The Weight of Magic: A Progression Fantasy Epic (Restriction Book 1), page 10
He had stood in the doorway, watching. She had her back to him, and it seemed to him that the light reflected off her in a strange manner, making her seem to glow. Torian could not see her hands, so he had no idea what she was doing with the patterns, but there came a dancing beam of light around her at one point that cut off quickly. Wind replaced it, swirling around her, catching her cloak and making it dance. The ground trembled at one point, another sign of the power of her patterns before that faded.
From his vantage, it seemed as if she flashed through a series of different patterns, and though he couldn’t see them, he could feel the way that she did it, the power that she managed to draw upon.
He had backed away. Even though he’d been at school for several years at that point, he had never seen such quick switching from pattern to pattern, nor the level of control that she obviously possessed. It left him questioning his purpose at the school, at least for a brief period. He had struggled to master the primary patterns and then had begun to learn the first-tier patterns but did not think that he would be able to do anything like what he had seen her doing.
Torian pushed those thoughts away as he looked up at the sky, listening to the sounds around him. There was a hint of wind that pulled at his clothing, reminding him of what Willa had done that time long ago. It carried a dampness within it, something that suggested the cool energy of rain coming.
As he set off toward town, he slowed when he saw Lorent working near his chicken coop, glancing up at Torian when he approached.
“I’ve been seeing you wandering out here quite a bit more than usual, boy.”
“It’s just curiosity,” he said.
“Curiosity like what you and I talked about the last time you came through here?”
Torian had already forgotten about what he had spoken to Lorent about, which probably was a mistake, as Lorent obviously had not. “That’s right. I did mention shadow wolves.”
Lorent turned, looking off into the east, toward the darkening sky. The storm hadn’t moved any closer, and the flashes of light that Torian had seen persisted, but much like the storm, they didn’t get any closer, either. That offered him a measure of reassurance as he didn’t care for the way the clouds looked.
“You mention shadow wolves, then we get strangers coming through town talking about war.”
“You knew that?”
“I sit on the town council, Torian. I hear things.”
“I’m surprised you’re talking to me about it.”
“It doesn’t do anybody any good to ignore the rumblings that we hear. Not that I believe we are in any danger of war reaching us. We’re too isolated, and we really aren’t an appealing target.”
“But if it does come…”
Lorent arched a brow at him. “Are you concerned about that?”
“I’ll be honest, I hadn’t been, but I don’t know if I should be concerned about it or not. First the shadow wolf. Then the strangers. I can’t help but feel as if something strange is going on.”
Lorent frowned, turning to look out into the distance. His expression darkened, and there was something of an energy from him. It took Torian a moment to realize that Lorent was using power. He’d never seen him doing so before, but it wasn’t so much what he saw as what he could feel.
“The rest of the council don’t seem to think there is much to be concerned about, either. We get strangers coming through, and they think the strangers are running after rumors. But I saw the look in their eyes. That wasn’t the look of a man who wanted to drum up rumors. It was a look of men who knew the truth and wanted to make sure others heard it.”
“What do we do?”
He shrugged. “Do? Well, out here, we don’t do much of anything. Navarin has enough defenses within the army to make sure that we don’t see any danger. And if we do, we have the sahir from the school to take care of us.”
Torian thought about that. Other than Willa, there were Gaspel and Heshian, though there had been times when they had as many as five instructors. Two of them had left, taking a successful university candidate off to the south, which had diminished their instructor numbers but not so much that Torian had ever thought much about it. Until now. If they were attacked, and if the school was supposed to provide a measure of defense, there wouldn’t be anybody there to help.
“You should get back. Looks like the weather is going to turn again,” Lorent said. “Considering how soaked you got last time, I’m sure you don’t want to get caught out in the storm again.”
Torian snorted. “I really don’t.”
He started off, heading toward town, passing by a few other farms, though Lorent was the only farmer out and working. The others were probably off tending to their crops, or perhaps gathering supplies, or any of the number of things that a farmer needed to do…
Farming might be an option for him. There was a certain measure of freedom in farming, and he could actually use some of the things that he had learned at school while farming, so maybe what he needed to do was talk to some of the farmers. Lorent seemed the most receptive to him, but he wasn’t sure how much additional work he might have. Whenever he came across Lorent, it always seemed as if Lorent was working slowly but didn’t seem as if he had an overwhelming amount of work.
Torian was nearly back to town when the steady rumbling of thunder began to build. He turned to look back in the direction of the storm clouds when he started to feel the steady buildup of thunder rumbling all around him. It was a considerable and powerful source of energy, and it left him shaking with it.
Torian couldn’t shake the feeling that something was coming—and that he had to be ready for when it did.
Chapter 11
POINTLESS LESSONS
“Why don’t you simply practice each of the primary patterns,” Gaspel said, standing out in the courtyard outside of the school, while his body remained positioned and angled toward Eliza and Dary, both of who were working on early second-tier patterns.
“I can do more than that,” Torian said.
“It’s not necessary.”
Necessary. Torian understood what his point was, even if he didn’t say it aloud. It was more than it was not necessary. It wouldn’t make a difference. Anything he might do would not matter. Not at this point. He had thought that they would permit him to continue to work with some of the patterns, but all his classes had been very similar to this, with each of his instructors having some reservation about permitting him to learn anything new. How was he supposed to take advantage of the time he had remaining in school if they would not work with him?
Worse, Torian couldn’t say anything about it without revealing to the other students that he was not going to return to school after the term was over. He hadn’t even said anything to his sister, and as far as he could tell, his parents had not either. Torian appreciated that, as he had been concerned that they would reveal to Liana that he had only a little while left at school. Once she learned, everybody else in school would learn, as well.
He moved away from Gaspel, taking up position in the back corner of the courtyard, where he could work without anyone paying attention to him. He twisted so that he blocked Gaspel from seeing him so that he wouldn’t know that he was working on more than just the primary patterns. His gaze drifted toward the sky. There had been no further rumbling of thunder, and nothing to suggest that the storm clouds were moving any closer, though he had not gone out of town since he had returned. When he had mentioned something to Willa, she dismissed his concerns. Torian was not about to continue to raise the issue as he did not think that they were taking him seriously.
Jakob still hadn’t returned from his journey with Cory. That wasn’t terribly unusual, as they would periodically leave to gather supplies, but it meant the stables were undermanned.
“What are you working on?” Jensen asked.
Torian glanced over to the boy. “I’m just working through my patterns.”
“I miss when I could focus on the primary patterns,” Jensen said. “Gaspel has been forcing me to keep working on third-tier patterns. There’s just so many.”
Torian snorted. Each tier added another pattern to each of the primary patterns, so the third tier had three of each primary—which Torian didn’t think was that many, though he didn’t get to learn them so maybe he didn’t really know the truth.
“That means you are getting close to having an invitation to the university,” he said.
Jensen’s face fell. “I know.”
“You don’t want to go?” That surprised Torian, as anybody offered the opportunity to go to the university should want to go. They should want to have the chance to learn more complicated patterns so that they could help Navarin.
“It just means I have to leave home. My younger brother won’t be very happy when I go, and I won’t even get to watch my baby sister grow up.”
“But you will get to learn things that very few people get to learn.”
“Well, Gaspel tells me that it’s mostly repetition of what we’ve been doing in school. They want to make sure that our patterns are quick and precise before they permit us to move on to some of the more complicated patterns.” Jensen looked over his shoulder. “He even said that there aren’t that many who progress beyond the fifth-tier.”
“Well, we knew that. I don’t know what level Gaspel is, but other than Willa, he’s the highest-level sahir that we’ve had in town. And Willa is only here because she grew up here.”
“I think he’s only fifth tier.”
Torian turned to look at Jensen. Fifth tier? He would’ve guessed that he was at least seventh tier, though he didn’t have any way of gauging such a thing. At a certain point, the patterns became far too complicated for him to follow. Unless a sahir shared their level, it simply was not something that a person could identify very easily.
“Well, even if you only progress to fifth tier, it’s still impressive. At that point, you can decide what you want to do. Stay with the university, leave and teach, or go off and serve in half a dozen other ways. You will be a sahir.”
“That’s what you are, Torian.”
He shook his head. “I am never going to reach that tier. I can usually make first-tier patterns, and occasionally second-tier patterns, but I still haven’t passed the first-tier sahir testing.” And he never would.
“Well, I believe you might.”
“I appreciate it,” Torian said, and he did. It was almost enough for him to tell Jensen the truth.
“I overheard you the other day.”
“You overheard me with what?”
“I overheard you talking to Willa. Did you really see a shadow wolf?”
He cursed himself, and realized that he should have been more careful. Then again, he’d been sharing with everybody what he thought that he saw to the point where he was certain that somebody would begin to raise some concern about it.
“They tell me it’s unlikely,” he said.
“They do?” Jensen asked, wrinkling his brow.
His hands pressed together, and he flicked between second-tier patterns quickly. It was almost irritating how easy it was for Jensen to move from the concentrated lantern beam to wind funnel to thickening the air and then back to a blast of light. He danced from one to the next so quickly that it reminded Torian of Willa when he had watched her doing the same with some of her even higher-tier patterns. Seeing how easy it seemed to be for Jensen, Torian couldn’t help but suspect that Jensen was destined for something far greater than only fifth tier.
But he had to have the drive.
Talent was one thing, but motivation was something else entirely, Torian knew.
“Those who I’ve told,” he said. “And I don’t really know, to be honest. I think I saw a shadow wolf. I certainly saw a raven, and… Well, you were there with me.”
“I was talking to my parents about shadow wolves. They said the last time we had any shadow wolf sightings around Sarot was about three years ago. But if the stories are true, they’d have no reason to have come. We don’t have any valsahir to hunt.”
“I don’t remember hearing anything like that,” he said.
“My parents told me. Well, my father did. Priests hear everything, you know.”
“I suppose they do. I wish I could say I knew something, but I don’t. If there was a shadow wolf a few years ago, they kept it from others.”
Torian began to press his fingers together, working to flip through the different primary patterns, even though he really wanted to work on something more complicated. He finished going through the primary patterns before moving on to the first-tier patterns.
The primary patterns were unique. They represented different aspects of the power of the Saith: light, dark, air, water, earth, cold, and metal. Torian had most easily connected to light, but he could also use earth with some ability. Air and water were next for him, followed by shadow and cold, with metal the hardest for Torian. Everybody tended to have an affinity for one of the primary patterns. They were primary because they were the basis upon which every other tier built. It had taken Torian a long time to master the primary patterns, unlike some who could use them quite quickly. Most of the primary patterns did not require much power, as they were little more than a runic marker that a person could form temporarily.
There were a few of the first-tier patterns that Torian could do better than others. The lantern beam pattern was one of the first that he’d succeeded with, though it had taken him nearly two years in school to do so. He had thought that would be just the beginning, and that once he mastered that pattern, it would be a simple thing for him to grasp the others. However, it had been a constant battle, clawing for power as he strained to learn how to push that heavy weight inside of him aside so that he could unleash some of that connected energy into the world. Without having the ability to do so, he would never gain enough power over the first-tier patterns.
Even now, while he could complete each of the first-tier patterns, he couldn’t do so consistently. His use of light was easiest, and he could usually form the lantern beam pattern. Using earth in the stacked stone was only slightly more difficult. The other five first-tier patterns were more difficult for him, especially any attempt that he’d made to magnetize metal, though partly that was because he didn’t see the utility.
Moving onto the second-tier patterns was not just a challenge of knowledge of the variations of each primary pattern, as Torian had certainly seen those additional patterns and thought he could form them. It was a matter of not having the kind of strength necessary for him to do anything more.
Jensen continued to flash through the fourteen second-tier patterns, but then he began to use something even more complicated that Torian had only seen a few times, and he realized that the boy was starting to delve into some of the twenty-one different third-tier patterns.
“Don’t you get tired holding open your connection?”
“Tired?” Jensen shook his head. “It’s not really tiring so much as it is a matter of finding a way to keep it open. The only thing that gets tired is me.” He beamed at Torian, flashing a wide grin as he looked over to him. “And I just can’t hold my hands in the way that I need to. Once you get past the second tier, the patterns start to require a finer control over how you hold them.” Jensen lowered his voice, almost conspiratorially. “Gaspel claims that some of the even higher-tier sahir don’t even need to use the patterns. Can you imagine that? Simply calling power without those patterns?”
“I’d love to be able to do that,” he said.
Then again, he would need to have far more strength to even be able to make any of those higher-tier patterns.
Jensen continued, talking to him about the way that Gaspel had been working with him, and he even moved slower through the third-tier patterns as he practiced, giving Torian a chance to watch him, even if they were so far beyond his ability as to be impossible for him to even consider. Some of the second-tier patterns were that way as well. The only second-tier pattern that he ever got close to performing was the lantern beam, and that was because he had learned how to control that one as well as he had at the first tier. At least, that was what he believed.
Torian worked through the primary patterns, absently listening to Jensen, finding that the boy was not so annoying when he was talking about patterns like this, as it gave Torian the opportunity to see something that he was not often offered. Most of the time, he was kept from seeing the other patterns, as he had not mastered his tier yet, so he was not permitted to that experience. He understood why, as most of the sahir believed that one had to master one level before they were permitted to move on to the next. And normally, Torian would believe that as well, but he did not know whether he could believe it when it came to use of power that he simply did not have at this point. He wanted to gather as much knowledge as he could, so that when he left school, he might still have the chance to practice, whether or not he would ever reach enough control that it made a difference. And, if Torian were brutally honest with himself, he knew it would not matter. He would probably never learn what he needed to have that level of control. It was more than knowledge, which was hard to acknowledge, as it was also more than what hard work could ever bring him.
