Multiverse of Magic & Mistakes (Completed)

2.1.8 Chapter 8

The Red Dunes, Ashein, 328 years ago.

The numbers of mages joining the Echelon was rapidly growing. Each new member ended up telling two or three others, who would all at some point nervously find their way into the storage room that had become their meeting place. Lissa had lost count of how many mages necklaces and bracelets and rings that she had modified by this point. There had been at least three or four at each meeting, and she had altered a record number of six necklaces last night. The modification spell was tricky and complex, and took a lot of her energy, but had got the process perfected and she cast it with east every evening, whilst the Echelon-member-to-be nervously watched on.

Lissa only faulted once, when a new young girl, very short with long dark hair and wide brown eyes anxiously handed Lissa her mages necklace. She had looked from the familiar coil of beads up into the girl's unblinking face and was hit with a flash of recognition, a memory of a conversation in the dark passageway behind the library, months ago now, that she tried hard to forget. Then she promptly shoved the thoughts from her mind and got to work on casting the un-limiting charm. Caeli's cousin waited patiently as she worked.

That night, she finally had a wonderful free evening. Calem and Reinard were teaching the new Echelon members a basic introduction to the master runes, and thus Lissa was excused. Her mother was working a late shift. The apartment was empty and so Lissa was making use of the time to practice her teleportation.

It was like a game. She started off with tiny items, a pen, a spoon, a shoe and then moved on to increasingly larger items. A pile of books, then a whole bookcase. She knew she could teleport almost anything, after her success with the desert rocks, but she needed to be better, quicker, more in control. She moved her bed into the living room and back again. She moved all the chairs into the bathroom, she teleported bowls and plates into artistic piles around her bedroom. The apartment was soon a complete disorganised mess.

She experimented, trying to see if teleporting larger items, or items over increased differences was slower, and required proportionally more power, as the scholars theorised, but teleporting was always instant, an item gone and reappearing elsewhere in a blink of an eye. Her watch was not capable of measuring such small increments of time. And there was not yet a way of measuring power expenditure, that the Echelon knew of. Lissa gave up, making a note to discuss watches and timing with Reinard tomorrow; perhaps the older mage would know how she could make such measurements.

Despite how busy things were with the growing Echelon, he would always take the time to help her out with whatever she was working upon.

Experiment resigned as a failure, Lissa moved on to creating portals. Portal magic was heavily restricted by the city councillors. Reinard claimed that they were worried that if folk got a taste of instant travel, then who would want to walk through the boiling, cramped passageways anymore. After successfully creating her first portal last week, and stepping directly from the familiarity of her bedroom, into the Echelon's meeting space, without sneaking along the undercity tunnels Lissa could see his point. Portalling was just so efficient, and easy. It would instantly catch on. Who the fuck were the city councillors to deny almost everyone of this privilege? Who were they to deny mages from finding out if they were even capable of conjuring portals or not? Who were they to enforce such restrictions on how the mages lived?

Lissa stood in the bathroom and focussed creating a portal to the living room, mere steps away, but she needed to work on her speed. Casting her first portal last week had taken pathetically long, even if it was stable and safe. She fixed the portal rune into her mind, its complex interlocking circles and concentric loops. She focused on the entrance location, directly in front of her, and the exit location just in front of the sofa, and willed the portal to appear.