Bloodfallen: Curse of The All Knowing

Arthur slumped over the table while Gaelin just watched with growing worry.

“Um… Are you alright sir?” Arthur looked up at his apprentice with the veins visible in his eyes. The toll from creating all those potions back to back without stopping was as clear as the day, clearly he should have taken a break or two in between batches of potions.

“I feel like absolute crap right now, I already didn’t sleep all that well last night and then I just worked around… six hours straight just brewing the same potions over and over again. It was like I was some sort of dwarven machine just doing the same thing over and over again with little variety or change, the money and recipes I was given were nice but I am never doing that again.” Arthur let out a big yawn as he finished speaking, he kept it suppressed while talking but didn’t have the willpower to keep it hidden any more.

“Should I just go home, since you don’t have the energy to give me any lessons right now?” Gaelin nervously asked while standing up from the table, he did want to learn more about magic but he didn’t want to stress out his teacher any more than he already was.

“Just wait a moment.” Arthur quickly interjected, he reached into his bag and pulled out a piece of cheap parchment and wrote something down using hydromancy to manipulate the ink. When he was done he pulled out a small leather pouch and dropped two silver coins inside before handing it to Gaelin along with the paper.

“Take this and go to the address at the top of the paper, that is the person who has been teaching me a lot about magic since I found myself stagnating. The two silver coins will cover the payment for an hour of lessons, trust me when I say you probably won't last longer than that.” Gaelin nervously took the paper and looked at the address written down at the top of the page and froze. While he didn’t know the specific address he could tell that it was located within the northern district, somewhere that didn’t really like elves, specifically wood elves for some of the actions taken by some of the larger groves.

“Um… sir. This place is located within the northern district?”

“Yes it is. Why? Is there a problem with you going to the northern district?”

“No, no problem. I just haven't been there before, so I might end up getting lost.” Gaelin gave a small lie, he was guessing that Arthur didn’t know about the discrimination that wood elves in particular face while in rich parts of human cities. ‘I shouldn’t bother him with such things, he is going out of his way to help me. I should be as independent as possible.’

“Oh, don’t worry about that. There are loads of guardsmen that walk around there because of political reasons involving all the powerful businessmen that live there. They answer questions regarding directions all the time so don’t worry about losing your way. And besides it's an old church turned mage tower that you are looking for that has this symbol on the front. It shouldn't be hard to find.” Arthur quickly drew up the eye symbol that is present on the very front of Henry’s old church.

Gaelin took the cheap parchment that Arthur used and thanked him before leaving the house and going towards the northern district. The walk there would take him at least half an hour in normal dry weather, with the snow it would significantly grow to at least an hour. With that in mind Gaelin quickly pulled up his hood on his winter jacket and began his trek towards this teacher of his own teacher, perhaps he would visit him more once he became more independent and self sufficient.

********

Nearly an hour later Gaelin reached the gates that led to the northern district, outside were four guardsmen stationed. In addition to their standard issue armor they also wore some fur on top like a cloak to keep them warm. They were taking part in idle chatter when he approached and they only paid him a little attention as he passed by.

Gaelin sighed once he was outside of their hearing range, thankfully they didn’t notice he was an elf. He was half expecting them to demand he remove his hood to look at him for security reasons, but thankfully his size and build didn’t warrant any reason for concern or suspicion. His previous experience with the city guard in these parts wasn’t quite as nice.

The amount of snow on the roads was thankfully far less than what there was elsewhere, this was due to some humans that were likely employed by the city to shovel snow off to the sides. They also paid little attention to Gaelin as he passed by.

Eventually by following the pristine metal street signs Gaelin found himself at a part of the city that had several temples, but one building stood out from the others. It was a dark building in a very different style than the rest of what was in the area and following his hunch he looked at the address and found this was the ‘church’ he was looking for with the large symbol out front above the two double doors.

Swallowing his fear he walked up to the front double doors of this ‘church’ and knocked several times. After a minute of waiting the door slowly opened revealing a human man in his mid thirties dressed in traditional wizard robes. “Why hello there, do you need something?” Gaelin tried to speak but out of nervousness couldn’t, instead he simply handed the parchment from Arthur to the human mage before him.

Henry took the parchment and read over the contents and smiled. “Please come inside Gaelin.” Henry said as he moved out of the way for the young elf to enter which he. Outside of the snowy weather he placed his jacket on a nearby coat hanger and placed his boots on a thick mat that had another pair already on it.

“So you are Arthur’s apprentice, eh. Not what I was expecting, I didn’t think you would be a wood elf. No offence.” Gaelin cringed slightly at the mention of his race, it was something that had a lot of stigma attached to it despite not having any decision in the matter.

“Yes I am, he mostly teaches me alchemy which is a lot easier than normal magic.”

“Well that is to be expected, the basics of alchemy aren’t even based in magic. But that will eventually change, so expect your skill in alchemy to slow to a crawl. Though I suspect that part of the reason you are here is for that.” Gaelin nodded and handed Henry the small pouch containing the two silver coins, Henry smiled and placed it in his pocket and brought Gaelin upstairs to the office where Arthur would take his lessons.

As they walked up the stairs Gaelin’s eye wandered towards the old unused altar of the church and the statue that was placed behind it. It showed a humanoid, most likely a human based on his height, holding a book in his left hand while holding a quill in his right hand. He also wore typical mage or magician robes with a hood covering the top of his head and neck, from such a distance he couldn’t make out the face properly but it looked quite blank.

Even with such a view it was only for a moment and almost right away he was forced to practice his hydromancy under the watchful eye of Henry who pushed him with ‘little’ tests. Those tests were exhausting and Gaelin could only keep up for around half an hour with a fraction of the stress and pressure Arthur would be put through on a normal lesson.

*********

An hour after Gaelin lessons began he exited the old church and began walking towards Arthur’s home again. Passing by a clock he found it was 4:30 pm, he calculated that he would return home by around 5:30 given the current weather conditions.

So he quickened his pace and began going back the same way he arrived passing by the same fur wearing guardsmen who he could hear talking about women, specifically women of different races and which were the best. One guard was defending his love of feline women and denying the playful allegations his colleagues were dumping on him.

Gaelin pushed what he was hearing to the back of his mind and continued on his way back. After almost an hour of pushing through the streets that were filled with fresh snow while he was taking his lessons he reached Arthur house, from a distance he saw the smoke spilling from the chimney and inwardly thanked his teacher for keeping the house warm.

The front door was predictably locked so he had to knock quite loudly to attract Arthur’s attention who then opened the door and rushed him inside. Once inside Gaelin noticed that Arthur looked noticeably better, for starters his eyes no longer looked so strained. ‘He must have taken the time to rest his eyes, I might have even woken him from his sleep.’

“Good afternoon Gaelin, how were your lessons with Henry?” Arthur asked, forcing back a yawn yet still looking far better than he did a few hours before.

“Quite well, though he was just as tough as you described him in the past. By the half hour I was already exhausted and needed to rest and allow my mana to recover. He used that time to teach me a basic meditation technique to recover my mana a little faster, though it was only a little bit faster when I used it.”

“That is to be expected, since the technique is based on your overall skill in manipulating mana on its own. Once you spend more time learning it should shoot right up and with it the efficiency of it.” Arthur began walking towards the kitchen and pulled out a large pot and filled it with water taken from the moisture in the air. He then placed some larger pieces of wood on the fire and hung the pot above it to boil.

“Um sir, I have a question. Why didn’t you teach me how to recover my own mana faster?” Arthur paused at the question, at the moment he was looking through his pantry of food for something that would taste good in a soup. The question forced him to stop looking and think. ‘Well I wasn’t expecting that. I guess I just didn’t think he was capable enough yet, I didn’t learn that until I was already casting tier one spells.’

“Well to be honest I didn’t think you were even capable of doing that yet. I only learned that when I had already been able to cast tier one spells and even a few tier two ones. Henry never told me what the requirements were to do it so I just assumed that it was tier one or two spells which I doubt you will be doing for quite some time.”

Arthur kept his back to Gaelin as he said this, while he wasn’t lying it wasn’t exactly something he wanted his apprentice to think based on his facial expression.

“Really? When did you learn tier one spells?” Arthur nearly sighed from relief, thankfully Gaelin was more focused on the idea of tier one spells than anything else at the moment.

“I learned them a few months after I began learning magic, I also had to become a part of the guild to do that and pay for the actual class where it happened. They have changed the name several times over the years but when I learned the class was called The Fundamentals of First Tier Magic.” Gaelin was wide eyed at this information, he heard lots of things about priests, druids, and mages alike. The most powerful of those were the ones casting tiered spells which were actual structured spells that had complex applications .

“Wow. Do you think I will be able to join the mages guild soon and learn tier one spells?”

“I would say you are quite close. But I would suggest that you learn how to both conjure and collect water from the atmosphere before you do that. You won’t always have an opportunity to use nearby water for your spells, or there might not even be any.”

With the conversation out of the way Arthur moved his focus back towards the food in his pantry that might taste good in the soup he was making. Currently he had a few dried fishes that he bought about a week ago that would be a nice meat source, now he needed a vegetable or two that he had in large numbers. In a small cheap bag were five potatoes that he had for some time, quickly looking them over he found no signs of rot or mold so he placed those next to the fish on the table. He did continue looking a bit for something else that might go well with it but nothing really felt quite right.

Closing the pantry Arthur brough his potatoes and fish over to the pot. Keeping them both his conjured earth bowls Arthur quickly cut up the two fish he had into small pieces that he sprinkled into the pot and gave a good stir with his hydromancy. The potatoes still having their skin on them needed to be skinned, with the same knife Arthur did his best to keep as much of the actual potato together.

When he was done skinning the five potatoes he used the knife in hand to cut them up into small pieces like the fish and dumped them into the pot as well while giving it a good stir.

“Hey Gaelin, why don’t you come over here and stir this soup for me. It might even be good training for your hydromancy.” Arthur gave a small smirk as he joked, Gaelin didn’t appear to understand but stood up and began stirring the soup anyways.

After around ten minutes the smell of the soup began to fill the room, smelling quite nicely, it still needed more time to cook but it was well on its way.