Book 3 - Chapter 3: Mother and Daughter

++I found it hard to get along with other women after my rebirth, and this was only partly because of the contempt they often had for my perceived deviance. They were just…boring.++

- From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, ‘The Great Lich’. 1,891 A.E.

I slept well that night, as people sleeping on three hundred year-old, antique luxury beds tended to do. My dreams were great bastions of torture and horror, cacophanies of misery as the most hideously immoral experimentation the world had ever seen befell helpless victims bound to do nothing but accept it. Naturally, such pleasant dreams awoke me with a smile on my face, and I found that, though it was early in the morning and I had not gotten much sleep, I felt as refreshed as ever.

I slithered out of my bed and got dressed shortly, deciding that I would do my day’s magical practice in the garden and beneath the sun.

The Vornholt estate’s grounds are large. Very large. Were there two armies of roughly five thousand men suddenly marching through the area near Lachfel, they may well have been able to fight each other within my family’s lands and not even use up all the room.

This meant there was more than enough for me, and I did enjoy being around such undiluted nature. The millennia had changed much about me, but a love for natural things was not one of them. At my core, I was in some ways still that young boy born into the wilderness of Irucci. I still liked it when birds sang, breezes blew and the sun shone.

And now, in this life, I was powerful enough to relax and enjoy such things without being abruptly beaten to death.

“Oh, there you are darling,” my mother’s voice rang out. I hid the instinctive groan it inspired in me and turned to see her taking a seat on one of the numerous benches littering our grounds. She, clearly, was enjoying the weather too, and dressed to soak in as much of it as possible. “I was wondering where you’d gotten to, none of the servants knew where you were. You just disappeared from bed, as they tell it.”

That was intentional. I do not like my position being known, when avoidable. Partly as a precaution against murder, and partly because knowing where I am empowers people to converse with me.

“I wanted some fresh air,” I replied, gesturing around me. “The garden is lovely at this time of year.”

My mother’s eyes twinkled, like they always did when the fruit of her own labours were being discussed. “It most certainly is, if I do say so myself,” she giggled. “Those roses were especially difficult to transport here, they only grow in certain soils and I had to source that, too.”

She was probably hoping to impress me, and she was, in a way. I could appreciate that there was some level of planning and skill involved in creating so complex and controlled an ecosystem, even with the countless hands labouring to execute her design.

But I was also painfully aware of how much quicker a start in the oil industry I would be enjoying if this material wealth had been saved up for that instead.

“You’re also practising magic?” my mother asked me. I was surprised that she had figured that out, though perhaps I should not have been. I practised magic enough that it would be a luckier guess to correctly deduce I was not honing my powers at any given moment.

“Correct,” I told her, eying her from the side of my vision to see her face fall.

It did not. She had either adjusted to my proclivities, and accepted that I would continue doing this decidedly un-ladylike passtime, or had simply become very good at politely pretending not to care.

“As you were then,” she smiled politely, though turned her eyes away from me and rather pointedly studied the flowers.

The latter, then.

That was fine by me either way, whether she was accepting or tolerant it did not change the end result that I actually desired—not being interrupted while I worked. With her silent, I was able to continue straining my Vessel just enough to coax it into more of its continued growth.

A few dozen vis a day, still. I was growing easily twice as fast as I had in my first life, though I was not foolish enough to think that this would, on its own, make me any more capable of besting the Gods, even if I was able to live another life as long as my first and hone my powers for all that time. My raw power was to a God’s as the weight of an ant was to a human. Doubling that was simply a rounding error from their perspective.

Hours trickled by before I had pushed myself as far as I needed to, then I turned my attention to more technical training.

It was a careful act, balancing my mana expenditure. If I used too much in raw magic training, then I would be limited in how much I could exert to practise with more fine manipulations. Use too little and I would be growing in raw strength less quickly than I could. The margin of error was almost nonexistent, a fraction of a percentage point. Like lifting sand-covered weights while calculating the exact count of grains clinging to each one.

So far, having done this for years now, I was yet to make a mistake. I did retain some advantages from my past as Lord Dread.

“What are you doing now?” my mother asked. I turned to her, frowning with genuine surprise.

“Why do you ask me that?”

She paused. “You’re…I mean to say, you’ve finished your magic training, right?”

“Did you just feel my mana stop flowing?” I asked her.

My mother hesitated again, going suddenly red. “I just…I just got the feeling it had,” she said weakly.

“That is remarkable,” I told her. “No wonder Victoria, Agrian and myself are as gifted as we are.”

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“That does not come from me,” she snapped. The venom in her eyes and voice surprised me for a moment, but only a moment. I was so impressed with her instinctive sense for mana that I had briefly forgotten what she thought of it. One glance at that expression, so eerily similar to the one my tribe had given me before the stones flew, and I was reminded where we stood.

“I’m sorry,” my mother said after a moment. “Isabel I really am, I’m…you know this is still…difficult for me.”

I was only half-listening, more concerned with the actually useful act of honing my magic than I was with whatever babbled excuses my mother would make between now and repeating her behaviour later.

“What are you working on?” she asked me. That did give me pause, she had not shown interest before.

“I…do not think you will be interested,” I replied.

“Well, I’m asking,” she insisted. “And it’s polite to give your mother an answer when she asks you a question.”

I quickly calculated that surrendering and telling her would be, if only slightly, less annoying than continuing to argue.

“I am trying to learn how to fly,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“To use mana to suspend myself off the ground while—”

“No,” my mother cut in. “I understand the concept. What has me baffled is that you seemed to think I wouldn’t be interested in you learning how to fly.”

“Was I…mistaken?” I asked her, turning to look fully at my mother now.

“Yes!” she gasped, a hand to her head. “By the Gods, Isabel, this is why I’ve always said you’re both my smartest and stupidest child. Sometimes I really do wonder how you get on in life.”

I decided to ignore that remark, this conversation was already not going the way I had planned.

“Fine,” I sighed. “Then just watch.”

With my mother quieting down, I was finally free to focus my glorious intellect on the practical task at hand. It was at once simple, and horribly complicated

I could not just levitate myself up into the air, as I might an object of aether. For one thing, I was not made of my own aether and lacked that instinctive magical connection that let me manipulate my constructs so easily. That meant that using magic to lift myself was already more complex and concentration-demanding.

On the other hand, if I possessed the magical dexterity to do this anyway, I would still need to deal with being my own target. If I nudged a rock slightly too far to one side while lifting it, nothing would happen. If I did that to my own body, my body would spasm, jerk one way and the other as muscles instinctively fired off to correct their balance. My aim would be ruined, causing me to tilt more, making more spasms, worsening the tilts.

I had already learned through experience that it resulted in something less like a controlled hover and more like a violent and full-body seizure. Not especially useful.

If I transformed back into Lord Dread, and exposed my ancient power to the world, I could do this easily, just by using brute dexterity. It did not matter if I needed to make a thousand minor adjustments every second, I could do that without even being distracted.

My secondary Vessel, though, was not as well trained, not yet. So if I wanted to fly as Isabel Vornholt, I needed to be somewhat cleverer with my technique.

I ended up coming up with a possible solution only thanks to the new, modern magical and scientific theory I had been absorbing since my rebirth. And it seemed promising.

A complex spell matrix was woven around me, similar to the magic-banishing effects I had seen used to counter magician-killers. This one was not made to counter mana itself, but rather to banish the effects of gravity.

The matrix had to be made flexible and bound to my body, following my silhouette tightly to ensure that parts of my body did not suddenly regain their weight if they moved too far, and to keep me from unknowingly levitating any debris that drew too close.

This was far, far easier said than done, even for me. It took me the better part of ten minutes to finally finish just my first iteration.

My mother’s gasp was almost as quick as the feeling of weightlessness, then my body began drifting upwards. I must have jerked my feet slightly, because, although I was not applying any kind of upward force with magic, I continued to slowly quiver further into the air for several feet in the next few seconds. Air resistance would slow me eventually, but with gravity taken out of the equation my momentum was carrying me high indeed.

I looked around at the garden and smiled.

“That is step one,” I told my mother.

I expected more awe from her, but instead I saw only worry.

“Get down Isabel!” she yelled, on her feet now like one of my limbs had fallen off and she was hastily preparing to stick it back on.

“I am fine,” I assured her. “This spell is—”

“You’re ten feet in the air, get down!”

It was closer to seven feet, but I did not think pointing that out would do anything to counter her clearly-irrational fear.

No. Instead, I had another idea.

“Join me,” I suggested. My mother froze like I had aimed a gun at her.

“I can’t,” she said.

“Yes you can. Nobody is watching, we are alone. And I am in control. Do you trust me?”

My mother took a few more moments to stare at me in silence. Then a smile slowly broke across her features. She held out her hand for me to take, and I did.

It was easier to cover her in the spell matrix than it was myself, mainly because I gave up on discriminating with it and just expanded it to envelope us both and everything within a few inches of our skin. In moments Elizabeth Vornholt was drifting up alongside me, tugging me down slightly as we bobbed and jerked weightlessly in the air before slowly equalising.

It happened slowly, but inexorably. Years of aristocratic conditioning and deeply-ingrained knowledge of what was appropriate and proper ground against the sensation of levitation, and soon enough all that propriety caved in. My mother started squealing with laughter.

A few moments later, I was growing tired. My mana had already been heavily depleted by training, and this new spell matrix was…inefficient. For now. I set us both down carefully.

My mother was still laughing, and it took her almost as long to stop as it had taken me to ease away the spell. “That was…something,” she said at last. I felt a flutter of pride. I am still, ultimately, a human. And I am not immune to having my work appreciated by another, however lowly and ignorant they are.

“I told you it was safe.”

That sobered here. “You’re not to show Victoria this, understand?” she said urgently.

“Okay.”

“Promise me, Isabel, I mean it. You know she’ll try to copy this herself. Do you trust her to do it safely?”

I hesitated. “...That is a fair point. I give my word I will not show Victoria this.” It would be unjustifiably inconvenient if my younger sister ended up dying in some ridiculous accident trying to fly.

My mother relaxed even more upon hearing my promise, and the smile returned to her face as she looked up to the spot we had just been hovering in. She seemed to be picturing herself back up there, even now. Swaying slightly like her body was still caught in the phantom throes of levitation.

“It’s almost like riding a horse,” she whispered.