The day moved on; the sprites had been talked to, so there was only one thing left.

  The team got to the first grave site quickly enough. A team of [Foresters] left behind to cut a path toward the site. I was a little hopeful I could get a look at their work, perhaps pick something up by watching someone with the same class, but they would take time to cut the trees and remove trunks.

  I was greeted by the [Forman] when I arrived but quickly found myself working. I had laid the groundwork for them, and done some heavy lifting, but we had tons of earth to move.

  They set up a cloth above us to catch the rain from hitting the soil, preventing more of the earth from turning to mud. The earth I had uncovered had turned mucky and needed to be tossed aside, with moist soil beneath it. I loosened the soil again, letting it bead and run from the hillside, out of side and mind.

  To move that much earth, we piled it out the side, setting ramps of earth that were left compact as we dug a new pore in the face of the earth, ten feet deep. Each hole could be a root cellar, but they would hold only goods fitting a grave, and even then, they would be lacking.

  It was toil to move that much earth; skills turned from quick fixes to necessity. A normal man could not move that much earth; one bolstered by skills had a hard time as it was. Ground was broken beneath the blade of spades, shucked along before being tossed free, then away, each along the line relying heavily on skills to bolster their body, to move more earth.

  It was both demanding and freeing; the mind was left to wander as the body burned in the effort.

  You could lose yourself in it, let it eat away your time, or you could let it wander.

  My mind wandered frequently; a simple stray movement would send me skittering away. I had never found something so focused as I did simple physical labour. The repetition weighed down my body and let me simply think.

  Usually, it was along the line of, ‘fuck there's a rock,’ today, it was on a set of questions. I could more easily sort things out like this. While I acted single-mindedly, I could let my mind wander the breadth of something without spontaneity dragging me around, unlike when I sat immobile, where my mind flitted between things too quickly to have a good thing.

  I could have a good, deep think, basically.

  To pass Annas test, I needed to answer five simple answers. What are the normal mana types, and one simple fact about them? I had the answers in my pocket, and I ran down the list as I remembered them. I was fairly sure I knew enough about them to remember them properly.

  What was a spell? Tricky, but tricky in a way that I made it tricky, and one that I had help puzzling out. The question was complicated because a skill was so similar to a spell. You got skills from levelling up, but you could also get spells. You could learn a spell, but presumably, you could create the effect of a skill via a spell.

  One was woven by mana passing through a shaped braid of knotted anima, and one was woven by mana passing through a shaped pattern of mana. They were, in almost every way, the exact same thing.

  As Gunther pointed out, the only difference was in the name. It was expectation; the only difference between them was that they were artificial, a fabrication of the mind.

  If you were to split hairs, they were different, a spade vs a shovel, but even I would look at them and call a spade a spade if it didn’t matter. Dirt was sand and silt and clay, but you called it dirt all the same.

  So, they were the same. The only thing the question needed clarification on, was what part of the formula was the spell. Was the spell the effect? Was it the fire ball, or the pattern that created the fireball, or was it both.

  If a skill was the same as a spell, and someone used a skill to do something, the only answer could be the shaping of it. Spellcraft, the craft of making spells, the craft of shaping man. Spell casting was the act of casting a spell, of hurling shaped mana.

  What was the next spell she was going to teach me, what was the reason everyone wasn’t a mage, and what were the recognized types of casting? Those were wonky.

  What was a type of spell casting? There were external and internal. Anna had shown me the first day when she had shown me different kinds of mages. There were too many types of mages, however, and that wasn’t the question.

  The question had been types of casting, not types of mage.

  If it was any method of casting a spell, I would have shaped mana internally as the big unknown. The way the soul was viewed made me think that internal spellcasting had nothing to do with it. There was a similarity in how it was talked about to that of external, just somehow shaped inside a person's body. If that held true and casting via a soul was also casting a spell. That meant that there was external, internal, and spiritual casting.

  There were also complications to that. Anna was a [Druid] after all.

  [Druids], [Clerics], [Warlocks], [Cultists], Monsters, and Saints, each was notable for their connection to a higher being. They could lean on them to grant them different things, but spells were shaped mana. If a God could shape mana, it could shape a spell, and these could obviously work for each of the prior kinds. My soul had a skill shaped and powered by a goddess, and it worked through mana somehow.

  [Cultists] worked rituals, and I had seen them doing so. Those, too, were a method of casting a spell. Anna worked ritual magic, slowly storing up mana through a prolonged casting.

  Could you shape a ritual with your body? Inside it? With your soul? I had no fucking idea.

  How could I even tell?

  Was levelling up a ritual of sorts?

  If you could shape it there, then surely there must be some method of casting it there, too. I couldn't see a reason for the opposite to be true.

  I could not think of another method of casting. External, Internal, and Spiritual, three times three was nine. External, External with aid and External ritual, Internal, internal with aid and internal ritual, spiritual, spiritual with aid, and spiritual ritual. Nine types.

  I had no idea if that was right, but if a spell could be cast from three general places with three methods than that was all the ones I could determine.

  The last two were troubling.

  What was the next spell, and what was the reason not everyone could be a mage?

  There was no way I could get the answer from a mage on what the next spell would be, and mages would not write it down in a book. Mages did not share the details of being a mage in that way. Even Magelins guide to Mana only talked about mana and what mana can do, not how to work it or how being a mage works. Mages limited who could be a mage, foisting the responsibility of teaching new mages to mages, each one tracing back like a great big family tree to the first mage.

  If every mage passed down the methods of the first mage, or even by the sage that taught him, a visage of the God of the Arcane, then there was no possible way that the answer lay outside.

  How would an orphan learn what spell he would be taught? There weren’t even any other mages. There were no magical books. There was only the word of his teacher and whatever the first mage could puzzle out on his own.

  Anna hadn’t told me an order of spells that was in line with that, but she also hinted that I should be able to figure it out.

  Why?

  “I wish I could remember that,” I thought out loud.

  “Wish you could remember what?” A woman digging next to me asked.

  Her voice brought me from my deep, near-meditative thoughts. Her voice was out of place, not least because the crew had been all men last I checked. Most women wouldn’t choose to spend all their time digging a ditch, not because they couldn’t but because it was drudge work. The most out-of-place thing was that it was a familiar woman’s voice.

  I stopped digging, my hands perching on the end of the long spade, the blade sliding through the ground to bring it down to chest height. Taking a moment to breathe and place the voice, I turned to look down at the woman who was working beside me.

  Joan, the woman with the familiar voice, was shovelling. It was genuinely so out of place that I thought I was mistaking myself.

  Joan was shovelling dirt.

  She didn’t have any skills for it; there was no fluctuation of mana, not that I could tell very well, considering she was empty to my senses. She was just a normal girl shovelling normal amounts of dirt at a normal pace. She wasn’t quite wheezing, but it was obviously hard work for the slip of a girl. She wasn’t unused to work, but she was a [Barmaid]; heavy lifting was a few pounds, for a few minutes at a time, not prolonged exertion.

  “Joan?” I asked her stupidly.

  “Yeah? What's up?” she said, breath obviously short.

  “Joan?” I asked her a second time, more confused and with added stupidity.

  “Still me,” she told me, hefting up a good scoop and tossing it down the line.

  “You… Have rather immaculate form,” I told her, my mind not quite able to puzzle out what to say given her rather sudden appearance.

  “Sorry, I’m taken,” she told me, her voice unchanged.

  “I mean with,” I told her, unsure of what she meant, adding to my words with a gesture at her.

  “What can I say? I know my way around some wood,” she huffed in disappointment.

  “Your legs, you're lifting with your legs,” I told her.

  “You're no fun,” she told me.

  “Maybe?” I asked her, “Why are you using a garden spade? No wait why are you here?”

  “Because it's from my family garden? and I want to help, so I'm here?” She asked me as if I were particularly slow. To be fair, I was at the moment. She did not fit in here.

  “You’re supposed to step on those,” I told her, pointing to the flanges on the short shovel, “but you should be using a longer handle. You're not going to get much done with that.”

  “This is the only one I can get my hands on,” she shrugged, “it's too short to do this well, though. You're right about that.”

  I sighed and stopped her, passing the shovel over to her. It was about time I started using a little mana to speed this up and I didn't need to dig for that. We were limited on hole diggers, and we had a lot of holes to dig; letting her do work instead of blowing her back was a no-brainer.

  “Oh? Thanks, but I shouldn’t be accepting just anyone's wood,” she told me before whispering, “I wouldn’t want people thinking I’m a loose girl.”

  I picked up that note, and snorted to myself.

  “Wow, there are some wheels turning in there. Finally,” she said.

  “My wood is… Shit, I can’t think of a good one. Stupid Charisma,” I murmured.

  “Well, I guess if you don’t kiss and tell, I could find it in me to accept your tool,” she said, rubbing it in. I sighed, but Joan just took it as a challenge.

  “Your tool is so much bigger than I’m used to. Are you sure it will fit? It's so long,” she said, a little sway of hips making enough of a point.

  “Your hips and innuendo can’t corrupt me succubus. I’m a Gods fearing Kobold woman and can’t be swayed by a pretty face and intentionally suggestive tone,” I told her.

  “Yeah. You could say you’re a [Saint],” She smirked as I took the tiny shovel and set its blade, earthing it to use my skills and mana to start shifting distant earth toward the ramp.

  “I’ll repeat, what are you even doing here?” I asked pointedly.

  “I’m helping. Strause and I wear many hats. I’m moonlighting. Digging holes is my passion,” she told me insincerely.

  “Moonlight? What does moonlight have to do with holes?” I asked her.

  “I… My goodness, you aren’t messing with me,” She said as the tide of dirt inched toward the corner where dirt was removed, inching forward like a dirt slime.

  I was stuck between confusion and annoyance but picked neither for the sake of not sounding rude, and because I didn’t care enough to keep letting her distract me.

  “You know what, I don’t care. Nice seeing you, Joan. How are you doing?” I asked her.

  “I’m doing alright. My dad broke a toe, but he’s alright, and I’m moving up in the world, living my life, you know?” She told me.

  “Sure. Good you hear nothing bad happened to someone,” I told her, not really feeling it even as I told her.

  “Thanks. I figured I didn’t have anything to cry about, so I should help out. So, what were you hoping to remember? You were all deep in thought; I thought you were ignoring me; I was right next to you for at least a quarter glass; I hummed a little tune and everything.” She told me.

  “Nothing important,” I told her, deciding not to dump on her like I had on Gunther. Gunther was a captive audience; I shouldn’t have dumped random issues on her to begin with.

  “Oh, yeah. It sounds like nothing important, for sure. You can tell because you suddenly murmured to yourself in the middle of deep contemplation. Nothing important ever comes from voicing one's deepest thoughts,” she mocked with a huff as she hefted a shovelload.

  “It's just a murmur. I forgot why Anna thought I could figure something out,” I told her dismissively.

  “She thought you could figure it out on your own? Maybe if you figure out her train of thought, you can figure it out,” she suggested.

  “Yeah, right,” I told her. I can barely organize my thoughts while sitting still. Trying to figure out Anna's reasoning is like trying to divine the myriad epithets,” I told her.

  “I can’t tell if you're speaking highly of her or saying she makes no sense. No wonder you’re all wound up,” She told me.

  “She’s a one-of-a-kind. She’s on a different level, and I can’t understand her well enough to know why she feels how she does right now. Nonetheless, figuring out why she thought I could figure out something weeks ago,” I told her.

  “Well, I could give you a bit of help with both if you want. I’m not good with magic, obviously, but hanging around with Strause has given me an uncanny amount of insight into how people feel,” she told me.

  I looked at her discerningly. She was suspiciously unsuspicious, given my experience with mind readers, which had been Strause. He was the kind of guy that would give you an ominous one-liner before fucking off.

  “Not to be rude, but why are you trying to help me?” I asked her.

  “Well… How do I say this… You and Annabeth are a thing, yeah? And me and Strause are a thing. If we make it all the way, we're going to be sisters-in-law. I can’t say that Annabeth or you are rare, but you’re not common, and you’re kind of sweet together,” she told me.

  “You and Strause?” I asked her, “Since when?”

  “Since last night. I finally broke him in. Chiseled away all his hangups,” she told me.

  “You broke him in… Last night. And now I’m your future sister-in-law?” I asked her, still not seeing it.

  It felt off, even if I couldn’t put my finger on anything beyond a weak reason to help me, and that was troubling, given my current company and her capabilities.

  “Yes,” she said quickly.

  I squinted at her as I continued to move the earth, but she didn’t change her expression under my scrutiny.

  “You know what?” I asked her.

  “No?” She asked.

  “I do not have enough mental fortitude to care if you’re hiding something,” I told her, “Give me your wisdom.”

  She did. She got me to walk through my issues and generally jabbered to me about her stuff. It was a time waster for sure, but I had gotten one side of the hole down to ten feet and was being bottlenecked by the guy shovelling dirt out of the hole.

  I was surprised at the cost; slowly moving it cost very little, maybe 20 points for maybe 125 cubic feet of earth. That still meant I was only going to get 12500 cubic feet done without playing around with my life mana, but it was something.

  She engaged in random small talk, teasing out details, though most of them were for new things, trying to piece together what Anna might have been feeling, trying to succeed where I failed earlier. It ate into some of my quiet time, but she kept up with the shovelling and was, at the very least, interesting to talk to.

  I hadn’t heard her talk much when I had met her, and I was starting to think that was a bit of a blessing. Not because she was annoying but because she had a mouth on her that could go the distance.

  Strause was going to have his hands full, for sure.

  “So anyway, he was holding back because he was a big dumb idiot.” Before making a Strause impression, “But I’m bigger and stronger; what if I used my big arms to hold you down and give you what you’ve been asking for, multiple times, for several years? Like hello? Yes? I was starting to think he was a bit funny in the head.”

  “That does sound kind of funny for a guy, but I can at least understand the point where he’s coming from. You two are good on one another, but what if he was a real bung sucker?” I pointed out as we finished up the current hole.

  “If he was, as you put it, a bung sucker. Nice choice, by the way; he wouldn’t care. That’s the issue with it. If you lacked basic human decency, you wouldn’t limit yourself. A Monster doesn’t care to restrain itself.”

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  In that, she had a point. A monster thought only of itself, or at least, that was something that was a well-known thought.

  The idea of the recent super regenerating, soul-chained gremlin ogre thing and its ‘mistress’ was so wrong. It was just freakish. Monsters were heartless; the creature itself was heartless, but it seemed to have a twisted sense of devotion and reverence, a twisted love toward its leader.

  That wasn’t our topic; the thought only caught me for a moment.

  “I suppose you’re right, aren’t you… Well, except for wanting to be with Strause. I can’t say I understand you there,” I told her, the idea of what we were talking about and that I agreed with still in my head.

  I was unable to shake that my first take on it had been right somehow, but she was also right. It was a tangled knot that I needed to trace around. Being weary of abusing power was a good thing. Power corrupts, and it turns less-than-stellar people into both monsters and Monsters.

  “Ehh, I mean, I can understand where you’re coming from. A soft girl could be nice, but I prefer a bigger partner, and six-foot muscle women are both rare and not soft. It also wouldn’t get my parents off my back. Strause is the best I’m going to get, and I’m more than satisfied.”

  I could see that. Most of the time, the best you could get out of a marriage was a skilled [Craftsman] or a [Merchant]. Strause was the son of a [Lord]; even as a second son, he would have a decent life. A commoner stumbling into the arms of a noble was basically the quintessential fairy tale moment. That was a good marriage prospect if I had ever heard it, though, despite her words, there was obviously something more there.

  “Well, I’m glad for your future. Is that why you were there earlier? In Clause's study, I mean.” I asked her.

  “No, we both heard what he was planning and decided to voice our opinions on the matter. That and Strause needed to ask about our new… Well, I suppose that doesn’t matter. I won’t say I’m vexed, but I’m not happy with it,” She told me.

  “I can understand that. Clause seems to be decent, however. He’s trying to solve an issue with a resource shortage. I don’t know if he’s doing the best, but I think he’s doing his best. Enough of the men. I don’t want to think about them too much. We’re doing grim work here, not drinking tea.” I complained.

  “No fun at all. If we don’t lighten the mood when everything is shit, who will? If we let the terror take hold, we’ll never move past it. Bad things have a way of eating away at you; you have to lift your head and see that tomorrow could be better,” she pointed out.

  “True. But not so soon. Today is about those not here to see that tomorrow,” I pointed out.

  She nodded at that, seeming to think about it. An agreement to my words said through thoughtful silence. She wasn’t cowed by it or shamed but simply thoughtful. She kind of pushed dirt around helpfully as the next hole started.

  We had gotten through our hole faster than the others, but there were many holes to dig. I couldn’t [Sanctify] an infinite space. It might have been easier if we could have just one big grave.

  I started to think to myself again and started playing with the ideas I needed to figure out.

  “I think I can figure out some things about your problem question, but there are a few things you need to fill in for yourself.” She started, “If she thought you would get it easier compared to her, then the answer lies in your differences. You both have the information somehow, but when she did it, she lacked a reason to think about it.”

  “Well, obviously.” I told her, “But that could be anything.”

  “Ab-ap-ap. None of that yet. It’s also something she knows. It can’t be just anything. She wouldn’t make a comment like that if she didn’t know you knew it. She doesn’t sound like she makes calm bets she doesn’t think will come true, so she probably knows you probably know the answer right now. She knew you knew the answer, and she knew you probably knew it already because of some difference between you,” she pointed out.

  I stopped my digging, the short spade pressing into the ground so I could turn to her.

  “So instead of everything, it's every difference between us that she knows about? Like what?” I asked her.

  “Don’t look at me when the answers are in your head. I can’t read your mind; I just feel stuff,” she told me.

  “Great,” I told her, my fingers moving to rub my temples.

  “Hey, don’t blame me for that. If it seems obvious, you should have already been thinking about it. If you weren’t thinking about it, then it wasn’t obvious. It’s not my fault that you can't wrack your head for details. That’s a you issue, buddy, not a me issue,” she told me.

  Her voice told me she was unperturbed by my annoyance, though considering how cheeky she was, I could have felt that via a letter and lost only the look.

  “Life is never easy, is it?” I asked her, not expecting an answer.

  “Life is the great game. What's the point of it being easy?” She answered, “Or that’s what I would say if I was huffing my own farts. Listen, I get being huffy because it’s a puzzle, but like, just go on, give a little prayer or whatever, and get to thinking.”

  Prayer. Right.

  “I haven’t prayed properly in a while,” I sighed, “Not that I even know how to do it anymore. Everything’s so different.”

  “You could just go to mass? It’s not that hard to learn how to pray, you know,” Joan pointed out. “I don’t go frequently because my little guys don’t like it, but I pray plenty.”

  “Little guys? No, wait, I don’t think I want to know. It’ll just make thinking harder…” I sighed. Distractions would just make puzzling myself out and getting down to those big thoughts harder. “I don’t know if you remember a few months ago, Joan, but Strause was there, so maybe you heard about me being tormented by a mob? I mean, maybe I would go if Anna cared for going; she could keep me in my seat, but I’ve been avoiding that main square in front of the temple of Life like it's haunted…”

  “Maybe that’s it right there. Anna thinks you can puzzle it out through divine communion. A test of your Spirit,” she shrugged, “I got no clue.”

  “This was a rip-off. I want my money back.” I complained.

  “Have it back,” She told me with a smirk, passing my extra-long spade back to me, “my arms are starting to hurt too much. I need a water break anyway.”

  I frowned at her, squinting at her. What was she thinking in that funny little mind-reader head of hers? I took the shovel and passed her back her own, only for her not to take it. She instead walked over to the edge, shambled up the shallow dirt edge, and lay herself down with a big sigh.

  I could only shake my head and get back to work. I didn’t have time to complain. Instead, I spent my time letting my mana regenerate some more. It wouldn’t be much, but every bit would help. For now, some muscle would do just fine.

  Besides, it would help keep me sharp.

  It took me far too long to get back into it.

  “What the hells is she even talking about? I can’t for the life of me think of a damn single thing. Nothing of import, anyway,” I thought to myself.

  It was a spiral, circling the point without finding where I started. I couldn’t quite make it back around to where I needed to go, no matter how I poked at it, which only made it worse because that meant that I didn’t know Anna as well as I thought I did.

  Was it hidden in something Anna thought I knew? We weren’t on a level with one another; that was for certain. I didn’t know what was going through Anna's head while she had talked to me last night; who could say if I understood her at all? Maybe Anna just thought I knew it, and she had simply misunderstood me. If I didn’t, and Anna was wrong, then not only was I not any closer than I was when she had given me the questions, but I was actively wasting time devoting time to it.

  I put that to the side with all the grace of someone smashing a vase.

  Back to the less worked question: why isn’t everyone a mage?

  If skills were the same as spells, technically, everyone would be a mage. It also would explain why everyone could even be a mage in the first place; everyone could be a mage because everyone performed magic every day; it was built into everyone. But that wasn’t what a mage was. A mage wasn’t just a spellcaster. A mage learned how to cast spells. You could only acquire a skill or spell once every two levels; a mage could get far more spells.

  Learned spells were like imperfect skills; whether due to the medium, simple error or an inability to properly weave a spell, they were less efficient, less powerful, and less versatile.

  They didn’t grow naturally, like a skill flexing to account for new things; they didn’t necessarily become more powerful by pushing more mana in; they didn’t grow with the caster, and they definitely didn’t become more efficient with use. They did, however, have ways of doing each. You could learn to ritual cast, making a spell with more power requirements possible to cast. You learned how to refine a spell, clean it up to make it more efficient, and you could figure out a way to make a more efficient spell with more power.

  You could do all of that, and you could do it independent of level by figuring it out.

  A mage learned spells; it was a kind of trade. A [Carpenter] learned carpentry and woodcraft. A [Blacksmith] metal craft and a mage learned magic, magecraft, or as I had thought about it, spellcraft.

  Each ‘cast’ spells, but each learned different skills for their trade.

  I looked at these crafts and compared them.

  Craftsmen had a guild of sorts, a big one, as Gunther had explained. It was a kind of super guild, but it formed the same basic idea as what I understood from my time. [Craftsmen] would make a guild, which let them self-regulate a city's market, stop people from undermining each other, and protect them and the consumer. If you needed something done, once upon a time, you could go to a young [Craftsman] to get cheaper work or a [Guild Craftsman] for quality work. It was a kind of certification, a badge that said, ‘I know what I’m doing, I make quality goods.’ That was changed, but the premise remained similar enough to work with.

  Did mages have a comparable system?

  As far as I understood it, yes. Anna talked about registering me as a mage and about a collage of sorts. A magic boys club, pointy hats and all, but what was its purpose?

  Necromancy was, as I understood it, illegal. You could not perform Necromancy, but as far as I could tell, people still did. Hells, I had run into a not people that were more than willing to defile corpses. That made me think it wasn’t particularly enforcement-based. If it was, the valley would be chock full to the gills with amped-up mages ready to scalp [Necromancers] for pocket change. The black cloak will get you ten gold; line up over here for a single file line, please, and thank you.

  No, I was, however, being tested for something that did ring a bell. I was a Journeyman. I was learning a trade, so there was some level of accreditation involved. If I was a random guy and I convinced people I worked magic without it, how would you check? Not everyone could sense magic. Perhaps you could go check with some sort of record keeper and get a list of mages. If Anna was working on signing me up as her apprentice, come journeyman, then they kept tabs on mages, even if it was just them adding to an archive. Mage craft was passed down from teacher to student, and you could trace it back down the family tree to the first mage.

  So, a level of familiarity was required, but why? If you got a bad guild, you got bad products, but mages did not have the same issue. If you had a crap mage, they were a crap mage, but a bad mage was more of an issue to themselves. Short of casting magic in a town square like a madman, the most damage they could do was to themselves, and only the rich would be able to hire a proper mage to grant them stuff, and most of those things would be done by a [Magical Craftsman], who likely fell under the guild.

  It couldn’t be to regulate the level of competence; I was nearly sure of it.

  One trick of it probably came in the form of why I wasn’t being judged on my competency in casting a spell. A [Craftsmen] needed competency in their work, but I needed to answer specific questions.

  If the Arcane god taught the first mage, and the first mage forced everyone to learn this stuff as he did, then it must somehow be in line with the god's teachings. The god of the Arcane was the god of magic and arcane things. He was a god of hidden stuff, a god that was all about peeling up the floorboards of the world and discovering all the interesting stuff that lay beneath.

  If the god taught a man, the god wanted them to know it and teach it to others.

  A+B=C. God wants people to know this + god demands you teach it this way = God thinks teaching this way will make more people know it.

  That made more sense, but upon revision, it was missing something.

  Why did he demand it to be taught one-on-one if he wanted to spread it? What did the menor-student relationship have to do with it?

  But then again, there were a few things that it held in parallel to [Craftsmen].

  If a [Craftsman] knew a technique, he could pass it on personally, whether that be father to son or master to student. Small breakthroughs were lucrative; they piled on to one another.

  Then there was something I had read a while ago, and re-read only today, and they clicked together rather explosively as my mind took the puzzle pieces and dry fit each one together.

  Magelin had mentioned that he was a [Magician], a funny kind of mage and that once upon a time, a [Occultist] had figured out how to work magic like that, had pieced together lost methods to rediscover something that had been lost.

  The question was revised. Why had the Arcane god taught the first mage like this? Why did the Arcane god need to teach the first mage this at all?

  The first mage, by all accounts, was Human. Now, I wasn’t a scholar, but I had a vague idea of the order of a few events. There once were great beasts like the Kirin and dragons and titans. Then there were their offspring, like Kobolds and then came the humans from somewhere south.

  If the first image was human, then the great beasts must have lacked magic, which made no sense because that made absolutely no fucking sense.

  Dragons. Giant flying reptile things that had so much magical power they could breathe fire, and Kirin, creatures who could supposedly prance around in the open air. Beings are so potent and so steeped in power that upon their death, they create new life from their shattered bodies.

  They didn’t have magic? Not one of them figured out how to doodle in the air?

  My ass they didn’t. The Kirin could probably shit magic if they wanted to, and they had two notable magical offspring, the long-dead Sibyl and the now-departed elves. How on earth could the first mage be human if there were mages before humans? There were no doubt ways a human could have learned magic.

  Unless they had been lost.

  Many things could be lost. I understood that well. Moran had been reduced to ash right before a 2000-year dark age, and New Moarn was primitive in comparison. Anna kept her door closed with a length of leather cord and locked it at night with a bar like it was a freaking castle gate. They had lost the simple latch you could find on a cottage gate. Nonetheless, a genuine lock made by a [Locksmith], and the damn thing hadn’t caught on yet; it was a luxury I had only spotted a few times in the front of merchant’s places.

  [Merchants], a people who travelled the lands, were the only bloody people short of nobles who could get them.

  But magic? Magic was still going. Of all the things lost, magic was not.

  The only reason then could be that passing from teacher to student preserved it better, that one powerful mentor with one student was better at protecting the process of handing down that knowledge.

  This process was done to pass down foundational knowledge, to keep it safe, to keep it alive.

  That was something I could see a god doing.

  So a mage was taught this way to hand down knowledge; that was part of it, surely. Something to do with the passing down of knowledge being important. You couldn’t do it hap hazard, so people had to do it carefully.

  Did that work? Magecraft was slow to pass down, so you couldn’t give it to everyone; it spread slowly.

  That was certainly an answer, but it felt like an incomplete one. That was part of what I could see, but the rest remained veiled. It was one reason for an end result, but even that one wasn’t the full extent. If a mage taught only two students, there would still be more mage. It was exponential growth. 2^n.

  Anna was the only mage I knew of, and there were no doubt more in the valley, but not enough. If there was only one mage in the valley after it had been incinerated, and it took 20 years to teach a mage and for them to, in turn, teach another, that would still be more than 2^100. I couldn’t even count that high. That was a big ass number. Two times, two one hundred times.

  So, I was back to the start.

  Mages learn spellcraft; why wouldn’t you want to teach that many people how to make a spell?

  Mages could learn more than one spell; they could gain a damn lot of them. A cabal of mages could probably save Moarn ten times over right now. If everyone was a mage, Moarn would have no issues; what would be wrong with that? What were the downsides I wasn’t seeing?

  I took a long moment to simply let my head spin around at the halfway point of the hole. Joan had long since come back to digging, her short shovel and sweaty face close by as I let mine turn toward her.

  “Joan, if you need to take a break, you should take a break,” I told her pointedly.

  She was starting to flag even with her break. The difference between [Toil] and those without it. I could keep going until not even a skill could keep me up, my body exhausted from mana deprivation.

  “I’ve been,” she huffed, “Trying to keep pace with you… You, uh, just keep going.”

  “And that is admirable, but you are not made for this. Besides, I, uh, want to pass a question by you,” I told her awkwardly.

  Her eyebrows raised droopily, breath quick as she looked at me, upturned eyebrows and slight gape of her mouth a clear visage of confusion, her head no doubt taking more than a second to start spinning, the idea of me asking for help something she wasn’t expecting. I had made a less-than-stellar conversational partner.

  Fantastic.

  I would need to fix myself up with a charisma class at some point, if for nothing else, than to better pick my words and tone.

  “I… I think I could do that. Give you a second opinion, that is, assuming I can give it while I sit down,” she told me.

  “I was just telling you to do that. Why would I demand you stand when I just told you to sit down and rest?” I asked her.

  “I was asking more because I think I need help? I was lifting with my legs, but now they're all stiff. I could use a hand. I get it’s a little awkward, but-” she told me, quickly starting to explain herself and the situation and the name of her family dog and why the sun revolved around the earth.

  I, for my part, seated my shovel with a firm tap, quickly loosened the top half of my new cloak from the bottom, and seated her shovel. I draped the wool over her and smoothly scooped her before walking her to the side where she could sit down.

  She was surprisingly heavy; then again, I didn’t have extensive experience carrying human women, just Anna.

  As I walked her over to the side, I thought about Anna and found the tangled ball of feeling inside of me. I was carrying Joan, but I wanted to be carrying Anna. I wasn’t carrying Anna, I wasn’t next to her, and the mangey fox in my head was yipping and yowling about how it wanted to smell her because it was impatient.

  Joan was not her, and so it didn’t like experiencing something familiar with her because she was strange.

  Joan did not remain silent at my turmoil, first letting out a short “Oh” of surprise before a quiet, “I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”

  “It’s not a problem, Joan, I don’t mind,” I told her.

  “You certainly seem to care if the way you’re feeling is anything to go by,” She mumbled tiredly.

  I looked at her, confused, before putting one plus one together to get two.

  “Joan, you're picking up on my instinct, not on me,” I told her. “It's conflicted because you’re not Anna. Ignore it; it’s not very smart.”

  “That… That makes more sense. It's like there's two of you in there; you’re very loud,” She said.

  I placed her down the cloak, keeping her off the cold ground, with the edge able to wrap around her like a blanket.

  “You might want to wrap yourself up,” I told her, “You’re warm now because you’ve been moving, but the second that’s gone, you’re going to be cold as Fimbul’s tits in all this rain.”

  She did so without complaint or agreement. Instead, she wrapped herself up while I covered myself back up to keep the cold out. Both halves of the cloak could be a full cloak; there was just a style to it when it was folded.

  “This is surprisingly warm. Now, where were you?” She asked.

  “I was looking to ask you a question. I’ve been thinking, trying to figure out the answer to a question. Why isn’t everyone a mage? I’ve thought it through, but I’m not seeing the whole picture. The way it works has nothing to do with it; mages have passed down spellcraft like any other trade, and they exist to do it; there could be more mages than there are people mathematically. There's something else to it. If everyone, or I suppose almost everyone, present company excluded, then what would be the downside? Everyone being a mage sounds like it could solve a lot of issues.” I told her, setting a little groundwork, but ultimately.

  “Me excluded?” She asked, tone obviously curious.

  “Well, based on my understanding of magic, it's mana-based. I guess I don’t know, but as I know it, you and probably Strause are the only people I’ve met that wouldn’t be mage capable. Maybe you can be a mage, just of a different kind, but I have no clue,” I told her, unable to feel the emptiness that rested inside the confines of her form.

  There was a moment of thought on her face, but she put the information in her back pocket and focused on my question.

  “Well, I don’t know about mages, but I can tell you a story that Strause told me once, its what had him in a tissy about power. When he was a lad, as he put it, he went to the capital with his father. While seeing the sights, a mage came up to him, observing him, one that no one gave mind to. He decided that Strause had no mana, and he was going to take him away to study him. That mage was a mind mage; he did something not dissimilar to what Strause can do now: muddle and twist the minds of others. He dragged Strause off in broad daylight. No one, not even his father, was the wiser, and he decided to do something. I don’t know what. It was presumably some kind of mind fuckery. Strause killed him, met him mind to mind, and simply killed him, leaving him a living but inanimate husk. The world would be full of people like that. Most people are alright, but no one is a [Saint]… Company excluded. Power can twist people into monsters; even alright people will get swept up in a mob.”

  She told it to me without great detail; her words did not carry the entire story, but they were a summary. The point, however, was pointed enough for me to spot its gleam, its edge sharp enough to glide through the fat.

  “So power is bad. But you can’t judge that. A bad apple is enough to spoil the bunch, but the rest of the apples aren’t inanimate,” I pointed out, a counterthrust of my own.

  “Maybe not, but maybe the point is just to not let bad apples in. Necromancy is illegal, and so is mind magic, but there are always [Necromancers] and [Mind Diddlers],” she pointed out before smirking at the class. “Nice. Anyway, power is bad. Give power to those you trust. That could be one bit, but there’s something else I can think about. Who would make the food? Sure, some people would enjoy farming with magic, but most people would not. There wouldn’t be enough people. Who would bake the bread? Who would do the tedium life requires? If everyone is going to starve, then you need to force more people to farm, but everyone is a mage. Could you imagine two [Archmages] having a disagreement about which one of them is going to be consigned to the mines to get ore? It’s not a recipe to a stable world, but one of constant upheaval.”

  I listened to her second point and held back a scoff.

  “I can imagine worse than that, though point taken,” I told her.

  There was a funny truth about it, and yet there was also a hollow untruth to it. There would not be a collapse of function, not as such. Some people liked plants; they can grow crops faster than a farmer. Hell, that was something you could use Necromancy to do. You could raise a host to harvest grain; you just need to make sure the source of caustic black mana doesn’t kill your crop.

  You could have a society. Joan had forgotten the most important issue, Level. The visual of two [Archmanges] reducing one another to tar stains aside, the only thing two [Archmages] would be fighting over would be which of their Juniors they would be teaching important roles over or who violated who’s territory. They would be something akin to nobility.

  There was something else that her words brought to mind, however.

  People liked power, and the wider you spread it, the thinner it got. A mage was a very stable job, a mage was a powerful class, a mage was a clever person, and the likelihood of them undermining themselves was less present.

  Why dilute your own job market?

  Why wasn’t everyone a mage? While a mage was supposed to teach others, those teachers were only human. They were people who fell into the same issue: sharing power reduced their own.

  That felt like a complete answer to me. Extra possible answers aside, people not spreading the craft to keep their power and stop bad eggs felt like a complete enough answer to give.

  “I think… I think I have an answer. Thank you Joan. Stay warm, we still have to finish the second site. I’ll make sure you get back. Just drink some water, maybe eat, if you brought some food,” I told her, genuine in my thanks.

  “There are two sites?” she asked with a sigh, “I… I should have brought food and water.”

  “Yes, you probably should have,” I told her, the fact that I had done the same thing not escaping me. Then again, I had skills. I still wasn’t even peckish, nonetheless thirsty.

  “I suppose I could always catch some water in the cloak, but I think I’ll take your advice and take a break before my arms fall off,” I told her.

  I left her to that and finished up with the hole.

  Four for five, all I was left with was the last question, but no matter how I spun it, no matter what direction I took it, the answer didn’t materialize, and the question didn’t unravel.

  It was a hole of its own, an empty spot, the answer within, invisible and untouchable, dug for me from my own ignorance.

  I was missing the obvious, there was a missing key that I could not find the glimmer of. It took me all the way to the end of the day, all the way to the second site, to give up for the day. I couldn’t figure it out, no matter how much mana I dumped, or how deeply I thought, or how much my arms burned.

  Maybe Joan was right. I should get to praying for the answer because, at this rate, I wasn’t going to. Defeat sour in my mouth, I picked up Joan and made my goodbyes, each of us exhausted. The opportunity to observe and learn from the [Woodsmen] is gone like smoke, and physical and spiritual exhaustion is draining me dry of effort.

  But they were ready for tomorrow. They would be ready for the fallen.

  I'll be changing the day I upload back to Wednesday. That's right. Wednesday!

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