Urasmian had said that magic had to be done using words in the Keftios language only, and he wondered why that was when he had clearly shown that magic wasn’t restricted to that language. Odd. He considered the hybrid spell he had just used and saw that most of the action words were still in Keftios. The few English words he had used were only there to define the action he wanted to make happen, for which he had found no suitable Keftios words. Interesting. He would have to continue to study the matter more and see what other hybrid spells he could come up with! Why Urasmian and others from the sorcerer’s Earth believed you could only use the Keftios language was still a question to be pondered, though. There had to be something to it, as you’d think that over three thousand years, someone would have tried adding words to spells from other languages, wouldn’t they?

He put the thought aside for the moment and began formulating ideas for spells that would enable him to do all sorts of interesting things! If he could mix in English words, then the spell crafting became a whole lot easier! He decided that he would only use English words where he had no alternative, although he resolved to try an English-only spell at some point. There were all sorts of things he should be able to do now that he’d overcome the language restriction. That night he thought about the use of Keftios only and decided that perhaps it was like they still used Latin for animal and plant proper names. Maybe if you had the whole language available and only a limited tech base, it meant there had been no need for anyone to actually sit down and develop a spell without using Keftios. Hmmm.

His not having to work made life easier. Even if it meant he had no money! A week of pondering and practicing had resulted in him developing a range of spells, and he was pawing through his old superhero comics, looking for more ideas. The hardest part was not showing off! He wanted to show off his newfound abilities to his friends so much! Impress the girls who never gave his nerdy self a second look! Right wrongs and beat up bad guys! Just like a real superhero! Fortunately, his common sense got in the way of his wanting to show off. It was tempting, oh so tempting, but no. He had to keep his newfound abilities hidden and to himself for the moment. Real-life wasn’t like a movie or a comic. Of that, he was certain.

It had always been very obvious to him, at least since he was fourteen or fifteen, that there was a clear dichotomy between real life and the world of superheroes, as shown in the comics and movies. The movie and comic superheroes lived an almost completely make-believe life, as far as he could determine. In real life, someone who could do what he could do would be jumped on by the government, locked away, and studied before being made to work for the government. And if not his own government, then some other less scrupulous one would kidnap him almost certainly. Any government would want his sort of power for themselves, not running around loose! And even if he could protect himself, that would only mean they would kidnap or threaten his family and or friends to get leverage on him.

He spent five minutes lying flat on the ground with his vision tunneling and all sorts of shooting lights flickering around in his mental vision. He did manage not to faint. His breathing, which was again threatening hyperventilation, finally calmed down, and the light-headedness faded somewhat. He lifted himself up and found he could sit. All right! He looked around carefully, but no one seemed to be about. Standing up very carefully, leaning on the hood of the truck, he checked around once more, but then he felt so lightheaded he waited a bit longer to make sure he didn’t faint. He grabbed the cooler box in the back and pulled out one of the beers he had tucked away in there. A few swigs from the can, and he felt much better!

Everything was still quiet, so he sat on the same rock he had sat on earlier and finished the beer. When he felt ready to try again, he studied the hill and focused on a spot maybe three hundred yards away. And he moved there instantly. Woo hoo. He grinned even as his head spun again, but then, as it settled, he quickly looked around at the few houses relatively nearby. Nothing, Oh, no, wait. There was a woman in the yard of that house looking up here. Okay. Time to go. No need to get any official attention. He refrained from teleporting and simply wandered over to where the rod was, retrieved that, and then sauntered back down the hillside to the truck. It took a bit of maneuvering to get the truck turned around on the narrow track, but eventually, he had it facing downhill, and then he headed home, mentally exhausted but jubilant.

Over the next few days, he surreptitiously worked on developing a range of spells to move things. He noticed that as he practiced, the ease of making the spell increased to the point where it was like his mind subconsciously triggered the spell without him being required to parse it out. The more he practiced the same spell over and over, the easier it became to the point where it was like all he had to do was think of a particular spell, and it would happen. He kept studying any Minoan tablets that were available on the internet, and his vocabulary kept growing, albeit slowly, but mostly in ways that were not a lot of use. He now knew the words for various household items and even some plants aside from the frequently mentioned food crops, but the general vocabulary was still very limited. He worked out a spell to apply kinetic force to an area but lacked the Minoan words for kinetic energy. He tried various combinations of words, but he simply lacked the right terms and the appropriate ordinary connecting words that the tablets simply hadn’t provided. After all, they were not conversation pieces, merely accounts of things for calculating tax, most likely. It was annoyingly frustrating, that was for sure! He got to the end of his tether one day, and in sheer frustration, he formulated the spell in his head with the appropriate English words for the action he wanted to accomplish in the places where he had never found the right Minoan words. Hmm. He repeated the spell in his head several times and then looked at a Coke can sitting on the workbench in the garage.  He said the spell with force, and the coke can promptly flew across the room and hit the garage door quite hard. Whoa! He trotted over, and the can was badly dented, although fortunately, there was no matching dent in the garage door, as the can had luckily hit one of the crossbeams that reinforced the panels. Jeez. Then it dawned on him what he’d done! Alright! He could mix in English words, which would give him the flexibility to do the things he wanted!

He jumped like a yard in the air and nearly fell over in surprise! Fuck! Then the full impact of what he’d just done hit him. Yeah! He hadn’t really believed it would work. Not really! His heart was thumping out an African drum solo in his chest, and he felt so light-headed he abruptly sat down on the packed dirt of the track and almost started hyperventilating. He sat for a couple of minutes until he had the incipient hyperventilating under control, and his breathing had calmed back down to almost normal. Then he grinned to himself. He was a sorcerer! He looked at the broom handle and changed the word for east to the one for north. He knew the word from the tablets, along with the words for the other three cardinal directions. He ran through the spell, and the broom handle, sorry, axle, disappeared and reappeared four or so yards north! Oh yes! After using the spell, he felt extremely light-headed again and decided it would be better to continue sitting on the ground rather than try and get up.

He looked over at the hillside beyond the road and thought about moving the broom handle east about thirty paces so it would reappear inside the hill. Then he realized that moving the broom handle into the same space as the hill could cause the atoms to fuse, well, maybe. Oooo. A fusion bomb, possibly. Right here. Not a good idea. He could be wrong, of course. He probably was, in fact. Particle physics wasn’t his area of expertise after all, but he decided that interpenetrating solid objects was something he would experiment with from a long, long way away! If at all! He went to stand up and immediately saw stars, so he reluctantly sat down again and tried to calm himself some more.

After about five minutes, he felt his body had calmed down enough to get up, and it was then that he realized that his real problem was going to be the lack of vocabulary. He really didn’t have the words he needed to do other magic. If that was what it was. It was possible that what he was doing was simply redefining the position of certain atoms in the space-time continuum. Uh-huh. It was an interesting explanation of the teleportation thing that he had come up with after Urasmian’s little disappearing act. Was that what was happening, or was he just rationalizing an effect of real magic? He looked at a spot on the road about a hundred yards up the slope. Right….

He grinned to himself and fiddled with the spell. It didn’t take him long to develop a modified version of the spell in his head, and then he said it with power. And he was a hundred yards up the road, slightly off-balance, as his reappearing a foot higher variable was only just enough to keep him above the road… but whoa! He thought about the spell and then looked at the ground near the truck, about a hundred and twenty yards away. He removed the distance component and changed the height to be two inches above the ground level at the spot he was looking at. He ran it through his head again and decided he had indeed made a spell to simply move there. As in that spot right there. Focus. Cast the spell, and there he was! He dropped two inches and nearly collapsed while seeing stars and feeling faint! He sat down, which this time didn’t really help as he still kept seeing stars, so he lay down completely on the dirt track while feeling very strange.

Late again – sorry

And even if it did work, he may not have the control he’d need, given the limited vocabulary he had to work with. He had the recording of Urasmian’s translocation spell as well as the sizable collection of Minoan words he’d painstakingly built up over the last few months, both before and after he’d presented his Doctoral Thesis. The trouble was that the words from the tablets were all descriptions used for accounting purposes, such as animal and equipment totals, five sheep, or whatever. They weren’t a general vocabulary of sentences forming an entire language like you would get from a novel, for instance. So he knew it was going to be hard to use the limited word choice to both do things and control them, and that was presuming this even worked!

He had the broom handle with the aluminum foil end bits semi-welded onto each end by whatever the spell did with him. He retrieved it from the pick-up and added it to his collection of materials before sitting down on another handy rock outcrop to consider what he intended to do for a minute or two. Alright, he thought to himself, let’s start with what I know. He opened the laptop up and put his headphones in, and listened to the recording he’d made of Urasmian speaking the translocation spell as he embedded it in the wooden handle. Even though he now understood the words, he re-ran the recording a few more times until he was sure he had it memorized.

He then recorded his version and listened to the replay. The laptop’s built-in microphone wasn’t the best, but it sounded pretty right to his ear. He listened to the original and did a second recording. That was better. He had left off the bit at the end that actually enabled the spell just to be sure his laptop didn’t go whizzing off somewhere! He couldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been able to understand the words used in the spell, or at least the meanings of the words used. He was glad Urasmian’s translation spell was still working! Which brought up the question of how long it would continue to work. That was something Jason had no idea of the answer, as Urasmian had never said.

He then considered the list of words he had from the tablets and found only one that was any sort of match for the broom handle. So, it would be pronounced like that. Hmm. Right. And phrases would probably sound like this… Right.  The broom handle could be called an axle, as in the word used on several tablets to record the number of chariot axles a person owned. He got the impression that chariot axles tended to break regularly as everyone listed as having a chariot always had more than one axle.

Okay. Let’s see if that works. He ran the modified translocation spell through his head several times and listened to the original a couple more times. He substituted in the word for five paces for the distance and axle instead of the word for a person and moved the broom handle to a clear spot ten yards up the track. He stepped back and said the spell aloud while focusing on the broom handle. It disappeared and clattered to the ground about four yards further up the track!

Chapter 8

Whoa! I’m magic!

Back home, he found that he kept pondering whether it was the right plant, and if so, could he do magic now? That was the big question. He had no idea, but he knew he had to find out. It was almost two weeks after getting home before he escaped his parent’s supervision. They had taken it in turns for one or the other to have a day off from work to make sure he wasn’t left alone in case of a relapse or whatever. Not that Jason felt sick or anything. By the second week home, he was doing push-ups and star jumps in his bedroom, trying to regain some of his fitness even though his folks banned him from going to the gym. Not that he had ever been a gym junky, but after the hospitalization, he had felt very weak.

Finally, they decided he would live without one of them being present twenty-four hours a day and resumed their normal work routine. Yes! Finally, he was free to see if he could do anything. Even better, his dad had left the truck at home, at least this week, being dropped off and picked up from his work site by mum! Okay! He deliberately waited two days before doing anything, studying Google maps and deciding on just where he would go. Once in the truck, he kept the map open on his phone and headed out.

It wasn’t that far until he reached the area that he had decided on as the place to try things out. Satisfied the place matched the map, Jason got out of the truck and looked around the immediate vicinity. The track off Willow Glen Drive wasn’t used to access the water tank at the top of the bluff anymore but still saw regular use by trail bikers. The spot he remembered was still accessible and apparently untouched. It offered a view back down to Willow Glen Drive and a fairly good view all around so he could tell if anyone was coming. It also offered some concealment amongst the stand of rather stunted trees on the otherwise rather barren hillside. Getting out here so early in the morning meant there were no trail bike riders out using the trails as yet, which would have attracted attention if only from the noise. Not that there it was likely that there would be many on a weekday, but there could be some, especially late in the day after school was out. The current peace and quiet suited him just fine, and he hoped he wouldn’t be interrupted. He’d find out, he guessed.

He grabbed his laptop and found a bit of rocky outcrop to perch it on in an area that he hoped would be covered by the shade of one of the scraggly trees. It was still early enough in the morning that the sun was still behind the mountains, but it would be up in an hour or so. Right. Let’s get this experiment underway, he thought to himself. Then he laughed at himself as he hadn’t really needed to come all the way out here to do his experiments, and he was going to feel pretty stupid if nothing happened! On the other hand, while he hadn’t been feeling sick for some days, he had been feeling very strange mentally ever since the episode on Santorini, and he hoped that meant this was going to work. It wasn’t like he thought he was going to pass out at any tick of the clock, but there were these shooting stars in his vision regularly and occasional dizzy spells, which he had been careful to hide from his folks.

As of Kyron the Warlord

sorry this is late

The doctor shrugged and told him not to do anything too energetic for the rest of the day and that he would see him later. He had barely left the room before a different nurse appeared and inserted a new catheter in his other wrist before drawing a new blood sample which she bore off like a trophy. He visited the bathroom again and then propped himself up to watch the television.

An hour later, his parents walked in, surprising the hell out of him. Apparently, they had flown to Crete as soon as they could get airline tickets and visas organized. Once there, they caught the next local flight to Santorini, dumped their bags in his hotel room, and immediately headed for the hospital. Much emoting followed their arrival, even from his father, which surprised him a bit. His father was not, as a rule, the overly physical contact type usually. They were clearly very upset at his near-death! His sister hadn’t been able to come but sent her love.

They had get-well messages from many of his friends, relatives, and even a couple of his professors! And they brought his laptop! With an amazing display of self-discipline, he forbore opening the device and disappearing into it while they were there. Eventually, they were sufficiently satisfied with his recovery that they were persuaded to retire to the hotel to catch up on their sleep. After they had finally departed, he found his email account overflowing with get-well emails. He had never had all that many friends, and getting emails from people he didn’t even know was a strange experience! The fame he had engendered for himself with his translating Linear A, at least amongst the Classical Studies world, was brought home with a rush by the sheer number of messages he had received. And he wasn’t even game to look at his social media accounts! Ha, they would probably be less full if the truth be known.

The doctor reluctantly signed him out the next day as, to all intents and purposes, he was completely recovered, if more than a little weak and very pale looking, and the new blood tests had come back all normal.  His mother made him stay at the hotel on Santorini for another day, which was awkward with them sharing the room before they began the trip back to the States. Jason found himself so weak and prone to the shakes that her maternal hovering was actually welcome rather than annoying. The flight home was long and boring and included a three-hour layover in New York, making the trip seem even longer. At least by the time they arrived back in San Diego, the shakes were finally starting to subside.

He thought back over the trip and wondered whether the leaves had done anything to him? Apart from apparently killing him, twice, that was. Hmmm. Then there was all the strange carry-on with the blood tests. Urasmian had said normal people had a two in a hundred chance of dying from drinking the tea made from the leaves of the right plant. Unfortunately, he had no way of knowing if he had actually found the right plant or not. He didn’t feel magical, that was for sure! But at least he wasn’t dead, which was a good thing!

Kyron the Rescuer is out now.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FSXDQPFD

The following morning, he felt almost back to normal, apart from a level of weakness commensurate with five days in a coma. He had no trouble hopping out of bed to use the toilet and was sitting up watching the television after scarfing the meager breakfast when the doctor next visited.

“Well,” The doctor said, walking over to the bed. “You are looking much better.”

He quickly studied the records, did a few tests of Jason’s vital signs, and then nodded at Jason.

“Hmm. Interesting. If I didn’t know better, I would say there is nothing wrong with you.” The Doctor offered at the end of the process.

“I do feel a lot better today,” Jason commented, smiling sweetly at the doctor.

“Yes. All your vitals are normal. It is so abrupt it is almost scary. The last blood test was still odd. It is possible your catheter got contaminated somehow, so I am going to have a new one inserted this morning and do a new blood test.” The doctor didn’t sound so much upset as puzzled.

“So, I’m not getting out of here just yet?” Jason asked.

The doctor frowned and shook his head. “Not yet. You’re still rather debilitated, and I want to keep you under observation for another day, at least anyway. I am probably being overcautious, but if anything, you have recovered too quickly from whatever it was, and I am wary of a relapse. That liquid you drank certainly did not agree with you!”

“You don’t know what it was I drank?”

Jason thought he had said a tea of cannabis leaves the first time he had seen Jason once Jason had woken up.

“Didn’t you do a stomach pump or whatever? I thought you knew?”

The doctor shook his head. “Yes, of course, we did, but there was nothing unusual apart from some odd organic remains commensurate with a hemp plant, the leaves of which you had apparently boiled and then drank. We couldn’t identify anything else that would be the cause of the metabolic shutdown you experienced.” He paused. “Drinking a tea made from the hemp leaves should not have caused the symptoms you exhibited. I doubt it would even get you high. Do you remember what you ate or drank before the episode?”

Jason tried to look like he was struggling to remember. “Nothing substantial. I had some herbal tea I picked up in a shop on Crete, which I brought with me. That is the only thing I remember after I got back from the cruise around the island that I went on during the day. Other than the tea, there was nothing else apart from the hemp leaves. Someone told me that boiling the leaves made a drink that was less harmful than smoking that stuff. I was just trying to relax a bit before I was to meet with a couple of colleagues for lunch, and then I suddenly felt strange and had trouble breathing which was when I managed to call reception before passing out.” He paused and decided to play down the tea bit. “I had been drinking the herbal tea on Crete for a couple of days, so I doubt it was that, and I don’t remember eating anything during the afternoon.”