Maturation 4

September 25th, 2032.

I hummed quietly as I sorted different potions and elixirs, taking extra care when it comes to magical chemistry. Different materials absorbed different kinds of energies, from elemental to emotional to mental.

Supplies were sorted by hazard class, acids with acids, bases with bases, oxidizers with oxidizers, flammable with flammable and so on. But it was also sorted by elemental affinity and by which source or sources they were bound to.

It was very much a modern chemistry lab… but alchemy was also about diving into the spiritual and metaphysical aspects of material reality. It was about focusing on the lore, deep into the very Nature of things. It was a reaction in the world of Light, and in the world of Darkness.

It was about connecting to the very essence of things, letting a part of your own soul seep into the shape of alchemical absolution.

I carefully put away the reagents and supplies, putting them all in their rightful place.

“Four types of alchemical reactions. Creation, destruction, single transformation, double transformation...” I murmured to myself, tickled pink at the clear analogies to mundane chemistry. “Acid and bases are labeled as sours and bitters in old textbooks. So many ways to work the Craft in a dance of a trillion little reactions.”

I held a bottle of lab-made loken-inhame that I had been taught how to make as a test. I had macerated the dried roots of the yam within organic alcohol, and followed a three-step process towards converting the precursors within it into the right substance.

And not all of the substances were safe, acetyl acetate is an irritant and combustible liquid and corrosive to skin. Chromium trioxide is highly toxic, corrosive and mildly carcinogenic. Then there was the six step process towards converting the progesterone into either estradiol or testosterone.

That was purely from the material side of things, and didn’t include the cleaving and reshaping of the power embedded into the extract. A Potioneer had to learn how to guide those energies, the Green blasting off the reaction like plasma.

The yams used in my potion routine had inherent transformative powers, but they needed to be shaped, and needed their rules applied. The hormones produced applied those rules to a body, with different ratios providing different results.

Of course it was rare for any one discipline to fall under a single source, as all of them existed within all things. So when you created potions, you also reacted the very spirit of those substances, pulling on their meanings, on their rules, it was an art as well as a science.

A chili pepper was associated with fire, protection, power, passion and more. You tapped into those forces to create one’s magnum opus, the culmination of all your efforts and goals. They were hidden variables, extra degrees of freedom when creating potions.

You had to ponder and isolate and emphasize different aspects of your reagents and reactants. What part of its spirit would you emphasize, protection, fire and heat, or protection?

The potion in my hand emphasized transformation and femininity as part of its concepts. Another would emphasize masculinity or androgyny, or any combination within and outside the binary.

It was a reaction of concepts as much as it was one of substance. Creation reactions involve combining two or more concepts, destruction reactions break down concepts. Transformation reactions replace a similar concept with an adjacent concept, double transformation was even more complex.

Enchantment as a whole wasn’t dissimilar, it was working concepts and purpose into tools, etching altered states of Reality into material existence.

I heard a loud booming call, and carefully placed away the last supplies. I sprinted through the house after shutting the door to the lab, literally hovering on air between leaps.

Reyna was waiting at the front steps, anxiously waiting with a saddle in mouth.

I snorted. “Don’t be so impatient, I was just putting away potions and supplies.”

She blew back my hair with a light blast of wind.

“Hey!” I jumped onto her face, lightly sapling the sides of her feathery cheeks. “No ruining my hair. I spent years growing this beautiful mane out!”

Fly, we have your trip with the old man, was the unsettling reply from Reyna’s mind.

I rolled my eyes. “Fine. Let me open a portal.”

I circled my arms, reaching out to the tangles and strings of space and time. I could feel a thin verge, where Ersete and Earth bordered each other. It was a gal both infinitely small and infinitely large.

Cease.

That gap was negated in a yawning scream of vacuum as we stepped from one world to the next.

“Fly!”

We took off into the skies of California, shooting up like a missile. Hidden in plain sight by magic and will.

We had places to be.

----------------------------------------

I yawned as I gently tugged Reyna in the direction I had been given by Mads. Her grandfather was apparently interested in meeting me due to my involvement in the Thread Incident as it was called in the magic community on Earth.

Reyna had been taking lessons from Sundiver, which was quite obvious with how she was interfering with Reality. It was omnidirectional, seeming to manipulate… the information relating to connections, awareness. Anyone or anything that could sense us wouldn’t receive the information, overwritten with something mundane.

Empty air, a stray beam of light, a cloud or even a bird or bat or small plane. Reyna was drinking from the depths of the Violet, tugging on the streams of information and memory.

I could see the strands of violet shades, knotted into impossible angles and corners and patterns. A stubbornly four dimensional object accessing extra dimensions beyond human sight and vision, shuffling through infinite permutations.

Terrifying.

I was getting a deeper look into the levers and cogs of reality with how the Feel had grown and become more complex. But then that was something inherent to the process of the Craft, Ultima said it was a journey towards attaining your personal legend. Towards enlightenment and a deeper understanding of yourself and the universe.

Glyphs were the symbols of that journey for me, letting me piece together the heart of it all. Runes and glyphs were one and the same, two dimensional surfaces which projected effects in greater dimensions. In turn they were formed from fundamental building blocks in one dimension, of lines and points representing strings.

With spell focus bangles, I could use the Light to draw out those patterns, knitting the world to my heart’s content. Seven of those shapes were fundamental, Pillars of Existence, the rest were derivative or determined the shape and form of a spell.

A fifteen minute flight was no trouble for Reyna, she had shown me memories of flying across the world, flying for days at a time without stopping. Enough to know Ersete as a whole was the same size as Earth, just with half the land at best.

Her memories of the Stormwall were incredible, an eternal weather system circling the equator, dividing the world in two.

“Can you see our destination Reyna?” I asked my companion, noticing how we were dropping in altitude. We had been flying at two kilometers up, and had dropped to a few hundred meters.

Yes, was her reply, impressions seeping into her strange form of communication. It was an unadulterated memory unfolding into the mind, like every instance I had ever heard of the very word. I had my suspicions that many species had their own forms of telepathic communication.

Dragons like Dinah seemed to channel emotions and will, it was a fire of the mind constantly seeking, constantly testing.

Were you prey? Enemy? Kin?

From the air I could see what had to be Mads’ grandfather’s home, it was a large mansion. The architecture was all angles and lines and brutalist structures with angular geometric shapes. It was softened by colors and facades and stucco, composed of patterned elements.

Stolen story; please report.

We crossed an invisible barrier, and I shivered at the sensation of the topology of the knitted network of magical energy.

There was a flat landing pad, made of solid concrete and I leaned back with Reyna as she increased her own drag.

One, two, three, four…

We landed firmly on the ground, and were greeted with who obviously had to be Mads’ grandfather.

He didn’t look much older than my own mother aside from his shock white hair, and wore a billowing outfit in black and red. It wasn’t a design that screamed vampire, instead it was wild and brutal. Furs and animal hide, like a cross between stereotypical Norse and Spanish gentleman with their cloaks and suits.

His eyes were a soft shade of red, and despite his seeming youth there was a hollow feeling to it. Like… someone aged prematurely, while still being young in body. His ears were pointed, bat-like, and his lips peeled back to reveal needles for teeth.

“You are the human my grandchild has chosen to call friend and ally then?” He said with an enthralling quality to his voice. “Apprentice of Ultima Grimshaw, the Wandering Abyss?”

“So she is a known person on this side of the divide?”

“She’s the only reason we know that our old home is not lost to us,” he spoke with trilling tones, a hint of rage biting at the edge of my mind. “But she is elusive, an outcast among outcasts. It’s only through my grandchild that I know that old monster still lives.”

“Mads never told me your name, sir.” I spoke quietly in response, clutching Reyna’s feathers.

The hundred and fifty year old vampire smiled. “Please. Call me Vesper.”

----------------------------------------

I coughed into my shoulder, feeling out of place in the massive borderline palace. It was at least a dozen times larger than my mama’s house, and far richer in both quality and quantity.

But it also seemed… well lived in, I could see traces of entire generations of people who called this place home. Little marks on walls for height, scratches and marks on walls and ceilings, dubious stains on furniture and paintings of families including Mads’ own parents. It was different than I expected, ostentatious but not in the sense of being sprinkled with gold, and paintings worth millions of dollars.

It didn’t make it any less awkward to have a butler serve us tea, one hot and bitter the other cold and sweet. How long had he had this house for?

“I’ve had this place as my… domain for over a century,” Vesper explained like he could read my mind. “It started as a tent held up by sticks and hopes and dreams, but as I grew in understanding my people’s Gift I rebuilt this place over and over. As long as I exist or one of my kin does, this place will exist as a home and sanctuary for all who need it.”

He looked at old pictures, in black and white and in color. There were people who seemed to be from indigenous tribes, Luiseno, Cahuilla, Kumeyaay. Some pictures were of Japanese and Jewish people… World War Two era?

“You’ve been around a long time haven’t you?” I asked hoping not to offend the vampire.

Vesper snorted. “I was ten years old when my people fled the genocide of the Pale King, one hundred and fifty years ago. I’m not the oldest Being you’ll encounter, there are many among the undead and the living who have reached five or more centuries. Dragons can live for thousands of years, and I’m sure there are sleeping primal beasts older than Humanity as a whole.”

I nodded. “I’ve seen hints of such things, the skeleton of a creature the size of a town. My mentor calls them Archetypes, the platonic ideal of a creature. What happens when an animal overcomes mortality and becomes a force of nature.”

Wolves had their wargs, Devorasaurus had the Devouring Tyrant Himself, an individual a hundred meters long and four thousand tons. If a normal Devorasaurus could tank literal artillery, bunker busters and mass bombardment, the Tyrant could tank small nukes.

He had battled entire armies of witches and won, his attacks capable of ripping through defenses with sheer density of force. He had been a legend for close to two thousand years, and even now still lived.

Vesper chuckled quietly. “I see what my lovely grandchild means when they say you are very… spacey as they say.”

I flushed. “Sorry. I’m just like that.”

He shook his head. “No reason to apologize for how you are. I did ask you to come here.”

“Why am I here?” I decided to get to the brunt of it before I got lost in thought again.

“You have connections to a place I haven’t seen in a hundred and fifty years,” he was just as blunt. “Connections to the man who slaughtered my people.”

I almost fell under the sheer weight of his power, like space and time were being crushed under gravity. Like my own space was being contracted against my will.

Stop it.

“Apologies.” The presence ceased with his apology. “Even after all this time… I haven’t forgiven that man. For what he did to my people, to my mother, to all those who weave Blood to their whims.”

“He didn’t just kill them?” I asked quietly, fearfully.

“No. No he did not.” He didn’t elaborate and I felt cold at that chilling answer.

“What do you want from me exactly?”

“What I want I cannot make you do for me,” Vesper said with a quiet unease. “But what I can do… is to give you resources. You have gained influence and power, but that is a danger for a young one. So I wish to teach you some of the Gifts of my people. The power of Blood, and how to shape it into power, into results.”

“Mads has taught me some, how you can use bodily matter to perform esoteric effects, to develop favored tools. Like her Shadow.”

Vesper smiled proudly, stretching pale brown skin. “Maddie was always a clever child, rather than gathering power into tools, she invested it into herself. Her Shadow is her tool, allowing her to manipulate all the concepts she’s imbued into it.”

“There’d be quite a few wouldn’t there? Shadows and darkness itself, death, fear, cold, night and sleep.” I had seen Mads eat color on more than one occasion, as an alternative to blood.

“It’s how she’s grown in strength despite being half-human,” Vesper admitted with a shrug of his shoulders. “Her mother chose not to become one of us, and that is her choice.”

I blinked. “How does that work exactly?”

“Our bites aren’t infectious. Siring a vampire is a spiritual matter, through the incubation of spirits of death and sanguinity in a willing host. A form of adoption, of linking spirit to spirit. It is a Gift of our people, so that we’ll never be alone.”

“If it’s spirit to spirit, I imagine a hostile attempt is… difficult?”

The older man shuddered, breath fogging with ash. “That is how one creates a monster, a violation of the highest order. I have not seen such a thing in more than a century of life.”

I think I touched a dangerous topic.

I took a sip of tea before speaking again. “So she’s half-human… that raises a lot of questions about witches and humans.”

How different were we really? What did it mean?

“Many.” He agreed with a sip of his own tea. “Humans are how many of us survived, even as we hid away in the shadows of the world.”

“Which begs the question of how you’re still not found out on a large scale?”

“We are not completely unknown, a handful of institutions and governments know strange things exist. But there is a reason, the Masquerade.”

“The what?” I asked.

“A powerful and mysterious ward, anchored not to an object or a place or a person but to a belief.” He spoke dramatically, clearly enjoying the suspense.

He was still a grandpa… makes sense.

“A belief?” But I played along. “In what?”

“The Masquerade is anchored to the belief that magic does not exist.”

I leaned back, eyebrows shooting up. “So someone in the past created a ward so powerful it can hide magic from billions of people?

“It is not a flawless shield, but it’s powerful enough to cover for the last refuges of magic in this world. The Masquerade is an ancient thing, before written history.” His explanation was mind boggling and concerning on the how and the whys. “It has protected both humans and witches for thousands of years and yet… it is a fading relic of a bygone age.”

“It’s breaking?” I said quizzically, peering at his eyes.

There was a tired slowness to his movements. “Yes it is. As magic begins to fade day by day, the Masquerade is beginning to show cracks, tested by human technology, and by the actions of the supernatural. Of the beasts biting at the roots of the world tree.”

Right… monsters lingering in the paths between universes, unparticle monstrosities not bound by space and time.

“That… I wonder if my dad ever knew about things like that, he was working with Applied Metaphysics.” I rubbed my chin, had he been hinting at magic even way back then?

“Many witches and otherkind work in that field,” he confirmed. “It is how humans are beginning to see how to cause without cause, to not be bound by fate. You have Seen it yourself have you not?”

I nodded with an uncertain wonky expression. “The void is… impossible, it breaks all rules, all logic. It simply Is. But we’re going on a tangent now, what did you want to teach me?”

He slid over a sheet of paper, emerging from the shadows of his body. On it was a glyph, one that resembled the water glyph… with a cross through it.

“It was the last gift my mother ever gave me, the Glyph of Blood. But it is more than just blood, I wish you to discover it for yourself.”

I gingerly picked up the paper, fingers carefully holding the ancient paper.

“Why?”

Vesper snorted. “I am a very petty old man, so I thought… why not teach a young woman the art he destroyed?”

…

Fair enough.

“Hmm… I like your reasons, old man.”

Vesper’s smile was positively sinister. “I’m glad we can agree with this. I’m sure Ultima will enjoy learning more blood magic as well.”

My grin was equally sharp at the thought.