Do I shake? Well sort of, but not much Who: Quenten Delacreaux and Ophion Barnard What:an epic mage duel sniffing out the new student Where: Mages Tower When: Today~ Rating: PG Status: Complete~
Quen was more than a little nervous on her way to her first lesson with her new mentor. She knew little of Ophion Barnard: except that he was a noble; he was a red mage who’d once been a black mage; and in every interaction she’d had with him so far, he’d been rather unfriendly. To Quen, that meant she’d have her work cut out for her in winning him over. She thought herself equal to the task. She’d simply go in at her most charming and be her adorable self, and surely he’d warm to her as readily as everyone else.
It felt odd, walking to the casting room, not wearing her scholar robes. She’d lived most of the last 6 ½ years in them, and she hadn’t yet gotten new ones to reflect her current status as a black mage. Traditional black mage robes, she’d discovered, were cut quite like a long coat, with a high, stiff collar and voluminous sleeves. Peony didn’t wear them, she knew; but Quenten had always put a lot of stock into tradition. Today, however, she was feeling very un-magelike in a simple cotton work dress. She carried both a rod and a staff: she was far more comfortable with the rod, but she thought she might like to switch to using a staff.
When she reached the door to the casting room, she switched the rod to her other hand and knocked. “Hello?” she called, gingerly pushing the door open. “Ophion– Mr. Barnard– Can I call you Phi? It’s me, Quenten Delacreaux.”
“Don’t.”
The correction came before he returned a greeting or introduction. Brusque and icy, the older mage swallowed the news of taking on his own scholar by approaching it as a challenge; who was he to walk away from that? Still, he harbored no desire to befriend his new assignment and certainly did not care to treat her like a child. He intended to treat the recently promoted black mage no differently than ever, with no sympathy.
He pulled a face at the charm that laced her words. If anyone could be allergic to kindness, it would be Lord Ophion Barnard. He exhaled slowly, in tune with the door’s steady opening, as if to dispel the toxicity in his voice. Yet when he continued, Ophion’s words were still bitter. “Don’t call me Phi. It’s Barnard to you.”
He rose from a wooden stool, the only item in the room he had cleared out himself, to stand before Quenten. In the short time he waited in the casting room, he had already imposed his gloom upon it. It was lit by insufficient candlelight, empty save for the young girl, the new mentor and their shadows.
Barnard. He wanted her to call him by his last name? That was so impersonal. Although she couldn’t see the dimly lit casting room or the shadows, she could already sense that this partnership would be very different from from the one she’d shared with Peony all summer. There would be no tea, and little sympathy.
Immediately more subdued, she said only, “Yes sir. Barnard.”
She lifted the strap that secured the staff to her back over her head and leaned the staff against the wall before straightening and clasping her hands in front of her. “I’m really looking forward to working with you!” she attempted. “You have a reputation for being very powerful and knowledgeable, and I may become a red mage someday, if I don’t become a geomancer.” Her voice echoed ominously in the empty, cavernous room. She fell silent, listening to it.
“What would you have me do?” she asked in a smaller voice.
He scoffed at her cheer and flattery. His chin jutted out as he grinded his teeth with annoyance. Then, he relaxed to begin the lesson. Ophion skipped over her attempt at building bridges.
“Black magic is an art.” His voice, cool and steely, matched the dank atmosphere of their casting room. “You want to play? Go be a child. I have no time for your games; magic has no time for it either. The power of black magic cannot be tamed without your full attention.”
With that, he resumed his usual silence, letting his words ring in the air to sink in. In a swooping of his robes, the red mage retreated to the other side of the room, leaving a reasonable distance between them. “Show me what you know,” he demanded, suddenly.
“Where is the target?” Quen couldn’t help but ask. Was there one? Surely he didn’t mean for her to attack him.
“Don’t waste my time, Delacreaux,” he growled. “Your target is me.”
Well. That was new. Using the sound of his voice as a guide to determine where he was, Quen closed her eyes in concentration, finding his center, and casting Poison as Cy had taught her: like fishing, slowly feeding in the power until it “caught”, and then letting the rest of it flow in to feed the spell. She had only been working on Poison for about three weeks now: while she could now cast it fairly reliably, it wasn’t natural to her yet, and consequently it took longer than it ought.
Once that spell was active, however, Quen knew exactly where he was, and she let fly her other three, perfected spells in rapid succession: first Fire, then Aero, and finally, Blizzard, her strongest. While they were all low-level spells, Quen knew that when she cast it, it was more powerful than average. It was something about her innate magical power: Quen didn’t understand it, but she hoped it would impress her prospective mentor.
The Poison took hold, and while he was still off guard, so did the Fire. The smell of burning cloth reached his nose as he dodged the last two spells, owing his reflexes to the well-roundedness of his current specialty. “Did I say stop, Delacreaux?” he called, eyes following the Blizzard spell warily as he cast a quick Esuna over himself.
Before continuing, Ophion shot Water in her direction, aiming for a point over the head, and closed the door behind her. He had no time to spare for interruptions if a passing mage thought to question this crude battle. Gathering up his pride Quen had scattered with her raw skill, the older mage began to build focus for his own Fire. “You’re slow.” The criticism glossed over the speed of her mastered spells.
“Keep going,” he snapped. Without warning, he released his spell at a point over her shoulder.
Quen jumped in surprise when she felt the Water spell hit just above her head. It drenched her, but didn’t cause her any damage. When the Fire spell hit over her shoulder, she felt its heat but none of the searing pain she was so familiar with when hit by her own spells.
He’s trying to unbalance me, Quen thought. This wasn’t a real battle: it was a test. Taking in a deep breath through her nose, she murmured the incantation for Blizzard once again, sending it for the origin point of the Fire spell Barnard had just cast. She followed it immediately by Aero, sending it in the same direction.
“Have you got Shell?” Quen asked sweetly. “I don’t want to hurt you again.” It was harder to aim now that he’d cured Poison. Any sustained spell, even a buff, would make her feel more confident about her aim. Without one, she had to rely purely on sound, movement, and what directionality she could glean from her mage senses.
“Hm,” came his default phrase. As he had told her over the network, its meaning depended on the context. Here, he bid her a second of thoughtfulness while observing the strength of Blizzard but mostly annoyance at her bargaining.
“You have to be ready to hurt and to be hurt,” he answered in an echo of his former mentor years ago, before adding, “This is offensive magic you’re casting.”
“Yes, sir,” Quen said before aiming another Blizzard at the sound of his voice. It had been worth a shot. She preferred not to have to resort to aiming by sound alone—it was less accurate than if she had magic to aim toward, for one—but while she could tell he was moving, presumably to dodge her spells, as long as he continued to speak, she did have some idea of where he was.
The edge of his sleeve, still singed from her previous spell, now iced over due to Blizzard. He gave an ambiguous grunt, balancing annoyance at her and at himself. Shaking off the crystals of ice, he scanned the younger mage as if to take in the smaller figure and assess her skills that way.
“That’s enough for now.”
Immediately, Quen pulled back the Aero spell she'd begun and stood with her hands clasped in front of her. She was still soaked from the Water spell that had landed just above her head, and without the adrenaline of battle coursing through her veins, she shivered in the cool, empty casting room. Was the test over?
As she waited for him to speak, to give her an instruction or perhaps state what would happen now, she realized that she wanted to have impressed him. She wanted this man to agree to take her on as a student. As gruff as he was, she could tell that this man wouldn't try to protect her endlessly from the world. He would teach her to be a battle mage.
Still surveying her with eyes colder than the Blizzards she casted, Ophion exhaled a contemptuous breath. He could not deny that she wasn’t as terrible as he expected (which may not mean much, considering what low expectations he had for others not himself). Yet, he held back on any compliments, any sign that he was satisfied with her show of powers. It was, in his opinion, still too soon. What was a few minutes of his time compared to the decades he had spent studying the same things she presented to him?
Paying no regard to her shivers, he began coolly, “You’re not used to this. Black magic is offensive.” It was a point he had made earlier, the separation between a man like him and a girl like her. He recalled how his own mentor taught him to reclaim what he had lost, how even now he thirsted for revenge. Keep careful. The warning, not a warning, rang in his mind.
“Do you even understand the power a mage can wield?”
“I’ve read all the books,” Quen answered immediately, her voice steady. “I know that there are mages who can command the power of a dozen of the spells I just cast. I know that there are mages who can take out an entire hillside of enemies with one spell. I’ve memorized the relative strength tables of every known black magic spell, I can argue several theories of elemental reactivity, and I can write an essay on the effects of concentrated mist accumulation, because I’ve just done six and a half years as a scholar. But all I know how to do is what I just showed you. That’s why I need you. I want to be a battle mage, and I think you can teach me, and I will do anything you ask.”
Sometime during her speech, her hands had clenched into fists. She took in a deep breath and released them. She wanted this so badly. If she could win him over by sheer determination alone—but she didn’t know what he wanted, truly, and she could give him only what she had.
Ophion pondered on her determination for a second; he was not a man given to empathy. At the end of her spiel, all he said in response was, “Hm.” The red mage’s lips thinned, an icy boulder to her youthful passion. What else came with youth, but innocence? Min, he scowled to himself, must be out of her mind to assign this mage to a man as jaded as him.
Battle and theory—so rarely did youth know how to balance the two (so rarely did the guilds teach this, came his criticism). “Battle mage? For whatever reason you enter battle,” he began, measuring her hastened reaction and countering with his own, colder and slower, “whether you fight to kill or defend, you’ll be responsible for your enemies’ blood. Don’t forget that, books or not.”
“Peony told me,” Quen agreed, her voice softer in response to the lower speed and temperature of Barnard’s voice. “She told me that black magic gives the power to end lives, and that I should never take that for granted.” Of course, knowing and doing were two separate things. Quen had said as much just a moment ago. It was one thing to know, abstractly, that the purpose of black magic was to kill. It was another to be aware, with each and every spell, of the life-ending potential you were releasing into the world.
She became aware of just how quiet the casting room really was, and how loud and quick her own heartbeat sounded in comparison. She noticed the gooseflesh prickling on her arms, the water cooling and drying at her scalp and dripping from the tendrils that escaped her loose bun and curled around her face. She breathed, in and out, and it felt like the first breath she’d taken since the battle had ended. What could he be thinking? What had she left to prove?
Ophion allowed the silence to thicken in the darkness until the tension curdled. He retreated back to the back corner of the room, back facing her. With arms free at his sides, he flexed his fingers and allowed a small flame to envelop the spaces between joints.
“No, never,” he said at last, in a resolute echo. “Will see how you do then when you face battle yourself.” A “when we face battle” wandered lost from the journey from brain to nerves to tongue. He resolved to himself not to give so direct a promise. Not yet, he thought, before attempting to correct himself: not ever.
Then the fire grew as he raised his hand up to chest-level to examine his own spell, his own shadow flickering. He changed tactics, reverting back to corrosives. “Thunder. First lesson. Same room,” Ophion regarded the spell he noted was missing from her repertoire, before exhaling another huff and dismissing her until the next meeting, as he fell into deep thought of his own time as black mages and all the things she had yet to learn.