Mom had announced one morning she was going to teach me the fundamentals of Thaumaturgy. It was one thing to know that magic of some form was real in this world and could be put into items, but to know I could learn about it was so utterly exhilarating that I wanted to jump and bounce in excitement.  In fact, I may have done just that when Mom had let me know.

My anticipation of learning actual magic was only further because of everything that had happened in the aftermath of my birthday. I think Mom may have just thought I was excited to learn, which wasn’t incorrect, but the thought of learning actual magic after a life where magic was equated with scams or parlor tricks? The excitement wasn’t so much palpable as it was a physical force driving me forward.

Given all of that, I’d looked forward to today. Then Mom started talking.

“Okay, maybe a refresher is in order?” Mom said. She didn’t sound certain. I groaned. “Don’t be difficult.  This should be easy. Now focus on my words. Try not to think, only feel. I’m going to start over." Mom leaned closer and held up her left hand, the one with her crest.

"First, I will gather mana in my hand, and channel it into the light sigil on the shell. Take my hand so you can get a feel for the flow here.” I did so, and took her hand. Her skin felt warm to the touch, but that was about it. “Good, now close your eyes, and don’t open them. Keep your hand on my crest, and focus on the feel of mana flowing through my hand as I cycle mana,” Mom commanded.

I moved into a cross legged position before Mom and closed my eyes. I tensed and waited. I tried to just focus on Mom’s hand and “feeling”, but it was hard. My ears twitched at every sound from the wind, an occasional bug, the waves hitting the shore, and a nearby seagull my mom hadn’t shot yet.

“Okay, Gwen, do you feel that?” Mom asked.

“No, Mama,” I said, keeping my eyes closed. “Are you doing it yet?”

I could feel her pause afterward. I peeked my eyes open to see Mom moving her lips but no words coming out. Finally, she shook her head. “Gwen, you are focusing on your senses, right? Not just daydreaming?”.

“But I didn’t feel anything?”

Mom leaned forward, flicking her hair out of her eyes. “Gwen, be honest. Are you sure you didn’t feel anything? I know this exercise well, and it’s not that hard. You should have felt something, at least a little bit?” Mom asked with a depressing amount of hope in her voice.

I had a sudden urge to stomp until I couldn’t feel my paws anymore. I didn’t, but the fact that I was sitting explained more of my restraint than I was fully comfortable with.  “I. Didn’t. Feel. Anything,” I stated. If I was a touch more indignant and childish than I meant to sound, well, I was like five years old in this world. I had an excuse.

“Maybe the crest isn’t really integrated yet?” she mumbled, more to herself than to me.  “Okay, I think instead a bit of theory might be in order.” She counted off on her fingers, ignoring me for a moment, then snapped her fuzzy fingers. “Aha! Okay, so I already gave you the basics-magic is”

“-the act of utilizing thaumaturgy to enact a change in the world based on the use of mana as a thaumaturgical energy source,” I recited.

Thank fucking God I had at least some college education and, more importantly for this situation, theoretical context courtesy of countless fantasy novels, games, manga, anime, and other media from my previous life to piece together concepts here. I liked my Mom in this world, I truly did, but the moment she opened her mouth to speak about Thaumic Particles when I wasn’t even six with almost no context, I’d realized she was going to be a terrible teacher. I had to remind myself at times that she really was trying to explain magic with the complexity of higher-level mathematics like she was to someone who, as far as she knew, was five.

When I said I didn’t understand the formulas she tried to show, she’d sheepishly paused and pivoted to this entire exercise. Which I was also failing at for completely different reasons.

Mom didn’t say anything, although her ears stood up.  “Yes, that’s right!” she smiled brightly. “Tools are the best way to conduct thaumaturgy, and our primary tools for thaumaturgy are runes. Your crest is, effectively, just a really complicated, multilayered rune, see?” Mom said, taking my hand and tracing her finger along her own crest. “Your crest is a little complicated right now to discuss, though,” Mom said sadly. Her ears even drooped.

I was moderately concerned about what she considered complicated if her opening lecture on magic was to talk about Thaumaturgy like an intro to calculus meets ancient Latin with almost no context.

“But, runes can be really simple. The one here, on your rock, is one of the most basic ones. Remember?”

I did my best not to roll my eyes because I hadn’t hit the teenage phase yet, I didn’t want to be an angsty little shit, and because my Mom was being painfully genuine to the point I felt saying no would be equivalent to punching an old lady asking for help to cross the street. “Glow, I think?”

“Right! Derived from the divine word radiance, it’s a lot less powerful and complicated, but it can still emit a fun and useful little glow when fed mana, which our ancestors used as a replacement for more expensive candles way back and-”

“Mom?” I asked as a problem occurred to me.

“-and while magic is present in the atmosphere, known as thaumic energy or the ambient thaumic field if we’re really getting into the physics of it, it’s generally thin unless you can draw a lot of it in at once, so we instead rely upon a condensed form made prior known as mana which is a far more reliable for thaumaturgy, and-” Mom continued

“Mom!” I said.

“Oh? What is it, Kitten?”

“Why are we doing this outside on a bright, sunny day when we can barely see the glow?”

Mom said nothing. She said nothing for a painfully long time even as the wind rustled past us.

“Mama?”

Mom bolted upward, startling me into a minor shriek. “Well, would you look at that, I think we have some other work to do today so we better get going. We can try again late tonight, yes, tonight. We, uh, just have other work to do today.”

I fell in line with Mom and tried not to be disappointed at my failure to instantly master magic beyond my wildest dreams whilst simultaneously tamping down giggles at Mom’s firm insistence on changing the subject.. “What are we doing today?”

“Today, we’re going to work on Sandy.”

________________________________________

If you've paid to read this anywhere outside of Patreon, SubscribeStar, or Ko-Fi, then you've been scammed and someone is ripping you off as it is stolen.

If you're reading this on any other site than RoyalRoad, SufficientVelocity,Spacebattles, QuestionableQuesting, MZNovel, or Wattpad or it's by anyone other than HiddenMaster, it's been plagiarized and stolen.

________________________________________

Chapter Nine Author’s Note

Learning the first bits of magic is always a fun part of any story, and there’s rarely a single ‘right’ way to do this, but this chapter was inspired by a particular professor I ran into in college.

She was brilliant at her subject, knew what she was talking about, could talk for hours on the intricacies of genetics and DNA, but had no idea how to talk to first year newbies to her subject who didn’t have a decade of experience and context to follow her ramblings. It made her class, which should have been a breeze, about five times more difficult simply because we often had to collaborate to figure out what the heck she was talking about.

Obligatory author plug because I'd love to write more but society sadly says I need monies to keep living (and support my growing addiction to commissioning catgirl art)

Support me on Patreon, Ko Fi, or Subscribe Star. Check them advance chapters uploaded every weekend, too. Or check out my website for links to my other author accounts, contact, socials, etc. Anything is appreciated :3

Also I have a discord now! Check it out. I would love to chat with fans. :3