Secrets, secrets, they’re no fun, unless they’re shared with everyone!

The silly little ditty was stuck in my head, running on repeat, as Fenrir flew all of us away from the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft. Iona pulled on his harness, more of a way of communicating than any real control, and he obediently turned to his right, flying south.

I’d been flying on my own for years. I’d occasionally flown under the power of others. The first time I’d ever ‘flown’ was after Julius asked me to become a Ranger, and Artemis had lifted me up on a platform of stone. Another major flying experience was with Sky, as he brought us to the frontlines.

Flying on Fenrir was a whole different experience. There was a living, breathing creature under the layers of metal and leather, sheer… well, Fenrir wasn’t exactly unbridled power now, was he? We jostled slightly with every beat of his wings, then our flight became smooth as he glided for a distance.

Another big difference was we were strapped in, leather straps around my legs, Iona’s arms around me. It wasn’t feasible to get up and walk around, not with the wind and narrow, unsteady footing. A hairband stopped my hair from eating Iona’s face. I’d given myself a third eyelid when doing my biomancy operations, and they acted like a pair of goggles, keeping any little bits of dust and dirt out of my eyes, and stopping the wind from drying out my eyeballs.

Interesting that I’d never had that problem with [Talaria] or [Scintillating Ascent]. A minor effect of the skill?

With all that said, I was probably a faster flier than Fenrir. I had significantly more levels, and I wasn’t weighed down by a ton of stuff. It was one part practice, two parts making sure we didn’t get separated, one part hanging out with Iona that I was here, and not flying literal circles around Fenrir.

Auri was in the back, on Fenrir’s tail. I occasionally heard a delighted “Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrpt!” as he swung his tail up and down, Auri having an utter blast of a ride.

“We’re over Suen, right?” I shouted back to Iona, unsure how well she could hear me with the whistling wind.

“Yes! And you don’t need to shout, I can hear you just fine!” She said.

I nodded and snuggled deeper into her embrace. This was nice. One of Iona’s hands started to wander, massaging me here and there. I reached down with my hand to her leg, and started to softly scratch her just the way she liked it.

I leaned back to just watch the world drift by. I had a few books for in-flight entertainment, but no. My stash of books was extremely limited for the foreseeable future, and I didn’t get that much joy out of rereading stories, not nearly as much as reading them for the first time. I wanted to savor them. I wanted to save them for the right time and place, when we were snowed in with a cozy fire or something.

Or when I knew where my next supply of books was coming from. Whichever came first.

The view was gorgeous. A beautiful summer sky with a few drifting clouds above promised a wonderful day of flying. I leaned forward, looking over Fenrir’s neck to see the ground below.

We were high up, but not too high, and my biomancy operation had done wonders for my vision. I could make out the individual corn sprouts reaching for the sky in the fields. I could make out the different rods a [Fisherman] had set up along a river. I couldn’t see through the forest canopy though. Super vision wasn’t the ability to see through walls - that’s what [The World Around Me] was for!

“Do we know where in Suen we are?” I asked Iona.

There was a pregnant pause behind me. I twisted my neck all the way around to stare right at Iona.

“We do know where we are, right? I don’t like that look on your face…” I really didn’t. Iona had the awkward ‘oh fuck’ look of someone who’d walked into class without homework, and the professor had just asked everyone to turn in their assignment.

“Could you please not do that with your neck? It’s super squicking me out.” Being able to turn my head a full three-quarters of the way around was a hilarious trick.

“Whoooo, whoooo.” I mimicked the sound of an owl, continuing to stare accusingly.

“You’re the one who knows where we’re going! I thought you had this all set, and could glance at a mountain and know where we are!” Iona kept protesting.

“You’re the native! You’ve literally had classes on the world, maps, and you took a cartography class! I’ve seen a few world maps, and about three inches of Rolland and Cartref Clyde!”

Iona held up her hands in surrender.

“Arguing about this isn’t going to get us anywhere. Do we want to keep flying south, stop at a town or village and ask for directions, or try to figure out where we are by looking at the map and landmarks?” She asked.

I mentally crunched through the options.

“Why not all of them? Let’s keep flying south, and ignore any small towns or villages. I doubt they’ll be on the map, and without being rude, I’m not sure if they’ll have the necessary knowledge to properly point us in the right direction. We know we need to go south. If we see a large town or city, we can stop by and orient ourselves. While we’re flying, why not check the map, and see if we can figure out where we are anyway?”

Iona nodded.

“Sounds like a plan. Also, this was a communication fail by us. We need to do better, I’ll make sure I talk more about who I think is doing what. Now, about that neck orientation…?”

I twisted my neck back to normal.

“You’re right. I assumed, you assumed, hey, at least we’re in Suen and not Phantasym.”

There was another awkward silence behind me.

“...We’re in Suen, right?” I asked.

“I don’t see any wizard towers, so yes.” Iona said.

[The World Around Me] let me ‘see’ inside of things, and I could look at most of our belongings that we’d strapped to Fenrir. Included in one of our chests was a medium quality world map, along with a more detailed map of Exterreri. [Comprehensive Speed Reading] let me skim the map quickly and easily from where it was safely tucked away.

“Good! Alright, I’m going to start checking out the map. Yell out landmarks you see.” I said.

“Mind if we bring the map up here?” Iona asked. “I’d like to read it as well.”

“Sure! Hey, challenge me, I’m working on my efficiency. How much mana and power budget do I get to bring the scroll up here?”

“Hmmmm… how about 5000 mana?” Iona suggested. She didn’t know a ton of wizardry, but she did know that it was roughly eight times as expensive as sorcery to do the same thing was - at a minimum.

“Alright, 5000 mana to retrieve the LOST SCROLL OF WHERE THE HECK ARE WE!” I boomed the last words out like a mighty [Archwizard] might.

I split my mind in three with [Parallel Thoughts]. One was dedicated to sweeping and looking around, noting places, mountains, forests, and other landmarks. The second went to reading the map, trying to find a similar place in Suen - or anywhere near the place. The third started to construct a stupidly complex array to get the map into my hands.

On the landmark front, we looked vaguely like we were in Suen. The only other real options were Ralakar or Phantasym, and both countries had distinct styles, for lack of a better word. Suen was ‘bland’, and the countryside we were flying over was equally bland. The island the School was on didn’t fly that fast.

Sadly, the [Cartographer] had taken some artistic liberties, and there were just ‘mountains’ on the map, no great detail as to what the mountains looked like. The northern continent wasn’t even on the map! Just a bunch of ocean with depictions of sea monsters.

The spell array was the trickiest one. First was figuring out what I wanted to happen. I needed to rearrange the contents of the chest, getting the map to the top. I needed to tilt the chest such that everything wouldn’t fall out when I opened it. I needed to open the lid a crack. I needed to float the scroll out, close the chest and latch it, then levitate the map into my hands.

All while on a living creature, flying high and fast. Wind shear would be an issue.

Then there was doing all that efficiently. Iona had given me a 5000 mana budget for this task, an arbitrary number that felt way too low.

The whole point of the exercise was practicing being efficient though. At the same time, we weren’t in a classroom. This was the real world, and a mistake here could have us lose our map - or an entire chest of our belongings!

I constructed my ‘brute force’ method first, and added in a half-dozen redundancies for other issues. An array to grab the chest if it fell. An array to freeze our belongings if it started to tip. An array to grab the map and yank it to me.

Worst case, I could just rip myself out of the saddle and dive for the map, or anything else. Would need to restitch my part of the saddle, along with anything else I’d broken.

Backups secured, I started to work on the main project. It was interesting to see how little things were different at each step. Take opening the chest. Instead of a quick Zoh rune to open, I needed to get into the nitty gritty. I had to mentally map out the latches. I had to figure out their mechanism. I needed to work out how they moved. I then needed to write a whole array just to target that one specific bit, and nudge the latch a tiny distance. I copied that array, changing the targeting a hair to the other latch.

Once the latches were done, I needed to lift the lid of the chest enough to get the map out, without letting it flap in the breeze. After the scroll was out, I needed to close the chest again and relatch it, instead of using a simpler Rairlik rune.

Then there was getting the scroll to me. I could just zip it across the distance, but again, efficiency. Fenrir’s body was a mass of tiny swirling eddies of wind, with some spots shaded from the wind shear and other parts fully exposed. Instead of going directly from the chest to my hands, I could see if there was a path along the side of his body that would be more complicated, but in the end, use less mana.

All the little details were annoying on one level - I had an easier solution already devised - but on another, they thrilled me. I felt like I was practicing magic. Throwing [Fireball] around was great and all, but carefully building a new spell like this? I felt very proper-witch-like. Wouldn’t want to spend all day every day doing it, but it was satisfying on a deep and primal level. Challenging myself to think and create just scratched some human itch in my psyche.

Didn’t come close to mangos, books, or healing people, but I didn’t have a surplus of any of those on hand.

“How’s it going?” Iona asked.

“I think I’ve got the arrays figured out. I need to double check them, there’s a bunch.” I’d only built one spell with more arrays ever, and that had been a technical exercise to try and link as many arrays together as possible! The other issue was I couldn’t test the array, nor fix any mistakes I’d made. No, I had one try to get this done perfectly first time.

[Astral Archives] helped, but the best analogy I had was writing a sentence. I wouldn’t make any spelling errors, but it was possible that I had a grammatical error in there somewhere, and only by painstakingly checking every word could I have any confidence that it was right. Similarly, changing one word could mean I needed to change others - like how “arose” became “had arisen” when a tense was changed.

Except wizardry wasn’t that simple, oh noooooo. It would be more accurate to say the entire array needed to be edited on a single change, although the nature of wizardry meant only a single circle needed to be changed - not the other interlinking circles.

“Ready?” I asked Iona.

“Ready!” She confirmed, patting Fenrir’s neck. “Stay steady, witchosaurus is doing some magic.”

I started tracing the symbols in the air with [Lepidoptera], the glowing runes stationary relative to my position, in spite of Fenrir’s flight.

Central array. Shifting array. Flight array. Chest array. Stillness array. Latching array. Movement, relative, positioning, targeting, and a dozen other arrays were traced before me in the soft golden glow of Radiance as I carefully assembled my spell.

One last glance to make sure the spell I’d cast was the same one I’d imagined, and I activated it. The runes burned in the air as mana coursed through the mandala, and I carefully watched with [The World Around Me].

The chest opened.

The scroll flew out.

The chest closed.

And I let out a triumphant shout as the map slapped into my hand.

“Yes!”

[*ding!* [Parallel Thoughts] leveled up! 101 -> 102]

I’d gone a bit over my mana target if how much mana I’d spent to craft the mandala was included. Ignoring that, and I was just under.

Iona ruffled my hair.

“Nice! So where are we?”

I rolled my eyes at her as I used [Mantle of the Stars] to make a windbreak, unrolling the map.

“We’re somewhere in here.” Suen was one large island, which made defining the boundaries easy enough. “As long as we keep going south, we’ll hit the border. Find the nearest city from there?” There wasn’t anything super obvious that let me instantly pinpoint where we were, not even after all this flying. A few small towns here and there, but nothing that had screamed YOU ARE HERE.

Iona traced her finger from Suen to Exterreri, then paused at the nation and tapped on it a few times.

“Why?” She asked. “Now that I’m looking at it, no matter where on the southern coast we end up, the rough direction is the same. We’re going south by south-west, and we want to be west of the Crystal sea. Now, if it’s the end of the day, sure, let’s stop and hit a tavern, but if we’re confident this is Suen, I don’t see the need to stop.”

I studied the map again.

“I guess the only question is Omospondia. Do we want to cut west across the land bridge, follow the coast but be forced east, or just fly over?”

I could feel Iona shaking her head.

“They’ll do their best to shoot us out of the sky, if for no other reason that we might be a rival’s plot. I don’t like the idea of flying the wrong way, so yeah, you’re right. Let’s land when we hit the coast, get our bearings, cross along the Omospondia-Ralakar border, then follow the coast south. Cross the Serene Bay, and we’re in Exterreri.”

The flight plan looked viable and almost one of the shortest ways to Exterreri, although we weren’t going to land near Sangino. We’d need to travel more in the country, but for no good reason, I’d feel a little better once we were ‘there’.

“Alright! Sounds like a plan.” I wanted to kick back and lean into Iona, but no. Stupid saddle straps. Instead I rolled the map up and handed it back to Iona.

“Cheers, for you!” I had a cheeky grin on my face.

“Hey, wait, I don’t want to hold this the entire way!” She protested.

“Ahhh, what a shame!” I languidly stretched out. “If only someone hadn’t wanted to see the map for herself!”

Iona bonked me on the head with the map.

“Sassosaurus.” She accused me while slipping the scroll into her saddlebag.

Her other hand slipped somewhere a little more fun, and the ride became a lot more interesting.

====================

“Iona?”

“Mmmm?” Iona breathed into my ear. I swatted at her.

“Serious for a minute.” I reproached her. Iona snapped up, standing up straight, one hand snapping to her lance and the other ready to form a shield out of her flowing mallium armor.

“What’s up?” All traces of playfulness and teasing were gone.

“So I haven’t gotten around terribly much.”

“Yeah.”

“And there’s a wide gap between theory and practice.”

“Go on.” Iona started to relax.

“But is that a fucking plague flag over there?”

I pointed to a sparkling harbor town in the distance. We’d finished traveling across Suen, and were approaching the southern border. I could just barely pick out the fine details - it was at the edge of my range of vision - but there was a checkered black and yellow flag flying from the ramparts.

Iona squinted in the direction I was pointing, and we flew until she could make it out.

“Yup.” She grimly confirmed. “That’s the plague flag.”

[Name: Elaine]

[Race: Chimera (Elvenoid)]

[Age: 27]

[Mana: 786,000/786,000]

[Mana Regen: 451,384 (+877,695)]

Stats

[Free Stats: 0]

[Strength: 1,299]

[Dexterity: 6,714]

[Vitality: 25,468]

[Speed: 25,500]

[Mana: 78,600]

[Mana Regeneration: 78,717 (+87,769)]

[Magic Power: 45,038 (+1,155,225)]

[Magic Control: 44,956 (+1,153,121)]

[Class 1: [The Dawn Sentinel - Celestial: Lv 513]]

[Celestial Affinity: 513]

[Cosmic Presence: 323]

[The Stars Never Fade: 12]

[Center of the Universe: 472]

[Dance with the Heavens: 513]

[Wheel of Sun and Moon: 513]

[Mantle of the Stars: 492]

[Sunrise: 471]

[Class 2: [Butterfly Mystic - Radiance: Lv 446]]

[Radiance Affinity: 446]

[Radiance Resistance: 446]

[Nova Lance: 446]

[Lepidoptera: 446]

[Nectar: 446]

[Solar Corona: 446]

[Scintillating Ascent: 446]

[Kaleidoscope: 446]

[Class 3: [The Very Hungry Bookwyrm - Spatial: Lv 81]]

[Spatial Affinity: 81]

[Comprehensive Speed Reading: 81]

[Channeled Blink: 36]

[Bookwyrm's Hoard: 81]

[Beneath the Dragon's Eyes: 81]

[Vivid Dream Reading: 81]

[Astral Archives: 81]

[Hunger for Knowledge: 81]

General Skills

[Long-Range Identify: 380]

[Parallel Thoughts: 102]

[Companion Bond between Elaine and Auri: 456]

[The World Around Me: 59]

[Oath of Elaine to Lyra: 513]

[Sentinel's Superiority: 513]

[Persistent Casting: 432]

[Imbue: 35]