tobiasbegley

The Twin Trials: Chapter Sixty-Seven

As I trudged along throughout the day, I was once again left more or less unscathed. While I did have to spook away another small pack of coyotes, and one arctic fox got a little too defensive over my intrusion into its territory, but all things considered, it wasn’t too terribly difficult. 

My second night passed similarly to the first, with the odd attack I had to fend off, but nothing too horrifically strong passed by. The broken sleep was definitely starting to get to me some...

The Twin Trials: Chapter Sixty-Six

I bit my lip. 

Surely Edgar couldn’t object to me taking a few of the bulbs, right? I would leave plenty of them growing in the surrounding area, which should ensure the environment was able to make up for the small loss. 

Extending a touch of life mana into Enhance Plant Life, I connected to three of the opal snowdrops, gently pushing through the snow to dig them out. 

My quarry in hand, I headed back to where I’d be setting up camp for the night, and wit...

The Archmage: Intermission (Assorted, Part Three)

Trenton Elide was sitting in his wheelchair, turning over four potion bottles in his hands. All four were for the magesight arch-star, and each one had been an incredible resource. 

But he couldn’t give all of them away. The other noble houses would never allow that. 

That was the real reason that there were so few archmages in each house. Not due to a lack of resources – even the smallest house commanded billions upon billions of crowns.

It was to counter bala...

The Archmage: Intermission (Assorted, Part Two)

Janice Littlefoot was hawking her goods in a medium sized farming town when the light exploded from the clock towers. Caught off guard, she dropped the book she’d been waving around, and had to dive to catch it before it splattered into the mud. 

As she stared into the light of the tower, she felt hate churn in her gut. She hated magic. Hated it so much. She didn’t used to be this way, but… Her son had awakened an aura, and he’d begged her, day in, day out, to go to school....

The Archmage: Intermission (Assorted, Part One)

This next bit will probably read a lot smoother as a book than as a serial, but I really want to give a sense of just how big the magic really was. So there will be three parts to this intermission. If you get annoyed of it by the third day of it, I'm sorry!

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Darrel Baker was a sensible man. When the pillars of light had struck, he had immediately decided that it was magic. 

He glanced around, and people on the street didn’t seem to ...

RELEASE ALERT!

Book One of Mana Mirror is now out on Amazon! It has a chapter that was added in, not seen on Royal Road, and has a lot of polish, as well as a few lore drops that have been sprinkled in.

It is up on Kindle Unlimited, as well as for normal ordering. The audiobook is up for pre-order, releasing in July.

And for those of you who care about the finale of The Journals series, fear not! It’s up for pre-order now, and will release on September 26th! It can be found 2024-06-20 14:00:11 +0000 UTC View Post

The Archmage: Chapter Forty-Four

There will be a post about this later, but Mana Mirror is out now, and the Archmage is up for pre-order!

Mana Mirror: https://www.amazon.com/Mana-Mirror-First-Tobias-Begley-ebook/dp/B0CYHQG7L4

Mana Mirror Audiobook: 2024-06-20 12:00:12 +0000 UTC View Post

The Twin Trials: Chapter Sixty-Five

Out of the eighty plus people who were standing there, more than twenty of them immediately broke through to ascend. I wasn’t entirely sure how they all managed it, without the excess amounts of mana that were needed to manage the breakthrough, but they did. 

I had theories, of course – Edgar had literally just said that people tended to bring a few potions or enchantments or wardlines, after all – but it didn’t really matter. 

What mattered far more was the spik...

Opal Snowdrops...

The Twin Trials: Chapter Sixty-Four

“It’s… a lot,” I said as I gave the tortoise some dried apple slices from dusk’s realm for it being so helpful. 

“I can imagine,” Kene said. “You’ve got quite a mishmash of beast magic at this point. Primes, you might be as inhuman as me or Kamal now.” 

They smirked at that, and I actually felt a bit lighter, gladdened by the fact they felt confident enough to joke about their condition. After finishing up our lunch, Kene and I went back to brewing fo...

The Twin Trials: Chapter Sixty-Three

I scratched my chin in thought, and then my eyes flew wide as I let out a gasp. 

“What?!” Kene asked, magic spiraling out of his hands already. 

“Feel my chin!” I said, elated, jutting my chin out a little bit. Kene ran their fingers over it, feeling the tiny amount of fuzz on the tip of my chin, and their face lit up. 

“You’re growing facial hair!” Kene said, and I bobbed my head in a goofy grin. 

It was only a little bit of hair, the...

The Archmage: Chapter Forty-Three

I leapt out of my seat and floated down into the arena, landing next to Willow. One of the guards actually tried to release a force lance right at me, but I broke it apart before it could even finish forming. 

“Congratulations!” I beamed. 

I had wanted to congratulate her, but there was another reason I wanted to land here. As I stomped my foot into the ground, I spiraled a circle of faerie magic in the wood under our feet, and shaped it into a spell that would rende...

The Archmage: Chapter Forty-Two

If I had been Willow, I would have attempted to draw out the fight. Use less burners than my enemy cast spells, and rely on the fact that I had two charges of force armor – one of which was hyper-efficient – to hold out. 

Willow, apparently, thought differently, as she whipped three of her leather cords off her wrist and threw them into the air, releasing a quite powerful fireball, force lance, and air slash, all three stronger than she should have been able to fit onto the cor...

The Human Dragon

Been in a bit of a short story mood recently, not sure why... Ah, well. What can you do?

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While estragon might clutch yearly, and even terragon have a successful mating cycle once every decade, dragons rarely have more than one child a century. Some scholars claim that this is the only reason that early humanity was able to claw its way to the relative top of the pecking order. 

Regardless of if that is true or not, it’s still a gene...

The Archmage: Chapter Forty-One

The second day, I was far less accosted by nobility. I wasn’t sure if that was their way of attempting to punish me for the stunt that I’d pulled the day before, or if they’d just burnt themselves out the day before, but I was grateful for it either way. 

Once again, there were large scrying mirrors that had been set out, and I idly calculated how expensive it would be to set up the arrays for such complex spells. Even if they used as many purely mundane components as possibl...

The Archmage: Chapter Forty

Heya! This is just a heads up that there may be a short lag in Archmage chapters during July 4th - 7th, as I'll be traveling to visit my grandparents, who are across the country. I'll try to get out what I can, but I can't guarantee chapters that week, sorry!

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I was sure that assaulting a warded fortress must have been exciting from my student’s perspective, but for me, it was rather boring. 

When the group was split in two, A...

The Debt Collector

Just a warning, this one has a lot of curse words and a mention of drugs. Reader discretion is advised.

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A sharp pulse of abnegation mana struck Cora’s left arm, slipping through the table she was crouching behind a a shield. For a moment, the dull gray zero-steel that ran through it glowed brighter, blocking the foreign magic, but the Association agent’s grade-three spell was too strong. She was forced to watch as the carefully constructed ...

The Twin Trials: Chapter Sixty-Two

Edgar and I spoke for nearly an hour about Dragontooth’s environment. The tortoise was ancient, well over two hundred years old, and remembered when the glaciers had been in entirely different positions. He told me that these were slow glaciers, but even still, across the span of his life, they had shifted over a hundred meters. 

I was starting to shiver, even through the highly insulated parka and the ungated heating spells I was casting inside of it, when Edgar finally wrapped ...

Tort Time 4 Real?

The Twin Trials: Chapter Sixty-One

It took us nearly two hours, but eventually, the shop was clean. Agnes seemed to know with uncanny accuracy when we’d missed even the smallest patches of dust. 

The old woman, of course, would never do anything so helpful as tell us where it was, just telling us that we’d missed a spot.

It was slow, humiliating work, but when I finished, Kene was still bent over the potion, studying it and giving it the odd swirl, a look of interest on their face. 

“Can you c...

The Twin Trials: Chapter Sixty

Puinen, as it turned out, was absolutely frigid. Coming from Mossford, I thought I was used to the cold. Even the snowy port city we’d landed in had been chilly, but manageable. 

As we left the station and walked into Puinen, however, I could feel the freezing cold energy biting through my defensive aura pin and suit, and stinging at my hands and feet. Kene raised his hand and caused an orb of fire to bloom in it, but even the warmth of the spell was quickly stolen by the snowsto...

The Archmage: Chapter Thirty-Nine

It was always fun to watch an archmage approach, and I was curious to see how someone who Draven notably looked down on would manage it. Of the three that I’d seen, I honestly thought that Frank’s had been the most impressive. For all that he had been an abusive father, callous murderer, and conniving worm, he had certainly understood style and presentation. 

It was also, like we’d all figured out, a good test of my skills. I maintained the three hovering circles around me, a...

Scheduling Issue

Ope, sorry about that! Poll has been deleted, but I clicked too early!

The Archmage: Chapter Thirty-Eight

During the weeks my classes were working on their final projects, I rounded out the work with the spell that Oberon had traded to me while also starting working on the metal spell I’d use to carve the relays.

The metal spell, at least, was a fun challenge, and getting it to manipulate all of the runes that I wanted into the gun was a strong test of my skills with it. The bullets were a little bit easier, by virtue of how simple they were, but still complex. 

As I set up the...

The Archmage: Chapter Thirty-Seven

“Welcome, everyone,” I told them, smiling, even as I fed power to the foci Mellt and I had created for practice. “I’m afraid our final unit is going to be a bit of a boring one, but if you manage to ride through it, I’m confident you’ll find it useful. Now, something I’ve tried my best to give each of you through this class is the chance to do things yourself. I show you how to anchor a foci, you do it with a new spell.”

I gave them a grim smile. 

“But like ...

The Archmage: Chapter Thirty-Six

I completed Oracle’s bracer the following week, alongside the veils for Osheen, to give him some time to practice with them. After that, I started working on the training wands. 

Those proved to be an interesting problem to puzzle over. Building them with human magic was a well-established tradition. Faerie magic, on the other hand, I couldn’t figure out. Converting one to one just caused the magic to dissolve, much like the bedsheets I’d used to escape House Elide. In the en...

The Twin Trials: Chapter Fifty-Nine

It was easy to dismiss Ed as stupid. Even he admitted that he’d struggled in school, and he’d been called stupid plenty by the kids who he’d gone to school with. It was a nice school, after all. Not one his dad would normally have been able to have them attend, if he hadn’t plopped his bakery down in an upper class neighborhood. And like most nice schools, the students there were all smart, driven by coming from innately more educated backgrounds and opportunities. 

So they...

The Twin Trials: Chapter Fifty-Eight

The vendor sold long strips of smoked eel with a lovely tangy mustard. I’d never had eel before, be it smoked, fried, raw, or any other way, but it was pretty good, and it was more than long enough for Kene and I to share. 

Kene’s grandmother apparently asked to leave Dusk’s realm around then, and so Dusk waved her hand, and the witch ambled out. 

“Grandmother,” Kene said, putting the chunk of eel he’d had down. “Are you feeling better?” 

“Mo...

The Twin Trials: Chapter Fifty-Seven

“Sure,” I finally said. “As long as you’re fine with it?”

...

Kene and I disembarked the boat at the Dragontooth stop before hurrying to the harbourmaster’s office, which had four lines for people coming into the country, a faster one for simple one day or less visits that basically only required an ID check, and then a longer one for longer stays.

As we waited in line, my eyes were drawn to the person who, judging by the fact she rod straight on a balcony that w...

The Archmage: Chapter Thirty-Five

“I’ve got a solution to our power problem,” I told our little group as we sat around one of Tara’s tables.

“Oh?” Tara asked, giving me a curious look. 

“We’ll use Yesgol’s aura and remaining life force to power it,” I said. 

“What do you mean, remaining?” Tara asked, and I quickly caught her up to date on the fact that the tree was dying. I left out some details about how alive the tree really seemed to be, just confirming that it had asked ...