by Kyle Johnson
Aranos sighed in relief. “I thought that, you know, after the last Traveler, you might have a grudge against me,” he admitted. “I overheard some of the elves in the Forest talking, and it seems like there’s quite a bit of hostility in the Stronghold to the idea of Travelers. In fact, your double seemed to be a part of that.”
She frowned. “That was not the case when I was last in Eredain,” she said slowly. “Yes, there were those who preached caution, and rightly so: the words of the ancients warn that Travelers can do great good but also great harm, so caution must be used in dealing with them.
“And yet,” she continued, “there was no open antagonism to Travelers, even though the first had proven unreliable at best. That such exists is troubling, for all know that it is only through alliance with the Travelers can we reclaim our Fallen Lands. When we return and I have completed my Cleansing, I shall have to speak to the elders of this.” She shook her head. “Now, you must tell me how you arrived here, and how you defeated the gasha.”
Aranos spun out a brief version of his journey, explaining that, when he entered this world, he was given the option to choose a Class and a race to ‘incarnate into’. He described his trip through the Eredain, being found by the patrol, and his attempts in the Trials. He did not describe entering the orbs, meeting Lythienne, or gaining her memories; instead, he simply framed his Spells and the granted Skills as ‘Quest Rewards’. Finally, he told her about entering the Fallen Lands, defeating the gasha by draining it of mana, and eventually finding his way to her. After his story was done, as she sat quietly in thought, he took a moment to check the notifications that had appeared:
Yeah, that was when I lied about spotting her in Stealth, he grimaced internally. After what she had been through, he kind of felt bad about that, now. The next notification was better, though:
That’s…a lot of new options, he thought, staring at the screen for a moment before realizing that Geltheriel was watching him.
“Notification?” she guessed with a grin?
“Yeah,” he confirmed, nodding. “Quest updated. Hey…can I share it with you?”
Geltheriel sighed. “You must indeed be a Traveler,” she murmured. “Yes, it is simple. First, you must create a party and invite me to join it. Then, you will be given the option to share any active Quests with me.” Before he could speak, she held up a hand. “To create a party,” she continued, “you must focus on the concept of the two of us, fighting as allies, sharing in danger and rewards. Your intent will be passed to me, and I can choose to accept or not.”
Aranos followed her direction, imagining sharing the Quest and adventure with the elf, and a moment later, a notification appeared:
He mentally selected ‘Yes’, and suddenly, a tiny icon of Geltheriel’s face appeared in his vision. He could see her LP, SP, and Stamina as red, blue, and white bars respectively: as he guessed, her SP bar was tiny compared to her LP and Stamina. When he focused on her image, text popped up that read, Geltheriel, Level 8 Keeper, Current Debuffs: Corruption 5, Hunger 4
“You have no Stamina!” Geltheriel exclaimed suddenly, breaking his reverie. “How do you have no Stamina? How are you even moving?”
“Oh, yeah, that,” he muttered. “I, uh, have a Perk that lets me use SP for Stamina. I’ve got a bunch of SP, so that makes sense for me.”
“A bunch, he says,” she retorted. “Your SP are ridiculous! Have you been doing anything other than grinding Wisdom? And you can use those instead of Stamina? No wonder you don’t care about your Hunger debuff!”
“Yeah, speaking of that,” he said embarrassedly, trying to change the subject, “I’ve got the ‘Fatigued’ penalty that I’d like to take care of, if that’s okay? You can keep watch…” He stopped as she shook her head vehemently.
“I’m at the fourth level of Hunger,” she reminded him forcefully. “Without food, I will last perhaps 12 hours before reaching level 5, when I will fall unconscious and starve to death. We cannot allow you a full rest, I am sorry.”
“Okay, 12 hours,” he replied thoughtfully. “I can work with that. I don’t need much: if you can give me 2 hours, I think we can deal with the gasha at the trees and maybe even the edimmu. You said they were bringing you food, right? If we go back to where they were holding you, I’ll bet I can Track them to wherever they are storing that food. We can load up, get rid of your debuff, and maybe get an idea of what the creatures are searching for. If we can find it, it might help us.”
She looked at him quietly for a few long moments. “Two hours,” she allowed at last, bowing her head. “No longer, though, or we will not have time to ascend to the crown as your Quest demands. Do what you must; I will stand watch.”
As she rose, holding her ragged clothing in place to cover herself, Aranos suddenly remembered something and whipped off his pack. “Hold on a minute,” he said excitedly, digging through it. “I’ve got something in here for you…well, sort of.” He removed the clothing he had made in the forest earlier and passed it over. “I made those for practice earlier,” he explained. “Well, probably yesterday by now. Whatever. They might not be the right size, but if you wear them over those – other things – it might at least make you feel better.”
She took the vest, pants, and cloak from him and gazed at the Shoddy Quality clothing silently. “You have had these this whole time,” she said in a deceptively quiet voice, “and you let me parade around in these horrid rags? What, were you enjoying the show?” The last part came out is a hiss, and he could see her anger.
He shook his head vehemently. “I honestly forgot they were there,” he admitted. “Literally, as you just stood up, I thought, ‘I wish I had some clothes for her’, and then I remembered that I did. I’m sorry, I wasn’t deliberately trying to…well, you know,” he blushed, gesturing at her exposed skin.
She sighed, rubbing her forehead. “Were you not a Traveler,” she said tiredly, “we would be having words right now. As you are, however, I will give you the benefit of the doubt and remind you that you have an Inventory, one which you should fall into the habit of checking regularly to memorize its contents.”
She took the vest and slipped it on over her head, covering her shredded tunic. “Thank you, in any case,” she finished. “You should do what it is you intend to do so we can move on. Both the Hunger and Corruption effects are rather painful.”
Aranos nodded and hurriedly sat down, closing his eyes and descending into his mindscape for the first time since, well…since last talking with Lythienne, he realized. Have I been avoiding this? he wondered as he felt his consciousness sink within himself. Maybe I just didn’t want to come here and not see her. But, that’s silly: I’m so much better at making new spells here, after all.
Sighing, he opened his eyes to a chaotic maelstrom of colors. Shocked, he looked up to see his beautiful mana spirals shattered and disorganized, with barely a trace of the organization they had once held. “What the hell?” he swore aloud, hurling himself into his chair and closing his eyes. I wonder if this is from all the mana I absorbed from those gasha? Oh, I never thought about hos the flow reversal might screw up my system! Gah!
He hurled his mind into his power, and to his relief, he found that things were not as bad as he had feared. The spirals were mostly intact, but it looked as if drawing the mana in the reverse directions had accidentally overrun some channels, allowing the energy to move about more freely than he intended it to. He analyzed the problem dispassionately: he wasn’t about to stop draining mana, so he needed a solution.
It’s the overflow, he realized after a moment. I drained too much mana, and it had nowhere to go. I need to add more channels…or, maybe, add a third dimension of movement. He focused on that second idea and unfocused his mind, pulling up the graphical image of the mana flows. I’ve got movement along the xy plane, he observed, but nothing in the z axis. Shouldn’t be too hard to add it…
It was actually far more difficult than he imagined it would be. His fractal spirals
were designed to eventually move in the z axis, or the third dimension, but they were there, yet. He had to build them like hourglasses: the mana would spiral up from below, cross at a tiny point in the center, and then the flows widened toward the top. Upon reaching the top, the stream would be captured by some nearby hourglass that would carry it down in the reverse direction, where it would be picked up by another hourglass and spiraled upward, and so on until it exited the system at some point. It took him perhaps 30 minutes to rebuild the system, but when he exited, to his relief his energy flows once again looked like smooth spirals…in fact, they seemed far more stable in this configuration!
Those 30 minutes were a loss he didn’t need, he realized. He wanted to craft two spells, but now he wasn’t sure if he would be able to do it. Fortunately, he’d been thinking about how to make the effects he wanted for a while now, even since fighting the first gasha, so it hopefully wouldn’t take very long to fashion at least one of them. Wasting no more of his precious time, he immediately closed his eyes and began picturing the first spell he wanted.
I need some crowd control, he told himself. I need something that will hold a gasha or a bunch of edimmu in place. He had first thought of creating a bunch of tentacles, similar to a spell he’d used before in one of Phil’s and his tabletop games, but that seemed too inefficient. All it would take for a creature to escape would be for them to sever a single mana tendril, maybe two, plus the number of creatures he could hold would be limited to the number of tendrils he could create.
What he was picturing was something like Velcro: thousands of tiny hooks that grab all over every creature within the area of the spell. Each hook would be easy to tear, but a thousand of them would be very strong…and if something ripped free of one set, it would just get caught in a thousand more! Envisioning the network of hooks wasn’t very hard: he was really just combining Velcro with images of diaphanous jellyfish tendrils he had seen in books before. He envisioned a cloud of tangled strands of mana, each strand thin as a hair and covered with tiny barbs. He heard the ripping sound as edimmu tried to move through it but simply wound themselves more deeply in his net. He felt the tension of the strands binding the creatures together and to the ground beneath, holding them in place. Once he had the image securely in mind, he began applying SP to the image, pouring energy into it until finally, he felt it solidify in his mind. Grinning, he checked his hew notification and was fairly pleased:
Okay, so it’ll probably slow a gasha to 50% speed, he reasoned, remembering how hard the first one had hit. That’s enough to stay out of its range. Now, I need a better way to hurt one.
As he waited for his SP to refill, he slipped into his mana flows once more, this time seeking the tangled strands of aspected mana. He didn’t try to move the strands; instead, he simply touched them briefly, testing them. To his surprise, the different types of mana felt different in his mind’s grasp, each strand seeming to contain the properties of its element. The dark brown strands that he assumed were earth mana were heavy, thick, and difficult to move; by contrast, the silvery-white strands that he guessed were air mana were so light they were almost ephemeral, his mental fingers slipping right through them. The brilliant red strings he associated with flame mana were more solid but chaotic, jumping from his grasp as he gripped them. The pure blue mana that he assumed was water flowed easily and was simple to guide, but it had weight and power once it was moving.
They’re all different weights, he realized slowly. If I want to separate them, I need a centrifuge…which means I need to spin the hourglasses faster. I can’t do it now – I want them to get a bit more stable – but when I come back here next, that’ll be my project. That’s how I’m gonna aspect my mana!
His SP finally refilled, so Aranos withdrew from his energy pool and began to construct his next spell. What he was looking for was a way to apply damage to a large area. He had considered following his existing damage Spells by just creating a larger explosion, but that approach had a couple of downsides. First, it would take an inordinate amount of power: making an explosion that filled four times the radius of his Mana Barrage, for example, would require at least 16 times the SP just to start. Second, it would be too easy to inflict collateral damage: to accidentally harm people or structures that he didn’t really want to.
Instead, he was looking for a damage-over-time, or DoT effect. He wanted a Spell that would cause a relatively small amount of damage each second, but that would last for a while and add up the damage. At first, he had thought about tiny saw blades like his forged mana saw, but he wasn’t sure if he could make them all spin fast enough to do damage. Plus, they would also take a fair amount of energy to power, and he was afraid that if combined the damaging spell with his new Entangling Web, the blades might cut the strands of the Web and actually let enemies go free.
He had decided, instead, to create a bludgeoning effect rather than a cutting one. He closed his eyes and imagined a cloud of tiny, dense mana bullets, all whirling around and slamming into everything within its radius. In his mind, it was a tornado of mana, filled with particles that were about the size of a grain of sand but with the weight of a small ball-bearing. He pictured a gasha moving through the cloud; he could hear the roaring as hundreds of tiny mana pellets slammed into bones, the cracking of joints subjected to the constant barrage, the shattering of limbs as they collapsed under the constant strain. The next time, he envisioned a cloud of edimmu caught within the storm, heard the smacking of the tiny projectiles against their flesh, smelled the dryness of the air as the whizzing particles sucked the moisture from it. Once it was firm in his thoughts, he began applying SP, hoping he had time to complete the Spell.
As the Spell progressed, on a whim, Aranos decided to imagine the shadowy, unknown figure of the elf who had brutalized Geltheriel in the center of his storm. The first couple of times, he simply ran through the Spell in his mind, but by the third time, he remembered the filthy cell he had found the elf woman in, her broken and pathetic state, and his anger started to stir. He recalled her tale, and he found himself picturing the elf with a sneering grin as it taunted her. Its eyes swam into focus, leering and lecherous. He could hear the horrific words pouring from its mouth, and his anger roared into fury. As he ran through the Spell the next time, he drove SP into it with all of his will, no longer content with wearing the monstrous elf down with slow, gradual pain. The force of the storm doubled in fury as he pressed it into the elf, driving the bullets not just against its skin, but through it, puncturing completely through the elf’s body. He would smash that leering grin off its face; he would rupture those hateful eyes, he would rip the beast to shreds! He roared as all of the anger, the stress, the fear, and the pain he had felt, both for himself and for her, raged through his mana and tore the figure to shreds. He tasted the blood on his lips, felt the spray of it against his skin, smelled the stench of blood and viscera, and yet, he was not satisfied. He ran through the spell again, pouring his rage – his Passion – into the creation, making it something more.
Finally, the spellform snapped into being in his mind, and he collapsed, exhausted and weeping, his emotions utterly drained. He let the tears fall, finally giving himself over to his feelings: to his fear, of failure and of failing the elf; his pain, hearing the tale of his suffering; his anger, that someone could do that to another; his grief, at the thought of the loss of Lythienne’s memories. For long minutes, he simply knelt and cried, allowing it all to wash over him, until finally, he felt spent…but also, strangely, content.
I needed that, he admitted, sniffing and wiping his nose. That was…cathartic. Now, let’s see about this new Spell. He pulled up the blinking notification and stopped, stunned at the description.
“What the holy hell?” he blurted, staring at his screens. “What the freak is that?”
“That, child,” a ragged voice spoke from behind him, “is Passion!”
Chapter 10
Aranos yelped and jumped backward, rolling over and c
rashing into the transparent dome about his mindscape. He cursed and rubbed his head before slowly looking up to see the image of Lythienne slowly fade into view in front of him. The ancient elf was still wearing her faded but elaborate robes and stood with her hands folded before her. Her hair was pristine white and hung in a long braid over her left shoulder and to the floor. Her face was twisted into a grin, and she chuckled at his discomfiture.
“Surprised to see me, boy?” she chortled. “Well, it took you long enough to come back here. Good thing you did, too: those spirals were a disgrace!”
“What…” he sputtered, completely stunned at the sight of her. “What are you doing here? I thought…the orbs, they all went dark. I thought that meant you were gone! Or, at least, that you were waiting for the next Traveler. How…?”
“Slow down, child,” she admonished, holding up a hand. “The orbs and the Trials still remain. I, however, am no longer within them, and the Trials have been – modified, let us say.” She waved her hand. “That is no matter. Suffice to say that only a Sorcerer could go through the true Trials and learn from Lythienne’s memories. However, for that to happen, those memories had to leave the orb and become part of the Sorcerer taking the Trials. How else could we have met here?”
“That…makes sense,” he admitted slowly. “But, wait, does that mean that if I fail, your memories are lost?”
“Oh, you won’t fail,” she chuckled dismissively. “All you have to do to succeed is leave this place and return to Eredain. A simple enough task for one who has slain not one but two immortal gasha.” She sighed and walked away from him, looking up at his now-orderly spirals. “No, child,” she said after a moment. “It is not about succeeding, but about true victory. You have a chance to truly conquer this Trial, to shut the gate to this Fallen Land for good.