Maturation 5

September 27th, 2032.

The Real parted around Arali’s voice as he unleashed his power, insisting upon the very concept of Fire.

I paused to take it all in, watching his power through the Feel. Reality-fluid flowed into the potent spell, like whorls of sun directed into a beam. It struck against a massive stone target, which melted in a flash of scorching heat. Dozens of cubic meters worth of lava poured out onto the ground, like thick blood or syrup.

“Impressive.” I said aloud, complimenting the little guy.

Arali was resting on his haunches, and I noted the oddity of his feathers. They seemed to shift and flex like limbs, occasionally folding back to form interlocking scales. There was a very slight purplish-red hue to his black body, strangely reminding me of the night sky of Ersete.

“Is it?” Arali asked sullenly, his tail swaying back and forth with a tired air. “It took a human of all things to figure out what was wrong with me.”

Oh.

I immediately walked over to the boy, sitting down next to him. He was a head shorter, but I could see… hints of growth. He was still just as lean, but he was a little taller and the markings on his face had become more defined.

“Arali, that’s not your fault. There’s nothing wrong with you at all.” I clasped his shoulder, offering a faint grin.

“Ultima always talked about being responsible with our Gift,” Arali said with a low tone. “We both shared a connection to the Deep, to the endless depths of the Black. A powerful force, the opposite of the Light. She says our power is adaptiveness itself, that it’s the force of evolution and conflict. It’s why we have to learn how to control that power.”

“And since you couldn’t control it…” I trailed off for a moment, then found the words. “That must have hurt a lot didn't it?”

Arali nodded, his hum shaking the air. “She raised me since I was an egg, that she said fell from the heavens. Fed me, cared for me like a mom.”

“She is your mom,” I said with intent, clutching his shoulder tight. “She loves you a lot, no matter what.”

Arali didn’t seem to believe me. “Then why can’t I do this for her?”

“Arali… that’s not how being someone’s kid works…” I said with sadness running through me. “Ultima doesn’t want you to do anything more than to be healthy, happy, and safe. Sometimes things are hard… and that’s how it is. All we can do is adapt, to try and change those things where we can.”

Arali kicked his feet, clearly irritated. “I’m eleven years old, not sure what that means back home for you. But for us, it means it’s time for us to step up.”

“Well aside from all the environmental and societal collapse, my world is less lethal on an individual basis.” My world lacked a lot of normal wildlife much less a vast ecosystem of magical creatures capable of warping reality. “But Ultima certainly doesn’t want you to lose it either. You can ask for help if you need it.”

“So help me.” He demanded with an arrogant sniff, but his desperation was obvious even to me.

“What do you want me to do?” I was curious now, he was a sweet and intelligent kid. His knowledge of politics, social dynamics and sciences was vast for someone his age.

He was also a brat though.

“Study me, figure out how I tick. A big issue with training me is… that I don’t know what I am. Blood tests don’t work on me, and using the Feel to examine me barely works most of the time. But you’re smart, clever and stubborn.”

I think that was a compliment.

I smiled. “I’ll try my best then, I’m not sure how much I’ll find but if it matters that much to you…?” I prompted him and he chirped.

“It does, I can’t exactly conquer the world if I don’t know where I came from, do I?”

“Conquer the world?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.

Arali nodded. “This world isn’t fair, I’ve known that from the start. But I want to change that, to make things fair.”

I leaned back. “That’s a pretty big goal isn’t it? To change the very Nature of the world?”

I couldn’t say it was impossible though, even my world had its share of conquerors and revolutionaries alike. Sometimes they were even one and the same.

He shrugged. “Maybe. But I have to try.”

“I’ll try and see how you work then. But I’m going to need samples.” I decided to agree with his goal for now.

“Like blood?”

My nose scrunched up. “No. That’s a little much, Ultima would kill me unless I asked for permission. Just some easily scraped samples will be fine… but I’ll ask her about it.”

He grumbled but didn’t protest keeping her in the loop.

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

“Huh, this is interesting.” I muttered as I analyzed Arali’s samples under a bright powerful microscope. “Your anatomy is certainly interesting.”

“Interesting how?” He leaned over my shoulder, claws gripping my workshop bench.

“Your physiology is extremely irregular, made of some form of barely differentiated crystal.” I pointed to a nearby computer screen hooked up to the expensive microscope.

Four hundred times magnification, it was purely optical, able to resolve down to fifty to ninety nanometers. The lens used a microsphere amplifying lens, along with a CMOS camera with sticking and distortion correction.

I’m pretty sure I had seen these go for eight thousand dollars, so I knew Ultima was making bank.

“Crystal, like a rigid?” Arali asked with a owlish head tilt.

I gestured to the screen where his samples were being filmed. “Kind of, but it’s way stranger as well. Rigids possess organs and more differentiated biology. The samples here are pulled from scale-hair, saliva, and skin.”

Crystals, dense and black as pitch. All pulled from different parts of his body, and alien in structure.

“They’re… moving.” Arali pointed out the most disturbing revelation about his biology.

I nodded, pointing to patterns within the crystal. “Yep. I’ve noticed there are isomer territories within your crystal, which form and compete to become the most infectious pattern. It’s crystal from both a spatial and temporal standpoint, forming repeating patterns and repeating changes in shape.”

“Is there any way to figure out what the pattern of this stuff is?” Arali asked as he watched his own biology fight like competing viruses.

“Not at all. The isomer domains battle along their boundaries and are constantly adapting and recruiting one another. They even have mutants within these domains rising up to conquer, which can spill out into other lattices.” I shook my head as I watched one pattern devour another pattern before shattering from the onslaught of two other patterns.

Fight, die, take. Defend, birth, share.

“It gets stranger, some patterns act like perfectly rigid bodies, with a pattern regular through space and time. Perfect crystals. They also seem to be constantly leeching ambient heat and energy.” I switched to infrared mode, showing him how the heat was flowing into the lattices. “I’m pretty sure these are time crystals, which is uhh… strange let’s say.”

Especially since we only figured out how to make space-time crystals about sixteen years ago. Arali was a living mass of competing quantum systems made out of alien and exotic forms of matter.

That was more a guess since I didn’t have a way to look at atoms or molecules, unless Ultima decided to break into a lab on Earth again.

“So I’m weird.” Arali said with a shrug of his shoulders.

“Yes. Interesting but weird. I honestly have no idea how you can move at all, unless certain sections of your body are biased towards specific outcomes.”

“Huh?”

I folded my arms. “If your entire body is an evolutionary battleground, then different sections have different goals implanted into them. Your legs are adapted towards being legs, your arms toward being arms, your eyes are eyes. Which makes me wonder what controls that goal, is it the crystal or yourself?”

Or was there a difference to begin with?

“You think I can control what happens with my body?” Arali asked excitedly, practically bouncing in the air.

“You can shift your density can’t you? That’s pretty extreme, only oozes and slimes can manage that. And that’s more volume manipulation than mass manipulation.” They could spread out or compact their form, but they couldn’t conjure mass without using magic. “How heavy can you make yourself?”

He blinked. “Never tested that… let me try and…” His eyes gleamed as he flexed his body, a strange ripple passing through the air.

The ground didn’t seem to suffer from whatever he had done, so I walked over to Arali. I picked him up, flexing my own internal energies.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Oh Jesus Christ!

It was like the time I bench pressed a dozen fifty kilogram plates to prove I was strong to Althea! He was at least as dense as osmium if that was the case, how the hell…

I carefully lowered him, afraid dropping him could crater the floor of the workshop.

“Now lighten back down before you fall to the center of the earth, little creature.” I poke him on his chin with a warm grin. “You’re very interesting, those crystal structures go down to the nanometer scale. Almost unique.”

But there was something familiar about this kind of structure, about this kind of almost viral living matter. But I wasn’t entirely sure why that was, and it was irritating to not remember.

His weight dropped immensely, until I couldn’t even feel his weight, and he started to float in the air.

“Oh. So you can float now, which means you can shift your density from as light as air to as dense as osmium.”

He dropped immediately, as he increased his weight to whatever was nominal for his species.

“I want to learn more about what I can do, and I think I know how.” He rolled his shoulders, feathers shivering with a chime. “Ultima has been teaching me how to fight, in case some Chantry goons show up. I wanna fight you.”

I blinked. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, both our magics can be unpredictable and dangerous. Remember yesterday when we both tested out manipulating Darkness?”

Arali shuddered. “So you still haven’t figured out what we did to that hunk of metal?”

“I can guess, the sources are dynamic interplays of light and darkness. We used the Green to try to manipulate metal… and the Black to narrow the possibilities.” I frowned absently. “I think we twisted the metal, mashing and warping different states into one.”

The metal had gone from stainless steel to a blender of different layers of alloys. Different possibilities of the original metal, now forcibly collapsed into a singular state. It was the most horrifying thing I had done with magic so far, and I shuddered to think of what that spell would do to people.

If they couldn’t shield themselves from it… would it merely kill them, or do something worse?

“So extremely dangerous and not something to play with?” Arali spoke, rubbing his claws together.

“Yes. But that’s the Craft as a whole, responsibility is paramount with the ability to bend the laws of causality to our whims.”

Is this what your study of Paracausality was leading towards?

“I still wanna fight.” But my reluctance didn’t change his mind.

I sagged. “Uhh. Fine. But we gotta do this properly, and we gotta tell Ultima.”

He grinned, bearing his fangs. “Heh.”

Ugh, kids.

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

I buttoned up my cloak, until it covered my entire frame in layers of magical boundaries. At its most basic, the silk-weave was able to tank bullets, arrows and reinforced punches. As in… even a fifty caliber bullet from two hundred meters wouldn’t break through its fibers.

Of course on its own, you’d still get your organs pulped from the force of a bullet capable of punching through an inch of steel. Which was why the energy was spread out across the entire surface of the bounded field, and slowed down.

Otherwise I’d get hit with more than double the shock of a car crash, though I’d still get launched several feet back.

Ultima had set up the sparring circle about eight meters in radius, carefully drawing out a line in the dirt. Arali and I were at opposite ends, his feathers rippling violently along his back.

I pulsed out the element of void from my fingertips, my mind whirling with dots and lines and one dimensional shapes. The symbol of the void, surrounded by guides and channels of two dimensional shapes and patterns. Void was carefully etched into a barrier, forming a space of raw negation, nullifying forces.

A basic kinetic barrier was easily worked around by the Blue, the strange mental energies taking a route of least resistance. This spell was more complex, more powerful. Like a solidification of the very stuff of spacetime, of nothingness itself.

It held up to even the strongest of Althea’s strikes in her glorious battle-form, so I was confident it would hold against Arali.

Arali was nervous, but he was also excited, eyes black as night surrounded with a ring of light. The diamonds of trapped light were like cracks in that strange darkness… and I wondered why it was familiar.

“Hmm. So are you going to start flaring your energy or not?” I asked Arali as I watched his energies through my sight.

“Yeah. Give me a second.” He said with a snort.

He did exactly as he said, an outline of the Black hanging around his body like a second skin. It radiated outwards as a force of unseen pressure on my shoulders, like I was walking through water, with currents swelling with possibilities.

There was a vicious hunger to the Dark, predatory, opportunistic, like I was standing at the edge of a singularity.

So I shrouded my own energies with the Void, a force equally as ravenous as the Deep.

Ultima stepped up to the sparring circle. “The rules are simple kiddos, don’t kill or maim each other, you win when you can pin down your enemy or knock them out of the circle. That’s it.”

Not the best rules, but then again we were both way tougher than we should be.

“Got it.” Arali’s tail was swaying back and forth with fervent energy.

“Understood.” I added with a smirk.

We circled around each other as we stepped into the ring, gathering energy and power with every step. His darkness pressed outwards until it collided with my void, with crackles like scintillating crystal.

I swayed from side to side, cracking my knuckles as I tapped into the energies of my bracelets.

My neck prickled, and I sidestepped as a black blur slammed down where I had been standing. Arali had pounced, claws raking down with blades of shadow.

He Shouted.

A whirling cyclone burst out from his mouth, like a horizontal hurricane. Wind suddenly imbued with boundless rotating force.

I leapt over a hundred feet in the air, partially negating my mass. With a casual flick of my wrist, I cast a solid beam of kinetic force. It screamed out from the vacuum, as I balanced repulsive and attractive forces into a delicate beam.

Arali didn’t dodge, simply squaring his shoulders. The spell fell into the darkness, billowing clouds of the Black bursting to the seams with the force.

“Not bad.” I complimented Arali’s foresight against my ability to generate boundless repulsive and attractive force. The push and pull of the void was a powerful Gift.

Arali didn’t respond, feathers lifting in a display of aggression. He Shouted once more, unleashing solar fire that burned hot as plasma. I laughed, and dove into my own connection to the Black, to turn the promethean spark into its opposite.

Stillness.

The effect was short ranged but effective, I watched the shifting in the air as it extended. It stalled things in motion, it silenced and stilled. The plasma was nullified by boundless cold. A compound glyph of fire and darkness, where the ice glyph was a compound glyph of water and darkness.

Arali howled so loudly it shook the window of our home, eyes reflecting white light.

I cut through the distance between us, launching him away with a kinetic kick. He twisted, his body flowing like liquid, almost coming undone.

Wait what—

A hundred and twenty pounds of munchkin latches onto my face, and I flail back like an idiot.

“Hey!” I try to shake him off as he gnaws on my face, jaw cracking along my barrier.

“Bolt.” He whispered, and my mind came to a terrible conclusion.

I was struck by a bolt of lightning from his mouth, and ragdolled. My barrier absorbed the brunt of the blast, but my muscles were no less forced to twitch and tense.

Motherfucker!

Some of my stray hair was singed, and I hissed. I reached out to those stray strands, gathering a law of burning, electrification and chasing. The stray hairs exploded into electric fire, spreading outwards. Arali let out a chirp as the flames chased him down, flaring with electrical sparks.

Ultima blinked. “Huh, so you’ve got a good handle on the law of sympathy and reciprocity huh?”

“Being able to use a spell to target someone right back is convenient.” I replied right back with a smug grin.

Arali was scampering, as the ionized flames bit at his heels. “Call them off!”

“You wanted to fight hermanito, and sympathetic magic is included in my arsenal.” I shrugged, as I prepared another spell.

I was going to surround him in a bubble of void, keeping him in place. I used both arms to shape the bubble, and he was lifted into the air and frozen in place.

The flames withered away in the vicinity of the barrier as he was held within it.

“Well we certainly learned you’ve got more bodily control.” I spoke up for his sake as Ultima began to step forward. “Do you give up?”

He looked indignant in his little void cage, barely able to move in the trap. There was rage and panic tainting his aura, and then it went wild.

The Black spread uncontrollably, forcing the void to quiver and undulate. I stepped forward without thinking, worried about my tiny friend

And the trap shattered with a Scream that shook the world, and a wall of darkness pulsing outwards like a supersonic flood.

I didn’t have a chance to scream before I took the blow.

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

I awoke to a familiar ceiling and a pounding headache.

“Oww.” I said aloud, noting the weight on my chest. “What hit me?”

“You’re awake!” Arali was the weight, sitting down on my stomach with a guilty look. “I thought I… hurt you.”

“What happened?” Unwilling to let him focus too hard on his guilt.

“I… when you trapped me I felt… angry, afraid, desperate. Then my power went wild and it hurt you.” There was shame in his voice, his body trembling very slightly.

“Oooh boy, that’s a lot isn’t it? Has your Gift ever done things like this?”

Arali shook his head. “No. The only Gifts I have is my Voice, and how I control my body a bit. This is new.”

“You might be getting stronger I think, which sucks that it happened here. But better than it happening in a real fight.” That got a glare from him. “No. Not gonna accept any guilt from you, it wasn’t on purpose or you being negligent. It just means it’s something we need to test and work on along with Ultima. Same way Althea trains with her moms in shifting.”

“Doesn’t make me feel better.”

That got a faint haggard snicker from me. “Maybe not, but will this happen next time? Or will you get a handle on your growing power with time and effort? What do you want?”

“I want to get a handle on it, but there’s so much I don’t know.” He looked so lost, like he thought I’d disappear.

I clasped our hands together, gently applying pressure. “I’m in the same boat, I’m still an apprentice. So let’s learn about it together Hmm?” I offered the partnership free of charge.

…

“You called me little brother.” Arali said with no hesitation.

I flushed. “Umm. That sort of came out without thinking, that’s weird isn’t it—”

“I wouldn’t mind having you as a big sister.”

Oh.

I swallowed a reply that would probably be embarrassing and stupidly cheesy.

I placed a hand on the top of his head, simply smiling down at him. He really was a sweet kid most of the time. I probably would help him conquer the world.

“Then I’ll keep trying my best, you little goober.”

God goober is so dumb, idiot.

His haughty laughter told me he also thought it was stupid.

I can never win against him can I?