Join my Discord, it's kinda funny sometimes. And I also give pings n shi for the fic, among other things. Join at discord.gg/aWZ9qX9mAW
Glory to my bum ass proofreader: Solare.
----------------------
Sellen stared at him pointedly. It was not the polite, diplomatic stare of a sorceress weighing a dangerous political figure; or even the icy, superior stare of a learned woman looking down upon an overeager fool.
Even the Pumpkin Head beside the door seemed to have paused mid-breath in secondhand embarrassment.
The silence stretched for a while, until Sellen lifted one gloved hand to the smooth edge of her glintstone crown and let out a low, disbelieving chuckle.
"My apologies." She said at last, voice still velvet-soft despite the clear hitch of surprise beneath it. "I confess, Lord Demigod, I require a moment to decide whether you are remarkably straightforward… or catastrophically insane."
John blinked.
"Hm?" He took one step back, rubbed the back of his head, and somehow managed to look genuinely puzzled rather than embarrassed. "Did I come on too strong?"
Marika, hovering at his side in a wash of muted gold, folded her arms.
"Yes." She said flatly.
John ignored her with the confidence of a man who had survived dragonfire, divine bureaucracy, and two separate women calling him a degenerate within the same day.
He looked back at Sellen and shrugged one shoulder. "Figured you to be the type who prefers straightforward men. Scholar. Ambitious. Probably doesn't have patience for dancing around a point for three hours."
That hit her harder than the first line.
Sellen laughed again; this time shorter, more startled, the sound pressed out of her before she'd quite chosen to let it happen. It was not a loud laugh, nor even a comfortable one, but it carried a strange, nervous amusement that sharpened rather than softened her.
"My, my~..." She murmured. "You are either far more perceptive than most Tarnished… or catastrophically presumptuous."
"Can't it be both?" John asked cheerfully.
Marika closed her eyes for half a second as if petitioning some higher force for patience.
The Pumpkin Head, apparently deciding that if his mistress was not immediately vaporizing this man, he could in fact relax a little, lowered his flail by an inch.
Sellen noticed.
"Jack, outside, if you please." She ordered without taking her eyes off John.
The giant brute hesitated for a moment, then he gave John one last deeply unhappy look, grunted, and lumbered off up the stairs with all the wounded dignity of a bodyguard told he was not needed for a conversation that might either become diplomacy or a mating ritual.
Once he was gone, Sellen leaned one shoulder against the doorway and regarded John in silence for another long beat.
The blue glow of glintstone lit the edges of her crown, making the carved stone face seem almost animate. Behind its cold, inhuman features, John could practically feel her thinking, measuring, and then re-evaluating. Rebuilding the entire conversation in her head from first principles.
"Very well." She said at last a few moments later. "Since you have elected to barrel through courtesy like a troll through a chapel door, let us proceed in that same spirit."
John grinned. "Now we're talking."
Sellen's chin tilted slightly. "You came to me for instruction. Not for pleasantries, tribute, or to flex your newest title in front of an exiled sorceress skulking in ruins?"
"Nope."
"You know who I am?"
John's smile turned sly.
"You're Sorceress Sellen. Former Academy prodigy, current heretical Witch, generally too smart for your own good, and one of the only people in Limgrave worth learning from if I want actual glintstone sorcery instead of random pebble tutorial crap."
Sellen went still, her form slowly filling with interest.
"Oh?" She said softly. "That is rather a more flattering assessment than I am accustomed to hearing from newcomers."
"He's not wrong." Marika murmured, still studying Sellen. "Though 'too smart for thine own good' may yet prove the more relevant half."
Sellen's head turned just slightly, enough to acknowledge the golden presence beside him. The fact that she could not see Marika clearly but could feel her was written in the slight tightness around her shoulders.
It said a great deal that she did not grovel. John caught that too.
'Nice.' He thought. 'She's scared, but she's still standing straight.'
Marika's gaze slid toward him with bone-dry disapproval. "Must thou appraise every competent woman as though thou wert shopping for blades?"
'In my defense.' John thought back. 'Good swords are also hot.'
"...How?!?!"
Johnathan Pendragon's smile didn't budge an inch.
Sellen's voice cut through before the inner banter could spiral any farther.
"And what does a newly risen Demigod expect from me, precisely?" She asked. "A few lessons in glintstone pebble? A tour of the Raya Lucarian curriculum? Or do you seek the truths from which lesser minds recoil?"
John's expression sharpened just slightly, there it was.
The steel under the silk. The real Sellen, peeking through.
He stepped a little closer, enough to signal he was taking her seriously now.
"I want to learn everything." He said bluntly, as if the statement was such a simple matter. "Properly. I've got the Intelligence for it now, apparently."
Marika snorted very quietly.
"And I've got enough enemies lined up that not learning every tool I can get would be stupid. I'm already knee-deep in dragon communion, beast incants, faith magicks, and Great Runes."
He raised a finger with a sly smirk. "Might as well add sorcery to the pile."
Sellen's posture changed by a fraction, and that fraction mattered. The tension in her shoulders eased, but only because it was being redirected into curiosity.
"And why should I bind myself to teaching you?" She asked.
"Because I'm charming." John replied shamelessly.
Sellen's head tilted as she watched him continue without shame.
"Because I'm strong. Because I'm going to keep getting stronger. Because if you tie yourself to me now, before the rest of the world stops gawking and starts scrambling, you'll have patronage, protection, resources, and basically a front-row seat to history."
Now that landed, he saw it in the way her fingers flexed once against her sleeve.
Sellen was ambitious to the bone, not greedy in the crude sense, but truly hungry. Hungry for room to think, to experiment, to reach beyond the suffocating ceilings others had placed above her.
She did not need to be seduced by flattery alone, she needed possibility. And John, quite suddenly, represented an absurd amount of possibility.
He took another step, stopping just short of the threshold. "I don't need a court sorcerer who nods and says 'yes, my lord' while secretly plotting around me. I need someone brilliant, dangerous, and just unethical enough to be useful."
Marika arched an eyebrow. "Thou hast a shocking talent for making outrageous proposals sound almost complimentary."
Sellen's laugh this time was lower, richer, less nervous. "So you do know how to court a scholar's pride."
"I am a fan of multiclassing." John replied. "I contain multitudes."
She looked him up and down then, openly now.
The loose shirt. The half-dragon posture hidden under casual movement. The white threaded through his dark hair. The ease with which he'd raised that iron door. The complete lack of fear standing in front of a sorceress who could, under more favorable circumstances, flay a less resilient man's mind open like fruit.
And then, perhaps most importantly, the fact that he had come here himself. He didn't make and gaudy summons, and didn't even come with any guards or companions. He didn't bother with any flowery speeches.
It was obvious, Johnathan Pendragon didn't come here as a Demigod.
Currently, he was just a man with moonlight on his shoulders asking to be taught.
"What would your patronage look like?" She asked at last.
John shrugged. "Depends what you need."
"It is a dangerous answer."
"I know. That's why it's honest."
Sellen considered his words as the basement remained very quiet around them. Only the faint hum of glintstone sorcery and the distant, irritated stomping of Jack above broke the silence.
She nodded once.
"Very well. I will teach you."
John's grin flashed bright.
"In exchange, you will extend to me your patronage and support. Protection, yes, but more importantly, tolerance." She continued, raising one finger.
"Space in which my studies may continue without every frightened fool in Limgrave attempting to burn me as a heretic. Access to materials, where reasonable. And should the Academy or its agents move directly against me, I expect you not to suddenly discover a moral objection to my existence."
John listened, then crossed his arms and nodded
"Done."
Sellen narrowed her eyes behind the crown. "That was too quick."
"Because it's easy. You want room to work. I want a teacher. Plus, anyone the Academy calls a problem is usually worth at least hearing out first."
"That is either deeply foolish or deeply promising."
"Again, both."
There was a small pause, then his smile turned sly again. "All right. One condition on my side."
"Oh~?" Sellen almost laughed just from the audacity of that sentence. "You come to my door, ask me for lessons, and then place conditions?"
"Yeah."
Marika put one hand over her face. "Stars preserve me."
John pointed gently toward Sellen's glintstone crown. "Show me your face before we start."
There was a small break of awkward silence between them, then Sellen's shoulders moved once.
It could be mistaken for a breath, or a small shift. And then she laughed. It was not the startled laugh from before, nor the smooth practiced chuckle of a diplomatic woman. This one held genuine disbelief, a little heat, and an undercurrent of something dangerously close to delight.
"You are absolutely shameless."
"Correct."
"And forward."
"Also correct."
"And either absurdly bold or catastrophically spoiled by the women around you."
John paused and brought his hand to his chin. He rubbed it idly and thought of Melina, Marika, Millicent, and the general trend of his life over the last week.
"…Probably that last one too, yeah."
Marika's stare could have stripped paint.
"Thou art a shameless womanizer." She stated dryly. "I'd call thou a menace in mortal skin, but I distinctly recall saying such already."
'Hey, I'm appreciating beauty respectfully.' He thought back.
"There is nothing respectful in the speed with which thou hast made this request."
Sellen had gone very still now, one hand slowly rising to the edge of her crown. "Do you always ask impossible things with that same smile?"
"Only when I think I've got a chance."
Her covered face angled toward him. "And you think you have one?"
A sly smirk came to John's face when he recognised the lull of her voice, his answer came easily. "I think you already decided whether you'd say yes before I even asked."
He couldn't see her full expression yet, but something in the line of her throat and the way her fingers tightened on the crown told him he'd struck closer to truth than mere flirtation.
Sellen exhaled softly. "Very well. If I am to serve as your tutor, I suppose it is only fair that you know whose lessons you are truly receiving."
Slowly, with a deliberateness that was almost cruel in its precision, she lifted the glintstone crown free.
John appreciated the showmanship immediately.
She did not yank it off or treat it like a hat., she knowingly removed it like a veil.
The crown rose inch by inch, blue light sliding over pale skin as it left her fair features behind. Her hair, long and dark as midnight water, spilled free once the crown cleared her head, tumbling over her shoulders in soft waves.
And beneath it all was the face he remembered, now more vivid than memory had any right to be. She had pale skin and high cheekbones, with sharp blue eyes that faintly glew in the dim light. John let out a slow breath.
"Well…" He said honestly. "Damn."
Marika stared at him, then at Sellen, then back at him.
"Control thyself."
"No."
Sellen's lips twitched as he looked her over with complete, unabashed appreciation. It was evidently not crass or leering, but it was absolutely not subtle either.
"You know. I had a feeling the giant rock nerd helmet was hiding something unfair under there."
"'Rock nerd helmet'." Sellen repeated, one brow rising.
"Respectfully."
"Nothing in your tone even suggests respect."
"Then respectfully disrespectfully."
She laughed again quietly, clearly against her better judgment. "Fufufu~... I begin to see why so many seem willing to orbit you despite the obvious hazards to one's peace."
John tapped his chest. "I call it natural charisma."
"It's madness." Marika corrected.
"Those are not mutually exclusive."
Sellen slipped the crown under one arm and stepped closer to the threshold, studying him in turn now that they had crossed whatever strange line the conversation had been circling. She understood without an explanation that he must be conversing with his patron Goddess, and decided to cross that bridge when she got to it.
"Tell me then, Lord Johnathan, what exactly do you seek first?" She said, voice low and smooth once more. "Battle sorceries? Glintstone theory? Or… the founding principles of primeval current?"
John's grin returned in full force.
"Oh… I want the good stuff."
Marika sighed like a queen forced to watch a fool juggle knives for sport.
And Sellen, to her credit, did not look cautious anymore, only amused. She was amused, intrigued, and just curious enough to be dangerous.
The perfect teacher, really.
Sellen's lips curved, blue eyes glinting with equal parts amusement and professional interest.
"Then we are starting off well. Come, my pupil."
The words should not have landed as hard as they did.
And yet something in John's brain, that strange lizard thing that liked titles, pretty women, and being praised by said pretty women, immediately sat up straighter. Marika, floating just over his shoulder in a spill of pale gold, gave him a narrow look that promised judgment later.
Sellen turned with a smooth swish of robes and beckoned him deeper into the hidden chamber beyond the ruined cellar.
He followed. Her inner sanctum was not large by the standards of great halls or noble studies, but what it lacked in scale it made up for in density. The room felt less like a basement and more like the inside of a sorcerer's rise.
Every available surface had been claimed by scholarship.
Books were everywhere. They were stacked in towers on the floor, tucked in precarious columns against the walls, spread open across small tables and low stone ledges, some pristine and leather-bound, others so worn that their spines had been stitched back together with careful thread.
Loose parchment rested in drifts between them, covered in diagrams, equations, constellations, circles within circles, and notes written in quick, elegant script.
Clusters of glintstone had been set into brass fittings or left raw in little bowls, their blue light pooling over the room in soft, sorcerous glows. Some were no larger than a thumb. Others jutted up from iron stands like shards of frozen night sky.
There were tools too, many of which John could not even begin to identify.
Bronze rings suspended around armatures. Star charts with layers of rotating discs and etched symbols. Glass vessels full of luminous dust. Models of spheres and branching lattices that looked half astronomical device and half occult torture machine.
One shelf was entirely devoted to miniature carvings of celestial arrangements: stars hanging over moons, moons hanging over some larger invisible geometry, all linked together by fine silver wire so thin it looked like spider silk.
A chalkboard took up nearly one full wall, scrawled over with formulae and constellation maps so complicated they made his eyes slide off if he looked too long. Nearby, a half-finished model of what might have been a comet sat disassembled on a table, its tail rendered in fine strands of blue crystal.
The whole room smelled of old paper, dust, metal, and the cold ozone scent of worked glintstone.
Sellen crossed it as if it were second nature, moving around stacks and devices with the ease of someone who knew exactly where every dangerous, valuable, or irreplaceable thing sat.
Marika looked around, her expression shifting into something like reluctant approval. "For an exile's den, this is not wholly unimpressive."
"Not wholly unimpressive?" John snorted as he repeated. "There's enough wizard crap in here to build a small moon."
Marika lifted one delicate shoulder.
"Compared to what I knew in Raya Lucaria's height? Compared to what I had access to when Order and the Academy had not yet sundered from one another?" Her gaze drifted over the room again, more measured this time. "This is basic."
John turned to stare at her.
"Basic?"
"Aye."
He spread an arm helplessly at the chamber around them. "She has an entire magical crack-den of books and space rocks!"
Sellen glanced over her shoulder at that, one brow arching faintly.
"I feel I ought to be offended." She said dryly. "But I confess I am far more curious as to what your queen just said to earn such incredulity."
John looked back at her.
Right.
She could sense Marika. Barely glimpse her, maybe even read the shifts in her presence if she paid attention. But she couldn't actually hear the golden goddess currently critiquing her life's work from the astral sidelines.
Sellen set aside a brass instrument shaped like a many-ringed astrolabe and turned fully to face him.
"If I may…" She said, her tone smooth and pointed, "I can only dimly perceive Her blurry visage. Enough to know that I am in the presence of something… immense. Not enough to understand the manner of your bond."
Her eyes flicked once toward Marika's outline.
"What are you to one another?"
John opened his mouth, paused, then shrugged. "It's complicated."
Marika scoffed softly as Sellen waited.
John sighed through his nose and ran a hand through his already-messy hair. "All right, blunt version. She's in my soul. She sees through my senses, talks in my head, judges my taste in women, and gives me life advice with mixed results. In essence, she's my patron goddess, my guide to this world, and in exchange I work to carry out her will."
Sellen stared at him for a long moment.
"...That is not, in fact, a simpler version."
"Yeah, well, I did my best."
Her gaze slid between him and the faint golden shape only she could partially sense.
"And the Queen is… content with this arrangement?" She asked carefully.
Marika answered before John could.
"Content is an ambitious word." She said coolly, though Sellen could not hear it. "Resigned, mayhap. Increasingly indulgent, against my better judgment, certainly."
John, because he was himself, translated with only a sliver of dishonesty. "She tolerates me."
Marika looked scandalized. "I have done more than tolerate thee, thou insolent creature."
Sellen's lips twitched.
"I see." She said, clearly not seeing and yet piecing together enough from his face to know she had stepped into deeply strange waters. "Then yours is either the most sacred bond I have ever encountered… or the most deeply unwell."
John grinned. "Also both."
Something in Sellen visibly relaxed at that, though not entirely. He was still a demigod-level unknown, standing in her sanctuary, carrying the attention of Queen Marika. But whatever she'd expected from him; be it a self-important lord, a pious fanatic, or a lunatic tyrant, he was apparently not matching it.
That made him harder to predict. But it also made him, perhaps unfortunately for everyone involved, more interesting.
"Well…" She said at last. "Your eccentric domestic arrangements notwithstanding, you did not come here to gossip."
"Nope."
"So, let us begin." She said, gesturing toward a clear section of the floor.
She sat first, directly on the cold stone floor with the practical ease of a woman who valued function over ceremony when real work was to be done. The folds of her robes pooled around her neatly, glintstone light painting pale blue across their edges.
John sat opposite her.
The distance between them was not much, a few feet at most. Close enough that he could see the finer details of her expression now that the crown was off. Close enough that the cold magical air pooling around the glintstone between them seemed to bind the space into a small, humming circle.
Somewhere behind and above his right shoulder, Marika lingered in silence, watching as Sellen folded her hands in her lap and studied him.
The mood changed. The strange line of flirtation their first conversation had skated along was still there, subtle and alive beneath everything else, but it had shifted register.
They were teacher and student. Scholar and ambitious fool.
Sellen tilted her head slightly. "Tell me. Do you know anything at all of true sorcery?"
John considered that for a moment.
"Hmm.. The bare basics, I guess? Something about sorcery being the study of the stars."
Sellen smiled faintly. "A promising beginning, then. And painfully incomplete."
She reached beside her and pulled a worn book from one of the lower stacks. Its cover was scuffed smooth with age, corners softened, the spine cracked in several places from long use. She extended it toward him.
He took it carefully.
"We shall have to start from the beginning, then." She lifted one hand. At first John thought she was merely gesturing, then blue light bloomed in her palm.
A tiny model of the heavens formed above her skin: stars suspended in a slow-turning cluster, a small moon gliding around an unseen axis, and lines of glintstone energy connecting them in patterns too precise to be improvised.
"In essence, we sorcerers are simple." Sellen said, voice low and steady beneath the faint hum of magic. "We study the stars, and examine the life therein."
John blinked, he looked from the constellation hanging above her hand to her empty fingers.
"Wait…" He said, something else clicking in his head. "You're not using a staff, I thought all sorcerers needed one?"
Sellen chuckled.
"For most lesser sorcerers, yes, a glintstone staff is necessary. It serves as a focus and a mediator, a sort of shaping instrument." Her fingers flexed beneath the miniature stars, keeping them suspended with casual control. "But in a place sufficiently rich in sorcerous residue, and for workings sufficiently minor, I need no such crutch."
Marika hummed softly behind him.
"She is skilled." She admitted as John's eyes stayed on the little star-model.
"Cool, very cool." He muttered.
Sellen's mouth curved in approval before she continued. "Our power draws upon the energies embedded within glintstone. But one must understand what glintstone is before one can hope to wield it properly."
She reached down and lifted a small shard from the floor between them. Its interior glowed like frozen blue flame. Our powers draw upon the powers embedded in glintstone, but what is the nature of such power?"
"Glintstone is the amber of the cosmos, and golden amber contains the remnants of ancient life and houses its vitality." She said, quoting old Academy doctrine with the ease of long familiarity. "It contains residual life, thus the vitality of the stars."
John listened intently.
His Intelligence stat did not magically download knowledge into his skull. He did not suddenly understand sorcery the way he understood a boss moveset. But what it did do was make the shape of things easier to grasp.
Each concept slid into place with surprising smoothness. It wasn't exactly easy, and more like his mind had more hooks now to hang difficult ideas on.
Sellen seemed to notice, and her explanations deepened.
"It should not be forgotten that glintstone sorcery is the study of the stars and the life therein. Not merely the manipulation of blue energies or the flinging of sharpened light at one's enemies, useful though such vulgar applications may be. A fact lost on most sorcerers, these days..."
She sighed tiredly in resignation, obviously thinking of other sorcerers she met along her travels. Sellen then rotated her hand, and the stars shifted.
"The Academy teaches form, discipline, and replication." A subtle dryness entered her tone there. "Many spend their lives there learning to shape glintstone into neat projectiles and call it mastery. But true sorcery is broader, stranger. It concerns celestial law, the currents by which stars move, the pull of moons, the hidden life sleeping within cosmic remnants."
She summoned another image beside the first: a faint line of blue trailing across darkness like a current in deep water.
"The primeval current, any true sorcerer's goal…" She began slowly, eyes sharpening. "...is the great stream from which all sorcery first arose. To study sorcery properly is not merely to cast. It is to seek."
John had stopped blinking entirely. He was locked in now, elbows on his knees, book forgotten in his hands as he stared at the light unfolding between them.
Sellen went on.
She spoke of the Academy's foundations. Of glintstone as both vessel and fossilized trace. Of the stars as not merely objects but expressions of law and life and even fate itself. Of how sorcerers did not "command" the heavens so much as study their language and learn to echo fragments of it.
Sometimes she quoted older texts directly. Sometimes she simplified. Sometimes she paused and made him explain back what he thought he understood, correcting him when he oversimplified and nodding when he got close.
John discovered, to his deep satisfaction, that high INT really did help. Concepts that should have slid off him or tangled up instead clicked with a kind of clean internal satisfaction. It wasn't because he was a genius all of a sudden, but because his brain finally had enough processing room to keep up with a woman like Sellen.
It felt amazing. But the more it clicked, the more he understood why men and women spent their whole lives chasing this stuff until it devoured them.
They continued like that for what might have been an hour or might have been only thirty minutes. Time had a way of getting weird around focused learning and moonlit magic.
Eventually, Sellen closed the lesson-book resting beside her and studied him in thoughtful silence, then she smiled. "Good. It seems that you are not hopeless."
John put a hand to his chest with a smug grin. "Is that high praise?"
"It is."
She reached into one of the nearby stacks and withdrew a narrow scroll sealed with faded Academy wax.
His interest reignited immediately.
"All right, now we're talking." He said, sitting up straighter. "What's my first spell? Something flashy? Something cursed? You gonna teach me how to pull a moon out of the sky? Please say yes."
Marika giggled as Sellen handed him the scroll.
"Temper your impatience, my pupil."
John took it, already grinning, and broke the seal. He unrolled it and began reading. And a second later his face fell so hard it was almost tragic.
Marika laughed outright now, one hand covering her mouth.
"Oh~?" She purred. "What didst thou expect? A forbidden current from the stars' deepest grave? Some secret moon-art only whispered beneath eclipses?"
John looked up from the scroll with obvious petulant disappointment. "I don't know… Something slightly more interesting?"
Sellen's shoulders shook with a small, helpless giggle of her own. She didn't need to hear Marika to understand the shape of the moment.
"Temper your impatience, my pupil~..." She repeated, more softly this time. "Among all sorcerers, this is a universal first step on the journey toward true knowledge."
John sighed, then sighed again, because unfortunately she was right and he knew it.
"All right, fine. Foundational knowledge, I got it, I got it…
He lowered his gaze to the scroll again, and upon it was inscribed the most basic glintstone sorcery of the Academy of Raya Lucaria.
The humble Glintstone Pebble.
He stared at it in silence for a second before looking up at Sellen with evident dying hope in his eyes.
"Surely you're kidding, right?"
"I am not."
John stared at the scroll for one long, wounded second. Then he sighed through his nose, planted his elbows on his knees, and actually started reading it.
At first glance, Glintstone Pebble looked insultingly simple.
That, he very quickly learned, was a lie.
The spell's written instructions were compact and precise in the way only foundational teachings ever were; stripped of flair, but dense with assumptions about what the reader already knew.
The notation referenced the shaping of glintstone residue through focus, the alignment of thought to sorcerous intent, the compression of that thought-form into a stable projectile, and the release of it without allowing the whole thing to collapse back into loose magic.
In plain English, which no one here had kindly translated it into, it amounted to:
Think right. Breathe right. Feel the glintstone. Shape it. Don't let it explode in your face.
John looked up from the scroll, then at Sellen, then back at the scroll, and then back at Sellen again.
"…This is hazing."
Sellen folded her hands over one knee and smiled with infuriating composure.
"This is the beginning." She corrected.
Marika, lounging at the edge of the room in a spill of pale gold, looked entirely too entertained. "Thou desiredst intellect. Use it, mine champion."
John muttered something unflattering under his breath, then reached into his inventory and pulled free the staff he'd looted from Sellia, Town of Sorcery.
The Staff of Loss shimmered into his grasp.
It had dark wood, curving length, and was lined with glintstone set with old, faintly violet undertones. It looked elegant in a way he had not earned and absolutely intended to abuse.
Sellen's eyes flicked to it, and one brow rose.
"Oh?" She breathed softly. "A Staff of Loss. You have been pilfering from interesting places."
John gave the staff a little twirl that was cooler in his head than in reality.
"I get around."
"So I have gathered." She said dryly.
He ignored the layered meaning in that and looked back down at the scroll. Then he inhaled, focused, and tried to do exactly what it said. He held the staff forward, and closed his eyes for a heartbeat.
Reached for what Sellen had described, that subtle current, that glintstone resonance, that faint cosmic pressure resting dormant in both the stone and his own mind-
But nothing happened.
He opened one eye to peep, then the other. "…Huh."
Sellen did not move to help him.
John frowned, reset his grip, and tried again.
This time he felt something. It was a flicker. A tiny, cold pressure in the staff's core, like touching the edge of a current with numb fingers.
Then he instinctively tried to force it. The magic sputtered with a sad little blue cough and popped into harmless glitter that rained over his knuckles.
Before he could say anything, Sellen smacked the side of his head with the rolled-up edge of another scroll.
Thwack!
John's hand flew to where she swatted him, it didn't hurt but it still completely caught him off guard. "Oi!"
"Do not force it, read."
"I did read."
"Then comprehend better."
John stared at her.
Marika, traitorous queen that she was, made no move whatsoever to defend him.
He took a slow breath, and read the scroll again. The second attempt got a little farther. He felt the glintstone answer more clearly this time, a cool, lucid thread slipping from the staff into his senses. He tried to gather it, shape it, hold it near the tip-
The projectile formed for half a second as a blurry blue lump before unraveling into three harmless sparks and a crackle of wasted mana.
Thwack!
She struck his hand that time.
"Ow!"
"Your grip is wrong."
"What, how?! Like spiritually?!"
"Yes."
John blinked. "Bullshit."
Sellen's expression did not change.
"Again."
So he did, again, and again.
He learned very quickly that Sorceress Sellen was not a kind teacher.
Melina, when teaching him Flame, Grant Me Strength, had guided. She had corrected softly, demonstrated patiently, and adjusted his posture with the quiet care of someone who wanted him to succeed without suffering more than necessary.
Sellen did not give a damn about his comfort. She sat across from him like a beautifully dressed executioner of incompetence and watched him fail with clinical interest.
If he rushed, she hit his wrist.
If he overthought it, she slapped him sharply on the brow and told him to stop "gnawing on his own mind."
If he tried to skip steps because he thought he could intuit the rest, she struck the back of his hand and told him intuition was for prodigies and idiots, and he had not yet proven which one he was.
Marika seemed deeply amused by this.
"Sink or swim…" John muttered after the fourth failure.
Sellen inclined her head. "Aptly put."
"No encouragement? No 'very good, my pupil, thou hast almost birthed a pebble'?"
"No."
"That's harsh."
"Reality is harsher."
He glared at her, she simply smiled.
Five minutes in, John's stubbornness had overtaken his irritation.
Seven minutes in, he began to understand what she meant by alignment.
The current was not brute force. It was not faith, not really, and not like dragon communion either. There was no surrender to appetite, no dragging something primal through his own flesh by the throat. Sorcery was colder, cleaner.
It was not easier, but more exact.
It asked him to think in shape. To imagine not just a projectile, but the steps of its becoming. The gathering. The refinement. The release.
Ten minutes in, sweaty, mildly offended, and more focused than he'd been at any point since fighting Godrick, something clicked.
The staff hummed in his grip, and the glintstone within it soon answered.
He felt the pressure gather at the tip, not as heat, but as clarity. A sharp, bright point of intent. The shape held. The spell-form did not wobble. Mana threaded through it like wire through glass.
He thrust the staff slightly forward, and a tiny shard of glinting blue shot free and slammed into the far wall with a crisp, satisfying crack.
It was a single Glintstone Pebble.
The room went still as John blinked in shock. Then his eyes widened, and he started laughing. It came out of him in a wild, half-hysterical burst as adrenaline rushed through his veins so hard it almost felt like lightning. His hands shook once around the staff, not from exhaustion, but from exhilaration.
He had done it, actually done it. Not by scroll-summon or system-cheat or borrowed instinct. He had reached into the structure of glintstone sorcery, grabbed a thread of the thing, and made it answer him.
More than that, he felt it. A new connection.
It was thin, tiny. Barely there, but real.
Somewhere beyond the spell, beyond the room, beyond the little shard of blue light he'd flung into a basement wall, something had opened.
A fraction of a current. A whisper of stars. A vein of the world he had never touched before.
"Ohhh, that is it! I fucking got it!" He barked, still laughing.
Across from him, Sellen wore a sly, knowing smirk. She knew that feeling very, very well after all.
It was, in the end, the first real touch of sorcery. The moment the world's hidden geometry stopped being theory and became experience.
She let him laugh himself out for a moment before she spoke.
"Congratulations, my pupil." She said, voice smooth and rich with satisfaction. "You have just touched a fragment of the grand primeval current."
The words settled over him with surprising weight as he looked up.
Her blue eyes were fixed on him, pleased without softness and proud without sentimentality. "You have proven that you are not merely some rune-swollen brute fumbling with a staff. You have crossed the threshold. You are now, in the barest sense, worthy of my teaching."
John's grin came back full force. "Damn right I am."
Marika rolled her eyes. "Thy arrogance blooms quickly."
"Earned arrogance, this time!" John corrected.
Sellen's smirk sharpened. "We shall see."
She made him cast it again, and again, and again.
The first ten minutes had been pure sink-or-swim brutality. But once he'd crossed that line, Sellen finally changed. Though she did not become warm, she did not start praising every small success or cooing encouragement like Melina might have.
But she did begin to guide.
When his hand angled too far, hers reached out and adjusted his wrist with cool, gloved fingers. When his stance drifted, she nudged his knee into place. When his shaping became too loose, she leaned in and quietly told him exactly where the thought-form was bleeding apart.
The touches were practical, entirely practical. But John was still unfortunately very aware of them.
Every time her fingers settled briefly against his hand or forearm, that subtle strange tension between them returned. It was not enough to disrupt the lesson, just enough to make the air hum slightly differently.
Sellen either did not notice or noticed and chose not to acknowledge it. John suspected the second.
His casting soon smoothed out.
The first successful pebble had flown crooked, weak, and embarrassingly dramatic. But the next few were better.
Soon he could call the mana up without fumbling. He could feel the glintstone align under his will. He could loose the little blue projectiles one after another with increasing consistency until the far wall wore a cluster of faint impact cracks where his training had landed.
It was simple. It was basic. It was absolutely the tutorial spell. And John still loved it.
He cast one more pebble, watched it strike true, and exhaled in satisfaction.
"There, again."
He did.
"Good. Again."
He did.
"Now stop before you teach your arm bad habits through enthusiasm."
John lowered the staff with visible reluctance.
"That one wasn't bad."
"It was not." She agreed.
He looked absurdly pleased by that.
Sellen rose from the floor in one smooth motion, gathering the loose edge of her robes with one hand. The glintstone in the room dimmed slightly as the lesson's intensity bled away. "I believe that is enough for tonight."
John's shoulders dropped in disappointment on reflex. "Already?"
Sellen's lips twitched. "Yes, already. Some of us prefer not to burn out a new student's channels on the first evening."
He looked like he wanted to argue anyway, then remembered the world outside the basement.
Melina, and the promise he made her. The fact that she was probably still asleep in the royal suite, overcharged with mana and buried in his pillow, waiting to wake up and find him gone if he tarried too long.
That sobered him quickly. "…Right, yeah. I told her I'd be back before she woke up."
Sellen noticed the shift instantly.
"Ah…" She said, amusement glinting faintly in her voice. "Then I shall not keep you from your domestic obligations, my Demigod."
John pointed at her with the staff. "You say that like you're judging me."
"I say it, like I am observing that you are more housebroken than your entrance suggested."
Marika let out a startled, delighted laugh.
John put a hand to his chest. "That's so cruel!"
"It's truthful." She stepped closer into arm's reach, and folded her hands behind her back, leaning forward and showing off her impressive bust.
"Before you flee back to your maiden you will, of course, honor your end of our arrangement."
John chuckled, admiring it unabashedly. "I'm not the type to forget a deal."
"I should hope not."
He dismissed the staff into his inventory with a flicker of system-light, then held out his hand to her.
"Come on, I'm taking you to the Roundtable Hold."
That actually got a visible reaction out of her, Sellen's expression shifted into dry disbelief.
"The Roundtable Hold?" She repeated.
"Yep."
She looked him up and down, then at the offered hand. "I do not think that such an… orderly place is in the habit of accepting witches of my calibre."
John's mouth curled into a smirk. "Then I guess I'll have to give them an offer they can't refuse."
Marika sighed. "Thou sayest such things with the ease of a bandit chief."
"Thank you."
"That was not praise."
Sellen stared at him.
At his hand, the confidence in his face, and at the complete lack of hesitation with which he was offering to march a reviled heretic into the symbolic heart of Tarnished order and simply declare that she belonged there now.
She sighed, it felt like the sigh of a woman making a terrible decision and knowing it.
"I am going to kill you if I end up regretting this." She muttered.
John's grin widened instantly. "Deal."
She placed her hand in his, her fingers were surprisingly soft and warm. He closed his around them and helped her up, though she hardly needed the assistance. Once standing, she lifted her staff and gave the room one final glance.
The glintstone at its head flared.
Cerulean magic spread outward in a smooth, rippling wash, enveloping the sanctum. The books, devices, and half-finished models blurred at the edges, then vanished behind a veiling illusion that made the whole chamber look emptier, duller, almost abandoned.
John blinked.
"Oho~... You've gotta teach me that one too."
Sellen's laugh came low and easy now. "All in due time, my pupil."
She turned toward the stairway and raised her voice. "Jack."
The Pumpkin Head grunted from above.
"Take a few hours off. I shall return later."
A confused, muffled noise came in answer. John could practically hear the poor guy thinking: What do you mean, later? Where are you going with the dragon man?
Sellen turned back without answering him.
"I am ready."
John nodded and reached inward, toward that now-familiar connection threaded through Grace and soul and the strange nowhere-space of the Roundtable.
The bond answered.
Sellen's eyes widened slightly as pale gold currents gathered around them.
Faith, Grace, and space twisting around a point that should not have existed.
She looked around with immediate scholarly fascination, her earlier caution momentarily eclipsed by professional hunger.
"…Remarkable. This is no common teleportation. It feels like… nested sanctity. A fold built atop another fold within space and reality itself."
John hummed. "Yeah, that sounds about right."
The Grace around them swelled, and the world inverted. In one heartbeat they were in the hidden cellar beneath Waypoint Ruins. In the next, they stood in the Roundtable Hold's main hall amid drifting torchlight, stone pillars, and a hundred lingering Tarnished.
The arrival did not go unnoticed.
Johnathan Pendragon appearing out of nowhere was already enough to draw stares. Johnathan Pendragon appearing with Sorceress Sellen at his side turned stares into a wave of immediate whispering.
Heads turned, murmurs rose, and a few people went visibly pale. John looked around once, unimpressed.
He made a broad shooing motion with one hand. "Move along. Nothing to see here."
That did not help. And Sellen, for her part, said nothing. She only looked around herself.
Her gaze traveled over the architecture, the worn stone, the drifting warmth of Grace embedded in the place. Even while a dozen Tarnished whispered about her, she was examining the Hold itself nonchalantly.
"Where am I going, then?" She asked quietly.
John jerked his head forward. "Follow me."
And she did as he led her through the hall with the ease of someone who had decided that belonging somewhere was mostly a matter of acting like it. The whispers followed them in their wake like smoke.
Eventually he found the same poor clerk who had, the night before, handed him the keys to the upgraded rooms. The man brightened at first on seeing him.
"My lord!" He began with a bow.
He then saw Sellen, and his face slowly collapsed into the expression of a man witnessing the exact moment his job became not worth the pay.
"A-Ah… Oh."
John pointed casually at Sellen. "Get her the closest equivalent to a sorcerer's rise you've got available."
The clerk stared at him, then at her, and then back at him.
"My lord…" He said carefully, voice straining under the weight of panic. "Do… Do you know who that is behind you?"
"Yep."
"That is Sorceress Sellen."
"I am aware."
"She is… ah…" The man swallowed. "A reviled witch of considerable notoriety and I do not know if I am allowed to-"
John cut him off with one raised finger. "Stop thinking. You weren't asked to."
The clerk shut his mouth so fast his teeth clicked.
"Give her what I asked for." John continued. "And if anyone has a problem with it, tell them to come directly to me with their complaints."
His tone remained conversational but it somehow made his orders more final.
Behind him, Sellen's mouth curved into a small, feline smirk. For once in her life, it seemed, she was on the pleasant side of scandalous favoritism.
The clerk visibly deliberated, but then survival instincts won.
"O-Of course, my lord."
He bowed stiffly, fumbled through a ring of keys at his belt, and finally produced one wrought in dark iron and blue enamel before turning to Sellen.
"P-Please…" He muttered weakly. "If you would follow me."
Sellen did not move immediately, instead she looked to John first as he folded his arms and smirked.
"You're welcome~."
That finally got a soft, genuine laugh out of her. "Thank you, truly."
She tilted her head, blue eyes bright with mischief he absolutely had not earned but would happily take anyway. "I shall see you tomorrow night, at the same hour."
Her smile sharpened teasingly.
"Little tadpole~."
John blinked, then barked a laugh. "Oh, that's how it is?"
"Yes." She said smoothly. "Do not make me wait."
With that, she turned and followed the poor, doomed clerk down the hall, robes whispering over stone, glintstone staff tapping lightly at her side.
John watched her go with entirely too much satisfaction.
Marika drifted into view beside him and gave him a long, measured look.
"Well..." She said at last, flicking her hair behind her ear idly. "Thou hast acquired yet another dangerous woman."
John shoved his hands into his pockets.
"Yeah…" He said, his grin still lingering. "I'm pretty good at that."
Marika sighed toward the ceiling as if asking the Erdtree to explain why it kept handing her this man, but her lips twitched anyway.
And somewhere else in the Hold, in a royal suite still warm from the night before, a maiden would soon wake and find her demigod had gone out for a walk and come back with a witch.
It was a very productive morning, all things considered.
----------------
Author's Note:
Stones, please
Johnny Boy has finally tipped his toes into Sorcery. This shall be a recurring bit for a while, again Sellen may or not become a kind of love interest, if there is enough want for it. Or if it strikes my fancy as I write.
…
Next Chapter Title: Back on the Ol' Grindset.
…
If you want access to all my stockpiled chapters, up to 16 chapters ahead (140k words ahead), as well as special privileges on Discord among other things, you can go do so on my Patreon!
Join at patreon.com/Helios539