TheBookofEndsEndFightingDogs - The Lich King Reincarnates As A Baby: Book 4 Chapter 12
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Book 4 Chapter 12: Sorority
++Of course I’ve heard plenty about those Vornholt girls, who hasn’t? The older one, I hear, is some sort of pervert, but the younger…well, I’ve seen pictures, and let me tell you my son could do a lot worse!++
- A view expressed by Earl Elqarth on the Vornholt family at a gathering of Arygin Museum patrons, utterly unsolicited. 1,888 A.E
Victoria hadn’t believed it at first when Isabel had offered to take her on that big trip around Garamon. It’d just seemed too good to be true. Years she’d been packed up in the Vornholt estate, that stuffy old dust-house with nothing to do and no girls her own age to speak to.
Or, rather, no mentally functional girls her own age. Victoria knew plenty from the local nobility, and they were all simpering idiots. The ones who were even willing to talk to her, in spite of her learning magic, were transparently just doing it out of a desire to get some dirt on her to laugh about later, or, worse, pity.
Victoria didn’t want or need their pity. If anything, she should’ve been pitying them. She was the one learning how to be powerful, how to actually change things. Like Isabel, she was learning to go her own way rather than sit around waiting for some stupid man to stumble over and solve everything for her.
Ha! Victoria had met most of the young men of Lachfel too, the noble ones at least, and the only thing any of them would be solving was a shortage of drool and smarm.
But now she was free of that. Now she was travelling with Isabel. Isabel, the mystery. Isabel the outlier. Isabel, the woman who did what she wanted, when she wanted, and made the world warp itself to let her rather than the other way around.
It was hard for Victoria to actually articulate how excited she was, even before being told about Isabel’s plans for her shopping habits. And then, of course, when they actually took off into the sky, she seemed to reach some sort of critical point at which her brain could store no more enthusiasm and it all just blended together.
“Can you teach me to fly?” she asked her sister.
Isabel didn’t seem to hear, and Victoria had to repeat herself a few times to finally get an answer. Fortunately, Isabel did something before replying, seeming to harden the air around them into a wall that killed the bulk of the screaming winds that had drowned every word out before. It dropped their speed, too, Victoria thought, but not by too much. They were still flying something like ten times the top speed of a train.
“Can you teach me to fly?” Victoria asked again.
“Probably at some point,” Isabel told her. “Though I doubt I can with this technique.”
Victoria frowned. “Why?”
“It is too complex for anyone except me to use. I doubt even…the world’s second or third prodigies could achieve it.”
She’d been about to say Agrian, but in thinking about him, she’d remembered him, and Victoria could see now how sad that made her sister. She decided to speak fast to change the subject.
“Could I learn any flying technique, then?” she asked.
Isabel thought about that. “There are certainly methods that you could acquire. The Vorets seem to have the best, though they guard it as closely as they do all their other secrets. Other powerful magicians have a few. I doubt you will ever discover the trick yourself, but you could certainly learn the ones used by others. Your talent is extraordinarily rare.”
“One in a million, Doctor Brown says,” Victoria noted. Isabel nodded.
“Precisely what I would have guessed as well.”
“Are you…you’re more talented than that, right? I read Doctor Brown’s book about you. It says people still can’t figure out the probability of your birth. Every time someone looks at old patterns of magician talent based on population size, the numbers come back at essentially zero percent.”
“That is probably correct,” Isabel confirmed. “As far as I know I remain unprecedented. An outlier.”
Victoria suddenly felt a lot less proud of her own talent. One in a million. It was a big number, it sounded impressive, but then you thought about it compared to the grander scope of Garamon and it became terribly clear how fundamentally finite it was. One million. But there were billions of people in Garamon, and one in every two hundred or so was a magician. So the talent pool there was, what, ten million at least, probably more like twenty or thirty. Victoria, then, was not in the top ten prodigies of Garamon, and very possibly wasn’t even in its top thirty.
It wasn’t just Isabel who stood above her, there were maybe dozens. Victoria clung a bit tighter to her older sister as it dawned on her that the reason she couldn’t be Isabel, the reason she still lived under mother and father, was simply because she lacked the ability.
Power was the greatest virtue, at least as far as this world was concerned. Isabel had always said so, and now, for the first time in her life, Victoria realised that she was right. Without power Isabel would be right where Victoria was, and with power Victoria…
Well, Victoria would be buying a lot of her own damned horses.
It took them only an hour to leave Lachfel and set down in Manchist, apparently the first of Isabel’s many stops on her seemingly-random museum tour. Victoria had never been to Manchist before. It wasn’t a name that came up when you pictured the cultural heart of Garamon.
“Are we not going to Laugrey?” she asked Isabel.
“We are,” Isabel assured her. “But this stop is on our way to it. Besides, you should see more of Garamon than just its capital city. There is a lot to learn.”
Victoria chewed on that as they set down and started walking. Isabel, as poised as she was in all things, took off with a casual, easy grace that made it look like she was prancing out into a ballroom rather than taking her first steps after half an hour of defying gravity. Victoria wasn’t nearly so together. Her first dozen or so strides were dizzy and stumbling things. Damn it all, was there anything her sister didn’t do better?
“A lot to learn,” she repeated irritably. “Like what, how to tolerate the smell of sewage?”
Isabel arched an eyebrow. It was an expression she’d picked up relatively recently, but it had as much an effect on Victoria as a dressing-down ever had. There was something about her older sister that simply made her seem like someone you wanted to impress.
Maybe it was just the lack of prejudice she had, one way or another. What she saw in you was purely about your value and your abilities, and falling short of so objective an assessment stung more keenly than any remonstration.
Victoria wasn’t a child anymore. She was, as far as she was concerned, basically a woman. She’d started bleeding, she knew how to take care of herself, and she’d started doing all the things she’d grown up being told would wait until she was a woman. As far as she was concerned, anyone insisting she was anything but a woman was acting out of pedantry.
And so her desire to impress Isabel didn’t come from some girlish need for approval, far from it.
No. Victoria liked and respected Isabel. She loved her, of course, because they were sisters, but she respected her because Isabel was a strong, intelligent and accomplished woman, and she deserved respect by her own merits.
Just as Victoria did. And she knew that Isabel, strong, intelligent and accomplished as she was, would soon be made to realise that.
She would show the world’s greatest magical genius, and one of its most successful businessmen, that they were equals.
Granted, it was hard to come up with any ideas on how she’d go about proving that just yet. They weren’t exactly going into combat, not that Victoria would know what to do there if they were, and Isabel had pretty much promised to bankroll everything. Like it or not, Victoria was still beholden to the legally-recognised adults of the world for money.
One thing she could control, at least, was how attentive she was to Isabel’s little lessons. She tried to hide it, but Victoria’s sister wasn’t nearly as unreadable as she seemed to think. Her face had these little shifts and twitches that Victoria had long since learned to pick through, and every fractional expression was as transparent as glass to her.
Victoria could see when Isabel was impressed, happy or, on those brilliant, rare occasions, proud of her. And she could tell that her older sister had been underestimating what she could do. At first their little practice sessions started out simple enough, just basic mana output and control exercises, interrupted by Isabel’s strange new habits of physical exercise.
As they went on, though, Victoria could tell that Isabel was growing more and more invested in her education.
“Not like that,” her sister told her irritably when she made some error or another. “You’re using too much power.” Or. “You’re letting the magic move on its own.” Or. “You could do that twice as fast if you practiced.”
Victoria realised, then, the true benefits of being trained by a genius. They did not settle for mediocrity the way a more common talent might. Doctor Brown was a good man, and Victoria loved him like an uncle, but he was, she had to admit, a very common talent.
But the best part was how Isabel seemed to be opening up as they went. There’d always been a distance between her and Victoria, one that had gotten more obvious as Victoria aged.
Really, it was more like a distance between Isabel and everyone not named Isabel. A wall, or a barricade, or lines drawn on a map. Here began the territory of Isabel Vornholt, all others must keep out or pay the price.
But Victoria wasn’t being kept out now.
She’d stopped hugging her sister years ago, partly because she’d felt it was too childish, partly because she’d become less sure as she grew older whether Isabel actually liked it, whether her protests were really false. On her sixth day with Isabel, Victoria absent-mindedly cuddled up to her again.
Isabel tensed, paused, and then silently wrapped an arm around Victoria’s waist to hold her closer.
“Why do you always leave home?” Victoria asked her after a moment. “Is it…It’s not me, is it? I’m not the one driving you away?” The thought had been too big for her to ever give voice to it before. Victoria was quietly horrified to hear her voice cracking as she did so now.
Isabel hugged her tighter, and she didn’t hesitate this time. “No. It was never you. I am…sorry if you thought it was.” Victoria dared a look up into her sister’s face and saw that she seemed regretful. Taken in by a sorrow too deep for her to even begin to understand, let alone empathise with.
“Will you stay with me a while this time?” Victoria asks her. “Please?”
“Of course I will,” Isabel told her. “I…I love you.”
Victoria didn’t think her sister had ever said it before, and hearing the words at last left her rather insensible and beyond words. Since she couldn’t speak, nor do anything else productive with her face, she just buried it against Isabel’s shoulder and started crying.
Perhaps, Victoria was finally forced to consider, she was not actually all that grown up at all. Not just yet at least.
Book 4 Chapter 12: Sorority
++Of course I’ve heard plenty about those Vornholt girls, who hasn’t? The older one, I hear, is some sort of pervert, but the younger…well, I’ve seen pictures, and let me tell you my son could do a lot worse!++
- A view expressed by Earl Elqarth on the Vornholt family at a gathering of Arygin Museum patrons, utterly unsolicited. 1,888 A.E
Victoria hadn’t believed it at first when Isabel had offered to take her on that big trip around Garamon. It’d just seemed too good to be true. Years she’d been packed up in the Vornholt estate, that stuffy old dust-house with nothing to do and no girls her own age to speak to.
Or, rather, no mentally functional girls her own age. Victoria knew plenty from the local nobility, and they were all simpering idiots. The ones who were even willing to talk to her, in spite of her learning magic, were transparently just doing it out of a desire to get some dirt on her to laugh about later, or, worse, pity.
Victoria didn’t want or need their pity. If anything, she should’ve been pitying them. She was the one learning how to be powerful, how to actually change things. Like Isabel, she was learning to go her own way rather than sit around waiting for some stupid man to stumble over and solve everything for her.
Ha! Victoria had met most of the young men of Lachfel too, the noble ones at least, and the only thing any of them would be solving was a shortage of drool and smarm.
But now she was free of that. Now she was travelling with Isabel. Isabel, the mystery. Isabel the outlier. Isabel, the woman who did what she wanted, when she wanted, and made the world warp itself to let her rather than the other way around.
It was hard for Victoria to actually articulate how excited she was, even before being told about Isabel’s plans for her shopping habits. And then, of course, when they actually took off into the sky, she seemed to reach some sort of critical point at which her brain could store no more enthusiasm and it all just blended together.
“Can you teach me to fly?” she asked her sister.
Isabel didn’t seem to hear, and Victoria had to repeat herself a few times to finally get an answer. Fortunately, Isabel did something before replying, seeming to harden the air around them into a wall that killed the bulk of the screaming winds that had drowned every word out before. It dropped their speed, too, Victoria thought, but not by too much. They were still flying something like ten times the top speed of a train.
“Can you teach me to fly?” Victoria asked again.
“Probably at some point,” Isabel told her. “Though I doubt I can with this technique.”
Victoria frowned. “Why?”
“It is too complex for anyone except me to use. I doubt even…the world’s second or third prodigies could achieve it.”
She’d been about to say Agrian, but in thinking about him, she’d remembered him, and Victoria could see now how sad that made her sister. She decided to speak fast to change the subject.
“Could I learn any flying technique, then?” she asked.
Isabel thought about that. “There are certainly methods that you could acquire. The Vorets seem to have the best, though they guard it as closely as they do all their other secrets. Other powerful magicians have a few. I doubt you will ever discover the trick yourself, but you could certainly learn the ones used by others. Your talent is extraordinarily rare.”
“One in a million, Doctor Brown says,” Victoria noted. Isabel nodded.
“Precisely what I would have guessed as well.”
“Are you…you’re more talented than that, right? I read Doctor Brown’s book about you. It says people still can’t figure out the probability of your birth. Every time someone looks at old patterns of magician talent based on population size, the numbers come back at essentially zero percent.”
“That is probably correct,” Isabel confirmed. “As far as I know I remain unprecedented. An outlier.”
Victoria suddenly felt a lot less proud of her own talent. One in a million. It was a big number, it sounded impressive, but then you thought about it compared to the grander scope of Garamon and it became terribly clear how fundamentally finite it was. One million. But there were billions of people in Garamon, and one in every two hundred or so was a magician. So the talent pool there was, what, ten million at least, probably more like twenty or thirty. Victoria, then, was not in the top ten prodigies of Garamon, and very possibly wasn’t even in its top thirty.
It wasn’t just Isabel who stood above her, there were maybe dozens. Victoria clung a bit tighter to her older sister as it dawned on her that the reason she couldn’t be Isabel, the reason she still lived under mother and father, was simply because she lacked the ability.
Power was the greatest virtue, at least as far as this world was concerned. Isabel had always said so, and now, for the first time in her life, Victoria realised that she was right. Without power Isabel would be right where Victoria was, and with power Victoria…
Well, Victoria would be buying a lot of her own damned horses.
It took them only an hour to leave Lachfel and set down in Manchist, apparently the first of Isabel’s many stops on her seemingly-random museum tour. Victoria had never been to Manchist before. It wasn’t a name that came up when you pictured the cultural heart of Garamon.
“Are we not going to Laugrey?” she asked Isabel.
“We are,” Isabel assured her. “But this stop is on our way to it. Besides, you should see more of Garamon than just its capital city. There is a lot to learn.”
Victoria chewed on that as they set down and started walking. Isabel, as poised as she was in all things, took off with a casual, easy grace that made it look like she was prancing out into a ballroom rather than taking her first steps after half an hour of defying gravity. Victoria wasn’t nearly so together. Her first dozen or so strides were dizzy and stumbling things. Damn it all, was there anything her sister didn’t do better?
“A lot to learn,” she repeated irritably. “Like what, how to tolerate the smell of sewage?”
Isabel arched an eyebrow. It was an expression she’d picked up relatively recently, but it had as much an effect on Victoria as a dressing-down ever had. There was something about her older sister that simply made her seem like someone you wanted to impress.
Maybe it was just the lack of prejudice she had, one way or another. What she saw in you was purely about your value and your abilities, and falling short of so objective an assessment stung more keenly than any remonstration.
Victoria wasn’t a child anymore. She was, as far as she was concerned, basically a woman. She’d started bleeding, she knew how to take care of herself, and she’d started doing all the things she’d grown up being told would wait until she was a woman. As far as she was concerned, anyone insisting she was anything but a woman was acting out of pedantry.
And so her desire to impress Isabel didn’t come from some girlish need for approval, far from it.
No. Victoria liked and respected Isabel. She loved her, of course, because they were sisters, but she respected her because Isabel was a strong, intelligent and accomplished woman, and she deserved respect by her own merits.
Just as Victoria did. And she knew that Isabel, strong, intelligent and accomplished as she was, would soon be made to realise that.
She would show the world’s greatest magical genius, and one of its most successful businessmen, that they were equals.
Granted, it was hard to come up with any ideas on how she’d go about proving that just yet. They weren’t exactly going into combat, not that Victoria would know what to do there if they were, and Isabel had pretty much promised to bankroll everything. Like it or not, Victoria was still beholden to the legally-recognised adults of the world for money.
One thing she could control, at least, was how attentive she was to Isabel’s little lessons. She tried to hide it, but Victoria’s sister wasn’t nearly as unreadable as she seemed to think. Her face had these little shifts and twitches that Victoria had long since learned to pick through, and every fractional expression was as transparent as glass to her.
Victoria could see when Isabel was impressed, happy or, on those brilliant, rare occasions, proud of her. And she could tell that her older sister had been underestimating what she could do. At first their little practice sessions started out simple enough, just basic mana output and control exercises, interrupted by Isabel’s strange new habits of physical exercise.
As they went on, though, Victoria could tell that Isabel was growing more and more invested in her education.
“Not like that,” her sister told her irritably when she made some error or another. “You’re using too much power.” Or. “You’re letting the magic move on its own.” Or. “You could do that twice as fast if you practiced.”
Victoria realised, then, the true benefits of being trained by a genius. They did not settle for mediocrity the way a more common talent might. Doctor Brown was a good man, and Victoria loved him like an uncle, but he was, she had to admit, a very common talent.
But the best part was how Isabel seemed to be opening up as they went. There’d always been a distance between her and Victoria, one that had gotten more obvious as Victoria aged.
Really, it was more like a distance between Isabel and everyone not named Isabel. A wall, or a barricade, or lines drawn on a map. Here began the territory of Isabel Vornholt, all others must keep out or pay the price.
But Victoria wasn’t being kept out now.
She’d stopped hugging her sister years ago, partly because she’d felt it was too childish, partly because she’d become less sure as she grew older whether Isabel actually liked it, whether her protests were really false. On her sixth day with Isabel, Victoria absent-mindedly cuddled up to her again.
Isabel tensed, paused, and then silently wrapped an arm around Victoria’s waist to hold her closer.
“Why do you always leave home?” Victoria asked her after a moment. “Is it…It’s not me, is it? I’m not the one driving you away?” The thought had been too big for her to ever give voice to it before. Victoria was quietly horrified to hear her voice cracking as she did so now.
Isabel hugged her tighter, and she didn’t hesitate this time. “No. It was never you. I am…sorry if you thought it was.” Victoria dared a look up into her sister’s face and saw that she seemed regretful. Taken in by a sorrow too deep for her to even begin to understand, let alone empathise with.
“Will you stay with me a while this time?” Victoria asks her. “Please?”
“Of course I will,” Isabel told her. “I…I love you.”
Victoria didn’t think her sister had ever said it before, and hearing the words at last left her rather insensible and beyond words. Since she couldn’t speak, nor do anything else productive with her face, she just buried it against Isabel’s shoulder and started crying.
Perhaps, Victoria was finally forced to consider, she was not actually all that grown up at all. Not just yet at least.
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