Fan Fiction ❯ A Wizard's Heart ❯ Chapter 1

A Wizard's Heart

By Nix Winter

Kuraia Company had a thousand years of history. Wizards and peacekeepers, mercenaries and orphans, Kuraia earned its keep fighting in small feudal wars, protecting crops, lands, making the battles more magical and more between professionals than the landfolk of world.

The world had need of all it's landfolk, the craftsman and farmers of the world. The world wasn't so fond of it's wizarding kin. To say the Church wasn't fond of Wizarding kin was like saying Sei really licked botching his comprehensives again.

He leaned against the widow he sat in, on foot pressed against the other side of the arched window. He'd been there so long the cold stone wasn't even cold anymore and his bottle of wine wasn't full anymore. Sei the Bastard was the most powerful wizard in the Kuraia. At nineteen he was also the oldest apprentice.

Twenty levels below the Company celebrated the completion of training for fifteen new wizards, and once again Sei wasn't there. He didn't care! The heel of his boot thumped against the dark stone of the window. A magic heart, raised in a house of stone, he swore he didn't care, didn't care if Kai were now a wizard.

Green eyes closed, held tightly, tears of frustration sliding down a slender pale face. He could see Kai so clearly in his mind, from his first memories until this very moment. They'd started together at a church run orphanage. They'd just been a skinny blond boy who talked too much and said nothing and a dark russet haired boy with grey eyes who said nothing at all. Everything had gone wrong then. That had been the root of it. Kai had become the only one in the world for Sei, and yet no matter what Sei did, he never got Kai's attention.

Kai's eyes were grey with the slightest shades of blue in the sunlight. Kai's water magic matched his temperament, cool and unstoppable. Kai was beautiful, a beautiful prince of ice, pale unkissed lips with curves that Sei knew so by heart. Kai's lips, Sei thought, taking another drink of his wine, leaning his head back. Sei stayed with the experience of the wine burning into him, exciting his magic.

He'd ruined things so completely.

"I've been looking for you," Litha said gently.

Litha was his partner, the person with whom he trained. She'd been a good friend, a dark haired girl with the same kind of magic Sei had, heart magic. "I hope you had to work at it," he said, sneering at her. "Shoulda told you something."

Litha crossed her arms over her chest. "I saw what you did."

"Oh, you and everyone else? Saw me blow up a tree, nearly setting fire to Aba Forest? Yeah. I lost control of a lightning spell. They'll bond me one of these days." That required another drink of wine, a nice long one. A wizard could survive being bonded. Survive the loss of their powers, go on to be scribes or landfolk. Sei sometimes knew why he'd developed magic in the first place and even if it hadn't been a fact that Heartmages rarely survived bonding, he knew he wouldn't.

Drunk as a marinated duck, sitting in a windowless castle window twenty stories above the ground, he could remember it so clearly, watching a younger Kai play with the water in the tub, commanding it, shaping it, so innocently. Sei had made the choice, opened the magic in his heart as one of the nuns had thrashed Kai within an inch of his life. Later that night, holding his friend close, combing sweaty auburn hair. There had been only the purest friendship when they were six and eight. He'd promised, not to worry, Sei would take care of him. Sei had magic too, even though then he hadn't had any. They would go to a wizarding company together.

Sei had gone first. On his twelfth birthday, he'd been taken by a wizard who stood on a captive lightning bolt. That had been the only time Sei could remember seeing Kai cry. And Kai had never forgiven him. Yes, Kai had followed three years later and at thirteen and fifteen there had been only silence from Kai and the badgering from Sei. "He hates me."

Litha hadn't left the door, cautious, "You're drunk."

"Why shouldn't I be? They'll probably fucking bond me for this." He looked back out towards the open land around Kuraia, towards some possible future that didn't include wishing Kai didn't hate him. "Serve me right."

"Why don't you just tell them you let the spell go wrong on purpose because you had a vision and wanted to stop the exercise?"

"I didn't have a vision," he said, voice low. "I don't have visions."

"Yes, you do," she said softly. "Heartmage/empathy, remember? There's nothing wrong with loving your friend this much. You just feel some need to be an ass to him. If I didn't know better I'd think you wanted him in your bed."

Silence floated around between them. "Kai's going to bed some princess somewhere, get to be her father's adviser, live in a nice tower. He's going to have all the things he wants."

"Gods, I hate when you're drunk. Are you going to get all gloomy and melancholy now?"

"Nope," he said, dropping the closed bag of wine back inside the room before standing up in the window sill. "Am going to go out with a bang."

"Sei!" Litha reprimanded, moving towards him. "Get out of that window!"

Hands up, he mouthed an incantation, made up on the spot. Heartmages did not draw on learned incantations or rules for wizarding, only summoned up the emotion within them. Lights, sparkling and colored, blues and reds, greens and golden white flashed from his fingers moving out over the court yard and exploding in flowers of colorful flowers and patterns. The crest of Kuraia lingered in sparkling light then showered down on the party below in thousands of rose petals.

Feeling slightly less hopeless with the expression of emotion, Sei held to the inside of the window, leaned out, and screamed, "I love you, Kai!"

The faint cry of his words was lost in the laughing and celebrating mages and apprentices. Some danced in the raining rose petals, some of the older ones lingered at the side arguing over who had authorized such a display.

Kai hadn't heard Sei's words either. The grey eyed wizard leaned against the wall, watching the petals drop, wishing Sei could have seen the display. Sei had always loved such colorful over the top things. Without warning, he wished for Sei, the Sei he'd known as a child. With smiling green eyes and something welcoming that the water wizard couldn't even name, Kai wondered where Sei was.