supremacy

[ertia]

Kithabel wants to be a sorceress.

She's very precocious with dabs of householdy magic, like what her mother does when there's the right amount of work for this to be faster or easier or the only way - rescue an overcooked roast or dust a whole room without missing spots or make sure flies find other places to be than their apartment. These things are only a matter of a few minutes' want. Want the roast to be perfect and rare in the middle and tender - want the room freshly clean and unsneezeworthy - want those pesky bugs gone gone gone. Anyone can do it. Kithabel's fast, maybe, and starts early - most four-year-olds don't have that much concentration - but this is not exceptional, and it is not, really, sorcery.

There are ordinary people, who do only that, and only now and then; these people have no particular name. And then there are people who do magic fairly often, who put up buildings or perform for audiences or heal the sick. Those are specialists, who work the same power, want and concentrate on and need the same thing so much that it makes a home in their bones and learns the way they breathe and doesn't take too long to rekindle in the morning.

Kithabel doesn't want to be a specialist. She wants to be a sorceress.

Sorceresses do not get days off. Sorceresses do not take hourlong lunchbreaks or roll over to sleep in or have hobbies.

Sorceresses might start like specialists, but someone who only needs one sort of power can put it down and pick it back up again without the furrows they've left in their ambient power wearing shallow. Specialists specialize.

Sorceresses (or sorcerers, as the case might be) specialize only in doing magic. Familiarizing the energies that collect around them not with construction or color or curing but with the sorceress herself. Accustoming the magic to obedience.

Where a specialist thinks I've done this before, a sorceress thinks I can do anything if I want it hard enough.

Kithabel is very good at wanting.

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She doesn't do very well in school past the time she's about twelve. Too distracted. She's always, always trying to do magic. The reason sorceresses do not get days off is because the magic will forget about them if it isn't in constant use. She drops out of school and carries books from the library with her instead. She switches to a biphasic sleep schedule so she doesn't lose so much progress overnight - five hours at night, nap in the afternoon. She makes sure she has work. A variety of work. Some specialists aspired to proper sorcery only to fall into doing the same thing over and over, then figuring they might as well go on vacation... Kithabel doesn't do that. She finds lost sheep. She fixes plumbing. She encourages her mother's garden. She wears wooden beads on a string around her wrist and concentrates and concentrates over weeks, and then gives one each to her parents and someone who runs an emergency response service, and they can talk to her from far away.

When she is eighteen, she has finally built up enough momentum that she can fly.

This means that she can put her name in the national book of sorceresses, and that makes finding things to do magic to a lot easier.

For instance, the national dispatcher speaks to her bead to summon her to a flooded area in the lowlands.

She's in the air and on her way presently.

Comments

[assayer]

She is not the first sorceress to arrive.

The other is already stalking through the flooded lands, look of determination on her face. Sorcerers are recognizable, or at least this one is, just from her walk she screams, 'I am magic, get out of my way.'

As expected, the water's obeying. As if it's been cowed by its mother, it curls away from the buildings and people, leaving damp but otherwise dry land. The sorceress is picking up the water and she is putting it back, water is not allowed to go where she doesn't want it.

She's got a subtle grin, on her face. Sorcery's fun.

[ertia]

Kithabel doesn't even land. This one seems to have the water itself under control; so Kithabel concentrates on the flood damage. Is that house trying to be damaged while she's looking right at it? It had better stop right the fuck now.

It stops.

[assayer]

"Oh, that's convenient," observes the other sorceress, voice echoing up to Kithabel. "Thank you."

She doesn't need to be on the ground anymore, the water is good and cowed, now. She leads it to the river it came from, and then wills the river to keep it. What's that river? Yes, that's right, no complaints, you do what you are told. The sorceress deepens the river, just for good measure. And it will stay that way, now won't it? Yes. Yes it will. Good river.

Once that's taken care of, she flies back and starts telling houses that they should start doing what she says, too. They obey.

[ertia]

"No problem," says Kithabel. She flies low over the streets of the town. She fixes sinkholes and knocked-over posts and drowned flowerbeds. Somebody calls her over to fix some stuff in her house. Whatever it is is already fixed before she goes through their door, as though it sensed her approach. "Are you a new flier? I haven't seen you before."

[assayer]

"Nah, I travel a lot. Been doing this for a while. Am I poaching? Somehow I don't think you'll mind."

There are a few people with injuries, but those are easy to take care of. The broken bone she finds snaps itself right, and the person with some nasty bruising ceases to be bruised. Between the two of them, they're going to have this little town back to normal in no time.

[ertia]

"I don't mind," agrees Kithabel. "I'm fairly new myself, I could have missed you that way and wasn't sure."

[assayer]

"I couldn't tell! Congrats, are you one of the ones with a funky sleep schedule...? I've never had the discipline to manage it."

[ertia]

"Yeah, five and threeish, sometimes five and four. I look young to fly, don't I."

[assayer]

"A bit, I've seen some sorcerers that look, what, maybe twenty five? And then they turn out to be three hundred. Because of course they do. So I'm not judgy."

[ertia]

"I'm actually eighteen," chuckles Kithabel. "How about you?"

[assayer]

"Thirty one! I might go make myself a castle eventually, I've been holding out on it so I can get it to fly."

[ertia]

"I might go ahead and make one that doesn't fly. I mean, how hard would it be to get it to lift off afterwards, as long as I didn't put in a basement?"

[assayer]

"You'd be surprised! Sometimes they get touchy, especially if you put it in a well-known location. People start thinking it belongs there, and then it's hard to move the thing, because not only are you telling it to move, but a lot of people are sort of - telling it to stay."

[ertia]

"Hmmm. Invisible castle probably takes nearly as much momentum as flying one."

[assayer]

"Pretty sure, yeah. You might be able to pull off underwater, though. As long as you spend extra time on like, the windows, telling them they are not allowed to open to the water outside ever."

[ertia]

"Floating, submersible sea castle. Hmmm. On the other hand I might just like having a castle in one place, even if it got stuck there."

[assayer]

She shrugs. "That's up to you. Me, I want a flying castle. So my entire house can just up and move wherever."

[ertia]

Kithabel pauses to glare at an overturned fence. (What overturned fence? It swears it never ever even thought about falling! No ma'am!) "I get the sense you don't like staying put."

[assayer]

"Nah. Traveling's fun. Call me spoiled, I'm just too used to flying, I don't get how people that can't survive." She looks at a pedestrian. "No offense."

The pedestrian is not offended.

[ertia]

"Oh, I couldn't stand to give up flying now I've started, but I like having a home base and I don't mind if the scenery around it is consistently the same."

[assayer]

"I like seeing new stuff! I'd get bored of the same place all the time. If I make it to a hundred I might start visiting places I've been more, see how they've changed, but. Thirty-one. Not there yet."

[ertia]

"What are you counting as places, here, countries or cities or what?"

[assayer]

"Cities, usually, countries don't tend to all look the same on the inside."

[ertia]

"Cities don't either if you pay close attention."

There's somebody's porch un-sunken. You're welcome, somebody.

[assayer]

She laughs. "Well, no! But if you explore the city and figure out all of the things about it, it's not as interesting. I suppose I'd feel the same way about countries, too, if I could manage to explore them quickly enough that they didn't start changing on me."