Ar'Kendrithyst

Erick had promised that he would stay in his guest house for a week, which meant 8 more days of relaxing and preparing for the next part of the Worldly Path.

As one day off turned to two, and then three, Erick realized that he desperately needed some time off.

Taking that next step along the Path…

Searching for the dragons…

Erick would rather play with magic a bit more. And so he did.

He had gotten nowhere with [Draining Elemental], itself, except to run into Errors from the Script. So he went to some bookstores and grabbed up all the texts he could find on the Propagation Ban. Mages had been running into that limitation ever since the Script laid down the Foundational Bans, and so, they had been writing about that annoyance and cause for Errors ever since the Script saved Veird from the Sundering of the Old Cosmology.

After that research, Erick decided that, yes, [Draining Elemental] was directly against the Propagation Ban; it was a magic that made magic, with no limit. Of course it was against the Ban. There were some ways around this limit, though, and one of them was rather obvious.

If Erick wanted to make a living elemental that cast the spells he wanted, instead of a spell that cast spells, he probably could have done that, but to do that would be to make a living being that only did what he wanted to do. Such a creation would likely run him afoul of the anti-Slave parts of the Script, and then his creation would likely do something that he didn’t want it to do. Like attack and kill him.

To be fair, whatever [Draining Elemental] he eventually made would probably not be powerful enough to kill him, but many a mage had said the same thing about their own magics, and many a mage had died when they pushed magic just a bit too far. Heck! Erick had already almost died countless times to his own magic. (Thank the gods (literally!) for Healing Magic!)

But even if he couldn’t make [Draining Elemental] how he wanted it to be, there was still the necessity of learning how to make [Drain Ward] painless.

After some private discussion from Patriarch Tsung Red Ledger, and the man begging off because he was extremely busy with the restart of the school year, Erick decided to have Ophiel attend a class at the University. Classes had restarted yesterday.

With Ophiel sitting in the very back, trying not to be a distraction to the other students, Erick listened in as a professor spoke of preparing patients for surgery with what was perhaps a bit too much of a focus on [Drain Ward]. After hearing an offhand comment by some student pointing out that the spell diagrams for [Drain Ward] resembled, in a little way, the diagrams for Elemental Void… Erick had an idea.

After that class ended, he set up an experiment of his own.

- - - -

In the third floor room of his temporary house, Erick channeled Mana Altering for Elemental Void through his hand, and listened. It was the sound of desolation; a silent, tearing sound. He handed that sound off to Ophiel. Then he listened to [Draining Void]. It was much the same as Elemental Void, but with an edge. It was a bit tougher to suss out the sound of [Drain Ward] from the generalized spell of [Ward], but... Yes. He could hear the Elemental Void in that one, too. It was a lot less present, but there was Void in there, too.

So Elemental Void was already in [Drain Ward]?

… Sure. Let’s go with that hypothesis.

So what else do we know?

Elemental Void was harmful to people; it naturally injured, because it attempted to make ‘nothing’ out of ‘something’. But it was possible to make a [Drain Ward] that did not harm as it stripped away resources. So, back to the main question: How was this harm made non-harmful?

Erick went to some of his books to read about his Elements, to see if he was missing something obvious in the Elemental Chart.

To locate Void as it pertained to the other Elements, one must first look toward Water, and then down, toward Shadow. Abyss was the joining of Shadow and Water. Void was an offshoot of Abyss, with a nod toward Destruction. Void was, contrary to expectation, not Destruction. Destruction was anathema to everything. Void was still a ‘thing’.

This was because Void had connections to Water, or more specifically, to the absence of water. Back in the Old Cosmology the Mana Ocean was an ocean, literally, but just as where there was life and solid ground in that ocean, there were Voids, too. Past the deeper waters, past the Abyss, where mana switched from highly pressurized to a primordial soup of nothing, lay the Void. In this way, Void was the idea of the absence of Water, taken to the Nth degree.

There was a flow to this ecology, though.

This flow was not discussed in the arcanaeum approved books, though. Erick had to read about it in a book he got from the Library of Ar’Kendrithyst.

In that book, it explained that mana flowed from the solid parts of the Old Cosmology, from the life that created it, down into the depths. This flow was ever present. Ships could sail those mana waters but those sky rivers always flowed away from sources of mana. If a ship wasn’t careful, if they got stuck in the currents that flowed down into the depths, they would invariably reach the Abyss, which was the final warning not to go any further. If a ship reached the Void, they were almost never seen again.

For past the Void, lay the Darkness; The source of Wizardry, as well as the source of Creation and Destruction and Paradox. It was theorized that the Void of the Old Cosmology was actually the barrier that the Darkness erected in order to protect the lifeforms in the mana from its own destructive existence.

And wasn’t that a heavy thought.

Erick switched back to the other books, looking to the Elemental Chart. He looked up from Water, toward Light, toward Elemental Healing, because Healing Magics rarely ever felt harmful.

There was something there… Some way to make a [Drain Ward] painless, for sure.

Erick wondered…

Could he just take this whole idea, whole cloth, and replicate it in a spell? Could he mimic the now-gone Mana Ocean, and make the space in the center of his [Drain Ward] feel like Healing waters, but have the edges continually sucking away at the mana in the center? Or, to say it another way, could he make a rim of Void that pulled out everything in the center, without having that Elemental Void be in the center, where that Void would directly harm anyone inside? The pull of the Void would still work, even if a person wasn’t directly exposed to it, right?

Tsung had spoken of how Healers naturally figured out how to make their [Drain Ward]s harmless, while Harmers never figured it out, but the man had no real idea how to do this. All he could really say was that the ability to make a [Drain Ward] harmless was the sign of a good Healer.

Maybe… Since mana responded to people’s desires, maybe that’s all that was happening there? Maybe Healers naturally utilized Healing Magic in their [Drain Ward]s that were already Void-aligned?

Time to test that theory.

Erick went back to his experiment room, and cast a [Drain Ward] in the space, instilling the center with ‘neutral’ desire while he cast the edges with Mana Altered into Void, to pull at everything in the center. A shadowed [Drain Ward] appeared, like a spherical dimming on the shader of reality. He stuck his hand inside the dim sphere.

He thought of [Draining Void]. Erick had made that spell with way too much hate on his mind. That spell felt like a thousand bees poking his skin.

This one merely felt like a hundred bees poking his skin, with more bees poking at the edge of the Drain, and less in the center. Bees were still strewn all throughout the spellwork, though.

He took his hand out of the space. This one was a failure.

… It might be a failure because Erick already had a spell that combined the [Drain Ward] function of [Ward] along with Elemental Void. [Draining Void]. Maybe there was no way to make this work without breaking apart that spell first?

… But on the other hand, Erick had Mana Altered for Void in this spell, while [Draining Void] was just cast with hate on the mind. He shouldn’t need to break apart his first spell.

One of the good things about Mana Altering was that you could play around with different spellworkings without actually creating a new spell, as long as you didn’t go too deep with the Alter. Erick was well within that tolerance.

Erick tried again, mixing up the ideas behind his magic, instilling the edge with Void, and allowing the center to be pulled a bit harder. A shaded sphere appeared, again. He stuck his hand in. Still more bees. More bees on the edge than in the center, though.

A few more tries later, without getting anywhere, Erick decided to shift around a few things. Instead of shoving the Void to the edges, he shoved the Void to the side, producing a shaded sphere that was darker on one edge and more like normal air on the opposite. He stuck his hand in the deeper parts and felt the bees again. Then he moved around, and stuck his hand in the lighter part, and felt… Not much. Pin pricks, at the most.

Maybe this was the proper way forward?

He checked his mana to see the Drain rate of the spell. From the lighter side of the spell, he Drained at 15 mana per second. From the darker side, he Drained… at 17 per second? He checked again to be sure that he was seeing what he was seeing. And… Yup. Well. There was some degradation from the spell, because it was sucking up mana and thus losing cohesion, but the Drain from both sides was functionally close enough that the difference of a few points did not matter. What mattered was that it was working… Somewhat.

So what did this sort of spellwork look like when taken as far as it could go? When taking into actual spell creation territory?

In an instant, an idea appeared.

Erick imagined the entirety of the [Drain Ward] as a miniature ocean.

As soon as he had the idea, he knew it was a winner.

Almost the entire [Drain Ward] would be a neutral ‘ocean’, but even the shallows of this spell would fall to the Void, and in that depth, the mana would be transformed by the pressure of the Abyss, then finally, it would become the Void, which would reinforce the whole spell with deepening power. The shallows of the spell would feel like shallows, but even in that space—

Oh! And that was another good idea, actually. The ‘shallows’ of the spell would be the calm, neutral mana ocean. Duh. It might even be a bit Elemental Healing aligned, so that the occupant wouldn’t recognize the danger they were in. And since it was Healing aligned, that should make it painless. Erick didn’t want to actually heal anyone with this spell, though.

This spell would catch someone in an undertow, and if they didn’t escape, they would be relegated to the Void and stripped of all of their resources and—

Erick paused.

This spell included Light and Shadow and Water in its working. Therefore, maybe it naturally included Illusion, too?

… No. There were a lot of distinct Elements here, with half of them aligned to Light and the other half aligned to Shadow, but none of those Elements were Illusion.

Perhaps if this didn’t work out, then he would try it again with Illusion. That would be a different spell altogether, though, so he wouldn’t need to wait a day to make that one if this one failed.

“I need a bigger experimental space,” Erick whispered to himself, as soon as he worked through the entirety of his idea.

So he moved to the roof.

It was a bright day, with barely a cloud in the sky. Erick stood upon the northern edge of his temporary house, feeling the wind against his skin, hearing Ophiel twitter on the railings all around. He spared a glance backward to see Poi come up to the roof, then he turned his attention back north, and with Meditation, he gazed upon the flow of mana rolling across the world, following with the wind. The free mana crashed against [Prismatic Ward] under his feet, and upon the other spellworks atop the clan mountain, like those spells were rocks in the world and the mana was a river. The free mana barely cared for the physical world, though it did slow down a bit when it struck the mountain. Mostly, the mana flowed on, ever traveling, moving to its own rhythm that existed alongside physical reality.

Erick began channeling.

To the left, an Ophiel trilled in a muted song of Healing, and the mana around him turned calmer, and more conducive to life. To the right, Ophiel sang of Abyss, and the mana around him turned darker, hinting at depths unknowable. Directly in front, Ophiel sang of the Void; the hole at the bottom of it all where mana fell and transformed, and thus the Ocean grew just a bit more. The mana around that Ophiel began to slow, to sink, to vibrate with ancient history, and a depth of power.

Fully envisioning the Ancient Mana Ocean would be a spell worthy of a Propagation Ban, though. So Erick pulled back his spellwork to something more manageable. Reinforcement was okay. Propagation was not.

Erick cast into the mana-filled air before him, molding Elements and magic together into a miniature version of a Reality that no longer existed.

In the instant between his cast, and the appearance of the spell, Erick felt a tug on his soul, like nostalgia, but deeper. It wasn’t his emotion. It came from somewhere else. Erick didn’t have to wonder where it came from, though; it came from the mana, for sure.

And then his spell appeared.

White light coalesced into something that was not what it appeared to be, for what it appeared to be was a drop of water the size of a small lake, floating in front of him. The shallows at the top of the floating ocean flexed and tumbled with light, like the underside of waves. The depths were deep blue, and then deeper. At the very bottom, was Void. In that liminal space it was as though the world had inverted, and Erick was looking at an ocean’s surface on a moonless night. He knew, almost instantly, that those depths could be at the top of the sphere, or at the left or in the center, or wherever he wanted them, for the real Mana Ocean had no ‘up’ or ‘down’, and therefore this spell was free of gravity, too.

The spell settled into his soul like a loved one returning home. Erick felt a tear roll down his face. He wiped it away, just in time to see a blue box appear.