Book 3, Chapter 14

Author's Note: For those of you not watching on Royal Road, I've accelerated the release schedule to 7 days a week until mid August in order to get the entire volume out on Royal Road before it has to come down in September.

* * *

The two birds circled around me while chirping and cawing to each other. Perhaps they were trying to speak to me as well, but if so, I understood none of it. More out of curiosity than anything, I tried to read their minds.

Mana… invisible. Threat? Or treasure? Capture it.

So they did have some form of rudimentary intelligence, at least. Mind reading didn’t work on animals, no matter how smart they were. There had to be sapience for the spell to latch onto, which meant that while these creatures might be simplistic, they were not dumb animals. They were capable of forming societies, of having laws, of pondering abstract concepts. They were concerned with more than mere survival.

That didn’t mean I wouldn’t kill them. I’d never had much problem with killing humans, monsters, or magical animals if I needed to. It just meant that if I could find a way to talk to them, diplomacy wasn’t necessarily off the table.

The one with red in its feathers moved to attack me first. Or perhaps attack wasn’t the correct word. Either way, it was the bolder of the pair, and its body passed through the cloud of air that currently made up my physical form. This did nothing to injure me, of course. It would take far more than a bird flying through me, no matter how big, to disperse the air enough that it cracked the mana shell surrounding me.

I wasn’t able to speak like a normal person, but that didn’t mean I was without a means to communicate. It seemed prudent to get the easiest tests done first, and a simple auditory illusion spell was enough to mimic my voice.

“Hello,” the spell said. “Do you understand me?”

The reaction was immediate, with both birds immediately flapping their enormous wings to rise even higher into the sky. The downdraft from that was strong enough that I had to focus to hold my elemental body from being blown apart, though, again, it wasn’t nearly strong enough to break the shell of my magic. It would only have been a mild inconvenience to pull myself back into a single spot.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” I said through the spell. “I’d appreciate some sign that you understand my words, if you do.”

Once they got over their initial surprise, the birds exchanged too-intelligent looks and resumed circling around me. The silver-tipped bird started doing something strange with its mana, perhaps casting a spell the way its species did. I watched warily, prepared to counter it or defend myself if necessary, but the creature seemed more curious than hostile now.

Bird magic incorporated far more motion than human magic did. I, and every other human I knew, tended shape mana into the various rune combinations needed to cast a spell. There was an element of timing to it, of course, and speed was essential for larger spells. The longer the mana had to be held in a specific shape, the more taxing it became to do so.

The mana the birds used was always in motion, looping in and around itself in complex patterns. Some were easy to see, the magical equivalent of tracing a circle over and over again. The strange magic providing them with an updraft for them to glide on without actually flapping their wings was a good example of this. It looked similar to an extremely exaggerated channeled spell.

Whatever the silver-tipped bird was doing now wasn’t that type of magic. In fact, it was mostly supposition on my part that there was a pattern at all. I certainly hadn’t been able to pick out more than pieces of it, and I couldn’t begin to guess how the bird’s mana would flow next.

A squawking voice came from the mana circulating through the bird. “Friend?”

I considered that for a second. I could be a friend to these giant birds, though I didn’t have the first clue of what they’d want, or if they had anything that I might want in turn. For now, it was probably better to proceed with friendly relations. After all, it was much easier to go from friendly to hostile than the other way around. If I attacked now and then later decided that they did have something worth fighting over, there was no doubt that it would be a fight to claim it.

“Friend,” I confirmed with my magical voice.

Maintaining my elemental form wasn’t cheap, and if I was going to be communicating with these birds for a while, there was no point in holding it. I had for more efficient ways to defend myself than hiding behind a shell of mana that turned my physical form into air. Just to be safe, however, I cast another illusion that mirrored my human body floating in the air right where the blob of air that was my current form was.

Both birds were surprised—perhaps jumpiness was a trait they shared with their lesser animal cousins—by the appearance of a flying human, but neither flew off this time. My illusion gestured to the eyrie, and I had it say, “Talk there?”

Silver-tip’s looping mana twisted a new way and shaped different words. “Friend talk.”

The birds descended, flaring their wings as they landed and clutching the open lip of the tower. I followed them after dismissing my elemental form. One day, and soon, I’d advance my mana core to the point where I wouldn’t need to be so stingy with my mana.

“What you?” Silver-tip asked with its strange mana projection.

“Human,” I replied. “Mage.”

Red shifted uneasily at the word ‘mage,’ but didn’t start cycling its own mana to speak. Silver-tip, for its part, ignored Red and began speaking again. “What you sky?”

“Up there?” I asked, pointing up to where we’d made first contact. At the bird’s nod, I added, “Magic to make me like air. Fly far. Fast.”

“Fast,” Silver-tip said. It ruffled its feathers a bit and added, “Brakvaw fast.”

“Your name Brakvaw?” I asked. This conversation was already getting tedious, but the only cost so far was time. I might as well see what I could learn.

“All are brakvaw,” Silver-tip said.

“All… birds?”

“Brakvaw is big!”

That must be what they called themselves. I’d never heard of a species of sapient magical birds known as brakvaw, but this was hardly the first time I’d come across something new. It was going to be a challenge to my patience to get more information out of them, but I was committed to the conversation now.

“Brakvaw make this?” I asked, stamping a foot on the tower we were all perched on.

“Brakvaw make wayfinder nest.”

“The mana too?”

“Brakvaw no make mana. Only use.”

That was ambiguous enough that I wasn’t sure how to parse it. Technically, nobody made mana. It came from the astral realm, which we were connected to through our mana cores. That wasn’t what I’d been asking though. I wanted to know about the mana streaming through the eyries. I could scarcely credit a species with such poor communication skills for crafting such complex magic or raising the towers out of the ground.

Then again, it was obvious the brakvaw used mana completely different from humans. Maybe these tasks were trivial to them. Senica had been training with me for four years now, and I doubted she could manage to make one of these towers, let alone enchant it. She was certainly smarter than these two bird-brains, which meant either I really didn’t get how their magic worked at all, or they weren’t the ones to do it.

Maybe they weren’t representative of all brakvaw. Maybe they’d fallen out of the nest and landed on their heads as chicks. I couldn’t rule out the whole species just because the thoughts of these two were roughly equal to a two-year-old human’s.

“What is your name?” I asked Silver-tip.

Whatever the sound that came out of that bird’s mouth was supposed to be, there was no way I could ever hope to imitate it without magic. Even using a spell to make any sound I desired, I wasn’t sure I could get it right, so I didn’t bother to try.

“I can’t pronounce that,” I told it. “Sorry.”

Red shuffled in place and kind of stared at me, though I couldn’t really determine if that was because the bird was hostile, hungry, or if it just looked at everyone that way. Maybe I’d offended them by not being able to pronounce their names.

Or maybe he wasn’t looking at me. On the horizon behind me was a long, dark smudge, and now that I noticed it, it was getting bigger. “Friend of yours?” I asked.

“Mother,” Silver-tip said.

“Oh?” Maybe I’d misunderstood the whole situation and I really was talking to baby birds. It would explain a few things, though it would also indicate a relatively high degree of natural aptitude for mana manipulation.

If that was the case, I had to wonder how big the mother bird was going to be. It could just be a trick of the eyes not being able to properly judge size and distance against what I was expecting to see. These two birds were already bigger than me. If they were chicks, then the mother would be dragon-sized, with a dragon-sized mana core to match.

Hopefully she was as friendly as her offspring.

“Mother wayfinder,” Red said, the first time he’d spoken since our meeting.

“She uses the towers,” I realized. “Did she activate them?”

The smudge continued to get bigger, too big. I glanced down at the silo filled with interior balconies. How big could an adult brakvaw be if it could still fit inside? The two in front of me were small enough that each could comfortably fill a nest. Maybe the adults didn’t use the eyries.

Neither of the birds seemed to understand my question, which wasn’t all that surprising. I was starting to get the impression that the brakvaw magic traditions didn’t really have a concept of on or off. Their mana was constantly circling through them; what changed was the direction and speed. It seemed terribly inefficient to me, but I supposed if I had a mana core that big, I wouldn’t mind.

The giant bird was no longer a smudge. No, now it was enormous, with piercing golden eyes locked onto me as it screeched through the sky at speeds I’d be hard pressed to match with a flight spell. She was still a ways out, but I was starting to get an impression of her size now, and I could take some guesses at a protective nature.

Maybe it was best if I took a few steps away from her children, just to be safe.

Before I could suggest anything like that, Red and Silver-tip both burst into flight. My shield ward flickered to life, preventing me from being battered by their suddenly-outstretched wings, but I had to use magic to keep myself from falling backward into the eyrie. By the time I recovered my balance, my two new friends were winging their way to their mother.

She met them a few hundred feet from the eyrie and slowed to examine the scene as they looped around her joyfully. Perhaps seeing that her children were happy and unharmed calmed her down, because while she didn’t stop, I got the impression I was much less likely to be snatched up by enormous talons or snipped in half by a beak longer than I was tall.

In fact, as she got closer, she started to shrink until she was no bigger than her children. It was fascinating watching the mana loop through her body over and over, each time taking a subtly different path until she reached the size she desired.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” she demanded, her voice clear and intelligent.

“Oh good,” I said. “I was getting nowhere fast with those two. My name is Keiran.”