Alice stared at the blue window in the middle of her vision, mind awhirl with indecision.
“Why the long face?” Asked Marie, and Alice sighed. It was probably a silly thing to try, given that [Pain Nova] was her first spell ever, but she couldn’t help but want to update it. At the moment a simple blast of Pain Ether just seemed too… limited.
Explaining her issue to Marie, Alice’s shoulders sagged with shed tension as her tutor nodded. “If you think yourself capable of making a better version of what you just did, then go for it. It’s a lot harder to forget a spell than it is to try time and time again until you get exactly what you want.”
Marie’s approval given, she closed her eyes and delved into her soul once more, dismissing the prompt with but a thought.
The process to recreate what she had done to create [Pain Nova] was noticeably smoother the second time around, and as she held the compressed ball of Pain within her chest, she noticed that her first idea had been to detonate the equivalent of a magical bomb within her chest.
Alice laughed at the absurdity of it all, the action almost breaking her concentration completely.
Taking ahold back of the ball of Pain in the middle of her torso, she tried a couple of different things. First, she let only a small circle within the pressure she had been applying the whole time falter, and the result was a small beam of sputtering ether that reached farther this time but dissolved even faster than before. She didn’t pay attention to Marie as the spell hit her, the older woman not even blinking at the beam of incoherent Ether. The prompt for a new spell didn’t even appear this time, and she guessed that her Echo had read her contempt towards something as feeble as that.
Once she confirmed that just deleting a small part of the containment didn’t work all that well if it resided within her chest, she gathered the Ether once more and compressed it into a different shape. This time she made a disk, as flat as she could make it, and eased the containment on the outer borders of said disk.
The result was a small circumference of solid red and black light surrounding her horizontally, and Marie looked at the colourful display with one inquisitive eyebrow raised.
“Was that your intention?”
Alice shook her head, looking at the disk while cocking her head to the side. “It sure does look pretty though. Perhaps I can make something out of it, but no, this isn’t it either…”
Frustrated even after only two attempts, she came back to the sphere mould, ignoring the faint headache she could feel behind her eyes and the hint of aching emptiness that her core was projecting at her.
Something more long-lasting, and something that covers an area around me, she thought, and as she did so, an idea popped inside her mind like a firecracker.
What if she connected a thread of constant Ether into her spell mould — mould? matrix? she’d have to settle into something a little easier to remember — and constantly fed a trickle of ether into it? That supposedly would take care of the ‘long-lasting’ part of what she wanted, but how could she engineer the area effect?
[Pain Nova] was too limited, too one-note, but what if instead of releasing all the ether in one big blast, she did so slowly?
Excited by the prospect, she went to work, attaching the feedline of Ether into her mould, and weakening it at the same time, but instead of targeting a concrete section, she did so all around it. Eventually, it came to a point where Alice could feel how she was releasing Pain from her body, the everpresent ache every time she manipulated her Ether now growing much stronger, but quickly, she surpassed some kind of threshold and the whole thing fell apart.
Alice was undeterred though. Relentlessly, and welcoming her core’s aches and the sharp stabs of agony behind her eyes as a sign of progress, she tried again and again as she lost track of time, each time growing ever closer to that marginal threshold, that knife’s edge between catastrophe and glory.
Only after so many attempts that her core was screaming at her, her soul blisteringly empty, did she find her perfect balance between the resilience of an iron grip and the soft caress of a silk glove, finding the common ground between the two and taking only the advantages of each approach.
Alice smiled as she opened her eyes, the air around her slowly pulsing a soft carmine that wavered in tempo with her breathing, providing a mild amount of light. Streaks of what she could swear were blackened chains filled every shadow inside the aura, the red grass near the entrance to the Blood Blossom that was within her aura was now wilting into a blackened rot.
With her focus slowly switching towards the material world, albeit at the pace of molasses rolling down a hill, the first thing she noticed was Marie’s piercing gaze barely three feet across her, when they had been separated by more than ten before. Doing a small skip back due to the shock, the once-passive aura roiled with activity, concentrating around the perceived aggressor, trying to burrow into any possible crack or crevice with an unrelenting malice that made Alice’s stomach do several consecutive flips.
This was, undeniably, hers. She had made the spell with nothing more than some tips as guidance, her own intuition, and pure force of will
“You’re really interesting, you know that?” Purred Marie, as if she wasn’t being attacked by what Alice could only describe as a living cloud of pure Pain.
Before Alice could answer or mentally order the spell to back off, it suddenly cut off on its own, just as Alice collapsed backwards, clawing at her chest as a horribly all-consuming feeling of emptiness spread outwards from the middle point of her chest, where she pictured her soul to be.
Gasping as frozen tendrils of pure void crawled along her veins, Alice sagged in relief when she felt the mouth of a glass bottle touch her lips and pour down a stream of heavenly cool liquid that outright erased the horrible lack of something that had been burning away at her being, and only after partially recovering did she notice a flashing prompt that had been bothering her for a while.
WARNING!
Incredibly low Ether!
The message repeated itself half a dozen times before the text changed to ‘Ether reserves empty’.
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
Ether
5/170
So that had been what happened. With a grimace, Alice acknowledged that she had overextended herself, and vowed to never let anything of the sort happen again; not if any other alternative was present at the moment.
“Thanks.” She croaked, voice hoarse and throat parched. As if reading her mind, Marie extended a small glass bottle filled with what she understood to be water, which a sip confirmed.
“Don’t mention it. Ether starvation is a nasty thing to experience, but unless you pass through it yourself, there is no way to convey the full experience with words alone.”
Gulping down easily half the bottle, Alice thought over Marie’s words, and after finding them logically sound, she still decided that, one day, she’d throw a rock at her teacher. Preferably a big one.
“Anyhow, it’s not too bad, right? You had me nearby and ready with an elixir, so you only got the curated experience instead of the real deal. Dealing with it for the rest of the day is the true killer.”
A very big one.
Marie smiled toothily, and Alice glared at her as her tutor spoke. “I like your look. It heralds good things to come. Now, why don’t you finish the process and learn whatever spell you just created? I want to have a look at it too, even if I can guess a lot from just the earlier display.”
Alice did so, a thought bringing up the partially dismissed message.
Success!
You have created [Torment].
Learn?
Alice nodded despite herself, and the interface blinked out, coming out once again a fraction of a second later.
Torment [1.1]
Surround yourself with a halo of pure agony, the cutting fetters of despair digging into your enemies’ minds and flesh alike. Embrace them into the cold horror of bloodletting suffering, and watch as they fall apart.
Range: Close.
Cost: Minor [Sustained].
Damage: Minor [Sustained].
Other: Mild psychic degradation.
— Smother hope, unending.
Alice smiled despite the reverberating echoes of that gnawing void still resonating through her very being, and turned the screen around, too giddy to give errant thoughts of murder anything else than a passing glance.
Marie read the description at an incredible speed and nodded. “A Domain type skill. Not bad at all, if very uncommon for someone’s first choice.” Tapping her chin, Marie looked towards the Blood Blossom, a thoughtful glint flitting across her gaze. “Say, now that you’re too wrecked to train be it Ether or your body, do you have any kind of question you’d like me to answer, or would you prefer to research in your own time?”
Mulling it over briefly, Alice nodded towards Marie. “You’re the experienced one here, besides the one supposed to be my tutor, or guide, or what-have-you. You should know things that I won’t be able to put together by just reading a couple of books.”
Marie nodded, gesturing towards Alice, and she took it as her cue to start asking.
“Say, how is it possible for me to understand you, or everyone that came with me at the same time? I saw a plethora of different ethnicities, and I greatly doubt they were pulled from the same place as me.”
“That’s pretty simple.” Answered Marie. “The Goddess did it.”
Alice waited for a more in-depth explanation, but Marie’s small smile indicated that she wouldn’t get one unless she asked, apparently content if she left it at that.
Well, Alice wasn’t.
“What do you mean that the Goddess did it?”
“Exactly as it sounds. Do you think something as silly as a language barrier would stop Nuram from seeding fresh blood and new talent into Aspen? No, not at all. Of course, the language here has developed and deviated a lot since Humanity got here, but for me, you’re speaking perfect Narini. In my experience with other outworlders, I’m talking in a language you’re fluent in, right?”
Alice nodded, and Marie gyrated her wrist, palm facing Alice. “See? The Goddess did it.”
As Alice huffed in exasperation, a part of the conversation got stuck between the gears of her mind, and she couldn’t help but blurt out the next question.
“‘Since Humanity got here’? What do you mean?”
Marie’s face darkened as she looked towards nothing in particular, her eyes aimed at the depths of the forest but not really seeing anything at all. “That’s… a really, really long story. Are you sure you want to hear it?”
Alice thought it over. She didn’t really want to spend the evening in an impromptu History class, but she knew that the burning curiosity that lapped at her chest wouldn’t go away unless sufficiently satisfied.
“Just give me the short version as I recharge.”
Marie nodded, and Alice leaned back, trying to find a more comfortable position atop the deadened ground.
“A long, long time ago, there existed a species of what I could only describe to you as living golems, a mixture of flesh, rune-inscribed metals and precious jewels covering every inch of their surface. These were the Anur, and they were incredibly powerful sorcerers, each and every single one of them. They only had one core issue they hadn’t yet found a solution to, and that was their atrocious reproductive rate.
“Each birth required an incredibly time-consuming and costly series of rituals and materials, and as a result of this, they lived mostly in their only city and capital.
“The rest of their small nation was nothing more than the temporary abodes and research outposts of sole individuals or small groups, but even those temporary homes of loose Anur were incredibly well defended, almost to the point of being completely unassailable.
“The research into easing their reproduction stalled, and, with time, fell out of favour. With natality rates as they were within the Anur and their overwhelming mastery of Ether, one of them, may his accursed name forever be erased from history, had an idea. If they couldn’t or wouldn’t make most of the menial labour required to maintain their nation, why not just conjure free labour out of thin air?”
Alice had a niggling suspicion as to where this was going, and she didn’t like it at all.
“The rest of the sapient species in the continent would be too much of a hassle to subjugate, even with their advantage in firepower, so they settled on the next best thing. On average, neither too dumb nor too smart, neither too strong nor too weak, and completely unattuned to Ether. Those were their criteria. They decided on pulling another species through the abyss between realities, maybe a hundred, two hundred or a thousand people at a time, we just happened to draw the shit-covered stick of the bunch.
Once they saw how humans could be their perfect beasts of burden, they wanted nothing else. Pulling more and more people across more and more realities, without regard or concern for their victims or the consequences their absence may leave. They only wanted meat puppets that could follow their orders better than the average golem, and they cared for nothing else.”
The venom and hatred in Marie’s voice were palpable things, and she could almost feel the liquid hate sliding down her tongue and singing a hole in the ground. But, then, Marie smiled, and Alice unconsciously scooted back.
“Everything went well for the Anur. Life was good, their nation grew by the day on broken backs and roads greased with the blood of human slaves, until, suddenly, their capital lost contact with one of their major outposts. And then, with another. Then another, and another the pieces of the domino fell, until they figured what had happened.”
Marie’s smile widened, and Alice could almost feel the raw elation radiating from her expression.
“They had a rebellion on their hands, and at its head…”
This time Marie shuddered, and it was the first time Alice had seen the older woman show anything other than pure confidence, the crescendo of the story dwindling down into a dread-filled whisper even as Alice leaned forwards, enraptured.
“At its head was a monster within men. At its head, was Atos the Unbroken, at that time the Champion of Nuram, and, now, Demigod of Victory.”