Vignette - Test of Dreams 2

Prog pressed his back against the berry bushes stem. Although calling something big enough to hide his entire body a stem rather than a trunk still felt decidedly odd. Not that it mattered today. A few simple checks confirmed that his scent blocker was active (near-jasmine flowers dried and ground up into a potpourri scent bag rather than a more magical option) his foci was ready and he was fully behind cover.

All was in readiness. Now they all just had to wait.

And, nerves gradually tightening into cables, that's what they did.

Till at last the ground began to rumble and the passel of hogs came bounding through with considerable speed. Speed that came to a snarling, squealing halt as they hit the pit traps and ankle breaking gopher holes. Hogs might be able to negate the initial impact, but that wouldn’t save them from a bed of spikes or a trapped leg. Nor from the men and women waiting in ambush around those traps.

Simple elemental spells slashed out in waves even as vine cable nets with rock weights were flung over the trapped beasts. A horde of fire darts, icicles and rock spikes. Even Prog contributed with a simple, but robust, jet of flames. Battle magic might not be his specialty, but everyone needed at least a few basic combat spells.

But it wasn’t the spells that did the majority of the damage. Nor that protected them from the hogs violent responses. Mostly it was the prep work that had laid out a series of pit traps, trip lines and unsafe terrain. It wasn’t just the the large spike trap that kicked off the fight by removing the largest (and leading) hog from the fight. A series of additional traps had been laid out to deal likewise with the follow up beasts as they charged into the now exposed ambush. Their predictable battle fury led them stumbling and dying through the well prepared ground.

Or at least most of the follow up beasts.

He grimaced in pain as an unseen hog, having fallen significantly behind his brethren managed to avoid every trap before he lept in a magic assisted blur that completely removed Camille from Prog’s sight. No time to mourn while on the mission. He reminded himself for what felt like the hundredth time, snapping off another fire dart. Keep it together. With its motion charge expended the beast was vulnerable, and several men and women took ruthless advantage to bombard it with stone spikes and even a few spears. It fell quickly under the assault, but that wouldn’t bring back Camille.

Nothing would.

Things began to quiet down with the exception of the largest pit, now well covered in nets and rocks. The high tier 2 beasts trapped within was the reason they’d risked coming out this far. His divinations had predicted that it would tier up soon, absent any interference. So here they were to provide the interference. It’s final squeals died down at last under the steady bombardment of over 20 guardians. A bit of overkill considering the nature of this trap, but use more, lose less. A belief that he lived by.

It wasn’t always practical, not when the nature of threats were unclear and there were many such threats to be dealt with. But then, that was the point of divination. Some called it fortunetelling or soothsaying. It wasn’t really. No more than old world weather predictions were. If you looked east and saw a heavy dark cloud with the wind blowing to the west, it was a good bet that there would be rain.

The familiar thought carried him over to the edge of the pit where the high tier hog was already being butchered down. Everything on the beast was valuable, from his blood and bones to the ever tasty flesh.

It had to be, considering the price included the life of a guardian. If divination were really capable of telling the complete future, how he wished he could use it to prevent such accidental deaths.

It does! He reminded himself, just not always visibly. If this beast had been fully tier 3, then a simple spike trap with nets might not have been terribly useful. The strength and durability of such a beast had to be seen to believe. Simple wooden spikes would snap off rather than pierce it’s hide, and the earth walls of the hole might as well be paper.

The small price now, would have been dramatically worse later.

That was the point of his magic. To read the signs the world provided. The unstable consumption of the nearby magic field that predicted the evolution of a beast. The fault lines of competing territory that predicted transit paths and the state of the greenery that said when the migration would begin.

Take all that and intuit the probable results. With it he’d managed to keep the holds surroundings relatively clear and safe over the last few years. But this beast foretold a change. He wasn’t ethically raised and locally sourced. No, he'd wandered into Prog’s detection range already high tier 2, just waiting for the opportunity to jump up.

An opportunity they’d just insured would never happen. But what if he’d delayed a bit more before migrating? Appeared as a tier 3? What about the next beast? All things had causes, and most had effects. The ruthless culling of the local beasts had created a vacuum of power and nature abhorred such vacuums.

The effect would be coming home to roost.

Trekking back toward the hold with the hunting party he mulled it over. He knew his strengths. With a bit of effort, now that he knew what to look for, he could predict dangerous migrations. Power vacuum plus background magic flows and the availability of food supplies... He stopped his mind from proceeding through the lists of possible inputs. There would be time enough for that later.

The problem was he also knew his weaknesses. He could completely know what was coming, but be unable to do anything about it. Divinations helped to predict what was coming. They didn’t provide much of a punch to deal with it. Pit traps and ambushes were a real force multiplier, sure. But for a multiplier to work he had to have some force to start with!

If he just had someone to team up with, he groused for perhaps the thousandth time. He would set up ambushes for them, and let someone more offensively focused go to town. Unfortunately it wasn’t to be. Even worse, guardians followed in the footsteps of their Pathfinders. His lot were great at detecting incoming threats and intuiting solutions based on small bits of data, but none of them had much of a punch either.

He might not be able to see the future, but he could predict this one pretty damn well. Sooner or later something bigger than they could handle would migrate in from outside their zone of control, and his underpowered troops wouldn’t be able to handle it.

He had to make a change.

Training and the assumptions of the elders can only take a man so far. That was a hard reality of life. His current mastery was acquired by learning from his elders, and step by step slightly improving on where they stopped.

The problem was along with the good there was a great deal of bad. The weather was predicted not based on the future, but by understanding the present. That was an acceptable metaphor. But it fell through when he wanted to manipulate that coming future. His elders had worn blinders, the weather can’t be changed! He was stuck against what they didn’t know and bound by what they did.

But this ambush, and many more like it they’d pulled off, showed that the future was not exactly like the weather. With the weather all you could do was close the windows and fix the roof. But why stop there?

‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’

And it was time to man up.

He couldn’t let the wall of someone else's preconception control what he could and could not do. If magic was possibilities, the many potentials waiting to be reduced to one reality then divination was about reading the present possibilities for the most likely results. All possible events were contained in the amorphous flow of energy that backed reality, then could he go beyond reading the likely events and move into forcing the preferred ones?

He was sick of just seeing what was coming, it was time to take the power needed to change it.

Chapter 14

He set his spoon down regretfully. He was far shy of bloated, but it was the optimal stopping point. Give it another half hour and he would feel ‘full’. A particularly unpleasant reality for a foodie. He always felt like he had room for ‘a few more bites’ but if he gave in to it, he would regret it later.

“That was delicious, Lissette. I don’t know how you do it, but I am so very glad that you do.” With a last envious look at the still heavily laden table he pushed his chair back to make room for his expanding waistline.

“Mommy’s best!” Little John piped in. At 3 years of age his high pitched voice was a bit garbled, but Timothy got the point. He was actually named Bartholomew Mason, under the more recent trend of naming children something unusual to prevent guesses. It wasn’t quite Rumplestiltskin but Bartholomew was offbeat enough to do the trick. For more everyday use he was nicknamed after his Grandfather. That or in expectation of his adult size. With his parents the comparison wasn’t exactly a stretch.

“Yes she is.” Regi said in a rather disgustingly, fatuous baby voice. What was it about young children that turned grown adults into fools? One of those mysteries of the universe Timothy had no desire to plumb.

Even if he was ridiculously cute…

Moving on.

“Thank you, loves.” The large black woman stood up from the table. While she’d been decidedly rubenesque, years of harsh living had changed all of them. The term amazonian seemed more appropriate now. Thankfully, while constant exercise and inconstant warfare had trimmed the fat, it hadn’t trimmed the skills that led to it. The combined dishes on the table, colorful with various peppers, fruits and exaotic seasonings were as delicious as ever. A disquietingly quick step, for a woman of her considerable size, put her in range to drop a kiss on Little John's head on the way to a sideboard liberally decorated with jars and bottles.

“Care for a snort?” She lifted up a distinctively blue bottle of the French Cordial. Ya, she knew his weakness.

“Please, but just a single.”

She snorted, but complied before pouring two decidedly more generous portions for herself and Regi. Serving them didn’t take more than a moment, although a small detour was required as she assured little John and Ant that this was an adult desert and they would get theirs in a minute. A promise she quickly followed up on, leaving Timothy and his brother at the table for a few minutes.

“You are looking decidedly relaxed, brother mine. Should I summon you a servant to help you home?”

“Only if he brings a wheelbarrow. Don’t snipe at me when you eat like this all the time.”

“Not all the time. I’d hate to inflate your already large head, but we eat much more simply when we don’t have company.”

“Not sure I believe that anything Lissette cooks counts as simple.”

“Can’t really argue with that. But getting back on subject. You do look like you finally put down a 200 lb pack. Was teaching that much of a load?”

“To start with, yes! Teaching is incredibly stressful.”

He paused, standing up with Regi as Lissette slid back into the dining room, closing the door behind her. “I dropped the littles off next door to play a bit before bed. Why is teaching stressful? I would think all the defense work or putting in new thresholds would take the cake.”

They both waited for her to seat herself before following suit. Some things are ingrained by early training. “Those are stressful too, but it's different. With teaching it's like a ticking time bomb. You won’t know for a long time whether you did it right.”

“Did it right?” Regi raised an eyebrow, “I’ve heard you say a thousand times that there isn’t one right way.”

“True, I misspoke. But while there may not be a right way, there are uncountable wrong ways. Especially with new pathfinders.”

“Pathfinders? Ahh, that's right. You teach a class for guardians too. What is it once a week?” Lissette asked.

“Every other week, actually. And that’s an easy one by comparison.” He didn’t wait for the obvious question. “Guardians are easy. I just need to explain in detail what I thought and intended when I made the enchantments they are using. The more they can understand, about both me and the enchantment, the better they’ll be at using it. But pathfinders? The same class might as well be poison. Poison of the mind.”

“Why?” Lissette prodded him. He glanced up to see if Regi wanted to handle that one. A small head shake left the ball in his court.

“Haa, let me think.” He took a drink to give him a few more moments to organize his thoughts. Then another moment for a second sip. Damn. ”Every new pathfinder needs to find ways of thinking and ways of casting that fit them. If I explained in detail how I did it, then it will be damn hard for them not to default to that. Sort of like not thinking about a pink elephant. So when I teach guardians I say ‘I did it this way and you will need to do the same’. But when I do it for pathfinders it's ‘how many different ways can all of you think to do this. No, no. Don’t say it outloud’ that would poison each other, ‘write down 10 for me’. It’s decidedly tedious. Even when I tell them something I discovered I have to be damn careful to warn them that it’s not the only way.”

Taking another small sip he continued. “I even have a quote for the idea. Put it as a stamp on every stone tablet. ‘A’ way, not ‘the’ way.”

“I heard about that. A number of the ladies were laughing about your ‘tablets’ when I was down in Paradise with the kids. Felt a bit to 10 commandments-ish for them. Putting all that information on essence stone slabs. What's wrong with paper?”

“The quality. Crap paper in an extremely moist climate along with equally crappy ink means I’d have to rewrite them every 5 to 10 years. No thanks.”

Regi grinned, “Why not make the kids do it? Copy their own textbooks to make sure they really read them.”

Timothy stopped to think about that wistfully, but regretfully shook his head. “I try not to waste their time on busywork, and that would definitely qualify. There are plenty of necessary but unpleasant jobs that need doing out there. If they need humbling that's a much better option. Besides, what if they make mistakes? Think of ten classes playing telephone with the texts…” he shuddered. Small changes in wording, or at least the intent behind it, could have disproportionate effects.

“Uhhuh, that explains why you didn’t use paper, but why does each slab have a domed top on it?” Lissette asked, giving him a doubtful glance.

She had him, no point dodging it now. “Because I have a low sense of humor, of course.”

That drew a few laughs and an unfortunately vigorous agreement from Regi.

“So when does your next class start?” Regi chimed in once the laughter settled.

“I trust you mean for Pathfinders? It doesn’t. At least not more than the occasional question and answer session. The second reason I used stone is it holds the intent considerably longer. Those pages don’t just hold explanations, but the feelings and intentions behind them. That plus an entrenched payment method that requires them to work for their learning, no, or at least very little, parental help permitted, and it should give them a decent platform to start from.”

“So that's it? You taught one class and you mostly leave the next one to it’s own devices?” Regi sounded decidedly doubtful. No surprise there.

“Even if I was still teaching that would be the case. It’s like that tired old saw about leading a horse to water, but can’t make it drink. Pathfinders need to think for themselves and you can’t force that. All I can do is provide them with a base of what we think we know. Provide them with a list of what we have done, spell and enchantment wise, carefully devoid of all the assumptions and personal thought that went into it. Then put them in an environment where they have dirty nasty tasks to do. They’ll figure out ways to magically do them…. Or they will have to shovel some nasty stuff by hand.”

“NO, I’ll have to provide advice and answer questions here or there, but my time as ‘principle-cum-teacher’ is thankfully over. I’m looking forward to having more time for my research and a bit less stress now that I don’t have to deal with ‘disasters’ and ‘emergencies’ all the time. I’m looking forward to the quiet.”

Regi snorted, “You know, I thought I was going to feel bad about this. Even set up a nice dinner and drinks to smooth it over. What a waste. You had it coming if you can say something like that outloud and not even knock on wood? You ought to know better than to tempt fate that way. “ Still shaking his head he stood up, carefully lifting and setting his chair down rather than the standard casual slide most people do. Probably got sick of breaking chairs that way… Timothy shook that thought away with growing nerves.

“Regi, brother mine, what do you mean?”

Regi ignored him for a minute, digging through a drawer. But Lissette was laughing softly to the side. Finally finding what he was looking for, Regi walked back over to drop a wooden tablet in front of him. “Go on.” He rumbled, “It’ll explain as well as I can.”

Feeling a bit sick to the stomach over the implications Timothy nevertheless looked down and started reading. His stomach did not find any relief in what he read. It was the emergency call log, with critical issues at the top, thresholds or holds currently under siege with guestimated hold out times, followed by important but less time sensitive issues like rotting food in long term storage or regular recurring sickness. Brush fires, in effect, that need to be put out before they rage into full blown forest fires.

He glanced up ready to complain and stopped, Regi had deep seated dark circles under his eyes and a certain set to his unbowed shoulders. He might be moving about and joking, but there were multiple signs of long term exhaustion if he bothered to look. Considering he’d repeatedly suggested he take care of himself and lay off some of the load, he couldn’t in good conscience turn this down. That didn’t mean he couldn’t complain about it.

“Well shit.”

“Enjoy! You did tell me I needed to share the load a bit.” Way to rub it in.

“Uh-huh.”

“And I’m sure with your stellar intellect you can make short work out of these minor inconveniences -” Minor, like trying to find out what was causing sickness to spread was easy? “- and I look forward to hearing about your great successes!”

Timothy sighed, “-suddenly it looks like the school needs me!”

“Hah! I’m so glad you could explain in detail why they don’t need you anymore. You did a good job over there. As a reward -”

Timothy chimed in with him to the familiar refrain “Here’s another job!” Throwing back the dregs of the expensive cordial Timothy managed a smile. The luxuries that surrounded them (whether he partook or not!) came at a price. Great food, great drinks and living company. Somebody had to make it all possible. Or rather, a lot of somebodies.

“Alright brother, this fish is well and truly hooked. Why don’t you point out what you think I should start with hmm? And any suggestions for the approach.”

As the second, much more detailed discussion began, Timothy couldn't help but notice the mouthed thank you and the tears of relief Lissette let out from behind his brother's large but overloaded shoulders.