Chapter 19

A wizard is one who prepares

In the vision I was a boy, a young boy going to school who knew nothing of his past. The boy, his name was Acura, lived in a small island nation called Japin. And the boy had magic, of a sort. It wasn't like the magic we had on Pyre, it was slow and clumsy. Was the vision about the past? I saw fantastic sights like flying machines, tall metal buildings, and metal machines that ran on tracks. Was it the future? It reminded me of stories about the world before the Chaos Moon came to our solar system and changed everything. Or was it another world? I couldn't tell. The boy knew only his world, a world of ghosts, and demons, and struggling to protect a world that neither knew or cared to know of such things. His only companions were a girl his own age named Mickey, and a younger boy with no powers at all, named Bull. The boy's magic was too slow to use in combat, but as the boy's situation grew darker and more dangerous, he realized he needed more help. He could already call upon a spell much like my own, the one that created Athame, but his was a great bird of fire. This magic pulled upon him just as it did me, forcing him to split his attention and making him less effective. Did the boy not know how to create a focus like I had? Could no one make one for him? He bore his burdens alone, it seemed. But the boy wasn't stupid. He modified the spell to make a smaller bird, and gave to it spells of defense so he could keep it near and allow it to protect him during his struggles with a demon that was trying to rile up the spirits. This bird hardly affected him, and proved itself in combat time and again, protecting him as he cast longer spells or simply to deflect blows so he didn't have to himself. It was a glorious solution, but even that was not enough for the boy. He tired too quickly, but realized his magical constructs had spirit energy of their own. So he made a third companion, one with magic to transfer its energy into him, so he didn't have to hold back in a combat and could recover easily afterwords. Then did the boy become a true protector to Mickey.

I began to lose the vision. No. No. I had to see what other techniques the boy discovered! I couldn't go yet, there was still so much I could learn from the boy. So much! "Mickey!"

I thrashed around, calling out in my delirium as strong arms held me down.

"It's okay Orchid," a voice told me. "It's fine, you're going to be fine."

My eyes popped open, but I had to look away. A bright light was above me, and I hurt everywhere. "What?" I managed.

"We're safe, for the moment," Malachite told me. "Are you okay? I thought I lost you, don't scare me like that!"

The attack came back to me. "Hanz! Snarly! Are they-"

"They're fine, I think. Snarly is fine. Hanz is still stuck to the wall. I don't know. Can you kill one of his kind with just cold? Can you move?"

"I'm so cold, but I'll try. What did you..." I managed to look at the light that he was holding.

"You like it?" He moved it, and I saw he had made a crude torch by wrapping his sword up in rags and lighting it on fire. "Those wolves are scared of the fire but who knows for how long. We need to prepare better."

"No kidding. Let me heal myself and we can go see about Hanz."

"Here's something funny I think you'll like," he went on as he helped me up.

"What's that?"

"When your light went out, I could still see just fine. Another 'gift' of my dragon heritage I guess."

So I just need a spell to transfer someone's abilities to others and we'll be all set. "Glad you're getting something out of all this..."

Once up again I cast my healing spell a few times, on myself, him, and Snarly. We headed back into the central cave, it seemed Malachite had pulled me into the first section again away from the ice and cold in the other room. It was freezing, ice was everywhere, but he held his sword nearby as I cast the repair spell on Hanz and they too finished coming around. We broke them out of the ice and I apologized for my lapse.

"Both of them, I guess," I went on. "Even had I been able to save you by pulling you into the astral as I intended, the light would have come with me leaving Snarly in the dark. Some adventurers we are." Naturally I didn't worry about Malachite now as he could apparently see in the dark. It only would have disadvantaged Snarly.

"No worries," Hanz replied. "But now we must decide our fate for the next few minutes. Do we press on, hoping that our encounter with the ice creatures has adequately prepared us for their next attack, or fall back for now and come up with a new strategy?"

"We could be centimeters from the ice orb," I mused. "It could simply be tucked away back there. I hate to think our prize is just sitting there and we were simply too timid to pick it up."

"Perhaths we could have thish conversation ethwhere?" Snarly asked. "Ith freezing here."

"Grab on, we'll head to the astral," I decided. "If there are more guardians at least we can tell that and plan our next move with all the facts."

"Sounds good to me," the others agreed, and we vanished.

Malachite went ahead, peering through the plains as best he could. He jogged back to us looking grim. "Bad news," he reported. "More ice creatures and ghosts in the chamber ahead. The orb is there too. And more bad news, I think the ghosts saw me somehow."

"Impossible!" I scoffed.

"Maybe, but explain how they looked right at me as I moved around."

"Uh..."

"Curious," Hanz remarked. "So now we have the facts. What is our next move?"

Everyone was silent for a moment, thinking. "By the way, what was that you shouted?" Malachite asked me.

"The what?" I answered, confused.

"When I woke you up, you shouted something."

"How did you wake me up, by the way?"

"Healing potion. I just poured it on you, I'm glad that worked."

"What healing potion?"

"We found 'ome earlier, remember?" Snarly announced. "I'm thmart, tho I remembered and kepth them nearby."

"Good thinking," I praised. "I'll get some replacements for sure. How about that, it did turn out that I was hit hard enough to need them. Maybe I have a little seer in me as well? I wonder if that's how I saw that vision."

"Vision?" Malachite pressed.

"When I was unconscious..." I explained about the boy and his magical companions, and how I was thinking of following that example.Was it a divine vision? I'm not particularly devout, but I do try to keep these three from too much sin. Perhaps this has afforded me a little nudge from the heavens. I have spoken to the angel of death, after all, and I was almost dead just then. Perhaps they are watching over me because I kill so much."Now, if we do want to press on, give me a minute to mana cycle my core. If I cultivate for a moment I should have enough potential to socket a few spell engrams into the ally spell template and create a new defender for myself. It will still be the ally spell so my necklace can hold it, and we can continue the assault. I'd still like to be… What?" My companions were all looking at me like I had gone nuts. "Oh, sorry, just talking about magic! Did I lose you? I vote going back and better preparing. Those ice creatures- an attack with no casting time, area effect, and can hit us through phasing? Never experienced so cheap an attack in all my life. Doesn't even seem to be part of this world, everything here has a counter or downside to balance it out. But that took us apart. We need some kind of defense."

"Agreed," Hanz said with a nod. "We are chilled, outnumbered, and perhaps outclassed. A retreat is a tactically sound decision."

"If we don't have to fight them again," Malachite countered. "For all we know this cave creates the creatures."

"Then why stop at just the number we have already seen? Why not absolutely fill the cave with them? They are clearly guarding the orb, and more guards are always better than less."

"...That's a good point. Okay, let's head back."

Naturally we couldn't talk much with the enlarged Malachite flying us back, but I was too busy berating myself anyway. Even to be too concerned about the height. I was supposed to be the responsible one! The one that thought ahead! Why had I kept that stupid shield spell when I realized it was personal only? Why had I rushed to aid Hanz but put myself in so much danger? I knew how fragile I was, just hitting a doorframe could crack one of my curse crystals and make me wince. I had put everyone in danger with my actions, and I had to do better. A lot better. Always the astral, never phase, that's my new catchphrase.

Hanz announced they were heading to the library to research the creatures, see what they could come up with in terms of weaknesses and such. (Apart from the obvious, fire?) I put on my disguise spell, a rabbit beast-kin I had used in the past but suddenly named Broccoli for some reason that had me giggling as I walked, and headed to Solara's shop. Man, I could totally go for a cinnamon bun right now. Her apprentice was competent enough to sell me a light spell and directed me to the spell directory so I could see what else I wanted to buy. Making us immune to cold would be fine, but fairly specific. I needed a single spell that could help everybody, me included, because holding onto spells really did distract me so the solution wasn't to hold on to more spells, but as a magic user what else could I do?

"Perhaps I can help?" Solara offered, after I had been paging through the book for about fifteen minutes. It was pretty huge, listing the standard spells the Guild had on offer in alphabetical order. Theorized grade, price, brief description of effect, planetary sphere cast under, the whole works. No formulas of course, that would have made the book several meters tall and be the most valuable item on this continent!

"I'm not even sure what I'm looking for," I admitted. Why do I have the overwhelming urge to hug this woman? Hug everybody, really. Odd. "Maybe having another maintaining focus made for a second magical ally focused on attack? But I know that's really expensive, this one I had made a hundred and fifty years or so ago cost me a bundle and I don't have my family's resources anymore. Plus it doesn't really help the party that much-"

"Perhaps starting at the beginning?" she asked, confused. "What do you hope to accomplish?"

"Oh, right! Sorry!" I explained the situation, and how we had nearly died. How I didn't want to maintain a bunch of magic and how most of my spells were fire and forget anyway to help my team either directly or by messing with our opponents. But we needed light, torches just wasn't going to cut it, (who wanted to carry it? Everyone used two handed weapons but me, but I needed my hands free to cast!) and we needed Hanz to be able to use his weapon more, and if Malachite and Snarly could hit better all the time-

"I know exactly what you need, if you have the skill for it," she cautioned.

"I count myself a fair wizard," I didn't mind bragging. "And I'm fast. I can usually get off two spells, both empowered, while my hunk- I mean lunk of a draig swings his sword once." My hunky boy! Wanna hug him when I get back! What is wrong with me today?

"I see. May I?" She held her hands out for the book and I passed it over. She paged through and got to the S section, handing it back. I took a look, and my eyes got wide.

"This spell is amazing!" I gushed.

"It is. But hard to learn, and expensive."

"Yeah..." I put a hand on my coin pouch. "I wonder if I can afford it?" Of course, spells should be free, or have a token cost. There's really no reason they can't be apart from policy. I'm trying to keep my party alive and doing good in the world, the Guild is trying to squeeze as much coin from me as possible. Which of us is really on the moral high ground, and thus, the argument is over?

"Then let me look around the back. Given the cost and difficulty, you can probably imagine there's not much call for it. But I do believe I have a copy somewhere."

"Please, take your time and look properly!" I insisted. Not have it right at hand? But it seems to be the most useful spell ever? Even at a high difficulty, this is the sort of thing you practice every day because it'll make your life so much easier. It's going to make my life so much easier...

"Be right back."

She went into the back and I read the spell over again. Basically, you cast a spell that had "holes" in it, just like the ally spell did. But instead of needing to have the spell fully engraved into your mana core such that it was the same every time, this spell hung in the air attached to an object. You then slotted another spell into it, and both were sucked into the object. The object could then be used by anyone, and would maintain the spell for you. Basically, a single use imbued object that took only a minute or so to create! Why hadn't I seen this one in my family's records? Or had I just forgotten about it? Hard to say. I put the book back on the counter and looked around the shop as the apprentice kept an eye on me. Strange, nothing for sale that would indicate she's using the spell. But it seems like I could? Shatter rock into some thin disks, and put the spell onto the disk. I could make a whole bunch of them- light, healing, compass, detect enemies, pest repellent, hygiene, communication… The list goes on. They're easy to make taking my time and empowering everything. Sell them for the standard price of casting the final spell, as really that's the only spell the user is directly benefiting from. This satisfies guild rules, and my magic is now out there helping people all over. I get money for basically hardly any work, and if I brought barrels of them here she could manage the collection and take a cut for using the space in her shop. She could make money doing literally nothing. Then I wouldn't need to set up a booth or shop of my own. Think she would go for it? I can only make a few to prove the concept and try to convince her. Is there some rule against it? Why hasn't she done it herself? Very odd.

"Here we go!" she announced, finally coming back with a scroll in her hands. "Found it."

"Let's count my coins," I said, dreading the outcome.

In the end I had just enough, but was now basically broke. Good thing I at least have the steady income of my statuary business, I thought. And I don't eat much and the house is already paid for. So I should be good. I'll get the orb, take care of Jekserah, and then hopefully make it back selling spell tokens in a couple of weeks. Of course I have no idea how popular they would be but maybe some posters printed up to announce the new product- One thing at a time, let's get to work.

I announced to the others, when they arrived back at the house, I would be spending today and probably the next day studying the spell. It was that complex and I didn't want to mess it up. They were free to do whatever and that when I was done, we would easily take out any forces arrayed against us.I hope I'm not overselling it, but just freeing me up to let Hanz fire his beam weapon as much as they want whenever they want is going to be huge.That got their curiosity up but I said I wanted it to be a surprise, and that a lot of our problems were about to be solved. They left me to it, but I stopped Hanz as they were about to leave the room.

"Wait, did you find anything?" I asked.

"Not much," they admitted. "Elemental creatures such as gnomes and undines have, of course, been known almost as long as the chaos moon has hung in our sky. These creatures are different. They vanish when killed, like a demon, but are made of their element. I found one reference, in an old book, about a theoretical elemental plane or planes each relating to the elements. The work theorized this is where elemental energy comes from when channeled by wizards or demons, rather than simply being created out of nothing. Spells that attack with the elements simply open a hole of varying size to this plane, which lets elemental energy through. As spells here can become sentient, in the form of cohesions, it is thus theorized raw elemental energy could come through to our world and take shape in a similar way. What such a creature would want, once it was here? That can only be speculated upon."

They did seem perfectly content to stand around that cave, but how did they get the ghosts to work for them? "You've got that right," I agreed. "Well done, that's more than we knew before. Elemental demons, for lack of a better term. As if the Gloom wasn't bad enough. Not that we've seen much of that lately. Okay, thanks for doing that." Unless that's how, it's all connected to the Gloom?

"Of course."

I studied for what felt like hours, then took a break to take care of the other parts of my plan. Sitting in the middle of my workshop I closed my eyes and started breathing deeply, feeling mana flowing around me and directing it to my core. I had some work to do here as well.

"Did you fall asleep?" a voice asked me some time later. I cracked one eye open and saw Malachite standing there, looking a little sheepish. "Oh, I guess not!"

"I'm cultivating," I told him. "But I can take a break. What's up?"

"Oh, nothing," he waved his hands around. "Just wondered how it was going, if you wanted some company? Something to drink? Oh right, you don't do that much. I'm probably bothering you, I'll just leave." He turned to go.

"It's fine," I told him. "I should get to bed soon, but I'm almost done here. Then I can get back to studying tomorrow."

"That's great. Er, done with what? You were just sitting there?"

"What do you know about the mana core?" I asked.

"Well it's the core, isn't it? Of… Mana."

"So nothing," I sighed. "Not that I would expect you to. Look, sit down."

"Okay!" He did, across from me.

"Right. So for the most part, magic is imprinted on the soul," I began. "You have to be born with a mana core to cast magic. Those that easily inscribe magic to their core, and can use their souls to strengthen their spells we call natural magicians. Those like me that use ambient mana to fuel our magic and can learn to pull in a little bit more for a single spell, are called scholars. I won't talk about those using orreries that's a whole different thing. Anyway. Think of the mana core as a ball, a glass ball, and spells as being engraved onto the ball. The mana, which naturally collects in the ball, passes from the center through the engraving, and takes a certain shape. That shape is the spell that's being cast, and we call the final product magic. Here." I got up and got the spell I was studying. "What do you see?"

"It's just a bunch of gibberish."

"Right. What you can't see, and what I can only feel, is the engraving I'm trying to do onto my soul using this spell formula as a template. This isn't just ink on paper, there's magic bound into it. Part of the process of learning the spell is taking that magic, engraving it onto my soul, and then returning it so it can be learned by someone else in the future. It's why we have so little understanding of how early magic was done. Like the Skybourne islands or the magic used in the war after the moon came. We have the writings, sure. You've even seen some, like with that whole diamond episode and the warehouse. But they're so old they have no more magical template. They're dead writings. We can't learn anything from them. They're trash. Jekserah must have been trying to recreate whatever spell that was from scratch, maybe using ancient techniques that scholar's book talked of? So, what am I doing? Cultivation is the process of changing your mana core. I take in mana from the environment, it's pretty much everywhere, and I use it in various ways. Remember how I said it was like a ball? It has only a certain amount of 'space' to write spells onto. I don't want to cast the stupid light shield spell anymore so I'm smoothing that space out. I'm going to put my new defender spell in its place, they're about the same size so it works out. I also have to make room for this spell, it's quite large, so I'm smoothing out some other spells I don't use. Like detect traps, we have Snarly for that."

"When he's not almost dying from setting them off."

"Well, they get noticed that way, right?" We both chuckled. Something wrong with that boy.

"Once it's smooth I can write to that space again. Of course I can make more space by making the sphere bigger. That takes longer though, pushing magic into the core so the outside expands, like a glass blower. Of course this is all metaphorical, I don't have a glass ball in my soul."

"I'm not that dumb!"

"Just making sure. So that's what I'm doing. I'll work on inscribing this new spell, the light spell, and my new idea for a defender spell. After we get the orb I'll come back here and expand my core so I can write a slightly different variant of the ally spell that'll focus on attack. I'll use the new spell so I don't have to concentrate on that one, and the old necklace for the defender."

"How does this new spell help you with that?"

I waggled my finger at him. "Ah ah ah, that would be telling. Don't worry, you're going to love it. You should look forward to it."

"I guess I will. Thanks for the explanation… It was interesting." But he made no move to get up, and looked a bit troubled.

"What is it?" I pressed.

"This whole dragon thing, it's got me thinking. Lots of them are magicians, they have the time and the resources to study magic. Do you think one day I can use it too?"

"Here, let's see your hands." I held my hands out and he shyly took them. I concentrated, trying to feel any magical potential in his soul. "Now that's interesting," I finally announced.

"What? What is it?"

"It's almost like an echo. You don't have a mana core, not yet, but it's almost like one could form, with a bit of pushing. I could teach you more about cultivation and feeling out magic, I think you're one of the rare ones because of your heritage that might be able to create a core when you weren't born with one. Or maybe you were, and it's just developing, like your sudden immunity to fire? Maybe it'll just suddenly be there one day? You should probably document the process, I'm sure scholars of all kinds would be interested in your progress and if the process is exclusively trigger based or can happen spontaneously."

He grinned at me. "Leave it to you to want me to write a whole research paper on my… evolution? Is that what this is?"

"Perhaps there was just so little dragon left in your background it's just taking its time to be expressed? It's a pity you had such a hard time growing up, your bad memories of the town and your true ancestor not being forthcoming make getting answers more difficult. Well, I wouldn't worry about it, you are who you are and will become what are you meant to be. I'm sure it's all part of the plan."

"I guess you're right."

I looked down to my hands. "Better not give the others any wrong impressions if they saw us like this."

"Right!" He snatched them back and hastily got up. "I'll leave you to your mana… Whatever it was. See you tomorrow!" He rushed off.

I shook my head. Dragons live a long time, how does that song go? A dragon lives forever, not so little boys. You'll have to grow up soon, my friend. And I'll be right there with you, our adventures will last a long time, given how long we should both live. If we don't get killed in ice caves… I went back to cultivating, I had work to do.