Chapter One #2
So he wiped the tears away, built up the fire a little more, and dug out the dried soup he'd brought along.
No matter how good a life he'd been living, he'd never been able to shake the habits of a life of struggle, of hunting and foraging, and so when he'd packed, he'd had plenty of dried and otherwise preserved foods to stuff in his knapsack, which was the kind used for long travel and could carry days, even weeks of goods, at a time.
Once the water was well boiled, he added enough soup to tide him over until morning.
While that cooked, he washed off all the berries and laid them out on a spare shirt to dry by the fire.
Come morning, after he'd rested and things were as safe as they could get, he'd have some of them for breakfast then dry out the rest and reduce them to a powder that would be infinitely useful later on.
Would be better if he could can them, but that required glass jars, sugar, and all manner of implements he didn't have anymore. Didn't matter anyway. He was making plans by habit, but it was about to be full dark, and that meant the whole reason the forest was forbidden.
Bitterness threatened to turn to blinding rage, so he stopped fussing over the drying berries and went to eat.
By the time he'd done that and cleaned up after, he was exhausted.
Still work left to do, however, so after getting his bed finished up, he detached his magic case from the front of his knapsack and set it on the ground by his bed where it wasn't too close to the heat of the fire.
Magic was many things all at once. Strictly speaking, anyone could perform magic.
It was a drawing of natural energies and shaping them to the caster's will.
People did it all the time, inherently, without ever realizing.
Small things, like willing a coin to land on crown three times in a row.
A last burst of energy to get through a difficult task.
Understanding someone's thinking in a way that even years of familiarity could not entirely account for.
Luck. Good guess. Fortunate timing. All magic.
That was basic magic. What some cruelly called plebian or peasant magic.
Advanced magic was the laying of wards, curses, spells, and more.
People trained for years, decades, to be able to do such things.
Part of that was simply learning to shape your will into such complicated castings, but another part was learning how to supplement your own abilities with the things around you: plants, flowers, dirt, stone, blood, bone, gems, and so forth.
The most difficult, but most prized, of the advanced magic was healing.
In the whole of the city, there were maybe twenty master healers, and perhaps thirty or so minor healers.
The vast majority of healing was done by folk mages who used a small measure of magic and a large measure of herbs and common sense.
Like most mages, Dipak was a shit healer. He could do a few basic things, but nobody would be coming to him to save lives.
No, he'd poured everything he had into becoming an altered mage, those who underwent an excruciating transformation process that granted a special, permanent ability, most often the vast improvement of one of the senses, but also included things like increased strength, being able to breathe in non-standard environments, and more.
If the process could be survived, the alteration could be done.
Surviving was the trick. Three of every ten mages who underwent transformation died in the process. Almost worse, some survived but only in the barest sense of the word. For those that survived the ordeal in whole…
Well, for a poor boy from poor parents from a poor family in a poor village, it had been wonderful. With his upbringing and military training, magic and martial, transforming his eyes had been the obvious choice.
He remembered very little of the process, really only that he'd wanted to die the pain had been so great.
Then he hadn't been able to see at all for nearly a month, and after that he could only go out at night because anything brighter was just too fucking painful.
All told, it had taken a year before he could go about like normal again.
For better and worse, he had what was properly called altered eyes, but generally were called moon eyes. Though he was technically a mage, properly trained and licensed and employed by the crown, he'd mostly just been called a moon witch.
He could see perfectly, up close and at range.
His eyes rarely tired. When he pushed himself, he could see otherwise invisible wards, though that was difficult and usually not worth the effort.
Perhaps of greatest use, he could see in the dark—any darkness, even when there was no light source.
Unfortunately, the side effect of that was a significant loss of color.
The whole world was muted now, like a gray wash that had stripped the vibrancy from a painting.
He'd undergone the transformation at twenty-two, just over twelve years ago.
Brilliant color was a memory equally faded.
His eyes were a pale, glowing blue rimmed in barest black, like his eyes had been replaced with tiny moons.
His vision had made him invaluable as a scout and spy in the army, and later as a private messenger, private many things, to His Majesty King Lochan.
But he'd told himself he wouldn't be dwelling on those thoughts, so he focused on the matter at hand again, deftly pulling out the jars he needed and pouring careful measures of the contents into a mortar. It had added significant weight to his pack, but was infinitely worth it.
Once the powder was ready, he walked the circumference of his little camp, chanting softly to focus his thoughts on wall, protection, keep out, safety as he sprinkled the powder.
The spell caught as he completed the circle, and relief flowed through him like the warmth of good homebrew. His father had been especially good at making homebrew, and it had provided his family with food and supplies when it was too cold to hunt or take on work around the village.
As safe as he'd be getting, Dipak stoked the fire a bit more, removed his boots and outer layers, and finally stretched out on his bed.
It wasn't long before he heard them, the chittering, clicking and clacking creatures that slept in the day and thrived in the night, feasting on anything not smart or quick enough to hide away.
Demon wyrms, the length and width of oak branches, with hundreds of legs and long, grabbing fangs that used venom to soften their prey from the inside out.
Spiders the size of a torso that dropped from the towering trees to carry rabbits and birds into their hollows. Carrion wyverns, paralyzing cockatrice.
The only real threat to such creatures were the exceedingly rare, almost never seen dragons. Everything else took the path of wisdom and hid until the sun rose.
Realization jolted down his spine. There had long been rumors that a blue dragon lurked in the Forbidden Forest.
A blue dragon. The rarest color of dragons. No one knew why they were blue, a color glaringly out of place in creatures of that size. They were so rare that anyone who could single-handedly kill one could ask for quite literally anything in reward, so long as it was in the king's power to give.
Like a full pardon.
The last time anyone had even seen a blue dragon was roughly fifty years ago, and that was just a sighting, and who even knew if they'd been telling the truth. Tales of anyone successfully killing one were dubious historic accounts at best.
What else did he have to do, though? What was the worst that would happen? He died? In six months he didn't find one? He'd be in no different a position than he was now.
But if he found one… if he found one before his home and everything in it were taken away, he could get it all back. Pack it up and say farewell on his terms, instead of being thrown out like trash.
He had a goal. A plan.
Despite everything, he was starting to feel like himself again.
Pulling up his blanket, Dipak closed his eyes, and for the first time in too long, slept easily and dreamlessly.