Clip-clop...
I sat in front, trying to keep my back straight as the horse walked along the road and gently rocked us at every turn. Roxy settled in behind me and held the reins, because I did not really understand how to guide the animal or what to do when it picked up speed. But that did not bother her.
We left the village early in the morning. The road ran between low hills and gradually curved to the right, so from time to time we had to lean aside to avoid the branches hanging over us. I felt a slight excitement, because ahead of us waited the exercises she had been talking about for almost a week, and every time she emphasized that they would require more concentration than all the previous attempts.
The horse stepped onto firmer ground, then quickened a little when we reached an open stretch of the path. I glanced back over my shoulder and saw Roxy give a slight nod, letting me know that we would stop very soon and begin.
"Are we there already?"
"Almost..." Roxy pulled on the reins and leaned forward a little to look at the road. "A couple more minutes, and we will be there..."
I felt the horse change its gait again, because a wide opening between the hills appeared ahead. Roxy gave a quiet snort, as if judging the space, and turned the horse slightly to the left, where a small flat area opened up, suitable for training.
"We will start here..."
Roxy took hold of the reins and led the animal to a tree, where she fastened the strap to a low branch. The horse snorted, but stood calmly while she checked the knot. Then Roxy lifted her white staff, flipped it across her palm, and stepped a little farther away to inspect the area.
"By the way." She sighed as though remembering something especially irritating. "The elder started whining again that a little rain would not hurt. Awful, right? That is how people live. First they shout that you are a mage and that you do not belong among normal folk. Then they come and whisper that they desperately need help. After that they start singing the same tune again. Every single time."
She gave the staff a small swing, as if brushing away intrusive thoughts, and looked at me over her shoulder.
"That is why you and I are going to try to arrange some weather for them right now. Someone has to do the work."
"Yeah..."
After that, Roxy spent several minutes showing me everything I needed. She walked across the training ground, traced lines in the air with her staff, and reminded me of the symbols from the language we had been studying almost every day.
When she was done, I raised the wand and made a short swing.
The red crystal in the handle flared with a soft light, and I focused a stream of mana into it. A lot of energy was needed here, because the spell had to create something truly large. And fortunately, that was exactly what I had no trouble with. For the first time in a long while, I did not have to painfully maintain control inside myself — I only had to direct the power into the proper course.
The stream grew denser the farther I drew it from within. It seemed that the mana rose along the handle of the wand and flowed upward, where the air was beginning to tremble. The sky changed almost at once, and dark clouds slowly gathered above us, growing thicker with every second.
A minute later, the first drops fell to the ground, leaving dark spots on the dust. Then there were more of them, and the dry earth quickly darkened across the whole clearing until the light tapping turned into a steady noise of rain. I lifted my head and saw that the heavy clouds had already covered almost all the light, so everything around us immediately became dimmer and cooler. At first Roxy only looked up in silence, then she slowly spread into a satisfied smile and tapped her staff against her boot, clearly admitting that the result was more than merely passable.
"Well, well..." Roxy watched the movement of the clouds with a crooked smile.
"It worked?"
"As you can see..."
I wiped the water from my forehead, but it did not help, because by then the sky was already pouring much more confidently.
For a moment, I remembered that in my old world rain was not simply water falling from the sky, but a whole system in which heat lifted the air, cold gathered moisture, and the tension inside the clouds sometimes ended in a flash and a strike. I did not know how closely the local magic followed that logic, but that was exactly what caught my attention most of all, because the spell was already working, which meant it could be carefully adjusted to see what would change.
"Hey." Roxy narrowed her eyes and noticed my look at once. "Do not make that face people usually make right before they ruin everything interesting."
"I just thought of one thing."
"That is exactly what scares me."
I raised the wand again and slowly opened the flow once more, only this time I did not simply push the mana upward the way I had before. I tried to change the movement inside the spell itself, to make it denser in one part and sharper in another, so that the clouds above us would not merely hold the rain, but start pressing it down harder and faster. At once the air grew heavier, the streams of rain thickened, and a low rumble rolled over the hills, making Roxy jerk her head up.
"What did you just do?"
"Adjusted it a little. Kn—"
Bang!
Lightning struck somewhere off to the side, beyond the far slope, and the white flash cut across the whole sky for an instant so brightly that I squeezed my eyes shut. A second later the thunder rolled in, and the ground beneath our boots answered with a tremor. Roxy stared first in that direction, then at me, and her face made it clear that at this very moment she was choosing between the urge to throttle me and the urge to find out first how exactly I had managed it.
"So... you..."
Bang!
Another flash of lightning struck somewhere off to the side, and Roxy very sweetly hunched her head into her shoulders, losing her lofty mentor look for just a moment. Then she spun toward me with wide eyes and her mouth slightly open, as though she had already prepared a long and extremely biting speech in which every single one of my questionable decisions was about to be brought up at once.
"You really are..."
She did not finish, because at that very moment something changed. The sky shuddered all at once, from edge to edge, and then suddenly jolted so sharply, as though someone had pulled that entire heavy gray mass with tremendous force toward a single point far above. The rain was still falling, the thunder was still turning over above the hills, but the space above us looked wrong for an instant, and that made everything inside me tighten unpleasantly.
It seemed to me that cracks had spread across the sky. Thin pale lines ran through the clouds for a single moment, crossed somewhere high above, and froze there so clearly that I even stopped breathing. But as soon as I blinked, all of it was gone, leaving only the dense clouds, the rain, and a pale flash slowly fading into the gray depths.
"Did you see that?"
Roxy did not answer at once. She was still looking upward, gripping her staff tightly, and for the first time this whole while her face was neither angry nor mocking, but genuinely wary, because this no longer looked like a training spell, or an ordinary mistake, or even an unusually successful magical experiment.
"What was that? Was it me?"
Roxy quickly shook her head. Then she stepped a little forward, without taking her eyes off the place high above the hills where, just a second ago, the air had merely trembled with rain and thunder. Now a funnel was beginning to gather there, at first barely visible, almost transparent, but with every heartbeat it became clearer and slowly widened, pulling the clouds into itself.
"No..."
Roxy narrowed her eyes even more and moved her staff, as though trying to judge the boundaries of that thing by sight alone. Her mouth opened slightly, though no longer from confusion, but from concentration, because she was clearly sorting through everything she knew about weather magic, disrupted flows, and things that were not supposed to appear in the middle of an ordinary training session.
Roxy exhaled sharply.
"Rudeus, do you know how to ride a horse?"
"No?..."
"Tch..." She twitched the corner of her mouth. "Then you are riding with me..."
So that was how we headed toward the funnel. Roxy jumped into the saddle, grabbed me by the arm, and pulled me up in front of her in one sharp motion, while the horse was already shifting in place, sensing the tension in the air. I heard her curse under her breath as she checked her grip on the reins, then dig her heels into the animal's sides.
The horse lunged forward, eager itself to get farther from the growing tear, but Roxy guided it straight toward the funnel.
"Hold on tight, Rudy," Roxy threw over her shoulder without turning around. "I want to see what is happening there."
***
A man in a black dust-covered cloak was walking along the road. After several weeks of wandering through the Wild Lands, Brynn had finally found the right path and was now making his way toward Buena Village, trying not to stray from the washed-out trail.
Drip. Drip.
The rain began as suddenly as the clouds had appeared. Just a moment ago the sky had been clear, the sun had warmed his back, and now cold drops were falling more and more often, leaving wet marks on his cloak and on the ground. Brynn raised his head, trying to understand where such an abrupt change in the weather had come from.
Then a white flash blazed out, and the sky jerked sideways, twisting the clouds into a wide spiral. Brynn stopped in the middle of the road, lifted his head, and watched for a long moment as a funnel formed above the hills. The air around it wavered, and even from this distance there was a weight to it that an ordinary storm did not have.
He stood there for several seconds, evening out his breathing. Then he looked at the fork in the road: one path led to the village. Then he turned back to the funnel again, weighing the decision.
At last he stepped forward and headed straight toward it, wasting no time on doubt.