Chapter XI | Ancestral Magic

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Caleb, Synthia, and Tyler convened at the sofas of their lounge the next morning while drinking a cup of tea with biscuits and a slice of cheese each.

Tyler stretched his back, rolled his neck, and cracked the bones of his fingers. He groaned and sipped his beverage.

"Sore muscles?" Synthia asked.

Tyler looked at her with tiredness in his eyes. "Yeah... Dying does that to you."

Caleb snorted and continued eating his slice of cheese with delight.

"What do you think we're doing today?" Caleb asked curiously, "Anaya didn't mention it."

"I mean, as long as she's not murderous, anything's good."

They finished their meals and set their vases on the kitchen counter, leaving them there for the Servant Spirits to clean up. They fixed their generic white outfits and headed out to the library, where they found Anaya waiting in the middle of the room.

"Good morrow, children. We are almost done with your basic training!" The sorceress called out.

"That's good, Anaya," Caleb said, trying to break the tension of being in the same room as the woman who had tried to annihilate them.

"What're the plans for today?" Synthia and Tyler asked in unison, cringing and looking at each other in disgust.

"Don't copy me," Tyler said.

"I said it first!" Synthia answered.

Tyler gaped. "No, you did not!"

"WITCHLINGS!" Anaya intervened, bringing their attention to her. "Behave, for the gods' sake. And yes, there are indeed plans for today's lesson. The idea was that training would've ended yesterday, and therefore practice would have begun at dawn today, yet yesterday in Combat practice," she flinched, "again, sorry about that," she resumed, "yesterday, you showed me something that I had not foreseen."

Caleb tilted his head as he remembered his encounter with Anaya inside the mist storm.

"The three of you, the spell placed on your lineages, and the prophecy that is yet to be fulfilled has a lot more power than I initially thought. Caleb wrote a spell on the go yesterday without crumbling to ashes while the other two of you single-handedly handled me and my reinforced, deadly powers. That can only mean one thing. Combined, the three of you have a power that was last seen millennia ago."

She went quiet, opening a gigantic book that she had in front of her. She read and flipped through the pages in raging concentration.

Synthia broke the silence. "What power do we have, Anaya?"

The trio looked at each other and beamed with a mix of pride and fear.

"Raw magic," Anaya answered, letting out a heavy breath as she did, "the deadliest, most eternal ability a magician can wield. As I have told you before, people of the gods' bloodlines all have powers but are especially prone to having an affinity for a path each. Smiths, warriors, healers, seers, spell writers. They all have characteristics and abilities that set them apart in groups."

She eyed the trio and turned around, reaching for another book in a group pile behind her.

"Magicians who carry the power we call Raw Magic, they are different," she explained, with her back still toward them, "They are not limited by these categories, they have no limits to what abilities their powers can reach. Not only do they have more abundant sources of magic inside them, but they can use their magic for almost anything anyone can do. Yesterday, Caleb proved that to me when he was spell writing, and I started to wonder about it when Synthia mentioned activating her bracelet unintentionally. Your powers are too much to contain, so they are seeping through cracks in your body, coming out in unexpected ways."

They gaped at her, their eyes wide.

"But most importantly, this means that you can also reach a type of magic that only the strongest, most famous magicians could ever reach." She picked up a book from the pile, pushed the current one off the table and replaced it with an even older book. "Ancestral Magic."

On the cover of the book was a Symbol, a bigger version of the ones that the keys inside Caleb's father's chest had been. They were some sort of looping serpent that encircled three smaller icons, each shiny in its own color.

"Ancestral magic is the most powerful and influential training, yet also the most destructive and draining. It is represented by this symbol because it's based on cultural heritage, Greek, Egyptian, or Norse. A magician who can yield ancestral magic has the power to harness energy from Greeks, Egyptians, or Norse gods themselves, depending on what culture they descend from. If a Greek were to try invoking Egyptian ancestral magic, they'd be blown to pieces."

Synthia looked at her hands in awe. Tyler did the same and grinned at Caleb, who was studying the symbol, more specifically the icons the snake wrapped around.

"The eye," he pointed out, "it's the Eye of Horus, like my own. That means Egyptian."

Anaya nodded.

Tyler leaned in. "The Omega, that hoove up top, it's a Greek letter, right? That means me."

"Then that means," Synthia concluded, "that the runic figure left, the one like a tree with a bunch of branches curving out, must be Yggdrasil, the Norse tree of life."

The ancient sorceress smiled at them as she opened the book. "Take this book, study it together at your lounge. Uncover the secrets of a magic that I never got to delve upon." Her invitation was almost sad, but encouraging nevertheless.

The trio nodded as Caleb took the book in his hand. He rose it in the air and said, "Recipio, stélno."

The book was immediately taken into the air by an invisible Servant Spirit, who hurried off into the halls and took it to their living room. They watched it fly off into the distance and hide behind the walls.

"Nice trick," Tyler complimented.

Caleb did a small bow and laughed, breaking completely the awkwardness that they'd had around Anaya the entire morning.

"Now," Anaya announced, "we can move on to what was planned. Today is practice day. Shall we head into the Combat training room?"

The trio of magicians simultaneously gulped, arching their brows in worry. However, they complied and headed to a side of the room where the ancient sorceress knocked on a wall and opened a doorway five meters tall into the metallic room they already knew from the day before.

Synthia strode in and cracked her knuckles defiantly. "Who am I fighting first, huh?"

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⏰ Last updated: Apr 13, 2018 ⏰

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