Book 3, Chapter 1

Black slime steadily oozed out of a crack in the wall. There was already a pile of it up to my knee, and it would only continue to grow until the monster had seeped entirely past the barrier I’d built to protect my home from exactly things like this.

Finding and sealing off the tunnels leading into the valley I’d claimed as a sanctuary for my family had taken months of work, and to say I was displeased that something had somehow wormed its way through the ten feet of solid rock I’d transmuted to block the tunnel was an understatement.

“That looks gross,” Senica said. She fanned a hand in front of her nose. “And it smells gross, too.”

“What would you recommend we do to get rid of it?” I asked. “And don’t say—”

“Kill it with fire!”

“—that,” I finished with a sigh.

But my sister was already brandishing the wand I’d made from her. It was made of ember bloom, a tree that I’d thought had gone extinct thousands of years ago until recently. A few years back, I’d stumbled across one being tended by a neophyte druid in an old sewer tunnel underneath a desert city. It was to his credit that he’d been able to keep the ember bloom alive at all, and I’d promptly transplanted both it and its caretaker to a more suitable home.

“Stop and think,” I said, grabbing her arm to prevent her from aiming the wand at the ooze. “Do you know what this creature is? What will happen if you burn it? Are you prepared to defend yourself if it reacts violently?”

“That’s what I have you for,” she told me, her tone annoyingly flippant.

I reminded myself that my big sister was still a child – a real one, unlike me. Thanks to the alchemical ointment I’d been using, I’d grown far faster than my years and was actually taller than her now, a fact which bothered her to no end but which made it a little bit easier to assume the commanding role in our sibling relationship.

“What if I wasn’t here?” I asked. “Suppose you’re defending the valley on your own, with no help from anyone else. You encountered this monster. What should your first move be?”

“Ugh. To identify what it is and determine if it has any useful properties,” Senica said, reciting my own lesson back to me.

“And how do you go about safely doing that?”

“Obtain a sample using force magic and take it back to the lab for testing.”

Senica unslung her backpack and produced a wooden case from inside. She opened it to reveal a padded interior with five vials nestled safely within. “That’s new,” I said.

“Tetrin made it for me,” she said.

“Ah. That was nice of him.”

My relationship with Tetrin was… complicated. We’d initially met as enemies, but he hadn’t displayed any real loyalty to the cabal he was part of at the time. He cared about his work, and being part of the cabal gave him the tools and mana needed to do that. Once I’d finished dismantling their organization, he’d been happy to come work for me instead.

The problem with mercenaries was that they were loyal to the money, not to the man holding it. It was never a smart idea to trust them to stay bought, and similarly, I knew that Tetrin would happily sell me out if a better offer came along. I doubted that would ever happen, especially considering that I gave him not only the mana, tools, and workshop he needed, but also tutored him in making ever-increasingly complex enchantments.

But still, I didn’t and couldn’t trust him. His work was a boon to my sanctuary, but if he ever thought he could stand to gain more somewhere else, he’d become a liability. Because of that, I made sure to give the box a careful examination. The magic imbued into it all dealt with preservation and kinetic impact resistance, both ideal enchantments for a sample box. More importantly, I didn’t find any other enchantments hidden beneath them.

“He charged me more mana than I make in a week,” Senica said. “I don’t know how nice of him it was.”

Weirdly, that actually made me feel better. Tetrin had a crafter’s pride in his work, and I couldn’t see him sabotaging a commissioned job like he might a gift that had ulterior motives. Really, he’d been perfectly fine to work with for the last few years, and one could make the argument that I was being uncharitable in my suspicion of him. That wouldn’t stop me from continuing to keep a careful eye on him, of course.

“I’m glad you came prepared with the proper equipment to contain your sample,” I said. “Now show me how you’re going to get it.”

“It would be easier to just set it on fire,” Senica grumbled. “We’re going to be late for lunch.”

“I’m sure Mother will keep our portions warm for us.”

Still muttering under her breath, Senica produced a knife, stepped over to the ooze, and scraped a chunk of the material off the pile. She cast a minor telekinesis spell to hold the vial steady, smartly keeping her hand away from the ooze, and scaped the sample off. It dribbled into the glass with a thick, oily viscosity, and once the blade was clean, she capped the vial with a glass cork.

“There. Happy now?”

“I might be,” I said, “if you weren’t standing in the ooze.”

“What?”

Senica looked down to see the ooze seeping around her shoe. It was already starting to climb the sides and would soon engulf her foot entirely. She tried to pull away, but the ooze just stretched and clung to her. “Gravin,” she said. “Help?”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Get this thing off me!”

“And deprive you of this learning opportunity? I would never.”

“Gravin, please.”

Senica backed a full step away from the ooze, but it just continued to stretch as more and more of the material was pulled from the pile. It was a good thing for her she wasn’t wearing open-toed footwear today, else the ooze would already have reached her skin.

“So you’ve made a mistake,” I said. “You were a bit careless about where you were standing, and now the monster’s got hold of your foot. It seems to me there’s an easy way to get yourself free?”

“What’s that?” Senica asked, her voice rising in pitch.

“The ooze doesn’t have you. It has your boot.”

“My… boot. You want me to give it my boot?”

I shrugged. “I’m sure there are other ways to get it off of you, but that’s the only way I know of that will definitely work.”

“Can’t you just cast a spell?” she whined.

“I’m not here, remember? You encountered this monster all by yourself.”

“If I was all by myself, I’d have set it on fire from all the way back over there,” Senica said.

“What if this stuff is flammable?” I asked. “Do you have a heat ward?”

“You know I do. You made it for me.”

“And it’s fully charged?”

“It’s… probably charged enough,” she said.

I knew for a fact it was nearly empty, and Senica did too. She hadn’t been doing the maintenance on her gear because that upkeep was costing her precious mana that could be used for other things. It would have been one thing if she’d taken a calculated risk and prioritized something else that was more important, but last week I’d watched her repeatedly climb onto the roof of the house, then jump off using a sheet and a weight reduction spell to glide down the street.

In all fairness, it had looked fun and it had been a fairly windy day, eliminating the need for her to manipulate the air herself. Senica was not to the point of maintaining two spells at once just yet, so it was an opportunity for her.

Perhaps if I gave some lessons to the other kids, it would spur her into working a bit harder to stay ahead. She took her position at the best child mage—not including me, of course—very seriously and was highly motivated to defend her title. That was part of the reason we were out here together today. She’d wanted to see what kind of magic I was using to keep the valley safe, so I’d taken her on a tour of the spots I was keeping an eye on, spots like this one.

“Do you think you can control your fire enough to burn it off without scorching yourself?” I asked. “And, are you willing to risk the ooze reacting violently? Better decide quickly.”

Scowling, Senica slipped her foot free of her boot and crossed her arms. “Now what?” she asked. “How do I get my boot back?”

“Sometimes you just have to take the loss. You weren’t careful, you made a mistake, and it cost you one boot.”

“Graaaavin, come on.”

Sighing, I cast a greater telekinesis spell to rip the ooze off the boot and fling it back into a pile near the crack it was drizzling out of. “Happy?” I asked.

Senica huffed and gave the boot a quick check before putting it back on. “Not everything has to be a lesson, you know.”

“Considering you got your foot stuck in this ooze because you weren’t careful about where you stood, I think it did need to be a lesson.”

“Fine, whatever. I have my sample. Can I set it on fire now?”

“Sure,” I said. “Just give me a minute to get far, far away before you do so.”

I hurried back the way we came while Senica glared at me. When I didn’t stop after the first hundred feet, she started running to catch up. “What are you doing?” she yelled.

“Better safe than sorry,” I yelled back.

“You know how this thing reacts to fire, don’t you?”

“Yep,” I said, not stopping until I rounded a bend in the tunnel. “Okay, go ahead and hit it.”

“No?”

“No, really, go for it. I’m excited to see what happens.”

Senica rounded the corner and tried to grab hold of me, but my shield ward pushed her hand away before she caught my arm. “You’re not funny, Gravin!”

“Are you going to set it on fire or not?” I asked.

“I am!” Senica paused and glanced back around the corner. “From really far away.”

Fire blast was a basic-tier conjuration, which was about the extent of Senica’s abilities right now. We’d decided to focus on a well-rounded education and she knew basic spells in every discipline, but we were still working on the mana manipulation skills she’d need to start casting intermediate-tier spells.

But for the spells she knew, Senica was really good at them. As long as she verbalized the incantation for it, her fire blast was practically flawless. There was some mana loss with her silent casting, but she’d get there soon. I was proud of the results she’d achieved over the last few years.

Fire bloomed on the ooze pile down at the end of the tunnel, followed immediately by a large whumph of displaced air as it expanded beyond her control. Black ooze flew in every direction and started filling the tunnel until it was a large, solid plug of sticky, spongey material.

The loose splatters hit the wall at the end and started swelling. A few splashed onto Senica and did the same thing, making her look like she had heavy black fungal growth all over her body. The ones that would have hit me were instead halted by a quick force wall I cast to protect myself, leaving me untouched.

Senica shouted in surprise and tried to throw herself away from the rapidly expanding ooze, but it was far too late for that. She bumped into my force wall, then spun in place, eyes blazing. “Why did you let me do that?” she demanded.

“Sometimes, you have to learn things the hard way to really make the lesson stick.”

With a frustrated huff, she started trying to rip the black growths off of her. Now that they’d been heated, they no longer had that sludgy, oil-like viscosity, but that didn’t make them easy to peel off. “Don’t worry,” I said. “A little soap will help.”

Senica tried to reach out to smear the black growth stuck to her hand on me, but failed to make contact. “Some days, I hate you,” she said.