Chapter 15 — Depths
The winter solstice was fast approaching, a fact that was not lost on the snowstorms that had become ever more frequent and severe. But today the sky was clear and the wind’s cold was only nibbling rather than biting.
On what was perhaps one of the last pleasant days of the year, Rína chose to enjoy it sitting on the driver’s bench, bundled with tea in hand, listening to the wagon’s oxen crunching through the fresh snow. The two women were once more on the road, making their way through yet another pass between valleys. This particular one was lightly wooded and only a week ago was so piled with snow as to be, as Yvette put it, ‘too costly of calories and discretion to plow through’.
The tranquility of the scene was soon broken as the wagon’s driver door opened, revealing Yvette with a bowl of steaming breakfast in each hand. “Here you are,” she said, handing a bowl to Rína.
“Thank you very much,” Rína said, as her mind was briefly whisked away by the first bite of gooey eggs over a stir fry of seasoned rice, sauteed vegetables, and spicy sausage.
Lucidity slowly returned to Rína, as she looked to Yvette, “So what have we got today?”
“Well that depends how healthy you are feeling. If you’re coming down with a cold, then we should take the day off so that you can rest.” Yvette began, leadingly.
Rína narrowed her eyes, “Really? Holding lessons hostage?”
“What? No, of course not. I—” Yvette paused, then frowned, “I suppose I worded that poorly. Here: while we eat, may I please administer a health checkup?”
Rína grimaced, “You know, you’d be wasting your time, I feel perfectly fine.”
“And I know that you know that there are viruses that infect the brain, are thus outside my direct reach, and only show symptoms after it is too late.” Yvette said, a hint of worry leaking into her voice.
“You know, that I know,” Rína pointed her fork at Yvette accusingly, “that those recent disease lessons weren’t half as subtle as you think they were.”
“Whoever said I was trying to be subtle?” Yvette smirked half-heartedly before her expression turned sincere, “Please, Rína.”
There was still a part of Rína that was angry with Yvette, but it was getting more and more difficult to hold onto it. Even disregarding the woman’s odd philosophy on bodily privacy, Rína knew she hadn’t acted with any kind of malice—just the opposite—and after all, it was better to have someone looking out for you than to not.
Rína sighed, “Alright. Go ahead. Then tell me how perfectly healthy I am.”
A thought occurred to Rína as a slight smile twitched at the corner of her mouth.
“Thank you.” Yvette bowed her head, “Now, for today I was thinking—” Yvette frowned, “You know you will have to take that down first.” she said, waving vaguely at Rína.
“What? You mean the big scary Flesh Weaver can’t slip past the wee little initiate’s aura?” Rína said with an impish grin as she tried to keep the mental strain from her voice.
Aura projection, and aether control in general, was still a new ‘muscle’ for Rína, but she was growing more accustomed to it by the day. At present, the most difficult part was actually shrouding her body as she could only see her aura with her soul sight, and not with her actual eyes. It was to be expected, Rína guessed, as all aether was in the Astral, just with varying distances from the physical. She wasn’t even trying to fill her body with her aura, not really. Technically she was just trying to blanket the part of the Astral that abutted where her body was in the physical. Her current strategy was to send her aura down to the tangle that was her soul roots—the place in the Astral she knew was immediately adjacent to her brain—and then just spread her aura out from there. It wasn’t elegant, but it seemed to work.
Another issue was the weight. Yvette had gone on and on about aether with intent having a certain weight in the direction of the Astral, and now as Rína was trying to wrangle her aura into place, she could see the effect in action. Whenever she lost concentration, some of her aura would snap back into her soul, like a smaller water droplet merging with a larger one. But the majority would fall away into the endless nothing around her, with her losing feeling and sight of the bits of aura the moment they lost a connection with her soul.
The emptiness also bothered Rína. Intellectually, she knew that around her soul there was, well, quite a lot. Yvette’s soul would be somewhere nearby, just as the woman’s body was near to Rína’s, and of course literally all of physical reality was right there, like an infinite plane that her roots were attached to. Yet she could only see her own aura and soul.
One of the first things she tried was sending her aura deeper into the Astral, but that had ended anticlimactically as, similar to a stream of water being shot over a long enough distance, she couldn’t keep her aura from separating into droplets beyond a certain point—droplets that she immediately lost sight and feeling of.
Next of course was sending her aura as far in the direction of her roots as she could. As it got closer to her roots, closer to the physical, Rína felt an odd kind of ripple go through her aura as it was compressed into a space with one fewer dimension, but when it reached her roots, it just stopped. She only felt a slight kind of pressure against it, still without being able to see anything. It had taken some time for her to fully accept that the invisible ‘thing’ that resisted her aura from continuing was all of physical reality itself, and that her soul was well and truly outside of it.
Yvette had mentioned that because the Astral had no real up or down, certain cultures and traditions conceptualized the Astral, and thus the soul, as instead being above the physical. Rína could see why; most of the time she herself thought of her soul roots, and thus the physical, as being ‘below’ her soul core, like the roots were legs beneath a torso. Hells, gaseous aether was even pulled ‘down’ to the physical by mundane gravity.
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However, for the Astral to be ‘above’ then aether would have to be thought of as floating off heaven-ward with buoyancy and not falling with weight. But seeing it for herself, the Astral unambiguously felt like an infinite pit one fell into and never returned. And she certainly hadn’t thought about her roots becoming unmoored and her soul falling into that infinite nothing.
After all, thinking about that kind of thing would be a waste of time. Though she would have to confront it eventually. Even if her body became ageless, it was just a matter of time and luck until she died to violence or some tragic accident, and then she would be off to the Deep Astral to either slowly starve, be ripped apart by gnashing teeth, or face the judgment of who knew which god. Until then, the bits of her aura that slipped through her grasp, from now until she died, would be the prelude to her own arrival into the Deep Astral.
And anything could be happening to that aura. Aura was supposed to be corrosive to other souls, so was her unmoored aura falling onto the souls of the dead, dripping onto them like acid, each slip of her own aura control bringing agony to someone she’ll never meet? Someone who would already be slowly starving—not to death, but to oblivion.
But Yvette hadn’t ruled out predators being in the Deep Astral. If they could eat a soul, surely they’d be able to eat aura. Was she just giving them an appetizer? Was she just wetting the appetites of whatever nightmares lurked down there? Were they developing a taste for Soul du’Rína?
And even if a deity awaited her, that was cold comfort. Some of the religions Rína had heard of had some pretty stringent prerequisites for being allowed into the ‘nice’ afterlife—and that’s assuming the deity she met was even represented among the world’s religions. If her aura was an imprint of her soul, was it possible that some deity could actually read her mind from her aura? Was every bit of lost aura being collected and cataloged to eventually be used as evidence for when her ultimate fate was decided? Should she maybe stop cursing, just in case?
No, that would be fucking ridiculous.
It’s not like Rína had never thought about death, but before it had just been an abstraction. Now… Now she was getting repeated previews of the day her soul would finally fall into that infinite abyss.
Ultimately, there was nothing she could do about it, so she definitely hadn’t spent a few nights unable to sleep, staring at the wagon’s ceiling, with thoughts of the Deep Astral lurking in the back of her mind.
Well one thing she could do was to keep practicing her aura control and do everything in her power to not let a drop fall into the Astral. The alternative was to not practice, not become a mage, much less Flesh Weaver, and die sometime in the next couple of decades. So she had practiced, even on her own time, outside of the structured exercises with Yvette.
As she practiced, thankfully less and less of her aura fell into the Astral, but at present she could only practice a few hours a day. Each day the amount of time would increase as her control improved, but it was still annoyingly restrictive. The problem was that as she practiced and lost aura, she needed to replenish it from the aether still in her soul. Eventually she would start to feel lightheaded, and her thoughts would become sluggish, which were the telltale symptoms of her soul running low on aether. This would then impact her ability to concentrate, which would make her lose aether at an even faster rate, which would force her to stop altogether—unless she wanted to spend the next several hours in a mental haze as her soul gradually refilled itself from the ambient aether.
Thankfully, it was still morning, and Rína’s soul was full of aether. She had projected her aura over her body and as Yvette began, Rína felt something akin to abrasion across the edge of it. It wasn’t painful per se, but it was definitely noticeable and mildly annoying. It reminded Rína of the twinge of pain—albeit significantly reduced—that she would get whenever she’d contact one of the targets Yvette would make with her aura during their practice. And since the abrasion receded a moment later, Rína could only conclude that she had held back the gods-only-know how many threads Yvette had sent her way.
Yvette raised an eyebrow, “You know, your aura control is progressing remarkably fast.”
“Thanks,” Rína said with a smile of pride, despite the mental strain.
“To answer your previous question: No. Neither mine, nor any other Flesh Weaver’s spells nor threads are capable of contesting even an initiate’s aura. It’s an intrinsic drawback of the discipline. If pressed, a Weaver could use their own aura to batter down another’s, then have their threads follow in its wake. However, that is not something I will be doing.”
“Well I’m still taking this as a win for me.” Rína said.
“As you should.” Yvette nodded, “Though, I feel I should still mention that your aura, centered as you have it on your brain, only covers down to your knees. Consequently, I am happy to report that your shins are in excellent health.” Yvette chuckled.
“Ah, damn it,”Rína scowled. It was difficult to get a sense of how the scale of her soul sight compared to that of her physical sight. The only vague point of comparison between the two was the volume in which her soul roots were clustered and the volume of her brain. The two necessarily had to be about the same, but it would seem Rína was slightly off in her estimation.
Taking a centering breath, Rína began pushing her aura further out. It wavered and wobbled, threatening to break apart, but nevertheless, its radius slowly expanded and—
A painful sizzle broke Rína’s concentration as her growing aura fell away. She winced, not so much at the pain, but at seeing most of her aura fall into the Astral. The pain wasn’t actually too bad, just unexpected. It had come from… a direction, somewhere near the physical at the very least.
“Well hello to you, too,” Yvette chuckled.
“What? Oh, right,” Rína shook her head, “I’m guessing that was you I just bumped into? Wait, I thought you said it took a while for aura and souls—erh, aether crystal—to react?”
“It was and they do,” Yvette nodded, “Most mages, myself included, keep an aura tightly controlled around their body.”
“All the time?” Rína’s eyes boggled.
“Indeed. I know it might not seem like it, but eventually controlling your aura will become second nature to the point that you will be able to project a lossless aura even in your sleep—which most mages do.”
“Huh. But how do you actually get it to be just around your body? I mean, how do you figure out where your actual body is?”
Yvette shrugged, “Mage sight will help once you get it, but is ultimately unnecessary. With some trial and error, that I can assist with, you can get a sense of how to translate your soul sight of the near-physical to your actual physical perceptions. But all of this is well off topic, and there’s still the matter of today’s academics: an introduction to metabolisms.”
“Oh, speaking of which, I was wondering if we could instead do chemistry today, or maybe tomorrow?”
“I suppose you are thinking of something specific?”
“Yeah, I sort of had this personal project in mind…”
“Oh?” Yvette raised an eyebrow, “Concerning what?”
“Hypergolics,” Rína quickly adopted the same tone of a child asking for a specific nameday present, “So, you know, maybe we could have a full lesson about those, maybe with an emphasis on practical synthesis? Also, do you think you could expand the types of reagents we keep in stock?”
Yvette chuckled, “Well calories are a bit less convenient on the road than they were back at the cottage, but I suppose the budget has enough room for that.”