“The gods come back and kill almost a million people with their tantrums, and now they want to negotiate with them?” Dad practically shouted, shaking the remote at the TV. “This new administration has no spine. They should keep hitting them with missiles like the French did to that one outside Lyon.”
A mountain god from before recorded history was upset and confused when he found his people missing entirely. Apparently the French weren't the ones he was after, so maybe another group lived there a long time ago. Nobody would ever know now. Four simultaneous strikes by ‘AASM Hammers’ had ended the living titan of history. Turns out, humanity still had a lot of control, but only if we were willing to get very kinetic.
“Dad,” I sighed, giving him a tired look.
He grumbled to himself, but then the President came up on TV and he started bitching again. “Look, I'm happy we have a young woman as President now, but we would've been better off with stability. It's too much, too soon.”
“Dad,” I said with more force this time. “She's almost fifty.”
“That is young in politics, kiddo,” he said, finally looking over at me.
Eight months since Saoirse moved in, and the progress that I thought dad had been making turned out to be… not. No, that wasn't totally true. It was more like the two wolves meme, where one wolf wanted to be a great dad to two daughters, and the other thought ‘Fox News has some good points sometimes’.
“Whatever,” I said, rolling my eyes.
Hopping out of the dining table seat, I lifted my laptop under my arm and made for the exit.
“I'm going to do my homework where I don't have to listen to you make out with the TV.”
I took the stairs on all fours, because my leg wasn't broken anymore and I was going to cherish that. Well… this time it was only threes ‘cause of the laptop.
The laptop which was my whole fucking freshman year of high school. Sometimes, when I thought about it, I felt like I'd been robbed. The school year was almost over. Hell, in like… half a year, I'd be sixteen.
When I got into my room, I did my usual scan to see if anything was different, and when it looked like my room hadn't been tampered with, I closed and locked the door. The lock was nice, and I thanked Saoirse's shenanigans every single day for getting our parents to put them in.
Placing my laptop on my desk, I looked down at the book beside it. My granddad's book. The one that mum was now letting me openly study. Well, not openly, but it was with her blessing.
I was stuck, right now, in my efforts to translate it. I was translating the writings of a woman from the 1400’s named Isabet Dorem, and it was just… the words didn't make sense where they were. Middle English was pretty well understood, and yet I couldn't understand anything past the first few pages. It was utter gibberish, and it pissed me off.
It felt like every time I tried to concentrate on the words, my eyes started to swim with the nonsense phrases on the page. With a groan, I slapped the currently open page of the book and pulled my phone out. My brain needed a rest, and what better way to not have to think than to let the algorithm do it for me? That couldn't have any lasting effects on my still very elastic brain, right?
Almost immediately, I was inundated with cute animal videos mixed with rants from strangers about political situations halfway across the world. It was the hero stuff that I kept coming back to, though.
There was this one superhero woman that I couldn't keep my eyes off sometimes. She called herself Lesbionics, because she was gay and could integrate technology into her body for as long or as short as she liked. She operated down in New York and Boston, and she was so fucking cool.
She was currently beefing with this hero guy from the same area, called Vacuum. He was some sort of wind elemental Spiritborn. He could control the wind — way better than Eva could — and even become it for short periods of time.
The beef was about how Vacuum had a choice between saving a gala full of rich people having a party, or protecting a women's shelter. The party was actually the better choice from a purely human-life-count perspective, but letting the marginalised, abused women get hurt over a bunch of rich fucks felt wrong. I would've gone for the shelter — the rich fucks could pay for security. In fact, they probably had, but Vacuum got to the raging spirit before they were forced to act.
With my phone in one hand, I didn't even realise until a particularly boring video essay jarred me out of it, and I saw my other hand was clenching and unclenching. I really, really wanted to go back out there… I just hadn't found the courage yet.
I wanted to feel the fight again. I wanted to spin through the air, firing off spells with gestures and—
Just putting on the gauntlets wouldn't hurt. Just to feel them a little.
Mum knew they were ‘missing’ now. She also knew there was a fox girl on the loose using a set very similar to the ones that we ‘used to own’. Thankfully, we were at least aware that other sets had existed at some point — created by lost branches of our family tree. Our ancestors might've lost, but they kicked in the teeth of the mage-knight orders — the predecessors to the APA — before they went down, and the tools they used were those gauntlets.
It meant I had to be a lot more careful with anything surrounding the gauntlets, though. Around my mum, that is. I'm sure the APA and their hunters knew what they were.
Anyway, I'd carefully installed a jank little cupboard in the back of my closet, and that was where I kept my Gauntlette stuff. It was in the side, so you had to poke your head in and look for it.
Reverently, I extracted the gauntlets and slipped them on. The way they contracted and adjusted to fit my arms like a hug… it felt so nice. Flexing my fingers was wildly easy too. Like, you'd think with how big and chunky they were… but no, of course I had a lot of movement in them. They operated on gestures, after all.
Flexing my arms, I paced my room, staring down at them while I thought—
What was that?
My eyes bored into the open book on the desk. The book that was a journal of these gauntlets as they travelled through time. Isabet’s words made sense.
I began to read, hungrily. It spoke about how she was tasked by her family to figure out what the ‘men of magic’ were doing in a small rural area. It spoke about how she posed as a refugee from a small-scale war nearby, and began ingratiating herself with the locals. Then I read something that got me very excited…
“I have been our eyes in this village for weeks. The local population is wary of me, and it has made working alone a difficult experience. Better than becoming cursed, they say, but I am not so sure. I think that the men of magic seek to divide us as much as gather information with their curse.
“A handspan of days past, some of their kind began to show in the village. They poke and prod, they bully and ask questions. Although, as ever, they are too foolish to suspect a woman of subterfuge. I pray that they do not come to the realisation that Cenél Sindach is operating in the area. I find myself ever grateful that the Arms of Bronze are now capable of subtlety. With this new magic, I feel that I may be bolder in my work, safe in the knowledge that torc may become weapon in but a moment.”
Torc? What was a torc? Google said it was an old type of necklace, but the following passage in the book confused that description.
“The magic they have woven into the torcs is incredible. Touching my fists together with intent, they seem to flow down from my upper arm and coat my limbs in bronze. Then, when I am done, a shake and a little more intent, and they become nothing more than arm decoration.”
Well then, Google, I guess you lied to me. Unless. Going back, I realised that if I actually tapped the link and read the page, there were mentions of them being worn on the upper arm too. Duh, silly Tia.
Looking from the book to the gauntlets, I wondered… it seemed like Isabet's had been modified with the transformation ability. Were these the same set, or had they been replaced at some point?
What did it say to do? Shake with intent? What did that mean?
I shook my arms. Nothing happened.
“Come on, stupid things, do something,” I said, shaking them again.
Nothing happened, again.
Well. Shit.
Maybe if I read more of Isabet's magic scribbles? They were magic, too. Like, I could tell that the nonsense from before had reformed into sentences and paragraphs that had actual meaning.
So, with the gauntlets on, I began to read about the life of a woman who'd lived hundreds of years ago. She wrote about her discovery that the ‘men of magic’ were gearing up to close a large, important leyline in the area. They needed more than one Spiritborn to sacrifice, so Isabet kept intercepting and freeing the ‘shipments’. Until they sent so many guards that one angry young woman couldn't fight them all.
She requested help — begging for backup from the rest of ‘Cenél Sindach’, but they were spread thin. A full-scale battle was being fought in a different county, and she was all the Cenél could spare.
In the end, she lost, but she killed so many of her foes in hit-and-run attacks, that it was a pyrrhic victory for them. They almost got her a few times, too, but she was too cunning — too smart.
A hammering at my door jerked me upright. Dad's voice came through the door. “Kiddo! The address is starting! Come down!”
Fuck! The damn gauntlets! I was wearing them. Also, what the hell was dad even talking about? Address? Whose Address?
Closing the book, I stood up and started to pull my left one off, but it got stuck.
“Piece of shit,” I hissed, wiggling my hand to get some leeway into the fingers—
There was a rushed hiss of metal on metal, and suddenly the left gauntlet was gone. On my upper arm, wrapped too firmly to have any hope of coming off, was a slim band of bronze.
“Ohhh,” I giggled, as I came to the realisation about what intent meant.
I attempted to shake the right one off, and sure enough, a slightly thicker band of bronze wrapped itself around my bicep.
“Cool,” I whispered happily.
Thump, thump, thump. “Tia! This is important for you!”
“Fine, fine!” I called, rolling my eyes.
I pulled the door open with a scowl, but he either didn't see it, or didn't care. Instead, he just placed a large hand on my shoulder and gently guided me towards the living room.
On the TV, the logo of the US government sat in the screen, static and unyielding.
“Dad, what’s going on?” I asked warily.
“It’s the big Presidential address! Their plan to handle the crisis is being announced!” He grinned, looking quickly between me and Saoirse, who was sitting on the sofa playing with a little fidget toy that my dad bought her.
She looked… very tired. Poor girl had been squeezed through a very thin tube, metaphorically speaking, over the past six months. She had almost a decade of schooling to catch up on, and while she was crazy smart, six months was simply not enough time to get it all done. The smile she gave me was the same as always — her eyes dancing like she’d already pulled a prank on you and was just waiting for you to notice.
Sitting beside her, I dropped my head onto her shoulder and hugged her with both arms. “Think this’ll actually mean anything, or is it going to be a big bowl of nothing?”
Dad chuckled. “Fifty fifty, kiddo. It’s the democrats.”
What did that mean? He always said shit like that, where he sort of implied that you agreed with him and knew what his subtext meant. Except, I didn’t. Like, was he saying it from the perspective of someone further left than the democrats, or someone from the center, or even the right? Those three words meant entirely different things when said from each different perspective.
The TV screen flickered, and was replaced by the image of the President behind her big fancy desk. Her mostly grey hair was in a neat bob, and she wore a smile on her face. Honestly, as far as politicians went, I actually liked her. She wasn’t the best, and some of her ideas about like, certain war-crimey nations weren’t great, but after Toad-Man… whatever, fuck it. Go, girlboss, go.
“Hello, America. For eight months, the world has been forced to reckon with the resurgence of magic in all its many forms. So far, the strength of our nation has not bowed, has not broken in the face of the Concord Event. We have persevered. Today, we will take our first steps towards not just surviving, but thriving as we move forward into this new era.
Today, I am announcing the Arcane Vision Plan — an initiative that will reshape the place of magic within our society. This begins with a formal partnership between the United States Government and the Arcane Practitioners Association — an organisation whose roots stretch further into history than any nation in existence today.
Under this partnership, several steps will be taken. The first, is the establishment of the Department of the Arcane. This body will be dedicated to the fair, transparent, and accountable regulation of magic on American soil. Under their watch, we will ensure that magic becomes a tool to be used for good, rather than a weapon of harm or oppression.
Next, the APA will begin providing federal agencies and state institutions with the training and knowledge they need in order to do their jobs in this new and changed world. With their guidance, stability will be upheld and maintained.
Finally, we will be enacting the Arcane Education Mandate. This law will require that any young person, aged fifteen or older, who manifests magical ability or who carries the potential to do so, will receive the proper education and guidance they need. Currently, only the APA has the capacity to provide this education, so it will be with their assistance that we begin to lift the coming generations into this new era.
Education, regulation, and understanding will be our keys to unlocking a future where magic is used for the betterment of every American. It will also be our shield against the chaos that has assailed our walls these past eight months.
Together, we can move forward and carve our future into stone.
Thank you, and may God bless the United States of America.”
The screen returned to the logo of the USA, and the three of us blinked, then looked at each other.
“Oh shit,” I blurted. “I’m a young person fifteen or older who can use magic.”
“Do I count?” Saoirse asked, her fidget toy clicking rapidly.
“You’re listed as Spiritborn with the government,” Dad said with a knowing look.
I looked at her — both of our eyes were wide as the moon. We were getting sent to magic high school… one run by the fucking APA. Oh, this was beyond weird. A year ago, we would’ve been on their hit list!