It had been around three decades since Kalina last saw Seliana. The young woman of that time was still present somewhere in this aged version Kalina saw now. It was the eyes. Everything else had aged and changed, but Seliana’s eyes had remained as bright as ever, taking Kalina back in time.
They had met on Kalina’s last dispatch to Augusta Belia, in her role as the Enforcer of the magi law. Mages, she was sad to say, were not above breaking the laws and Kalina was duty and salary bound to enforce them.
The topic of brewing had somehow come up when they met, Kalina couldn't recall how, but they talked for hours and at the end of the conversation Kalina had lamented on not finding this gem a little earlier. Had Seliana been even fourteen at the time they met, Kalina would have taken her to the Pyramid to make a mage out of her. Unfortunately, the girl had been over half a decade older than the age limit of the Academy entrance, and Kalina— still in grief over her disciple's untimely demise— had been unable to undertake such a monumental burden that is training a mage from the ground up, of her accords.
Instead, Kalina had given Seliana a few months of tutorship in the basics of alchemy, just like she used to teach her Disciple. Well, almost like that. The truly major things that Kalina was able to share with her Disciple, she wasn’t able to share with Seliana, yet that hadn’t stopped the girl one bit. Even while using what little Kalina gave her, Seliana had shown a lot of promise. They had parted after Kalina gave the young woman a few tips about getting herself some specific skills, skills that were tailored for a brewer, along with an old recipe book of common potions.
Now, three decades later, they met again in the strangest of ways.
When Kalina did her investigation into the boy, the name Ana had come up more than once. Finding ‘Ana’ had been as easy as checking the registry of new arrivals to Chameos, but she had not been certain. For a while, Kalina had thought that she must have imagined it.
“Teacher…” Seliana said and the words rang out, and Kalina knew that she hadn’t imagined it. There were a few tears in the familiar eyes, and Kalina’s throat constricted. There it was, sparkling right there in those eyes, the thing that ultimately drove Kalina away. The young Seliana had started looking up to Kalina as one would a Mentor. Kalina hadn’t been ready to see that, then. She wasn’t ready for it even now.
“Is that you? But… you…” Seliana asked, clearly not believing her eyes. Kalina couldn’t fault her. Kalina looked the same as she used to, save hair length.
“I thought it was you, Seliana, but I wasn’t sure. A lot of time has passed, hasn’t it?” Kalina said, keeping her voice as even as possible. “I am that glad to see you again, child.”
Even as she steeled herself, her sensory skill stirred— her nose smelling a strange mana activity, and abruptly Kalina's head turned Tercius's way.
***
Time slowed to a crawl for Tercius, as he stood up and made some distance between himself and the stunned Seliana.
Teacher, he heard Seliana say. Mistress Kalina’s reply to Seliana repeated itself in his ears, word for word. The two had a prior bond.
Suddenly, his skin crawled and he took a step back, towards the door.
Was that why Seliana had been so persistent for him to come over to her home? Had Seliana only been close to him so that she could spy on him for this woman? What was the game they were playing? But…
How can it be true? Tercius thought, as his breath hastened. Seliana’s connection is to Lux. Without him, I wouldn’t have even met the woman. I have seen the cut out part of the lung with my own eyes, for Heaven’s sake. I put Energy in the potion that gave her the lung back! If she… but wait… what if none of that actually happened? What if someone … implanted those memories… What if…
Tercius shook his head, as his face gained heat. That was a deep rabbit hole. The only way to check the veracity of his memories was to backtrack them and talk to people who were present in the memories. His uncle was probably as compromised in the same way as Tercius, but he could try the inn where they stayed in Lissea. It’s been a year, though… who would remember our little group?
Going further back, he remembered the woman who smuggled them on a small boat from the cove to that little town. One by one, past interaction flew through his mind, backtracking his voyage with Lux. Those warrior women, the butler of that governor, the captain of that ship, the old woman in Spheros’s port…
Small explosions of memories assaulted him, as his breath quickened and eyes went wide.
Going further back, was anything of it real?!
Anything?! he thought, as his eyes wildly darter around.
“It has to be!” he whispered, with desperation, as the faces of those close to him pierced the increasingly frenzied veil that covered his heated mind. “It is!”
Like a bucket of cold water, he remembered all the nightmares he had had when he was a few months old toddler, where he and the world evaporated like a bit of spilled water under the harsh sun.
Gone, like a puff of smoke, diffused into particles that would never join again. He had needed time before he had grown convinced that the new world was real.
And now...
The room was hotter than it had ever been and he lacked the air to breathe. His heart was heard, it’s drum fierce. He could feel something bubbling inside of him, and a momentary thought that he should calm down came to him, but…
Is any of it real?!
Suddenly a desire to retreat from everything and everyone and just reassess everything came surging, stronger than ever, and he embraced its welcoming arms.
One moment he was present in his body, the other he observed things happen through the eyes of a puppet.
As the house of cards— the house that he had built every day for the past decade— shook around the edges, Tercius felt something surge in his body.
A pressure came demanding release, straight from his center. He knew what it was. With a part of his mind that was distant now, far removed from him, he noted that his mana was responding to his agitated state, his Mana Manipulation [25] and Mana Metamorphosis [12] slipping into familiar states, just like his teachers had warned repeatedly that could happen.
Mana came surging, all of it, through his arms, legs, chest, and even head left tingling from the amounts drawn from his Well.
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Fascinated, Tercius observed as his mana attuned to crystal, little by little.
“Tercius,” the voice of Mistress Kalina reached him. “What are you doing?”
Glowing white light started seeping out of his pores, all over his body, the crystal mana latching onto the last layer of his skin. Fireflies of white mana grouped together all over him, their light dimming as the surface of his skin gained a glassy finish. And it didn’t stop there.
“What’s going on?” Tercius heard Seliana ask, her voice strangely muffled through the glass that covered his head.
“Wild magic,” he heard Mistress Kalina hiss as the woman moved to stand in front of Tercius. He noted his heartbeat quickening at her approach and accelerating the magic.
“Tercius! Snap out of it!” the woman yelled.
There were no Runes present at all, he noted, the process done naturally and organically as if his skin was supposed to grow molten crystals as a part of itself.
Hands and arms, feet and legs, his torso and up his neck over his head, the crystal covered him completely and started to thicken and settle, even as the calls for him dulled in intensity.
Mistress Kalina gingerly touched the edge of the still-growing crystal around his face, only to retreat and purse her lips in distress.
One issue that Tercius noticed was that the crystal helmet had consumed his head. That was a problem, as his body had no way to breathe.
Master Lazarus had warned of the dangers of wild magic in his classes. Powerful emotions were the catalyst that guided wild magic, and emotions rarely cared for all the fine nuances that a body depended on to operate. An ice attuned student of magic might freeze the blood in his or her veins, a life attuned student’s last meal might have seeds that sprouted while inside the stomach… and that’s for those who manifested wild effects on themselves— there were those who manifested effects externally to devastating effects. The students were not the only ones to whom wild magic could occur, any mage who loses control over self while under an emotional turmoil was a liability to themselves or to others, Master Lazarus had warned.
The situation was observed by his distanced mind and he appreciated the irony of all of it.
In his bid to retreat and protect himself, he had triggered all of those surging emotions he could feel roiling in his body, and the mana was responding in kind.
His mana would protect him, but there would be a cost.
He saw his body try to shift as the air became a rare resource inside his sheltered little crystal world. There was a strange beauty to observing things through the see-through crystals. Everything outside was broken, for one, and the boundaries between him and the outside were very clear.
A scratch on the back of his mind alerted him of Amber, who was asking what was going on. Why was he in a block of … solid water? Why was the giant flower woman swinging a paw at him?
Mistress Kalina's mana-covered hand struck the crystal's outer edge and cracks started spreading around the impact zone, but they were rapidly mended as crystals shifted and repaired themselves.
The woman's orange eyebrows furrowed deeper, the image coming in clear-cut pieces to his eyes.
Should I water the flower woman? Amber asked. Tercius noted that he wasn’t even interpreting what Amber sent him… He was just… doing it. Their link was stronger than ever, it seemed, and Tercius reached for his side of the link—
Suddenly, he was no longer inside his crystal. He sat on his back legs, head tilted to the side, observing the world in a bigger size than it usually was. His hands had no skin, but rather scales and his chest rumbled pleasantly.
He saw Penelope and Seliana behind the wall of the kitchen area, their heads looking towards the crystal statue of him with worry.
"— No! I can’t do that! If I break it, it might create a recoil. With this amount of mana… should it happen… it would pulverize his mind," Mistress Kalina said out loud and Seliana inhaled sharply, as her hand covered her mouth. "Wild magic is … damn! What happened?! Why did this happen?! If I can figure it out… then maybe…"
“Please, help him,” Penelope called out in a low voice as Seliana held her back. “Please—”
“Not now, child, I need to think,” Mistress Kalina said harshly and started waving her arms around him.
I need to think as well, he said to himself behind serpentine eyes.
It had been a minute, by his estimate, since his body last took in the fresh air. Returning to that boiling pot that was his body was not very high on the list of things he wanted to do, and he wished he had activated Meditation in time to calm down. Any thoughts of what was going on with this whole Mistress Kalina and Seliana and Energy business, he left for later.
Now he needed to somehow solve the predicament he placed himself in.
Or did he?
Tercius knew that Meditation, the skill, had inherited his own ability to detach, be it from people, things, or anything else. Even from himself. He had always been good at it. The skill had probably been born of that ability, molded by his experiences to suit him better. But, unlike the skill, where he only needed to command it to re-engage with the world, here he had to do the attaching himself. There were times in his old life where that had been too difficult to do, and a few times when he never did. Here, to not attach back quickly meant the death of his current body.
What would happen to him, though? Would he once again go somewhere else to reincarnate? Or would he cease to be?
Even disconnected, he felt strange wisps of curiosity and then amusement by the second possibility. How do you know that you stopped existing if you had stopped existing? I guess you wouldn't… Existential crisis at it’s finest, indeed… hmm…
Questions he had asked himself for a decade now would get their answer, or wouldn’t, depending on his choice. To let things run their course, and let his body die, or…
One thing was sure, however— time was ticking away.
Through Amber’s eyes, he observed his crystal statue and the body contained within. The face was familiar to him, but the expression he saw on it was strange. Mouth stretched in horror and eyes widened with a grim realization, it was certainly not an expression Tercius wanted for himself. It wasn’t one he wanted for anyone.
Why was the world and the people that inhabit it so difficult? Why were the first things that came to his mind always so suspicious? Why was he the way he was? He had a hand in his own making to a larger degree than most people ever would, so why did he make himself so paranoid?
Or was he paranoid because he had a hand in his own making?
No… it wasn’t that. He was … afraid. There it stood, plainly written across the expression etched on his face. Afraid of being blind and controlled. Afraid of being betrayed. But most of all afraid that everything he had come to know in the past decade had been a lie. Every person, every day, every event— a figment of his or someone’s imagination. That had been the final straw that tipped him over to this state.
But even disconnected, he hoped for one thing. To remember it all. Even this… strange experience that was going on. False or real, he wanted to remember them.
And... he realized that he would like to have more things to remember.
And so Tercius left Amber's body and returned to that hover over his own shoulder, a strange almost apathetic existence that he could become. Surging back into his body, he felt all of the fear that paralyzed him, the mana that immobilized him, but most of all of the burning in his lungs.
Meditation surged and calmed the emotions and the bare scraps of unmorphed mana he had left returned to his channels. Moving was not possible, and it was actually good for him. Any move would have spent the oxygen he sorely needed now, he knew. The morph that his mana was taken was a strange one, completely unfamiliar. Tercius had never learned it, for one, and he only saw the end result.
But he didn’t see only the end result, he remembered, as Visualization took some of his mana to take him visually back in time to the moments of the creation of the crystals. He saw a few glimpses of the stages his mana had morphed to, slowly becoming more corporeal with each transformation. It was fascinating and in need of further study, but now was not the time for it, he thought as his lungs burned for release.
Quickly, he went over the process from start to finish in broad strokes first and then once more in a bit more detail. With a grim realization, he realized that he wouldn't have enough mana to free himself. After the wild spell, he had been left on fumes, his queasy stomach and pounding head had informed him, and his use of Meditation and Visualization had only further drained his resources. He barely had enough fuel for Mana Sight and Mana Manipulation to run.
He needed more mana to let himself out, he thought as the corners of his eyes blurred. Focus! Tercius screamed in his mind. Think! Well, Energy is the only answer—
And then he felt it. Mana. It was all around him and it was almost his own. It was moving around the crystal, trying to make it dissolve, and finding some limited success. It would succeed, eventually, but too late.
His own Mana Manipulation reached for the mana and found some purchase, finding a presence there that abruptly stopped, seemingly surprised to sense him. Abruptly, the presence retreated from a part of the mana morphed to be similar to his own and left it for him.
Mistress Kalina, he realized with a start. She was trying to make her mana similar to his own so that she could dissolve the crystal noninvasively. It was possible, he knew from classes, for mages to share mana. You only had to learn how to morph mana properly. Mistress Kalina certainly knew how to do it, and she was able to adapt her mana in seconds, intent on finding the mana language that his wild spell spoke.
She would learn the signs of his mana language, Tercius knew, but to learn to speak it… it took time.
Luckily, he was fluent in it.
He took hold of the mana and claimed it, spending a part as the price of the process. The mana moved to his head, and he started undoing things. His Mana Metamorphosis made minor changes to his crystal helmet’s front side, and that proved enough. Destabilized, the mana outline he fiddled with reverted to the previous stage, and suddenly he had a separate entity for Mana Manipulation to manipulate. His skill pushed the front of the helmet out and with a gasp savored the smoke and herbs tinged air of Seliana's home.
As he took in the first, the second, and the third breath, he felt that his decision had been a good one. Then the three women gushed over the immobilized him and he flinched from their combined voices.