The first magic lessons, in the evening of the first days when I was still being taught the alphabet, began equally as slow as letters and words. What Tower taught was similar in an odd way. In the same way that I already knew many words and ideas, and only had to be taught to recognize how they appeared in written form, I discovered that feelings and sensations that I knew were also linked to practicing magic.
I was taught focus and concentration first, and to differentiate between what I was experiencing when I was exposed to magic rather than a physical sensation.
Focusing took many days, and I can describe it like a sliding of the mind. If you hold up both of your hands away from your face at different distances, and extend only your index fingers, you will have one finger in the foreground and another in the background of your vision. If you switch your eyes between the two you will see your vision slide and warp each time you switch. The sensation was not dissimilar to that.
“Close your eyes,” Tower would say. “Focus your mind to a point. What do you feel?”
“Pressure. Like something pressing on my head between my eyes.”
“It is in your head, not on it. You rely too much on the senses you use all the time, and your eyes far more than any other. That is the only reason you feel it there. You can move that focus to your chest if you like, or your hands. Your hands are especially useful, to create a focus there so you can properly channel your magic in the right direction. Move your focus.”
I tried but it only made my head hurt more. I felt a throbbing grow where there had previously been only pressure. When I gave up, I opened my eyes and felt my stomach lurch. My vision was blurry and felt foreign, as if I was seeing with the wrong pair of eyes.
“You will be able to in time. When you are very good you can find a focus even outside of your body,” he said with a smile.
By the time we moved onto sentences and books, I had been able to shift my focus to different parts of my body. I had experienced fleeting brushes of magic. At first I thought it was like something running along my skin, like a gust of wind or the touch of a fingertip. Over the weeks I learned to distinguish it as something that came from within myself, rather than without. I wasn’t reaching out and bringing a cold or warm sensation from the magic to my skin, I was creating that sensation from something within myself that radiated out of my skin.
It was the barest of connections but I found it intoxicating.
Chapter Eight
When I could read sentences and paragraphs, Tower opened up his floor of the tower to me.
I remember the excitement I felt at exploring new territory. I had been living at the tower for nearly four months and I had never seen a single glimpse of what was behind Tower’s door. It had built up in my mind like the cellar room had, an exotic place full of magical experiments and items. Frightening too, but in a way that made a nervous grin cross my face instead of a grimace.
“Easy now,” Tower said as he saw that look on my face. “You have to be careful in here. Only touch what I give to you and be careful of where you rest your hands. You are capable of channeling magic. There are things in here that will respond to that. Some things might even take advantage of that.”
“Advantage?”
“This place was not built or filled by me. There are objects here that even I don’t understand. Some are useful, others are amusing but have nothing practical to offer. Some are helpful, while some are dangerous. They are tools like any other, but tools can be weapons if mishandled. Be excited to learn, but be cautious.”
“Who taught you magic?” the question blurted out of me as the thought of it popped into my head.
“Another who lived here, a long time ago. I was a boy like you. You might meet him someday.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
“So would I,” Tower replied, but the way his eyebrows furrowed together belied the light tone of his voice.
He pressed open the door and I followed him inside. The doorway opened into a corner of the room. There was a wall immediately to the right with a closed door that Tower explained was his bedroom. The rest of the room was to our left.
The room exceeded my expectations, and those were that of a young boy’s imagination running wild for months. It was massive, for one, and looked like it circled around the entire tower. It was strange to be in a room that curved along with the shape of the wall.
There was a bookcase that started near the door. It was built into the wall closest to the center of the tower and ran along the length of it. I followed it and discovered that it kept going until I reached the end of the room.
Books were neatly lined up on every shelf at first, with all of the spaces firmly but comfortably taken up on each separate case. As I got further along I noticed that the amount of books began to dwindle until that last third or so of the bookcase was filled with loose papers and, eventually, nothing at all.
I came to the end of the room as if I had woken from a dream during which I imagined what secrets each book held. I looked back and saw Tower watching me from across the room. I thought he had an amused expression but he was too far away for me to tell. I looked at the wall I was up against and found another closed door. I wanted to open it but I stopped myself, remembering what I had been told about keeping my hands to myself
The room was far longer than it was wide, and I reached the other side of the room quickly. The wall that must have been the outside of the tower, like my room, had no windows.
Once again, I had to remind myself not to touch anything when I saw what was in the corner of the room. All of the gemstones we had collected from the mines and extracted from the rocks had never diminished their beauty or splendor for me, but the object I saw there may have been the moment that I finally adapted to handling gems and crystals as a normal part of my life.
Nestled in the corner was the largest gemstone I had ever seen. It was scarlet red. It was colossal. I was not tall for my age, but neither was I short, and this gem stood as tall as my chin. It was wider than it was tall, and looked to me like it couldn’t have fit through the entrance to the room. I wondered how it got there.
“Don’t touch it,” Tower said, his words serving as a reminder rather than a rebuke. “That gem is the most powerful object in here and probably the most dangerous.”
I nodded to him. I didn’t know when he had walked up behind me. The gem must have enthralled my attention more than I realized. I continued walking along the wall away from the corner.
There were a few cabinets and chests pressed against the wall. On some I saw padlocks while others were open and displayed their contents. There were candles and cups, dozens of pieces of glass molded into different shapes, and other items that I didn’t recognize. In one chest I saw hammers, tongs, and other tools. In another, curiously positioned next to the tools, was a box full of what appeared to be children’s toys. There were wooden carvings of people, animals, miniature sized weapons and armor, and little wooden houses. They were untidily piled into the box. I thought it was a waste.
About halfway across the room, the cabinets parted and I found a large barrel between them. It looked similar to the one on the roof of the building, but as I got closer I noticed there was an odd vapor pouring from the open top. I was too short to see what was inside of it and looked to Tower for help. He brought a chair from across the room and lifted me on top of it. I leaned forward, with my feet on the chair, and peered down into the barrel.
Initially I thought I saw boiling water, but as my eyes adapted to seeing through the misty vapor I saw that it was more like snow. Winters in this area weren’t particularly cold but we would get snow for a few months of the year. To see a barrel almost full of it in the middle of a warm room made no sense to me whatsoever and I loved it.
I hopped off the chair and continued surveying the final half of the room. There were tables and countertops filled with intricate glass objects that I had never seen before. Glass, like the gemstones, had been a rarity
in my village.
“Did your village have an alchemist?” Tower asked as I looked confused at the items.
“No. What is that?”
“It’s the study and application of substances and their reactions to other materials.”
I looked at Tower as if he had just spoken words that I had never heard before, because that was exactly what had just happened.
“Sorry,” he said with a grin. “Many things in the world have uses if put together the right way. Some creatures and plants have magical properties that draw from the magic that is inside of them. The root or leaves of a certain plant might create something that can cure a disease if prepared properly.”
“That sounds complicated. What if you get it wrong?”
“Exactly,” Tower nodded. “There aren’t many books on the subject here. I don’t know much about it myself, but this apparatus was here before I was. It didn’t seem right to move it. There are flasks, an alembic, a burner...”
The equipment looked to me to be an extensive collection. I continued to explore the final part of the room and stopped at the final corner. There was a writing desk in it. It took up the little section of wall that was next to Tower’s bedroom door. There were papers, quills, and books piled all around it. The chair looked sturdy but worn down after decades of use.
I stood at the start of the bookcase once more, back at where I had started, and looked at Tower. He had walked several paces down along the bookshelves and was shuffling through them.
“Once you can teach yourself new words and work your way through any book on your own, you can take whatever you like from here as long as you remember to put it back,” he spoke at the books more than at me, too engrossed in his search to turn and face me. “There’s one book in particular I want you to learn from. It should be up here somewhere.”
I walked passed him and stopped when I reached the bookcases that had piles of paper instead of bound books. I stretched my hand out to hold some of them before I remembered Tower’s rule. I didn’t think it applied to papers but I couldn’t be certain. My book was full of enchanted paper, after all.
“Why aren’t these books? Did these pages fall out?”
“What?” Tower took a quick glance at where I pointed and then turned back into the bookshelf. He continued talking while still shifting through the books. “No, those are mine. I wrote those. They’ll be bound in a book eventually.”
I was stunned. For some reason, in that moment, I was more impressed by what he had just said than the magic he had shown me. “Really? You’re going to write a book?”
“Going to?” Tower said and then laughed. “About a third of these were all written by me. The one I’m looking for now included. Which is, ha! Found it. Here you go.”
For some reason I had never considered where books actually came from. Wooden carvings and furniture had qualities that I could trace back to their creation. They were pieces of worked and shaped wood. Stone also. But books? I carefully took the book that Tower held out to me and considered it.
“How do you get all the pages together? Is there a spell?”
“Maybe,” Tower said. “If there is, I haven’t discovered it. The books I made here are quite crude, but they work. My writing book is like yours that I can remove pages from. I use a combination of those and spider silk to bind the pages and papers together for covers. I weigh them down and keep them pressed together until they dry, then smooth down the edges with a knife. They’re not as pretty as the old books with leather covers but,” his words trailed off.
“I like them,” I finished for him.
“Thank you,” he said. “It’s funny that you asked. This book is about animals, creatures, and monsters. It’s called a Beastiary. There’s an older one here that I made copies from and then added some pages. Here.”
He opened the book as I held it in my hands. He turned the pages and I saw a blur of pictures as he searched for the right one. With only a passing glance, I saw only glimpses of each topic. Some were ordinary animals, while others were horrific darkly shaded depictions of monsters. I thought I saw one that looked eerily similar to the creature that Tower had to collapse the tunnel on but the page was turned before I could get a better look.
“There we are. The Giant Spider,” Tower said. “For now I want you to take this book to my desk. Go to your room and bring down your book and quill and make a copy of this page. You probably won’t be able to understand all of the words and sentences just yet, but that’s okay. Copy it one letter at a time. If you make a mistake, start again. If you need help then I’ll be here. Find me if you get stuck.”
I did as he instructed and we were deep into the evening by the time I finished. I had been following his examples when learning to write for months and my individual lettering looked similar to Tower’s. For this copy, my words were far too big. I had made a few mistakes and had to start over, but I stuck with it. At first I was confused when my larger letters made it so my sentences and words didn’t match up line by line with his version. I eventually adapted and completed a rough copy but resolved to learn in the future how to write in a neater, smaller hand.
Tower was satisfied with my work and we ate a late dinner in the central room of the tower. He told me eventually he would have me copy the pictures down in addition to the words. Although I was discovering that I enjoyed drawing, perhaps even more than writing, I was confused as to why it was important to learn.
“So you can make entries in the book yourself,” he responded simply.
“What?”
“And also when you write your own books. Diagrams can help a lot. Both for the reader and for yourself when you use the book as a reminder,” he explained.
“I’ll write a book? Me?”
“Of course,” he said with his mouth full. “Magic has many unexplored areas. You’ll need to write down what you learn.”
Again, I found myself stunned. Every day when I thought I was finally getting a grasp on my new life something came along that rattled my perspective all over again. It wasn’t always unpleasant, but I often worried that I wouldn’t live up to Tower’s expectations.
We finished our meal but instead of ascending the stairs for our evening magic lessons, Tower beckoned me over to the stairs down to the cellar. Even though the tunnel was sealed, I still disliked going down there. Surprisingly, I had gotten used to the spider. It was being near anything to do with the monsters in the mines that set me on edge.
I couldn’t tell if the spider was sleeping or not when we entered the cellar. It was usually very still except for the occasional twitching of its legs. The walls had been covered in its silk and pulled awkwardly into webs over the months. It didn’t have a lot of room to maneuver in the cell so it mostly hung like a thick, second layer on the walls.
“Your focus has been improving quickly over the past few weeks. I think we’ll be moving onto a few simple spells and energy manipulation soon,” Tower said as we stood side by side at the bars of the cage. I wasn’t quite sure why he was explaining this down here.
“I wanted to give you an example,” he continued. “This will be one of the first techniques you’ll be working toward. Initially you may need to use a gemstone but eventually you’ll have enough strength to go without.”
I felt a stirring of magic build within him. I felt it in the same way someone might notice the heat of a nearby fire or feel the vibrations of something through the ground run up their legs. Over the months I had learned to keep myself open to sensing such a thing, not only in others but also myself.
Instinctively, I sought a point to focus myself. Lately it had been in the center of my chest as Tower insisted that I remove my magical sense from the focal points of my vision and hearing. From my point of focus I could feel a reaction building in the air between us and the spider. It reached out to it, between the bars and wrapped itself around the legs of the spider.
The monster didn’t move. It didn’t cry out in pain. I was pleased
that we weren’t going to hurt it. I wasn’t exactly sure what had happened until Tower opened the door to the jail cell and walked right in. I had a moment of shock before I calmed myself. He had paralyzed the spider—maybe paralyze was not exact enough. He had manipulated energy into a physical force around the legs of the creature. It could still feel its body but was unable to move.
To Tower it must have been a simple spell. To me it was as complicated and far away as writing a whole paragraph by myself.
I watched him work through the cage. He had carried a bundle of thin wooden spindles from the tool cabinet in the cellar. He proceeded to whip them around through the spider’s silk and wrap them around the end of the wood. They became plump with the silk quickly, like sheets of cloth bunched around a torch.
There was more silk than he could collect on the few spindles he had. He burned the stray strands that were strewn from the wood and the wall with small sparks of fire that popped out of his fingertips. When he was finished, he set the silk down in the corner of the room, near the collapsed tunnel, and then locked up the jail door. I felt a similar sensation as the spider was released from its invisible shackles, but it was over much faster that time. The spider stirred a little but made no sudden movements. I wondered if it even knew what had happened.
Chapter Nine
The final days of autumn were spent in the cellar. The cold was starting to seep into the tower and we stayed underground most of the time. Tower insisted that we finish extracting the gemstones and move most of them upstairs. He wanted to avoid going near the tunnels as much as possible when winter arrived.
We would sit at the cellar tables for hours working on the rocks we had hauled in from the mines. We grinded away at the stone with chisels and hammers. I could hardly do any of the tougher work that Tower did, but he made no sign that he was displeased with my contributions. I chipped the gemstones free and added my small collections to the pile.
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