The chatting between Bella and DeMorte changed this chapter, so please tell me if I need to do something like start and end the internal conversations with asterisks or something (*) to keep things clear.
Quick explanations/reminders to all: DeMorte cannot perform the extensive magical surgery and reconstruction that are required to turn him into a man again by himself. He needs someone who knows a working spell or to create a magical device that can transform him back into a man instantaneously… Of course he would have to trust someone a fair amount to let them perform such a spell so he is rather… eager to find someone who he can then research before bribing/trading/blackmailing their assistance – although he is desperate enough to just take a leap of faith if it becomes an ‘acceptable risk’
Also, I did not state Bella’s formal house name until now, despite the fact that she has been technically apart of the nobility for a while… It simply was not mentioned in the villages as no one really thought of her or Nathan as full nobility, even years/cycles after they officially became them. The town, more so, but DeMorte tried to stick to less populated areas.
Nathan and the family had a meeting beforehand and decided on a house name, but it did not seem relevant as I did not include the ‘raising ceremony’ that showed Nathan making the informal request of what he wanted his new house to be named (King can raise you as the house of Shite if he wants)
Random info dump over, please enjoy :P
Chapter 27: Adaptation, Arrival, and Adaptation
“Motherfucking asshole.” I groaned “Why am I here Leo?”
My head was pounding as hard as it could, trying to make me wake up from whatever dream I was in. A dream which included a familiar bookish-looking Nalk and a red sky with a giant heart on the horizon.
“I would really appreciate you watching your language DeMorte, even if you revel in the way that your cursing makes others react.” Leo said disappointed. “Although I will give you points for realizing that this was a dream.”
“Fuck off.” I groaned again in response as my head felt like it had an ax imbedded in it. I was also deliberately using Anton’s language to let him know how annoyed I was. Bella and I were going to be within sight of the capital before noon and he was interrupting my dear sleep. The fact that I had found a farming couple nice enough to let me stay with them for free had been a bonus.
Which brought up an idea: was there a way to set up wards to detect Nalks? They used that odd energy instead of mana, but I got the feeling that mana manipulation was not impossible for them. While my mind was working in that direction I tried reaching for my mana, but found it blocked. That surprised me a little as the previous time I had been here it had simply not been there, as I was a spirit at the time, but now it was blocked.
So getting rid of this headache with mana was out of the question? Headaches were tricky, but not impossible to remove magically.
Sighing out loud as I rubbed my temples I spoke again. “If it was that easy to move me you would have just thrown me into your new ‘game’ and let me start making noise. Now, what do you want and does my head feeling like it is being bisected have anything to do with our location?”
“Ah, well your questions have more than a few answers, but the main reason is that I am pulling on the small amount of your spirit that has not fused into your new body to delay things a bit.”
I glared, deciding to keep my responses to a minimum as talking seemed to make the headache a little worse.
“Well,” Leo continued, “you know that you will merge with Bella soon enough, but there are a few things that need to be… corrected. Starting with the timing of everything, as some Backers have complained about your deliberate manipulation of your new biology. Specifically, they want you to merge with your other-self completely right around the time that you decide on your gender as it will affect the course of the Game.”
I ground my teeth “and playing tug-the-spirit with me helps how?”
“A couple of different ways, first of which is that it will solidify the time in which your spirit will merge into your new body: precisely 185 days before your 16th birthday.” I raised an aggravated eyebrow at the precise nature of his statement.
“Is that including the ‘day or the gods’ or not?” I growled, before lightly regretting it as my head throbbed.
Leo gave a friendly smile, which only made me want to growl more. “Just count backwards from the day you would mark as your birthday, or ‘naming day’ as I believe it was called on your previous world.”
“185 day? At dawn, noon, or dusk?”
Leo’s smile grew, “Just before dawn, it will likely wake you. The reason for the precise timing however is that precisely 180 days, or half of a cycle, before your 16th birthday on the 66th day of the Metal phase, you will have your first period.”
I froze and stared at Leo for a moment as my mind suddenly shoved the headache into a metaphorical box. That would be… 61 days into the new cycle, into the Wood phase, that I would fuse? 5 days after that I would be… I needed to move up my plans, I was approaching my 14th ‘birthday’ already.
Leo smile seemed to flash from sadistic to manic to slightly embarrassed in of a fraction of a moment. “I have corrected your biology to have a more dramatic and compressed puberty at this time and if you have not changed into a male again you will be stuck in your new body as your mana and spirit semi-permanently fix themselves into your post-pubescent body.
“Of course, you could still systematically defeminize yourself to the point where no one would mistake you for one with your clothes on, but it would still be in an extremely limited form in comparison to what you would be if you change before that date. Plus…” Leo’s smile turned regretful, “If you force the change through after that point, with either the spell or that thing that you are growing inside of you, then the rebuilding of your body will likely cause significant damage to your magic capabilities.
“Side effects include, but are not limited to: vomiting – with or without blood, – loss of mana holding capabilities, reduction in the ability to manipulate mana with your current skill, hives, spontaneous desire to break into song, complete failure and collapse of mana pathways, death, and hemorrhoids.”
I took a deep breath… Then I took another.
“Alright then, is there anything else?” I asked evenly.
If Leo was disappointed in my reaction, he kept it to himself. “One more thing: To make your transition that much smoother, I have established a small barrier between you and Bella. It will not stop you from communicating, but it will keep your minds from fusing any further until you have absorbed the last remnants of your spirit – at which point it will collapse.”
“Why?”
“To make it interesting, of course.”
I rubbed my temples again as I felt the headache return. Absently I tried grabbing at the energy that the Nalks seemed to use all the time and tried to throw it at him. The energy was just floating in the air around us and I figured that my inability to use mana might now translate into being able to manipulate it as well… although I did get it to respond to my touch, though it did not feel or act like mana, so using it was impossible.
Keeping his exact same smile in place, Leo dismissed me with an arrogance that I could only imagine coming from a god. “Goodbye DeMorte.”
The energy that I had been trying to manipulate and throw into Leo’s face was instantly ripped from my mental grasp and threw me back, away from Leo and into a shadowy passage that might have otherwise led to the abyss.
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We groaned, sitting up and instinctively checking our wards, which were intact and had not had to activate to keep others away.
Apparently being closer to the major cities raised the population density considerably as the only open space anywhere seemed to be owned by nobles. As a result, I had set up my wards to specifically discourage or stun people who got too close.
When I reached out to Bella though something was… different, like there was this distance that had not been there before.
Bella?
DeMorte? Did that Nalk talk to you too?
Yes, I presume that you were informed of our new standing?
An… interesting way to put it, but yes, I know that I have until half a cycle before the day we turn 16 to convince you that being a woman is not so bad.
You have that long to bang your head against a wall, yes. Now, I suppose that we will have to move a little faster as we will have just over a cycle and a half to find a mage to perform the gender changing spell… Which also means that my back up will be useless as it needs at least at least another full cycle of hard experimentation to rewrite the body that completely.
I still do not understand why you are so against changing that to be used on other people, think of the potential!
I snorted to myself and did not bothering arguing with her. We had both had our say over this particular subject and come to the same conclusion and impasse every time: Bella wanted to turn other people into our loyal followers by using the genetic recoder in our body to create people with enhanced physical abilities. I always countered with the same problem, until we had made a few of them it would be impossible to create the recoders on a large enough scale to matter, leaving us dependent on whoever we modified for data.
That person, whoever they would be, would have to like us enough to deliberately let us recover the results of the HIGHLY experimental procedure over the course of whole cycles. After that, we would also have to do the same experiment again and recover those results over another few cycles before perhaps doing it a third time. That was all assuming that no one betrayed us, disagreed with the changes and demanded to be changed back, and stayed alive.
After that, we could think of producing a magical device that somehow produced the recoder in higher numbers. Oh and if we were correct about our changes to the DNA of the wolfpeople, they would be living longer lives than any other human – something that would also draw greedy people to my experiment. People who might want to keep the secrets for a longer life to very select groups of people.
No, overall, letting someone else become the ‘super human’ that my recoder would likely enable them to become was going to be far too dangerous for me… Especially if there was a specific combination of genetic code that led to increasing the power of mages. In theory, that type of discovery could actually turn normal people into mages! Or even make mages more powerful, so that there were no mages who could not power at least 10 circles worth of magic.
Overall, it was dangerous, with an enormous potential impact, and dependent on the actions of others: meaning that I was firmly against it. Bella might still believe that other people can be trusted, but I knew better by now.
Disassembling our wards, we stretched and I let Bella practice cultivating the mana around us to restore our Gía to the level it was before our encounter with the SRMs. In the meantime, I stretched and felt the couple who owned the home start to wake up. It was slightly odd, but there was just a sort of unspoken agreement in the farms I was used to: everyone had a specific time to wake up.
The tacit agreement seemed to be in effect here too as, just before the sun started to create the morning twilight, the couple had already awaken and started to prepare for the day ahead.
I was honestly conflicted as part of me admired them for letting a stranger like me sleep in their home without worry, but the rest of me wanted to berate them. I mean, on one hand I do look like a relatively harmless little girl, but on the other hand, I was a complete stranger. I found myself hoping that they had some lethal trap set up on the other side of their home, to ensure that anyone who violated their personal space would pay for it with blood.
After all, if it was your space and someone tried to sneak in without your knowledge, it was their life and their decision, even if you happened to have a lethal trap or 4 set up waiting for them.
Moving on though, the lives of the local farmers were not that different from the ways Bella had grown up before I could talk to her so it was… pleasant to feel that there were not that many differences between the farmers closer to the capital and the ones farther away. It left us feeling somewhat more familiar with the surroundings.
Though there were definitely some differences. Most notably, the locals also did not seem to know how to farm like the ones from the Entrials area, which was very odd to me. While Nathan had been farming in an efficient rotating system based on which phase of the cycle it was, these lot seemed to leave roughly a quarter of their lands fallow each year. From what I knew of farmers, it was likely justified as ‘it has worked for a long time and we have no reason to change.’
Or, more succinctly, ‘if it is not broke, then do not fix it.’
On one hand I could understand as their livelihoods depended on growing enough food to feed themselves, pay their taxes, and maybe a little more to sell for some small personal income. On the other hand, it was hard to accept their decision in my head when I had seen firsthand that the methods I had told them about did work.
Nathan had either been given a little push by the Nalks or had honestly gambled on trying out his new system and helped to prove it to the people around Entrials. It was one of the reasons that he had been so popular before his ascension to ‘lord.’ These people, as nice as they had been to me, made me want to bang their heads into a wall and drag them north to prove that they did not have to go hungry nearly as often as they did.
As it was, all I could do was give them advice and thank them for their hospitality before I left to get back on the main road, which had become paved with stones at some point along the way: likely at a city, but I had deliberately decided to avoid them as much as possible.
I felt my stomach growl and decided to find one of the larger estates and ‘obtain’ something to eat before I would go ahead and use some Gía to arrive at the capital a bit sooner.
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1 sheep and a burst of Gía later and we were within sight of the capital, Thysia, before noon. I had deviated from the road briefly and was currently standing on a rare hill to the northwest of the capital. It gave me quite a view.
It was not the biggest city I had ever seen, containing a few hundred thousand people if I had to guess, but it did look fairly clean… in the more upscale parts of the city. In the center was a large, slightly elliptical, stone fortification of some sort, which gave off enough magic that I was surprised I could feel the outer walls at all. It was surrounded by rather large mansions in a section closer to me while I could see more business like buildings on the other side, extending out of my view.
Surrounding that were surprisingly ordered streets in a grid pattern that were clearly separated into a large market, a living quarter, and a walled off portion with what appeared to be a sizable military presence. Naturally these areas were much cleaner than the surrounding areas, even from a distance. Outside of this clean area, was what I surmised was the lesser slums, which extended to the outer wall.
Beyond the outer wall, which were heavily warded, there was a cleared space where it was clearly forbidden to settle before it transformed into the city outskirts and extreme poverty. This area seemed like it should have salesmen outside every possible entrance selling cheap boots, nose plugs, and directions to any bathhouses inside the city walls. It was not a place that I wanted to just walk into and I found myself wondering how much a carriage ride through the area would cost me.
In addition, like so many other towns and cities in this nature fearing world, the city was built with a river nearby, but not running through it. The river ran from the southwest up to the capital and then into the distant southeast. It was also the site of more than a few small barges and large smokestacks that were clearly some type of foundry. Carts and wagons were traveling between the buildings along the river and the city walls.
Idly I found myself analyzing possible ingress and egress points into the outskirts of the capital that would likely be less watched. It would take a great deal of drink to supply this place with drinkable fluid – the river itself turned a nasty color downstream that told me where the human waste was being dumped – that would be the key if I wanted to hold it hostage or cause panic: dump something rotten into the water and spread rumors of poison.
You were just thinking of something evil, correct?
You have to ask? This wall thing might be more annoying than I originally thought…
I grunted in annoyance to myself and ignored some old man yelling for me to get off his hill.
The city would be crowded. More so than I originally planned for too, as a city this big would normally take up much more space than it currently did. Clearly, the people here were even more comfortable with the idea of living with close neighbors than those in the surround countryside were.
Silence runes must be in high demand, I thought wearily, or maybe people around here just pay their whores to be a little more vocal. After all, if someone is likely to overhear you anyway, you might as well make sure that people were impressed by what they heard.
Regardless of what people said, advertising was the oldest profession in existence as it was practiced by many different animals, humans included.
I dodged the grumpy old man and descended to the road again, I wanted to walk straight in as normally as possible given the fact that I was a little girl traveling all alone… with a dozen sharp knives of iron that would come out if anyone got too close. I also had Bella practice making wards on our way here so she was more than happy to show off her ‘ice queen’ ward that would drop the temperature anytime someone got too close.
We had also taken the liberty of having our hair grow out enough to hide our ears after the incident with the SRM. Bella had argued that not making enemies was the best path and I reluctantly agreed with her. I might be able to slaughter the entire “Adventure’s Guild” given enough time, but dealing with the Guilt would make it annoying at best and debilitatingly painful at worst, not to mention how long it would take.
Checking our knives and travel pack as we walked the last few kilometers along the road I also added a few wards to Bella’ own as I wanted to make sure that no night soil would stick to our robes or sandals. We both talked for a while, but could not think of anything other preparations that might help us.
Since the walk in took some time we also observed the area surrounding the city, which appeared to be grazing land for a verity of animals. It was all fenced off and there were quite a few (well-armed) people on horseback, patrolling along the fences. As I drew closer I even felt some mana from the fences, indicating that they were warded in some magical way as well.
I started to worry about my earlier sheep acquisition as I noticed just how well protected these animals were, but these were likely better protected due to their proximity to the outer slums.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Surprisingly there was almost no one else currently on the road despite how busy it had been during almost my entire journey here. The only group that I saw since the morning was a pair of wagons that had been filled with produce, it was slightly eerie.
Still, I entered the outer slums easily enough and ignored the beggars who started tracking me with their eyes. It seemed that children were either afforded some measure of protection or they were suspicious enough to question why I was not worried despite traveling alone.
Though, as we moved further into the outer slums I felt myself deliberately placing my steps more carefully. On one hand, the occasional children running around and people moving from here to there was comforting, but the increase in people made it harder to navigate without touching anyone.
The road also became smaller as the occasional stall on the side of the way or small groups of people gathered around some type of gambling event. To my surprise though, there seemed to be a fairly efficient series of wagons that had large, mostly sealed, cauldrons that naturally cleared their own paths through smell alone. The wagon had a plank of wood on the side where people would occasionally come stand on to dump a chamber pot into the unsealed cauldrons.
I could appreciate the method, if not the smell that haunted it on its slow path. I also tried not to think about where they would end up putting all of that stuff.
To my slight surprise and disappointment, no one tried to rob me or gave me an excuse to cut off their arms and reattach them backwards. Not that it was a bad thing, but the walk to the wall did seem a little boring because of it.
There I was forced to wait a little while for a pair of wagons in front of me to be checked before they moved through. “Name, group, and business.” The guard asked me mechanically, barley seeming to register my age.
“Bella, corpus callosum, location.” I did not want to reveal myself like this, but since no one had started a fight or otherwise given me an excuse to attract attention, I would have to hope that Nathan’s official business (which we naturally helped name) would turn heads instead.
It did not. “Location?” The guard asked, looking down at me as if I had just declared my intention to marry the king.
I kept my face in perfect control and resisted the temptation to drop Lady Rapier’s name as, for some reason, I felt like it would result in something bad happening. I could not be sure why, but I did know that this sort of feeling resulted from something that I forgot because of the Guilt.
Instead of answering him directly I took out the white-silver disk from my robe and quietly showed it to him. He stared at it for a moment before tensing up completely as he recognized it. Before either of us said anything else I put the mithril disk away.
It took me a half day to testing and prodding on the road before I suspected what it was and put my mana into the disk. Sure enough, the disk became lighter and so hard that when I put a bit of Gía behind my swing, it easily left a deep gash in the large tree. It also held the mana I put into it for a little while, making it an interesting throwing weapon as, although it was affected by mana, the disk could be thrown at extremely high speeds with minimal amounts of Gía and mana, even penetrating through some test wards with pure force.
“I need to check your name and group young lady.” The guard explained regretfully, but now both very attentively and politely. “That metal is important to keep track of and only certain individuals are allowed to be in possession of it. I assume that you are nobility?” he briefly turned and gestured behind him and one of the other guards jumped in shock before moving towards the gate’s guardhouse.
“I would prefer not to advertise it, but yes I am Bella of house Corpus.” I sighed inwardly, hopefully this would only earn me the attentions of the people I actually wanted to talk to and did not simply get passed into the rumors of the nobility.
The guard nodded, “and may I ask what both what exactly you are looking for and to the amount of metal on your person?”
I gave him an obvious once over with my eyes and had Bella give him a ‘slightly more than polite’ smile. “Who is going to hear about it if I tell you? Besides it would take too long to count all of my knives so if you do not want to search me for every scrap of iron, we should just say one disk worth.”
The guard, noticeably more discomfortable than a moment before, just nodded affirmative before realizing that one of my questions could not be answered with a yes or no. “Your response would be passed through my captain to the head of the guard before it was given to the appropriate governing officials.”
I rolled my eyes and decided to ignore this one to look at someone who I thought might be the guard captain come stumbling out of the guard house. I did not need an enhanced nose or a pair of magically enhanced eyes to spot the signs of a hangover, much less the smell of booze.
I checked and confirmed that the sun was only just reaching noon and tried not to breathe too much as he approached. “Greetings your ladyship, I am Capitan Tulip and I would like to welcome you to Thysia. May I see your house proof?”
“No.” I replied, annoyed that such a simple meet and greet had turned into a running question and answer session. This would attract all the wrong types of attention for me.
The Capitan almost said thank you before his ears finished their tea break. “Pardon my ladyship? I need to see your proof in order to let you pass- Miss!”
I turned around and walked back towards the outer slums, too much attention would be paid to my sudden departure, but I was already mentally planning out which cities were big enough to have my the necessary information network to find the mage that I needed.
A proof was a magical device used to confirm who I was and was magically bound to certain individuals or a group. Typically, new noble houses just used their patriarch’s blood to make sure that everyone who was related to him could use the proof without worry, but naturally I had a couple major problems with this: starting with the fact that I did not have the Corpus family proof, or even a lesser version called a seal, on my person.
As I understood it, Nathan’s little present that I declined was to be a proof or seal to connect me to him. However I could not use it because I had modified my DNA, my blood, enough that any blood spell that tried to use me to target Nathan or anyone related to him by blood, it would fail. The reverse was also true, meaning that no one from the Corpus house could be used to cast blood curses on me. It also meant that I would have to specially add myself to the magical ‘approved’ list of the proof in order to use it.
The last major reason was less practical though, I had killed more nobles than anyone in this world likely had, so the idea of carrying around something that bound me to some king was disgusting in the extreme. I was not above throwing my own power around, but proofs were like dog chains to me, they reeked of servitude.
Capitan Tulip tried calling after me, but there was only a 5 meter clearance between the outer slums and the wall so I was into the crowd and disappeared from their view by ducking between the run-down buildings/shacks that made up the slums.
A few twists and turns later and I was forced to duck out of the way of a small group of charging children as they wound their way through the maze that was these buildings. In fact, I found myself incredibly thankful that I had kept track of the sun on its eastward track through the sky as it was one of my only reference points in making my way south.
I had chosen my direction on a whim, but as I continued to move south I remembered all of the carts and wagons that were traveling between the buildings on the river and the city proper. With my mind now racing I suddenly found myself with 3 option:
-Go to another city, or even another capital, to try and connect with someone who could help me, (Although I would have even less influence and more barriers to finding information if I left the kingdom and if they have some ward that can detect mithril…)
-Walk through one of the other gates after hiding the mithril, just in case, as Bella of house Corpus (Which was a fairly good option, but would definitely grab attention from an official)
-Let the city get a acquainted with me as DeMorte and pretend that my mistake at that gate was intentional (Dangerous if they discover me, especially as there are spells to see what you looked like previously, but it does have the opportunity to sell it like an audition to see if anyone can make the connection between us… and all the possible trouble that could bring.)
After analyzing it for all of a few moments, I decided to do take the third route, but not as DeMorte. Back in the days when I was still a small time, but somewhat notorious bandit, I had to use fake names on occasion, so I just drew on the times from back then.
As I weaved my way through the slums without bumping into others I had Bella pull our wards closer in and started to rework my bones and cartilage
A let of lower cheekbones, a squarer jaw, something that appeared to be an Adam’s apple, and several other small modifications later, I was once again ‘Set,’ my old alias.
Not that the name mattered as much as the memories that I attached to it. Very old memories that I used to reminisce about with Osiris, memories of how we did truly stupid things that somehow did not get us hung or butchered in the streets.
Shaking my head free of the past though, Bella helped us navigate as I quickly rolled up the sleeves on my robe while creating and pushing small needles of bone through them to pin them in place.
Overall it was not much of a change, my face was different enough not to spot quickly, but anyone who stared too long and knew what I usually looked like might spot the similarities. There was also the matter of my ears, which, for some reason, were much more difficult to change. Although I did manage to make them less pointed in the end, they felt wrong and made my hearing feel off. In the end I blamed it, once again, on the Nalks.
You know we cannot blame everything on them right?
True, but I do have a good reason to suspect them this time – our ears were a special ‘edit’ that the Nalks performed... Which reminds me, I wonder if these things will change with our body?
Bella did not respond and I ducked from one alley to another before stopping briefly to check my reflection with a small spell. I felt a bit conflicted given that the changes only made people more likely to instinctively call me male and I was still wearing the same clothes. My plain robes were still noticeable and if anyone knew to pay attention, it would not be impossible to notice that it had runes stitched into it. Even with most of the runes on stitched on the inside, it was a legitimate concern. Overall I had mitigated my known risks and concerns, but I could feel Bella’s unease that it might blow back on Nathan’s family.
I accepted her concern and tried to respect it, but I could pull some truly terrifying tricks out of my survival bag when I needed to and I felt that it was worth the possible risk to try and contact someone here. Any contact that could be used here would be useful into the future too, so I decided to chance it.
Still, I felt slightly uneasy as I got moving again, my voice could be made androgynous, but I was still conscious of the fact that I was biologically still a woman. That feeling somewhat disappeared though when some teenage brats tried to accost me.
They said something about the area being in their territory, but I just hit them with a light mesmerizing spell and moved on quickly. The spell would make their memories hazy for the next few moments as I quickly moved past them.
I was almost at the southern gate before I remembered the sources of all my troubles, the mithril disk that I accidentally allowed to complicate my life. Unfortunately, there was no way to be sure that there were not wards to track mithril specifically, so I hid it as best I could: inside me.
It took a bit of internal manipulation, a couple of snip spells, a shove, a spell to close the wound and a spell to get rid of the blood, but I had hidden my dangerous disk. Of course, the human body conducted mana too well to hide it from an active search, even inside of me, but I could wrap it in my own mana and at least obscure what it was made of from passive wards.
While I had briefly considered just swallowing it, I would either have to wait for it to pass out or perform a bowel operation on myself to recover it. Bella had reminded me that “women have more hiding places then men,” however that would have impractical as I would have had to focus on that particular area of my body while I was walking to make sure it did not fall out or something. Bella tried to tempt me by calling it an experiment, but I declined to partake.
Regardless, this time it was a simple trip through the gate. After waving a pair of wagons through in a rush he had only looked me over barely paused long enough to ask me his standard questions before collecting a few coins as a toll and waving me through.
As I passed through the south gate into the city I felt a small pulse of mana from the wall’s wards, but nothing else happened. I mentally sharpened my focus and tried to identify if there was anyone watching me, but after a few minutes of walking through the streets of the city itself and ducking into the occasional alleyway I felt safe enough to start to look for where the temples would be.
Since I had not seen a religious area from the north west of the capital, they could be scattered or near the south east area of that absurdly warded inner fortification. I could ask for directions if I needed to though, as no one would question that.
A small reminder, most devout followers do not approve of cursing too much.
Stones, thanks for the reminder. Not that they would even know why ‘stones’ was a curse anyway, but if I let ‘graveborn’ slip they might get really confused.
I sill do not get graveborn as a curse but why does a mountain bandit curse ‘stones’ anyway?
What? Oh, old habit from when I was a flatlander, I picked it up from my adopted father and I accidentally reinforced it whenever I raided from the mountains.
I started searching for the temples, feeling Bella deep in thought over something else, but leaving her to it – as we would both know if it was of any major importance.
* * *
Pluto’s Cave:
Bella watched DeMorte’s actions with a surprising variety of feelings.
Anger, sympathy, annoyance, and fear.
The fear part was growing, but the annoyance was dominant right now: He does not even see the potential in half the things that he has been doing!
One of the few areas where Bella felt fervently thankful for DeMorte’s influence was his inquisitive mind, which she could feel drinking in its surroundings and analyzing them at a speed that amazed her. He had been raised with alternating amounts of generously provided information and a total lack of it, which left him with a hunger for it.
Still, as powerful as his underlying desire for knowledge was, he was blocked by his own ingrained values and beliefs! She saw the potential in things that he dismissed so easily as either impossible or too likely to rebound back on himself in a bad way. Still, why not go for that knowledge? He even had what almost amounted to a fear of learning certain thing, like what it was like to have a real family!
From what she could tell, Leo and the Nalks had given him an opportunity to completely relive his life in a new way and he seemed to be simple interested in improving his previous path and avoiding others. Even with the few ‘goals’ in his mind, he was restricting himself, not accepting that he could metaphorically ‘fly’ in this new world with the power that he had been given.
Of course, it was not like she could not understand him, in fact she could not avoid understanding him on a variety of levels and it showed whenever he made her mad. Anytime she peered at his logic, she seemed to be sucked into it, like it was the only thing that made sense and arguing was unthinkable.
Then the Nalk came this morning and changed something. Suddenly she felt like she could separate herself from DeMorte more completely than ever and could actually analyze his thoughts more easily now, without getting swept up in them.
It also made a difference when it came to spellwork. DeMorte had helped her learn how to use their magic on her own in case he did not see a threat that she did, but he had not let her practice too much beyond cultivated while they walked around or the occasional ward system. It had also not helped that she had to deal with his mind ‘instinctively’ knowing how to work spells.
It was like she was trying to study and replicate an emotion behind a face that she had briefly seen someone else make. Now it seemed like she could dissect the spells that he used in her own mind and understand them, it was wonderful!
It also showed her just how much DeMorte must have practiced over the decades to get so used to his spells, some of them were incredibly complex, despite the fact that he was mentally creating them in mere moments. She would go so far as to accuse him of just using the ‘splash’ method of spellcasting if she could not break down every single part of the spell that he was currently using.
Instead, DeMorte only used certain ‘splash’ commands in his spells, which felt more like simple feelings of what should be done than explicit instructions on how everything should be done. That said, she did feel a little cheated because of those commands as they turned an incredibly complex magical equations into a mixed series of explicit commands and what amounted to ‘insert minor miracle here’ instructions with a general idea of what should happen.
[AN: basically: computer programming plus random bits of ‘make it work’ to compensate for things that the magic user does not know, like the laws of physics or fluid dynamics]
It was both fascinating and infuriating.
The mesmerizing spell that he had used earlier, for example, had dozens of separate commands that made up the spell, with almost everything was laid out in detail in his head, except for things like how the spell actually affected the brain.
The contradiction in logic and the fact that it clearly worked bothered her to no end. She would still need to check some of his other spells, but anything beyond his favorite ‘snip’ spell seemed to have at least some elements of ‘just do this’ in the spell construction and it make her annoyed.
That aggravation, that annoyance, clouded her judgement and made her do something she would not have tried otherwise… She lied to DeMorte.
It was a small thing, pretending to not know the origins of a certain curse, but it was a revelation for her. Despite the fact that he should have been able to instantly see through the statement immediately, as DeMorte was a technical ‘graveborn,’ he said nothing.
When she checked his mind, she realized that he had paid it no mind and she was able to confirm that he did not know she had lied.
She spent quite a while afterwards trying to sort out what this meant and making sure that her feelings of shock could not be felt by DeMorte.
That Nalk had done this deliberately, but why had she?