The Chronicles of Brendan Earle, Apprentice Mage.

A Problem

Phoebe

Senior Ferguson called a group of us together for a meeting in his private rooms before the evening meal. I was the only one in the group not an Elder. That was cool. Aki should have been there, to discuss Brendan, but she wasn’t allowed. She’d had to tell her story to Niall, separately.

He started by announcing that we’d be holding a special celebration after the meal that night for the victories we’d had that day, and he put the credit for them all on me. I was blushing like a stop signal, but everyone was for truly impressed and pleased with me.

Then it all got serious, but mecha. He announced that we had to discuss what might be a problem. It was Brendan Earle.

Each person had to tell the others what’d happened with him over the past few days. It all came out mecha freak too. And it was all wrong. Brendan is a very fast learner in the books, and it’s clear from the beginning he’s going to be a powerful Mage. But none of the things that’d happened since we got here happen in the books. He isn’t so powerful and he isn’t so out of control. At the beginning, he’s just a bit better than anyone else except Jess, who just wasn’t part of the story here at all.

Elder after Elder told the story of the class that they’d taken with him in it, and no one needed to say that the things he was doing were odd, everyone just knew that. I was the last one to speak. I couldn’t tell them what we’d really done, just that I’d talked to him because he was in my cohort and different, but I could agree with everyone and say that he didn’t seem like a normal eleven year old.

Like everyone else, I could say that I hadn’t seen any sign of him being bad in any way. I wanted to say that he was just too pushy and wouldn’t listen, but I couldn’t tell them what he wouldn’t listen to, so I didn’t.

“Let’s sum up then,” said Senior Ferguson. “Our best case is that we just have someone who is off any scale we’ve ever had for measuring Potential in a new Mage. We will have to tutor him separately, for his own safety if nothing else, but certainly for everyone else’s. If today is anything to go by, he has insufficient control of his own powers to make him safe to practice magic anywhere near a rank of less than Elder. Aki would not have been able to pull him back from the falcon, and we’d still have been tracking that bird to get him back to his own body. We’d have been wasting time that we don’t have, diverting effort that’d be better spent on the preparations for the next assault by Maldon. As for our worst case… I’m open to suggestions. I honestly don’t know what to think of him.”

There was a silence while they all thought through the question and then Kayley spoke up first.

“It would be possible, I have never seen it done, but it would be possible, for a powerful Mage, to take the body of a child, and mind-ride into it. First, you’d need to work the spell of zombie on the child. In that way, the normal rejection of a riding spirit would not come. Next, you’d need for the Mage walking in the body to have an edit of their own memory, so that they’d believe they were the child whose body they rode in. Then you’d need to fool us at the crossing. How you’d do the last I can’t think. Why you’d do it I can’t guess.”

Feri spoke next. “I see the logic of your first and last steps, but the second one? I don’t understand it.”

“As I said, I tried to read the boy. There is no shield on his mind yet, as you’d expect. No one has taught him the way or the need of it. But nor is there a history to read in him. I have seen that happen before. Never to the extent of this boy, but then nothing about this boy is normal. Children who’ve been abused, who’ve trained themselves not to think of things they did not want to remember can lose histories.