Chapter 23: Master of Her Domain

“Hmm, I see you’ve reached the second level of your Lesser Fireball spell. That’s unfortunate,” Hima said, her voice reflecting the annoyance on her face. Miro had just managed to level up a spell for the first time in his life, and the one person he thought would share his joy over the accomplishment dashed it with her complete contempt for it.

“What? What could possibly be disappointing about increasing my spell by a level?” Miro found that he had raised his voice, and a tingling sensation covered both his hands. “What could I possibly do, short of setting my own self on fire, that would actually impress you?”

“The reason it’s disappointing,” Hima answered, with that frustrating tone that sounded as if she was using her last shred of patience on a puppy that refused to be house broken, “Is because now your Lesser Fireball costs 3.5 mana, so though it does more damage, you’re limited to five fireballs per full mana charge instead of six.” Without even the slightest movement of her head, she cast her eyes down to his hands, which he found both to be fully enveloped in a simmering flame. “And put that away. You’re not scaring anyone with that little flicker.”

It had been slow, methodical, and daily, and Miro had followed Hima’s every instruction. Yet still somehow nothing he did was good enough. And not just not good enough, but nothing he tried had even reached above a level where it would no longer attract the full brunt of her scorn and disdain. It was possible that there was something more going on than him just being a bad student or even her being a terrible teacher. Perhaps it was her own arrogance that was keeping him from unlocking his magus powers, from absorbing a new element into his repertoire, and from showing what his full potential was.

“I don’t know about ‘scaring’ anyone, but fire sure seems to make short work of your ice,” Miro spat, nodding his head towards the partially melted target and remembering the hole he blasted in one of Hima’s ice walls when they were fighting the razorbacks.

“Is that right?” She turned to him, her eyes narrowed, her lips tightening and appearing thinner. Despite himself, Miro took a step back. “You think my powers are inherently weaker than yours?” she asked.

If Miro was a smart man, if he’d put more than one additional point into his Intellect stat, Miro would have noticed both Nydra’s and Peteri’s heads snap to attention in response to this exchange. He would have likely noticed that Nydra got up, and would have probably heard her say “Hima” in the most commanding soldier’s voice she could muster. Miro, however, was not yet a smart man at all.

“I’m just saying,” he ploughed on, “Fire melts ice. You can’t argue with facts.” There was nothing Hima could say to that, he thought, but she didn’t need to say anything. Instead, without him even noticing how it happened, she acted, and he found both his hands encased in rough globes of ice. He tried to use his powers to melt them, but even channeling all his efforts he couldn’t move a single finger. The ice’s coldness pressed into his hands and he felt like his skin was on fire.

“Now listen here, you overhyped provincial dilletante,” Hima said in a voice calmer and softer than he’d ever heard it, which somehow made it terrifying. An ice spike grew from each of the blocks encasing his hands and anchored them into the ground before tugging him sharply and bringing him down to his knees. He tried to get up and found that his feet too were rooted with ice that slowly grew up his legs.

“It was your father’s failure that almost led to the imprisonment of all mages.”

The cold in his hands made it feel as though his bones were twisting out of shape and the ice had now enveloped his chest, stinging his heart. Hima approached him and crouched down to look into his eyes. The ice reached over Miro’s head to cover both his mouth and his eyebrows, leaving a narrow slit through which he could see Hima and breathe.

“As his successor, you may be destined to be a jack of all trades. But I am a master of my domain. And you would be wise to never forget that.”

This was fear. Real fear. Not the bandits or village hooligans or the razorbacks. It was when your own heart grew sluggish and questioned continuing its work, and when the cold no longer hurt but was reduced to a distant numbness.

“Hima, let him go,” the muffled voice of Nydra came from somewhere far away.

His eyes grew heavy as the ice embraced him in a feeling that started to resemble warmth and in his dimmed vision he could see Hima’s face, cool and content, yet the health bar above her hovered solidly green – the last thing he could clearly see.

The ice shattered, dropping him to the ground and leaving him breathing shallowly as the newly admitted warmth spread through him in a wave of pins and needles.

Hima went back to join the others and Miro heard Nydra say “I don’t think that was –” but Hima must have made some gesture to cut her off because the soldier never finished her sentence and didn’t seem to mention it again.

They did no more walking that day, Nydra deciding that Miro needed the rest and that perhaps they’d all been pushing themselves too hard and could use a break. An unusual quiet set over their camp. Hima, and especially Peteri, weren’t much for talking on a regular day, but that evening even Nydra preferred to drift through her own thoughts, either looking at the campfire or staring off into the distance for long stretches of time. Miro kept to himself, dutifully discharging his fireballs whenever he‘d accumulate enough mana, aiming them at random rocks for maximum benefit, looking up each time to see if Hima noticed. The icewinder was busy honing her own powers – creating two-foot wide intricate snowflakes in the air, each on its own a work of art, and then dissolving them into fine blue mist.

Miro refused dinner, knowing full well that it could easily come off as a showy tantrum. Instead, he turned in early, setting up his sleeping bag at that perfect distance from the fire where he could feel apart from the group, but not so much that wild animals could carry him off without the other three noticing.

Those other three; there was one thing that united them at the obvious exclusion of Miro – competence. Hima very clearly demonstrated how lacking Miro was in that respect. There was no reason for him to be there. Even if it took them a year to get to the hideout of this northern rebel king, Miro couldn’t see how he could possibly make any difference. His father, he was the one they wanted, but instead they got Miro, barely more impactful than a candle in a windstorm.

He spent a long time there in the sleeping bag, his face turned away from his travelling companions, staring out over the darkening landscape. A murmur of conversation eventually returned to their camp, with long pauses in between, but a significant improvement over the graveyard stillness that had taken hold earlier. At some point, they must have assumed Miro was asleep, because the subject of the hushed discussion turned to his training.

“I’m not going to mince words,” Hima whispered, which made Miro roll his eyes as he wasn’t sure there was ever a time when she chose to mince her words, preferring to clobber people with whole uncut chunks of her speech. “I’m not sure what’s happening here, but he’s not progressing as he should be.”

There was a response from Nydra, but it was lost with the rustling of grass in the wind.

“I don’t know. I thought maybe he needed a Dexterity point but that seemed to have made no difference. I’ve seen a couple of fire mages train before, they’re the most common ones, and none of them had the same issues with controlling something basic like a Lesser Fireball spell.”

“He grew up in that small village ever since his parents died, Hima. Maybe he needs some time to warm up,” Nydra suggested.

“It’s not that. I’ve seen raw recruits too, but I haven’t seen anything like this. Besides, didn’t his father grow up in some backwater on the shores of the Boundless Sea? Do you know if he experienced any problems like this?”

“No. As far as I know, he’d taken the Akademiya by storm. They’d almost been giddy that the northern rebellion started because they could show to the world what Jalvyn was capable of.”

Miro tried to suppress a frustrated exhale so as not to alert the others that he was listening. He’d been right in his suspicions, they’d hoped his destiny was written before him. But at the end of his father’s journey, his father was dead and couldn’t even save Miro’s mother from the same fate. What did that mean about Miro then, not being able to amount even to that legacy, failing before he was given the chance to fail big?

“Then I don’t know what it is,” Hima continued. “He seems to be gaining experience and levelling up faster than any mage I know, but beyond that … I’m completely stumped. Not a feeling I’m used to.”

“Will you continue training the lad?” Nydra asked.

“I have my instructions from the Akademiya. And I’m not planning on failing them by choice.” There was a pause, filled by a low whistle from Peteri. “But unless we manage to solve whatever’s going on beneath the surface here, he’ll never become a proper mage, let alone a magus.”

It was almost comforting for Miro to know that he was so terrible at what he was supposed to do that even Hima seemed to assume that there was something greater going on here, and not just his irredeemable incompetence. It almost didn’t even sting anymore. So much so that he had half a mind to get up and lead them on a late-night march just so that they could reach their destination faster, get it over with, and Miro could go back to a blissful life-long retirement tending sheep and chopping wood with Bondook.

What did; however, Hima mean when she claimed his father almost caused the other mages to be imprisoned? Surely that couldn’t have been justified solely because his father failed to thwart another royal assassination attempt by the remnant of the rebel king’s forces. Or was there something else about that day Hima had chosen not to share with him? It was odd to think that he was alive somewhere then, infant though he was, and wondered if he tried hard enough, would some blurry images emerge from his mind? Instead, he summoned up his character sheet, same as it had been the day they fought the nest of razorbacks, except for one detail that nearly made him bounce back and out of his sleeping bag.

In the final line labeled “debuffs”, one that he had never really paid attention to because all his life it merely said “unavailable”, it now contained two chilling words: “Mother’s Blood”.