Chapter 15
Astor is a very, very large country with a very, very large military. It spans the continent from shore to shore. The southern border is, of course, the Arpasso mountain range, separating Astor from the Kiirenese peninsula. The northern border is much, much bigger than the southern border with the country of Sanan to the north-west and the Kingdom of Parense to the north-east, both of which are also separated from Astor by mountain ranges. Astor itself is really more like one centrally located government ruling over three very different countries that have all, begrudgingly, “agreed” to work together. The western area of Astor used to be a nation called Cormick, but they formed an alliance with the nation of Astor, in the center of the continent, in order to push back the invading armies from Sanan. Cormick just kind of agreed to be absorbed by Astor, and then their combined forces easily overpowered the much smaller and very outmatched nation of Xian to the east. So now Astor, Cormick and Xian are all one country, sort of. It’s a bit more complicated than that.
To get to Nixian, the former capital of Xian, we had a few different options. The easiest and fastest route would normally be to take the train straight to the city of Astor itself, right in the middle of the continent, and then board a train going east toward Xian. During normal operations, that route would actually have gotten us to Nixian by the next morning. That was obviously not what we were doing for a variety of reasons, the least of which was the war at the north-western border. Fortunately, there were other railroads that, while they were less used, would still get us to Nixian. It was just going to take us four days instead, because the less-used trains only operated during the daytime, so we would need to disembark each night, find an inn, and then board again in the morning. A huge hassle. And also the trains weren’t as nice on these railways, though that was just more of a petty complaint at this point. The route would keep us as far away from the conflict in the north as possible, and was also far, far less likely to be watched by any of the various people that were looking for us.
Far less likely but not impossible, as I soon discovered when we made it to the first of what would be many, many stops along our planned route. From Milin we were headed to a somewhat large city on the Astor side of the Arpasso range, a town called Marksberg. There was only one stop along the way, a quiet little hamlet called Sezan. The trip to Marksberg wasn’t going to take long, maybe two or three hours tops, so we elected for the standard seating instead of getting a private room. From what I could tell the stop at Sezan was generally less for people to board the train and more to load up shipments of produce and goods, but a few people did board the train. One of those people was wearing the same kind of gray uniform that we’d seen the other Astorian spies wearing. I nudged Rasha and tilted my head in the direction of the gruff looking gentleman. We both watched as the Astorian surveyed everyone in the car we were sitting in, looking critically at everyone with a dour look on his face. He definitely clocked the two of us, and Koreo and Souta as well, but I didn’t see any kind of look of recognition on his features. He eventually grumbled to himself and stalked to the back of the car, going through the door and into the next train car.
“What was with that guy?” Souta leaned around Koreo to ask. Koreo looked confused.
“Guy?” she asked. I felt my eyebrows lift. Souta really was more capable than I thought he was.
“Can’t say much right now,” I replied, my voice low. Souta nodded, and Koreo looked around the train car. “We can talk more when we get to Marksberg.”
The rest of the relatively short trip to Marksberg was pleasant. I passed the time reading a book I’d grabbed from Sarien’s vast collection. Everyone on the train had to disembark at the Marksberg station, as the train we were currently on would be heading back to Milin next. Rather than heading straight to board the train that would take us in the direction of Xian, I dawdled in the station, waiting to see what the grumpy Astorian guy did. He exited the train and made a beeline for the mail station. After checking in with the clerk, he then headed straight in the direction that we were going to be heading as well: toward the train heading east. We followed him as he made his way there, glancing around at the people he passed but not seeming to pay close attention to anyone. I had my hair shoved under a hat and Rasha was wearing the necklace that made his hair brown, and I was almost positive that those were the reasons that the Astorian hadn’t paused to look more closely at us. Well, there was that but also the fact that we were traveling as a group of four, not two. Ironically, Koreo and Souta tagging along might actually have been working in our favor, here.
The Astorian didn’t board the train right away, instead posting up at a nearby bench with a newspaper that he was clearly not reading. I made for the ticket booth and paid for a private room in the first-class car. Then, I turned to my three companions.
“Alright folks, we’ll be on this train for the rest of the day. There’s a bathroom on the train but you do not want to use it if you can avoid it. We should arrive at our next stop by dinner time, but if you want to get snacks now’s your chance to stock up,” I advised. Everyone nodded. I, of course, never passed up the opportunity for snacks. I wasn’t as familiar with Marksberg, as I’d only been there once during my travels, but fortunately the attendant at the ticket booth was able to point me in the right direction. I boarded the train with a sack of delicious looking pastries and a box full of an assortment of chocolates. The Astorian was still watching the crowd. He paid attention to us when we boarded, but didn’t look too closely. Still, I waited until we were behind the closed door of our private room and I’d activated the Orb of Silence before I let out a sigh of relief.
“Finally,” I said. The private room consisted of two upholstered benches that were facing each other, with a table between them. I put the orb down on the table and slid into one of the benches, scooting over to be next to the window. Koreo plopped down next to me, playfully squishing me against the window for a moment. Rasha sat across from me, but Souta stayed standing, looking at the Orb with interest. It occurred to me that he probably had no idea what it was — Rasha obviously knew, and Koreo probably remembered me having something similar back when we were fleeing from Kiiren all those years ago.
“We can talk freely in here,” I said, gesturing to the orb. “It blocks sound from leaving the area we’re in.”
“Oh, that’s what it does,” he said. He looked to the open seat next to Rasha a bit uncomfortably, but then he took a seat. “Well in that case, I’m sure you noticed that guy wearing the same thing as the Astorian spy from back at the bar?”
“Yup,” I confirmed, with a nod. Koreo looked a little startled. “It doesn’t seem like he’s suspicious of us, but he’s definitely on the lookout for someone, probably the two of us.” Rasha nodded. “Astor probably has people on all the main roads and trains in the area, just in case we pop up somewhere unexpected. We just have to keep acting like normal tourists and hope he doesn’t ride the train all the way to Nixian.” I leaned back in the seat and looked out the window. We’d be seeing some nice views on the way to our next destination, at the very least. We were facing away from the station, so I couldn’t see anyone that was boarding. It wouldn’t be long until the train disembarked, though. I set the sack of pastries and the chocolates on the table, then I dug into the Infinity Bag and pulled out the jar to make myself some coffee.
I waited until the train had left the station and we were all a little more relaxed before I fixed Souta with a stern look.
“So, you cast a Fireball without a chant,” I said, casually. He went visibly stiff. “Spill it, where did you learn how to do that?” He looked distressed and, to my surprise, so did Koreo.
“You… aren’t going to like my answer…” Souta said, clearly trying to evade the question. Koreo turned to me.
“I meant to bring this up to you earlier, I swear, but there wasn’t a good time—” she started. I turned in the seat fully to face her.
“What is it?” I asked. Koreo was visibly fretting.
“And, look, they asked me not to tell you they were looking for you, but I’m going to tell you anyway, of course—”
“Someone was looking for me? Who? When?” I asked, startled.
“It was about a year and a half ago?” Koreo hazarded. Souta nodded in agreement. “Yeah. Two summers ago, they just kind of showed up and asked about you.”
“Who?” I asked. A year and a half ago, who in the world would have been looking for me? Who would have known to go to Milin and not Kiiren to find me? Koreo looked away, nervous.
“Lucien and… Aspen,” she said. I sat back in my seat, stunned.
So, Aspen was apparently still Lucien’s apprentice, or at least they were traveling together. Lucien was traveling, Lucien had traveled as far north as Milin. And they were…looking for me? Or they’d asked about me, at least. They had no way of knowing that I was connected to Koreo, that whole fiasco had happened after I’d… parted ways with them. Not long after, mind you, but still after.
“Did—” I started, and I almost clammed up, because I honestly didn’t know if I even wanted to know the answer to the question I was about to ask, but I asked anyway. “Did Lucien ask about me, or did Aspen?”
I saw the knowing look on Koreo’s face, the pity. That was exactly the reason why I’d hesitated in asking that question in the first place. I tried not to get aggravated.
“Both of them did,” she said. I could feel myself frowning. “Lucien asked first, but Aspen wanted to know how you were doing.” She was quiet for a second before continuing. “I didn’t tell either of them that you moved to Kiiren, but I told them about how you rescued me from the Itagaria, and how you fought all those guys while we were escaping, and about building the bar and all that.”
“And, uh,” Souta butted in, and I turned to look at him, one eyebrow raised. “Lucien is the one that taught me how to cast Fireball without a chant.” Yeah, that tracked. “It’s the only one I can do without a chant, though. I’m still trying to figure out some others…”
“Makes sense,” I said. “Lucien’s the one that taught me how to do it too. I used to be able to cast a lot of spells without chants, actually.”
“Spikora…” Koreo sighed. I turned back to her. “So, you’re not mad?”
“I wish you’d told me earlier, but nah,” I said. I really wasn’t mad. I was still kind of in shock. I wasn’t sure what I was more surprised by — the fact that Lucien had left his mountain, the fact that they were still worried about me even as recently as a year and a half ago, the fact that Aspen was worried, even… It was a lot to take in. Koreo’s hand on my shoulder startled me out of my thoughts.
“Hey, do you need to talk about it? We can kick the boys out,” she offered. Rasha looked startled and Souta looked mildly offended. I sighed.
“Nah, they can stay,” I said. “There’s not much to talk about, it was a long time ago.”
“Lucien was your mentor, correct? The one with the tattoo on his shoulder?” Rasha asked. I looked over at him and nodded. “Perhaps if you talked some more about him, I might be able to figure out something about it.”
“Tattoo?” Koreo asked. I nodded.
“Yeah. Rasha has a tattoo on his shoulder, the same kind that Lucien has, in the same place. That’s actually kind of the reason that I ended up buying him in the auction,” I explained. I frowned and looked back over to him. “But even if you figured something out, would you be able to tell me?” He shrugged, which was as good of an answer as I was going to get out of him. I sighed.
“Well, I suppose I could talk a little bit about him,” I said. “Not even Koreo knows a lot about my time with Lucien, actually. And we’ve got a while so… if you’re all really okay with listening to me ramble for a while…?” All three of them nodded. “Okay then. I guess I’ll start at the beginning.” I sat back, cleared my throat, and gathered my thoughts.
“I don’t remember a lot of the really early days, because I was literally a toddler. My parents were both apprentices of Lucien’s. My good-for-nothing dad left after my mom got pregnant with me. She raised me up on the mountain, but when I was around four or five she just kind of left one day? At least that’s what Lucien said. Maybe she died, and he just never had the heart to tell me? I don’t remember much from then, just that she was there one day and then gone the next, and then it was just me and Lucien for a long time. He claims that he only kept me around out of pity and so that I could help him with his chores, but he was honestly a great parent compared to some other parents I’ve heard of. Better than my actual parents, anyway,” I laughed, but there was no humor in it. One look at the other three and I could tell that they were pitying me. I frowned.
“So your parents really just abandoned you?” Koreo asked, though I could tell she hesitated to ask. I shrugged.
“Yeah. No idea why, and if Lucien knows he’s never told me. Honestly, I don’t give a damn about it now. Heck, even at the time I wasn’t really angry or sad about it, just confused. Even today if I ever met either of them, all I would do is ask why.” Koreo nodded, and I continued. “Anyway, this isn’t about them, this is about Lucien. He kept me fed and clothed and raised me the best he could, but he was a single guy in his thirties and I was a little kid. A wild little kid, apparently. He started teaching me magic to get me to calm down, or so he says.” I laughed at that, and Koreo giggled. “And apparently I was a prodigy at it. I learned fast, a lot faster than most kids do. He taught me a lot, all the basics of a lot of different kinds of magic. I learned a lot of really advanced stuff from him, too. For ten years it was just the two of us up on the mountain where he lived. I didn’t see a lot of other people. He had a garden and raised chickens and goats, so we didn’t need to get groceries or anything like that. Anything he needed, like spell components or equipment or what have you, he got delivered. He had a few guests over the years, but never anybody my own age. Mainly stuffy old geezers. No relatives, at least not that I know of. No kids. No significant other, at least not while I lived with him.”
I stopped for a minute, clearly hesitating on moving forward with my narration. Rasha held up a hand, and I nodded to him.
“You mentioned that he taught you a lot of different kinds of magic. Did he specialize in any one?” he asked. I nodded.
“He was able to teach me all kinds of magic, but the only spells I ever actually saw him use were for healing and defense,” I said. Wait. Wait a second. “You know, I always just thought it was because he never had a reason to use any destructive kinds of magic, but…hmm,” I trailed off, staring over at Rasha. “You told me you can mostly only use healing and defense magic, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” Rasha confirmed.
“Other than that StunI saw you use, no elemental magic of any kind? Like manipulating water or soil? Or helping plants grow?” I asked.
“I haven’t had much of a reason to do any of that,” Rasha admitted. “So I don’t really know.”
“Lucien used stuff like that all the time in his garden,” I said. I put a hand to my chin for a moment, thinking. What were the implications of this? It really could be that I just hadn’t ever seen Lucien use something like a Fireball spell, but I’d studied under him for a decade, and never once had it happened. This couldn’t just be a coincidence, right?
“So tell me this, Rasha,” I started. Gears were turning in my head. “Is it that you just simply don’t know how to cast, say, a Fireball spell, or that you can’t cast it?”
“I can’t,” he confirmed for me with a nod. “I know the chant, I know how it’s supposed to work, I clearly have the mana for it, I just can’t do it. I just can’t cast any powerful destructive magic myself. Even the elemental magic I can only do in self defense.”
“And does that have something to do with the tattoo?” I asked. He shrugged, and I groaned.
“So, wait, you used to be some kind of super genius at magic, but you can’t cast now?” Souta blurted out. Koreo visibly winced, and I took a deep breath, huffing it out.
“That’s right,” I said, looking out the window. “I guess I’ll get to that part in a minute. Might as well.” I frowned and reached into the bag for one of the mugs, making myself some hot coffee as I pressed onward. “Anyway, it was just me and the old man for a long time. Then when I was about, I dunno, fifteen or sixteen, this guy a little older than me showed up out of nowhere and begged Lucien to be his mentor. That was Aspen.”
I couldn’t help smiling a little at the memory, even if it was bittersweet now.
“I’m still not sure of where he even heard about Lucien, let alone where he got the idea that he could just show up and demand to become his apprentice. But he was terrible at magic at first and… a gigantic dumbass, if I can be brutally honest. But he worked hard and did a lot of the chores, especially the ones I didn’t want to do, so Lucien kept him around. And I guess he’s still Lucien’s apprentice if they were traveling together,” I said. “And Aspen was… well, we were teenagers, and we were alone together a lot, and he was pretty attractive, so… stuff happened.”
I let out a sigh and looked out the window.
“But that’s all I’ll say about Aspen. He’s not really relevant. Let’s see… what else about Lucien? What else could you have in common with him?” I asked, looking over at Rasha with a frown. Rasha looked like he started to say something, but hesitated, and then looked over at Koreo, for some reason.
“Um,” Koreo started, and I looked over at her. “You never did tell me why you left the two of them.”
“For the same reason I don’t cast magic any more,” I eventually answered, frowning. “I did a reckless dive into the Abyss… well, I guess I should back up a bit. There’s an unguarded portal to the Abyss inside a cave on the mountain that Lucien lived on. Aspen and I found it and went inside. At first we just went in a little ways, but then we started going a little deeper each time. And, well, I…fell, one day,” I said. I knew I was frowning, trying not to recall too much of the memory of my hand slipping out of Aspen’s, of falling into the thick, dark water of the Abyss, washing up on a dark shore, the cottage, the— “I found a magic knife and took it, and got cursed. Whoosh, just like that, all my mana was gone. I didn’t realize what had happened at first, and I got really, really sick. They had to take me to a hospital in one of the towns nearby, and even then the clerics there couldn’t figure out what was going on for a long time. Now I just can’t make my own mana any more,” I explained. “That happens to people sometimes, but it’s usually really old people. As far as I can tell I’m the youngest person ever to have this happen to me.”
“So wait,” Souta said, interrupted. “If you can’t make mana, you just can’t cast spells? Like a mundane?”
“Oh no, it’s much worse than that,” I said. “I can still cast, and the spells still happen, but instead of using mana it uses, well, my own life force, for lack of a better term.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, looking horrified — and rightfully so.
“It slowly kills me,” I answered. I had to look out the window. “It makes me very sick, it damages my internal organs… I’ve probably taken at least a decade off of the end of my life by now.” I sighed and closed my eyes. “And the worst part is that even if I don’t ever cast spells, my body still needs mana. I’m not like a mundane, if I’m ever completely out of mana I start getting sick from that, too. Fortunately it’s easy enough to get a little infusion of mana every once in a while from batteries and the like, but… well, it’s only really enough for me to not be sick all the time. If I cast anything, even something as simple as a Light spell, it hurts.”
It sucked, to put it mildly.
“Anyway, once the clerics figured that out I was able to recover, but I… I couldn’t stay with Lucien and Aspen, not when I couldn’t cast spells without getting sick or killing myself. So I just…left. I traveled around for a while, looking for something, anything that would be able to break the curse or get my mana back. I came up here to the northern continent, and eventually I settled in Kiiren. Even without being able to cast there was plenty of work for me there, and if there was going to be anywhere that I could do research on my condition, it was going to be there.” I turned to Koreo. “It wasn’t long after that before I went to that auction and ended up leaving with a certain person.”
“And the rest is history!” Koreo replied, with a grin. “Well, I always guessed it was something like that, having to do with the mana thing.” I nodded.
“I’m surprised that Lucien left his mountain to travel around,” I replied. “He hates people. The only time I ever saw him leave the mountain was to take me to the hospital, actually.”
“They said they were going around looking for information or rumors or even stuff like urban legends about a few different things,” Koreo said. “They asked about… let’s see. The Abyss, I think. The Witches and the Elder Dragons, Spectrum, the Hecatus stones… and then they described a few different people, including someone that turned out to be you.”
“Interesting,” I replied. I put a hand up to my chin, deep in thought. My travels and research had eventually pointed me toward the Hecatus stones and the Spectrum, too. Among other things. “Do you remember who else they asked about?”
“They gave pretty detailed descriptions, but it didn’t sound like anybody I’d ever met,” Koreo replied with a shake of her head. “I don’t really remember the specifics…”
“They stayed at one of the inns up the road from the bar for a few days before they left,” Souta informed us. “It was mainly that Aspen guy that was asking around about all the Hecatus and Parn stuff. Lucien was holding free magic lessons in the town square. A lot of folks showed up. He picked about five of us kids out of the crowd and gave us one-on-one lessons, and that’s where I learned how to cast Fireball without a chant.” Souta looked proud. “He actually taught me a few different spells! He’s really powerful — but you don’t need me to tell you that, huh?”
“Did they happen to say where they were going after they left Milin?” I asked.
“Somewhere north,” Souta said with a shrug. “Nowhere specific.”
A year and a half ago… I was obviously wondering where they were, and if we would somehow run into them. It was a possibility, now that I knew that Lucien had deigned to leave his mountain and travel around. Still, it was strange. They couldn’t have been traveling just to try and find a cure for me. They probably would have done that a lot sooner than nearly a decade after I left them. What could have possibly happened to spur Lucien, of all people, into activity like this?