BT - Book 1 - Chapter 23 (Patreon)

The spell worked.  It took four tries for Micah to get the feel of the ritual and how it interacted with temporal transfer, but it worked.  The one time Micah actively wanted a new spell to not live up to expectations, it performed flawlessly.

Gheb screamed and begged Micah through his gag the entire time, but there wasn’t anything he could do.  Brenden stood just outside of the circle, a summoned daemon at his back just waiting for Micah to hesitate.  There was no question in his mind that any failure on his part would spell the death of his entire family.  Micah’s only option was to grit his teeth and count down the days until he could use his blessing again as Gheb deflated before his eyes, the time magic wilting him like a week old bouquet.

The spell ‘only’ stole a year of Gheb’s life for Martin, but that was enough for it to be declared an unqualified success. Performing the ritual and temporal transfer in the laboratory became Micah’s new world.  Each day, Brenden would escort him to the room where a new prisoner would be waiting.  Some truly deserved to have years ripped from their lives, murderers, kidnappers and rapists.  Many were political prisoners.  Members of the Resistance or even just outspoken individuals that annoyed the wrong noble.

The first month was mostly devoted to ‘treating’ Martin, performing the spell over and over again until Martin shed his age like a used overcoat.  The difficulty of the casting steadily pushed up his spellcasting and ritual magic skills until Micah was able to transfer two to three years at a time.  Finally, once Martin looked to be in his early twenties he announced the project a success.

The next day, Micah vaguely hoped for a period of rest, but once again Brenden retrieved him from his apartment.  When they walked into the laboratory it was practically humming with tension.  Martin stood in the center of a cluster of older, well-armed men, showing off his new body.

“Squire Silver,” he called out as soon as Brenden brought him into the room.  “The man of the hour is here.”

Micah’s breath left his body as all six of the other men turned to look at him.  Every one of them carried a palpable aura of power, a weight of energy and gravitas that demanded respect.  They stared at him with vague disinterest, cataloguing and immediately dismissing him as beneath their notice.  Micah would bet his last point of attunement that all of the newcomers were at least above level sixty.  He was a rabbit, shivering and alone in the midst of a pack of wolves.  

“As I was discussing gentlemen,” Martin said with a hint of nervousness as he draped an arm over Micah’s shoulders.  “This here is Squire Silver, the Time Magi that performed the treatments on me and restored my youth.  It should just be a matter of time and effort and he should be able to do the same for you.”

Their gazes intensified, but no one responded.  A cane clacked on the stone floor, and the men parted, making way for a wizened old woman who slowly approached Micah.  She was almost a foot shorter than him, her hair a stringy tangle of wihte and grey, but her rheumy blue eyes didn’t miss a thing.  Micah couldn’t look away.  She glowed like the Sun.  A corona of power leaked off of her, her very aura creating heat mirages in her wake.

“You’ve kept him at level twenty?” She asked Martin, her voice the crackle of paper crumpling.

“Yes M’lady Ikanthar,” Martin hastily bowed at the waist.

“He’s compliant then?” Ikanthar continued, peering at Micah’s shaking form.  “I don’t want a spy or saboteur working on me.”

“Yes M’lady,” Martin responded unctuously.  “He was discovered by the Golden Drakes, a high tier adventuring guild where he demonstrated the power of prophecy.  They sold him to us and we’ve been training him ever since.  Squire Silver has a perfect ten affinity in time so we’ve been able to train him to use time magic and the ritual at a much lower level than would otherwise be expected.  He’s already gotten his hands dirty on my orders several times and his family is being held against his good behavior.”

Micah twitched slightly as Martin laid out his entire life story, describing him as an auctioneer would a prize head of cattle.

“Good,” Ikanthar hobbled to the seat next to the restrained prisoner.  “If this works, your research into the black rituals will be forgiven Knight Osswain and you will be rewarded.  If this doesn’t work, you knew the risks when you began your research into Dakkora’s rituals.  They are forbidden for a reason, but as you know, success forgives all sins.”

“Success forgives all sins,” all of the Knights repeated the phrase in unison, reverently as if it were some sort of talisman or prayer.

“Now,” she waived a wrinkled and veiny hand in Micah’s direction.  “Boy.  Work your dark magic on me but be aware, if you fail or try to harm me you and everything you love will learn the true depths of human misery in exquisite detail.”

“Archmagus Ikanthar isn’t prone to idle threats Silver,” Martin turned to him, his face deadly serious.  “I’d suggest trying your hardest.”

Micah coughed nervously, very aware of how dry his throat was.  He approached, smiling weakly and not even looking at the political prisoner he’d be draining today.  Micah found that it helped.  Their screams still haunted him, but at least he didn’t have to deal with their eyes.  He still saw Gheb staring at him every time he tried to sleep.

He traced the circle, placing the rituals reagents and components, his hands shaking slightly under the gaze of the powerful Knights.  Now that he’d had a moment to calm down, he recognized almost half of them from the bards’ tales.  Noble men, renowned for their valorous deeds and service to the kingdom.  Men he’d grown up  respecting and wanting to emulate.  All waiting to kill him if he didn’t perform an unnatural act of magic on a defenseless prisoner.

Micah enacted the ritual.  Once again using his body as a conduit to transfer the monstrous amount of power built up in Archmagus Ikanthar’s aged and twisted body.  As the temporal energy passed through him toward the prisoner, for the first time he began to truly feel the weight and majesty it represented.

With Martin, it’d simply been a chore, channeling a massive amount of energy from one spot to another.  The ritual and spell were little more than an equation in which he was a variable.  He played his part, but there was a lack of vital understanding.  He knew that the temporal energy existed and that it was powerful, but he couldn’t harness or control it.  

It wasn’t mana.  Temporal energy was something more than that, much closer to the life force used in ritual magic.  A primal energy that moved outside the safe boundaries of regular magic, only restricted by the natural phenomena of the universe itself.

His mind went back to the ritual he used to graduate.  As the energy passed through him, he could see how the spellforms and reagents would interact with it, transforming it into something that he could begin to use.  It wasn’t a complete thought, just the beginning of a concept.  There wouldn’t be a way to use it as mana, the energy was too wild for that.  It would overwhelm the limits of magic almost immediately and backlash on Micah, consuming him in a moment.  He squinted his eyes, trying to see the shape the ritual would take.

Then the spell was over.  Absently Micah realized that he’d fallen to both knees, gasping as sweat poured down his back.  The prisoner had aged visibly, wrinkles appearing around the corner of his eyes and grey gathering at his temples.

Archmagus Ikanthar stood up from the chair, stretching her back briefly.  The room’s silence became electric.  The various Knights grasped the hilts of their weapons, each training their eyes on Micah, waiting for any signal from Ikanthar of his betrayal.  She waved her hand, a ball of fire forming in her palm without her chanting a single word to the spell.  Quickly it turned into a writhing snake and wound in between her fingers.

She snapped her thumb and index finger together, dissipating the tendril of flames.  She turned to the crowd of Knights and nodded, smiling quickly.

“You’ve done our Kingdom a great service Knight Osswain,” she inclined her head ever so slightly at Martin.  “No one else thought to harness the black rituals in this way, molding an untrained talent into the vehicle of our Kingdom’s rebirth.  For this, you will be removed from your duties at the Royal Academy and rewarded greatly.  From this day forward, Squire Silver will be remanded to my care.”

Micah started blankly at Martin as the older man opened his mouth to respond, before closing it bitterly.  His entire fate was decided before his eyes without even a second glance.  Like he was a bolt of cloth or a loaf of bread to be sold at the market.

“Yes Archmagus,” Martin replied, the reluctance audible in his voice.  “It shall be as you command.”

The hour or so after meeting was a blur.  Micah was ushered away by the Archmagus’ servants.  Soon he found himself in a new, slightly more luxurious apartment with the notable addition of bars on the windows.  Any slight chance he’d had of crawling out the window and using updraft to cushion his fall was long gone.  Even if he chose to abandon his family, he was truly and completely trapped.

Micah pulled out the Folio and began sketching his thoughts on the new ritual.  He’d need more experience transferring temporal energy to perfect it, but if he had to guess, temporal transfers looked like the entirety of his near future.  He just hoped that Archmagus Ikanthar wasn’t the type to destroy her tools once she was done with them so that no one else could use them.  He only had about four months left before the cooldown on blessed return finished off.  It would be a painful kind of irony if she simply killed him right before he was able to use the blessing to escape this bleak timeline.

Luckily, those four months passed quickly and productively.  Ikanthar literally never spoke to him in that time.  Servants would fetch him and ensure that Micah was dressed appropriately before ushering him off to a much larger laboratory where he would perform the same ritual time and time again.  At some point, when Ikanthar was a beautiful and vibrant young woman, she stopped appearing and one by one Micah found himself casting the spell on a series of geriatric Knights.

Transferring energy for the nights wasn’t nearly as beneficial to his research as the times he performed the ritual on Ikanthar, but it hardly mattered.  By that point Micah had most of the theoretical framework of a ritual to harness the temporal energy put together.  He wouldn’t be able to cast the ritual before reversion, too many eyes were on him at all times, but the Knights provided the research material he needed to polish off his final draft of the ritual.

He didn’t know for sure what the difference between Ikanthar and the Knights was.  Maybe it was her total level eclipsing theirs or her status as a Chosen of Katton, God of Fire and Forge, but for some reason the energy flowing from her was just on another level.  He hoped that when the time came, it wouldn’t matter, but really there would only be one way to find out.  In his next life, he would need to do everything he could to avoid falling into her grasp once again.