“You said I wasn’t in trouble,” Arielle accused, taking a step back and getting ready to run. Her brother also lifted himself off the mantle, moving closer, her sister’s hand moving toward her ankle for the dagger she kept there, her mother subtly angling her body like a coiled panther.

  Ari knew that if the mage made even one move towards her, her family would attack without question.

  “No, you’re not in trouble,” Elric rushed to clarify, still brushing his chin in thought. “But I think I might be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He sighed. “First, I must make sure. It might still be a fluke or…” He shook his head, eyebrows ruffled. “Of course, it has to be a fluke. I can’t see how it wouldn’t be. I’m not even sure how to explain this to anyone...but if it is true, I’m going to get the gallows for this.”

  Ari and her brother shared alarmed looks. Her mother stood, turning to face Elric with an arched brow and a careful tone.

  “Perhaps, you should explain exactly what the problem is, Archmage Elric,” Thessa said.

  “Of course. But first I have to check,” He took a breath. “Arielle, can you do a simple wind gust spell. Just a mild tier one. You can draw essences from my reservoir." He uncorked it from his belt and handed it over.

  Areille took it, excitement bubbling up. She still had the one he'd given her all those years ago, kept tucked in her box full of all her other priceless treasures.

  She recalled that [Wind Gust] was one of the spells in the beginner's manual. She remembered the glyph, and it was one of the simplest spells she'd attempted.

  The balanced equation was 2(Calor?+2) + 4(Massa?-1). The sigil was a straight chain of red, bordered on both sides by the brown massa orbs.

  She kept the image in her head as she held out her hand, arranging the glyph as she recalled it.

  Once the spell was complete, she directed it at his face, and it blew his hair back.

  Now it was time for her family to freeze in shock.

  "Merciful Celestial," the other mage exclaimed. "She didn't even need to say the spell."

  Ari nodded. She'd never had to say the spell to get it to work. Once she'd built enough off a link between her and the spirit orbs, all she needed to do was telepathically move them in place.

  She'd done it enough times with his reservoir before it had run out of essence.

  Now, she stared at Elric again, wondering if he'd be proud of her progress.

  Far from it, he looked pale, like he'd seen a ghost.

  “What about [Flashblind], a Tier 2 spell?" he asked.

  "I don't know that one," she admitted. "But I can do it if you show me."

  "How?"

  "I can see the spirit orbs."

  He blinked slowly, his lips parting slightly. "You were telling the truth?"

  "Yes. I don't lie, I'm not good at it."

  "So you can visualize the spell and...copy it?"

  She nodded.

  Without another word, he used his hand to arrange the orbs (gold and brown) into a glyph that appeared to be a star geometric structure within a ring.

  Then a controlled flash of light emerged, but it was contained within the parameters of the ring.

  She nodded and waved her hand, repeating his hand motions and copying the geometric shapes. It was slightly more complex than the first, but within a second, she released her own flash of light, feeling a sharp intake of breath echo around the room.

  "Okay," Elric looked even paler. "Tier 3. [Root Bind]."

  This one also involved green, gold, and brown orbs; the brown orbs and green were arranged in a tree formation, while the golden orbs were arranged in an arrow pointed at her feet.

  After it activated, roots burst out of the ground and wrapped around her ankles.

  Wow. Cool.

  She repeated the spell, directing it back at Elric.

  After it worked, the mage once again made a noisy sound.

  Without stopping, Elric said, "Tier 4. [Rapid Healing]." This time, it was a combination of four different orbs that collected together. The green orbs sat in the middle of the brown and the red, forming a matrix structure that twisted around eachother.

  Then another step began, as an additional gold and brown lattice drifted along with the point of his finger, an arrow towards her face.

  Suddenly, she felt the relief around her bruised eye

  "Now you do me," he said.

  "You don't have an injury."

  He glanced around, his eyes zeroing in on a kitchen knife.

  He held out his hand, and it flew in. With no further preamble, he sliced his forearm, and blood dripped out.

  "Archmage..." His companion murmured, but Elric stared hard at Ari with a nod.

  Ari complied, holding her hand out and arranging the particles together. She made sure to go step by step as he did, and then when she was done, she directed them to his arm.

  The wound healed in two seconds.

  The companion mage swooned.

  "Davenport," Elric said. "Get a hold of yourself."

  "I don't know that I can, Archmage," was his shaky retort.

  ***

  Nicolas Davenport had experienced many things in his short time working for mundane affairs. He'd seen a monster rip the head of a man, heard the call of a siren, leading sailors to their demise.

  But he'd never seen anything like this little Mossborne girl using a Tier 4 spell with such ease. No script. No spell utterations. No wand.

  Just a quick movement of the hand, as though she had been doing this for decades,

  "That spell took me nearly a month to perfect," Elric said, with a weak smile.

  "You must not have been very good," the girl responded, with no trace of mockery.

  Davenport thought Elric might react negatively to the insult, but he merely laughed.

  "Yeah." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I guess I wasn't."

  The girl's family watched the exchange silently, just as they watched their daughter copy a spell exactly right on her first try, looking almost bored at her own lack of effort.

  Meanwhile, Archmate Elric shook his head.

  “Tier 4. [Illusory Double]." He showed her that spell, doubling his image in the air.

  She copied that spell, just as fast as he did.

  "Tier 5. [Chamber of Secrets]."

  She did that perfectly, too, automatically drawing forth the best hidden item in the home, which was a chest of silver coins.

  "Tier 6. [Flame Shield Reverse Attack]."

  That took her a second more to figure out, since it used a different isotope of the elements than she was used to.

  But once she'd figured out the shape, she completed the spell in the same timespan as the Archmage, much to their shock.

  Then, they finally landed on a Tier 8 spell, [Seismic Pulse].

  Elric held out his hand, and the ground trembled beneath their feet, causing ripples even in the swamp below them for miles.

  He'd simultaneously created a border in the home that precluded it from the tremors and reduced the power of the spell so it didn't destroy the home.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  At its true level, it would blast everyone in the vicinity with eardrum-bursting force and sink this home into the swamp.

  Davenport was about to warn Elric that the girl might not have as much control as he did and might not know enough how to reduce the power of the spell.

  But then she shook her head.

  Elric looked almost relieved. “You can’t do it?”

  “No, I can do it," she responded. "You just don't have enough in your reserve."

  “How can she tell?” Nicolas wondered, as Mage Elric looked to him and said, "Give her your reserve."

  “What? Why?”

  “Just do it. Don’t worry, I’ll get you a refill.”

  Nicolas reluctantly handed it over.

  She took it, and Elric repeated, "Now try."

  ***

  Ari took a deep breath and called it forward. This spell was more complex than the others because it involved multiple simultaneous reactions and multiple stages, the result of one leading to another.

  There were five glyphs in total: a ring, an explosion, a flow of light, a bond, and an encompassing wheel of black.

  It was the first spell she'd seen that used the black Vacu essences. It seemed to suppress the effect of the rest.

  Ari went slowly, making sure she copied it exactly right. She released a tremor in the earth that reflected the exact intensity of the Archmage's.

  The room was deathly silent when it was done.

  “That was a Master-level spell,” Davenport said in the hush.

  “Yes,” Mage Elric concurred. “Yes, it was.”

  Ari looked around, feeling quite proud of herself for managing to succeed at a Master-level spell. But no one else looked proud of her. Her family looked shocked. Archmage Elric looked positively pale, and his companion looked on the verge of fainting.

  Elric took a deep breath. "There's one more thing I need to see. Just to appease my own curiosity."

  "What is it?"

  "One moment." He held her shoulder, and before she knew it, the scene around her changed.

  She didn't know how or why, and the magic had been so quick she'd barely seen it.

  "Did we just teleport?"

  "Yes," he said.

  Ari pouted. She would have liked to learn how to do that.

  They were in an empty field, with nothing for miles.

  "Why are we here?" Ari asked.

  "You're going to do a fairly complicated spell," he told her. "I'll hold it for some time so that you can study it, and then you'll try to repeat it."

  "Okay."

  "This is a special spell that I made myself," he said. "It might be difficult to replicate."

  "Maybe." She doubted it, though.

  "[Cathedral of the Living Light]," he said, and the spell echoed louder than the rest, the order travelling for miles.

  Orbs poured out of his EPUQ like a stream of all the colors except black.

  A series of different shapes formed, and it spread over the grass as far as the eye could see.

  Nature answered the call, and Ari immediately felt things come to life. Wisps lifted from the ground to form shapes. It thickened to image houses and lanes and streets and people. A village came to life before her eyes, a cart rolling through the center, a market in the distance, people dancing, someone slamming a door as they walked out of the house.

  Laughter and noise bloomed.

  A butterfly even fluttered in the wind.

  It was remarkable how detailed everything was, considering it was made of mist.

  Ari stopped marvelling at the scene and instead watched the essences holding it all together. It was a complicated pattern of repeated sequences, increasingly complicated by a special signature that formed on the ground.

  Runes.

  Ari cleared her throat and began to mirror it.

  She crafted her own shapes, laying them next to Elric's, making the essences double on each other.

  Elric and her spell formed weird triple bond in places, and the addition made the scene more lifelike, the smoke becoming flesh, the sounds becoming clearer, the scent of freshly baked bread teasing her nostrils.

  Echoing one spell on the other boosted it into reality.

  Elric let his hand drop, and the scene ended.

  He stared at her for a few seconds without saying anything.

  "What was that spell?" she asked him.

  "It showed the recent past," he said.

  "What happened to all those people?" There were no buildings around to even remember them by.

  Elric didn't answer.

  He held her shoulder again. This time, she watched the swirl of black orbs arranging into a rune at their feet. It was a strange pattern, not geometric but more muddled.

  It wrapped around them, and a second later, they were back in her mother's living room, where her mother and siblings looked to be on the verge of assailing the other mage.

  He had his hand up and looked at Elric desperately.

  "Next time, sir, please explain where you're going before you leave with someone's child."

  "Oh, thank the Boglord, Ari." Her mother rushed her, grabbing her by her shoulders. "Are you alright? Did he hurt you?"

  Ari shook her head.

  "Sorry about the sudden disappearance," Elric said. "I simply needed to evaluate her in private."

  "Evaluate her for what?" Her mother glared at Elric. "What is happening here?"

  “That’s what I would like to know,” Elric switched his attention back to Ari. “How…how long have you been able to do that?”

  Ari shrugged. "I don't know. I've only done the spells in my book so far."

  "The Tier 1 Beginner Spells?"

  Ari nodded.

  Elric shook his head. "There's absolutely no way you could have managed all this with only that as your baseline. You shouldn't even be able to perform spells unless you've cultivated your cores, and you couldn’t have done so without a trainer or a host of them. Not to mention, essences often move at different speeds depending on their charge isotopes et cetera, but you’re able to correctly identify, just based on looking at them, and move them at the right speed, and you ensure they hold their structure and...all this without even a basic script is–"

  "Mage, can you speak in simple terms so the rest of us can get the point of your eloquent speech?" Brom said.

  “Yes, of course.” He cleared his throat. “You see, the issue here is that, as of right now, your teenage daughter is an unregistered magic user. An unsanctioned Archmage of all those things, which is a Class C crime across the continent."

  “Wait, you’re saying she’s a criminal?” Brom sputtered.

  "As of right now, yes."

  Her brother grinned. "Well, who knew Little Ari would be the first Blacksoil Class C criminal and not me?"

  "This isn't a laughing matter, Brom," their mother said.

  "It sounds like it to me. I don't understand how she's doing this. Mossbornes can’t be mages." Her brother looked around for confirmation. “Right?”

  “Of course, she's a mage. Did you think she was doing all that magic without cause?" Celie asked. "For crying out loud, Brom, use the one brain cell you have and think for a second."

  “Quiet," Thessa said, nipping their bickering before it could even begin. "Archmage, explain."

  “According to my research, Mossbornes have been mages before," Elric said. "A long time ago, there were a few. But even those only had weak affinities and always lost their powers before adulthood, so there was no point in even having them evaluated. That's why the evaluators don't come to Fenway."

  "So it's your mistake? Not ours."

  "Are you saying she'll lose her powers before adulthood?" Celie asked.

  “I doubt it," the Archmage said. "She’s fifteen. That's three years from adulthood and her cores... I haven't seen cores this refined in one so young before. I doubt all that power is going to disappear. And it’s not just that. It’s the way her power works.” He gestured. "She can take control of someone else's spell. Stabilize it, or steal it. She does it without effort. That kind of talent is not common, not even with Archmages with centuries of training. I would call it a bloodline trait, but I've never heard of any bloodline being able to do anything like that. Such raw natural talent is unheard of.”

  “It could have been a fluke," Brom said.

  He shook his head. Facing Ari, he asked, “Tell me. How have you been training?”

  She shrugged and stared at the ceiling. “I haven’t been training."

  “You're lying," he said instantly.

  “I told you to stop looking at the sky when you lie,” Celie said.

  “I’m not lying," Ari responded.

  “You had to have been doing something," Elric said.

  “Just the meditation exercises in the book."

  "You got to where you were with simple grade 1 meditation exercises?"

  "I did a lot of them." They were breathing exercises, and she'd done them every day, whenever she was alone and bored, which was often.

  She also talked to her spirit friends often, too, but she didn't want to tell him that, lest he think she was strange.

  She did notice that as time had passed, it became easier to use and move the orbs. It was easier to connect to them, and she could almost understand them, too.

  "What did you meditate on?" Elric asked.

  "I don't understand."

  "Well, I assumed you ran out of the first reservoir I gave you. So what did you train with?"

  "Just the spirit orbs around me."

  His mouth slackened. "You trained with imperfect raw cuts. No wonder you're so good with the refined material."

  Ari shrugged again.

  He released a breath, his shoulders sagging.

  "Okay. We have two options here. One, we can get rid of your powers. It will be a process, considering how much of it you have, but we really can't have an unsanctioned Archmage running around."

  "Why not?" Brom and Celie asked.

  "Because it's not good for the environment, for balance, and equilibrium. There is only an allotted number of Archmages allowed each cycle, and one can only become an Archmage when a previous Archmage dies or decides to give up their power. Or loses it in a duel. In other words, the only way for an Archmage to ascend is for one to fall. But Ari ascended all on her own, which affects the celestial quota."

  There was quiet in the room for several beats.

  "I don't want to lose my power," Ari said. Just the thought of not being able to see her spirit orbs anymore made her sick. They were her friends, her allies. The only things that understood and never disappointed her. Without the spirit orbs, she would be completely alone.

  "What's option two?" Thessa finally asked.

  "Option number two, you will need to join a magic academy. It'll be a late registration, but I can push it through. We'll pretend that you awakened and received private lessons from me. We'll say you're a once-in-a-millennium genius, but you can't reveal the true extent of your powers." He exhaled. "It's rare to have later in life genius Ascendants, but I have seen a few people like that. You’ll learn the basics and slowly go on and reveal that your potential as an Archmage at the appropriate time, when you’re already graduated."

  "That sounds good but..." Thessa glanced at her daughter, then back at Elric. "We don't have the money for an academy, Archmage."

  "I can secure you a scholarship," he said quickly. "It’s the least we can do, considering all of this is partially my fault. I should have known all those years ago, should have believed her. Please. I want to make this right."

  Thessa bit her lip but still seemed conflicted.

  "I'll give you time to decide," he said. "And will return at this time tomorrow for your answer. In the meantime, it's very important you do not tell anyone about this. The less people know, the better."

  "Yes, mage. We understand." Thessa said. "The Blacksoils are excellent at keeping secrets."

  ***

  Elric left the Blacksoil residence, feeling like he'd aged several decades in one hour.

  He stood a few paces from their front door, shocked to his very marrow. He didn't even know how to explain to himself what had happened. He didn't know how to start.

  An unsanctioned Archmage with almost no training, just an instinctive control of the essences.

  One who saw essences just like the ancients did.

  Incredible.

  He needed to look into this, explore it further. He needed to understand what it meant.

  Despite being an Ascendant, Elric had never been a religious type, nor had he been the type with a longing for the old ways. He was far too practical for that and enjoyed the ease of the new technology.

  But this, this was something.

  "We should report this," Davenport murmured. "This...we need to alert the ministry that such a person exists."

  "Mmm," Elric said, regretting the other man's presence. It hadn't been his idea to bring Davenport with him. The man was a stickler for the rules, and he was too fidgety and too prone to report even minor infractions.

  However, Davenport had been the agent assigned to this problem, and his report had to bear his final stamp. He wouldn't have given it if he hadn't come.

  "They must have done something to her," Davenport said. "Her parents, that is. They must have infused her with forbidden magic, prayed to a demon, summoned a primordial..."

  While he ranted, Elric reached into his pocket and pulled out a vial of dust.

  "Sorry about this, Davenport," he said.

  "Sorry about what–"

  Davenport didn't finish his sentence. Elric blew dust into his face.

  As the Unknowing potion began to take effect, Elric recited, "When we came to investigate the incident, we found nothing of note. The girl had simply been playing around, and the wand had given a delayed reaction. The girl has no magical powers. The problem was the wand. Understood?"

  Davenport blinked in a daze, then nodded. "Understood."