I walked into the alchemy lab Querit was using two days later. He’d come out of the fight unscathed, though the combat frame I’d built him had lost about a third of its functionality when he’d put down a pair of reanimated skeletons made from literal giants. Each of them had been close to thirty feet tall, and Ammun had taken some pains to give them a bit of extra power.
The fight sounded thrilling to hear Querit tell it, all desperate weaves around lumbering punches or dodging thrown boulders while he slowly chipped away at the animation spells keeping the bones held together. At one point, one of them had literally flattened a house when it lumbered through the building in its pursuit of my assistant.
“Glad to see you back on your feet!” Querit said with a snicker.
“I do not now, nor have I ever, appreciated puns,” I told him gravely.
The process to regrow the missing parts of my feet had been every bit as tedious and painful as I remembered, though thankfully it wasn’t a whole foot. Once, I’d lost everything from my calf on down, and that had taken me a week to rebuild. Human bodies were complicated. Fortunately, very little of my body was actually human at this point, and that sped things up considerably. Crystallized mana in squishy, fleshy form grew much faster than actual body tissue.
The fact that it was only the bottom third or so of each foot had also helped. I’d worked on them both at the same time, with Querit’s help, and we’d gotten the whole thing done in a single session. After that, it had just been a night’s sleep to recover and I was once again ready to face the world, standing on my own two feet.
“Liar,” he said with a smirk. “You just don’t appreciate when other people make puns.”
“Irrelevant,” I said, brushing past his point effortlessly. “What are you working on?”
“Breaking down mysteel using that mana eating potion you, ahem, developed. I know you can do it manually, but for the volumes you’re talking about needing, it seemed like having an alternative would be helpful.”
“I wouldn’t complain about not having to do that chore myself,” I agreed. Even once I reclaimed and recycled all the mysteel I’d put to other purposes for the battle against Ammun’s forces, I had barely a tenth of what I’d need to produce, if that. It was going to be the work of years to make everything I needed, and that didn’t even include the other preparations I had to make.
I’d taken over Ammun’s silo already. The golems were destroyed and their cores salvaged. I was still considering refurbishing my own workforce from them, but I wasn’t sure it was worth the effort. They weren’t very sophisticated golems, built more for the most basic of tasks than to perform any sort of complicated labor.
The silo itself was complete, and I’d promptly warded the place over with every method at my disposal, then removed a few core components from the interior just to be safe. No one should ever find it, and if they did, it wouldn’t work. To be honest, my cursory study revealed that it probably didn’t work even with the pieces I’d taken. I suspected Ammun held the final key in his own phantom space, which was now lost, the connection severed with his demise.
Somebody might stumble upon the real location of that cache one day, but I doubted it would be me. If I’d been willing to hold onto Ammun’s phylactery, I probably could have traced it, but I hadn’t thought to. I’d just wanted it all to be over, and I’d destroyed him the first chance I’d gotten. I didn’t regret it, either.
Besides, it wasn’t like I needed Ammun’s key. Almost all of his spellwork was based on the lessons he’d learned from me. I had a few spots I wanted to redo to increase overall efficiency, and I knew what was missing to make it all work. I doubted it would take me even a week to make that silo fully operational, giving me sole access to a globally destructive weapon.
I wouldn’t be using it for that. In fact, I was going to use it much the same way Ammun had been using his connection to Yulitar. I needed it as a source of mana. In fact, I needed so much mana that I was planning on building four more silos just like it to connect to the other moons.
A few thousand years ago, we’d have to wait for a lunar convergence to build up the ambient mana to its peak levels to pull off powerful ritualized spells like my reincarnation invocation. I’d expected I’d be doing something similar when I went to reignite the world core, but this worked better. The plan now was to just forge direct connections to all five remaining moons and use that mana instead.
That was still a few years off, however. First, we needed the mysteel, then we had to actually transport it all the way down to the world core, which would involve an impressive amount of excavation. It was going to be a monumental task, something that I could use plenty of help doing. I was willing to bet I could convince the Order to assist me, however. For something like this, a chance to bring back the halcyon days of magic, where abundant mana saturated the very air we breathed, I was confident they’d help.
Stolen story; please report.
“Well, come look at this,” Querit said, drawing my attention to the vials he was working in front of. “I’m trying to get the ratio balanced here, but I’m having problems getting an accurate measurement with these tools. The liquid keeps trying to phase-shift into gaseous form unless I run a current of mana through it, and that’s causing problems getting the mysteel to properly dissolve.”
I stood there for an hour, exchanging theories with my assistant and experimenting to see where to refine our ideas. We didn’t solve the problem, but we were one step closer by the time the conversation ended.
* * *
Three months had gone by. My projects progressed at an acceptable pace, the damage Ammun had wrought was slowly being repaired, and, most importantly, my sister was now fully grown. Despite our parents’ objections, Senica had opted to continue the aging treatment now that I could devote all the attention needed to ensuring nothing went wrong.
She was a tall woman, close to six feet in height, and objectively speaking, I could say she was attractive. I was sure the glances she got around town were more from the fact that she’d aged several years in the span of a few months than from her actual physical appearance, but the fact remained. Senica looked very much like our mother, only with our father’s height.
Since she lacked the ability to change how things grew, she hadn’t added the extra few inches of height that I’d managed to stack on when I’d been aging myself up, but in the end, it made little difference. She’d met all the prerequisites to get the most out of her transition to stage three, and had been studying diligently to ensure she made that transition successfully.
“I can’t believe I ever thought our written language matched spoken Enotian,” she said as she flipped through the manual one last time. I’d written it myself in true Enotian, an alphabet I’d insisted she familiarize herself with. “This makes so much more sense now.”
“I’m hopeful that in a generation or two, I’ll have spread this enough that spoken and written Enotian will have synced back up,” I said.
“Did you ever discover how that whole thing came about in the first place?”
I shrugged. “I have some guesses. Most likely, it was something Ammun did as a method of ensuring the world would struggle to recover from the world core breaking. He knew he was going to be hibernating for a long time, and didn’t want to come back to find dozens of new archmages able to rival his power.”
“Do you have any evidence to support that theory?” she asked.
“Not really. It’s difficult to find proof of what happened even a few hundred years ago, let alone a thousand. Querit didn’t know anything about it, so my guess is that it happened after he ran out of mana and shut down, which makes Ammun one of the only entities on the planet capable of conducting such a powerful ritual. And I could see him easily deciding to doom the world’s magical traditions just to safeguard his own return.”
“We’re better off with him gone,” she said.
“Agreed, but let’s focus. I’ve supplied the mana, but it’s on you not to waste it. How’s the ritual circle coming along?”
Senica gestured to the floor, where she’d been laboriously carving the pattern for the last three days. “Completed, checked, rechecked, and ready to go.”
“And you’re entirely confident there are no mistakes?”
“As confident as I can get without actually running mana through it, which I considered doing just to see what would happen.”
The circle was perfect, of course. I’d already checked myself and knew that, but I wasn’t going to tell my sister. She needed to be confident in her work, not because she knew I was looking over her shoulder, but because she was comfortable with her own level of skill and knew her limitations. The stage three ritual circle was probably the most complicated piece of work she’d ever done, but she’d risen to the challenge.
“It’s not the worst plan in this case, but I wouldn’t rely on it as a method of checking ritual circles in the future. Some of them aren’t reusable.”
“I know that! But I already checked. Mana cycling won’t fundamentally alter the material in any way, so I could do a dry run on the circle before I actually set foot inside it to make sure that’s not going to reveal any problems.”
“You can,” I acknowledged. “I’m just saying, don’t get used to relying on that as a way to catch problems.”
“Yes, thank you, oh wise and magnanimous brother of mine. I know what I’m doing.”
“Fantastic,” I said. “Then you’re ready to get started. Good luck. Come find me when you’re done and let me know how it turned out.”
“Oh no you don’t!” she yelled, lunging forward to grab my arm as I turned to leave. “What’s the point in having an archmage for a brother if you can’t leverage it for your own personal gain? Get back in here and go over things with me.”
Laughing, I shook Senica loose. “You said you were confident. Own that. Besides, you’ve been preparing for this for months. You know what to do. You know the risks. You know how to handle it if things go wrong. Worst-case scenario, you botch the whole thing and shatter your mana core, leaving you crippled and unable to cast spells ever again. But, I mean, that’s the absolute worst case. What are the odds of that happening?”
“Don’t be an ass.”
“Senica,” I said, my voice turning serious. “I know it’s scary, but you’ll be fine. If I didn’t think you were ready, I’d say so. I have faith in you. Now, quit stalling and get in there. You’re never going to make it to archmage if you keep coming up with excuses to hold off on the next step.”
She took a deep breath, then nodded. “Alright. I’ve got this. I’m going to begin now. You’ll watch over me, make sure nothing interferes?”
“Of course,” I told her. “We’ll have a big party to celebrate when you’re done, and you can show off all your new tricks to Nailu.”
That was assuming Mother would let us. She was quite frosty toward the both of us right now, having strongly disapproved of Senica’s decision to resume the aging process and my support of that. We hadn’t seen much of the family in the last few months, but we’d be forgiven sooner or later, at least so long as we promised never to tell Nailu that ointment of aging existed. Mother was determined that at least one of her children would grow up normally.
Senica stepped into the circle, met my eyes, and gave me a firm nod. Then the mana started to flow, and she took her next step on the path to becoming an immortal archmage.