The First Mage

After returning to the temple, we immediately turned right and went to a door at the farside of the large hall that ritual candidates would wait in. I unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped into the room that I had only ever seen cursory glances of before.

“It’s so weird to stand in this room again,” Tomar said.

‘I could do without it...’ Lilana said with trepidation.

Ordinarily, you would see this room only once in your entire life. During your Calling ritual. You would come in, stand on the platform, see a few pretty lights, and leave. Or some guy would enter your mind, you would be scared for your life, and hopefully manage to escape before you were killed for hearing voices. You know, the usual.

I couldn’t blame these two for having mixed feelings about being back here, where it all started for both of them. Though we hardly had a choice, since the ritual platform was in here.

When we questioned the imprisoned priests we learned where the key to this room had been stored and were now able to come and go as we pleased. While I headed towards the altar behind the platform, where a bowl of white stones was just waiting to be raided, Tomar went over to the singular shelf on the wall, on top of which stood a bunch of books.

One member of our group meanwhile couldn’t wait to get started. Taking a pocket knife and some chalk out of her pocket, Riala crouched down on the ritual platform and started happily scratching away the script on it.

‘Wha!? Miles! Stop her! She... she is...!’ Lilana said in a panic.

“Relax, you know that Ria knows what she’s doing. She’s better at this than Tomar even.”

“Excuse me that I’m not a fanatic like you two,” he said without looking up from the book he was browsing through.

‘But it’s the ritual platform...! Miles... Come on!’

I could practically hear her tear up at the fact that someone was destroying the ritual script without any respect for what it stood for. She knew why we were here, but she had presumably pictured the moment in a more reverential way.

“Sorry, Lilana,” I said with a sympathizing smile. “I guess it’s a little late now... Hey, Ria. Will you be a little more careful? The ritual platform is important to Lilana.”

“Oh. Okay!” she said and became a little more mindful of her actions, though it didn’t slow her down too much. In a matter of seconds she had scratched away all of the sigils we didn’t need and made room for the ones that would turn the ritual platform into a “Calling sign projector.”

“Who are we going to test?” she asked as she drew the new sigils.

“Berla,” I said, and looked up at... my girlfriend. Still weird.

Back in Cerus she had refused to do the test, because she didn’t know what the result would be, and she didn’t want us to know she was a potential Ruler. Now that we knew, however, I had to ask her to do it. A Ruler turned Fighter was a rare combination, and I couldn’t wait to see her signs. Not to mention that I hadn’t done any experiments in days and was itching for it. Oh god... I am like Ria...

“Berla?” Riala asked while she kept drawing. “Will the signs say something other than Fighter?”

“Maybe, that’s what we’re trying to find out,” I said. I could see that Berla was a little nervous though. “This is still okay for you, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I do want to know what my signs are.”

As Riala finished the script, and I quickly double checked her work, Tomar joined us again, a book under his arm.

“Anything interesting?” I asked him.

“This one has notes about all the Callings, maybe there’s something we don’t know yet.”

“Huh, nice. What does it say about the Ruler Calling?”

“Not a lot, unfortunately. Essentially just that it’s rare, gives various abilities, and that it has an unusual sign.”

That unusual sign was something I hadn’t been able to picture. Tomar had once read a book that described the signs of various Callings, and most of them were straight forward and actually seemed a little copy-and-pasted. Handiworkers had a green ball of light, Fighters a blue light, and Charmers a pink one. Seeing those for the first time in Cerus had been impressive, but at the end of the day, in and of itself, they were just lights, floating in the air. Worshippers had a more elaborate sign, where a white light formed a humanoid shape in the air, with its hands spread downwards, as if blessing the one receiving the Calling. This one I was able to utilize to create fake blessings in front of people, by simply executing a Calling sign script for Lilana, who was naturally a full-blooded Worshipper.

The most involved sign, however, belonged to the Researchers, where orange lights briefly flew through the air and then landed on top of each other, forming something that looked like a stack of books. It had the most movement and the most details, to a point where I would say that whoever created these signs was probably a fan of Researchers. And maybe they got bored halfway through and stopped at designing two proper signs...

And then there was the Ruler sign. Based on Tomar’s description, it was supposedly a white and black ball of light, but it apparently flickered somehow, and it wasn’t a pretty light like the others, whatever that meant. Since you would not usually have the chance to see someone else’s Calling sign, nobody in our group had ever seen it, but I was hoping this would change today.

Riala hopped off the ritual platform after placing a white stone, and Berla got closer, kneeling in front of it, to put her hand on the marked spot. Placing my hand on her shoulder to encourage her, we waited, while she swallowed hard and took a deep breath. After a moment, she finally put her hand down on the platform, and the first sign appeared.

“Fighter...” Berla said with a relieved sigh.

She hadn’t wanted to become a Ruler, so if the signs would be in favor of that Calling, her becoming a Fighter would’ve been a fluke, and she wouldn’t have truly been “meant” for it.

Riala quickly put down the next white stone, and Berla executed the script once more, producing another Fighter sign. This repeated, again and again, for a total of nine times, and Berla got more and more relaxed. We had yet to see a ten percent chance for a Calling in anyone, so at this point, nobody expected anything else to pop up anymore. We still did the tenth pass though, for completion’s sake, and that’s when the sign suddenly changed.

“Oh! What’s that, what’s that?” Riala asked curiously.

“I guess that’s the Ruler sign,” Tomar commented. “Looks like you did have a small chance to become one.”

“Ugh... not a full Fighter after all,” Berla said in disappointment.

Meanwhile, I stared at the sign in bewilderment. Black and white... flickering... and not pretty... “What the...”

“Hm? What’s wrong, Miles?” Tomar asked when he noticed my surprised and confused expression. At this, the others turned to me as well.

“That’s... static...” I said.

“What’s static?” Berla asked.

“...”

What’s going on here?

The sign faded away, and after just a few seconds, it was gone. It was a ball of light, in the sense that it did illuminate our surroundings, and it was black and white, but it looked just like static noise on a TV. People in this world would naturally not know what that was, but to me, it was unmistakable. This is absurd... Why is the Ruler sign...

“Miles?” Berla said.

“Oh, sorry, I’m...” I started, but I found myself unable to formulate a complete sentence.

“Is it bad?” Riala asked, and this finally pulled me out of my daze a little.

“Bad...? Hahaha!” I said as I started laughing. “Hm, I guess in a way it is. Haha!”

‘What’s happening...?’ Lilana asked, as the others looked at each other in confusion.

“Hah... Sorry. No, it’s not bad. I think... It’s just something from my world that would be difficult to explain. But I don’t understand why that is a Calling sign...”

Unless... it isn’t?

It made absolutely no sense to me that static noise was supposed to be a Calling sign, especially when compared to the other signs. But someone, or something, must’ve created it. This wasn’t a TV, or any kind of electronic device that could pick up random noise, or at least I didn’t think it was. If we assumed that it wasn’t random, however, nor that it was an actual Calling sign, what was it then? The first and only theory that came to mind was an error. Say I were to design such a system, and I wanted to define a fallback for when no sign could be displayed, what would I do? Show a giant X? An error message? Maybe nothing at all?

I would’ve wanted such a fallback to provide a visual cue that something had gone wrong, without confusing the people involved. That could’ve maybe been simply a specific color, but seeing how the copy-pasted signs were just a bunch of colors already, that wouldn’t be a very strong cue. Static on the other hand... that would fit the bill, and maybe this would explain the weird nature of the Ruler Calling.

“I think this Calling might be a glitch...” I said. “Like... a mistake.”

Berla looked at me with worry. “A mistake...?”

That might’ve been poorly worded...

“No, don’t worry. Not necessarily a mistake in a bad way, just something that technically isn’t supposed to happen.”

The Ruler Calling was kind of a mix of all other Callings, giving the candidates bits and pieces of them. It was also so rare that there had only been a couple dozen or so in all those centuries since the ritual platform was discovered. The only “Calling” that was rarer than this one was the Mad Calling, which seemed kind of like an error in its own right, and maybe this wasn’t a coincidence. What if both of these are just bugs?

The possibility made me wonder once again what this world even was, with a seemingly RPG-like job system, monsters that hunt people, and bugs in the job assignment mechanism.

“So... what does this mean?” Tomar asked.

“Well, I can only guess right now. But I think whoever created this world might’ve messed up a little bit here.”

‘The gods!? They would never “mess up!”’ Lilana said.

“Ugh... Lilana. That they’re ‘gods,’ doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re perfect in every way.”

‘Of course it does!’

“Oh? What was that story about Celeth being killed by a beast?”

‘Er... But... But he’s alive! You guys have seen him, so he didn’t die!’

When it came to the gods, talking to Lilana hadn’t gotten the least bit easier, and it didn’t help that she felt closer to them than ever, after she had had a few more dreams, where she met most of them. At least she didn’t mention them constantly anymore.

“So the gods are perfect, but they’re flawed in the stories that people make up about them?”

‘They’re not made up!’

Ugh, I’m fighting a losing battle here.

“Okay, okay, let’s stop here. It’s just one of my theories, and it could be complete nonsense. Right?”

‘Right!!’

“Maybe I should rethink whether I want Miles back, these back and forths still look silly,” Tomar said with a chuckle.