“So I came here,” Mark said, as he sat in a stone booth, facing a stone wall, “To see if I could get questions answered about a whole bunch of stuff having to do with demons and dragons and archmages and elves and resurrection magics and… ah… All of that.”
Mark went silent, his tumble of words petering out. He had spoken to the Stone for the last hour and a half, or maybe more. There had been no answers, but he had started talking, and he kept talking. Everything was weird in his life. Nothing was as it should have been. His parents were dead and demons were pointed in his direction, and a dragon was his ‘brother’, and Malaqua, the Stone God of the System, the Demon Jailer and Emperor, had all the answers to everything anyone would ever want to know.
But would he actually give answers? That was the real question.
Usually the answer was no. Gods usually didn’t answer people, unless those people were truly important, and not even then most of the time.
Did Mark rank getting answers?
Mark had never tried to speak to Malaqua before. He had never tried communing with any of the gods except for Freyala, and only obliquely. But he had run the False Tutorial twice, and he had taken the real Tutorial once, and he was set up to be a powerhouse eventually, so maybe he should have come here for answers, and sooner than this.
And so, here Mark sat, in a grey stone room, sitting on a grey stone bench, looking at a grey stone wall. It was a small room. Brutalist. Mark’s ass was threatening to fall asleep, but not really. He was just uncomfortable here in this solid room, now that he had finished speaking. A minute passed. The soft white light overhead and the solid greyness of the walls had turned from welcoming-strength to uncaring-emptiness, and Mark could not tell when the switch had happened, only that it had happened, and now Mark felt alone—
Words appeared in the air.
Do you want to contract with Leash? I will arbitrate this demon contract if you wish to pursue this option.
Mark’s stomach dropped, his heart beat hard, and black veins pulsed into the air. Softly, strongly, Mark said,
“No.”
The words changed.
Speak to the archmages. They would likely be willing to talk to you to answer your questions about magic and demons. Good day.
The words vanished. The left wall of the privacy booth flickered and a door handle appeared, along with a seam for the door. The room was unlocked and Mark could leave at any time. His time talking with Malaqua was over.
… It was over, just like that.
Mark didn’t leave right away. He stayed seated. He needed some more moments to process what had happened.
“Speak to other archmages, huh,” Mark muttered. And then Mark sighed, and asked, “Can I get a System readout of my Power Levels?”
The light overhead blinked, and like Malaqua had triggered a subroutine to take care of Mark’s request, words appeared with no preamble at all.
Body, Healthy Body: 059
Shaper, Adamantium: 087
Mind: 79
Natural, Union: 091
Soul: 67
Arch: 49
Estimated astral body completeness: 95%
The numbers were all a little bit higher than they had been last week. But also, last week, that ‘estimated astral body completeness’ had also read 95%. So his numbers had gone up, but he had remained at 95% ‘done with growing his astral body’. Maybe a person’s astral body is never truly ‘completed’? … Though that seemed wrong, somehow.
Mark was pretty sure he was growing beyond the normal limits that his astral body should have allowed. From what he understood about how this all worked, he knew that people usually reached their full astral body strength about half a year after Tutorial, but that ‘full strength’ was always going to oscillate up and down. Mark only seemed to be ‘oscillating’ upward, though.
Tri-Talents were maybe weird like that? Maybe they took longer to grow to full power, too?
Mark wasn’t sure.
… He didn’t want to talk to archmages and their demons.
“… Ah, fuck.”
On the plus side, there was an archmage out there that wanted to talk to him, and whom Mark had already spoken with and had a congenial moment. And it wasn’t Addashield.
Archmage Steve Blackthorn of Memphi had been one of the major forces to respond to the demon Thrash’s presence at Wolf Bayou, a handful of months ago. He had been wearing robes and he had been one of the first people to descend from the sky, to speak to Mark after Mark had told Leash to kill himself, and Leash had acquiesced. Mark hadn’t known he was speaking to Blackthorn at that moment, which had been for the best.
Mark had been rather more cold toward the demon-contractor the next time he had accidentally met the guy.
There hadn’t been a third meeting because that second one had gone so poorly, but Blackthorn had extended an open invitation to Mark to speak with him, whenever Mark wanted.
… Did he want to talk to another archmage, though?
Maybe.
But for now, Mark sat in the privacy booth, and he thought.
Eventually, Mark stood up and touched the door handle. The wall briefly turned to liquid and flowed away, exposing the ambulatory of the Stone Church beyond. Other people were out there, walking left or right, headed to their own personal booths or otherwise. A lot of people used this time to speak to Malaqua as some sort of therapy, for he always answered in some sort of way. Never directly, of course. But always in a way that you needed to hear… or at least that’s what the priests here had always told Mark.
Mark had expected an unexpected answer, and he had certainly received that.
An offer to arbitrate a Demon Contract?
That wasn’t normal, right?
Mark walked out of the Stone Temple and got back on the tram, his mind lost in thoughts.
- - - -
Mark steeled himself in the driver’s seat of the car his uncles had loaned him. He did not look up out the window, because he did not want to see what was out there. Not at this moment. He would get to it in a second.
It was a snowy day on this, Friday December 18th, 2048, and Mark had an appointment to see Blackthorn, the Archmage of Memphi.
Mark sighed, and thought back to a few days ago, at the Collective Temple of Memphi.
“There really is nothing we can do, Mark,” Lola had said, sitting at her temporary desk in her temporary office.
Inquisitor Lola was still in the process of moving to Memphi, because that’s what she had decided to do with her life. She had told Mark that she was still his trainer, too, if he wanted, because that’s what she wanted, when she wasn’t being an Inquisitor. Just how Mark was getting out there and making a life for himself, Lola was making a new life for herself. She had moved out of Orange City, never to return as well.
Most of her duties were already transferred to the local hierarchy of the Church of Freyala, so she was outside of the office more often than not. Mark had managed to catch her on her business hours, when she was inside her office, for once.
Mark had sighed, saying, “I really don’t want to go to that archmage for answers, and I really don’t like the idea of Malaqua offering to arbitrate a Contract between Leash and I.”
Lola had nodded seriously, saying, “And you shouldn’t. Malaqua can only ever point you in the right direction and give you a baseline to circumvent the largest of pitfalls, but the actual Contract is always hashed out between the individual demon and human, and the final Contract is always full of danger to the human and the world.” She added, “But as for Blackthorn, he’s not a bad sort.” A bit less polite, “Still an archmage, though.”
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So much meaning in one small statement.
Mark had hummed.
And then Lola had stood up, grinning, and said, “It’s about noon! Have you had lunch yet? Let me take you to this place down the road and we can talk all about archmages and what I know about magic, and the Mage Guilds…”
Lunch had been great. They had even managed to talk about some weirder sorts of Unions, though Mark had made no progress on his personal quest to make his body produce more adamantium at a faster rate. Lola couldn’t help him with that, and she wasn’t even willing to ask around about it. Mark being able to make adamantium was something she was not going to spread around.
But Mark wanted more adamantium, for dozens of reasons. If he could just get more of the stuff, then he could truly become who he was meant to be… Or at least he wouldn’t have to use his alchemical silver spear as a stopgap measure. It was cheap enough to spend 100 goldleaf every mission to have a truly weighty, good length of metal to slash and stab into monsters, but the spear was only tier 5 when coated, and Mark wanted something better.
And maybe, when Mark finally ended up with excess adamantium, he could sell it for crazy amounts of money that he could then use to finally buy artifacts and tools to make him able to exist around a dragon without getting squashed, and hopefully, eventually, being able to fight back. Because that was the real goal.
Dragon hunting.
Kaiju killing.
Putting big monsters into the ground.
As it was, unless the kaiju battle took place in an easy scenario, like, for instance, with Mark sitting next to a Brain Popper and feeding them power enough to blow up the 6 heads of an uncaring kaiju in the far distance, then Mark couldn’t be anywhere near a kaiju battle without being in real danger.
And Mark wanted to learn how to fly, for real, so…
He needed answers from a mage.
And so, Mark was here, sitting in the parking lot of Blackthorn Tower, but not wanting to go inside. He glanced at his phone, sitting in the cupholder. Quark came to life at Mark’s glance, showing the time. 2:17 PM. The meeting with Blackthorn was at 2:30. Mark stared at the phone for a while, the time ticking to 2:18, and then 2:19, as Mark thought about Addashield and Mom and Dad and the destroyed house, and demons influencing archmages to commit atrocities, and dragons—
“Shall I request a reschedule?” Quark asked.
“… Y—” Pause. “No.” Mark picked up Quark and put him in his pocket, as he opened the door, muttering, “It’s time to see another archmage.”
Mark stood in the parking lot, looking up at Blackthorn tower.
It was shaped like a particularly thick and rough-hewn obelisk made of obsidian, with some weird architecture happening with the top floor, but it was really just tinted windows reflecting black and a disguised hoverport on the roof. It looked almost like natural obsidian, chipped by weather and shaped by forces beyond the ken of mortal men. And maybe it was, in part. It sat in the middle of Enchanting, a suburb and inner city located on the southern side of Memphi, overlooking the Mississippi River and Enchanting’s own port on the river.
Enchanting was a ‘mage city’, and there were guilds everywhere. The main ‘mage guild’ was here, but they were just in charge of making sure that mage secrets weren’t released. They were sort of like the Collective in that way; like the Inquisitors. Less violent and more ‘able to blackball someone from mage society’, though. That meant no ability to buy reagents for alchemy, or mage books, and a whole bunch of other things. Magical learning was highly regulated.
So there were reasons that mages stuck to the regulations. If they were found flouting the regulations, they were blackballed. Non-mages simply didn’t ever learn the true secrets of magics that real mages learned, with few exceptions.
Lola knew what to look for in her job as an Inquisitor, when it came to a mage exhibiting demonic influence, and if Mark ever wanted to become an Inquisitor he’d need to learn a lot about magic for those reasons as well. But Lola wasn’t a mage and she had a holy mission to keep humanity safe from demons, so her hands were already too full with that to add real magic to her skill set.
She had told Mark that ‘real magic’ was a bunch of minor Powers, though, and that was about it.
Mark already knew that much. Mom and Dad had gone to a year of arcanaeum to learn some minor magic. Mom had possessed the minor Power of Cleansing, while Dad had possessed the minor power of Telekinesis, and both of their powers had mutated to even more minor versions. At the end, Mom had been good at keeping water clean and that was about it, while Dad’s power had mutated into Fish Yank.
… Mark didn’t want to go into the tower.
Mark went into the tower anyway, one step in front of the other. Snow billowed across the ground as a gust of wind whipped through the parking lot, and Mark stuffed his hands into his pockets, to ward off the chill. A flurry dusted Mark’s coat and hair.
The doors opened at Mark’s approach and the snow followed him in, but not very far. The door closed behind him, and Mark felt like he was in the dragon’s den again, though it was really just a nice public lobby, if on the small side. Black and grey marble floors, obsidian pillars, and brightly colorful paintings on the walls done mostly in gold and yellow.
Archmage colors; black and gold.
The public entryway to Blackthorn Tower wasn’t very large, because Archmage Blackthorn only had himself and his staff to worry about, but it was large enough to have a greeting room with large couches and a big fireplace that was roaring with flames. It was warm, and it felt lovely. Homey. Even in all this ostentation, the place felt kind of like a home. That’s because it was. The whole place reminded Mark of a hotel entrance, but one of those fancy, ‘you don’t belong here’ sort of hotels.
This particular ‘hotel’ didn’t have many guests in the front room at all. Mark only noticed three, aside from him.
A student and a professor stood at the front counter, talking to the secretary on the other side of the counter, and some guy was sitting down on a couch by the fire, reading a book and sipping a coffee, probably waiting for his appointment, or something. Mark walked to the counter and stood behind the student and teacher.
In an arcanaeum, students would wear robes or shoulder capes that bore the colors of their arcanaeum. Memphi had 7 arcanaeums, but all of them had an M on the logo. The student here, who was a teenage girl, had a red shoulder-cape with a white M on the center. The older man wore a plain grey small-cape, marking him as a professor.
His words and tone also marked him as a professor; an angry one.
“Please,” said the man, straining to keep his voice even, “Deirdre will be a great mage one day, and the world will be poorer off for her not getting the education she needs to truly grow strong. I am begging you to give her a chance. Please allow her to speak to the archmage directly. Just that much.”
The small girl stood resolute, but silent.
The secretary said nothing.
Mark couldn’t tell much of what was going on, not really, but he could sense the vectors of the professor, the student, the secretary, and even the guy sitting down and reading his book, and he could tell a lot about the situation from just that. The professor was truly trying to do well by the girl, his vector pointed at the girl and the secretary, but also high, high overhead, to an indeterminate area where Archmage Blackthorn probably was. The girl was putting on a brave face but she was reluctant to be here, her vector pointing right back out the door. The secretary and the guy sitting down both thought that the professor was pushing way too hard… or something like that. Neither of them were really caring about what the professor was trying to do, with the secretary barely pointed in any direction at all, and the reader only glancing away from his book to look annoyed. Mark couldn’t put exact emotions to all of what he was unionsensing, and he certainly couldn’t read any minds, but he could tell basic intentions in the vectors he sensed.
The secretary, to a small extent, and some guys watching from some cameras to a much larger extent, were mostly focused on Mark. They had seen him come in, and now the secretary was trying to figure out how to politely get rid of the guy standing in front of her, so that she could focus on Mark.
Usually Mark didn’t notice what people were focused on unless they had a desire to harm or undermine in some way, or unless he was out in the field, but being here felt like being out in the field, getting ready to face a monster or hundred.
Mark’s own vector was pointed outward, toward the door, just like the girl’s.
“I’m sorry, sir...” began the secretary.
What followed was stuff that Mark tried not to pay attention to. It did not concern him at all.
Soon the professor was huffing mad and walking away, though the girl was walking faster. She was out of the door first, saying something about how it wasn’t a big deal, while the professor spoke about how it was a big deal, and how he couldn’t teach her like she needed, but by all the gods, he was going to try. It was kinda nice to hear him say that, and the girl thought so, too.
She grabbed the professor’s hand, and said, “It’ll be fine, dad.”
The professor’s heart soared, and he said something about how she hadn’t called him that yet, but the door closed and cut the rest of the conversation.
Huh. So they were father and daughter then? Or maybe adopted? Mark didn’t understand—
“Sir? Mister Careed?” the secretary said, smiling, and she was much more focused, now.
Mark stepped forward, saying, “Yes, ma’am. I have a… a 2:30 appointment…” Mark imagined that he should have said more than that, but he simply went quiet.
The clock on the wall read 2:28.
The secretary smiled, and said, “You can go up now if you want. The elevator over there will get you where you need to go.”
She gestured politely to the left, and Mark saw an elevator door that was almost hidden among the decor.
“… Well okay then,” Mark said.
And then he went to the elevator.
The door opened before he pressed the button.
They were ready for him, huh?
Mark got inside and there were no buttons to press. The door closed, and Mark’s heartbeat raced, black veins extending under his skin and connecting him to the world. He felt trapped, but he knew he wasn’t. The materials of the elevator seemed to be just tier 1, according to a scrape test Mark had instinctively, and maybe accidentally, performed on the metal in the wall. He retracted his adamantium back to his wrists before he broke anything else, and he relaxed. The elevator was just enhanced stuff made stronger so that normal wear and tear didn’t easily happen. This was not a death trap. Mark could get out of here easily enough.
But he was already within range of the archmage, and that terrified him.
Mark had seen Addashield kill with ease. He knew how powerful archmages truly were.
Blackthorn wasn’t a 360-year-old archmage who made the world what it was. He was not an Addashield. But Blackthorn was still an archmage. He still had a demon telling him all the secrets of the world, how to do real magic, and strengthening his body enough that Mark’s adamantium would have a tough time actually harming him…
Mark breathed in the good, and breathed out the bad, settling himself, black miasma threading into the world with every breath.
And the elevator went up.