Izzy sat on the roof of Yelric’s shop taking in deep breaths, Yelric stepping him through some meditation techniques. He was explaining to Izzy the importance of meditation and mindfulness as it pertained to magic.

  They’d discussed some of what Izzy saw during his absorption. According to Yelric, what Izzy had experienced during his core absorption had been dubbed “The Void” by spatial magic users. It was a concept so far beyond their understanding that they all avoided it like the plague after receiving their cores. Izzy had called it “Outer Space” and Yelric had grunted assertion, but Izzy had a feeling they were talking past each other.

  From the space magic book, the prevailing theory was that “The Void” was a vast amount of space magic from which spatial spells and enchantments derived their power instead of the natural world like the other magics so obviously did. From the lack of a sun, moon, or stars in this place, Izzy wasn’t surprised that the concept of outer space didn’t really hit home.

  The books posited that with so much extra “space” in The Void, there needed to be something in it; hence, the prevailing theory that it was filled with magic. This explained why space core users were so powerful while also being particularly unstable.

  Something Izzy found interesting in that theory, is if that “space between stuff” is where spatial magic existed, there would be way more than the people of this world even realized. The books didn’t cover the fact that most of outer space was actually just the empty space between celestial objects, or that all matter even has space between its atom’s nucleus and electrons. This could also help explain why space core users, lightning casters in particular, could wield some of the most potent spells.

  He wasn’t going to start explaining the science to Yelric and instead talked about the experience at the beginning of absorption. Yelric was interested in how Izzy described all the “extra” power that he absorbed and that he had seemingly been actually teleported to “The Void” instead of just experiencing in his mind.

  The books also didn’t explain why Izzy had become so sensitive to the electrical pulses throughout his body or why he had developed lightning powers. Since that was a more tangible thing he could talk about, he steered towards that topic.

  “That is an extremely rare power and it is only possible from Space core users,” Yelric had explained. “Unfortunately, those who usually get it tend to… well… burn brightly and quickly?”

  “Ahh…” Izzy said, his mind finally calmed and his heart beating in time with his magic, slow and with purpose. “Picking fights they shouldn’t? I can see why; this feeling is intoxicating. They get overly confident in their seemingly important and overwhelming power and get themselves killed?”

  “Something like that,” Yelric said, nodding gravely. “Including those who never learn control and just let it run wild. Those ones have been reported to just implode. Fun fact,” he said, taking one of Izzy’s favorite phrases to heart, “anywhere that happens, no magic will work for a very long time on the ground marked by one of those explosions! You can stand there just fine, but no magic will work, try as you might!”

  “That is a fun fact,” Izzy replied, thinking about the implications.

  If Space magic was capable of manipulating the space between atoms or exerting forces at the subatomic level, and enough of it was spent all at once, it could literally rewrite the laws of nature and magic in a localized area. This could interrupt the normal expressions of nature and the magic that normally worked on the physical matter in that location. The result would just be, well… orphan particles. Purposeless dust.

  This tickled something in his mind, but he couldn’t place it.

  He went on, “It’s also kind of impossible. I know I’ve been trying to use that word less, but even in a realm of magic, natural material still needs to… well… exist. Naturally? How can you disrupt how that works so thoroughly?”

  “Nobody has ever figured out why,” Yelric said, impressed with the insights the young man was coming up with so naturally. “This could be one of the things you work on for me under our contract.”

  “That’d be really cool! I might have an ability that can help us out with that, too.” Izzy said, his excitement spiking his heart rate which pushed his magic to the surface. He took a slow breath and brought it back down. “Okay, this is amazing and all, but does this eventually calm down? I can’t have my magic bursting out every time my heart rate goes up.”

  Izzy had a brief image of getting intimate with somebody and lightning starting to arc out of unfortunate places. He shook the vision out of his head.

  “It calms down pretty quickly,” Yelric said, “but lightning magic is inherently a little on the volatile side of things. Eventually the control will come easily and it will be more natural and less attached to physical cues. Yours is attached to your heart?”

  “Yeah,” Izzy said, retying his hair. It had become a recentering exercise; he’d let his hair down, shake it out a bit, and tie it back up. “Still pretty touchy, apparently.”

  “That’s alright,” Yelric reassured Izzy. “Like I said, it should come quickly. You’re already doing quite well and seem to be pretty in tune with your magic. You were saying something about your magic explaining itself to you?”

  “Yeah,” Izzy said, “It can identify external magic and items as well. We’ll have to test it out some time! But maybe we get into that later, I am a bit too jazzed right now to dig into it.”

  “That will be very useful indeed!” Yelric said, nodding. “We’ll need to walk you through the basics over the next few days so you feel comfortable with it and it’s natural.”

  “Well…” Izzy started, getting to his feet. “Now I have the power, now I just need a quest! Give me a good reason to train!”

  Yelric shook his head, just as a commotion started down on the street. Izzy grinned impishly as Yelric looked at him again.

  “It can’t be that easy,” Izzy said and rushed over to the edge of the roof.

  Yelric got up grumbling something about welcoming the idea of Izzy being somebody else’s problem for a while.

  Down on the street, a strange procession was making its way up towards the keep on the main road up from the lower city. Izzy’s eyes went wide when he saw the three people leading the group, catching a view of their cores and shards. He looked at Yelric who had come up next to him and was now smiling.

  “Who is that?” asked Izzy, breathless at the sight of the magic coming off of the three figures at the head of the small, impromptu parade. It was almost blinding to Izzy’s new sensitivity.

  “That,” Yelric responded, still wearing a grin, “would be above your magic grade and your pay grade.”

  There was a woman who would have made Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson feel self-conscious, a man whose arms and outfit clearly marked him as some sort of monk, and an elf who made Elrond Half-Elven look like Elrond “not quite enough-Elven”. The magic grades coming off the trio was terrifying and comforting at the same time.

  While the magic was overwhelming, Izzy could also sense in their willpower a large amount of purpose and benevolence.

  He’d seen Yelric’s core and shards as well as felt his willpower for a few days. Izzy could tell for certain now that Yelric was more powerful than he let on, but Yelric also seemed to actively tamp down the potential effect he could have on people. The result was like a sleeping dragon over their hoard.

  The grade and willpower of these three was on full blast. These people were here to help and were going to make everything okay.

  “Well shit,” Izzy said, looking away and rubbing his eyes. To his surprise, he wiped away a few tears. “We could have used that lot five days ago.”

  “True, but all things considered,” Yelric replied, stepping back from the edge, “the local guild and guards did okay. A Muraeneth and an Eradicator? It’s actually more surprising that there was as much of the city that went, relatively, unscathed.”

  Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

  At the mention of the Eradicator, Izzy’s eyes went wide.

  “Purposeless dust…” Izzy said breathily. He turned to Yelric. “The path of destruction left by the Eradicator had that. Bits and pieces of materials that were just… nondescript dust. Bricks cut perfectly smooth.”

  A grave look came over Yelric’s face despite the influence of the willpower coming from the street.

  “Indeed,” he said. “Eradicators are not of this world and are somehow particularly attuned to spatial magic. Besides being large and powerful, they can also fire beams of extremely disruptive spatial magic. It isn’t something that we fully understand, we just know that it can. We also don’t know of any material that has managed to resist it. Eventually it can be cleaned away, built over, and the ambient magic and material settle down; it isn’t permanent, but it is still pretty persistent.”

  “Is there a monster manual of some sort?” Izzy asked, walking back to the middle of the roof. “If all of these things have names and there is info on weaknesses or local hangouts that would be a nice resource to have. And, ya know, knowing whether or not they can obliterate me by looking at me funny. Would that be something the Pathfinder Guild has?”

  “Yes, they would. You’d have to sign up for real, but I think that is probably beneficial for both you and me,” Yelric answered, making his way to the trapdoor that led to the stairs back inside.

  “Hey, Yelric,” Izzy said, before the firbolg made it to the trapdoor. “Could we do lessons up here? I know it doesn’t get sunny, and that you don’t know what I mean by that, but today is the brightest I’ve seen here and it is super nice.”

  Yelric looked at the pleading look on Izzy’s face and saw a bit of innocence that seldom shone through his demeanor. Izzy had explained to him what a “sun” was one time when he asked why there wasn’t one here and it seemed to be really important to Izzy.

  “Sure, we have plenty to practice on up here,” he replied, grateful for the excuse to put off using the stairs.

  For the next few minutes Yelric walked Izzy the fundamentals of telekinesis. While most magic types were capable of some sort of manipulation of ranged objects, spatial magic core users had an edge when it came to pure telekinesis. Yelric started explaining how telekinesis with spatial magic was essentially rapid, crude teleportation.

  The caster focused on the “space” between the desired object and the caster, compressing it little by little to make the object “want to move” towards the caster. True teleportation in the future would be the full replacement of the “space” in the desired location with the “space” that the desired object currently occupied.

  This would also eventually include the ability to move the caster in a similar fashion.

  Starting simple, Yelric picked a small stone that had made its way onto the roof and told Izzy to move it just a little closer. Izzy stretched his hand out and did his best Luke Skywalker impression. After some time and a lot of sweating, the rock sat stubbornly where it had begun.

  Izzy put his arm down, frustrated. Yelric smiled and placed the rock back down on the roof.

  “I swear Yelric,” Izzy began when he saw Yelric’s grin, “if you say ‘do or do not, there is no try’ I’ll melt that rock onto the roof permanently.”

  Yelric laughed.

  “No Izzy, I was actually going to congratulate you,” he said. “You are remaining focused despite an immense amount of effort. Frankly, I’m surprised you didn’t accidentally melt it or burn more of your pants off with that much straining. It was well done, you need to keep focusing on both extending your magic outside of your body while keeping your intrinsic magic inside at the same time. You’re already doing quite well with the second part.”

  “Oh…” Izzy said, embarrassed. “Well… Thanks. Sorry, Yelric.” Izzy was worried about how fired up he seemed to be getting today. “Can I get a second Yelric?”

  “Not a problem,” Yelric said, smiling genuinely. “You can only learn so much from books. This is the hard part with magic.”

  “You’re telling me,” Izzy complained, rolling his stiff shoulder out.

  He was going to have to start working out again if he was going to be holding his arms out like that. That reminded him of the complicated arm and hand movements he’d seen Yelric perform when enchanting the bag and what the book had said about arm movements for fire magic.

  “Does all magic usually come with arm or hand movements?” He asked.

  “Usually,” Yelric answered. “Some fighters will throw in leg movement or kicks to express their magic. Flaming punches and water blades coming out of feet. Stuff like that.”

  “Huh… and it is based on what they feel or think is natural?”

  “Again, usually,” Yelric said, watching Izzy get excited like he does when he is on the verge of figuring something out. “There are a few tried and true methods for some basic castings, but I’ve never found any for spatial magic.”

  “Hmmm…” Izzy stood up and walked over to the rock.

  He got down on all fours and got his face really close to the rock. He leaned back onto his knees and held his fingers in front of his face like a square, like he was composing a shot for a camera.

  “Compress the space between me and the stone,” he said under his breath.

  He stood up and walked a few meters away and turned back at the stone, squaring up like it was going to try to tackle him. He slowly raised his hands in a square out in front of him with his arms as straight as possible. In one rapid movement, he expended some magic into his hands, drew his hands close to his face, and expanded his hands away from each other, keeping the two right angles with his hands relative to each other.

  The stone rocketed off the roof and smashed him square in the forehead. Izzy crumpled to the roof clutching his head.

  Yelric flew to his feet faster than a creature his size had any right to, but Izzy didn’t notice.

  “Ah fuck,” he moaned, holding his head. “Shit… that hurts.”

  Yelric let out a breath, the stone had moved remarkably fast. He had been ready to grab Izzy’s body and rush him to the Healing Ward of the keep to extricate the stone from Izzy’s head.

  “Izzy…” Yelric said slowly. “Izzy, that was incredible! Not only did you move it on what could amount to your second try, if you had sent it away from yourself it would have been considered an attack if it hit somebody. Seriously, be careful! Both directions!”

  “Mmm…” was all Izzy replied, still groaning on the ground. “Give me a minute Yelric, we can be impressed together after my brain stops trying to liquify.”

  Izzy saw a new notification and sat up and opened it.

  Izzy grinned at the power name and description his interface had given the power. He definitely wouldn’t use it to steal, at least not with such large, obvious hand movements. He’d have to work on making that a little more subtle.

  Yelric had been watching Izzy’s eyes flitting back and forth with a dumb grin on his face and was concerned.

  “Izzy, are you okay?” Yelric asked.

  “Yeah, I think it is fine. I just awakened the telekinesis power so I was feeling it out.” Izzy said as he sat rubbing a large red spot. The rock had broken the skin and some blood came away. “How bad is it? Can you see it? I have a date tonight.”

  Yelric burst out laughing as Izzy scowled and reached up with a palm to press against the spot.

  “Let’s get you downstairs,” Yelric said, chuckling. “I keep a couple Grade 1 healing coins on hand. There is a workshop on site, safety first!”

  “Sounds delightful,” Izzy grumbled, getting off the ground with his one free hand. Then he brightened up and said, “maybe I’ll grab a cookie or five as well!”

  As the two made their way to the trapdoor, Izzy suddenly went stiff and his eyes went wide. Yelric looked down at him and saw a look of horror on his face. Then he felt it, too.

  It started as a tickle on the back of his neck, and then there was a wave of remnant spatial magic that washed over him. Izzy promptly threw up on the roof and Yelric felt a little dizzy.

  Izzy fell to the roof, doing his best to avoid his sick. His equilibrium had been thrown into disarray and he was struggling to stay steady even on all fours. Yelric had turned to look up at the keep with a pained look on his face.

  “No,” Yelric said, his voice chilling Izzy to the bone. “Not again.”

  “What do you mean? Did you feel that? What is…” was all Izzy got out before he was retching again.

  Yelric answered him with just three words.

  “She is here.”