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.

-------

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

[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."

[ertia]

"Do you speak a lot of languages?"

[assayer]

"A good amount! Two fluently, two others I can pass in, and like... I know how to ask where the bathroom is in a few more, but nothing else."

[ertia]

"I know almost literally nothing of any other languages. Maybe I should learn. It'd be easy to find occupations if I could move around more places."

[assayer]

"Yup! It's pretty great. I usually don't lack for things to do, and if I do, I go flying around looking."

[ertia]

"Maintaining momentum is so much easier now I can fly! Before I used to have to be booked solid and now I can fill irregular periods of time just flying around."

[assayer]

"I'd do environmental effects when I had nothing better. Little ones, like - sparkling lights when I was excited, some stuff with plants. I still do it sometimes, but not as much."

[ertia]

"I'd tend to play around with wind. Or decorate my notebooks."

[assayer]

"Pretty! ... If I remember right, I'm pretty sure I pulled some pranks, too. Heh."

[ertia]

"Oh dear," snorts Kithabel. "Friendly ones?"

[assayer]

"Friendly ones. Filled one guy's kitchen with little flying paper butterflies, he thanked me for them, thought they were fantastic."

[ertia]

"Awww, paper butterflies, I'm stealing that for my mom."

[assayer]

Giggle. "Go ahead! You can make some of the paper translucent, too, get little sparkly paper butterfly designs."

She's moved on to drying out the land completely so that foundations aren't potentially ruined. The land obeys. Predictably.

[ertia]

Kithabel swoops up for altitude to get a look at what remains to be done. Oh, there's a washed-out bridge. She goes in close to fix it, then circles around back to - uh -

"Hey, what's your name? I'm Kithabel."

[assayer]

"Dianira! Nice to meet you."

[ertia]

"Likewise. I know like zero other sorceresses, I just meet people for ten seconds putting out fires and then they're off to tunnel through mountains or whatever."

[assayer]

"I know a few, we keep in touch with some magic objects, but I wouldn't say I'm close with any of them?"

[ertia]

"Because you travel too much?"