Chapter 9: Magic

Despite her initial reluctance to go to Palangea, Soria had to admit she had been wrong about the academy.

When she was first drafted, she had imagined spending her training weeks in some dusty, mystical sorcerer’s tower, surrounded by old crones chanting metaphysical nonsense and dancing in trance. Her mother, and her grandmother before that, had always been Flow Walkers. Yet, Soria could not remember them ever really talking about the Deepwell. To the elder Tolmar women, their trade had just been a way of life, mystical and otherworldly.

She didn’t mean any disrespect. The Taoara was a simple tribe. They took pride and pleasure in everyday things, like good cooking and working the land. Their Flow Walkers were no different. In the village, you learned magic from your parents, who in turn had been taught by their parents. Using the Deepwell didn’t have to be fancy or complicated. All that was needed was that you knew enough to heal an infection or mend a broken bone. Around that core, they had built their mystical traditions—practices and rituals that had little or nothing to do with the actual magic, but had become ingrained in their art through the years. Among the Taoara, healing was as much a matter of rites as of magic.

But that was not quite how things had turned out to be in Palangea.

There had been some chanting, Soria admitted. And if you wanted to, you could take dance classes, too. But those were evening art courses, not magic lessons. Even now, with the war drawing closer, the Derimar refused to give up their way of life. They would not allow Agerian aggression to turn them into soulless fighting machines. For those who were inclined that way, training in art and music would always be available, but only as extracurricular programs.

No, the focus at the Flow Walker academy had instead been on theory, and here, Soria had thrived. All her life, she had dismissed the Deepwell as supernatural and incomprehensible. While it was fine for her mother, it had not been for her. But here in the golden halls of Palangea, she had learned it could be understood, reasoned about, and measured. It was no different from any other force of nature.

In fact, that had been the very first lesson she had been taught when she arrived here with the other draftees, taken from tribes and villages all over Derimar. It had come as a surprise to her to learn that using the Deepwell had more to do with experience than with strength, and experience was just another way of saying understanding.

Which meant you could follow the Taoara path and learn through repetition, until the magic came naturally. Or you could study the theory, and gain the knowledge you needed that way.

Of course, the best way to learn was probably to do both, Soria thought, warm thoughts of her ancestors lingering in her mind. They had spent lifetimes becoming the best Flow Walkers they could, and she respected them for that. But their way was not Soria’s. She wanted numbers and rules. She wanted to poke and prod at the fabric of the world until she understood it and could control it with precision. That was why her heart had leaped when her teachers had begun to teach her Deepwell theory at the academy.

And that was also why her heart had sunk when, days later, she had realized no one in Palangea truly knew how the Deepwell actually worked.

Oh, the knowledge was there, to be sure—the knowledge that it could be understood. But no one knew the numbers needed to describe it. If the Old Ones had had them, they were long gone and had never been rediscovered. They were lost and forgotten, much like the knowledge of how light worked or why an apple fell to the ground from a tree, instead of hovering in the air. Everyone knew a candle was brighter when you stood right in front of it than if you watched it from afar, and Soria was certain there were numbers out there that could be used to figure out exactly how much brighter it would become if you stepped closer. But the knowledge of those numbers was lost.

Just like the numbers describing the Deepwell were now gone.

Still, her teachers at the academy did the best they could to imbue her with the limited knowledge they had. Together, they studied old books and manuscripts, theories collected through the ages by the best mages. They were not only written by Flow Walkers, but also by Fire Breathers, Shieldguards, and all other manners of Deepwell users as well, by men and women alike. Together, they argued the merits of the authors’ different hypotheses and discussed their own experiences with the fabric that lay beyond the visible world.

Among the tutors in Palangea, she thrived. Despite the specter of war hanging over them, she actually had fun.

And to her surprise, when it was finally time to put theory into practice, her first experience with using the Deepwell herself actually turned out to be quite interesting. Though she had to admit that might at least to some extent have been because it, too, turned out to involve a whole lot less chanting than she had initially expected.

“Close your eyes,” Head Teacher Kalatea had told them, and Soria had immediately lost heart. So, this was where the mystical elements of her education would begin.

It was, but that was also where the mysticism ended. From then on, learning to harness the magical forces was entirely hands-on.

“Imagine the Deepwell as an immense piece of cloth, an elastic fabric that stretches across the sky.”

She did, knowing from theory it was just an image in her mind, and not actually what the Deepwell would look like, if you could see it. In reality, it wasn’t a surface at all, and it wasn’t far away in the sky, but everywhere at once. And just like her eyes could see light and her ears hear sounds, her mind could feel it.

“Now, put your weight on it,” Kalatea continued with her old, croaky voice that still somehow seemed to be permeated by youthful enthusiasm for her subject. “Imagine you’re lying on that fabric. The weight of your mind is no longer down here. It’s sitting on that fabric, bending it. The heavier the weight, the bigger the dent.”

It was one thing to know Deepwell magic wasn’t about strength, but about precision—precision bought with experience and understanding—and another thing entirely to actually use that knowledge. She was down here, after all, sitting in a musty-smelling old room, in an ornate chair at a table worn smooth by centuries of students who had come here before her. Making the weight of her mind move up there, to the fabric beyond the world, did not come intuitively to her.

The dent in the fabric was there. It just wasn’t deep enough.

“Now, focus the weight of your mind,” Kalatea instructed the students. “Concentrate it into a single point.”

Soria groaned. She wasn’t ready for the next step yet.

“I’m sorry, Head Teacher,” she said, interrupting the lesson. “I can’t seem to move my mind up there. It works up to a point, but then it just gets too difficult.”

The old woman laughed, a friendly sound that made Soria relax.

“That’s great, Adept Tolmar! I can’t have your head stuck in the clouds. Remember: precision, not strength! It’s enough that you’re there. You don’t have to strain.”

“Focus on your weight,” her teacher said, continuing to guide the students through her lesson. “Shrink it. The weight of your mind will stay the same, but it will be concentrated into a smaller volume.”

Well, Soria thought, if it was alright with Head Teacher Kalatea that she stayed grounded while performing her magic, that made things a lot easier for her. There would be no transcendental flights of fancy for her here. Magic rooted in the real world suited her just fine.

“Now crush your mind into a single point, without any volume. This is the singularity.”

She finally understood.

There it was, the foundation on which the lesson rested, and the reason why the strength of her mind was irrelevant. Why her control of the Deepwell was the only thing that mattered, and not how powerful she was.

Because once the volume of the part of her mind that rested on the Deepwell became zero, the force it exerted on the fabric beyond the world became infinite. How heavy or light that part of her mind was made no difference.

With that, the small well her mind had created in the fabric suddenly became a funnel, stretching from the fraction of her mind resting on the Deepwell, all the way down to the ground, where the rest of her was sitting in an old classroom in Palangea.

And down that funnel, the magic from the Deepwell came flowing into Soria.

* * *

Over the course of the following weeks, Soria learned the basics of what it meant to be a Flow Walker, laying the foundation for what she would need to know before going to war. First and foremost, she learned to heal, to knit a broken human body back into something that was whole again, or at least close to it. But she also had to learn how to do it safely with fighting going on all around her, and that meant learning to shield both herself and her patient.

All this was knowledge her ancestors in the jungle had taken decades to amass, and now it was taught to her in mere weeks. There were times when she feared her sudden elevation would go to her head.

Still, it wouldn’t be fair to say she was now the equal of her mother and grandmother back home. While she had learned to lean on the Deepwell to close a wound or reduce pain, the process didn’t always work. Even in the safety of the halls of the academy, there were times when she couldn’t concentrate enough to make contact with the fabric beyond the world. Though not experienced with war, Soria suspected doing so would be even more difficult on a raging battlefield, once she was deployed.

But the basic foundation was there. The rest, she would simply have to learn by doing.

And there was so much to learn. Had they been at peace, she could have seen herself staying in Palangea for the rest of her life, training, studying, experimenting, and eventually teaching new, younger students or even writing her own textbooks on magic.

With the Agerian army amassing in the eastern foothills of the Cold Edge, that was not a luxury afforded to her. Any day now, a hundred thousand men—or more—from the Empire might roll in over the lands of the Derimar tribes like a human plague.

There was simply no time left.

Thus, when Headmaster Mackarat called Soria into her office, she naturally assumed she was about to receive her orders for deployment to the front. The room was filled with rows upon rows of books and scrolls, sorted into tall, dark bookshelves, and it smelled of incense and age-old dust. The space was well-lit, with shafts of sunlight streaming into it through large, open windows on both sides of the office.

And at her heavy, wooden desk, the headmaster sat, her face both sad and concerned.

“Adept Tolmar? Of the Taoara?” she asked, making sure the right student among the hundreds studying at the academy had been brought to her.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m afraid I must ask,” the headmaster continued, “are you the sister of Cairn Tolmar, from the village of Tarafel?”

And with that question, Soria’s entire world imploded.

She nodded, unable to force her throat to form even the simplest sound. She understood all too well what was to come.

“I’m so very sorry,” Mackarat said, her voice deep with sympathy. “The 18th Scout Regiment, where your brother was stationed, was ambushed last week during a raid behind enemy lines. The War Government only learned yesterday that they were captured and brought to Terynia. As soon as I recognized your last name on the list of those missing, I asked you here to speak to you.”

Soria nodded again.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice weak from the shock. “Is he alive?”

“That’s what our spies in the Agerian Empire have indicated. He, and other prisoners of war, are held in Castle Agamor, waiting for interrogation or to be sent to the arena.”

The young girl understood the implication all too well. Sooner or later, her brother would be executed by the Agerians. It was just a matter of when.

They talked for a few more minutes, and despite being responsible for hundreds of students, the headmaster took great care to ensure Soria knew she had the full support of the academy. If she needed to be excused from her lessons in the coming days, the staff would of course understand.

It was all utterly civilized, and very sincere. Yet, it did nothing to ease the cold hand of fear that gripped her heart. Her only brother, whom she had looked up to her whole life, was now in the hands of the Agerian Emperor.

Alone in the darkness of her dorm room, she screamed into the night, cursing the gods and the war they had brought on her people. In despair, she bashed her fists bloody against the heavy stone walls. And with her mind set on securing the release of her beloved brother, one way or another, she made a solemn vow to whoever might be listening out there in the void that, before long, she would walk through the Lion’s Gate in Terynia and free Cairn.

Even if that meant deserting her post.

Author's Note

Thank you for reading Echoes of Fallen Gods!

This novel is 43 chapters long, with new installments posted twice each week. Perhaps you’d be interested in reading some of my other stories while you wait for the next update?

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