++The following extract is the product of Kyvaine’s own recordings, once again. He appears not to have considered the specifics of Vara’s attack at the rooms to be worth writing down, thus my including her own account for context. This trend will continue further in his writings of course.++

  Morlo took me to a costume shop, for some reason. This was surprising to me at the time but, now, I like to think I’ve learned enough about the world to have seen it coming. Morlo planned to make a hero of me, he’d been open about that much at least. And being a hero is nine-tenths presentation.

  The remaining tenth is misdirection though, and I understood that much to do it on instinct at least. I hid my confusion and went along with Morlo as he dragged me into the expensive-looking place and deposited me before its counter.

  “I need clothes for my son,” he began,

  —”great grandson,” I corrected, and watched for a note of irritation on his face. Surprisingly there was none.

  “For my grandson,” Morlo amended, “who isn’t half so funny as he thinks he is.”

  The clerk seemed unimpressed, but was as professional as anyone who smelled money on the air. They worked quickly to ask about my measurements, which I realised only then I no longer knew, and then took the recent ones borne from my horrible trek cross-country.

  I’d slimmed down obviously, and had apparently gotten an inch or two broader around the arms and legs. Probably a product of all that time I’d spent swinging around heavy metal and trudging up-hill with chainmail and a breastplate. I found myself grinning at the news.

  “I don’t normally work with builds like this,” the seamstress sighed, “the extra fabric will cost more, you realise?”

  “Of course,” Morlo grinned, “just see that it’s done, this note here contains a written description of the attire I want, try not to deviate from it more than you absolutely must.”

  She took it and read through fast, lips pursing with disapproval but, of course, expression quickly smoothing itself away. Money was on the air. I’d never quite get tired of how easy that made everything, at least when you were the one who owned the money in question.

  That said, there are limits to what money can achieve. However strongly motivated she was. the woman still had finite abilities, which meant non-zero time taken before she finished the job. Morlo offered an even more ridiculous fee to hasten it along, and we left with the promise that it’d all be done in two days’ time.

  “So you want me to play the part of some hero,” I began as we walked, “which means…You want me to look the part too?”

  It was a painfully obvious thing to feel was in need of pointing out, but at least I was using my brain to actually think about things. That habit would save my life more than once, later down the line.

  Today it just earned another snort of derision from the Thaumaturge.

  “You’re figuring that much out now?”

  I bristled.

  “You obviously want something from this, and you were investigating the undead after me. So I’m thinking you believe they’re going to turn into a serious problem, right? And you’re preparing a hero to pocket in case you need a way of having people do what you say to fix that.”

  This time Morlo did look impressed, which surprised me quite a bit given that I’d mostly been speaking out of my arse and stringing that sentence together on an almost word-by-word basis. I kept the fact from my face, of course, and just smugly soaked up his reaction.

  “It’s a miracle you’ve managed to do so little with your life until now,” he told me.

  It was, I think to this day, the most absolutely eviscerating way I’ve ever been complimented in my entire life. It wiped the smile right off my face, and I trudged along in a grim sulk until Morlo finally saw fit to speak again. Perhaps even he felt bad about that bloody atrocity of a retort.

  “What do you know of Heroes, boy?” he asked me abruptly.

  My mind racked itself at the question, eager to prove its worth again out of pure spite if nothing else.

  “You mean the most relevant ones? Recent ones? King Henrig is the obvious example, I’d—”

  —”no,” Morlo cut in, “no, capital ‘H’ Heroes, not just humans who were in the right place at the right time.”

  I swallowed at that.

  “Uh…Nothing.” I didn’t think they were myths like a lot of people, I’d read enough actual history books—involuntarily, I had to admit—that I was aware of the historic documentation which left it little debate that they did exist.

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  But that was about the extent of my Heroic knowledge.

  Morlo didn’t seem surprised by this, for entirely obvious reasons nobody ever seemed surprised by my not knowing something, and didn’t miss a beat.

  “Thought so, then you need to learn a thing or two about them.”

  “Hold on,” I cut in, “you don’t want me to pose as one of them do you?!”

  He shot me a look that I couldn’t translate, but kept quiet. I continued.

  “The Heroes were powerful creatures, and power demands respect.” Morlo had abandoned all his usual screeching now, become calmer, steadier. It was the most disconcerting part about him, this. The clarity he sometimes brought on. The worst of it was that I still didn’t know how much of the madness was even real.

  “People are scared of them, too,” I cut in. “You’ve heard more of the stories than I have, but even I know that much. Glyca the Facechanger brought ruin to all of Durundhai by posing as its emperor and—”

  —”there is more to that tale than you know,” he cut in, surprisingly sharp, “and it’s not relevant here anyway. Yes the Heroes were hated and feared, others were admired and followed, but all were respected. And right now, respect is the highest currency.”

  Morlo was growing more intense, like he had some personal stake in the idea. I realised fast that, of course, he did. This was his own influence I was talking about, not to mention the fact that if his worries about the undead had been half as severe as I was suspecting they were, it would be a matter of life and death—or undeath—for him as much as everyone else.

  But then another thought struck me, and since this one was about me it took automatic precedence over…well, pretty much everything else really.

  “So you are going to teach me Thaumaturgy, then?” I grinned.

  Morlo looked at me without giving anything away in his expression, but that didn’t dent my confidence in the slightest.

  “Why are you asking all of a sudden?” He said at last.

  I just grinned wider. “Because Heroes can do magic, everyone knows that. And if I’m going to pass myself off as one, it’d help if I actually knew a few of the basics, right?”

  Morlo grunted.

  “Hope for you yet, I’d say, boy. Maybe a bit more discomfort will do you good.”

  The way he said that, as if the discomfort were already scheduled, knocked the smugness right out of me. He was talking again before I could turn my concern into another question.

  “Yes, you’ll be learning Thaumaturgy. But you won’t be calling it magic, alright?”

  That earned him a frown from me.

  “It is though.”

  “Yes, well, Thaumaturges and magicians tend to get a bit touchy about that topic. We’ll move onto it later though, that’s one of the more esoteric fields of study ahead of you and I don’t have nearly enough cannabis in me to have that talk now.”

  “What’s a cannabis?”

  “Shut up.”

  I shut up.

  Morlo took a moment from there, then sighed in frustration.

  “I never get any better at this,” he muttered, “alright, well the first thing you need to know about Thaumaturgy is that it’s not about having power. It’s about using it. Borrowing it, or, if you’re particularly megalomaniacal, commandeering it. We take power from one place to put it somewhere else, and the stronger a Thaumaturge is the more power we can draw in from a larger area in less time.”

  That confused me more than no explanations had, and though I took an uncharacteristically long time chewing on the idea I found myself no closer to understanding. We were halfway through the city by the time I spoke again.

  “So Thaumaturgy is…asking favours?”

  Morlo smacked me across the back of the head, which I deserved, and continued talking as if I’d said nothing.

  “Everything around you has power, in one form or another. What a Thaumaturge does is take in this power from external sources and channel it for their own use. Wait.” He stopped, and I stumbled to a halt beside him as he raised a hand.

  “Feel that?” he asked me, “the wind on your skin?”

  I did of course, a light breeze that I found rather soothing. It made me want to pause a bit longer and enjoy it. Vara would’ve been beaten to death and probably raped if I had, of course, but I didn’t know that at the time, and had been speed-walking for long enough that I was eager for a pause.

  “That,” Morlo said at once, “is power.”

  I burst out laughing.

  “Oh great,” I snorted, “so you’ll teach me how to tickle people from afar.”

  Of course I should not have said that, and Morlo made me regret the fact near-instantly. Stood there smiling, as if he himself were pausing to enjoy the moment as I came to understand my own baffling stupidity. Then he raised his hand.

  Instantly the wind stopped, all at once, as if by command. I froze, looked around, saw…that it was still blowing. People’s clothes still moved in it, ten paces away, it was just around me and him it had stopped.

  “Power,” Morlo repeated. “Doesn’t feel so small now, does it?”

  And it didn’t. An area wider than three of me lying down had seen the wind stolen from it. Just as I was trying to articulate that, Morlo gestured again.

  This time, I felt a great deal more wind rather than less.

  Morlo sent me spinning literally head-over-heels and laughed as I landed hard. Had I hit my head on the ground I might’ve died, but I suspect he did something to ensure that wouldn’t happen. Instead I was just left in a grumpy, undignified heap while he stared down at me.

  “A little power, over a large area, can turn into a very appreciable difference. I just drew in the wind from everywhere within about ten paces of me, we don’t have a particularly strong breeze today but it’s fast enough. I’d call it seven miles per hour or so. Does that sound about right to you, lad?”

  I whimpered a bit, and Morlo nodded as if I’d given an answer.

  “Right, let’s call it seven. Now you’re a big lad, but you’ve slimmed down something too, so I’d estimate that the surface area of your body—just the side facing me, that is—is around two hundred and fifty times lower than that of the area from which I just absorbed that wind. Not to mention that I was taking it depth-wise, too, so all the power delivered across all the air from ten paces behind me to ten paces ahead got thrown your way too... Am I losing you here?”

  I started crying.

  “Good, keep paying attention. All that power might not do anything normally, but suck it all up and throw it into one place and it can launch a fifteen-stone cunt more than his own body-length across a street. And that, my boy, is Thaumaturgy. Are you ready to learn more?”

  That was around the time I pissed myself.

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