Legend of Ransera

"Well, fuck her," he said, immediately rising to Arry's defense. He didn't know if the mysterious Hytori woman could hear him, but he didn't care. If Aurin had critiques of Arry, he didn't look kindly on anyone else expressing them. This was why he was rarely in the rehearsal room when it was time for notes, at least on a production Arry was in. Elric did enjoy the 'virgin eyes' and sometimes threatening actors with the impresario's disapproval.

He took a sip of his tea, already cool enough not to burn his tongue.

"It was too fast to really learn much, but I think... I think I might recognize her... ah, aetheric signature...? I mean, if I ran into her at market or something. It was like hers was overlaying yours for a moment. But I don't know enough about magic to say how she might be speaking to you in your dreams. I thought... Dreamsailing was lost?" Perhaps not to everyone. But Torin and Talon worked magic into objects; perhaps she had some scrying stone or magic mirror for communicating with her errant son.

"Maybe when the snows thaw, Darus of Haqs will return to Antiris. As far as we know, that's where she and your father had their fling... Might be someone who remembers him, her... knows something to point me in the right direction. If you want me to go, I will. I'll just have to have you rack your brain for any details that might help me."

They hadn't spoken too much of those things, Arry's memories being tender, but Aurin did want to know him inside and out and he would have a legitimate excuse to ask.

"How do you feel otherwise?"

"Well, it's settled: come Glade, I'll run up to Antiris and see what I can find. It's possible your father confided in someone. I just don't like the idea that she can swan into your life whenever the spirit moves her and you don't have any power in the relationship. Fucking unfair."

Aurin tended to favor games where the odds were in his favor, but he didn't like the cards stacked against his ward. Didn't matter that Arry was grown, was all moved in with his beau; he would be Aurin's ward until one or both of them died. He didn't know if the elves of Sol'Valen looked down on miscegination, but there were surely Hytori alcoves elsewhere in the wide world. The redhead had done his fair amount of traveling, but he hadn't seen the entire world.

"Locusts?" he asked, knowing it was likely just the trick playing tricks. His own threshold sickness had sometimes involved illusions that only he could sense; sometimes Ava had seen them and smacked him upside the head.

Focusing, he could sense Arry's aether reaching out and then he began to get glimmers of the vision like some sort of desert mirage.

"Let me just..." He reached out awkwardly and put his hand on Arry's forehead. It was easier and gentler when he made some sort of physical contact. With greater power and practice, he tried to push his sense of reality into Arry's mind: the clear sky out the windows frosted by the difference between the wintry air and the warmer interior of his cottage. He tried to reinforce his vision of his cottage, as well, reinforcing reality. He didn't know if he could maintain it for days on end, but he could give Arry a respite.

"Back to normal?" he asked.

Aurin didn't really have a leg to stand on when it came to fucked up maternal relations. He didn't actually know if Ava was alive and, if so, where she might be, whether she might come for him someday, wanting blood or bonding. He could still see with a bit more objectivity when it came to Arry and his mother, but he might also fight the woman for whatever paternal feelings he held for the younger man. They were complicated because of course they were.

When his reassertion of reality seemed to work, he didn't give an audible sigh of relief, but the tension in him did relax a bit. This was the first time he had passed his magic on to someone else and he felt the weight of responsibility for it all the more keenly because it was Arry.

"I'll try to hold this for a few hours," he promised. "If you don't get bored and fall asleep, we can give you one of the sleeping draughts and you can sleep through some of it and give me a break. Then I'll be able to do it again when I've rested and you've woken up.

"Mm, they gave me both at once, which... Well, from what I understand, you can't initiate someone without consent, but I was... out of it at the time, so consent can be a bit of a gray area. I was also doped up with things that were supposed to mitigate it, but made it last longer. So most of what I was doing was trying to shut it down when it would go off without me trying. But once I wasn't having magical hiccoughs, I suppose I worked on being invisible and silent... being able to stealth through situations was really helpful for me."

He realized that was the opposite of what Arry was likely to do, but that only made him smile.

Aurin considered. He had never really articulated much about his tricks before. Deception had always been what kept him alive, and even the magical tools that helped him were shrouded in the same.

"We'll go over technique later," he said, "when we know you're recovered. I mean, technique insofar as I have any that I've managed to cobble together. But you won't be able to do much more than simple things at first, purely visual. Later, you'll be able to play with sound and other senses. A lot of it depends on your imagination, though, in the end. You learn to project things and perfect them. Important things can be committed to memory. You'll get better at detail with practice and power... and at maintaining them. At first, you'll have to maintain them for them to last, but as you get better, you can leave them behind and the illusions will stick for a time. So... you could set up dummy Arry up in the background for a scene, and then wander off to have a piss or something with none the wiser..."

He snickered, imagining Arry playing fast and loose with that one. Sometimes, actors were basically scenery; other times, they actually got to perform the complex and rewarding roles they wanted.

"Am I making sense? I don't really know the right words for all this. I sort of learned on my own, a bit here and there from other people." His eyes tried to gauge whether he was clear or Arry was floundering. An actual magus might explain things better, or perhaps they would explain things in such an academic, pedantic fashion that only another highly educated magus would understand them. To each their own.

A smirk twisted his lips as he replied without a pause, "Like replica, like original."

But while neither of them was a scholar, they were both clever. It was either something one picked up when surviving against all odds or else the odds just killed those who weren't clever. Their lives might be more comfortable than they had been in ages past, but the patterns of survival were laid deep—or perhaps that was their trauma. They might have been one and the same.

Aurin squinted slightly at him, concerned but not worried.

"I wonder... I've never managed to make my illusions real enough to touch, but I suppose that's something that either of us might accomplish with enough time and power. And touch is a cousin of pain. Could we trick the mind to feel pain? Or to not feel pain?" His mind only wandered down that path for a moment before returning to the present and his ward. "Well, I've got your mind only seeing and hearing and smelling what's real, so it's possible your wild talent is focusing the rest of your new power into pain. Or the pain might just be your power settling into your mind. I had headaches, but nobody ever told me what was causing them. You want something for the pain or to just sleep through some of this?"

If he wasn't as knowledgeable as some Tower mage, he was prepared for everything that he had gone through and some other eventualities just in case. But he wasn't going to force anything on Arry unless the kid was overwhelmed and the choice was something Aurin was forced to make in his stead. Life had taken quite a few choices out of their hands, so he preferred not to steal a man's agency—unless that man needed to be dead.