Chapter 19. LIGHTNING IS DRAMATIC

  The next morning Bend spent time working with Shade, Ehren, Willow, and Briar, to practice simple spell casting techniques and teach them several of his own survival spells, while I worked one-on-one with Greer.

  I couldn’t help but get a little bit excited when I thought about Greer’s potential. Not only was he going to be a mage with powerful potential, he was also a blacksmith, which could help us imbue weapons with additional magical power.

  Fear fluttered inside me, nonetheless. There hadn’t been a banding together of this many mages in years?—?could this be the beginning of something? I tried not to think about it, or put pressure on this moment or these people. Instead, in my mind, I sorted each of the young mages into different possible areas of emphasis.

  My own areas of emphases were the Sword, which connoted battle spells, though they were largely defensive in nature; the Book represented history, ancient languages, and scholarly study; the Sword over the Map which symbolized war strategy and tactics, as well as some mapmaking and geography; and the Water Drop, which covered everything to do with spells relating to water —creating it, using it, finding it— and also included using water to power spells, and strangely, even steam power.

  In this group of six, I had a potential Battle Mage and Smithing Mage in Greer, a possible Crafter in Shade, and from our early discussions, Willow seemed ready to pursue study in Knowledge, History, as well as the gathering and storage of spells. Already, I could see Bend had the gifts of a Teacher and a Leader as well. We would see where the others found their interests and skills developing over time.

  Greer and I stood out in the desert some miles south of Vale itself, at a location far enough away that no one would hear us if we made a ruckus. With his innate potential so great, we would need some space to stretch ourselves and destroy some things.

  We left before the sun rose, while it was still dark, and walked through many tunnels and passages until we slipped into the outer city of Vale. From there, Greer and I walked far to the south of the city until we were out of sight, and I believed, out of earshot.

  I led us until we found a long depression rutted into the ground, which also held a small rock field, including several larger boulders that stood all around us. We stopped and put down our packs, as fine dust blew across the plains, stinging sharply on my skin. We both performed a water spell and took a short break.

  As I looked around, it occurred to me this depression must have once been a river, in order to deposit so many varied rocks all in one place.

  “Greer, we’re out here today because I want to train you in a few battle spells, focused on both attack and defense,” I said gesturing to the desert around us. “Most of these spells can be dangerous and loud in operation, which is why I wanted us so far from the city.”

  Then, I peeled open my tunic so he could see the tattoo on my chest.

  “This is the tattoo of The Way of the Mark,” I said. “And this symbol of a sword represents my training emphasis in the magical arts of battle and defensive, or reactive, war.”

  “Will I get a tattoo such as this?” Greer smiled, as he looked curiously over the four quadrants of the shield-shaped mark on my chest.

  “Yes, we will make sure to mark you soon enough,” I said. “But before we get started, I must ask: do you have any problem using your spellcraft to fight The Motorized?”

  His face grew steely and intense in an instant.

  “The Motorized attacked my mother when she was young, injuring her knee in a way that never healed,” he growled through his considerable beard. “She walked with pain her whole life because of the injury they left her. Those thugs in Vale leave me alone because I forge tools and weapons for them, but they have oppressed our people long enough.”

  “I have a similar story,” I replied. “For today, we have little time. So, let us start with one simple spell and see if my suspicions about your abilities are correct.”

  Greer nodded, and I cleared my throat, bringing out a couple of small semi-precious gemstones and pieces of ivory that had been scrounged in the past few days.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “The Way emphasizes several principles in battle,” I said. “We protect the innocent. We always seek peace until battle is impossible to avoid. When it comes time to do battle, we use an attacker’s own power against them, when we can. As a last resort, in order to defend ourselves, we use whatever means necessary, keeping the other three ideas in mind. Typically, I would start training a Battle Mage slowly and by learning defensive strategies and spells. However, The Motorized are already hunting for us and we must learn quickly, so I’m going to break that tradition.”

  “I understand,” Greer said. “This in itself is a form of defense against what is coming.”

  “Yes, exactly,” I replied. “So, let us begin with a spell that conjures a semblance of lightning and thunder. We should always keep in mind that one part of a battle is the actual damage your attacks can cause an enemy, but another part of a battle is exerting a dramatic effect.”

  “Lightning is dramatic,” Greer noted.

  “It sure is,” I said. “Creating a bit of theater can serve to demoralize and drive fear into the hearts of those we have not yet engaged, both those you are fighting and those who are watching. Our numbers are much smaller than the Motorized. So we need every advantage we can get. Stand back.”

  Greer took three steps back, and furrowed his brow while staring at my hands.

  I took a step toward a large boulder standing on the desert floor about twenty feet front of me. First, I drained the matter of a single small rare semi-precious gemstone in my open palm, and its matter winked away in a flash.

  Immediately, I performed another weave, bringing my arms into the air and dropping my hands down in swift movement, transforming the matter into another form entirely.

  Finally, I brought my hands together and pushed forward, as if shoving away an enemy, while muttering the trigger word.

  CRACK!

  Suddenly, a jagged flash of lightning erupted into existence above us and drove down into the boulder before me, accompanied by a thundering roar. The sound echoed across the desert and reverberated for miles. The light of the strike flashed so intensely I was forced to close my eyes, and the strike hit with such force that my ears rang for a few minutes after.

  The large boulder before me, once half as tall as a man, had become a charred and smoking mass of rubble.

  Greer stared at me, his eyes wide as the pulleys on a steam engine.

  “Such power,” he mumbled to himself as he looked at the rubble. He noticed me looking at him. “The Motorized will rue the day they attacked my mother.”

  “You will be able to do even more than this, Greer,” I said.

  Then, I walked him through the forms of the spell, slowly, painstakingly showing him each individual movement, having him repeat each one, and finally, saying the trigger word.

  Some of our order used to train in hand-to-hand fighting, and they would carefully memorize the forms of each defensive and offensive stance, practicing the punches, the kicks. They grew so adept at these stances and forms, that they began to look like a choreographed dance.

  Learning a new spell was the same. Often mages would run through their most relied upon spells, one after another, training their bodies to remember these movements through gentle and consistent repetition.

  Spell form training became routine only through focused, regular work, and lots of practice. After I showed Greer the forms, and he tried to follow my lead, he began to catch on—and I saw, for a muscly guy, he was surprisingly agile. Greer ran through the series of forms a dozen times, ending with the trigger word, until he had broken a sweat.

  But he picked it up quickly. After his last time through the spell, he looked at me as he finished, out of breath but excited.

  I nodded and handed him a small piece of ivory.

  “Start with this and practice the spell on that boulder there,” I said, gesturing to a much smaller boulder the size of a large rodent. Then I walked him through the weave one more time.

  “Do you know it?” I asked.

  “Yes, I think so,” he said with a nod, stepping forward.

  Greer focused his attention first on draining the ivory of its matter. The draining was always the same in every spell, and therefore easier to remember.

  He drained the chunk of ivory with the moves we’d practiced only yesterday. Though it took a few seconds longer, eventually the ivory piece winked away. With the matter now hovering in the air before him, Greer began to weave it into a new form. Slowly and carefully, he stepped through the simple forms of the spell, building the matter up, weaving it into something intricate and dangerous?—?and as he did this, I sensed his own internal spark lending the spell significant power.

  As I watched I felt the awe and wonder that initially attracted me to The Way and everything it could do. Here, now, training another to use this craft in the way that I’d learned it, a feeling of peace settled over me, a foreign feeling I’d not felt for many years.

  Greer was thorough and meticulous in his movements and it paid off when he spoke the trigger word for the spell.

  CRACK!

  A jagged lightning strike hammered into the smaller rock, accompanied instantly by roaring thunder, similar to what I’d launched only moments earlier.

  The strike itself stunned me.

  It was smaller than my own lightning spell, but only by degrees. This was especially shocking when compared to the strike I’d managed with a gemstone, a rarer piece of matter than ivory, by a large margin.

  The rock itself vaporized, splitting into hundreds, thousands of tiny shards now spread all across the plain.

  “Greer, with enough training, I think you may become one of the powerful mages I’ve ever met,” I said with a smile and a clap on his back.

  He grinned at first, his eyes shining with the same awe and wonder I’d felt years before. I could tell he felt the thrill that came with casting a spell. Then he turned serious.

  “Uof and The Motorized will regret their evils, I promise you that,” he replied.