Spoiler: Marion's Technology Skill {Routine Success}
Show
It seems like Brother Bright is trying to figure out which axle is bent, but the problem is actually one of the swingles; specifically, the one lashed to the evener in front of the horse left of the wagon’s shaft. It seems like in the haste to circle the wagons earlier, the short length of chain on the swingle got looped around the swingle proper, meaning the leftmost horse is pulling at a differential to the rightmost, rather than parallel. The result is that the wagon is skewing right. It’s just a matter of untangling that bit of chain, but it’s the kind of problem that someone without a modicum of technical skill - everyone except Marion and the drivers, for example - wouldn’t even know to look for. She could easily fix his problem, or show him how.
Spoiler: Marion's Dream Continued.
Show
You can draw up the mana into yourself. That part has come to you like breathing. But forcing it into forms, with the practised movements of your young hands, and using words whose phonemes are ancient and classical and outside of your spoken language… that part isn’t easy. Tutor Laerdan has been teaching you to make frostbolts for over a year now. With her constant correction and eye for detailed caster work, you’ve become pretty alright at it with supervision. But it’s complex, and not internally interesting, and as you curl your fingers and try your best to incant, you can feel your palms getting exceedingly cold exceedingly fast. That, you know, means you are on your way to fouling the spell. The first phrase is to produce motion within the mana, as the elves call it; the second phrase is supposed to always be a containment phrase: the element of the spell that allows the caster to hold it like a physical thing as it builds, and is then dissolved in a fashion and at the time of their choosing to release that energy into the world. You’re already at your fourth phrase in the casting - the flow, and trying to think back to what you said or forgot to say back in the second phrase that collapsed the containment. You double back, repeating the second phrase to try to create containment after the fact; but the flow is already happening, and mana is sublimating out of your will into icy shards growing directly on your hands. It’s all you can do not to cry now, aborting the casting with a premature trough phrase to return the unmanaged flow back to its dormant state, and you brush your hands together to dislodge the accreting ice.
Randal, who is also suffering from the cold but only because he isn’t used to the alpine conditions like you are, watches your fumble without comment; though you notice his eyebrows move with … What? Amusement, perhaps at your expense?
“Don’t look at him. Look at the feather. Try again.”
You feel her hands squeezing your shoulders. You can feel… not precisely disapproval in her voice, but certainly an awareness of the imperfection that has transpired. It’s hard to see the feather now, black against the black of the sky; but you track its motion by the way it blots the stars it passes in front of. Resolving, you try again, and hear Laerdan’s voice in your head, cycling the seven words you have heard so, so many times in the last three years.
Motion. Containment. Frame. Flow. Vector. Breach. Trough.
You cite the opening phrase, and feel the mana stir in you again. And then your attention is drawn away by a gunshot from far below, in the streets.
No, not a gunshot in the streets - just a clap, hard enough to sound like a gunshot for an instant to your ears; and not below in the streets, but below on the terrace. Your eyes cannot help but jag their attention downward, and they capture in your mind a memorable tableaux. Randal’s father, this armored nobleman from another nation, has his right arm across his body, palm open, body slightly twisted at the hips with the preceding motion. Staggering back, not quite falling but unbalanced, is your father. He has been slapped with such force that he has nearly fallen over. With the sound of the blow, your mother’s hands tighten instinctively on your shoulders to the point of bruising; as if the blow has been transmitted in part to her through the bond of matrimony, and she is earthing the charge of it directly into you, by touch.
The feather catches an updraft and begins to spiral higher, and further; too far for you to hit it now, even if you were a very practiced mage. But you won’t flounder the same way twice, and you recite your containment phrase. This time, you feel the scintillation in your fingertips that you expected. Yet you cannot help but glance down, again; and the scene is arguably worse. Now your father is standing upright again, and the two of them continue to speak as if the blow had not happened. As if your father had not been struck in the face in the heights of his own tower in the view of his wife and daughter. You are too young to understand the politics that made it this way; but you are not too young to understand the incredible, galling audacity of such an exchange. The sickening disparity of authority that impresses on you unmistakably that as powerful as your family is, and as your nation is, there is a power possessed by other thrones that could reach in and wipe your world from the face of history.
You feel something welling up in you that you mistake for a desire to be sick - but it’s something else - the mana inside you, sympathetically roiling with motion at your emotional state, too fierce and hostile as a force to be boxed in the containment measure you’ve constructed. But it’s coming up, and out, and with a surge of instinct that races up your spine, down your arms and curls your fingers into locked claws, you look up to the sky and focus your outrage on that vanishing black feather in the night sky.
Ice does not leap from your hands; but a gout of flame originating around the feather itself blooms into being with growl of conflagration and ten foot detonation before it is dispersed enough to wisp away in the air. Now Randal is looking at you with surprise; maybe even fear. That was not like a bolt spell. It needed no containment to protect you, no frame to describe its form to the cosmos. It was all flowing mana, and the intention to destroy. And unlike the intimidating formalism of the magic you have learned… it felt good.
“I think…” Your mother begins, loosening her grip on your shoulders, gazing up at the sky, “We might arrange a more formal scholarship for you, in Dalaran. You have, perhaps, exceeded what lone tutor can offer you, my Marion.”
Below, gazing up at you, are the faces of the men on the terrace. Your father seems at ease, having seen the familiar form of you and your mother and knowing at once that you are not startled by the burst in the sky. But the nobleman, Randal’s father, looks bewildered; hand on the hilt of his sword, his two guards moving in to his sides as they puzzle out what they fear to have been the sound of some assassination attempt.
Re: World of Warcraft - Interbellum (IC Thread)
Reply With Quote