Mage Catalyst

by George, Christopher

  “What’s yours?” she asked, ruffling through the paper looking for the right section.

  “Aries.”

  Renee chuckled as she read my horoscope. “Looks like a new romance is on the cards.”

  I felt my face go hot.

  “Best not tell that to your girlfriend,” she teased with her smirking half grin on her face.

  “No, probably not a good idea.” I agreed. “I wouldn’t have imagined that you believe in all that horoscope stuff?” I wanted to steer the conversation away from any mention of Tina.

  “Oh, I don’t.” Renee replied. “But you obviously do!”

  “I do?” I stammered.

  “You must believe them since you make some effort to read them,” she said.

  “What? How does that make any sense?”

  “I never check my own,” Renee continued, “but I’ll check other people’s.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s handy to know what their expectations of their day are,” Renee finished.

  “What?”

  “No, seriously, think about it,” Renee said.

  “How does knowing my horoscope in any way help you?”

  “Well, it doesn’t help me as such. It gives me an idea of how you think your day is going to be,” Renee explained. “So I know what to expect from people. I don’t like getting surprises.”

  “That sounds a little manipulative.”

  “Possibly,” Renee conceded grudgingly. “It’s just something I do.”

  “Anything else in there I need to know about?” I asked, cursing myself at the inevitable mocking that would come from my question. Renee would no doubt jump on the opportunity.

  “Oh? So you are interested in your horoscope for today then?” Renee retaliated triumphantly.

  “Just read out the damn horoscope.”

  Renee went back to reading the paper. “It says in here that you need to be careful sharing confidential information today as you may hurt someone’s feelings.”

  “Wow? Really? That’s kind of specific,” I said, a little surprised.

  “No, it’s pretty much the usual garbage that they usually dole out.”

  “Now look who’s suddenly an expert in horoscopes,” I teased.

  “Shut up,” Renee laughed. “I told you I never read my own.”

  “Pass over the paper then,” I grinned, sliding myself onto the couch next to her so I could read over her shoulder.

  I was immediately overpowered by the aroma of her perfume and the heat of her body next to mine. I was very conscious of the fact that her leg was pressed against mine as I leant forward.

  “Okay, what’s your sign then?” I demanded nervously.

  “Like I’m going to tell you!” Renee laughed, either ignoring or not aware of my obvious discomfort.

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “Who says I’m afraid?” Renee snapped instantly, her eyes flaring at the implied insult.

  “Well, come on then, tell me your sign.”

  “Aries,” she sighed grudgingly. I was pretty sure she was lying.

  “Ha!” I snapped, instantly taking advantage of her lapse in judgement. She shouldn’t have selected Aries as her star sign.

  “What?”

  “You did read your own star sign before!”

  I was a little proud of myself that I’d managed to pull one over Renee.

  “No, wait, what?” Renee stammered as she realised she’d been caught out.

  I burst into laughter at her expression. At first her eyes narrowed dangerously but she shrugged and joined in.

  “You’re not really an Aries are you?” I enquired once we’d stopped laughing.

  “No.” She smiled. “And don’t bother asking me either. To be honest, I actually don’t know.”

  “You don’t know your own birthday?” I asked with a raised eyebrow, all hilarity immediately disappearing from the conversation.

  “No, I don’t,” Renee snapped. “Can we just drop it?”

  “Sure, no worries,” I replied. “It’s just unusual.”

  “There’s a reason why I live with my grandfather and not my parents,” Renee continued, her tone turning sharp again.

  “I’m dropping it, I’m dropping it,” I protested, not wanting to antagonise her further.

  “So, you don’t celebrate your birthday at all?” I asked after a few seconds silence as my curiosity finally got the better of me again.

  “Is that dropping it?” Renee asked acidly.

  “No, I guess not. It’s kind of sad though.”

  “Not really.” Renee shrugged. “I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything.”

  “Fair enough.” I nodded, still not convinced.

  “So, what did you have in mind?” Renee asked with a slightly upraised eyebrow and a smirk even though she was obviously just trying to change the subject.

  “In mind about what?” I asked. “To be honest I haven’t given any of my plans much thought.”

  “Well, that figures,” Renee replied dryly.

  “What are you implying?”

  “Oh, nothing much,” Renee chuckled. “It’s just that you look like the type to barrel into situations with no idea of how you’re going to get out of them.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well? You invited yourself over here and intruded into my time,” she continued with a mocking smile on her face. “Entertain me.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was serious or not. I couldn’t help but notice her hand had moved from the table and was now resting on my knee.

  “What do you want me to do? Dance for you?” I joked back, attempting to focus on anything other than her hand resting gently on my knee.

  She must know she’d put it there. It’s not like you can accidently place your hand on someone’s knee without noticing.

  “Can you dance?” She grinned.

  “Umm... No?”

  “Then, yes.”

  “You want me to dance for you?”

  “Yep.” Renee nodded.

  “Umm.” I gulped.

  “Sit down.” Renee chuckled as I made a motion to move myself from the couch.

  “I wasn’t going to dance. I was just getting more comfortable.”

  “Sure.” Renee nodded. “Boy, you really do have no shame do you?”

  “So, what do you want to do tonight?” I asked, ignoring her question and trying to change the topic of conversation.

  “I don’t have any plans.” Renee smiled.

  “You didn’t have any plans, and yet you thought it would be fun to grill me on disrupting them?” I shot back.

  “Yep.” Renee chuckled. “It was more fun than I thought it would be.”

  “You’re very welcome,” I replied sarcastically.

  “Well, you do make it very easy.”

  “So, after all that,” I grumbled, “did we actually decide what we’re doing tonight?”

  “Nope.” Renee smiled. “Who says we need to do anything?”

  “You brought it up.”

  “Yeah.” Renee nodded. “But I was only teasing you.”

  “I guess.”

  We both lapsed into a nervous silence. I made slight tentative glances at Renee who smiled back at me as I focused in on my drink.

  “How is your girlfriend anyway? How are you guys going?” Renee asked innocently.

  “Good, good,” I replied a little too quickly. Renee’s eyes flickered at my outright lie.

  “Really?”

  “No, not really,” I replied, deciding to come clean.

  “Oh,” Renee replied.

  “No, we’re just not getting along, you know?” I continued.

  “Yep.” Renee nodded sharply. “So break it off then.”

  “It’s not that easy,” I disagreed. “It’s complicated.”

  “No, it’s not,” Renee argued. “It’s actually very simple, if it’s not working then it’s not working.”

  “It’s th
at simple, eh?” I mocked sarcastically.

  “Yep.” Renee smiled. “That’s all there is to it. If you’re not happy then most likely she’s not either. You’d be doing both of you a favour.”

  “What a remarkably pessimistic philosophy,” I commented a little petulantly.

  “Call it what you will.”

  “What about yourself?” I pressed. “Any boyfriends on the scene?”

  “Not at the moment,” Renee replied. “Just came out of a serious relationship a few months back though.”

  “Oh? Got difficult did it?” I snapped peevishly.

  “Yep.” Renee shrugged, ignoring my jibe.

  “What happened?”

  “He was a jerk,” Renee continued.

  “Was he normal or was he like us?”

  “Yeah.” Renee nodded. “One of us.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was a jerk,” Renee repeated.

  “That’s not overly descriptive.”

  “I know, didn’t mean it to be,” Renee replied. “Relationships between our kind don’t often work out anyway.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “Something about two strong personalities at odds with each other eventually turning the relationship into a power struggle I guess,” Renee mused.

  “I can see how that would be a problem.”

  “To be honest, when I first met you, I thought you were him,” Renee commented.

  “What? He looks like me?”

  “No, but what you look like can easily be changed. You could have been doing anything with the state you were in at the time.”

  “Anything?”

  “You were projecting a lot of mana. It was coming off you in waves. It’s a technique sometimes used by mages to hide what they’re actually doing under a blanket of magical noise.”

  “Magical noise?”

  “Yeah, I can’t really explain it any better than that,” Renee continued.

  “Like waving your hand to hide what you’re doing with the other hand? You know that trick stage magicians use, what’s it called? Misdirection?”

  “Kind of.” Renee nodded. “That’s why I attacked you in that alley. I wasn’t sure if you weren’t going to attack me first and didn’t want to risk it. You could have been doing anything behind all that static.”

  “Oh.”

  That made sense.

  I had wondered why Renee’s immediate response had been one of attack when we had first met in that alley. It had seemed excessive at the time and a little out of character, now that I knew her better.

  “So all that crap about it being life threatening? Was that a lie?”

  “No,” Renee replied. “It’s true you were at a dangerous level – if you continued like that you would probably have burned yourself out, but I didn’t know you weren’t faking it.”

  “Burned out?” I prompted.

  “It’s more like immolation but by the time that happens you’d probably have been unconscious for some time. You probably wouldn’t have felt anything.”

  “Small mercies eh?” I grinned, attempting to make light of it.

  “Have you ever heard of spontaneous combustion?” Renee continued.

  I nodded. I had heard of it, It was a term used when human bodies were found half burned to cinders yet the surrounding area was untouched. People had been found burned to ashes sitting in their armchairs and the only damage to the chair was a slight charcoaling of the leather or fabric. It was one of those great unexplained mysteries of the world, like ghosts or UFOs. Of course I’d always discounted it as fiction.

  “It’s caused by mana?”

  “It’s where the body is unable to cope with power being released and burns itself, from the inside out,” Renee nodded back.

  “Sounds nasty.”

  “I’ve never seen it, but my grandfather described it once. He said it was amongst the most horrible things he’s ever seen.”

  “So, tell me about your ex then,” I prompted, changing topics. “What was he like?”

  “I’d rather not discuss it,” Renee cut me off. “It didn’t end well.”

  “Fair enough.” I shrugged. Renee obviously didn’t want to talk about it. “You brought up relationships though…”

  “Tell you what, if you let this drop, I’ll teach you that invisibility spell you asked about last time.”

  I leaned forward eagerly. I had been looking forward to learning this. I nodded as Renee moved herself over onto one of the armchairs on the other side of the coffee table.

  “Okay,” Renee began. “It’s really quite a simple technique. Although mastering it takes some time.”

  Renee held out her hand over the table and I began to watch as she skilfully threaded a mana field across her hand.

  “This is close enough to what the weave should look like,” Renee instructed.

  I mulled the thread over in my head. It didn’t look that different from the thread field that we were using for the shield spell, but I could spot some differences.

  “Okay, I’m going to start now.” Renee nodded, getting to her feet. “I have to project the field around my whole body or the thread won’t hold.”

  I nodded in understanding as Renee flexed her fingers. The thread expanded up her arm, along her sides and wrapped around her body. The mana flared once and then she simply faded away.

  I could still see her mana of course but I realised with some degree of understanding that I was now looking at the mana weave across her body, not her actual flesh.

  I wasn’t looking at the details of her body as the shape had become a little indistinct and there was certainly no colour. All the details were washed out into the pale blue spectrum of the mana particles.

  As I watched I could see the field pulsing with power as the mana threads in the weave reacted to the mana particles flowing across its surface. It left a small blue shadow of her silhouette as it travelled across its path.

  “Okay, the theory behind it is,” Renee explained, her voice appearing crystal clear from the figure in front of me.

  It was a little disturbing that I couldn’t see her lips move or discern any kind of facial expression as she talked.

  “The mana weave bends the light around it,” Renee continued, ignoring my obvious discomfort.

  “Bends light?” I asked, not understanding.

  “Okay,” Renee clarified. “As I understand it what you see around you is caused by light reflecting off objects and being picked up by your eyes.”

  “Yeah.” I nodded back. I understood — that was eighth grade science stuff.

  “What the mana field does is to cause that light to be bent around you. This means that the light never reflects off you and this is what renders you invisible. The light simply passes around you.”

  “But,” I began before I was quickly cut off.

  “Just take my word for it,” Renee snapped, irritated.

  I grinned and didn’t pursue it. I couldn’t really formulate my question into words yet anyway.

  “You think you’ve got the weave now?”

  “I think so.” It had been relatively simple.

  “Okay, give it a go then.”

  I placed my hands in front of me as I slowly concentrated on the thread. Once I was sure I had the thread right, I began to duplicate the effect without trying to focus too much on what I was doing. I’d learned from the shield spell that the trick was to focus on the pattern and not the thread.

  I flexed my fingers and began. I watched with satisfaction as the field worked its way up my arms and across my chest. Immediately my world was plunged into darkness. This wasn’t just night, or being in the dark. This was a complete lack of light. Complete darkness. I shivered slightly and it felt as if I’d walked into a walk-in freezer.

  I must have shouted or gasped in fright, because I heard Renee chuckle. “Everything go black?”

  “Yeah,” I replied shakily. It was starting to get uncomfortably cold.

  “I th
ink it’s getting colder.”

  “Yep, it’ll do that, absence of light,” Renee confirmed. “It’s not dangerous.”

  “I don’t like this,” I stated. It was getting quite uncomfortable.

  “Yeah,” Renee whispered. “It’s quite disconcerting.”

  “I don’t see how this is in any way useful,” I grumbled.

  “Oh, it’s not.” Renee chuckled. “Not like that anyway – you’re doing it wrong.”

  I immediately dropped the field around me and was bombarded by the sensation of light and heat washing over my body. I had to clench my eyes shut. When I at last opened my eyes I couldn’t see properly. Everything was blurry and my eyes stung a little as they filled with tears. I began to blink rapidly, trying not to let them fall.

  “You let me keep that field up all that time before telling me that I was doing it wrong?” I accused darkly.

  “Don’t worry. We all do that the first time,” Renee explained. “You were making the weave too tight.”

  “What?”

  “You have to let some light through.”

  “What?”

  “You need light to see,” Renee explained, breaking off each word as if speaking to a child. “Let some light through your field.”

  “But then I won’t be invisible,” I argued.

  “Not completely, no,” Renee agreed. “That’s not the point though. You don’t need to be completely invisible.”

  I tried it again, this time ensuring that the threads were a little looser. The field enveloped me and it was if a veil had been thrown over my eyes. It was weird, the veil moved and pulsed across my vision and made areas of the room fade into a greyish haze and then become visible again.

  “This is weird.”

  “You’re doing it right then,” Renee confirmed. “Go into the hall and have a look, there’s a mirror.”

  I stumbled across the room, accidently catching my shin on the edge of the couch that I couldn’t see properly.

  “Watch for the vase,” Renee yelled out, reminding me of its existence just before it flashed into my vision and then immediately disappeared.

  “How do you get around like this?” I called back.

  “The better you get at the technique, the easier it becomes to see. I’m almost at the point where my vision is hardly impaired at all,” Renee explained. “You’ll get better with more practice.”

  “If I don’t accidently walk off a cliff first,” I murmured ruefully. My shin still hurt.