NOVEL NEXT Book 4, Chapter 3
"Why do we do it this way?" Emily asked, as she held up her training wand, whose tip glowed dimly.
It was Friday, and I was using my time to help Emily with her Wizard practice. Which, admittedly, mostly amounted to satiating her curiosity while she did the actually important part of her practice, mainly to make sure she actually did it instead of deciding that she had better things to do with her time.
"Well, it started with the Order of the Silver Maiden," I said. "Which some people insist on calling the Maiden's Guild- your instructors shouldn't be doing that, but they might anyways, so it's nice to know both names. Anyhow, the Silver Maidens are major figures in the history of Wizardry and its formal research, and what you're doing right now is based on methodologies they've been testing and refining for centuries."
"But why is it the way it is?" Emily repeated. "Why do I have to keep this wand glowing until I'm sore every day?"
"Magicka is like a muscle," I said simply. "When you expend it past a certain point, it'll be a bit stronger when it recovers. And for a raw beginner who still isn't that great at reliably holding spellforms in her head? Well, a wand that glows when you pour magicka into it is a reliable way to have you expend your magicka to the point of exhaustion."
Emily grunted wordlessly.
"I know it seems dumb," I continued, "but think of it like a knight lifting weights. Bicep curls aren't exactly good practice for killing people with a sword, no, but it's not about training the obvious skills, it's about building a solid foundation for those skills to rest on."
"It's unpleasant," Emily said.
"Yeah, well, so was whatever training regimen the Healer's Guild put you through to train up your ability to handle raw vital essence without your organs exploding," I said with a shrug. "You get used to it."
Emily sighed.
"Isn't there some better way?" she asked, looking up from her wand again. "Your mom is a two thousand year old archmage- surely she didn't train you this way."
"She very much did, and don't call me Shirley," I said dryly. "Anyhow. While my training did deviate from the standards set by the Mage's Guild and the Silver Maidens, she was pretty clear that this part, specifically, was something that the Mages and Maidens had gotten pretty much a hundred percent right. The only difference was that, because she was an archmage who could just casually do this, she gave me a special power crystal to use instead of a wand like that. That way, all the magicka I expended would be stored and stockpiled for later use, rather than just turned into light and wasted."
"Is there a reason the Silver Maidens don't do that?"
"They probably do, internally, but the thing is, the practice isn't widespread because it's expensive," I said. "A power crystal designed to store an individual Wizard's magicka for later use is way more expensive to make than a wand that makes light. Also, using a wand properly is in fact a skill that has to be trained and developed- it's easier to do well enough than casting a spell without a wand, sure, but it's still something that has to be practiced, so..." I shrugged. "Also, I should point out: you're not complaining about this because the specific magicka exercise you're doing is about making a wand glow. You're complaining about this because magicka exercises in general are pretty uncomfortable, and you'd still be complaining even if I went through the trouble of making you your own power crystal."
Emily sighed dramatically.
"Sorry, honey," I said apologetically. "There's no real shortcut to being good at things. You gotta put in the work, and sometimes that work sucks."
"I'm surprised your mom is willing to admit the Silver Maidens and the Mage's Guild are right about anything," Talia said, looking up from her trigonometry homework. "Doesn't she kinda hate them?"
"I mean, she refuses to join them and maintains her independence," I said. "Also, she very much remembers that the Mage's Guild eagerly participated in the War of the Roses, and does tend to hold that against them. But, Ariel's the kind of person who can admit that even people she hates are capable of being right, and she's also capable of admitting that, as much as she personally may have contributed to the development of Wizardry, she's still outnumbered, and it's unreasonable for her to act like she has some unique insight that makes her better than every other Wizard who's ever lived."
"That's probably easier for her to do when the scholarly tradition of Wizardry has only existed for a fifth of her life," Faith pointed out. "It's not exactly some life-defining thing that she's been doing since she was fourteen."
I inhaled sharply through my teeth.
"You have got to be fucking shitting me," Faith said flatly.
"The scholarly tradition of Wizardry has only been around for five hundred years," I said carefully. "However, the tradition of non-dragonblooded mystics using meditative techniques and rote-memorized spellforms to perform Arcane magic is older than elves themselves are. Now, this pre-scientific tradition of Wizardry was significantly held back by the fact that none of these Wizards understood how spellforms worked or what they were actually doing, and even the mightiest of the pre-science Wizards simply isn't a match for modern Wizardry, but, that doesn't mean they were idiots. My mother, who spent most of her life studying Wizardry and trying to figure out how it actually worked under the hood, was in fact a key figure in the scientific revolution. She, uh... Doesn't like talking about it, though. Honestly, a lot of what I know about her past, I learned from history books, rather than the woman herself."
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"Maybe she's just pathologically modest," Faith said.
"Considering who her mother is and what she's like, it's not hard to see how Ariel decided that being a prideful show-off was a bad thing," I said dryly. "Still, I wish she'd actually talk about it sometimes. She's participated in a lot of history, and right now, I could really use her insight on the Silver Maidens."
"What insights?" Emily asked. "You said she wouldn't join them."
"That's... a bit of an oversimplification," I said carefully. "I'm not completely certain of this part, but... I think she helped to found the Order of the Silver Maiden."
There was a dramatic pause, as everyone took that in; my Bard teacher would've been proud of me.
"Sorry, your mother helped found the Order of the Silver Maiden, which apparently makes its money by selling women into marriage contracts?" Faith demanded. "What the fuck?"
"They weren't doing that when Mom was part of the group," I said. "It started as just a group of friends who formed a small research fellowship; Mom was friends with a few other elven women who'd also disowned their families and taken the name Silver, and someone joked that, since everyone gave their social clubs such ridiculous and pretentious names, this research fellowship composed entirely of unmarried women with the last name of Silver should call itself The Order of the Silver Maiden."
"That does sound like what elves would do," Talia said idly.
"What, accidentally make irreversible changes to the course of history for the sake of a shitty pun?" Faith demanded.
"Yeah, exactly," Talia said, nodding.
"That... does sound like elves," Emily admitted.
"It's very elven, yes," I confirmed, nodding. "Anyhow, Mom left the group after an argument about ethics went sour. See, one of the members wanted to try empirically testing the hypothesis that women with large magicka reserves would give birth to magically-gifted children, and Mom thought that an experimental breeding program that involved using a whole bunch of humans as test subjects was abhorrent. She lost the argument, so she just took her ball and went home, and the Silver Maidens kept going without her, and went deeper and deeper into unethical experimentation, especially after the War of the Roses, where they eagerly transitioned into a Hikaano institution rather than an elven one."
"Then why do you think your mom would know anything about what they're doing now?" Faith asked.
"Because elves live forever, and the original Silver Maidens are still in charge of the current Order," I said. "The only real change is that they invented a new hierarchy of ranks within the Order, and call themselves The Silver Crones."
"Also," Talia added, "if what they were doing was so bad, why didn't Ariel do anything about them? She was still a Wizard, she could've just killed 'em all with a botched teleportation spell."
"Ariel Silver was a scholar, not a soldier," I said. "She didn't live by violence, so it never occurred to her that she should kill her former fellows with magic because of a dispute over research ethics."
"Why not bring this to the authorities?" Faith asked.
"High Elves didn't really have authorities," I said. "Not the way most other societies do. High Elves just never developed a centralized administrative state- not even to the degree the Hikaano have, which is generally considered to be one of the worst-run administrative states in the world. The closest thing High Elves had to an authority who could look at what the Silver Maidens were doing and tell them to knock it the fuck off was High King Lysander, the grandfather who Ariel disowned two thousand years ago, and who she was not on speaking terms with."
"Mmn..."
"Also, I should probably reiterate: I don't know that this is what happened. I'm speaking with confidence because I know the historical record and I also know my own goddamn mother, but this is only well-supported conjecture. I should also mention that I am not actually a time traveler, and nitpicking with 'well why didn't she just-' isn't going to change what already happened five hundred years ago. Ariel Silver was a founding member of the Silver Maidens. She left because of an ethical dispute. The Order survived without her. Everything else about the nuances and the details of how exactly it went down are all beyond me, because I wasn't there, and Ariel never saw fit to mention any of this to me." I shrugged.
"Which brings us back to the overarching issue of this semester," Volex said. "We don't know anything about the Order of the Silver Maiden that isn't public knowledge, and we're going to have to deal with a Silver Maiden or three. And if we're unlucky? The Silver Maidens might remember Ariel turning her back on them, and might even hold a grudge. Now, does anyone happen to remember that Ariel Silver is a well-known figure and a taxpaying Hikaano citizen, and the fact that she's a mother is public knowledge?"
I blinked a few times.
I considered just how insufferably intractable Erica Silverpetals was going to be if she decided she hated me because of what my mother had done five hundred years ago.
"Well, fuck," I said simply.