Chapter 5

I escaped dinner without anyone noticing anything out of the norm.

Well that isn't strictly true, all throughout the dinner I had sat and watched the people I had always called family and I became more and more depressed. My entire world had changed in the past three hours and they didn't even notice. Were we really that different?

With a sigh I pushed the door leading down into my bedroom open. I locked the door be-hind me then made sure the other two doors in my cellar bedroom were locked too.

I grabbed the book from its hiding place and immediately flicked to the section marked simply First Steps.

As I had previously found, the most important thing for a new mage to do was set up a Sanctuary, complete with Inner-Sanctum and Ritual Chamber that was warded as much as possible as soon as possible.

As I read a few sections in more detail the reasons why the Sanctum is so important be-came readily obvious. The book quite clearly outlined what happened when Mages got in-to prolonged battles or wars. Quite simply, Carnage.

It became glaringly obvious that pretty much everybody who has magic cares little for rules or law, instead each mage kept to their own code, whatever that may be. Often this meant that a mage would do anything they could to protect what they saw as their posses-sions or territory, as such it is recommended for any budding mage to protect their Sanc-tum with as many wards as possible directed at concealment and stealth.

An odd reference to Territory made me flick to another later chapter that was referenced where I found details on how to create claiming, marking and saturation spells over wide areas. By this method I could claim large areas of land and once the spells were performed my magic would be much more powerful there while any one else's would be weaker.

I made a note to myself to come back to that section later once I was a more accomplished Wizard. Instead I flicked back to the Wards section and read what was required to create some wards to divert attention away from my Sanctum and stop other mages from noticing my presence.

My research showed me that before I could hope to use wards in any meaningful manner I would have to learn how to see the flows of magic and learn a few basic bits of Enchant-ment and Mind magic, which upon reflection made sense I guess.

After all, if an ward was a permanent magical effect on an area, then It would be an en-chantment by nature. And of course I wanted to affect people's minds.

So before I was able to create a Ward to divert attention away from my Sanctum I would need to learn how to do so with my magic manually, then learn how to enchant an object then graduate to a ward.

As I flicked to the Chapter on mind magic I pondered the possible applications for some-thing sounding as cool as Mind Magic. Would I be able to control people's minds?

Surely not. If there were people who could completely control others then someone some-where would have overreached and got noticed by now.

A quick look over the introduction to the Mind Magic section confirmed my Hypothesis. Mind Magic was an extremely subtle art and some would argue completely useless. How-ever it was noted that those who had much skill for Mind Arts could become so proficient that if a person had even the tiniest desire to do something, no matter their morals, a master Mind Mage could convince them to do it. But only something they had already thought about doing.

Reading over the section on Mind Magic showed that again it was helpful to see magic and necessary to be able to feel one's own magic, so that you could project it onto another, which was how mind magic worked.

It seemed that Mind Magic operated on a very simple principle that the more magic you have in relation to your victim the more effective the magic is. Providing you are capable of such manipulations anyway.

I flicked back to the section on pledges.

It all came down to this then. Good, Chaos, Neutral or Evil?

They say the good guy always gets the girl...

Oh no wait, in real life the Good Guy always gets screwed over.

It was no contest really. I began reading the section on what was required to do the Evil Pledge and started to make a list. This is going to be fun...