by Jay Boyce
He shook his head again, still trying to look at her even though she was now clinging to his side. “I’ve heard about a few of the things that happened, but I suppose hearing about it didn’t quite prepare me for seeing you…” He paused, then reached over and used his other arm to hug her. Surprised, she let go of his arm and hugged him back as he said gruffly, “I’m glad you’re okay. I feel stupid for telling you that monsters only invaded occasionally. Even if it isn’t that common, I didn’t realize they would all come after you.”
She smiled, just enjoying the hug. After their first misunderstanding was cleared up, Lucas had been solidly there for her. He owned up to his mistakes and made an active effort to be better, which she admired. Granted, she didn’t know if he’d changed his outlook on peasants as unworthy of notice, but that was more a product of society and his upbringing than his fault. He was one of the people who made her feel safe and looked after.
“You couldn’t have known. They broke the pattern,” she said softly, finally picking up the conversation after her introspection.
“Still. I wish I’d been able to help you.”
She pulled back, smiling up at him as she reassured him, “You did, Lucas. I don’t think you realize, but running into you was what allowed me to learn light magic. If I hadn’t learned that, and if you hadn’t helped me learn about it, I would have been taken in that first attack. Meeting you quite literally saved my life, so stop beating yourself up about that stuff.”
He looked down at her, smiling. “You’re amazing, you know.” He leaned down, kissing her on the top of the head as he said, “Now come on, let’s get to class before we’re late.” She nodded, a happy little smile on her face as he let go and held out his arm again, which she gleefully took. She felt like her little butterflies were rioting in her stomach. She was being silly, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.
As they entered the building, she paused at the door, holding it open longer. Lucas looked at her in confusion until her babies came swooping in out of the night. He startled, but she was holding onto him and laughed. “Lucas, I forgot to mention, these are my bonded. Pretty, aren’t they?”
He nodded, still staring at them a little warily until she poked him in the side. “They’re completely harmless, so relax. I’ll drop them off at my workshop before we go to class, though. They didn’t seem to like the water class much, so they’ll be more comfortable where they can play.” Still nodding a little stiffly as he stared at them, they walked up the stairs and she pulled him towards her workshop.
Opening the door, her babies flew into the room gleefully, save one. Ramoth sat on her shoulder, and Jade looked questioningly at her little queen. “Light class. I come.”
Jade grinned gleefully, nodding. “Of course you can come, Ramoth.” With a happy whirl, Ramoth flew off her shoulder before landing on Lucas’s head, who looked a little nervous. Jade giggled as the golden butterfly seemed to make herself at home. “Ramoth, what are you doing?” she questioned her little queen, still giggling.
“Light magic. Feels nice,” her golden queenlet responded, and Jade remembered how the nature-based fellacai had flocked to Ren.
Lucas was looking at her quizzically. “Her name is Ramoth?” Jade nodded. “What’s she doing on my head?”
Jade broke into more giggles, barely able to breathe because she was laughing so hard while Lucas patiently waited. Finally, Jade got herself under control and said, “She likes your magic. The fellacai are drawn to those who have the same magic as them. I think she’s basically basking in your aura, since your light magic is more concentrated than mine.”
Come to think of, she hadn’t actually checked. Activating mana sense, she stared at Lucas. His aura was a beautiful bright white, but at the edges, barely visible, were three other colors: black, yellow, and light blue. She dropped it, a triumphant smile on her face as she said, “I knew it, you do have an aptitude for other magics too!”
Lucas looked at her, confused. “What do you mean? I only have an aptitude for light magic.”
Jade shook her head, closing her workshop door on the rest of her babies with a promise she’d be back in a few hours and locking the door. She grabbed his arm, pulling him down the hall towards the light classroom. “Nonsense. You have traces of lightning, wind, and dark magic as well. I can see your magic. They’re not developed, but they’re there.” He looked utterly shocked and was still a bit dazed as she opened the door to the light classroom. They were almost late, so it was no surprise to her that she was, yet again, the last one to the room. She needed to fix this habit.
She scanned the students first. To her surprise, she knew all of them. There was Marie from her water class, two boys whose names she couldn’t quite remember but she knew they had both manned the desk at the library, as well as another boy and girl whom she’d healed, though she couldn’t remember their names either. Count Aiden was at the front, smiling at her and Lucas as he raised a brow at her clinging to his arm and the fact that he had a golden butterfly in his hair. “Starting a new trend, Lucas?” he asked with a smirk.
Lucas was about to respond when Ramoth took off from his hair, flying gleefully towards Aiden before she plopped onto his head, much to his astonishment. Smiling apologetically, Jade spoke, “Sorry, Count Aiden, Ramoth apparently likes to bask in the aura of strong light magic. I don’t think she’s going to leave you until I leave.”
He now looked bemused before pointing to the desks. “Please, have a seat.” Jade and Lucas took two adjacent seats, Jade shooting a grin over at him as they did. She looked around, smiling cheerfully at the other students. “Now, let’s get started.” He reached back to his desk, and to her surprise, pulled out one of Damian’s figures that she’d lit.
“These amazing figures have recently come onto the market, and they’re all everyone is talking about. What we’ll be doing today is still creating the light balls, but we want to try figuring out how to do it with color!” He seemed extremely excited at the prospect, and Jade sat there, staring at him like he was a crazy person. Their whole class was going to be spent making colored balls of light in glass? What the heck? She had to make sure.
“Count Aiden, you’re telling me we’re going to spend all class lighting up the glass?” She pointed to the rather large pile of glass balls she had now noticed at the side of the room.
He grinned. “Exactly! Colored light, mind you.”
She stared at him for a moment, then nodded. “Sorry, you’ll have to excuse me.” She stood up, preparing to walk out of the room as Ramoth quickly fled Aiden’s head to go land on her once more.
“Jade, what’s wrong?” It was Lucas who caught her hand, trying to stop her. Everyone else was just staring at her in confusion. She took a deep breath, looking down at him and trying to calm her rage. She sighed, then turned to the glass balls and started walking towards them. Since he wouldn’t let go of her hand, he ended up scrambling to his feet and following behind her.
She stared at the giant heap of glass balls, picturing what she wanted to do in her mind. A flood of energy rushed out of her, filling the glass. From one end of the pile to the other, the glass balls started lighting up. She had made it so it went from one color to another, following the pattern of the rainbow. It was a beautiful, glowing testament to her power. There were surprised gasps behind her, and she turned to face to confounded class feeling slightly light headed from the exertion but determined not to show it in her anger.
“I’m disappointed. Light magic saved my life, and I was excited to learn more, but you have nothing to teach me. Even the book on light magic was so hideously underwhelming, I thought it was something of a joke, like you didn’t learn the real stuff until you got to class. Now I realize…you have no idea what light magic is capable of. All of you think of it as nothing but a light source. That is…weak. Aiden, you saw what I did earlier today with light magic. Why on earth aren’t you trying to do more?”
Aiden paused, shaking his head sadly.
“You combined it with lightning for destructive power. It’s not something I can duplicate.”
“Bull crap!” Jade practically yelled at him, making most of the class jump. She continued her tirade, “You aren’t even trying! Light is capable of so much more than this! There’s no reason that progress should be stuck at this point! It’s ridiculous. I’ve experimented more with light magic in the last week than you have in the last few hundred years! It’s pathetic! You’re stuck in the rut of this is how it’s always been, so you don’t even try! What baffles me is the fact that people are learning to control and manipulate every single other element, but you? You’re using it to create light sources. You have one of the best weapons against the mesmer, and you’re wasting your talent. Even Ramoth uses light magic more creatively than you! So you tell me. Why on earth should I stay?”
Silence reigned supreme in the classroom. Aiden was looking at the ceiling as if asking the heavens for help. Most of the other students were staring at their desks, and Lucas was staring at her; he still hadn’t let go of her hand. The sound of a book snapping shut made half the class jump again, and Jade looked curiously at Marie.
She met Jade’s eyes and demanded, “So teach us.” She waved her hand to indicate the giant pile of glowing orbs behind Jade. “We can’t do that. First off, I’m betting the amount of magic power you have is exponentially higher than ours. You’re right, this is all we know. So help us instead of yelling.”
Jade felt her anger draining away. She glanced at Lucas, who smiled and nodded, squeezing her hand for support. She sighed, deflating. “Sorry for yelling. In all honesty, I was hoping to learn. I have ideas of what might be able to be done because of stories from my old world, but I have no idea how to put them into practice.” She waved at the balls of light. “Color is easier for me because I know the principles of light, and I can tweak it. It’s just a matter of changing the frequency.” They were looking at her confused, so she glanced at Aiden. “Do you have a piece of paper I can use?”
He nodded silently, grabbing paper, ink, and a quill from his desk. She frowned at the quill, realizing she still hadn’t learned how to properly write, but it was better than nothing. She started drawing the spectrum of light, sticking to just the visible spectrum. When she was done, she held it up. “Light is a frequency. It’s these tiny particles in the air that are bouncing around. The tighter the frequency, the different colors it produces.” She explained what she could about the spectrum and lasers, then paused.
“Honestly, I don’t know what all can be done. I told you about lasers, but honestly, I feel like we should be able to do what the other elements do. Like in water class today,” she nodded to Marie, who warily acknowledged her, barely, “we made shields and arrows out of water. I think we should be able to do that with light. Not only should we be able to make light, we can probably snuff it out. We could probably bend light so that it appears that whatever is behind us is in front of us, making us practically invisible. I don’t know how to do this stuff, but I think it’s worth trying. Light is not the weak link of magic. That just makes no sense to me.”
“So let’s try.” One of the librarian boys whose name she still couldn’t remember smiled at her shyly.
She glanced at Aiden, who smiled ruefully. “Where do we start?”
Chapter Thirty-One – Friends
Nearly two hours later, Jade was exhausted. Still, progress had been made, which made her smile tiredly. Using the principle that light was just another element, they’d managed to make light shields before Jade forced them to move outside to one of the giant practice grounds. She’d grabbed her ‘gun,’ the extra cartridges, and her fellacai on the way out.
Lucas and Marie were the ones who caught on fastest. She guessed Marie was because she was a multi-mage and Lucas because he’d already started trying new things with her the week before. Aiden was also picking things up rather quickly, but he remained quieter. She felt bad for him, in all honesty. Here he was the teacher, and he had nothing to teach. However, as soon as he caught onto something, he would quietly go help the other students. He was taking her rebuke and teaching surprisingly well, considering he’d been wanting to personally tutor her earlier that day.
Joseph and Scott were the boys she knew from the library desk. Lucas had explained that in their third year, they were expected to take part in a work-study program. The library generally recruited light students, which made a certain amount of sense, given how dark it was and not wanting to harm the books. The other boy and girl were named David and Alexa, and they were pretty quiet as well. It seemed the light class was not one of the talkative ones and tended to draw in the shy students. Maybe it was because it hadn’t been combat oriented…she didn’t know, but she did feel guilty.
Either way, she’d identified that all of them had multiple gifts that they weren’t developing. One interesting thing was that all of them had dark magic, and she figured it was something that was just the other side of the coin. You have one, you have the other. It was ironic, because she’d been told to have one meant you didn’t have the other when she first got here; it was yet another example of people’s minds creating limits for themselves. Joseph also had some earth, Scott had metal, David had water, and Alexa had earth as well. Aiden had nothing other than light and dark, which she found a little strange.
Still, before they tested trying to attack each other with light, she decided inanimate objects would be better. She’d raised five successive walls of earth about twenty feet away from them to use as targets. She didn’t use her gun, given that they were just trying to create arrows or beams of light.
They had started destroying the walls, marveling in the destructive power of the light. Lucas and Aiden managed to crash through three walls before the light stopped its explosion of rock.
Near the end, Jade had gotten curious now that deathly lasers were becoming a thing. She’d tested the light shield by throwing different things at it, finding it was better at blocking energy attacks than solid objects, though it still helped with those solid objects. One of the most useful things was the difficulty in pinpointing someone behind the shield if they could get it large enough. It was like a screen of brilliant light that hurt to look at for long, making it nigh impossible to target properly.
One worrying thing was that the light shield acted like a mirror for light attacks. Instead of stopping it or letting it through, it just refracted it in a different direction, which thankfully no one had been in when she tried. She’d also tried wind and water walls, realizing they were useless against light as well. Wind walls just amplified the power of the beam. Water did so to a lesser extent but also with the refractive property in that the beam’s trajectory was altered.
Wanting to test her new toys, she asked everyone to stand back and reinforced the walls until they were double the thickness of before. “What’s that?” Lucas asked curiously as she messed with her blaster gun. She was recharging the bullet like container with energy before she stuck it into the gun. She added a few tiny wind walls on the inside of the barrel to amplify the blast, checking on the crystal, which somehow wasn’t hurt. Probably because she’d magically reinforced it so much.
“This is potentially one of the most dangerous things you’ve ever seen: a way for any non-mage to shoot magic at an enemy.” He looked curious, but she grabbed the gun with a gust of wind, encasing everything but the front in wind walls so that it would contain any blast that might occur. She floated it out in front of them, then muttered, “You might want to take cover.”
She raised a five foot wall in front of them so they could only look over the top and could duck down as necessary to take cover. They all started to get nervous at her extra precautions. Finally, she used a finger of wind to pull the trigger for two seconds. Light barreled out of the blaster, much thicker and more concentrated than she’d expected. It completely shattered one wall after another, going through three reinforced walls with ease and utterly obliterating them. It s
till thoroughly demolished the fourth wall, shattered the fifth wall, and ended up destroying half the back wall of the area which was another twenty feet behind it.
With a small shudder, Jade immediately called back the gun, removing the cartridge at once. It was Alexa who spoke up in her pretty alto voice, “What in heaven’s name was that!?”
Jade smiled at the girl, then responded, “Stored energy that was released and amplified.” With a slow wave, she fixed the back wall and rock walls that she’d just destroyed, recreating them as she broke out into a light sweat. She was pushing her boundaries right now, so she paused, reaching down into her bag to pull out food, sitting down nonchalantly as she munched on it.
“You’re…eating?” Scott’s voice was quiet as he stared at her. “You just caused mass destruction, and you’re eating?”
She smiled at him briefly, nodding as she swallowed. “I just used up a lot of magic energy, and my reserves are almost depleted. Food helps, and I want to try one more thing before I stop for the night. You’re all welcome to go if you want.”
They exchanged glances, but none of them moved. It seemed they were curious as to what her ‘one more thing’ was. She couldn’t blame them because she was curious if this would work too. As soon as she felt she had enough in her to do what she wanted, she took out a clean cartridge before starting to inject energy into it. Once it was full to the brim with energy, she put it into the gun, then floated it out once more.
“Ready?” she asked, glancing around to nods. She concentrated, feeling the drain as she pulled the wind trigger again. Out of the front of her pistol came a stream of light blue flame, the backlash of blistering heat hitting them all as it started melting the rock in front of them. Thankfully, unlike light, it didn’t go on forever and petered out before it got to the back wall, leaving a mass of molten rock bubbling fiery red on the ground behind it.