Chương 16: Chapter 12 - Basic Inferno

Morning once again arrived much too quickly after Karina fell asleep. While the first rest in the Cathedral had been interrupted by Alyssia's soft knock on the door, today was marked by the arrival of a very insistent dawn. Alongside the rising sun came a quiet whisper of thought in the back of Karina's head. While her other quick flashes of memory had come in the form of mental images, this one arrived as a statement that locked itself in her mind. Like a catchy song she'd forgotten was stuck in her head.

A thousand sunsets home. A thousand thousand sunrises here. The only thing that made Karina believe the phrase was a memory instead of anything else was that it arrived alongside the same feeling of revelation the glasses had given her. It was a reminder of something that had been. Before she could forget it, she took the quill and notebook from under her pile of cloth and wrote it down haphazardly across the inside cover.

The leathery binding of the notebook creased as she opened it to check her notes from last night. In the end, it wasn't much, but it was something, and she certainly wasn't about to let forgetfulness get in the way of mastering the gift she'd been given here. If the church or gods thought they could get rid of her that easily, they were wrong. Karina shook that idea out of her head before it could settle.

If spite was what drove her in the previous life, then she could use it now, but it was better to leave it in the background, where she wouldn't bring it up to Alyssia. Before closing the book, she checked the phrase one more time: "A thousand sunsets home, a thousand thousand sunrises here." If nothing else, that told her she didn't see sunrises at home, which aligned with the fact that she'd only seen two here and hadn't felt rested for either of them.

As she woke herself up, Karina ran the pad of her thumb along her newly bare patches of skin. The burns had mostly receded overnight, only leaving lightning-like patterns of charred tissue along her forearms and calves. And a final patch she only discovered when she went to put on her glasses, running along her right cheekbone. The encounter with the Volatu had taken all of her mana, and she'd needed at least twelve hours to recover most of it.

She didn't know how often they would be fighting demons, but that didn't sound sustainable. She would need to find a skill that helped her with her mana issue, even if Volrick had implied they were rare. Either that, or she needed to hope that her mana pool or regeneration grew quickly with each Cinder Mage level she gained. Just when Karina noticed that the campfire had been kicked apart to cover their tracks, Alyssia came back into the small central clearing of their camp.

"Good to see you're awake," she said.

"It's a lovely morning." Karina avoided pointing out that it was barely morning.

"We're headed to—""Yes," she said.

"But I haven't spoken to him about it. So let's not."

"Where is he?"

"Volrick is trying to catch breakfast," Alyssia said, checking over her shoulder to see if the ash-skinned man would suddenly be there.

"Just so we aren't eating into the reserves too fast." Karina checked across the horizon to see if she could see Volrick, but all she saw in every direction were the same rolling hills dotted with struggling trees and lined with greyish-white streaks of open sand. There was somewhere back home like this, but it had all been close to the coast, where there at least would have been fish.

But on the entire journey here the only animal presence there'd been was birds, and even they'd mostly vanished when they'd reached the sand barrows.

"If he's going to be gone for a while," Karina said, "should we work on—""Yes," Alyssia said.

"You read my mind." Karina stood and tightened a loose bandage around her upper arm.

"I might have," she said.

"But neither of us finished the sentence."

"Right," Alyssia said before turning and motioning for Karina to follow her to the far side of the camp. She had already changed robes for the day, having swapped out the flowing travel robes she'd worn at the cathedral for a brown set that was more snug around the top but had a wide skirt on the lower half. When the breeze picked up, it revealed that the leather, thick-soled boots Alyssia had worn on the journey were almost up to her knees.

Above the dress, she wore a shawl that hung loose around her shoulders at the moment. She must have expected the day to be colder than the last. Once they were about thirty feet away from the dead campfire, Alyssia returned to facing Karina.

"Seeing as you have somewhat of a handle on pyrokinesis," she began as she reached into a folded pocket within the shawl, "I figured that our first lesson would be in the applications of your basic spellcasting." Karina nodded along. Beyond a new tool, she also wanted to know if fire spellcasting would additionally level Firestealer.

"So, first things first," Alyssia said as she held out a hand and a small flickering orb of fire appeared within it.

"You have an affinity for fire. Right?" Karina took a deep breath before responding. If this was going to be anything like the pyrokinesis training, she needed to be relaxed so she could focus on command.

"Right."

"That means it's going to be naturally easier to learn and master fire spells," she said.

"But I don't have an affinity for fire and—" Alyssia waved the fire around in her hand for effect before snuffing it out.

"So spellcasting isn't limited by your affinity. It just helps."

"Question."

"Go ahead."

"If you earn Fates by performing the relevant actions and Basic Spellcasting with whatever affinity is a Fate, wouldn't I just gain the others by practicing in the first place?" Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. Alyssia clapped her hands once.

"Good question. Basic spellcasting, with an affinity, is limited to inherent fates. The ones that come with your class."

"So you're either a spellcasting class, or not."

"Correct. If someone doesn't have an inherent fate with an affinity, they will never get an affinity," she said.

"Technically anyone can follow Basic Spellcasting, but without an affinity, it's a difficult Fate without much benefit." Karina snapped her fingers and called the heat from under her skin to the surface, making a small lick of flame rise from her thumb. What did it mean for a fate to be difficult? Was it like Firestealer, where it required much more experience than others?

"But for now." Alyssia crossed the gap between them so that she could reach out for Karina's wrists. She only took them once she had the implicit permission of her not pulling away. She continued, holding both of Karina's hands.

"We are going to teach you the most basic fire spells, so you aren't exclusively relying on Pyrokinesis to create fire." Karina didn't want to interrupt, but it didn't matter because the curiosity must have been written all over her face as Alyssia delved further into the topic.

"I believe the term I've heard was that pyrokinesis came alongside an inner fire."

"There's a heat I feel," Karina said.

"You can draw that inner fire outside to control it, but in the end, pyrokinesis is best at controlling fire. A spell gives you another way to produce flame."

"Without setting the grass on fire first."

"That would be preferable." She turned Karina's hands over, pointing her palms to the sky.

"We probably only have time to practice the one before Volrick comes back with breakfast, but every day, wherever we're headed, we will take time in the morning to practice and train." She released Karina's hands.

"Now, you just saw me perform this spell, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Simply repeat after me." Alyssia said something in a strange tongue before Karina took her turn to grab her wrists.

"You said, 'you just saw me do this,' but you didn't say anything when you summoned that little ball of fire." She quietly pulled her hands out of Karina's and revealed the ball of fire in her hands again.

"I've mastered the spell."

"Mastered?"

"Spells get to level up, as Fates do," she said.

"Once you've mastered a certain spell, you can cast it much quicker, and you no longer need the verbal or somatic components to cast it." She snuffed the fire again.

"It becomes yours, like a skill you just need to activate."

"But," Karina started, catching Alyssia's caveat and drawing a fake-annoyed sigh out of the priestess.

"But you have not mastered the spell, so you need to learn it the long way." Karina answered with a sharp, curt nod.

"Okay, palm up on whichever hand you would like the fire to appear in," Alyssia began.

"Then," she added as Karina followed the instructions, "for a simple spell like this, all you need to do is trace a line around the inside of your palm." She traced that line with her fingernail, which was cracked on the right side.

"And then say the incantation."

"The incantation."

"Pyrek. Which is fire. Evet. Gau."

"Evet. Gau?"

"Roughly 'to me,'" she said, "but the tongue of the casters doesn't have a one-to-one translation for everything. It's just useful to know the important words."

"Guess I'll be saying 'Pyrek' a lot." That time Alyssia properly chuckled.

"Okay, so Pyrek, Evet, Gau," Karina said without doing the motion. Even without the somatic component, something crackled on her tongue as she spoke those words. Karina traced a circle across her palm, beginning beneath her blackened middle finger.

"Pyrek. Evet." Her fingernail returned to its starting point.

"Gau." Fire erupted in Karina's palm, swelling into a pillar at least half her height that swirled around a central flickering core. Alyssia jumped back as the fire lashed out in every direction, trying to find something else to burn. Karina slammed her hand shut, but the fire continued to escape between her fingers, pushing through each gap in thin lances of flame.

A blade of fire cut across the ground and left a long, black scar in the sand, before dying an inch from one of the saplings they'd been hidden behind last night. Karina opened her hand before another lance could escape between her fingers. Through the orange lenses, she could see the point where the spell poured from her palm. She drew a thin thread of her own fire into it. The connection caught. Suddenly, she could feel the whole flame. Karina pulled it tight and extinguished it.

"Well," Alyssia said after pushing her bangs out of her eyes and smoothing out her robe, "you certainly took well to that." [First Spell Cast! Ember Call] The text was there for a moment without being summoned and then flickered twice before flashing away into nothingness. Karina looked up at Alyssia, who was still in the middle of rallying herself after the initial explosion of flame. [Spell Learned! Progress—] The text sputtered out again. Then, there was nothing but fire.

A thousand towers of flame consuming the horizon in every direction. A swallowed landscape under a sea of ash. A hand coming down from the sun made of divine golden light. It was the end. It was about to be a new beginning. The world was a phoenix, and she would nest it in ash. The— Karina stumbled forward but Alyssia caught her against her chest before she could fall. She blinked away spots as her eyes struggled to adjust to the light from the other side of the vision.

"Are you alright?" Alyssia asked. Karina didn't have it in her to answer yet. Then, burning in front of her, in the darkness made by Alyssia's chest, the text returned. [Spell Recalled.] [Spell Mastered] [Fate Progressed - Firestealer 42/200] [Fate Progressed - Basic Spellcasting - Affinity: Fire 10/10] [Fate Ascension Available - Basic Spellcasting - Affinity: Fire 2]"Hero?" Alyssia eased her back enough to see her face.

"What happened?" Karina stared at the word Recalled.

"You said I had to learn it."

"Yes."

"But this says I already did."