Batshit Mages - 6. Attack of Awe

"What now?" Teague finally managed to ask. He whispered it. The darkness around them, interrupted only by the occasional glint of moonlight on the odd smooth surface here and there, and the near-silence around them hushed everything, especially his voice. Kjeld's calm stare added its fair share. Teague found it hard to bear. "You can never summon her again?"

Kjeld smiled very softly. Then he shook his head minutely.

"And you're alright with that?" Teague had been gripping his forearms so hard he had started to shiver slightly. When he noticed it, he let go and knotted his fingers together in his lap instead.

"Yes. If I weren't, I'd still be able to call her. And she wouldn't have said goodbye," Kjeld explained patiently. He blinked slowly. He looked pensive now, a little unlike himself. "I think I understand it now. Why spirit magic is ridiculed here, and forbidden in Ordara." His smile looked a faint bit amused now, as if he were embarrassed with himself.

"Why?" Teague found he was staring at Kjeld's face too hard. Too fascinatedly.

"Because you're not calling the people they were before they died. Or even what's left of them afterwards. They're just images we have of them. They're figments. That's why they only answer when we really long for them." Kjeld's voice was so soft he was almost whispering himself.

Teague's mouth opened of its own accord. This was the saddest thing he had ever heard. Kjeld had yearned for his love for years after her death, and believed that she was in some way still real, somewhere. And now he realised that he had deceived himself all this time.

But Kjeld looked so at peace.

His eyes fixed on Teague and he smiled again. "Are you crying again?"

Teague blinked and looked away. "No." Not yet. But he was about to. His mask of calm seriousness was firmly in place, but it felt very stiff and brittle to him now. He had to take care to keep his voice soft and level, his words measured and his movement slow and controlled, or something would break out and that would not do in a situation like this. For the sake of his friend, he needed to seem calm and collected, to be his rock after this -

"Why are you so upset?"

Out of sheer surprise, Teague's stare snapped back to Kjeld's face and some very oddly highpitched "Huh?" burst out of him. Kjeld had his curious looking-through-and-at-him stare on. Or rather, no... Kjeld was really looking at him now.

"I'm sorry if I've shocked you now," said Kjeld. "But that is the story." His smile was very kind. It suited him so well.

"You haven't." Teague looked around on the bed. "I should go. Thank you." He collected his limbs and slid off of the bed. "I'm sorry, I -" He found his slippers on the floor and picked them up to just carry them. That would be faster than putting them on. He would have fumbled with them too much, it would have been undignified and silly, and he couldn't impose on Kjeld this long, he had woken him up and kept him awake and forced him to drag up something old and emotional only to satisfy his curiosity because of what? Because he couldn't sleep, because he just had to know everything?

"Hey," said Kjeld, making Teague look back up at him again when he had almost reached the door. He had simply been watching him. "I've just told you something big and personal that no one else knows. Anything that's on your mind is equally safe with me, you know. In fact, I'd be honoured if someday you returned the favour." That sounded so serious. But Kjeld was smiling warmly.

Teague's face tingled and could do nothing but stare, until after far too long he remembered to nod. His hand found the latch on the door somehow, and he quickly slipped out.

Friendship is hard. Teague needed a moment of grinding his forehead against the wood of his door. It didn't seem to bother him at all. Why am I so jittery? This is ridiculous. He was still shivering, something in his chest was roiling and he was no less confused than before. His questions had all been answered, but the unease was still there. When he thought of Kjeld mourning the loss of his beloved so much he spent years talking to her imagined ghost, his breathing turned pitifully sobby.

With a sullen sniff, he resolved to not cry. But he really did feel like it.

"Magister Duhlen invented this, Magister Duhlen reformed that, Magister Duhlen, Magister Duhlen, Magister Duhlen, URGH!"

Teague laughed. It was quite enjoyable to have company at this tedious task of measuring the blood vials and calculating through the results. With over two hundred vials to scrutinise each day, it took up much of his time and more often than not, most of it was spent alone. The laboratory was usually deserted in the late afternoons and early nights, and since it was only accessible by a small number of people anyway, there was not much chance of running into anyone by accident.

Which was precisely why Driss liked studying here. She was an archmage's assistant herself and enjoyed all the perks of high clearance that Teague had. Unlike him at his young age, however, she was about to finish her studies at the tower, and for this purpose was working on a thesis to present to the archmages. She was extremely talented and clever, had mastered pretty much all practical magic the tower had to offer – at least as much as she cared to learn – so her true interest had always lain with anything that offered her a challenge. So she had devoted herself to theory and experimentation, and to the study of something she and her fellow theorists called Deep Magic. She was not content with understanding how magic and mana worked, but wanted to know what it was made of, where it came from, if it could be reproduced or mimicked, or in any way manipulated. Her thesis was to be about how mana influenced the world beyond intentional or recognisable magic. For this purpose she had to pore over piles of massive tomes and ancient scrolls and read everything there was to find about magical theory. The findings of Magister this, Magister that, this druid, that priest... It was all very historical, and for Teague, at times, hysterical.

"This bleedin' Magister Duhlen is bloody everywhere! I swear, if I have to read just one more 'If he were alive today' I'm gonna eat the rotten scroll just to be sure it's in a dark, dark place."

Teague snickered over his chart. "Sounds like he's more a mythical creature than a real person by now."

Driss looked up at him with an expression that looked both indignant and glad. "Exactly. If ever there's any question about anything, they all go 'Ooh, but Magister Duhlen would have known!' Like bloody priests, they are! Dumb sheep. Stupid little..." She trailed off and Teague kept working with a grin.

Their companionable alongside-working continued through a change of weather outside. It had been steadily pleasant for days now, with the usual moderate winds and an occasional dribble of salty rain once in a while. A storm had not been expected, but there it was. The wind picked up and rattled some of the older windows a little, and the waves rushing against the rocky cliffs of the island got bolder and louder. Now a few genuine thundercracks alternated with them.

"Teague," said Driss quietly.

He looked up at her. She was looking at the window behind him. Her expression was serious and alert. He turned to follow her gaze just when another thunderclap sounded, and the clouds that caused it could actually be seen roiling just off the coast this window faced. They had a peculiar colour, not just grey and black but dark blue and almost purple in places, and -

"There's no lightning," said Driss softly.

Teague stared. This was probably bad. He looked back at Driss for confirmation. She met his glance with a firmly set jaw. "Come," she said stiffly and quickly got up, "let's see if we can help."

They could not.

Well, Driss could, and she did, by rapidly repairing and reinforcing the wards and walls and everything else this occurence had damaged, alongside the Magisters and senior students that had arrived with or before them. Teague, along with most of the students, was forced to look on as Kjeld and Magisters Jeggid and Borna were trying to force the storm back.

It was a towering bundle of dark clouds only about a hundred metres out to sea and above the surface, twisting, writhing and swirling and disturbing everything around it like a fan, only that it did not just move the water and air like a proper storm would, but animated it somehow. The air crackled with magical charge and burned the leaves off the few trees that stood in the way of its billowing gusts. A boy had been caught in one of those blasts early on, it seemed, and was now lying behind the low drywall that surrounded a herb garden. People were huddled over him and trying to treat his blistered skin.

The sea below this occurence bubbled and screamed, and sent tall waves roiling with dark tentacles like a nightmarish hybrid of squid and giant jellyfish onto the beach that was quaking and rumbling and sucking in the feet of the Magisters and Kjeld, who shouted their spells against this deafening hiss and roar all around them.

One of the Magisters shouted out deflective spells and shield spell after shield spell against the attacks, she exhausted every single one that Teague had ever heard of, cast at least a dozen more, and then repeated them all. The other Magister was staying behind the other two a little and kept casting spells on them and on himself, obviously warding them and securing their footing on this hostile ground of wet shingle and pebbles that kept trying to swallow and pelt them.

And Kjeld...

Kjeld was magnificent.

With a wild defiance in his stance, and in his face as far as Teague could see it from this distance, he moved his arms and hands slowly and surely, and whatever it was that he was casting, it came with a deep calm, overwhelming like the stillness of an underground lake, and a force surrounding it that felt like the power of an erupting volcano. Similar to the vivification of the clouds' surroundings, the air and ground around him moved with his gestures, as well as the water before his feet. It looked as though he was countering the effects of whatever it was the clouds were doing, to calm the ground, air and water again. They flimmered around him in pulsating waves and moved forward in intervals. But when he had driven back enough of the screeching, sizzling water that still spat black, steaming globs at the three of them, and forced a long wedge of his pulsing air and ground into it, Teague could only gape at what happened next.

The entire beach rose as Kjeld slowly lifted his arms. The way he held them and his entire body, it looked very painful and exhausting. One of his hands, that he held like claws, moved down at his side and then forward and up again, as if he were throwing something very slowly, and with this strained gesture, the ground before him shook again and suddenly shot up like a fountain to form a spraying, moving wall of grit and pebbles. Within seconds it was as tall as the thundering mountain of black and purple cloud, and continued to grow left and right, gaining mass, depth and width until it was literally a wall as thick and wide as any fortresses' and as tall as most towers on the island. The grit and pebbles it consisted of were held together but did not stay in their places. They moved like water running down a sheet of glass and ground against each other with a rumbling, grating noise more deafening than the roaring and cracking of the water, burning air and shaking ground combined. It sounded angrier, too.

From where Teague stood, he could now see only some of the top of the crackling cloudbundle and nothing of the whirling water underneath.

When Kjeld pushed both his fists foward, this entire beachwall began moving. Slowly at first, then faster and faster until it was like a wave itself and threw itself against the dark, billowing mass that was attacking them. The water punching against it on the other side screamed like hundreds of strange birds getting crushed and when it reached the swirling clouds, it started slowing down. It shivered and shed sand and grit in some places, but held and kept pushing against them steadily. Kjeld was shaking and looked as if he were physically pushing all this mass. He seemed to be leaning into it.

Teague's astonished stare snapped back up to the wall when it started bending itself around the vicious growl and crackle beyond it, muffling it somehow. Or maybe it just thinned out because the wall of grit was crushing their source. It crept up and around the cloudy mass and moved with it a bit, looking a little like a giant, gritty ball of yarn for a few seconds. Streams of sand and shingle rained down from it into the seawater that was now still somewhat agitated but looked otherwise perfectly natural.

Kjeld's hands moved as though they were turning an invisible sphere that was trying to escape his grip. He seemed to be trying to compress it by pushing. The way his arms bulged and his face sported a strained glare that Teague could never have imagined on him, made this look extremely arduous.

Only now, with most of the noise gone and the ground and air around them finally still again, did Teague notice that the two Magisters down on the beach with Kjeld had stopped casting. Like everyone else out here, they were now only watching this huge ball of grit above the water twist and shrink gradually, slowly crushing the phenomenon that had attacked them out of the blue this afternoon.