Chapter 104: Harold (Patreon)

[A picture of a towering tentacle dwarfing a city port, flailing to remove the sand that coats its suction cups.]

K is for kraken, the rulers of the seas, they come and they go where ever they please. It’s only by luck they’ve left us the land, for you see they are not fond of sand.

-Sally Rider’s ABCs of Magic

—

After the slight of hand training had veered off course, Zale had dismissed them early.

“Ye look like mole shite,” Rakin commented as they walked out of the study hall room they’d been training in.

Zale had left through a door to her home, while Doug had run ahead, eager to meet up with Mouse and show off his ability now that he had extra time on his hands.

“Why are half your curses rodent-related?” Kole asked, dodging the question.

“I don’t know, why are all yer saying about fish and whales and crabs?”

Kole conceded the point, though felt he didn’t use as many references as the dwarf. They walked in silence, as Kole hadn’t answered until he thought he could hear Rakin’s disapproval in each footstep.

“I do feel a little ragged,” Kole confessed.

“Have ye been sleeping?”

“Enough,” Kole answered truthfully.

He was deep into practicing his wizardry, and adequate sleep was necessary to generate enough Will to keep his work moving head.

“What have ye been eating?”

“Oh…” Kole said realizing that he‘d been subsisting on plain oatmeal for that past week, the fixings he’d collected have run out the week prior. “I could probably use a real meal.”

They made plans to meet for dinner, and Kole ran off to his room to work on his wizardry. He expected to finish off  Magic Missile this weekend and was excited to fully focus fully on his last task of getting Thunderwave down to a more affordable cost.

Kole returned to his room to find Theral there. He greeted the other sorcerer and told him about his recent development.

“That’s lucky,” Theral said after hearing the tale. “My mother tried to teach me a new spell through frustration, but it didn’t take, so she went back to the more traditional methods.”

Theral had a whistful smile as he spoke, and Kole got the sense that his mother was no longer around. Despite the potential touchiness of the topic, Kole had to ask.

“You trained your sorcery? That’s barbaric! No one does that anymore.”

Theral’s smile grew.

“My mom was… demanding, but it worked.”

Theral told him how his mother had trained him to a tree to learn to cast Mage Armor—which had failed—and how she’d attempted to drown him to learn Water Breathing—which had also failed.

“I can see how it might have fallen out of favor I guess,” Theral admitted, after recounting all his near-death experiences. “But, I got a few good spells out of it.”

“Why though?” Kole asked. “Why not just focus on learning wizardry from spellforms instead? You had a bridge, right?”

Theral got a weird look on his face, which Kole noticed he got when their topics trended away from the pure discussion of magic and wizardry and into the events outside this room.

“Let’s just say they were hard for us to come by at the time, and this was the best means we had available to us.”

Kole wasn’t sure what to make of that diplomatic evasion.

Was he trapped somewhere? An island?

Then, as often happened mid-conversation, Theral vanished, and Kole went back to his work.

Kole was surprised not to find Rakin waiting for him outside their usual dining hall.

Am I that late, or just early? He thought.

A look at the clock within showed that he was on time, at least on time for when he thought he was supposed to meet. Kole decided to go in and check and make sure he wasn’t mistaken and saw Rakin sitting at a table talking to a very done-up voidy Zale in a dark green dress.

 “Hey,” he said awkwardly as he joined them.

“Hi!” Zale said, seemingly happy but her eyes looked a bit darker.

Rakin grunted, and Kole sat next to him.

 “I thought you had plans tonight,” Kole asked and managed to bite back a shout when Rakin stomped on his foot.

“I did,” Zale said. “But Harold had to cancel. He and Gray are in the finals for the tournament in the martial college and Gray is making him train tonight.”

To Kole’s ears, she sounded disappointed, but not hurt by it. Kole’s mood soured at the mention of Harold and worsened at Gray’s name.

Zale must have noticed because she spoke up.

“Don’t be like that. I know you don’t like them, but it’s very important. Harold still needs to get a mentor and doing well will guarantee him one.”

“Why do you look so upset then?” Kole blurted out and was about to smack himself in the face when Rakin stomped on his foot to chastise him.

“She was just telling me how she’s worried about her ma,” Rakin explained and then lowered his voice slightly. “And ye forgot that ye were supposed to go do that research we discussed.”

“Research?” Kole asked, confused, but before Rakin could stomp his foot a third time, he realized what the dwarf meant.

Follow Harold!

Rakin must have seen in Kole’s expression that he got the point, for the third stomp never came.

“My research!” Kole said, jumping to his feet, his chair flying out behind his straightening legs, the legs making a loud screeching sound as they rubbed against the wooden floor.

Kole ran out of the dining hall, but he was pretty sure he heard Zale laugh amongst the murmurs of surprise, which caused him to smile briefly before he remembered what he was about.

He wished he could stay and help console her. Worrying about one’s missing adventuring parents was something he was quite experienced with after all, but Rakin—for all his grumblyness—could do a decent job of it too.

Kole ran to the martial training yards first to find Harold, hoping that there was some truth to his excuse to get out of his date with Zale.

The yard was far more active than Kole expected for the late hour. He’d passed the place before at night and only seen one or two pairs training, but tonight there were dozens, all sparring hard with training weapons.

Distantly Kole was aware that all the years of the martial college were having a tournament, probably something Zale had said that he’d not paid attention to.

Kole turned invisible before entering the yards, and the third group he checked was Harold and Gray. Gray had a training rapier while Harold wielded a real shield and training bastard sword.

Kole was used to seeing Zale wielding the large blade and had grown accustomed to how large the weapon was compared to her frame, but now seeing it held by the hulking form of Harold he was reminded how odd Zale’s ability to use the weapon was.

Is that a strange voidling thing? He wondered.

Kole crept closer to try to overhear any conversation that the pair might have, but it was only the grunts of exertion. He noticed that Gray was wearing the nice military jacket he’d been wearing the night of the mixer, which matched Zale’s story of a last-minute cancellation, but Gray—who had supposedly requested the help—was just wearing his everyday clothes and not training gear.

Kole couldn’t be certain which, but Gray had learned a new spell at some point. He was jumping out of the way of Harold’s blows far too fast to be natural.  Each leap sent him farther than should have been possible. Running through the options in his head, he guessed it to be some sort of jump enhancement,

“Are you going to talk about it?” Gray asked after sidestepping a series of Harold’s blows, the last one glancing off his Mage Armor spell.

“You said you were ‘tired of hearing me whine,’” Harold said, stopping his barrage.

“Well, I’d rather listen to you whine than let you beat me to a pulp. Why did you cancel with Zale?”

Harold didn’t answer at first, inspecting his shield for damage.

“She came without her illusion again,” Harold said with a sigh.

“I thought you didn’t mind that?” Gray said uncertainly. “I saw you two the other day around the Glade, you definitely didn’t seem to mind then—though, it was hard to tell with you both—ow!”

Harold interrupted whatever Gray was going to suggest by slapping his knee with the side of his wooden blade.

“Don’t talk about her like that. Nothing happened.”

“Sorry,” Gray apologized, hands raised in surrender. “I’m just trying to understand.”

“I don’t care what she looks like,” Harold said, heavily. “I was only ever mad that she hid it from us but we've talked through that… I just can’t handle the way people act around us when we are out.

“The looks people give her—us, the things people say to her. I just can’t handle it. And she doesn’t seem to care! I don’t get it. I just want to smash those people’s faces in.”

Harold punctuated the statement slamming his sword into the rack.

“She won’t let me say anything to anyone, but she won’t hide either. I just don’t know what to do.”

Kole waited, listening as Gray gave terrible advice, and then left when it became clear Harold was just going to dither and whinge.

 He had some things to tell Rakin, and a decision to make on what to do about Zale.

Kole couldn’t find Rakin after leaving Harold, so he went back to his room to think things over and work on his wizardry. Having never actually eaten during his planned dinner with Rakin, he had another bowl of oatmeal, vowing to at least run out to the shops to buy more food this week.

His study quickly distracted him from thoughts of Zale and Harold, and when his alarm went off telling him it was time to sleep, he did so eagerly. His Will was getting low, but he was close to finishing his last version of Magic Missile.

When his alarm went off again—both times set to optimize his Will regeneration—he went right back into studying and a mere five hours later, Kole was the proud owner of a new-to-him old-to-the-world version of Magic Missile.

Grrrggle

And a rumbling belly.