On the Shoulders of Titans

by Andrew Rowe

  Still, it would have been useful in the fight outside the spire, and we didn’t know if that might happen again. I wasn’t going to begrudge my friends picking up a couple more items of their own.

  Aside from that, Sera wrote a note and asked us to have the Diviner look at her modified attunement. He managed to give us a couple bits of new information.

  The attunement was still maintaining connections to multiple external entities — meaning her contracts were intact — and that those entities were still attempting to drain away some of her mana continuously.

  He also noted that the connections seemed stronger than normal Summoner contracts, which was both scary and fascinating.

  I considered asking the Diviner to take a look at Trials of Judgment to see if he could identify how it worked, but I decided against it. Even if he was one of Derek’s friends, I didn’t know if I could trust him with information that important.

  After the Diviner headed out, I took Sera up to her room to discuss what we’d learned.

  “Seems likely that Vellum was right about the contract spells somehow activating the potion. If it somehow tied you more deeply with your contracted monsters...”

  Sera nodded. She still couldn’t reply aloud, but she began writing something.

  I kept talking because I could, and because it helped me think. “Wouldn’t you still be able to draw from those contracts, though?”

  Sera shook her head, writing some more. I waited this time.

  If I have stronger connections than before, that might mean each contract is trying to draw more mana from me.

  I did some reading, and there’s some precedent for Summoners making more contracts than they can afford the mana costs for.

  The result is similar to what I’m dealing with; those Summoners lost the ability to cast spells completely until they get enough mana to afford the contracts.

  Looked into breaking contracts, too. There are a few ways to do it. For full contracts, the best way is to actually summon the monster and negotiate with it. Obviously not an option right now.

  There are spells that can forcefully break a contract, but they’re dangerous for both the Summoner and the monster. I don’t want to go that route, either.

  I still have a couple bindings that aren’t full contracts, though — the ogre and the wyvern from the Survival Match. Those can be broken more safely. Usually, it’s a simple spell to do it, like how I got rid of a couple of them right before we dealt with the spire. But I can’t even use that spell, because I can’t use my attunement at all.

  “Hrm. Is it possible to cast the spell using your mana from another part of your body, like your hand?”

  She frowned, then wrote another reply.

  I suppose it might be possible. The spell only requires gray mana, and I still have that. But since my attunement is on my lungs, I’ve only learned how to cast Summoner spells through incantations.

  “I think you said you could determine where the cost of your spells came from, though, just by thinking about it. Is that something you do after you cast the spell?”

  She nodded.

  “Hrm. So you just need to be able to initiate the spell, then you can pay for it with mana from your hand. Oh, or maybe the bracer I made you? If the mana cost is too high, maybe you could trigger that along with it.”

  She paused, then wrote another line.

  It doesn’t sound impossible. I’ll do some reading and try to make it work.

  “Good. In the meantime, if your main problem is that the attunement isn’t strong enough to handle all your contracts, maybe we could make it stronger. Not with my attunement. I think trying to infuse it directly with more mana is too much of a risk, after what happened when you drank the potion. Maybe something that doesn’t put more strain on the body, though, like eating some iros fruit?”

  She stuck out her tongue in a sign of disgust. I didn’t like the taste of iros fruit, either. I would have recommended lavris, but that fruit was for building mental mana, and that wasn’t what she needed.

  But I knew her, and if she thought it’d help, she’d start eating them.

  “I’ll see if I can find anything on fruits grown for helping build air and transference mana, since I know that’s what your attunement uses. For tonight, though, I’m going to need to focus on trying to make a gift for Sheridan. I’m not convinced they’ll accept anything we found in Wrynn’s box.”

  The sword that I’d been working on with Keras might have been better, but after seeing Patrick’s reaction to it, I couldn’t justify giving it away. If Sheridan wanted a sword, we’d make another one.

  After that, I bid Sera good night so she could focus on reading about Summoning and I could get back to work.

  Even after eating and resting a bit, my hand was still burning from the effort earlier in the day. I didn’t regret working so hard, but it’d taken a lot out of me. A quick check with my mana watch registered my hand at 45/84.

  I guessed it had been about a half hour since I’d drained it down to almost nothing, meaning that it would take me about an hour to recover from zero back to full.

  That was about what I’d experienced with my Enchanter attunement as well, although admittedly I never drained that one completely, and I wasn’t sure if the recovery rates would change if I emptied my mana past specific thresholds. Sera’s slower recovery in the tower when she’d pushed herself too far implied that overuse could lead to lowered efficiency.

  I wasn’t going to push myself below zero. For safety’s sake, I’d try to keep my mana above ten. If I noticed diminishing returns on my recovery time, I could slow things down further.

  Assuming I was willing to use most of my mana once per hour, I figured I could do that two or three more times before I had to sleep.

  That was a big improvement over my previous abilities, but I still didn’t have enough time to make something complex.

  I did, however, have a lot of ideas.

  One of the things that interested me the most was learning how to copy Pre-Attunement Period items like the Jaden Box. It was obvious from watching Keras that his magic worked differently, but in a way that was similar enough that I could conceivably find ways to emulate it. Even if I couldn’t cast spells the same way he did, the end results — transferring magic into an object — could be mimicked.

  I needed to figure out a few more details, though. The main impediment seemed to be that they didn’t utilize runes in the same fashion. The ring of jumping didn’t have a single visible rune on it, although perhaps some of the cuts in the metal served a similar function.

  The Jaden Box did have runes, but many of them were unrecognizable. Maybe they were just types of runes that had been lost to time, or maybe they worked completely differently.

  I was tempted to try to transfer some of the mana from the ring of jumping into an empty ring. Could I split the power in half and make two functional rings that were weaker?

  It was a tempting prospect, but ultimately not worth risking ruining the single ring I had. Not yet, anyway. Maybe after I had a better idea of what I was doing.

  I didn’t even have any practice transferring enchantments from my own modern style of items to new ones. Conceptually, it was nearly identical to transferring mana from a mana crystal into a rune, but it did pose some additional challenges.

  Functional items often had mana flowing between the runes, not just inside them. Attempting to move the mana from one of those runes while it was giving or receiving mana — or worse, actively sustaining a magical function — presented some dangers.

  The most common problem was simply losing a bit of mana in the process. That efficiency loss was close to inevitable, unless the item was deactivated before the transfer.

  The real problems came from disrupting the item’s operation carelessly or in an improper sequence. It was analogous to sticking your hand in a bonfire to pull out the twig you wanted.

  Getting burned was likely, and there was also a good chance you c
ould end up spreading the fire — meaning detonating the item or transferring magic into an unintended object or rune.

  To mitigate the risk, you either extinguish the fire, or you could pull out the twigs and logs from other sections first. The latter approach was what I was planning on for my first experiment.

  I’d miss the rock of regeneration, but ultimately, I needed something a little more practical.

  I picked out a bracer as the target for my enchantment transferring experiment. I liked working with bracers. They were easy to wear and much easier to inscribe than a ring or necklace. Moreover, they were large enough that I didn’t have to bother looking up their mana capacities; there was no risk of overloading a bracer at my level of experience.

  From there, I had to figure out which enchantments to move first. Carving the runes only took a few minutes, and during that time I considered the safest sequence.

  I decided that the first things I needed to move were the runes that recharged the item, since it would be dangerous to have an item filling up with mana if I took out the other parts.

  I could have safely moved the activation rune before that, but I didn’t want the bracer to activate in the same way, so I decided not to bother.

  Moving the recharge runes first was going to pose another problem, though — the new item’s capacity runes weren’t functional yet. So, if I moved the recharge runes over and took too long, the new item would eventually explode. I didn’t know how long it would take, but I didn’t like that risk.

  I decided that before I moved anything, I’d power the capacity runes on the new item. That was easier to decide than implement, though. The gray mana and mental mana runes were easy enough, but regeneration items also used life mana.

  Until recently, I’d never had access to life mana. I’d powered the rock by transferring the mana from crystals, not my own body.

  With my Arbiter attunement, I could use life mana — it was the attunement’s secondary mana type. I’d just never done it before.

  I powered the other capacity runes first, then took a break to recover. Each rune was taking up nearly my entire mana capacity, since they were Carnelian-level runes. If they’d been Sunstone or Citrine-level, I couldn’t have handled them at all.

  I’d been told the original ring was Citrine-level, but I assumed that had to do with complexity or risk factors, not the mana requirements.

  After I’d recovered the necessary 60 mana for the life rune, I gave it a try.

  It wasn’t difficult using a new type of mana. Not exactly. I already had it flowing inside my body, and I’d been able to feel it as a distinct form of energy since the new attunement had been active. When I had my Enchanter attunement active, I could even see it if I concentrated on pushing some out of my hand and into the air. Life mana was a shimmering green, at least to my perception.

  There was still a degree of strangeness that came from manipulating a new form of energy, though, at least for me. Being able to see it helped. If I couldn’t visualize it, I wouldn’t have been confident that I was using life mana instead of just transference or gray, which I’d manipulated so frequently in the past.

  Maybe it was easier for someone like Keras, if his magic truly had a cost that was tied to the type he was using. Fire mana costing body heat made sense to me on a visceral level, now that I’d heard about it. I was grateful to my attunement for removing or altering that cost, but it also made it harder to conceptualize what type of mana I was working with.

  Regardless, I made it work, and I filled the capacity rune.

  I grinned as the rune flickered to life.

  Success.

  I had to rest a bit more after that. Even moving the runes from the other item would take up a bit of transference mana, both for moving the enchantment from place to place and overcoming the item’s natural resistance to alterations. More advanced items would have specific runes designed as safeguards to prevent alterations, but I’d never made one of those.

  Given how I’d handled Jin in the fight, that omission may have saved my life.

  Moving the mana from the existing runes on the rock proved easier than I expected. Maybe it was because I’d enchanted the rock myself, but the mana inside didn’t seem to resist my pull at all. The process barely taxed my body and it only took me a handful of minutes.

  It still felt a little tougher than charging the rock had been in the tower. Maybe that was because the mana saturation in the tower had helped, or maybe I’d just managed to rush through the process because of the dire nature of the situation.

  Either way, I was still enchanting at roughly ten times the pace I’d been able to before I got the new attunement, and that was an amazing improvement.

  The last part of the process was charging the new activation rune, which was distinct from both the one on the rock and the one on the original ring. I picked a classic; the standard activation rune used on a dueling cane. That way, no shaking was required, and it could be turned on by someone other than the wearer — a necessity for cases when I wanted to use it to heal unconscious friends.

  Hopefully I wouldn’t have to deal with that many unconscious friends in the near future, but I was sensing a bit of a trend, and I wanted to be ready for more.

  With the bracer done, I had to lie down and just cradle my aching hand for a while. The ring of regeneration was easing my pain, but it didn’t cancel it out entirely.

  That was probably good, because even the diminished pain was letting me push myself down to close to zero on a regular basis, and I’d been warned earlier in the year that pushing myself that hard could result in scar formation.

  I had to be ready for tomorrow, but after that, I promised I’d slow down a little. I still planned to exercise regularly, but I’d lost track of the number of times I’d abused my attunement over the course of the day. I needed to stop.

  After just one more thing.

  The bracer was an interesting idea, but ultimately I knew it was nothing unique. There were probably plenty of variations on the ring of regeneration out there, many of which would be far more powerful than this one. And if Sheridan was anywhere close to as powerful as Derek and Elora, they probably had better items already.

  I needed to make something unique. Something that would give someone like Derek or Elora pause.

  Ideally, something that would qualify as forbidden knowledge, but I didn’t think I could accomplish that so soon.

  I knew what I wanted to attempt, but once I’d laid down on the floor to recover, I physically couldn’t push myself back up for several minutes.

  When I did, I noticed that my hand was shaking.

  That was not a good sign.

  But I couldn’t stop. I needed to do this.

  First, I looked up the runes I wanted. Runes that weren’t meant to be combined. Then I drew the design on paper.

  My runes were crooked. Awful. If I’d etched them in metal, the item would have been wasted.

  But I couldn’t stop, so I put the new bracer on the wrist of my trembling hand and turned it on. Immediately, I felt a surge of relief as a second regeneration item began to work.

  It probably wasn’t a wise idea to have two regeneration items working on my body at once, but I promised myself I wouldn’t do it for long. Just long enough to make one more item.

  It was an item I’d told Sera that I couldn’t make. I’d told her that it wouldn’t be safe, that it wasn’t possible.

  I worked deep into the night, until it was finally finished. I didn’t even try it out, I was too exhausted.

  I fell asleep with both the ring and the bracer still active.

  In the morning, I couldn’t move my right hand.

  Chapter VIII – Sorcery Scars

  I took a few moments to breathe, then a few more moments to panic.

  My right hand was completely numb.

  I slipped off the bracer, rubbing my wrist. I hoped it was just a circulation problem from sleeping with the bracer on too tight.


  It wasn’t.

  Tentatively, I tried to push a bit of mana through my hand.

  That was a mistake.

  My hand ignited with agony, the muscles between my thumb and forefinger twitching uncontrollably as I fell backward and bit my tongue.

  The ring kicked back in, but instead of soothing my pain, it just reversed it. The inside of my hand felt like ice, the numbness worse than before.

  Cradling my hand under my arm for warmth, I found my mana watch and pressed it against my attunement.

  85/85.

  My mana was fine. It’d even gotten a little higher as I slept. I hadn’t broken my attunement in the same way that Sera had, but I’d managed to do something else.

  After several minutes of consideration, I clenched my functional fist and slipped off the ring of regeneration.

  Over the next hour, feeling gradually returned to my hand. That feeling, however, was agony.

  I may have made a mistake.

  I tried to go back to sleep. That was hilariously impossible.

  I could hear people chattering downstairs, presumably over breakfast. I had to put a pillow over my head to drown out the sound. Any additional sensory input felt like too much.

  I cradled my hand under the covers for the next couple hours until it returned to some degree of normalcy. I could move my fingers. Trying to use any mana sent me back into a state of pain that could best be described as tear-inducing, so I avoided that.

  The ring was nearby the whole time, tempting in some respects, but it had also been a part of what had probably caused the problem. By suppressing my pain so much, I’d let it build to the point where the ring and bracer must have numbed the whole area to prevent the pain from affecting me.

  I really hoped I hadn’t just injured myself badly enough to leave mana scars. My understanding was that scars formed from repeated overuse, and I’d been pretty good about avoiding that until recently.

  Hopefully remembering this pain would serve as a sufficient deterrent to making a similar mistake again.