Good and bad news for those of you who like it when I write fiction.

Good news: More fiction below
Bad news: as @si_storm tends to complain about “you never finish them.” I’m slightly sorry about that, but not really. To clarify, fiction that gets posted here is either a) a one off that just happened to be in my head, or b) small pieces of larger works that are taking my attention at the moment. What shows up here is rough draft at best. What is below is worse than a rough draft. Lets just say that tense is not my friend, particularly a first time through.

Anyway, here is the introduction to Gregory. Jared rescues him. This next little piece happens months, possibly years later.

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Jared had never been jealous of anyone before. He’d been driven for
years. Driven first by his need to find the truth, then by his quest
to turn the hidden arts into a method, and then to keep himself and
his students safe from first the government and then the private
agencies. His entire life was a mission, and he had always been the
best. The most suited for the job, the most capable. He had been the
first ungufted, uninitiated practitioner of the hidden arts in as long
as anyone he could coerce into telling him could say.

And now he could not contain his jealousy. Gregory’s gift made all his
study practically obsolete. He was beginning to understand why they’d
been destroyed, and why even before the extermination of the gifted
lines they’d never been allowed to be rulers. They held too much
power. There was a part of jared that wished he’d never helped gregory
escape taleisin. Lover or not, if he’d left gregory there they
wouldn’t be hiding again, and they wouldn’t have to rework their
entire training program everytime gregory came up with another of his
damned comprehensions.

More and more it was all jared could do to be civil to gregory. Every
time he accomplished some new feat with the power that was now coming
so much more easily to him jared wanted to spit. Things which took
jared an hour of preparation gregory did as an afterthought.

Perhaps todays demonstration had been the worst of it.gregory had
transmuted metal on a whim. He was working on control with jessica,
and had constructed a small ring out of a penny. Slowly he lifted the
penny into the air and ever so slowly excited the molecules in it
until it was a hovering nodule of molten copper and nickle. Then he
spun it slowly, forming it into a thin circle and cooling it with the
same patience.

Watching all that had amazed jared, but it was what happened next that
nealy sent him into a jealous rage. He’d held the ring in his fingers
and looked at it. Then said to jared, “gold suits you better than
copper” and then his eyes got that glowy distance they do when he
focuses particularly intensely. The ring in his hand shifted. I could
feel the change, it echoed through the room. It was gold. He placed
the ring in my hand and said “for you.”