Chapter 28 A Long Trip.
“We have a long walk back so while I have you all here I have some Innerworld related questions. I figured between the three…” Isaac glanced at Lenna. “Two, sources of ancient wisdom,”
“I don’t know how to feel about that.” Lenna replied, cutting him off. On one hand not referring to her as ancient was nice but on the other he took her out of the wisdom list.
Fen glanced between the three of them then his eyes settled on Isaac. “One, one source of ancient wisdom.” He replied. He knew that if it wasn’t directly within Jala’s field of study then she was completely ignorant, if it had nothing to do with combat then Lenna was useless, and he barely paid attention to politics as he was from a branch family and his political usage stopped when he married Jala.
“you should be able to answer most of them.” Isaac finished with a sigh. He was starting to wonder exactly how cutthroat and violent drow society actually was if the three dark elves around him were still alive.
“How long is this walk exactly?” Jala asked innocently.
Isaac looked at her cautiously. “About eighteen hours if I remember right.” He replied.
“Twenty with these two.” Lenna corrected.
“We… you aren’t… we get a break right?” Jala asked tentatively.
Isaac smirked. “If I was done transforming this body to match my elemental alignment, no. But as I am not, I still need to sleep.” He replied with a chuckle.
Jala audibly sighed in relief. “Thank you, what is your first question?”
The following hours had Isaac bombarding his companions with questions about drow society and their understanding of magic, concepts, and direct mana manipulation. He learned a lot about how the dark elves functioned as a ruling class, the backbone of the drow military, and how there was a maximum number of elves that could exist at any given time.
Apparently, unlike with non-elvish species, there was a limit to the amount of elvish souls that existed. When an elf died their soul would move on to the afterworld, either the land of sunshine and rainbows or the land of shadows and cobwebs depending on if they were light or dark elves. Forty percent of the entire elvish population were dark elves and that number fluctuated via births and deaths but always remained around the same ratio. Somehow the dark elven empire had managed to fight off the combined efforts of light elves, dwarves, and humans a few thousand years prior and that had set the tone of the Innerworld.
Even out numbered five to one the drow military was formidable. By the end of the war the drow military was half its original strength but the empire still stood. The other nations had cut their losses and the three drow with him didn’t know the extent of the damage to their military might in return. Many other exiled or tainted races flocked to the drow cities in the aftermath and were met with a… interesting… welcome.
The drow never gave up power. They have always and will always rule their cities. They cannot live in a city that they do not rule as all of those are razed near instantly. Safeharbor was only built because of a joint occupying force of humans and dwarves with an entire regiment of mages casting summoning spells and conjuring walls to speed up the process. The ‘lesser’ dark races were either turned into slaves or given second class citizenship. Their taxes were higher and the laws were less lenient. Regardless of their race they were required to pray to Dri’El at least twice a day and killing any type of spider or dark elf for any reason was punishable by death.
Two thousand years prior there had been an uprising of the non dark elves against their overlords and the only ones who hadn’t joined, interestingly enough, had been the dark dwarves. In exchange for their loyalty they were given almost first class citizenship. They were allowed to have any position not in government and they could have any number of non dark elves working under them without restriction. This had actually managed to boost the drow economy to a point where, if not for the wars on all sides, the drow empire would have challenged Altia for Safeharbor, once Contantis proved to be unable to remove it itself anyway.
The three dark elves hadn’t gone very deep into it but Isaac had learned that the drow empire had over a dozen factions trying its borders at any given time. This pressure was the only thing keeping the empire in check but it had the unfortunate, for everyone not in the empire, side effect of causing the empire to work like a pressure cooker churning out extremely high level combatants instead of canned tomatoes.
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On their other topics it appeared that the drow hadn’t researched very deeply into non dark mana related concepts as shadows had been their only real exposure to the phenomena. With the boundary between the plane of darkness and Primatia weaker in the Innerworld there was never a short supply of shadow sorcerers. Due to most other circumstances that could create sorcerers being incredibly scarce the study of the other colors of mana seemed moot to the drow.
The pair did know about death and shadows and how they related to each other which gave Isaac some interesting insights. One thing was that death flames were not actually death. They were simply the expression of the opposite of life. Black was the lack of white and thus shadows were simply the opposite of light, ‘death’ was the opposite of life, and dark mana was simply the other side of the coin of light mana. The reason death flames healed dark creatures was simply because life mana healed light creatures. As Fen had put it: “It doesn’t have to make sense, you are trying too hard to understand something that, by its nature, can never be fully understood.” That had upset Isaac but he had acquiesced as his head had started to hurt from him trying to understand the physics behind something that was incorporeal.
Unfortunately and fortunately for Isaac, raw mana manipulation was impossible for everyone else once the mana left their body. Their body was a sovereign space and thus the mana inside was theirs to command. Once it left them it became the magic of the world unless there was a spell to bind it to do their will. Fen could cause shadows to pour out of him like Isaac could, just not for very long and not very much at a time but it was possible. In fact it was a common training tool for sorcerers as repeatedly emptying and refilling their mana reserves would help their reserves increase, their regeneration increase, their ability to feel how low their reserves were would sharpen, and their ability to cast their element’s spells without chants would become more natural even if it still took more mana than simply chanting the spell.
The party had finally fallen into relative silence as Isaac was processing all of the information he had received when he suddenly stopped. His eyes shot from the ground to the wall ahead of them. The others stopped as well. Fen raised an eyebrow in question, Jala started looking around for what might have caused Isaac to stop, and Lenna drew her sword. “What is it?” Lenna asked and closed her faceplate.
“I… I don’t know.” Isaac replied. He closed his eyes and tried to feel his connection to everything. He searched out the strange feeling he felt and tried to understand what it was and what it meant. It felt fuzzy, then he felt something both smooth and rough, scales, small ones, even smaller than Kahtesh’s. He tried to focus harder and right when he was about to give up he got something else, fish. Isaac opened his eyes. “Ori-Masa. A lot of them.” He looked at Lenna. “So many that I almost thought it was one strong creature.”
“How far?” Lenna asked.
Isaac shook his head. “You know how it works. Far-ish.” Isaac shrugged. “We should be fine if we camp out where we stopped before. They are probably where we saw that scouting party yesterday.
“You can feel them from here?” Lenna asked with some concern in her voice. They should have been much too far for Isaac to feel anything from that distance. He usually had trouble feeling them until he was standing almost on top of them. To feel them at what was probably between five and ten miles was worrying.
Isaac nodded. “It has to be like a million of them.”
“A million? Ori-Masa?” Fen asked skeptically.
Isaac shrugged. “Either that or they are all a few magnitudes stronger than usual.”
“How does that ability even work?” Fen questioned.
Isaac shrugged again. “No idea. I just have a skill called Polarity Sense which the more I think about it the less accurate the name seems.” He replied.
The group continued until they reached the place that Isaac and Lenna had camped out previously. There they ate and talked for a while. Lenna was in the middle of taking a drink when Fen dropped the question he had had on his mind. “How long have you two been together?” He asked. The word for ‘together’ that he used meant together in the romantic or at least marriage sense.
Lenna inhaled some of her water and forced herself to swallow the rest of it that was in her mouth before she started coughing violently. Isaac started chuckling which turned into laughter that soon brought tears to his eyes as Lenna had gone from silent to choking at the question. It was the first time he had seen her so flustered that she forgot how to drink. The other two were amused by the pair’s reactions but didn’t understand why until they got themselves both under control.
Lenna waved away Fen’s question. “We aren’t.” She corrected him.
“Unfortunately.” Isaac replied.
“Not for lack of you trying.” Lenna shot back.
Isaac raised his hands. “I don’t know if I would call that trying. If anything I’ve been trying not to pressure you.” He responded.
Lenna rolled her eyes. “Confessing in the jewelry shop, telling me to forget it ever happened, then bringing it up later hardly counts.”
Isaac put his hand over his heart. “At least I haven’t been flooding the room with gifts or flirting with you,” He then quickly added: “on purpose.”
Lenna huffed. “Instead you just strip in front of me like I’m not even there.”
“Only down to my underwear I’m not a pervert.” Isaac corrected her.
“Stare deep into my eyes whenever you get the chance.” She continued.
Isaac smiled while looking into her eyes. “You have beautiful eyes, I can’t help myself.”
“They’re your eyes Isaac.” She shot back with her eyes narrowed.
Isaac shook his head. “They might be the same color but the framing is much more stunning. The slant, sharp contrast, and seriousness that is always in them gives you the look of a fox or wolf spirit. It’s irresistible.” His reply was honest even if it was still decidedly flirtatious.
Lenna’s eyes remained narrowed. “This is what I’m talking about. Either flirt with me or don’t. At the very least stop pretending that you aren’t.”
Fen and Jala shared a look. “We can… um… wait around the corner?” Jala offered meekly.
Isaac and Lenna both broke eye contact to stare at Jala. “No.” They both replied in unison.
Jala shrunk back like she was trying to merge with the wall she was leaning against. “Just offering.” She squeaked.
Fen sighed and relaxed against the wall next to Jala. “This is going to be a long trip.”