Reginar And Silvain

After a long tablet conversation with Curator Jane, they decided to wait for the province to send help in the form of an experienced magician. Taylor did some work in the area to decrease the toxic algae flowing downstream, but didn't try to attack the colony himself.

He was treated for over a week to nearly normal days after that. He did his physical training before breakfast, minded his Legate work, found productive ways to drain his mana, and studied magic or fished in the evenings. The only non-normal thing was Kasper. He was desperate to learn to fight, so Taylor included him during his morning exercises and taught him wrestling. The kid was fast and strong for his age, and he enjoyed the sport. After, they always ate breakfast together. When Taylor went fishing, Kasper went with him. Most of the time, when Taylor wasn't around the mansion, Blake either found ways to keep the cub busy or allowed him to roam the twin hills behind d'Mourne Mansion.

It was during these hours together that he learned the usual rules of his curse didn't apply to the wolfkin boy. In one-on-one meetings, people started to hate him after thirty minutes, give or take, unless he used total concealment like a paper screen or Riverstone's illusion. Kasper could endure him for hours on end, with only a mask. That prompted Taylor to take another long look at himself one afternoon, to try and find the curse that affected his life so profoundly. He couldn't detect any sign of it, nor traces of spellwork or mana flows doing things they shouldn't. The curse was real. Any slight negligence with his mask or timing brought him bad looks and worse feelings. But the inner workings were hidden from him as thoroughly as the ocean's deepest depths.

When the caravan with all his goods arrived, Bonce's Ventures became a daily disturbance in his house. Bonce's two-foot-tall divine figure of Moya, goddess of hospitality and interior decorating, moved into Taylor's foyer for the duration of the project, and everyone said a short prayer to her every day. It was daily chaos, but room by room, his mansion became a better, more comfortable place to live.

The only unpleasantness on Taylor's horizon was the algae colony and a formal affair at the governor's palace.

"You're joking."

"I assure you, I am not," retorted Jane.

A seven-foot tower of white fur stood in her office, black claws and obsidian eyes the only features standing out. He wore the same raw silk robe as the last time they met, minus all the blood. Taylor had only ever met one tenuit, and they were supposedly a vanishing breed of beastkin. It could only be one person.

"The province sent us the mad fuzzball who assaults children? That's supposed to be help?"

Jane's lips twitched. His lack of conventional respect sometimes amused her, but she couldn't let it show. As his legal guardian, she was obliged to correct him. "That's quite enough from you, young man. Reginar is an elder, probably the oldest beastkin alive. You were never in danger of dying. He only wanted to test you. Let it go."

"I don't remember applying for any test. And you got hurt too, remember? And how did we end up with him anyway? He's not even from Estfold! Shouldn't he be in Rossingol, terrifying Rossingol's children?"

"I heard about your little project and came right over. I thought it would be fun to see you in action. Enzo wasn't happy about it, so I had to pull rank. I was his teacher when he was just starting out, just as I'm your mentor now."

"I have never accepted your mentorship. You've never asked."

"And yet that's how it's going to be. I'm a very old fuzzball who follows very old rules."

"It sounds like you're just making them up as you go along."

"The privilege of the strong. Oldest rule there is."

Taylor glared at Reginar, then at Jane. "He's not even going to apologize?"

"I don't believe so. Do you have the power to force him to?"

Taylor remembered the seamless, powerful magic that had held him captive. Helpless. "No." He was angry at being so easily defeated. "I do not."

A wide mouth full of short, sharp teeth split the furry face. "Now that we all understand each other, tell me your plan."

"Our plan was to get help from the provincial government," grumped Taylor.

"And if the province refused to help, you had a backup plan," insisted Reginar. "That's what I want to see. If it helps loosen your tongue, remember I'm here on behalf of your governor."

"Fine." Taylor reluctantly stuck his arm into his satchel to produce a map and a stack of stone disks the size of coasters. He put the disks far to one side, out of reach of even Reginar's long arms, and unrolled the map. It showed the pond, inflow, otter dam, outflow, and the immediate forest.

"Two and a half acres of toxic algae colony. It can move, but not quickly. Most attacks are pointless. Light makes it grow, and lightning makes it fast. Fire is the only thing that hurts it."

"Your plan is intriguing." Reginar had one of Taylor's disks, the things he wasn't ready to talk about yet, in his hands. "I can't wait to see it in action. Pack it up. We're leaving."

When they landed uphill from the toxic pond, Taylor was badly windblown and trembling.

Reginar had hauled him onto an ice-blue gryphon, a beast nearly as tall as Town Hall, saddled up behind him, and shot into the sky. It was like riding a rocket fueled by muscles, one too big to get his knees around properly, and it didn't care that at least one of its passengers hadn't planned on taking a supersonic flight that day. He clenched his teeth against the powerful acceleration, unwilling to give Reginar the satisfaction of hearing him scream.

They came down as quickly as they went up, air braking at the last possible moment to hit the ground just hard enough to break an aurochs' back. Taylor threw himself off the gryphon and took several angry, frightened steps away.

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"That!" he yelled, pointing a rude finger at the gryphon, "is not a gryphon! It's not an animal. Or a monster. Or an aberration. Or a manabeast. It's too big. And you do not just grab people and throw them on the back of some insanely powerful creature and send them shooting into the sky! A little warning, first!"

"He's taking it quite well," said the gryphon in beautiful, possibly female, Arcaic tones. "They don't usually remain awake."

After eliminating everything else in Taylor's catalog, the remaining possibility was a spirit animal, a personification of the natural world. Of course, Reginar wouldn't ride just any old gryphon: Flying around on a rare and powerful warbeast was too blasé for him. No, he had to mess around with spirits, personifications of nature. Supposedly, the spirits were all dead or in hiding. But just because nobody had seen one in a while didn't mean they weren't still around.

And, apparently, Reginar knew one who was willing to carry him around, plus the occasional passenger. And, it spoke fluent Arcaic. Possibly, the gryphon was a very old, powerful spirit. It was four-legged, covered entirely in feathers, with strong hindquarters and a broad span of tail. She was ice-blue on top, and sky-blue beneath. He recalled there was a Mount Silvain in Ressignol, one of the tallest peaks in the world.

Still breathing hard from the ride, Taylor addressed the massive spirit creature. "Please pardon my rudeness. I am Bilius d'Mourne, Legate of Mourne. Thank you for carrying me." Taylor offered a slight bow, but without looking down or baring his neck. One did not ride intelligent creatures, but was carried by them. Neither did one show weakness.

"I am Silvain. It's a delight to meet a human who speaks our tongue so well and has a semblance of manners. Reginar, your assessment of your new pupil is far off the mark. I don't find him to be too wild at all. Perhaps the root of the problem is closer to home?"

"Stop interfering. Bilius is going to show us a cleansing by fire."

"Not yet, I'm not."

"And why not?" The impatience in Reginar's posture chilled Taylor's blood. Up to that point, he'd been annoyingly presumptuous but genial. Suddenly, he was scary again. Still, Taylor had his reasons.

"Because tossing off firestorms willy-nilly might be fine for ancient magicians with enough power for it and, one desperately hopes, the wisdom to avoid burning down the whole region. The rest of us have to set up properly. I have people downstream I'm supposed to protect. You don't want Mourne to burn, do you?"

"All right." The tenuit crossed his arms, impatience gone. "I'll wait."

Taylor went downslope to the pond and prepared. Thanks to his work on his last visit, the algae colony's living space was so cramped, it could barely stay wet. He had used shaping magic to re-route the stream to avoid the pond. Then, he'd modified the otter dam. He sealed up the structure so it wouldn't leak, engraved a water-filtering magic circle on it, then opened a small hole. Clean water came out, and everything else stayed inside the pond.

Taylor retrieved the nearly-empty mana stones he'd used to power the circle and sealed up the hole in the dam. Downstream, the situation looked a lot healthier. The vivid green goo covering the surface was almost gone, and there were signs that plants had started to grow again. Taylor turned his attention to the pond and the monstrified aberration living inside it.

He placed the first of twelve stone disks onto hardened ground at the easternmost edge of the ring of dead trees. Slowly, with compass in hand, he set the remaining disks into a nearly perfect circle. Precision wasn't absolutely necessary, but it reduced the mana requirements by roughly tenfold compared to making a mess of it.

Each disk bore a complex system of magic circles, engraved and filled with tempered silver. Tempering was a level of mana imbedment that far exceeded normal limits, requiring significant reserves, excellent control, and some sensing ability. Mana had to be compressed and folded until it took on nearly physical form, then worked into silver before the metal was drawn into wire. The dense mana wire allowed Taylor to use less silver and make his circles small enough to be portable.

When a pint-sized magician set out to burn several acres of land until it was clean, without the fire getting away from him, finesse was key. The circles encoded Taylor's plan so he didn't have to manually control everything at every step. The fact that Reginar had handled one meant the old magician now knew far more about his abilities than Taylor wanted.

Or, maybe the ancient fuzzball wasn't thinking that hard about anything, and just wanted to see the action.

With all the disks in place and double-checked, Taylor began. He reached out to his system of circles with mana and intent, and invoked the inscriptions for air. A stiff wind blew along the ground, sucking mountain air from outside the circle, swirled it around and around, like water going down a drain, until it reached the center and shot up into the sky. The air pulled moisture with it, parching the already dead trees, the damp banks, and what was left of the pond water. All that moisture was funneled into the sky, where clouds took shape above his work. The pond began to run dry.

Then came fire. It started with the outermost trees, flaring like candles, their smoke and heat caught in the wind patterns, drying out the interior even more. After the first minute, there was a startling change as whole trees went from sickly to charcoal to ash in seconds, driving enormous energies into his conflagration. The disks started to glow, as they tapped the extra energy, converted it into mana, and through a series of intricate patterns inside the circles, forced the mana to compress, fold, and imbue itself into the wire. The low level of tempering increased with the amount of fuel burned.

The ring of fire grew smaller and smaller, fanned deadly flames into the pond's dry bed, and consumed the dried-out algae. The temperature had to be managed, and ever-larger amounts of energy were converted into mana, with excesses used to conjure water into the currents and slow the process down enough so it didn't run amok. Smoke, ash, and steam spiralled thousands of feet into the air, to build a thunderhead of mana-charged rainstorm, ready to break.

When the last of the trees were consumed, the fire ended as suddenly as it began, and only the wind was left, dying down to a stiff local breeze. But Taylor wasn't done.

Quickly, he opened his bag and turned it over, dumping compost, topsoil, and fertilizer into the currents where they were picked up by air currents and carried away. One cubic yard after another went into the project, a seemingly endless stream of it, until a torus of earth spun in the air, circulating around the pond. He followed that up with seeds, mixed varieties of mountain grasses from his collection. Half of them probably wouldn't grow, but the rest would put down roots.

He let the wind collapse all at once, and new earth and seeds dropped onto the parched ground. Some of it fell on rocks or in the pond's bed, but most of it landed on good ground.

He had plenty of energy left inside his system of circles. Taylor let the cloud above him drop its moisture. Not all at once, but in gentle showers. To that, he added intense light similar to the sun's at midday, and encouraged all the seeds to grow. According to the Knexenk class system, his last stage would be classified as Druid magic. To him, it wasn't much different than healing magic designed for plants.

When the clouds had given up their water and the grasses were ankle high, Taylor ceased working magic and sighed. It wasn't great. If he had about ten times more seeds, seedling trees, water plants, and fish to stock the pond with, then it would be great. But the toxic colony was destroyed, and the land probably wouldn't erode away. He went around the pond, picking up his magic circles. He was pleased to find his mana wire had gone from lightly tempered to nearly the limit silver could hold. It was a rare commodity now, something he'd recover in his spare time and put to good use later. When it came to mana wire, few materials were better than tempered silver.

His next visit was to the vent, located at the bottom of the pond. A smattering of mana crystals lined the deep vent, which he dug out and bagged before closing the crack in the earth as far down as his magic allowed.

Finally, he restored the old water flow. It would take some time for the pond to fill in, and downstream would suffer until it did, but there wasn't anything he could do about it at this point. Mentally weary, he hauled himself uphill to where Reginar waited and Silvain loomed behind him. The genial attitude was gone, but there wasn't any hint of threat from them either. They simply waited. Taylor checked his defenses and enhancements before getting close.

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