Dreams of the Quill

Ten

The airship was moving at an astonishing pace when Mana and Julien stepped out onto the deck. Low-hanging clouds sped by as the Vapor overtook them and moved on, ploughing a straight course through the endless blue sky. Ahead, the sun seemed incredibly low in the sky, much lower than it had been, even though they couldn’t have been in the air for more than fifteen minutes. Looking back, Mana was surprised to see the tiny speck that was Port Antyliken behind them.

“We’re pretty far up,” Mana commented. Julien couldn’t hear Mana speaking over the cacophony of machine noises, and continued heading towards the stern of the ship. Upon noticing that his cousin had already moved on, the mage followed.

“Enjoying your- first is it?- airship experience, sirs?” Captain Guhnss asked, turning his eyes from the gigantic steering wheel and smiling up at the two lords. “Something wrong?” His smile turned to a worried expression as he noticed Julien’s grim face.

Mana extended both his arms and closed his eyes. The air cracked around his body as he prepared his spell and caused his long red hair to flare out behind him. Guhns looked on in terror as he realized what was happening, as he noticed the fact that Mana’s mouth was moving at a speed unknown to those who simply speak words, and he clung onto that steering wheel as though it was the one thing that could save him from the Guardian Heir’s dreadful magic, closing his eyes in terror.

“Wait, Mana!” Julien exlaimed, interrupting the mage’s concentration. In an instant, the air was normal, a comfortable breeze blowing through it as the Vapor sped on.

“Wh-wh-what do you want?” Guhnss asked frightfully. Mana looked up at Julien with a cocked eyebrow.

“It’ll be hard to steer this thing if he gets stuck to the wheel,” explained Lord Tryn as he moved over to the stout captain and began attempting to pry the fellow off. For one brief instant, Julien closed his eyes as he strained against Guhnss’s bulk, and in that instant, the captain’s eyes opened, a glaring crimson, and with an incredibly agile swing of one arm, he embedded a dagger into Julien’s right shoulder. Mana gasped.

“Kieku’s work… what has he done to this man?” Mana wondered aloud as Julien staggered back, clutching his shoulder and wincing. He extended his right hand towards Julien and began to focus.

“I’ll take care of it, Jul, don’t worry-”

“Don’t touch me, Mana!” Julien roared as he pulled the dagger out of his shoulder and tossed it away. “I’ll take care of this one.” So saying he drew his twin longswords and swung at the captain. In a blur, Guhnss had let go of the wheel and done two back flips in midair, landing five feet away. Already he brandished another dagger in his left hand. Julien’s sword strokes marred the wooden column that supported the wheel’s weight and then he dashed across the stern’s platform, not faltering in his delivery of blow after blow. Spinning around, his swords both at angles, Julien created an affective cyclone of slashes.

Not one of his attacks landed.

The stout captain, his girth jiggling with each of his speedy movements, evaded each of Julien’s blows, moving with a dexterity better suited to a man half his weight. Mana stood dumbfounded as he watched the spectacle, something he never expected to see. He knew that Julien knew how to use a sword and that he didn’t carry the twin swords for show, but he would never have imagined that his cousin was such an impressive swordsman. And never in a hundred years would he have expected to see a man of Guhnss’s proportions hopping and spinning around in calculated evasion of his cousin’s swordplay.

After a minute or two of simply dodging, the captain’s body for seconds became enveloped in a bright red flame. When the blaze vanished, so did Guhnss. Julien paused in his offensive, wondering where the captain had gone, and immediately Guhnss burst out of midair behind him, that bright red flame wreathed around him, driving a second dagger into Julien- this time into his right elbow.

“Julien!” Mana called out from across the platform. One of Lord Tryn’s swords clattered to the wooden planks as his right hand twitched. Cursing angrily, the lord spun around, his dead arm flopping with his movements, slashing the air with his left-hand sword where the captain had been moments before.

“Julien, stop it!”

“I’ll get that bastard,” Julien breathed heavily, drawing the blade from his arm in a spurt of blood and looking around in search of the possessed airship pilot.

“Don’t you see you can’t-” Mana was cut short as Guhnss reappeared and bowled Julien over in a mad flying tackle. The captain landed atop the lord and began slugging him mercilessly. “STOP!” Mana shouted, his voice deeper than usual, commanding. A powerful blast of wind burst forth from the young mage, spreading out in a nova, rippling through the sails and confusing the propellors. Guhnss looked up at the Guardian Heir, and then leapt off of Julien and charged Mana. Lord Tryn lay by the steering wheel, bloodied and groaning.

Mana dodged out Gunss’s path, leaping to the side. In the same motion, he twirled the fingers of his right hand and the captain tripped, sprawling out on his face. The airship continued speeding west into the sun as Guhnss stood, drawing himself to his full height of four feet, and drew forth two more daggers.

Keeping his eyes focused on the captain, Mana extended his right hand in the direction of Julien and began muttering the words of renewal. He just managed to get them all out before he was forced to leap aside once more, barely avoiding the captain’s attack. Julien coughed once, and slowly the blood on his face seeped back into his body, the skin began healing, and the internal hematomata faded away.

Now able to focus on weaving other magics, Mana continued to dodge the slashes and charges of the captain while leaving a trail of solid air in his wake. Within a minute of movement, he had completely encased Guhnss, leaving him locked in an invisible cell.

“Well, that’s that,” Mana sighed, as he prepared to stop the captain’s life. Extending his arms and closing his eyes, he began incanting the spell.

“Look out, Mana!” Julien roared, knocking the mage aside with his own charge seconds before a red-outlined Guhnss materialized with his fist extended to where Mana’s face had been. “We’re not getting anywhere like this.” Julien brandished his sword with both hands, assuming a defensive stance as he stood over Mana. “Pick yourself up. We need to somehow talk strategy while avoiding this monster.”

Mana rose just in time to nimbly skip towards the steering wheel and out of harm’s way, Guhnss speeding by a blur of red and dagger.

“It seems as though he can move through just about anything with that ability of his,” Mana commented.

“The Net,” Julien muttered under his breath, swinging his sword into the oncoming Guhnss and cutting air.

“What’s that?”

“Er, something I read about once.” Julien raised his voice and then continued. “The Net. It allows its user to transpose their existence to another point in this space- the world we know- via an alternate space. It looks as though this man has been enchanted to have access to this alternate space.”

“What can we do about it?”

“Normally- or so I’ve read- it’s very tiring, using this Net thing. So supposedly, he should exhaust himself and lose access. However- and you can probably confirm this- he seems to be enchanted in such a way as to defy this rule. We’ll tire long before he at this rate.”

“Indeed. So what do you propose?” Mana panted as he dodged yet another attack, this time by only a hair’s breadth.

“I propose going back on my original plan. The one to not cause bloodshed.”

Mana paused briefly, and luckily for him it was Julien who was targetted next.

“You intend to kill the captain?”

“Maim, incapacitate, yes, perhaps kill- whatever it takes. He’s not a captain anymore, Mana! You see it, don’t you? You see that this man has been transformed. Your magic alone can not stop him. Now, hasten me! Do what you must so that I may strike him!”

“Don’t ki-” Mana was cut off as Guhnss appeared before him and ran him through the abdomen with one of his two daggers. Julien cried out in shock as he saw the man materialize and Mana’s body begin to tilt sideways. Rage overtook Julien, a complete, distilled rage that did not merely make its presence known through words. He moved instantly, his actions clumsy yet incredibly speedy. Three bounds and one swing, and the captain’s head landed four feet away, on the edge of the platform. A small spray of blood issued forth from Guhnss’s neck as his body toppled over, lifeless. The dagger lodged in Mana’s abdomen was wrenched out, gripped tightly in the corpse’s grasp.

“Are you alright?” Julien asked, worry causing his voice to tremble as he knelt at his cousin’s side. The young mage’s green robes were stained a bright vermillion around the tear left behind by the captain’s blade.

“I’ll manage somehow,” breathed Mana between gasps of pain as he winced and propped himself up on his left elbow. Looking around, he discerned the severed head of Guhnss and sighed disapprovingly. “I’m better off than him.” Holding his right hand over the wound, he closed his eyes and wove another spell of renewal. A soothing aura crept outward from where he lay, calming Julien and stilling the sense of incessant movement that was created by the airship cutting across the sky. Three minutes later, Mana’s right arm dropped to the floor, his left gave out, and he was flat on his back, fast asleep.

Julien, still very much worried, opened the top of Mana’s robes and checked the wound. It was healed, the bleeding hole replaced with blood-covered skin. Breathing a sigh of relief, the lord of Tryn stood and punted the captain’s head off the platform and into the wide-open sky. He then heaved the weighty corpse overboard.

“He did a good job with my wounds,” Julien remarked to himself as he flexed his right arm after disposing of Guhnss. So saying, he strode to the steering wheel and spun it clockwise. The airship ponderously turned its nose towards the north and continued its course. The sun, no longer straight ahead, had fallen quite a bit. The clouds around the Vapor were tinged orange as sunset commenced, intense pinks and reds scattering across the otherwise solemn blue sky.

It was nighttime when Mana came to. Thousands of tiny stars glittered overhead, but with the moon behind clouds, everything was dim. Mana could see Julien clearly, standing at the steering wheel and peering out into the darkness ahead. Mana rose, stretched, and waved cheerily to his cousin when Julien realized that he’d risen.

“You’re alright,” said Julien, just loud enough to be heard over the airship’s machinery.

“Looks like these robes are done for, though,” Mana observed as he inspected the sizable tear and large bloodstain.

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

Mana stepped down from the captain’s platform and trotted over to the side of the ship. Looking down, all he saw was black.

“Are we still at the same altitude?”

“Most likely,” Julien replied, looking down at the mage. “I haven’t caused the ship to ascend.”

“And we’re headed for Terra?”

“That we are. Last light had us about a third of the way from Antyliken to what I would estimate is the Terran border. Of course, it’s just an estimate- there’s no way I could tell with any certainty from all the way up here. The forests seem a blanket of green covering those parts of the continent. We should pass over Murkwater, the nearest Terran city, in about seven days. Mist is another two from there.”

Mana, contented with the information he’d acquired, moved along the side of the airship, heading for the bow. Treading carefully over the metal pegs and now-taught ropes that led away up to the tops of the masts, he picked his way over to the most narrow segment of the vessel. There he sat down, his back to the low railing, and leaned his head back so that his hair and the long tassel of his hood became caught in the wind and blew out, trailing off.

He looked up at the stars, searching for the moon, but it was still hidden behind a thick curtain of clouds. Sighing as he turned his thoughts from the moon and to the matters at hand, Mana began pondering what to do next. They would arrive in nine days and then would set off hunting for the Crystals. He was well aware that there were no solid plans regarding the search, but he felt confident that it would go well. Where this confidence came from, he had no idea, but it was so real that it was almost tangible. Mana had somehow held this confidence even before boarding the ship, and it is perhaps the only reason why he boarded the ship, for from the outset he could tell that the enchantment was no good omen.

Even as he faced Guhnss with no clear way to win, even as he saw Julien injured again and again, and even as he felt his own wound form, he knew that everything was going to be alright.

It wasn’t an overconfidence in his own abilities. He knew that they were very limited. Ever since the Guardian Mage Academy was disbanded in the middle of the year 3035, there had been no one around the Mana Palace to instruct the young in the use of magic. Most of Mana’s knowledge stemmed from books that Julien had managed to smuggle to him and from what he guessed to simply be an innate ability to “see” magic.

He understood, from one of the books that he’d read, that until Lont’s ascent to the throne, magic had been called Jikkuu by the people. “Magic” was the demeaning replacement that the horrible tyrant had insisted upon, claiming that mystical powers were nothing. Jikkuu, a word of the old language of Libra, meant “everything”, the denotation of which Lont determined to be “far too noble” for such a “vile, useless thing.” Mana was on the whole unable to decipher the book as it was loaded with terms he was unfamiliar with, but he came away from the preface with the knowledge that magic- Jikkuu- is in everything, and that its mastery lies in the power to understand the composition of all things, both matter and nonmatter.

With this in mind, Mana had gone about looking at things differently, as if attempting to decrypt the secret of Jikkuu’s workings in the world, and he had trained himself to consistently produce the same results with the same effort when manipulating Jikkuu. As he was self-taught and had grown up facing a future of continued imprisonment within the Mana Palace, he had mainly taught himself various telekenetic tricks useful in his daily life- the turning of a knob, the sliding of a window, the straightening of fabric. This journey approaching, Mana had turned to attempting to master techniques more suited to the adventurous traveler, but with many disadvantageous factors, foremost amongst which was the fact that he couldn’t be caught practicing the dreaded magic.

In the end, Mana knew, his ability to use magic on the spot was quite limited. Even if his opponent wasn’t able to access that Net or whatever it was that Julien had mentioned, Mana doubted that his own magic would be able to stop or otherwise subdue him in battle. With the help of the environment, more precisely the local turbulence and wind, Mana had been able to improvise an air-solidifying spell, but he feared that on solid ground he’d have no chance of pulling it off a second time. He had never bothered to learn any of the offensive spells he’d read of, those of cinder-rain and torrential deluge, and now he realized that it might have been useful to spend the required weeks studying the composition of fire.

Sitting in the bow of the Vapor, Mana was very well aware of the limitations he faced in expanding the scope of his powers. Yet he also remembered something that Kieku had once said, years ago…

“The boy’s got real potential,” Kieku remarked as he stood over the bed on which the five-year-old Mana lay. “Probably enough to surpass any mage of your line since Mana.”

“Heeding your advice, I named him Mana II,” Guardian Lord Lanto said, peering into Mana’s eyes from the stool on which he sat next to the bed. “It was so long ago now, but may I ask you why you suggested this back then?”

“It’s simple, really,” Kieku said, standing straight. From Mana’s perspective, he towered above everyone in the room, including the Guardians in the doorway. “From the tests I’ve done, it’s clear that he’s the one.”

“The one of prophecy?”

“Yes.”

Mana had never thought to inquire as to what that prophecy was, but he stumbled across some cryptic writings in one lore-book that he’d picked up out of boredom one day. He remembered the words well, for they had puzzled him at the time.

“The prophecy is thus; ‘born under a purple sky, the son of Bane is reborn.’”

Inspecting this message, he had spoken with his father, who had merely closed his eyes and told the young mageling to run along. He had next gone to Kieku, whom he trusted at the time and who had acted as his doctor and caretaker since before he could remember. Kieku had thought for a bit, as if pondering the meaning, and then had knelt down to Mana’s height and had looked him in the eye.

“Did you know you were born in Verga, boy? And under the full moon, no less. Do you know what the full moon is like in Verga?”

Mana had shaken his head.

“At the time of the full moon, the sky becomes purple. Chin up, boy. You’re Mana Reborn.”

… at the time, Mana had not understood what Kieku was saying. Years later, however, he understood what this meant. He came to realize that he was Mana, son of Bane the Creator, reborn. What this itself meant was nothing at all. It didn’t change the fact that he was scorned by the townsfolk, or that his father didn’t show him any affection, or that his mother had died by the time he had aged three years. It didn’t change the fact that he was still a prisoner within his own home. Now that he was out, what did it mean? Still nothing. It was simple factuality.

Mana didn’t think much of it.

Kieku had never explained it to him, and he had never investigated past that one conversation. He didn’t imagine that it could have any effect on his powers, and prophecy didn’t mean anything for all he cared. Now, so disillusioned with Kieku, he entertained the possibility that the old man had been merely pulling his leg when he had shared the secret. He didn’t even consider that it might have anything to do with the immense confidence that he had garnered.

Discarding the confusing memories of his past, Mana sat up straight and reached up into the air above his head. The strong wind from which his body was shielded by the barrier around the bow battered his hands, and he reached into that battering and sought its source. Eyes closed, completely calm, he focused energy into his finger tips, reaching out into that everything that was Jikkuu, into that everything that was the power of magic the oppositiong of which he’d been so long exposed to, and a small torrent of wind shot straight up from where he sat.

Passing between the sails and not disturbing the propellors, the gust reached into the sky as if it were just an extension of Mana’s hands. And the clouds parted, and the moonlight streamed down.

Mana sat back and looked up.

It was going to be a long nine days, and he’d have plenty of time to spend ameliorating his powers.