Metal Mage

by Eric Vall

  “You are insatiable.” Aurora laughed as she rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “How do you mean to finish this workshop if we stay in bed all day?”

  “Magic?” I offered absentmindedly. My gaze was stuck on the long column of the half-elf’s throat. I tried not to lick my lips as I remembered how her skin tasted as the sun rose this morning.

  “Even that requires focus,” Aurora teased as she pushed herself off the wall. Then she crossed the small room and perched herself on the edge of my workshop table, close enough that my hand brushed the edge of her bare thigh.

  “I think I could manage.” I ran my hand up her knee, and the half-elf shivered.

  “Oh really?” Aurora purred as she cocked an eyebrow.

  Before I could respond, the Ignis Mage ducked down swiftly and pressed her mouth against mine. Immediately, our tongues began to tangle in a now familiar dance. Desire flared in me, and I turned to face Aurora more fully so I could grasp her hips and pull her into my lap.

  But then the half-elf smirked against my lips and pulled away before I could grab her.

  “You were saying?” she whispered huskily.

  “What?” I muttered dazedly. I had instantly lost my train of thought as all my blood quickly rushed south. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Aurora’s wet, pink lips. Then, that same mouth that enchanted me broke out into a wide grin.

  “Exactly,” Aurora said with a chuckle. She slid off the edge of the table and leaned down to press one more quick kiss against the side of my mouth. “You should get to work now.”

  “Fine.” I groaned. Then I turned back to the workshop table and rubbed at the back of my neck. “I guess I do need to head down to the mines today. My supply of lead is running a little low.”

  “See? We both have things we need to attend to.” Aurora grinned as she straightened and stretched her arms above her head.

  “What do you have planned for today?” I asked.

  “I have a meeting with Mage Abrus at noon,” Aurora replied as she tightened her sword’s belt and sheath around her hips. “We are to discuss the beast problem further.”

  “Has something else happened?” I asked with a frown.

  “No,” Aurora responded with a shake of her head. “There has not been another reported incident since Edhil. However, for too long we’ve only been reacting to these attacks. Now that we have these new weapons, Abrus and King Temin want to go on the offensive as soon as possible.”

  “I still need time to get everything ready,” I replied with a wince. “The mining and workshop construction took longer than I anticipated. I’ve barely even completed a handful of guns as of right now.”

  “I know,” Aurora said with a gentle smile. “It is alright, Mason. You’re only one man, and you can only do so much. Abrus and Temin will understand. I think right now they mostly desire a debriefing to see where we are at.”

  “Should I accompany you, then?” I asked. “So I can explain to Abrus exactly where we are in the process?”

  “Do you not trust that I can relay this information myself?” Aurora questioned with a teasing grin.

  “I trust you implicitly,” I replied with a broad smile.

  “Then you are procrastinating,” the half-elf accused with narrowed eyes.

  I held up my hands and laughed sheepishly. “Fine, you caught me. I just like hanging out with you.”

  “Hanging out?” she asked as her eyebrows knitted together.

  “It’s a term from my… country.” I laughed. “Means spending time together. I enjoy being with you.”

  “Oh,” she said, and her cheeks flushed a bit. “I also enjoy you, Mason. Ehhh, I mean, I enjoy your company, and you, and… I suppose I am babbling now.” Her face turned redder as she spoke, and I took the opportunity to run my hand higher up her thigh.

  “So, maybe you could stay a bit longer,” I whispered as our eyes met.

  “How about a proposition instead?” Aurora smirked as she rested her fingers on my roaming hand.

  “Oooh, do tell,” I replied with a suggestive waggle of my eyebrows.

  “If you are finished with your work by the time I return,” the blue-haired maiden said with a smirk, “then we’ll take a trip to the marketplace for dinner, or perhaps even a nice restaurant in the craftsmen’s quarter. How does that sound?”

  “I think that sounds like a fantastic idea,” I responded, “but only if we can take dessert to go.”

  As I waggled my eyebrows, Aurora tipped back her head and laughed. The sound went straight to my groin, and I shifted awkwardly on my stool to relieve the pressure.

  “I am amenable to this plan,” the half-elf teased when she stopped laughing. Her emerald eyes sparkled mischievously, and a smirk pulled at the corner of her mouth. “But that’s only if you finish all your work.”

  “I think I can find the motivation,” I replied as I dragged my heated gaze from Aurora’s feet to her beautiful face.

  “Good,” the Ignis Mage said with a grin. “I will leave you to it then. After my meeting with Abrus, I have a few errands to run as well. Try not to overexert yourself before I return. I’ll need all your energy.”

  With that, Aurora winked at me, spun on her heel, and left the workshop.

  “Oh, I’ll be sure to be extra careful,” I called out after her. My eyes were glued to her swinging hips as she sauntered out the door.

  When I was well and truly alone, I took a deep breath and exhaled sharply as I cracked my neck from side to side.

  “Well, I guess it’s time to get to the office,” I muttered to myself as I looked around the small room I had constructed.

  I slid to my feet, snagged my canteen from the table behind me, and then walked out of the workshop.

  The entrance of the building faced the cave I had originally found. Once I had finished the workshop, I had then set to work on excavation. This had been the most time-consuming aspect of my new project, and it had taken several days. The beginning had been easy. All I did was widen the cave entrance and enlarge the immediate inner chamber. I planned for this to be my staging area where I would haul the metallic ore and store it before taking it to the workshop at the end of the day.

  After I finished this task, things got a little more difficult.

  The cave itself wasn’t originally very deep, maybe less than a hundred yards. I found some veins of silver metal along the back wall, but not enough to make the magic in my veins writhe as it did. So, I started digging.

  And digging and digging.

  Even if converting the hard rock to soil or sand was easy enough, moving the vast quantity of earth proved to be the most taxing part. Like the goddess Nemris had told me, nothing could simply be destroyed, so I couldn’t make the excess dirt and rock disappear. It had to be displaced somewhere.

  But finally, I struck gold so to speak.

  The tunnel I had carved into the heart of the foothills opened up into a deep, vast underground cavern. It was there that my magic surged to the surface and crackled under my skin like static electricity. I didn’t even have to look very hard before I spotted my first thick vein of metallic ore. It practically glowed bright white set in the dull gray stone walls.

  “Eureka,” I had breathed triumphantly, covered in dirt and dust and sweat. “Now, we can get started.”

  Extracting the metallic ore actually proved to be the easiest part of the whole process. All I had to do was use my Terra Mage abilities to will the earth away from the metal. My prize came to me in great silver chunks, dust and sand falling away from them like water.

  Once again, I had to haul the materials to the surface, but this time, the task was more enjoyable since I had something more to show for my efforts than a giant mound of dirt. Once I had enough spare iron, I planned on laying some track in the tunnel and then building a mine cart to aid me in pulling up ore, but the most important task to do now was to build weapons, so when I had enough metallic ores, Aurora and I began the actual production King Temin had commissi
oned from me.

  I had crafted eight so far, and the king had asked for an initial batch of fifty to begin his infantry training. The number forty-two kept bouncing around in my head as I made my way down the familiar tunnel of my mine, and I reminded myself again to lay some track for a cart as soon as I had enough iron.

  Then I made it to the main cavern.

  It was about the size of four football fields, and maybe a hundred and fifty yards high. The dark void of space sucked the light from my torch like a high-powered vacuum. I had been extracting metal from the nearest point to the entrance tunnel, but the size of the chamber alluded to many more years of mining potential.

  “Okay, Mason,” I said as I raised my hands and used my power to feel into the rock wall where I had worked the previous day. “Time to do some metal magic.”

  Sensing the metal in the rock was a bit like using some weird sort of sonar. My magic would travel through the air, into the rock, and then kind of reverberate back to me like I was knocking on the drywall looking for a wood stud. The metal was denser than the rock, so it would kind of “echo” back “duller,” and then I could reach it with my power and pull it out like I was yanking a carrot from the garden soil. Today I was well rested, and the first batch of lead flowed out of the wall easily.

  Over the next several hours, I toiled to extract a large portion of lead and iron from the underground cave walls. Ever since I had awakened my metal manipulation powers, I discovered something new I could do each day. One of the first things I had discovered was my ability to differentiate between metallic ores by touch alone. The moment my finger brushed cool metal, I could immediately tell if it was iron, lead, or tin. So, as I extracted the ores from their rocky shells, I deposited them in different stacks for the journey back to the workshop.

  I had learned my lesson with the original excavation though, and I kept a large wheelbarrow down in the cavern for the express purpose of hauling my goods back to the surface. Once I was finished with the day's extraction, I loaded my haul into the wheelbarrow ore by ore and made sure to keep each different metal clumped together. It made things easier once I unpacked in the workshop, but I still needed to get a minecart going.

  Full, the wheelbarrow had to weigh over two-hundred pounds, but with a nudge of magic, it felt as light as a feather as I pushed it back toward the cave entrance. I barely even had to keep a grip on the handlebars, a fact that I was thankful for since already my body felt heavy and sore from the magical drain of today’s work.

  When I finally reached the surface and emerged out into the clearing, the sun was already well into the western sky. The warm afternoon breeze kissed my chilled skin, and I shivered as sweat dried along my neck, back, and chest.

  As I set the wheelbarrow down for a moment and stretched my stiff back, I squinted up at the sky again and tried to gauge the time. I didn’t think it could be too late in the afternoon, maybe around three or four o’clock. Aurora hadn’t said what her errands were after her meeting with Abrus, but she had implied she’d return around dinner time. That meant I still had at least a few hours before the blue-haired maiden got back.

  “There’s no way I’m missing our date,” I grumbled at the sun as if in challenge. I looked back to the wheelbarrow full of metal ore and took a deep breath before I summoned my power again to cart the heavy load the last few yards to the workshop.

  I dropped the wheelbarrow right outside the door and groaned as my head pounded from the magical drain. My stamina had strengthened considerably since I first started honing my powers, but mining had proven to be extraordinarily taxing. What I wouldn’t do for a handful of Tiorlin berries right about now.

  But since mystical elven berries weren’t readily available at the moment, I settled for taking a few deep gulps from the canteen tied around my waist. When my thirst was quenched, I ducked my head and poured the remaining water over my hair and neck. The water wasn’t exactly cold, but it was cool enough to be refreshing, and I rubbed the excess liquid into my skin to rinse away the dirt and dust from the cave.

  “Excuse me.”

  I whirled around, and my magic subconsciously rushed to the surface defensively, but I only saw an insanely gorgeous woman standing in the open doorway of the workshop.

  The first thing that jumped out at me was her outfit. The majority of it was jet black to match the woman’s short, pixie cut hair, but the accents were wild, eclectic, and sexy as hell.

  Thigh-high black boots with silver embellishments encased the woman’s incredibly long legs. The boots were then attached by delicate metal chains to what looked like a skin-tight, sleeveless, halter-style bodysuit that barely came to the tops of her thighs. The torso of the suit had numerous see-through, mesh sections, one along her left rib cage and one right in the center that extended from her belly button all the way up to her collarbone. Her ample breasts, accented by bright blue designs on the suit, were barely contained by the scrap of fabric and each time she breathed, I was sure her nipples would slip out.

  “Excuse me?” the woman said again with a concerned frown, and I realized I had been standing there gawking at her.

  “Oh, I-I’m sorry,” I stuttered out as I swallowed past my suddenly dry throat. “You startled me.”

  “My apologies,” the woman replied. She lifted a hand to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and the sun glinted off the silver bands she wore tight around her bicep. “I knocked first, but when there was no answer, I went inside. I am looking for the mage known as Mason Flynt.”

  “You found him,” I said with a wide smile as I executed a low bow. “How can I be of service, my lady?” Even though I knew I had work to do, how could I turn down a beautiful woman who was asking for me by name?

  A strange expression flitted across the woman’s face, but it was gone before I could tell what it was.

  “My name is Cayla,” the woman responded with her own curt nod. “I was told that you might be able to help me.”

  “I am always available to aid a lovely maiden such as yourself,” I replied with a charming grin. “Why don’t we step back inside out of the sun so we can talk?”

  Cayla nodded her agreement and turned sideways to let me past her. The outside edge of my arm brushed against her breasts, and a spark of electricity raced up my spine.

  The inside of the workshop was much dimmer now that the sun was slipping toward the western horizon, so I strode over to one of the tables and lit a few discarded candles I had used the nights I sat tinkering, hunched over the table until the early morning hours. When the warm orange light suffused the small room, I turned back to my guest.

  “So, how can I help you?” I asked as I outstretched my hand, summoned a few more drops of magic, and raised two stone stools from the earth.

  Cayla flinched slightly as the seat appeared before her, and her wide eyes darted from the stool back to me.

  If I hadn’t worn the same expression a mere few weeks ago, I would have been confused. Instead, I smiled reassuringly and asked, “Is this your first time meeting a mage?”

  “Well… no,” Cayla admitted at length as she met my gaze. From this distance, I noticed that her eyes were ice blue, the exact same color as the accents on her outfit. “But that was the first time I witnessed an actual demonstration of a mage’s abilities.”

  “Glad I could be your first,” I joked with a wink. A faint blush actually bloomed on the raven-haired beauty’s cheeks.

  “So you are a Terra Mage then?” she asked.

  “Of a sort,” I replied with an enigmatic smile. “Is this problem you have element specific?”

  “No.” Cayla frowned. “I was just curious.”

  When she gave no further information, I took a quiet deep breath and perched on one of the stools I had just made.

  “Why don’t you start at the beginning?” I said as I gestured for her to take the other seat. “That’ll make things a little easier.”

  Cayla sat delicately on the edge of the stone stool and c
rossed her impossibly long legs. My eyes immediately latched onto the bare strip of skin between her boots and her hips, and my fingers itched to toy with the thin, metal chains there.

  I mentally shook myself. Focus, Mason.

  “Where would you like me to begin?” Cayla questioned as she laced her fingers together and placed them on her knee.

  “Oh, so we are getting to know each other before you ask me for a favor?” I smirked. If this had been a dude and not a stupid hot woman, I would have told him to get to the fucking point.

  “You seem as if you would not mind building a rapport with me,” the beautiful woman said as she gave me half a smile, and she was right, I wouldn’t mind getting to know her better.

  “How about you tell me where you’re from?” I supplied with an encouraging smile. “Bear in mind, though, I’m new to Illaria, so my geography and political knowledge of the region isn’t perfect.”

  “Really?” the raven-haired beauty asked with a curious tilt of her head. “Where do you hail from then?”

  “A faraway kingdom,” I replied. “You wouldn’t have heard of it. It is far enough to be completely inconsequential.”

  “And how did you come to be in Illaria?” Cayla followed up.

  I laughed. “I thought we were starting at the beginning of your story, not mine.”

  “Forgive me,” Cayla replied as she pursed her lips. “I’ve often been told I am too curious for my own sake.”

  “No apologies necessary,” I said with a wave of my hand. “I’m happy to answer all your questions, but since you came all the way out here to find me and ask for my help, I’m assuming your problem is a little more important than me relating the boring details from my past. So, let’s try this again. Where are you from?”

  “Cedis,” Cayla responded promptly. “It is a small, neighboring kingdom along Illaria’s southwest border. We are a nation of farmers since we live in the fertile, southern plains.”

  “That sounds lovely,” I said with a smile as I pictured Owin and Theo, Aurora’s friends from the marketplace.