You wake up earlier than you’d like when you hear the rustling of your mother’s armor. You move as quietly as you can out of bed and manage to sneak out of the room without alerting Erden, giving you a brief moment alone with your mother.

She greets you, but you aren’t beating around the bush. Increasing, you find the stigma surrounding Erden to be more and more infuriating, so you ask about her thoughts on him immediately. She clears her throat before saying that you are too observant for your own good. When that visibly angers you even more, she immediately says that his Aether is bathed in Astral energy, a common indicator of the use of destructive magic, especially thaumaturgy and Black magic.

It is a familiar complaint. Your mother, well-versed in the arts of Paladins as she is, has acquired the ability to sense swathes of aether within a person. A skill that you certainly could have developed yourself, had you been accepted into their ranks and grown more. As it stands, you can only detect massive quantities of disrupted aether-- something most animals can do by instinct.

When Mizu first started to get into thaumaturgy, your mother was able to notice the changes in her over time. Originally, she was in favor of astral magic if it meant a safer city-state, but in her eyes the warping of aether is simply fool-hardy. While she is usually private about the matter with strangers, she has lectured you no small number of times on the subject.

Too much Astral aether will eat away at your soul if not balanced out properly, and your mother is almost on the verge of recounting her favorite cautionary tale, The Fallen City of Mhach, before she is cut for time. As she leaves, you protest that Erden has never practiced dark magic, stopping her at the door.

She apologizes if she came off as rude to him or to you, and wishes you both a good day, but notes that someone needs to help him, one way or another. After taking a deep breath, you wish her the same. You brew yourself some coffee from what she has available, and around an hour later Erden wakes up, suffering from a terrible case of bedhead.

You both meet up with Mizu later in Western Thanalan as promised, where she is standing dramatically atop a huge circular rock. Once she notices you, she strikes a dramatic pose and commands you to BEHOLD the magnificent power of thaumaturgy. She slowly and carefully crawls down the large rock before running over to you and holding her staff aloft. She instructs you to ‘stand back,’ which you do-- by around thirty yalms.

She channels aether into her staff for...a while. A minute, at least. Erden looks to you a few times to see if he should be doing anything, but you silently shake your head no-- Just keep waiting. So he does. You skim through the pages of your tome and pull up your temperamental shielding spell, and also summon Brick for good measure.

“I...CAST…!!!” Mizu begins to shout at the top of her lungs, drawing in some attention from the nearby refugees. “THE ULTIMATE DESTROYER OF ALL THINGS IV!!!” The surge of aether from Mizu to the rock is so large that you can visibly see streaks of it rip away from her body. Once the spell completes, a pillar of lightning falls from the heavens and strikes the stone a thousand times over. The resulting explosion is powerful enough to throw her back a few yalms and onto the ground, knocking her out cold.

You quickly deploy the barrier in front of her, which is just strong enough to endure the shrapnels of rock that would have killed her. By the time the dust settles, the massive boulder exists only in your memory. Fragments of ore litter the ground, though in such small pieces it is hard to argue they will ever see much use.

In hindsight, this is very funny. In the moment, you and Erden panic as you try to assess if she’s even still alive. No healing magic you have will be of any help, as her “injuries” are purely that of exhaustion. Lightning also sprawls across the ground, but to Mizu’s good fortune none of it is around her body. Brick runs in and drags her away from the dangerous area, and just a short moment after he does so, sparks of lightning crash into where she had just been.

Lightning continues to run amok in the same zone for the next two hours. The Brass Blades are not very happy about it, but settle down once you argue on Mizu’s behalf that this was an experiment in the military’s best interest, since she is a member of the Thaumaturge’s guild. Since nobody was harmed, you are only issued a warning. You are grateful that these particular blades did not know how many of these ‘warnings’ Mizu has acquired, and focus on getting her somewhere safe.

Once you get Mizu back into the city, Erden seems...exhausted. He tells you he is just hungry and insists that her condition is much more serious than his. Obviously, he’s right, but only because the bar is rather low. In the corner of your eye, you can occasionally see him swaying ever-so-slightly while trying to stay upright. You bring Mizu back to the thaumaturge’s guild and greet Yayake who gives a tired sigh before rustling under the table for Ether kits. When she hands you one, she also welcomes you back to the city.

You feed Mizu the Ether kit and lay her down on a resting bench in the back of the guild. Once she’s well-situated, you tell Erden that she will be out like this for another few hours but be fine once she wakes up. Probably. He is obviously concerned, but trusts you, and so you two leave to get a quick bite to eat in private this time.

Erden asks what you think he should get, so you both get your favorite meal-- Crab Bisque soup with crackers on the side. He is ravenous, eating it in full and getting two extra orders, while you just barely manage the one.

In the middle of the meal, he asks if arcanistry is something you could see yourself doing forever, which you suppose you could. Maybe, just maybe, you could return to being a paladin, but there’s something delightfully free about investigating long-lost runes and combining them to make new magic to help people. Sometimes, you’re not even sure if being a paladin was ever your dream, or if it was just your mother’s, but it’s hard to tell if you’re just distancing yourself from your failure.

If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

You ask him what he wants to do, and he hesitates. Clearly, he doesn’t want to be a farmer forever-- he seems to have bigger sights, bigger goals. He tells you that he doesn’t know, and you say that’s perfectly okay-- nothing wrong with taking your time to make decisions. He’s considering becoming an adventurer, sort of like you-- just after slightly different things.

Finding magic ruins certainly sounds exciting to him, but he admits that he does not have the smarts to unlock arcane geometries like you do. This compliment feels hollow, even if it’s not intentional. The rut you’ve hit with the shield spell has partially shaken your confidence in your ability to make good spells, you just try your damnedest not to let it show.

Once you both finish eating, Erden is in much higher spirits, and even asks if you two should spend some time investigating runes that can be found around Ul’dah. Honestly, the thought of it makes you so happy you want to cry.

“You’re a man after my own heart!” You tease, flipping to the back end of your grimoire to pull up your more experimental drawings.

“Hm...I guess I am.” He says, making you light up like a Starlight Celebration tree. A moment of clarity and intimacy immediately followed by a barrage of awkward stammering and muttering and gentle laughs from you.

On the subject of magic ruins, you are very curious as to the ruins of Sil’dih, a city that is written to have turned its own people into zombies in an attempt to win the war with Ul’dah. Monstrous and unethical, yes, but likely chalk-full of leyline drawings and runic patterns that thaumaturges are often just as fond of as arcanists.

Most thaumaturgy spells when placed into the press of arcanistry are a complete miss-- thaumaturgy hinges so heavily on the manipulation of aether within oneself that pressing it into a book results only in weak, worthless attacks with very little exception. Surely, though, there must be something worth researching in the field that can help develop arcanistry. At a minimum, there could be some treasure to find.

You have yourself, Mizu, and Erden, but could really use a fourth person to brave the city with you. Luckily, you are much less out-of-your-depth in Ul’dah, and know how to approach The Adventurer’s Guild for assistance. If your experience in Amdapor was anything to go by, very little healing is actually required to get the job done as long as you approach situations tactically. Then again, Mizu is coming along, so it’s hard to know how it will all shake out.

Healers are difficult to find so far from Gridania, as conjury is usually the most reliable method to get the job done. Arcanistry definitely has the potential to surpass conjury with more research, but healing is a relatively unexplored field for the artform. You hope that you will be enough as a healer, but you spend a lot of time penning down slight modifications of your healing spells that may come in handy.

First, a standard Resurrection spell is in order-- a tremendous surge of healing aether that can pull someone back from the brink. It requires a lot of focus to cast correctly, so it won’t be of much use in the middle of combat. Secondly, while Rejuvenate is great, a more direct form of healing would help to make sure Erden doesn’t get overwhelmed in the middle of a fight. The problem is, Physick, which comes included as one of the Grimoire core set, is complete and utter garbage, and you can’t quite figure out why. In a pinch, you suppose you always have Clemency.

You get so wrapped up in your spellwork that you don’t even notice that Erden both put out a notice for our group and found someone to fill the role already. His name is Himoto, an Au Ra man with a lance and penchant for Geomancy, something you didn’t have much of a grasp on at the time.

With Geomancy, instead of deriving power from the elements, you instead draw your strength from the planet-- whatever the hell that means. Himoto does not speak-- like, at all. You never catch a single peep from him, he only smiles and sometimes nods his head. Despite this, Erden has not seemed to have any difficulty at all communicating what you both plan on doing.

“He doesn’t want money or anything-- he’s looking for a gem.” Erden explains.

“What kind of gem?”

“Some kind of jewel that belonged to his people in The Ruby Sea. Rumor has it, many thieves stow their goods within the ruins of Sil’dih since the guards don’t look there.”

“Well...alright!” You shake Himoto’s hand and agree to leave once Mizu has recovered in full. Himoto returns to his Inn room at The Quicksand in the meantime. Since you estimate she won’t be in a good state to do adventuring until tomorrow, you decide to return back to your mother’s home until the next day.

On the way home, you are accosted by high ranking Brass Blades about the disturbance Mizu caused earlier, and you are told you will need to pay a fairly severe fine for the disruption it caused-- near a hundred thousand gil. They inform you that Fyrgeiss, the chairman of Amajina & Sons Mineral Concern, has filed the spellwork as destruction of private property, since the boulder destroyed contained semi-precious metals and was technically within the borders of one of his mining quarries.

You know Mizu, she can definitely afford this fee-- there is no world where she would actually let you cover this bill for her, so you simply pay the fine they are asking for and resolve to ask Mizu about it later when she is hearty and healthy. Erden seems upset that you are being forced to pay such a ludicrous fine for what was actually done, but you tell him that’s simply how it is in Ul’dah.

Something seems off about Erden on the way home, but you can’t quite place it. Before you call it a night, you ask if he’s okay-- if everything is okay, and he says yes, and that he just isn’t a big fan of the brass blades. So...monopolized and corrupt, he puts it. He calls it a night earlier than you, while you stay up tinkering with the runes your mother gave you more.

You make enough adjustments to Ruin that you are able to recreate Holy Spirit, though with a tremendous amount of aetheric efficiency compared to the original spell. Of course, it is slightly weaker, but over the course of a fight it more than makes up for it. You put your grimoire on the nightstand adjacent to the bed you both share, next to the choker you bought Erden. You have a long day ahead of you, so you try your best to get a good night’s sleep.