-Proverbs, from the tome of Kadish
In the morning, Dovik leads me out to my ship, parked more than a mile down the road in a stretch of shoulder-height grass. We have breakfast at the house first, and I explain why I need to go. No one tries to stop me; I don’t know how to feel about that. My father walks to the ship with us, talking about mundane things, telling me of how he is going to expand the eastern side of the estate and the new agreement he has with Lord Timmian. He carries the basket that my mother packed for our journey, a bundle of food she had ready before I even told her I was leaving.
Corinth didn’t leave me with much. Some part of me had been expecting some final words of advice from him, but the man merely gave me some books on spellcraft that he had before I left. I don’t know how much I will use them. I already know that path is a dead end for me. He even said as much.
I could tell that my dad didn’t believe the ship actually belonged to me when I showed it off to him. I gave him a tour of the inside, took him up a few dozen feet, and let him see the land roll out beneath us. He seemed unsettled by the entire affair, like I was trying to show him something he desperately didn’t want to see.
We hugged, said our goodbyes there, and then we were underway. Dovik has an awesome sense of direction it seems, able to point me straight toward Danfalla, the capital city of the Mari Dutchy. I set the course, flying over-country to save time instead of taking the road. Dovik is out right away, sleeping on a mattress laid off to the side, claiming that he didn’t get a wink of sleep last night.
The start of the trip is something I take my measure of enjoyment in. I have a heading, something I need, some place for me to head toward. If only I had a heading inside my heart to pay attention to. We can’t have everything.
The border between the kingdom of Gale and Cressfalla is a thick membrane of orange light that I see from miles off. Now that I know to look for them, the signs of the border are distinct. The barrier that separates the dutchies from one another is more difficult; I am barely able to notice our passage into Mari, the membrane of energy at the border a faint lavender that blends into the sky.
To my surprise, Dovik somehow feels the transition, snorting awake on the mattress. He lingers there for a time, staring up at the sky passing overhead, before lurching to his feet and joining me at the front of the ship.
“We are off course,” he tells me.
I shake my head, pointing out toward the horizon. “We need to go that way,” I tell him.
He squints, nodding a moment later. Galea told me about some kind of disturbance ahead, a disturbance near some settlement. I can’t make a thing out with my own eyes; my perception is frankly, abysmal, but she picked it up on the ship’s sensors. Dovik walks back to the mattress he has been sleeping on for days, retrieving his shiny new sword. He has already created a replica off it in his other hand by the time the first of the monsters comes into sight for me.
“Is this a beast tide?” I ask.
Hundreds. A swarm of moving shadows sprints over the landscape, weaving through the open space between the trees like dark water. Galea marks them for me before I need to ask, so many, all similar.
Terror Wolf(Level 52)
Minor Terror Wolf(Level 43)
Just those two kinds, but there are so many of them. A feeling of being here before comes to me, seeing a pack of monsters racing down a road toward some village what feels like so long ago now. Only this time, things aren’t so simple.
The rank one terror wolves are like huge dogs, no eyes, their heads little more than two stacked mouths of slavering teeth. Their tails extend like a steel scorpion, bobbing above their heads, ending in a serrated stinger that catches the evening light. The rank two ones are bigger, as big as a bear, each bearing three of the tails, their limbs looking to be made of steel as well.
The shadow of the ship races over top of the stampede of monsters. Our passage causes a wave to ripple through the monsters far below. Somehow they know we are here, can sense us, perhaps smell us. The minor terror wolves pay us no mind, sprinting toward the bundle of buildings on the other side of a lazy river, but the rank two wolves do not let our passage go uncontested. The three blades of their tails bend forward, and then we are flying through beams of silvery energy shooting up from below.
Dovik and I watch their attack, unimpressed. I doubt that if any landed a blow on our ship, something that does not even come close to doing, it would not do anything. This ship was crashed into a huge tree by a magical wolf, what are these little things going to do? The only thing I will grant them is the sheer number of attacks that scorch into the air. There must be thirty of the rank two wolves down there.
“Take this pack,” Dovik says.
“What do you mean this one?” I ask, staring down at the more than a hundred monsters racing through the trees below.
He gestures forward, to the opposite side of the settlement ahead. “There is another one on that side. It appears like there are some adventurers here already. Maybe they expected this attack. We should help them anyway.”
“If other people are here, wouldn’t that be us stealing their commission?”
Dovik smiles at me. “Are you going to let that stop you?”
I can’t help but smile back, tossing him the key to the ship. “Try not to crash it again.”
The door to the ship opens to me, and I fall through the air as I step out. I don’t pour growth mana into my wings as I summon them, the expanded size would likely just make me a target. My staves appear in my hands, balls of burning orange and white manifesting at their ends. Behind me, the golden dome of my ship sails away, leaving me alone in the air.
Beams of silvery energy continue to chase after my ship for a time before they eventually turn toward me. Again, the monsters below don’t come close to hitting me as I hover in the air, so strange. Well, it isn’t as if they have eyes.
Once Dovik has taken the ship far enough away, I exhale, bracing my mind for the flood of information as I unleash my soul presence. The enormity of my presence’s maximum extent truly hits me as I unveil it in the air, an orb of red and gold energy spreading out from me in all directions for nearly a mile.
Allowing myself to drop from the air, the edge of my soul presence washes over the front of the pack. The monsters stumble, their bodies growing heavier, their paws sinking into the earth in front of them. Watching the pile-up that begins as the row behind crashes into the confused first, both rows going over as the next behind crashes into them as well, is amusing.
A beam of silvery energy comes right for me, fired from a rank two wolf inside of my aura. Magical senses? The beam is halted as it is met with a wall of black sand, a rounded shield floating in the air in front of me.
“You first.”
Fire scorches the air as the first bolt descends from above. The wash of the heat as it explodes in a bloom of orange and white is warm enough to kiss my face even so high above. The monsters below wail, some writhing amidst the flames, some turned to cinders on impact. A hole appears in the pile-up, a gap of roaring fire that licks at the scrambling paws that climb over scorched carcasses.
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In the center of the explosion, the rank two monster stands, buffeted and knocked about by the swarming pack racing past it while flames spread low across the ground. Its steel limbs stand clean and shining in the sun’s light, the rest of its body pocked and burnt. The head turns up, the points of its tail coming together, energy gathering there. Then a second explosion of flames descends upon it, and it is blown apart.
Beams of deadly light fire up from the ground, more than half of the pack inside of my red and gold aura now. They sense me somehow, and I am forced to pull more and more of the black sand from my vault to form shields in front of me. My accumulation is considerable with at least a barrel full of the material now. The shields I form are thin, the majority of the black sand pooling into orbs to float about me.
I find my concentration stressed, the main bulk of my focus on moving the three shields I control, intercepting the silvery rays that shoot up from the ground. A minor part of my attention is pushed toward charging more bolts of dragonfire to capacity in my staves, the fully charged bolts easily proving their worth. Another part thinks, tries to see the battlefield, and ponders experimentation.
Two more bolts of fully charged dragonfire sail downward, exploding among the stampede, blowing apart the weaker monsters and managing to finish off even some of the larger ones. The stampede is fully within my aura now, and as they come closer to me, they begin to notice the weight pressing down on them increasing. We are still a few miles from the town. I have time to try some things.
The rank one monsters try to ignore me, wading through the knee-high grass like it was a bog, trying desperately to move forward. I bring the shields of black sand together in front of me, forming a bulwark that absorbs the silvery lights while I focus on the smaller prey. I push cold mana into my soul presence, just to see if it will have any effect. Nothing. I introduce corrosive mana, my soul presence becomes a roil of red, blue, and green. Again, no discernable change; it continues to only press down on the monster below like a weight.
When facing Ghostflame before, there had been an interaction. These creatures lack a soul presence, they have no way to project the power of a soul, and so perhaps my own can’t interact. It is a good limitation to learn. I pull the extra affixes out of the soul presence, reducing the strain on my mana. Projecting a soul presence usually consumes very little mana, but I have found that each aspect I add to it increases that consumption considerably. Another good thing to know.
I turn my attention to the three orbs floating around me in a slow orbit. The black sand is connected to me; if I focus, I can see the flow of mana connecting us. As I have done a few times before, I push mana through the bond, and the orbs begin to light with fiery orange light. The amount of mana the black sand can contain is immense, far greater than what I am able to feed it with my current skill. Still, I don’t push my infusion of dragonfire to its limit, giving each of the orbs a half-charge of flame before commanding them to launch.
Joining the two fully charged bolts from my staves, a fusillade of fiery death drops from the sky. Five orbs of orange magic strike near simultaneously, blowing apart the landscape beneath me the light of the explosion is enough to turn my vision white for a moment. Interestingly, I never lose sight of the color of mana down on the field below. In that brief instant of blindness, I see below harsh silvery lines competing with blooms of swirling fire. It is beautiful.
I drift backward in the air, moving to keep pace with the horde of creatures sprinting forward beneath me, trapping them in the most intense part of my aura. Mana flows out from me in streams of aether, the orbs floating around me firing off dragonfire bolts as soon as they can accumulate the mana. The forest below becomes a hell of explosions and spreading fire, the constant roar punctuated now and then by the conflagration of a fully charged bolt aimed at a rank two terror wolf.
The blue line denoting my mana is moved toward the center of my vision, dropping precariously by the second as I burn my mana. The air begins to stink, the smell of charred monster corpses reaching me even so high in the sky overhead. In less than ten minutes, the stampede of creatures is cut in half, most of the rank two monsters blown to bits as my attention turned fully toward them. The slaughter reaches a tipping point, the beasts below splitting out of their cohesive charge, fleeing in every direction they can manage. With far fewer beams racing up toward me, I turn some of the sand that formed my shield into orbs to infuse with more dragonfire. Caught in the weight of my aura, they don’t make it far.
Each second of the attempted retreat is peppered with balls of fire falling from the sky like meteors, the strikes only growing more precise as the fodder thins. The fully charged bolts finish the last of the rank two monsters, and I no longer need to protect myself. Seven orbs of fire float about me in the air as I chase the monster down, even the bolts that I fling from my staves reduced to just the barest charge.
The countryside becomes a wall of fire, as many of the monsters are done in by the spreading flames as the bolts I rain down from above. Before twenty minutes have passed, the stampede is gone, a smoking ruin smashed into the burning countryside. I check my mana, less than twenty percent remaining. Even so, the pool of energy is restoring itself at a considerable rate thanks to my high recovery. In a few hours, I will be at full power once more, not something many other mages could claim to do.
An eighth ball of black sand begins to form at my side, but keeping eight is still too many for me to juggle, requiring that I merge two others. The newest orb glows with a bright silvery light, all of the mana absorbed by the sand while it held off the attacks from the monsters below. The amount is considerable, they had been giving their all to kill me. Unfortunately, for them, I seem to have been a poor matchup.
I turn my attention to the orb of silvery light, pushing a modicum of cold affixed mana into the rest of my sand, sending it down in a spiraling wave to snuff out the flames slowly gathering on the ground below before a disaster can begin. There is a taste to the silvery mana that I don’t recognize, something intriguing.
The orb of light settles gently in the palm of my hand, thrumming softly. I open myself to the mana, breathing it in, feeling it siphon away from the sand to be absorbed into the index attached to a piece of my soul. A rune collects on one of the empty spaces, and a cursory skim of the affix glossary in my memory identifies it as steel mana. With such a considerable amount, I know that I could immediately integrate the mana into my soul, make the steel affix my own, but I hold myself back.
Steel mana is a valuable tool in several enchantments. If I hold onto it for myself and…wait a moment.
As my sand continues to snuff out the flames below, I pull an uninfused medium from my vault, a rod of silver, cold in my hand. Likely, this is a terrible idea, given how low my mana already is and how I don’t know if Dovik will need my help, but sudden inspiration calls to me. I try to pour mana into the medium, trying to infuse it with fire-affixed mana, my only native affix. As has happened so many times before, nothing comes of it.
I never understood it before, but after working with Corinth, I now know the reason that the index has been necessary. I read before that enchanters should be able to infuse their affixed mana into mediums, those with rare native affixes of sufficient strength can make a good bit of money doing that. Before my trip home, I thought the reason that I couldn’t do the same was because I wasn’t strong enough to do so, that it was something for rank three enchanters or something similar. I now know it is because I seem entirely unable to connect directly with the medium, that for whatever reason my soul doesn’t produce the right mana to use in that way, which is why the index has been so invaluable, acting as a place to store the correct kinds of mana I have gotten from breaking down items.
The orb of black sand still floats at my side, uninfused now that I have stripped it of the steel-affixed mana. Focusing, the particles of black dust separate from the gold they are bonded to, flowing into the silver rod I hold in my hand. The merger is total, the dust suffusing into the material so completely that I can move the medium about with but a thought. Now, I attempt to pour my burning mana into the rod once more with the black dust as a medium.
The rod in my hand begins to buzz faintly, heating up as my mana is forced into it. The resistance is incredible, the metal itself heating up as most of my mana is wasted, turned into heat as I attempt to suffuse the medium. I don’t stop, burning through my already low resources as I push fire into the rod. I am sweating by the time that I stop.
My feet touch the ground, and I look about, not having noticed when I started to fall from the sky. Black dust drifts up from the silver medium in my hand, pooling away to rejoin the orb of black sand at my side. A wave of black sand races back toward me, forming a huge orb that floats above my head like a moon as I stare down at the silver rod. A flickering orange light wraps the silver medium resting in my hand. I did it; I infused it with my mana. I didn’t need to harvest it from somewhere else.
At once, I understand the implications reach much further than what I can understand, but the most immediate is apparent to me. I don’t need to choose between integrating an affix into my soul or saving it for enchantment. The process will be more difficult, likely many times more difficult, but I can do both. I smile, seeing the road ahead become just a little bit clearer.
A window appears in front of me.
THRESHOLD FOR SOUL REINFORCEMENT REACHED!
I blink at the message, and the fey spirit holding it up for me. Turning my attention to the side, I see all of the messages from me destroying the monster stampede. There is a message among them telling me that I gained a level as well, but this one is different, it didn’t come from killing beasts.
So many questions. I push them aside, storing the now-infused medium back in my vault, making certain that I call back every grain of black sand to me as I begin to climb into the air once more. I turn toward the town, not too far distant now, and I see the sparks of magic in the distance, fighting still taking place. Before I get too caught up in myself, I should make sure Dovik is alright. There’s no telling what he might be facing on the other side of the cluster of buildings.
Pushing myself forward, I cut through the air, speeding toward where I think my friend might be fighting still, a torrent of pink mist chasing after me as I disenchant every monster corpse within the reach of my soul presence simultaneously. No reason to let their bodies go to waste.
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