The Beginning After The End novel Chapter 5

A *clang* drowned out the silence as my mother dropped her fork onto her plate.

"What? Reynolds! Arthur isn’t even four yet! No! Besides, you said if our son was an augmenter, you’d be able to teach him!" Mother spoke with evident desperation.

"I, also, never expected our son to be this much of a prodigy in mana manipulation. Who has ever heard of an awakening at the age of three?" Father responded a lot more calmly.

"But that means he’ll have to leave home! He’s only four, Reynolds! We can’t have our baby leave home at such an early age!"

"You don’t get it. When I observed his body while he meditated, I couldn’t help but feel that all of this was natural to him. Alice honey, I’m holding my son back by trying to teach him something he can do in his sleep."

Thus began my parents’ quarrel.

They went back and forth, basically repeating their initial points; mother kept saying that I was too young, father saying that they couldn’t hold me back from reaching my full potential, blah blah.

In the meantime, I was playing a game of war with my food, the peas attacked for the Mother Empire, while the carrots of the Father Nation desperately defended their land.

Finally, my parents settled down and my father turned to me.

"Art, this is concerning you, so you have a say in this as well. How would you feel about going to a big city and having a teacher?"

Fantastic...

I applauded the effort for trying to make this fair, but I don’t think he realized that he was trying to ask a four-year-old to make a decision that would ultimately change his life...

Trying to conclude this little argument, I suggested, "Can I at least try meeting some mentors and have them see if I need to be tutored or not?"

*Silence*

Did I step on a landmine? Was I not supposed to be this articulate in my sentences at my current age? Are they mad because I didn’t choose a side?

Having no confidence in keeping a poker face, I looked down and waited for their response.

Thankfully, none of my fears were on their minds. My mother finally spoke, quietly she muttered, "We’ll at least formally have his mana core and channels tested. We can figure out what to do from there."

As my father nodded in agreement, we began making preparations the next day. When I said what I did last night, I assumed that we’d be going to a nearby town or a city, maximum a day’s worth of travel away, to have me tested by a qualified mage but boy was I wrong.

We were making preparations for a three-week-long journey. A journey via horse-drawn carriage through the Grand Mountains to something called a teleportation gate which will get us into a city called Xyrus.

A book that I had read popped into my mind. I recalled reading about a floating piece of land built by an ancient organization of conjurers for the sole purpose of housing the most prestigious Mage Academy. A city was later built around the academy; both the City and the academy were named after the leader of the organization - Xyrus.

How was it possible to keep a piece of land, hundreds of kilometers long, afloat? Magnetism? Then the land beneath the city would be affected by it. Did the city have its own gravitational field?

Anyway!

This journey was going to be long. It’s times like these that I wished modern transportation existed. In order to get to the city, we’d have to enter through one of the designated teleportation gates in the Grand Mountains, otherwise, it would easily take months to travel across towns to reach the gate below the actual city, which floated near the border of the Kingdom of Sapin and Darv.

One reason why my father pushed for us to go on this journey now was because his ex-party members had recently stopped by and were on their way to the city of Xyrus. Going now, with them, meant that we would have three augmenters and two conjurers, along with my mother, who was a rare Emitter and my father, a B-class augmenter. While the mountain range didn’t have any mana beasts, there were still the potential dangers of bandits and wild animals.

While my mother and father took care of packing all of the necessities, I packed my wooden sword and two books (Encyclopedia of Dicathen and Foundations of Mana Manipulation) for the journey.

By mid morning, we were ready to head out.

After tying my knapsack, containing my books and a couple of snacks, to my back and strapping my wooden sword to my waist, I grasped my mother’s hand and followed my parents to meet their ex-party members.

Although I’d heard about them occasionally from father, I never visited home while they were rebuilding it, so it would be my first time meeting them.

The information I learned from my father about the party members of Twin Horns consisted of the following:

Helen Shard: Female augmenter, specializing in magic archery.

Adam Krensh: Male augmenter, whose main weapon was the spear.

Jasmine Flamesworth: Female augmenter, who specialized in speed with dual daggers.

Angela Rose: Female conjurer, specializing in Wind Magic.

Durden Walker: Male conjurer, specializing in Earth Magic.

We reached the inn they were staying at in Ashber and saw them out in front, near the stables.