The next day was… uncomfortable, to say the least. Noren was doing his best to remain upbeat and energetic, but there was an underlying tension to his actions. I kept seeing him glance at me when he thought I wasn’t paying attention.

  I wasn’t blameless either. I was less than pleased that his ‘cheap diversion’ had successfully distracted me from finding out whatever was going on with his vitae. I had a feeling he’d find a way to do it again if I pressed the issue, so I just awkwardly avoided him while I tried to figure it out from context.

  What made it worse was that our good luck with the weather had finally run out last night. In a situation that Cassie reminded me was my fault it had rained on us as we slept, which meant that the lot of us were a bit sleep deprived.

  Noren seemed to be handling it well, but Cassie was noticeably down. It hadn’t stopped raining either, and while our heavy travelling cloaks had been been thrown on quickly their valiant fight was coming to an early defeat by noon.

  When we stopped for lunch I sat by Cassie as we ate in silence. I had to say, I was getting quickly bored of travel rations. I mean, cured meat as dry as bone and nuts as bland as wood could only entertain the taste buds for so long. As I chewed some stiff meat I noticed Cassie shift beside me, gently leaning into my damp side.

  We had taken shelter under a frankly huge tree, which gave us some semblance of shelter from the weather. Noren was sat on the other side of the same tree, clearly as uncomfortable with the atmosphere as we were.

  I absentmindedly leant into Cassie to return the gesture, glad to be a source of comfort in the otherwise tense atmosphere that hung over the group. Even still, we remained in silence.

  I found my mind drifting to the revelation of my shapeshifting from the night before. Even now I could feel my form itching to change in some way, but I kept a firm hand over it. I wanted to be me, not some kind of ever-changing chameleon.

  I thought back to my mother’s story, specifically back to the fey that had technically fathered me, or at least the magical part of me. From my mother’s description he was completely consistent in appearance, not a reactive mess like I was. She hadn’t even known he wasn’t a mortal until he’d clued her in.

  I wondered if that was something that only full fey could do. They were known to change shape, so it only made sense that they had full control over it, including making it static. Perhaps whatever fey inheritance drove my shapeshifting was being interrupted by my mortal half, forced into whatever outlet was made available.

  Or perhaps it was a matter of practice. Sure, I’d been working on my shapeshifting a lot. Almost too much, although I found the process increasingly fascinating. My practice had been all about changing though, getting faster or more complex in the ways that I altered my form. Maybe staying consistent was just another skill I needed to learn.

  At the end of the day I couldn’t know for sure. I was the only changeling I’d ever met, and according to Almon the only one I was likely to meet. We’d been rare before, but supposedly the fey had shut the ways into their realm almost exactly around the time I’d been born, so there weren’t any around to answer my questions.

  With those questions on my mind, I spent the rest of the day practising this new idea of shapeshifting, where I intentionally remained static. After all, it was the only one of my ideas I could implement right now, so I may as well.

  It was harder than I thought it would be. My body felt like wet clay, and everything kept making imprints with even the smallest touch. The rain soaking through my clothes kept making my body try to turn hydrophobic, and I kept stopping that reaction. It was like holding in a sneeze with my entire body.

  The rest of the day was spent on this, with the other two in relative silence. The rain eased off before we slept, but we still stopped under a rocky outcropping to prevent last night from repeating itself. Noren sat away from Cassie and I again, which was to be expected at this point.

  At least Cassie seemed to have perked up, because she called me over after the fire was set for something.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, watching as she used her levitation spell to lift up stick that had been deemed too wet to burn.

  “Demonstrating,” she answered matter of factly. I observed as she retrieved her wand from her hip, beginning to channel the spell through the wand instead. As soon as she did the stick began to fizzle, small pops sounding from it as sparks leapt around it.

  Cassie grinned as the stick was joined by another, and then a third. Each of them began to spin, the second slightly behind the first and the third slightly behind the second.

  I watched for a moment longer before breaking into applause. “Three! That’s a new best, right?”

  Cassie nodded, opting not to respond. That made sense, from the sound of it three simultaneous objects held by a levitation spell wasn’t too easy. At least, not with the spell she was using. Apparently there were higher tier spells that worked better, but Cassie wasn’t qualified beyond first circle magic so that didn’t help much.

  It had taken me a bit to wrap my head around the ‘circles’ of magic, and I counted myself lucky that I didn’t have to consider them much. Supposedly, wizards classified their spells by complexity – the more dimensions that a spellform operated on the higher the circle.

  I personally couldn’t fathom what a fourth circle spellform would look like, but Almon said that they went all the way to six, so there must be something there. Cassie was still on the first circle, which were the simplest spells that weren’t cantrips.

  Cassie proceeded to up the complexity of her spell again, moving the sticks vertically in sequence even as they span. This was about the limits of her levitation spell, which wasn’t really built for complex movement.

  All of a sudden I heard Noren speak up for the first time in a while. “Do you two mind? Some of us are trying to sleep.”

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  At the sudden noise Cassie lost control of her magic, sending the sticks flying in several directions. One clattered to the floor at speed, breaking on impact. The second went flying out into the night, and the third rather amusingly hit Noren directly on the head.

  I couldn’t help but laugh as Noren’s head snapped backward on impact, even as I rushed over to help him. To my surprise though, he seemed fine. A little dazed, certainly upset, but healthy. I went to place a hand on his forehead only for him to catch my wrist.

  “I am fine, my dear,” he said, his words deliberate. “Don’t worry yourself about me. It would take more than a twig to harm me.” He let go of my wrist, flopping back onto the floor.

  “What do you mean you’re fine? You could have a concussion, there should definitely be some dama-”

  “I said I am fine, Julie,” he interrupted with an edge to his voice. “Trust me on this.”

  “How?” I asked, seeing an in for more information about the man.

  “Does it matter? Why not simply take it as good fortune. We are to part soon, are we not? Allow a man his secrets.”

  I sighed, not thrilled at being shut down. I was going to press him more, but at that moment Cassie came running over. “Sorry!” She called out.

  “Sorry,” she said again. “You startled me, I didn’t mean to throw that stick at your head.”

  Noren chuckled. “Of course not, my dear. Think nothing of it.”

  Cassie, seemingly relieved, turned to me. “Anyway, that’s what I wanted to show you. Well, aside from the end bit.”

  I glanced at Noren, considering trying to dig more out of him. The moment had passed though, and he was right. We would only be travelling together for some of tomorrow before we reached Perch. I turned back to Cassie.

  “It was going great before then. So long as you only cast that spell when nothing else is there, we should be fine.” I teased, earning myself a gentle punch on the shoulder.

  None of us stayed up for much longer after that. The day had been long, and I for one was looking forward to making it to civilisation.

  ------------------------------

  Everybody was in a better mood the coming morning. Whether it was the fact that this leg of our journey would be over soon, the fact that we didn’t wake up being rained on or the simple magic of a good night’s sleep I’ll never know, but all three of us were definitely less tense.

  Cassie began to natter with Noren almost immediately, somehow getting onto the subject of etiquette among nobility. How those two reached their conversation topics was truly a school of magic all of its own.

  With my time once more my own, I redoubled my focus on maintaining my current shape, having discovered that my body like to change as I slept. I did add one caveat, which was that I decided to leave my eyes alone for now. I didn’t want Cassie to think that I was shutting her out, and honestly it was a little convenient for me to have her know how I felt about something at a glance.

  That added a few complications though. No longer could I simply halt any and all changes to my form. Rather, I had to directly interpret how my body wanted to change and decide whether or not that was something I wanted it to do.

  This was harder than it sounded, especially because this exercise in stability was teaching me that all of the changes that my body was doing automatically were a lot more complicated than I’d thought.

  Something that seemed simple like ‘eye colour’ actually had a bunch of smaller changes that all tied into that one blanket alteration. It turned out that the eye was actually a bunch of separate parts, which made sense now that I examined it through my vitae but wasn’t something I’d ever considered before.

  Eye colour seemed to depend primarily on a small section of instructions that my body interpreted as an order to produce pigment of a certain colour around the iris. I did discover that my body seemed to have some of these instruction packets that weren’t doing anything, which was weird. I ended up removing them as a test to no noticeable result, which was weirder.

  That was a simple example too. With this deeper view, I kept an eye on all of the various changes that my body wanted to make to better adapt to my environment. At one point I heard something in a tree behind me and my body’s first instinct was to send a signal that I should grow an eye on the back of my head.

  Fortunately that signal was pretty incomplete, so it wasn’t hard to stop that change from going through. That did tell me that my adaptive changes were getting more complicated though. Normally my automatic changes were – at the most complex – changes to height. Nothing about my body changed structurally, just different compositions of the same things.

  The eye thing did have me wondering about pain, funnily enough. As it turned out, the effect that I had used to dampen Cassie’s pain when I was healing her burn was actually to do with the strange threading that was present just about everywhere in the body, both hers and mine.

  These strange wires were directly related to the sensation of wherever they were connected, and while they branched constantly they all eventually lead back to my spine and brain. I considered changing one, but I remembered the promise I’d made to Cassie about self-experimentation. It wouldn’t stop me forever, but I would wait until I better understood what I was doing, at least.

  The more I delved into exactly what my body did when I changed things the more interested I got. I was definitely going to have to look more into this when we got into Perch. We weren’t staying for long, but we would be there long enough for me to find a book to read or healer to talk to that might know more.

  The thought passed through my mind that other people may not know about this stuff, but I dismissed it. After all, it wasn’t like I was the first person with a strong life affinity. Sure, the average healer wasn’t shapeshifting to view the response, but still.

  I remembered another of Gabriel’s old sayings: ‘People are smarter than you give them credit for, right up until they aren’t.’ There was no way that nobody else had figured this out.

  I tore myself from my experiments when I felt my feet hit cobbled road rather than a dirt path. I looked up to see that the environment had completely changed in few hours I’d been walking on autopilot. The scant trees were completely gone now, replaced by an open vista of farmland.

  The cobbled road we were on was actually surrounded on either side by agriculture, which I supposed made sense. Perch was fairly close to the coast, but nowhere near close enough to supply itself with seafood. There were a few folk out even as we walked, presumably because it was harvest season.

  It was strange not being surrounded by trees. Having lived my entire life in Vernal walled in by thick forests the woodland had always been comfortable to me, like a shield between my little village and the wider world. I felt strangely exposed now that there was nothing between me and the horizon.

  I came to a stop when I got my first glimpse of Perch.

  Stone walls towered over the surrounding land. The wall facing us was likely the same width as the entirety of Vernal. Not just that, there were people there.

  There had been a scattered collection of houses outside the city limits, which brought with them the people who lived there. Those people had nothing on the people I could see inside the town.

  Far enough away to appear like ants working in a colony, I saw hundreds of people just through the open gates. That was probably the entire population of Vernal, visible from afar just inside the gates. I couldn’t imagine how many people in total there were, let alone how many there would be in Meria, since that was supposed to be larger than Perch.

  I heard a gasp and saw that Cassie had frozen too, which had Noren looking back at the both of us in confusion. He finally seemed to register that we’d never experienced this many people before, which caused him to chuckle and move on without us.

  Of all things, it was him moving away that brought me back to the moment. There was no way he was leaving us without me getting in a passive-aggressive remark at the very least!

  really here for: Exposition Time!

  Extract from 'How To Train Your Magic: A Beginner's Guide'

  "By this point, a lot of you readers will be wizards, at least in name if not in accomplishment. If you're anything like I was back when I started, you're going to precocious, competent, and most of all incredibly arrogant. Don't let it go to your head just because you can cast a first or even second circle spell! Trust me, I've seen what happens when hungry young mages reach above their station and cast things they shouldn't. Coincidentally, I've also seen hungry young mages get turned inside out. Believe you me, don't let yourself get overconfident.

  That's no to say don't experiment, however. Especially with your earlier spells, since they're more forgiving. I've known wizards who relied on one spell their entire career, give or take a few alterations. I even knew one guy who seemed determined to cast nothing but a highly modified version of Firebolt for almost his entire life. Died to a magma elemental, poor sucker. In any case, your early spells can go far, especially if you keep updating them.

  Just because your spell guide had the matrix for Ice Spike layered twice doesn't mean you have too! Make the sharpest, densest, least efficient Ice Spike the world has ever seen! Just make sure most of that inefficiency is going into control nodes, because trust me: you really don't want an offensive spell to backfire. Sure, getting slapped across a room because you messed up telekinesis is bad, but if you want to know real pain then miscast Acid Ball. Not an experience you'll forget, I'll tell you that for free. Why do you think they teach Dispel in every course these days? You need to know it.

  Experimenting isn't just about altering your early spells to help them earn their places in your spellbook, though. It's also great practice for when you get to making your own spells. Of course, this isn't really something you should think of doing for quite some time yet, but you will need to do it at some point. Literally, it's one of the requirements to get a license for fourth circle magic. Still, it's a helpful skill beyond that too.

  Now, don't get me wrong. You'll never have the on-the-fly versatility of a sorcerer, no matter how good you get at making spells. But those bastards are cheating and you don't need that anyway. Besides, you can get close. My old master could make a spell in half an hour if push came to shove. A good one too, not the unstable, unsafe combinations you see some folks putting together today.

  I've got one more tip for you before we move on, though. DON'T NEGLECT CONTROL. I know I already said it, but I'm saying it again! I've seen more prodigies forego their lives by foregoing control nodes in new spells than I've seen pompous nobles put in their place by magically talented nobodies, and that happens all the time!

  All I'm saying is this: Value your lives! If your spell is mana inefficient, you can streamline it. If it's too complex for you to comfortably cast it, you can simplify it. If it turns you into a swarm of locust, however? Your magicking days are over."

  Extract End