Spending some time along, I tried to sort out all my thoughts and feelings. Being told your mother had plans to kill your father was rather difficult to swallow. But, on the other hand, it really wasn’t so a bad deal for father either – he was probably over twenty when he met mother; she was going to keep him young and healthy for a hundred years; and she was the one giving him a paradise to live in by providing food, coin, young girls to share his bed…

Had he never met her, he’d be an old wrinkled man almost in his seventies by now. His youth would be gone, and he’d be suffering and close to death’s door. Instead, he was still as young as he had ever been, and he had another fifty years of youthful life to indulge in.

If someone would have made an offer like that back on Earth, they could charge millions of dollars and people would still pay up for such a deal. And, when the time for death finally came, it was swift and painless. Really, it wasn’t a bad deal.

But my mother was going to kill my father!

It was one of those things that made my brain run in circles. I convinced myself it wasn’t bad; that I understood it. And yet, I didn’t like it. But I wasn’t against it, I don’t think. But it wasn’t right!

ARGH!!

It was one of those things that made my brain run in circles…

I guess in some ways, it also helped explain some things to me that I’d always found just a little odd. I used to wonder how Father could pull a girl into his office every day, without wearing his equipment out. The reason for that was simple – mother was using magic to heal and restore his body back to the same perfect state it was in the day before.

It also explained why Mother didn’t care about a girl’s virginity. That’s one of the things you only lose once in your life, and she probably lost hers several thousand years ago. Hard to care about something which you haven’t had for that many years.

But at the same time, it filled my mind with a lot of questions as well. Did I have brothers or sisters? Was any still living? Had she been married before? If I was ageless like she implied, did that mean I wasn’t ever going to develop anymore? Was I doomed to always be stuck a preteen and be unable actually to be with a woman? Was everyone with magic ageless? Were all the girls here going to stay young forever? If so, I could see why they didn’t care about their virginity any more than mother did.

In the end, I decided it was simply too many things to worry about that, I had no way of knowing without asking, and I tried to let my worries go. If I was ageless, I didn’t have any reason to worry. I had plenty of time to learn the answers in the future, and only once chance in this life to enjoy being a child for a while longer. At the age of twelve, I could leave the island here, leave mother and father, and find my own way in the world as a tentative adult.

I’d have thousands of years to learn adult things, deal with adult problems, and worry about adult issues. This was the only precious time I’d ever have where I could just relax and be a child, and I decided to indulge myself in it. When tomorrow is forever, it’s easiest to think just about today.

The next morning, I got up and resumed my normal routine. I ate breakfast late in Le’Nara’s room. We hid from Father and skipped out on his lessons. Things went back to normal, with just a few exceptions. Most evenings now, I took time after supper and before bed to visit mother in her room before father showed up. I asked her various different things about being ageless and about magic in general. We grew closer and I no longer viewed her as a distant unapproachable figure.

My mother had never ignored me; she had just been waiting for me to get old enough to seek her out for the things she could help me with. Mother knows magic. She knows about not growing old. She knows how to manage a school full of teenage girls, and how to defeat enemies with a flick of her wrist. She, however, didn’t have much of a clue at all about how to deal with babies of young children.

As odd as it sounded to me, I was her firstborn child. Apparently, when magic alters one to make them ageless like us, it also alters them so that they’re no longer compatible for children with “normal” people. By using her magic to keep father young, she’d apparently altered his seed enough so that he was able to give her a child. I was a true miracle for her.

Several thousand years of life, and I was her first child. It’s no wonder she was as awkward around me as I was around her sometimes! But, over time, we grew closer and learned to accept each other for the unique individuals that we were.

A few other things I learned were first that I wasn’t finished growing yet. There wasn’t any reason for the magic to halt my growth to full adulthood. It’d just prevent me from growing older after that. Second, magic didn’t keep all people eternally young. In fact, it only affected a very small portion of those who could learn magic, and that was always those with the greatest potential.

Of all the girls on the island, there were generally only one or two out of the whole bunch, who might have an extended lifespan, and usually, they still grew old – only at a slower rate. Currently, there was only one girl on the island who had the potential to become ageless; and that was Le’Nara. Her sister De’Nara also had the same potential, which is why father chose them both as his ‘favorites’. After all, if he trained them well now, when they come back to visit in twenty or thirty years, they’d be just as young and vibrant as ever – and used to indulging in his pleasure.

He truly was an epic dirty old geezer!

Another thing I learned was about male wizards. I had always half feared that they might be outlawed or something since there was never any on the island. Apparently, that’s not the case at all. It’s just that male wizards are much rarer than female wizards. Men had evolved to grow bigger muscles, and there were a lot more male soldiers, guards, and hunters than there were female. When it came to magic, it was something which women generally evolved to do, and they greatly outnumbered the males.

And, when it came to those with the stronger magics, the ratio grew even more lopsided, just as it did when it came to women being able to lift weights. The stronger the man you looked at, the fewer the number of women who could compare with his strength. The same held true with magic. The stronger the female in magic, the fewer number of men could compare.

And since the strength of magic helped determine the length of life, there were many times the number of ageless women-wizards than there were male-wizards. Mother had met several hundred ageless women throughout her life. She’d only twice had met an ageless male. I was the rarest of the rare, and mother suggested that it’d probably be wise if I didn’t go around flaunting my talents to the world until I grew a lot stronger.

She even warned me that if I weren’t her own flesh and blood, she probably would’ve put me in shackles and chained me to her side for a couple of hundred years of training before unlocking me. Ageless women either walked the years alone; or else they walked them and watched the men they cared about grow old and fade away. What sin would be justifiable to get their hands on a man who could walk down the endless ages beside them?

Needless to say, mother definitely opened up my eyes to a whole new field of worry in life!

As far as magic goes, mother helped teach me many of the things that I was uncertain about already. She also helped me learn more about my limits. Magic is one of those things which is truly only limited by power, understanding, and imagination. If you could shape enough energy, imagine what you wanted to do with it, and understood how to do something, you could do anything!

This made me really regret being born on Earth originally! I had the imagination to think of a limitless number of things that I could do, but my mind couldn’t accept that it didn’t understand how things worked. Travel magic like mother used was absolutely impossible for me! My mind wanted to think in terms of black holes or wormholes, as I’d read about those in books and magazines before. The only problem is, I didn’t have a clue how something like that actually worked. I knew OF them, but I didn’t understand them; ergo no POOF magic for me.

Other things I couldn’t do was healing style magics. For some reason, most people of this world who learned magic could perform basic healing with it. I couldn’t. What was blood made of? Hemoglobin, iron, plasma, water… What the heck was that?! I knew just enough to know that I didn’t know, and thus I couldn’t understand how to make it and therefore I couldn’t heal. Others just thought “blood is blood”, and they didn’t worry about blood types or anything like that not matching, so they could imagine it working without worry and thus perform the magic.

I knew just enough about some things to know that they didn’t work the way these folks thought they did, and thus it wouldn’t work for me. Earth made me smart enough to be unable to do some things!

Of course, it wasn’t all bad; as some of the things I’d learned on Earth also helped me do other things. And some of the things that I could do were even beyond mother’s talents. Refining ore was one place where I truly excelled. I knew iron came from ore. I also knew that if the iron was smelted, and you worked the impurities out, you could make steel.

For me, my brain simplified the process down to “get it hot, push the bad stuff out, and pack the good stuff tighter”. In magic, imagination could overcome the lack of understanding, and I could easily imagine the process in my mind. All I had to do was keep imagining, “get it hot, push the bad stuff out, and pack the good stuff tighter,” and I could reform plain stone into some magical substance stronger than any steel we had on the island. That’s what I had done to make the blade I had for De’Nara. I don’t know what material it was that I’d actually created, but it was a one of a kind Mik’hail special.

Other things which I could do that amazed mother was turning sand into glass. I’d seen lightning strike the beach on TV back home, and I knew all it took was intense heat to turn sand into glass. I could easily imagine making it hot enough to melt, so transforming one to the other was a breeze for me. I could even turn coal into diamonds -- all it took was heat and pressure, and I could imagine that easily enough -- and that was almost enough to get Mother to hyperventilate. I was warned not to do such things very often as I could collapse the economy if I over did it. Not to mention that I’d probably become every kingdom’s number one target for secret kidnapping and abduction!

With her stern warning ringing in my heart, I promised myself that I’d find some other way to earn coin beside turning coal into diamonds.

As a safe means to earn myself some coin, I started playing around with wood and stone carving. It’s a breeze for me to work and shape those things with my magic – I seem to truly excel in the elemental arts, and both wood and stone are influenced by earth magic that is my specialty – but I started learning how to make things without using my magic. Little carvings of birds and bunnies, wolves and foxes, deer and horses, became my forte.

At first, I simply made them and gave them away to some of the girls on the island for whatever whimsy struck my fancy. If one looked depressed, I might give her a carving of a flower. If one laughed a lot and I liked it, I might give her a carving of a robin in flight. I did it to learn, and since I could feel the grain of the wood and steel with my magic, I learned rapidly.

Before long, girls started coming to me and asking me to make things for them. At first, I was happy to do it simply to do it, but in time, the orders were coming faster than I could produce them without cheating. I was falling further and further behind, and it was Le’Nara who tossed me a lifeline and stepped up and helped with the problem. She couldn’t carve her way out of a paper bag with a machete, but she understood supply and demand and became my “middleman” with the customers. She started charging for my work – while taking a small portion off the top for her services of course – and I was finally beginning to earn some coin on my own!

And, like that, a year came and went before I even realized it had passed. I hadn’t contacted anyone for an apprenticeship, I was still hiding my magic from the rest of the world, and I hadn’t made any plans really to leave home at all yet. I guess I’m blessed to have parents who were more than happy to see me stay with them longer, because without anyone ever making a conscious decision or talking about it, I simply stayed where I was and continued to learn and grow at my own pace.

In the year that followed, I finally turned thirteen and entered puberty. I finally grew hair between my legs, and my manly equipment started to work all the time. Bulges in my pants weren’t uncommon and the girls would always giggle and have fun deliberately pointing my problem out for the world to see. Apparently, it became a game for some of them to see who could make me pitch a tent in my pants the most often.

At first, it embarrassed the hell out of me, but then I slowly adjusted and simply thought of it as payback for seeing them naked, bathing with them, and being able to feel or even pull them into my room if I wanted. I never did take advantage and actually pull any of the girls into my bed like Father did, but I certainly did indulge myself in rubbing and feeling on them – especially whenever I was in the bath with them!

Surrounded by scores of beautiful young girls that I could indulge myself in anytime I wanted, and I never did. Several of them started to whisper and say I must be a “manly man”. I didn’t care. The truth is, they simply weren’t up to my standards. I wanted something – someone – special for my first time. I was going to live thousands of years, and I’d have the chance to indulge myself endlessly with women if I wanted it. I didn’t want my first time to simply be some meaningless romp out back with a girl whose name I wouldn’t even remember tomorrow, much less a thousand years from now.

Of all the girls on the island, Le’Nara is the only one I ever considered being with, and I decided to wait. She was still as wild and free as ever (in fact, she was still as naked as the first year girls as Father wouldn’t allow her to graduate up to wearing anything since she refused to attend his class), and most evenings she ended up in a special ‘class’ with Father. I figured she was simply too tired to be with me as well, and I valued her friendship and her too much to push the issue. If Mother was right, there’d be plenty of time for the two of us to get together in the future, if it was meant for us to be.

As for the next few years after that, my fame with carving grew and Le’Nara started selling and trading my goods with the merchants that visited the isle. We decided to go into business together as “Heartstone Enterprises”, and Heartstone Creations became a truly famous and sought after product. I no longer took special orders; I simply indulged myself and created whatever my imagination wanted out of stone and wood. Angels, dragons, fairies, and knights. I created a whole chess set, but of course, no one in this world even knew how to play chess. I made glasswork bottles, whatnots, hairpins, combs, and mirrors.

And, Le’Nara dealt with selling it all and splitting the coin into our business account. To be honest, I wasn’t even aware of how famous and sought after my works were becoming. Nobility, priest, knights, and the truly wealthy all wanted to own something that I’d created. Prices soared as demand was intense and the supply was so small, and we got rich. Not a little rich, but ‘rich’ rich. Maybe not Mother rich, but richer than just about anyone else that I’d ever meet rich.

And then, on my fourteenth birthday, I simply quit selling things. Rumors rocked the world that the young stone artist with the touch of an angel had been called up to the heavens to carve for the gods. I was declared dead, the value of my works skyrocketed even higher, and I didn’t even realize it. I was too busy learning and doing my own thing to prepare for graduation.

Le’Nara’s fifth year was rapidly approaching, and it was time for her to graduate soon. I’d decided that I was going to leave when she did, and thus, I stopped making things for the public. I copied maps, brushed up on my languages, asked the different girls questions about the world and where they’d came from, and I’d finally told mother and father that it was time for me to go out and see the world with my own two eyes.

I wasn’t ready to just toss myself out against the whole world all willy-nilly, though. I wanted a buffer to help me with the transition, so the course of action I chose was one that made mother laugh so hard she cried.

I wrote, applied, and enrolled at “West Gondor’s School of Learning”. I’d decided to become a student once I left home and went out into the rest of the world.