I slumped down onto the semicircular couch at the top of the tower. It sat in the middle of the room with a beautifully carved, round wooden table placed in front of it. The tower seemed so empty without him. I had grown up here with him, and his sudden disappearance, or death, maybe? I rubbed my eyes with my palms and pushed the thoughts of what had happened to my master to the edges of my mind and fell into the rhythm I had adopted in the past few days since he had died. 

A towering stack of books sat on the wooden table, some spilling onto the floor into a messy pile. I grabbed one and lay down on the couch, which meant I had to contort my body in an odd curve to find any semblance of comfort. Flipping through the book that I had fallen asleep reading the night prior, I reached the page I had left on and continued to read.

But it was nearly impossible to concentrate on anything, as memories of my past and my master’s words flooded my mind. I decided it would be a good distraction to start cleaning the tower, a task long overdue, while spells that needed calibrating ran rampant throughout some of the lower floors.

I tossed the book onto the wooden table, and its landing wobbled it onto its shorter leg, sending a cascade of more books onto the floor. I cursed silently, as my meager mission to clean had already become even longer through my own misstep. I briefly began a mental incantation to sort the books and put them back into the shelf. As the first few books started to float into the air, I stopped short as my master’s words came back to me, causing the books to collapse onto the floor and turn into an even larger mess.

Using spells for mundane tasks, much like cleaning, will make you too reliant on magic. That isn’t the type of person I’m training you to be, Korvack.

I groaned, staring at the books, and decided to start with the lowest floor. I walked over to the west wall of the room and approached the circular rune carved into the stone floor. I stepped onto the rune—it lit up, showering the room in bright purple light—picturing the first floor of the tower. I felt a slight vertigo as the space around me distorted, like light refracting through water.

A brief thought of how inconsistent my master was in his convictions for the tower to have only one staircase between the second and third floor, while the rest were only accessible through teleportation runes.

“Walking up stairs is damn near the most mundane task I can think of.” I huffed aloud.

And then I was on the first floor. Wind was whipping through the room, throwing my long hair into my face. Annoyed, I tied it back with a string of white mana I had conjured into my hand. I sighed and began to walk through the intense gales to the back of the room, where a carved rune on the wall was flashing red. I briefly thought back to the act of tying my hair up and remembered the second half of my master’s words that I had recalled earlier.

Convenience, however, is a different story.

Once again, I grumbled aloud, as if somehow in this tower, all my words were being sent to my master.

“Wouldn’t completing mundane acts with magic fall under convenience?”

Dismissing the thought, not ready to argue with my memories, I placed a hand onto the carved stone and sent a pulse of mana through it. My eyes closed, and the rune drew my consciousness into it. Wires of mana were displayed in front of my theoretical eyes, making the rough outline of the circular rune displayed on the wall within the tower. Pulsing mana through the system, I turned it off. I began sending rhythmic pulses through the rune, trying to determine what had gone wrong with the spell that was supposed to provide a nice breeze throughout the first floor of the tower, with an option to set the temperature to whatever the user wanted.

After a few tries, it was obvious that the encoding that determined the breeze’s force had worn down. With a bit of tuning and changing of how the magic flowed through the circuit, I isolated the deteriorated mana within the rune. I withdrew it into myself, before dispersing it into the air and letting it return to its natural cycle. After replacing the deteriorated mana with pure mana, I withdrew my stream of mana running into the spell, and my consciousness receded from the mental realm of the rune.

I returned to my body and instantly noticed the absence of raging wind. I sent a pulse of mana through the rune, turning it on, and a light breeze ran through the tower. It was currently spring, so the rune’s temperature had been set to a low heat, providing a pleasant warmth. 

Picking up a broom from the wooden closet pushed against the wall opposite the teleportation rune, I began to sweep the floor of all the debris that the winds had thrown around. After making a sizable pile in the middle of the room, I scooped it into a dust pan and walked toward the south-facing wall. With a press of my hand and a pulse of mana into the wall, the cobbled stones fell uniformly into the floor, revealing the outside. I tossed the dust into the grass outside and waved my hand in an upward motion. The rocks began to rise themselves back into place, but before the last stone had fixed itself in place, a yell pierced through the open hole.

“Hey! You there!”

The last stone slotted into place, and with a raised brow, I waited for any other confirmation that what I had heard was actually real and not some weird hallucination I had from not interacting with anyone in a few days.

A thud sounded on the wall, followed by another shout, “I know you’re in there, magician! I’m the royal messenger!”

Groaning, I placed two fingers onto a stone about head height and pulled my wrist back, pulling the stone out of place and letting it drift weightlessly around me.

Glaring out of the singular hole I had made, expecting to come face to face with some pompous-looking royal servant, I saw nothing. Just the green expanse of the grassy fields, the tower lay in, and the blueish green water of the ocean behind that.

“Bastard, down here!”

I peered through the stone again, standing on the tips of my toes, seeing a sun-reflecting spot of this servant’s head surrounded by straight brown hair falling around it. Sighing, I placed the stone back into its spot and repeated the spell I had made to create the door. 

As the stones fell into the floor, my line of sight followed the rocks until I made eye contact with a man roughly half my height. His face was flushed with anger, his eyes bulging, and he was huffing like he was out of breath. His nose was sharp and hooked downward, while a pair of large front teeth sat over the lower row. A carriage stood approximately a hundred meters away on the road.

“My master isn’t in.”

“I know that,” the man said between labored breaths.

“Then why are you here? I’m surely not qualified enough to help the king with whatever he needs.”

“Well,” he said, finally having caught his breath, “seeing as how your master isn’t in. I guess the responsibility falls upon you.”

“I can see how you might think that,” I said, folding my arms across my chest, “but I’m not the royal magician. I am merely an apprentice.”

“Oh, please,” the balding man said with a wave of his hand, the top of his head catching some of the light from the spring sun high in the sky, “Master Mirrus already vouched for your expertise, claiming you were better than he was. Not that I’d believe that. But his Majesty seems to believe so. And, with the recent disappearance of Master Mirrus, his Majesty is requesting your presence in the royal capital.”

I groaned again and uncrossed my arms.

“Fine, fine, whatever. Let me grab some things, and I’ll be back down. Did the king say anything about what broke or what he needed me for?”

“I don’t believe you should be questioning his Majesty’s summons.”

I glared at him, realizing now that he reminded me of the pesky rats I’d find in the tower during winter. 

“I need to know if I need any tools,” I said, biting back an insult I had considered throwing his way, “there’s a lot of complicated magic within the capital.”

Some semblance of shame flashed across the man’s rat-like features before he spoke, “Oh, yes, um…”

“Seems that you should ask more questions about ‘his Majesty’s summons,” I said, mockingly.

Shame was quickly replaced by anger as I raised a hand and the stones rose from the floor back into the wall, making the door through which I had spoken to the man vanish.

Once again, before the stones could fully form the wall, he shouted through the openings, “You better not be ignoring me! His Majesty has summoned you, and you will answer!”

Cancelling the spell, the rocks fell unceremoniously to the floor, not in their typical uniform structure, but into a pile.

“I know! I’m grabbing my shit, you rat-faced moron! Morsenic Gods above, you’re as dense as these fucking stones.”

The man stood, his features slack, obviously surprised by my sudden outburst. He attempted to stammer out something to refute my message, but I had already walked over to the teleportation rune. Picturing the second floor of the tower, I vanished into thin air, leaving the rat-faced man alone, awash in a purple glow in front of the tower.

Arriving on the second floor, water instantly rushed over my body. The second floor connected to the third, which was more of a loft than a separate circular room. Much like the first floor, a rune sitting on the ceiling of the two floors was flashing red. Rains whipped through the room, slashing through the light grey tunic that covered my chest and shoulders. The moss and plants throughout the room had gorged on the newly found humidity and abundant water expelled by the broken rune, growing to a size that I needed to deal with swiftly. But I didn’t have the time. Climbing the stairs to the third floor, I grabbed a wooden ladder nearby and placed it against the railing of the balcony. Wiping water off my face as I climbed the ladder, I put a hand against the rune and quickly pulsed mana into it, turning it off.

Descending the ladder, I put it back against the wall and walked down the stairs. Luckily, even with the abundance of water in the room, the enchantments fixed to the wooden cabinets, stairs, and flooring remained in place, staving off mold. I reached a cabinet with two wide doors covered in vines and moss and, with a wave of my hand, pulled them to the floor. I pulled the doors open and swiftly grabbed what I might need: a stick resembling a pencil but with a gem at its tip rather than charcoal, a brush, and a large copper pole with old runic inscriptions carved on every inch of it. Coalescing mana around the three items, they vanished with a warmth that spread across my right forearm.

A flash of purple light spread throughout the first floor as I reappeared atop the teleportation rune. Immediately upon my arrival, the rat-like servant began speaking.

“I thought you were getting tools, not taking a bath fully clothed.”

Quickly realizing my state, I paced across the first floor to the breeze rune and increased the settings to higher warmth and intensity. Hot gusts of wind blew through the room from every angle, quickly drying my clothes and hair. Once I was thoroughly dried, I reset the settings to normal and walked over to meet the royal servant at the tower’s entrance. 

“Well? To the capital, right?”

The servant blinked hard, seemingly trying to comprehend what had happened before speaking. “Yes. To the capital.”

Stepping out of the tower, I turned around and reformed the wall, hiding any semblance of an entrance. I recast the strengthening enchantment across the entirety of the tower, making sure it would be in one piece when I returned from the capital, no matter who tried to mess with it.

I turned away from the tower to follow the servant who was currently wading his way through the tall grasses surrounding the tower back to the carriage he had arrived in. Following his path, we made our way up the hill to the carriage and found a man lounging around on the driver’s bench. 

“About time, Senrith.”

“Blame the magician.” The rat-faced man—Senrith, I noted—said with a wave of his hand.

Ignoring both of them, I climbed into the covered passenger area and sat heavily on the cushioned bench. Senrith climbed up to sit on the driver’s bench with the other man, and the two began chatting idly. 

Staring out the window at the tower, I thought of my master’s disappearance, what might have happened to him, where he could have gone, any leads I may have overlooked, anything at all that might give me any idea as to why he vanished. Anger quickly replaced any longing or sadness, and right as the driver cracked the reins to get the horses moving, I cast another enchantment onto the tower.

This spell sat just below the strengthening enchantment and locked the tower from having any spells cast on it. It was a nullification of any use of mana on the outside of the tower, something of my design that I had hidden from my master. If he were to break through it, then I would know, but if he couldn’t get through it, he’d have to sit in the grass outside the tower and wait, a small punishment from me. I was confident in the spell’s integrity; only someone like my master could get through it, but even then, I wasn’t sure if he could break something of my design.

Satisfied with my locking of the tower, I watched it slowly recede from my vision as we crested another hill and continued down the road toward the capital. The ride wasn’t anything special. I had seen a fair bit of the continent—Morsenia. My master had made it a task to show me as much as he could while also teaching me magic. However, the royal capital was never on that list. He claimed it wasn’t nearly as impressive as some of the natural landmarks spread throughout Morsenia. There were times when I had begged to go to the capital, to see what it was like, but my master had never caved to my requests.

Trust me, once you take over my position, you’ll be sick of the capital in no time.

After my brief interaction with Senrith, I could only sigh at how right my master likely was.