I frown a little upon feeling a mind appearing at the edge of my gardens. It's probably a good thing whichever magus it is didn't appear right next to me or I probably would've reacted with an attack to the sudden appearance. Mind suddenly appearing right beside me tend to prompt that response.

  Not that it would have mattered to them since I know I can't touch them, but it would still make things awkward after. At least they're allowing me to feel their minds, since I know they can conceal it. I'd definitely attack if I suddenly became aware of a presence beside me which I didn't know was approaching.

  With it being early enough Nolan hasn't woken yet, I'm actually quite confused about why one of the magi would be here. Standing, I try to look over there but get reminded that my farms are a bit dense in growth and some of the bushes have grown quite tall. There are trees scattered around as well, further obstructing my view.

  I grab the basket I was putting berries into and send it into storage, then go to see which magus came and why.

  As I make my way to the edge of the farm, I find Rose standing on the other side, dressed in a deep purple dress that has hints of gold where it curves and folds as the moonlight hits it. A gold-looking necklace with a faint purple tint hangs around her neck, several deep purple jewels set into it. Matching earrings dangle from her ears, large enough to be fashionable but small enough to not distract others.

  "Good morning, Rose," I greet her as I near the front of the farm.

  "Good morning, Rowan," she inclines her head in greeting. "How does the farm treat you?"

  "Not bad," I answer. "Can be a bit more work than I'm used to, and I'm planning on making golems to ease the burden soon. The Grade 7 earth magic crystals I acquired from my most recent trip to the mines will let me add in quite a variety of abilities for them. If I use essence extraction and crystallization magics, I'll be able to strengthen them for more abilities, or even add in additional."

  "Indeed, they will," she looks towards the cabin. "Though it seems you have an easier time as well, with Dylan assisting you."

  "Yeah," I look at the cabin. "He's been a big help with maintaining the farm so far. I feel a bit bad, though, since most of his time is spent helping. Things grow quite a bit more than I expected, and I probably went overboard with the size of the farms. And, it seems, growing regular plants based on the mana flows causes them to mutate… all of my blueberry bushes are now mana berry bushes."

  That's what I was picking when Rose arrived: the berries off of the former blueberry bushes. With the sudden increase in mana berries as well as this discovery, I might as well remove these bushes. If I want to grow regular blueberries, I'll need to plant new ones while factoring in the mana flows to know where to avoid.

  "Yes, that does happen!" She laughs. "Robin and I learned that quite fast as well, when we built our home where it is. I expect your 'ordinary' farm will be fully magical by the end of the year. The former owner of this property tried utilizing that, though he couldn't sense mana veins and so didn't know the best locations."

  "I can imagine how frustrating that'd be for him," I snort. "Am thinking about just using the magic foods for eating. It's not as if it'll create effects, and the quality and flavor are good, too. That should ease the burden a bit as well. Though admittedly, even just one farm this size is a bit much."

  "The plan was for him to stay temporarily, wasn't it?" She asks. "Just until his own home was built?"

  "Yeah," I nod. "Having him helping me out on the farm is pretty useful, though, and I've been helping watch Nolan. Once I get the golems built, we'll probably build his home."

  Her face is as unreadable as her mind, so I don't know what she's thinking about as she watches the cabin for a few moments.

  "Have you experimented with your loot from the islands a couple of days ago?" She settles on.

  "Not yet," I answer. "I did ask Samantha if she'd be willing to take care of the wool for me yesterday, then spent the rest of the day out here working, as well as doing some brewing and food processing. Wanted to put it off, but figured I'd save the experimenting for a day when I have the whole day."

  In other words, today.

  "I see," she smiles gently. "Would you like to learn about charms? With what I've observed of and learned about you, I'm sure you'll have your first charm made before it's time to work on breakfast."

  Offering me a lesson in making charms is no doubt the reason she came here now.

  "If you are willing," I tell her. "Yes, though I'm not sure I have anything I can offer you in return for it."

  "If there's anything I need," she smiles. "I am more than capable of acquiring it. There is no need for me to ask for something in return. All we need for the lesson is a knife, a solcore flower core, and some sun-type arcane wood. And a spot for it, of course."

  That's an interesting combination. I expected charms to be made entirely out of a single material, not a combination of them.

  "Alright," I say. "We can do it over here."

  I lead her over to the lessons zone and we take our seats. As I pull out the required items, she summons her own batch of them.

  "The art of making charms," she says. "Is the art of using an item's natural properties to create an effect. Rather than placing a spell on it, you draw out the magical aspects. With the right technique, you can even make them conditional, or something which only activates in the right circumstances.

  "To start with," she holds up a chunk of wood. "You'll want to observe the wood you're using. Examine the way the magic within it flows. If you do, you'll start to notice patterns rather than an even distribution. Find a piece whose magic is similar to this one's."

  Rose allows me to take the chunk of wood, and I examine it deeply. I did notice awhile back that raw materials which were magic didn't have their magic even throughout but in fluctuations. That never really seemed to make a difference for enchanting so I never paid much attention to it.

  After memorizing the magic pattern within the wood, I start pulling pieces out of my storage. Another chore I did yesterday was cut some of the magical wood down into smaller pieces, though not all. It takes me a minute, but I manage to find one where the magic is identical to her piece's in one spot.

  Exactly identical to it.

  "You noticed, didn't you?" She smiles. "All sun tree fiends will have the exact same magic pattern throughout its body, what variations existing doing so due to size differences. This is a magic pattern found in its heartwood, and only in its heartwood.

  "The magic is still active," she tells me. "Even after the plant's death, and can retain its properties even for centuries, depending on the strength of the plant in its life. When cutting and carving, you affect how the magic can spread."

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  "And charms-making is the art of guiding the spread," I guess at the next part. "But I'm assuming you can't affect it too much? So you have to find a piece which already has something similar to what you want?"

  "That is correct," she answers. "And what we'll be carving is a miniature free fiend, one with a pair of arms. Pay close attention to how I carve."

  Rose begins carving and I watch as she does. She explains how to gently guide the flows as I carve, nudging them as I take off each small piece of wood, each shaving. While this sounds like a slow process, we're both magi with high stats. Even moving quickly, we can be slow and careful.

  The tree fiend carving takes shape, and we leave the center of it hollow, with small holes carved into the face of it for the eyes. When we make the dips down, we carve them so that the solcore flower cores will fit snugly into them – and need to be forced into place. That requires making sure to measure things precisely for that section.

  Careful carving and guiding of the wood's own magic causes it to enhance and channel the power from the solcore flower core. Rose hasn't told me what the charm does yet, but I'm patient enough to wait on that until we're finished.

  Once the cores are placed in, we fit back onto the tops of the carvings a section of wood we carved out with enough precision that it fits back in snugly as well. This makes it so that only the eyes of the tree fiend releases any light, apart from the very faint glow the wood already has.

  It looks kind of spooky.

  That's not the end of the process, and we use some varnish made with resin from the tree fiends to finish it off.

  "Examine it," Rose tells me, and I do.

  "We use these in our chicken coop," she informs me. "They provide enough warmth for four or five chickens to huddle around, if they get cold. Though Robin likes putting down enchantments as well, so we do have the coop set up to keep them warm anyway."

  She lets out another laugh.

  "Some of the chickens can't decide if they're warm enough or not and constantly move close to the charms and then away during winter," she tells me, a smile still on her lips. "And I think the little one might like the carving in his room. As long as he doesn't know the top can pop off until he's a little older, he won't accidentally burn himself."

  Something in the way she says that tells me she knows this for a fact. Not that it's an assumption, that she knows with absolute certainty that Nolan won't realize the top comes off on his own.

  I frown at that. The only way to know something like that is time magic. Her knowing it isn't a surprise to me as I doubt someone could live as long as her without learning it, but it's made me realize something.

  "My gift for magic doesn't come from spirit blessings, does it?" I ask. "It comes from you and Robin. I'm one of your descendants, just very far down."

  "If we'd had descendants," she says. "Don't you think others would have known? Massive talent for magic would be hard to hide."

  "I have [Foresight] as an inherent gift," I say. "I'd always assumed that it was from some spirit blessing. Same with [Empathy]. But you and Robin are powerful enough for it to have entered into your bloodlines. Even if it was centuries ago, that would have persisted."

  "And yet no one in the village has mentioned of someone with such powers to you."

  "Right," I frown some more. "Which is why it's confusing. But it's the only explanation I can think of. Zolbiatz told me that this is where my parents are from, and you two are the logical…"

  Realization dawns on me. An explanation for why none of the locals would know about descendants of the two of them.

  "You're my parents," I say, then frown again. "But that doesn't make sense – why would you deliberately have a child, then give him up knowing he'd have immense magical affinities?"

  "You caught that quickly," she says. "But you're only right on two of the four: we're your parents. The last time we interacted with society on a deeper level, society didn't know about bloodlines and how your Skills affected it. We didn't know that the child of a mage would have magical talent, with said talent being even greater the higher their Skills were."

  …right, they are old enough to have existed in a time where this wasn't known. And I've already learned that there are several more modern discoveries they don't know. It makes sense they might not have known about that.

  "But still," I say. "Why did you give me up, after going through the effort to actually have me? As old and powerful as you two are, it's impossible for you to conceive without you deliberately trying."

  "That's the second thing you're wrong about," she says. "We never intended to have a child. We knew that magicians lost their ability to reproduce without special magics and items as they grew more powerful, and we never intended on having one. Our studies have been more important to us – which is why we gave you to the best orphanage we could find. It's a shame we didn't look to see their future, which we didn't do as we expected it to continue going strong."

  "You just… miraculously had me?"

  "We were quite confused when I became pregnant," she admits. "Neither of us understood how it happened. It wasn't until almost fifteen years later, when you were doing your thing, that we'd realized how you were conceived."

  "You and Robin had sex, presumably."

  She gives me an amused look.

  "That was involved, yes," she says. "But as it turned out… the spirits decided to 'bless' us with a child. They made it possible and didn't bother telling us. Since you were fifteen at the time, we assumed you were doing fine for yourself and suddenly appearing before you might confuse you and make you have a lot of questions. So we decided to let you be."

  "But then I came here."

  "But then the godking went and decided to send you here," she snorts. "He didn't tell us about that, either. We noticed you suddenly appear yet be weak as can be, so we knew one of the gods was involved. Based on your personality and the fact that you're a Spirit Saint, we didn't think to look at how the ward viewed you. We knew it'd grant you permission to live here."

  She laughs.

  "Then we realized that you could access the ward," she says. "At least, to a degree. That confused us until Robin studied the wardstone and saw that it considered you an owner. The way we set it up, it's recognizes our authority by our bloodlines."

  "And since I'm your child," I say. "It recognizes me that way."

  "Indeed," she nods. "Giving you partial authority for it. We aren't planning on giving you full yet – that requires showing you the wardstone, and that's not necessary."

  "I'm not planning on taking over for you two," I shake my head, then lean back a little and look up. "So my parents are possibly the greatest mages in existence, huh?"

  "We wanted to get to know you," she tells me. "Without you feeling obligated to view us as your parents. We aren't really sure how to handle you as a son, either."

  That makes sense. If we try to go straight to treating each other like family, none of us will be comfortable. It's better if we learn about each other and get used to each other more organically – as we have been so far.

  "Then let's do that," I say. "With this new information… I take it there was more to this lesson than just teaching me how to make a charm?"

  "Yes," she smiles. "Robin said to wait until you came to me, but I know you were curious about making charms and I do want my son to learn some of my arts. So we'll continue to get to know each other as fellow residents and magi? Does that sound agreeable to you?"

  "Yes," I nod. "Though if I somehow end up having children…"

  "We'll try not to spoil them too much," her smile widens.

  "Alright," I chuckle. "Thanks for the lesson. And I'll make sure to come out to your workshop some point soon."

  "Don't try and rush it," she says. "But do stop by if you want more lessons," she stands. "For now, I'll be going. The little one's growing bored playing with the blocks in his room, and his father still sleeps."

  "Yeah," I stand. "I'll get him to help me with breakfast. Thanks again, Rose, and may the gods and spirits guide your paths."

  "May the gods and spirits guide your paths," she returns, then vanishes.

  Once she leaves, I think about what I realized and what she said. They're my parents, and it explains my talents in magic and my inherent, passive spells. They want to get to know me as a person and a mage, and are willing to take as much time as is needed. That's a lot better than rushing in to trying to be a family, as that would just make us all awkward.

  I'm surprised I'm as calm as I am about this. It'll probably hit me like a dragon's tackle later, though. For now, though, it's time to make breakfast.