++Meeting the other magicians-in-training was not such a surprise, they really were not very different from in my own time period. Most humans who have ever lived have been pathetic, the magically gifted are no exception.++
- From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, ‘The Great Lich’. 1,891 A.E
I feared, for a moment, that I had made a grievous mistake, that I had given away too much. My talent was unprecedented in this era’s history books, but not in the memory of the Gods. Would their attention be drawn by the stories spreading about me?
In the past, they had not attacked me until I achieved lichdom—until I joined them in immortality. That was when I became a threat, because that was when my potential for growth became infinite. Maybe they were more cautious now than in the past. Maybe I myself had not been cautious enough.
I was whisked from the examination room by a now-frantic Professor Bogern, and taken back to my quarters without any chance to protest. I had several questions, and for once I was able to actually ask them. They were very much the sort a real child would have asked.
“What is wrong?” I demanded. “What is going on?”
The Professor did not seem to really hear me, preoccupied by something else that I could not identify.
“What is happening?” I demanded again, louder and sharper. My facade was slipping, I almost caught myself about to threaten him.
He would just have laughed at that, his power was easily fifty times what mine was.
“I need to take this to my superiors,” he told me after a moment. “You must stay here.” He closed the door and locked it before I could push it open, then left me to roar in protest. I stopped bothering after a few more minutes.
Half a day passed before the door opened again, then I was whisked out. It was not by Professor Bogern this time, but by two sullen, hostile-looking guards who both circulated mana through their muscles just as my father did. More of those preternatural fighters this new age had yet to even name, then. They led me at a fast enough pace to leave my eight-year-old legs burning with the effort of following.
We moved hrough winding halls, deeper into the building, so fast that even I was struggling to remember all the twists and turns in case I needed to make my way back. When we finally stopped, it was in an office.
Professor Bogern was there, as was a newcomer. A woman. I had never seen her before, but I had seen her kind. At a single glance I could recognise her for what she was, feel the power radiating from her.
I was standing before a Demigod.
She lounged in the room like it was her own office, though I could tell by the portraits on the walls that it was Professor Bogern’s. She stood only when I entered and affixed me with the most intense stare I had ever seen.
“This is the child?” she asked the room.
“It is,” Bogern replied with a nod. It felt odd to see him so submissive to her, and repulsive. This, here, was a creature that had made herself less than human.
Demigods are not born, unlike what the legends would claim, they are made. First when a human gains a God’s favour, and is imbued with a tiny whisper of its power—turning them into a Godtouched—and then when that same human proves themselves worthy of even more. Many of the Demigods live for centuries, and practically any who reach that level of favour are superior in raw power to virtually any magician.
And they are all hopelessly beneath their Gods. Every thought and feeling is in some way controlled by the deity that gives them their power. Not directly, not always obviously, but on some level, everything about their minds is beneficial to their master. Their free will is not entirely scrubbed away, it is simply filtered and made to serve whatever goal their God holds.
It was never a fate that appealed to me, for obvious reasons, and I felt only disgust at seeing others fallen into it.
“Am I in trouble?” I asked, putting up the most convincing mask of worry and near-crying I could. When in doubt, while masquerading as a child, it was usually a good idea to seem on the brink of either tears or tantruming. This time I did not see any effect from my performance, the Professor merely looked away, the guards merely glared harder, and the Demigod simply tilted her head as if in fascination.
“You’re not…in trouble,” the Demigod replied after a moment. She seemed to be looking around, to the men around us, as if hoping to see cues regarding how she ought to progress. “We just…we have some questions about you, Isabel. Or had questions rather.” I saw her features tighten with focus, and was briefly lost at why that was. Her next words confirmed it. “There’s no hint of the divine about her, not even a crumb. Whatever this girl’s talent, it’s entirely human.”
She was right about that of course, and by the looks of her she was not suspecting that I was anything other than an unaltered human either. That much made sense, this body was an entirely natural human form. I had checked as much myself.
“Excuse me,” I began slowly, “what is going on here?”
It is always best to take on a note of politeness, when speaking to anything related to the Gods.
Particularly something as high as a Demigod. Currently, this woman’s magical power exceeded my own thousands of times over.
“Nothing, you can go.” The Demigod turned to the Professor, looking more irritated, now, rather than less. “Don’t call me here again for something so trivial.”
Bogern looked angry, though he did not in any way act on it. If the Demigod was a thousand times my own magical strength, and six hundred times Doctor Brown’s, she was still probably over a dozen times this man’s.
That is the temptation of divine power, after all.
“Apologies, your Radiance,” the Professor smiled queasily. “We just thought it best to—”
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—”to call on a woman because you were dealing with a young girl,” she cut in with a snap. “I’m not an idiot and I know why this happened. I also know that crushing you like a maggot would aggravate the rest of your Institute, and do me no favors politically. That’s why you are still alive. Don’t find out when your annoyance will outstrip the drawbacks of killing you.”
She did not wait for a response, simply disappeared in a flash of light and left a significantly sized burn in the office’s carpet. The air smelled oddly pleasant, after her vanishment. I was well used to that effect; any use of divine magic tended to leave enjoyable side-effects. It was one of the many ways Gods had of manipulating idiots into worshipping them.
I was standing with several such idiots now, but the Professor, at least, had a bit more self-respect.
He spat at his feet. “You were watching that, girl?” he asked. I took a moment to realise he was addressing me.
“Y…Yes?” I replied. The stammer in my voice was actually genuine, born from total confusion.
“That was a Demigod. The first one you’ve seen, I’d wager?”
“Yes,” I repeated. He nodded, sighed.
“Power beyond anything human, that’s what makes a Demigod. Or so we thought.” He turned to look right at me, then, with a smile. “Until you were born.”
***
I quickly learned more of what the situation was regarding the Winzorth Institute and its relationship with the Gods. Fortunately, it was not so different from what I had been led to believe. The magicians were not at odds with the Gods, and still wholly under their power, but they were not happy with this fact either. They shifted and struggled under their leash, and did all they could to make life unpleasant for the smug Godtouched and Demigods who so frequently arrived to bully orders into them.
“Ignore that little disturbance,” Professor Bogern told me with the same strained smile I was getting used to seeing everywhere. “It won’t be repeated.”
I got the impression that he could not guarantee that, and that I was being lied to.
“Thank you,” I nodded with a sweet smile. There is no real point to accusing adults of lying when you are a child, it is simply one of the things that they believe they have the right to do at a whim.
The Professor soon had me out of his office soon, and then I was being marched back through the building. This had been happening a lot lately. In fact, with how cooped up I had been before coming to the Winzorth Institute, I could actually feel my short legs burning with the effort. If nothing else, maybe navigating this ludicrously sized building would help me develop an athletic build by the time I finished growing.
“Isabel, I will be frank with you, is that okay?” Bogern asked me, but he was speaking again before his question could be answered. “You’re younger than almost any other student we’ve ever had, and yet you’re more powerful than all but a precious handful. Each apprentice in Winzorth who can match or exceed your power is close to double your age. I…frankly, don’t know how. And I doubt another talent like yours will come around for thousands of years.”
He was being shockingly optimistic. His impression of my talent was actually inaccurately high. I had been deliberately training my magic since I was a baby, after all, which he had no way of knowing, and Doctor Brown had not arrived early enough to deduce. There may never be another human born with my potential ever, for even if my talent was matched again, its wielder would waste precious years growing into a toddler before they could start honing it.
“Okay,” I replied. He seemed amused by my lack of interest, but continued.
“You will go far, and do great things, if you devote yourself to study well enough. Can you promise me to do that?”
I had to fight back a smile.
“Yes,” I told him. “I promise you I will study very hard.”
It was a nice change of pace to be able to respond in such a purely honest way. At long last, my introduction into the Winzorth Institute was complete. My talent assessed, and mistaken for even greater than it was, I was finally unleashed into the halls to do as I would.
Or, rather, to do as I would be instructed to. That brief moment of hope I felt at being told I was free to explore lasted only until I was informed what time to have my meals, when I was permitted outside the main building, and which sections of it the practice of magic was allowed in. I had less freedom here than in the Vornholt Estate.
Perhaps that should not have been so unexpected, it certainly did not bother me much in light of my getting past the Demigod. I decided to begin my period of free reign by looking for Agrian. The boy was family, which made him useful, and he had been given the chance to explore this Institute almost a full twenty-four hours ahead of me, which made him even more useful.
Besides, I actually disliked him being distressed for the sake of it. It was unbecoming of a Lich King to leave her familiars in a state of upset when there was nothing to be gained by doing so.
Fortunately, despite the vast size of the building, it did not take me long to locate my elder brother. He and I had been assigned to the same floor of it for our quarters, a decision that was no doubt made due to our blood ties.
Agrian answered his door only after I had knocked on it three times, something I found unacceptable. Just as I was about to inform him of his moral shortcomings in making me wait, however, I got a look at the boy.
Standing in the doorway, he seemed to be hiding himself partially inside the room. His eyes were red and almost inflated, clearly from heavy crying, and his clothing was disheveled.
My priorities shifted immediately.
“What happened?” I asked, barging my way into the room. It was a big set of quarters, bigger by far than the ones I had stayed in while awaiting my assessment. The carpet was thick and the walls high, everything clean, well-furnished in expensive woods, even boasting stone statues decorating certain sections of the place. But none of it mattered to me compared to this newest incident.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Agrian said, sniffing back tears. I rounded on him, and had to resist the instinct to more aggressively demand he answer me.
“Tell me,” I told him. “I might need to avoid whatever it was myself.”
“I went to the outer grounds, the, you know, the outside section. Still in the walls, but with open air.” I nodded in understanding. Agrian had always loved being outside, and been given more leeway to venture beyond the mansion than me following our kidnapping. I would have looked for him there next, had I not found him here.
“Well, these other apprentices came over to me. They said some things about…about our family, about father and mother not being magicians, about nobility being on its way out.” I could see him trembling with anger. “One of them shoved me down with magic. I couldn’t do anything to stop him, the rest started using their powers too.”
I was walking before I really intended to, feeling my legs move beneath me. This new human body was interesting, the way it did things without permission.
Agrian hurried after me.
“Isabel, wait!” he gasped. “I don’t want you to make a problem out of this, it’s fine, I’ll just avoid them from now on!”
“Okay,” I replied. And kept walking.
I was not sure where I was heading at first, though by the time I reached the courtyard I knew. There, thirty paces ahead, I saw wisps of Agrian’s magic lingering where the incident must have happened. Beside it, I saw a quartet of mouth-breathing apprentices.
Each of them was at least a year or two older than Agrian, closer to adults than children. That made me a shade angrier. I could understand dominating one’s enemies to prove one’s power, but targeting a child? What did that prove?
It proved that they feared people their own age. Unfortunately for them, they had drawn the attention of one considerably older. I made my way closer to them and examined the group’s mana, though remained far enough to avoid being noticed. Each one was aglow with power, though I noted that they were not quite a match for mature magicians.
I, currently, could output just shy of two thousand vis while exerting myself, Agrian could perhaps have managed fifteen hundred. These boys seemed to be closer to me than they were to my brother.
More than I was willing to fight as a collective, at least. Directly that was. And that was to say nothing of the consequences for open evocation usage.
I made my way from the courtyard, with Agrian still trailing behind me.
“You’re planning something,” he accused. “Aren’t you?”
“Of course I am,” I did not see any reason to lie to him.
“Well what is it?” he growled.
“You will find out soon enough,” I replied. “Now tell me where this Institute’s library is.”
I had some reading to do about illusion magic.