Washrags & Monsters

Content Warning: The following story is Smut-Free and Totally Safe For Work

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I love what I do. Being a mage, working with sleepers whose magic was newly awakened, going out and helping both my community and others, I often felt like I was living the dream.

Usually.

It was times like this, though, when a monster was trying very hard to rip my face off, that made me feel like I might have made a bad career choice somewhere along the line.

"Cast the spell, Booker, I don't know how much longer I can hold him!" I shouted as I willed power into the hold-pattern spellforms scribed around the ironwood handle of my halberd used to harness the monster and into the ones scratched into the leather of my boots that keep me firmly on the ground. The monster, in this case a towering, gangling, hairless thoxling with a face like that of a shaved bear, thrashed against the binding magics I'd cast on him like a muzzle around his mouth. I felt like I was attempting to reel in a trophy king salmon with a pole meant for creek-size crappies.

"I can't find it, Ombud Ranitulok!" said Booker, my ... trainee, for lack of a better term. Her voice cracked as she sifted through her tote bag in front of the village's mechinic semaphore tower, well out of range of the claws reaching towards, and occasionally striking, me. Not for the first time I thanked the gods for healing salves.

This particular maintenance village was, should have been, far enough out of the way that the Dread Sorcerer Thoximos wouldn't have thought to pass through here and work his fell magic. As such, Heart, a wrinkled, bald old human with skin the color of pitch and a spidery magemark that stretched up his arm and onto his chest, had seered out that we'd mostly smile, wave, and be friendly faces. A quick scuffle followed by a violent transformation of human carpenter into raging thoxling threw a wrench into that future, and so Booker and I leapt into action.

The thoxling, whom I was now struggling to contain, pulled against the magic I was using to restrain him once again again. He was attempting to reach the bearded idiot that he'd been yelling at before he'd transformed, presumably to gut him like a fish. A bearded idiot currently cowering next to Heart, who was looking over the Pillar at village's square, the village's reason for being, not a care in the world big enough to distract him from it.

"Why wasn't it already ready, Booker‽" I sent a surge of magic into another of the spellforms scribed into my halberd. This one was only meant to give the halberd heft but at this point anything that might keep it from breaking in half was a plus in my book. I ignored the flare of sky-blue light from the magemark on the back of my wrist that told me I was pushing my magic too hard.

"I wasn't ... sorry, Mom! M'am! Ombud!" The jangling increased as she continued to sift through her bag. I could smell the foul breath of the thoxling as I continued to restrain it, even as I stood a ways away from it. I tried not to think about 'mom'. I didn't think I was quite that old.

I sent another surge of power into the spellforms in my spear. I also poured a larger share of power into the stability spellforms bound into my boots. Flickers of green light danced from my magemark along the edges of the blue. I was pushing my boots' spellforms pretty far already; I hoped that they didn't simply burn out before we'd contained the carpenter-turned-thoxling.

I paled as I watched the thoxling's muscles bulge and grow in size once, then again. His skin, already near translucence in its thinness, transitioned from pasty white to a deep, blood red color as it was stretched taut over each of the hulking muscles beneath it. There was a horrible cracking sound, and I went flying through the air. Large fragments of cobblestone clung to my boots as I soared. At least the spellforms held, even if the ground hadn't.

I whipped around the thoxling, the rope-like bond connecting the magic in my spear to the magic still around the thoxling growing shorter with each circle. I curled up into a ball, which caused me to swing around faster and faster until I was close enough that, when I suddenly straightened, the stones still stuck to my boots smashed into the thoxling's jaw like a sledgehammer.

He staggered, and I pushed off, rolling backwards as I landed until I was far enough away that getting to my feet wouldn't immediately put me in range of him.

"Booker!"

"Got 'em!" said Booker as she pulled out a pair of black leather gloves a shade darker than her skin. "On my mark, shut your eyes!"

I willed magic into another spellform and threw up a force shield.

Booker was a generalist like me; a sort of jack of all trades. We could do bits of multiple varieties of magic that a specialist like Heart couldn't manage at the price of not being able to do the more potent magics of those same varieties.

But while I'd focused on amplification and reduction magics, Booker had instead focused on energy magics. Specifically, energy manipulation.

Energy like light.

And lightning.

The air around me grew cold and still as Booker harnessed the ambience of the daylight for her spell. Pooling it into a spellform bound into one of her gloves, she sent a beam of light searing towards the thoxling. A faint burning smell filled the air and the thoxling howled but didn't otherwise react. Then, with the other glove that she'd used to collect up the ambient static around her, she threw that forward as well. Her hair went wild as she threw it in an almost solid white mass of electrons.

It would have been a very useful strike if she'd had better aim.

"Sorry!" she shouted as the blast only just avoided hitting me.

It had, in fact, been well on track to actually hitting me but I'd thrown caution to the wind and sent an additional surge of power into my force shield, beefing it up and warping it up and over at the thoxling. I did best to ignore the deeper blue and increased green colors my magemark began to give off that meant I was pushing myself too hard. Again. As such, instead of piercing my shield, it arced along it into the thoxling. That meant it hit him in a series of maddening jolts instead of one great stunning blast, like Booker'd intended, and made my own skin hurt like hell. But it was enough to distract the thoxling, even if it wasn't enough to knock him out.

"Heart, we could really use you right now!" I shouted as I willed power into the core structure of my spear, reinforcing and strengthening it even more than I already had.

Heart--

"Ok, that's that test cleared. Let's try. Hmm, where is it," said Heart, puttering.

--was clearly still distracted.

The thoxling shifted, then turned and looked at me. There was hate in his eyes, and I had the distinct feeling that it might come down to him or me soon.

"Heart!" I shouted again, louder this time, as I began to shape magic around the head of my halberd, giving it an edge beyond anything mundane materials could create.

"Right, now I can help!" said Heart at last.

I looked over in time to see him pull out a little crystal and mumble something, then a wash of seeric magic crashed forward and swam through the air into the thoxling. The thoxling swayed back and forth on his feet a bit, then, as the magic sank into him, he fell backwards, his eyes rolled up into his head and his muscles spasming.

"We could've used that a while ago," I muttered as I finally relaxed and went to go properly look over the thoxling.

The thoxling finally looked peaceful. The rage had drained in his unconsciousness and he nearly looked human again, if you ignored the still-too-large rictus grin and his apparently-now-pitch-black eyes. His skin was stiff, like leather left in the sun.

"Heart, could you--" but as soon as I looked at him I could tell that he was already mentally gone, little flickers of green light dancing over the web of his magemark as he began to seer once more.

"Sorry for the delay, Rawn. I was preoccupied," he stated as he seered, more like he was speaking from a script than like he was talking to me.

"I understand." I tried very hard to not roll my eyes. I nearly succeeded. Then I sighed, and looked about at the destruction the thoxling had caused.

There hadn't been much damage to the surrounding buildings in our fight, but that wasn't surprising. Thoxlings were a lot of things, rage-filled and violent chief-most of all, but they weren't stupid. Never stupid, no matter what the Sentinels thought.

The majority of the damage had been done in the initial transformation. In fact, insofar as I could tell, the only damage that had been done in the fight had been when I'd been ripped from the cobblestone of the town square.

"I didn't think that Thoximos had this kind of reach," I said as I began the arduous process of laying thick magical bindings on the thoxling, ones he couldn't possibly break out from in case he somehow woke up, so we could transport him back to the Wings of Angels, our airship transport. My magemark hummed and distorted the air around it, but was otherwise happy and calm, no lights appearing on it.

Heart shook his head, then continued to read from his invisible script. "He doesn't. Or shouldn't, so far as I can tell. From what I could seer out, the carpenter had gone to some larger town a few weeks back. Thoximos must've struck there."

"Well, no matter how he reached him, at least we stopped this one from killing anyone, and he's still alive," I said, glancing back at the unconscious thoxling.

"And nobody's magic awakened via trauma, which is good," finished Heart, content to not say a bit more. His invisible script must have run out of lines.

"Right. Ok, thanks Heart." I went over to a particularly flat spot of ground in front of one of the surrounding buildings, laid down, and patted a spot next to me. This was the hard part. "Ok, Booker. Come over here and get comfy so we can go over what happened today."

As much as I enjoyed working with and helping newly Awakened folks, I'd never thought of myself as what you might consider to be 'trainer material.' I'd actually done my best to avoid any and all potential assignments that might involve training. Considering that I was now a Marshal-standard lieutenant, and had recently been made the lead investigator on the Dread Sorcerer Thoximos case for all pertinent investigative bodies, that strategy had worked out pretty well for me so far.

At least, it had until Booker.

Booker was my new trainee, or apprentice, if you wanted to be traditional. The Fates, the Washrag Society's seer collective, of which Heart was one, and the Sentinel training staff, in the form of Warden Greene, had both decided that it would be in our respective best interests to work with one another. In theory, it was a sort of "an older Washragger and qualified Sentinel leader teaching and passing the torch forward to the next generation" sort of thing. In practice, both groups had decided that it was up to me to evaluate her skills regarding the fine arts of field work, ombudding, and general do-goodery.

If I thought she was good enough by the time we returned to Aamand and gave my approval, Booker would be cleared for official field work training. The Sentinels, of course, assumed Booker would indeed continue her training with them if that was the case. The Fates, meanwhile, assumed that, by the time I was done with her, Booker would want to continue training to be a Washragger. I was just hoping she'd be able to do whatever it was she wanted to do.

Booker herself, meanwhile, was content to spend as much of her time as she could showing me just how much of my ashen brown hair would turn prematurely gray. I was in the twenties last time I'd counted. Not that I was counting.

It didn't help that she'd only just gotten past the 'coltish' phase of adolescence. She could switch from looking 'adultish' to 'the middle child but bigger sister' at a moment's notice. We were about the same height and we had roughly the same build, accounting for muscles and maturity, along with a bit more hip from me and a bit more bust from her, but I still mostly saw her as young.

I heard her come over and saw her perch down next to me. Not looming, just perched.

"What happened today?" she asked, repeating my question back to me as she looked dead ahead at Heart. Well, not at him. But at where he was.

"Your choices. Any thoughts you might have on them," I said, gesturing skyward at nothing in particular. I tried to channel Noona Bekah, a schoolteacher who was traveling alongside us and had been giving me teaching and tutoring tips between stops.

"Um ... I didn't use a spell fast enough and I should have been more prepared." Booker flumped onto the ground and, although I wasn't looking her way, I knew she was hanging her head in that way she did when she was frustrated with herself.

"What do you mean by that?" I turned my head and watched Heart frown and mutter, more thinking out loud than talking to us; it helped him process information.

"I didn't have my gloves on early enough because they have a tendency of going off at odd times when I don't want them to go off. I thought that if I kept them near the top of my spell-pouch it'd be better." Booker looked at me and smiled for a brief second.

I smiled back, then turned my head away and looked up at the massive trees swaying overhead. They almost seemed to lean into where we were sitting, like they wanted to hear what we had to say. "And how did that go?"

"Not great," said Booker, her voice fizzling down like a failed firecracker.

"And why do you think that is, Booker?" I watched a pair of what seemed to be oversized hummingbirds flit about through the trees.

"Because I put in other baseline spellforms and charms and such as well. All useful!" said Booker in a way that reminded me of a golden-furred hunt-hound. A golden-furred hunt-hound that'd just knocked over an expensive vase, and hoped that if they wagged enough then their owner wouldn't be mad at them.

I sighed. "Booker, you need to be organized. You can carry as much equipment as you want but none of it will do you any good if you can't find it when you need it. Tell me, and be honest: how many spells and charms do you have on your person right now?"

"Um, including baselines?" asked Booker. There was a loud jangling noise, followed by a soft 'flump-clatter;' she'd taken out her spell-pouch.

"Not including baselines," I said, even-toned as I continued to watch the hummingbirds.

Booker began to root around in her bag. "Um, well, let's see, let's start with spells. There's the Grasping Claw, Burst Speed although I've got four of those set up so I don't know if I should count each one or just the spell, um, Beyond Sight, what else ..." I heard her root around in her bag once more, each pause in the clatter, followed by a soft 'tink,' telling me of another spell set out. I liked to keep each of my spells bound into little charms I wore on a bracelet, but Booker was a fan of her doodads. "Oh! A blinder spell! That... " and she trailed off for a moment, "... might have been useful.

"Guesstemate it for me, Booker," I said, a bit more snappishly than I'd intended. A blinder spell would've meant that I could've-- well, they would've meant that I'd not need to take several awful-tasting pain medicines in the near future. It certainly would've meant that I'd not need to take a hit like the one I did.

She nodded, then, after murmuring a few numbers under her breath, said "Maybe fifty-five, not counting duplicates."

My eyes went wide. I sat up, stared at her, then took a deep breath, all thoughts of the hummingbirds forgotten.

"Does that include your charms?" I asked after I'd collected myself.

Fifty-five spells was a great many spells to have, and they might actually be useful if she could keep track of them all.

But.

But but but.

She went back to her bag.

"No, I have about eighty-nine including charms," she said, going slightly red.

I counted to thirteen.

I pulled an anti-pain potion of my own devising from a protected pocket of my pants and drank it down. It wasn't perfect, but it stopped the pain enough to keep me going and didn't taste like someone had distilled bitter herbs with red-wine-vinegar.

I counted to thirteen again.

I listened to Heart as he continued to putter around the Pillar that stood on the dais in the center of the amphitheater, not even bothering to seer it out.

"Now, let's see, where's the next test ... oh there it is. Command Gate Walk South West Craggie East Central Node Point One Light Burst Focus Diminished." A sparkle of lights appeared in front of Heart as he finished the Pillar-coded Word of Power. "Good, that's working fine. Let's try," and he made a series of handsigns, which resulted in another sparkle of lights. "Good, good, very good!"

As I felt the magic of the anti-pain potion settle into my aches, I took another deep breath, then put on as sweet a voice as I could muster. "Booker... "

"I know, I have too many and I should unmake some of them, I shouldn't fret that much, but I always feel like I'm going to come up short and I don't want to come up short but then I can't find them and I just mess up anyway," said Booker, all the words tumbling out of her mouth at once, her cheeks flushing even darker than they already were. Her eyes began to go red, and she began to play with a ring on her finger that unbound and rebound her hair into different styles; dreadlocks, straight braids, a loose afro, along with all sorts of others.

I closed my eyes, sighed, then rubbed my temple.

"No, Booker, you're not ... Booker, it's not that it's too many. Gods below, there are Washraggers, Ombud-qualified Washraggers even, who regularly carry over one hundred forty-four unique spells when they go out."

Ombuds are Washraggers, members of the Washrag Society, who can reliably respond promptly and professionally to situations where magic is a factor. It takes additional training on top of routine Washragger training to get the title but it means that you can be more useful. There's also a bit of a pay bump, which is nice as well.

"But they know where theirs are." Booker scratched at her arm, then winced and pulled her hand away like her arm was about to grow teeth and bite her.

"Yes."

There was silence between us, only broken by Heart's continued puttering.

"Are you going to give me a reprimand?" she asked after a little while, looking more downcast than ever.

She'd already gotten one official reprimand during her prior Sentinel training for causing an international diplomatic incident involving, among other things, several dragons and a bag of powdered mustard. Warden Greene had had to cash in some serious favors to allow her to stay in the program afterward. If I gave her a reprimand, that was it for her Sentinel dreams. If she got two more reprimands, she was fettered, her magic lost until the council revoked the fetter.

"I'm not going to reprimand you. Just think a little bit more about how and where you store things, that's all. Consider this another official finger wagging."

I smiled at her, and she smiled back, tucking a rogue hair behind her ear as she did.

She had, in the two and a bit months since she'd become my trainee, gotten more finger waggings from me than I had fingers and toes. She'd even gotten one from Seer Heart on a particularly memorable occasion when she'd decided to light the candles in her room using a Word of Power. But they were never for the same thing twice, which I was very proud of.

I glanced down at her arm and frowned. Her skin, a burnt umber color several shades darker than my own, normally had the kind of smoothness that only young people could manage. Now, it was splattered with rough, peeling, sunburned spots, just above the magemark on the back of her hand. The spots gave it, a little ironically, a pure umber color.