Magium

by Chris Michael Wilson

  “Hmm…” Melindra says, with a pondering look, as she studies me from head to toe.

  Seeing the girl up-close, I can’t help but notice that she has a rather cute face, which is nicely complemented by her light-brown hair that she wears in a high ponytail. The pajama-like clothes that she is wearing in broad daylight may look a bit ridiculous at first sight, but unlike Eiden’s clothes, the ones that Melindra is wearing seem to have been chosen with a bit more care, from an aesthetical point of view. Also, unlike regular pajamas, while these clothes definitely look comfortable to move in, they also seem to have been designed to fit in a way that highlights the slim frame of her body and the shape of her breasts.

  “Hmm…” Melindra says again, this time bringing her face much closer to mine, with the same pondering look in her eyes, as she strokes her chin with her right hand.

  “Is there something you—” I start to say, but the girl interrupts me.

  “Turn around!” she says.

  Melindra does not wait for me to turn around, and she grabs me by the shoulders, turning me around by herself. After a few more seconds of silence, the stillwater girl finally seems to have found what she was looking for, and she gasps loudly, in astonishment.

  “What?” I ask her, as I turn to face her. “What is it?”

  “You’re a half-lessathi, aren’t you?” Melindra says, with a mixture of shock and excitement in her voice. “That’s why your aura seemed so familiar! I’m a half-lessathi too! It’s so nice to finally meet someone of my own race after all this time! There used to be thousands of us before the still winter, but the lessathi have gotten much stricter with their rules since then, and there aren’t very many of them left either, so you barely get to see any half-lessathi these days.”

  She pauses.

  “Wait,” she says. “So that’s why Eiden has taken an interest in your group!”

  “What do you mean?” I say. “What’s so special about me being a half-lessathi? Does it have anything to do with my stat device?”

  “Oh, no,” Melindra says. “Not with your stat device.”

  “Then with what?” I say.

  “I’m sure you’ll figure it out eventually!” Melindra says.

  “You stillwaters sure like being cryptic, don’t you?” I ask her.

  Melindra smiles, but she does not answer my rhetorical question.

  “Still, I’m surprised that you managed to get hold of a stat device,” Melindra says. “I was also curious to see what effect a stat device would have in a tournament like this, given my half-lessathi aura, so I tried to buy one before coming here, but there weren’t any for sale anywhere I looked!”

  “On which continent?” I ask. “I bought mine in the Western Continent. Where I come from, you can pretty much find these on every corner of the street.”

  “I tried looking in the Western Continent as well,” Melindra says. “In more than one city. All of the shop owners told me that they went out of stock several weeks before I tried to make my purchase.”

  “Actually, now that you mention it…” I say. “I also had a bit more trouble than I expected when I tried to buy my stat booster. I even had to visit several shops before I could find one, and that was more than a month ago. In fact, I remember many of the shop owners being very evasive when I asked them when they would replenish their stocks. It seemed almost as if they were afraid to talk about it. Do you think that these merchants might have been lying about their stock, because they’d been threatened by someone who did not want them to be selling the devices anymore?”

  “Never mind, that!” Melindra says. “Could you lend me your stat device for a moment? I’m curious to see how well it resonates with my aura!”

  “Sure, I guess…” I say. “But don’t mess with it too much. I’m still not perfectly sure that there isn’t a secret combination of buttons, capable of erasing all of my stats, if I’m not careful. “

  “Of course!” Melindra says. “I only need to do one test, and then you can have it back.”

  I take the device out of my pocket and I hand it to her. After she looks at it for a few seconds, Melindra begins to press the side buttons of the device, multiple times, in quick succession.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” I ask her, as I panic a little. “You promised that you wouldn’t—”

  “Shhh!” Melindra tells me, with a very serious look on her face.

  After a few seconds of silence, Melindra hands me back the device, looking rather displeased.

  “It’s not working,” she says. “Or rather, it’s working as badly as I’d expect it to work for someone of a non-lessathi race. I suppose that my aura has changed too much since I became a stillwater for the device to recognize me as a half-lessathi anymore. Too bad.”

  “What were you doing just now?” I ask Melindra. “I saw you fiddling with the stat device’s buttons, but nothing seems to have changed.”

  “Oh,” Melindra says. “I just used a code to increase the hearing stat temporarily by a few points, in order to see if my actual hearing sense improves or not. It’s meant to be used as a test, to see how well the stat device reacts to your aura before you start using it. The code only works for the hearing stat, and it can only be activated once per day, for a few seconds.”

  “Can you give me the code?” I ask her.

  “Sure,” Melindra says. “It’s three times left, three times right, two times left, four times right, then left right left right. Oh, and you need to do it within five seconds, or the code won’t activate.”

  “Three left, three right, two left, four right, left right left right, got it!” I say. “Thanks a lot!”

  “You’re welcome!” Melindra says.

  “Excuse me,” Leila writes, as she pulls lightly on Melindra’s sleeve.

  “Yes?” Melindra says, looking at Leila, curiously.

  “I have a question,” Leila writes. “Are you able to tell the difference between lessathi and half-lessathi just by the feel of their aura?”

  “Yes,” Melindra says. “I’ve met enough half-lessathi in my lifetime to be able to make the distinction. You need to have a pretty keen magical sense to notice the difference, though.”

  “Could you…” Leila starts to write, but she pauses for a few seconds.

  “Could you tell me if I’m a half-lessathi as well?” Leila continues.

  “A half-lessathi?” Melindra asks, surprised.

  She gets closer to Leila and she furrows her eyebrows, like she did with me, earlier.

  “Hmm…” Melindra says, while she studies her for a few seconds. “No, you’re definitely not a half-lessathi. This is a regular lessathi aura any way I look at it.”

  “I see…” Leila writes, with a faint smile on her face. “Thank you for your answer!”

  Seeing her relieved smile, I suddenly remember the story she told me about the lessathi from her youth that treated her like some kind of reject because she was mute, and who were accusing her of being a half-lessathi, due to her disability. It seems that those people’s slander had in fact affected her a lot more than she let on until now.

  “Well,” Melindra says, as she turns to the rest of us, “I believe that we’re done for the day! If nobody else has any objections, I would very much like it if we could begin our journey tomorrow, at the crack of dawn.”

  “Actually,” Daren says, “we still need to get some papers from the king, before we can leave the city. We’ll be visiting him later today, but it’s not guaranteed that he’ll have them ready by the time we get there. Hold on!”

  Daren takes his backpack off, and he pulls a transceiver out of it, which he then hands over to Melindra.

  “We’ll contact you through this transceiver in case our plans change,” Daren says. “Don’t worry about the range. It’s been enchanted to cover very long distances, so we’ll be able to contact you no matter where you are in the city.”

  “Okay, then,” Melindra says, as she puts the transceiver in one of her pockets. “I
f nothing changes, then we’ll meet at the city’s northern gate, as soon as the sun rises. We’ll need to head north to reach Ollendor anyway, so we might as well meet at the gate that’s closest to our destination.”

  “Sounds good,” Daren says.

  “I’ll see you all tomorrow!” Melindra says, with a smile, and then she goes on her way.

  “Damn it!” I say, as I watch her leave. “She still didn’t tell us how you can become a stillwater.”

  “You’ll have all the time you need to ask her that question starting tomorrow,” Daren says. “We’ll be travelling together for a while, remember?”

  “Oh, right…” I say.

  “Anyway,” Daren says, “we should probably be heading for the palace. The king seemed rather busy, and I’m not sure how long he’ll be waiting for us.”

  “He told me that we should wait for about an hour before heading for the palace,” I say, “because he still had to arrange a few things with his army. I suggest we do some shopping in the meantime. I’ve seen plenty of shops while we were walking between the palace and the arena, and we won’t really get any other chance to buy stuff for a very long time after we leave Thilias.”

  “Yeah, that would probably be for the best,” Daren says.

  “Well,” Enrique says, “since it’s been settled that you’ll be spending the night in Thilias, I believe that there will no longer be any objections to the celebration tonight, yes?”

  Daren sighs.

  “Do as you wish,” he says.

  “Perfect!” Enrique says. “I know some of the best cooks in Thilias, and there are still plenty of expensive wine bottles left in the cellar. Tonight, we shall have a feast that will put the king’s royal banquets to shame!”

  “Just make sure you don’t overdo it,” Daren says. “We’ll be leaving before sunrise, so we can’t afford to stay up until too late in the evening.”

  Once we wave goodbye to Enrique, we start heading towards the castle of Thilias, at a leisurely pace. As soon as we set out, Arraka starts making muffled noises again, from inside her amulet.

  “What is it, Arraka?…” Flower says, as she opens the amulet.

  “I can’t believe the nerve on that girl!” Arraka shouts, with her voice sounding like three separate voices talking at the same time again. “Did you see what she did? She just closed my amulet without even so much as a ‘hello’! Is that any way to act with someone that you’ve known for hundreds of years?”

  “You know, I’ve always meant to ask,” I say, to Arraka. “What’s up with that voice of yours? Most of the time it sounds normal, but there are times when it sounds as if there are three of you talking at the same time. Is that what happens when banshees get old?”

  “Oh, no, it has nothing to do with age,” Arraka says. “Those two other voices are from the first two spirits that I absorbed, while I was still in the magical plane. Uh… Elkira and Rinaru, I think?… It’s been too long. I don’t remember their names that clearly anymore.”

  “The first two spirits?” I say. “You mean that you’ve absorbed more than two spirits while you were on the magical plane?”

  “Oh, yeah, I’ve absorbed hundreds of them,” Arraka says. “The method that I used for absorbing other spirits was still experimental when I used it on Elkira and Rinaru, which is why their voices still pop up from time to time, even after all those thousands of years. I didn’t have any more problems with absorbing all of the other spirits, though.”

  “But, didn’t the other spirits try to stop you?” I ask her.

  “Of course they did,” Arraka says. “But I was only getting stronger with each spirit that I absorbed, and by the time the really strong spirits figured out what I was doing, I was already too much for them to handle.”

  “Is this the reason why you got banned from the magical plane?” I say.

  “Eh…” Arraka says. “It was probably part of the reason. Mostly it was because of my murdering sprees, I think.”

  “Murdering sprees?…” I say.

  “Yeah,” Arraka says. “There isn’t really much to do in the magical plane. Most of the spirits tend to just live for the sole purpose of maintaining their existence. It’s pretty uncommon for a spirit from the magical plane to die of old age, so as long as you don’t do anything too risky, you could theoretically go on living forever. That’s why it’s so hilarious to kill a spirit in the magical plane. On the earthen plane, most living beings will expect to die at some point, but the great majority of the spirits on the magical plane fancy themselves as immortals. The desperation with which they cling to life in their final moments cannot be compared with that of any being on this plane of existence, which is what makes it all the more satisfying when you do them in.”

  “So, what did the gods have to say about all of this?” I say. “Didn’t you say that they live on the magical plane too? Why couldn’t they just unite against you in order to kill you off?”

  “Hah!” Arraka says. “You don’t think they tried? The ‘gods’ are nothing special. They’re just magical spirits like the rest of us. They only started calling themselves that after they found out that they could harness energy from the beings on the earthen plane, as long as they made them into their loyal followers. Once they gained enough followers, all of that worshipping went to their heads, and they began to call themselves gods, as if they were somehow more special than the rest of us. All of their ‘godly’ powers that they gained from their worshippers still didn’t help them when I killed half of their kind by myself, though.”

  “You killed half of the gods on the magical plane?” I ask her.

  “Yeah, but to be fair, it was mostly the weaker ones, who didn’t have that many followers,” Arraka says. “The stronger ones like the God of Death, the God of Fate and the God of Time managed to hold their own against me pretty well, so we went on a bit of a stalemate for some time, while I went to absorb more spirits, and they tried to gather more followers.”

  “Was this when they decided to ban you from the magical plane?” I ask her.

  “No, that decision came a bit later,” Arraka says. “When they realized that they couldn’t amass their followers with the speed that I was absorbing other spirits, they eventually called some sort of a meeting, where they invited all of the powerful spirits in the realm, including the ones who did not call themselves gods, like the golden fox, who was still in the magical plane at the time. In that meeting, they decided to ban me from their realm, along with every other female spirit that belonged to what you people call ‘civilized races’ here on the earthen plane. You know, like humans, elves, gnomes and the like.”

  “Wait, you have different races in the magical plane?” I say.

  “Not just different races,” Arraka says. “They’re the exact same races that you have here on the earthen plane. Including the monster races and the animal races, of course. It’s not like we have bodies or anything, but you can tell our races from our auras, just like you can on this plane of existence.”

  “So… does this mean that our spirits will go to the magical plane after we die?” I say.

  “Nah,” Arraka says. “You don’t have spirits. You only have souls. When you die, the ethereal matter that makes up your soul gets decomposed and it melds with the rest of the ethereal plane. The same goes for the souls of us, magical spirits. It’s possible that the souls which get decomposed after you die somehow get recycled and then they get linked with a newborn spirit from the magical plane, but that’s just a theory. None of the spirits on the magical plane have any sort of memories from past lives on the earthen plane, or anything like that.”

  “You were saying earlier that the fox originated from the magical plane?” Hadrik says. “How did she end up here, then?”

  “Why don’t you ask her yourself?” Arraka says. “You’re friends with her now, aren’t you?”

  “ ‘Friends’ isn’t exactly the word I’d use to describe our relationship with her,” I say.

  “Wel
l, the only thing I know,” Arraka says, “is that even before I got banned from the magical plane, the fox seemed to have taken a great interest in the animals that lived here, in Varathia. They were much more intelligent than the animals on the other continents, for some reason, and from what I’ve heard, the fox always talked about how unfairly these animals from Varathia were being treated on the earthen plane. I’m not sure when she decided to come here, but from what I could tell, she must have made a pact with all of the plants and animals from the region, so they would join together in some sort of a symbiotic relationship that would help her maintain a physical body, in exchange for her offering them protection. I don’t really know more than that, since I’ve been trapped in a mountain while all of this happened.”

  “So, uh…” I say. “Getting back to your exile from the magical plane… do you know why the gods and the other powerful spirits decided to also ban the other female spirits and not just you?”

  “Oh,” Arraka says, “it’s because I was only absorbing female spirits from the so-called ‘civilized races’, which made them think that there was something dangerous about the others too, and that they could turn out like me if left alone for too long. In reality, the only reason why I was absorbing just these types of spirits was because they were the only ones that had auras similar enough to mine for me to be able to absorb them, given that I’m an elf. There was nothing special about the spirits I was absorbing. The ‘danger’ of someone coming up with the same absorption technique as I did is still there, even after they threw us all out, but I wouldn’t expect them to invent anything similar anytime soon, since they’re way too stupid to come up with a spell that’s so complex on their own.”

  “Wait, you’re an elf?” I ask her.

  “Of course I’m an elf!” Arraka says. “What did you think I was?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” I say. “I always kind of figured that banshees were their own race, and I didn’t really give it much thought until now.”

  “Banshees aren’t a race!” Arraka says. “It’s just a name that was given to us by the locals after we got banished to the earthen realm. You can clearly tell what our races are from our auras. Seriously, how bad is your magical sense, anyway? Illuna is an elf too, but I bet you didn’t know that either, did you?”