Rangers magic 2, p.2
Ranger's Magic 2, page 2
A sad look flickered across her expressive face as she mentioned her growing up. She had been forced to leave her home village in a hurry when a raiding party of humans had destroyed it. The party had been led by none other than Malavax the red, the mage that Ralnor had destroyed in battle a few weeks ago. Malavax’s death had given her some level of closure on that sad episode in her life, but the scars of that pain would never completely heal for her.
“Now I’m the one thinking about the past,” she said, coming back to herself. “But you’re right, Ralnor. I’m sorry that you’re frustrated with the slow speed of your returning magic, but it has been good for me to have a chance to focus on training my own small capability for magic.”
“Demonstrate that hidden shield for us again,” Akhen suggested.
Lana concentrated for a moment, then looked up. “Right,” she said. “That’s it in place.”
There was no visible sign of the magic. “I’m going to try to detect the presence of the spell again,” Ralnor said. “I can feel that there is magic happening, but I can’t pin down my awareness of your specific spell. Just hold the magic steady for a moment, will you?”
“Okay,” Lana said, “but don’t get too annoyed if it doesn’t work!”
Ralnor glared at her, then couldn’t help chuckle at the mischief in her eyes.
Going through his regular preparation routine for magic, he grounded himself, feeling his feet against the earth and inhabiting his body fully as he opened himself up to the power of earth and the power of spirit.
You are the conduit between powers, the place where the power of the earth and the power of the spirit meet, he told himself. After a moment, a faint flow of spirit moved through him, flowing down through his body toward the ground. Moving ever so carefully, he allowed it through himself and steadied the flow, letting it fill him and spread around him, opening his awareness of the world up as he stood there. The presence of Lana’s shield spell became keener against his senses as he let the magic move through him.
“Good,” Akhen murmured, “that’s good, Ralnor!”
Ralnor kept his concentration focused on holding the flow of power steady. The magic was like a steady trickle of water into a bucket, where in the past he had channeled a raging torrent, but at least it was something.
“It is happening,” he agreed. “And it feels steadier than before.”
“Your magical channeling was overwhelmed by the power you wielded during the battle with Malavax,” Akhen said. “But now it’s returning. I can feel it too!”
Gently, Ralnor reached for the flow of magic, and to his delight, he found that it responded to his touch. As if he were carefully pouring liquid out onto a flat surface, he siphoned off some of the flow and channeled the magic out into the world.
It spread, slowly, almost reluctantly, but it spread. Exultation surged in his heart as he became aware of Lana’s spell more clearly and crisply than he had for weeks. He could sense its shape, its location, and could even see the thin tendril of connection that ran from the spell to Lana herself. He was about to surge forward, when his teacher’s voice held him back.
“Easy,” Akhen warned. “Don’t push the power. Have patience and let the process move at its own pace.”
The warning was timely. At this new success—more control than he had managed for weeks—Ralnor had felt the urge to press ahead and try to draw off more power from the channeling. He felt the flow of magic wobble for a moment, but on hearing Akhen’s words he made an effort of will to draw himself back from that temptation.
The channeling flow stabilized and continued its glacial spread out into the world around him.
“Ralnor,” Lana said quietly through the hissing of the rain. “Your channeling ring is glowing!”
He glanced at his right hand, now empty as he had sheathed his twin blades. She was right. The beautiful golden ring with its large red gemstone was glowing crimson, enclosing his hand in light as if he had been holding an ember.
“That’s the first time that’s happened since the battle,” Ralnor said with satisfaction. “We’re getting somewhere at last.”
The ring was an heirloom from his father, Parlax the mage. At the time of Parlax’s destruction, King Harald had taken the ring and kept it throughout all the long years, and when the time had come for Ralnor to awaken, Harald had made sure it went to the young lad, the only material link between Ralnor and his father.
He looked at it now and smiled. The band was made of three woven strands of thick gold, and the circular gemstone was held onto the bands with a circular gold casing. Runes, carved very small and very delicately into the metal, ran across the surface of each strand, and around the casing of the stone.
From the moment that his power had first manifested itself, Ralnor had been aware that the ring was a core part of his magical ability. As soon as he began to use magic, the red stone in the Ring glowed brightly. The color of its illumination ranged from the deepest crimson to the brightest scarlet, and Ralnor knew that the ring acted as a counterweight to the immense power of magic that was within him.
It balanced him, helping him to manage the powerful flow of energy that erupted in him when he successfully connected to the power of earth and the power of spirit and became the conduit between them both.
Or at least, that is what used to happen, he thought, somewhat bitterly.
“Concentrate!” Lana urged him. “I can see you getting distracted. Focus on your magic! It must be returning or your ring would not be glowing!”
She was right, of course. Ralnor gritted his teeth, then forced himself to relax and concentrate on his grounding to the earth.
It worked. The ring glowed more brightly, and Ralnor felt the magic moving through him like the humming note of a plucked harp string. With a speed that shocked Ralnor and made Akhen cry out in surprise as he also felt it, the magic surged up through Ralnor in a wave of power and spread out through the clearing.
A moment ago, Ralnor had been at the center of a slowly spreading pool. Now he felt that he was standing in the middle of a swirling vortex of magic.
And it was within his control.
“What happened?” Akhen cried, sounding amazed, delighted, and a little frightened all at the same time. “What did you do?”
“I’m not sure!” Ralnor exclaimed, “but the power is back!”
“Try to harness it and bring it to a focus,” Akhen instructed. “I want to see if it’s fully back or if it’s still volatile.”
Ralnor felt the sense in this. He worked to bring the magic down to a fine point, drawing out power from the flow and focusing it on Lana’s shield.
“I can feel the shield spell clearly,” he said. “I can reach out to it and…”
“Be careful!” Akhen warned at the same time that Lana shouted, “Go for it!”
Ralnor went for it.
He pulled up a surge of magical energy and transformed it into a force blast. Lana yelled out a cry of pure joy in the adventure of it all as her magical shield crackled into visible blue like a wall of flashing lightning protecting her body in a semicircle.
As the force hit her, Ralnor perceived the nature of her magic. It was an excellent piece of work. When at rest, it clung tight to her body, running over the outside of her armor or clothing and clinging to any parts of her that were not covered, as close as a second skin.
But the spell also had the capacity to expand in proportion to the amount of force that struck it. When he had tapped the shield with his sword earlier on, it had crackled into life to defend against the strike of the blade, but it had not moved away from her body. The shield had been acting then as an augmentation to her Ranger armor rather than a replacement. Now that he struck it with a full frontal force blast, the shield moved away from her body and expanded out, redirecting the force around her at a distance of at least four feet in every direction.
The environment in her immediate vicinity was not so lucky. As Ralnor’s force blast hit, the muddy ground around Lana was churned up and thrown backward as if in the face of a hurricane. Stones, branches, mud, and wet leaves were all picked up and hurled away from the blast. The rain, which was still falling heavily, was mixed in with the chaos and thrown backward.
Akhen gave an inarticulate shout as the unexpected force blast created a reverberating shockwave in the clearing. Even though Akhen was not in the direct path of Ralnor’s force blast, he was caught up in the impact of the shockwave. His umbrella flew out of his hand and was carried off into the trees, and Akhen himself stumbled a few steps and then fell backward into the mud. A flight of startled birds, that had been resting in the surrounding woods, lifted up out of the swaying treetops in a cloud of dark wings with a chorus of frightened cawing.
The rush of joy and satisfaction that filled Ralnor in that moment of regaining some of his old power was not enough to stop him from being concerned for his old friend and mentor. Seeing Akhen tumble backward, Ralnor realized that it was time to reign in this demonstration.
Lana’s eyes met his, and he saw in their dark, polished opal depths the immense pride and satisfaction that she felt in this moment, not only in her own achievement of this immensely powerful shielding magic, but also in him for remaining patient and trying hard to regain his strength. Through the blue crackling haze of her shield lightning, she smiled at him and nodded her head.
The ability to utilize great power once again had been hugely satisfying, but Ralnor found it equally satisfying to be able to cut off the flow of magic to the spell quickly as well. Magic, he knew, was not just about being able to expend power; it was also about being able to control it, and that meant knowing when to stop.
“Akhen,” he said, hurrying over to where his teacher was struggling to get up out of the mud. “Are you alright? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to knock you over like that!”
“Just as well for you!” the old fellow replied grumpily. “Happy as I am to see you manifest your power again, I am not certain that it compensates me for a mud bath.”
Ralnor could not help but laugh. He saw the pride and satisfaction that glowed in Akhen’s eyes and in his smile even as he covered it with feigned annoyance. Reaching out, Ralnor grabbed Akhen’s right hand and pulled him to his feet.
“Curse this mud,” Akhen growled. “And my umbrella! You young rogue, look what you’ve done with my umbrella!”
“Let me try to use my force magic to retrieve it,” Ralnor replied humbly. The umbrella was stuck high up in a tree, way out of reach of any of them.
“Allow me,” Akhen said. “I think I would rather do it myself, after seeing that display of yours.”
Muddy and disheveled, Akhen stomped across the rainy, mucky clearing, grumbling as he went. Around them, the high, dark pines that were the most common tree in the area around Rayne’s Outpost loomed over the clearing, swaying in the wind, their deep green needles dripping with the rain. The few smaller deciduous trees that flourished on the edge of the clearing, oaks and ashes for the most part, were beginning to lose their leaves as the late summer passed and fall approached.
“That was great,” Lana said, resting a hand on Ralnor’s arm as they watched their mentor extend a controlled tendril of force magic up to the tree to free his trapped umbrella.
“Your effort was great as well,” Ralnor said.
“How do you know that’s not what I was talking about?” Lana teased.
Ralnor punched her playfully on the arm.
Their relationship had been a little strange for a few days after the battle. Ralnor had been ill, and had kept to his bed, drifting in and out of sleep. Lana had cared for him, and he had often been aware of her sitting by his bed, reading one of her books, or gazing thoughtfully out of the small window of his room.
In the weeks and months before the battle, they had become close. She was a beautiful elf, strong and capable, and he could not help admiring her. He had learned that his admiration was returned during the tense hours in the night before the battle. They had held each other, and had almost kissed, but they had been interrupted and had never picked up that thread of romance.
Ralnor was not sure how he felt about that. On the one hand, she was still very attractive to him, but on the other hand he was keenly aware that romantic entanglements between the Rangers were highly discouraged, and that following up those feelings might well interfere with their training. So, he was content for the moment to let their relationship continue as close friends and squad members.
From her actions in the weeks since the battle, he guessed that she was content with that situation too.
“I can see the magic tendril Akhen is using!” Ralnor realized, coming back to himself from his reverie. “At first, I took it for granted, but of course that’s unusual! My magic sensing has not been anywhere near so acute up till now!”
“Excellent,” Lana said. “You are really coming back to yourself.”
Ralnor smiled as he watched his old mentor lowering the umbrella from its trap in the tree by means of a fine tendril of magic. To Ralnor’s newly reawakened magical awareness, the tendril appeared like a thin white line of dense mist that extended up from Akhen’s raised hand and wrapped like a tentacle around the base of the umbrella’s handle.
Without thinking too much about what he was doing, Ralnor allowed his spreading magical awareness to extend beyond the perimeter of the clearing, past Akhen, and out among the trees. The sensation of being able to do this once more was incredibly satisfying, and he enjoyed it for its own sake as he guided more power out from himself and into the surrounding area.
He was aware of all the life in the woods around them. His magical sensing bumped against all the different kinds of life, flowing out around them and showing him the shape. He felt the deep, slow, green life of the older trees, the swift moving, bright sparks of the smaller birds and of the little creatures that scurried through the undergrowth, and the slower, wiser presences of the larger birds. A fox was a brushstroke of sly cunning as it hunted a little ways off, and the thoughtful presence of a bear looking for running fish on the river was a deep note of watchfulness.
The life of the wood was all around him, and through it all there ran the presence of spirit, that strange, unformed power that had remained in the world as the permanent legacy of the great Sundering.
That spirit was the source of his own power, as well as being part of the curse that had troubled the world for so many years after the cataclysm. Spirit caused strange effects on the environment around it, and could turn innocent animals, trees, plants, and even people into raging monsters. These days, the effects of spirit were much more benign, but its continued presence acted as a constant reminder of the ancient days.
For a moment, Ralnor reflected on the Sundering and the presence of spirit in the world, and then his awareness bumped up against something that was neither tree, nor bird, not spirit.
It was no kind of woodland life at all.
“Lana,” he said urgently, “there is someone in the woods, just north of here, out beyond the edge of the clearing.”
“Someone?” she replied. “What kind of someone? What do you mean?”
“A person,” he said. “I cannot tell if it is human, elf, or something else, but it is masking its presence with magic. I can feel the shape of its masking spell. There is a sorcerer in the woods, not far off, and whoever it is, they are getting closer!”
Chapter 2
“Akhen,” Ralnor hissed as his mentor approached them. “Do you feel the presence of the person in the woods? Over that way?” He pointed in the direction from which Akhen had just come.
“Be careful,” Akhen replied. “Whoever is in the woods is using skillful masking techniques to hide their identity. You do not know what other powers they may have. Use your Ranger abilities to find them, rather than relying on your magic. Relying too heavily on your magic gives your enemy the opportunity to attack you that way. You must always learn to use every ability you have to your advantage. Here, you have the ability to track an enemy through woodland territory without opening yourself up to magical attack.”
His mentor seemed less concerned by the potential threat than Ralnor had expected, but he nodded, taking the lesson on board. In truth, he was happy to rest his magical abilities for the moment. That force blast had taken a lot out of him, and part of him had been shocked by the sheer force of the newly reawakened power. Detecting and tracking the specific location of life forms, especially of magic users, was a task that required fine control, and he was not sure that he was ready to undertake a task requiring that level of control just yet. He wanted to practice more before relying on that.
“Draw your magic shield in tight around yourself,” he said quietly to Lana. “And I will do the same with my magical awareness. Akhen is right, I am not quite ready to rely on my magical senses to locate an enemy. We will keep our magic in reserve and concentrate on our Ranger skills to locate this intruder.”
“I will shield myself here,” Akhen said. “You will not see me, but be assured that I will be ready to come to your aid if required.”
With that, there was a rippling of white and blue light around Akhen, and Ralnor and Lana were amazed to see the old fellow vanish from sight completely. As Akhen disappeared, Ralnor felt the unique magical signature of his mentor disappearing from his magical awareness as well. Akhen’s power at masking his presence was so highly developed that it was as if their teacher had never been there in the first place.
“Amazing,” Lana whispered, looking at the place where Aiken had been but a moment before. Then she turned toward the edge of the woods. “Come on, let’s see what this new threat may be.”
Together, they moved across the clearing in the direction where Ralnor had sensed the intruder. Ralnor drew his magical awareness in close around himself, but he took a general direction of north-northeast for the location of the intruder.
