Since discovering magic, Lucas had steadily been starting to think of it in all its myriad forms as, in essence, a singular phenomenon. It had started with how his floramancy had seemed to transition so easily into necromancy, when he’d picked up a bone and circulated mana into it, thinking it was just another stick by the side of his makeshift bed in the middle of the summoning hall.
The theory got a bit muddier when comparing floramancy and pyromancy, since they seemed to be incompatible for the most part, but they ultimately functioned in the same way. In its simplest form, magic was an act of moving around that mystic energy known as mana, to varying effects depending on the nature of the mana. It could get complicated, and do strange things one mightn’t consider intuitive at first glance, but he suspected it was at least consistent across all the disciplines, to a degree.
That being said, he’d found himself wondering how well techniques transferred between the disciplines. Jyn had displayed the ability to turn his body into fire, and glean information from heat, a kind of postcognitive sense for what temperatures an object had experience. Could Lucas somehow turn himself into moonlight, if he worked at it? Or a plant? It seemed ridiculous to consider, but a few months ago magic in general would’ve seemed absurd, too.
After all the hassle with the flaming hand he’d sported for a few weeks, Lucas was confident he’d be able to change himself back if it went drastically wrong, at least. Quite apart from its magical properties, mana acted as a kind of archive, one could say. Jyn had told him mana had memory, and that had turned out to be true. Somewhere deep within the mystical energy flowing through his metaphysical body, there was a blueprint for his physical body, accurate down to the individual cell.
Or, well, there would be. Lucas was yet to map out his entire mana system. While his arms were pretty much complete, there was still a lot of progress to be made in the rest of his body. Opening new channels was going a lot faster now, his advancement increasing exponentially as he gained more mana to devote to the task, as well as the Great Star simply making him better and better at it. The problem at this point was that he hadn’t yet developed the mental fortitude necessary to literally do it all the time, and multi-tasking was still a work in progress.
So right now, the only parts of his body he felt completely confident in being able to change back to flesh, blood, and bone were his arms. Staring down at one of the arms in question, resting on his crossed legs, he found that confidence and courage were different things. He closed his eyes, feeling at the mana in his hand, focusing on the flow of it.
It wasn’t that he feared being caught. It had become easy to forget, since his comrades so far had shown little concern for his floramancy, but it was technically a branch of magic considered socially taboo. Claire had, for whatever reason, wielded her influence to manipulate events to make it so. Presumably, it was something to do with the plant construct she’d left behind in Pentaburgh, not wanting anyone to disturb it or the summoning array it probably guarded.
Or so Lucas hoped. If, after all this, it turned out the excuse that a demon of some kind had cursed an entire branch of magic turned out to be a real thing after all, he didn’t know how he’d handle it. Floramancy was his first magical art, and he found he’d grown somewhat attached to it. He couldn’t imagine having it taken from him.
And so, he’d asked Valerie to find him a hidden practice room in the Moontower, where he could mess with it without fear of discovery. She’d obliged, and her solution had taken him somewhat by surprise.
He’d been expecting to be led up an endless flight of stairs to a room that sat higher than the clouds themselves, but instead she’d taken him downwards, deep below the bowels of the great tower to a tall, wide, and, most importantly, empty chamber that seemed to have been chiselled out of strange white stone.
It turned out the complex descended almost as far below ground as it rose above ground, like it was actually a 10,000m tall tower that had been stabbed into the ground. The reality wasn’t quite that extreme, as far as anyone knew—but the operative term there was the “as far as anyone knew” bit.
With so much space above ground, with windows letting in sunlight making them much more pleasant to work in, the members of the Order tended to gravitate upwards. Claire’s office was, apparently, the very top floor of the immense building.
And so the basement levels had fallen somewhat into disuse. They weren’t entirely abandoned, but they were used rarely enough even before the time of the summoning that the records of how far down they went and what they contained were lost, and it had been a long time since anyone had tried to map it out. Superstitions abounded, of course. Humans were never meant to go so far below the ground.
Valerie had told him all this on their way down, and he’d become less and less enamoured with the idea of shutting themselves away dozens of stories below ground level.
“Who knows what’s down here?” he’d asked, watching the white walls like something might jump out at him at any moment.
“No one,” Valerie had replied, eyeing him over her shoulder as she led the way further and further down. Only a white crystal housed in a black metal rod had lit their way. “And thus, they won’t know you’re down here, either.”
That had been a week ago, the very next day after they’d arrived at the Moontower. He’d still been in awe of the place, then, ready to believe any fantastical rumour that popped up. In his defence, the building had to be magical in myriad ways to even exist as it did above ground, and learning that it stretched down into the earth too? That had set his imagination wild.
Standing at the base of the Moontower upon their arrival had been one of the most awe-inspiring experiences of his life. It had been akin to what he imagined standing at the base of Mt Everest must have felt like. Craning his neck backwards, it had seemed to stretch on forever above him, an endless white road climbing fay beyond the stratosphere, a road straight to the stars.
Its height had been incredible enough, but it was surely wider than any Earth skyscrapers he’d ever seen. It was five-sided—because of course it was—and each of the five equal white faces were wide as two football pitches, granting the tower’s interior a vast amount of space. Even the five walls that surrounded the tower’s compound had to be a hundred metres high.
The place had crawled with skycloaks and the various servants that kept the place running like an ant’s nest, zapping Lucas’ heart with anxiety. But no one paid him any mind. He’d been just another face in the crowd of thousands, and, like any big city he’d ever experienced, everyone had their own things to do, too busy to devote any attention to the stranger standing around gawking up at the tower.
And, in fairness, that probably wasn’t an uncommon sight.
A week wasn’t enough to lose that childlike wonder for this immense feat of magic and engineering, but it was more than enough to grow fed up with the stairs. Valerie’s quarters, where they were staying, took up a solid chunk of the 224th floor. The room she’d chosen to let him practise floramancy in was 72 floors below ground level.
That was a lot of climbing.
“Your mind is drifting,” Valerie’s voice snapped him out of his reverie, and he quickly wiped the scowl from his face. She did not countenance his complaints about the stairs, insisting that it was good exercise. “Shall we head back up?” she asked.
Lucas shook his head, as much out of a desire to put off his suffering as to continue his work with floramancy. “It’s fine,” he told her. “Just gotta work up the courage to actually try this.”
There was a pause. “You’ve done something similar before, have you not?”
“And it was deeply unpleasant,” Lucas said. “The firehand had its good points, but I guess there was a part of me that worried I’d never be able to deal with it. That’s stuck with me, a bit.” Lucas opened his eyes, staring down at his hand as splayed out his fingers. “And I guess there’s a bit of apprehension in me at turning my hand to wood, or whatever, in the first place. I imagine fire as more malleable. Wood… isn’t supposed to move. That’s a factor in magic, right? The further you take an element from its nature, the harder it is?”
Valerie’s boots clacked on the stone floor as she stepped closer. Lucas looked up, blinking a little to adjust his eyes to the darkness so he could take her in. Her expression was neutral as her gaze moved between him, sat cross-legged on the floor with one of his sleeves rolled up, and the potted plant they’d brought down yesterday resting a few metres away, giving him something for his floramancy to work with. Her armour was back to its pristine condition, and her cloak was the blue of a cloudless sky in the height of summer. Her blond hair, too, had been tamed into a braid that fell to the small of her back.
“You’re not incorrect,” she said. “But the fact remains that you know it’s possible to change yourself back, and you have an idea of how it’s achieved, even if your previous technique involved a different discipline.”
Lucas shrugged. “It’s not necessarily a logical thing.”
“No. But using logic to reason yourself through emotions you know to be irrational is a good solution to problems such as this.”
“I’m not convinced it’s irrational,” Lucas grumbled.
“It’s not entirely, of course,” Valerie agreed with a nod. “Things can always go wrong, in the practice of magic.”
“That’s not encouraging.”
“If you feel uncertain about working with your magic at the moment, we can continue your sword training?”
“No, I think I’ve had quite enough of that for today. Even with the Great Star, there’s only so much I can devote myself to learning one thing at a time. I've got to mix things up.”
“We could work with bows or shields.”
Lucas sighed, letting his shoulders slump. Then he straightened up once more, glaring between his hand as he clenched it into a fist and the potted plant. “No. I’m gonna do this. Today.”
“You said that yesterday,” Valerie said.
“Shush. I’m concentrating.”
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Another woman might have rolled her eyes, but Valerie just returned to her post by the door, standing guard without complaint. She was ever vigilant, even down here, right in the heart of the Order of Five’s territory, her icy eyes on a constant scan.
Lucas held back a sigh. He’d hoped that reaching Dawnguard and ostensible safety would mellow her out a bit, but instead the opposite had happened. She was tenser than ever. Wouldn’t let him out of her sight for more than a moment. He hadn’t had any time alone in the past week, and wasn’t going to for the foreseeable future, it seemed. Until Claire was back, she’d told him, she was going to keep him under constant guard.
The thing was, Claire’s return didn’t have a precise date attached to it. They didn’t even know what she’d left to do beyond taking on some kind of mission in the Blight to Aeyem with only her most trusted subordinates. Valerie would usually be counted among that number, but had begged off, seeing an opportunity to investigate Pentaburgh.
Nervous butterflies fluttered around in Lucas’ stomach whenever he thought about Claire. 100 years she’d been in this place, living the life of a leader, a general, a chosen hero, and so many other roles all at once. Quite apart from how much it would all have changed her, the thing that worried him most was how she’d see him. He’d be like a child to her, no matter what he said. And that wasn’t even getting into how she’d feel about him, after all this time. She’d never been one to accept excuses, and from what he’d heard about her second-hand thus far, that didn’t seem to have changed much. Would she blame him? The Claire he knew wouldn’t, but she’d still be mad.
Focus, he told himself, gritting his teeth and forcing all his attention to the mana in a single finger of his right hand. He chose the pinky. Easier to work with something small, he reasoned. His pathways were so dense in the digit that they practically filled it in its entirety, and he spent some time watching the mana move.
Ever since his crude attempts at meditation back when he’d first woken up in the summoning hall, watching his mana had become something of a soothing pastime, for him. Letting his consciousness drain away into his mana was simply relaxing, pulling him into a quasi Zen state.
The dim golden glow coursing through his pathways was like a miniature and fiendishly elaborate lava lamp. At rest, it flowed almost lazily, looping itself through the hypnotic patterns formed by his pathways. If he zoned out a bit, akin to letting his eyes unfocus, it all seemed to mush together as one big blob of golden magical energy.
His worries started to drop away. The trepidation as his mind fretted over what could go wrong here; the frustration at Valerie’s paranoid vigilance; the anxiety over the inevitably meeting with Claire. They all slowly fell to the wayside as his breathing levelled out, and his heartbeat settled into a steady rhythm.
Warmth suffused him as he started to take his mana in hand. Or, in finger, to be more precise. A tendril of mana slithered out of the tip of his pinkie and snaked ahead of him, seeking flora. Usually, he tended to let it emanate out in all directions, but that wasn’t needed here; he knew the plant was directly in front of him, a few metres away, and he didn’t want to be relying on brute force tricks when he was working on a technique that required finesse. Being controlled in all steps of the process seemed prudent.
In no time, his mana located the plant and dived right into it. It lit up in his mind’s eye, unfurling a map of its potential. It was essentially a succulent, with thick, fleshy leaves coloured a pale pink, shaped together in a pointed, prickly mound. When they’d picked it up, it had been more unfurled, but had seemed to shrink in on itself overnight, left in the darkness.
Through its mana, he could feel it was going into a sort of plant hibernation, conserving energy until it could get sunlight. Obviously, it was a plant, and thus hadn’t the intelligence to understand that they had every intention of keeping it alive for their purposes. He could see where it was going to go, from here, the routes its roots were going to take. Plants didn’t have consciousness, per se, but there was something like that, in there, a genetically coded instinct. An intent of sorts that he could read, as well as other paths it could take in other circumstances.
But he was more interested in the more concrete information stored in its mana. The cellular layout of its physical form. Like this, he could see the plant without looking at it, and delve into it as deeply as he wished, zooming in from a comprehensive view until he could peruse an individual cell. He wasn’t at the atomic level yet, but figured that would be something he could do, with more skill in the art. It made sense to him, and hunches like that were to be heeded when you had a cheat code imprinted on your soul.
For now, he endeavoured to split his attention, simultaneously holding that image of the plant’s molecular structure in his mind and overlaying it with the mana suffusing his pinky finger. Through the mana connecting him to the plant, he started to pull, drawing in floramantic energy. The golden thread of mana started to gain a green tinge, steadily creeping up from the plant to his finger.
If it weren’t for the meditative state he’d inadvertently trained himself to slip into when messing with his mana, he was sure nerves would’ve had him trembling at this point. His mind couldn’t quite get past the wrongness of transmuting his body into another material, yet. Hopefully the Gift would work on that.
Instead, he remained calm as the thread slowly turned green, and the colour started to spread within his little finger. It didn’t take long for the entire appendage to match the mana of the succulent plant, and he was ready for the next step.
Lucas opened his eyes, observing his finger. It didn’t look any different to normal. Maybe a bit more tanned than he was used to, with all that time spent outside under the sun. His gaze flicked to Valerie, still standing by the door, though she was observing him now. She had some skill with sensing mana, and no doubt was following along what he was doing. She noticed his attention and gave him a nod, staying silent.
Okay, Lucas thought. Plantfinger time.
This was where he’d had trouble yesterday. Getting the plant mana into his own system was easy enough, and holding it in a specific place while keeping the rest of his mana that base life-energy gold wasn’t so difficult either. It was in the transmutation that he was struggling now. While he was confident enough in changing back, having done it before, the method he’d used to transmute into another element in the first place… wasn’t really replicable, here, and he wasn’t willing to go that route even if it was.
Burning his hand had been a deeply unpleasant experience born from desperation. How would he even repeat that with a plant? Sting himself on something poisonous, maybe? Shove his hand into a tree’s trunk? Didn’t sound like a good way to do things. If he was going to be turning himself into various elements, he needed to figure out how to do it properly.
Lucas raised his hand, bringing the finger close to his face, inspecting both the physical digit with his eyes and the plant magic flowing through it with his mana sense. Then he brought up the other one, comparing them. Was he imagining that it felt different? The prospective plant finger seemed to have a certain quality that the other lacked, but it was difficult to put his finger on.
It turned out that one’s flesh and blood had a feel to it that you didn’t really notice until another part of the body lacked that feel, and all of a sudden it felt deeply wrong. Human flesh had a warmth to it. Blood pumped through the body, and brought heat. It was a big part of how body heat was regulated, after all.
And apparently mana had some kind of effect on that? Enough that swapping out his pure, natural mana for plant mana made a noticeable difference, anyway. It felt not just colder, but stiffer. Harder to move.
A theory came to mind, and he pulled more plant mana into the finger, packing it in denser, making it move slower. After a while, he felt able to move the finger with plant mana in it with as much dexterity as the regular one. He figured that was due to the rule he’d mentioned earlier: the further you strayed from a given thing’s natural state of being or behaviour, the more energy it required to manipulate.
That little confirmation—being correct—raised his confidence further, and it gave him an idea regarding how to proceed.
Lucas let his other hand fall, focusing all his attention on the finger infused with plant mana once more. Right now, the plant mana was merely flowing through his pathways. It was having some effect on his physical body, but while it flowed where it was supposed to, the effects were easily offset.
But with the extra mana he’d been taking, and with the act of slowing down his mana in his channels, Lucas had been reminded of something that had slipped his mind due to all the shit he’d been through in the last few weeks before reaching Dawnguard.
Mana enhancement. The act of taking your mana and absorbing it into your physical body, granting a variety of augmentations based on the nature of the mana. Valerie had warned him off it for now, citing the possibility of danger while his mana system wasn’t fully developed. But if he was just targeting an area where he was fully developed…
Lucas asked her about it, still focused on his finger.
“It’s still dangerous,” she told him. “Excess mana in a physical object will slowly change that object’s very nature, and thus it’s best to enhance all your body at once.” She paused, and he heard her shift. “But if it’s just for the sake of body transmutation, isolated to a small appendage, the risk may not be quite so severe.”
“Is that permission?”
“I will neither force you to do anything nor prevent you from doing anything.”
That caught him off guard enough that he couldn’t help turning his gaze to her. There was nothing unusual in her bearing or expression, but there was weight to her words when she continued, “The situation in Dawnguard is fraught, but not so desperate as it was on our journey here. Suffice to say, a member of the Order is not supposed to be so heavy-handed as I have been with you on our travels.” She paused, her lips thinning. “By law of the Order of Five, I am technically your subordinate. I cannot command you to do anything.”
Lucas was left blinking for a moment. “I wouldn’t even know what to order you to do.” He shook his head. “Well, I’m not asking for permission, then, but advice.”
“I would advise you to follow your instincts in this particular matter,” Valerie said. “When it comes to improving your skills, at the very least, the Great Star is undoubtedly a far greater guide than I am.”
Lucas nodded, turning his attention back to his finger and the mana within. With a deep, fortifying breath, he set to the task.
Mana trickled out from the channels, but through force of will Lucas kept it in place, suffusing his pinkie in the physical world. The temptation to start feeding it straight into his physical body hit him like a truck, but he tamped it down, his instincts urging patience. He carefully spooled out more and more mana. It started to build, and soon he could just about make out a dim green glow beneath his skin, like someone was shining a weak green torch through the finger.
Still, he let it build. Watching like a hawk, every iota of his attention dedicated to assessing the equilibrium between the physical and the magical, he waited for the right moment.
Minutes passed. Sweat began trickling down his forehead. His limbs started to ache from holding still so long. Even his mana itself was beginning to strain against his iron grip, too much energy packed into one place, with nowhere to go.
And then, just like that, it was time.
Taking hold of all the mana he’d built at once, he shunted it straight into his flesh in the blink of an eye, giving it no time to react. Immediately, he felt the change. Saw it, too.
The glowing green mana flashed bright enough to sting his eyes, then dimmed. Fading as if the colour was being drained away, it gradually bleached white. But it didn’t stay that way for long. A different colour started to fill in, one that was mighty familiar—Lucas looked between the succulent plant and his finger a few times, and within about ten seconds the pale pink of the latter matched the fleshy leaves of the former.
Soon enough the fleshiness matched too, going from the softness of human skin to the firmness of plant skin. At first, the new plantfinger was stiff as the plant itself, but Lucas had accounted for this possibility; there was a reason he’d built up mana to such a degree, going four or five times over what would’ve been needed to simply transmute his finger.
With the excess mana, he could move it around as easily as the pinkie on his other hand. It still looked odd, like uncanny valley CGI, since plants weren’t supposed to move that way. But it worked, and he set it to wiggling like a worm. A child-like giggle bubbled up from his belly.
And then a frown pulled his lips downwards. He stared at the finger in consternation for a long moment, then turned, almost reluctantly, to show it to Valerie.
“I definitely should’ve done my thumb,” he said, annoyed with himself.
Discord :)
