Remembrance!
The cast of the Step-1 spell opened up the same spectral past as before, just more vivid and detailed. The blurred corners sharpened, the distorted parts straightened, and the gray carried a bit more color—it was the advancement from the old film boxes to the modern tv of Obria.
The promotion of the spell might change what it showed last time, Perceval might give him another part of the truth, but Ewan pulled out and cancelled the spell, and the world of the memories shattered. What he needed wasn’t in the remembrance of the past, but in the reality of the present. The abrupt termination of the spell stirred the whirlpool of the Mystic-Anima, and they seethed. Bit by bit, they came together and fashioned a blob—it squirmed into the broken shape of a canine. Soon the hazy image cleared up and a large but ethereal wolf stood before Ewan, its snowy fur swaying with the halo in all its glory.
The Mystic-Anima made up the wolf, so it carried no sentience, yet its eyes lived—Perceval had long affected the Anima in this cave. It cried at Ewan and rubbed against his face, licking his cheek.
“Good boy,” Ewan said, and petted its furred neck. “Will you lead me to what I want?”
The wolf whined and tugged his shirt with its mouth and guided him towards the tunnel. Its faint glow lit up the passage, and with every step, the wolf shrunk a size. The Anima that left it floated back to the hall and rejoined into a growing ocean. Halfway through, when the light at the end of the tunnel was still a dot in the distance, the wolf growled at Ewan and scattered into a crowd of Mystic-Anima, most going back to the hall while some sticking to a section of the wall.
It had no shape, had no design. The random placement puzzled Ewan; the arrangement gave him no clue on what to do next. There could be no physical mechanism or a hidden door, otherwise even with their Ryvia suppressed to an extent, the Governor would’ve found it long ago. Ewan could check it just in case Perceval hid the secret right under the Governor’s nose, but time was running out, so he wasted no minutes on it and moved on with his conjecture.
The Governor overshadowed him in all aspects, he couldn’t begin to compare, yet one facet still gave him the edge—the mystic. If he were to find what the Governor couldn’t for years, this element was his only hope. And so, he pulled back a step and cast
The Anima trembled for a second, but the spell failed to trigger any response.
Ewan stared at the wall without attempting a second cast, a seed of an idea growing in his mind. If it was just about stirring the Anima, any mystic spell could do, and it already failed. However, if he were to take a different approach, the approach of an illusion….
Phantasm!
He traced the circuit and created an illusion of a passage onto the wall. The lights and the shadows shifted around the area when the spell took effect, the Mystic-Anima sticking to the wall condensed into a wolf again, and Ewan’s hand passed through the illusory entrance—the fake had turned real. The astonishment came in a wave, Ewan gaped at the result even though it existed within his prediction. It was just one of the possibilities he thought of, and it wasn’t hard with his imagination knowing no bounds, yet Perceval achieved it in reality. The mechanism behind the feat triggered Ewan’s itch, but the threat of exposure hung above him with a noose, he couldn’t delay…
The smaller-than-before wolf tugged him again and led him down into the slanted dark tunnel. They went through turns and curves, but the path didn’t divide. After minutes of descending in silence, where only the clatters of his boots against the stone path echoed, the wolf stopped before a dead end and dispersed into a cluster of tiny Anima—some glued to the wall and the rest went back up the tunnel.
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‘What was her name?’ The Anima sticking to the wall formed a question.
“Taria,” Ewan said, yet the reply garnered no reaction.
Phantasm!
He cast again and wrote the Kaaleria word for ‘Taria’ on the wall. The mystic finally reacted to it, and the question changed.
‘Show me.’
“I’m not good with portraits…” he murmured and closed his eyes, recalling how Taria looked like.
Phantasm!
The spell became his brush, and his thoughts painted her portrait on the wall. The last stroke went in, and when her lifelike image showed up smiling, the Mystic-Anima responded with a tremor and the wall vanished into thin air.
A chamber came beyond the door, soft amber radiance enveloping the right side, while the left buried a quarter of the metal-mammoth—it was the Warship. The distant sound of waves crashed into the walls, the dripping droplet of water echoed inside the dome, and Ewan’s rapid breaths loudened amidst the haunted silence.
The Warship ‘Stormfalcon’ was the standard edition of one of the Class-M size series with little to no modification—two thrusters on each side and the main thruster at its back, a long running deck on top for troops deployment and defensive warfare, and the insides partitioned into three floors and ten sections.
The ownership of a Warship, especially a Class-M sized carrier, was a dream for many. Yet, Ewan couldn’t take his eyes off the amber glow. A tree was its source, leafless and branchless with only a crystal trunk, and its two irregular amber-like fruits hanging from the top shined the brightest.
Déjà vu fruit, the shape and the details from his journal overlapped with the tree and the fruits in front, and a name came to his mind. A few among the small group who knew about it also called it the fruit of regrets. The cause of the war that decimated Drarith and the prize he racked his brains for now lay before him. It was within his arm’s reach. However, he couldn’t own it, for a portal opened on the side and a cane with a wyvern-head handle emerged.
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Status: Healthy
Step-1 Severynth [Spirit-Nebula: Zeroth Surge]
Subtype: Step-0 Elementalist
Name: Ewan Ayres
Species: Human
Vitality: 7.0
Spirit: 25.3
Anima: [Fire – 25.3 | Ice – 25.3 | Blood – 25.3]
Astylinds: 4 [Potential: 1]
Rolling Cat [Toast]: Step-1 Severynth [Spirit-Nebula: Zeroth Surge]
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Fire Monkey [Orange]: Step-1 [Level-10] [Grade-B]
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Imp [Frost]: Step-1 [Level-10] [Grade-B]
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Bloodthorn-Lotus [Iris]: Step-0 [Level-4] [Grade-D]
Equipment: Common Clothes; Yurn [Neck Gaiter]; Moonkeeper [Crystal-Ball]; Rainwarden [Staff]; Blackfeather [Overcoat].
Storage: Journal; Elementalist—The Path of Anima [Subtype-Book]; Spellbook; Bloodlust [Spell]; Transmute [Spell]; Unknown Book [Radon’s Legacy]; Anima-Crystals [Novas Coins]; Obsidian Dagger; Hub-Connector; Ingredients.
Novas: 28,245
Crelith: 1,298