Chapter 23: I Got a Cool Rock
The two returned to Innovation’s Retreat. Nara was haggard, while Amara beamed with a pride that made her sheepish by association.
Chelsea arrived in front of Amara in a flash, her nymph beauty twisted in a scowl. Even then, she was still mesmerizing, evidenced by Amara’s exuberant grin.
“Look at her,” Chelsea said angrily, pointing to Nara’s ripped-up clothing dyed with blood, dirt, and grass, “I’m guessing you threw her at whatever monster happened to cross your path.”
“How did you know?”
“Don’t act dumb with me, how long have we known each other? You want to be a teacher so badly but you’re heidel shit at it.”
“That’s not true,” Nara piped up, “I learnt a lesson. A uh, rough lesson, but a good lesson.”
Chelsea stalked around Nara, like a judge evaluating a dancer. She manifested a stone out of the air, “Hands out.”
Nara obeyed, just glad she wasn’t the direct target of Chelsea’s wrath, even if Amara was enjoying it.
“Awakening stone of cloth?” She said, reading the description, her Guide returned her.
“Likely to produce an armor conjuration suited for you,” Chelsea said, then quickly turned her anger back to Amara. “I can’t believe you threw her into combat without any protection.”
“A lot of iron rankers fight without armor,” Amara pointed out. “Most can’t afford it for a while.”
“Have you even given it a moment’s thought that you may be too diehard? This outworlder hadn’t even lifted a weapon for the first twenty-three years of her life, let alone seen a monster because their world doesn’t have any blasted monsters—or magic—I might add. Maybe, just maybe, you should ease her into monster battles? She should have a tough lesson but not—” She waved her hand over Nara’s bloodied clothing, “—That tough.”
Her wounds had mostly healed after a few hours spent running around an open field with no direction, so all that was left was her own blood and minor scratches. Her arm still felt sore, and the newly healed bones in her shoulder were still tender.
“We’ve eased her into it for the past few weeks. Besides, she did fine, and got an awakening stone out of it. Isn’t that, right, Nara?”
“Yup! I got a cool rock!” She said, showing it off to Chelsea like a child showing off an unhygienic street-find to their exasperated parents.
Chelsea groaned.
*****
Nara decided to use her new spoils of battle. A wolf familiar sounded cool—she liked fluffy animals, but she wondered if she was stepping precariously closer to edgy than mysterious.
“It’s not a fursona if it’s an actual familiar, right?” she told herself as she slowly drew out a ritual diagram on the floor of the communal ritual workshop. She had absorbed an Introduction to Ritual Magic skill book already, provided to her by Amara, but familiar rituals were complex. Amara oversaw her progress as Nara slowly redid the places that did not glow, an indication of her mistakes.
When she had absorbed the stone, she had, as expected, awakened a familiar. In the case of a ritual ability, like a familiar summon, the ritual needed to summon the familiar along with the material required was knowledge provided by the ability. Her ability conveniently displayed it, but others would be able to tell what they needed to draw and gather in the same way the skill book told her everything she needed to know about basic ritual magic. The information was in her soul.
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-You have used [Awakening Stone of the Wolf].
-You have awakened Mystic Essence Ability, [Umbral Wolf]. You have awakened 3 of 5 Mystic Essence Abilities.
Ability: [Umbral Wolf]
Familiar (ritual)
Cost: Extreme Mana
Cooldown: None
Effect (Iron): Summon an [Umbral Wolf] to serve as your familiar.
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“I haven’t heard of this familiar before,” Amara said, pacing around the room with excitement. “The wolf awakening stone is a common stone; it shouldn’t have awakened anything new.”
“That’s hardly true,” Chelsea said, still in an argumentative mood, “More than most abilities, familiars are individualized. Her experiences as an outworlder—and in the astral—may allow her a greater ability selection than those of this world.”
“What does my experiences have to do with the abilities I awaken?” Nara asked.
“You cannot awaken abilities for that you have no knowledge of,” Chelsea said, “there are exceptions--”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“Nuances?”
She glared at Nara before continuing where she left of, “—There are exceptions, but most abilities are tangentially related to your personal experiences.”
“A cook may awaken cooking related abilities, with an Awakening Stone of the Feast. Whereas a non-cook may awaken an offensive health-drain ability instead. For an alchemist that has chosen the Elemental, Pure, and Adept for the Master Confluence, their abilities will look different than a non-alchemist.”
“So, will and experiences have an influence.”
“That much is a known fact, else how else can we explain who becomes alchemist and who becomes a wielder of elemental forces? Keep drawing.” Chelsea chided Nara who had momentarily stopped her hand.
“Oh, I got it.” Nara suddenly thought of her own example, “Nobody will have a gun essence ability because guns don’t exist here.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” Chelsea said, “More outworlder nonsense?”
“My point exactly,” Nara nodded with satisfaction.
Chelsea shook her head and rolled her eyes, which was becoming a characteristic combo for the elf.
The people of Erras had gravity-manipulation abilities despite their lack of knowledge about gravity and mass, instead conflating gravity and weight. Gravity was felt on their bodies, so even if they didn’t understand the physical force and thought it was magically generated instead, they could still awaken abilities related to it.
Nara recalled the floating shards of rock at the top of Sanshi’s stone spires and thought—she didn’t blame them.
She finally finished drawing the familiar ritual. It was the second most complex ritual she had ever completed, but leagues behind the cosmic scale google search she had painstakingly completed.
Each familiar ritual was unique to the familiar ability, and each ritual required specific reagents. The ritual crafted a physical body for an astral entity, so each type of entity had specific ritual and material requirements.
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Material Requirements:
* 200 [Dark Quintessence Gems (Iron)]
* 100 [Death Quintessence Gems (Iron)]
* 2400 [Iron Rank Spirit Coins]
* 500 grams [Midnight Onyx Powder]
* 1 [Radiant Jade]
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The members of the retreat had already found and supplied the ritual requirements for her. She decided to just dutifully accept their goodwill; it was a tired and fruitless argument to deny them. She didn’t have the capital nor the means to acquire the materials herself.
“What do you know about familiars?” Chelsea asked.
“Nothing much, just what the skill book had in it. Familiars are astral beings summoned to serve their summoner on a voluntary basis, is that right?”
“That’s right,” said Chelsea. “They cannot betray you, the summoner, and have the option to leave instead if they are unsatisfied with the partnership. In that case, another astral being will take it’s place.”
Nara didn’t know if she could take those words at face value. ‘Cannot betray’ seemed absolute in a cosmos where absolutes were few and far between. The inviolability of the soul was the only absolute she knew of, and the only one she had experienced.
The only thing left to do was to see for herself.
She steeled herself for the cringe and chanted the incantation. She wondered who decided the incantation for magical abilities. She was torn between chanting as nonchalantly as possible or chanting like a cultist, and reluctantly chose the latter. Despite her best intentions, she didn’t have the flair for dramatic acting, and it sounded like a poetry recitation.
“The One that walks the boundary of life and death, light and darkness, reality and astral. To the walker of the cosmos, to the seeker unbounded, venture forward with fang, shadow, and flame. Send those in your way to the other side.”
The moment the incantation finished, the ritual circle lit up with a gale, light pouring from the circle like light from the end of a long dark tunnel. The room was cast into darkness, the features of floor and ceiling fading away. They were suspended in outer space, the only semblance of the ground marked by the sensation beneath her feet and the ritual circle on the ground. Stars and nebula sparkled into existence, lighting up the previous dark expanse in myriad lights.
Nara absentmindedly thought that stars were made of flame—plasma, more like, but close enough. They were called solar flares, after all.
Two, glowing eyes that sparkled like the stars appeared in the space beyond, past where the wall should have been. A carpet of dark flame tipped with an ethereal blue spread out towards her, like a red carpet rolled out for being of myth, except it was flaming and blue.
As the eyes grew larger, she realized it was the eyes of a wolf. Its body was pitch black, with fur made of dark flame. It stood tall, far taller than Nara and beyond even the true size of wolves, like a Clydesdale Horse.
The tension was broken when the wolf sat down obediently like a good dog, a bright blue-white tongue lolling out from sharp white teeth.
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-Name [Umbral Wolf].
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Her Guide prompted her.
A name popped into her mind. It was edgy—she accepted that was inescapable—but it suited the incantation of the goofy spectral wolf. But once that name had popped into her mind, she just couldn’t shake it. She couldn’t think of anything else. She resigned herself, and spoke the name:
“Thanatos, then. If you don’t like it, we can figure another one out. But it’s a name of myth from my world, like the name I’m using here. What do you think? We’d be one mythical duo.”
Thanatos licked her face. There was no saliva, and the tongue felt simultaneously cool and warm in a strange assault on her senses.
“That’s a yes then. Can you shrink down?”
He could, in fact, shrink down.
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Effect (Iron): Summon a [Umbral Wolf] to serve as your familiar.
* Can utilize [Umbral Flame] to perform long-ranged attacks and enhance melee attacks. [Umbral Flame] deals disruptive force and fire damage. Enemies damaged by [Umbral Flame] are affected by [Vulnerable] and [Umbral Burn].
* [Vulnerable] (affliction, unholy, stacking): All resistances are reduced. Additional instances have a cumulative effect. Consumed to cleanse [Resistant] on a 1:1 basis.
* [Umbral Burn] (affliction, magic, fire, stacking): Suffer ongoing disruptive-force and fire damage. The mana cost of abilities is slightly increased. Additional instances have a cumulative effect.
* Can dematerialize and travel in shadows but cannot attack while immaterial.
* Can change the size of its form, up to a limit determined by rank.
* Can be subsumed within the summoner’s shadow. When subsumed, the Umbral Wolf can launch attacks from the summoner’s shadow. Additionally, denies shadow-based abilities from taking effect on the summoner’s shadow.
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He shrank down to the size of a normal wolf, looking like a slightly oversized black German Shepherd. Impulsively, she reached out, running her hands through his sleek black coat, partially between fire, shadow, and fur. She couldn’t help herself, she wanted to pet the fluffy animal. This is why humans had hands.
Thanatos responded, rolling onto his back to show his belly, tail wagging.
“My, my, my, what a good boy you are,” she crooned, running her hands vigorously through his fur. His fur had the same cool-and-warm sensation, but less so than his tongue.
“That was anticlimactic,” Amara said. “With that incantation I expected something...more. Something imposing and destructive.”
“It’s a familiar, Amara,” Chelsea said, “It’s the same as all the other familiars out there, undiscovered on this world or not. It’s not like she was summoning an apocalypse beast.”
“A what now?” Nara said, her hands that were vigorously petting Thanatos paused. Thanatos looked up too, ears perked up and tongue lolling out with a dumb smile that wondered why the petting had stopped.
“Never mind that,” Amara interrupted, “I want to pet him too.”
It turns out, the appeal of fluffy animals was literally universal. If it wasn’t, Nara would’ve doubted whether any of her common sense could apply to this world at all.