by CM Raymond
Being raised with a drunk as a father, she never touched the fire water down in the lowlands. In her view, it created assholes and miscreants—not to mention, it tasted like piss and ate at you from the inside out.
But the mystics’ elixir was nothing like the swill they served in Arcadia—even the best of it. It opened her mind instead of clouding it, and she needed it to fight back against the emotional exhaustion of their training.
Sal immediately flew over to her and landed in her lap with a thud. She groaned at his weight. The mountain air seemed to be doing him some good, and he seemed to have gained twenty pounds since they arrived. “Geez, Sal, you’re going to be carrying me before long.” The dragon nuzzled his head under her hand until she began to pet him, and she wondered if what she said was the truth.
The magic that created Sal was brand new. Neither Ezekiel nor Hadley had any idea how it worked. For all Hannah knew, Sal would never stop growing.
Maybe one day her pet would get so hungry he’d swallow the whole world.
She shook that image from her mind and looked down at the little guy who had already fallen asleep on her lap. Maybe not, she thought.
He was far too lazy for that.
As Sal started to snore, Hannah turned her mind back toward the last three days of training. This meditation was always the final assignment of the day. Hadley convinced her that one of the major problems in education was that it always looked forward, while the mystics were convinced that in looking backward, they could concretize the things learned more deeply in their bones.
The first day had been a breeze. Hadley had led her to a spot on the edge of a cliff overlooking the valley. Their session was much like her earliest days with Ezekiel; he led her in some meditative reductions and how to empty herself of the concern of the world. She had already become good at this on her own, but a few more tricks in the toolbox would come in handy, especially if she needed them on the fly.
She thought the second day would be more of the same. Hadley began again by leading her to the edge of a cliff. They sat and meditated for most of the day. Hannah didn’t mind much. The scenery was beautiful, though, having spent all her days in Arcadia, she was still getting used to life in the Heights.
Just as she had emptied her mind of all its concerns, Hadley filled it back up again. He stood, took three steps, and leaped from the edge of the cliff into the nothingness.
“What the hell?” Hannah screamed and scrambled toward the edge. She could hear the screams of the lunatic as he sailed toward the valley floor hundreds of feet away. “Hadley!” she screamed after him, knowing it would do no good.
“Pretty cool, right?”
She spun to face her new teacher. “You fuck. You gave me a damned heart attack.”
Hadley laughed. “Yep. That’s the power of persuasion. Just imagine how much you can do with that sort of influence in someone else’s mind. Amazing, right?”
Hannah’s heart was still beating out of her chest. “I think I hate you, you know that? You and your damn tricks.”
Her scorn only made him laugh even harder. “You don’t have to read minds to see that’s a lie. But magic like that, it’s more than a trick, Hannah. Julianne has told me what you are up against. And power like this, power to control your opponent's mind, it could be the difference between life and death.”
Hannah nodded her head. She had already seen how effective Ezekiel’s illusions were in a fight.
“Change your mind, change the world. I got it. It’s like the little nudist trick when I first got here?”
“Yeah, exactly,” Hadley said. “But this time, the magic will affect other people, not just your own perception.”
Hannah flushed as the implications of Hadley’s statement dawned on her. “Wait a second. You could…”
The man winked and turned back toward the monastery. It had been an act of godlike patience for her not to throw him off the cliff for real.
Hadley was far from normal, but she couldn’t doubt the effectiveness of his methods. By the end of the second day, she had learned to cast simple images of things that weren’t in the room. They weren’t perfect. Hadley also taught her how to see the flaws in the false images, but they would serve in a pinch.
Hannah could also suggest to others that she wasn’t in the room, making her all but invisible. Again, someone trained in the mystic arts could see around the trick, but it would work on most of the idiots in Arcadia.
When she first arrived at the temple, she thought the mystic stuff was mostly a waste of time—nothing compared to creating spears of ice or communing with the forest. But Hadley’s lessons made the mystic arts seem damn useful.
And the best part of it all was that she was having a blast. There was something about Hadley that made the lessons easy to understand, and he had a direct nature that would all but baffle Ezekiel.
What was troubling was the more time she spent with him, the more she liked him. And, the more she liked him, the more she thought about Parker, wondered if he was safe. As much as she enjoyed her time in the Heights, she couldn’t wait to be back in Arcadia, kicking ass and raining down fireballs of the Matriarchs justice.
Still, her time in the Heights had been rejuvenating. It was a life she had never known was possible.
But it also had its dangers. Hannah had to work like hell to keep the mystic out of her head—though, she had the sinking suspicion that she was failing miserably.
“You rested yet? We’ve got more work to do,” Hadley said, sticking his head into her room, breaking her out of her meditations.
“What gives? I thought we were done for the day?” Despite her exhaustion, Hannah didn’t really mean it. She was ready to take whatever new hell Hadley wanted to dish out. “What do you want me to learn now? How to paint rainbows in the sky?”
Hadley grinned. “Better. Time to crawl around in people’s brains.”
Hannah sat up so fast, she almost dropped her cup. This was something she had been waiting for since she learned the mystics could do it.
“For real?” she asked. “I don’t know if I’m up to seeing your perverted thoughts. I’m scarred enough already.”
He shook his head. “Unfortunately, my mind is too good for you. As is most of the other mystics. Would have to be a freaking baby mystic for someone as immature and unfocused as you to get past. If anybody that lives up here wants to keep you out of their brain, they will. Although most of us keep our guards down. It’s part of our community. The mystics are open people—with each other at least—unlike you lowlanders, who do all you can to deceive.”
Hadley raised his brows, and Hannah wondered if he’d been in her mind this whole time.
“Not the whole time,” he said, answering her thoughts. “But long enough. No offense, Hannah, but it’s just something we do. Takes work for us not to step inside.”
“But that’s not who I’m going to be training on?” Hannah asked. “Why not?”
“Well,” Hadley replied. “You aren’t exactly going to war against us mystics. And since you are only getting the rushed version of my training, I figured it made sense to start a little closer to home.”
“We’re going back to Arcadia?” Hannah’s heart began to beat a little faster, and she noticed a sad look in Hadley’s eyes. But he brushed it off.
“I said a little closer to home. We’re only going down the hill to Craigston. I’m starving and they’ve got a great little breakfast joint. But the rearick are even easier to read than you Arcadians, although it depends on how much they’ve been drinking. Just the place for my pervert in training to cut her teeth.”
****
The walk down the long winding staircase was a joy compared to climbing them. Gravity did most of the work. All Hannah needed to do was keep her eyes on the rocky steps. As they descended, they passed a group of mystics on their way back up to the monastery.
Hadley greeted them with a smile as they passed. She could only assume that more words were sha
red that she couldn’t audibly hear, and couldn’t help but wonder if any of them were about her. Nodding to each of them, she continued down the stairs, doing all that she could to close her mind to the man three steps ahead.
As they neared the bottom, the sound of the bustling town rose to meet them. Craigston had been established during the Age of Madness. It was uniquely situated in the Heights, which kept it safe from most of that damage caused by the Mad.
But over the years, this community began to adapt to its new surroundings. They became the rearick, a race of hardworking men and women perfectly suited for their mountain homes.
Hannah had asked Ezekiel about them once, about how the rearick could change so fast. They were practically another race. Ezekiel said that it had to do with the Kurtherian nanocytes, the alien tech running through all of their blood.
But that alien stuff still didn’t make a whole lot of sense to Hannah.
She knew that it was what empowered the Matriarch and the Patriarch all those years ago. But somehow, a distorted version of it spread to all of mankind, creating the Age of Madness. But once Ezekiel cured the zombies, the alien tech opened the world to magic—at least for the Arcadians.
The rearick, on the other hand, never learned magic and didn’t quite trust it. Instead, the Kurtherian blood shaped them into the strong, stout people that they were.
And that came in handy. The rearick were known as legendary fighters, and their strength and size made them perfect miners as well. And because of their access to the wealth that laid within the earth, the rearick had become a backbone of the Irth commerce network.
For years, their primary hunt was for nuggets of gold and beautiful gems that were becoming more and more valuable as the world rebuilt itself after the shitstorm of the zombie apocalypse. But over the past few years, the rearick had found something to mine more valuable than a pound of gold and a shit ton of diamonds.
They discovered amphoralds.
Arcadian engineers, under the supervision of the Chancellor Adrien, discovered how to use these strange crystals to channel energy. A skilled magic user could transfer power directly into the crystal. After years of research and design, the first magitech tool was made. It was simple, a magic-powered flashlight, but only the forebear of the technology that would follow. Machines for transport and for mass production, armor, and, of course, weapons.
Hannah had seen firsthand the danger of magitech weapons.
But it just so happened that the only place that the gem had been discovered in abundance was in the Heights—more specifically, right there in Craigston.
Once a crafty rearick learned about Arcadia’s obsession with magitech, they realized just how valuable this gem, which they use to toss over the cliffs with the rest of the rubble, had become. And ever since, the rearick dug as deep and as quickly as possible, mining the crystals.
Hannah and Hadley finally finished their descent and entered the town. People rushed back and forth, their minds focused on work. Hannah could see a line of them moving in and out of a mine on the opposite end of town.
“Here we are,” Hadley said, nodding to a short building with a sign that read: Ophelia’s.
They ducked under the low door. Hannah looked up to find a dozen sets of eyes staring back at her. The eyes were about the only thing she could make out through their thick hair and beards. Each rearick had a hammer or an ax at his feet and a plate piled high with various kinds of meats. And each of them had a large beer in front of them as well.
They nodded at the lowlanders—an expression not entirely accurate seeing as the mystics lived higher than them—and returned to filling their bellies before their shifts underground would begin.
Hadley grabbed a table in the corner, and Hannah slid in across from him, facing the room. “Nice place,” she said.
“Eh, it’s kind of a shithole, actually, but the food is really good.” He nodded at Ophelia behind a counter and raised two fingers.
“Did you just order?” Hannah asked.
“Yep.”
“What the hell are we getting?”
Hadley laughed. “Whatever she’s cooking. The rearick aren’t quite as refined or as picky as the mystics. You should taste their damn ale. Our elixir is good, but their stuff will put hair on your chest. I find it refreshing to come down here, to connect with people whose brains aren’t always in the sky.”
“Guess theirs are mostly underground.”
Hannah scanned the room, looking for Karl, the rearick who had saved her from the boar the first day out at the tower, but he was nowhere to be found. She knew he was from a mining community, but was unsure if it was this precise one. Then her mind turned back to the mystics.
“Those mystics we passed, they looked like they’d been gone for a while.”
“Yeah,” Hadley said. “That group has actually been gone for a little over a month. It’s a pretty common practice. We leave for a lot of reasons. We have groups that carry our elixir to Arcadia and a few other places with people rich enough to afford it. The rearick here help us along the way. Some mystics travel to visit their family who they’ve left behind. But we also have a long tradition of pilgrimage.”
“Pilgrimage?”
Hadley nodded. “Too long on the mountain doing nothing but going through the cycle of meditating to sharpen your mind, practicing mental magic, and then drinking like a fish to numb yourself can take its toll. The pilgrimage is meant to get us out of our ordinary routine, push us to connect with lowlanders who think differently, and for some of the mystics, just to dry out a bit.”
Hannah laughed. “That makes sense. It’s amazing up there, but I’m not sure if I could do it forever.”
“Nah, most can’t. That’s why we go on the walks. It helps a lot, and it gives us new experiences, which only fuels our creativity—and our magic. I’ll be leaving to go on a walkabout one of these days.”
“Where will you go?” Hannah asked. “Someplace where the women don’t know you enough to hate you?”
She meant it as a joke, but a sad look past Hadley’s face. Hannah was about to apologize when he took a long swig from the ale that Ophelia had just placed in front of him. He shrugged off whatever he was thinking about.
“Who knows?” he said. “Maybe you could show me around the boulevard. But enough about me; let’s focus on you. If you’re going to be sneaking around dangerous waters, it’s helpful to know what your enemy is thinking. And for that, mental magic is the best tool you could ask for. But it takes work to try to get into somebody’s mind, even in minds like theirs.”
Hannah scowled at her teacher. “Better keep your voice down before any of these guys hear you calling them dummies. You might just end up with a war hammer up your ass sideways.”
Hadley laughed. “The rearick aren’t dumb, just unsuspecting. Most of these guys don’t really give a shit if you get into their heads, not much to hide. They’re simple folk, but honest. And damn good at what they do. Not to mention, the rearick are known for being the most loyal people in all of Irth. It’s why they make such good guards. If they give their word that they’re going to make sure you get someplace unharmed, you’ll get there, or a rearick will die trying.”
Hannah nodded. The way that Hadley described them, she almost felt guilty for trying to intrude their mind space. But Ezekiel had sent her here to learn, and learn she was going to do. Pushing away her concern for the strangers, she asked, “OK, tell me what to do.”
“Yeah… tough one to answer. The mystic arts are the hardest because they are difficult to explain how they work. Ezekiel has taught you nature magic already, right?”
