[A Fractured Song] - Chapter 16 - Fantasy, Isekai (Portal Fantasy), Adventure

Summary: 13-year old Frances was summoned with her entire class to the fantastical world of Durannon to fight the monsters invading the human kingdoms. Struggling from the trauma and self-loathing inflicted on her by her abusive parents, how will Frances survive as she is thrust into this war?

[The Beginning] [<=Chapter 15] [Chapter Index and Blurb] [Chapter 17=>]

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A year later...

The White Order’s castle of Salpheron sat on the slope of the mountain for which it was named, just under the mountain’s peak. The builder’s logic was that the order would have a highly defensive position in case they were suddenly rejected by non-mages. That, and they would also have a more remote place to practice their dangerous magic. Although a town that had sprung up beneath the high towers of Salpheron to service the castle’s inhabitants, most of the surrounding land consisted of farmland or boggy moors.

Usually, these moors were quiet, often misty due to the high altitude. They were, after all, best for peat gathering, which didn’t happen at night.

Suddenly, the night sky blazed with blue light, as hundreds of brilliant blue tendrils of lightning sparked across the night sky from the highest tower of the castle to the peak of Mount Salpheron. It was instantly followed by a thunderous crack, which echoed over the entire mountainside.

Suffice to say, Edana had been quietly reading a letter and pinching her nose about the contents when the crack deafened her and made her jump half-out of her chair. Still dazed from the thunder, she staggered to her window and noted there was definitely not a thunderstorm going on outside.

“What in Amura and Rathron—” some initiate in the Order must have failed at some spell. Not uncommon in this time of hour as each apprentice to the Order could book workrooms or towers to experiment spells with. The towers and workrooms were heavily shielded and each apprentice was usually overseen by a supervisor. Just in case.

Still feeling a little on edge, Edana sat back down at her desk and read the letter. It was from Sebastian, Prince of the neighboring Kingdom of Lapanteria, requesting that she send Frances along with the army heading to take Gestoch.

Gestoch was one of the border provinces of the fae-kin’s Kingdom of the Alavari, and a stronghold where King Thorgoth’s forces continued to launch their attacks into The Kingdom of Erisdale, and their neighbor—though often rival—the Kingdom of Lapanteria.

However, the threat to both Erisdale and Lapanteria was so great that they’d allied against Thorgoth’s invasion, and Prince Sebastian was the primary commander of the Lapanterian army.

Somehow over the past year, the human kingdoms had managed to hold off the fae-kin advance as they trained the Otherworlders, but he’d seized the low country of Vertingen that lay between Erisdale and Lapanteria. The rich, fertile valley did need to be taken back.

But her student was fourteen. A rather skilled fourteen-year-old, but Edana knew Frances wasn’t ready for combat.

The issue was that Sebastian had asked her student to come not as a war mage, but as a healer, and Edana wasn’t sure what to say to dissuade him.

Oh and he was coming in a few days to get her reply, and meet Frances, so there was that.

First things first, she needed to tell Frances about this. She’d put it off because she wasn’t sure what to say to her student, but the visit was drawing close. Now how could she—

Blue light filled her office and she was immediately deafened with another crack of thunder. Eyes wide, Edana ran to her office window, to see the last bit of a massive fork of lightning crash across the sky and strike the peak of Mount Salpheron. The air seemed to spark with the aftermath of a thunderstorm, despite the fact, there was nary a cloud in the sky, and Edana felt the hair on the nape of her neck stand on end.

That was some serious power being thrown around, and the lightning seemed a bit too… real for comfort. Most mages couldn’t generate lightning on such a scale, and most of the time it was an imitation of natural lightning rather than the air-charged, hair-stand-on-end, blue death that had streaked across the sky.

Curiosity well and truly piqued, Edana set the letter down, grabbed her staff and made her way from her office to the tower. She believed it came from the North Tower, the one highest and closest to Mount Sapheron.

Luckily, because stairs were hard for anybody, much less a group of mages who usually had a physical handicap of some kind, there was an elevator that ran on magic and a series of counterweights.

Quite a few people were walking to the elevator to the North Tower, probably all wondering what had caused this. One of them, Kellyanne—one of her best teachers, waved Edana over.

“Master Edana! Come quickly!” said the blonde woman. She was pointing at the sign where apprentices or other mages would sign the tower off.

Edana frowning ran over and read the name at the bottom, and her eyes widened.

Neatly printed was the name “Frances” and written beside it was “Ulric” a… bit of a mad scientist of a magician, but still one of Edana’s best. But if he was supervising…

“I do not like this,” muttered Edana, throwing the elevator door open, and pushing aside the gate. “Kellyanne, you’re with me. The rest of you, out!”

Closing the door, and then the gate, Edana placed her hand on the charging panel and the enchantment activated to start carrying the pair up.

“You don’t think Ulric—”

“I don’t think so, but I don’t know for sure,” said Edana with a grimace. Ulric was always safe on precautions but had a habit of just letting students do what they wish.

“Edana… are you alright?” Kellyanne asked.

She sighed. “No. I’m worried, Kelly. Frances… needs a lot of attention. That prince made a demand that I’m not sure if I can refuse.”

“I thought you enjoyed her coming out of her shell?”

Edana sighed. “I do! But she learns faster than I can teach her! I don’t think she’s bored of me—not that she’d ever tell me—but between administering the war, strategy meetings, and teaching her… I can’t lie that I’m feeling a bit stretched thin.”

“Then why not accept Sebastian’s offer? Aside from the fact he’s a Lapanterian asshole who you can’t trust because you nearly skewered him back in the war?”

“That, and Frances is…Well, she might be ready for field hospital duty, but if something goes wrong… she isn’t ready to see true combat yet.”

Kellyanne scratched at her chin. “But isn’t she—”

“Good at magic? Smartest student I’ve taught for her age? Physically fit and even has basic arms training? Well, she needs some work in the physical fitness department, but yes to all of that! However, she’s also fourteen, and has never had to take a life— well she’s never had to face combat,” Edana corrected herself. Because time and time again, she’d always be reminded that her student was stronger than she’d realize. Like it, or in Edana’s case, despise it with so much of her being that she wished she could unleash a wave of fire over two particular people, the abuse her student suffered had in some ways, forged in her, deep strength and resilience.

But it also had created terrible fault lines that most did not have.

“You’re not telling me something,” said Kellyanne evenly.

“Yes,” replied Edana, meeting the taller woman’s gaze. Kellyanne nodded and drew her wand quietly as the lift started to slow down.

The North Tower’s main feature was an open observation deck, which is probably how her student was able to shoot lightning from it to the peak of Mount Salpheron. From the elevator, Edana and Kellyanne stepped into the room, making their way to the deck, whose doors were open. From the doors, they could hear Ulric’s hoarse voice running at his typical manic speed.

Leading the way, Edana stepped onto the deck and stared.

Ulric, a bald man born with a malformed left arm, was kneeling on the deck, scribbling into his notes, having completely not noticed her arrival.

Frances, being turned to the opening of the observation deck, did though, and an eager smile burst onto her lips.

A year ago, she’d been frightened at Edana’s approach. Now, she was grinning. It was… amazing to see her young student change under her care and guidance. Good food and measured exercise meant she was several inches taller now. She was still quite slender—a good diet this late in her life could only do so much—but her warm brown skin glowed, as did her smile.

It was her attitude that had changed the most, though. She was still shy, but with Edana, Frances displayed an animation and enthusiasm for learning that sometimes exhausted her instructors

“Good evening, Master Edana! Good evening, Master Kellyanne!” exclaimed Frances, she curtsied, polite as always, and rose to her feet. “I did it! I channeled lightning!”

Edana barely registered the words. She was staring at her student’s hair, which was still cut short, and now stiff, frizzled outward as if emanating from her head.

“Hi, Frances, what happened to your hair?” Edana asked.

Frances blinked, touched her hair and gasped. “Oh! Sorry!” She tried in vain to smooth it out, even trying to use her slightly smoking wand to try to push it down. “It’s a side effect of the spell I used. You remember when we were casting lightning spells, we ended up discussing the nature of lightning that I learned from school in the world I came from right?”

It took several long seconds, but Edana recalled that conversation and nodded. “Yes. Your teachers in the Otherworld explained it was about positive and negative “charges” in the air being built by a storm that eventually discharges as the phenomenon known as lightning.”

“Yes. So I thought, what if I combined that understanding with my visual picture of lightning? I visualize the target as having a negative charge and myself as having a positive charge, and the lightning as leaping from me to the target? So I did that, while also singing an aria that would evoke the temperament and tempestuous nature of a storm?”

“Then—” Edana’s eyes snapped wide open. “OH!”

“I know! You’d create lightning, REAL lightning. Not visualizing magic as lightning. Real lightning! And you wouldn’t have to call up a storm!”

“That’s… amazing, and…” Edana caught herself, but her attempt at a stern expression turned into her shaking her head and smiling. “Incredibly dangerous. I’m surprised Ulric allowed you to do this.”

“I am surprised too, but we did put shield spells up, Master Ulric?”

Ulric was still scribbling in his journal, and Frances glanced back at Edana and shrugged. “He told me to give it a try but warned me it probably wouldn’t work. But it did, and so he asked me to do it a second time.”

“Ulric asked you to do it a second time!” Kellyanne shrieked.

Said mage kept writing, but Frances immediately froze. Her shoulders hunched over and her knees bent. The hand holding her wand went white as it tightened around her wand, a flimsy stick of ash issued to White Order apprentices. Her eyes were wide with fear.

Edana narrowed at the blonde mage, but Kellyanne ranted, “Do you understand what you did? That lightning lit up the entire mountain and sent a thundercrack that made us all think we were in the middle of a thunderstorm—”

“Kelly!” snapped Edana in a warning tone, a firm hand clamping down on her colleague. The mage nodded and clamped her six-fingered right hand to her chest, taking deep breaths in and out.

“I’m sorry, Master Kellyanne…” whimpered Frances. All enthusiasm was gone and her head was bowed.

“It’s not your fault, Frances. It’s just what you did was… very dangerous, and not something any of us predicted.” Edana took a deep breath. “I’ll let Kelly explain why.”

Kelly looked down at Edana, eyes wide with panic, and she glared right back. If her subordinate’s freakout had scared her precious student, she was going to make damn sure that her subordinate would explain why she freaked out.

Sighing, the blonde mage nodded. “Frances, I’m sorry, but I panicked because you could have seriously hurt yourself. That was the nearest to true lightning being safely channeled I’ve ever seen since Archmage Star the Glimmering Light was head of the White Order. Edana’s Master. Nobody has managed to safely do that since.”

As Frances’s eyes went back to pretending they were an owl's eyes, Edana pointed her staff at Ulric and whistled a tune.

Ulric was ripped from the floor and stood up. He somehow managed to hang onto his notebook though. But he finally was meeting Edana’s eyes.

“Which of course, Ulric, leads to the biggest question I have. Why did you ask my fourteen-year-old student to perform such a dangerous spell a second time?” Edana asked, smiling toothily.

Frances winced, not out of fear, but out of sympathy, as she glanced between her master and Ulric. She knew the smile Edana wore. It was a smile that wouldn't look out of place on a lioness, or a particularly angry mother bear.

It was extremely nice and reassuring that her master cared so much, but sometimes it could be a bit scary.

“Uhhhhh, sorry? Did I get carried away? And we had layers upon layers of protection spells on and were in a warded tower so the risk was negligible.”

Frances cringed. She knew this was the wrong thing to say to Edana.

“Frances, meet me at my study in an hour. Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble.” Edana shook her head, a tired smile on her lips. “I’m extremely impressed. We just need to talk about some things, including the spell and its dangers.” She turned back to the hapless instructor. “We’re going to talk about risk, Ulric.”

Frances nodded and quickly picking up her notes and bag, ran to the elevator. As she closed it and pressed her hand to the panel she could already hear the two women bellowing at Ulric.

Well, she had an hour, better make use of it. Now if she recalled her master very much liked chamomile tea at night…

[hr]

“Edana, I think I see what you mean,” said Kellyanne later, as the pair walked from the North Tower’s base back to the main building.

Edana blinked. “Mean by what?”

“That Frances might be skilled, but she isn’t ready,” said Kelly, quietly. “She cast true lightning today, and got scared because I was panicking at her? You were right.”

Edana grimaced as she walked on. “Mm-hmm. The problem is explaining it to her.”

That made Kellyanne stop in her tracks. “Edana? What do you mean?”

The Master of the White Order sighed. “Nevermind.”

Author's note: So we begin a new arc in Frances's journey! For our question of the chapter, what was your favorite childhood fantasy series? I think mine was Redwall, and Harry Potter.