Cursed with immortality, Mars goes on a journey with his lifelong more-than-friends partner Astral, a painfully average future-seeing mage, to find the root of magic, in an effort to ease the side effects of Astral's visions - and to finish their th...
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We found the house easily enough and Astral knocked.
"If this goes south, I'm blaming you," he muttered and glanced at me.
"Sure, I'll take the blame. And the praise if it goes well."
"Nah, credit goes to me if this goes well." He smirked at me and then turned his attention back to the door, which opened.
"Hello, I'm the friendly travelling mage. I was told you needed help," Astral said in his friendliest tone. Which just sounded sarcastic. I cringed a little.
"We were told by the server at the inn, you might need some help with your daughter," I said a lot softer, hopefully soothing the woman. She looked like she was ready to slam the door in our faces.
She looked from Astral to me and then stepped back, opening the door fully. "My daughter has been gone for three days now."
"Gone?" I asked and stepped in first, following the woman through a small hallway. Her house was very neat. Very clean and modest in decoration. Flowers on the dinner table that was placed in the kitchen. We had stepped right into the kitchen from the street. All blackened brass with an indoor pump. We hadn't even had an indoor pump back at the college.
This was a nice house.
We stopped by a door and the woman looked back up at me. "You'll see."
She opened the door for me and showed me and Astral into a bedroom. It was nice. Had a lovely view of the garden that had been hiding behind the house.
In the bed was a girl. Her eyes were open and entirely white. She looked like the woman working in the inn. Maybe a couple of years younger than Astral and I.
Astral gently pushed me aside and went to her, pulling the chair next to the bed closer and sitting down. He narrowed his eyes a bit at her, leaning in close. Then he grabbed her wrist, pulling out his pocket watch and looked down at it, his thumb pressing into her skin.
"She has a slow pulse," he murmured.
I pulled out my notebook and wrote it down. "She's obviously having a vision. Her eyes." I pointed my pen at her face.
Astral nodded and looked back up at the older woman. "How long did you say she has been like this?"
"Three days. Before that she'd fall to the floor and shake."
"Seizures," I murmured and noted it down. "Would she be feverish after? Nauseous? Headaches? Be excessively tired?"
"All of the above."
"How about pain? Would her limbs hurt?"
The woman nodded again.
Astral looked up. "Right, your daughter has The Sight and should be in the college. She's a mage. Which should've been obvious from the colour of her hair." He lifted the scarf around her head and a bundle of tight dark purple braids slipped out. "She isn't cursed or possessed. There's nothing wrong with her." He rose to his feet and shrugged at the woman. "Don't know why we were needed here."
