by Kyle Johnson
“No, Ekimmu not want,” it said quickly, shaking its head. “Wizard not want, either, when know what Ekimmu know. Ekimmu tell, but must ask, first. What Wizard want? Want escape? Or want more?”
Aranos looked at the creature thoughtfully for a moment. If I say I want to escape, it might help me find the way, he reasoned, or it might attack. If I say I want more, what does that mean? I think it means to help them…maybe to defeat its Mistress? “I want…more,” he answered at last. “I want to…”
The Ekimmu hissed, waving its hands. “Not tell Ekimmu,” it insisted. “What Ekimmu not know, not tell Mistress. But, if Wizard want more…Ekimmu help.” Suddenly, the creature stretched its mouth and began to make a gagging sound. Aranos took a step back, concerned, and shared a look with Geltheriel, who looked utterly defeated. The Aura of Despair, he realized. It’s not affecting me, but she’s getting hit from all around. We’ve got to speed this up!
The Ekimmu coughed once, and a large, round object flew from its mouth and landed on the floor, rolling to rest against Aranos’ boot. The Ekimmu bared its teeth in what Aranos interpreted as a smile, if a smile was designed to give someone eternal nightmares. “Wizard take,” it encouraged. “That help.”
Aranos bent down and gingerly picked up the slimy, mucus-covered orb, wiping it against his tunic, followed immediately by his fingers. Ugh, I so need a bath after this, he groaned in disgust. And maybe to burn these clothes. “What is this?” he finally asked, staring at the mostly cleaned object. At first, it had looked like an orb, but now he saw that it actually had thousands of tiny facets covering its surface. The crystal itself was clear and slightly translucent – although that might have been the remaining slime hazing the surface – and it was deceptively heavy for being the size of a plum.
“That is a memory crystal,” Geltheriel said dully from beside him. “It appears empty, though.”
Ekimmu nodded enthusiastically. “Elf smart,” it agreed. “Crystal what Mistress want. What edimmu look for. Now help Wizard.”
Aranos looked at the monster in surprise. “If this is what she has you looking for,” he asked curiously, “wouldn’t you have to give it to her? She’s your Mistress, and it seems like you have to do whatever she says, right?”
Ekimmu shook its head. “Mistress not say right,” it explained. “Tell Ekimmu, give crystal when Ekimmu find it. But Ekimmu not find crystal, edimmu find. So, Ekimmu not must give. Keep instead.”
“But, why?” Geltheriel spoke from beside him. “Surely, she would reward you for your service. Why would you keep the edimmu searching when your task could be done?”
“Not reward,” Ekimmu spat. “Ekimmu and edimmu slaves. Not need reward, must obey. Edimmu not know, not care what do. Follow Ekimmu. Ekimmu not want go back to Mistress. If crystal found, what Mistress do? Play with edimmu and Ekimmu. Give pain, edimmu no can die. Hurt forever.”
Aranos stared at the creature, shocked. No wonder it wants to help you, he realized. “Ekimmu, what would happen if your Mistress died…not that we intend to harm her, of course,” he explained as the creature looked alarmed. “I mean, what if someone else were to do that?”
Ekimmu calmed down and nodded. “Good, Wizard smart,” it said. “No Mistress, no magic hold edimmu and Ekimmu. Edimmu and Ekimmu free. Not here, not hurting.”
Aranos nodded as a pair of edimmu approached, carrying what looked like stale, crusty bread. “Little food,” Ekimmu proclaimed as Geltheriel snatched both pieces and began devouring them hungrily. “More food, follow edimmu. Must kill edimmu after and run. Mistress ask, Ekimmu say, elves come, take food, kill edimmu, run away. All true, not lie to Mistress.”
“We understand,” Aranos nodded as Geltheriel swallowed the last of the bread, sighing in relief. “Once we leave…what should we do if we come across more edimmu?”
Ekimmu shrugged. “Kill, not kill, not matter,” it replied casually. “If send to Mistress, Mistress know where elves kill, not more. Edimmu not talk, not tell Mistress things. If Ekimmu go to Mistress, Ekimmu must talk, tell Mistress what know. Maybe not matter: Ekimmu send all edimmu away from Spire Tree, into city. Maybe see no edimmu. Not matter.”
Aranos nodded and gestured to Geltheriel, following the pair of edimmu into the darkened hallway. He wanted to say something to the pitiable Ekimmu, but the creature’s warning had been clear: it would answer its Mistress’ questions, and what it did not know, it could not say. He didn’t want to make its already horrible existence even worse.
The edimmu stopped before a bag filled with stale bread, dried fruit, and withered vegetables. Geltheriel grabbed more and began ravenously devouring it. Aranos tore off a few hunks of bread to eat -- Hunger wasn’t much of a debuff for him, after all – and stuffed the rest into his pack. A nearby vat held water, and while he was refilling his waterskin, he heard Geltheriel gasp.
He turned quickly, wondering if Ekimmu had betrayed them after all, but the woman was rushing across the room to grasp the handle of a sword leaning casually against a wall. A set of the mottled leather armor he had seen the elves in the forest wear was tossed casually on the floor next to it, beside what looked like a long, tapered staff with a string wrapped around one end. That’s a bow, idiot, he reprimanded himself after a moment.
“My sword,” Geltheriel gushed, excitedly. “And my armor! My bow!” Aranos turned his back quickly as she began to pull off her shirt and resolved to watch the edimmu until he heard the rustling behind him finally still. When he turned back, she stood proudly in her armor and was belting her sword around her waist. A quiver of arrows was slung across her back, with her unstrung bow resting through a loop on the quiver. She looks like a real warrior now, he thought admiringly. No wonder she was so happy to see this stuff.
She walked over and held out his staff. “My thanks for the weapon,” she proclaimed. “I…I need to thank you, Aranos. I thought never to see any of this again. I doubted your choice to come here; I doubted your decision to speak with that creature. And, yet, those choices have returned me to my strength and granted me my arms and armor once more. I said it once, but I did not mean it.” She suddenly dropped to one knee and bowed her head. “Where you lead, I follow,” she intoned formally. “My blade stands between you and your enemies. My life, given freely for yours. This do I Vow.”
A pulse of energy washed out from the kneeling elf, and Aranos felt some of that energy reach into him, seeking a connection. He opened his mouth, unsure of what to say, but the words came to him as if he had always known them. “As you follow, I will lead,” he affirmed, placing a hand on her bowed head. “My Spells will guide your blade and fell our enemies. Your life, given freely, held tightly and valued. This do I Vow.” Another pulse of energy washed out from him, and a notification popped into his vision unbidden:
Aranos blinked, stunned, as his new Follower rose to her feet. “What now?” she asked him simply. He stared blankly at the woman, his mind refusing to process, and she chuckled.
“You lead, I follow,” she reminded him. “So…lead, Oathbinder.”
“Umm, okay,” he stammered, trying to collect his thoughts. “I think we do what Ekimmu suggested: we kill these two edimmu and then run like heck.”
She nodded and drew her blade, whirling into the pair. The shining steel flashed and sang as it bit into their deep, blue hides, and in a matter of moments, both creatures lay dead before her, slowly dissolving into blue smoke. She turned back to him and grinned. “It feels good to wield a blade again,” she proclaimed. “Now, let us run!”
She darted out the door like a rabbit. Aranos yelped and followed suit, no longer used to carrying his staff and struggling to find a way to carry it where it didn’t bang into his legs as he ran or get caught in doorways. He finally decided to just hold it in one hand vertically in front of him. By the time he had gotten himself sorted out, Geltheriel had vanished, but he followed her easily by Tracking her scent.
He burst through the front door and found her engaged with a
pair of the edimmu. One was bleeding badly, but the other was attempting to claw through her armor. He quickly sent a Mana Arrow into its face, blasting it backward and freeing her to finish off the bleeding one. As the second one rose to stand, he hit it again, using Precise Shot to aim for its knee. The arrow sunk deeply and burst, causing the leg to collapse under the creature’s weight, and with a few, accurate slashes, Geltheriel put it down.
The ran together down the street, not bothering with Stealth. If, as Ekimmu had said, the edimmu were scattered throughout the city, Stealth was not as much of a priority as speed. They needed to get back to the Spire Tree and bar the doors before it was discovered they were inside and before the Mistress could place more edimmu to block them. We also need a place to rest, Aranos admitted privately. Now that Geltheriel isn’t dying of hunger, we could use some rest, and I need to think and check notifications.
They made it to the Tree without incident and slipped inside, closing the doors behind them and slamming the bar back into place. Aranos sighed and slumped against a wall, physically fine but mentally worn out. His Scent Ability helped him Track Geltheriel as she moved over and sat next to him, resting her head back against the pitted bark.
“So, uh,” he began awkwardly. “I just want to say, thank you. Thank you for trusting me and for your Vow. It means…”
He broke off as her fist struck him firmly on the shoulder. “No, no drama, please,” she chuckled. “It was a choice, and I do not regret making it. And, it is not as if I do not gain benefits from it, as well.”
“Yeah, I saw,” he agreed, relaxing. He was half-afraid she was going to start acting like some kind of servant to him, and he was glad to see he was wrong. “Bonuses for you based on my Charisma, which is one of my Strong Stats. That’ll be nice as we level up.”
“Indeed,” she replied. “As well, it seems that I am now immune to the Aura of Despair from the edimmu. I wonder if It will apply as well to the Presence of that Rabisu?” She shuddered as she said the name. He was curious, but she cut him off.
“We will not speak of that creature before I rest,” she proclaimed. “Or I will never rest. You will keep watch and wake me in four hours, Oathbinder.”
Aranos agreed and settled back, deciding to take the moment to check his notifications:
He spent some time looking through his notifications, checking his combat logs, making sure that he knew where he was causing the most damage. His mana saw, he discovered, actually caused more damage per second than his Mana Arrow spell did to the gasha, but it took too much of his concentration to be an actual combat Spell. He could probably create a Spell like the saw, but he wasn’t sure what the utility of it would be. Maybe if we were facing plant-based or wooden creatures, but he had a feeling that without his will driving the blade, a conjured saw would skip right off the hardened bones of the gasha, and he didn’t want to deal with a spinning, ricocheting blade.
There were certainly Spells he could use – a light Spell, for example, or something that could heal damage – but he didn’t think either of those would be very effective until he could aspect his mana. What might be useful is some kind of paralysis Spell, he mused silently, aware of the elf woman snoring softly beside him. Again, it would probably be easier with aspected mana – there’s probably a type of mana that would drain energy or stop the body from functioning – but maybe I could do the same thing by locking a creature in a shell of hardened mana?
He decided that it would be worth putting some SP into, once he placed his newly acquired Stat points. He considered dropping another point into Endurance, but honestly, now that Geltheriel was with him, he didn’t know if it would be worth it. After all, his Mana Armor could currently soak up about 800 points of damage. Sure, eventually he would face something that was armor-piercing, but wasn’t that the reason he had his pretty, new tank?
Of course, assuming that he would never get hit was a losing proposition, so he went ahead and added another point to End for this level. He dropped one into Dex, to keep it advancing with the other Stats, and put the last one into Int: his single-target spells seemed to be lacking some impact lately, and an Intelligence boost would help with that. Content with his choices, he pulled up his status:
He glanced over his Skill advancements, happy to see that Mana Control was up to Adept 8 – only 3 more ranks, he hoped, and he could aspect his mana – while Mental Resistance had gone up to Student 7, probably from fighting off whatever that floating creature was doing. Camouflage and Stealth had gone up another point, but he felt like it was getting harder to level those by moving around the city. I probably need to use different environments to advance, he reasoned. After all, Skills seemed to level faster when you really challenged them.
Most of his Spells had gone up a bit, too. He didn’t expect Empowerment to rise, since he had no plans to use it anytime soon, but he really needed to start grinding Mana Barrage. The problem was, it was loud, flashy, and honestly didn’t do much damage anymore: it was designed to deal with large numbers of low-level creatures with low LP, but his new Hailstorm Spell could do something like two and a half times the damage for less SP. He’d need to play with it and refine the Spell if it was going to be useful to him anymore.
He dismissed his status and started to play with the idea of a mana-paralysis spell. At first, he considered building a form around a creature and filling it with mana until it hardened, but that took too long – the target would probably move away before he could fill the form – and would probably take a lot of SP, as in most of his SP pool. His next idea was to create something that acted more like bindings: chains or bands of mana that would pin the target’s limbs and hold them. The issue he saw was that strong creatures like the gasha would probably be able to break that sort of thing easily, and unlike his Entangling Web, once a binding like that was broken, it was simply useless.
No, what he needed was something like a flash-freeze, where the temperature of a liquid was well below the freezing point and some disturbance caused it to instantly shift from liquid to solid. Using that parallel, he needed to oversaturate the area around the target with mana, pressing it against them but not solidifying it, and then suddenly triggering the solidification process so that they were trapped almost instantly. It still might not hold a gasha for long, but if it could hold one just long enough for him to Mana Drain another, it might be worth it.
Actually creating the Spell was much more difficult than he imagined it would be. It took a lot of SP poured into the area around the target to reach the critical level, and even then, at first, he couldn’t get it to flash-harden. The mana simply wanted to escape into the air when it was agitated, rather than combine into a solid surface. Eventually, he hit upon a mix of SP and compression that caused it to suddenly crystallize once he created a tiny burst within it. He practiced again and again, making sure he had the concept down securely before starting to add SP to it.
He exhausted and refilled his SP pool five times before the Spell finally shivered into being. Excited, he laid his staff on the floor and began the new Spell, layering it with mana, compressing it down, and then igniting a tiny burst to agitate it. He heard a crackling sound, and when he reached down to touch it, he found his staff was bound to the floor in a sheath of a rigid, faceted substance that he assumed was crystalline mana. He pumped his fist in excitement and pulled up his new Spell description:
He waited for a minute until the mana encasing his staff shivered into vapor and wafted away, then reclaimed his staff and allowed his thoughts to wander. Something about the city had been nagging at him, and he needed to relax his focus for a bit to see if it would coalesce. He puzzled at it for a time, and an idea slowly took shape in his mind. It fit all the tiny clues he’d noticed as they moved through the city, and – if he understood Geltheriel’s explanations about the creatures correctly – it explained why the gasha and edimmu were here. He turned the concept over and over in his mind, examining it for flaws, and he found only one: the memory
stone. That object didn’t fit into his narrative, at least not in its current state, but he had a feeling that, with more information, it eventually would.
His mental alarm sounded, startling him out of his thoughts, and he leaned over to touch Geltheriel’s shoulder lightly. The woman’s posture immediately straightened, and her snoring ceased at once as her hand moved down to her side. “You asked for four hours,” he said quietly, not wanting to alarm her further. “I need about 30 minutes, and we can head up and see what’s waiting up top.”
Sensing more than seeing her nod, Aranos closed his eyes and slipped into his mindscape. As soon as his eyes opened, he sunk into his chair and delved into his mana spirals, smoothing and tightening their flows. He moved from spiral to spiral, giving each one a gentle, mental nudge that started it very slowly rotating. Getting the spirals to move wasn’t really an issue – they were bound to their central nodes, after all, and twisting the node imparted spin to the entire spiral – the difficulty was in keeping the entire spiral moving at the same pace, and ensuring that each nearby spiral was moving at a nearly identical rate to prevent any one spiral from overfilling or not receiving enough mana. Finally, everything was stabilized, with the outer edges moving at a sedate pace the he estimated to be about 50 rpm. For the moment, that was as fast as he could keep the spirals moving stably, so it would have to do.
When he returned from his mana flows and opened his eyes, he saw Lythienne’s specter staring up at his slowly twirling spirals. “That is both beautiful and disconcerting,” she declared in her raspy voice. “But, it is the correct path to take if you wish to use aspected mana, child.”