20 years after the death of Himmel the Hero, in the Great Sanft Forest, located in the northern lands
Senken sat at his seat at the table, head held high as his family ate the dinner he had bought and cooked. A relatively simple dish of roasted potatoes and carrots, with a cut of grilled roast, all slathered in a gravy made from the renderings. A cut of bread, and a slice of strudel, had everyone fawning over the hard work he put into the meal.
His mom gave him a grateful smile. "Thank you for cooking, honey."
Senken preened under the praise, but was mature enough to not show it besides a nod. The mouth on his abdomen, hidden from view, had the cheesiest grin on it.
"I'm guessing you took some coins from the grocery funds?" His dad asked offhandedly, cutting a piece of the meat. "How much was all this."
"Oh," Senken started, looking up as he thought. "It was…maybe 3 silver for all the ingredients."
"And how much did you spend?" His dad asked, in the voice all adults had when they knew something that children didn't. He saw his mom look up from her plate.
"7 silver, total." Senken admitted, stopping from taking a bite when he caught the glare of his mother across the table. From his left, Heben stifled a giggle into a bit of potato.
"So what was the other 4 silver for, then?" His mother asked through clenched teeth, voice in a falsetto of calmness.
"Another strudel and a bushel of apples." Senken replied easily.
"Oh," His mom said, lifting her head to look in the kitchen. "Where are they?"
"I ate them."
She was not happy with that.
25 years after the death of Himmel the Hero, in the Great Sanft Forest, located in the northern lands
Senken was deep within the throes of a growth spurt, he realized, seeing the stretch marks that crawled across his thighs and arms. He could feel them on his back as well, deep grooves in the skin that crossed over his spine. He was about as old as Heben was when he had first seen a mage, and now he was finally catching up to her in height, being only half a head shorter than her.
Naturally, as needed with growth, Senken had to eat more and more to fuel this body. The day he had developed Schrein was not the only day he overspent the family's funds.
Each time, his mom felt the need to up his "training regiment", and while he knew in the long run this would help, he could only take so many two on one spars with the powerhouses that were the ladies of the household.
So, he took to finding his own food. They lived by a river, there were plenty of varmints in the fields, his dad complaining about them for longer than he could remember.
Every once in a while, a hunter went to the woods and found a deer. There was plenty of game around their village. Senken just needed to get it.
So Senken began hunting and fishing as often as he could. Snare traps for the varmints were made and disseminated throughout their field. Everyday he made time to sit on the banks of the river, having bent an old nail into a hook. Both of these made great use of his braided dry grass, but he knew if he wanted to stay ahead of his caloric needs, he would need to get bigger game.
His first bow was enough, the string also made of braided grass. Not a lot of strength, but enough that he could fire an arrow if he was close enough. He went out into the forest with the plan to find a deer and test his archery. Should he be out of practice enough, or his bow lacked the penetrating power, Senken would just have to use Schrein and overkill the animal.
The first time he had gone out to hunt, he didn't catch anything but trouble.
He had been tracking a doe for almost an hour, stepping quietly across the forest floor as he kept an eye out for his prey. He caught sight of it, her light brown coat broken with a speckling of white dots, the largest only a few centimeters in diameter. Senken snuck closer, but a russell of leaves not only alerted him, but the deer, the doe trotting off into the brush as, flying from the foliage, a snake sprung with its fangs bared.
Senken caught it by the neck and noticed how sizable the snake was. Its body was as thick as his arm at its thickest, its head bigger than three of his fists put together. Senken was ready to kill it instead for his much needed protein, but it lifted its tail fast, letting him see that the tail was, instead, another head.
Senken grimaced, and threw the beast away before it could finish its attack, sending a slash towards it. It split in two, and fell to the ground, beginning to wisp up into black particles shortly after. He frowned at the loss of a meal, and turned back to continue to track the doe that ran off. An hour later, he hadn't found anything, and the sky was darkening.
He would have preferred the taste of venison or snake to the taste of failure he would have to deal with that night.
Senken had eventually found his footing with hunting, but it had been with effort. What had also been an effort was getting any more books on magic. The closest thing they had to a bookstore was his uncle's printing press, where they sold the books they made en masse.
So he went to his uncle every year, and asked him to find him some books on magic. Grimoires would be nice, but any text that was prevalent to the use of magic. Every year, his uncle was able to get him something, some years more than others.
The first book had been a grimoire, but an old one, written in ancient elvish. He knew none of it, the grimoire from the traveling mage having been in the basic language he had been taught, and that had been printed by his uncle.
He could have waited until he got another text in ancient elvish, but much like most youth his age, he was impatient. Unlike most youth his age, he flipped through the book, analyzing the text. It took considerably longer than his first grimoire, due to not understanding the text, but he memorized it in a few months.
From there, he identified the symbols that showed up the most often, as well as the amount of symbols in general. The total unique symbols were 22, meaning these symbols were much like the letters of basic. It was a lot of trial and error, working on finding strings of text that repeated and finding what those were so as to extrapolate on what the rest could be.
However, a full year after he had received the grimoire, he was able to translate enough of it to infer the rest, and his third spell was added to his repertoire.
A joke of a spell, but one nonetheless.
This grimoire detailed the spell to heat material put to the back of the foot of the caster. A literal "hot-on-your-heels" spell.
As a first impression, Senken could only hope the rest of elvenkind weren't such little shits.
The next few books he got over they years were a textbook, referring to the "basics of mana control", which helped him understand how to better stifle his mana beyond the muscle memory of cursed energy, as well as an almost biographical rendition of a "Heroes Party" that had felled the Demon King decades ago.
Both had been a good read, the latter leaning slightly into something less mature teens his age would read. Now, he was dressed, walking into town to visit his uncle to see if the newest book had come in. The road, now sufficed with cobblestones, stretched far beyond his home, all the way to the treeline. It was framed by a simple wooden fence on either side, allowing the natural partition between fields to be more prevalent. He could see the water wheel on the river rotating from its own flow.
Walking past the fountain, where children played, Senken entered his uncle's printing press. The air reeked of oil and ink, but it didn't look like anyone was present. What was, on a small table tucked in the corner, was a book laid flat. Wandering over, he picked it up and saw it was another grimoire.
"Thanks, Uncle!" Senken called out, leaving just as quickly as he entered. He started flipping through the pages, finding new words he would have to translate. Starting at the beginning, he started reading, when the cry of a child made him lift his eyes.
There, by the fountain, a kid had fallen, scraping his knee badly, blood rolling down the shin. It might leave a mark, if the kid picked at the scab, so Senken was ready to turn away.
Then the priest exited the church, walking to the child with a worried look. Senken had sat in that church many times for mass, weddings, and funerals. He didn't place any stock in this goddess that they revered, but he recognized that many did. For the majority, it was simply the comfort of something beyond themselves when they died. For a few, they could use the scripture to give miracles.
The priest kneeled, lifted a hand, and green light bloomed from it, washing the courtyard in new shadow. Senken watched, absorbing the motions of the mana in the priest as he heeled the scrape, before he began walking back to his home.
It was said that faith in the goddess was necessary to heal oneself or others, but his memory of reversing his cursed energy had him thinking otherwise. He would at least experiment with it.
Firstly, however, was this grimoire detailing basic offensive magic.
A spell called Zoltraak.