Dark mind, p.1
Dark Mind, page 1
Dark Mind, Fall of Magic Book Two
Copyright © 2022 Val Neil
Living Relic Press
All rights reserved.
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No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by US copyright law.
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Editing by The Blue Garret
Cover Illustration by Warm Tail
Sensitivity Reading (partial) by Amber Williams
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Ebook ISBN: 9781955075046
Paperback ISBN: 9781955075053
Hardback ISBN: 9781955075060
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
www.valneil.com
This book is dedicated to the fans who aggressively recommended Dark Apprentice to anyone who would listen, tagged me in their fan art, and posted reviews.
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You know who you are.
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Thanks for keeping me motivated during an otherwise dark time.
CONTENTS
Obligatory Reminders
Author Notes
1. Heat
2. America
3. Confirmation Bias
4. Hypotheses
5. Yoxtl’s Bargain
6. Kindness and Grace
7. Persistence
8. Sensitivity
9. Puppets
10. Strange Encounters
11. Missing
12. Exposed
13. Wheels
14. Hysteria
15. The Man with the Checker
16. Intractable
17. Infantilized
18. Orbitoclast
19. Rocket Surgery
20. Magusmania
21. Leadership
22. Home on the Range
23. Accommodations
24. Barriers
25. Rise and Shine
26. Tapped Out
27. Beige
28. Complications
29. Hunger
30. Shadows
31. Turkish Delight
32. Impulse
33. Clackity Clack, Grandmother’s Back
34. Rituals
35. Branks
36. Not His Kink
37. An Attempt Was Made
38. Verification Needed
39. Results
40. 24th Street
41. Intervention
42. Shared Trauma
43. Unity
44. Requests
45. Demands
Author Notes
OBLIGATORY REMINDERS
The Major Players
Nikolai: Psychopathic wannabe dark wizard, natural-born telepath, too horny for his own good. Medea’s apprentice. Reasonably accurate portrayal of Antisocial Personality Disorder (psychopathy) confirmed by psychologist and multiple people with ASPD.
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Medea: Immortal autistic bookworm with a special interest in magic and kicking ass. At home in her element and a hot mess everywhere else. Currently training Nikolai. Accurate portrayal of autism because the author is autistic.
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Yoxtl: Furloughed trickster spirit, will work for souls. Pronouns are yit/yitself when inside its point of view. Has the ability to teleport to known locations (or people, via a blood link). Can choose who sees and hears it, and whether to be corporeal.
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The Magic
Spells take three things to cast: mana, will, and focus.
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Mana is like magical energy, and the amount of mana a spell takes is directly proportional to the amount of energy expended. (Except when it’s not. Don’t come at me with numbers. I didn’t enjoy physics in college, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to do the math for every spell now. Just understand this isn’t Star Wars—the size of the object moved does matter.)
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Will is the caster’s commitment to action.
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Focus is the caster’s ability to concentrate and see precisely what they wish to happen.
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Magi are people born with enough inherent mana to cast spells. They can increase their natural mana pool by casting spells, just as an athlete can increase stamina or strength through training.
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Mundanes are people born below this threshold. Most are unaware magic exists.
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Witches are people who get their mana from a spirit in exchange for their soul (upon death). However, Mundanes often apply this term to anyone who uses magic.
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Spirits are conscious beings made of magic.
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Gateways are magical portals connecting distant places together. Medea has a hub of them on her island.
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There is much more, but Medea goes into great detail in Dark Apprentice and I’m not going to repeat everything here.
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The Story Thus Far
Reminders of major events in Dark Apprentice take place within the book itself, in the form of mini-flashbacks (you know, those paragraphs you skim over if you’re binging). I’m planning on this being a long series, though, so I will probably end up using this place for more detailed recaps in later books.
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If you missed the bonus epilogue for Dark Apprentice, you can grab it here.
AUTHOR NOTES
Yes, there are author notes at the beginning and the end now.
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This book nearly broke me. Both because I had to split it and because it covers heavy topics like racism and mental health treatment (or what passed for it) in 1957. While not historical fiction, the series is based in the real world, which is an objectively shitty place to live depending on who you are. To say this book strained my own mental health is putting it mildly. I had to stop many times during my research because it was so upsetting. I will never cease to be devastated at the casual horrors humans inflict on one another. It didn’t help that I was doing revisions during a global pandemic or that certain news stories mirrored scenes I’d written—things that shouldn’t still be happening today but most decidedly are.
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I’ve always intended for the series to overlap with historical social issues, so I got a little concerned when readers praised Dark Apprentice for not taking itself too seriously. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of humor in Dark Mind, but it is dark fantasy and certain parts are intentionally uncomfortable. There are the things you expect: swearing, violence, murder, gore, and body horror. But there is also sexism, racism, homophobia, and ableism (as usual, written to be accurate). Perhaps someday I will write cozy fantasy, but today is not that day.
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Special thanks to all my beta readers, but particularly Kakwasi, who generously donated her time to help ensure that my portrayals of Black characters and their experiences in the 1950s were accurate, and to Jem for doing the same with regard to the Black disabled autistic experience.
1
HEAT
Nikolai landed hard on the smoldering ground. Something burned, but it wasn’t the grass. A tendril of flame snaked up his lapel. He smothered it with his hand and discarded the coat.
“Why must you overdress for everything?” Medea stood a ways away, a ball of fire dancing from one hand to the other.
“This is perfectly acceptable casual wear. See? No tie. If it offends you, I can take everything off.”
A fireball winged toward him. He rolled away, then sprang to his feet and replaced his shield. It was barely up before the next bolt hit. Even with his heels dug in, the force pushed him back several inches.
Heat radiated through the shield. Water. He needed water. Medea had intentionally chosen a location far from lakes and streams to practice combating pyromancy. At first, he’d tried to summon water, as he did with food, but Medea had tsked and told him to try something else. Lately she’d doubled down on insisting he be more creative in solving problems, discarding his first and sometimes his second ideas.
Conjuring water hadn’t yielded nearly enough. His meager attempts turned to steam and dissipated. Conjuring, unlike summoning, made use of whatever was in the vicinity, and the air was simply too dry.
He shot a spell from behind his shield, not really aiming, just trying to buy himself time to look around. A fine layer of white gravel covered the dry earth, reflecting the intense midday sun. What little vegetation dotted the landscape was yellow and parched. No water there. A small grove of trees stood in the distance. Would they hold enough moisture?
Fire kissed his toes. He yelped and danced backward. It had been two years since he began training with Medea, and he still couldn’t launch projectile spells from any point other than his own body. She’d told him to keep practicing, that it would come, but in the meantime, he was forced to use a partial shield, one that left several body parts exposed, a weakness Medea consistently exploited.
“It’s not good to stay in one spot for too long!” she called out, conjuring a flaming lasso and sending it hurtling in his direction.
He tried to move, but he was too late. The lasso encircled him, shield and all. Pain seared his unprotected back. He slashed apart the lasso and bolted for the grove.
Blood pounded in his ears. As soon as he reached the trees, he started drawing water f rom the foliage into the space between his hands. Leaves browned and fell like rain. When all the leaves had been drained, he had an orb with enough water to counter a single fireball. It wouldn’t make a difference in the onslaught he knew was coming.
Medea strolled toward the grove at a leisurely pace, as if she were simply enjoying the countryside. When she reached the trees, her eyes fell to the ankle-deep mass of leaves.
She shook her head. “That was a mistake.” With a flick of her wrist, the carpet of dried leaves burst into flame.
He spun the orb about himself, encasing his body in a thin film of water, and tore from the grove, flames licking at his heels. He crested a small hill and flung himself down the opposite side, out of Medea’s line of sight.
He was missing something. Medea was forever lecturing him about tackling problems from a new angle. Water was the obvious counter to fire. What was less obvious?
Regular fire needed fuel to burn, but magical flames could be conjured at will and hurled through the air. Magical fire might not need fuel, but it was a fair bet it still required oxygen.
Back over the hill, Medea had just left the inferno. Ash and embers swirled around her. Already her palms were filling with fire. A year ago, he wouldn’t have recognized it for what it was—pure spectacle, a handicapping of her abilities for his benefit, as he’d once done for his sparring partners. She could unleash fire instantaneously, but then he’d never be able to dodge or block, and he’d never learn.
He focused on the air in front of him, willing out the oxygen. The fireball would extinguish before hitting. Sweat beaded his brow. The necessary focus was like nothing he’d ever experienced before. His chest hurt with the effort.
As the first fireball hit the oxygen-free zone, it winked out. The pain in his chest was excruciating now. He ignored it, holding his focus as the second fireball approached. Instead of winking out, the fireball grew dim. Everything was getting dim. He had to focus just a little longer! The fireball extinguished, and the world went black.
“. . . Nikolai . . . Nikolai!”
Someone called his name from far away. His head pounded. A hazy red shape hovered above him—Medea?
He sat up and the world spun. A firm hand pushed him back down.
“Not yet.” Medea knelt beside him. Christ, how many times had he been unconscious around her?
“What happened?” He rubbed his eyes with his palms, stars adding chaos to his vision. Memories came back slowly—pyromancy . . . trees . . . he had tried to stop a fireball.
“You blacked out. When you suffocate fire, take better care not to suffocate yourself as well.” She sounded amused.
He groaned. So that’s why his chest had hurt. He should’ve left a small region of oxygen near his face. He’d been so focused on pushing it all away that he hadn’t realized his error.
“Didn’t you feel it?” she asked. “You almost drowned twice. I should think you’d be used to the sensation.”
“I felt it. I just ignored it.”
“Pain is the body’s way of saying—”
“—that something is wrong. I know, I know.”
Medea helped him sit up. “Heal yourself.”
He turned his focus inward and urged his body to heal. She’d taught him little else the past year. He could now heal surface wounds with minimal scarring, mend bones, even regrow limbs, though the latter took far too long to be practical in combat. Grievous injuries were still a challenge, especially if they involved internal organs—he was no good with those—and the small details, what Medea called “fine work,” eluded him completely. She could glance at someone and instantly know their ailments but couldn’t adequately describe half the things she did, working from some intuition he lacked. The body simply spoke to her in a way he couldn’t perceive. When he failed to grasp the fine work, she’d been unable to hide her disappointment.
“I’m not sure my healing is doing anything.”
“It’s not. Here.”
The world came into sharp focus.
“Can you stand?”
He tried his legs and nodded. Getting up proved harder than anticipated. Once on his feet, he felt like a gentle breeze might knock him over.
“Come on. I’ll support you.”
He began to walk, and a magical force steadied him. Medea never did by hand anything that could be done with magic. Even if that weren’t the case, an arm around him would have been too familiar. She set a brisk pace toward the gateway, the force nudging him along as she lectured.
“You did quite well at the end there, despite your blunder. However, you missed a very bountiful resource at your disposal—earth. It can be used to smother fire, blind your opponent, block attacks. Even if you have nothing else at your disposal, remember you always have that.”
They arrived at the gateway—a space between two massive boulders. Medea, with her slight frame and short stature, slid through easily. Nikolai ducked his head and turned sideways to shimmy through the opening but got stuck.
“Why must you hide your gateways in the most enclosed spaces?”
“Why must you keep complaining about it?”
He sucked in his stomach and pushed against the rough granite, nearly tumbling into the gateway room. He grasped the center table to steady himself, then reached back and yanked out the peg marking their location, depositing it in the box.
“You going up to your room to juggle oranges?” he asked.
Every afternoon she retired to her room. When he’d begun his apprenticeship, he’d imagined she was doing all sorts of sordid things up there, most involving black magic and draining his youth to keep herself young. That hadn’t turned out to be the case, and while he now knew he could just ask and get an answer, it was far more entertaining to postulate increasingly outlandish theories. Sometimes he got a laugh from Medea. Today she rolled her eyes.
“No oranges. I did want to talk to you before retiring though.” Medea took a steadying breath, as she always did before saying something important or launching into a lecture. “I’ve decided you’re ready to begin telepathy training.”
Yes! He kept his face impassive. He’d spent a year boiling water and stacking stones and getting his ass kicked in sparring sessions. All Useful, but not what he craved. Telepathy though—that was a talent he was born with. Medea’s library was filled with books written by mages trying to acquire a tenth of the power he naturally possessed. With Medea’s aid, he could become the most powerful telepath who’d ever lived.
“We will be training in America, so I’d like you to take a few days to adjust to the time difference.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said hurriedly. “We can start tomorrow.”
Medea balked at the suggestion. “Well, I need to adjust.”
“It’s okay, no need to apologize. I know at your advanced age you probably need lots of rest and—ow!” He rubbed his arm. “Must you attack me?”
