“That’s quantum cohesion, temporal flux, and complex application down.” She frowns. “Nah, I’m not doing it term based. It’s just practical skills over theory… Remember the seven terms?”
“Yeah.”
“The stuff we did with reinforcement and fire were both singularly affecting quantum cohesion. I got a little carried away at rock shooting and turned it from a lesson on gravitoelectromagnetism to a complex application quite beyond what we’ve done. Temporal got you a little into the languages. The leveling system is kind of wack for letting you cast that spell, really. Clearly, I didn’t have a hand in making the system. Maybe for the best. I’m not really an organised teacher. I’ve run you through the theory basics of temporal flux just to protect you and ready you, cus its more immediately important… forgot to tell you. If you uhh…. Ess and eff. The higher the ess, the less temporal flux. Good for using it around you as countermagic if someone tries to mess with you, though it’ll be hard to tell properly if it’s happening unless you can determine the relative flows of time. What else, what else? You’ve learned matter fields along the way, though the scanner’s a neat crutch for you, cus I can’t be bothered teaching you innate- that’s after this. You’ll keep the scanner, but we’ll talk about innate. The mass term is pretty simple, try some stuff with that. Make a singularity, or something. Since there’s atmosphere, you can get singularities from mass term manipulation as well as spacetime geometry, gravitoelectromagnetic manipulation, and scalar field manipulation. Y’know what? Make a singulairity with all four. With mana. I’ll power.”
Beryl stops her pacing, and crouches in the sand, before getting up again, and putting out her left palm. A snaking wire slithers out, caressing the sand, growing longer, like a whip.
“Is that a whip?”
Beryl smirks. “Pft. Funny. I wouldn’t need one. You might even like it. And that’s not what I want. I’m sick of drawing. Copy my print.”
With her other hand, she makes a quick motion, and the sand organises itself into a shape. I recoil, scrabbling away.
“What?” Beryl complains.
It takes a while of blank-mindedness to realise. I’m panicking. It’s like a keen of white sound. No. No. No. No. No. A worm in my brain, with hands and hands and feet and feet, crawling and biting, twisting its little limbs around the little stumps, amplitude hills and troughs deepening in my brain, until it’s all jagged, and the worm begins ripping, tearing-
That wasn’t my end. I am sure of it. It happened a great many times, the visit from that worm. What do I call him? The Worm? That foreign tongue stuffed down my throat will not suffice. But my mother tongue is gone, it has shucked me just as my motherland has. Linear B. Greek. Those are two things important to me. What does that mean? I need to keep those two familiars by my side. LB and G. I shall name The Worm LB. Linear B is what I write, after all, and language is a worm of the mind. Linear B. Bacchus? That’s Dionysus. A foreign god-coming. Whatever. Good enough.
“Hello~?”
“Just- need a minute. Memories, I think. I don’t know.”
What the fuck was that? What memories were those? I reach for it with the tongue of my mind and it falls short. Very short. The winter air is cold and unforgiving, so I pull the tongue back.
“Hm. I’ve got a theory. Let’s go on. Get back to copying.”
I get back onto my knees, meekly. “Sorry. Alright.”
What was I thinking?
I work through each term, referencing Beryl’s.
“Question.”
“You may ask it.”
“Is this the same order as the rock one?”
She looks over, and her eyes flick up, for a moment, into the back of her head, before they flick back down. “Ehh… kind of. A bit of a different representation, but like it’s about the same. You can simplify it to the same equation, is all. Same order, though, yeah, that’s what you were asking.”
“One more question.”
“Alright.”
“I don’t get the scalar fields term and the mass term.”
“Like, generally?”
“Pretty much. I can intuit how gravity and electromagnetism conceptually get linked together to bend spacetime and make matter and all that stuff, I get that quantum cohesion does particle bonding, and that temporal flux is just timey-wimey stuff, and I’ve pieced together that the matter fields specify where and what, but then what do scalar fields and the mass term do?”
“Alright. You clearly haven’t been listening perfectly, but of course, you’re only human. So, the Higgs. Right. You know how that gives weight, right? It’s everywhere, like the water of a pool, and the resistance it gives is resistance against acceleration, and it imparts mass on particles. Fundamental fundamental stuff. Well, there’s also bunch of weirder fields. Like the magic field, or the God Field. Most of them are carry-overs from stuff like cosmic inflation from outside the Deep Blue, so they don’t really affect the Deep Blue, but there’s the God Field which you do not fuck with if you like retaining your limbs and familial relations, because all your spells affect the world through the word of the gods by nicely asking them to make these laws of physics work a bit different here, and you’ll get fucked over by them if you straight up go and tell them you’re trying to fuck with their power. There’s a tachyon field for certain string theory instability mechanisms, like weird decay in unstable spacetime, some vacuum mechanisms that Halton gets very touchy over. Thermonuclearly. You may have magic, but you don’t have the energy to counter a thermonuclear bomb. And Halton’s had half a millenia to rebuild their stockpile since their last great war. Again, the gods are way stronger than Halton. But that doesn’t much matter to you. Human or nephilim, both can squash an ant just fine. Not sure why Halton’s so touchy, personally speaking, maybe they’d some long-term plans for weird computers. I’m analogue. And then there’s a chameleon field that messes with large scale gravity manipulations and makes them unfeasible without reinforcement via other parts of the grand unified plan langrangian, and again, another leaveover from string theory, moduli fields that you’ll study in higher dimensional geometries, including ones with more temporal degrees of freedom, bunches of other fields that don’t do anything here cus they’re stuck in higher dimensions. Uh, there’s some fields that work only in the Great Sea, like a coupled scalar field, where some of the dark matter and dark energy fields come into play, but not all. Never been to the sea, never plan to be. It’s a terrible place. Oh yeah. And there’s an entropic scalar field. Usually separate unless you really mess up the TF Lagrangian and you have no idea how to fix it, in which case you’ll need to manually reintroduce entropy. It models the single dimension of time we have- that is, forwards, as an emergent property of the interaction of every other messy thing about. There’s a few more confusing fields we think are probably part of the God field, since the gods didn’t tell us what their field equations were, so I don’t like fucking with that. The mass term just uses the scalar fields to surmise an effective mass term that gives mass to other particles, you can see the references back towards the matter field. You can change it directly to change mass, or dynamically change other scalar fields. Be careful, though. Changing the mass of particles in a region fucks up literally everything fatter than… I dunno. Atomic structures, chemical structures, anything biology. If you fine tune other forces or create other scalar fields and you’re a year five or six in bioengineering, you might be able to pull it off, but you don’t really want to do that right now. If you don’t want to fuck up everything in a region you want to put more gravity in, in a way that’s extremely hard to put back together, just clump gravitoelectromagnetic strength in that region, which will indirectly bend space-time geometry, or like, just do it directly, it’d be more efficient. Simple words, bend space-time geometry for gravity purposes unless you know exactly what you’re doing and you’ve studied magic for several years.”
“Never knew you’d be so cautious about magic.” I include a bit of an accusatory tone. I’m not really, like, calling her reckless. Just a massive prick. But I can’t say that directly. So I have to hint at something else being wrong.
“It’s easier to put back something that’s been blown up by a conventional bomb than something that’s been discombobulated at the subatomic level by fucking up the symmetries of everything in that region.”
“Symmetries?”
“Hm. A symmetry of a system… Imagine a system as a rubiks cube. A symmetry is like turning the cube. You’ve rotated it, but it’s still a rubiks cube, and you can turn it back to solve it. Messing up the mass without balancing out the other bonding stuff breaks the current symmetry and makes a new one, it’s like you upsized a centre cube. You can’t solve it now cus the whole cube is stuck around the new biggy guy.”
“Alright, I think that’s everything, for now.”
“Get to copying. Then tell the scanner to give a point in the air about a kilometre from you.”
“The scanner can do that?” Smart weapon. I wonder…
“Get to copying.”
“Right.”
I do, on my hands and knees, making sure not to muck up the spell. But I talk, as I work.
“Could I fit that scanner into a weird sort of gun? Think about it. Tungsten, or something, a sort of channel for Mana, and the scanner as a smart sight and integrate it to press the liquid mana…”
“No. Well, yes, but also no. No, I mean. Answer’s just no. My creations are like my children. I will not stand for you integrating them into primitive weapons just like that. And besides, that’s how innate channels work. Will explain that, later, promise. But, also, Mana tends to be extremely… destructive. You don’t really see the effect in the middle of the desert, but it tends to dissolve structures much larger than a grain of sand. You’d need like single-use prints. Possible, and other mages do this to a limited degree, but the main limiter is the scanner, and I’m not letting you stick it in a gun.”
“Fine, fine.”
A long silence interrupted barely by the low wind. It is very low. Quiet. I keep on working.
“Done.”
“Great. Pour in mana.”
I wince. “M-mana.”
It comes out easier, this time. I fill it into the holes.
“Couldn’t I do this without the… like… tracing?”
“Sure. But you need to learn the basics, first. You can try that when I’m gone. Now move over.”
I do.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Hm. I don’t like these values. Don’t mind me, I’ll tweak them.”
“What? Uhm. I- I’ve hardened the Mana, already.”
“Don’t worry. It’s fine.”
She crouches in the sand, using her finger, treating the liquid mana like a weird sort of clay. Her finger steams.
“Is your finger-?”
“Yeah. I’m mechanical. This puppet’s not very complex. Think a metastable crystal. Or think of pneumatics. A small push to get over an unstable equilibrium to a more stable state, which recoups some energy. Not all, since I’m using that energy. And then it takes more energy to either tunnel the limb back to the previous position or just manually crank it back.”
“Tunnel?”
“Macroscopic quantum tunnelling. It’s magical enhancement of that effect. It’s when an object goes through a potential energy barrier, like the little hill on which the unstable equilibrium sits, for my arm to get back from the more stable state back into metastability.”
“Kind of something elastically metastable? I knew some alloys.” The words come out before I know what they are.
“Mine are more complex than your old weapons. But they’re also simpler, so my expressions for the magic powering my internal mechanisms can have more efficient matter field… expressions. And they’ve also more uses than being a slab of material. I store information in me. Like a library. Watch, now. Gonna power it.”
The snake. My attention goes back to the snake. It’s been winding around Beryl’s leg, and it whips around with a hissing sound to the mouth of the mana pattern. Beryl picks up the mana Mandala, holding it up to light, and makes a flicking motion with her other hand, whipping the snake into her hand.
“Watch. Carefully. Where’d you point the scanner, again?”
I point to my right.
“Right. Alright. I’ll throw up a countermagic field to make sure you don’t die. Basically, I’ll set a firm hand on spacetime curvature between us and the space. Hold on. This is going to be complicated. Wait. You’re human?”
“...Yes? You’ve been… calling me human.”
“Shit. Forgot. Too close.” She grabs my wrist and I jump. She looks some distance in the horizon, then back towards me. “Focus your eyes on me.”
“Is this something romantic?”
“Do you want to vomit?”
“No,” I admit. “But why?”
“We’re going to a more distant observer position. It’s going to be a lightshow.”
I look around from the desert, to the metal plate of a face. It reforms as I stare at him, becoming more human, eyes turning from simple holes to rounded, eyelids and eyelashes forming.
“What the-”
And the world around goes blurry.
“Don’t mind me.” Beryl breaks eye contact. I realise I haven’t been looking at her face, much. I turn back to look at her. She’s looking back where we were, and we’re- we’re floating.
“Magic?” I ask.
“Eyeh. Yeah. Air-glass. Alternative chemistries. Incompatible with our biologies, though I wouldn’t recommend trying to displace it.”
“K.”
“Hold my hand, for stability.”
I interlock our fingers, on accident. My fourth and fifth get stuck between her fourth and fifth. It takes an awkward moment to try and extricate those fingers. Beryl turns her head and stares at me. It flicks between bemused and nonplussed.
“Right. Uh. So. There’s a cultural thing. Might be counterintuitive to ask a Fugued, but like it tends to unilaterally be an intimate action since it stimulates the human vagus nerve, so what are you trying to say by this?”
“I don’t want to fall. And I don’t trust my fingers not to slip.” My heartbeat heightens. It’s not like I’m into this. It’s just… the anxiety on being questioned on something personal.
“K. Good that’s sorted. Look thatways. It’s gonna be cool, for humans. I prefer effort over effect.”
She snaps, and I barely see a dark pinprick, for just a split-second, before the world goes to chaos.
And she says she’s not a god? What else could this magic be but divine? Power. Powerful. I feel a deep hunger. The fires reflected in my eyes are one with the fires in my heart.
Shockwaves. The world seems to bend slightly in towards the singularity, the air ripples and bends. Air gets sucked in within concentric shells, it seems, as I hear sonic boom after sonic boom. Different densities?
They are like thunder, rolling, a loud roar, continously going, punctuated by a rapidly repeating series of cracks, going on, and on. The gravity, it’s bending light. Or maybe it’s the air. Maybe both. The compressed air acts like lenses with such squishing. A pond on a salt plain grafted onto the dark sphere, which itself grows. Misty rings and vapour clouds begin to form. I don’t know why. The closer air goes up in flames. Not flames. A plasma sheath.
I remember learning- singularity. Black hole. Did I learn about this? Yes. Who knew black holes, or the sort like, were so… loud? God.
I yell over the roar. “Beryl, is this a-”
“No. Pseudo-singularity. Quark matter at the singularity. Finite density. Denser than neutron stars, but not quite a black hole. No event horizon. Below Schwarzchild radius. Would be a star if it could undergo fusion at these conditions. Would get fatter, as well. Radiation pressure. Currently, the pseudo-singularity’s forming into some… weird matter.”
“Oh.”
I keep watching. The sand from the desert sweeps up like a cloak in the roaring vortex. It’s found a spin, somehow. A fireball of blue and orange haloing darkness imperfectly. At the tips of the shockwaves, colorful fringes flicker, between the compressed air and the light. The sound seems to modulate a bit. Maybe it’s because the inflow is uneven. Maybe some clumps of sand from one way were bigger. The spin will work it out. Loud cracks. Rocks from above seem to fall as if by a funnel towards the singularity, then fall. At the mean line, they scatter.
What words could describe the abstract sublime this reality creates in mind? I am somewhere out of humanity, in this state. Human words cannot express this perspective, only a mutilated version of it. But a mutilated version is better than none, I suppose.
Beryl makes a confused sound. I look at the tiny black pseudo-singularity at the heart of the storm. Some light is escaping, other things as well. The black seems to have a weird sort of red glow, though in parts, it turns a bluisher black. There are bits of white streaks, but they seem to flicker in rainbow colours, in and out of the visual spectra. Maybe it’s my eyes playing tricks on me, with all the blue around. The rings of matter around it are rippling, the surface of a pond in rain. The air is rippling as well, though less. It’s a strange feeling. The very medium through which something is conveyed is itself being subject to effect.
And then a scraping sound, barely heard through the roars.
“What’s the scraping?”
Beryl looks at me, surprised. “You can hear that? It’s interactions within the accretion disk.”
“Oh. What’s the rainbow light?”
“On the pseudo-singularity, it’s red-shifting, and on the bumpy parts, it’s a bit bluer cus gravitational redshift’s weaker, there. And there’s a lot of things going on. Like deadly radiation. Atomic spectra. The glow around the radiation, like a halo, that’s mostly sand and air, squished into plasma. The sound is shockwaves. Air compression, you see? And it’s also things falling directly onto the singularity. I’ll stop it, here, before I crack a layer more. She drops the spell in her hand, the mana fading away as she releases the charge. I watch the snake retract back into her hand.
There is an even bigger explosion, like a thermonuclear bomb. The sucking efffect of the pseudo-singularity reverses. Sand, light, debris, plasma, they all go flying out, resulting in a rainlike effect of dozens more little booms.
“Fuck.” Suddenly, the explosion stops, the sound freezes. Beryl’s holding out a hand. “Forgot about gamma rays and x-rays.” She turns to look at me.
“Cancer?” I ask.
“Cancer, probably. Stopped time to pause the radiation. Would you like me stick a lead wall in front of you so you don’t die?”
I sigh. “It really looked pretty.”
“You won’t, when you’re dying in stage four. We’ll just go a few more kilometres away.”
“Can I look, for a bit more?”
“Didn’t know you being a weapons engineer meant you were a destruction fetishist.”
“Part of the job. Can’t build that which you don’t worship,” I say, dryly.
“Pft. Go on. Have your look. You can let go of me, now.”
“What if I fall?”
Beryl drops me, and I scream, as I fall a metre. I scowl up at her. She snorts.
I think of something to say, before stopping, and going with something else. “I can see up your skirt.”
“Look all you want. Nothing to see. I’m not a sex bot. Don’t bother. I’ll be admiring my handiwork. Would you like a gift, for being such a… student?”
“I’m up for any gifts. Help me up?” The floor elevates, and I stumble, a bit, under the sudden acceleration.
“Well. There’s probably four types of things you’re going to get.”
“Yes?”
“Well, they’re all going to be very heavy. There might be some magnetic monopoles, so if you ever figure out how to carry around, you could get a cool party trick. Mostly, it’d depend on densities, with stuff like neutron star heartstring, a micro metastable singularity, or, say, a piece of weird shit around four hundred million tonnes per centimetre cubed of volume. That’s the most likely. Called quark matter. Don’t worry. There’s nowhere near a centimetre cubed of volume. Say a ton of quark matter; that’d probably be the densest thing I’d find. Radius would be around nine micrometres, I think. It’d be around a third the radius of your hair. Size of a red blood cell. As in one strand. It could be a bomb. That’s the main application. Or you could use it as a really nice focus for projectile weapons. Though I’m not sure how metastable it would be. Probably if it hasn’t exploded by now, it’ll survive contact with the air, but the more you whack it the more likely it’ll explode. Doing some back of the napkin calculations, that’s up to around twenty megatons of TNT for your speck, not accounting for inefficiencies. Probably more, or less. One ton’s too much of a nice number.”
“Quick question. Is there conservation of energy in magic?”
“Of course there is.”
“Then… if this remnant core has a theoretical explosive yield of twenty megatons, how much energy did you pour into this spell? Considering how inefficient compressing external matter seems rather than directly transmuting?”
Beryl smiles. “Enough to put on a good show. Needed to show the peak of magic. Though magic doesn’t exactly work how you’ve described. Again, school. I’d guess my singularity would hopefully have way more than a ton in mass, but beggars can’t be choosers.”
“...Beggars?”
“I don’t have an innate channel for singularities. So I can’t get to theoretical efficiencies that virtually break conservation. Other clans do. They make wires out of beads of these materials, for crack power plants.”
“Virtually?”
“Virtually as in apparently. They don’t, not actually. It’s a fundamental fundamental law. You don’t break it.”
“Great.” The conversation ends there, and I watch each frozen piece of reality. It’s not worth describing properly. There is an element of time that makes an event once magical mundane. So it is with words and ambiguities again that we restore magic. But how would you describe a bomb? Fiery? Shrapnel-filled? There is a fire, a beautiful fire, and that is what is important.
Time passes, and eventually, Beryl gets bored.
“Right. We’re done here.”
I only nod. Beryl grabs my hand, and we’re far, farther away.
Beryl snaps, to alert me, I think, as she restarts time. I see the explosion in the far distance start again, hazy against the horizonlight. I count the seconds. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight- the roar arrives. Eighty kilometres. Damn.
“Stay here.” Beryl lets go, and strides some distance off. She vanishes, in a singularity of her own. Huh. There seems to be at least two different methods of teleportation, with her. I didn’t see those singularity effects when we moved.
Beryl comes back, half an hour later, smiling, with a menagerie of dangling grey boxes hanging off a chandelier. It strikes me how much she looms over me. In every way. She is me, in as much as every other person is, but with all the presence of the world.
“Fancy,” I comment. The word escapes my spiel of thought. Nothing else does.
“Pure gold and lead, suspended the bits best I could. Some shinies. Some dark ones. All rather massive. Pleased to say the sum’s around five tons, which is amazing for remnant mass. Most of the other pieces detonated. I’ll have to more carefully look at these, for later.”
I stare at them. Strangely, it reminds me of a dinner. Meals, somehow, all together a sort of demonstration of great wealth.
She carelessly tosses them backwards, before they seem to land on an invisible conveyer belt, and zip backwards into the horizon, throwing up a slight gust of wind, and stretching across the horizon in a very weird way. So there are two forms of teleporation. Looks like spacetime folding, for that… or… the weird singularity thing she did to come here, and get us down. I won’t ask her about this. I like a little puzzle.