Chapter 1: Level 3 Mage

If there was one thing Miro had learned to do over the years, it was how to steal for himself a few minutes of time out from under the watchful eye of Bondook. For example, as far as Bondook knew, it should have taken about a half hour to corral the sheep from their favourite bend in the river where they were grazing and bring them home. If Miro took any longer, Bondook would somehow know, even if he was deeply involved in something else, and would inevitably suspect that Miro was up to no good, such as secretly practicing his skills, and most of the time, Bondook would be right. What Bondook was not aware of; however, was that Miro spent weeks carving himself a secret shortcut through the woods and the extra few minutes that earned him were devoted to doing precisely the thing that Bondook forbade him from doing. What Miro did not count on was just how vigilant and mistrusting Bondook was.

As the sheep grazed lazily behind him on the lush grasses that grew within the river bend, Miro crouched down and concentrated on the small pile of twigs he had constructed for this occasion on the previous day. He had never worked on a pile that large before and hoped that if he were able to ignite it, the success would reward him with a greater experience boost. His assumptions were correct, and after no small amount of effort, a thin column of smoke rose above the wood, and both his general experience bar and his spell experience bar crawled forward by a bigger amount than they had in ages. Crawl though they did, and even despite that modest bonus, it appeared that it would still take years for him and his incinerate spell to reach their respective next levels.

Miro reached into himself to pull up the stat sheet that he’d been able to summon since encountering it for the first time when he was around ten. Bondook had sent him to the barn to ruminate on how Miro got so irresponsible that he would forget to lock the sheep up before a storm. As Miro was washing the mud from the wool of the sheep Bondook spent hours retrieving, the introspection touched on a hidden door within Miro and numbers and words floated out before him that he’d never seen before. Unable to shake the translucent golden letters from his vision, he ran to Bondook in a panic. The man’s sudden pale constitution, and the angry admonishment to “Never look at that bedeviled nonsense again” didn’t help at all with Miro’s fear, which eventually did chase away the cursed stat sheet, and kept it hidden for years. Adolescent curiosity, when young boys tend to explore everything about themselves that they may have not considered exploring before, made him retrieve it again, curious about what it all meant, and then at regular intervals ever since.

That day by the river, as the little pile of sticks continued to smoke, it read as follows:

MIRO KALDOUN

Level 3 Mage

Strength: 1

Dexterity: 1

Vitality: 1

Intelligence: 1

Charisma: 3

Spells: Incinerate level 1 (cost: 0.5)

Maximum Mana: 8

Mana regen: 1 per 2 hours

Debuff: unavailable

Meanwhile Volod, who was the only other person in their village with special powers like Miro’s, and who also must have had his own stat sheet that declared him a “mage”, had recently reached level 5. This also meant that he leveled up his ability to move objects with just his mind and could now lift two-hundred-pound bales of hay straight off the ground and up onto the barn rafters. He was also the one who was dating the older of the Stolyar Sisters, and in Miro’s mind those two facts were inexorably connected.

When the first flickers of flame revealed themselves in the lower levels of his miniature bonfire, Miro spied through the trees the approach of a familiar health bar. He had been seeing these things for years – an ethereal bar hovering over the head of any living thing larger than a bug, along with that creature’s name, or some generic description if no name was known to Miro. Older folks’ bars were shorter, those his age significantly longer. The longest he’d ever seen belonged to Volod, the level 5 mage from his village, and Miro wondered if Volod had possessed the same ability and could give Miro any insight into what Miro’s health bar looked like. Volod though had never mentioned it, and as far as Miro could now tell, he was the only one that possessed the skill, whose utility was mostly limited to helping with remembering names, which was only so useful in Miro’s village of two hundred and some folk.

Still, Miro was thankful for it then. Seeing the faint image of one such bar floating towards him through the woods bought Miro enough time to extinguish the smoldering sticks and at least try to act like nothing at all was the matter before Bondook emerged from between the trees with an “a-ha!” look smeared on his face.

At his age, Miro now stood a head taller than Bondook, and though the man had never raised his hand against Miro even when he was a wee lad, Miro still felt himself shrink in the presence of the farmer. Bondook surveyed the scene with squinted eyes that highlighted the wrinkles on his skin, tanned by a lifetime of outdoor work, and finding nothing but a bunch of haphazardly strewn about twigs, gave his round balding head a scratch.

“What have you been up to?” Bondook asked in his usual scratchy voice.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing’s right. You’re moving so slow I can hardly tell you apart from the sheep.”

Miro looked at the flock surrounding him, languidly going through an existence even more repetitive than his, and seeming to suffer little for it.

“Bondook, it’s just that you’ve been working me so hard in this heat I was starting to think that maybe I’d be better off as one of them instead.”

“Is that right?” Bondook crossed his arms, which made him look that much more like an upright bale of hay with a melon for a head. “So, what? You’ve been grazing now?”

“Well it did always annoy you how few vegetables I ate.”

Bondook let out a sound that was as close as he could get to a laugh, though it more resembled a hacking cough and then said, “Come on, you loafer, let’s get them home.” Bondook waved him on and Miro wasted no time in following, hardly believing his luck at having gotten away with it.

It wasn’t entirely luck though that sometimes helped him dodge Bondook’s scrutiny.

The two times Miro had managed to level up on his way to his current level 3, he had been given the opportunity to allocate a point into one of the available skills: Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, Intelligence and Charisma. Both times he committed to Charisma. This had caused a marginal improvement in his ability to talk his way out of things, and the elder Stolyar sister had once laughed at one of his jokes and has generally not completely ignored his existence. He suspected though that Volod had done likewise all four times that he’d leveled up and, if this was something that was at all possible, had also transferred his single Intelligence point to Charisma as well. Miro had once hoped that if he spammed his Charisma stat, he might convince Bondook to let him practice his other skills, though now it looked like it might take years for him to level up again.

And he was about to suffer another setback.

Bondook took only a few steps in the direction of their home before he stopped, raising his head. With one long sniff of Bondook’s squashed-in nose, Miro knew that his goose was cooked.

“Have you been burning again?” Bondook growled and Miro wondered if his points were not better spent in Vitality in order to survive the tirade that was about to follow.

Bondook moved incredibly quickly for a man his age and stature, and Miro had to break into the occasional trot in order to remain within earshot of the dressing down that was delivered all the way back to their house.

The usual talk about danger and ineptitude was first to take the stage, hammering into Miro the idea that Bondook wouldn’t trust him with a match let alone the abilities he was so desperately trying to unlock. In all fairness to Bondook, there was the one incident with the barn fire that prematurely turned several sheep into mutton roasts, but that happened more than four years earlier when Miro was twelve and he would have thought Bondook would have let it be water under the bridge by that point, especially since Miro spent the entire rest of that summer building an entirely new barn all by himself.

The verbal onslaught continued with a discussion of delusions of grandeur that led to foolish dreams of running off and saving the whole Kingdom while forgetting where he came from. Miro only had a moment to ponder where Bondook even picked up such vocabulary before the next phase commenced – this one about the responsibility one had to the laws of nature and how some people ought to be more modest about competing for power with the gods themselves.

When they reached the farm, Bondook pointed at the pile of un-chopped logs sheltered under an overhang behind the house and said, “Till you run out of light,” before going inside and slamming the door behind him.

Miro chopped for hours, until the ache that stretched from his lower back through his shoulders and down into his fingertips turned to numbness. With each stroke of the axe, he counted the ways in which he could get out from under Bondook’s watch and every time he realized that realistically the count amounted to zero and he would start over.

He didn’t even have any “delusions of grandeur” as Bondook had so eloquently accused him of on multiple occasions. That was what some of his friends from neighbouring villages had indulged in, leaving their village to find their own way in the world. Though he supposed at least someone of them were now his former friends, not by virtue of the distance between them but by the fact that they were dead. Nothing good happened “out there” is what Miro gathered, and all he wanted to do was impress the younger Stolyar sister with his fire skills and multiple Charisma points and settle down and raise a flock of sheep of their own someday.

As dusk settled over the only home he knew, he could hardly see for the sweat stinging his eyes. Cows mooed as they reluctantly lumbered home under the thwacks of the switches hitting their backsides, dinnertime stoves filled the air with the faint aroma of smoke, and a swarm of mosquitos made an absolute feast out of Miro’s forearms. Even after the sun had gone down, Miro still had his list of daily chores he needed to complete, such as checking that all the animals were secure for the night, and hauling pails of fresh water from the well.

By the time he was done, Miro had forgotten that he was starving, and since he expected that Bondook had already turned in and left him with nothing, was surprised to find the older man sitting at the table, illuminated by the light of a single candle and chewing on his lower lip as if on the remaining shreds of his vigour.

“Dinner’s cold,” Bondook said flatly, gesturing at his own untouched plate.

Despite waiting for Miro to eat, Bondook insisted that the meal would be spent in complete silence. The only exception was when Bondook paused with the fork halfway to his mouth and as he stared at the chunk of potato impaled at the end of his utensil, shook his head and said, “It’s all for your own good, Miro. Everything’s for your own good.”

There was a strange sort of emphasis that he placed on that “your” that Miro couldn’t identify.

Bondook was not his father. Miro used to have a not-a-mother as well, but shortly after gaining his ability to see people’s health bars, he noticed that the bar over Sierra’s head had begun to empty. He was too terrified to say anything about this to anyone, even after it had gone down to nothing and they buried her in the little plot of land behind the shrine, among the rows of elderly who had withered with time and the youth who had not gained enough wisdom in time to see old age. Walking home that day, after listening to the healer drone on and on about the hope we should maintain in the face of evidence to the contrary, Bondook uttered no words, but Miro noticed that from that day on, Bondook’s bar had gone from green to yellow.

It hung there right as they sat at the dinner table, solid and yellow and full, with his name displayed below it, the single “Bondook” with no last name, if he even had one. Miro noticed though another bar, a smaller faint reflection in the dark window behind Bondook’s head. Miro wrapped his fingers around his empty wooden cup and in one swift motion turned around in his chair and flung it into the corner of the room. The yellow bar instantly emptied and turned black and the word “Mouse” was displayed in grey over the fresh carcass. Miro felt bad, to be sure; a kind of philosophical sadness at taking a life. But mice bred fast, and they got into the grain, so it had to be done. What troubled him far more was how much his experience bar had grown in comparison to any of the other bumps he had experienced recently. Was that all it took? Was this the real cost of magic and what had truly been worrying Bondook about the path Miro was trying to follow?

For one shameful moment he wondered how much experience could be gained out of doing the same to Bondook.