My fingers grasped the fabric of space, tangling through and around it as though I were threading them through a lover’s hair. Not that I knew what that was like, I’d never dated anyone, but I’d imagined it on more than one occasion. Bright, shining hair. Soft to the touch and silky like— 

Anyway, back to magic... It would only take a moment, a snippet in time before I had a firm grasp, and then I’d pull, and the world would shift. Not all that elegantly, mind you. Each time I tugged on the weave of space, I lurched through the air, my new velocity far exceeding the small movement my arms had made.

Unbidden, a whoop of exhilaration escaped my smiling, chapped lips. I was fucking flying!

The gauntlets had turned out to be the key to the magic problem in a great many ways. All the stories and folklore and even pop culture talked about was wands and potions.

Turns out, neither of those methods of manipulating magic disposed themselves particularly well to defence. So when the hunters had turned up to burn a witch, it was the ones who couldn’t fight who died.

The ones that could? They used different implements, like for example, a pair of heavy, ancient metal gauntlets. Not just any gauntlets though, but gauntlets designed to hone the mage’s natural magic into a blade far sharper than it would have been had they been relying on their mind alone.

A mage’s power wasn’t enough though, not to fight the hunters, they needed to be able to draw upon the power of the leylines. Leylines that had been slowly eradicated by a fanatical cult of magic hating whackos. That’s where the gauntlets truly shone, they got around the whole dead leyline problem by allowing a mage to convert mundane energy into magical energy.

Since then, I’d been playing around in secret, learning how to use the gauntlet’s power to twist whatever energy I could find into a shape I could use. Currently however, I was relying on the small pool of magic within my soul, using that to pull myself through the air.

Something I hadn’t anticipated in my headlong rush to leave the house was the frigid late summer air, especially up above the rooftops. Nights got cold mighty quick in the north. 

My eyes were watering with it, lips cracking and upper arms numb. At least I was nearby to the protest now, I could distantly hear the commotion over the rush of the wind as it sought to pull my hood not just back, but off entirely.

The buildings were getting tall as I closed in, four and five stories now, with the central business district beyond rising into massive skyscrapers. Thankfully my destination wasn’t among those monsters, I was definitely not confident enough in my abilities to navigate that jungle.

I was confident enough to drop down into the middle of the protestors, changing my velocity at the last second with a tug upwards. The lurching stop had my stomach turning, but it did the job, so I wasn’t going to complain.

The park was large, a massive grass expanse lined with tall poplar trees, a playground off in one of the corners the only feature of note. Well, except for the thousand or so protestors who had been penned into the place, but they weren’t normally there.

The atmosphere among the trapped people was lightning, all bottled up by fear and anger in equal measure. Sporadic chanting would pick up when someone with enough charisma got it going, only for it to fizzle again as people grew tired.

Signs of recent clashes were around too, open spaces where medics were keeping everyone back from someone in need of their expertise, spent gas canisters laying in the grass drenched in water.

The funny thing was that I wasn’t completely out of place, given what I was wearing. I saw a few people with swords strapped to their backs, makeshift shields were all over the place. People had turned up ready for the fight that the cops would inevitably bring, and now I was one of them. Not to mention all the masks, couldn’t let this become another superspreader event.

As I’d flitted in from above, I’d seen more cops coming in from the south, their vehicles parked out the front of the courthouse. To the north stood their unofficial counterparts, several ragtag groups of right wing militia nutjobs. Everyone knew they were in bed together, probably even talking over the phone or whatever. Didn’t seem like anyone in power gave a shit though.

If any of the three groups here were going to start shit, it would be the military wannabes, so now that I was on the ground, I began to push my way through the crowd in their direction.

With the way everyone was packed in, I had a tough time finding my way. The gauntlets might give me magic, but I was still a small, scrawny little dude without the OP buff that was testosterone. A sentient pinball trying to get from one side of the park to the other.

Wincing as a stray elbow caught me under the ribs, I stumbled into someone else my size with a whoosh of air. “Sorry!” I blurted, cringing again as I felt one of my gauntlets crush against them.

“It’s okay,” a familiar voice gasped, causing me to spin in alarm. It was Eva!

Eva was a short girl, only slightly taller than my five feet six inches. She had a bright orange shock of shoulder length hair that was perpetually messy and held back out of her face by a blue hair clip. When I say her hair was bright, I mean it. It was the colour of fresh magma, spewed straight from the core of the earth.

She was cute too, in a messy sort of way, never really giving a shit about her looks or presentation. Her reasoning was that if you didn’t conform to society’s beauty standards for long enough, people would just stop expecting it of you.

“You can’t help it if the fascist cosplayers have us boxed in,” she said, taking hold of my shoulders to steady us both. It was about then that she noticed my getup, eyebrows rising as she took it all in. “Damn, speaking of cosplay…”

“A-ah… yeah,” I laughed nervously, wondering what the hell to do now. She hadn’t recognised me yet, and it would probably be a good idea if it stayed that way.

Hesitating for a moment, she peered at me closely, asking, “Are you here with friends? I got separated from mine, and… well, I’m pretty sketched out.”

I shook my head, trying to figure out how I could speak without giving the game away. Wait… probably looked like a girl right now, and I knew how to make myself sound like one too, since I naturally did anyway. Just had to swap to feminine speech patterns… how hard could it be?

“I’m here on my own,” I told her, my voice coming out far more timidly than I’d intended.

She gave me another surprised look, head tilting slightly to the side in a familiar gesture I recognised as her extra thinky expression. “Well, then now we’re here with each other. My name is Eva,” she grinned, extending her hand.

I tried to take it, only to realise my gauntlet wouldn’t let me shake her hand or anything. “Oh, uh… I’m… um… Lette.”

Oh god. Had I really just taken a chunk out of the word gauntlet and used that? I was so lame.

“Cute name,” she said with a friendly smile.

“Oh… thank you,” I said with a return smile. She had no idea how happy she’d just made me. The rush that was coursing through my veins right then… I couldn’t help but beam at her. Cute! She thought my name was cute!

Her next move surprised me more than anything else that had happened tonight. She winked at me, her voice taking on a sly tone as she said, “Can’t see much under the mask either… but I bet you have a cute smile too.”

It took me a full five seconds of staring at her before I fully processed what had just happened. As far as I knew, she was straight… so why was she flirting with me? Not just flirting either, she had game. Unless my disguise wasn’t as good as I’d thought, and she was messing with me? No, she was probably just joking around. She was a bit of a handful like that.

I didn’t have time to ponder that too seriously before fresh commotion broke out at the nearby line between the protestors and the militia. I needed to be there, to step in if things turned sour. It’s why I was here after all, apart from finding Eva and the others.

We weren’t far from the line between protestor and militia had formed, so it wasn’t hard to worm my way through to the edge and see what was happening.

When we got there, it was pretty easy to figure out the problem. Some gun nut guy with a ragged beard, combat vest and assault rifle was waving his gun around and yelling at the protestors, and a large black woman was matching him. Despite his gun, the woman wasn’t taking any of his shit, fearless in the face of his dog whistle diatribe.

I thought she’d fold when he swung his fist at her, face red with anger, but she took it quite literally on the chin. Her return swing was quick and wild, a right hook that slammed straight into the side of his jaw. Unlike her, he went down like a sack of bricks, tumbling uselessly to the ground in a heap.

Several protestors moved forward, some trying to hold her back from kicking the man, while others went to try and restrain the man and take his gun away. An older black dude got his hands on it, and made to eject the magazine and chambered round.

As that bullet pinged out and into his hand, I caught something in my peripheral vision, the suggestion of a movement, nothing more, but I reacted anyway.

With a flick of one hand, I pulled myself into position while raising the other, contorting my fingers into the correct position for a spell.

Several sharp cracks filled the night, silence descending in their wake. Some dickhead had just unloaded half a magazine at the poor guy. Screams could be heard nearby, people who couldn’t see what had just happened were probably panicking over the shots fired. Everyone around us though, they stood frozen, staring…

Staring at a series of bullets that hung in midair, sheathed in the purple glow of a stasis field and glowing white hot with their previous kinetic energy, now converted to heat.

Carefully, I funnelled the exhaust from the spell through invisible channels and into my other gauntlet, where I flexed and twisted my forearm. Guttural mechanical sounds were followed by a sharp hissing as the smaller gauntlet expelled the spent magical energy. To the naked eye, the metal plates all rippled and shifted and my arm was briefly wreathed in a darkly glowing purple smoke.

“Shoot again, and I send these bullets back where they came from,” I called, feeling strangely calm, confident and in control. I wasn’t Itias, the awkward little boy who should be growing up but wasn’t. No... I was a... a person called Lette with two big fuckoff gauntlets on uh… his… her… their hands. This was so confusing!

QuietValerie

Posting two chapters every two days until caught up with my backlog!