Free The Galactic Mage by John Daulton Page B

the stone covered when you’re not using it. That’s the most important thing. Keep it covered, and keep it away from you. Accidental contact is fatal with this stuff. Understand?”
    “I understand.”
    They stood staring silently across the intervening space at one another, waiting. Altin wanted to just out and ask if he could go but didn’t want to seem any more impatient than he was.
    “Go,” said the weathered mage, looking very tired. “Just go.”
    Altin gripped the wadded cloth firmly in his fist, raising it to chest level and invoking a triumphant “yes!” With that he turned and ran back to his tower, victory finally at hand.
    When he’d mounted the tower he stood briefly surveying the land around him. The gray wall cliffs beneath Mt. Pernolde climbed high behind him, looming protectively at his back as the Great Forest spread itself far into the west, a deep green that faded to gray as the horizon blurred it into the distant sky. Everywhere else, to the south and east, lay the vast plains of Merimak, rippling in the gentle wind as far as the eye could see. It was beautiful, and the day was beautiful, and it was the perfect day to finally find the moon.
    A small, weather-beaten and largely burnt table, with a matching and equally decimated stool, stood near the passage leading down into his room. Gingerly, he placed the bundled Liquefying Stone upon the table and patted it softly, as if it needed to be soothed. He needed to find the right spell for trying out the Liquefying Stone. But what?
    He thought about it for several long moments, coming up with many options—and none. He ran back down into his room and took one of his old notebooks from the single shelf above his narrow bed where he kept his most valued and his most frequently used books. It was a notebook from his second year of tutelage under Tytamon, filled with simple, easy–to–cast spells that any D or E-class mage could work with a bit of instruction and some practice. He decided this was probably the safest place to start. Simple and small, just what Tytamon had ordered.
    He leafed through the book for a time and came across the perfect spell. A growth spell—not natural growth, for Altin had no skills in healing magic, but a basic expansion spell from the conjuration sphere instead: take something and make it bigger through the addition of material, more like packing a snowball than nurturing a tree. “Easy as tossing a toad,” he said aloud.
    He read through the spell notes several times, it having been many years since he’d used this particular spell, until he was satisfied that he knew it completely and by heart. The words were simple and the inflections elementary to produce. As he looked them over, they came back to him with an old familiarity. At length he was confident he could start.
    He snapped the book closed and, bringing it with him just in case, headed back to the battlements. Now that he knew what he wanted to do, he just needed something to do it to, something small, small enough that if he drew too much mana, he could simply make it a little bigger than he planned when the spell began. He looked for a chip of stone or some gravel, casting his eyes about the ground, searching along the rounded edge at the base of the parapet. At last he spotted one, a tiny rock, roughly round and about the size of a pea. It would do perfectly.
    He placed the little rock on the floor, dead center of the tower which was roughly twenty paces across and encircled by the parapet, broken only by the open doorway down to Altin’s room. He took the wadded towel from atop the burnt table and moved to the crenellated wall. He flipped open the notebook and reviewed the spell once more, just to be extra sure.
    The plan was to grow the stone to the size of a cantaloupe, but if he drew too much mana, he could make it as big as he needed too, big as a watermelon or big as a cow. Size didn’t matter. The spell allowed for channeling power directly