Chương 23: Chapter 22: A Lich’s Diplomacy

++My school life was, despite the early difficulties in adjusting to it, one of the highlights of my early rebirth. It was there, for the first time, that I was at last surrounded by social equals, more or less. And it let me exercise something I had been waiting a long time for: power over others. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E The Professor's attention was firmly concentrated on myself and my new training partner, who I had already learned was named Alira Bella Paula.

She did not recognise my own family's name when I gave it, which was no surprise at all. The Vornholts were not a nationally large name, and there was no reason for someone lurking so far from my family's lands to be familiar with them. I found this more refreshing than anything, as it meant I was freed from some of the expectations heaped upon me. Already I was being treated more like a person in the Winzorth Institute, I could only hope that resumed.

And hope that I proved canny enough to get over this newest magical hurdle. The powers of illusion were unknown to me in my own time, and I was struggling to wrap my head around them now. Professor Varylani had given few details on what they were or how they functioned, too, and had only told us both to work on swapping between several patterns of mana while sending the shapes onwards to pulse through one another's Vessels. I did have several guesses, though.

I assumed from the fact that this was targeting our partner's magic directly that it would be in some way designed to alter the target's senses, not conjure illusions made out of light or sound as I thought. This actually appealed to me a lot more. I liked the idea of invading another's mind and twisting it to my will, it was a very lich thing to do. And I was growing tired of playing the hapless child.

Our earliest efforts were met with no success at all, but I found this exercise far more intuitive than the previous one. Rather than focusing on simply shaping our mana to a given extent, something that exclusively relied on magical dexterity and control, we were now aiming to manage specific shapes down to a fine level of detail. That was something that I found far easier than Alira, because I was unique in my ability to actually see those shapes and know exactly how I was falling short of them.

She floundered around with instinct while I just looked. Even with that advantage, though, I did not succeed before our lesson ended. By that time there were another few pairs set up, and two students still left irritated by their ongoing failures. The Professor was as sympathetic to them as she was anyone else.

"You have until the end of next lesson to succeed," she told them.

"After that you're being written off as lost causes. I don't have time to waste on apprentices who won't yield any returns." They were far from pleased to hear this, and I saw a good deal of relief elsewhere in the room. Nobody spoke up in their defence, of course. I did not, because I did not really care, and the other students remained silent out of fear that they might be removed next. A stupid fear, I thought. Our Professor was, if nothing else, honest. She cared about nothing but results.

"That was boring," Agrian scowled as we exited the room.

"Magic often is," I told him. He looked at me sideways.

"Why are you talking like that? You always do that, act like you know way more than me. You're nine." I decided to just leave his comment there. There was no benefit to replying one way or the other. Agrian, however, was not done.

"And I don't need you fighting my battles." I turned to him.

"Those boys insulted me by attacking you," I explained calmly.

"They must be taught that they cannot do this."

"I'm the one they're picking on, you just stay out of this." I did not promise anything. Our other lessons were somewhat less eventful than Professor Varylani's introduction to illusion. Professor Bogern was rather more enthusiastic about his teaching of conjuration, and most of the class proved more enthusiastic to learn it. I shared this feeling, because conjuration was a form of power I had kept my eye on for quite some time.

It came as quite the disappointment, then, to be told that we would be unable to actually conjure anything for several more years, and would first have to spend our time conditioning each of our Vessels to output mana in the way that would make it even possible to attempt. I saw Alira in this class, too, as well as most of Varynari's rejects from our session on illusion.

Most of the ones who had done well in that class were being glared at by the ones who had not, and to my dismay I realised that I was absorbing the bulk of their contempt. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. A recurring problem with being perceived as a female child, was that any time I upstaged an older person, especially an older male, they took it very personally indeed.

By the time my first day at the Winzorth Institute ended, I was suffering from a considerable lack of friends, and far too many enemies.

"Everyone here is a dick," Agrian rather poignantly observed.

"They are." It felt odd to agree with him so thoroughly on something. The two of us were seated in the common room for our year, a sort of expanded living space set aside in-between the floor in which all of our rooms were located, reserved to accommodate students in-between lessons and encourage us to socialise. The official reason was to let us learn social skills and build bonds with one another. The actual reason, I suspected, was because they wanted to encourage friendships among fellow magicians.

I had already noticed that the Professors of the Winzorth Institute spoke not-too-fondly about outsiders. This was as much a recruiting station as an academy. No wonder the world's nobility and priests were fearing the rise of its magicians, those magicians were doing all they could to consolidate each other into a single faction. Agrian continued to be troubled by the boys who had picked on him that first day, though never when I was around.

Apparently word had already spread of my anomalous talent, and outside of the many looks I got in-between classes and in corridors, people did not seem to be eager for any kind of confrontation with me. That suited me just fine, but it did nothing to help Agrian himself. The boy was miserable, and his misery reflected on our family, which reflected on me. Blood was important in this age, even for those who did not enjoy a noble title.

I got to work on a way of ensuring that my brother's torment would be ended sooner rather than later. My first thought was not a particularly productive one. While walking over to the bullies and brutalising them with magic would be entertaining, it would likely cause more problems than it solved. I had to find another, more subtle way of fixing this. Especially since Agrian himself may bristle at being seen to have a girl protect him.

This solution was already clear to me, my only obstacle was becoming physically able to enact it. In the end, it was Professor Varylani who helped most with that. Her and Alira Bella Paula. By my third lesson in illusion magic, I was starting to not only gain some ability to control the odd kind of spellcraft, but some understanding of how it works.

'Illusion' is actually an overly simplified word for the school of magic, because it covers much more than just producing hallucinations and sensory effects. It consists of altering the mana flows of a person's own body, and from there altering their own perceptions and thoughts. At first, this manifests in fairly simple and direct ways. My earliest experiences were in feeling and creating basic optical illusions. There is a certain art to it that requires an especially deft touch, but I picked it up fast.

A pulse of mana shaped in a certain way down low, in the arm, leads to odd sensations beneath the skin of the upper back. Running a broader wave of it across the whole body numbs certain areas of the legs. Everything was connected, even if those connections seemed random and unpredictable. It was all just a matter of memorising what affected what. And a lich's memory is very, very powerful. Weeks passed with Agrian growing more miserable, but both of us growing more powerful.

When we were not studying specific forms of spellwork, we would be taking part in carefully regulated magical exercises as part of a communal training routine. I found this to actually be quite impressive, because the exercises I myself was given were near-perfect for maximizing my growth. In fact, I had to be careful about practicing on my own time to keep from straining my Vessel too hard and ruining the perfect balance my tutors had managed.

Before long, I was inducing illusion effects on people without much effort. I could make audio hallucinations easily enough, and with more effort could even alter the things people saw. Nothing too large-scale yet, I could not make anything lifelike or difficult to distinguish from reality, but, after experiencing them for myself as Alice performed these same techniques on me, I became confident they could be used for a lot.

On a target who did not know they were under any sort of magical effect, even a subtle alteration to their perceptions could be devastating. I would get a lot of utility out of this, even after my current goal was seen to. Agrian helped me practice more, and dedication helped me with the rest. I experimented in fields not strictly taught within the classroom, too.

It turned out that physical touch was the next easiest sensation to manipulate, and in fact I found that I could do more with it than I could sight or smell. Perhaps it was simply more primal, less precise. Once you can affect touch at all, a lot comes naturally from it. In my case, it was phantom sensations and bodily feelings. I took a few days more to perfect my skills in producing them, and then I simply bided my time. Of course, I did not tell Agrian what I was planning.

He was stubborn and, I suspected, had the misguided urge to protect me. He had already made it clear that my help was not welcome, apparently not understanding that I was not doing this for him. The bullying problem was worse than I had thought, as well, because as I trailed after my brother, it took only an hour for the four boys to approach him with sneers on their faces. Whatever they had been planning to say or do, history will never know. I chose that moment to inject myself into the situation.

"Excuse me," I cut in as I approached the apparent leader of the group. He turned to me with a petulant glare.

"Yes, what do you want?" Then I sent my mana through his body and lit up as many of his pain centres as I could manage. The boy dropped to the ground and began writhing around in agony, screaming before his throat convulsed too much for the screams to continue, drool foaming from his lips as the eyes rolled back into their sockets and his limbs shot out in all directions, twisting and grasping at nothing.

"Isabel, no!" Agrian yelped.

"Isabel yes," I informed him, then watched as the boy continued writhing around on the floor. I am not without mercy, and more importantly I was aware what the consequences would be if a child suffocated to death due to my actions, so I made sure to release him from his pain after a few more moments. By then, he had already soiled himself. This was fine by me.

"You will leave Agrian alone from now on," I told the boy, who may not have understood me, and then his friends who certainly did and were now backing away with terrified looks.

"If any of you cause problems for him again, I will do this to you as well. Maybe not soon, but eventually. You will be alone at some point, and when you are I will find you." The leader, the one I had targeted, vomited and started sobbing.

"Shut up," I told him. He shut up.