Amun.
***
With the matches done for the day and lunch taken care of, I elected to spend the rest of the day perusing through our pamphlets to see what guild I’d shadow with when the time came.
Naturally, the Polaris guilds were out of the question. The last thing I wanted was to take orders from some self-righteous prick, much less anyone else. That took the first 6, the eighth, and the 10th guilds off the list immediately, with the 8th being the Marulean Guild Army. Not that I knew what they did to distinguish them from the Association, but they worked under the command of one Amos Silva. Of what relation to Zeke was my biggest guess, but I would find out in due time, I supposed.
Blue Lion’s Guild was ranked just above them, an independent band of mercenaries operating in north-central Polaris. Another immediate no, as experience and maybe some undead were the only prospects of working with them. The 9th greatest guild, The Cowl, was considered but eventually dismissed due to me naturally being an assassin and my ambitions being much higher than that. I planned to have assassins working for me, after all.
Continuing down the line to find the guilds I didn’t want brought me to Greenwater Transport, ranked 13th. They were an independent group primarily composed of Rangers near central Polaris. Although they had bases in other quadrants scattered around Polaris and the Sirius Kingdom closer to the Betrarthian portal, I had no intentions of being a magical taxi, despite the potentiality of me getting a much-desired lay of the land. Nor did I have any intentions of becoming a bard, so I skipped past Sinestro’s Quartet and skipped again past Bombyx Grove to make a short stop at the 17th guild, Rocks. They were a terraforming and battlefield sanitation effort located in the badlands to the far east of Polaris' Territory. Going there would allow me to learn how people used magic and enchantments to mold environments to their liking. But that was it, so I eventually declined.
Bedrock Forge, on the other hand, was something I couldn’t join if my life depended on it. It was a Dwarven Artisinal Guild. And Drow were most certainly not allowed. But I knew someone who was. And I knew he needed no convincing to work under them and learn as much as he could. So I moved on to place The Millers and the three that followed them on the ‘No’ list as well. Ranked in 20th place, The Millers were a group of private investigators and nothing more. Similarly, Plassein’s Hunting Guild hunted, Turncoat Mercantile traded, and G3, the Bodhi Tree Fighter’s Subguild, fought. Sunshield Industries was in 27th place as a union that specialized in mega-constructions. They were certainly impressive, but something more fitted for my Chief Engineer. The following three were definite no’s as well. The Changelings specialized in body augmentation and cosmetics, the Green League was the Barbarian Subguild for the Bodhi Tree, and the Cloud Shapers specialized in environmental or weather control and disaster relief.
And then came the ‘Fuck No’ List.
Bira Brigade, ranked 35th, was another Taxi service found on the outskirts of Polaris. The Ozetia Crawlers were ranked 38th and operated as a rescue force in the mountains to the far north. Betelle Mercantile, 39th, was another union of merchants, rogues, rangers, fighters, and artificers that operated in both Maru and Nonus and perhaps beyond. The worst of them all was the 40th. A bunch of self-proclaimed good Samaritans who unimaginatively called themselves the Sky Keepers. A police force found only in the sky, for some odd reason. Their Guildmaster wasn't even a Sapiavi, although the Cloud Shapers' was. But I digress. The last guild to be placed on my ‘No’ list was Slirial Grove, for obvious reasons.
With my markings complete, I started from the top to go through the ‘Maybe So’ list.
It wound up being remarkably short, containing only three lines of text. The first two were Rex Magica and Agnes Arcanum, ranked 11th and 12th respectively. Both specialized in research and artificing, but the latter was advertised as the Bodhi Tree’s Artificer Subguild. With my prospects of learning the craft in half a year's time, I decided to place the two on the back burner and revisit them in a year or so. As was the case with Greywater Apothecary. An independent alchemical superlab located on the outskirts of Polaris Central. A great place to learn a higher tier of potions, I was sure. But again, I already planned to dabble in alchemy during my second year and pass on the job to a subordinate thereafter.
With that list done, I was left with a slew of interesting or prospective options to choose from. Perhaps the most intriguing of them all was the 18th guild. The White Wisps. Located in Polaris Central, they were an independent and secretive Senders Guild advertised to use and sometimes sell a variety of communication-based goods or even send parcels over vast distances. Although my magic allowed me to do such things with ease, having redundancies or negating the need to load down my legionaries with enchantments were advantages I couldn’t pass up. However, the same could be said for the Nein Archives. They were a spellbinding guild in Polaris Central. Ranked 24th, their libraries contained a vast wealth of historical knowledge, but they were famous for their spellbinding services, wherein they’d pay a veritable fortune to document a mystic's spells.
While I had no intentions of sharing my spells, I did seek to peruse the treasures hidden in their libraries; however, the fact that objective truth was rarely found in such pieces of literature remained present in my mind.
The 25th guild was another to go on the ‘Yes’ list. The Toothy Maw had both chefs and beast hunters working in their traveling restaurant and I was all too eager to familiarize my palate with exotic dishes and gain a horde of crafting materials to boot.
The Purists; ranked 26th, provided much the same benefits as well; albeit in a different way. Their specialty was to travel to Nonus to perform exorcisms and rid the lands of the undead and other tainted things. A noble endeavor that I was more than capable and willing to help them accomplish.
Wizard’s Wright was another spellbinding guild that was smaller than the Archives but said to contain a higher quality of tomes than quantity. A claim that needed more investigation before I was to decide between the two.
Perhaps even higher than the White Wisps were five guilds that utterly fascinated me. Though for differing reasons. At 32nd place, The Life Bloods were the largest union of magical anthropologists and taxonomists in Nonus. An interesting endeavor on its own, but I found myself curious as to how my necromancy would come into play with those fields of study. The Free Laborers, placed just below them, were a nomadic group of missionaries who traveled the lands in search of prisoners. Seeking to reform and reintegrate them into society. A seemingly noble endeavor, but I was sure some of them were unable to be redeemed. Thus making it a prime ground for cursing and dealing. Below them was Graystone. A group of Rogues, Rangers, and Artificers who were doing what I planned to do once I left this place. They explored ancient ruins for the sake of recovering ancient knowledge.
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The 36th and 37th guilds were placed on the list more for insight than anything else. 36th was Ayolia Nursery, a place where magical plants, flowers, and trees were cultivated in excess to be sold for profit. And Hotis Cartographers did just as their name suggested.
With that, all that remained were the 41st through the 50th guilds. They were all general force guilds, or Gennys, all scattered amongst the small townships and fiefdoms found at the edges of Polaris’ vast territory. There, they acted not only as militaries or police forces for the locals, but as couriers, farmhands, instructors, and a slew of other things as well. Not much was told about them other than where in the realm they were found, what type of creatures they faced there, and what type of mystics they were seeking to recruit. Though some of them gave some sort of inclination of their natures through their names.
Of them all, I narrowed it down to just four. The Sikaria Armada and Gray Lagoon- ranked 41st and 49th, gave me a chance to explore some ocean depths and possibly recover some sunken ships to prepare for when I find Henry’s seafloor crawler and perhaps make my own as well. On the other hand, the very last guild was found near the Steam Line far to the south. There, The Misty Arbor Keepers fought day in and day out to keep their commonwealth safe. Making it the most suitable place to gain experience. Not to mention, it had quite an exotic landscape. And lastly, there was the Xikkavell Monastery. Ranked 43rd, it was located at a meeting point between the badlands to the far west and the gelid mountains to the north.
After wasting away the day and some of the night, my decision had been made and I was off to my room to meditate and arise in the wee hours of the morning for my normal routine in our rented room. Under the cover of magical darkness, I practiced casting what was my strongest combination spell for hours until the time finally came to experiment with the magic I’d been brainstorming about for months.
The Void.
My previous experiment led me to describe my Void Sorcery as the power of potential. While it did indeed destroy indiscriminately, it was still entropy manifested in magical form. All things it touched were transformed into energy and poured into a domain that either pre-existed or spawned into existence at that very moment. Alone, I assumed my sorcery could only fill that void with death and darkness. But with my other affinities, so too could there be light and radiation. Space and time. Gravity and Light. Because, if what Telin said was really true, the only limit to my magic was my imagination.
Without taking the time to think, I molded the Void into a sphere set between my hands and took a deep breath to concentrate. The violent churn of shadows and air began cascading into the void within seconds. Whipping a horrendous storm up inside the cramped room until the sound started to wane and eventually rise once the plants and enchantments began billowing air into the room to compensate.
I closed my eyes to concentrate on emptying my Well, splitting it into five streams, and guiding them through my Cores.
The first flowed towards my void core and split once more before it cascaded into the inky black organ and flowed out either side as twin rivers of black and gray ink.
The second stream fell into the deep purple organ to be mixed into an energy of the same archetype before it poured out to join the streams of Death and Darkness flowing down my arms.
The third fell through my electromagnetism and split like the first. Only, the stream split thrice to create a torrent of electricity and a churning magnetic wave chugging behind a pinpoint of light.
Through Space-Time, the fourth stream barreled straight through and emerged at the same pace as the Nuclear Arcana flowing through my arms with all the others.
The streams churned like molasses through the paths I’ve made over the last several weeks. Like a dam, building its reservoir, I affirmed and reaffirmed every intention, law, and minute detail of the spell before I poured, recharged, and channeled the entirety of my Well through my fingertips five times over.
The result was a Void of Space and dilated Time. A pocket universe within the universe. One filled to the brim with necrotic radiation, shadows, light, and a laughably small volume of the air it stole from the training room. It was like the Shadow Realm or my Shade Pocket but also not. Those places- even my Underworld, were smaller parts of something greater. Private Domains within the Fell and the Under, given to me by my ancestry. And if my hypothesis was correct, the void was much the same. Albeit on a cosmic scale. My use of the void resulted in the expansion of the one that seemed to surround the Mortal Plane or my own in some far-off region of space. But this void was an entirely new domain. A permanent one of my creation, of my arcane sorcery. Made for me and my fiendishly necrotic denizens. Though it was far from infinite.
It was a bubble of ‘empty’ space roughly 6,500 km in diameter. A hollow Mars that contained around 1.1 trillion cubic kilometers of foul energy and pale golden light. And that gave me problems.
First, it was nowhere near the paradise I envisioned for my living followers. But this was just a test. An experiment to see if the spell would work. And now that I knew it did, the problem was where to put it. My experiment of absorbing the void on the first day of class resulted in no feeling or noticeable effect. That said, the energy involved was negligible. On the contrary, the dummy I destroyed during my last experiment remained in place once I assimilated with it. That said, the aforementioned experience led me to dissipate the energy as I’d done throughout my childhood. Or rather, my earlier childhood.
Regardless, that left me at square one. So all I could do was sigh, shrug off my hesitation, and convince myself I could always make another one.
Not only that, but I poured my will into the spell to make it permanent. In my imagination, that equated to the sphere contained within my hands becoming a region of dark space and distorted time tucked away in my soul, body, and spirit. A branch of the same Void Tree sprawled across my chest. And so, I only needed to grow the branch some more. I only needed to make a path or build a road or better yet, create a wormhole to transfer anything I wanted into and out of my domain at will. So with that in mind, I reached my left hand out and filled my head with the image.
As my hand grew closer, I felt a cold line snake down from the edge of my shoulder. Coiling, slithering, thinning out as it made its way around the joint in my elbow and down my forearm. Emerging like a thin brook of dark mist, the impossibly black tendril poured over the heel of my wrist to lick across the void before my flesh could. Like it’d been baited and trapped, the tendril recoiled into my hand with almost concussive force. Pulling the void with it as it fled up my wrist, snaked around my elbow, and burrowed into my shoulder to spread its pervasive cold toxins across my chest.
A horrendous whine pierced the air, almost announcing the last of the void cascading into me. Building up the pressure of what already was until it breached containment and shot into the sky that was my neck. The cold burrowed higher, reaching the meeting point between my jaw and ear to give me a sickening wave of vertigo before it spread to the back of my skull. Then my senses began to fade. I felt my knees buckle and the cold snapped forward accordingly, burrowing into my left eye to double my vision. And then… the cold faded, releasing the mental shackles that kept me from perceiving the nostalgic sense of omnipresence felt by my body.
But it was more than that. My flesh remained in the training room. Yet my eyes saw its forested interior overlaid with a scene that rivaled Jupiter’s cloud decks. Thick bands of black and gray clouds dominated the space, churning with a primal ferocity in a perpetual effort to blot out the seafoam-green flashes of lightning and the gold, purple, and red beacons of light shining in the far distance. In astronomical terms, it was Bok Globule. In magical terms, it was a doorway built within my eye that led to a pocket universe. Which wound up having quite the adverse effect.
Seconds, minutes, hours. I didn’t know how long it took for the perspectives to separate enough for me to regain my full mental capacity. Though they never fully faded into separate things. I still saw the real world when my mind was relatively focused on something. But when my mind began to drift, when I adopted the thousand-yard stare I so frequently adopted when the cogs in my mind churned, all I saw was my domain.
All I saw was my Twilight.