Gemworld

by Jeremy Bullard

  Reluctant as he was to do so, Jaren had to call an end to Keth’s portion of the lesson. The evening was drawing on, the moon was high in the sky, and the village was silent, save for them.

  The granite had no objections. He was absolutely drained from the magic and the stretching of his imagination. But he was pleased. Jaren saw a vitality, an excitement, in Keth’s body that matched his own. Deciding that a night’s rest would be welcome, Keth departed, vowing to return after his smithing duties the following afternoon.

  As Keth left, Sal made to follow. “Game called on account of extensive delay,” he muttered sleepily.

  “I’ll make no attempt to understand that one,” Jaren said, “but if it means that you’re done for the night, I won’t accept it. There’s too much left to do yet. We should at least start you on the path to discovering your abilities.”

  Sal groaned, then nodded and sat down. “Sooner started, sooner done.”

  Jaren sighed inwardly as Sal retook his spot near the fire. The night was indeed growing long, and his eyes heavy, but he just couldn’t bring himself to dismiss his otherworldly friend. If he could spend half the night trying to guide a granite—a granite!—through the first steps of arcane enlightenment, he could do no less for Sal. And the thought of working with an entirely new soulgem was more than incentive enough to renew his passion for the night’s exploration. Touching Emerald, he wielded, and the essence of Life flooded his being. At once, he felt refreshed. His swimming vision steadied, and tired muscles stopped their complaining. But Jaren knew the spell was short term. In a matter of hours it would wear off, and his fatigue would return with a vengeance. He would have to do this quickly. Turning, he looked to Menkal, silently begging the sapphire to stay.

  “I’m an old man,” the sapphire drawled, sitting back down with a shrug. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Besides, I’d love to find out where Sal comes up with these ideas of his. That was quite an impressive display of deductive reasoning.”

  “What? Keth?”

  “Yeah. No telling how long it would’ve taken me and Jaren to reach the conclusions you did in such a short time.”

  “Well, I’ve always been good at Geometry. Geometry? You know, the study of lines and angles, and how to define shapes as being similar? No? Geez, you people are backward.”

  “Tell me about it, this ‘geometry’,” Jaren said, stroking the midnight stubble on his chin curiously.

  Sal scanned the campsite for something he could use as an example, and his eyes settled on the rocks ringing the fire pit. He pointed to three similar sized rocks in rapid succession. “This one’s A, that’s B, and that’s C. If A is the same as B, and A is the same as C, then we can assume that B is the same as C. That’s Geometry. It was one of my favorite classes in school, because my mind naturally works along those lines. Especially tonight. I’ve been so involved with shol’tuk for the past few weeks that I’ve been thinking more outside the box than normal.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you,” the old man said, his bushy white eyebrows knotting together. “How is shol’tuk like this ‘geometry’?”

  “Well, it’s not, really, but the principle kinda relates. It’s basically a study in abstract logic. Although Geometry is technically a form of mathematics, you don’t need precise numbers to reach a viable conclusion. Similarly, shol’tuk is basically the art of improvisation—reaching the conclusion without directly considering the specifics that will get you there. You learn the moves, condition your body, stuff like that, but the art is not in the moves; it’s in how you apply them. You see yourself blocking this punch, dodging that kick, sweeping that leg, and it’s like shol’tuk just kinda takes over. You don’t think so much of how you’re going to do something. You just do it. I don’t know how to explain it better than that.”

  “An interesting thought, Sal,” Jaren conceded. “Since we don’t know how a potential mage aligns with one particular soulgem or another, it’s entirely plausible that your flexibility of thought led you to be tied to Diamond, the same way Keth’s practicality seems to have preceded his ascent to Granite. But what do you suppose that would mean for the way your soulgem wields magic?”

  Sal took a deep breath, steeling himself. Jaren knew Sal had been hoping to rely on the conjecture and experience of other mages, but they knew little more than he did. That being the case, no observation could be considered irrelevant, no matter how petty it might seem. Furrowing his brows, Sal spoke uncertainly. “Well, the only thing that really stands out to me is how my soulgem looks.”

  A slow smile spread across Jaren’s face, but he said nothing. But Menkal betrayed no emotion whatsoever, studying Sal intensely. “What do you mean exactly?” the grandfatherly sapphire drawled. “Let’s see that knack for deductive reasoning again. Talk it out for us, the way you did with Keth and his granite magic. Let’s see where it goes.”

  “Okay, this may be kinda lowbrow, but it’s all I got. See, Ruby is red, and its element is Fire. Sapphire is blue, and it uses Water. The other soulgems are the same. The colors, not just the soulgems themselves, they seem to be tied to the element they represent.” Sal continued to speak, his eyes unfocused. Jaren couldn’t tell if that meant he was giving intense thought to what he was saying, or as little thought as possible in the hopes that he might avoid his own preconceptions coloring his logic.

  That was seemed to be his way, anyway. He was an absolute marvel to behold—presented with a problem, Sal would start by connecting the dots then turn his mind loose. Or his mouth. His reasoning often ran in improbable directions, taking odd tangents, making preposterous leaps of faith, but more often than not it carried him to an incredibly insightful solution. He’d never been able to tell exactly how he reached his conclusion, of course, never be able to “show his work” as he called it, but at least he’d have an answer. Jaren hoped it would be like that now. His smile widened, but he dared not say a word. Sal was “on a roll”, as he put it, and Jaren did not want to risk breaking his chain of thought.

  “When I first saw my soulgem in the mirror, it looked like crystal, all smooth and clear. But when the light shone on it a certain way, it refracted that light the way a diamond does. I could see reds, blues, greens, purples, all the colors of the rainbow. Now, if the colors of the soulgem are tied to their respective element, then it stands to reason that—” His voice cut off abruptly, and took on a breathless quality. “Oh my God,” he he choked out. Is it possible? Can that really be what Diamond can do?”

  He looked incredulously at the two elder mages. Jaren fidgeted in nervous anticipation, waiting on Sal to finish the thought on his own. Menkal, implacably calm, simply waited, placing a hand on Jaren’s shoulder as if preventing him from taking off in excitement. Just as well that the sapphire did—Jaren on that very edge. Come on, Sal. You’re almost there.

  Menkal held Jaren’s shoulder a moment longer, then clapped it once when it became clear that Sal was too dumbstruck to finish the thought. “Okay, Green, you can let the kid off the hook now.” Jaren shot the sapphire a reluctant look of thanks.

  “Nice use of earth slang,” Sal commented blandly.

  “Hey, if it’s about fishing, I’ll probably know it regardless of what world it comes from.”

  “Anyway, we suspected that you can touch more than one soulgem,” Jaren broke in, refocusing the conversation, “but your reasoning helps to confirm our own. You see, we see a side of you that you do not see. In our secondary vision, we see auras the color of the soulgem they are aligned with—green for Emerald, red for Ruby, and so on. But when we look at yours, we see a white aura shot through with the colors of all the other elements. It looks quite like an opal, or mother-of-pearl. For some reason, we do not see brown in your aura, or black, the colors of Granite and Obsidian, so apparently you cannot touch the elements ruled by those two soulgems. But we do see yellow, which is not a color represented by any soulgem, or at least, one known to us yet. It’s all so very strange.”

  “So how
does this help you understand how I wield?”

  “Well, that’s just it,” Menkal said, finally speaking up. “We don’t really know. Diamond being a brand new soulgem and all, we don’t have a whole lot to go on. We can teach you the basics alright, and even give you a few hints on how your soulgem might relate to others or maybe the kind of abilities you might have access to, but as far as actually wielding your prismatic form of magic? I’m afraid you’re about four thousand years behind the curve. You’re gonna have to start from scratch, like our forebears did.”

  The faintest murmur of revelation tickled the back of Jaren’s mind. “The Tiled Hand,” he muttered quietly.

  “Huh?” Sal said, confused. “It didn’t work.”

  “Of course not. You’re a diamond.” Jaren stood and began to pace, speaking aloud as he thought things through. “Now, normally, a mage can sense magic in all its forms, regardless of the element being wielded, but the pre-ascendant mage can sense nothing but his own soulgem—which is of little consequence because as soon as he touches the soulgem, he ascends. In your case, you were sensitive to four of the six soulgems, and yet you did not ascend, not until you touched a diamond, which was previously not a soulgem. At least, not that we’re aware of.” He fell silent as he slipped deeper in thought, his frustration growing with each step. The answer was there, somewhere. He was so close to it, he could feel the answer on the tip of his tongue trying to wiggle free. It was infuriating.

  Menkal was just the opposite. He said nothing, offered nothing, instead retrieving his knife and a previously unfinished piece of wood. Jaren felt the faintest twinge of irritation at his friend, who seemed perfectly content to whittle the night away while Jaren worried the problem to death like a loose tooth. But Jaren knew better. The old sapphire was a Bastionite born and raised, a true scholar who knew the value of a good catalyst. And it was a role he excelled at. The old man would act like he had not a care in the world, and then throw out a certain question that would cause all the answers to fall into place. As was the case just then. His knife paused in mid-cut, just long enough to play his part. “Why do you figure Sal had a reaction to four of the soulgems, but didn’t ascend?”

  It was an obvious question, one that he himself had asked and re-asked, to no avail. That night had been at the very forefront of his thoughts, but something about the way the old sapphire worded his question, or the timing of it, hit Jaren square in the gut.

  “A diamond is a natural prism, shattering light into its base colors,” the emerald breathed this old recurring theme as if it were a new revelation. And indeed, it was! “Brown, though technically a color, is not produced by light passing through a prism. And black really isn’t a color at all. Rather, it is the complete absence of light, and therefore, color. But red, green, blue, violet—all these colors are represented by a soulgem.”

  “And I was sensitive to those same soulgems when I should’ve only been sensitive to Diamond,” Sal said, catching on. Menkal just whittled on, though Jaren noticed that his knife moved a bit unsteadily, as if the old mage had lost interest and was only performing the action by rote.

  Turning to Sal, Jaren saw his adrenaline levels spiking, his blood racing, his entire body poised to leap. But it was a mental leap, rather than physical, that Sal was taking, his voice providing a perfect counterpoint to his visibly quickening pulse. “If those four colors are all part of the same beam of light, shot through a prism, maybe their soulgems are all part of Diamond in the same way. And if that’s the case...” His voice trailed off as he looked around for something to experiment with.

  Slowly, his hand visibly shaking, Sal picking up the mug that lay at his side. Menkal spoke, his whittling forgotten, and all trace of his lazy drawl vanishing in a moment of intensity. “See the peace of the cup, how the vessel itself rests undisturbed. Feel the motion of the air, the eddies, the elemental droplets of water that fill the void around us, around the cup. Gather that water. Directing it into the mug, stilling its motion and granting it the peace of the cup.”

  Jaren watched in awe as water, lightly green-tinged in his sight, bubbled slowly to the rim of the mug. But he watched only for a moment, his attention ripped away by a ripple of blue-tinted magics.

  He looked up, and even in the taint of Jaren’s emerald sight, there was no mistaking the brilliant blue sapphire, conspicuously occupying the orbit where just a moment before there sat a diamond.

  ***

  The lessons continued for another hour or so, pausing only once, just after Sal had filled that first cup. Jaren wasn’t the only one caught off guard when the diamond eye had suddenly went blue. But after much discussion—mana shifts, Runic Theory, and a bunch of other crap that Sal didn’t understand—they determined that it was normal, depending on which soulgem Sal was touching at the time. And sure enough, his eye went green the first time he wielded emerald magic. But always, when he released the magic, his eye returned to its original clarity, and his aura resumed its opalescent glow. He still had yet to learn how to use his magical vision with either Emerald or Sapphire, to say nothing of wielding either Ruby or Amethyst, but overall, he believed that he’d had a very productive night.

  Now, weaving his way through the meandering, night-dimmed streets of Caravan, he found himself laughing at the understatement. Productive night?!? In one evening, he’d gone from a displaced soldier trying to make his way in a strange, new world to a mage, a power in his own right. But not just any mage. Sal was apparently the most unique mage on the planet—save for the Highest himself—and able to wield the powers of more than one soulgem. Productive night? Yeah, he thought so. So productive, in fact, that he’d agreed to Jaren’s suggestion of taking a few days off to concentrate solely on his magic. No shol’tuk, no gemsmithing, nothing. Granted, Marissa would be disappointed—Sal could tell he’d grown on her—but it would be worth it, if only to develop a keener sense of where he was in the realms of magic, and how he could use it to the fullest extent of his ability.

  Which was just fine with him. For a man who’d never been exposed to such things, magic was turning out to be quite addictive. Now that he could actually feel the magic—or mana, as Jaren called it—coursing through his veins, he found himself wanting to use it at every possible opportunity, to look for opportunities to use it, even if it wasn’t truly necessary. With so many ideas banging around in his head, it was hard for him to contain himself. But Jaren had been quick to warn him before he left. “Sometimes a little knowledge without understanding is more dangerous than no knowledge at all.”

  The emerald was absolutely right, too. For all that he’d learned, Sal really had no clue what he was doing yet. And he was a firm believer in knowing exactly what he was doing before he did it. “An ounce of prevention”, and all that jazz.

  It was a lesson he’d learned almost twenty years before, when his tae kwon do instructor took Sal’s white belt and presented him with the yellow. It had been a big deal to Sal, not even ten years old yet, and he couldn’t help but feel a little smug. Master Holland took care of that, though. “Congratulations, Jimmy,” he’d said. “You now know just enough to get your butt whipped.” As it turned out, he was right. A week later, Sal picked a fight with the wrong bully and got his smug little butt spanked good. That little stunt cost him a black eye, part of a tooth, and about a week’s worth of humiliation, until some other unfortunate soul caught the bully’s attention. It was a hard lesson for Sal, but one he learned well, and he rarely made the same mistake twice.

  That didn’t stop him from grinning, though. Inexperienced, yes, but he was a mage!

  He walked on into the night, the moon having already begun its descent. Not that he noticed. He saw the path through the sleeping village just as clear as daylight.

  ***

  Keth watched as dust motes swirled around in the palm of his hand like a miniature tornado. In seconds, the vortex coalesced, the motes binding together to form a sphere. He solidified the sphere, hardened it, and set it aside
. He counted eight of them on the ground next to his pallet, each one of them more perfect than the last. The magic was coming faster to Keth with each use. No doubt, soon his wielding would be instantaneous.

  He looked up at a sound, and saw that newly-ascendant young man walking past.

  Sal. There was no mistaking him. He was the only mage in the village with a single glowing gemstone eye. Not to mention the eye’s dim whitish rainbow aura, so different from that of any other soulgem.

  Keth had never felt himself to be in anyone’s debt, and here he was, indebted to a stranger twice over—first, for playing part in his rescue, and then for his fresh perspective on magic, a perspective that even the most scholarly mages in Caravan respected. Had it not been for the young soldier, Keth might never have gained control over his magic. Even now it was all new to him, but thanks to Sal, he was at least headed in the right direction. He was a veritable repository of unconventional ideas.

  Keth was by no means slow, but he had always been content with the ordinary, the normal. Mastery over his magic would demand a level of imagination that he would never have attained without Sal’s help. He’d showed Keth ways to broaden his imagination—to “think outside the box,” as Sal had put it, though the once-blacksmith failed to see what boxes had to do with anything.

  Looking down at the globes next to him, Keth chuckled a bit. Sal hadn’t liked every idea of his. He’d almost choked when Keth presented the idea of the spheres. He said that it was a good idea, but it sounded to Keth like empty encouragement. Reluctant, in fact, as if the idea frightened Sal.

  Odd, really, for the spheres seemed a perfect weapon. Small, light-weight, responding to Keth’s every command. Blessed Crafter, he could probably make them fly through the air if he really wanted.

  Sal passed from view, no doubt headed for his tent—it was getting rather late, as the empty streets attested to. Alone again in the night, Keth settled back on his pallet, content for the first time in months. What he’d once thought a curse might yet prove... useful. He stopped short of the term “blessing”. At least, Sal seemed to think that the magic would be useful. Keth hoped that the lessons tonight had proven as useful to his new friend as they had him.