Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Author's Notes: Hey so there are themes of physical disability in the third part of this chapter. It's not super explicit, but it's there in case that's not something you're comfortable reading.
Also,This was probably THE HARDEST CHAPTER of this entire fic. Shadow was so tricky, and I knew I wanted to incorporate Pronyma in it somehow since she's really the only person we see using dark magic, other than like, Gravity Well. I have a few headcanons about Pronyma, nothing properly defined, so this was kind of an exploration on her. I really don't particularly LIKE her, but I think she's too singular of a character to not take a look at somehow.
This is how they survive, you know…They paint the world full of shadows, and then tell their children to stay close to the light. Their light. Their reasons, their judgments. Because in the darkness, there be dragons. But it isn't true. We can prove that it isn't true. In the dark, there is discovery. There is possibility…There is freedom in the dark once someone has illuminated it. -James Flint (Black Sails)
The universe was born in the dark. That was all there was, once. The dark vastness of space, stretching forever on. The stars hadn't even been born yet. That came later. In the beginning, it was just the three of them, Shadow and Origin and Ratatosk, the only things in the emptiness.
And Origin was teasing Ratatosk, tugging on a tendril of his vast mana and light was born, powerful enough to burn. The others came, slowly, one by one. But always there was Shadow, waiting beside them as they were born, a quiet smile welcoming them into this strange universe of theirs.
The thing about dark magic was not that it was evil—nothing was inherently so—but that it was simply strong. It was all the magnitude of the beginning, and all the inevitability of the end. Raw dark magic couldn't be contained so easily. Shadow's form itself wasn't corporeal like the others'. He could keep it solid for a bit, but it wouldn't stay like that. Shadow's priests and summoners became used to the ghostly feel of their Spirit on their shoulder, of the weight of him in the heavy afternoon sun.
Channeling his magic took something else. It was too strong for continued use, too uncontained for most people to get beyond even a basic spell. Shadow's mages were clever, though, his monks clever and creative. They anchor the spells to their bodies in ink as black as their Spirit, creating their own languages to keep the secret.
The thing most people didn't realize was that the reason that light magic was so good for Healing was because of how incorporeal it was. The other elements could be bent to Healing, but it was harder and less effective. Darkness could be used in that same way, for the same reason, but it required a different kind of control than Luna's priestesses. Luna's magic burned if you didn't do it right, would cauterize and blind in the same breath.
Shadow's magic came with the vacuum of space in its memory. Without control, the body would crumple in on itself, would boil the blood in their veins and burst the air in their lungs. The monks meditated and secluded themselves to learn their calm and control. They traded with the dwarves for amethyst, wearing it around their necks and on circlets to help calm their minds, letting them promote healing and peace.
Shadow's mountain was a refuge. Nothing like Gnome's mountain, towering and tall. Shadow's were low-lying, but deeper, with crystal deposits that the dwarves had long since formed their cities around. When the refugees came, when the draft-dodgers and the escaped slaves made their way into the mountain, they were promised safety.
"This is a haven," they were told. "We will not turn you away, and we do not fight."
That wasn't, strictly, true, but it wasn't fighting the way that any of them would understand. Shadow's mountain was under constant attack, as it was so easily defensible to ground troops, with high cliffs and narrow paths. Getting an army up there was a logistical nightmare. The people of Shadow's mountain didn't seek out battles, didn't send their fighters out, but they defended their mountain fiercely.
There were no children fearful of the dark in the mountain. If some of the newcomers' children seemed nervous, the monks and nuns would take their hands and walk them through the Temple, pointing out the soft glowing crystals—like the stars in the night sky—and how Shadow was nothing bad. He was the safety of a cave in a typhoon, and the darkness of the womb. It was safe here. And you were never alone, in the dark.
It had all gone wrong, apparently. Pronyma wasn't a scientist of any sort, not an engineer like Kvar, or a war hero like Forcystus. She got to where she was now because of luck and the sheer stubbornness to not die.
Or at least, that's how she understood her medical records.
Pronyma had been a candidate for Martel's soul. Even Lord Yuan verified the results of the tests. Not an exact match, but close enough to be worth a shot of trying. Pronyma was off in the details, apparently. Her green hair was a few shades too dark, her eyes too violet; she had the broader bones of her human father, with the sharper cut of his jaw. But the mana signature was close, the DNA pretty close. She even had a proclivity for light magic, as Yggdrasill tested her with basic Photon spells.
Pronyma wasn't the only one. She was in a batch of ten, and she would be the only survivor. The experiments for Exspheres were different, in those days. Not nearly as kind as they would get later.
There had been attempts to curb the physical changes of Exspheres and Cruxis Crystals, to stop the mana from turning people into monsters, to keep crystallization from happening. The backlashes and side effects were too severe for bodies to handle, creating worse and worse mutations. There had been a survivor from the previous batch of testing too—a girl named Kilia, her body warped and bent, looking like a monster herself.
When Pronyma came out of her post-experiment coma, there were braces on her legs and a complicated magitechnology apparatus around her. Lord Yuan sat at a desk at the end of the infirmary, writing something.
It took all her strength to even make a sound, hardly louder than a whisper. Lord Yuan heard her though. He strode to her bedside, checking on the machines monitoring her vitals, on the apparatus surrounding her almost like a cage.
"You've been in a coma for seven months," he explained, writing things down on a clipboard hung at her bedside. "Frankly, we didn't think you'd come out of it. You are currently on a significant amount of painkillers. We will wean you off them slowly to find out the exact amount of damage done."
"Damage?" Pronyma tried to say, but her mouth barely wanted to work.
Lord Yuan seemed to figure it out anyway. "Your legs shattered below the knee, and you burst every bone in your left hand. Your right hand still had some intact. For our best guess, your mana went out of control, but rather than turning inward and turning you into a monster, you tried to channel it out and ended up functionally creating explosions in your extremities. Currently, the only thing holding your bones together is this machine." He pointed at the apparatus around her. "Now that you're awake, we can take better stock of what exactly happened."
There were doubts about whether she would ever so much as sit up again. If she hadn't managed to break herself into paralysis. Yuan and several dwarves worked with the apparatus, and a Healer tried to fix the damage Pronyma had done to herself.
She didn't leave that room for years. Couldn't leave the bed for nearly two. She stayed there, in a room in Derris-Kharlan, tucked away in the void of space, by herself. She saw the same rotating group of about five people, and was left alone far too often. And Derris-Kharlan was silent. She stared out the window at the vastness of space, idly reaching and playing with her own mana like a child in their crib trying to make the mobile move.
The dark reached back, at some point. Toying back with her, sometimes idly puffing against her hair or curling against the sharp edges of her broken body. If anyone else could feel those odd dark spots, with the shadows just a bit too fuzzy or too dark, no one made mention of it to her.
In a year, Pronyma managed to sit up under her own power. It took an Exsphere at the base of her spine and one on each hip, but she managed it. Her hands took longer. So many little bones, such delicate muscle groups and nerves. The Healing was methodical and careful, with therapies working to get her motion back.
With the slow exercises of rotating her wrists and trying to curl her fingers, Pronyma reached back out for the dark. Felt it reach back, experimented with how to gather it, how to make it more solid. It was like light magic, in a way, but instead of narrowing it for more effectiveness, you had to broaden it, had to let it fill space instead of cut through it.
The dwarves were the first to notice what Pronyma could do now. One of them—a broad one, even for a dwarf, with silver streaked red hair—sat with her, looking at the results of the experiments, a file easily several inches thick.
"You had not done dark magic before, had you?" Their accent was thick, the vowel short and deep.
"No."
"I thought not. Most mages that can do either light or dark aren't capable of doing the opposite."
Pronyma frowned. "But I can still do light magic." It had been something to entertain herself, trapped in this bed. Making witchlights hover above her, changing colors and sizes, letting them dance and dazzle. A child's trick, but much harder when one couldn't properly move their body to guide the movement.
"You can." They grinned at her, lopsided. "Which makes that an interesting result of the experiment."
A dwarven monk came to help her with dark magic. His name was Broc, and he wasn't as patient as the other people in charge of Pronyma's care. It meant they got along, and Pronyma excelled under he mentorship.
She earned her tattoos before she was discharged, a timeframe unheard of apparently.
Broc inked them on her, bold red patterns that, he explained, were marks of the blood she'd shed for the Goddess, and the powers gifted from her, opposite, but just as thoughtful. They, combined with the apparatus Lord Yuan and the other engineers developed, would have her upright and mobile again.
It took half a dozen Exspheres attached to the braces—her legs would never be strong enough to hold her up on her own again—and it took several months to make the apparatus more portable. Lord Yuan was there, when she floated for the first time. He and the dwarves had developed a type of hover technology, using some combination of her mana, the planet's mana, and the electromagnetic pulse of the planet. The runes inscribed on the apparatus were complex, some mirroring the ones inked on her body. A helmet was designed for her as well, to help guide her movements with a push of her thoughts instead of physically using her mana and muscles to do it.
It took months to learn to do it properly, to adjust and calibrate the apparatus so moving was effortless. When Pronyma managed a lap down to the end of the hall and back with no difficulties, excitement brimmed in her. This was what Cruxis was capable of, what they wanted the world to be. A place where no one was trapped in their own bodies, where medicine could advance and no one would be shunned for inappropriate knowledge.
"Lord Yuan," she said, coming to a stop in front of him.
"Is there a problem, Pronyma?" He'd been professional to a fault with her throughout these years of recovery, designing the systems and machines, troubleshooting everything. He was brilliant, if cold, and oddly patient with her recovery, even when it had been one step forward, four steps back.
"Let me serve Cruxis. Lord Yggdrasill is right. This type of prosperity needs to be shared, and our people don't deserve to live in fear."
Lord Yuan took a long time to answer, his unfathomable eyes boring into her. She'd seen a similar look before, when he was running calculations at the infirmary desk. "…I'll see where we can find a place for you."