The problem with living on top of the clouds is that there is nothing to do. No food, no friends, no entertainment except the thoughts inside your own head. There’s only so much fun you can have looking down at the earth like a sky god. Perhaps it was boredom that had made Madness insane. Looking down at the world from the moon must have gotten real old real soon. And it wasn’t like this feeling was new to me either. It wasn’t like I spent all of my time in an airplane glued to the window. If windows could keep the average person entertained throughout a flight, there was no way those scummy airline companies from my Earth would have installed in-flight entertainment systems.

That was the kind of tangent my mind went on while I was in the clouds. Don’t get me wrong, I knew this was important training to help get my energy consumption for the spell down by increasing my wisdom, but that didn’t change the fact every break on the ground felt more heavenly than it did to drift like Zeus in a thundercloud.

In the sky I also had more time to work on my new magic. The new magic wasn’t anything too complicated, but it did require a few calculations that I was still working on. Specifically, I needed to find the speed of light in a vacuum and a few other physical constants. I also needed to think a lot more about the fundamentals of magic independently of how they had been taught to me by the Simurgh. In fact, I had already started down this path by making my pure light magic and my flight magic, but there were still some rough edges to smooth out. Chief among those rough edges was a question that had been bugging me for a while. I felt like it was something I should have realized much sooner, yet I also felt like whenever it had surfaced in my mind before, it had been pushed back down into my subconscious by something. Something that might have been external influence or my own mind telling me not to worry about this kind of stuff. But now that I had a clearer mind and could resist the influence of the Simurgh, I felt like I had to ask this question. Noel had sort of beaten it out of my subconscious and now it wouldn’t leave the top of my mind.

If magic was governed solely by knowledge and wisdom, why couldn’t the people on this side of the mountains use magic?

I remembered discussing something like this with Noel a long, long time ago. Back then, we’d been wondering why the adult elves of the Jora tribe couldn’t use our kind of magic despite the knowledge and wisdom that they had gathered over the years. Yes, some of the oldest elves like elders Starry and Vell could use a little ritual magic, but why couldn’t people like Noel’s uncle Sharun use our kind of magic even though he had lived for so many years and obviously knew enough to have developed some kind of spear thrusting or animal skinning magic. Back then, we had assumed it was because their knowledge was not backed up by enough justification, enough regimented and ordered thought. It wasn’t enough to have the knowledge, it had to be arranged in a certain way and then applied in a certain way so that wisdom could then turn it into a spell. To put it simply, the prehistoric elfin society did not produce the kind of knowledge and wisdom that could create spells on its own.

But the peoples on this side of the mountains were in what could be called an iron age. Their development was centuries ahead of where the elves and humans had been when I first met them. By this point in time, the demons, fairies, spirits, and even beastmen had a system for passing down knowledge down generations of their people. They had invented iron tools, complex societal structures, and a bunch of weapons and types of weapons which should have easily translated to some sort of magic system. The field of medicine alone should have produced a few real witches or spell masters yet all I could find as I roamed around the place during my many travels were the same kinds of outcasts and mystics that had popped up in ancient times on my Earth. There had been no sign of powerful, systematized magic like the kind of magic that I had invented after learning about the so called fundamentals of magic from the Simurgh.

This could only mean two things. Either the fundamentals were wrong or our argument for why ordinary people couldn’t use our kind of magic on their own was wrong. The fundamentals couldn’t be completely wrong, since I had built all sorts of spells based on them. But perhaps the ‘fundamentals’ were not actually the whole picture. As for our assumption that ordinary people couldn’t come up with spells because they didn’t know how to turn ‘knowledge’ into a spell through ‘wisdom,’ well, that idea had to be wrong too. There was no way that during the hundreds if not thousands of years the demons had taken to get to an iron age, not a single demon had tried to explore magic. And what would be one of the first things somebody would do if they wanted to do things ‘magically’? They would try to ‘will’ something into existence or manipulate something based on their knowledge of it. Surely, they would have created some sort of spell, even if only by chance.

I tapped my forehead. It was getting late. Campfires sprung to life in the camps down below and with a little light magic, I could even see the furtive glances the soldiers were giving to the cloud that never moved. They shouldn’t be able to see me peering over the edge of the cloud, since I was so far away, but perhaps they would see a tiny speck of movement from time to time. I was sure rumors about the ‘great elf’ and his ability to fly among the clouds had already spread throughout the camps. It was good propaganda for the troops. Kinda like world war two soldiers who’d see the RAF overhead and write about them in their journals. It was nice to know you had air support, I mused.

Speaking of flight, the way I’d made this flight magic was a massive clue to unraveling the mysteries of magic in this world. But it also made it even harder to understand why mystics and spiritual types in this world couldn’t fly. I’d tried to explore that question by investigating the way the spirits hovered over the ground, but it seemed like that was just an innate characteristic of their species. Taoc even said she felt no different walking with her feet on the ground and walking on the air a few inches above it.

I squinted into the distance. Intensifying my light magic in the waning light of the dusk, I looked at the horizon. A smile grew on my face and I dispelled everything but my flight magic. The cloud beneath me began to move at last, and I could’ve sworn I heard the entire camp gasp. It didn’t matter to me though. I rushed through the air towards the horizon, taking the cloud with me.

Tiny dots appeared in my vision. Those dots turned to a group of figures trudging through the hills towards a small field. A few of them grabbed some sticks and tinder and lit torches with their hands, while some reached for the packs on top of the large animals they had brought with them. It looked like they were planning to make camp for the night on that field. I shook my head. Boy, would they have felt silly waking up the next morning and going just a few minutes further to the main encampment. Lucky for them, their good friend Cas was rushing over with a surprise.

I parked the cloud right over the field and waited for the group to approach. A familiar figure had taken the lead, stepping onto the field while wiping his forehead and calling something out for the others behind him. Then, the figure stopped, and he looked at a shadow that was falling over him. He looked up and saw me hurtling towards him like a missile.

Kelser’s eyes widened and he almost tripped over his own feet as he tried to get out of my way. I reached out both hands in front of my body, letting the wind whip past my face but protecting my eyes with magic. I used magic to slow my fall, but kept enough momentum to slam into Kelser and drag him several feet back.

I stood up and brought a dazed redhead up with me. I smiled at my friend and welcomed him to the war.