Mid-Life Magic

It was almost as if his mother was waiting until Darius returned to the Academy to continue “adventuring”. No. Not only was that not true, it was uncharitable to think she’d planned it that way even if maybe she had. Alright. That wasn’t entirely accurate to say either.

Sabina had actually skipped her way back to the Trebal branch of the adventurer’s guild the very next morning after the day she’d registered, dragging her only performatively reluctant son behind her. He’d watched her curls – a riotous blend in various shade of honey, pale as dried straw to the deep amber of caramel – bouncing down her back as she’d only spent enough time getting dressed that morning to pull it back hurriedly. In the back of his mind there was a dim recollection of the fact that most female adventurers had short hair. But he wasn’t going to tell his mother that she needed to conform to the stereotype of everyone else.

“Mother, why are we going back to the guild already?” It hadn’t made sense to him, because how likely was it that someone brought in another gathering request so soon?

“Because I want more gold.” She’d glanced back at him cheekily, a grin splitting her face as her eyes sparkled with merriment. “Don’t you want me to have more gold? It means you’ll have more spending money to fit in with the other mages at school. I’ll split anything I make with you if you be my escort.”

“ d – uh… That’s actually a good reason.” He conceded after a second of fumbling his thoughts. “But how will going back get us more gold? You completed all their gathering quests yesterday.”

“No, I didn’t.” She chuckled at him and turned her body fully around to skip backwards while speaking. His blood pressure spiked in concerned.

“Will you watch where you are going. You’re going to sprain an ankle, and I’ll have to levitate you all the way home.

“You,” she pointed a finger, still stained with ink, or dye, maybe paint from activities before she ran off to be an adventurer on a whim the day before, at his chest for emphasis while swirling little circles in the air at him annoyingly, “worry too much. Also, you can’t levitate something as heavy as me yet and definitely not for as long as it would take to get me home.” He narrowed his eyes and gave her a flat look of exasperation.

“Thank you for the vote of confidence in my skills, mother. Glad to know you have such faith in me.” It did hurt that she had called him out on his abilities even if she was right.

“Oh pshaw. Don’t get discouraged. The fact that you can levitate anything at all is very impressive. It’s not even officially supposed to be taught until the second year, and you are already proficient in the basics. But also, the guild will bring out the requests that didn’t have out before. The not-urgent ones.” The young student mage was so surprised at what his mother said, which of course made sense and was knowledge which had been covered in one of his classes, non-urgent requests stayed off the boards until there was space for them.

“Ah, I forgot about that.” He felt his face heating with a blush of embarrassment that his mother ignored.

“That’s okay. You probably also forgot that they will be bringing over urgent requests from Adventurer Guild Halls in nearby cities, too.” And now he did remember that bit again. Sabina laughed once more at her son before twirling around to continue skipping along the road. Her thick leather soled shoes whispered on the cobblestones and the hem of her dress flounced around her shins. More demure ankle-length dresses, like a proper lady would wear, were too long to properly prance in.

“We’re going to make so much money, mom.” He grinned at her exuberance as it ignited that familiar happiness to go on a fun adventure that every kid was familiar with but gradually forgot as the grind of adulthood wore them down.

“I know.” She tossed over her shoulder. Darius shook his head and ran to catch up with his mother then began skipping beside her. The pair continued skipping down the road joyously and laughing with glee until his breath became labored and rasped in his chest and he had to stop due to gasping for air.

When they stumbled through the Guild House door of the Trebal branch of the Adventurer’s Guild, the two were laughing. And arguing. But with smiles on their faces in the way of bickering children who were familiar with each other’s gripes.

“Well, I’ll have you know that I don’t just meet but exceedDraconarix Academy’s requirements for student physical fitness.” The young mage was bantering with his mother, sweat dripping down his face and his own multi-hued blonde curls flopping in his eyes and stuck to his face.

“And I keep telling you that the student mage requirements are not nearly as stringent as the battle mage requirements. So, you need to exercise more.” It was nagging, but gently, and indulgently with a hint of pride despite her scolding tone. They were clearly not genuinely arguing, and it immediately brought a change to the lobby of the Guild House.

The receptionist, who had been lazily reorganizing the books behind he front desk straightened as a gentle gust of wind blew in with the pair and the dingy lamp light was briefly brightened by the open door. They were back. Already. She felt a combination of intrigue, disappointment, and relief as well when the two of them jockeyed their way over to the bulletin board rather than coming to the front desk.

There was a long backlog of gathering quests since this Guild House was less frequented by active adventurers who were willing to do the work. Most active adventurers considered it ‘beneath’ themselves. As evidenced by the group of young men who were already three mugs of ale into their morning while they waited for a ‘real quest’ to come in. One that was at their level, at least.

It made the elf snort and draw her eyes over the not terribly bright room with a few old retirees and lazy new adventurers. She wondered how many quests the mother and son pair would clear today. How many levels would this kind of adventuring gain someone? It had to count as experience. Right? Even if she wasn’t fighting or using magic. There was some kind of experience gained from this?

Whatever the case, it didn’t seem to matter to either one as they perused the newly posted gathering quests from the backlog and the urgent requests which had been sent over when she’d filed that their capacity had opened up for new requests. For the most part, their conversation was unintelligible from where she stood. Occasionally an exclamation from one or the other would punctuate the background of rowdy adventurers telling stories of their past glories. Clearly, they were going to clear a few quests because the mother kept patting the wicker basket hooked over her elbow in response to his inquiries as the son rifled through the sheets on the board.

After what seemed both interminably short and a very long time, they turned and brought their stack of quest notices to the front desk. Watching their slow seeming but really just normal paced steps brought a wave of some unsettling emotion over the receptionist. After a moment she realized it was anticipation.

This had been the most boring posting she’d ever held working at the Trebal Adventurer’s Guild House.

It was boring enough that she questioned whether she should have become a mage at all. She’d even considered getting her own adventurer rating, maybe going back school to cross train as a battlemage. Battlemages got way more interesting things to spend their time on. But maybe this new adventurer might make life more interesting.

“How can I help you?” She greeted the smiling faces with matching freckles and golden curls. Though, she did notice the son had blue eyes while his mother had eyes that were that shade that morphed depending on the lighting and exertion. Cute. They were adorable. It was sweet of him to help her and accompany her like he was.

Several minutes later and Sabina, that was her name, had emptied her basket and was filling her bag of holding with a mixture of coins with varying denominations. Unsurprisingly, most of those denominations were gold.

“I’d also like to – ”

“Mom.” The young man interrupted sternly, but also hurt. “You promised you were going to go slow and wait until you had gotten some training before you took any potentially dangerous quests.”

“Fine,” his mother sighed “I’ll wait.” She smiled a painfully bright smile of disappointment while her son sighed one of guilty relief.

“Not forever mom. But you literally just started this.” She shoved her bag of holding into her wicker basket then turned her son around toward the door, patting him reassuringly on the shoulder.

“No. No. No. Don’t feel bad. I did say I just wanted to do some gathering quests. I did promise I would get some kind of training before I tried anything dangerous.” As she guided her distracted son away from the counter, she deftly slipped the quest bulletin she never got the chance to ask about into a pocket on the other side of her body from her son. Even as she was opening her mouth to tell the middle-aged adventurer that she couldn’t just take off with the bulleting, the receptionist was changing her mind. This could be very interesting… and technically, not her fault if anything went wrong.

This was their daily schedule for the rest of the time that Darius was home from school on break. Marcellus, Sabina’s husband, would leave for work before light. Later, Sabina would wake up Darius with breakfast or Darius would make breakfast for his mother. Then they’d gather herbs, lichens, mushrooms, and other things from Sabina’s garden or in the various areas that they grew wild nearby. Afterward they walked to the Adventurer’s Guild House in Trebal to submit them and get paid. A small snack on the way back home to Sabina’s shop in the front of their home completed the ritual.

It was a happy time for Sabina. She was finally doing something which she’d wanted to do for so long. It brought her joy. But she wanted more. More adventure. More excitement. She was capable of so much more. However, a certain overly cautious adult child was raining on her parade.

“I’m pretty sure I know what’s doing it.” She mentioned casually as she mixed some dough. The woman was holding a large bowl and gently but firmly stirring the contents with an equally large wooden spoon.

“Doing what?” Darius responded distractedly. His brow was furrowed as he stirred his own bowl of dough with just as much diligence but not as much objective success as his mother.

“The apiary quest,” It was said with as studiously a nonchalant tone of voice as she could muster. Which made Darius give her an eyebrow of suspicion. Taking his eyes off the contents of his bowl momentarily caused some of it to glop up onto his face.

“What? How did that even happen?” Setting down the bowl, he grabbed a dishcloth and wiped the chicken egg sized splash of sticky dough from his face before gravity could drag it down. His mother giggled and he glanced back at her to see her sucking both lips in to hold her laughter. Darius narrowed his eyes at his mother in mock annoyance. “My misfortunes are a constant source of amusement for your, aren’t they?” His voice was as sarcastically flat as he could make it without it becoming a biting comment.

“You do have minor misfortunes at inopportune times,” came the happy agreement. “Also, you have lots of dough on your face still.” He reached up a clean corner of his dishcloth and wiped at his face again.

“How is there more?” He kept wiping at it ineffectually. “It just keeps coming. Okay. There. Did I get it?” He angled his face so that his mother could see better to tell him if he’d managed to clean his face off.

“It’s good enough.” The slightly mischievous tone of voice caused Darius to pause in suspicion.

“Is it really?” He dabbed at his face more, accidentally spreading dough with his attempts to clean himself further. “I don’t believe you because you are being too normal.” Which of course triggered a peal of his mother’s ringing laughter.

“It’s fine. Stop. You’re just going to make it worse. Tend your bowl before it gets out of hand. You already broke concentration.” She snatched the cloth from him and tossed it out of his reach when he tried to grab it back.

“You broke my concentration with your quest obsession.” Was his defensive reply, to which his mother quickly retorted.

“You want to learn this or not?”

“Maybe I don’t.” He sniffed as if he was hurt, then tried to blow one of his rampant curls out of his eyes because of course there was a lose lock of hair flopping in his eyes right now when his hands were covered in flour and dough and his face felt like he’d contracted a severe case of doughpox.

“Well,” Sabina snorted, “that’s one hundred percent a lie.” Then she laughed again as her son agreed.

“Yes, it is. Please help me,” Picking up his bowl, he beseeched his mother for help plaintively. Smiling fondly, Sabina took a few gliding steps over to look at his progress critically.

“You were doing well. As you can tell from the way the dough is… expanding… you were successful in following the recipe.” The vagueness of the compliment made the young mage wince and frown at the same time.

“You mean that I managed to make the dough rise?” Still frowning, Darius glared at the dough in his bowl. “Isn’t that just how dough works? Like yeast makes it get bigger? I can’t tell how you can tell that I was doing it right.”

“First, your starter became stringy when you mixed the correct amount of flour, yeast, and water. Then it began to grow.” It was stated simply, as if that was the very essence of the matter.

“Mom. I asked you to teach me a wealth or success spell for good luck with my studies at school. But instead, you are teaching me how to make bread where one of the ingredients is but ‘abundance’.” He glanced up at her dubiously then back down. “Abundance isn’t an ingredient, it’s a noun.”

“It’s also an adjective, adverb or verb.” The correction was clearly added automatically while Sabina was distractedly examining her son’s bowl of dough. “Also, this isn’t, technically, dough yet.”

“I know, it’s a starter.”

“Uhhh…. It’s technically a preferment. Use the correct terminology.” Hastily, the woman set down her bowl, reached for the open flour barrel with a scoping cup in it and handed a cup of flour to her son.

“And you lost too much of the ‘abundance’ when you spilt. Quick, add one, no, one and a half scoops of flour,” and she sniffed at the bowl and then licked her lips, “and three quarters of a scoop of water. Hurry. Before it all escapes.”

Dubiously and with much doubtfulness in his mother’s instructions, Darius followed his mother’s instructions. Then used the spoon to keep stirring until the preferment returned to its stringy nature.

“Damnit boy, add the abundance again. You were so close last time.”

“I literally have no idea what I did.” He proclaimed with frustration. Some of that frustration was transferred to his stirring and he almost splashed the mix out of the bowl again.

“Just focus on what you are trying to achieve. Like this.” She picked up her bowl again and watched her focus on it as she stirred and Darius could see that her mixture had more than tripled in size. Now, he was not an expert in baking, but he’d been raised by one, and it did not seem odd to him that the mixture had risen so much.

That was just always how this step in the baking looked to him when he helped her, yet his preferments never got as big as his mother’s did when he made them alone. They did get big. Just not as big as his mother’s. It was so much harder today to get that rise than normal. Perhaps he was just out of practice. But all he remembered from baking with his mother that was different before was that he used to ask the preferment to grow. They’d sang a song together when he would help in the kitchen as a child.

“Little bit of flour get bigger, bigger, bigger.” He started mumbling the song under his breath which made his mother smile. “Bigger, to fill our bellies. Bigger to fill our coin purse.”

“Good job,” his mother congratulated him. “Keep singing.” For a second, Darius wondered if he had done it right, but then he saw that the mixture in his bowl had gotten larger so he continued singing the song his mother had taught him as a child.

“Little bowl of water, mixing with the flour, feeding all the yeast and growing bigger by the hour. You’ll be baked into abundance and good luck to be devoured.” Singing the childish song felt silly. But it brought back the memories of being raised as a young child.

Their small kitchen. The meager ingredients that his mother would buy and somehow turn into feasts so that this belly was never empty. The way she could cook so little but make so much. He remembered wishing for more, more flour, more water, for the little mixture in their bowl to grow and grow so that she didn’t have to spend more money they didn’t have.

As he remembered those feelings, focusing them through his hands, down the spoon and through the bowl into the preferment he was stirring…it grew. Thrice. Four times. Six. Eig…. It began to overflow the bowl and he had no idea what to do with it.

“Quick. Toss it in here.” His mother had set down her own bowl and grabbed an even larger one from a storage shelf. So, he poured it into the new bowl. “You don’t have to keep stirring. It took this time.” The two stood back and watched the sticky mass continue growing.

“Why is it so much bigger than yours?” He finally got up the nerve to ask.

“Oh. Because I started with way less flour and water than you.” A nervous laugh escaped her lips. “I thought you might need a larger starting mass to help you get it up to size. You always needed a bigger starting mix when you were little. But maybe I was wrong. We haven’t even let it rise or added the flour and water for the main part of the recipe and the bulk fermentation yet. Here,” she handed him her bowl. “Do the same with this one. I’ll just do a special on bread this afternoon and tomorrow. There will be more than enough left over for sale after you pack some up to take back to school with you.”

He repeated the process, feeling even sillier as he sang the song for a second time but also proud that he’d been able to replicate the results twice. It was still weird that he needed to sing to the bread at all for it to rise. Did everyone sing to their bread?

They began cleaning bowls while the large pillows of dough grew larger on the countertop and an hour later, Sabina had determined that they were ready for more flour and water if needed. Not until after she’d made Darius sniff, taste, and feel the texture of the mass. Also, he had to lookat it until he felt like his eyeballs were going to come out of his head.

“Remember the textures, the tackiness, the smell. Is it yeasty? Does it smell like beer? Or sweet and nutty like bread? Is it shiny? Or matte?” She quizzed him relentlessly on the various physical aspects of what he’d created. “Does it feel like promises?” Her last question through him.

“I’m sorry. What? How could I tell if it feels like promises?” Even as he asked the question, he remembered his mother teaching him these same techniques as a young boy and him never quite understanding. All these years later it felt like he’d gone even further away from those old lessons. The obvious excitement on Sabina’s face dimmed a little bit, thought she hid it valiantly.

“Okay. How else to explain it?” She tapped a finger against her lips restlessly as she thought. “Does it feel like potential to be more?” Slowly Darius turned his blue eyes to the bloated lumps of not-yet-dough on the counter.

“It feels like it has potential to be bread.”

“Aaarrggg! Use all your senses.” Somehow Darius felt like he was failing his mother at not being able to do the impossible. So, he touched, looked, smelled, listened to, tasted it all over again. “All your senses boy. Use your…arg….” She stopped and rubbed that spot between her eyes where headaches formed.

“Your sense. Your potential sense. You know, the sense that tells you when things are more than what they physically seem.”

“That’s, mom. That’s not a thing.” Now it was Sabina’s turn to give her son a flat look as she dusted her hands off on her apron.

“It is too.”

“No. It’s not.”

“Yes, it is. How do you think I’m able to do the things that I do?”

“With magic.” He countered. “Of course.”

“And how do I know a thing is magic?” She was getting petty, and Darius was growing frustrated.

“I don’t know?” Came the frustrated shout. “You just wave your hands and make things happen. You don’t say an incantation. Or write a rune. Or shape a magical sigil. Or infuse a sub… stance…” His mother was watching him closely, as if she could see the wheeling turning in his head ever so slowly taking his brain to a conclusion. She even turned her head to gradually until it was almost completely sidewise then whatever she was watching, her focus slowly shifted away from his face.

“No. It was close. You were close. But also, so far away.” Her words were thoughtful as she continued watching some invisible thing as if it were drifting away through the window and into the distance. It had been so distracting that Darius had stopped thinking of anything at all. “Let’s try this. What do they call it at school when you assess the magical qualities of something? Use that!”

“A magical assessment spell?” he proffered.

“Does it tell you the potential magic in something? Like, it if would make a good ingredient in a spell or alchemy?”

“Ah. A component assessment spell is what you want. I have the basic one they teach first years.” Uncertainly, Sabina nodded.

“That might work.” Cupping her chin in her hand, she thoughtfully bit her finger. “Maybe. You might still not be ready.” With a sigh, he wandered out of the kitchen.

“I’ll be right back. Just need to grab a wand from my bag.” He left the room, quietly disappointed, and muttering about how his mother never thought he was ready. Upon returning, he incanted the component assessment spell that he was most familiar with. Expecting nothing. And there was nothing returned on the spell. “Nothing mom. It says there’s nothing magical about the dough.”

“Preferment,” she corrected absently, then rolled her sleeves up. “It’s fine. It will still work even if you can’t prove that it’s working.”

“That doesn’t even make sense, mom.” Groaning, the young mage put his wand aside and followed his mother’s example to get back to work.

“It doesn’t have to make sense to be true, child.” Her soft scolding was distracted still, as if she was trying to solve a puzzle that eluded her. “Here, we fold in the flour like this.”

“I remember.” They worked in silence for a while, incorporating more flour and water into what was already going to be an enormous batch of bread. When they left it to bulk ferment, Sabina sat down in a corner of her shop across from the kitchen and began crocheting.

“I think,” she mused as the yarn knotted images and dreams into garments. “I think you need to bake with someone else.”

“What would that do?” It was frustrating for both of them that he could not see what she was trying to show him. He had been busying himself with drizzling a light frosting over buns that were cooling near the window for sale that afternoon. It was still morning, and they’d had very few coming to the shop so far. That would pick up around midday when workers were hungry and wanted a quick bite or shoppers made it into town from the surrounding hamlets.

“You have never seen the world without magic. You have never made the bread without abundance. You have never worn a scarf or mittens without a memory to protect you or keep you warm.” That, that made him stop cold. Just for an instant. Like a hiccup in a perfect frosting machine.

“So, you’re saying that I can’t see how your magic works, because I’ve never seen how those processes work without your magic?” It…. It made sense, in a suspiciously simplistic kind of way. Whatever Sabina did, it wasn’t quantifiable the way traditional mages quantified things. And that was half the reason her son had chosen to become a mage, to understand what his mother did.