Ends of Magic

Over the next week, the Heirs settled into their new routine - a run before dawn while scouting out the far shore, then taking on any necessary tasks in the morning, before using the afternoon to practice. They’d spent the evenings socializing with each other and the villagers, and were starting to get used to the slower, but constant, pace of village life.

The food wasn’t as fancy or as heavily spiced as it tended to be back in Gemore. Regardless, Nathan found himself preferring to be away from the Adventurer’s Guild and its gossip. Like he’d noticed before - it provided a more relaxed atmosphere that soothed all of them, made Nathan’s meditation easier, and made him more comfortable parceling out all of his biochemistry knowledge into his Memory Palace.

At first, they’d been expecting to need to do more - but eventually it sunk in that the Heirs were here as a contingency, to have a combat-capable team ready to defend the bridge if needed. The Agmon legionaries never showed up, and nothing happened that demanded their attention. If they’d had the ability to send and receive [Messages] it might have been a different story. They might have been informed of things that needed doing in nearby villages. But nothing came up in Bridgeguard itself, and nobody arrived with orders to the contrary.

So, they leaned into their practice. One afternoon, Aarl, Khachi and Nathan were practicing advancing under heavy ranged attack - Sarah was using her old-fashioned arsenal to imitate a dozen bowmen, while Stella was filling the air with elemental attacks. It wasn’t Aarl or Khachi’s favorite kind of practice, but it was necessary given some of the things they might face. Stella was tearing up the forest, but they were some distance into the forest outside Bridgeguard and had confirmed nobody was around.

Afterwards, Aarl was slumped against a shattered tree, panting as Khachi pulled a wooden splinter from his leg and healed the wound. He looked up at Stella and gestured around at the carnage. “How much mana do you have? This has to take more than you should have at our level. Especially since you’re the lowest level of all of us.”

Stella looked sheepishly around at the devastated forest. “More than I’m supposed to have, yup.” She looked down at her feet, kicking one heel with the other. “I think it’s time to hear that secret spoken aloud. I… I know enough of your secrets.” She looked up, eyes noting Khachi, Sarah and Aarl before coming to rest on Nathan. “And you don’t know mine.”

Everybody looked up at her words. Sarah had been about to give Nathan shit for being hit by a few arrows, but she closed her mouth and wiped the sardonic grin away. Khachi finished healing Aarl and sat down next to the wiry man, crossing his arms and paying undivided attention to the short mage.

Stella continued tossing her staff nervously, eyes flitting around. She spoke hesitantly, but she spoke. “There’s a Talent I have. [Mana Transfer]. It lets me transfer mana in and out of materials capable of mana storage.” She picked at her green robe, the heavily enchanted one that she’d been wearing for almost all of the time Nathan had known her. It had been carefully repaired after she’d been injured by the Last Dungeon of Old Gemore, but was still replete with dimensional pockets.

Her tone was uncertain but growing firmer as she kept up the explanation. “Just before the Solstice, I Developed it into [External Mana Pool]. Any item capable of mana storage I have on me, it’s part of my mana pool.” She reached into her robe, pulling out a hand-sized chunk of glowing conductive quartz from a dimensional pocket. Nathan recognized the shape of the crystal - it was one of the ones he’d purified after they’d shattered the crystal at the center of the Sklias Mage-Lord’s tomb.

The crystal was glowing with a vague blue light that was intensifying as Nathan watched. Stella held the crystal up proudly as she continued. “The reason my parents were so controlling on my level 27 Class Development - I got a class skill that makes my mana regenerate faster depending on how much mana I'm missing from my pool.”

Khachi breathed out slowly, wrapping his head around what Stella had just said. “I understand. With an extensive amount of conductive quartz and other materials stored on your person, you have an enormous mana pool that regenerates proportionally to the fraction that is empty?”

Stella nodded jerkily, her excitement showing through her anxiety. “The skill’s based on the absolute amount of mana missing, not a proportional amount. With the spells I can sling now, it’s impossible for me to run out of mana. I could throw lightning bolts all day and my pool would start coming back faster than I could spend it.”

Stella’s face had morphed from her previous uncertainty into a self-satisfied smile, and her posture spoke of confidence backed by power. She was clearly enjoying this reveal immensely now that she’d gotten over her hesitance. “That’s why I’m working on casting bigger spells faster, which Nathan’s calculus is helping a lot with. Being efficient is not important until I can cast spells as large as my parents can. I’ll only need to be efficient with my spells when I’m destroying mountains.”

A moment of silence greeted the arrogantly spoken words, as the rest of the Heirs absorbed the bombshell Stella had just dropped. Aarl started speaking but found his mouth dry. He swallowed and continued. “Why are your parents worried about the Giantsrest archmages? If they have so much mana, can’t they just crush them?”

Stella’s grin slipped off her face, the mantle of infinite power evaporating from her posture. “My parents don’t have the exact build I do. But the Giantsrest archmages have their own Insights. Obviously we don’t know what they are, but there are some that can match and overpower my parents, spell for spell. And Gemore wouldn’t survive that fight.”

That brought the mood down, as it reminded them all of the likely catastrophic consequences of sufficiently aggravating Giantsrest. It was important for Nathan to remember that they were effectively in a cold-war style situation. Sure, there were slave raids and lower-level adventurers like the Giantraiders nibbling around the edges, but the true elites didn’t normally get involved.

Because, while elite Gemore adventurers could kill Giantsrest Archmages, the Giantsrest Archmages could simply [Earthquake] Gemore and the villages while invisibly flying a mile in the air.

And the only reason they didn’t was because the elite Gemore adventurers, people like the Guardians of Gemore, or Faline the Witch, would go to Giantsrest and kill them in revenge. While a sufficiently powerful spell could level Gemore, it was much less likely to kill the Gemore elites.

How will I get around that issue? Giantsrest knows that I’m an adventurer of Gemore now. Or at least Taeol does. If I start acting against them too strongly, will they take it out on Gemore?

Probably. But I can’t think of a way around it. Faline would be able to tell me more. If anybody knows, it’s the leader of the Assassins of Gemore.

Nathan hadn’t seen the intimidating assassin since the Solstice. She’d been the first to give a eulogy on that day. According to tradition, the eulogy had been for Istin Bho, the founder of the Bho clan and first Adventurer of Gemore to kill an Archmage of Giantsrest. The first Assassin. Then the mysterious woman had vanished, and left Nathan remembering her offer. That he could help her kill Giantsrest mages once he leveled up past 81.

Nathan looked around at the suddenly gloomy Heirs. Taking that offer would probably mean leaving them behind, at least for a time. But it would be what he would have to do, if he intended to follow through on the promises he’d made when he first came to Davrar. The ones that involved toppling Giantsrest. He just wasn’t sure he wanted to follow through on that if it meant the destruction of Gemore.

Nathan was about to change the subject, but Khachi beat him to it. The big wolfolk looked back towards Stella. “Have you decided if you wish to learn of Nathan’s offered Insights?”

She pursed her lips, nodding. “Yeah. I do. I think it will help me figure out what my style is, and if we keep leveling this way I might not get time to learn it properly with my parents.”

Khachi nodded in agreement. “Good. [Message] is a priority, and our man from another world thinks it will help.” He shrugged one armored shoulder. “I have come to trust Nathan’s Insights.”

Everybody turned to Nathan. “What? I feel like there’s a lot of pressure on me now. I don’t know if this is going to work, you know.”

Sarah spoke up from where she had started to whittle another piece of wood. “Less pressure than being thrown at our last two fights?” She mimed an object flying in a high arc before landing in an explosion.

Nathan threw up his hands. “Not really! How do you want to do this, Stella?”

She looked at him, exasperated. “You’re the one who knows it, don’t you have an idea? I couldn't make it work by trying to make alternating electric and magnetic fields, and neither kind of mana have an effect on light.”

Stella had a tendency to get frustrated when things didn’t work the first time. Nathan sympathized, but he’d had some time to give this some more thought as well.

“Yeah, it’s complicated, and light itself is not simple. Maxwell’s equations are one way to understand it, but not really a complete picture. So let’s try another course. No math for now.”

I think I’ve decided against special relativity or wave-particle duality. For now. Probably when she’s working on advanced light spells.

Following the pattern they’d developed earlier, Nathan spent the rest of the afternoon explaining to Stella how light was generated and absorbed. The rest of the Heirs quickly peeled off to other forms of practice, letting Nathan fall into the socratic method of teaching he liked best for one-on-one tutoring.

He focused on the interactions of photons with electrons. He didn’t want to get stuck in the details of atomic theory, but Stella was already familiar with the idea of electrons as point charges and current flow as movement of electrons. That meant his statements about light being absorbed and released from units of charge were pretty easy for her to understand. Especially because she understood light in terms of electromagnetic waves already - it made sense that they’d be able to affect charged particles.

He talked about why light warmed things up - the energy in it was absorbed by the electrons that were part of matter. He talked about why light was emitted - high-energy electrons became less high-energy, and the balance of energy was emitted as light.

Nathan could tell that Stella was vibrating with a desire to try zapping electricity mana around to generate light, but Nathan wanted to cover a few more bases.

First, he talked about how voltage and current flow was not the same as electron excitation. If voltage was having water pressure, then electron excitation was more like having hot water. You could certainly create pressure with heat and heat with pressure, but they weren’t the same thing.

Then he talked about how light was created through black-body radiation, and how that wasn’t the right way to do it. You could run electricity through air or metal and create light, but that was just because you were heating up the material until it got so hot that it started glowing. Most of the energy was wasted as heat, and fire mana would probably be better at that application. But it wouldn't get you light mana.

No, what you needed was an opportunity for electrons to ‘fall’ in energy without transferring that energy directly to another material. If you did that, then that energy would have to be emitted as light. Nathan suggested that Stella try to use air mana to create a small area without air, then send electricity mana across it and try to somehow decrease the energy partway across.

The difference would hopefully show up as light mana. He cautioned her to only start with a small energy difference since the color of light would depend on that gap. One short explanation of gamma radiation later, Nathan hoped the point was made.

Mid-tier Lecturing 3 achieved!

Stella accepted his skill-enhanced explanation, asking questions as he went. She frowned at the complexities Nathan described, but he’d earned enough credit that she didn’t ask for any kind of proof. The mage was mostly just trying to figure out how to translate the explanation into practice.

She tried implementing the suggestion by sending a crackling arc of electricity from one hand to the other, then quickly modulating its intensity. After that and a few more experiments failed, she sighed and accepted that it wasn’t going to be so easy. In her own words, “I don’t have the spellwork to give that Insight a fair shot.”

It would soon be time to return to Bridgeguard, but Stella had one last question for Nathan, as she leaned against a burnt tree after her magical exercises. “You mentioned another Insight. A way to use light mana for [Message]? How would that work?”

Nathan had been sitting and watching the magic. He looked up as he responded. “From what I understand, [Message] is mostly about sending traces of your mana far away, towards the person you want to contact. Right? They need to still have some structure, but you can think of it as reaching out and touching a person at a distance, right?”

Stella nodded in return. “Yup. Easy with Shadow and Dream. You just reach out and touch your target’s shadow, or their dreams. It still has a limited range, but it’s a long one. And a [Dream] message can take a while. My dad can do it with air mana. He talked about guiding a gust of wind across the sky to find your target and convey the [Message].” She waved a hand through the air, imitating a leaf falling on the wind. “I can’t use air mana that well. It might take a few years of practice.” She said that last with a fragile casualness, like casually waving away a gaping wound.

“But I don’t see how light could do better. Maybe if I can see the person I’m sending to, but I don’t see how that is useful.”

Nathan nodded. “Yeah. Well, I mentioned different colors of light? And how there’s light above and below what we can see? Some of the really weak invisible light is called radio, and it bounces. It can bounce off the top of the sky, as well as around on the ground. On Earth we can use it to send messages long distances without needing line of sight. If all you need is a structured trace of your mana reaching somebody, then it should work.”

Stella shrugged. “I’d be pleased to try it, but I need that light mana first.”

“Practice seems like the proper solution. I know a lot about light. If this Insight isn’t enough, we’ll figure out another one.”

“Yeah. But - Nathan. I’ve gotten used to taking Insights from you, without thinking as to debts. But this can’t just be me taking. What sort of favor do I owe?”

Nathan blinked up at Stella. She wasn’t flirting. She was troubled, reflecting on how he was acting through the lens of traditional Gemore Adventurers. She had realized they’d skipped past that negotiation and was calculating how large of a favor she’d owe Nathan for sharing his Insights.

Nathan had the urge to stand and clap Stella on the shoulder, ruffle her hair and tell her not to worry about it. But he didn’t think that would properly address the issue, and he didn’t want to condescend to his teammates. This was a real concern for Gemore Adventurers, who kept track of complex nets of favors and debts in their social system, with disputes mediated by duels.

Instead of patronizing Stella and intruding into her personal space, he reached his hand up and she took it, leaning backward and putting her full weight into levering Nathan to his feet.

Nathan stepped back, sighing and rubbing his hand through his own hair. “Stella… you stood with me on the Solstice, when I challenged Simla and the way the Adventurers of Gemore work. You helped me win that duel, and have faced mortal danger with me.”

The rest of the Heirs were approaching, gathering up to go back to Bridgeguard. But Nathan wasn’t quite done. He looked up, to include the rest of the Heirs.

“I know how the Adventurers keep track of favors. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to worry about our relationships being balanced. We have enough to worry about with the Endings and monsters, not to mention Giantsrest. I want to help you, and I hope you want to help me. To me, friends give without expecting anything in return.”

Nathan saw apprehension in the Heirs’ eyes, and pushed onwards. “This isn’t an ultimatum. But it’s how I want to proceed. I want to win, and help my friends do the same. There are secrets I won’t share, but I don’t expect payment for the Insights I do share. And I want to be clear - I do not expect anything for this. One day I’ll go to fight Giantsrest, and I will not expect you to join me.”

High-tier Earnestness 4 achieved!

Then he turned back to Stella. “But in the meantime, I’ll share every Insight that seems like it might give us an edge in this conflict. And Khachi gave me an idea with his [Mage of Science] comment. So, Stella, let’s talk about something called the Scientific Method for when you next work on light.”

Status of Nathan Lark:

Permanent Talent 1: Magic Absorption 7

Permanent Talent 2: High-tier Regeneration 9

Talent 3: High-tier Slow Fall 4

Class: Spellbreaker Juggernaut level 65

Stamina: 662/750

Juggernaut's Wrath

Antimagic Momentum

Raging Thrill

Juggernaut's Inertia

Unarmored Resilience

Utility skills:

High-tier Focused Mind 9

High-tier Earnestness 4

Mid-tier Sprinting 6

High-tier Spellsense 4

Mid-tier Notice 9

Mid-tier Identify 7

Mid-tier Dodging Footwork 5

High-tier Enhanced Memory 4

Mid-tier Lecturing 3

Mid-tier Tumbling 2