Chapter 26

Gnomes are well known to have a strong natural talent for myst craft. Their elemental affinity can come in any combination and normally lean closer to the higher levels of any elements they are linked to. In fact, a Gnome’s Mystwell is inherently larger from the beginning but grows very little with use and training.

Day 164 Smeltesday

“NO, NO, NO!” Howled Professor Neckar.

I stood in the center of a circular room filled floor to ceiling with tomes. The shelves looked to be made from redwood. The stained glass skylight overhead was a simple design of five moons of varying fullness in the corresponding color placed around a dome frame of dark blue. Sunlight shone down through this colored display sunroof to paint me in a vivid red under the glass Reva moon. Reva in the portrait was full, representing a good time for revenge. Meanwhile, Master Mystagogue Neckar stood in the glare of a waxing Secca, a sign of raised predatory activity. Rumors among the students said that the moons in this room reflected the actual moons in the sky. That raised some questions for me personally, but that moment was not the time.

The perfectly tanned Gnome Master Mystagogue stomped her foot in aggravation, sending her dandelion tuffet of pink hair into a hectic dance as her sea-foam blue-green eyes sparked with vivid aggression.

“I’ve already told you! To pull upon your myst requires a sensation of pulling forces from within yourself.”

“I-I’m sorry, ma-ma’am, but I d-don’t know how to d-do that.” I stammered. I had tried a variety of visualizations of pulling from my chest, but none of them worked thus far.

The small, three-and-a-half-foot woman stomped around me, eyes glued to the floor, hands locked behind her back. “Well, what are you visualizing?”

“I don’t know.” I confessed, waving one hand in a noncommittal manner before using both to illustrate each example as I listed them off. “I’ve tried a vortex pulling into my chest, a river flowing into my chest, a flow of everything from butterflies to eels entering me. I’ve tried roots pulling up from my feet, a waterfall flowing down into my body. Hells, I’ve even tried mouths on my hands pulling into me, and nothing’s worked. I’m sorry, ma’am, but I just don’t think I can pull Myst into my well like you want me to.”

“Fool boy.” she snapped. “Myst resides in all things, shaping, forming, and empowering everything from the soil you walk on to the air you breathe to the steak and potatoes you had for dinner last night. You can’t just picture random methods of drawing into yourself. First, you need to not just think about the myst around you, but you must realize it, feel it. How does the myst appear to you? Some see it as threads of energy running through everything, pulling on a filament to affect the others around it. Others see it as particles, trillions upon trillions of dots vibrating in an effect like static on a screen. The very first to realize the existence of myst and manipulate it saw it like water vapor. A swirling cloud of fog rolling over and through everything the eye can see. That’s where we get the name myst. Everyone sees the energy in their own way. No two are the same, even if the differences are minute. How do you see the myst? Let’s start with that.”

I blew out a frustrated breath. “I honestly have no clue.” As I spoke, I threw up my hands and let them flop down to my sides like dead fish.

In a fraction of a moment, the small woman backhanded me across the cheek. The blow stung, but I was more confused at how a three-and-a-half-foot woman could reach my cheek with that agility from where she stood. Then I noticed she was at my eye level. I was the first to admit that I wasn’t tall for my age. Yeah, I was shrimpy, but I was still a good foot and a half taller than the Master. Did she grow taller? I looked down to find her standing on a disk of hardened air.

“I swear, boy, you will be the death of me. Any other classification of mage or caster realizes what they are, at least by the time they reach mid-adolescence. You age like a human, so by that logic, you should have been casting sparks by the time you hit ten or eleven at the latest. But you just had to be a Myst-Blooded.” She twirled on her heel to face away from me and stepped off the disk. Her hands still clasped behind her back. She shaped a new disk of hardened air with each step till she reached ground level. The act looked to be second nature. Her eyes were dark and distant, brooding on what could only be me and my lack of talent.

“What’s wrong with being Myst-Blooded, Master?”

“What?” she turned to look at me, her eyes coming back to the present. “Oh. No, no, nothing, boy.” She said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “The simple fact is that you are the first of your kind I’ve ever trained. And the second I’ve ever met.”

“Are we really that rare?” I asked, nervously wrapping an index finger around one of my horns and lightly tugging it as I thought.

“That’s difficult to answer. Any other classification of mage comes from different species at more measurable rates. Elves produce a Mage once out of every seven children, and those commonly bear affinity ratios leaning towards Elementalists or Wizards. Dwarves produce casters once out of every twelve children, and they commonly lean toward Circuit or Mechanist classifications. But Myst-Blooded like yourself show up once out of every hundred thousand casters, and the frequency is mirrored in all species. Part of it has to do with the fact that, like yourself, they go unaware of what they are until very set conditions are met.”

“And what would those conditions be?”

“There must be an active threat to their life, blood must be spilled, stress levels must be elevated but not overwhelming, and they must instinctively feel access to myst. Or at least that’s what the records have stated thus far to date.” She fully turned to face me, eyes inspecting me like a cell under a microscope, her chin pinched between her thumb and forefinger. “Can you attest to that?”

I opened my mouth to answer, then snapped it shut, puzzlement written plain on my face. I tried to remember what happened in those moments, but a lot of it was hazy. “It’s hard to say. Blood was definitely spilled.” I rubbed the scar on the palm of my right hand with my other hand as it ached at the memory. “And I was definitely under stress. There was this moment when I was certain I was going to die. When I learned the blades were real and I was closed in on all sides, part of me just gave up, expecting to die. But there was another part, something deeper. It’s hard to explain, but it was like my Darkling brain, my thinking brain, faded into the background, and something more primal rose up to take control. When my hand was pierced, at first, I felt no pain. It felt more like I was in a dream. Everything felt... Ephemeral? Like nothing was real, and whatever happened really didn’t matter. But I still wanted to fight back. When my blood lit with fire, I was almost certain that I was dreaming. And in my mind, if I was dreaming, then there would be no repercussions for maiming the students that had been pushing me to the brink since years start.”

Master Neckar hurried back to me, her pace reflecting obvious eagerness, but her eyes read of pensive ruminations. She snatched my scarred palm from my opposite hand like a crane bird spearing fish, the movement swift and precise. She held my hand palm up in steady but firm hands the size of a child’s but with untold years of experience. The short woman cocked her head to set one eye closer to the scar, her gaze feeling like a cat toying with a tuft of feathers. She was fascinated and looking for more detail, and I didn’t like being the subject of her focus. Despite the fact that I stood head and shoulders over her, I felt as though she were looming over me, her shadow blotting out the sun. I felt minute, tiny beneath her meticulous gaze. 

“That sounds to me like you instinctively entered a trance state.”

“You mean like hypnosis?”

“Close but not quite. Athletes and artists refer to a similar state as ‘getting into the zone’. Have you ever gotten so engrossed in a project that the world fell away as you worked? Nothing matters but you and your subject, and suddenly, hours have passed?”

“Yeah, kinda. There are times when I’m designing tools and gear or crafting when I kind of forget everything else. That’s also when I get some of my best ideas.”

“Precisely. Think of it as a self-induced trance in which your mind is solely dedicated to a single goal or train of thought. It’s also fairly common to have semi-fugue state effects.” She dropped my hand without a second thought, hurried across the room, and levitated herself till she was another three feet over my head. The Master thumbed through the books, looking for something.

“What? Semi-fugue state? Isn’t a fugue state what happens to people who experience severe mental trauma?”

“Commonly, yes. A true fugue state is a defense mechanism to mitigate physiological and emotional trauma. While in the state, the subject suffers from a form of amnesia. A semi-fugue state could also be thought of as partial amnesia.” She tossed the book in her hand over her shoulder with a careless nonchalance. In mid-air, the book righted itself and altered its trajectory to land on a nearby table, open to a particular page. 

“That’s why time seems to skip, and when you come out of your ‘zone’, you commonly don’t remember where many of your ideas come from.” The Master thumbed through textbook, after tome, after the thesis paper, zipping across the room on occasion to look through another section of the library. Occasionally, she would pull a book or document with some form of kinesis and skim over the pages before either slipping it back into its slot or throwing it across the room and correcting its path with the very same kinesis. 

“In the case of artists such as writers and musicians, they will frequently leave the state with a whole new concept with a complex structure for a song or book with no idea what brought about the formation of the concept.” Her entire lecture came in a distracted tone as if she were reciting facts anyone would know as she paged through ages of written knowledge.

“So what does ‘the zone’ have to do with using myst?”

“Oh.” she gave in a bark of mild surprise as she refocused on me. It seemed that I needed to remind her that I was a person and not an inanimate object. “Put simply; my theory is that when you entered the trance, reflexively, you entered into a new state of awareness where you could grasp the concept of myst-craft instinctively if only a fundamental grasp. Or, in layman’s terms, you followed the feeling, and it resulted in access to your Mystwell.” 

“So what you’re saying is in order for me to learn how to use myst, I’m going to need to reenter the trance state?” I chewed on my thumb as I thought about this new idea.

“Well, I wasn’t intending to link this back into your training, but that would be a valid course of action.” The Master lowered herself back down to the floor. Her posture told me she was chewing on the thought as well.

“How do you know all this, anyway? Trances, fugue states, and all?”

She came back to the present yet again, but this time, she fixed me with a peeved stare. “I swear you spanners never seem to even know the basics about us?”

“Spanners?” I asked as I cocked my head slightly to the left.

“That’s a term we Gnomes use to refer to the other Sophic Species. Do you know how long my people live on average?”

I thought about it for a moment before I shook my head, admitting my ignorance. “I’ve heard that Gnomes are immortal. But I’ve also heard of some dying after thirty years.”

“That’s because the term ‘bored to death’ is very literal for my people. A Gnome’s lifespan is based on how long they can remain curious and entertained with existence. After so many months without having an invested interest, we will quite literally fade from existence. Our only remains are dust. So, to stay alive, we stay active in some form of hobby or employment. Some take up art as their activity. Others took up adventuring. Then there are those like me who took to the study of the workings of the universe all within. Do you know what you can learn in eight hundred years?”

I opened my mouth to speak, but she cut me off, her words sharp as razors and heavy as stones. “Over the course of my eight hundred years on Anogwin, I have mastered cooking in seven cultural styles to the level of master chief. I can play any song on any woodwind or string instrument and make it convey any emotion you could possibly imagine.” 

The Master stormed towards me, tiny feet setting the room to shake. “I have Masters’ certificates in heart surgery, lung surgery, bone transplants, eye surgery, and curing any number of ailments.” 

She levitated to my eye level once again, grabbed me by the collar, and yanked me till we were nose to nose. “I have explored the psychology of killers and Heroes from any of the Sophic Species so in-depth I could drive Dwarf to turn against his clan, man to murder his lover, or drive even to most vain High Elf to suicide out of a loathing for his own looks.” I gave an audible gulp out of reflex but didn’t dare move. I didn’t even dare to blink as her triangular, sea-foam green eyes bore into my very soul with venom and vitriol. As fast as her temper had flared, it vanished. She turned away, throwing me away with casual disdain. After feeling the ground shake with her steps, I was sure she was going to launch me. But I barely even needed to take a step back to correct my balance.

When I next looked at Master Neckar, she was standing over a scrying bowl as it glowed and swirled with faraway images. When she spoke next, her voice was distant and hollow. “We don’t belong in this realm. We should have known its reality couldn’t hold our existence. My people aren’t what you’d call a native species. Our original home was Kadys-Necor, the Realm of Dreams. A mass exodus, fleeing something so nightmarish that those who know what it was refuse to pass the knowledge on. They only called it The Hungering.”

I tentatively walked towards her, still unsure if even breathing was safe. I didn’t dare speak a word. Gnomes rarely spoke of their past, preferring to live in the moment, and they never spoke of an era before Anogwin. Part of me was sure that the Master was cracked, totally dacker. Someone who lived as long as she had must’ve had a few loose screws. That had to be the reason why she flew off the handle at a question about where she acquired so much knowledge. It was a simple and innocent question that gave rise to a spewing of facts in caustic tones before falling into a melancholy like a stone dropped into a river.

She dipped the tips of her fingers into the scrying blow and drew them back and forth, birthing rips that lapped at the sides of the vessel. I drew up behind her and stopped, wanting to hear more, but sure that if I asked, she would take my head from my shoulders. “We’re dying out, actually.” Her voice was calm, tinged with a deep sadness. 

I took a chance and asked, “How?”

“We don’t reproduce like any of the species here. I was before my time, but I was told that in our home realm, when we wanted a child, the parents would simply will a baby into existence. On this plain, it’s become a closely guarded ritual that very few know how to perform. We are told that it requires absolute mastery of the elements and a mastery of one’s self. We are such rare people and only becoming rarer with every passing decade. Soon, we’ll be little more than a myth told to awe children.” She started with a shock. She shook her head as if waking from a dream. When she turned around and found me standing there, she jumped again.

“Sorry, boy, but I’m going to need to end class for the day.” She turned to walk away but stopped to turn back. “And if you tell a soul about this episode, I’ll use you as pier fuel.” She half snarled. Wordlessly, I have a vigorous nod of affirmation. With that said, she turned and fled the room without running at a pace I didn’t think her Gnomish legs could manage. As she beat a hasty retreat, I saw something fall from the sleeve of her robes. When I moved to inspect it, I found a small ziplock baggie.

I picked up the bag between thumb and forefinger, inspecting it closely. It held the dregs of a light-blue dust that looked to have a similar texture as sugar. I pinched open the bag and dipped my finger in to pull up a few grains of the mystery powder. I pressed a tiny amount of the granules on the tip of my tongue. The taste was vile, causing me to spit violently and repeatedly to clear my mouth of the taste. Yet still, a phantom of the taste lingered in the crevices of my mouth. The taste was bitter and caustic, like a chemical.

I closed the bag and pocketed it as I left the room, raking my nails across my tongue in an effort to extinguish that rancid nastiness. With my early release from class, I could catch Nel and Ferris. Maybe one of them knew what the mystery substance was. I hurried down the hall and made my way toward the exit of the Mage wing of the academy, commonly called the Rooks Nest by the students. 

Down the hall, around a corner, down a flight of stairs, and across yet another hall I went, and I passed back into the main structure of the Aegis Hall. I hurried across the academy to wait beside my old general studies lecture hall. Thallos informed me that I would no longer follow the standard classes of everyone else. He claimed he was going to dedicate one thousand percent of his efforts to teaching me everything I’d need to know. This meant he was the instructor for almost all of my classes, which I was not looking forward to. But it also meant that I would only ever see my friends after classes were over or on Quenchendays. I found this very depressing, but I couldn’t turn back, so all that I could do was steal every spare moment I could to see the only people in the academy who cared about me beyond an academic interest and weren’t motivated to use beatings as a teaching method. Maybe beating was an over-exaggeration. He was only slapping me with a riding crop. While it stung like a mad wasp and left welts on occasion, the damage was minimal.

I clasped my hands behind my back and rocked forward and back from the heels to the balls of my feet. I looked to be waiting patiently when, in actuality, I was playing an arcade game on my therra-node. While they had trapped me in the hospital bed, I decided to try to crack the code of my node and get unrestricted access to the LSN (Living Sigil Network). I had cracked the device the first night I was bed-bound and conscious after a laborious process.

Thallos gave me credential access to more complex learning material; among it all were basic coding and hacking lessons. I managed to patch together a simple sniffer program and a simple cipher cracker. Between the two programs, I managed to find what I could only figure was a hidden test to crack the security for higher-level education material. With the higher level material, I patch-worked together a backdoor to admin access and bypass the restriction to the LSN. With access to the worldwide network, I pulled together everything I needed to fully jailbreak my therra. That technically reclassified my therra from a Utility Model to what was colloquially known in the underground as an Unbreakable Model. I could go excessively deep into therra-node models and uses, but that’s a rabbit hole for another day.

After I got my all-access pass to the net, the first thing I did was find some free therra games. I spent the following days catching up on news from the outside world and playing a couple of the optic-controlled augmented reality games I picked up. As I waited for Nel and Ferris, I played a retro game called Metal Manticore from the early days of digital existence, when quartz circuit boards were just becoming regularly used in mystech.

I got absorbed into the game, shooting and dodging in the side-scrolling platformer while I waited. I lost track of time as I worked on breaking my high score. As the world faded away from my awareness and time distorted around my razor focus, I suddenly realized that the state I was in was ‘the zone’ that Master Neckar had been talking about before she went totally dacker and almost turned me into a pile of ash. The moment I realized what was going on, the trance shattered. I fell out of the state of honed focus. The world snapped back into place even as I tried to pick up the shards of my mental state. As I realized I wasn’t going to be jumping back into the zone, my character lost its last life, and I was greeted with a Game Over screen. I threw a small fit at my failure, stomping a foot against the floor even as I half-heartedly threw my fist back to strike the wall I propped my back against.

“What the hell are you doing?” A voice came from beside me, rife with accusation.

I dropped my display to find Nel and Ferris looking at me like I had lost my mind. 

“I know your uncle was supposed to work you hard, but I didn’t think it was going to be hard enough to make you throw micro-fits in the hall while you ditched class.” Ferris wore an amused smirk with the jest.

“I’m not ditching. The magic instructor cut class early after she blew a gasket. I’m pretty sure the rotor in her head is stripped bare from how she went totally draconic on me for asking a generic question.”

“What was the question?” Nel asked as we began walking down the hall together. 

I stuffed my hands in my pockets, and I could feel my tail swishing back and forth in spasms. A clear sign that I was agitated. “I asked how she knew the medical stuff she was explaining along with myst-craft theory. She was on the brink of breathing fire at one point, and I’m pretty sure there was a less than subtle threat to cause permanent damage to my psyche.”

“Well, rumor has it that she does almost no teaching anymore. They say that she shows up occasionally for lectures and vanishes before anyone can ask a question.” came Ferris.

“The screw loose explains why she doesn’t do much instructing, but then what does she spend most of her time on?” I asked.

Nel piped in, “I’ve heard some of the second-year Blackened Crown students say that there are rumors going around about her crazy breeding experiments.”

“So what you’re saying is that you heard a stranger muttering to another stranger about a rumor they heard from somewhere else?” I gave Nel a stare that conveyed my disbelief. “There is a word for those kinds of stories. It’s called apocryphal, meaning I can trust these fifth-hand accounts about as much as I can expect The Dragon Titan Wackarrdree, to fall from the sky at my feet and make me one of her godly children.” I made sure that I conveyed just how skeptical I was with my tone, just as much as my words.

“Whoa! Dude!” Ferris looked around us in a panic to see if anyone had heard. “There’s no need to be xenist, Ive’. You know full well that the first mother of dragons is called Wackarrdra. Are you trying to pick a fight with every Dracose in the academy?” he chided.

I gave an exasperated sigh as I raised my gaze to the vaulted ceiling above. I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose as I took a long and slow breath. “No. Sorry, man. I didn’t mean to come across as such a skavy scumbag, but that Dracose from Mallrimor’s group did some serious damage to me, and I need to reign in my spite.”

“Damn right, you do.” Ferris commanded as he stepped around Nel to stand beside me. He playfully tussled my hair and shoved my head down. “Use that big brain and think before you speak.”

“Hey!” I took a stride forward and tried to fix my mess of hair. “You know I’m not people smart. Everyone aside from you two and Rose all think either that I’m a weirdo that can’t do anything right or a crazy Hellspawn bent on world domination.”

Nel stepped up to match my pace before she shoulder-checked me in play. “Well then, Mister Evil Mastermind, I guess you’ll just have to take over Anogwin and show them all just how awesome you really are.”

“Oh, yeah.” I scoffed in self-mockery. “I’ll just take over the world with my menagerie of gadgets,” I shook my tactical gauntlet beside my head to make a point, “and my smooth-talking charm. I’m so charming. In fact, I had the Master Mystagogue of the Blackened Crown almost turn me to mulch.”

“Oh, come on, she couldn’t have been that angry.” Nel prodded.

“Angry. No. Angry would not be a fitting word. I feel like a better term for how bat shit crazy she was would be closer to... unhinged?” I tapped my thumb against my chin and thought, “No, deranged.” I concluded, punctuating my decision with a single wag of a finger.

“Please tell me you’re over-exaggerating.” Ferris half pleaded.

“Nope.” I stuffed my hands back into my pockets, about to explain the madness she spewed at me, when I felt the small baggy in my pocket. “Actually, I’ve got a question for you two.” As we passed through the main gates of Aegis Hall, I took a sharp left turn, gesturing for the other two to follow me. As soon as I rounded the corner of the massive structure, I turned on my heel and pulled the small plastic bag free to hang before the others. “Any idea what this stuff is?” 

They both looked from the small item to me and back to the item with quizzical expressions. Ferris gingerly took the bag in hand and opened it just ahead of his face and under his nose. Just as we had been taught to do with unknown chemicals, he waved any scent from the bag to his nose rather than sniffing it straight out of the bag, in case it was toxic. He closed his eyes as he tried to catch the odor. Ferris shook his head in the negative. “I can’t smell anything. It doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen before, either. So I’ve got no clue. Nel?” He turned to our human friend and passed the packet to her. 

Nel dipped a finger into the bag as I had and pulled free some spare granules. She rubbed the powder between her thumb and forefinger, and just as I had, she licked the substance. Her response was almost identical to my own. She violently spat several times before trying to wipe off her still, very human tongue with her mechanical forearm.

“That was exactly my response.” I informed her as I plucked the bag from her hand to close it and eye it suspiciously yet again. I flicked the bag, hoping for some kind of reaction but not really expecting anything. 

“I thought I saw you three sneaking off this way.” Came a female voice from behind Nel and Ferris. I looked up to find Rose jogging toward us. I raised a hand in greeting. “Hey, Rose, we got a question for you.”

Rose lept the last three feet to meet us. As she landed with her all too feline grace, she draped an arm over the shoulders of Nel and Ferris. “Lady,” she said in greeting to Nennel. “Gentleman,” she greeted Ferris. “So, what’s this question you’ve got for me?”

Only a moment after the question left her lips, her eyes fell upon the packet dangling from my fingers. Her face shifted through several emotions at a speed that I wasn’t even sure if I was reading them right. From my perspective, what I saw was in the order as follows: one brow raised in curiosity, then her eyes went wide with realization, her ears flattened as she scowled at the bag, then she bit her inner cheek in pondering before making eye contact with me and her face went deadpan blank.

“I take it you know what this is? Cuz we sure don’t.” I stated as I bobbed the bag in acknowledgment.

“Where did you find that?” Rose’s tone was scalpel-sharp and frigid.

“The Master Mystagogue of the Blackened Crown dropped it when she fled the room after going schizo thermonuclear on me for a totally bland and generic question. Why? What is this stuff?”

“That stuff is something you should definitely keep out of sight of anyone. I would say throw it out, but all three of you guys’ prints are on it, aren’t they?”

We all numbly nodded. I felt like I was holding a bloody dagger just used for murder, carrying it around in my pocket like it wasn’t something that could ruin my life.

“Well,” Rose said as she continued to chew on her cheek and stroked her chin in thought. “The best advice I can give is to hide it from everyone. Take a cloth and wipe it down with an alcoholic solution to remove the prints. Then Iver, you hide that in your room away from any curious eyes. If you’re found out with that stuff, there’s gonna be a lot of questions that will probably end with you kicked from the academy. Am I clear?”

I vigorously nodded in the affirmative.

“Good. Now get going and keep your wire quiet and lips zipped.” Without another word, she turned on her heel and stormed away before I could even ask what the stuff was. But now I knew that whatever it was was most likely very illegal.

With numb legs and a mechanical stride, I made my way to my room to hide the bag before making my way to meet Thallos for my course in crafting, administering, identifying, experiencing, and withstanding poisons.