I Swear I'm Not A Dark Lord!

Training

Soon after, Taylor started spending three days a week away from home. The practice ground was six hours away with Ted, or four with body enhancements, so the trip was only worth it if they stayed overnight. He took food, a bedroll, and a few camping supplies. From the road, the quarry looked like any other local hill, but the opposite side of it was cleared of dirt and vegetation, and massive square sections were carved into the stone beneath. That hill, and the one just beyond it, supplied stone for all the townships on this side of Estfold. A tiny village of small wooden buildings housed cutters and serviced their needs during the cutting season.

The quarry's water was supplied by a small canal that brought it from a river running down through the mountains in deep, narrow channels. Taylor followed the canal to the river and the river upstream, navigating narrow hillside trails. On his first visit, he almost passed the training area because it didn't look at all like he expected. His mother hadn't been there since before he was born. Years of weather and vegetation hid the evidence of her training, but the area was conspicuous for its excellence as a camping ground. It was just off a bend in the river, where the current slowed and widened. A pebbly point bar eased out of the water and rose gently uphill to become a broad meadow. Continuing up the slight incline, Taylor passed through a stand of trees ending in a rock face that rose suddenly in front of him. Grooves sliced along the cliff like claw marks from a bear — a thirty-foot-tall bear with dire grievances against the mountain.

Water, sheltering trees, and a cliff face to practice against. He'd found it.

On his first trip, Taylor threw anything and everything against the cliff and nearby trees. He tried out offensive spells of every type mentioned in Art and Practice. Several times, the costs were so extreme his mana bottomed out, but there were no hard barriers to what he could do. Skill and mana were his only obstacles.

There were other spellbooks in his collection, too. Most magicians used Old Gordian translations of Mi'iri 'spellscript' without realizing they didn't know the original language of their spells. Those translations drifted from the meanings of the original, in a language poorly suited for Mi'iri thought. That, plus the sometimes ridiculous modifications made to the spells in the name of 'improvements' made the difficult art of spellcasting even more difficult to learn. But the true mistake of Gordian practice lay in their belief that 'structured' magic began and ended with Spellscript. Traveling the well-worn path left by the ancients was a starting point, not the whole adventure.

Once Taylor had an idea of what he could handle, he set out to build a basic arsenal of spells. He started with all the familiar elemental attacks and learned to do them silently and efficiently. It was wasteful to cut with air, evoke the energy of fire, and conjure earth to throw at people. But those were the expected basics, and doing them well and silently would impress, without revealing his true abilities.

If a magician truly wanted to poke a hole in something or slash it into ribbons, the efficient way was pure kinetic force without the go-between of some physical carrier like air or water. Taylor pulled the so-called "dark element" force spells from Art and Practice, learned what it felt like to cast them, and started using unstructured mana to replicate the effect without spells. It took most of his practice time for a month to learn to slash and stab with pure force, but he could do it almost instantly, and repeatedly. It was nearly invisible and easy to control.

What Gordians called earth magic was mostly conjuring rocks and flinging them at high velocity or using them as barriers. The problem with that approach was the high cost. Turning mana into mass was expensive. Magic didn't entirely defeat the law of conservation of mass and energy, but it bent the rules by conjuring stuff that was temporarily real and disappeared after a short time. Taylor's spell-less version of Rock Shot started with a real rock, shaped and prepared ahead of time, and used pure force to give it spin and forward velocity. The result was several times deadlier than Rock Shot because the bullet was really real instead of partly real, traveled twice as fast, and ignored barriers that only protected against magic. In theory, he could use anything as ammunition, from harmless pillows to slivers of wood flechette to dense steel alloys.

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On a whim, Taylor spent several hours designing a new spell in the Mi'iri Spellscript. He wanted to summon a perfectly formed tungsten carbide round three times stiffer than steel and twice as dense. Explaining the material to Spellscript was the hardest part of developing the spell, requiring two long stanzas. The shot had to travel at supersonic speed, with enough spin to fly true. On his worksheet, he named it Dragon Shot. It was the kind of thing he had to use a spell for because he couldn't manage that much complexity without structural support.

The first time Taylor tried it out, the impact was loud enough to echo from hill to hill, alarming quarry workers miles away. It gouged a hole into the hill so large it destabilized the cliff and started a rock slide. A column of powdered stone and debris floated into the air. Mana spent, he fell to his knees and laughed like a maniac for what seemed like an hour. Using his personalized Rock Shot with pre-made bullets was tons more efficient than that beast of a spell. But for pure effectiveness, Dragon Shot was an amazing thing to have in his pocket.

When he wasn't honing his arsenal, Taylor worked out while he recovered his mana. It wasn't nearly as brutal as it used to be when he started, but the routine left him spent by nightfall. By dinner, he was starved and fished to augment his meals using a new pole. It was a praxis that let him control the line and haul in his catch with vastly increased strength. It also had other, less obvious uses.

His early evenings were spent reading and sleeping. Sometimes, he brought along the most unlikely of companions: a journal written by Bilius' parents.

He might have found it by accident, or the God of Mysteries may have guided his hand, but he happened on the journal while leafing through the volumes in his library. There was no catalog, and many of the bindings didn't have titles, so the only way to know what was in it was to open all the books and make his own catalog. He was working his way through a shelf he'd never touched and discovered he was holding an old book with a new cover. It was written in two hands, Father and Mother, back when he was newly installed as legate. They surveyed every corner of their new domain and noted every hill, every tree and flower, every fish, every bird and animal, and every crop that did or didn't grow. The handwriting belonged to both of them, each noting particular features they cared most about. Father made illustrations for their joint text, beautiful expressions in a few lines and a little color. A flower grew in all its stages of life, all at once. A bat-eared forest dog skulked between trees by starlight. Ranks of mushrooms mustered across four contiguous pages, their colors still vivid after all this time. Mosses and lichens faced pages depicting hills and streams. Day by day, their survey of the land unfolded. Father had known the township of Mourne for all his life, but Mother was new to it. Sharing it with his young wife, the new legate's love for his domain swelled until it filled the pages to bursting. Mother's observations were sharply evoked in prose.

"The lowland snows are melting," she wrote, "but the hilltops are white. We climbed snowy Leorath today, all the way to the top, then slid down on our backsides. My ass has never been so cold, and I've never had so much fun."

Father's hand barely knew about complete sentences. "Wheat is sprouting okay. Good news. Baby on the way. Jane wants money again."

Near the end of the journal, Taylor turned a page to be surprised by the face of Bilius' mother. She was beautiful and severe. It was easy to imagine her as a magician of rare ability, a woman who could burn a horde of monsters to a crisp and then sip tea over their smoking remains. This was the woman who died to bring him into the world and then cursed him for it.

If that's what happened.

One thing had been clear to Bilius for the entirety of his short life: nobody would love him, not even his parents. Taylor had heard a story that explained it, but what did he know besides what Jane had told him? The curse was real enough, but who was in the room when it was laid on him?