NOVEL WEB AF Chapter 2 – Going Away
Blackness licked over them like a thing alive. Space shook as power very, very old, and very, very actively malevolent, a power that was Evil, knew it was Evil, and glorified in being Evil swirled and grew as it devoured the energy of the very thing it had been remade to kill. It grew in power so fast it sucked all the life right out of the air as it fed.
The psychic scream of the Entity was completely unfeigned as it realized it had just done something phenomenally stupid, and now it was going to pay a hideous price for it.
Then the world slammed back together as it tried to tear itself away and free, and everything blew up around me.
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I coughed out some sand, my head woozy, and pounded mental fists against my disorientation, trying to breathe and reorient myself, trying to make sense of unfamiliar messages screaming into my head, all of them demanding attention nownownow.
I was pretty sure I had a couple broken limbs and maybe hip. There’d been a severe spatial rupture, and while living creatures fared much better in such things than inanimate objects, I’d been tossed and smashed into something, and was probably lucky I could still feel the pain.
It meant my spine was still intact.
The False Life I’d gotten off had probably saved me, as I could feel the extra Soak was completely gone. I stifled my coughing and the acute desire to get the grit out of my mouth as I relaxed completely and stopped trying to put pressure on my injuries.
Something that wasn’t my memories said I had to use Life Magic to Heal myself.
I followed the tangents of that thought to a dutifully-practiced spell, of a form completely different than what I knew, channeled by hexagonal scarabs of base metals, wooden talismans, herbs, powdered minerals, mixed tinctures, and tiny taper-candles with infused essence in them. A needlessly complex system of material components and very proper phrasing went with said components, which, when combined with a Wand or Orb, allowed the wielder to properly direct the flow of mana into the required form.
Well, I suppose this was a reason why I took the Basic Metas while I was reorganizing what I could while drifting through astral space.
Malar Zhapaj, I thought, feeling no Wand in my hand, very slowly letting the magic gather. Tiny candles ignited and burned away, little storehouses of power meant to power and guide the magic.
I had vented the entire store of mana in her mana pool into Be Gone when I’d sent it out, which had both allowed it to attune to her harmlessly and blend into her so it was sucked up with the rest of her soul. It had been the last of HER power, striking at the creature, and so it was her revenge upon it.
The whispers of memories flitting about my head said something had changed with the mana coming in, based on my interpretation and comprehensions of it, which were an order of magnitude or four higher than hers had been.
She had considered herself very gifted, one of the most talented Gharu’n magi of her generation. Also, it seems I was a total snob and bitch, given the hauteur and arrogance riding through these memories I’d inherited.
My comprehension of Healing energy involved Arcane, Eldritch, Primal, Divine, Heartsong, Soul, and even Typeless Energies. The start of the process here was the tapers... and there was some hesitation.
I mentally flipped through the spell, and noted that the collection of tapers for each spell and for each spell level changed with the mage casting them. There weren’t unlimited forms of patterns, as the red tapers seemed to harmonize the most with all spells, but there were indeed 144 known combinations. One of the most tedious parts of practicing magic here was having to test out the many, many combinations to find the one that applied to you, although there were some master guidebooks that could walk you through the probable combinations once you worked out the first three or four levels yourself.
This girl was indeed talented by the standards of her people, as she was casting level III spells before she was sixteen, and her combination of tapers, her Candle Talent, as it was called, seemed to be known and accepted as strong and vital.
The double red tapers that were supposed to burn for this Healing spell were absolutely quiet.
There were twelve different random tapers for a level III spell. The II spell used a basic red taper, while the III rotated to a pink one, with a second attuned taper inserted to boost the spell further and purify the energy. The turquoise taper in her satchel reacted to the copper hexagonal scarab, the sprigs of hyssop, powdered amber, and colcothar tincture potion, lined up with a carved yew talisman. Power, school, what it affected, energy type, and talisman choosing the form.
Good enough. I looked at the form of the spell, lined it up in my Visual File, and pointedly duplicated it with a Cantrip so I wouldn’t ever need to go through this dumbass stuff again, letting it all hum through the Arcane Bloodline I’d brought in with me. In the future, I should only need the scarabs, as they were the catalyst for the amount of energy that needed drawing.
Her name was Devra. Well, I guess that was my name now, although I refused to think of myself as al-Shamira. I think I would go with... al-Ryinth. I had to suppress a smile. Yes, that would work. Devra al-Ryinth made for a decent Name, and I fit it into place.
I could probably sub for Miss Shamira if I so desired, although there was no way I would replicate her completely self-focused and arrogant personality. It seemed to be something she had inherited from her teacher, who had praised her and talked her up like she was the second coming of the Poet or something...
She had a special talent for conserving mana, able to use less than the default amount for spells, and thus being able to stretch her mana pool farther. It was a sophisticated skill to have as a child, and based on her tremendous sense of Self and intellect, she’d been groomed to be a mage since she was discovered by a wandering mage of the Academy of the Arcane at the age of eight.
It was... sort of the underside of metamagic? Metas allowed extra effects to be added to spells without increasing the costs, so spells grew more powerful. This method allowed mages to cast increasingly powerful spells at reduced costs, which amounted to something similar if the user’s skill was high enough.
My eyes were closed, but I was sure they were glittering. That sounded like just the sort of skill I would love to spend tremendous amounts of time developing the crap out of. Nothing like it existed in the Power of Ten.
Whatever, I used the energy of a Cantrip to sub for a Wand, the small amount of mana burn a pain that I could overcome. I watched the mana flowing through the pattern, my own mana having to sustain the magic wherever it was not adequate, draining my partially-full pool in a sweep as Healing magic swirled through me.
Ho, that felt REALLY good... Ouch!
I winced as the spell read my Kirlian field, found out things were out of alignment, and abruptly corrected them. Bones shifted hard, snapped back together, shards from the breaks wriggling through meat to get back to where they were supposed to be before melding back together and fixing the holes and scars they’d left behind.
It was also considerably stronger than my added memories thought it should be, which didn’t surprise me at all. I had several layers of Feats and Theurgies wound about my Healing spells, and this magic was just a variant on them. This magic was basically a variant Cure Serious Wounds, and my Theurgies boosted the heck out of something that crossed multiple Traditions.
I needed to Assay myself... which started cross-memories down another rabbit hole that identified such an effect as a native magic that anyone could master, with three more variations on it: Assess Creature, Assess Human, Appraise Item, and Appraise Magical Item. The simple divinatory effect had been subdivided down to very specific avenues of study that even non-Caster people could pursue if they were so inclined.
The skill to block them, Deception, was something that could be learned, as well.
Physically, I seemed to be whole, any internal bleeding and wounds dealt with, but I was certainly not in perfect shape, aching and bruised all over. I looked at my pitiful mana pool, and compared how long it took to recharge the thing normally.
Well, no, because you didn’t wait around for it to be recharged. You used vivimancy, Life Magic, and recharged it that way, leveraging it with mana conversion, inherited lessons berated me.
I sent my thoughts down a whole new branch of this Life Magic, as they called it, noting that there was nothing like Divine or Natural magic in my memories, and even astonishment that there would be a ‘clean’ type of magic like them.
The magic she’d been using had not been clean by any estimation, and to me felt very like uncontrolled Eldritch Magic, stuff that should only be accessed with a strong Pact to regulate and formalize it.
Nothing about true gods in her memory, only people of legend basically deified by time and the examples they set.
Demons they had, and didn’t seem to know if they were real or not, although the Viamontians seemed to get the title a lot, blue-skinned conquerors that they were...
She really hadn’t liked Viamontians.
Huh. There were three types of ‘Conversion’ spells available. They were based on the principle that Healing magic was really turning Mana to Health. Thus, you could also convert Health back into Mana. There was also topical physical energy, ‘Stamina’, which you could Heal/Convert back and forth as well.
Healing was stabler, fixed effects, basically restoring Health or Stamina in a known range of efficacy. The Conversion spells were mana-powered, but could be much stronger, because they worked on ‘half’ of existing Source, and then converted it to the target energy type, at increasingly higher efficiency as the spell grew more powerful, with the only limit being the source energy.
So, someone with a very, very large stamina pool could very quickly recharge a mana pool, as stamina could be recovered fairly quickly compared to Health and mana, especially if buttressed with a Rejuvenation or Revitalizing spell...
Unlike the Matrix-locked spells in my head, the mana pool allowed mana to flow in and out of it freely, without limit. Even Sorcery didn’t allow such free incoming mana, requiring long periods of Meditation or sleep to regain power to alleviate Spell Slot Burn.
Granted, natural mana recovery was also quite slow, generally requiring focused Meditation to have any speed to it at all, which was why it was only used when you were truly empty of mana.
Did they really have an entire school of magic around ‘Buff Skill X’ and ‘Buff Stat Y’?!?!
I looked between the range of various Skill-boosting ‘Creature Magic’ spells and Wieldskill, and then at the Stat-boosters and the Animal Affinity six-way choices.
To their credit, they did have offensive ‘debuff’ versions of the spells, which was very inventive in its way, like a Curse effect that was not a Curse.
In the back of my head, I began consolidating things, because that's what Theurges do, and most especially Soul Shards of Master Archtheurges.
I really wanted that Wand back, but had no idea where it was right now. Still, a Cantrip was not going to injure me.
Prestidigitation was the King of Cantrips for all the uses it had, and cleaning myself off was just one of them... especially the grit in my mouth.
It occurred to me that I had a lot of Karma I could apply. This mana pool didn’t actually sound all that different from the Arcane Pool that Einz had stumbled across, which could conflate excess Spell Levels, Ki, Heartsong, Channel uses, and Spell Pool uses, only it was faster to recharge than those were. The principles should be the same, just the rules were a bit more permissive here when backed by magic aimed at the specific effect.