A Concept of Apathy

Chapter 12

“In any action, what matters more; the act, or the belief?”
– A Collection of Thoughts, author unknown

I groaned, getting out of bed. It took me about a week, but I started going out again. It was a very easy trap for me to fall in, to dwell. It did no one any good, and for most of the past week I had not really followed up on enchanting. I was barely allowed to leave the house, and my father had started a working around the house. He claimed the short stone walls created a boundary he could make into an actual barrier.
I had looked at the math he used to figure the working out, and I saw notation I did not recognize. I quickly stopped trying to understand it, figuring I needed a much more solid understanding of the basics.
I felt insanely sore, as Mister Sharp had taken up sparing me himself due to Kaeo being asleep. She wasn’t getting any better, but at least she wasn’t getting any worse. I had taken to looking at her with the Sight, trying to piece out what I needed to do to help but it was slow going at best.
I got changed into more reasonable clothes for walking about, strapped on my sword from Mister Sharp and picked up my cane which was resting next to my door propped against the wall. I made sure I had my knife and needle as well, and with that I headed out. I went to the bathroom to wash my face letting the cold water wake me the rest of the way up.
Spring was in full swing, and the gardens at the front and back of the house were in full bloom. I sighed, limping down the stairs to find Madam Lie preparing breakfast. She gave me a smile, and I returned a nod.
“Where are mom and dad?” I asked sitting down.
“Your mother is in the garden despite my insistence she should rest, and your father went to his tower. He said he was picking something up, although would not say what.”
“Okay, any idea when he’ll be back?”
“Oh, if I had to guess within half an hour?”
“Okay, thank you.” She put a plate of eggs, bread, and cheese in front of me along with a smaller bowl of blueberries.
She started in on dishes while I ate quickly. Whatever Madam Lie cooked turned out delicious, which my father had told me was due to her cheating. Evidently she could lie to your sense of taste, which did make a bit of sense I supposed.
I had asked her about it later, and she had handed me a cracker she made that tasted like chicken. It was a rather odd experience due to her not changing the texture, and I decided to never bring it up again.
She finished dishes before I finished eating, and went off to clean other parts of the house. I pulled over a step stool to the sink to do my dishes, putting the clean dishes on a drying rack and then went to find my practice sword. I liked to start off with whatever Mister Sharp had in store for me before going to see whatever history Mister Sharp had for me. Or geography and politics I supposed, but he was much better at history.
I grabbed my sword and went to the back of the house where I found both Mister Sharp and my mother gardening. My mother was tending to the standing pots, using a pair of sheers to get herbs. She was placing them on a cloth to be dried afterwards, and I wondered if she could magically dry them.
“Good morning.” I said on my way by.
“Good morning Sylin.” She said, turning away from her work briefly and smiling at me.
Mister Sharp was further in, still working away at the hill. It was mostly done now, but wood and stone needed to be brought in to make sure the entire place was structurally sound. He was currently making sure the ground was level before starting any further work, leveling off the parts that needed to be.
“Do I need to come back later?” I asked him walking into the alcove. He looked up at me, smoothly rising to his feet.
“Now’s fine, Young Master.” It was always a bit weird watching concepts work. Most people would, when doing heavy labor, sigh or groan or something else. Concepts did not do that, most of them not even needing to breathe.
We walked to the front yard where there was more space to move about. We tried sparing in the backyard but when a pot got knocked over my mother banned us from even trying. Neither of us were dumb enough to try and gainsay her, so the front yard it was.
Mister Sharp cycled through a list of weapons, although cycle was the wrong word. He had not yet repeated a weapon, always having a new thing to fight with. The worst days were when he ended up with a shield. It was a far better offhand than my cane, at least for now.
Not that my cane was bad at this point. The forest seemed pleased to be used, and so I used it for sparring. It was a good thing to have more mastery over the ability as well, so I welcomed the chance. It had made me much more precise, and although I did not move faster I processed the world faster in function. I could make dozens and dozens of adjustments per second, which let me be inhumane precise.
I may not be any faster, but I always had the correct distance and timing for every strike or block. Not that that had let me win against Mister Sharp yet. He was relentless, could not tire, was inhumanly fast, and seemed to know what I would do to his every move. On top of all of that, he was a master at every weapon he had picked up, with the only saving grace being that shields did not count as a weapon or at least a sharp one.
I had not seen him use any purely blunt weapon, and I figured that was for a reason. He was called Mister Sharp, not Mister Blunt, and as much as that helped I had to imagine it hindered some as well. He had to be sharp, it was part of his concept, which although a useful thing in theory if you were fighting him was not something I had managed to take advantage of yet.
I sighed, getting back to back with him and taking the five steps. He would not wait for me to be ready like Kaeo would. He claimed it was because attacks were not always as foreseen, so I made sure to be fast in the steps before turning. I started drawing on the cane before I had even finished taking the fourth step which let me know he was on his fourth as well. We would finish in roughly the same time then.
I turned to see what weapon he would be using for this fight, and I found what looked like a spear with a hook coming off like another prong. That was going to be a pain, as I had to get into his reach and anything that let him guide my weapon easier was always annoying.
I started in, waiting for the first strike which would almost always come. It had been hard for me to learn a way around it, as I had nowhere near the strength to bat it aside with my sword or cane.

***

I pretty much had to sacrifice my footing, as when the strike came my bone leg heavily fractured. It knocked the spear hook thing off enough, but he timed it with my step onto the bone leg. The bone leg repaired almost instantly, but almost was not instantly. There was a fraction of a second where my footing was terribly off, which he used to whip the hooked part at me nearly instantly. I moved my sword into block, but it was a rough thing. I got pushed far to the side, but it did let me step into his reach. He started backpedaling, trying to regain his favored distance but I was letting none of that happen.
I had found that twenty pounds of force when applied in the middle of a step could really throw someone off. I pushed on his shoulder knowing it was somewhere that was very hard to stop yourself from moving if pushed from, and tried to retrieve my sword. He slightly stumbled, and instead of anything reasonable he threw himself backwards and threw the stick part of the spear at me.
I started trying to intercept with my cane, which I would be able to but it would let him regain his footing. He was still inhumanly fast, which let him recover his footing and get his foot below his spear which let him flip it into the air and get it back in hand. I was back at a dangerous distance, and was forced to take another step back lest I get my arm cut with the tip of the spear.
I started circling, trying to find a good opening but finding none. His guard was perfect while mine was not, and he moved in. The first stab I managed to get out of the way from by backing up, but he could move forwards faster than I could back up. I was making sure to keep more weight on my good leg which let me send the spear off to the side with the next thrust, but I was in a bad position to block the hook, and my block was poor enough I was taken with the blunted hook in the side.
“What do I need to do to fight a spear?” I asked after nodding to the hit he scored.
“You don’t. If the other person has a spear and you have a sword, don’t even pick that fight. If you have to, try to take sharp corners that they can’t take wide to try and get into their reach, or pick up a trick that will let you deal with it.”
“Noted.” I grunted. He had told me the same thing about most weapons that had more reach than a sword.
I did not win any of the fights that day, not that I had ever won even one match against Mister Sharp. There was always tomorrow, and perhaps I would find a trick.

***

“There have been four ages before this one. I cannot say they were creatively named, but never-the-less here we are.” Mister Reclamation liked to walk around as he lectured, which he used not to do as he thought it would be distracting. I rather liked teachers who paced, I thought it gave them more character.
“The first was the Age of Concepts, then Dragons, Titans, and the Lost Age. Then we have now, which is most widely called the Age of Dawn, although the Age of Awakening is something you might hear.”
He gave me a second to write it down, which I did in my cramped scrawl. It was perhaps one of my personal favorite things about personal tutoring, the ability for the teacher to be a person and not just a teacher. As I was finishing, he picked back up.
“Little is known about the first three ages, as the Lost Age was one of great wars. You will sometimes find ruins or corpses of great beings lying around. These are quite often where adventurers are called in, to clear them out. Concepts lay strongly in these old places, and sometimes so strong they create life or matter.”
“Are Dragons or Titans still alive?”
“Yes, although only Dragons can reproduce.”
“Why is that?”
“That is a very good question. We don’t know, in short.”
“I imagine Dragons are not very common then.”
“No, they are very solitary creatures. They only stay in each other’s company when mating or when raising young.”
“And what is the Lost Age?”
“It is the age in which most previous written history was destroyed. About halfway through the Lost Age something happened to destroy most written information, which is believed to be concept based. That age is also sometimes called the Age of Awe, as it is where most giant workings happened. The summoning of Death is the big one, but there is also the Sleep of Blood, three crusades, and the All War to name a few.”
The summoning of Death was a well known instance, being closer to a story than history from what I could tell. I figured that was because while a lot of information had been written down about it, there was little from the people who actually summoned him and even less from the people who defeated him. Well, at least got him to be only a concept and not a Concept.
I knew nothing of the Sleep of Blood, and knew that the three crusades were arguably what caused the All War. The All War was the closing of that age, and then there was the current age. It was fairly young, only about one hundred years old. The All War died out, but tempers still ran high and revenge was wanted all around. That had led to The Nothing War, which both of my parents had fought in. Pretty much everywhere was tired of war, and still recovering from those two wars.
“So why even bring up the previous ages if we know pretty much nothing about them?”
“Your parents have tasked me with teaching you about adventuring.”
“Why?”
“You are a very skilled young mage, with a lot of talent. They see three paths for you, and I am not sure I disagree. They see you either being forced into military service like they were, being taken by some college which all tend to be closer to cults, or adventuring.”
“Why is adventuring left out of either of the other two paths?”
“It is widely agreed that the Corpses and Ruins need to be cleared out, as when they are not some truly terrifying things can bloom from them.”
“Why not pave over them? Bury them?”
“The powers there do not take kindly to that I fear. We don’t know why, but it is a path people will accept for you.”
“And this is all because I have high mana?”
“Not only that. You are the son of Rot and Ruin, you would not have been left alone. They have long shadows, Young Master. They cast long shadows on this age, so the world will watch you.”
“I’m not sure I want that.” I said, inwardly grimacing.
“I don’t think your parents want that for you, but there is only so much they can do.”

***

I was in my fathers house study, reading some of his books. There were a few he tasked me to read here, perhaps thirty, and I was trying to get through them as fast as I could. I was currently reading a foundational book on mana, called Mana, Magic, and More. It talked more on the logarithmic scale they used, and more on how there were no instruments that could measure past a ten on that scale.
It was like with earthquakes, how in theory there was no limit on how powerful one could be but in practice there was a limit. I suspected I did not have a ten, but likely slightly more. There were also some statistics which I did not fully believe saying that mana was genetic and dominant, and that it was going up in the general populus. It also showed how it was reaching an asymptotic limit, where the average seemed to be maxing out at around five point five.
I didn’t trust it because it was hard to poll enough people with the limited reach that currently existed, not to mention just mages. My father had once told me mages were around one in two thousand. Most people were not truly awakened in the awakening, and if you were not awakened there was no way to test how much mana you had. Well, unless someone like my mother came around, but she was a rare type as well.
My father had not been lying when he said I would be the first mage in recorded history with a ten on the scale however. I had searched every history we had, even the more fictional ones for mentions of anyone like me. My mind flashed back to the girl drawing in the dirt, and I shuddered. Did she know anything? Who was she?
I pushed it out of my mind, trying to focus back on the readings but it was a fruitless endeavor. My father said that today we would try to bind something else to an item I owned. I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to bind, and knew it couldn’t be clothing. It was either my ring or my sword I would have to work with, unless I wanted to once again work with the staff.
I didn’t quite know, and perhaps my father would have some insight. I leaned back suddenly, my head hitting the back of the plush chair with an unsatisfying whoosh. I reached for my staff which was leaning against the side of the chair without looking, pulling it up to rest against my leg.
The door opened up with my father eating a sandwich from one hand and reading what looked like a report in his other. He grunted at something, then looked over to me. He swallowed, moving over to the other side of the room to toss the report on his desk. He quickly finished off his sandwich before starting, pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket to briskly wipe off his hands.
“You know, it’s been a long time since I had to read anything on mana.” My father started, which seemed good.
“Is that what you were reading?” I asked, looking at the papers which had somewhat spread out on his desk.
“Nope, but I have reread a lot of mana theory recently. You see, your father has somewhat hindered you.”
“Hindered me?” I asked, fingers drumming along the length of the cane.
“Yep. We shouldn’t have gone to the forest. We should have measured your mana before setting off to do anything. Because it is a resource I do not have, I discounted it out of habit. It is my deepest apology for that.”
“It’s fine, and I presume you’re leading up to something?”
“Yes. Most of my workings draw power from other things, but you have no need for that. You could tie it directly to you.”
“I can’t really use that much power at once.” I replied, presuming he had more to say.
“That won’t matter once the working is tied to you. It’ll pull from your mana directly, by passing any amount of draw strength problems you may be running into.”
“I see. So I just need to set things up?”
“Exactly. You have so much mana that even if you had a few thousand major workings pulling from you, you would likely still have quite a bit to work with.”
“Huh. So what should I do with that?”
“Good question. Today, we could either do another working or we could experiment. We haven’t found a draw limit for you, and depending on what that is we might have a few new doors open for us.”
“So what exactly is draw? I presume it is the amount of mana I am using per second or whatever, but I could be wrong.”
“Eh, you’re close,” my father said, wiggling his fingers in an equivalent gesture at me. “It is not how much, but the maximum you can use per second. Most people can’t ramp up their draw enough to find a max before they are out of mana, but that would be extremely hard for you. That means for most of us we have to use tricks or storage if we need more mana than we have, but in theory you could just keep pulling until you hit that max.”
“So why not just store it or use one of those other tricks?”
“Ease of use, mostly. Storing it or using tricks takes resources and is the main reason you have to know the basic types of power magic can take.”
“Huh. I suppose test, I would like to know all my options before committing to anything.”
“Good!” My father said, clapping his hands together. He went over to his desk where he pulled out two rings that were connected together at a point. One looked made of copper and the other looked made of carved and smoothed quartz. “Hold these, the copper in your right hand and the quartz in your left, and then start to draw.” My father instructed, handing it to me.
Each ring was seven inches wide, and the point they connected on seemed to truly be one point. I saw nothing actually binding them together. It should have just been two rings, but they were clearly connected there as I could not pull them apart.
I started to draw from my mana into the rings like my father told me to. It took several hours, and I had to skip dinner, but we found a limit. I breathed a sigh of relief when I was told I was on the higher end but not the literal best.
It was sometimes good to be nobody.

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