A Tale of One Deviant (Book One)

Chapter 102: Training the Family

"First, you are going to learn chant-less magic. If you want to go far in life, this is on a need-to-know basis," I stood in front of Mother in the grassy field in front of the house. "I use chant-less magic constantly, and I only say the name of the spell if it's going to be a bit complex." Or I just want to show off. Actually, that's precisely the case. "But I never use whole sentences as you do, instead short key phrases. Like this, watch."

I put my hand up in front of me, the others from the family council listening in from the gazebo since they didn't have anything else to do. Well, Father probably had paperwork, but he wasn't a workaholic like the king and decided to skip it for now.

"[Ignite]."

A flame appeared atop my hand, a regular red color. Normally, to get even a little something like this, the chant would be too long for me but regular for other people: "Atop my palm, bring to life a flame of red."

     Cheesy, right? And useless. I always used to wonder if you could just make up your own chant or if these things were fixed. What if I wanted a chant that had the flame under my hand? Has someone made a chant for that?

     No? See, that's why those are useless and my way is better.

     Either way...

There are many way to phrase it, but those were probably too specific and I didn't want to think about a bunch more.

"There's a difference between the spells and the chant-less magic I use, compared to the chants and stuff you guys do. What I just said now was a spell, what some would call a short chant. Chant-less is activating magic with your imagination, but others think it is saying a phrase inside your head instead of out loud. Hm, now that I think about it this world's concept of magic is off...no matter," I shook my head. The rest of them were already rolling their eyes at my explanation. "You guys don't care about stuff like that anyway."

"Very true," Mother answered.

"Do you really want to learn?"

"Yes. Keep going."

She was waving a hand at me.

"I don't feel like you are taking this serious enough..." Well, it's Mother after all. It's probably best to just learn by doing rather than preaching and showing. "Mother, please repeat what I just did."

She held her hand out in front of her, saying, "[Ignite]."

Nothing happened.

"...and herein lies the problem," I walked over to Mother. She was frowning at her hand and repeating the action, but nothing happened. "[Ignite]," I cast the spell. The flame appeared, same as before. "Try it again," I put my hand on her arm to feel her mana flow and look into her mind.

"[Ignite]!"

I knew it. "I had the feeling, but you are just saying the word and spending mana, aren't you?"

"That's what you do for chants," she shrugged.

"Oh, but Mother, this is a spell. For this you need imagination, since you aren't just saying something preprogrammed to pop out the same way every time. I could say [Ignite] ten times, and it would come out differently every time unless I had the same image in mind while saying it. [Ignite]."

A different flame came out this time, from the same spell. If I used a set chant as you would learn in school, it would come out the same regardless of what I imagined.

"Mother, try it like this," I extinguished the flame as I grabbed onto her arm again. There were three things needed if you wanted to be basic and take it slow while learning this, or two if you were an expert like me. Two of the three were the same in the expert one, the only thing disregarded in the two part was the word.