by John Bierce
The pattern linking spellform was the most versatile spellform he’d ever used, but that very versatility made it aggravatingly difficult to use at times. He definitely understood why Kanderon didn’t want him tinkering with the spellform— he’d be more likely to make it fail or injure himself than to improve things.
“Alright, then,” Alustin said. “Everyone ready?”
They all glared at him. He laughed, then stepped between them to perch on the railing directly behind the figurehead— which also served as the bowsprit for the Rising Cormorant.
“So,” Alustin said. “I’ve been talking to Artur about your educations, and he believes you’ve all become too focused in your studies. I’ve come to agree with his arguments.”
“Being focused is a good thing, though, right?” Talia asked.
“It certainly can be, and narrow courses of study can be useful in a lot of respects, but many of the greatest mages achieve their mastery not just via depth of study, but breadth as well,” Alustin said. “Quite a few mages have developed entirely new techniques and spells by studying affinities other than their own. Artur’s a great example of that, in fact.”
They all glanced at Godrick, who looked blank for a moment, until a look of realization crossed his face. “Right! Me da developed his armor after studyin’ illusion magic fer years, ta figure out how ta make it work. Lots a’ stone mages have developed armor before, but it always either took active shapin’ and intense focus, or was prohibitively mana hungry, but da figured out how ta pull it off by modifyin’ the techniques illusionists use when they create illusions based off physical objects— illusion anchors.”
“Which, I can assure you, isn’t as nearly as easy as it sounds,” Alustin said. “Plenty of people have tried to mimic Artur’s approach, but there’s clearly more to it than just that. I’ve met few other mages as brilliant as Artur.”
Godrick smiled proudly at that.
“So for the rest of this summer, along with many of my other planned lessons, I’m going to be introducing you to the abilities and techniques of various other affinities,” Alustin said. “Not only in hopes of inspiring you to think of new techniques or new ways to use your own affinities in creative ways, but also so that you have more familiarity with different affinities if you need to fight them in the future.”
The tiny bone shard between Talia’s hands started expanding, and she hastily threw it overboard. The resulting explosion was small enough that it likely wouldn’t have done more than burn her fingers, but Hugh thought it was pretty obvious why Talia wouldn’t want that.
“Start again, Talia,” Alustin said. He waited for her to pull out a new bone shard before continuing. “I decided I’d start with one of the strangest affinities— shadow affinities. Does anyone know what, precisely, shadow affinities affect?”
“Shadows?” Sabae guessed, somewhat sarcastically. A bit of water sprayed out of her spinning armor and splashed Hugh, and he almost lost control of the salt crystal he was growing in the waves beside the ship.
“And what’s a shadow?” Alustin asked.
“It’s… a lack of light?” Hugh ventured.
“Exactly,” Alustin said. “It’s a lack of light. That’s the weird bit, though— how many affinities do you know of that affect a lack of something, rather than a thing?”
They were all silent for a moment as Alustin stared at them.
“Ah guess… ah haven’t seen another like that?” Godrick said.
“So why is shadow unique like that?” Alustin asked. “How is it the only affinity that affects an absence, rather than a presence?”
The bone shard in Talia’s hands grew a little bit, and its cracks shone slightly brighter for a moment, but then it seemed to stabilize.
“It’s affecting something other than the shadows?” Talia said. “Like… the light, maybe?”
Alustin grinned at her. “Right on the mark, at least half the time. That was actually something of a trick question, because shadow affinities are what is known as a compound affinity. That is to say, there are two entirely different forms of shadow affinity. Compound affinities are actually fairly common— there are, for instance, at least six different versions of ice affinities. There’s one that functions via draining and moving heat, almost like a fire affinity, and there’s another that works like a crystal affinity specialized for just ice crystals. There’s yet another that is a water affinity variant, and so on and so forth.”
“What about stone affinities?” Godrick asked.
Alustin shook his head. “Stone affinities are, rather, a form of cluster affinity. It’s a subtle difference, but with compound affinities, you essentially have multiple versions of an affinity for a single substance, whereas with cluster affinities, you have a single affinity for multiple substances, like the different types of stone or, alternatively, different types of trees for tree affinities. Cluster affinities are where you most clearly see specificity translating into more power, though that rule still remains true of all affinities.”
“And is that why ah’m stronger with some types a’ stone and weaker with others? And likewise with me da, but different stones fer him?” Godrick asked.
Alustin nodded. “Most likely, though the specific mechanisms of how those variances occur aren’t known.”
“Are there other categories of affinity?” Hugh asked.
Alustin nodded. “Quite a few. There are structural affinities, like crystal or fiber affinities, which target structures or arrangements of material rather than varieties of material. Then there are monolithic affinities, like solar, wind, or flame affinities, which only affect a single material in a single manner.”
“I hadn’t heard the term compound affinity before, but fire is definitely a compound affinity,” Talia said.
Alustin raised an eyebrow at her. “That… is certainly a bold claim.”
Talia shrugged. “I can’t tell you more— because it’s a clan secret— but are you really going to argue with a member of Clan Castis about fire?”
Alustin grinned at that. “That would be even bolder of me, so no.”
Sabae raised her hand. “I hadn’t heard those terms either, but my family suspects there are different types of wind affinities too— we haven’t been able to prove it, but we suspect air has different components to it, and that a lot of what we see as variations in wind affinity power is actually variations in what part of the wind the mage is affecting? So I guess it would be a cluster affinity.”
“Different components of wind?” Alustin asked, visibly intrigued.
“I haven’t spent a lot of time looking into it,” Sabae said, “but some of my family members believe it’s why a candle goes out when you place a glass jar over it— because it’s burned through some component of the air as fuel.”
“So, what yeh’re saying is that the world will run out of air someday because a’ fire?” Godrick asked.
Both Talia and Sabae shook their heads at that.
“Plants produce whatever part of the air it is that fire needs,” Talia said. “Clan Castis has known that for a while now.”
Sabae nodded in agreement.
“I’m definitely going to want to speak to both of you more about this later,” Alustin said. “All of this, I should note, is on the theoretical end of things, not so much the practical, but neglecting the study of magical theory is a good way to stifle your ability to innovate. Purely practical education makes effective battle mages, but it won’t make you an archmage or a great power. Of course, neither will purely theoretical education— a balance is needed between the two. And for all that taxonomies like this one are often among the more arbitrary theoretical constructs, they’re still highly useful.”
Talia cursed and threw her bone shard overboard, where it detonated. Alustin waited patiently while she started the process all over again.
“Anyhow, back to shadow affinities,” Alustin said, once she was charging a new bone shard. “There are only two types of shad
ow affinity. One is, like Talia guessed, a close relative of light affinities. It effectively acts as a light barrier, creating shadows. It can be used to turn invisible and has limited illusion-generating ability. Yves Heliotrope, one of the Skyhold Council members that died in the battle against Bakori, had both a light affinity and a shadow affinity of this sort— which allowed her to generate shadows for her light-based illusions, something purely light-affinity based illusionists can’t do. That’s the easiest way to identify a light-based illusion, by the way— look for missing shadows, at least for entirely constructed illusions. Illusions that are just masking another object might still have something of a shadow, though it will be distorted. Other illusions based in different affinities have different weaknesses you can learn to identify.”
Hugh shuddered, thinking about Yves’ body impaled on Bakori’s tail, and his salt crystal began to dissolve. He quickly stabilized it, and dismissed the image from his mind.
“The other type of shadow affinity is a lot more interesting for our purposes,” Alustin continued. “Not to mention, it’s significantly more powerful, and one you’ve encountered before.”
“Eudaxus, the high priest of Indris’ cult,” Sabae said.
Alustin smiled at her, and then clambered all the way up onto the railing, until he was standing atop it.
“Eudaxus,” he agreed. “He can make shadows tangible, transmit his voice through them, even teleport through them across short distances— which, by and large, is one of the rarest abilities any affinity can have. Of course, Eudaxus is one of the most powerful shadow mages alive, and stands fairly high in the ranks of archmages, but it’s still astonishing. His variety of shadow affinity is sometimes called a darkness or night affinity, but I prefer simply calling it a greater shadow affinity. Less ambiguous and confusing, to my mind, since I’ve heard regular shadow affinities called night or darkness affinities quite often as well.”
“Will Hugh ever be able to teleport with his spatial affinity?” Talia asked.
Alustin shook his head. “Probably not. It’s possible, of course— it’s one of the other rare affinities that can do it. It’s so prohibitively difficult that you basically have to spend years mastering it at the expense of almost all other applications of the affinity— both due to the opportunity cost, and due to the fact that teleportation can disrupt extraplanar spaces. And, as those are Kanderon’s specialty as a planar mage, she doesn’t personally use it.”
The smell of sea salt rolled over them, more apparent for its previous absence, and it was Godrick’s turn to curse. Alustin waited patiently for the smell to recede again before continuing.
“I could have you play an elaborate guessing game to figure out how Eudaxus does that,” Alustin said, a grin on his face, “but I think I’m being hard enough on you already today. A greater shadow affinity is a type of affinity known as a meta-affinity, a vanishingly small category. In fact, the only other I know of off-hand are dream affinities and language affinities, the latter of which only the Ithonian Empire ever developed. Meta-affinities mimic the abilities of multiple otherwise non-contiguous affinities. In the case of greater shadow affinities, it’s a blend of spatial, shadow, light, and force affinities. This isn’t an exact metaphor, of course— someone with all four of those regular affinities would be hard-pressed to replicate greater shadow affinities, since it’s not truly a blend of those abilities, but rather just mimics their effects. Rather, greater shadow affinities work by, well, ignorance.”
The ship hit a particularly large wave, and all four students cursed. Talia’s bone shard went skidding across the deck before Sabae sent it flying into the water with a well-timed gust strike. The water spinning around her other arm, however, drenched the other three. Hugh lost his magical grip on the salt crystal, and he had to frantically reach out with his affinity sense to find and retrieve it as it sank.
Godrick’s loss of control wasn’t as dramatic as the others, but still resulted in the smell of salt flooding back.
Alustin, meanwhile, simply stepped with the lurching of the ship over their heads, to the railing on the other side. He was hardly even splashed by Sabae’s loss of control.
Someone— Hugh was guessing Alustin— cast a drying cantrip on the group. Their teacher waited patiently standing atop the railing for them to all resume their practice before he resumed.
Several Radhan children, the youngest barely old enough to walk, watched them from near the foremast, laughing at them.
“Essentially, Eudaxus and other greater shadow users seem to be able to, for lack of a better description, trick places into thinking that they are other places, with other properties, or even to link them together somehow. Almost as though the lack of light inside of a shadow makes its contents less certain, less real.”
“That’s bizarre,” Talia said. “And it seems entirely different than what a dream affinity does.”
Hugh shrugged. “Seems pretty similar to me, at least in how weird it is.”
“Maybe,” Talia said, “but I don’t know what lessons we’re supposed to draw from this, either about how to fight a greater shadow affinity or how we’re supposed to apply this to our own affinities.”
Alustin fixed her with an ominous smile. “As to the first, fighting greater shadow affinities is straightforward enough. Prevent a shadow from staying in one place or becoming too clear, and it becomes difficult for a greater shadow mage to affect. Weakening the shadows with more light also does the trick. The latter question, that of applying it to your own affinities, however, is a lot more interesting. It would take several weeks of lecturing to explain in detail, but it reflects on a concept much bandied about by pre-Ithonian philosophers— the idea of representation space. Representation space was a hypothetical transcendent location where affinities came from— where the ideal form of all things was located. Both real objects and affinities were supposedly just representing what was found in that space, with each affinity there representing a node in a sort of strange, multi-dimensional conceptual grid.”
“Ah thought yeh told us the Ithonians proved that wrong, though,” Godrick said. “That nothin’ a’ the sort existed.”
Alustin pointed at him. “Precisely correct. They did not, however, do away entirely with the idea of representation space. It transfigured, as some ideas do, into something the Ithonians called description space. Rather than a transcendent plane where the true forms of all things existed, it was a purely notional space where the descriptions of all things existed, and that affinities were nodes in the multi-dimensional conceptual grid of description space, along intersections of axes of physical properties like hardness, density, melting point, size, and so on and so forth.”
“Purely notional meaning fake?” Hugh asked.
Alustin swayed on the railing as he tilted his head to one side, then the other. “Well… it’s certainly not real except as an idea, but not being real is hardly the same as being fake.”
“I’m still not seeing the relevance of this,” Talia said, though there was a note of apprehension in her voice.
Alustin’s smile grew even wider. “In essence, meta-affinities, rather than being nodes in description space, are claimed by some philosophers to be axes in description space. Not axes for any normal physical property, however, but for stranger ones, that intersect non-contiguous nodes in description space. As for the relevance of all this, well… you, Talia, are going to be spending the next few weeks reading pre-Ithonian philosophy, Ithonian studies that disprove that philosophy, and a long, long list of post-Ithonian essays and texts on description space, and then at the end, you’ll be telling me what the relevance is.”
A glowing blue tattoo appeared on Alustin’s forearm, and an impressive stack of books appeared in midair above his hand. He levitated the stack down in front of Talia.
She glared at it for a moment, then glared at Alustin.
“So you’re having me investigate an imaginary space that even its creators don’t believe exist,
that was made up to respond to another imaginary space that was disproven,” Talia said.
“Essentially, yes,” Alustin said.
“I hate this more than any other assignment I’ve ever received,” Talia said.
Alustin just smiled at her.
Talia scowled and threw her newest bone shard overboard.
By sheer bad luck, it detonated right alongside Hugh’s submerged salt crystal, cracking it apart and sending it towards the depths.
Hugh sighed, and prepared to start the process of growing a salt crystal all over again.
CHAPTER TEN
Unfortunate Dietary Choices
By the time their lesson was over, Godrick was exhausted and wrung out. His scent reservoir had given out fairly early on, so Alustin had set him to solving complex blacksmith puzzles using only his magic. Alustin had borrowed an enchanted blacksmith puzzle from Sabae for that— one that Godrick had actually given her for her birthday. Solving it with only his magic was far, far more challenging than solving it with his fingers— complex motions like that were harder to perform with magic than one’s hands. Listening to Alustin lecture them about different types of affinities had only made it harder. After shadow, he’d taught them about hair affinities, which were bizarre, and then an introductory lecture on the different types of illusion magic. Those ranged from light to dream to mirage, all the way to the absolutely terrifying perception affinities. Thankfully, those last were vanishingly rare, and their users tended to die horribly or drive themselves insane. There were also, apparently, illusionists that used cloth, pigment, and other such affinities to perform more physical illusions. Much of it was recap for Godrick, having heard many lectures on illusionists from his father, but Alustin put a fascinatingly different spin on things.
There were, apparently, many more such lessons to go on illusions— not just on how they worked, but how to spot them, how to see through them, and how to disrupt them.