Flashbang without the bang

Part of Jodah’s mind told him he should put aside the thoughts of the manor and the old farms, for the fire magic he sought lived in mountains. Yet once begun, he could not break away from the reverie of home. He would never see that home again, he knew, and he would probably never see his surviving family either.

Yet from the memories of his homeland there came a light, like a door opening in Jodah’s mind, or a dream remembered. That was the magic, he knew, the mystical wishing power that drove all spellcasting, the stuff that fed the engines of dreams. It was not mountain magic, filled with heat and angry stone, but rather that pouring from his memory of the surrounding farmlands and plains. Jodah could smell the winds of a brief, warm summer sweeping over the sun-dappled fields of grain, and he heard the scream of a lonesome summer hawk.

It was the wrong type of energy for lighting fires, but it was all he had, and it came unbidden now. To contain it, to deny it, would damage him, Jodah knew, for that was another of Voska’s first lessons. Jodah pulled on the energy, drawing it from his memories like a spinner pulls thread from the wheel. Part of his mind saw the tinder in the fire pit, but part of his mind was elsewhere, back on the family’s manor, listening to his grandmother speak of the days when the land was in its glory. He gathered it together and focused it on the gathered clump of leaves and small twigs. Then something inside him, at the base of his brain, moved.

Across from Jodah, Voska was viewing the lad through half closed eyes, half expecting the boy to suddenly shake his head and admit defeat. Voska remained silent through Jodah’s preparation and meditation, though usually he would seek to coach, focus and direct the boy’s thoughts.

If the lad could light the fire, then he had learned his lessons well. If he could not, well, they were far enough from civilization not to attract too much attention and close enough to get Jodah to a church healer if he did damage himself.

Voska wanted the boy to succeed but did not want to walk him through the entire process, not this time. He had told Jodah for the past year and a half that a wizard should think things through and not depend on anyone, not even his teacher. Voska felt the lad had promise, though he started his studies extremely late, at the age of fifteen. Still, Jodah showed an aptitude to the craft, and had the blood of old Jarsyl in him, and Jarsyl was a legendary wizard in his own right.

Voska started from his reverie as Jodah’s eyes suddenly widened within his lean, boyish face. The young man rocked forward, his hands splayed wide. That was not how this spell was supposed to be cast. Something was wrong.

A great ball of light incandesced around the bundle of tinder beneath Jodah’s hands, glowing hotter and whiter by the second. Voska shouted a warning, but his voice was drowned out by a crackling, not of lightning, but of light itself, sparking and feeding on the air in the heart of the fire pit. The light bleached all color from their surroundings—the trees, the stones, even Jodah’s faded silk vest was reduced to a series of white patches and black shades.

In another moment the light rose from the fire pit like a phoenix ascending from its flaming nest, burning its way through the canopy of trees above them. The ball trailed a plume of light and rose perhaps twenty feet. Then it exploded, soundlessly, in a still brighter flash. Voska threw an arm up in front of his face, his eyes screwed tight, and Still he could see the flash of the glowing ball as it detonated.

The afterimage of the light ball still burned Voska’s eyes, and he had to blink away the bluish flash from his vision. When he had regained his vision, he saw that the slender young man was already hunched over the pit, studiously feeding the flickering flames at the base with small bits of kindling. The passage of the light ball through the fire pit had ignited the tinder.

Voska scowled and opened his mouth to reprimand the boy but did not know what to say. Jodah had lit the fire after all.

Finally, he said, “You weren’t concentrating on the mountains, were you?”

***

The Gathering Dark, Chapter 1