by Dakota Krout
The mage was slack-jawed and couldn’t find anything to say in reply. No one questioned the Mage’s College! It… it was against their policies! Joe tilted his head back as he spoke out loud, “So now what, I wonder? I can’t simply let you run back and tattle on me. I suppose I could keep you here and use you for my rituals…”
“No! You will not use me as some sort of foul sacrifice to summon demonic beings!” The mage began to struggle heavily, even though he was obviously in great pain.
“What in the world…?” Joe looked shocked at the thought. “Of course I won’t do that! I’m the champion of a deity. Why would you think that would be allowed? I meant that I need a second member of my coven to activate more powerful rituals! This one almost killed me, and it is only a beginner tier! I can create apprentice rituals–maybe even expert tier if I need to–but I need people to join me in powering them. You seem to have access to mana already so why not?”
“You want me to join you in this proscribed activity?” The mage seemed to be about to faint.
“Yes.”
“No!”
“Well, dang. I was really hoping it wouldn’t come to this.” Joe sighed and pulled out his black book. He walked over to the table and began collecting circles and components onto a list. No matter how loudly the tied mage shouted, he was unable to break Joe’s concentration. As the sun rose in the morning, Joe looked down at a new ritual that glowed a lovely golden color. He sighed, looked at the mage who had either fallen asleep or fainted, and got to work. Out came the chalk, and Joe tried to keep quiet as he scratched the symbols onto the floor. The ring he drew up was large enough for a bed and a chair, about ten feet in diameter. Since he had made this ritual so very specific, the components were cheap and he had them readily available.
The silver chalice was once again filled with his blood, and yet again he grumbled about not being able to find or buy a smaller one. The captured mage groaned as the noise woke him up, blinking at Joe in obvious confusion. Fear flashed across his face as Joe stabbed him in the hand and began collecting the blood that dripped from the wound. “What are you doing!” His voice was hoarse, all the yelling the previous hours coming back to bite him.
Joe looked him in the eye without blinking. “Making a ritual, of course. I just started to get good at it and I need some practice.” He stepped to the side as the mage began to thrash, trying to move his broken body out of the circles surrounding him. He couldn’t move at all without his bonds twisting his broken bones so his attempt ultimately failed.
“I don’t want to be practice,” the mage whispered as tears formed in his eyes. Joe ignored him as he placed the blood in its position. He stepped out of the circle and looked at the whimpering mage.
“You came in here with the intent to either kill me or get me killed. You cannot be too surprised that I would seek retribution on you. I ask again, will you help me willingly?” Joe looked at the pitiful figure on the ground, hoping that he would accept his offer.
“I can’t!” the young mage’s words burst out in a terrified scream. “Every mage has to sign The Accords when they start school and when they graduate! This has to be done before they get their license! Even you travelers sign it, at least the few who have graduated or came into this world as full-fledged mages! I can’t willingly work with you. I’d die! Plus, I don’t even want to help you!”
“Firstly, stop screaming at me. If you want to speak against what I have to say, or you think I am wrong, give me reasons why I am wrong. Improve your argument. Next, why in the world would you sign something that kills you if you help someone?” Joe was looking at the man, aghast at the words even as a darker conspiracy theory tickled against his senses.
“I didn’t know! No one knew!” the mage howled at him. “It’s a binding contract; it forces us to follow the will of the Archmage. Since the lifespan of mages ranges into multiple hundreds of years, everyone that worked together to create The Accords had died before he made them mandatory for inclusion in the college. They hide the minor negative ramifications like this for good reason! The Accords were made to protect us and ensure that we work together as a society! Until now… until now I have always seen them as the greatest good, the thing that set us apart from the common rabble outside our walls! We have courses on The Accords and how it protects us against the rogue mages that have tried to destroy us in the past.”
“Minor negative ramifications? Taking away your freedom for an elusive ‘protection’ is never the solution. When are you protected? Give me examples of people attacking your college. When were your accords made, who voted on them, or were they forced upon your people? Who decided to hide important information from you until you had already signed them?” Joe looked sadly at the suddenly silent mage. “Tell me, what did your older mages say about The Accords?”
“Nothing!” The mage paused, suddenly seeing the discrepancy. “Actually nothing. They weren’t required to teach those classes, and we were always directed to the younger generations if we asked… looking back they seem… sad? Angry? I… I don’t understand.”
“What’s your name?” Joe asked the man quietly.
“Cel,” he answered, lost in thought. Panic appeared on his face. “No! I told you my name! Fiend!”
Joe rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I never needed your name for magic. I have your blood. I’m just trying to be nice and stop calling you ‘the puke and poop covered mage’ in my head. Thank you for the information.” He thought that he had heard enough, so he stepped back and concentrated on the ritual. “Hope this works.”
His words didn’t comfort Cel in the slightest. The mage’s eyes widened as he watched the mana flowing out of Joe. Since Joe was always doing his best to cut out distractions, he had never watched the process from the outside. As much as Cel hated to admit it, this was a beautiful piece of spell work. Mana poured into channels that were already prepared for it, creating strong bonds and links throughout. The spellform lashed out and converted the supplied components to energy, pulling what it needed into the ritual and turning the remainder to vapor. It almost looked like a lightning strike. The only thing different was the Core. When the mana struck out at it, the Core simply dimmed a bit.
Cel felt a strange pull inside of himself and gasped as the power from the ritual settled upon him like a blanket. He tried to escape once again, but his bonds forced him to remain still. Joe stood up, brushed off his knees, and watched as the ritual began to complete around Cel. The seconds ticked by, and the power piling atop Cel seemed to slowly vanish. After a full five minutes, Joe nodded and stepped over the ritual circles. He untied the mage, preemptively apologized, and pulled one of his broken bones into place. Cel screamed, but the sound seemed to echo strangely. When Joe pulled the next bone into place, the young mage passed out. After Joe had ensured that the bones were where they were supposed to be, he channeled his lay on hands spell and healed the mage as best as he could.
The bones would take more time to heal naturally, but… Joe decided that now would be a good time to practice fixing them. Nothing like a ‘willing’ and damaged target to hone his skills on! He started small, looking for the fragments floating next to where they were supposed to be. Pushing the shard into place, he tried to convince the small fragment to bind itself to the larger bone. The chunk of calcium simply ignored his orders. Joe huffed, feeling a bit upset. Why wasn’t this working? In every other game ever, as far as he knew, healing bones wasn’t an issue. To be fair, he hadn’t really played games, but... Then again, if he remembered correctly, healing was usually considered a ‘light’ spell and he didn’t have… he did have access to dark spells though. Could that work?
Joe tried to add darkness to his healing spell, braiding it into the water. To the naked eye, the water flowing from him simply turned black. Inside Cel’s body, Joe was able to see the darkness sink into the bone and fragment, acting as an adhesive that held them fast to each other. The darkness didn’t vanish even when Joe stopped putting power in
to it! Since bones didn’t have nerves in them and because the bone remained stable when he moved Cel’s arm, Joe had to conclude that the bone was healed. Hopefully the dark mana would eventually vanish and leave behind a healthy arm, but Joe would need to watch for side effects in the future.
“Gah!” Joe rolled his eyes and almost slapped himself. This was why he had been able to heal his own body to a much higher degree than he could heal others! Joe was already stuffed full of dark and water mana and could manipulate it freely when he healed himself. How had he not practiced with this yet? Joe could only blame his lacking skills on himself; he should have been practicing instead of gallivanting all over Eternia! He was almost spitting mad when he canceled the spell and tested Cel’s movement. His face was calm for the first time since they met, so Joe assumed he was out of pain. While the man was still asleep, Joe took the chalice and filled it with Cel’s blood. He had to add him to the quarantine ritual, or staying here would remain absolute torture. As he went about his business, he checked the notifications waiting for him.
Congratulations! For grasping the requirements for a more specialized form of healing without system assistance, ‘Heal’ has morphed into a higher tier skill, Mend. Your creativity, true knowledge of healing, and usage of the spell has shown a high level of skill and power, boosting your skill ranks greatly!
Skill increased: Mend (Beginner VIII): Select a target to heal restoring 5n health where ‘n’ equals skill level. Unlike the lower tier skill ‘Heal’, Mend is able to heal broken bones. Congratulations! Mend has reached the beginner ranks. Dark affinity is automatically added to the spell and will heal dark-aligned creatures twice as effectively. No extra effect added.
You have created a new ritual: ‘Ritual of containment’. This ritual utilizes the target’s stamina to power the ritual and absorbs any mana from the target that is bound into a spellform. If target leaves the containment area, their stamina and mana will be fully drained. Their health will also begin to fall but can never fall past ten points due to the effect of this ritual. Health, mana, and stamina will only regenerate once the target has re-entered the circle. To cast this ritual, the target needs to show willingness to be confined. Remaining in the spell circle for a full minute after activation and a donation of their blood can be used to show their ‘willingness’. More targets can be added to the same ritual with a donation of blood. This ritual can be deactivated at will by: Joe.
Joe had built the at-will deactivation functionality into the ritual for a very simple reason: it was very unlikely that anyone could change the ritual and have it remain effective. This way, if someone got ahold of his rituals and tried to use them against him, he could quickly end the ritual and save himself. He planned on adding this as a safety function to all of his rituals, though it added about ten percent mana cost to the overall diagram. Rituals could be activated and used by anyone, so it was better to create a way to protect himself now than be betrayed in the future by his own work.
Cel woke up right about then, moving slowly as his mind tried to convince him he was still injured. “What did you do to me? I feel… not good but no longer damaged.”
“Well, I healed you and added you to the exceptions listing of the ritual over there. So you won’t feel sick and you shouldn’t be all sorts of mangled. I have a couple more questions for you before we are all done, namely: do you think the mage’s college is withholding assistance from the Kingdom? I have seen a lot of Warriors and archers that have a couple magical abilities, but I haven’t seen any mages out hunting down Wolfmen.”
“I guess… I am unsure. I know that there have been messengers coming to the college for years, and any of them that seem to be on official business always leave looking like they have been eating lemons. It was always a point of pride to us, seeing the heralds of the Kingdom be turned away like commoners. Now it just seems… wrong” As Cel was speaking, he was inspecting the ritual he was surrounded by. He was trying to be sneaky but had a very poor poker face.
“Uh-huh.” Joe watched as the man obviously began to create a spell. Cel thought he was keeping his hands hidden in his robe, but the motions had the whole thing wiggling and moving around. “You said that the older mages don’t say anything about The Accords. Is there any reason that The Accords would affect them differently?”
“Sure, sure,” Cel responded distractedly. “When mages are allowed to specialize to their second class or graduate, they sign The Accords a second time. They sign a third time before they are allowed to specialize further. When they sign the third time, they have full rights and privileges as a master or professor. That is also when they stop talking about The Accords, now that I think about it. In my head, it was always because they no longer needed to worry about them. Instead it could be- winds of immolation!”
Joe stood silently as the crazed look of glee slowly slid from Cel’s face. He was posed in an awkward position, his hands pointed at Joe. He wiggled his fingers a bit more and frowned. Joe coughed into his closed fist to regain Cel’s attention. “Last question for you then. If The Accords were somehow destroyed, do you think the mages in the guild would turn against the Archmage and help the Kingdom?”
Cel looked rather shaken. “You took my spellcasting ability? You unbelievable monster.”
“Pretty sure you just tried to light me on fire,” Joe responded dryly. “Answer the question.”
“No, they would not ‘turn against’ him,” Cel growled as he started to sidle away from Joe. “They’d all be dead. All of us would, anyone who signed The Accords. There is a repercussion clause against a foreign power gaining control over the college. We’d all die instantly if The Accords were destroyed.”
Joe looked at the ground, nodding and thinking to himself. Seeing his distracted state, Cel started sprinting toward the exit. Ten feet from his starting position he crossed the lines of the ritual, instantly falling flat as his stamina and mana were drained from him. He began to scream weakly as the ritual latched onto his health and began to pull. Ever so slowly, Cell was able to roll himself into the ritual area again. Joe watched all of this happen with a callous gaze. The mage had tried to kill him several times now; simply keeping him contained was Joe’s way of being merciful.
“Thank you for the information, Cel. I’ve decided that you will be helping me for the next few weeks, however unwillingly that might happen. Let’s start now!” While Cel looked on–trembling from fear–Joe spent the next half hour writing out the ritual diagram for ‘Gravedigger’s requiem’. When it was finished, he looked it over, double checked the circles and markings, and began to place the components in their positions. The final item was his scepter, and he felt a bit naked without it at his hip. Taking a bit of Cel’s collected blood from his storage ring, he added it to the ‘mana donor’ section. When he was ready, he took a deep breath and began empowering the ritual.
His mana started to stream off of him, and he was very careful to keep it flowing along the proper channels from the beginning. It’d be nice to increase his mana manipulation at the same time. As the first circle finished becoming powered, Joe looked at his mana and noticed that it had been draining like normal. As the second circle started to draw power, he watched as his mana dipped all the way to only a quarter full. At that point Cel suddenly yelped, and mana stopped escaping from Joe’s body. He watched the mage try to control himself, but his face was paling rapidly. Just before he would have collapsed, Joe’s mana began to drain once more.
The ritual completed just as Joe’s mana touched twenty percent, and he whooped as he saw that the taglock needle on his scepter seemed to be distorting the air around it. It was vibrating softly and releasing a faint musical chime. Joe was concerned that the vibration might be damaging the needle, but after watching the durability for a minute, he was certain that he was simply paranoid. Though he was very excited to test this out, he really needed to get some sleep first.
“I feel so violated. You used me like a…a…”
; “Battery?” Joe finished for the captured mage. “You make a pretty good power Cel.” He looked at the confused man, waiting for a reaction.
“I make a good what?”
“Power Cel!”
“Power what? Stop saying my name!” Cel balled his fists and roared at the ritualist.
Joe tisked and looked away. “I’ll go get you a bucket of water and a clean set of robes. Then I’m going to bed. You should try to rest up; we have lots of work to do!” Joe strolled away, tiredness obvious in his voice. He had been up overnight, and he was feeling it now.
When Cel was alone, his brow furrowed. “My mana manipulation skill increased?”
~ Chapter Thirty-three ~
Joe woke up feeling refreshed and cheerful. Sure, he didn’t have a team to hunt with. Yes, the quests that he currently had were long-term and vastly difficult. No, he didn’t have a clear way to reach his goals... Joe suddenly wasn’t feeling quite as cheerful. He decided that before going back to the research and development of his rituals that it might be a good time to return to the library and look for some easy quests that he could complete between studying and creating rituals. He stepped out of the guild building and winced at the bright light flooding the area. Whoops. It was later in the day than he had thought!
Joe started trotting toward the library. The position of the sun showed him that it was already early afternoon, and he wanted to make sure to find some good information before the library closed for the evening. It wouldn’t be a good idea to mess with his sleep cycle too much, so he should try to do his work during daylight hours. He walked into the library, waving at Boris. The old man glanced up, nodded at him, and then did a double take. “H-hey! How are you a level two scholar? I haven’t rewarded you for any quest completions! Who is giving unauthorized quests? Is it Bobius? It is, isn’t it! I told him that I-”