We ended up only taking a day off our journey, neither of us really wanting to stay in the forest for too much longer. For our day off I ended up practicing with my [Growth] spell and managed to get us a nice stash of berries, with the yield slowly increasing the more frequently I used my mana. While I spent my day doing that Brook and Sophie explored around us to see if they could figure out which way the forest ended. So when it was time to head out, we had a rough idea of where the trees seemed to thin a bit.

After six or seven hours of walking, it is kind of hard to keep track when you cannot track the sun across the sky, we finally found the edge of the forest.

“Finally, some sunlight! Oh beautiful sun, how I missed you so.”

“There’s no need to be so dramatic Brook, we still had sunlight through the trees. It is nice to finally be out of the woods though.” After some brief deliberation we decided we could skirt along the outskirts of the forest until we found some sort of road or sign to travel with.

As we made our way south-west around the trees we could see a symbol carved into the trees every so often. It sort of looked like a cross with three lines protruding from the bottom of the cross, and was obviously man made.

“It’s probably a bandit claiming their territory so that other brigands know not to poach their victims in the area. That or it might be some sort of marking that rangers leave for each other, to mark a direction toward a camp or something?” Brook was quick to offer her opinion on the mysterious symbols. Sophie just sniffed the tree a couple of times before peeing nearby.

“Gotcha, guess we will move into the tree line when we camp at night.” Bandits had been a problem in the past but it was one of the few things Florida got right, having very few bandit attacks at all most times of the year. Apparently the whole, ‘Nobody wants to be in Florida’, applies to brigands and ne’er-do-wells as well as regular people. I couldn’t really blame them, the place was a cesspool and most of us there didn’t have enough for ourselves, let alone anything to be stolen. Somehow my solution to the problem didn’t put Brook at ease and her eyes darted along the tree line while we walked.

“So, Luke, how is it that a farmer like you ended up with a combat skill like the one you used to save us? Or any spell at all really, I thought that they were impossible to learn without being in a mages guild or something.”

“Well, you aren’t exactly wrong. Mage guilds horde a lot of their proprietary spells and magical knowledge but they still put very weak spells out into circulation. If they didn’t, they would have a much harder time finding children with strong magical talent. As for my spell, it was just [Weak Growth], it kind of… evolved? after leaving home.”

“Mmm.” The entire time we spoke, Brook hadn’t stopped being vigilant. The question was a good one though, spells were wildly expensive and difficult to learn. It wasn’t unheard of for somebody to learn a spell naturally, although it was very far from common, and most other methods of learning a spell were difficult to say the least. After the Nerf, nobody could remember any of their magic. It wasn’t until sometime later that the first spell scroll was located in a dungeon loot, and magic started to be reproduced.

A spell scroll was a sheet of paper that held the formula for a spell. The first one that was located was some form of [Magic Dart] if what the traveling merchants had said was true. The men who found it were unable to read the scroll and had no idea what it was, so they brought it back to their village. One of their wives was able to read it and learned the spell, also populating a mana section to her sheet that hadn’t been seen before.

One other person was able to read that first scroll and learned the spell, but nobody else was able to learn it. People with the gift could still read it, and while holding the scroll they could cast it, but nobody else was capable of learning it. Naturally the next thing attempted was transcribing the spell again, that way the ones who hadn’t learned it could still cast it. It didn’t work. It wasn’t until somebody reached the late stages of the spell, years later, that they were finally able to recreate the formula.

Although the original spell was regular [Magic Dart], the newly written spell came out as a [Weak Magic Dart]. While writing the scroll was very much an autonomous process, the mage in question was able to realize at some point that she’d written down a 3, without context. In her heart, she knew that only 3 people would be able to learn this vastly weakened version of the spell and had to select very carefully who she wanted to learn it, and so the beginnings of the very first mages guild had begun. As assumed, only three of her friends with “the gift” were able to learn the spell, but surprisingly this time the page disintegrated after being learned the third time.

So there they were, five women who knew the spell and a single copy of the spell to be cast from those who hadn’t learned it, birth of ‘The Coven’. At this point, many other spells had been discovered from dungeons and even a few prodigies had self-discovered spells. The ability to teach any number of students a spell upon mastering it shook the fledgling mage’s scene, leading to the rapid formation of several guilds and the hoarding of knowledge. There were still a few spells that were mastered and given out to the populace (sold to merchants) like [Weak Growth], a mana-inefficient spell that had little combat use and was better served with farmers.

My father had gotten the made-scroll last winter and gifted it to me after neither he nor my mother could learn it. I pushed back against it, telling him I was still leaving to become a mage and that he couldn’t guilt me into staying, but that was never his intention. He’d given me my first spell which I used every morning to help the crop come in, and it had saved my life within the first week of travel.

“Into the woods, now!” A shove from Brook took me off the side of the road and tumbling into the trees. She grasped my hand and pulled me with her as she dashed through the low bushes and twigs, deeper into the forest away from the road.

“What’s going on?” I’d recovered by now and was running behind her rather than being pulled, trying to figure out why in the hell we were sprinting back into the forest after just having escaped. I was shushed and it wasn’t until 10 minutes of sprinting/running later that we slowed down and she explained herself.

“I heard a bird call.”

The blank look on my face must have conveyed exactly how that sounded to me, because she continued the train of thought a second later.

“It was the same bird call I heard when the bandits attacked my parent’s caravan. It is how they signal to the other scouts that they’ve seen someone on the road and should set up an ambush.” I’d almost forgotten how Brook ended up lost in the forest by herself, and finally understood why she seemed so uneasy after seeing the carvings of bandits on the trees.

“Right, thanks for listening out then.” I had not heard a bird call but I’d also been lost in thought, so it was a good thing that Brook had been so vigilant.

The rest of the day was spent walking through the forest parallel to the road, or at least as close to that as we could get. I used my [Minor Growth] whenever I regenerated my mana to full, saving some incase we came into conflict but also trying to advance progress with the spell. I nursed a few bushes to bloom berries and a few trees to drop their nuts with my magical fingers, wait. No, not that, I used my spell to refresh my travel rations. Ugh.

Brook also showed me a few herbs to harvest to flavor food or brew into tea, and gathered a few more that she said were a ‘surprise for later’.

When sun set we decided to risk a small fire, doing our best to keep it smokeless. It was a risk, but so was freezing to death and the winter was setting in. Brook boiled some water for a tea in a small portable container I’d brought with me specifically for boiling/cleaning water. We both set around the small flames in silence, staring into the depths of the crackling wood, before Brook spoke up.

“Are you a virgin, Lucas?”

“Wha-Why… where!? Where did that question come from?”

Brook was quiet for a moment, still looking into the fire with her arms around her knees. I realized quickly that the question was just as awkward for her as it was for me.

“Look, I’ve been making advances on you this whole time and you haven’t responded. It’s not like I can’t tell you are interested, just afraid. If you’re a virgin that’s okay.”

Well, in that case, “Yeah. Sorry.”

“Why are you apologizing?” Silence. “Anyway, this is an herb that should help you keep it up. If we are going to do this I want to make sure I am getting something out of it too, until you get more practice at least.” All of the anxiety I thought I’d seen on her face previously was gone as she stood up and poured the water into a cup of the surprise herbs from earlier, and the usual confident and forward Brook was back. She pushed the cup into my hand and I hesitated. Was she doing this because she was scared and alone, or was she genuinely interested in me?

I looked up, to reassure her that this wasn’t necessary and that I’d travel with her and protect her whether or not we were sexual, and was treated to the sight of Brook in her underwear. Just like that she’d stripped and my doubts were erased almost instantly.

“While it’s still warm, hurry up. It doesn’t work as well when it cools too much.”

I down the tea in a few short gulps and stripped as fast as I could. With every second that passed my heart slowed down and my head got heavy. Isn’t that backwards? My eyelids got heavy and I fell over backwards, watching Brook slowly stalk over to me. I got a notification that I couldn’t read in my current state and it faded away quickly to free up my rapidly blurring vision. Brook sat in my lap and leaned over to whisper in my ear.

“Sorry about this, Luke.”

My vision went black and my consciousness fled from me for what felt like the millionth time since I’d set off from home. The last thing I felt was a lingering sensation of pressure on my lips.