Illusory Empire: A Magic School Progression Fantasy, page 42
“I heard that you found a mentor,” Tal said.
Kole nodded again.
“Did Professor Underbrook tell you?” Kole asked.
“No,” Tal said, smiling. “You did, just the other day.”
“What?” Kole asked and then realized what he meant. “That was like, what? Thirty years ago for you?”
“I honestly have no idea,” Tal said, “but let’s just stick with your temporal frame of reference. It will make all this much simpler.”
“I already hate time travel,” Kole said.
“Yeah… it loses its novelty really fast.”
“Isn’t it supposed to be impossible?”
“What? Like being a primal, a wizard, and a sorcerer?” Tal asked back.
“Good point, but still…”
“I’ll get to that, but first, my question. And before I ask, you should know I’ve spoken to Professor Underbrook, and he agreed to this.”
Tal was watching Kole’s face for any sign of a reaction.
Is he nervous? Kole thought. He seems nervous.
“Would you consider being my apprentice?” Tal asked.
Kole’s brain stopped working at that moment and he just sat there, beginning to squint.
“Are you okay?” Tal asked after a moment.
He forced his mind to work, entered his vault for a second to make sure this wasn’t a dream or a magical trick on his mind, and then returned to his senses.
“Why?” Kole asked and then berated himself internally for asking single-word questions.
“Why what?” Tal asked, not taking offense. “You don’t think you’d make a good apprentice?”
“No!” Kole shouted, as if he could banish the thought from having crossed Tal’s mind. He thought he’d make a great apprentice to Tal. In fact, he doubted there was anyone alive who had the skill set to help Kole as Tal could.
Though, he admitted, Tal likely had the skill set to help any wizard.
“Why did you change your mind?” Kole said, clarifying his question. “I did ask earlier.”
“That brings us back to the thing I wanted to talk about earlier. I think I can trust you, but it is rather a large secret, and I’d feel better if it was covered by master-apprentice privilege.”
“Wait, that’s a real thing?” Kole had thought that Underbrook had made it up.
“Of course!” Tal said. “When I was your age, I literally had to kill to get a spellbook. Wizards are more open with their magic now, but they still have secrets.”
“You killed for a spellbook?” Kole asked. He dropped the statement so casually it was distracting.
“Oh, don’t worry about it, Leslie got better.”
“Better from death?”
“Well, he’s dead now, it was a hundred years ago,” Tal said. “But this will make sense to you later if I get to explain. So, would you like to be my apprentice?”
Kole still had questions. A lot of questions. But he knew the answer to this one.
“Yes!” he nearly shouted.
“Great!” Tal said.
Then there was an awkward silence, as neither was sure what to do next.
“I’m not actually sure if there’s a formal procedure for this. My mother was my master,” Tal said.
“Back home in Illandrios, there’s a whole ceremony,” Kole said.
“I think we can just skip that.”
“Oh gods, that would be great.”
“Alright, apprentice,” Tal said, testing out the word. “As you probably figured out by now, I have been jumping around in time with little control over it.”
He pulled an amulet out of his shirt and showed it to Kole.
“This,” he said, holding it in the light of the fire, but not taking it off, “is an ensouled artifact that lets me stop doing that.”
It was rather plain as far as items of immeasurable wealth went, but Kole supposed his own spellbook had seen better days. The stone was a dark blue, simply cut to look like a sapphire. Silver metal wire wrapped it and formed a loop for a chain to go through.
“You found one that fixed the problem?” Kole asked.
Tal shook his head.
“I made it,” he said, smiling.
Kole’s own smile vanished.
Is he playing a prank on me? he wondered.
“How?” Kole asked, not wanting to call his new master a liar. “No one knows how to make them, or why we can’t anymore.”
“Well,” Tal said, visibly embarrassed, “it turns out I not only know why we can’t make them anymore, but am the reason we can’t—well, it was my idea, but I had a lot of help. But that’s not immediately relevant. The important part is that I made this—with some help from Zale’s void magic—and now I can stay. I didn’t lie before. I wouldn’t take on an apprentice if I was likely to vanish at any moment. Immediately after the battle, I dedicated all my time to making this lest I vanish before being able to complete it.”
“That’s a lot,” Kole said.
“That’s only the beginning.” Tal closed one of the books open before him, revealing the cover of his spellbook with the golden scales.
“I didn’t want to put any undue pressure on you to accept my apprenticeship, but now that you did… why don’t you take out your spellbook.”
Kole did so.
“Open it to the foreword,” Tal said.
“There is no foreword,” Kole said, “it was a blank journal.”
“Was it?” Tal asked.
Kole flipped the book open to the first page and read.
Dear whoever you are,
If you are reading this, then I am dead.
Probably.
“What’s this?” Kole asked after the first few lines.
In response, Tal flipped his spellbook around, and it shrunk, transforming its appearance as it did. The scales dulled, turned to brass, then leather, and then became worn until it was identical to Kole’s.
“That,” Tal said, “is Spellbook—my spellbook. I used it as a journal of sorts. Before you ask me a million questions, read that.”
Kole quickly read the rest of the foreword, then flipped to the next page to see a diary-style entry.
“Before that, though,” Tal said, “there’s just one last thing.”
Kole looked up expectantly.
“There’s a… friend of mine who has been trapped in a pocket realm for—well—almost a thousand years. The thing is, I think it might just be the same one your parents are in. So, would you mind lending me your mother’s amulet so I can track them all down?”
Chapter 73
Crybaby
The Hardune have been the stewards of Kaltis since the departure of the gods, silently working on our collective behalf to keep this planet from destruction. I have helped where I can, and they have often provided a home for me when I am away from the present.
—Tal of Storms. A Wizard in Time.
In the days that followed, Kole was left alone. Zale went off with her mother to the voidlings to negotiate their involvement in the coming war and to relay the fate of Dorian—something Zale’s mother assured Kole wouldn’t earn him any enemies.
Rakin’s mother took him with as she helped settle the dwarven refugees, and the duergar found in them a group of experienced Stoneweavers with no hate for his people. The freed slaves had been separated from the Realm so long that their long and deep-seated hatred of the duergar was replaced by the far more tangible hatred of their slavers. They were willing to train him with some small apprehension, all of which went away when they learned that Dagmar had adopted him and that he’d slain a stone man himself.
Doug was busy, but with less globally consequential things. The Archdruid had taken notice of him and given him extra duties. She suspected that his recent progress might have caught Assuine’s attention and was preparing him for the eventuality. He was also training in what free time he had with Professor Tailor, who had been authorized to train him in the open after he proved himself to be critical in averting a global invasion.
Amara continued her work supporting the war effort and was likely happier than she’d been in a while.
And that left Kole alone and conflicted. His Master Tal—
Gods, I have a master, and it’s Tal of Storms!
He couldn’t stop marveling at that.
It was one of many things he struggled to comprehend on a regular basis. Another being the fact that Tal of Storms was close to locating his parents, using his mother’s ensouled artifact. His life of late had changed a lot, and it was hard to grow used to the absurdity of it all.
His master Tal had also given him access to a few more of the abilities of his—their—spellbook.
Capital-S Spellbook, as Tal referred to it, and the way he spoke of it made Kole think either it was sapient to some degree, or Tal wasn’t completely right in the head. Both could be true at the same time, in Kole’s opinion.
The first thing Tal had shown him was a way for the book to reveal part of Tal’s journal. Tal had discovered a means to save works in the spellbook—Spellbook—for select others to read long after his death. Tal had instructed Spellbook to only reveal the history to Kole once Kole opened the book intending to read the foreword. At that point Spellbook was to reveal Tal’s diary-like entries up to and through the Day of Heroes.
At first, when Kole had read the date of the first entry—only a few days before the Day of Heroes—he’d been disappointed by the small amount of his master’s history he’d get to read. The Day of Heroes took place on Riloth 19, 720 AF, and Tal’s first entry was dated the 13th. Not only that; Kole knew that Tal had no great recorded deeds from that day.
Needless to say, Kole was very surprised when he flicked through Spellbook to see thousands of pages of Tal’s neat script available to him.
While one might have thought reading the secret history of his childhood hero would have fully occupied Kole, he had other temptations for his time.
Tal had given Kole a passphrase to write in Spellbook that gave him access to all of the spellforms Tal had recorded inside it up until that current date in Tal’s timeline. This meant if Tal copied a spellform into his Spellbook, it would become available in Kole’s. They could have made it so all the ones Tal would ever find before his death appeared, but that began to cross the line into “dumb time travel prophecy territory.”
The whole “future version of the same ensouled item” thing was already hurting Kole’s head. They’d spoken of it briefly before swearing to leave it alone. At some point in his relative future, Tal would die—as everyone would someday—and Spellbook would be placed in the room in the Dahn. Either that point would be in the objective past and Spellbook would make its way to Kole, or he would die in the future and somehow Spellbook would be brought into the past.
Allowing Kole to see Tal’s entries for events that hadn’t happened to them yet would only result in anxiety. Tal was positive that the immutable timeline theory was true, and Kole had no trouble taking the time-displaced wizard’s word on the matter. The future, even once glimpsed, could not be changed, making detailed knowledge of the future a double-edged sword. The more you knew, the more you could prepare for, but if in your future knowledge you glimpsed a fate you wished to avoid, it would be too late.
In practical terms, limiting the spells Kole could access to just the ones Tal currently had left far, far, far more than Kole had the capacity or time to digest. He created a short list of the first- and second-tier spells he wished to learn and was working his way through them.
So Kole fluctuated between reading Tal’s entries and studying. Aside from the entries being fascinating in themselves, Kole got to read Tal’s firsthand account of his master learning the tricks of the Spellbook and Kole found he could replicate most of the techniques as he learned about them—which led to another distraction.
Zale’s mother had insisted they stay on the voidlings’ island without departing as they negotiated their participation. Kole had given Zale some pages from Spellbook, and they were using them to keep in touch, writing messages back and forth.
He’d learned many tricks, but some of the things Tal could do, he found he still couldn’t. Tal could control the book telekinetically—or make the book control itself, Kole wasn’t sure. In either case, Kole couldn’t do that.
To be fair, Tal had his limits too. Tal could pull a piece of paper covered with runes out of the book, but he couldn’t Will a fully formed runed blade to construct itself midair as he battled a dragon—as just one example.
On top of all of that, Kole was being mentored in any spare moment Tal had. Tal had a plethora of new magical discoveries he’d been meaning to share with the world but hadn’t gotten around to and had given Kole access to his notes on them to see if Tal could replicate them. The first of these was something Kole recalled “Theral” discussing: creating secondary bridges in one’s vault designed for specific purposes. Tal had gone far with this research, making great use of it himself to create what he dubbed “battle cantrips,” but he wanted Kole to attempt to replicate the results before he published the findings.
So in summary, all of Kole’s wildest dreams had come true, and he was struggling to manage all the things he wanted to spend his time on.
He briefly complained to Zale in their written correspondence, and she’d drawn a beautifully detailed image of a crying baby in return.
Chapter 74
Magistrate
The Font of Creation has not been lost but sealed. Any means to free it would see to the destruction of Kaltis and all life on it.
—Tal of Storms. A Wizard in Time.
“Are you sure you’ve done this before?” Zale asked Kole for the third time as he struggled to untangle the fishing lines.
Zale had only returned that day from the voidling nation when Kole had taken her on their first real date. Admittedly, he’d not fully utilized her time away to plan enough, but he’d been rather busy and thought he was making a good showing.
She sat on a rock alongside the river just north of Edgewater, smiling at him amused as he struggled to straighten out the mess the fishing poles had become during their hike here.
“Yes,” he said as he freed the hook from where it had snagged on his shirt in his efforts. “But it was years ago, and we didn’t use this string.”
“How do you fish without fishing lines?” Zale asked.
“We use long rods with hooks on the end and just push them through the dome,” Kole explained.
Zale let Kole work a while longer, lying down on the large rock and watching the clouds pass overheard, occasionally offering to help, and Kole continued to decline.
“We don’t have to fish,” Zale said. “The hike and picnic were great. We could just lie down, watch the clouds, and then head back.”
Kole stopped struggling with the lines and looked up at Zale. He watched her for a moment and then smiled.
“You don’t want to touch a slimy fish,” he said.
“It’s mostly the gross bait, but now that you mention it, slimy fish doesn’t sound super appealing either,” Zale admitted with a sheepish smile.
Kole sighed and dropped the gear, relieved to be done with it.
“You could have said that before I bought all the fishing stuff,” he said, climbing up onto the rock beside her.
“You seemed so excited about it,” Zale said, “I didn’t want to ruin your plans.”
“The fishing line did that.”
They lay next to each other in the warm breeze and comfortable silence until a thought occurred to Kole.
“How come you have no issue eviscerating ant people, but don’t want to touch a worm or fish?”
Zale’s skin darkened in embarrassment beside Kole, and when she didn’t answer, Kole answered for her.
“You’re not dressed for it?” he asked.
“You know me so well,” Zale said, and they both laughed.
Kole felt a mental knock, halting his laughter. He let the thought enter, and his master’s voice came into his mind.
Kole, sorry to interrupt, but you have a letter marked “urgent” from your uncle posted two weeks ago.
“What’s wrong?” Zale asked, seeing Kole tense.
“Master Tal sent me a message, I got an ‘urgent letter’ from my uncle.”
Zale raised an eyebrow and looked at Kole askance, but not for the reason he thought.
“You call him ‘Master Tal’?”
“Oh, well, only in public,” Kole said.
While Tal and Kole were not the most formal of people, they both acknowledged it wouldn’t be good for them to be too familiar out in public. Some people took it upon themselves to be offended on behalf of others, and Tal’s status as a famous wizard had already seen people being overly critical of Kole.
Zale looked around at the empty shore.
“And I’m ‘public’?”
“Good point,” Kole said.
“Alright,” Zale said, climbing to her feet. “It wasn’t a bad date, but I still prefer my hikes.”
She pulled out a handle to the Dahn from the picnic basket they’d brought.
“Those aren’t hikes,” Kole said offhandedly as he packed up their items.
They bantered as they cleaned up and shared a quick kiss just before opening a door to the Dahn. It led to Tal’s office, and the pair stepped in. Tal stood inside; he’d been pacing as he waited for them.
“Here,” Tal said, throwing the letter at Kole across the room.
The paper spun across the distance and stopped, floating in the air in front of Kole, where it unfolded. Kole grabbed it and read it.
“I already read it—sorry—but we should hurry.”
Kole,
Oldhill found out you got a master. He realized that makes me no longer your guardian, and he filed an appeal about your mother’s amulet. He pulled some strings and expedited the trial, and it’s scheduled for two weeks from now. I’m sending this through Meech. I sent an expedited letter as well through official channels, but I doubt that will get to you.
