Chapter 77 Soul
Lenna sat on the roof of the Celestial Dawn. Celeste had been willing to let the two of them train their nondestructive abilities up there instead of in their room. There was one very good reason for this; Isaac and Lenna scared people. The feeling of Isaac’s magic and Lenna’s aura was simply too much for most people to deal with for extended periods of time.
Lenna hadn’t opened her eyes in hours, maybe days at that point. It was very difficult for her to lose track of time but she had successfully done it. As she sat there with eyes closed and steady breathing she felt something subtly shift. This time it wasn’t her losing consciousness, no, this time it was what she had been after. She felt her aura shift slightly. The mana in the air started to resonate with her but not quite in the way that she had expected. Her aura was causing specifically fire and death aspects of the mana in the air within it to resonate with her more than the rest. She had only been expecting the fire aspect to resonate. If she wasn’t only barely hanging on to consciousness then she might’ve been able to consider why. Lenna let herself fall backwards from her sitting position to sprawl out on the stone-dust covered roof. She had barely stopped falling when sleep took her. Not even Isaac’s death flames could keep her awake anymore but she had done it. Finally, Lenna had leveled up.
—
Isaac sat on the floor, on a rather comfy rug, in Alexander’s tower. Jala sat at a nearby desk with a previously blank book and a Never Ending Pen. Alexander had used some kind of spell on himself to record the memory of what was going on so he could go over it again later. Clayton had been invited as well but the younger wizard was way out of his depth, at least for now. Clayton was making sure to stay out of the way, not touch anything, and commit as much of what was going on to memory as possible.
Isaac’s head jerked to the side slightly as something happened inside the memories of Shaeo’ahna the Silent Fang. The skeleton was so close to being finished but Isaac was nearing his limit. They had been at it for hours and almost every drop of mana he had was being ripped out of him to fuel the recreation process of the formerly alive drider. It had been a struggle but he had somehow managed to keep the smallest trickle heading towards Lenna. He hoped it helped.
—
Isaac felt the blood run through her hands as the gash in her neck only got wider from the intense attempt at flight from her lost battle. The world was slowly getting darker around the edges as long chitinous legs silently ate up ground. The sound of metal on stone and clanking armor was never ending. A rock caught her leg and the ground came up to meet her. ‘My punishment.’ Shaeo thought to herself. ‘Should have been more dedicated to Father? Would have lived long? Doesn’t matter.’ The world finally drifted into total darkness. Shaeo felt a wave of relief in the sweet embrace of death. It was finally time for the ancient drider to get her due rest.
—
Isaac rocked slightly before taking in a massive breath. He hadn’t realized that he hadn’t been breathing. That explained the lightheadedness. He looked up while opening his eyes and locked eyes with the skeletal drider before him. The connection he felt with it was different from the one he felt with Kahtesh. The little dragon was tied to his shadow. Isaac thought that the reason Kahtesh could have a shadow of a soul was because he was the shadow of Isaac’s soul that was limited to the knowledge and experiences of the little dragon.
The small black orbs of death flames locked onto Isaac’s silver eyes as the remaker and remade seemed to size each other up. “You’re just as big as I remember.” Isaac told the skeletal half woman half spider in front of him. Some things were very different from the original. Shaeo’s ribs had flattened into platemail armor. They were a bit thicker around her chest as if they were attempting to fill out her old silhouette. Bone grew out of the sides of her head into the rough shape of her pointy ears. Her cheekbones grew downward and forward to cover her top teeth and her jaw bone grew a bone plate that moved upwards to cover her bottom teeth. Her old nose was back but this time it was entirely made of bone. Everywhere that was once chitin was now bone though Isaac wasn’t sure why. The two materials weren’t exactly similar even if they did have a similar function. Isaac figured it was probably because everything grew from the skull downwards and the skull was only bone. The entirety of the spider body was back including the spinnerets. The top of what used to be the chitinous section had grown upwards to cover the large gap between Shaeo’s bottom ribs and itself where it took the place of her hip bones.
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Isaac received no reply to his comment so he offered the drider a hand. It took it and rose to its full height carrying Isaac to his feet. “Thanks.” He told the drider and then frowned. “Something is… wrong.” He told the three wizards watching him.
Worry flashed across Clayton and Alexander’s faces but Jala only looked curious. “What is it?” Alexander asked.
“She feels… I don’t know, off, somehow.” Isaac replied and then closed his eyes and focused solely on feeling the creature that he was now connected to. “She’s… incomplete, missing something, empty, hollow.” He spoke about the odd feeling he was getting from her.
“Maybe it’s because it doesn’t have a soul anymore?” Clayton postulated.
“But neither does the dragon.” Alexander replied.
“No.” Isaac replied. “I think Clayton is right. Kahtesh does have a soul, kind of, partly.”
“What?!” Jala exclaimed. “How?” She demanded and closed the distance between Isaac and herself in little more than an instant. Curiosity, intrigue, longing, and a bit of insanity seemed to be painted across her face in shades of purple, gray, and black.
“I don’t know.” Isaac told her calmly before putting both of his hands on her shoulders and pushing her back a foot so he could see her entire face again. “That was the whole point of this ‘gathering’ in Alexander’s…” He looked around a bit. “Living room?”
“More or less.” Alexander replied.
“Jala, I know that you are basically my aunt-in-law but please, I am not your niece nor your husband, stay out of my personal space.” Isaac told her and took half a step back while letting go of the ancient wizard.
Jala nodded a few times in thought though it was clear that almost everything Isaac had just said had already gone in one ear and out the other. “It was the same process right?” She asked Isaac. “There weren’t any differences?”
Isaac shook his head slowly. “Not quite. I didn’t form the same connection to her as I did with Kahtesh and my shadow. I get the feeling that I can only truly have one creature that lives in, is, I guess, my shadow.” Isaac shook his head to clear it of most of the side tunnels of thoughts forming in it. “You know how it looks like you have a bunch of shadows if there are multiple light sources?” He asked the group of wizards.
Clayton and Alexander nodded but Jala seemed to be inspecting the drider as much as she was listening. “Yes.” Clayton replied.
“But even with a dozen different silhouettes of yourself sprawled out around you there is still one place that they connect.” Isaac continued and Clayton nodded along while Alexander just watched and tried to take in every detail for future study of both the conversation and the bone creature standing a half dozen feet in front of him. “All of those shadows are just different expressions of the one true shadow that exists. It’s like how under your feet there is an area trapped in total darkness. The anchor point for all of those other shadows is still right there. That is where your true shadow exists. I feel like I could keep creating and feeding mana to a few more creatures like Shaeo but they wouldn’t be complete because they wouldn’t be the true shadow. Kahtesh is my true shadow and, unless I decide to change that somehow, that is how it will stay.”
“I think there are a few leaps in logic there that I don’t think really apply to mana or magic as a whole.” Alexander replied incredulously.
“I am too far out of my depth to argue or agree with either of you.” Clayton said before nodding towards Isaac. “But it is your magic so I will defer to you.”
“Wrong.” Jala said after pulling her finger back out of Shaeo’s eye socket without immediately specifying who she was talking about. “Magic has a way of defying even its own logic and rules. As long as witchcraft exists that fact cannot be proven untrue. Draconic magic was much the same for thousands of years. Even now, to some extent.” She shook her finger to make sure that there weren’t any death flames still clinging to it.
“Magic can be studied and understood. That is the point of our class.” Alexander countered. “That is how we level, we master higher tier spells and we learn.” He shook his head. “There should be some level of quantifiable effects and logic to this.”
“Boy, do not try to lecture me on magic.” Jala told Alexander sternly. “I was learning magic before your great great great grandfather was more than a thought in his parent’s mind.” Her ancient gaze fixed on Alexander. “Magic is not science. I use chemistry and magic to produce alchemy. Spellcrafters use physics and magic to make spells like Flight and Quicken. He,” She gestured towards Isaac. “only has a conceptual color of mana to work with. Two times two doesn’t equal four when both of the twos only exist when they feel like it.”
“Conceptual color of mana?” Alexander parroted in a question. “If it is merely a concept then how can spellcrafters make spellforms with mathematical values of the expressions of the effects of mana?” He demanded. “If magic was just arbitrary and whimsical then spells wouldn’t exist. Even witchcraft has some form of logic to it even if we don’t properly understand it yet.”
The debate between Jala and Alexander continued for well over an hour until both of their voices were hoarse. Clayton leveled up simply from being in the presence of an ancient wizard and a wizard prodigy bickering about magic. If either of them heard someone refer to what they were doing as bickering they both would have corrected the speaker by saying that they were debating. Isaac and eventually even Clayton knew the truth, the two just couldn’t accept being wrong.