The Black Adept
Chapter 3: Time Passes and Heartstones
Disclaimer: See chapter one nothing has changed since then… I still don't own either storyline and my vaults are still echoing.
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Alex writing one last word in his latest journal before sitting back eyes staring unseeingly around his office. Once he had figured out that he was stuck here he had, with help and encouragement from the townsfolk and mayor, decided to stay in the town of Clear Valley. Every town big or small would kill to get a single powerful Mage to watch over them and Alex after four years of training was able to get his own skills and powers back to what they were on Halloween with a lot of hard work. It was rare for a Great Adept to bother with already established towns preferring to set up a tower somewhere isolated and tinker with their Magic, well the ones not bent on ruling the world or stopping those that were bent on such a thing. Personally Alex didn't really care who ruled outside his Clear Valley and had spent the last six years working on ways to protect the village.
Since he had managed to get back to the right level Alex had been delving the depths of his mind for everything he could remember of the nature of nodes and Heartstones when he had exhausted both Urtho's knowledge and everything he could remember from the books that described some part of either he had locked himself in the Tower he built as his Adept test, it looked like a large house resting in the gaping mouth of a large Black Dragon and seemed to sparkle with an eldritch light that Alex had told the Mayor was just an effect he liked. In truth he had spun as many spells into every crystalline inch of the Tower as he could for as many purposes as he could think of.
His studies of the nodes that made up the large web of magic he could see all around him had shown him some fascinating things about the differences between an Adept of after the Cataclysm and the Great Adepts of this time. Of course a lot of it is the training, but it seems that just as much knowledge as had been lost during the Cataclysm on the intricacies of working magic from what he could tell the work of the Tayledras to tame the magic of the world had bunched it together. Magic today was spread in what looked like a giant web of nodes and ley-lines all connected allowing feats of magic simply not possible without the Web as he had come to call it.
And now, he thought looking silently down at the book in front of him that held all of his collected research into something he was sure would help him keep the ravages of the Cataclysm from affecting the magic of this Valley, I am ready to start. His plan was easy after learning from Urtho's memories how to create creatures he had spent months designing one that would help him in making a working Heartstone. A creature he called a Fairy after the creatures of legends and of course Tinker bell, it would be able to merge with him and keep him grounded during the process so he wouldn't be swept away in the node directly below his tower.
Standing silently Alex picked up the thick green leather book and carrying it with him he walked around his solid oak desk to exit the simple door of his office and primary work room. Walking down the silent corridors of his Tower his mind drifted back to when he had been younger and him and Jessie had read the Mage Wars books dreaming of being as powerful as Urtho the two of them had spent hours trying to decide what they would make their Towers look like if they were Mages like Urtho. In truth the Dragon design was Jessie's, it was a way for Xander to honor his fallen friend though the Tower was empty as Alex mostly lived in the house at the top. The Dragon part of the tower though had been designed for Workroom's his primary sharing space with his office had the tightest shielding he could weave together and was constantly upgraded as he found better or stronger ways to do things.
The secondary Workroom, the one he was headed to right now, was at the very bottom of his Tower being about twenty feet underground carved out of the same crystal the rest of the Tower was made of, the only way into the room was from a hidden door in the wall behind his large bed and the place he was planning on putting the focus of the Heartstone. Sending out a call through the stone around him as he stepped off the last stair into the Work room he stared around at it. It was a large room easily large enough to fit a football field inside and right in the middle of the room a five foot tall pillar of the hardest stone he could find was capped with a pure diamond that he had burned the impurities out of. This was important the magic of this time was tamer than what was described in the books but there was more of it and the slightest impurity could kill him in a fiery explosion that might just start the Cataclysm early.
Hearing a noise the Mage who hadn't aged a day since he started learning magic looked up and grinned and the gnome, a small humanoid that reminded him of Tinker bell with her blonde hair, size and the green dress she was wearing. "Hello, little one," He said letting her land on his shoulder as he smiled at her, "How is your tribe?"
"They are well, Creator." The small fairy said hugging the side of his neck. "Is your project ready?" she asked looking around at the one room in the Tower she had never seen before. Her tribe had moved out of the Tower seen after they had been created wanting to show their Creator that they could take care of themselves and he didn't have to worry about them, but she came into the Tower every chance she got. She knew all the rooms like the back of her hands having explored the place as much as she could with the others playing hide and seek in the many hidden passages, they had free run of the whole tower so long as they didn't damage anything past fixing and stayed out of this room and his other Workrooms when he was busy, for their own safety some of his experiments with node-energy had backfired explosively.
"Yes," he said simply reaching out with his mind to connect with hers and reveling in the feeling of being one with the earth below and all around them,: I am not sure how long this will take, but with your help nothing should go wrong.: He told her mentally sending across what she needed to do before turning to the pillar and calming his mind.
Linking with the diamond he turned his attention to the node below him and reached out to meld with it slowly not wanting to rush even these simple parts. Slowly, sweat beading on his forehead; he pulled with all his strength. This was the hardest part of the process, while people had been touching and using node-energy for years that only involved connecting to it and allowing it to fill you while controlling the flow. Moving a part of the node was something that had long been deemed impossible once some of the Adepts that had tried had burned themselves out, becoming mindless husks or simply burning the Mage-Gift out of their bodies. None lived long after something like that, it was almost impossible for a Mage to live without their Gift, simply because the ability to feel the Magic around them and not feel the rush of channeling it drove most of them to suicide quickly. The closest they had ever come was Permanent Gates where you had to tie the Gate Spell to both the node and the doorway, it was more complicated then that but then what wasn't.
His theory, though it hadn't been proven, was that they had not been able to direct the energy and keep themselves grounded at the same time, causing them to lose control of the flow and drown in the energy burning through their bodies. That is why he had made the Fairies. He worked alone so he did not have other Mages around him to hold him nor did he have a Companion so he created something that could serve the same purpose.
Finally managing to get the energy where he wanted it he tied it to the crystal and started weaving. Soon after he flopped back on the floor behind him utterly drained. It was remarkably similar to the process of tying off a Permanent Gate except in that case the channel to power the spell could only hold one spell, the Gate Spell, this one, he thought as he studied it with his senses was more complicated and less at the same time. Permanent Gates were created by grabbing a very small amount of power from the node and weaving it into the Gate Spell tying it to an arch of appropriate size and stopping the spell at just the moment when it would normally reach out with tendrils of power for the destination. Stopping that Spell once it got started was sometimes harder to do then to stop an avalanche it took more willpower than many Mages even Great Adepts were capable of, though after this, Xander thought to himself as he rested his eyes while laying on the remarkably comfortable stone ignoring the calls of the irritating little fairy fluttering around him, I will never complain about Gates again the weaving required for a Heartstone was so complicated it wasn't really a surprise that only the Tayledras could do it in the future.
Dragging himself up off the floor he staggered over to the stairs and started to slowly drag himself up them not even bothering to try and climb to his feet just crawling ungracefully up stair after stair, blessing the gods that nobody from the village would see him like this. They all had this vision of him being some super mage and crawling up a set of stairs really would hurt that reputation. Finally making it up the hellish stairs he looked blearily around his room for a second before his silver-blue eyes locked onto his large silk bed and stumbling into it falling asleep before his head hit the pillow.
A/n: I'm not really sure about this chapter it's kinda short and I'm sure as confusing as possible but I couldn't get the damn thing right lol I spent the last week trying to figure out where I was going with this story and I'm still not sure so don't expect fast updates.