Maker

Chapter: 2

Chapter: 2

I sat down and brushed everything in the trash. Damn him. The paper went too, but that didn’t matter—the address was burned into my memory the moment I saw it.

I told myself I had a choice, but I didn’t; not if I wanted to continue my endeavor of one day becoming a decent human being. I was frustrated he’d backed me into a corner, but I suppose that was part of his job. Sometimes it seemed like being backed into a corner was mine.

I looked at the trash where the shattered prism lay. I’d only made four. It was a simple design, and therefore resilient. No one had ever come back with a broken one before. How much residual magic did it have to absorb to heat up like that?

It didn’t feel good knowing there was something within a few miles of where I stood that could do that. Whatever it was had to be beastly as far as magical force. The prism hadn’t just shattered; it had shattered a day or more after the spell had been cast.

I dropped my head in my hands. Two kids missing and I was thinking about myself. There was no place for children in the supernatural world. The woman who taught me about magic was named Tema Rion. She had tortured me since I was six. She’d called it training, which just proves how gullible I was as a child.

She’d cut me open more times than I could count, used me as a guinea pig for magical experiments, and I was certain she was the reason I couldn’t remember two-thirds of my life. She was dead now, but her memory held enough sway to get my pulse racing with a familiar amalgamation of anger and fear.

I took a deep breath and let it out. Then again. Then a third time.

“Dammit.” I huffed in frustration at my neurochemistry. I wasn’t going to get far if I let my fears run wild. Meditation to calm myself down was a skill I picked up early in life. Just how early I couldn’t say. Up until about six years ago, most of my childhood was a blur of suffering, hunger, confusion, and screaming.

I put my hands together on the desk and spread them apart about six inches. “Light,” I said. There was a chill in the air as I cast. A thin beam of illumination traveled from one hand to the other and back again with a slight hum.

This was the spell I’d used to train as a kid. Despite the associated memories, it was relaxing and helped me focus. The light moved slowly enough to govern my breathing. Left to right, inhale. Right to left, exhale.

When I felt the fear rise again, I watched the light and did what I always did when meditating; I thought about elementary particles.

All wizards get a physics education, whether it’s formal training or a crash course in the school of hard knocks. Even magic must yield to the almighty study of everything. Unlike most wizards, I fell in love with the subject.

Every mage I’d met saw the universe as something holding them back; most even going so far as to dismiss science entirely and subscribe to long outdated ways of thinking about the world.

There are indeed four fundamental forces that shape the earth, and they are not concoctions of nitrogen and oxygen or mixtures of silica, alumina, and iron. Not the universal solvent, and certainly not the rapid oxidation of a material in an exothermic chemical process of combustion. Don’t get me wrong, I like throwing fire around as much as the next wizard, but there’s nothing mythical about it.

Only when you let go of all the mysticism garbage can you see the world for its breathtaking beauty.

The cosmos is a giant clock made of anarchy that’s always on time.

It runs on laws. Infallible, unbreakable, no exception laws. No excuses, no passes, and no uncertainty.

That was part of the reason I didn’t relate to most people. They were always adding needless complications to straightforward concepts. When someone chafes at the idea of a law that applies under all circumstances, it’s certain they are only looking for a reason why it shouldn’t apply to them.

I hear it when they whine about things not being fair. Absurd. The playing field is now, and has always been, perfectly level. If it isn’t a law of the universe then it’s something they made up, or worse—society made it up, and they’re just following along.

I break Rollo’s laws whenever it’s advantageous. Because I can.

But no one can plead insanity to escape entropy. I’d love to hear someone build a case for why they shouldn’t yield to conservation of momentum. The universe doesn’t allow for sympathy, doesn’t deal in favoritism, and anytime anyone crosses a line, they die.

Simple. Beautiful.

It can seem like a brutal taskmaster, but no. It’s an uncaring overlord presiding over a rigid system that leaves no doubt where you stand, what’s required, and what will not be tolerated. It’s a wonder that I was the only person I knew who found comfort in that.

For example, any mortal is permitted to move energy from one place to another. That could be something as straightforward as throwing a rock, or as complicated as making a potion that bursts into flame.

The energy of the universe, most often expressed as heat, can be put into anything. It was why old things made by expert hands—and handled often with focus or intent—had power.

The Sistine Chapel is magical. Men and women working on it for years, getting everything just right. The Great Pyramid at Giza is like that. Thousands of people working for decades. Each one imparting a little magic, each day, into each stone. Not to mention the billions looking upon it in wonder over the millennia. As a result, it was hands down the greatest single source of magic on the planet.

As far as the universe is concerned, wizards are just advanced humans. No normal human can gather the energy needed to light a candle all on their own. A few dozen together could have enough power, but they’d have no way to harness it and make it do anything.

Wizards are humans born with a harness. We can reach out to all those electrons, quarks and bosons, take a little power from each and direct the energy elsewhere. The difference being that wizards do it on purpose and not unconsciously like normal humans; but the universe is immune to such trifles.

That’s why it gets cold when most spells are cast. The energy is literally being sucked out of the room.

I have a hypothesis that is why wizards are almost always depicted wearing thick, elaborate robes. This life is a chilly one.

Throwing fireballs like an Italian plumber is nice and all, but enough cold would kill you. Without taking the time to recover, I could die of hypothermia, or have some of the blood in my body freeze at just the wrong moment. All the fuzzy bunny slippers in the world couldn’t save me from a potent incantation making sno-cones in my brain

I could cast a spell to destroy the world, standing in the center of a volcano, wearing a heating blanket, with a steaming cup of cocoa and I’d still freeze to death long before it went off.

Mages trained long and hard to gather energy from outside their body. The better their focus, the more power they can wield and the further out they can get it from. But no matter how much training we do, a spell will always chill someone down to their bone marrow, and it never becomes something that could be construed as safe.

The power out in the world is practically infinite, but the power inside my body is easier to get. It’s the classic question of speed vs. power.

Speed is riskier, but I’ve always been weak. If I had to cast a spell and couldn’t get it done in time, I was probably gonna die anyway.

Tema had been in the majority of those who saw physics as a hindrance. Horrid b***h that she was; she leaned far the other way on the speed vs. power debate, and no wonder—she had been one of the strongest wizards on the planet.

It hadn’t been the cold that killed her, but the mental strain… and I helped a little.

Mental exhaustion was a part of casting, and that could be fatal too. Gathering energy and releasing it wasn’t like flexing a muscle. It was like an emotionally draining day after an all-nighter, raised to the power of a relationship conversation that starts with “It’s not me, it’s you.”

I could cast ten spells and run a mile with ease. Cast ten spells and sit down for a math test and I was screwed.

That’s what the spells were for. Wizards need some way to keep all that energy in check. If it’s uncontrolled, even for an instant, bad things happen. The incantation for a spell is a tool to hone intent and focus all that power.

It was the reason I couldn’t just copy someone’s words and gestures and get the same result. “Abracadabra” might let me pull a rabbit out of a hat, but it could incinerate the next wizard who tried it.

There were dangers, but they seldom came up as long as you were careful and didn’t start thinking you were special enough to put one over on the universe.

Tema’s final scream echoed in my mind. Her last cry as the universe ripped her from existence. I shivered a bit and reminded myself how happy I was that she was dead. All my hatred and anger aside, she had been something special—but not special enough.

Reliving her last moments threw off my focused deep breathing. The light spell in my hands shattered, and I flinched. I checked my pulse and didn’t have to wait the full fifteen seconds to know it was through the roof.

Meditation… Fail.