I turned fifteen. My mothers suggested that I throw a party like my brother did during his big one 1-5…However, I wasn’t really fond of parties, and my social circle contained all of two people, if you excluded my blood-related kin, such as my siblings and the handful of cousins supplied by my father’s emotionally distant, but physical proximate, siblings.
Once upon a time, I would be considered an adult now, but since the human race was no longer being pressed by endless hordes of mutants and extradimensional monsters, the age of majority for most of the world had thankfully returned to the ballpark of 18 to 21. Which is good, because I still had only the faintest clues of what I intended to do with my life, once I was officially “all grown-up.”
It took surprisingly little time for me to forget my ambitions. What can I say? I ‘was’ a teenager. While I wasn’t really taken by the dating game, pop culture, and the various fads that came and went over the passing years, yet I did still end up getting distracted by other things as time went by. I discovered the novel and fantastical in the mundane, and suddenly my desire to explore the cosmos was shrunk down to a desire to maybe just see the limits of Tesson, and life in Tesson.
As I grew older, and my range of perception grew wider, I observed and met all manner of people, from all manner of walks of life. I considered becoming a merchant, or maybe just becoming some kind of messenger. I was trained to be able to interact with people socially, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to ‘have’ to interact. Yet, I did find a strange yearning for some kind of connection to the world at large.
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Anyway, 15 was a big year in Tesson. When it comes to coming of age, most countries and cultures, plus the point where a person can generally be utilized for society’s needs. Or at they’d focus on the point where they could prepare the youth for imminent utilization in three to five years. Tesson was no different, 15 was the point where the body and spirit were stabilized enough that one could reliably test to see if a young person had any worthwhile magical talents.
It was a big deal, no matter where you were in the core-worlds of Tesson. The military, the sorcerous orders, and the temples would all kick in. Paying for the initial process of discovering and cultivating those young talents, so they’d get their pick of the litter when it came for the kids to graduate.
Now I stood amongst a crowd of thousands of 15 and 16-year-olds, my classmates and grade-mates. All of us were waiting in line for the “privilege” of touching one of three large crystals that were up on a stage. Those crystals were soul-glimmer stones. If you’re from a low-magic universe, you’ve probably read about similar stones. If you’re from a magical universe, you’ve probably run into, or heard about, similar items and devices. They were your bog-standard, appraisal maguffins.
Touching one and getting it to light up brightly, in one or more interesting colors, was basically our SATs/ACTs. Our big, important, standardized test for all the marbles, and a major decision-making device for pretty much all our futures. Even if you didn’t end up becoming a mage, it would affect your civilian career. On top of that, to some extent, it would affect your future marriage partners, since magic potential was heavily influenced by genetics in this universe.
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“ I can’t believe my baby is a mage!” cried Reina. Giving me a tight, happy, hug.
It was in the evening following our school’s big appraisal day for the current year of high school freshmen. You’d think we’d be sophomores based on the average age, but the Academy treated the 9th grade as part of its middle-school section. Adding in a single year of college-level classes so that most students, that stuck with the whole program and didn’t drop out mid-way through, graduated when they were 18 to 19.
“Ha, I can’t believe our Dunkel clan finally has a mage,” said Ferdinand. Boisterously clapping me on the back while draining his mug of light beer.
As you might have already guessed, I finally elected to reveal my powers. Or at the very least, I decided to reveal more of them. I’d already done the groundwork with my family, and the people who lived in both of the neighborhoods in which I had lived, would have almost certainly seen or heard some strange things about me. Either seeing it firsthand, or hearing about it from my parents.
Now the whole family had gone to a local family restaurant to celebrate. All six of us sat in a cozy booth, with sodas and juice for the kids, beers for the parents, and huge platters of pizza, chicken, and burgers, sitting on the table.
Returning to my prior analogy, comparing awakening one’s magical potential and affinity to scoring well on one of those big general education standardized tests. If the hypothetical, largely figurative, top “score” was a 2400, I had earned a healthy 1900. An 88 to 91 percentile result that would gain the approval of most factions, but wouldn’t draw too much attention.
Speaking more plainly, Tesson’s population was 65-percent non-mages, it was 75-percent non-mages, if you count those like my mother Reina, who had a certain minimal amount of potential, that unfortunately generally wouldn’t be considered a high-enough potential to allow her to become a full mage.
Most new mages would just manage to clear that threshold by getting the soul-glimmer stone to emit a modest amount of steady light, that was equivalent to a candle or a dim bulb. Most new mages would also only have between 1 and 2 innate elemental affinities. Getting the orb to light up, 1 to 2 colors. 1 color was the norm. 2 colors was pretty good and generally considered a decent leg up on the competition.
I didn’t reveal all I had, but I modulated the response of my spirit and my elemental roots, to get the Soul-Glimmer Stone to light up at roughly the level of a decently bright desk lamp, and got the orb to shine Red, Yellow, Black, and Silver. I actually intended to stop at just three colors, but I was willing to take the risk for the sake of publicly accessing all four elements.
The elements I’d revealed myself to have were, life the red, light the yellow, darkness the black, and space the silver. I had to reveal my life affinity because there was nothing I could do to hide my growth and healing abilities, and I figured I might eventually want to reveal my body modification and shapeshifting later, as well.
Light was a bit contrary to the stereotypes for a vampire, but it was quite handy for a mage that fully and truly understood all that light was. Darkness had excellent synergy with light, and provided good stealth options. Space had excellent utility spells associated with it, and was just too convenient for me to pass up on. Which was why I decided to take the risk.
Based on my research, and the stuff I couldn’t help overhearing due to my broad perceptive-range, awakening to four elements was rare but far from unheard of. The fact that I made sure to adjust my potential so that the light the crystal emitted wouldn’t be “too” bright, would ratchet down the amount of attention I got for having all those elements.
I looked around at my family as we celebrated at the restaurant. I watched my brother Thad, who unfortunately sat somewhere between my father, Ferdinand, and my mother Reina, in terms of his lacking magical talents. Like Reina, he could theoretically learn to use a spell or to, or directly utilize lower-leveled magical artifacts, but it would be hard for him to become a full mage. At least, that’d be the expectation according to the knowledge and standards of this world.
Now that I was a mage, I would soon be able to freely slip my brother, and sister supplements and materials that could strengthen their bodies and spirits, and thus increase their magical potential. So who knows, maybe we’d make a mage of him yet. Though then again, he’d already grown past the point where any sorcerous orders, sects, and corporate recruiters, would have shown any interest, and the path of an itinerant, or “rogue” mage, was a hard one.
I paid close attention to my brother, expecting to see the resentment, jealousy, and loathing I had seen in the eyes of my former-self’s siblings. I was surprised to see none of that. There was some jealousy, and maybe a tinge of regret, but for the most part I saw contentment, and something else.
Was it pride? Why would he be proud? Why was he not angry? I didn’t understand it, but I found myself relaxing all the same. Feeling a sense of relief, that I hadn’t quite expected from myself, as my fears of me and my brother’s relationship disintegrating looked increasingly unlikely.
As for my sister, I didn’t feel the need to worry about her. Emile stuffed pizza and chicken wings into her cheeks, like she was a chipmunk getting ready to winter down. Her eyes were bright and hopeful. She was twelve going on thirteen, and it’d be some time yet before her talents were revealed.
What’s more, even without my help, she’d likely have been revealed as a mage. Our birth-mother, Yijun, wasn't lacking in magical talents. In fact, it could be said that her talents were uncommonly strong and it seemed that she’d passed that down to Emile.
