The Effaced: Chapter Fifteen

I found myself riding in an automobile for the second time in as many days, and contemplated just how strange my life had become.

“This an alright point for you sirs?” the man driving the automobile asked, and I glanced around. We were near the mountains that ringed the city of Elderglass, where even the buildings were rarely more than five to ten stories tall. 

The middle of suburban nowhere, in essence. 

I considered for a moment, but eventually decided that there wasn’t really much of a better place. I’d never been here before and knew nobody around here. 

Of course, they could still be using a diviner to track me, but even I couldn’t prepare for every eventuality. I had to hope that the time spent in the automobile’s anti-divination wards would be enough to have made them give up and think I’d gone to ground somewhere. 

“Why are we out here?” Kelly asked from next to me, and I nearly jumped. He’d been silent so long that I’d practically forgotten that he was there. 

“You’re out here because you insisted that you be,” I said, giving the kid a somewhat annoyed glance. 

“You got me out and paid off all my stuff,” he said. “I owe you one.” 

“Repay me by learning the spells to work at a memory bank and getting out of an illegal apartment,” I grumbled. 

“But that’s just more advice that helps me,” Kelly argued. “Makes me more in–” 

“Sir, do you mind arguing with your kid outside? I do need to return,” the automobile driver said. 

“He’s not my dad,” Kelly said. 

“He’s not my kid,” I said at nearly the exact same time. 

The driver just eyed us, and I sighed and unlocked the door, breaking the wards, and stepped out of the car. A moment later, Kelly followed. 

“I can help!” he insisted, and I gave him a side-eye. 

“I know some mind mages can stop someone from using telethesian-based diviners, can you do that?” 

“I can turn invisible by removing myself from the minds of people around me,” Kelly offered. 

“Not going to work on a diviner, unfortunately,” I said as I started walking, heading into one of the taller buildings nearby and starting to walk upwards along the long, winding looping floors. 

“Are you really innocent?” Kelly asked. “I heard some of the constables talking, and they kept saying that you’re a killer.” 

“And you’re still following me?” I asked. 

“Lots of reasons people will kill someone,” Kelly said. “Maybe the senator was planning to burn the undercity out. I know at least one person suggested that.”

“That…” 

I sighed and ran a hand through my hair. How could a kid from the undercity who was being abused for his aura also be so… innocent? 

“I didn’t kill Senator Ermonte,” I said. “I have killed before, I won’t lie. Mostly because I didn’t think I had another choice. You really shouldn’t hang around me, though.” 

“I ow–” 

“I know, I know,” I muttered. “You really don’t. But listen, Kelly. I’ve got at least one group trying to put a hole in my guts. You’d be safer off going home.” 

That actually caused him to pause for a moment, then he shook his head. 

“No. I don’t… I can’t.” 

I frowned and leveled a serious look at him. 

“My dad’s gone,” he said. “I’m paying for the apartment all alone, and I don’t want to go back there. When my dad was around, it wasn’t bad, but…” 

I mentally added Kelly’s landlord onto a list I kept in the back of my head. If Kelly would rather run around with the first adult to show him a modicum of kindness even while said adult was being head hunted by unknown forces, that said some very bad things about the landlord.

“Does your landlord work for the Concrete Crown?” 

“No, he’s a part of the Darknight gang,” Kelly responded. 

I hummed. I didn’t know that particular gang, but smaller ones rose up and fell all the time, even in the good parts of the Undercity. 

But a properly run mob, like the Concrete Crown’s, could stand solid and stable for over a century with. 

“Look at some apartments in the Crown’s territory,” I said. “Won’t lie to you, it’s still going to suck, but the Crown doesn’t tolerate abuse of people who pay their dues in their territory.” 

“Alright,” Kelly said, nodding slowly. “So can you show me some aura shaping techniques?” 

I blinked, the whiplash of the sudden change in conversation topics catching me. 

“Sure, kid.” 

“I’m not a kid,” Kelly said, and I rolled my eyes. 

“What’s your recharge? I’ll go first – I recharge my aura by touching metal. Iron, specifically, though steel has enough iron in it to work, just much slower.” 

A thoughtful look came across Kelly’s face as he glanced at the copper walls of the apartment complex we were walking through. 

“It’s a shame it’s not copper,” he said. “I think you’d be invulnerable.” 

“Nobody’s invulnerable,” I responded. “But iron has its own benefits. For one, I almost never have to worry about faerie magic. But let’s not get into metals, unless you want me to perform a ritual to make you a metal sorcerer in addition to a mind sorcerer.” 

I glared at him as he opened his mouth to ask another question.

“No, I don’t recommend that I do that. Balancing two rune bonds is doable, but I think you should get a good grip on your mind bond before you start looking for another. What’s your recharge?” 

“Okay,” Kelly said, then lit up his aura around him, a bright purple color. I studied it for a moment. 

While any auric capacity reader could get a general idea of a person’s relative amount of power they had to throw around, that didn’t mean that everyone was made equal. My aura was only an average size, but through practicing shaping, spellcraft, and work, I’d made it quite dense. 

Kelly’s aura was actually larger than mine, which did make some sense. People forcibly awoken by harvesting the aura spark of someone else tended to have smaller auras – there was always some loss in the conversion. 

The difference was that Kelly’s aura was loose, diffuse. While mine was like a thick, frozen syrup, Kelly’s aura was like a gas around him. He did have the single knot of an arch-star floating above his head, as well as a strange bluish spot that I thought might be some sort of blessing or boon he was owed.

Kelly raised his hand and started siphoning off aura, shaping it into a basic light producing glyph. He flowed power through it for several long seconds, causing it to flare painfully bright, then stopped. His aura had grown thinner, diminished from the spellcasting. 

Then he snapped, and his aura boiled, surging out to replenish itself. I whistled. 

“Snapping! Not bad at all. How much does it replenish you?” 

“Usually it brings me back to full, but sometimes it doesn’t,” Kelly said, and I considered the implications.

“It’s probably drawing on ambient aura for power, like an enchanted item. When you’re in a spot where it’s too thin, you can’t fully restore.” 

“That’s… good?” Kelly asked. 

“Eh, most recharges are drawing on ambient aura. The ones that don’t, you can usually make really good money by selling it to a lab, since they’re most interested in weird ones. For normal sorcerer purposes, yours is really good. If you wanted to make self-recharging magic items… less so, since most magic items can’t snap.” 

“But I am a sorcerer,” he said. 

“You are,” I agreed. “Do you know why your recharge matters? After all, a shaping exercise is a shaping exercise…” 

“Because… No, I don’t.” 

I sighed. 

“Think about it as a mage. If you can easily restore your spells, you need a shaping exercise that’s focused on allowing you to get the most out of your recharge. You can train most recharges. For us, that would be increasing how far away we can draw in ambient aura. That’s what most of mine do. But if you had a recharge like… Okay, I had a friend in college who drew hers in from sunset each day, right? Instant recharge the moment the sun touched the horizon at her current location. She didn’t need to focus on how much she drew in, it was coming from somewhere other than ambient aura. So she focused entirely on overall density. She needed to ration her power throughout the entire day, so she wanted to make every tiny bit as dense as possible.” 

My own exercises to improve my iron activated recharge combined with the fact my third arch-star gave me continuous generation of aura independent of ambient levels, and the fact my first arch-star allowed me to store away excess power within it to give me a nearly unending stream of aura for spellcasting. 

In the end, it didn’t matter if my density was only slightly above average for a working mage, if I never had to worry about running out. 

Kelly seemed to be chewing on my words, then finally nodded. 

“My first arch-star lets me give aura to other people, or take it from them if they’re willing to pass it to me, so if I expanded the amount of ambient aura I could take in, I could keep an entire group of mages topped off.” 

“Exactly,” I said. “Or, ya know, you could destroy your arch-star.” 

Kelly missed a step, and I caught him on reflex, hauling him back to his feet. 

“What?! Why?” 

I shrugged. 

“Lots of useful arch-stars out there. Maybe you don’t want to pass aura to others.” 

“It’s fine,” Kelly said, “just show me the exercises.” 

I nodded and thought back to the first shaping exercises I’d learned as a kid.

“Light your aura, then start pushing out,” I said, lighting my own up. It normally extended only about three or four inches from my body, but as I twisted and pushed it, it expanded outwards in a needle-thin line, shooting off my finger to strike the wall. 

It didn’t do anything. Raw aura, without the direction of a spell, was little more than a beam of oddly colored light. 

But it showed him what to do. 

Kelly focused and thrust his hand out, and a wave of light the thickness of an apple erupted from his hand. He took in a heavy breath. 

“Good,” I said. “That’s getting your aura used to extending past your body. I want you to focus on compressing it into thinner beams like that. The other thing you need to practice…” 

I held my hand up and my aura began to spin around my hand in a vortex, then immediately flipped and started spinning in the other direction, then flipped again. 

“This is good for mental flexibility and conditioning,” I said. “It will get you used to changing spells on the fly, and help you remember that for all that aura looks like a liquid or gas or whatever, it isn’t bound by physical rules. It has no mass, and it doesn’t even really have acceleration unless we give it some. It definitely doesn’t have momentum unless you give it any.” 

Kelly held his hand up and started spinning it around. Rather than a vortex, it was more like someone stirring a pot of a chunky stew.

When he tried to flip its direction, it slowed, then stopped, then reversed direction, and I nodded. 

“Exactly. You’re treating it like a liquid. Stop it. It’s aura.” 

Kelly frowned and nodded, and as he tried to focus on alternating between the two exercises I showed him, we stepped out onto the roof.

A spot of light flared out of the corner of my eye and I whipped around. I activated my second arch-star, split mind, and built a sensory spell in either half, one for my metal rune bond, and the other for my more experimental bond. 

An eighty-one millimeter, thirteen kilogram shell, the kind usually reserved for airship combat, was hurtling towards us. Its surface was carved with enchantments to disrupt shaping, to allow it to punch through most wards, and to stop most sorcerers from being able to stop it mid-flight

It wasn’t using my subtle trick of slipping past most defenses notice with my fourth arch-star and Odril’s infusion. It just relied on raw power. 

Most mages wouldn’t be able to stop it in time. It was powerful enough to rip through the outer plating of a airship, which meant it took a lot of power to stop. 

I wasn’t most mages. 

I flicked my hands out and in one stream of consciousness used my experimental rune bond, layering a spell over the bullet. With my other stream of consciousness, I cast a metal manipulation spell to send it firing off course and into the direction of the uninhabited mountains.

The shaping disruption spell carved into the shell tried to stop me, making every line and rune of my spellcraft take four times as much effort to complete, but I pushed through it. This wasn’t the first time I’d had to deal with shaping disruption, and a single shell, no matter how competently enchanted, would have a limit on how much disrupting it could do. 

I poured power into the spell, and then…

The disruption broke, and the shell suddenly became far less threatening, curving to streak away. 

I traced the trajectory shell had been following before I’d redirected it, just using my eyes, not any sort of spellcraft, and my eyes fell on an airship that had dipped lower than they were normally allowed.

Standing on a gunning turret, on the side of the airship, was someone in a coat and a familiar mask.

Mist’s mask.