My next short story, Spiritbinders, seeks to explain how magic works in the world of Karatera. Set from the perspective of Chloe, a young girl who possesses unique spiritual attunement and who’s being told by everyone that she has to become a spiritbinder. The only question left is what kind of spiritbinder Chloe wants to be. Please enjoy an excerpt of this story below!

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The following is a work in progress and has not been edited nor proofread. The final product may read differently to what is presented below

The mist trial was an old practice, Chloe had been told. Every year, the church would choose twenty children from the town at random to test if they were able to use magic. Those who passed the trial were offered a place in the church, and those who failed were taken back home. Chloe had been quite surprised and suspicious when she learned that she’d been selected. Girls are never chosen for the trial, she knew, and she wondered if someone was trying to make a fool out of her. She tried to ask why she’d been chosen when the novices and the chapel guards fetched her, just before the crack of dawn. “All will be explained in time,” they told her patiently. She didn’t find the answer satisfying.

Nineteen boys made up the rest of the trial, their ages varying between eight to fifteen. They stared at her with disbelief and confusion, though she elected to ignore them. They were taken to a hollow in the hills bordering the river and were made to sit in the grass and dirt at the bottom, where the early morning mists had pooled. The novices told them to ‘empty their minds’ and ‘listen to the spirits’, but when Chloe asked them how to do that, they shushed her. She heard some nearby boys chuckle, and one of them called her stupid underneath his breath. “You don’t know how to listen to the spirits either,” she’d snapped at him before getting shushed again.

It felt like an age that she sat out there, listening to the yawning and grumbling of the town boys and feeling the sun’s rays wash over her as it rose in the sky. Much of the mist burned away as the warmth touched it, but some of it remained for a bit longer, clouds of light blue vapour that rose a foot off the ground. Curiously, the clouds that lingered seemed to be centred on particular boys, and the mists around Chloe remained for much longer than those of the other boys. Once all the mist was gone, the novices announced the trial over. “Does this mean we pass?” she asked, but she’d only been hushed, to her mounting frustration.

Of the twenty, the priests took seven children, including Chloe, back to the town chapel.  It was an old building, possibly the oldest in Tethyes, where the hieropate would deliver his weekly sermons and deliver news from afar. A ring of curved wooden pews surrounded a circular dais, upon which was painted a simple fresco of a sideways white eye against a blue sky, with rays of light instead of lashes. This was the symbol of the First Eye, the one true god to rule all gods, and at the very back of the room was a large statue of Saint Petrus the Kind.

Hieropate Glaukos greeted them in this chamber. The old priest had a sallow face and hanging jowls, and he wore white vestments with a long green stole. “As hieropate of Tethyes,” he droned, his low and monotonous voice threatening to send Chloe to sleep, “it is my honour to offer you a place within the Church of the First Eye. If you would accept, we would take you in as clerics, and teach you the sacred art of spiritbinding—”

“But why?” Chloe asked loudly, desperate to get some kind of answer. “What did we do in the mist trial?”

“Shut up!” hissed a nearby boy. “He’s going to let us in the church!” growled another. They glared at her and muttered insults, and Chloe felt her cheeks turn red with anger. I’m just asking questions! What’s wrong with that?

Glaukos waited for the muttering to fade before answering her. “The trial reveals your attunement to the spirits, young Chloe,” he said kindly. “For mists are spirits given form, and spirits are the shards of the souls of holy men, left behind after death. The longer your mists linger before burning in the sun, the greater your attunement, and the greater a spiritbinder you can be.” He turned back to address all seven of them. “As I was saying… we would teach you how to lure and bind spirits, and how to harness their energy to cast divine miracles. You would—”

“How does that work?”

The boys muttered again after she asked her question, and Chloe saw a flash of irritation pass over the hieropate’s face briefly before he answered, “Spirits, once bound, yearn to be free. In their efforts to escape, they build energy, energy that is unleashed upon the spirit’s release. The First Eye takes that energy and shapes it into a miracle, with the miracle performed depending on what we need it to do.”

“But if they’re the spirits of old priests, why do they try to escape?” “They are only the pieces left behind, sadly,” Glaukos told her. “They remember none of their past life, but their will lives on.”

End of excerpt.