Keiran Sample Chapters

Keiran of the Night Vale has staved off death for two thousand years, but even he’s reached his limits. His body is old, worn out, and failing. While the flesh fails, however, his mind and his magic remain as sharp as ever. What he needs is to reincarnate into a fresh, new, young body, and he bends his prodigious talents towards doing exactly that.

He awakens to find that he’s been reborn in a wasteland where mana has become a scarce resource, one to be hoarded and guarded jealously. Even the internal mana generated by people is stolen away by those who rule them. And without mana, he’s no longer a mage.

It will take more than that to stop Keiran. With each passing week, he regains more of his old strength, but can he keep his secrets safely hidden? Standing in his way is his new home’s cult-like nightly mana tithing, a governor with secrets of his own, and an unforgiving desert with hidden monsters who’d love nothing more than to swallow him whole.

It's a deadly scramble to claim the mana he so desperately needs to survive, but Keiran didn’t become an archmage by accident, and he’s willing to use every dirty trick and tactic he knows to get there again.

* * *

Chapter 1

When I first opened my eyes, it was to stare down in confusion at the thin, grubby, dirt-smudged fingers of a child far too old to be a newborn. My hands, somehow, impossibly. They should have been the soft, pudgy digits of a freshly born infant, not even an hour old, but instead, I had months and months, maybe even years of memories of my new life.

Something had gone terribly wrong.

The invocations I’d laid into my soul should have sparked my previous life’s memories with only the barest brush of mana to trigger them. If not for my new body’s memories, my first thought would have been someone had detected my passage through the reincarnation cycle and trapped me in a mana void for years. Just looking around was enough to dispel that line of thinking. The truth was both simpler and stranger, it seemed.

There wasn’t a speck of ambient mana in the air around me, not a drop in the dry, dusty earth. I was sitting in a garden, a place that should have been bursting with life, but each row of plants was sadder than the one that preceded it. They barely clung to life, sad, wilted, shriveled things starved for the mana they needed to flourish.

It appeared I’d been reborn in a desert, one that had been devastated by some cataclysm that had scarred the land. It had taken my new body years to generate enough internal mana to trigger the soul invocations that would awaken my previous life’s memories. There’d been no mistakes, just ill fortune that had seen me reborn on a swath of dead land.

“Gravin.”

This was probably a blessing in disguise. If there was so little ambient mana in the environment that it had taken years to trigger the soul magic, I wouldn’t have been able to do much during those initial years anyway. At least this way, I’d been spared the tedium of having to live through them. The memories alone were bad enough, fragmented and disjointed as they were.

“Graaavviiin,” a voice cooed.

I was going to need to adjust my time frame. Internal mana was going to be my only source of power as long as I was stuck in this mana desert, and I was physically too weak to survive on my own. It would be months before I built up enough mana to ignite my core. Damn. What rotten luck to be reincarnated in a place like this.

“He looks so serious,” a different voice said. “Look at that scowl on his face.”

“Come here, Gravvy,” the first voice said, and suddenly a shadow appeared over me. I looked up just in time to see a plain-faced woman wearing rough home-spun leaning down to grab hold of me. My mother, if the memories of my new brain were to be believed.

“Did you have fun?” she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she whisked me away towards what could generously be described as a hut and said, “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up and we’ll have dinner.”

My mother said her goodbyes to the other woman, a neighbor by the looks of it, and carried me towards a nearby hut, one of dozens lined up next to a dirt street, our home if my new body’s memories were to be believed. They were more or less identical, all mud-fired bricks of some sort with a woven thatch roof. I took that time to consider my mana core. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure something had gone wrong. Even in this desert, I should have generated enough internal mana to awaken far sooner than I had. I couldn’t recall the exact averages for mana generation rates in babies, but I should have produced enough well before reaching two years of age.

I didn’t realize we were inside the hut until I was plopped down on a table and the woman carrying me started tugging at my clothes. “Arms up,” she said in a little sing-song voice. My body reacted without my conscious decision, and she pulled my shirt off.

I needed to figure out this mana situation immediately. Otherwise it was going to be a long few years.

* * *

My memory wasn’t perfect, but I hadn’t been an archmage for nothing. I’d done the math, repeatedly, and the results just didn’t make sense. I would have said my mana core was crippled in some way, but I could sense it perfectly. It was as flawless as any other two-year-old’s. Even if my math was somehow way off, I could sense it generating mana. It should have only taken about twenty hours before my core had enough mana to awaken my memories, not over two years.

Something was interfering with my mana generation. That was the only explanation that made sense, but I couldn’t for the life of me fathom why. Even if someone found the records of my experiments, it was impossible to trace the flow of my soul through the afterlife to my new body. It would take a grand magus invoker to examine my soul here and now to note anything unusual, and judging by the conditions I’d apparently been living in, I doubted there was one within a thousand miles, let alone one bored enough to spot check random babies for soul modifications.

I could only speculate for now. Until I learned more, the best I could do was start working on building up enough mana to ignite my core. Given how pitiful my mana generation was at the moment, that was going to take a month just for the mana to form, and I’d need more than my core was capable of holding. I’d have to invest some time and mana into building a storage crystal to feed my mana into.

Another frustrating delay. I could scarcely picture a way in which I could have started my new life in a worse position. This process should have taken me a few hours at most, not weeks and weeks.

My new family appeared one by one. First, my older sister showed back up just as Mother was finishing dinner, followed swiftly by my father. I had memories of both but, perhaps unsurprisingly, a baby’s memories didn’t provide clear pictures. I wasn’t even sure how old my sister was, though she certainly didn’t have more than a few years on me. Gravin felt a baby’s love for the parents who nurtured him, and perhaps curiosity at his older sister more than anything else. I supposed a bit of acting was in order.

Fortunately for me, Gravin was a quiet child with a tendency to stare at whatever caught his interest. If anything, he seemed a bit timid. That should be easy enough to copy for the time being. Once I’d ignited my mana core, things would have to change, of course. That was several months away, and without an abundant source of ambient mana, my progress was going to be agonizingly slow.

Dinner was a simple affair of humble food prepared with more love than skill, and, unfortunately, no seasonings at all to help the taste. I focused my efforts on fine motor control, which was surprisingly difficult to accomplish and somewhat exhausting. Who would have guessed that eating a meal without making a mess all over myself would turn into such a grueling test? It wasn’t even that it was hard to accomplish so much as it was that my stamina was non-existent.

The whole while, my new sister nattered on about what she’d learned that day, which I did my best to tune out. Basic numbers and letters weren’t exciting when I had been the one learning them thousands of years ago and they weren’t exciting today. More and more, I despaired of how tedious my life was going to be for the next few months. It wasn’t until after dinner was done that something interesting happened.

“Good job, Gravin!” my mother said. “You barely need to be cleaned up at all. How about we go to the square early today and you can watch everyone while we wait for the Collectors? We’ll be right near the front of the line this time.”

“That’d be a relief,” Father added. “We can all go to bed early tonight.”

My sister’s round little face scrunched up at that, but she didn’t say anything. At first, I thought it was the early bedtime that she had a problem with, but somewhere in Gravin’s fuzzy memories were visions of a group of people all lined up in front of tables, moving forward every few seconds. It was hard to pick details out of it, in part because of Gravin’s habit of fixating on things. I had one memory with a clear picture of a man’s mud-stained boot in front of me, but no clues as to why we were in line to begin with.

I supposed I’d find out soon enough.

* * *

The village was one of those little huddled specks on the landscape, a collection of fifty or so huts surrounded by fields that barely grew enough for the people to survive. Everything was dry, dusty, and hot. I didn’t get to see much of it during our short walk to the square at the center, but what I did see was not reassuring. These people were one crop-ruining storm away from being wiped out.

More importantly from my perspective, there was no ambient mana at all. I would have said it was impossible if I wasn’t seeing it myself. Everything had mana in it, even the world itself. Living things were the best source of mana, but even in a desert like this, there should have been at least a little. Instead, the whole village was bone dry. Not even the people had any mana coming off them.

They had mana, of course. Each and every one had a dormant mana core, but not a single one of them was full. Maybe it was just that they were all coming back in from a hard day’s labor. I could see it being common around here to spend mana on physical invocations to aid in farming. The techniques would be as basic and bare bones as possible, just a simple conversion of mana to energy, but it would explain why not a single person was producing ambient mana from a full core.

While I studied the villagers, they started organizing themselves into four lines that stretched across the square. Families chatted with each other as they waited, though I wasn’t able to tell what exactly it was we were all gathered for. Whatever was going on, it was common enough that nobody felt the need to discuss the details.

The north side of the square had a wide, squat building, more than five times bigger than any of the huts various families had emerged from. It also had a single wooden door, which was the first one I’d seen so far. The huts had all used rough cloth to drape the entryways.

The door opened and eight people walked out in groups of two with tables carried between each of them. Those were lined up in front of the building, and four more people emerged. They were carrying large black rocks, probably about forty pounds or so, close to their chests. Without talking, they all stepped up to a different table and placed the rock down. We were close enough to the front of the line that I could easily make out the details.

Draw stone. Of course. I should have guessed.

The lines started moving, people placing a hand on the stone for a few seconds, receiving confirmation from the attendant and having their names ticked off a list on a nearby sheet of paper, and moving out of the way for the next. Each person’s mana core was emptied into one of the draw stones, and within a minute, it was my family’s turn.

Father went first, then turned to my sister. “Come on, your turn,” he said.

“I don’t like it. It makes me feel tired.”

“I know sweetie, but everyone has to contribute so the barrier doesn’t come down. The monsters will get in if we don’t donate our mana.”

My father took her hand and gently pressed it against the draw stone. What little mana she had drained out of her over the next few seconds, and she swayed on her feet. He scooped her up and carried her out of the way so my mother could take her turn. From what I could tell, he wasn’t handling the mana drain much better than my sister.

My mother let the draw stone take her mana, then knelt down and boosted me up so I could reach it sitting on the table. “Just put your hand here, like we practiced,” she said.

All around me, the other lines were moving forward. Behind us, more villagers were waiting their turns. No one was objecting, at least beyond some fussing from the smaller children. Everyone thought this was perfectly normal. Had I been reborn inside some sort of cult? And what barrier were they talking about? I would have noticed something like that.

Her hand over mine, my other guided my hand to press down on the draw stone so that it could steal what little mana I’d managed to generate.

To hell with that.

Chapter 2

Draw stones were easy to use, so easy in fact that they would passively steal mana right out of the cores of anyone nearby, albeit much more slowly than if someone touched one. It was no wonder it had taken so long for me to awaken if this was a nightly village ritual.

Fortunately for me, anyone with the least bit of knowledge could block the pull of a draw stone. It was a simple matter to keep my mana right where it was. The only question was whether the attendant would realize, but considering there wasn’t a single ignited mana core in this entire village, I was betting the answer was going to be no.

I pulled my hand back after a few seconds of pretending to let the draw stone do its business, and the attendant just ticked off a box next to my name. Mother picked me up and said, “There we go. Good job, Gravin! Maybe you should give Senica lessons on how to be brave.”

My sister stuck her tongue out at me from our father’s arms, and together we walked back to our one-room hut. At least I knew her name now. I was sure Mother and Father would suffice for our parents, and no one would look at me too hard if I forgot the names of anyone else I was supposed to know. No one was even really commenting on the fact that I hadn’t said a word yet since I’d awakened. Gravin had always been a quiet child.

Now that I had a better idea of the situation I’d found myself in, I could start forming a plan to get myself out of here. The first step was going to be creating a mana storage crystal. My own core couldn’t hold all the mana I needed to ignite it, and there was no ambient mana to draw in. I’d have to hoard it. That shouldn’t be too terribly difficult. I just needed a physical object, some mana, and a great deal of patience. The biggest hurdle was going to be how weak my body was. Even without letting myself be mana drained, I was feeling drowsy.

Toddlers slept a lot, and while I could use my own mana to energize myself, I needed it for other projects. A nap wouldn’t go amiss right now. Luckily enough, the sun was going down and it looked like everyone else was getting ready to sleep too. That led me to take my first good look around the inside of the hut, and I realized almost immediately that there were only two pallets. One was a small, Senica-sized rectangle with a pair of dolls laying on it, and the other was big enough for two adults.

Oh no. Was I still sleeping with my parents? This whole reincarnation was starting to feel like some sort of cosmic joke someone was playing on me. It was bad enough that I was sleeping on an unscented oblong bag of straw, but to have to share the pallet with two other people…

Getting my own place to sleep was right up near the top of my priorities list.

My new family went through their night time rituals before Senica crawled onto her own pallet and I was placed between my parents on the larger one. My mother handed me some sort of straw-stuffed doll shaped like what I assumed with a local animal. I didn’t recognize it, but that could have been because the quality was lacking or because it was just an animal I’d never seen before. Neither would have surprised me. Wherever I’d reincarnated at, it wasn’t a place I was familiar with.

Apparently, it was just expected that I’d want to hang onto “Farnsley,” as my mother called the toy. It wasn’t ideal for my purposes, but I only needed a storage crystal for a month or two. I could easily empty my mana into the toy every morning once I’d modified it, and no one would think twice about me constantly holding it. It was almost galling thinking about the transference loss, but then again, it wasn’t like I had anything better around to work with.

I’d get started on forming the storage crystal inside the toy where it couldn’t be seen tonight, and over the next few weeks, I’d slowly fill it. No one would suspect a thing. Perfect.

* * *

My eyes cracked open to see sunlight pouring in through the window. Both my parents were already up and preparing for the day, though my sister was still laying on her pallet. I groaned and sat up, then looked around for the toy. It had somehow made its way down past my feet while I slept.

I had not managed to finish forming the storage crystal last night, not even close. I hadn’t even managed to use all the mana in my core before I’d fallen asleep. I crawled across the bed, scooped the toy back up, and got back to work.

“Oh, you’re up early,” my mother said. Before I had time to think, she’d crossed the room and picked me up. “Come on, leave Farnsley here. Let’s get your morning business taken care of.”

With no say in the matter, I was whooshed out of the hut to the nearest communal outhouse. How humiliating.

* * *

It was far more difficult than I’d expected to work on the storage crystal. I wasn’t allowed to take the toy anywhere, and when I tried, I was told that I was getting too old for that now. Between that and my weak body’s inability to stay awake at night, it was hard to get time to even work on the crystal. That was frustrating, but if I was being honest, it wasn’t like I was generating mana fast enough that a ton of additional time would make a difference.

It took me a week to finish forming the storage crystal inside the toy. It felt like a rock the size of a grown woman’s thumb, and the only way to tell it was there was to squeeze the toy tightly. Its maximum storage capacity was pathetic, and if circumstances hadn’t been so dire, I’d be embarrassed to associate myself with its creation.

The storage crystal was horribly inefficient and I was forced to once again revise my estimations about how long it would take to fill it. At least half the mana I poured into it leaked out before it stabilized, and if the tests I’d done were in any way accurate, I was going to lose half of it again when I tried to pull it back out.

Two months, at least. That was the best-case scenario. So far, nothing had interfered, at least not in any meaningful way. Mother was intent on monopolizing most of my waking hours, and when she wasn’t, Father occasionally took over my evening. The only person who didn’t seem particularly interested in me was Senica. At least, that’s what I thought.

* * *

“How come you don’t talk anymore?” Senica asked me one afternoon.

I slowly turned my head to look at her and blinked once. It suited my purposes to say nothing, and no one had made any demands otherwise.

“Mom’s worried about how quiet you got. I heard her talking to Malra about it while we were gardening the other day,” my sister continued. She jabbed a finger in my direction. “So how come you stopped?”

I shrugged my little shoulders and told her, “Nothing to say.”

“You’d better start talking again soon. Malra said we should take you to the gover- the govenirer, no, the… to Lord Noctra’s house to see if you’re possessed.”

That was ridiculous. What kind of spirit would waste its time possessing a toddler? What would even be the point? Now, if they were worried about body snatchers or changelings, that would make sense. But a possession? That was just dumb.

Just the same, I didn’t need anyone taking a closer look at me before I had the ability to defend myself. Even if they couldn’t see the soul invocations I’d woven into myself, that might not stop some third-rate charlatan from pronouncing some suitably mystical sounding garbage to some frightened villagers that ended up with me in even more dire straits than I was now.

“Not possessed,” I said.

“Well, of course you’re not, dear,” my mother said, sweeping me up into her arms. Curse my toddler senses, I hadn’t even realized she’d been listening. “Senica is just being mean. Ignore her.”

I spent the next half an hour reciting the names of various fruits and vegetables from the garden back to my mother as she told them to me, much to her delight. It looked like I hadn’t done as good a job at acting like a normal toddler as I’d thought.

Two more months…

* * *

Everything would have gone so much faster if I’d had the ability to cast even the most basic of spells. Mana draining my parents in their sleep, for example, would have increased the amount of mana I could put in my storage crystal. It was too bad I couldn’t do it.

Days turned into weeks, and ever so slowly, the storage crystal kept filling. Every evening, I went to the town square with my family and pretended to give up my mana to the draw stone, an event they called the tithe. Every night, I poured it into my storage crystal instead. Soon enough, it technically had enough mana in it to ignite my own core, but with so much being wasted upon drawing it out, it wasn’t really close to enough. I needed to fill the crystal to the brim to ensure success.

The whole thing would have been easier if Mother was just a little bit less interested in me. Her constant demands on my time were bad enough, but the amount of energy I wasted appeasing her attempts to play with and educate me were the true problem. It was impossible to keep up with her demands without tapping into my mana. Gravin, and no doubt every other baby here, had probably been doing it unconsciously. It was a common enough form of invocation, which itself was by far the easiest kind of magic to cast without realizing it.

If I tried to get out of it, I got admonishments. If I persisted, it turned to concern about my health, which led to greater scrutiny. The last thing I needed was someone like that neighbor Malra snooping around or, worse, going to someone else who might actually be competent. Anyone with a lick of training would notice that storage crystal. I was running a calculated risk not shielding the mana, but it would take ten times as long to fill if I did.

Why couldn’t I have gotten an absentee mother, like in my previous life? That woman had been so disconnected from me that I couldn’t even remember her name anymore. Thinking about her only brought to mind the smell of burning yamma weed that she’d smoked from a long-stemmed pipe every day and the sound of flesh slapping on flesh, which was how she’d paid for it.

My new mother was nothing like that. It was ungrateful of me to resent her for being such a loving parent, but she was standing in the way of my progress. I played along and did my best to keep my mana expenditure to a minimum while silently fuming about even more delays. Weeks turned into months, and my goal of filling the storage crystal in just two months seemed laughable. Before I knew it, my third birthday had come and gone.

That led to even more expectations, and my mana generation hadn’t grown enough to keep up with them. It was now four months of this routine, and every day was an exercise in willpower as I resisted the temptation to tap into the storage crystal, drain it dry, and hope that I could squeeze enough mana out of it to ignite my core.

The day was coming, and soon too. Even with all the stumbling blocks, I was over three quarters of the way to filling the crystal. Just another two months should do it. This time, I was sure.

* * *

“Gravin,” my mother said. “I have a surprise for you, sweetie.”

I opened my eyes and looked at her. I’d been sitting in the garden while she worked, doing my best to meditate and increase the amount of mana I was generating. With my core in the state it was, there wasn’t really much I could do, and I would have normally considered it a waste of effort. In these circumstances, though, anything I could do to shave off a day or two was worth the work.

“This is Cherok,” my mother said, gesturing to a man standing next to her. “He’s going to be your school teacher for the next few months while you learn how to use your mana. Isn’t that exciting?”

Chapter 3

The man standing at the edge of the garden had a round, soft face and thick, pudgy fingers. He wore the same rough home-spun as everyone else in the village, but in his case the fabric strained over a potbelly. In my former life, I would have pegged him as some sort of low-ranking noble, high enough up the ladder to not have to do manual labor, but not so high that he had the time and inclination to maintain a state of physical fitness. He would be someone for whom appearances weren’t important.

Here, where almost everyone worked the fields, and did so without much magic to help, finding someone with an appreciable amount of fat on them was something of a rarity. Everyone else I’d met so far straddled the line between lean and malnourished. So then, this Cherok fellow must be important to the village’s society, someone in a privileged position. He represented yet another complication I didn’t need.

He advanced through the rows of stunted tomato plants and squatted down in front of me. “Hello, Gravin. It’s nice to meet you.”

I had no idea how Gravin would have reacted, but as my sister had pointed out, I’d developed a reputation for not saying much among my family. There was no reason to change that strategy now.

“Hello,” I said. Then I waited.

Cherok smiled patiently, but after a few seconds of me not saying anything else, he looked back to my mother, who just shrugged in response. “Do you know what mana is?” he asked.

It was a struggle not to roll my eyes, made easier by the fact that I had a very real fear that this man was going to be hindering my progress greatly. Depending on his capabilities, there were really only two ways to play this. Either I could pretend to be a prodigy and get through the unnecessary lessons as quickly as possible, thus wasting the minimum amount of my precious mana appeasing him, or I could pretend to be hopelessly thick, wasting no mana and deliberating failing all his lessons.

The problem there was that I didn’t know if I just needed to prove I could manipulate my mana or if the classes lasted the same length of time regardless. More than that, I didn’t know how much he’d be able to detect. There were too many unknown variables to make this decision with any degree of confidence, and of course nobody had bothered to talk to the toddler about what he wanted to do. Why would they?

The only thing Gravin would know about mana was that the draw stones took it. That was a nice, safe topic. “It’s what we give to the big rock every day,” I said.

Cherok chuckled at that. Perhaps I’d just spent too many months as a small child, but I’d noticed that a lot of adults were very patronizing towards children. It was to be expected to an extent, but there were degrees of difference. My mother, for example, wanted to celebrate every little thing. That was a perfectly valid tactic for encouraging children to grow and explore, but it did get a bit wearing to me personally.

This particular adult was not like that. He clearly looked down on me, probably on all children, and considered me lesser. I disliked him immediately. If I’d been on the fence before, that laugh of his sealed the deal.

“That’s true, but that’s not what mana is. That’s just something you do with it,” he said condescendingly. I glanced over his shoulder at my mother, but she just stood there smiling at me. Obviously, I wasn’t getting any help there.

Cherok was waiting for me to say something again, no doubt intending to lead me through the conversation by the nose while he displayed his intellectual superiority to a literal toddler. I stared back at him and remained silent.

The moment stretched between us, him waiting for me to ask the question he was baiting me into voicing, me more than willing to sit there all day ignoring him. I didn’t need to ask him what mana was. I’d known that for over two thousand years, and my original teacher had been an actual mage, not a dull like this guy. All he was doing was interrupting my meditation, which was just a way for me to pass the time and generate just slightly more mana than I would otherwise.

“Mana,” Cherok said, giving up on waiting me out, “is the magic inside us. It makes us strong, and we collectively use it as a community to empower the great barrier that keeps Alkerist safe from monsters.”

Almost nobody ever said the name of the village. I’d been here for months before I’d heard it the first time. For a group of people utterly isolated from the outside world, the real surprise had been that they’d named their village at all. I suspected someone who’d died a long, long time ago had come up with the name, and whatever meaning it had once had was long forgotten.

Then there was this guy.

“Okay,” I said.

Cherok frowned and glanced back at my mother again. She didn’t say anything, and I felt a surge of malicious little glee at the whole situation. He looked back to me and said, “My job is to teach children how to sense their mana and, more importantly, how to manipulate their spirit to make more of it. Some of my students are so advanced that they can even use their mana to make themselves stronger or faster. Doesn’t that sound exciting?”

It really, really didn’t. Also he didn’t seem to know what he was talking about. Presumably, he meant he taught people how to manipulate their mana cores, but I couldn’t be completely sure.

“Okay,” I said again.

Cherok rose back to his full height and walked back over to my mother to talk to her in a hushed voice. I went back to “playing” in the dirt, as my mother had termed my meditation sessions. A bit of mana sharpened my senses so I could pick up their conversation easily. It might have been wasteful, but it seemed prudent to keep on top of whatever they were planning for me.

“Maybe he’s just a bit too young,” Cherok said, “but he doesn’t understand what I’m saying, and he’s not interested in learning.”

“It sounds like you’re saying my son is stupid,” my mother said, a warning tone in her voice.

“No, no, of course not. Everyone develops at their own pace, and just because his sister started early doesn’t mean he will too. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just how it is.”

“So you don’t want Gravin to attend your next class?”

“He can, if you really want him there. But I won’t be able to give him special instruction time to help him catch up. It might be best for everyone if we try again in a few months.”

Yes, good. That sounded reasonable. It would give me enough time to ignite my mana core. Then whatever demands Cherok made of me would be easily compensated for. As long as the lessons weren’t too intensive, I could probably spend most of the time strengthening my core so I could push past stage one quickly.

Considering the utter lack of ambient mana in the village, increasing my own mana generation was really the only way to progress. Once I was strong enough to leave, I’d get out of this desert and I could return to my original plans. I didn’t like being vulnerable like this, though there were still a few failsafes left in my soul if the worst should come to pass.

“Senica wasn’t that interested to begin with either,” my mother said. “But you’ll recall she ended up doing very well.”

“She did,” Cherok admitted. “But as I said, every child is different. Your daughter was interested in playing and was extremely active. She thought the classes would be boring and a distraction from her games. Once she got a taste of what I had to teach her, her whole attitude changed. Gravin, on the other hand, well…”

“Well what?”

“He’s just kind of… sitting there. And from what I understand, that isn’t unusual behavior for him. He doesn’t do much of anything, isn’t curious, doesn’t play, doesn’t talk. I’ve been teaching the children of Alkerist for twenty years now, and I’ve never seen one as disinterested in the world around him as your son. Xilaya, he’s not ready, and he might never be ready. There’s something wrong with him.”

“There is nothing wrong with my boy,” my mother hissed.

Cherok held his hands up and took a step back. “As you say. You’d know him best. Regardless, from my conversation with him, I’d recommend waiting a few more months to see if he develops some interest. I can show you a few things to work with on him here at home that might spark something if you’d like.”

I hadn’t realized I stood out so much. Here I thought I’d just been well-behaved and easy to care for, and instead I’d gotten a reputation as an idiot. I’d be offended if there was even a single person in this whole village whose opinion mattered to me. As it was, I’d take being looked down on if it meant I was left alone for the next few months.

“Our next Testing is in a month,” my mother said, her voice quiet and almost desperate. “Gravin needs to be able to show that he’s contributing to the barrier.”

“Well I’m sorry, but even if the boy was a genius, it’d be all but impossible to teach him mana techniques in just a few weeks,” Cherok said. “Not even I can take a child to that height so quickly, no matter how talented they might be. And your son, I’m sorry to say, isn’t.”

If only he knew how wrong he was. But no, it wasn’t worth it to draw the attention to myself, not when I was still this weak. I had nothing to prove to a bunch of farmers living in the back corner of nowhere and clinging to superstitions about a fictional magical barrier that was keeping them safe from a vague, unspecified threat that never seemed to emerge to prove them wrong.

“What are we supposed to do then?” my mother demanded. “Sellis is already working himself to death. We can’t afford for him to be taxed twice a day.”

“There is nothing you can do,” Cherok said stiffly. “My suggestion would be to keep your legs closed in the immediate future so you don’t end up with a third child you can’t afford.”

It was a good thing I was studiously avoiding looking in their direction, otherwise one of them might have seen my smirk when I felt the mana in my mother’s core surge in an unstructured invocation that bolstered her physical prowess. A second later, there came the smack of palm against cheek and Cherok let out a surprised, pain-filled squeal.

It seemed I wasn’t the only one who didn’t like the village teacher.

“Well then,” his mother said, her voice cold, “thank you for the deep insight into my family. Truly, your wisdom is without peer.”

I risked a look over and saw Cherok still staggered back a step, one hand clutching at his face. He straightened up, shot me a nasty glare, and said, “My recommendation is that you wait for your son to get older before he begins his schooling. He is nowhere near ready at this time. Good day, Xilaya.”

And with that, he turned on his heel and stormed off down the street. My mother watched him go, her fists clenched at her side and her nose flaring with each breath. Only after he’d turned the corner did she force herself to relax.

“And good riddance,” she muttered. When she turned to face me, she’d resumed her normal, smiling expression. “Well then, wasn’t that exciting?”

“Mean man,” I said.

“People are complicated,” she told me. “Do you understand?”

“Mean. Pretends not to be.”

My mother paused, gave me a speculative look, and nodded. “Yes, I suppose that’s a good way to put it. There’s nothing to be done about it, though. Why don’t we see about getting this row weeded, and then we can start working on dinner?”

It looked like I’d managed to dodge school for now. With any luck, by the time that particular issue reared its ugly head again, it would be too late to matter.