Dare to Accomplish Wonders [Isekai Quest] <Birdsie Quest>

The Lightbrook mansion-castle, as Lazara learned in her toddlerish forays through the halls, was extensive for someone her age. The walls were a pristine white, with golden embroidery and paintings, red curtains over eight-sectioned windows looking over a very neat outside with trimmed, emerald shrubberies, small trees, and arrangements of colorful flowers and rocks that pleased the eye.

The body of the mansion was rectangular, and one of the sides was connected to an older complex, more brick and tiles, built centuries ago by an ancestor. The mansion was an addendum; an afterthought, really, but now they lived in it.

The older complex was what you'd expect of a medieval castle. It was decorated with old suits of armor, somewhat inelegant but at least polished to shine. There were scant windows, and if there were, they were without glass, and too small and high to look through. Torches were used instead of lamps for light, but they'd already been enchanted to be self-lighting. From what she knew, this older 'castle complex' was roughly square-shaped, with an empty space in the middle where one could find a small courtyard with a fountain and a statue that was slowly overgrowing with weeds.

She also thought it had some towers, but she wasn't sure. She often - practically every day, actually - saw one of the maids entering and coming back out one of the entrances to said towers, but what she did in there was a mystery.

Oh, and, the entire mansion-castle was on a hill, because of course. The hill led down a sloping, somewhat angular path, which would be great for rolling down boulders onto the enemy like in Donkey Kong. Of course, Lazara didn't know that, or what Donkey Kong was.

It also overlooked what seemed to be a town, in the distance, but it was hard to tell. It might have been a city, but she'd stick with the town theory for now. Said town was surrounded by walls and she saw an army of rooftops of various shades of brown and dark red coming out from them.

Naturally, she wasn't allowed too far in her exploration, but Lady Daevina insisted she be allowed this little freedom. As a concession, Lazara had to be monitored by a maid, guard, or some other staff member.

There was, of course, the pantry. Whenever she tried to get in, the butler or one of the cooks panicked and scooped her up. She'd reach back out in its direction and cry out, drawing Lady Daevina to the room and making the staff member 'responsible' repentant under the fury of the Lady.

As Lazara grew, she received tutorship in various, interesting aspects of life.


At seven years old, she sat in a dusty chamber with an old priest beside her, teaching her science. She was most interested in physics, but to be fair, every other science came easily to her. Too easily, to be exact, as if she were re-learning them after a few years of brain-stasis, rather than learning them ex nihilo.

The teachers were impressed, amused, and least often: scared.

Sylvester, her main educator, was a scruffy and observant monk. Not the Shaolin kind of monk, but rather the old, faithful, abbot kind of monk. With a balding head, a rather embonpoint tummy, and a grandfather's smile, he was older, in his sixties, but proud if it, and prone to partaking in 'little pleasures.' Food, drink, joviality; unbefitting of a priest.

And yet, here he was, teaching her. Her parents must have had a reason to hire him, so she didn't bully him too much, but still, it was a bit irritating how condescending he could be sometimes. She was learning quickly, but he often refused to budge on letting her move to more advanced materials until she'd repeated the current ones five times in a row, to make sure her knowledge was perfect.

This was annoying, and she knew she'd be more annoyed if she wasn't as smart as she was. Her progress was stilted because of him. Even she understood, at age seven, the usefulness of double-checking one's work for mistakes, but doing it thrice, four times, five times? That was too much.

She tapped her quill absently on the parchment in an incomprehensible rhythm, skittish, and shifting constantly. She thought, murmuring, and said, "So multiplying is like... having groups of many things? Three times three means I have three groups, and each one has three, uhm, things in them?"

Sylvester's lips drew thin as he considered, bobbing his head around. "Sure."

"Oh!" she chimed. "That's easy, then!" Lazara leaned forward and began to write out the equations with gleeful pride.

"Well, yes," Sylvester said, rolling his eyes imperceptibly. "Just wait until we get to divisions. Your mind will freeze."

"Pffft, divisions are easy," she replied, not even looking up. "All you gotta do is cut something into parts!"

"Even parts, in mathematical terms."

She paused to look up at him, blinking. "Even? Like, like... if I have ten, and I divide it into two, I have five and five?"

"Yes. Also, divide by two, not into two." Sylvester gave her a smile, lifting an eyebrow. For a moment, he stayed silent as she returned to writing out her work, but then he said, "You're getting the hang of this very quickly. Mathematics, I mean. You've excelled in languages, too. Actually, you're very good at every subject, for someone your age."

She lifted her chin, not quite sneering at him, but looking down at him despite being shorter and younger. She assessed the chubby priest with her eyes, as if plucking him away into the sum of his parts and reading each one out, then snorted. "Of course I did. What else did you expect?" she asked haughtily, prolonging each vowel with a posh accent.

"Ah," he said in recognition, "and even your mother's teachings are not lost on you. Are you some kind of prodigy?"

She shrugged. "Either that," she paused to put a zero next to her two, "or I'm an evil demon, here to torment you."

He lifted both of his eyebrows until they met the top of his forehead, where his hair would be if he wasn't balding with a bit-donut hairline. Then he nodded with an amused smirk. "Please, do not torment me in the Pits of Hell, my fair lady. This humble servant has committed no sin that deserves such punishment."

"Oh, really?" she asked smugly. Her eyes slid over to look at him in understanding. "I saw you snooping around in the wine cellar last night."

"Urk!" Sylvester felt as if he was dealt a blow to the gut. "That-that, I was, urm, just, just anointing wine!... Please, don't tell your father."

"Oh, I won't," she said, putting down her quill, blowing lightly on the parchment, then standing up with a screech of the chair. As she walked past Sylvester, she patted him on the shoulder and whispered, "In exchange, I'd like to learn things that are more challenging."

He gulped, sensing too much-unexpected shrewdness from this devil child.

He only looked at her parchment a moment after she left, and found all the answers perfectly filled out.


"You were right, big brother," Lazara told Timory. "He is easy to bully."

"Dahaha! Did you threaten him with the wine cellar thing?" Timory asked, walking alongside her. His plate-mail made clunking sounds as they stepped through the halls. He shook his head in retrospection. "Old fool needs to learn to stifle his passions."

"I told him to teach me more advanced subjects for not ratting him out," Lazara chirped with a devious grin.

Her brother stopped in place to stare at her. He didn't believe her for a few seconds until she didn't say she was joking. "Well, damn. You might as well learn from books at this point."

She shrugged. "Never know if I make a mistake. Having someone to double-check is useful."

Timory, as befitting of an heir to the house carried an air of elegance when talking to most people. Their parents, servants, outsiders - no one except Lazara, or mother on rare occasions - knew he had a fun-loving side to him, a bit mean-spirited. He was apparently like that since his youth, and never grew out of it.

He was still learning how to use the sword, the horse, and 'physical magic,' but when he was done, he'd be joining in the rest of his countrymen in battle.

Lazara learned it during history lessons and dialogues with Sylvester, as well as overhearing conversations between Timory and Lord Lightbrook, but apparently their country - Algrannar - was embroiled in a civil war, or more accurately, a secession of sorts.

For some time now, the elven and half-elven minorities to the east were oppressed by the local lords until they decided they had enough. With some indirect and 'unofficial' military aid from Ethengarde; an aristocrat nation of high elves, who were culturally desperate to cut themselves away from their fae origins and hypocritically believed in their own racial superiority. Officially, a war between the Kingdom of Algrannar and Ethengarde wasn't a thing, but it was looking like it would be in the future.

In other words, Algrannar needed soldiers and leaders, and Timory Lightbrook would be an asset.

Once sixteen years old, nobles, regardless of whether they were the house leader or a subject, could petition the military to be given command over a number of forces of their own, in addition to whatever men they brought themselves. In that same vein, the military was split into nobles leading their own armies, and the bigger department led by the Grand Marshall, with lesser leaders who had ranks and could be nobles or commoners. The Marshall's department, essentially, lent troops to the individual nobles, who would perform their own individual operations or coordinate with each other.

The system wasn't smooth, according to Timory, but it was developed by centuries of cultural growth and tradition and no one would dare to change it during war. Besides, it worked.

Barely, but it worked.

They walked in silence, a direction or goal absent. He was, after all, fifteen, and his birthday came in only months.

Her brother felt ready for the battlefield, but she wasn't certain if he was. The... wherewithal, to imagine a full-scale battle escaped her mind, but she knew it wouldn't be easy. Not for Timory who was still a child deep down.

Ironic, in a way. She felt like she stole maturity from him, with her birth. Like all the adult parts he was supposed to develop were transplanted into her as soon as they grew.

She had to tell him something before it was too late.

[] "Promise to be careful out there. I don't want to have to attend your funeral, alright?"
[] "By the way... Don't make mom cry, okay?" Beat. "If she discovers you were killed by an unceremonious stray arrow seven seconds into the brawl, she will laugh herself to tears."
[] Write-in.


When she was eight, her first lessons of magic came to be.

Lazara was waiting for this. Her legs kept trembling, as she stifled the desire to explode in her desk. Her quill rapped against the desk with furious repetition, clutched tight enough that any more force would snap it like a matchstick.

Then, the door opened, and her teacher walked in.

The teacher looked at her appraisingly, raising an eyebrow in bemusement. She looked left and right, as if expecting some other charge. Once it was clear that the little girl sitting by herself in the middle of the chamber, in the only desk there, was her student, she locked her eyes on her.

"Hello," Belladonna said, with something close to acceptance, closing the door and turning to look and examine her.

"Hi!" Lazara replied excitedly, leaning forward with gleaming eyes. "Can we begin? I can't wait to learn magic!"

Belladonna smiled kindly. "If you're that excited, I'm sure you'll make good progress. My name is Belladonna Whitebrow, and you are, of course, Lazara Lightbrook. How alliterative."

"Thanks!" Lazara replied, performing a hasty curtsy. "Where do we begin? Shooting fireballs from my eyes? Pudding elementals?!"

Belladonna snorted, then walked up to her, saying, "No, no, I believe... we'll start with the basics."

"What would those be?" Lazara leaned back into her chair, calming down slightly, even as her left foot kept beating against the wooden floor.

"How much do you know of magical theory?"

"Um," she paused, taken aback by that momentarily. She stumbled mentally through her knowledge, then replied, if a little mechanically, "People have souls, and, someone with the right knowledge can force their soul to do things for them? Like making fireballs shoot out of their eyes?"

Belladonna rolled her eyes, but offered a warm smile as she leaned against Lazara's desk and began to explain, "Well, not exactly. There is something called the 'Weave Maxim,' which is a type of comparative logic used to explain magical operations to someone new. Would you like me to explain that?"

"Yes, please!" Lazara replied eagerly, rolling out a scroll of parchment and dipping her quill in ink to make notes.

Belladonna, taking stock of this, waved her finger and muttered something under her nose. The feather was yoinked from Lazara's hand, as Belladonna appraised it up close, now clutching it in her fingers. After a few moments, she ordered, "Quill, make notes."

The quill floated over to the scroll of parchment, and Lazara sat back in astonishment as it began to note Belladonna's explanation: "The Weave Maxim postulates, or rather, compares magic to the titular weave. The logic of it follows so: If you take a rock, a human hand, a room of space, and a minute of time, then decompose them to their most base elements, you will obtain raw magical energy. Everything in existence, of every element and logic, is made out of magical energy in varying degrees of complexity. As such, the universe at large can be compared to a giant loom, and everything within it is strings of various levels of complexity and durability. A mage - being the weaver - can use his soul - the needle - to cross his own strings through the loom."

She waited to take a breath and let the quill catch up. Once it made the last scratching sound against the parchment, Belladonna stared forward, out the window, and continued, "These strings, thereon called spells, are no different from a rock, human hand, a room of space, or a minute of time, only that they are built of magic energy assembled in a different manner. Ergo, woven with a different string, of different complexity, durability, and purpose. Its complexity and durability depend on the will, proficiency, skill, and experience of the caster."

"Now," she said, the quill dropping down to the desk. Lazara was still whimsical from the blatant supernatural display of writing, but listened as Bella explained, "Going back to what you said, your explanation was half-correct. The soul is the terminal, the intermediary, through which all magic is done. A soulless being by definition cannot do magic. But do you know how this is achieved?"

Lazara shook her head.

"Self-hypnosis. It is the act of convincing one's brain - you know what a brain is, right? -" an affirmative nod "- great. It's the act of convincing one's brain, which is connected to the soul, to... pass on a signal, simply put. Some people are less, or more sensitive to self-hypnosis. Some can do magic with a simple thought, while others need exertion or small mental exercises. With training, these can be alleviated, but most wizards and smart sorcerers still rely on them. As such, our first spell will be something simple and non-invasive. I'd like you to fill a glass of water for me."

Lazara blinked, as Belladonna placed an empty glass in front of her with a little flurry of the hand. It was relatively short and wide, looking more like a glass for hard alcohol than water.

"It's simple enough. Think of... of images, sounds, or other things, subtle ones, that make you think of water. If it helps, try incanting some sentence that you correlate with water or flow or liquids in general, or moving your hand in a way that feels natural for summoning water. There's a reason people who draw on hate can cast destructive spells more easily, ones who draw on love can heal, and those who are afraid can cast accidentally.

"It's all about feeling, emotion, self-conviction, and self-introspection. If you have those down to pat, then practice, you will be able to cast most basic spells. Also, it is worth noting, your soul will itself grow accustomed to certain types of spells the more you cast them, or self-hypnotize yourself with them in mind. It's no different from training specific muscles of the body. If you have strong legs, you will run faster, and if you have strong arms, you will punch harder. Therefore, if you practice more evocation, you will be able to shoot more fireballs from your eyes, and if you practice more summoning you will be able to call on more pudding elementals. Understood?"

Lazara nodded.

"Marvellous," Belladonna said, pushing her hair aside as she stood away and stopped five steps from the desk. She motioned with one arm to the glass, then crossed her arms. "By all means, go ahead."

Lazara...

[] Thought of water, of the flow of a river, the stream in a mountain, the water from faucet, flowing to fill a container of some kind. The movement of the water was moderate, not pressurized, but not slow and calm. As she did so, she outstretched her hand and muttered 'create water.'
[] Imagined something else. A distant place, on a small cliff. Some kind of tower, which shone with a rainbow at the top? And there were ships, there... weird ones, with big hulls. A small town? A bizarre reflection in the water. It flowed and flowed, and then there was a rain, and there was only silence after that.
[] Asked the teacher for more advice. Some unusual tricks or mental triggers? Something more personal, that worked for her, but might have also helped here? Mages seemed more individualistic, but who knows? She looked experienced in the mystical arts.


"Sooo... what's with the creepy mask?" she asked, not afraid of the two-and-a-half meter tall, bulky man in a black robe, staring at her with a metallic and heavy-looking mask that resembled a furious or screaming face; the lips bent downwards. He had a white snake with red eyes coiled around his shoulders like a necklace, though it was too lazy to move.

"It was a hand-me-down from my master's master," the spy said, with a thick accent that couldn't be placed to anywhere she knew. Then again, she didn't know many accents. "He was the great assassin Tutchalanka, slayer of King Piervod the Eleventh. We pass it down, in our line."

"Woah," Lazara said, taking her cheek off her hand. She stared at him heavily in a pregnant silence. The assassin tilted his head slowly, uncertain of how the situation will proceed. Before he could assert anything else, Lazara raised her fists to her face in excitement and said:

"Cool! Do I get to wear it after you teach me?!"

He stared, unimpressed. Or at least she thought he was unimpressed. "No."

She frowned, drawing upon the power of the resting bitch face and sneering at him with her nose lifted. The look of nobility looking at dogshit, carefully instilled by her mother's instruction. "Will I have to torture it out of you, Mister Spy Master?"

He didn't respond for three seconds. Then, still unimpressed, voice a little bit looser, he said, "Actually, we call it 'kinetic information retrieval' in the business. It's harder to implicate you if they can't get the confession."

She blinked, dropping her bitch face in favor of a surprised expression. "Did you just joke?"

"No, that's an actual fact," he stated, serious as a fatal disease.

She stared blankly, unbelieving.

"At least, I use it when I can. Sometimes I forget. Do well to remember it, child. For one of your..." he assessed her without fanfare, lifting his chin and giving her the impression that he was using her own resting bitch face power against her through his motionless mask, "disposition... may find it useful."

She nodded absently, waving her hand in a dismissive manner. "Kinetic information retrieval - got it. By the way, want to bet eight silvers that I can look into a history book and prove to you that someone called Tutchalanka never existed and you made this up as a cover story?"

"You are too intelligent for a nine-year-old girl," he noted dryly, not surprised, but with a ghost of amusement in his voice.

Resting bitch face, activate! Double power!

"Oh, puh-lease... I'm a prodigy!" she said superciliously, adding a singsong inflection to the word 'prodigy' with a hand stretched straight on her heart in a lioness' pride.

There we go. Each dialogue option has at least one "Straightman" answer and one "Sassy smartass/Renegade" option, as it should be.

For a moment, Timory stopped walking.

Lazara fixed him with a glare.

"Promise to be careful out there. I don't want to have to attend your funeral, alright?" she said, her voice monochrome black.

Timory seemed to skip a beat as he locked his eyes in Lazara's own. "I will," he told her. "I've been training, I'm good at this, Laz. I can take five of our guards in a spar, plus Sylvester showed me a healing spell. Basic, but... it works."

"Will it keep your heart beating when an arrow finds it?" Lazara asked, eyes carefully studying his face. He looked reluctant to have this conversation, but firm in his confidence.

"That won't happen, for a number of reasons," he said, counting them on his fingers: "I have armor, I have physical enhancement, during larger battles in the open I'll be mostly fighting on horseback. It'll be fine, Lazara."

She frowned, almost scowling at the light patronizing shade in his tone. "No, no, you idiot, no! You won't be! It doesn't matter how fast you move, elven archers are different from human ones! They have faster reactions, see things moving slowly, and their aim is on another level! I've read about this! You're going to get hit by an arrow, sooner or later. That's a truth; a statistical reality, and when it happens, I want you to survive."

He started looking bleached and frowned in a modicum of outrage, taken aback by the sudden approach of her reprimand. Lazara continued her verbal assault without mercy, "Get armor that can take mithral arrows, or - hell, even adamantite!"

"That's... paranoid, Lazara. Armor like that costs, too."

"Then get something to save your skin! Anything! A lot of arrows are going to fly on that battlefield, Tim; some stray, some as volleys, and some surely aimed at you. And when elven rangers aim, they don't miss! They never miss when they intend to hit, Tim! And they will aim for your face, Tim! Yours specifically! The best archers of Ethengarde will try to kill you!"

"How do you know that?" he asked, folding his arms, and causing an abrupt shift in the flow of the conversation. Taken by shock, Lazara stood motionless for some time, considering his question, debating on what the actual answer was.

How did she know? She remembered reading books on Ethengarde, as a nation. Their archers were the best on the continent, and the very profession was considered a 'noble calling' there, related culturally to gentry and high society. Having the most steadfast aim was equivocal, but was mostly associated with keenness of the mind or being blessed by the gods. Archery was a method of war suited for elven biology.

There was nothing to indicate Ethengarde would be sending their own men, at least officially, or aiming to eliminate Timory Lightbrook - that's an act of open war, something that Ethengarde wasn't prepared for, hence why they were content to just aid small rebellions and elven uprisings.

Was she just making childish assumptions?

Timory shook his head, walking down the halls. He stopped to remark, "I'll be fine, sis. I'll get better armor, but stop worrying so much about me."

As he walked off, Lazara stood frozen and questioned how she knew - with full conviction - someone would try to kill her brother. The obvious answer was that she was acting childishly, making assumptions because of how worried she was. That's what Timory probably assumed, and she was mentally convincing herself that was the case, but in her memories, that was wrong. In hindsight, she could remember the dead-cold certainty with which she spoke those words, like someone knowing the person they were looking at was a calf going to get slaughtered.

It took her a minute, but eventually, Lazara shook off the worries and went to her chambers to rest.


"I don't..." Lazara shook her head, leaning back. "I'm not sure how to approach this. How do you do it?"

Belladonna blinked; she wasn't expecting that. After a moment of staring at the floor, she indicated with her fingers in a 'so-so' gesture. "Well, I... I'm not used to conventional methods. I'm something of a prodigy, but I usually start it off by thinking of what makes me think of magic."

"The Weave Maxim?"

"Maybe that'll work for you, but not me. No, I have a different image for that. After that, I imagine the spell. If I were to fill it up with water, I'd imagine the smooth sensation of bathing, the sound and scenery of a river flowing close by, all while focusing on the glass. Incanting helps, definitely. There's something solidifying about speech that convinces your soul that you want this to happen; possibly the conscious effort put into it."

Lazara nodded, then stared at the glass, breathing out as if preparing herself for an immense exertion.

Something that makes her think of magic?

The Weave Maxim? Hm...

A large loom, spanning the universe. So large it takes up the entire horizon, with nothing but perfectly-straight strings of varied thickness. Colorful strings, actually. Some were yellow, others green, blue, or red; heavily saturated and lively, like a child's crayon drawing. There was no preference for warm or cold colors, but there was an abrupt and visible lack of blacks, grays, and whites. No sky, either: there was only the loom.

Imagining it, she pictured a needle piercing into the glass and making a neat hole, as if the vessel was fashioned from cardboard rather than crystalline material, and creating a stream of water from its tip, slowly filling it.

In a second part of her brain, she pictured a faucet, with two cranks for increasing the amount of water. She imagined the cranks being turned, both of them, increasing and increasing gradually with deliberate motions as water began to flow into some nebulous container.

Lazara kept all of these images in her head, cycling through them in a form of meditation with closed eyes. After she was confident in this - confident this would work, she opened her eyes and still thinking of the images, she held her hand imperiously over the empty glass.

In her eyes, it had water. It was a full glass, damn it!

She stared at it, like an empress cruelly watching her slave, and then ordered, "Create. Water."

For two seconds, nothing happened.

And then a few drops of what she was certain wasn't water but sweat released from her palm and plopped into the glass.

"What."

Blank, and feeling hollow and bitter on the inside, Lazara's thoughts contorted as her eye twitched. The weave of colorful strings was cut with a billion scissors, the faucet of water exploded out of the wall flooding the entire bathroom, and the glass with the needle in it shattered into dust.

"Now, now, calm down!" Belladonna said, stepping forward with her hands outstretched.

Gritting her teeth, Lazara kept herself from imagining the glass scream. She did as her mentor said, and tried to calm herself with a small breathing exercise, repeating the process over and over for a minute. Anger would lead to a possible, telekinetic glass explosion, and that wasn't healthy.

"Maybe you're just not attuned to that element," Belladonna said. "Hm. We should find out your soul's preference, actually."

"My soul?"

"Yes. As I mentioned, souls have leanings and affinities towards certain effects, schools of thought, elements, et cetera," Bella explained, picking up the glass and staring at it mid-speech. She turned it in her hand, looked at the bottom of it.

She frowned when she noticed that the droplets of sweat from Lazara's hand had small blotches of colorful dye in them, and refused to mix. Some kind of miscasting? A mistake was made. "Did you think about colors when casting?"

"Um, I thought of the Weave, except colorful. Like a rainbow."

"Any idea why?"

"I don't know," Lazara admitted with a helpless shrug, voice tiny. "You told me that it's about doing what feels natural. For some reason, I thought it'd help me focus. It felt right."

Belladonna nodded as if noting something down in her head. After some awkward silence, she said, "Well, that means water might not be your element. Doesn't mean you can't cast it, just that it'll take more mental exertion, more training, repetition. It's the kind of thing that you can force it, if you try hard enough. I've only gotten my first tinder spell right on my seventh attempt, and I tried very hard each one of those times. And that's with an impressive array of meridians and a natural inborn proficiency for magic on my part, might I add. Don't beat yourself up over it." She laid a hand on her charge's shoulder, and Lazara felt soothed by the gesture. It was supportive; communicated something more.

"Okay."

"When I get my equipment, we'll find out if your soul and magic have a preference for some elements or types of spells," she stated. "For now, try the water exercise again. If you don't get it on the tenth try, we'll attempt something else."

Lazara nodded and took the glass as it was handed to her.

"Should I try a different mental image, or keep going with this one?"

"Either method could work," Belladonna answered with an weighty shrug, lips drawn thin. Then she grinned and winked in a knowing way. "It's up to you to find out."

Trait Gained: Inquisitive.


"Are you doing this to actually teach me something, or is this an attempt at manipulating me to bring you free information? Or, c-crap, is it both? It's both, isn't it? You're multitasking at this, aren't you?!"

Snake-in-the-Reeds didn't make any answer, feeling it prudent to stay silent to the little girl's question. The silence - in itself - was like an answer. Lazara sunk into her chair with a sigh of exasperation. "Oh, fine! I accept your challenge, Snake."

A nod was the only response she received.

"Then it is agreed. Do not disappoint me. Grandmaster Tutchalanka would turn in his grave."

She laughed in a way that signaled she wasn't amused.


The week passed in an unobtrusive, almost silent manner.

Timory was gone, off to some training camp south of the Lightbrook province, though he'd be back by the end of the month to speak with the family and live with them for a few more months, learn some more magic, and receive his order of mithral-durium armor. Father bent to the request after Lazara convinced their mother to talk some sense into him.

Lord Lightbrook may have been the Lord, but Lady Daevina was the Lady. That itself was a convincing argument.

In that time, between lessons and rare excursions into the local town (called Twinkle Peaks, apparently,) and trading outpost, Lazara occupied herself with... spying, for a lack of a better term, on the staff.

The amounts of juiciness she'd found went far beyond her expectations.

As it turns out from his letters, Sylvester has a niece - a girl called Alice - and sends most of his earnings so Alice can have a college fund prepared for when she's grown. Lightbrook pays him to be an accountant, clergyman, and, to some extent, a steward, to pay off a debt he owed to the chubby monk. Lazara would've never expected they had a past history, at least not to this extent.

The gamekeeper and hunter on father's payroll, Poscidion Dedina, was some kind of retired adventurer. Father hired him on a semi-whim after seeing his proficiency with the bow when he partook in an archery tournament, but they 'knew each other from before that,' and since Dedina is mostly useless in a fight (bum leg,) he decided to agree to this job. At least when hunting, he can ride atop a horse, even when the same doesn't apply to walking in a cave or crawling through narrow tunnels. Hence the retirement from adventuring.

Nellie Blazebloom, one of the maidservants and de facto nursemaid - Lazara vaguely recognized her for taking care of her in her toddler years - was Lady Daevina's favorite. Sometimes they had tea together when neither was busy, to discuss recent events in their social lives or just talk about manicure. Weird relationship.

She also had a secret and spicy romance with one of the guards who mostly patrolled the courtyard: one Enoon Eruraina. He was a patriot, through and through, but not to the point of driven fanaticism, and he carried around a ribbon that Nellie offered him as a gift. Now, that's kind of sweet.

Otho Stonewolf, his patrol partner, wasn't. He had a scarred face and the creepiest, most predatory grin that Lazara had ever seen. He practically reveled in any chance he was given to bully others. In fact, he admitted to her openly that he only worked here on the off-chance someone decided to sneak in one night, and he could make sweet love to their chest with the business end of his sword. Why her father hired this psychopath was beyond her. Skill? Need for more guards? Bah!

Finding out about Efar Cuthacar, the head kitchen chef was a bit more difficult, but Lazara soothed him by lending him a hand in cutting onions. Apparently, he was an ex-convict, arrested for stealing an honest-to-Bahamut reliquary of healing from the same monastery that Sylvester worked in. Poscidion was actually part of the party that Lazara's grandfather tasked with hunting him down, and Sylvester offered to join them as a healer. She wondered if this was where her father and Sylvester had met, and just how far this entire 'previous kinships' web-thing stretched.

When asked why, Efar simply deflected 'avarice,' though Lazara didn't like that answer. He'd matured since then, understood that not everything in life is about money, and even so, he put his one talent - cooking - to work with Lightbrook's offer to work as a cook in return for the relic. A middle ground - a compromise everyone was happy with, and Efar was even promoted since then.

And lastly, was the maid who walked up into the easternmost tower in the old castle complex every, single day. Lazara was curious about that ever since he noticed it.

Turns out said maid, Hailee Eidan, had found a group of pigeons that made their nest atop the tower, and decided to feed them. She showed Lazara the baby pigeons in their little nest: they were rather cute, but Lazara still washer her hands afterward.

Better safe than sorry.

Weirdly enough, after telling Snake-in-the-Reeds on their next meeting, Hailee told Lazara that some of the pigeon eggs went missing. Lazara definitely didn't suspect her potentially-assassin, probably-spy tutor of stealing pigeons to grow message carriers or train them into silent killers, but she still asked Belladonna to cast an anti-Columba spell on her.

And speaking of Bella.


Lazara also managed to cast her first elemental spells, with a lot of practice. Making proper, not-dyed water took her forty-seven tries with a good quarter of an hour between each try spent on introspection and thinking of new methods of self-hypnosis. One of the methods seemed to work better than the others for her, and she decided to keep using it on an instinct; only five tries using it and the results were there, but she only managed to actually fill a tenth of the glass' capacity with clean water, which Belladonna cast an analysis spell on.

She said it behaved in ways water should not. It had a different optical density than water did, despite all of its other physical traits being demonstrably the same.

She was curious about the effect and cast dispel magic, but to her chagrin, the effect was halfway between extraordinary and supernatural, meaning it would actually remain there without magical energy and actually getting rid of it with anti-magic would be difficult. The best method was just to change its physics, in the same way that Lazara did, somehow. They continued to experiment with water in a plethora of ways, finding that Lazara could do some impressive bullshit with the reflections and it was very easy for her to adjust the optical density, and Belladonna briefly wondered if her soul specialized in illusions of some kind if she did that on accident.

She cast a fire spell quicker than water, only on her eighteenth try, managing to light a small stick, but it produced no other effects.

Earth? Earth went even worse than water, taking sixty tries and doing little more than letting her spawn a pill-sized clump of dust and sand which Belladonna said didn't even have the proper composition, both chemical and substantial, of dust and sand.

Wind and aerokinesis, as well as general telekinetics, were slightly easier. Even on her first tries, she managed to budge small objects, but Belladonna said that was normal. Wind was something of an... exception - working differently - when compared to most elements.

Aerokinesis - or aeromancy - was simply moving oxygen molecules, and telekinesis was moving molecules and stuff in general. There was no elemental affinity for telekinesis, even if some mages had a specialty in it. Therefore, aeromancy was just telekinesis targeting wind and wasn't even strictly elemental. An actual test for affinity in manipulating winds and airs would be something like compressing air into shapes, large-scale weather manipulation, or creating thunderwaves; or the opposite, of making sounds not leave past a certain area.

She also learned the philosophical and metaphysical meanings of elements. Why the 'fire,' 'earth,' 'water,' and 'air,' were more important and central to existence and magic than, say, 'swords.'

It turns out they weren't, but they were representations of larger, more comprehensive concepts that were translated by souls in a way that can be applied to common, physical sense.

Fire was related to fuels, entropy, heat, energy transfer, activity, thermodynamics, and dynamic energy: fire itself was the chemical reaction of oxygen combusting. The reason it isn't a wind spell despite manipulating oxygen is that the act of burning itself is more related to the aforementioned concepts than it was to the ones that wind was related to.

Earth was related to closed systems, grounding, energy embedding, cultivation, solidity. Earth represented these concepts the best: drawing everything in with a gravitational pull and keeping them close, while also teeming and providing space for life to grow and thrive.

Water was related to flows, forms, cycles, combinations, and manipulations; to free movement within a system that itself is limited, and related to the concepts connected to Earth.

Finally, Wind, which dealt with air, kinetic forces, static energy, free energy, and directed movement. True freedom from most systems, or energy transfers from systems to systems, or other more interesting combinations.

At some point, after reading through a list of the traits of people with various affinities for the four primary elements, as well as several dozen auxiliary elements, Belladonna and Lazara were struck by a collective headache and gave up, with Belladonna deciding to test what Lazara's affinity was the hard way: Spiritual information retrieval. Belladonna brought a crystal ball to suck the answer straight out of Lazara's soul.

That's what they were doing today.

"It's not bad," Belladonna said, the crystal ball on the table losing its lustre in seconds, the red, hypnotic swirl dissipating. "Your soul has a twelve-meridian count, with significant strength and durability; and three dantians, two of which are connected to five meridians each, and the last one is connected to two. I also get the impression your soul is all but waiting to grow more."

Scratching her head from across the table, Lazara rather sheepishly asked, "Um. Isss thaaat... a good thing...?"

"Yes, actually. A sorcerer has twenty meridians and three dantians on average, but proficient ones can get even to fifty and ten without their soul breaking apart. I've seen some impressive spiritual structures with incredible and contrived efficiency channels. I'll tell you about it when you're educated enough to understand. Either way, from what I know, your mother and father have very little magical talent?"

"Dad can heal, a little bit. He actually straightened my sprained ankle when I was young, with some kind of blast of yellow light," Lazara explained, blinking in thought as her thoughts went to the rest of her family. "I don't know about mama; I'd have to ask, but I know Timory is training in physical magic, and he's good at it. I've seen him sparring Enoon and Otho with just a wooden sword, while they had spears. Otho of them actually managed to strike him, but it just veered off his skin like someone sliding a pen across the table, and he still beat them both."

"Impressive," Belladonna said. "Your family seems to have quite a steady level of potential; shame not one of your relatives are interested in growing it."

"Growing?" Lazara asked, only a little bit surprised. "I was under the impression that souls are immaterial. They can grow?"

"Yes, actually," Belladonna said. "You're either born with the talent for magic, or you're not. Only a few know there is a third option."

Now, very interested, Lazara fixed her gaze on Belladonna's features in a faint snippet of power-hunger. "And that would be?"

"There are meditative methods - very advanced... time-consuming... sometimes even resource-consuming... meditative methods - that one can utilize to convince one's soul to grow more meridians and open more dantians," Lazara related, grinning like a smug cat playing with a mouse. "That's how many wizards who lack inborn talent get their power. Magic can also awaken in response to stress, but that's debatably rarer."

Lazara crossed her arms and pouted defiantly. "Why doesn't everyone do it, then?"

"Like I said: very advanced, time-consuming, sometimes resource-consuming. Not a lot of people are willing to go through one-hundred hours of reading, another two-hundred of sitting in place and introspecting, followed by drinking homemade mutagens and magical reagents that might have dangerous side-effects just to convince their soul to forcibly grow an extra organ that won't put them at a reasonable power-level unless they repeat it for at least months. Besides, it's a very little-known fact, even among mages. Most wizards who do it either get tipped off by another wizard, have outside help, or are incredibly and utterly desperate."

Lazara nodded in silent understanding, accepting the explanation. Once she made up her mind on what question she wanted to ask next, she looked up at her tutor.

"So. What exactly are meridians and dantians?"

"Do you know what leylines and nodes are? You've read those chapters I assigned?" Belladonna queried, eyes narrowed in suspicion of potential laziness.

Lazara nodded. "They are lines and nexuses of magical energy in the planet's anima mundi. Why?"

"Meridians are your soul's leylines, dantians are the nodes that connect them into large pools of energy and handle the intake and outflow of energy."

"Wow! I'm a mini-planet!"

Belladonna rolled her eyes, raising her cheeks in a smile. She gazed at Lazara, then said, "Twelve and three is impressive for what seems like a first-generation sorcerer who didn't have much to do with magic until recently. Oh, also, I've discovered... an elemental affinity. A rare and interesting one."

"And that is?" Lazara asked, parchment with spell example tables and elemental associations already gripped tightly.

"Light."

Lazara glared at the paper, then looked up at her tutor with a frown.

Belladonna bobbed her head, lips pursed and eyebrows lifted in a nearly proud and overbearing manner. Like someone who found a very rare and strangely shaped rock and was impressed with its existence, deciding to keep it. "Now, that's debatably rare. I think you might be interested in some of the alchemical lenses I've made."


Voting Options [Education between ages of 10 to 18]: [choose up to 4: locked-in options don't count; leaving unused slots will simply allow you to focus on the rest of the studies]

[X] (Locked) Learning how to behave as a noble lady with mother: Daevina Lightbrook.
[X] (Locked) Learning the basics of language, mathematics, culture, history, geography, and other sciences with tutor: Sylvester Spiritsorrow.
[X] (Locked) Learn the basics of magic and sorcery with: Magistrix-Lenscrafter Beldonna Whitebrow.
[X] (Locked) Learn how to gather information and plot intrigues with: Information Broker Snake-in-the-Reeds.

[] Learn how to use martial and ranged weapons to fight with: (enter hypothetical tutor)
[] Learn the basics of magic and sorcery with: (enter hypothetical tutor)
[] Learn how to gather information and plot intrigues with: (enter hypothetical tutor)
[] Write-in.

[Vote by Plan]