Sharing The Road

As the journey began, Kir did his best to ignore his problems as he spent his carriage shifts driving and his rest shifts puzzling through how his deadbeat father could shapeshift.

He tried circulating his magic while thinking about shapeshifting, which didn't work, but did make him uncomfortably warm as he focused on his skin, especially around the brand he kept hidden on his chest.

He tried bending light to change his appearance, which worked, up to the point that his still-present wings caught on the edge of the canvas as he tried to get in, which also taught him that he wasn't quite in control of the illusion as he fell out of it. It stayed in place and distorted until he let the spell go with a frustrated huff.

His moms couldn't help because neither of them knew how such magic worked, and because bodily magic at that high of a level was typically considered innate to beings that could wield it. Rare was it to find anyone that wasn't an angel, beastkin, or demon capable of full body transformations.

By that logic, Kir wondered why he couldn't do it innately if he was technically both. He also realized he might be technically neither, but nowhere in history had it been recorded that an angel and demon produced a child.

Morn's moderately mocking disbelief of his heritage didn't make him feel better, but it was reassuring to think she thought he'd been joking with her. The stories she liked about demonkin turned his stomach though, revenge tales, mostly, but she was an excellent storyteller nonetheless.

Lugh's attention, which came in the form of disapproving scowls and angry eyes often made Kir wish to punch him in the face. Mostly they would make eye contact and then glare at each other.

Then there were the anger flashes.

Kir knew he'd been sheltered somewhat by having a good home and no particular desire to cause trouble. But as he'd learned at age twelve, and the night he'd met his father, that didn't mean that anger wasn't inside him.

Spitting in Lugh's eye and threatening his own father with annihilation were actions he considered a bit extreme. Especially the latter since, until he actually met the man, he had only Brigit's suppositions to go on.

The stressors of travel and the presence of hostile people, but especially Lugh, made his claws feel like they were itching.

Thus it was a relief when Darlae proposed that Kir go hunting, thinking that if he caught a boar or a deer he could break the ice with the caravan and show that he was more than pulling his weight.

"We're sharing the road with them for a while, and now's a good chance to dazzle them with your cooking," Darlae elbowed Kir in the ribs as they sat next to each other during the drive. "That and I'm sure the raptors need a couple of bones to gnaw on."

"I thought they were vegetarian," Kir said.

"They are. But I've been out and about enough to see birds and horses and even deer chewing on bones. Trust me on this, smarty pants." Darlae always felt proud of herself when she knew something Kir didn't.

Kir humbly accepted that animal life was not his strongest subject. He didn't really know what he knew about a subject until it came up, and since most of Brigit's books had been about magic, philosophy, and cooking, he had a sense that he might also be forgetting more than he could fathom.

And so, when next the caravan stopped, Kir headed off into the woods after helping to set up camp.

While he intended to only use magic for the hunt, he kept a knife on him just in case. Always having a backup felt like a necessity ever since he learned his father was gunning for him.

Hunting wasn't one of his strong suits, but he'd been on enough hunts with Darlae to have the basics down.

A couple of minutes walk from the camp, he started with some basic traps for small-game, digging holes with magic and laying out food on a bed of leaves supported by sticks. Then he marked a tree so he could identify the trap area when he came back to it.

After a few hours of quiet walking, he finally came upon some tracks.

Walking into the woods had been a bit troublesome given his wings, but stalking - with his body lower to the ground and his steps more controlled - gave him a better sense of them as he focused his breath and circulated his mana.

After what felt like thirty minutes, he finally saw it.

A deer, but not any deer like they had on earth. This was a crystalbranch stag, and true to its name, it had mighty horns that branched above its head for more than a meter.

The horns were made of ice, and male deer used them to show off how powerful they were while also cooling their bodies in the summer months. This was reflected in the fact that at the "trunk" of their antlers, one could see red where they circulated blood.

Magic, after all, was not the exclusive domain of people, and many creatures seemed to have evolved to use it in one way or another, even if it was just to basically strengthen their bodies.

Crystalbranch deer, like their earthly counterparts, fought to make harems for themselves. Unlike earth deer, the stags didn't bash antlers. Instead, they used magic, trying to out-freeze each other. If Kir wasn't careful, he would find himself frozen by the ball of cooling mana held aloft between the stag's horns.

He watched as he thought through what spell to use, feeling his heart start to race in anticipation. After a few moments, he settled on trying something new.

His academy exam was similar to the test children took to start their mage training. He would have to demonstrate basic spells and a "most powerful" spell just like he did when he was thirteen. Unlike that test, however, there would also be a written exam on each of the school's primary subjects. All of it would take place indoors, he learned.

His problem was that his most powerful spell came with a significant degree of ionizing radiation, seeing as he had basically recreated a particle collider. He needed something more than a few steps away from that, and a railgun sounded like just the thing.

Thinking about his situation, he should have made some iron bullets or darts. Finally the idea struck him to use his knife. It was a well-balanced, symmetrical blade perfect for throwing - shaped rather like a leaf to his eyes. Drawing it, he slunk back into the shadows to test his idea.

By circulating his mana and pulling on the local magnetic fields, he was able to create a confined area where the knife began to spin along its length. After that, it took only a little modification to grow the power in preparation for launch, and- THUNK!

Crap. He'd launched the knife into the tree right next to him.

The birds inside the tree took off, crying out.

His knife had drilled a hole through the tree and come out the other side with no sign of itself, indicating it was now either buried or shattered.

Oh, and the crystalbranch stag was looking in his direction, with a very ominous gathering of mana between his horns.