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

[assayer]

Dianira cracks up. "Send muffin baskets to your neighbors! Make friends with them."

[ertia]

"I'll see if any of them seem nice."

[assayer]

"Mhm! And I will travel around and see if I can find any nice ones."

[ertia]

"We will form a cabal."

[assayer]

"Bwuahahahaha. We'll gather round every full moon, sacrifice some goats, it'll be great."

She's joking. It's pretty easy to tell.

[ertia]

"Goats are passé. Doves," says Kithabel.

[assayer]

"But they can be hard to catch!"

[ertia]

"Are you a sorceress or not?"

[assayer]

"Well when you put it like that..."

[ertia]

Kithabel laughs.

[assayer]

"Doves it is! The initiates to the cabal can catch 'em to prove that they're worthy."

[ertia]

"Sure. Should our cabal have a name?"

[assayer]

"... Yes, but I shouldn't be the one to name it, I would pick something really ridiculous."

[ertia]

"Like what, Apple Apple?"

[assayer]

"Like Bearingtons unite!"

[ertia]

"You're very silly."

[assayer]

"Yes. Yes I am. This is why I shouldn't name the cabal."

[ertia]

"We can wait until we have more than two people and then let them have input."

[assayer]

"Works for me!"

[ertia]

Kithabel gets ahold of a map that includes both larger political units and approximate sorcerer territories within. Both her own town and the one where her father lives are in the country of Tanree, which is medium-sized and contains eight sorcerer territories (besides Kithabel's-to-be) which jointly cover about half the land and all of the coastline-adjacent sea, although of course the dispatcher can send them to places that aren't within their immediate territories, and nomads come through often enough. One of them is way up on the island, but Kithabel marks that as to-visit anyway. She's in the south, a hop away from the neighboring land of Beraz, and her dad's in the east, close to Ampar. She marks three nearby Berazin and two Amparsh sorcerous territories to visit, too. There's one to the southeast, too, in the nation of Var, over the mountains, but if Kithabel recalls right people in Var almost never speak Reesh, it's kind of far away, and from the look of this map that's a hermit-sorcerer territory anyway, no towns. (What does she do all day, Kithabel wonders?)

"I think I've figured out where to pay visits," Kithabel tells Dianira.

[assayer]

"Oh, good. I'm still in transit, I should be there in a few days. Can't only fly, after all."

[ertia]

"Gotta stop and redesign the roses."

[assayer]

"That," she laughs. "If I lose hold of my sorcery now I'd never forgive myself."

[ertia]

"Is there going to be a better time?"

[assayer]

"In several thousand years when I have run out of things to see and do."