[fic] [Tales of Arcadia] Your Future Hasn't Been Written Yet 141/?
Your Future Hasn’t Been Written Yet
by K. Stonham
released 26th May, 2023
"Tell me," Douxie invited once they'd broken their fast, "what do you know about staves?"
"Old men use them to walk," said Myrddin. "Young men use them to hit things."
Douxie gave him his best unimpressed look. "Wizards' staves," he specified.
Myrddin blinked at him. Mind clearly empty, search engine coming back with no results.
Douxie sighed, his head falling into his palm. "Bran's tongue, I'm stuck in the dark ages," he muttered. Because Taliesin had had a master wizard's staff, and Merlin and Morgana had both had staves, and he had earned a staff....
"Oh," he realized. It was possible the knowledge of staves, with their magical focus gems, had been lost with Atlantis. A gap of thousands of years, at this point. Which he was going to have to remedy.
He summoned an illusion of Taliesin's staff, letting it rotate above the kitchen table. Myrddin stared at it, wide-eyed. "A master wizard's staff," Douxie said, recalling his own lessons on the subject, "is his most precious possession. It is made by a master for an apprentice who has earned their own mastery. A staff will focus your power, making it that much more effective. It can also store up your magic inside the focal gem, holding it ready for great feats, or times of direst need."
Myrddin licked his lips nervously. "What makes one ready for mastery?" he asked, his voice thin and reedy. But there was the faintest spark of covetousness in his eyes. Of wanting.
Avarice, Douxie thought, could make one want to live. So while he was normally unimpressed by that particular desire... in this case, he'd use the tools laid before him.
Douxie met Myrddin's pale blue eyes. "Mastery of magic is mastery of life. Of...." He waved his hand nebulously, trying to describe it. He hadn't understood when Merlin had explained it to him. Some days Douxie still wasn't sure he understood what mastery was. And if he didn't understand it, how could he describe it? But he had to try. "There are some who say that it is mastery of oneself. Of not simply reacting to life, but of shaping it."
"And you, Master Taliesin? What do you say?"
Douxie sighed and let the illusion vanish. "Mastery is doing the best you can. It's carrying the weight of the choices and mistakes you make. Not just for yourself, but of the consequences they have on others." My burden to bear. He wondered if Jim understood that yet, about Divine Kingship. That it wasn't just a power, but a burden.
He was not looking forward to the day that Claire realized consequences held more weight than mere guilt. If she chose to move so far into magery as to earn that mastery. She still might not.
Myrddin was silent for a moment. "You bear no staff," he observed.
Douxie sighed again. "It was lost," he admitted, "to time, to magic... to the consequences of a choice." He smiled wryly. "Perhaps some day I may have another staff."
"Even if there is no master to forge one for you?" Myrddin asked, astute.
Douxie shrugged. "Perhaps somewhere I will find another master. I haven't yet."
Or....
Oh, Douxie realized.
His mind reeled.
The Arcane Order had staves. Well, at least Bellroc and Skrael did, and he knew he'd seen ancient engravings of Nari with one as well, though she hadn't carried it by the time he'd known her. He wondered what had happened to it. How she'd lost it.
If she'd lost it in whatever event had led to her breaking paths with her siblings.
"There are a trio of primordial gods," Douxie managed, "called the Arcane Order. They are... not always friends of humanity. But neither are they always enemies." And he was pinning so much hope on the possibility that Bellroc and Skrael's minds might be able to be changed on that point. "Like wizards, they carry staves. It is theorized that they created the first master wizards, honing their craft and teaching them. Giving them staves, like their own, to signal their mastery."
If... Merlin of the past can't or won't grant me my staff this time around... could Nari? The idea felt breathless.
The thing about being the Trollhunter that Jim hadn't understood for a long time, was the hunting part of it. When he'd been fully human, it had been something that had been borderline impossible for him, muted as human senses were. After the Eternal Night, though, when he'd been a half-troll for months on end... well, Aaarrrgghh had started teaching him some more instinctive things that Blinky couldn't, and Draal hadn't been able to.
Things like, how to track something. Or someone. Or, in this case, several someones.
Jim crouched at the entrance to Trollmarket, the stone solidly sealed behind himself, and the horngazel tucked into his armor's subspace pocket. One hand rested on the ground as he closed his eyes, to block out the extraneous information that vision gaze him, and focused on the world of smell.
Gnomes had a particular smell, he'd learned. It wasn't unpleasant. Goblins' scent was spicier and made him want to sneeze if he got a big noseful of it. Trolls were, by and large, a warm-dusty kind of odor. It was possible, Aaarrrgghh and Blinky had both assured him, to distinguish between individual trolls by their aroma alone, like knowing a loved one by their footsteps, but Jim wasn't that good at parsing out the nuance yet. But for this, he didn't have to be.
A large number of trolls, some injured, heading... that way.
Jim's eyes snapped open.
He followed the scent trail, hunting.
"Yes, Nana, I'm sure," Toby said, walking back to Spanish class much more slowly than he'd left it. His amulet was tucked back into his pocket, and he twirled the hall pass in one hand, holding his cell phone against his ear with the other. "Download the Dog Fight game and start playing it. Get your chess friends to do it too. Yes, I'm very sure the fate of the planet is at stake." He listened for a moment more, until he was sure she'd opened the app correctly. "All right, I'm back at class. Love you, Nana!" Toby hung up and hummed, trying to think if there was any way they could get more people playing the game and attacking Morando.
He'd gotten what he could of the school playing it. Mary's work should have alerted all of Arcadia and a decent portion of the internet about it. They'd let Zoe know what to expect; she should have seen Mary's post and be trying to get HexTech off their asses. Trollmarket, unfortunately... was probably a lost cause. Those trolls who had phones tended to have landlines rather than cells. Probably, Toby thought, because landlines were slightly less likely to get absentmindedly munched as an expensive snack.
Sighing, he reentered Señor Uhl's classroom.
The lights flickered, then cut out.
Almost everyone paused, looking up at the ceiling.
"Power outage," Señor Uhl announced. "I'm sure it will be restored shortly. Keep working, everyone."
Since the school was a California school, and every classroom in it had big windows to the outside light, there weren't any sounds of classroom doors opening and students filling the halls. Nonetheless, Toby felt slightly unnerved as he set the hall pass down on Uhl's desk and retook his own seat.
Krel, too, had his eyes narrowed, even as his fingers never stopped tapping at his screen. "This feels suspicious," he said.
"Pfft, chill, Krel," Mary told him, her own digits moving even more rapidly than his. "It's a power outage. They happen. Deal with it."
"Yeah, at least it's not in summer," Steve agreed. "It sucks when it's over ninety and the air con cuts out."
"Especially while in gym class," Eli muttered. "Yes! Level seven!"
"What?" demanded Seamus. "No way. I'm beating your score, Pepperjack!"
"There are plenty of high scores to go around," Señor Uhl assured them. Then, "Ha! Level seven also."
Which was about when, just as he was about to level up, the hairs on the back of Toby's neck prickled up. A wave of energy - there really was no other way of describing it - blasted through the room. It ghosted harmlessly through people, desks, windows. But the projector sparked, as the did PA system, and every single cellphone in the room went dead.
Krel shot to his feet. "No!" he said, tapping frantically at the screen. "Nonono, not now!"
Mary had her own stream of unprintable cussing going on as she tried to reboot her device.
Uhl, standing now, arched an eyebrow at her. "Really, Miss Wang, this is neither the time nor the place--"
"This!" Mary said, brandishing her phone at him, "is magic! It should be protected from whatever cheap EMP device some jackoff just set off for lols and funsies!" She glared at her phone again. "But apparently it's not." Suddenly she paled. "Ohmigod, I wrecked my trainee phone, Zoe's going to kill me--"
"And this!" Krel added, still trying to work on his own phone, "is an Akiridion communicator! It should be able to withstand anything your pathetic planet's limited technology can come up with."
Aja, however, was staring at the ceiling. At the defunct fluorescent light fixtures. Her eyes were narrowed. "Little brother," she said slowly.
Krel whirled to glare at her. "What?!"
Aja swallowed. "I do not think," she said, "that blast emanated from a being of this planet."
Which was when low, cruel laughter sounded through the classroom.
Krel paled. "Tronos Madu..." he whispered.
Zadra slammed her hand down on the console. "No!"
"It is not enough," Izita reported from the other end of the galaxy, her own face tight with worry. "Not enough of the parking drones are attacking. General Morando's ship will leave the system any mekron now."
"Almost a quarter of all the 'players' have dropped out of Dog Fight," the Mothership reported. A holoscreen next to her icon plotted the global locations of players in red dots. A large number of the red dots, highly concentrated, suddenly vanished. "The missing players appear to be concentrated at the Arcadian educational penitentiary."
"Prince Krel's plan is not working." Izita's voice took on a tinge of desperation.
"Keep calm," Zadra told her. "Even if Morando breaks atmosphere, it will take him time to get here."
"Three point four delsons, by my calculations," Mother agreed.
Zadra nodded. "If needs be, the royals, Commander Vex, and I can deal with Morando here. And his distraction and distance will give you and the rest of the Resistance an opportunity to attack his positions of support on Akiridion-5."
Izita's mouth firmed up. "We will try," she vowed, her arm across her chest in a solemn salute. "We will not fail."
Zadra allowed a small smile to cross her face. "I know you will not," she told her unexpected sister-in-arms. "Keep up the fight. Zadra out."
The moment the connection was broken, she turned to the Mothership's icon. "What is happening at the high school that all the players have dropped out?"
"Unknown," Mother told her. "My attempts to contact the King- and Queen-in-Waiting's personal communicators have been ineffective. Local surveillance systems are also down."
Zadra's eyes narrowed. "Inform Commander Vex of the situation," she told the Mothership, already striding toward the exit. "I will go perform reconnaissance myself."
"Your staff," Douxie told Myrddin, the two of them having relocated to the hedgewizard's workshop, "will be attuned to you. It will help you channel the arcane powers of the universe. To do that, it must be attuned to you. Any wizard can use another's staff," he said, thinking of the Skathe-Hrun, and how both Claire and Angor Rot had wielded it, "but magic will be so much easier with your own. It will be like an extension of your arm."
Myrddin snorted. "A sword's that."
"I have known many talented swordsmen who speak truth to that statement," Douxie agreed. "And a wizard does wise to be a warrior as well, to save himself from, ah, more mundane threats, when discretion is needed." Having a very clever shapeshifter as a familiar also helped with that last bit, he thought. Though that was not something which would apply in Merlin's case. "Magic isn't, and can't be, the answer to all problems. At least not in a world where the majority of humans don't have any."
Myrddin's eyes were fast on Douxie's face. "You're saying I must study the blade as well."
"I'm saying you would be wise to," Douxie told him. "But for that, you must seek out other teachers. All I can offer you is magic."
"Magic," said Myrddin, "and the secrets of the universe."
Douxie inclined his head in agreement. "Just so. Now, to attune your staff to you, young Myrddin, the first thing we need to find is a focal gem which resonates with your magic. The rest will follow on from there." He waved his hand at the table, laden with a dozen gems, none of which was smaller than a teacup. As Merlin had/would do with him, once upon a time, Douxie invited, "Which one speaks to you?"
Myrddin studied the gems, eyes narrowed. His mouth tightened in a frown as his gaze moved from one gem to another, seeking. Finally, he shook his head. "None of them."
Douxie, who knew exactly which gemstone would form the heart of the Staff of Avalon, doubted this. "I have known precisely one master wizard's staff which did not have a focal stone," he said, "and to wield that one cost a heavy price. Are you sure?"
Myrddin's gaze snapped to him. "Tell me of it," the hedgewizard asked.
"It belonged to a woman skilled in shadowmancy," Douxie said, careful with his information. "Which may have been why it worked for her." His mouth quirked. "What use for a gem to refract light, after all, when her primary power was rooted in darkness? Though that said, I've no idea how her staff worked to store power without a gem to hold it. Or even if it truly did," he added thoughtfully. "She was very strong, unto herself. Perhaps she didn't need the extra reservoir. Or thought she didn't." All the shadowmancers Douxie had met were very strong. An idea to perhaps pursue later.
Or not. Two individuals is hardly a broad sample to draw conclusions from.
Myrddin's expression fell. "I've no talent for the shadows."
"Few of us do," Douxie agreed. He contemplated the younger wizard. "Do you think it's your associations with the stones that render them banal to anathematic to you? These gems that failed to heal your wife and son?"
Myrddin winced, flinching, but to his credit did seem to consider Douxie's words. After a moment he inclined his head. "Perhaps."
Well, fuzzbuckets, how was he to get around that hangup?
Douxie breathed, thinking. And then had an idea. When in doubt, go with Star Wars.
He placed his fingertips on Myrddin's eyebrows and gently dragged down, closing the man's eyelids. "Let go your conscious self," he said, shamelessly quoting Obi-Wan Kenobi. Well, the character's words were appropriate. "Your eyes can deceive you. Don't trust them. Stretch out with your feelings." He took Myrddin's hand in his and guided it over the table. Then, trusting that Myrddin would try again, Douxie let go.
Jim ran out of night before he ran out of Gumm-Gumms to track. Which was frustrating, but... well, at least for him, not fatal. He looked up at the thin sunlight filtering through the trees, and sighed. Before him stretched a wide-open plain. For a troll, crossing it at this time of day would be suicide.
But Jim had more tricks up his sleeve than the average Trollhunter. He sighed again, and concentrated.
A moment later, several inches shorter and decidedly more nose-blind, he stepped out of the shade of the trees and continued tracking his quarry. It was harder this way, of course, but he thought that might be part of the point. The Gumm-Gumms would have counted on their pursuers, if any, to be trolls, and would have chosen this wide open space and daylight to break their trail. Trolls wouldn't be able to cross here, would have had to wait until nightfall.
Jim didn't have to.
He was sure there was something there about the advantages of having a dual nature. Maybe that, he thought, was something he should talk about with Strickler, when he got home.
For now, though, he concentrated on following the physical tracks the Gumm-Gumms had left in their wake: flattened grass, broken twigs, scuffed earth. Trolls in a hurry were about as stealthy as elephants, which was to say, not very.
He flexed his hand, frowning at the pale silver sheen of his magitech armor. "I'm not going to be able to go back to Merlin like this," he muttered, remembering how big a process Douxie had made of, months back, of casting the invisibility spell on Jim's circlet. The wizard hadn't done anything nearly so involved this time, which probably meant that the illusion he'd cast on Jim's armor and self was a one-and-done thing, broken now. Because Douxie had made the armor look ivory, and not like it had an enchanted medallion, dripping with traces of Merlin and Douxie's magic, powering it. And if that illusion spell was broken, so, presumably, was the one that had made Jim look dark skinned and as unlike James Lake, Junior, as Douxie currently looked like Hisirdoux Casperan. Neither of them wanted Merlin - Myrddin - to get a glimpse of their true selves.
So Jim was on his own.
"At least I'm not in the Darklands this time," he muttered, and fell into the easy loping jog that he could keep up for hours.
He had troll children to rescue.
"No! Go left! LEFT!" NotEnrique shrieked, clinging to the rear horns of the askelrof, his backpack bouncing along behind him. Chompsky, holding fast to the front horns and therefore nominally in charge of the steering of the nine-legged demon-beast, said something very rude in Gnomish and flipped him off. He looked rather like a biker holding on to his hog's riser handlebars, intent on driving off a cliff in his effort to outrace their pursuit.
Chompsky, grinning wide with a mouth full of pointed teeth, dug a pair of freaking sunglasses out of nowhere and put them on, completing the impression of a biker.
Which was when the askelrof did in fact plunge down the face of a cliff, its pseudopods clinging to the sheer surface.
The two short heroes' mutual scream echoed in the air behind them, together with the aborted shriek of the nyarlagroth that had been chasing them. "Eff me for wanting to rescue kids!" NotEnrique yelled, his voice echoing.
"Electricity guy?" Toby demanded, taking a step back. He, Aja, and Krel stood back-to-back with one another, each of them nervously scanning the walls and ceiling.
"Mister Domzalski!" Uhl said, standing. "What is the meaning of this?"
"A bounty hunter," Krel replied before Toby could.
"Tronos Madu is an electricity based lifeform," Aja added. "We cannot defeat him."
"Crud, crud, crud," Toby said, mind racing. There was no sign of Tronos Madu in their classroom yet, but out the windows, he could see blue light flickering in one of the opposing rooms, then the next as the Voltarian searched the high school for the Tarrons. "Colonel Crazypants took him out last time. But we've already taken care of her!"
"Apparently that was a mistake," Krel admitted. His hand rubbed at his thigh, where Kubritz had stabbed him.
"We need Jimbo," Toby said. "We need the army, the military, the armed forces--"
"We are the armed forces," Aja told him, raising her serrator.
Oddly enough, that broke Toby's incipient panic. "We need the trolls," he realized, remembering how Tronos Madu had been completely unable to affect Aaarrrgghh.
"But how can we call them?" asked Krel. "Our phones are down."
"Uh, dude," said Steve, standing and pulling a crystal pendant out from under his shirt, "who needs phones when you've got magic?"
The three of them stared at him. "Wow, Steve," said Krel, blinking. "You are actually useful for once."
"My brilliant Palchuk," Aja beamed.
"I'm not sure I'd go that far," muttered Toby, "but yeah. What she said."
Miss Janeth had finally finished frowning at her defunct phone and reluctantly returned to the chalkboard to resume the interrupted lesson on matrices, when a blue flash exploded in her room and resolved into an armored alien who looked around at the students, his eyes sparking as he sniffed the air. "Tarrons," he muttered, and disappeared in another blue flash to the sound of screams.
Claire's eyes shot wide. She stood. "Excuse me, Miss Janeth!" she said. "I have to go." With a quick wave of her hand, Claire pulled a shadow portal around herself, focusing on the emotional anchor that was Aja-and-Krel.
I still wish I had my shadow staff!
Many things seemed to happen at once. Claire appeared in a whirl of purple-edged shadows, which made several students shriek in surprise. (Lame, thought Mary about her fellow students. After the whole debacle at the science fair, they should be used to magic by now.)
"There's a bounty hunter," Claire told the Tarrons, her eyes wide. "He was just in Miss Janeth's room--"
"We know. Tronos Madu," Krel interrupted her, his stance balanced, his eyes never stopping their scan of the ceiling lights.
"Our parents failed to send aid to the Voltarians during the war that destroyed their world," Aja said. "He bears a grudge."
"Yeah," Toby added, nodding. "He's not just your typical financially motivated bounty hunter--"
"Kleb!" Krel tackled the three of them to the ground as blue lightning lashed and resolved into something serious ugly right where they'd been standing.
The students' screams were even louder now.
"What is the meaning of this?" Señor Uhl demanded, taking a step forward. "This is a classroom, not some cosplay convention!"
The alien (Voltarian, apparently) turned to look at him, then turned away, clearly dismissing the teacher.
Darci, at her desk, tightened her fist around her pencil. Mary could practically hear her calculating whether or not she'd be able to get to the baseball bat that was strapped to the side of her backpack.
"Eat this!" Claire, still on the floor, flung a shadow portal at the bounty hunter.
He flickered and reappeared elsewhere, the portal going right through where he had been.
"What--?!" Claire demanded, staring.
"We will have a discussion later on how Voltarians move in the empty space between atomic components," Krel told her, pushing to his feet, holding his serrator before himself. "And how I am pretty sure that your portals use the same space to go between dimensions."
There was a hum to Tronos Madu, Mary thought, narrowing her eyes. She could hear it, in the same space that she "heard" electronics.
"Voltarians"... were they energy based beings?
Could technomancy work on them?
"Screw this!" Steve tore his panic button necklace over his head.
He smashed it against the edge of his desk, breaking the crystal.
Instantly Mary's necklace lit up, as did five others in the room. And presumably all the others in Douxie's magic web as well.
Tronos shifted to glare at Steve. "What game are you playing, human?" he demanded.
Steve whimpered, but stood firm as the bounty hunter took a step toward him.
"I can't say the thought of leaving fills me with anticipation," Waltolomew said. "Particularly not with Young Atlas still absent. But neither do I wish to leave this unknown variable at large." Particularly not one who, in their attempts at assassination, was willing to involve collateral damage. The loss of his car was one thing; what might have occurred to bystanders was, frankly, another. He shuddered to think of what might have happened if, say, he had been offering a neighbor a ride to work that morning.
Or Barbara.
Barbara's hand covered his. "I do understand, Walt," she said. Her smile was wry. "You and Jim are more alike than you think."
He gazed at her blankly.
"You're very responsible." She picked up her cup. "Especially when it comes to the safety of the people you've decided are yours."
Waltolomew blinked. After a moment, he had to chuckle. "You are very astute, my dear," he said, picking up his own cup. "I would never have thought to phrase it that way, but perhaps you're correct."
"What about the school?" Barbara asked. "The acting principal taking a leave of absence...."
"Hmm." He took a sip of his tea and set the cup back down. "Having thought about it, and having consulted a few of our resident time travelers... they assure me Uhl would make an exemplary principal. I've submitted his name to the board, with my recommendations and commendations."
Barbara blinked, her eyes going owlish behind her glasses. "That... surprises me," she confessed. "Not about Mister Uhl," she said, "but that you'd give up the position so easily."
The power, was in her words, but remained unspoken.
Waltolomew sighed. "I wouldn't have, once," he confessed. "But, to be honest, I prefer teaching to administrative work. I find I'm a different man than I used to be. A better one, I hope."
Her blossoming smile was all the assurance he needed. Barbara's hand covered his. "Walt..." she said, warmth in her voice.
The crystals that hung around each of their neck exploded with light, buzzing with urgency. An unmistakable sense that something was wrong at the school flared in Waltolomew's chest. And, he surmised by her shocked expression, Barbara's as well. "The kids," she said, standing. "We have to go--"
"Yes," he agreed, standing and turning. Something shot past his face, just missing.
Barbara cried out behind him, as the smell of iron-rich blood to burst to life.
Whirling, he saw Barbara fall to the ground, clutching her arm.
Bright red seeped past her fingers.
She'd been shot.