NOVEL NEXT 36. Full Moon
Excerpt from Yenna Bookbinder’s ‘The Travelling Mage’s Almanac.’
“In all honesty, I find myself overwhelmed with knowledge, discoveries and mysteries. Questions upon questions—every one that I answer reveals two more, necessitating a certain triage of inquiry. I had expected to have my hands full studying the curious fusion of corporeal person and spirit, especially with the unusually consensual nature of the event. Then, a black book bearing visions of ancient misery that defies scrutiny, a witch and her begrudging introduction to witchcraft, a march of beasts led by a water elemental, and now this. Am I ever to have a moment to myself, to finish studying but one thing in peace?”
As the coin in her hand became startlingly cold, Yenna nearly dropped it. In fact, she tried to—the freezing temperature caused it to adhere by means of freezing the merest hint of sweat on her palm, though the mage was able to pry it off with minimal issue. Carefully holding it between thumb and forefinger, the glint of silver drew the attention of her tablemates.
“What’s the matter? Not a fan of divine protection?” Hirihiri’s tone was quite teasing. “I hear the kesh mages of Aulpre aren’t much for gods.”
Yenna grumbled a not-quite-affirmative sound, bobbing her head between a nod and a negatory shake. “Aren’t you Aulprean? I had thought all the nation to be similarly ambivalent to the divine.”
To say the mages of Aulpre were atheist would be startlingly incorrect—arcane mages dealt in theories and proof, and it was undeniable that there existed forces powerful enough to act in a manner that could be construed as ‘divine’. In this fashion, most mages—especially kesh, who had their own cultural feelings on the matter of divinity—wouldn’t deny the existence of a deity, but instead debate whether that being deserved worship or subservience, whilst defining the rules that clarified if one was divine at all¹.
“I already told you,” Hirihiri smirked, “I’m from Asova.”
It was one of those smirks that led Yenna to believe she was joking, but it didn’t seem like a lie. Still, Yenna had no idea what Asova was, so she moved right on.
“We’re getting distracted. The coin suddenly became freezing cold. Here, feel it.”
Holding it up for Hirihiri to take, Yenna was startled when a powerful red hand descended from beside her to gently pluck it from her fingers. Narasanha looked it over, her piercing orange eyes staring holes through it as though it could be intimidated into answering its questions. After a moment, she placed the coin back in Yenna’s palm.
“Well? Could you tell anything?” Yenna pried it off again before it could damage her skin.
“...It’s cold.”
Narasanha looked almost embarrassed to have no further commentary, and Yenna couldn’t help but laugh—though Hirihiri didn’t make it any easier, the older woman letting out a harsh cackle. Yenna’s eyes flicked over to the other table, worried that their conduct would be disturbing to their noble host, only to spot Tirk wandering their way.
“Hello, Tirk, what can I–”
“Master Yenna, can I see it too?” A slightly grubby hand rose up towards the silver coin. Tirk looked at his own hand, suddenly self-conscious, retracting the limb long enough to wipe a stain into his shirt.
Yenna would have been surprised about Tirk’s arrival, but the boy had a habit of showing up whenever something interesting was happening—she wondered once more if his horn didn’t have some kind of unprecedented extrasensory capability, and reminded herself to look into it again later. With a smile, and a word of caution, the mage handed over the coin.
“It’s cold!” Tirk gave a beaming grin as he looked it over, carefully trading it between fingers to avoid hurting himself.
“He’s as observant as our inimitable bodyguard!” Hirihiri laughed, ruffling Tirk’s hair. Both the boy and the guard grumbled for their own reasons.
“Why’s it so cold, Master Yenna?” Tirk looked up at the mage, his wide black eyes flicking between the coin and the kesh that gave it to him.
“That’s just what we were trying to figure out. I’m, heh.” Yenna stopped for a moment, bashful about what she was going to admit, “I’m not sure if it’s rude to use my magical sight spell within a noble’s manor, or if I might trip an alarm of some sort.”
“That’s okay, Master! I’ll use my su-per du-per…” Tirk dramatically stretched out his words, “ma-gi-cal horn powers!”
With an air of drama that only a small child can bear without shame, he shut his eyes tight and gently tapped the coin with the tip of his horn. After a few moments, his grin fell to a pout, and Tirk solemnly placed the coin back on the table.
“Did you learn anything?” Yenna was genuinely curious, even as she scooped up the piece of silver. “What did your horn tell you?”
“It’s just…” The boy struggled to think of the right word. “It’s really…still. But it’s moving anyway. …That doesn’t make any sense. It’s so weird.”
The group frowned. Yenna was about to ask Tirk another question when Eone shouted to him from across the room. With a little wave, the boy practically sprinted back to the captain’s side, and moments after he ran from the room. The speed with which he moved evidently put more concern on Yenna’s face than she realised—a reassuring smile and nod from Eone in her direction insisted that all was well.
Still, without Tirk to distract them, the table had a distinctly lopsided amount of people who were interested in conversation. Narasanha was quietly alternating between sipping tea, eating small bites of cheese and scanning the room for threats, while Hirihiri began to ramble about seemingly anything and everything—the weather, something innocuous she saw on the journey here, her thoughts on everyone’s relationships. Yenna was far too distracted to do anything but smile, nod, and pretend she was listening, though she suspected the yolm was talking more for her own sake than anything else.
Though the restriction was mostly self-imposed, Yenna was hurting for her magic sight spell as she inspected the coin. There was clearly some magic involved, for coins didn’t often become deathly cold all of their own accord, and the mage was determined to figure out what it was—whether simple glamour or a byproduct of something greater. Fortunately, even without rummaging in her bag for goods, Yenna did have a number of subtler tools, aside from her spells, that were always with her. The rings on her hands all performed different functions, acting as generic components of a spell in the process of being cast—here, Yenna would be able to observe how they reacted to the coin.
Her first hypothesis was that the coin was drawing in magical energy. There was too much going on in the room for Yenna’s passive magic sense to give her a sure answer, with both the abundance of people and enchanted objects in attendance. A sure test would be how Yenna’s magic-storage ring would react to it. An elegant golden ring, the magic-storage ring was composed of several spheres of gold bound together. It was used mostly as an overflow for excess energies in a spell, to avoid backlash or unexpected results, but it did hold a small ‘emergency’ charge at all times. Focusing on the ring, Yenna could tell how much charge it held—it remained at a steady level, no matter where she placed it near the coin.
If it wasn’t drawing magic in, Yenna wondered if it wasn’t releasing its own excess. Her capacitor ring was a perfect fit for this, a wide silver band studded with hundreds of tiny grey stones. Unlike the storage ring, which could only accept magic through a spell, the capacitor ring could be set to draw in ambient energy. Mentally activating it, Yenna put it near the coin and almost immediately yanked her hand away—the cold had spread with alarming speed along the silver of her ring.
“So it’s an overflow, then…” Yenna murmured to herself and clenched her fist shut, willing some body heat to offset the freezing cold magic that was slowly pouring out of her ring.
“Something the matter, dear?” Hirihiri had been in the middle of talking about her favourite way to prepare some foreign root vegetable, pausing for a moment as Yenna muttered.
“It’s nothing. You were saying about the…erm, graffor root?”
“It’s pronounced graffur
, dear mage. So, as I always say, the best part is the…”With Hirihiri tuned out once more, Yenna was able to return to her study. If the magic coming out of the coin was overflow from a greater spell, she wondered if she might get insight into its nature by trying to interrupt it—and if it was indeed just a temperature glamour of alarming strength, then her disruption might just break it entirely. A simple solution, in either case. Yenna grasped the outer layer of a ring on her pinky—a copper plate slid over a brass core, allowing slits in the copper above to align with markings in the brass below. The markings were twofold in design but singular in purpose—composed of magic-repelling Av symbols and redirecting lines, the ring while active would disrupt the flow of an unprotected enchantment and cause it to fail. Of course, it was mostly for wiping away simple runes or undoing a line made in error, but the Av ring had its purpose.
To Yenna’s surprise, the cold barely abated at all. Even for excess, the effect of magic was strong. Sliding the Av ring’s outer plate back to its inactive position, Yenna mulled over her options. The rest of her rings weren’t going to be particularly useful here, insofar as teasing out what kind of spell or effect was involved, so she really only had two avenues remaining. The first was to bust out her magical sight spell, and trigger a bunch of security systems. The second was to go over to the table of powerful nobles and interrogate the priestess Suee directly. Both felt like they would cause Yenna to melt into a puddle of social anxiety in the best case scenario, so she desperately tried to think of an alternative.
The only thing she could think of was the last remaining of the six colours of magic the witch Lumale had told her about. Stasis, the light-blue colour of ice, had been the only one to evade her so far. If anything, Yenna had tried not to think about it—there was something viscerally unpleasant about the very concept of stasis itself, something incompatible with her being that made it hard for her to even contemplate. Even trying to distance herself from it with academia and rational thought felt difficult, as though a force within her soul had genuinely prevented her from even thinking about it in any reasonable depth. It boggled the mind, and left Yenna feeling frustrated.
“Yenna. …Mage Yenna.”
A heavy hand tapped at the mage’s shoulder, and Yenna broke out of her contemplation.
“What? I-I mean, yes? Sorry.” She hadn’t meant to snap, but the frustrated feeling had lingered longer than expected. Narasanha didn’t seem to mind, but Yenna didn’t want to seem angry with the guard for disrupting her.
“I was curious about the coin. Was the design always of a waxing moon?”
Yenna frowned. Sure enough, the design held a waxing moon, the remaining space filled with stars. She flipped the coin over, the pattern on the back identical, though Yenna distinctly recalled it being that of a crescent moon. The mage felt foolish—this entire time, her focus had been in the realm of the purely magical, attempting to decipher the spell. Staring at it, she hadn’t even noticed an obvious physical change.
“You’re absolutely right, Narasanha—it wasn’t like this earlier. I hadn’t noticed it changing at all.” Yenna flipped it back and forth a few times, puzzled over what this could mean, Narasanha’s piercing gaze fixed upon it.
“It changed again.”
“What? Where?”
With a free hand, Narasanha pointed to the leading edge of the moon. “Here. Look closely. It moves ever-so-slightly.”
Yenna squinted, holding the coin closer, though she couldn’t see what the guard was talking about. Then, when she blinked, the line moved. Yenna might have blamed false memory, but Narasanha’s finger was still in the exact same place—for all her stoicism and resemblance to a finely carved statue, the woman was also unbelievably steady.
“Y-You’re right again! I could barely see it at all. But what could it mean…?”
Yenna trailed off into a mumble, though her eyes lingered momentarily on Narasanha. Someone with such steady hands and keen sight would make a great mage, though her impressive musculature and powerful physique insisted she had made her choice in expertise. Yenna let her thoughts drift momentarily as to what such a powerful woman could do, only to be brought crashing back to reality by a commotion by the other table.
At first it was a clattering of crockery and cutlery that the mage was about to dismiss as background noise, but the shouts that went up after it triggered a primal flight reflex in Yenna’s kesh brain. Her lower half tensed and readied to flee, with her mental conditioning hijacking that impulse to momentarily speed up her thinking to make a rational decision about the moment. What she saw nearly made her lose that concentration.
Standing over the other table like an ill-omened shadow was a beast. Twice Yenna’s height, it bore resemblance to both a yolm and a bird of prey. Rippling with muscles, its powerful arms ended in a hand of wicked claws, its bulky legs terminating in huge, wicked talons. A set of four black wings spread wide from its back, and the tips of every feather seemed to glow white with excess magical energy, as though it had just been conjured into reality—a fading circle of incredible complexity beneath its talons insisted that it had teleported in.
The room was erupting into chaos. Glass shards were falling from the ceiling as nullifier traps activated moments too late. Eone and Aroearoe had started leaping to their feet, drawing swords, while the three members of house Stormsea ducked or leapt aside from a blast of blood-red fire that had erupted right on top of them. The kesh priest beside Suee was tumbling away, their chest opened with thin claw lines from the beast’s opening strike—inexplicably, Suee herself was a figure of calm, evidently channeling some spell.
Beside her, Narasanha leapt up like a demon possessed—even in the slow-motion realm of Yenna’s increased mental pace, she cleared the table with speed that would make a professional athlete blush. Hirihiri had barely even turned around to witness the spectacle herself.
Yenna was beside herself, shocked at the sudden shattering of the peace. There was no spell she could cast fast enough to deter such a monster, nothing she could do that would end this without blood—more blood, she reminded herself, as the rough kesh was knocked aside. It was then out of pure desperation that she looked down at the coin in her hand, and saw its new shape—a full moon.
Then, everything was still.
¹ - So-called ‘rules for divinity’ are a subject deeply debated in Yenna’s time. They seek to define exactly what would be sufficiently godly enough to unequivocally call an entity a god, a distinction that mostly only mages care about. Most worshippers, followers or servants of a divinity don’t care about the ‘divinely paradoxical power law’, or ‘apotheosis vs eternal implication’ debates—reasonable people simply say, “I believe, which is enough.”