by Peri Akman
“Okay. Now hold it there,” Kole said. Quinn nearly jumped at how loud her voice was, until he realized that she was still holding his face.
He stared at the tear, and the more he did, the closer he seemed to get to it. It was huge. The fraying was uneven on one side. Neatly cut on one end, and dangling on the other. The black was also a slightly darker black than the black that the tear led into.
The bandages around the face that was his were less now. He didn’t really know what Kole was doing, but it seemed like she was further away.
“I’m going to let go now, okay?” Kole asked.
Quinn wasn’t sure he replied, but the vibrations returned. This time he was ready. They slowed. And he continued his focus. Finally, he blinked, and was jolted back to reality.
Everything burned. It felt like he had just ran a marathon. Kole was back on the other side of the carriage
“That was excellent, Quinn,” Kole praised. “I could tell you were working incredibly hard.”
Quinn tried to smile, but that hurt too. “I… thanks… I think I’m done for now, though.”
Kole nodded. “All right, fine by me. You take a nap or something.”
The rain still poured lightly on the carriage.
Quinn’s body was on pins and needles. His legs felt heavy, his head felt light, and his fingers seemed to vibrate when he stared at them.
He looked out the window slightly, but he couldn’t find a comfortable position. Instead, he turned to face Kole again.
“So what was the point of that?” he asked.
“Oh, I was flexing your brain. After a few more different exercises, you should be able to propel your mind past your comfort zone. After focusing was going to come rapid expansion and rapid deflation. Not trying to expand further than normal, just quickly. Then you focus, you hold, and you go quickly, one chunk at a time.” Kole said.
“And… that’s how you break through the wall?” Quinn’s mouth hung open slightly. It had been exhausting, sure, but it couldn't be that simple.
“Well, for you, yes.” Kole scratched her neck. Or at least, the bandages on top of her neck. “I mean, it’s not like getting past the barriers turns you into a reality-warping fiend, you won’t even know what your affinity is. It just means you can now expand your magical abilities in a way that can affect the world around you.”
The last part, Quinn had already known. It was the first part that confused him. “For me?”
“Yes. For you. Everyone has a different type of mental barrier,” Kole elaborated. “It’s why so few techniques work for everyone, and why Zin is a pompous ass. Writes an entire book on magic, and only provides three meditation techniques, and then of course everyone only copies those! It’s terrible.”
“So… how do you know this will work for me?” Quinn took his cloak off and started turning it into a makeshift pillow for him to rest his head on. Halfway through, Kole took his school pillow out of her stick and tossed it at him.
It landed softly on his face, but it felt like it weighed fifty pounds. Quinn gave a slight muffle in protest, but he placed it underneath his head and draped his cloak over him as a blanket.
“I know because that’s my main skill. I know exactly what skill level you’re at, and exactly what is causing the struggle. I am very good at picking up that sort of thing,” Kole explained.
Quinn furrowed his brow. “What do you mean? Are you an empath, then?”
Kole chuckled. “You think I could get around screaming at people if I was an empath? The feedback alone would be a nightmare. No. I just… take the skills of whatever warlock I’m nearest to.”
Quinn blinked. That sounded familiar. “So if I could… like… generate fire out of my hands…?”
“I would have no way of knowing because you yourself have no way of knowing,” Kole recited dully.
“So then… how did you defeat the monsters from before?” Quinn asked.
“I get about a day of bleed over. I just spent the entire morning with a bunch of powerful warlocks. I was at my peak then, being able to pick and choose. The further we get away, and the longer it is, the more we’re actually exactly the same,” she elaborated. “So really, it’s just as beneficial to me, as it is to you, to improve.”
“Mimicry,” Quinn muttered.
Kole nodded. “That’s what the Government records it as. Currently, alive, there are five other officially recorded warlocks like me. Most are higher up though. High intelligence jobs, where they have to analyze enemies at the drop of the hat. Very stressful, very dangerous.”
“What… what am I like? Magically, I mean?” Quinn asked.
Kole made a clucking noise as she thought. “You’re distant. I can’t improve myself. I can’t break through your walls because you haven’t yet. I could do it ten times more successfully right now, but I’m limited. But whatever you control, or create, or make, or whatever, it’s far away. You definitely are not any sort of elemental controller, for better or for worse.”
Quinn shrugged. Well, that took some stuff off the table.
“Unless…” Kole started up again. “Unless you control, like, magma. Or rare and precious metals. Or the heat of the sun. Those things would be far enough away. But I doubt it. You don’t seem the type. Although your vibrating energy ball could lead to something heat related.”
“The teachers said it was pointless to deduce from how it acts,” Quinn mumbled. He was actually pretty comfortable. He had been sleeping well, lately.
“Yeah, and yet, everyone does it all the time. Sometimes you can get accurate results. At the very least, it provides a direction,” Kole said.
“Oh… I guess that makes sense… anything else you ruled out?” Quinn asked.
“Definitely not a self affinity. You keep wanting to escape out. You’re not even capable of internalizing your meditation. So you’re definitely not an empath. You’re also not an amplifier, a channeler, a shapeshifter, and I think we can also cross off anything ghostly. Oh, and if you had your heart set on doing what Han-Yue did, you can forget that too,” Kole explained, waving her hand in a vague motion. “Honestly, my best guess for you would be teleportation. Would explain the vibrations and your need to leap above and beyond what most mental blocks are.”
“Isn’t teleportation a… self… thing?” Quinn asked.
“It can be. It depends how it works. You know baldie from the government? Hers wasn’t a self thing. She pictured a pinpoint, and travelled through the light to get there. All external. But yes, some teleporters are more internal. Those tend to have a tougher time, since they have to sort of traverse blindly. Also, there are the ones who merely speed up their own processes to make short bursts of teleportation,” Kole rambled. “If you have teleportation, it’d be like baldie.”
Quinn smiled. “That would be really cool, actually. I could go wherever I wanted.”
“Yeah, plus, teleportation affinities have a high chance of a secondary affinity.” Kole’s eyes twinkled. “I mean, beyond the usual ‘I have some resistance to my own skill’ secondary affinity that I love to abuse. I think baldie has some degree of assorted invisibility and silent moving at her disposal, hence why she’s so annoyingly good at her job.”
“Have… you ever met anyone with a second affinity? Not a secondary one. Second.” Quinn asked.
“Second? No. Usually people with skills over two things are cheating in some way. Those who can imbue, amplify, or control items can make the illusion of having multiple affinities, because of the variety of things they can have going on at the same time. I mean, look at my homunculi, they’re one-note, but I haven’t had access to the guy who I mimicked the skills off of in years, and they still work how they’re supposed to. I just have to pray every day that they don’t break down.” Kole gestured with her stick.
Quinn chuckled slightly. That explained that then. Her walking stick was probably the same.
“The closest you get after that are either people like me, who have an af
finity reliant on the outside elements, or you have someone who's gotten really good at separating their own inclinations into distinct attributes. There was a warlock I knew once, freaked everyone out because she seemed to control two unrelated things, she could speak to birds, and she could breathe out a poisonous gas of sorts. Years were spent trying to connect the two. It turned out her affinity had to do with being related to a poison-breathing bird creature that hadn’t been discovered yet. She was showing latent signs of shapeshifting,” Kole said.
“And… there’s absolutely no chance of having an affinity for magic itself?” Quinn asked. He knew the answer was no, but he had already learned so much, it couldn’t help to ask.
Kole laughed. “Those damn Kasen books, destroying yet another idea. So back when I was a kid, there was an official ‘magical’ inclination, but it kept sending the wrong idea, so now it’s been changed to something else. I think it’s an affinity for enhancement. Those with that affinity actually can’t use any magic of their own—they just make everyone else around them really, really good at what they’re doing. Not nearly as impressive as the rest of the world was afraid of it being.”
“Could… could I be an enhancer?” Quinn asked, almost feeling embarrassed.
“Well… it would fit with what’s going on. If you did though, it’d be weird how much you need to focus. I’d guess it could work if you could only enhance one person at any given time. A sort of specialized external enhancer. But yeah. That’s feasible.” Kole tilted her head. “Why do you ask?”
“It’s just… then I would never have to fight. Or do anything dangerous. And… I’d still be really useful,” Quinn admitted. “It sounds like it would be an easy solution, that’s all.”
Kole sighed. “Quinn, you don’t have to worry about it. Besides, an affinity like that would mean you'd be carted off to wherever they wanted, and you would constantly be at the beck and call of warlocks who think they’re better than you. It’s not fun.”
Quinn nodded. He was slightly disappointed. It hadn't occurred to him that something like that could be… dangerous?
“I think by this point just not knowing is causing me more stress than the fear of what my future is going to be,” Quinn admitted.
“It’s easier than you think it is. In a few weeks, you’ll probably be confused that you ever worried,” Kole said. “It’s one of those weird feelings of life that we stop comprehending once it goes away.”
Quinn smiled. “It’d be nice if I could skip ahead to those few weeks now.”
“Yeah, we all wish that that from time to time,” Kole said.
Quinn felt his brain get fuzzy with exhaustion. Apparently meditating took a lot out of him, who knew? His eyes were incredibly droopy, and every blink took an enormous out of effort to execute.
With thoughts of inclinations and affinities dancing in his head, he drifted back off into sleep, with nothing but the pattering of rain reminding him of reality.
Chapter Eight
The carriage ride was rather uneventful. After the rain came a hot, blistering day. Kole and Quinn took several breaks for relief and other such matters, but they had to keep it short. If they stayed in one spot too long, they would end up becoming monster bait, and, unlike the ones in Haldon, these monsters were rather dangerous.
Quinn practiced his meditations extensively, but he couldn’t quite make it. He had apparently overtaxed himself yesterday. When he called Kole out on this, she merely replied, “You wanted to keep going.”
Which was true. It was all up to him. He did not particularly like the feeling of being in control of his own destiny. A fifteen-year-old boy was not ready to be the master of magic and all that spawned in front of him.
To be fair to Kole, though, she was right. If he had just kept going and ignored the stress, he would have made it by now. This wasn’t like exercise, where there was a wrong way to work out, or where there was a constant moving goal. This had one goal: break his mental barrier. Once that was over he could sleep for a week if needed.
He was able to get to the “rapid expansion” part of his meditation, but that just made the pain worse. Plus, the carriage amplified the heat from outside, and trying to exercise any part of his body, even if it was a metaphysical one, it still hurt.
Kole didn't seem too affected by the heat, not even sweating through her copious amounts of robes and bandages. She just sat in the carriage quietly, occasionally jotting things down or complaining about the modern economic failings between Shorne and Haldon’s trades, and wincing whenever she accidentally moved her bad leg into an awkward position. After a period of time, Quinn took a break from the meditating and instead opted to hang his head out the window, savoring what little breeze there was. Quinn wasn’t exactly a heavy sweater either, but, compared to Kole, he might as well have been sweating buckets.
The breaks were slightly better, as they were free of the heatbox, but now the breeze was nonexistent. In any mundane circumstances, Quinn would have sprawled under the shade somewhere and massaged his tired limbs, but these weren’t mundane circumstances; this was a place full of unfamiliar scents and sights.
So, tired, sweating and sore, Quinn limped around the new areas, exploring what he could before they inevitably returned to the carriage for another hour or so of riding. The air was different here. It was weird to realize that, but it was true. It smelled… moist. Quinn was familiar with humidity, but he had never smelled it in the air before.
Kole never went with him, her distaste at the rough and rocky grounds evident in her tone, but she patiently waited for Quinn to exhaust himself every time.
Finally, after the day was almost up, the lights of Shorne were visible.
Shorne was…
Where could he even begin?
Haldon had the one flat hill that the Academy was nestled on. Then there was the rest of the city sprawled out, then the farms. Then in the very, very long distance, the faded purple shapes of the mountains.
Here the mountains were everywhere. Closing around him, like the walls of the Haldon Academy. The buildings reflected the mountains as well, built for uneven ground and rocky terraces. There were also hardly any wooden buildings, unlike Haldon which had them in abundance. The roofs were even made of aluminum, and seemed to have curved open piping jutting out of them parallel to the ground, for reasons Quinn couldn’t even begin to fathom.
And those were just the buildings that existed on the outskirts! Occasional cabins up in the distance, warehouses, metal spires, guard towers that seemed vacated and herds of goats being guided to and from barns.
The entrance to Shorne itself was distinguished by two tall spindly towers with smoke coming out of the top. The road was less dusty here; it had become hard and black. Blocking the city was about a six-foot-tall barbed wire fence. If he had to, he could probably suck his stomach in and edge through, but not so long as the carriage also needed to make it in.
Kole sighed and kicked open the carriage door with her good leg.
She stepped out into the blistering sun and waved her stick around.
“Hey!” she yelled.
“I thought you said… Isvale was the walled in place,” Quinn questioned, stepping out of the carriage as well.
“Yeah. But if we want to go in as warlocks, we get to go through the official road. Isvale is just worse ߴcause you gotta queue. Otherwise we get trapped no matter where we go. Unless you want to break the law. Wanna break the law?” The way Kole phrased the question, she almost sounded serious. Almost.
Still, it was better to not humor her. Quinn silently shook his head.
“You’re no fun,” Kole snapped.
A man came to greet them through a smaller archway. He was old, hairy, and rather overweight. Quinn briefly wondered if that was what he would look like when he put on a couple of decades.
The man walked up to them and circled around the carriage. He seemed to be checking for… goods?
“You traders?” he asked. He pause
d as he walked past the clay horse. His eyes narrowed in confusion.
“Warlock.” Kole replied without missing a beat.
His demeanor changed, his back straightened, his mouth deepened into a frown. He took a few steps back. “Oh. Sigil?”
She sighed, and went to her left eye, and lifted up the bandages. Quinn frowned. Her sigil was also on her eye? She hadn’t mentioned that.
The man walked up to her to examine it. His eyes narrowed.
“Those things are supposed to be on your hand, ma’am,” He didn’t seem very convinced by the evidence.
“Hand. Arm. Ass. Mine’s on my eye. It’s easier that way. Or does that bother you?” she snapped.
His face twitched in annoyance. “You know I don’t have to let you in.”
Kole took a deep breath. “Sorry. Sir.”
The damage was done, however, and the man grumbled to himself throughout the rest of his questions. He asked for names (I’m Kole and this is my ward. His name is—oh you don’t care okay never mind), for abilities (to freelance wherever the heart wanders), and where they planned on going (everywhere).
Kole answered the questions with a bit of a tightened edge to her, like she really wanted to rant at him and wasn’t allowed to. She tried making jokes, but they mostly seemed to go over the man’s head.
“Is the man there also a warlock?” the man asked, looking at the clay homunculus.
“Not a man. A homunculus,” Kole corrected. “No free will. Just destined to drive this carriage and occasionally lift heavy things for the rest of eternity.”
The man’s eyes bulged out of his eye socket. “Are they dangerous?” he nearly yelled.
“No! If anything it’s the opposite of dangerous. No animal cruelty,” Kole said through gritted teeth. She narrowed her eyes as if waiting for a very specific answer.
“That seems like you’re putting honest people out of work,” he noted dryly.
