White Mage
Book 2 of the Six Books of Magic
By Jolie Jaquinta
Copyright 2015 Jolie Jaquinta
ARC 1
Chapter 1
Relief
Bianca shuddered and gasped and drew a ragged breath as the tremors subsided. She could feel them depart as she exerted her will against them. But they did not withdraw completely. They reflected and rebounded around the geography, the dissonant chords of their progress mocking her with echoes that sounded of laughter. She stilled herself, and took three deliberate deep breaths, holding them and willing her body calm. Pale hands pushed straw colored hair away from blue eyes. She then took stock of her situation.
Off grey parapets and causeways, buttresses and ramps filled her sight in all directions. They intersected at all angles and paid no heed to any conventional notion of up or down. They also shifted and changed. Slowly, when left to their own ends, but rapidly and reactionary when the crescendo of the Noise was upon them.
Amongst the chaos there was structure. They grew thicker in some directions, and more branched in others. A certain section was more grey-green, another grey-pink. The faint color differentiation along with the thickness gave a radial clue. It was enough to navigate by.
Her peripheral vision caught a stirring of changing branches further out. She pushed off and focused her will in that direction. Physical movement was almost as irrelevant as orientation here. She flew across the space in-between, somersaulting halfway over a balustrade and refocusing her will to stop. She landed in a small outbreak of Noise, crashed and rolled quickly to recover, gaining her feet right away. She ducked and dodged its shimmering sonic presence easily and keened her own response. Vocalization was not really necessary. In reality it was only a battle of Will. But the focus made it easier to actualize.
The echo died. It was only a small outbreak. She looked around suspiciously and then saw it. Rolling in from opposite directions came two breakers of Noise. Archways twisted and writhed in their passage and they were moving too quickly for Bianca to evade the trap.
They crashed on top of her and she screamed as the cacophony of non-sound invaded her consciousness and filled her head with visions of twitching crawling things that bent in all the wrong ways. Focus gone, she dove in one direction, whipping out her knife. Tendrils of Noise undulated towards her and she slashed at them. In her vision they took on the aspect of a nightmare form. But it gave her a base to react against. Instinctively, she darted at what appeared to be vulnerable points, ducked under its haphazard flailing, and dodged around it.
Her mind cleared as the familiar actions gave her an anchor. Driving her knife tip into a joint and evading a set of dropping coils she forced a mental separation between herself and the Noise. She circled and jumped lightly from one parapet to another, then slashed at its “back”. That had been a close call. But now she had her focus back, and it only took a few more telling blows before the Noise dispersed once more.
She did her breathing exercise again and sheathed her knife. On one level she knew that none of this was physically real. Her knife could no more hurt what she fought than harsh words. Reality was metaphysical. It really came down to her Will against the Will of the Noise. She had a lot of training, though, in expressing her Will through her knife against another's physical weak points. So bending the perception of the environment to that analog played to a strength of hers.
She had no idea how the Noise saw things, or if it had any consciousness at all. From what she knew, it wasn't even a whole being. Just the merest fraction of the tiniest splinter of Will from an Ancient. A being of such magnitude that the most brief and passing encounter with it had left this rippling Noise cascading around the psyche of the man whose mind she was lightly jogging through. Left unchecked, it drove him screaming and raving insane. Such was the fate of those who dealt with powers beyond mortal knowledge.
However, dealing with powers beyond mortal knowledge was her job. Not usually the Ancients. She was, personally, more familiar with the Grey Elves. Although of the same order of being as the Ancients, there was more of a basis of understanding, as they had created the world as she knew it. At least one had interest in the affairs of the Empire she served, although exactly what interest was very hard to tell.
Bianca preferred much more concrete problems. You couldn't stick your knife into the Noise unless you could see it as a physical target. Her dealing with the Grey Elves took the form of a book. The Book of Creation. Purportedly written by them in some impenetrable eldritch language. The written word was far too crude a mechanism for them to record their unfathomable thoughts in. So they used a Hydragyranium based ink. More commonly known as the poison 'fixated mercury'. This would produce death through madness if ingested. Proximity merely caused wild hallucinations. When employed as an art form, coupled with the pictures in the book, a greater meaning was conveyed in more than just words.
So she was not a stranger to courting insanity. Especially as interpretation was difficult and the temptation was always there to spend more time with the book rather than pursuing the myriad avenues of research that its potential opened up. But the book was 8,000 years old, and she was not the first to plumb its depths. The previous owner had gone quite deep. He paid the price, but he left some of his work: the Ævatars.
Twenty times the height of a man, these giant creations of stitched together flesh were done, apparently, at the direction of the sections of the book on anatomy. One had been found intact, one in the process of being built, and one in the process of being destroyed. Based on the notes, these creatures were expected to have powers proportional to their size. Enough to challenge the gods. Which is exactly why her Empire needed them.
However, they were not simply machines. They were genuinely like the humans they emulated, down to the metaphysical level. Every creature that moved had Animus. Biology differed from species to species, but it was always the spiritual Animus that imparted the directive to move a creature. This was the simplest of the three metaphysical qualities. In the case of the Ævatar, Animus was easily supplied via directed magical energies.
Animus is just the directive to move. In and of itself it could do nothing. What was needed was a Will to impose why to move. A Will was an intellectual force, a desire, an intention. Animals are mostly creatures of Will. They seek and hunt according to this. The Ævatar possessed a latent Will. It was there, but undirected. That's where its rider came in. Built into the frame, in the abdomen, was a compartment for a rider. The design of the creature was such that its Will was linked to that of the rider. When a rider expressed their Will, it was reflected and amplified by the Ævatar.
What the Ævatar lacked was a Soul. The essence and the function of the Soul was not yet well understood. All animals and even many species of humanoids that did not dwell on the surface lacked a Soul and seemed to get on just fine. But what they also lacked was the inherent ability to work magic. Something in the complex interaction between Soul, Will and Animus created mana; spiritual energy. In the religious, it was implicitly offered up to their gods, who collected it and maintained their majestic domains, and granted the occasional miracle. A mage was one who could use their own mana to work their own miracles; spells.
An Ævatar did not have a soul. But it hungered for one. This was the biggest problem Bianca faced in her research. She, herself, had attempted to drive the Ævatar several times. However, as the bond strengthened the observers saw an increased pressure on her Soul, drawing it into the Ævatar, and aborted the attempts. Given the theoretical power of an Ævatar, she shuddered to think what one would do if it had its own soul and could operate undirected.
It was just a technical problem. Unless she was forced to go back to basics and reinterpret The Book of Cr
eation from scratch, it should be solvable. Given time. But time was not a luxury there was much of. The gods considered the Empire of Romitu an affront to them, having already meddled in divine affairs. It was only a matter of time before they overcame their natural dysfunctional nature and joined together to cleanse her Empire from the face of the earth. Unfortunately her Empire had plenty of dysfunctionality to overcome to mount a defense against this inevitability.
And that is why she was here. The mage whose mind was being trampled by the Noise was considered important. No so much by Bianca, since he was doubtful of the Ævatar project. But the only person Bianca could count on for support felt this man not only important enough to marry, but also to spent the time she might otherwise be spending helping Bianca fighting up and down the highways and byways of his mind to keep the Noise at bay and secure his sanity.
And there she was.
In a contorted tangle of bridges of a greyish yellow she fought. The amplitude of Noise here was much greater than Bianca had seen so far. She steeled herself and felt the cold settle inside as she realized that all she had fought so far was but misplaced trifles. The peaks of the standing waves of Noise converged here. She did not hesitate and, instead, flung herself across the space, rolling to a landing in the midst of it all.
“Hello Mother,” she said.
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