"Singe my soul..."
How in the name of King Asgore's fluffbun beard did Priestess Frioke manage through more than one glass of the Royal Mead?
Heavy was the thunk of the bottom of the half-empty tankard of Royal Mead that Cter put back down onto her guest room table.
"Is it the same batch that she drank?"
Had the mead been fermenting ever since human magic was discovered?
"Jeez."
Tasted delicious, but hit like a spade on the head. Cter was sure feeling her monster side with her drink hitting her quicker than quick.
Worst of the situation though was that Cter had specifically asked for it from Huvett and Huvtvao. Confidently, and with a knowing smirk thrown over her shoulder. Came to bite her pretty badly, it did.
Stasis or blue magic to help her up on her feet? She needed some fresh air, and the window was the closest source she had. Could've more easily opened the window with stasis magic, she figured after her sleeved hand touched the old hatch. The window opened quietly which was a surprise considering how old it looked. There was a comfortable breeze outside. Filtered through the many trees hiding the massive forest behind them, it brought a sweet and sappy smell to the long, brushing strokes that the wind provided across Cter's cheeks and through her hair. It had been a while since she had felt her cheeks blush from the fresh and cool Hjearta breeze.
It felt nice.
A squad of guards that sprung joyous recognition from Cter were about to enter one of the barracks at the far end of the castle compound. To get their attention Cter threw a magical snowball that shattered with a crystal-like crash far enough from the squad to only get their attention and not to alert them. One of the humans in the squad turned his head towards the sound, and after trailing the area his eyes met the waving from Cter.
The entire squad then turned to salute her, including Kallorean and their general. Cter bowed back, but not too far as to fall accidentally fall out of the window. She was very agile with sitting on window sills owing to her sitting in her mage tower window each morning taking in the sunrise, so she knew when her long hair threatened to pull her over the edge with its weight.
That the Royal Mage of Ice stood below the window where the visiting Monster Mage was hanging out of she didn't know though. "Cter!" he shouted and instantly regretting his decision as the Monster Mage became as startled as he was.
After a conflicted grimace at the spilled mess of Royal Mead behind her as she slammed her hand down onto the table to catch her balance, followed by a relieved grimace from seeing that the mead missed her journal, the visiting Monster Mage sighed hard enough that her cheeks ached. All of her scribbles and crosses over those scribbles were safe.
For whatever good that did.
"What in Soulay's soul are you doing, Monster Mage?"
Terri's voice was fluctuating between scared and angrily confused with each word he spoke. Not something Cter blamed him for though.
If anything he gave her an excuse to why she couldn't finish her Royal Mead.
"I was getting myself some fresh air," Cter explained while leaning out just enough so that the Royal Mage could hear her without being scared a second time. "My apologies if it looked like I was doing something different from your view down there." Looking down, Cter briefly wondered if her landing on Terri's head would be worse than on the ground due to his spiky hair. A strange thought, come to think about it. "Did I give you a start?"
And they said there were no such things as stupid questions.
"I'm afraid to say that you did, Monster Mage." The Royal Mage exhaled, his breath forming a cloud of frost. With that out of him he tugged that intriguing smile of his. "If you are not busy perhaps you would like to join me for a walk?"
Cter looked back to the scribbles in her journal. While she would love to indulge in pride from having solved the riddle of Terri's magic she had also ran out of leads to expand on from what evidence she had gathered. The biggest suspect as the source of Terri's magic was his dog. That he perhaps made a Cooperative Connection with his dog and or that his dog was magical. Both cases had their share of drastic revelations.
One would be that Terri found out about the real truth about the Cooperative Connection.
The other would be that animals could be magical too.
But which one?
And which one did Cter prefer?
"I can meet you up at the egress on the next tower," suggested Terri with a point of his sleeve brimming with frost. "In a few minutes or right away?"
Right away worked for Cter. "I'll head there now." She let the window stay open to freshen up the room while she was gone. As her shoes touched wet though she remembered that she had to deal with her spilled mead. Easy enough though. Just had to freeze the spill, bend the frozen pieces off the floor and table, and then deposit into the basin bowl.
That Cter had experience with doing that routine more than once wasn't the best of signs…
The door at the ground floor of the tower half a hallway away from Cter's room opened to reveal the Royal Mage of Ice in a rather thoughtful expression. "Ice magic?" he pondered with his eyes narrowing and his jaw shifting slightly to the side. "Was that your ice magic I felt?" He knew full well that it was, but that he felt the need to ask? "You did use ice magic just now, right?"
Despite being asked three times Cter felt it was adequate with just one answer in return. "Yes." Perhaps two to show good faith. "Yes, it was." Eh, screw it! Cter was feeling nice. "It was my ice magic you felt." With her three answers to the three questions she could expand upon them. "I spilled some mead and froze it to easier clean the spill."
Terri's eyes shifted up towards the opened guest room window. "I see." He paused for a second before his eyes moved back to Cter. "Icy?" he said with not a lot of confidence behind it. "That works?" He was up for criticism of his repertoire. "Or was the timing wrong?"
It was fine. "Saying it without making it a jest first makes an expectation that you then subvert." It wasn't great or anything. "It works." Just fine.
"Right." Terri nodded. "Thanks."
Anytime.
"So what with it being your ice magic, Cter," Terri then brought up again after scratching his chin for a bit. "It was a Monster Mage type of ice magic, correct?"
Cter's brow sank at the inquiry. "No," she said in reaction while shaking her head. "No, it was just normal ice magic."
The sunken brow was transferred over to the Royal Mage from the Monster Mage. "Normal?" he challenged with a smirk. His curiosity plastered itself on both his face and in his aura. "That was normal ice magic to you?" He nodded once again, but with an undercurrent of playfulness to it. "Icy, icy."
Better delivery that time.
But aside that, why did Terri think that Cter's ice magic wasn't normal? Why did he nod like he was becoming keen on Cter lying to him? There was a sheen to his sleeve as well. Something was going on with his soul. Something he found to be a challenge of sorts. The way he beckoned for Cter to walk with him suggested that he was gonna try and get some answers from her too.
Problem was that Cter didn't know what it was she was hiding. While she was hiding a lot, nothing really was in direct relation to what it was that Terri apparently was thinking that she was hiding. Nevertheless he walked with his hands behind his back, leaving a smoky trail of icy shimmers emerging from underneath his mantle. The shimmer had as much twinkle as Terri had in his eyes.
"Ice magic," he stated underneath an apple tree bearing no fruits. "Quite the magic, isn't it?" He breathed in deeply to make a show of it, almost to the point of doing one nostril at a time followed by his mouth. "Deeply connected to Hjearta. Some even say that it was the first magic that King Soulay manifested."
It wasn't. That was blatantly false.
It was a form of fire magic from the warmth he felt from Queen Toriel sewing the blanket.
Terri knew that. He was in the lecture hall at the same time Cter was when Professor Leraull taught their class about King Soulay. If he was unsure still he would've asked Priestess Frioke to clarify. There was no way that he didn't know Prince Soulay's first manifested magic.
So why lie?
Pray and please tell, oh Royal Mage of Ice.
"And there are so many different flavors to ice magic. So many ways it can manifest itself, yet still be considered the same. Don't you agree, Monster Mage?"
He wasn't wrong, although he wasn't really correct either. Yes, ice magic had many different flavors to it. The color, the structure of it, whether or not it was cold or not, and how light refracted through it. All of those variables could be changed and the ice magic would be different. That the Royal Mage wasn't wrong about.
What he wasn't correct though was that it was specific to ice magic. The quip in his voice when he said it coupled with the sweeping tilt of his head implied that ice magic was alone in being a variable magic.
And Cter had just made a splendid entrance proving that wrong.
So again, what was the Royal Mage on about?
"A lot of that variation stems from the human casting the magic though."
Yes...again as with everything regarding magic. Cter was very much showing her brow furrowed at the Royal Mage so uppity with skating around the point.
"Did you know that you can tell history from ice?" Terri made another wide sweep with his sleeved arm over yonder. His frost magic followed the arcing motion, twinkling as it melted in the warm sun. Not completely and equally though, as parts of the trailing cloud was in shadow from the leaves in the trees planted next to the garden path. "In the mountains well and far over yonder there are human mages stationed at some of the more ancient of glaciers studying the depth of the ice. The further down, the older the ice, and the further we can look back in time. Human mages specialized in ice magic help with extraction and scouting of new places where potentially interesting specimens can be found. It was what I wanted to become, originally."
"I thought you were a wandering mage before becoming a Royal Mage," Cter posed with her own hand sweeping a cross the tree tops of the large forest circling Fenkeep Castle. "Research didn't strike you fancy?"
"Prospect of it I found fancy, but not the prospecting," replied Terri as he and Cter headed underneath the canopy of a flowering pear tree. "Was a bit too cold for me. Not in the literal sense, but more in the working sense. A bit too much debating what to do rather than doing. Five days being cold and listening to someone else not doing something before you got to do something for one day. I weathered it a month and a half. Took one of the sled dogs with me when I left. A fluffy, elderly girl named Mika. Gave her a cloud of constant snowfall to keep her comfortable during my travels which she eagerly followed. The flakes would collect on the top of her fur before sliding off as she turned to the smell of a deer or something somewhere in the forests we wandered next to."
Terri became more and more distant the more he spoke, with him eventually slowing down to a standstill with a deep sigh that seemed to rustle the leaves underneath the aspen he stopped besides.
"Now I can only find those ice-blue eyes in the mirror. Hers are lost to me, as is she."
He lost more than just a pet, didn't he?
"She was always so restless when she had to sit and wait for the other dogs to move before she could. So sulky and bored out of her mind. She could see that I was too. Of course I wouldn't just leave her there when I had decided that I wouldn't stick around and freeze myself unnecessarily." Before Cter could add anything, Terri raised an icy finger to halt her. Not that she would say anything, but just in case if she would. "I've no problem with cold, but I have a problem with being unnecessarily cold. Like if you were forced to stay standing still with weight alternating between each leg as to not faint while a monster argued between his two heads for days on end whether or not the spot one chose was good or not."
The Royal Mage finished with a humph and a glean back at the castle.
"I don't buy his excuse that Mika just ran away on her own. He might say that he left his days at the glaciers behind him just like he did his monsterdom, but I know how fancy humans are of keeping grudges. He did not not send her back to the glacier we worked at though." Terri lifted his sleeved arm flat in front of him with a descending look upon the magical lines glowing coldly. "Smart enough to send her somewhere else, weren't you?"
Cter's eyebrows were almost tangled in her hair, they flew so high up.
Huvet and Huvtvao's soul was in Terri's sleeve? That...that Cter didn't see coming. With how much he hated Huvett and Huvtvao though, how was it possible for him to use his learned Cooperative Connection?
Sensing that Cter fell deep into thought, the Royal Mage turned to face the Monster Mage with. "I respect him," came the answer, low and static, as if just being read out from a book without anything more to it. The complete opposite of how Braille Script would read from it. "He could convince himself to be a human. He had the inner strength to furlough the emotional closeness a monster needs. That is something you have to feel respect towards, no matter what you think of the person. That's why I wield his magic. The last of his magic before he became human. That respect is our Cooperative Connection. I may want him dead for what he did to my dog, but never would I wish his legacy to be tarnished. If anything it makes him more human that he did that to me." Terri let his anger through, tightening his face into a betrayed scowl. "Even if I respect the man I still despise what he has done to me. Actions louder than words, and all that."
The Royal Mage of Ice sat down on a nearby bench while Cter stood and took it all in.
"Apologies if I went a bit overboard there, Monster Mage."
Yes, yes. Cter was used to it. She just needed a few moments just to digest what Terri wielding Huvett and Huvtvao's magic meant.
"It's just that...with you being a third party to this, and a mage to boot." The sound of clothing shifting was Terri shrugging. "I've had no one else to talk about this to."
Huh…
Same story about Kry when Kurant became the Second Monster Mage? Cter could imagine it to an extent. Not as far as Kry sitting hunched on a bench with hands clasped and with quivering breath after finally having been able to talk with someone about the burden in his soul. It would have been more Kry and Kurant sitting for tea in the Royal Garden along with Queen Toriel and King Asgore.
Cter was lucky to have others who'd gone through what she had before when she became a Monster Mage. If she had to deal with that faithful night all alone…
The aspen leaves again rustled in response to a strong sigh filtering through them.
"In return to you listening I won't prod further about your ice magic."
Oh yeah!
That!
"No, by all means," Cter coaxed with a soft motion. "Ask away. Just please ask me straight about it, if you would?" That Cter felt was fair as a condition to impose.
Terri agreed with a few nods before he straightened up against the bench's backrest. "Did you study my ice magic that I left behind at Jarasevo Castle? Did you Monster Mages use it to further your own knowledge of it?"
While it might have sounded confrontational to someone passing by, it didn't to Cter. "Did Priestess Frioke mention anything about that?" Cter didn't study it, but the others could have. Wouldn't have surprised Cter if they did. Sund perhaps since he was meant to be the one looking ahead when it came to human magic.
"She didn't," said Terri. His fingers came up to underneath his nose as he gave his answer some thought to make properly sure. "No, no she didn't."
"Then we didn't," Cter lied very well. "Impressed by it, sure. Your dedicated focus on ice magic has it surpassed even what us Monster Mages can achieve. Otherwise you'd just be a Royal Mage, right? Not the one of Ice?"
The Royal Mage of Ice had to concede the compliment and accept it as it was without any pushing back. "I suppose." He again looked up towards where Cter's guest room was. "It's just that your ice magic felt different compared to your other magic. Could just be me though what with my dedicated focus on ice magic."
Cter was gonna lean on that as much as she could. "My father is a woodcutter. He can tell the difference between evergreen and a pine even if it's painted over and behind him." To further prove Cter covered the tip of her sleeved index finger with ice that she remembered from the lake in her village, and her thumb with ice that she used for her ice cubes. Instantly Terri's eyes and aura honed in that the two were different. "See?"
"Ice from a memory of natural and human origin on your index finger and magic of a source that's keenly monster on your thumb?" he said as a guess but had no doubt about him being wrong.
Cter snapped her index finger and thumb together, with the shattering ices compensating for her sleeve's inability to make a proper snap. "Exactly." She sat down next to the Royal Mage. "You're still getting warm...eh...cold in the clothes about being the Royal Mage. That's nothing to be ashamed of." God knows she was being quite hypocritical with her advice. "It's hard to gauge our limits as mages. Can't ask the older ones because their limits are lower than ours, so we gotta find it ourselves. With you as a Royal Mage and me as a Monster Mage we've been encouraged, if not privileged, to go beyond those limits that we don't even know about. We can only take it in our own pace though. That's the hardest part. To take it in your own pace with everyone's eyes upon you."
A small chuckle escaped in a puff of frost from the Royal Mage's snicker. "Forgive me for being a bit crass, but I can hear that you're not only giving me the advice that you're speaking."
True. Very much so. "I am efficient, dear Royal Mage of Ice." He should have thanks for giving Cter a good reason to say it.
"How long until your next scheduled activity, Monster Mage?"
"Four 'o clock."
"Do you plan on staying inside your room while waiting?"
"You asking me to keep you company here on this bench?"
"If you would?"
Why not?
"I would."
The smell of the flowering pear tree was not something Cter wanted to leave for the moment.
