Chapter 12 — Life, Death, and Cubes
“A spiral with… twenty-ish loops, repeated and rotated about fifteen and then maybe thirty degrees? Then just the letters of the word ‘Hello’, one after another.” Rína answered. It was their second day of travel and the trundling wagon had still yet to leave the forest, and since sitting in the cold, watching the same forest go by could only hold her attention for so long, Rína had retreated to the wagon’s warm interior.
The wagon was certainly large, but still managed to feel cramped with seldom any walking space. There were a pair of bunks for Rína and Yvette, an all-in-one bathroom no larger than a closet, a single worktable with chemist’s equipment, and a small kitchen and pantry—it was the previous evening that Rína discovered that the pantry was actually growing its contents from its inner walls. On the whole, it felt like just a much smaller version of Yvette’s cottage. However there was a single exception to the wagon’s compact design: a massive cushion dominated the back of the wagon, right next to the oversized rear door.
It still made Rína sick to her stomach, the thought of fully abandoning Felix, and Yvette had adamantly not wanted to talk about it after yesterday morning. But to hells with it. There wasn’t anything Yvette could do to stop her from visiting Felix in the future. Technically there was, Rína had to admit, but she couldn’t imagine Yvette would actually try to stop her. Traveling alone across gods know how many hundreds or thousands of kilometers would be dangerous though, but that just meant that the return trip would have to wait until she was a proper mage.
“‘Twenty-ish’?” Yvette challenged, “Try that one again.”
Rína grimaced, “Errh… twenty-three. Also how much longer till we get to Westreach?” Yvette was putting Rína through the usual soul sight exercises, sitting next to her on the massive cushion devoid of a canine. And even though the driver’s bench was empty, their forward progress hadn’t slowed at all.
“Correct. Well, the oxen and wagon will have to occasionally eat, but otherwise will be able to travel all day and night. As for time…” Yvette’s gaze moved to the opposite wall as the light brown wood began to darken in places.
In seconds a sepia map of the region seemed to have been painted on the wall. In its center was the Serric Highlands—countless interconnected mountain valleys that gave the region the look of a maze, or a crumpled piece of paper that had been flattened out. Towards the south, the mountains became taller and the valleys between them less habitable, until one reached the Lód mountains running east to west that separated the highlands from the ocean. To the east of the highlands the Lóds turned north to merge into the Oro mountain range that separated the Serric Peninsula from the rest of the continent and, from what Rína had heard, otherwise spanned the continent’s entire western coast. And finally, to the north and west, the highlands gradually gave way to the lowland forests and eventually the coast that even Yvette’s map only had sparse details of. Rína had seen several variations on the map, and her eye was naturally drawn towards a relatively small, nondescript valley in the westernmost part of the highlands—one just large enough to be home to the Leigh forest and its surrounding grasslands.
“If this were summer, I would estimate three months, perhaps less, but with mountain passes potentially being blocked off by snowfall, it could take until spring.” Yvette motioned to the map as a dark line appeared on it, starting at their location and zig-zagging through numerous other valleys until it terminated at Westreach, “I don’t suppose you would know a faster route than this one?”
Rína shrugged, “Sorry, no. Wait, the wagon and oxen need to eat? What do they even eat?”
“Just about anything, from carrion to entire trees. How else did you think they moved?”
“Aether? That’s how you’re moving them aren’t you?”
“Not exactly. I am controlling them by firing off signals through their nervous systems, but it is their own muscles powered by their own calories that are moving them. Biomancy only works on the smallest of scales. Anything you can see with the naked eye is the fruit of painstaking engineering work that had been completed prior. It’s similar to how, say, fiery explosions are not simply conjured into existence by apothecaries. And even if that weren’t the case, this region’s aether is far too thin for any kind of mage to move this many tons long distance.”
“And the wall quickly changing colors,” Rína waved at the map, “came from, what, you designing a quick way to redecorate?”
“More or less.” Yvette said with a smile.
“Huh. Anyway, I guess a few months isn’t too bad.”
“Indeed. Speaking of which, how did you plan on doing this on your own?”
Rína frowned, “Luck mostly. There’s a village nearby Leighton. I was going to walk there and try to hitch cart rides from there. And yeah, I know that would have been risky, but it was better than the alternative.”
“Hmm,” a look of concern crossed Yvette’s face, “I suppose it doesn’t matter now. Now where were we? Yes, I believe you are ready for this one.”
A familiar sensation poked at Rína’s soul, but this time the geometry was wrong somehow.
Rína widened her eyes, “It’s… it’s like a square, but not. Sort of stretched, but not a rectangle either. What the hells is this?”
“Would you care to take a guess?”
“I honestly have no idea. But this one is definitely cheating.”
Yvette smirked, “Cheating how?”
“Because it’s not a shape,” Rína complained, “You’re using soul weirdness to draw something impossible.”
“‘Soul weirdness’?”
“Yeah ‘soul weirdness’, it’s a technical term. Like how souls are sort of like a sphere, but not. They’ve got some fucky metaphysical shit going on.” Rína snapped her fingers, “That’s my answer. It’s a fucky metaphysical square.”
Yvette chuckled, “Incorrect I’m afraid. It is no more than an ordinary cube.”
“Uh, no? It’s weird, but it’s definitely flat. And it’s not some flat wire drawing of a cube either.”
“Let’s try this then… What shape is this one?” Yvette asked, poking Rína’s soul with a new shape.
“A good old fashioned square.”
“And these ones?”
Six circular pokes followed, but instead of withdrawing, the now seven pokes remained, pressing lightly onto her soul.
“Six small circles—dots, really.”
“And how many straight lines could you draw that start at a dot, intersect the square, and end at another dot?”
“Uh, three. Each dot’s in a pair on either side of the square. What’s the point of this exactly?”
“Just one last question: how many of these imaginary straight lines, drawn across the surface of your soul, are mutually perpendicular?”
“All thr—What the hells? See, this is exactly what I’m talking about.”
As Rína shook her head, the square poke stretched in a direction that didn’t make sense, until it was, allegedly, a cube. Then it receded entirely.
“What does this tell us?” Yvette donned her professorial tone.
Rína sighed, “If a three-dimensional shape is being drawn on my soul, then my soul,” Rína shook her head, “has to be four-dimensional, at least. That makes it a hyper-sphere, right?”
“Correct. And it is just four-dimensional, for now that is. Same as your soul stem, though soul roots are mostly three-dimensional.”
“This is the part where you tell how that’s possible; and maybe explain ‘for now’ while you’re at it.”
“Well to begin, your soul is in the Astral—”
“You mean I’m dead? Honestly, that would actually explain a few things…”
“Pardon? No.” Yvette gave Rína a quizzical look, “Why would you say that?”
“Isn’t the Astral where your soul goes when you die? I thought that’s like the one thing every religion agrees on.”
“Ah, I see the misunderstanding.” Yvette nodded before restarting, “The entirety of our universe drifts through the Astral, like an island drifting through a higher dimensional sky. All aether, of every type, even the aether constituting our souls, only exists in the Astral. Aether that we say is in our universe is merely pressed up against it, though that doesn’t stop the aether from interacting with it. Clear so far?”
“Yeah, I think so, but I thought you said soul roots were anchored to brains?”
“They are, even though the roots are immediately outside the physical. A person’s brain has unique cellular scale structures, each interlocking with the tip of a specific soul root. Even though the neurological structures and soul roots are only pressed together, you can think of them as having extremely high friction between them—it’s similar to interlacing the pages of two books and then finding that you cannot pull the books apart. The friction analogy isn’t perfect, but suffice it to say that a strong anchoring is the end result.
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“And a strong anchor is absolutely needed. For the aether devoid of intent that fills the world, the world’s own gravity is enough to pull it down and concentrate it in the lowlands and oceans. But the more laden with intent a bit of aether is, the heavier it is in the direction of the Astral. And there’s nothing more heavy with intent than a soul.”
“So then death is just when the brain gets too damaged and can’t hold onto the soul anymore, and the soul falls into the Astral? And then what? They get to hang out with all their dead relatives?”
“Correct, although what a soul experiences in the Deep Astral is the realm of religion, unfortunately. Despite what you might hear from a priest or similar, no one actually knows as there’s never been a confirmed case of someone making the return journey. An afterlife is theoretically possible: there could be other worlds out in the Deep Astral with deity-like entities pulling adrift souls into them. Or there could be nothing, and the dead drift alone in the dark as their souls slowly starve and break down into gaseous aether that is pulled to the world to begin the cycle anew. Or the Deep Astral could have predators, like giant souls with teeth, waiting for us to leave the safety of our world. Or all of the above or something else entirely. No one knows.”
“That’s kind of unsettling to think about. In Leighton all we had was a priest of Daefos. He just officiated ceremonies and talked about us going to the Astral and becoming ‘one with the Daefos’ when we die. It always sounded stupid when I was growing up, but it’s starting to seem like one of the better ends.”
“Well, if everything goes well, you won’t ever have to worry about those kinds of questions.”
“Right… So, uh, why does the Astral have more dimensions anyway?”
“That’s part of a larger lesson, the short version is that certain things you take for granted, like positions being definite and spatial movement being limited to three axes, are only true here in the physical. These axioms degrade the further from the physical and deeper into the Astral you go. The tips of your soul roots are as shallow as can be and still behave as if there are only three spatial dimensions. But your soul’s stem and core are deeper and behave as if there are four spatial dimensions—for the most part.”
“Huh…” Rína chewed her lip, “And the ‘for now’ bit?”
“That is an even larger lesson. The extremely short version is that while every mage walks a different path to power, they all work towards increasing the depth and thus dimensionality at which their souls rest. Advancing one’s soul in this way is as difficult as it is dangerous and serves as a bottleneck, but even a single extra dimension drastically increases the potential complexity of spell structures and the amount of aether a soul can hold. And that is to say nothing of the innate mental enhancements.”
“Mental enhancements?” Rína raised an eyebrow.
Yvette waved her off, “Like I said, part of a much larger lesson, but it is nothing you need to worry about for the time being.”
“Alright… So if two mages are duking it out, the one with the deeper soul wins?”
“It’s not guaranteed, especially since a mage’s body is just as fragile before and after an advancement, but yes, the deeper soul will be heavily favored. Flesh Weavers however, for reasons we can discuss later, are less impacted by a disparity of depth, for better and worse.”
“That reminds me: when do we get to the actual biomancy lessons?”
“Getting impatient?”
“No, well, maybe a little. Identifying shapes doesn’t really feel like magic. I guess I’m just asking for a roadmap, or maybe a syllabus?”
Yvette chuckled, “Perfectly understandable. I suppose I haven’t given you much of an idea of what to expect. As a wider overview: biomancy can be thought of in two parts. The first is the actual spell structures. As I’ve said before, the structures are simple kinetic ones—they use aether to apply force to matter—and the mage sight is an extension of this, acting as an extended sense of touch. Where Flesh Weavers differ from more traditional kinemancers is that our spell structures are heavily optimized to act on biological matter at as small of scales as possible at the expense of everything else, including power and range. The range is so low that were a Flesh Weaver to build their spell structures on the surface of their soul, just as a typical mage would, then they wouldn’t be able to affect anything as the mere distance from their soul to the physical would be orders of magnitude greater than the spell’s range. To compensate, we build our spell structures at the tips of thread-like soul structures, then when we wish to affect something, we simply move the tip of the potentially very long thread through the Astral until it is point blank on wherever in the physical we wish to affect.”
“Why don’t other mages do it like that?”
“There are drawbacks with everything. Firstly, typical spell structures have enough range that most threads would only yield a marginal increase. Secondly, the thread, just like any other part of the soul, has an Astral weight and most mages would be better served by using that weight for something else. A mage could build their threads very thin to cut down on the weight, but the thinner the thread, the less aether it can supply the spell structure at its tip, and the greater the risk that it is damaged by the mage’s other castings. The only reason threads are viable for use by Flesh Weavers is that all of our spell structures are incredibly small and require practically no aether to function.”
“...which is why you don’t care that the aether is so thin here, because you barely use any.”
“Exactly.”
“But how could other castings damage a thread?”
“This is also part of a larger lesson, but whenever a mage uses a spell structure to forcibly change the intent of their aether into some spell’s intent, a fraction of the aether is instead left… twisted, damaged. Colloquially this is known as ‘blight’ and unfortunately is not confined to the originating spell structure. Instead it spreads out, diluting into the soul at large. Above a certain concentration, it can damage or even destroy spell structures, starting with the smallest, most delicate ones first.”
“You said before that Flesh Weavers can’t study other mage disciplines. That’s why, right?”
“Correct,” Yvette smiled, “Theoretically, if there was another discipline whose spell structures similarly used almost no aether—and thus created almost no blight—then there could be a multi-discipline Flesh Weaver. But if such a discipline exists, I haven’t heard of it.”
“But couldn’t you just, I don’t know, build a filter kind of thing right before a thread or spell structure so the blight doesn’t spread?”
“If only. The soul’s roots and stem do function as you describe, preventing the influx of blight. But I have never heard of anyone successfully duplicating this functionality in their own structures, nor have I heard of someone managing to build their structures directly onto their stem or roots. How the roots and stem achieve either feat, I have no idea, but it is a good thing that they do otherwise most mages’ castings would instantly shatter their soul’s roots, killing themselves.”
Rína chewed her lip as she digested the information, “You know, you’ve said ‘small scale’ a couple of times while talking about this stuff. Exactly how small are we talking?”
“Well, an Initiate like yourself will start somewhere in the millimeter to centimeters range. That is to say that things you will be able to perceive and affect at once with spell structures will most likely be from a few millimeters to a few centimeters wide.”
“Ok…”
“But by the time you are a full Flesh Weaver in your own right, you will be working in the tens of picometers to hundreds of nanometers range.”
“Does that mean that you can’t work in the millimeter range anymore? Also, what exactly is a nanometer or picometer?”
Yvette quirked an eyebrow, “A picometer is a thousandth of a nanometer, a millionth of a micrometer and a billionth of a millimeter—it is the scale of atoms. And you are correct: the spell structures I use cannot directly affect the millimeter scale. It is possible to coordinate multiple smaller threads to simulate a larger one. Perceiving this way is doable, but any manipulation requires significantly more concentration. And were I to simply build and use a millimeter spell structure, it would overload and destroy all of my smaller scale ones. However, I have more than a few work-arounds for working at larger scales; for instance this wagon is on the scale of meters and I can indirectly affect it just fine.”
“Huh. And what is an atom?”
“The smallest unit of matter… how would you describe Leighton’s education system?”
“Pretty thin on the ground—I’m guessing it shows?” Rína winced, “It was just reading and basic arithmetic—though Master Andreou had some old books on mathematics and natural philosophy that I must have read a few dozen times each.”
“Well, nothing to worry about. The majority of biomancy’s knowledge base is forbidden anyway, so there was always going to be a large amount I would need to teach.”
“What do you mean by ‘knowledge base’? Are you talking about the spell structures?”
“No, I am referring to the second part of biomancy: biology. It is all well and good to apply force at small scales, but without the academic knowledge of the systems you are affecting you won’t be able to actually accomplish anything.”
“Yeah, that seems kind of obvious now that you say it, but isn’t biology a really broad subject? Hells, isn’t all of medicine sort of a subfield of it? Why would that kind of stuff be forbidden?”
“Because no one wants a repeat of the Scourge King. Of course the more commonplace knowledge isn’t and could never be withheld from the public, but the more advanced material is burned when discovered along with whoever was in possession of it.”
“That’s…” Rína’s eyes unfocused, “That’s awful. Also, isn’t it stupid and self-sabotaging for people to burn knowledge like that? Especially medical knowledge?”
“Unfortunately the people in power typically can afford to become undead when their health fails, assuming they aren’t undead already, so a dearth of medical knowledge does not meaningfully affect them. And even if undeath isn’t an option, no local leader would be able to say no to a lich’s inquisitors investigating a healer who was slightly too skilled at their job. I can’t comment on the overall price liches pay for this policy, but I can say that they can’t afford another global plague.”
“Hmm,” Rína scowled, “So how much biology will I get to learn?”
“All of it.”
“As in ‘all of it’, ‘all of it’?” Rína’s eyes widened.
“Yes, as well as all of chemistry and a healthy dose of physics, engineering, and mathematics where applicable.”
“So for instance, if I asked you what a disease actually is?...”
“They come in an enormous variety, but most are caused by small creature-adjacent things called viruses that invade and grow inside the body.”
Rína widened her eyes before continuing, “And how would you isolate pure elemental air?”
“Air is a mixture, not an element.”
Rína frowned, “Seriously? What about the other three?”
“Also not elements. But there are eighty-three actual elements in total.”
“Wh—” Rína shook her head as her breathing turned frantic, “What about… what about allergies? What’s actually happening there?”
“It’s the body’s defenses misidentifying a substance as a threat, and then enacting a kind of scorched earth policy in response, but in truth, these are just the most surface level answers. All of the underlying mechanisms require several full length lessons of their own.”
“Tell me everything.” Rína demanded with a hungry grin, “Sorry, I mean, could we have those lessons now? Or maybe do them along with the soul exercises?”
Yvette gave her apprentice a smile, “I don’t see why not, at least the surface level versions of them. The full versions will have to wait until you have mage sight capable of directly observing the subject matter in question.”
“And how long until we move on from identifying shapes to mage sight?”
“Well, once your soul sight is at a requisite clarity, we’ll move on to aether control, followed by building general soul structures, then spell structures, and finally your first mage sight structure.”
“Seems pretty far off…”
“Less so than you might think.” Yvette said, “Your two-dimensional clarity is almost there, it’s just a matter of shifting your frame of mind to accommodate the third dimension. Soul sight, aether control, and structure building are all skills you will be polishing for the rest of your life, but none of them actually need to be very far along for you to build your first mage sight.”
“Well then,” Rína’s eyes brightened, “Let’s get back to it.”