The Effaced: Chapter Four

When lunch came by, I was dry, and a constable brought someone else into my cell, a short, skinny teenager. He gave me a wide-eyed stare, and shuffled to the unoccupied cot. 

“What did you do?” the teen asked, and I sighed. Were the constables really trying to use me to frighten children? That was low. 

Then again, they might be using a spy. I doubted it, but if a senator had really been killed in a method that left Mist as one of the only suspects, they might just stoop that low. 

“Nothing,” I sighed. “What about you?” 

“Nothing too!” he said, far too quickly. I glanced at him and he quailed. 

“Well, I might have used magic to trick some people, but… It was only for things that I really needed! I didn’t have enough panes to pay for the groceries.”

I let out a half-amused snort. They really were trying to use me to scare children.

“You’re a mind sorcerer, then?” I asked. “Or light? Shadow?”

“Mind… are you a mage?” 

“Metal sorcerer,” I said. It was true, just not the whole truth. “I’m an engineer.” 

“Really?” the kid asked. “You look more like a fighter. I expected you to…” 

“What, you thought I was a mob enforcer or something?” I asked, fully amused now. 

“Kind of,” the kid admitted. 

“Nothing like that. I really didn’t do anything.” 

“Oh.” 

We lapsed into silence then, and it was only broken by the kid speaking up again. 

“My name is Kelly,” he said. “What about you?” 

“Axel,” I said, and he blinked. 

“Like… on an automobile?” 

“Spelled different,” I said. “E-L, not L-E.” 

“Oh.” 

I glanced at him. 

“We don’t need to talk if you don’t want to.”

“Okay,” Kelly said. We lapsed into silence again, then a while later, he glanced over at me. I had my eyes closed and was leaning against the wall, but I could feel him looking at me. 

“What is it?” I asked. 

“You’re old,” he said.

Ouch. I was thirty-five. That wasn’t old! 

“Do you know much about forming arch-stars?” Kelly continued, and I had to repress another snort. If he wasn’t a spy, then he’d lucked out – I was more than qualified to give an entire lecture about forming arch-stars.

“I figure you must have more experience than I do. I have the auric-transfer arch-star…” 

“Really?” I asked, cracking an eye open to glance at the kid. “Why that one?” 

“My landlord needed me to donate a lot of aura to him to pay the bills,” Kelly said. “I wasn’t intending to form it, I just ran out of money to buy crystals, and I had to give him some.”

“He was stealing the aura crystals you pay him with?” I said. “That’s… Pretty sure it’s illegal.” 

“Yeah,” Kelly said with a dark laugh. “Doesn’t stop him, though, and it’s not like I can do anything.” 

I paused and shook my head. I didn’t have time to go around helping every poor kid who wound up in trouble. 

“I know a thing or two,” I said. “I can’t list out all of the second-stage arch-stars that are out there, but you can find a list in the library, and probably some exercises for it too. I know the Ligature pushes that a lot. But the key to forming them is pressure.” 

“Pressure?” Kelly asked, and I ran a hand through my short-cropped hair.

“Alright, hold on kid,” I said. “Take it back a notch. What do you know about magic in general? Aura, spells, all that?”

“I know my dad told me that I needed to get a bond if I wanted to do anything, since we were poor,” Kelly told me. “And the person who did the bond gave me a couple of spells, it was a friend of his.”

I closed my eyes. That… was not correct. It was a common misconception, that much was true, and people did tend to label sorcerers as the poor of the magical community, but there was so much more that we could do than most expected.

“Alright, no,” I said. “All magic comes from aura, which is everywhere, but only archmages can see it. The amount of aura a person has is measured roughly by their auric capacity, you can test that at most machines, or when paying your yearly aura tax. You know that, right?”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding, then started to say something, but I kept talking.

“Right,” I said. “Before I get into this, I want you to wipe your memory of the idea that auric capacity is a measure of anything but power, and a rough measure at that.”

“Like a muscle?” Kelly asked, recognition dawning in his eyes. “You can measure how much strength it has normally, but that isn’t a measure of what it can do when it’s stretched to the brink?”

“Exactly,” I said, pointing at him. “And it doesn’t mean someone can fight. Ever seen one of those lean little professional warriors? They can take down anyone at a gym, even if the gym rat weighs twice what they do.”

“Then…” Kelly frowned. “How does that factor in with the types of magic? Are some just stronger, like a gun beating a stick?”

“There are generally accepted to be three types of mages,” I explained. “Druids, who deal with the stuff that comes from other worlds. Faeries, demons, angels, that sort of thing. Witches, who use elaborate rituals to do basically anything they want as long as they know how to, and sorcerers. That’s us.”

“Why isn’t everyone a witch? If they can do anything?”

“Couple of reasons,” I explained. “First is the caveat I already said. They can do anything they know how to. Someone with no experience in building magical defenses couldn’t do a ward unless they were copying it out of a book, and copied spells are never as good as ones you compose or alter to fit your style. Then there’s the second reason, which is important, and what we gain in exchange?”

Kelly gave me a strange look, so I continued.

“We trade away flexibility for speed and power,” I said. “I’ve got the metal rune bond. That allows me to cast just about any spell related to metal that I want. I can reinforce it, change some of its properties, manipulate its location, all that. A witch could do anything I can do and more, but here’s the catch – they need time, materials, and a focus. They need to draw out the spell physically, channel aura into it, chant out the spell, and use whatever components they have that is related to the spell. Then their spell charges up and only once it’s charged does it take effect. All I have to do is picture the spell, shape my aura into that shape, and it works.”

“Components,” Kelly said, eyes narrowing. “That’s why my dad said I couldn’t learn any other magic?”

“Probably,” I agreed. “He was wrong. I knew plenty of witches in Bronzelight University who came from backgrounds that didn’t let them buy fancy components. They did have some debt from hiring the tutors needed to score well on the entry exam, but they paid it off within a few years.”

Kelly snorted, and I wished I could have introduced him to Megan. She’d been from the undercity, and didn’t even have the luxury of a father willing to pay for a rune bond, but she’d made it to Bronzelight.

“How do arch-stars factor in?” Kelly asked, and I wobbled my hand.

“Arch-stars are a beast of their own,” I said. “A lot of people say that they measure a person’s skill, much like the auric capacity measures their power.”

“Makes sense,” Kelly said. “That’s why I asked you about it.”

“Wrong,” I said. “It doesn’t measure skill at all. It’s not a measurement. Far as I know, gauging skill is really just like gauging skill in any other art or sport. The arch-stars are a type of auric evolution. You know what that is?”

“I did have public school, even if it was undercity public school,” Kelly snipped.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Anyways. They’re like evolution. If your mind, body, or soul is strained to its limits, and you desperately need something, your aura can compress to meet that need.”

“They can do… anything?” Kelly asked.

“Well… Not everything. Sometimes new ones are discovered, but the thing is, it’s easiest to train the aura into that shape. With enough repetition, you can even get one to click into place without much pressure at all. Like I said, you can find a list of known ones in the library, and those exercises. But they don’t measure skill. It’s better to know what you’re doing, know your magic, and know yourself than to complete all five arch-stars and become an archmage. Did you hear about the violence in Paerús, up north?”

“The barbarians?” Kelly asked, and I winced. I had never felt quite happy about how people tended to demonize the ignorant, but a political lecture wasn’t what Kelly had signed up for.

“Their king was an archmage, who got killed by a kid with a sword and borrowed power. Nobody knows his auric capacity, but based on what the papers said about him, I’d guess he was at least twelve hundred.”

“No way,” Kelly said. “I don’t believe it. He had to be seven hundred, tops. I mean, what’s Archmage Davalier’s capacity?”

“Seven eighty one, was the last she reported, I think,” I said, “Anyways. Point is, he had all five arch-stars and had an absurd amount of aura to work with, but he had no skill.”

I stared at Kelly, trying to drill this lesson in, the same lesson my mentor had hammered in at the very start. I tried to not think too much about her – bad memories.

“Skill trumps everything. It beats the type of mage you are, it beats your auric capacity, and it beats the number of arch-stars you have.”

“Alright, I get it,” Kelly said. “I’m not stupid. If what you’re saying’s true, though, you’re saying I formed the ability to transfer my aura directly into someone else because I was afraid of the landlord?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. My teacher threw me in a pit, with heavy metal spikes that would take four times as much aura as I had at the time to lift them and climb my way out.

I shoved that memory away – it had been incredibly painful.

“So as a new mind sorcerer, the first thing you should do is get some aura shaping exercises,” I told Kelly.

“What? Don’t those just make your auric capacity go up and mean you gotta pay more taxes?”

I closed my eyes and begged for mercy. Apparently, I needed to give Kelly a lesson in how taxes worked, in addition to how magecraft worked. 

“First of all, it would just be your aura tax, not your money ones,” I said. “Second, unless you’ve got a truly massive aura size, and can thus make a ton of use out of exercises, you probably won’t see an increase in taxes. And third, the taxes are bracketed. You’ll still have more overall aura, even if you increased your capacity into the next bracket.”

“Okay, but didn’t you just say that power wasn’t anything?” the kid pointed out.

“I did. But increasing your aura’s density, and thus your capacity, is only half of the benefit of an aura shaping exercise. It’s a shaping exercise, it relies on you shaping your aura, just like if you’re shaping a spell. Practicing with shaping exercises is going to make you able to form your spells faster, smoother, and with more precision. Honestly, spellcasting will do more for your capacity than any shaping exercise.”

“Like… sparring, or shadow boxing, or doing acrobatics, in order to prepare for a fight,” Kelly said, going back to the earlier analogy.

“Kind of,” I said, nodding. “So, you’re going to practice, then you’re going to cast spells, then practice changing your spells, manipulating them on the fly. No witch or druid can change their spell that fast, they’d need to recast it entirely. If you want to get good as a sorcerer, you need to focus on the advantages of being one. Then worry about your second arch-star later, if ever.”

“Alright,” Kelly agreed. “Then what?”

“I don’t know, kid,” I said.

“I’m seventeen!” Kelly protested. “I’m an adult.”

I closed my eyes again.

“I’m just telling you how to get stronger as a mage,” I told Kelly. “If you want to improve your life, or become some sort of sage of wisdom, or whatever it is you wanted to ask, that’s on you. But take it from me – there are a lot of problems that power can’t fix. Maybe you can get a job working as a memory storage worker. That doesn’t need a degree, I think, just skill with the spells.”

“Fine, whatever you say, old man.”

“I’m not old.”

“And I’m not a kid.”

I opened my mouth to fire back a retort when I heard footsteps. The moment the constable appeared, Kelly shrunk back, folding himself into his cot.

“Font,” the constable said. “Your attorney is here.”