Peace and quiet.
I sat alone in my basement, an activity that I didn’t think I’d ever miss. I felt the constant boil of my emotions, and even that felt soothing. I meditated, I fell into a trance, it was time to finally make something out of the new concepts of magic I’d discovered.
The journey we took and the restrictions to what I could show had really slowed down my growth. I hated holding back, but now I could finally let loose once more.
Wrath and infernal magic hissed out of me. I materialized both, and I felt their soothing touch against my skin. My clothes burned for I was wearing some comfortable tunics for once, and I hurriedly put them out because I liked this shirt.
I smiled for a moment, all alone, as I sank back into deep meditation.
Days passed in that peaceful state. Moonwash and my parents brought me food periodically as I looked within myself and the two types of mana that flowed through my blood. At times I would leak them out and cast spells with them, and at others I would just smash them together and hold them in place for hours in an attempt to get them to stick and become one.
I felt every beat of my three hearts. One healed whatever aches may form on my body, another pumped burning pain into my veins, and the last one flooded my blood with a hatred for everything. There was noticeably more wrath mana being produced than infernal, which was to be expected for its origin was an entire evolution stronger.
But that wasn’t all.
Not only was my wrath heart producing a magnitude more mana, but there was seemingly even more of that wretched element than what could be accounted for by the heart alone. It was almost as if… the mana was… multiplying.
It was by a minuscule amount, and I immediately questioned if my senses were deceiving me, but I saw no harm in following this lead so I did.
All of the mana currently in my body, save for the ones in storage, suddenly exited through my pores to dissipate harmlessly into the basement air. I then focused my supernatural senses on my body, but before my hearts could even beat, there were already small specks of curse-aligned mana floating through my demonic form.
All three hearts pumped in near unison.
Mana flooded back into my veins.
The wrath subsumed the flecks of curse that had formed before, but I knew that they were not the same.
My body was producing menace mana by itself.
[Congratulations! During the process of evolution, the curse of menace had become integrated into your body and soul.]
“YES!” I pumped my fist in joy as I jumped up from my long meditation. This was what that notification from long ago had meant. My body was producing what I thought I had lost. It was presumably the same process by which cursetaceans became so full of curse mana.
But then where had this menace element been all this time? All I could use was wrath and infernal magic, and I’d lost access to some of my menace effects such as weakening and confusion. I desperately needed to learn more.
So I sat back back down, calmed myself, and reentered my meditative trance.
I could sense the usable mana produced not by my hearts, but by every part of my body, now that I knew what to look for.
I confirmed that the element produced by my very being was indeed that of menace. “Good.”
I could not access that menace magic because it was immediately subsumed by the wrath. The two elements technically mixed, but only one identity truly remained. A single drop of poison would not make an entire ocean toxic, it would not kill all those that swam upon its depths.
The menace within me was locked away by my unending wrath.
~~~
“What do you think?” I told Moonwash of everything I had discovered so far once I finally emerged from my basement. I was currently having a proper meal in our dining room for the first time in weeks. “It’s some great discoveries and all, but what I wanna know right now is how I could access my menace magic. It’s still there, after all. It’s still there. But I can’t reach it.”
“I don’t know. It’s already weird that they mixed at all.” She slurped her spaggheti. “It might be related to the Flavor Theory which states that no two sources of mana are the same. Just like fire and infernal are different despite being so similar, so too is one sundertop’s sun mana different than another’s, just to a lesser degree. Your wrath magic has a slight menace flavor now, so maybe you just need more practice and precision to bring it out. Or maybe it’s lost those abilities completely.”
“But that’s what I’ve been doing, and it hasn’t worked!” I complained between bites of sandwich. “The part about just training harder, I mean. But you’re also right that I might just be chasing after shadows here. What I’m trying to do might not even be possible!” I took another swig of ale. “Oh, but what if I just pluck out and isolate the menace mana before it can be consumed by the wrath in my blood.”
“It can work, but I don’t think it’ll be practical even if you can do it. It’d take forever to accumulate what you need for a single bolt of significant power.”
“Exactly! I don’t have anywhere to store it either. In fact, it’s weird that it gets snagged in my blood at all considering that it’s not produced by my hearts. Except maybe for the small amount that do materialize along that area. But I guess it becomes considered as wrath mana once it is assimilated.”
“It is disappointing that your blood can only be refilled by your hearts. This current phenomenon is an exception, and so is you making a circuit of magic through your sword that then flows back into your body.”
“Oh yeah. I don’t know why that works either. I can’t even return my mana to my blood once I’ve yanked it out, usually.”
“Blood flow. Mana flow. Some sort of circulatory system. Maybe those concepts are just related.”
“It could be. But I really just don’t know where to go from here. I’m treading new ground, and I can’t know if I’m onto something, or if I’m really just wasting my time!”
“It’s not a waste of time. Discovering that something doesn’t work is also a discovery. A failure today is another step to success. That’s what you’ve always done, you’ve always trodden new ground, and I have no doubt you will achieve something amazing this time too.”
“Moonwash…” I gave her a kiss. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She gave me a rare smile. “Give me some of your blood. I also want to tread new ground.”
“Aye aye.” I saluted mockingly.
~~~
I returned to our basement the next day with a bunch of live animals in cages for me to experiment with. Each of them were either level 1 or 2, for every individual and species had a different sort of potential, and small critters like the rats and mice my friends had caught just didn’t have much potential for growth.
Moonwash was here with me to help, for her own curiosity, and just to hang out. I sent a small whiff of wrath magic to a rat to get a baseline for how they reacted, and immediately the small critter died. That was the first hurdle and problem I encountered. I was too strong, and it was too easy to accidentally kill my test subjects.
I tried again with a different critter, and this time the mouse didn’t die. It merely fainted. The next one died again, and the one after that remained conscious but pissed itself out of fear. That was the exact reaction I was looking for. Well, maybe not exactly that…
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
After a couple more tries, I managed to have a rat showcase the other effect I was capable of, which was to enrage a foe. The small animal rattled around its cage, growing feral and injuring itself in an attempt to get to me. It was kind of cute how it tried so hard when it would never be able to so much as scratch me even if it managed to escape.
A stray thought asked if that was what me fighting an angel would be like, and the imagery made me kill the rat on the spot, but I did not let it ruin my good mood.
What followed was another training arc as I actually hired some of the crustecars that had come with us to catch for me all the vermin that they could. I then used these rats, insects, and tiny birds to practice the accuracy of my wrath magic, making sure to use just the right amount of force to get the effect that I wanted, until I could do it without any mistakes. I also did the same for my infernal magic so that it didn’t fall behind. I regulated its size, speed, and temperature to an increasingly finer degree.
It was a practice reminiscent of my time in Orila wherein I learned to control the amount of force that I used for every swing of my sword. The nostalgia made me smile as I recalled the shrieks of every cursetacean killed, and their curse that retaliated against me in painful bursts. Those were good times. Except for everything else. But that one was precious.
[Memory Core has reached Level 18!]
~~~
“Wait! Shit! I got entirely sidetracked!” I exclaimed one day while I was helping Moonwash make a wagon from the skeleton of the one we bought from all the way back in Orila where the prices for such things were much higher. We were currently in a large workshop somewhere near the tree wall, which Granuel had obtained for our projects. The guards up on the nearby trees had been… given gifts, so they’d keep an extra eye out on our property. There were plenty of crustecars here, either working on their own projects or helping as out with ours. They were free to use this workshop, and the building right next to it served as housing for most of them and the kids.
“What is it, Haell?” my girlfriend asked.
“Nothing I just realized that I should’ve been practicing how to use my menace magic again so I’m going back to the basement now bye!”
“Okay. Stay safe.”
“...Right. Um. I was making a joke. I’ll go back after we’re finished.”
“No. That’s fine. I’m almost done here.”
“Well, if that’s the case then I’ll just stay here and we can go back together.”
“Okay.”
She worked on the wheels and levers while I tilted the wagon around or held the tools she wasn’t using.
As promised, Moonwash was satisfied with our progress for the day only a few minutes later, and we waved the other people working here goodbye.
~~~
I hopped down to my basement, checked that I still had some guinea pigs, and then went back to trying to access my menace magic. The first thing I tried was to separate the element from the wrath mana before they could merge, but the fusion happened so fast that I couldn’t do it. The menace mana was almost attracted or magnetized to the wrath mana, and I called in help to figure out if that was something that just happened with everything.
I and Moonwash released a bunch of infernal mana and fire mana into the air, and found after many trials and errors that they did bleed into each other at least a little. It was hard to even figure this out because mana preferred to just dissipate into the ambient atmosphere instead. Burying them inside solid stone did work to slow this process, but it also slowed any proclivity they might have to mixing in the first place. Presumably. It might also just not mix at all under those conditions. We could not confirm at this time.
So my menace and wrath mana mixing together was not entirely unique, but it was the speed and the extent of it that was weird. That was when I had the idea that maybe it was the vastly different quantities that was the problem, and the results were… mixed. Infernal and Fire mana did overtake the other faster when one had a massive advantage in quantity, but it was only a minor difference, and served more to inform which was more dominant in the mixture. The menace mana within my body did not merge any slower with my wrath mana no matter how much of the latter I dumped out of my system.
Maybe wrath was just superior to menace in a way that infernal somehow wasn’t to fire… despite the latter example actually being the one that was more obviously superior? Wrath still lacked some of menace’s tricks, while infernal could do everything fire could, but with free additional abilities.
“Hmmmm…”
Another idea came to mind, and I summoned both wrath and infernal mana above my palm, to see if it was perhaps possible to mix them in this way to achieve what my mother had once shown me by deriving lava from fire and earth. I waited there, just holding the two different elements, but nothing happened. I released them into the air, and they dissipated into the ambient magic without ever mixing.
“Well, that didn’t work.”
I remembered how my mom had done it with fire and earth, and I recalled how the two elements began to behave differently. Fire became more rigid, earth became softer, until they acted the same as lava. Whereas I had just been swirling my two mana types against each other, waiting for them to mix, but I had no conception of how I wanted them both to behave as one coherent entity.
That was where I needed to start.
Where fire and earth made lava, I needed to find out what I wished for infernal and wrath to be.
Hellfire.
That was the first thought that came to mind. It should be more than possible. But I had a feeling, based on when I was building my infernal heart, that the Mutation would evolve to access that mana type someday anyway.
What I wanted was something new. From the infernal flames that acted like the fire it was, but stronger against the abhorrence that was life. Wrath magic was an energy, it was a damaging smoke, it affected the mind, and it manifested as some sort of smoky contained explosion.
What would the element in-between these two be?
Or perhaps I was looking at this the wrong way.
What greater element could the two become together?
I pondered upon this question, and I came up with a variety of possible answers; from a literally burning aura, to a fire that raged inside the body. But none of them worked. None of them felt right for me. It might have been possible to reach a breakthrough if I dedicated years into this project, but just like my mom wasn’t actually good at making and using lava, the result would only be mediocre even if I spent years on an image that just didn’t connect with me.
~~~
“Cauterization,” Therick rolled the dice.
“Raw power,” Angerly moved her piece on the Adventurer board. “Your wrath magic already has more raw power than menace magic in general, right?”
“Oh! An explosion!” Granuel enthused, and took down many cusetacean forces. “Sheer explosive force!”
We were all currently hanging out in my living room, playing games while brainstorming ideas for a possible combination element between my magics.
“What if it can’t be extinguished?” Berry sacrificed my piece to save her own. Why was she so fucking brutal here!? “T-then you can safely run away while the, well… die.”
“I’ll be very interested in some sort of forging fire that can help me craft better.” Moonwash prayed at the altar to reincarnate my piece in the grand palace. “Maybe it can curse everything made with it?”
“I’ll consider it,” I said seriously. My gear was a significant contributor to my overall power. “Shanayah! You stink!” I insulted the empress as she greeted me upon my reincarnation, and ran the fuck away.
I took all their ideas, and after letting them germinate in my head for a while longer, I finally came up with a result that I felt I could take the whole way.
~~~
It took a month more to get my first success, but I smiled by my lonesome in that basement as I perceived a mass of sickly orange and dark purple. It acted like a flame, but more volatile. Tendrils would shoot out regularly as if grasping, seeking for something. The colors, the elements, were still separate. They had not truly mixed, and that was the misconception I had coming into this. A quick and literal trip into memory lane, and some consultation with my mother who had shown me the technique in the first place, resolved the issue nicely.
“Come forth.”
I manifested the magic.
A fire blazed upon my palms, and I felt its comforting heat. It did not glow at all, for it was entirely black.
I blew the flame toward a nearby rat… and it instantly died.
Okay, that wasn’t the best way to test it.
So I grabbed my party and took on some local quest with them as I’d been doing these past few months.
I found a sheep-sized beetle a short walk into the forest, and I loosed my new combination element towards it.
The sinister black flame that came out splashed against my target’s body, and it immediately began to rapidly spread. The creature whined in distress, but the fire stubbornly refused to be extinguished by the motion and the winds. Even colliding against trees and things did little to deter it, but neither did the plantlife burst into flame. They weren’t even charred or burnt at all.
I too felt little warmth, no matter how close I got to the thrashing monster. All the power, all the energy, all the heat, was directed towards the sole target of the magic. Just as infernal magic wished to burn all life on Varyala, just as wrath magic held all of existence in disdain; I took the desires of these two elements, and used them to create a new combination that had direction.
The beetle died. My new kind of fire had enveloped it in record time, and it stubbornly stuck to the creature like a curse. No destructive potential was wasted by dissipating into the air, but rather it was all concentrated into the target of my ire, fueled by the burning of its very flesh.
This was my Curseflame.