Plodding away. >.>
The first time they met, Alec had come late to their first day of class. Five years old and clinging to his mother’s skirts with wide, mud-brown eyes eyes, Alec looked out at the group of students, about ten of them, all sitting on the bronze colored rug and staring right back at him. His mother shoved him gently into the room and with a smile at the teacher left him.
Jono gave him a quick look over and promptly decided to ignore him as uninteresting and scared. Their teacher, Mystra Sandie, beckoned Alec forward, deeper into the red hued classroom. Jono thought he looked like he would go up in flames he came in any further.
An utterly ridiculous notion as they were fire wizards and didn’t catch on fire. His mother and the teacher told him so. Mystra Sandie touched Alec lightly on the shoulder when he finally came far enough into the room to be actually inside it.
“This is Alexander Troven,” she’d said with her lilting voice. Her silvery blond hair fluffed as she spoke, lifting up gently in a no-existent breeze, when she turned her head. She then made everyone say their own name. Alec got that usual bewildered look of someone
confronted with a large body of information which was expected to be memorized.
Much to Jono’s annoyance, the only open seat turned out to be next to him. Tenatively, Alec sat next to him, his black hair falling over his eyes, pointed ears sticking through.
Jono poked him in the shoulder. “What’s wrong with your ears?”
“Nuthin’.”
“How come they’re pointed?”
“Cause.”
“Cause why?”
“Cause they are,” Alec snapped and looked away from him. Jono poked him again. And Alec ignored him. Which shouldn’t happen at all, in Jono’s mind. He poked harder.
Alec shoved him.
Jono didn’t remember exactly what happened next except that Mystra Sandie separated them and put them both in different corners of the room. His ears rung too, and his head felt like it had been dropped from a rooftop. That however was inconsequential.
Alec had hit him. That was important. That wasn’t inconsequential. No one had ever hit him before. No one ever bothered. He marveled at that and tried to figure out why.
That first day, seeing Alec huddled by the door, came back to Jono as he opened the door to the tavern, Jax’s. This time he’d be going in to the room and the unknown. As an outsider. Strange, being like that, everyone deferred to him and so treated him as other. As he stepped inside the loud conversations tapered off into silence for a moment as they all turned to look at him. Most were about his age, which led to a brief moment of wistfulness. Wishing he could have spent his birthday here. But the silence and stillness gave him the moment he needed to scan the room.
There, at the bar, hunched over a plate of something sat Alec. Their eyes met briefly and Jono smiled at the sudden recognition and then disbelief. He stepped down the creaky wooden staircase into the bell of the bar, rudely brushing past people who got in his way. No one said a thing against him. More than one person glanced up to the top of the stairs where his guards stood, passively waiting, used to their charge’s whims.
Quietly the conversations started up again around him, though hushed. But he only watched Alec. Who watched him back with narrow and suspicious eyes, making him look almost feral with the hair hanging over his eyes, casting him in shadow. The feral look vanished as Jono sat down next to him.
Alec wore his usual almost threadbare clothes. Not that he couldn’t afford better, but he tended to forget about the nicer clothes favoring the rough and work clothes for his constant running around and tendency for getting into fights. His hands played with a bit of bread, crumbling it onto the counter as opposed to the soup.
“You’re making a mess,” Jono said, snatching at a piece of bread and dunking it in the soup.
“You’re being rude,” Alec retorted taking the bread back before Jono could eat it. He ate it himself.
“When am I not rude?”
“You have your moments. Occasionally.” He gave a bit of a crooked grin.
“Bastard.”
“Twit.” With the bread Alec then gestured at Jono’s clothes. “What’s with the get up?”
Smiling smugly, Jono said, “They made me Oracle.” He got the reaction he wanted. The flickering bit of jealousy and that turn of his lips of annoyance. Of being beat. “Four years ago.”
“Mystra Coldine died?” Alec cocked his head a little. “Of what?”
Jono shrugged. “I don’t know.” And he didn’t care. It didn’t happen to him. Alec looked a little sad though. She’d been a distant relative. An earth wizard from the Kindess family, perhaps a cousin four or five times removed. Somehow a Troven ended up an earth wizard and married into the Kindess family. At least, that’s what Jono thought happened. He never paid much attention to the Family’s histories.
“I liked her.”
“You like everyone.”
“No I don’t.”
“Name someone you don’t like.”
Alec got a thoughtful expression on his face. “You,” he said finally. He dunked his bread into the soup again and chewed on it slowly.
The bar tender slipped Jono his own bowl of soup and bread with a glass of ale. The nasty bitter tasting stuff that they sold here. The sort that you just couldn’t help but try again and then just got used to. You couldn’t say you liked it, but you would drink it. It went with the thick lamb soup and crusty almost rock hard bread. He’d even been kind of enough to include a dollop of butter for the bread. “You like me,” Jono insisted as he broke off a piece of the bread and squished it into the butter. “You just think you don’t.”
“You’re an arrogant, rock for brains, smug…”
“Exceptionally handsome and powerful,” Jono broke in, earning him a scowl. “In fact the most powerful person in the city.”
A lazy smile appeared on Alec’s face as he took a sip of the pale ale. “I don’t know about that.”
“What do you mean?” A suspicious tremor filtered into his voice, much to his annoyance.
Alec leaned forward and whispered, “I’m an element wizard.”
Giving a short bark of laughter Jono said, “You can’t be. Prove it.” Impossible. There hadn’t been an element wizard in over a thousand years. Or if there were, none had lived long enough to be noticed.
Reaching over for Jono’s mug of ale, Alec put his hand on it, eyes never leaving Jono’s face. Jono, however, looked right down at the mug, curious to see what would happen. Slowly the liquid frosted and then turned to ice. He gaped, pushing his finger into the mug and finding no liquid to part away from his finger. It had completely froze, solid. “How?”
Alec shrugged.
“Come to the Temple with me,” Jono said on a sudden impulse. Not wanting to wait until tomorrow. He licked his lips, wanting Alec. Wanting to know about his secret. Wanting to know how come Alec had kept this from him all these years. It wasn’t fair!
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to.”
“You can’t say that,” Jono protested. “You have to do what I say!”
“No, I don’t.” Alec stood up from his stool and smirked at him before walking away. Jono almost shrieked in frustration, quickly calming himself down. It wouldn’t do him any good to make a scene. Besides, Alec trusted him enough to tell him this secret. Even if he’d been holding onto it for eighteen years. Alec did have to do what he wanted, even if Jono had to go the round about way to get him to do it.
Melting the ale, Jono gave a stretch, before swallowing it. He smiled to himself as he made his way back to his guards, plotting on how to get Alec to the Temple tomorrow. This would be fun, he decided.
Really, Alec didn’t know what came over him at the bar. He’d never spoken about his abilities outside of his family and his godfather Kratz. His parents, his mother, drilled that into him since they learned about them. “Tell no one. You are a fire wizard, nothing else.” That had always been hard. Being able to hear the other three songs but not being able to touch them, to work them, changing them as he did the fire. They dangled before him like tempting sweets just out of grasp.
For years he’d kept the secret. Then tonight, he’d practically blurted it out for the entire bar to hear. He supposed he got lucky with the noise level of people’s conversations. Still, he told Jono of all people.
Too one up him. How else would he be able to trump being an Oracle? Already Jono beat him in skill and raw power as a fire wizard, as a powerful telepath to Alec’s somewhat minor empathy and now enough future sense to become Oracle while he just had glimpses of the future at random intervals. Nothing he could control.
But, Jono couldn’t be an element wizard. He tested quite aptly as a fire wizard. Alec didn’t know how he, himself, ended up as one -except that they could trace their line back to an element wizard and a fey lord - but he did.
The testing was really only a formality, a way of putting into record and keeping track of how many of each kind of wizard born every five years and deciding which class to put them in. For at five all the children started school at the University. At least those who were lucky enough to live in Zanth. Those who weren’t were also tested, but they didn’t have the same prestige or education.
It took place in a colorful room with bright paintings of fanciful creatures, flying
horses with wings, rainbow dragons and frolicking deer. Toys littered the floor: worn wooden blocks, soft stuffed animals and dolls, carved stone game pieces that had long since lost half their necessary parts. And four giant crystals set in a circle, with smaller ones next to them, leading down like a staircase.
Sela, Alec’s mother brought him in, clutching tightly at her hand. Laruna went the day before, all cheerful in her new dress made just for her first day of school. Alec’s new clothes felt stiff, though he knew they weren’t. The red trousers and dark brown shirt under a maroon jacket all fit well. Even his new boots, shiny brown with gold beading felt soft and well broken in. But they felt uncomfortable because they meant that he’d be spending his days away from his mother and home for the first time in his life.
Absently he clutched the phoenix pendant that his godfather gave him as a present for his first day of school when his mother let go of his hand.
“Go look at the toys,” she said, pushing him gently. She wore a gentle smile that sparkled in her brown eyes. Alec grabbed on to her patchwork skirt instead and she sighed. “Alexander,” her tone turned warning. He let go and walked over to the toys, sitting in front of the pile of blocks, which he began to stack up.
Behind him he heard another person walk in, and he figured it would be the tester. When he heard her voice he turned around surprised. Councilor Kindess, with her dark bushy hair and somber black robes, stood talking to his mother in low voices. Occasionally they would look back at him.
“Alexander?” His mother asked, sounding worried for the first time he’d heard in a long while. “Come here. We’re going to test you now.”
“Yes mum.” He stood up and walked into the center of the circle of crystals. Laruna told him in great detail about what would happen. She’d lit up a lot of the blue crystals. The others were a wispy grey, a burnished orange and a swirled brown. The bigger the crystal you lit up, the stronger you were.
His mother walked into the center of the crystals next to him and kissed him lightly on the head. “Try your best to light up the crystals.”
Alec smiled at her. Of course he would! He closed his eyes and fell into the song. That’s what it felt like to him. Falling into a world of music, the different elements twisting around him from air, fire, water and earth. He could see the crystals in his mind, like empty vessels waiting to be filled up. Steadily he did so, starting from the smallest and easiest -the fire crystals - to the hardest -earth. Each one he filled up until he felt like he couldn’t any more. He didn’t know how many he’d done, but opening his eyes he smiled brightly.
All the fire crystals were lit and a great deal of the other ones were too. “Did I do it right?” he asked, suddenly worried at the expressions on his mother and Councilor Kindess’s faces. One by one the crystals winked out as he stared at them, waiting for them to say something.
“You did fine, Alexander. More than expected,” his mother said. But she had a sad look on her face which confused him. If he did fine, why did she look like she would cry?
Councilor Kindess walked over to him and then knelt down so that they were eye to eye. “What I am about to say to you is very important, do you understand?” she said in a serious voice.
Alec nodded somberly. When grown ups talked like that, it meant they were expecting him to do something grown up. (Which secretly thrilled him.)
“You are never to tell anyone what you did with the crystals. That you lit up all the elements.”
“Why?”
She bit her lip and then sighed. “Because it means that you have the ability to control all four elements. And that is very dangerous. You could get hurt, badly, if people found out.”
“What about Laruna? Can I tell her?” he had to tell his twin. She’d ask and she’d know if he lied.
The councilor looked over at his mother. She nodded so slightly that Alec almost didn’t see it.
“You can tell Laruna and Greywolf and your father. Anyone in your family. But no one else. Not a single person. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise I won’t tell anyone.”
“Good boy. This is a very important secret. A very grown up secret.”
He nodded.
She gave him a small smile. “Now, we’re going to pretend that you can only do fire. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Being fire?”
“Yes!” he said enthusiastically. “Like da! And grandpapa.”
“Yes, like them. Like a fine Troven wizard.”
His mother came over to him now and held out her hands. Bouncing over the crystals, he grabbed them. “Now what?”
“Now, you go to class, like a big boy.”
Jono gave him a quick look over and promptly decided to ignore him as uninteresting and scared. Their teacher, Mystra Sandie, beckoned Alec forward, deeper into the red hued classroom. Jono thought he looked like he would go up in flames he came in any further.
An utterly ridiculous notion as they were fire wizards and didn’t catch on fire. His mother and the teacher told him so. Mystra Sandie touched Alec lightly on the shoulder when he finally came far enough into the room to be actually inside it.
“This is Alexander Troven,” she’d said with her lilting voice. Her silvery blond hair fluffed as she spoke, lifting up gently in a no-existent breeze, when she turned her head. She then made everyone say their own name. Alec got that usual bewildered look of someone
confronted with a large body of information which was expected to be memorized.
Much to Jono’s annoyance, the only open seat turned out to be next to him. Tenatively, Alec sat next to him, his black hair falling over his eyes, pointed ears sticking through.
Jono poked him in the shoulder. “What’s wrong with your ears?”
“Nuthin’.”
“How come they’re pointed?”
“Cause.”
“Cause why?”
“Cause they are,” Alec snapped and looked away from him. Jono poked him again. And Alec ignored him. Which shouldn’t happen at all, in Jono’s mind. He poked harder.
Alec shoved him.
Jono didn’t remember exactly what happened next except that Mystra Sandie separated them and put them both in different corners of the room. His ears rung too, and his head felt like it had been dropped from a rooftop. That however was inconsequential.
Alec had hit him. That was important. That wasn’t inconsequential. No one had ever hit him before. No one ever bothered. He marveled at that and tried to figure out why.
That first day, seeing Alec huddled by the door, came back to Jono as he opened the door to the tavern, Jax’s. This time he’d be going in to the room and the unknown. As an outsider. Strange, being like that, everyone deferred to him and so treated him as other. As he stepped inside the loud conversations tapered off into silence for a moment as they all turned to look at him. Most were about his age, which led to a brief moment of wistfulness. Wishing he could have spent his birthday here. But the silence and stillness gave him the moment he needed to scan the room.
There, at the bar, hunched over a plate of something sat Alec. Their eyes met briefly and Jono smiled at the sudden recognition and then disbelief. He stepped down the creaky wooden staircase into the bell of the bar, rudely brushing past people who got in his way. No one said a thing against him. More than one person glanced up to the top of the stairs where his guards stood, passively waiting, used to their charge’s whims.
Quietly the conversations started up again around him, though hushed. But he only watched Alec. Who watched him back with narrow and suspicious eyes, making him look almost feral with the hair hanging over his eyes, casting him in shadow. The feral look vanished as Jono sat down next to him.
Alec wore his usual almost threadbare clothes. Not that he couldn’t afford better, but he tended to forget about the nicer clothes favoring the rough and work clothes for his constant running around and tendency for getting into fights. His hands played with a bit of bread, crumbling it onto the counter as opposed to the soup.
“You’re making a mess,” Jono said, snatching at a piece of bread and dunking it in the soup.
“You’re being rude,” Alec retorted taking the bread back before Jono could eat it. He ate it himself.
“When am I not rude?”
“You have your moments. Occasionally.” He gave a bit of a crooked grin.
“Bastard.”
“Twit.” With the bread Alec then gestured at Jono’s clothes. “What’s with the get up?”
Smiling smugly, Jono said, “They made me Oracle.” He got the reaction he wanted. The flickering bit of jealousy and that turn of his lips of annoyance. Of being beat. “Four years ago.”
“Mystra Coldine died?” Alec cocked his head a little. “Of what?”
Jono shrugged. “I don’t know.” And he didn’t care. It didn’t happen to him. Alec looked a little sad though. She’d been a distant relative. An earth wizard from the Kindess family, perhaps a cousin four or five times removed. Somehow a Troven ended up an earth wizard and married into the Kindess family. At least, that’s what Jono thought happened. He never paid much attention to the Family’s histories.
“I liked her.”
“You like everyone.”
“No I don’t.”
“Name someone you don’t like.”
Alec got a thoughtful expression on his face. “You,” he said finally. He dunked his bread into the soup again and chewed on it slowly.
The bar tender slipped Jono his own bowl of soup and bread with a glass of ale. The nasty bitter tasting stuff that they sold here. The sort that you just couldn’t help but try again and then just got used to. You couldn’t say you liked it, but you would drink it. It went with the thick lamb soup and crusty almost rock hard bread. He’d even been kind of enough to include a dollop of butter for the bread. “You like me,” Jono insisted as he broke off a piece of the bread and squished it into the butter. “You just think you don’t.”
“You’re an arrogant, rock for brains, smug…”
“Exceptionally handsome and powerful,” Jono broke in, earning him a scowl. “In fact the most powerful person in the city.”
A lazy smile appeared on Alec’s face as he took a sip of the pale ale. “I don’t know about that.”
“What do you mean?” A suspicious tremor filtered into his voice, much to his annoyance.
Alec leaned forward and whispered, “I’m an element wizard.”
Giving a short bark of laughter Jono said, “You can’t be. Prove it.” Impossible. There hadn’t been an element wizard in over a thousand years. Or if there were, none had lived long enough to be noticed.
Reaching over for Jono’s mug of ale, Alec put his hand on it, eyes never leaving Jono’s face. Jono, however, looked right down at the mug, curious to see what would happen. Slowly the liquid frosted and then turned to ice. He gaped, pushing his finger into the mug and finding no liquid to part away from his finger. It had completely froze, solid. “How?”
Alec shrugged.
“Come to the Temple with me,” Jono said on a sudden impulse. Not wanting to wait until tomorrow. He licked his lips, wanting Alec. Wanting to know about his secret. Wanting to know how come Alec had kept this from him all these years. It wasn’t fair!
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to.”
“You can’t say that,” Jono protested. “You have to do what I say!”
“No, I don’t.” Alec stood up from his stool and smirked at him before walking away. Jono almost shrieked in frustration, quickly calming himself down. It wouldn’t do him any good to make a scene. Besides, Alec trusted him enough to tell him this secret. Even if he’d been holding onto it for eighteen years. Alec did have to do what he wanted, even if Jono had to go the round about way to get him to do it.
Melting the ale, Jono gave a stretch, before swallowing it. He smiled to himself as he made his way back to his guards, plotting on how to get Alec to the Temple tomorrow. This would be fun, he decided.
Really, Alec didn’t know what came over him at the bar. He’d never spoken about his abilities outside of his family and his godfather Kratz. His parents, his mother, drilled that into him since they learned about them. “Tell no one. You are a fire wizard, nothing else.” That had always been hard. Being able to hear the other three songs but not being able to touch them, to work them, changing them as he did the fire. They dangled before him like tempting sweets just out of grasp.
For years he’d kept the secret. Then tonight, he’d practically blurted it out for the entire bar to hear. He supposed he got lucky with the noise level of people’s conversations. Still, he told Jono of all people.
Too one up him. How else would he be able to trump being an Oracle? Already Jono beat him in skill and raw power as a fire wizard, as a powerful telepath to Alec’s somewhat minor empathy and now enough future sense to become Oracle while he just had glimpses of the future at random intervals. Nothing he could control.
But, Jono couldn’t be an element wizard. He tested quite aptly as a fire wizard. Alec didn’t know how he, himself, ended up as one -except that they could trace their line back to an element wizard and a fey lord - but he did.
The testing was really only a formality, a way of putting into record and keeping track of how many of each kind of wizard born every five years and deciding which class to put them in. For at five all the children started school at the University. At least those who were lucky enough to live in Zanth. Those who weren’t were also tested, but they didn’t have the same prestige or education.
It took place in a colorful room with bright paintings of fanciful creatures, flying
horses with wings, rainbow dragons and frolicking deer. Toys littered the floor: worn wooden blocks, soft stuffed animals and dolls, carved stone game pieces that had long since lost half their necessary parts. And four giant crystals set in a circle, with smaller ones next to them, leading down like a staircase.
Sela, Alec’s mother brought him in, clutching tightly at her hand. Laruna went the day before, all cheerful in her new dress made just for her first day of school. Alec’s new clothes felt stiff, though he knew they weren’t. The red trousers and dark brown shirt under a maroon jacket all fit well. Even his new boots, shiny brown with gold beading felt soft and well broken in. But they felt uncomfortable because they meant that he’d be spending his days away from his mother and home for the first time in his life.
Absently he clutched the phoenix pendant that his godfather gave him as a present for his first day of school when his mother let go of his hand.
“Go look at the toys,” she said, pushing him gently. She wore a gentle smile that sparkled in her brown eyes. Alec grabbed on to her patchwork skirt instead and she sighed. “Alexander,” her tone turned warning. He let go and walked over to the toys, sitting in front of the pile of blocks, which he began to stack up.
Behind him he heard another person walk in, and he figured it would be the tester. When he heard her voice he turned around surprised. Councilor Kindess, with her dark bushy hair and somber black robes, stood talking to his mother in low voices. Occasionally they would look back at him.
“Alexander?” His mother asked, sounding worried for the first time he’d heard in a long while. “Come here. We’re going to test you now.”
“Yes mum.” He stood up and walked into the center of the circle of crystals. Laruna told him in great detail about what would happen. She’d lit up a lot of the blue crystals. The others were a wispy grey, a burnished orange and a swirled brown. The bigger the crystal you lit up, the stronger you were.
His mother walked into the center of the crystals next to him and kissed him lightly on the head. “Try your best to light up the crystals.”
Alec smiled at her. Of course he would! He closed his eyes and fell into the song. That’s what it felt like to him. Falling into a world of music, the different elements twisting around him from air, fire, water and earth. He could see the crystals in his mind, like empty vessels waiting to be filled up. Steadily he did so, starting from the smallest and easiest -the fire crystals - to the hardest -earth. Each one he filled up until he felt like he couldn’t any more. He didn’t know how many he’d done, but opening his eyes he smiled brightly.
All the fire crystals were lit and a great deal of the other ones were too. “Did I do it right?” he asked, suddenly worried at the expressions on his mother and Councilor Kindess’s faces. One by one the crystals winked out as he stared at them, waiting for them to say something.
“You did fine, Alexander. More than expected,” his mother said. But she had a sad look on her face which confused him. If he did fine, why did she look like she would cry?
Councilor Kindess walked over to him and then knelt down so that they were eye to eye. “What I am about to say to you is very important, do you understand?” she said in a serious voice.
Alec nodded somberly. When grown ups talked like that, it meant they were expecting him to do something grown up. (Which secretly thrilled him.)
“You are never to tell anyone what you did with the crystals. That you lit up all the elements.”
“Why?”
She bit her lip and then sighed. “Because it means that you have the ability to control all four elements. And that is very dangerous. You could get hurt, badly, if people found out.”
“What about Laruna? Can I tell her?” he had to tell his twin. She’d ask and she’d know if he lied.
The councilor looked over at his mother. She nodded so slightly that Alec almost didn’t see it.
“You can tell Laruna and Greywolf and your father. Anyone in your family. But no one else. Not a single person. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise I won’t tell anyone.”
“Good boy. This is a very important secret. A very grown up secret.”
He nodded.
She gave him a small smile. “Now, we’re going to pretend that you can only do fire. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Being fire?”
“Yes!” he said enthusiastically. “Like da! And grandpapa.”
“Yes, like them. Like a fine Troven wizard.”
His mother came over to him now and held out her hands. Bouncing over the crystals, he grabbed them. “Now what?”
“Now, you go to class, like a big boy.”