Broken Soul

Michael

The sun was at its highest point when Michael's gaze finally fell on the roofs of Reen. He had missed his city dearly in the past months, and he was a little bitter that he would only be here for a day or two before heading toward Lionsgate. Not bitter enough to skip on an opportunity to visit his friends, though.

Things had gone well enough in Emall, so he wanted to check on Reen before leaving again. Most of the projects that could be started in Emall had been started now, and Michael was happy with the people he had placed in charge. Especially High Castellan Pluke and High Magistrate Philo Peloras, who had come at the best recommendations from Lady Telp, put Michael at ease.

Michael looked over to see Sir Jereos a few meters behind him in conversation with Zeke. The knight had quickly concluded that nothing foul was happening, but had decided to stick with them until they returned to Lionsgate. Sir Lionel had been sent to Grent to gather the testimony from Michael's uncle and Duke Wallsten after he nearly got into a fight with the commonborn Sir Boris. Michael, for one, was happy that the insufferable man was out of his sight.

His eyes found Eydis next, who was riding not far from him but decidedly alone. Samira and the rest of her clanmates had decided to try their luck with the Rangda and had been sent to Grent with a unit of soldiers to be released back into their forest.

It wasn't hard to guess that Eydis had been disappointed by that decision, but for now, she seemed to be okay with how things had panned out.

Michael put all that out of his mind and let his gaze wander over his city. The forge complex had grown again in the time he was gone, with the water wheels taking up more space on the banks of their little channel and material being moved further from the walls to get some work on the surrounding open-air workstations done.

The temptation to split from the caravan and ride over to inspect the forge was strong, but he had more important things to do, so a visit to the forges had to wait. Rayakan was waiting for him with some kind of life-or-death situation, according to Kiran, so that would be his first stop.

Shortly after entering the city, Michael split off from the caravan, with Kiran and Pan, heading toward the academy. He had a bad feeling about this, especially after Sola wished him good luck.

"It will be great to relax for a while," Pan said as they stepped through the door of the former brothel. "Well, I am gonna leave you to it. Gonna get a bath and then see what the kids did to my room while I was gone."

Kiran and Michael made their way through the building and, after asking for the old headmistress, made their way over to the warehouse in the back.

"Do you also feel like there are more people here than when we left?" Michael asked Kiran while dodging a boy he had never seen in his life.

"I think you are right. I don't recognize a couple of the people here," Kiran agreed and looked around with a curious expression.

"We really have to get started on that new academy building if you keep growing like this," Michael said with a satisfied grin just before they stepped through the open double doors into the old warehouse.

Inside, they found Rayakan with a group of students sitting inside of what looked like a ritual circle. Spellsymbols of one of the common spell languages had been burned into a large wooden square, and the students were sitting inside small rings in the spell structure.

While it was uncommon to use known spell signs in personal magic, since they were easy to decipher and then counter, they were invaluable for group magic like rituals. Every member of a ritual spell needed to understand the spell to move his or her mana correctly, and that only worked if they were all able to read the spell.

For this, the common spell languages existed. There were dozens of them as far as Michael knew, depending on where the mage came from, what race they were part of, and more importantly, the origins of their teacher.

Humans were sadly notorious for different languages and even very different dialects in their day-to-day languages, and the common spell languages weren't any different. That fact wasn't helped by the insular and covert way mages in this region had lived for a few centuries.

Michael knew two common spell languages: Ilthiran letters and Kektos Common. Interestingly, Ilthiran was much more widely used than Kektos Common. The name was a relic of the past when they were ... well, more common.

The two new arrivals watched as the group of four students and their teacher sat in the glowing pentagon, one in each corner. Michael recognized that ritual. It didn't do anything other than glow, but it was very stable, and Rayakan could easily wrestle control and maintain it alone if something happened.

Even simple spells could have a very bad reaction when becoming unstable, and rituals were exponentially worse in that respect. That also explained the extensive stabilization frame around the very simple spell structure.

The glow of the circle was even, and the students were balancing the strain perfectly with little to no assistance from their teacher. Michael was about to be impressed by the young mages when one noticed him and instantly lost concentration. The light began to flicker as his part of the spell became unstable. The other students tried to correct his mistake and overdid it, which caused the spell to fluctuate even more. It was like stumbling and then hurting yourself even more in an attempt not to fall.

"Hans, keep your concentration," Rayakan said calmly, her eyes closed as she felt the spell tumble and break.

With a sigh, she let her mana flow into the spell construct, wrestling control from her students and reasserting stability. It took only a moment for the ritual to return to stability and then darkness, as she powered it down.

Her eyes opened, and her expression turned stern.

"You can't let yourself be distracted like that, Hans," she admonished the teenage boy. "You said you want to be a soldier one day and fight for the freedom of mages. Do you think you can concentrate in the middle of a battle with flimsy discipline like that?"

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"Sorry, headmistress," the boy said and let his head hang.

"Okay, lesson is over for now. Master Kiran will take over the next lesson for me," Rayakan said and pushed herself onto her feet.

"I am?" Kiran asked, surprised.

"You are. Lord Michael and I have to talk about souls and stupid little mages," Rayakan said and focused on Michael, who suddenly felt like a pig on a banquet table.

"Oh, you sold me out," Michael accused Kiran.

The old mage smiled, clapped his hands, and said, "Come on, students, let's give them some privacy."

Michael's stare followed Kiran well after he had left through the door, but there was no saving himself now.

"So, what am I hearing about a fractured soul?" Rayakan asked. She then looked down at the wooden ritual place and shrugged, deciding to leave it there for now.

Michael thought about running away for a moment before the doors slammed shut without anyone visibly touching them.

Rayakan grinned at him maliciously. "Let's have a little talk, you and I."

The explanation took only five minutes, but the flood of questions easily quadrupled that time, and the number of tests Rayakan then ran on Michael made him lose his sense of time. The old headmistress nearly blew herself up at least once when poking his soul, but what really concerned him was how serious she suddenly became.

"And you said these fractures happened in the battle but not while casting or even augmenting," Rayakan asked him for a third time.

"As I said. It happened when reinforcements arrived, and I relaxed. I think I put so much pressure on it that it broke when I relaxed."

"Could be," Rayakan replied deep in thought. "But I don't think that those fractures are an immediate problem. I saw no strain when you circulated mana or when you put up a spell for me. I have to be honest here. I never saw a soul like yours. I couldn't look at it too closely or risk going blind, but something is forcefully stabilizing it, which is the only reason you aren't breaking apart at the seams."

"Are you saying I might explode at any moment?"

"No, not just at any moment, but you should be careful with damage to your soul," Rayakan shook her head.

"Okay, what can we do about it?" Michael asked a little less worried now.

"I am not proficient enough in soul magic to do more than take a look, and even if I were, I wouldn't touch that with every safeguard available to men. There are alchemical solutions that can help and calm the flows. We should talk to Sibil, maybe she knows about them or someone who knows," the old mage offered.

Michael nodded. Sibil was the alchemist who had settled in Reen and was also a teacher in the academy.

"Let's see if we can get that sorted before I leave for the capital, then."

- A while later in Reen Castle -

Getting those potions would prove more difficult than Michael had hoped. It was a very niche thing he needed, and the ingredients were rare, so he would have to wait for Sibil to get her hands on them.

It wasn't an immediate problem, so he decided not to worry about something he couldn't do anything about.

Finding Solon was the next thing on his to-do list, after hearing that he was back from the Ereic Mountains. He wanted to catch up with his old mentor, but found his small room empty and deserted. It took some asking around to find out that Solon had moved to a more spacious room, like Michael had offered him multiple times already.

When he finally managed to find Solon's new home, he found the dwarf sitting in front of a fully lit fireplace with a book in hand and a pile of blankets in front of him.

"Ah, Michael. Good to see you back in one piece," Solon said while getting up. They bumped their lower arms together in a traditional dwarven greeting.

"It is also good to see you. I hope your trip into the mountains was successful."

"It very much was. Ferrekxan is knowledgeable beyond any of my expectations," Solon replied, and his eyes were virtually glowing with excitement.

Michael's gaze wandered over the piles of blankets, and something hard caught his attention. He kept his eyes on it, and it took him a few moments to understand what he was looking at.

"Please tell me that those aren't dragon eggs, or I will have a mental breakdown," Michael said, his voice being very faint and unsteady.

Solon followed Michael's gaze for a moment and then laughed before hurriedly explaining, "Oh gods, no. They are not dragon eggs. They are wyvern eggs."

Michael relaxed at that. Wyvern eggs were much more reasonable. That still left the question of how his mentor had gotten into possession of two wyvern eggs. A question that he promptly posed to the dwarf.

"Oh, that is a funny story. I am not quite sure what I did to get them myself," Solon said, sitting back down, Michael following suit. He touched the grey egg and found the rough surface hot, but not painfully so.

Solon told him of his adventures in the mountains, which basically boiled down to very long conversations with Ferrekxan and then a lot of little services for the local wyvern population. He had pulled old and damaged teeth, cleaned hard-to-reach spots, splinted the leg of a hatchling, and similar things. At the end of his visit, Solon had been presented with a grey and a black wyvern egg.

"I can only guess that something happened to the parents, and they thought I would do a good job. Or it is a thank you for how we are dealing with them, I am not sure," Solon concluded his recollection of the events.

"Did Ferrekxan say anything about it?" Michael asked.

"He just laughed and said we should be happy with what we got."

Michael nodded slowly while thinking about how to deal with the little flying murder lizards.

"Do you think they are trainable like horses?" Michael asked. The dwarf had traveled far and wide and told him stories about many tamed creatures.

"Wyverns are smart. Maybe not as smart as the civilized races, but smart enough. I don't think that will be a problem," the dwarf nodded.

"They are in your care, so I can't force you to do anything, but I think having wyverns in my service could have some very powerful fields of application," Michael explained cautiously.

Solon smiled with a knowing expression. "I can't feed them myself, Michael. You know how expensive a horse is, and they eat cheap things like grass or hay. I shudder when thinking about how much meat these little guys will devour while growing, so they will have to be put to some use if we don't plan to release them once grown."

Michael shuddered. He hadn't even thought about that. He knew quite well how much a horse cost in upbringing and maintenance, and Solon was right that the wyvern would make those costs look like change.

"Ok, yeah. They have to do something, or I am kicking you out," Michael joked.

Solon grinned at that. "I have taken some time thinking about it, and I think they will be worth the cost. It will probably be a few more months until they hatch. I am honestly not entirely sure how long exactly. That means that we have ample time to think about how we approach their care and upbringing."

"That is a subject for after my visit to the capital. I am not going to ask you if you want to come along with your new children," Michael said and poked at the black egg.

Solon inspected him for a while as they sat in companionable silence. Michael watched the fire and let his fingers trace along the shells of the eggs. They were something of wonder to him, and he was very much looking forward to seeing the little things that would emerge from them.

"Oh, I nearly forgot one thing. Ferrekxan had me write down a lot of things for us. Building plans for better tools, recipes, and similar, but he told me to hand you this personally." Solon got up and went over to his table, from where he unearthed a heavy tome. Its hull was made out of some kind of thick black animal skin. It looked old but was in good condition.

"What is it?" Michael asked as he took the book from Solon's hands. It was heavy, but nothing to Michael's enhanced muscles.

"I have no idea. It wasn't meant for my eyes," the dwarf replied.

Michael opened it up and skipped through some pages.

"By Idas," he exclaimed, and turned the heavy pages even faster. It was a spell book.