Chapter 1 — A Report Delivered at Sea
Zei`el’s iridescent ghost-like wings dodged the forming droplets of moisture as he ducked under the darkening clouds, warbling to himself. The pull of the beacon told the magical bird that his destination was close now.
Reluctantly, but eager to complete this latest task, he dove lower still before leveling out. The unpleasant air close to the surface of the windswept and frothy blue was terribly chill and tasted of salt. A strange fog roiled off the moving blue not-ground.
Ahead, a cloth-masted construction of wood cut through the surface of the not-ground. Zei`el knew the craft was one of those contraptions the human ones used to traverse the waving blue.
Zei`el nodded to himself and let out a trill of emotion at finally sighting his destination.
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Towermaster Atheron Riftsail unrolled the message scroll just delivered. He suspected it to be from Irelyni, currently acting as Towermaster in his absence—a supposition quickly proved correct as his eyes scanned over the missive.
> Atheron,
>
> Against expectation, I hope this season’s expedition brings good news regarding the state of the north seas in the proximity of the Great Northern Rift. Tower affairs are of lackluster interest as usual and no matters of import require your immediate attention. The upcoming vine harvest looks adequate enough to cover current operating costs for the year. Our second-year student members have undertaken a project to add an underground chamber dedicated to earth and darkness attuned crystal-fruit which if successful should further increase the variety of crystal-fruit produced.
>
> Speaking of student members, while this spring’s recruiting has been as lackluster in numbers as our tower affairs, the Novidus cast-off that you fortuitously convinced to join our previously esteemed Order has once again managed to gain us two first-years of significant potential.
>
> The first of which is being presented as a disfavored noble daughter of House Jayre with limited support likely due to having been branded for crimes involving mind magic yet has somehow earned one of House Benathi’s regional scholarship slots even while exhibiting traits characteristic of Moon Elf heritage and a rare illusion affinity. She has contracted a powerful rot spirit as her familiar.
>
> The second is presenting herself as a commoner from the Revanti village of Shadewood but has quickly gained support from House Novidus and, after her role in the defense of Vorshan’s Hills against the Skyreach tribe, earned both the title of War Hero from the High Council and a regional sponsorship from the head of House Vorshan. Contentions of common heritage and a farm dog familiar aside, analysis of samples has shown at least two draconic bloodlines—one of which having an exceedingly rare and powerful orichalcum affinity.
>
> The pair have joined our Grand Games team and proved popular in the Divinesday Newcomer tournaments, already seizing a championship in the 4 vs 4 competition, teaming up with the Emberflow delegate’s youngest and the prospective Vorshan heir to defeat a strong elven team in the final match. If they continue to perform well, expectations for future recruitment should be raised.
>
> I’ve assigned Shadwich to watch over the Shadewood girl, and I’ve been approving the expenses—for now. I am finding it harder to justify as Shadwich has asked for rare resource after rare resource. The Tower isn’t in a position to devote so much to just one student—much less a student with foreign origins who might leave or get stolen away by another Order at any time.
>
> But.
>
> Even I am not immune to the hope that this girl might be something special. Dare I say, another Luventi.
>
> The news is not all good, however. Complications involving the Shadewood girl are the reason I am sending this preliminary report early. While she was attending a Novidus event accompanied by a prospective Vesali heir, Revanti agents attacked the event. It is unclear if the assassination attempt was directed at her or the Vesali heir. The Vesali boy and the Shadewood girl were both injured in the attack and only survived due to intervention by the four High Priests attending the event.
>
> The subsequent requirement that the Shadewood girl be housed at our tower post recovery and the assignment of Gryphon Knights to guard her recovery room at Healer’s Hall suggests the High Council’s opinion as to the target’s identity and her value to the republic. Further, the academy’s protective enchantment has been temporarily extended to rebuff access by anyone intending to kidnap or kill students or faculty.
>
> Towerkeeper Alenna has been made aware of the issue and has assured me that no harm will come to anyone within the tower on her watch, but as with the academy itself, we may also want to consider temporary additional security measures.
>
> This event is not without impact to your current expedition, either. Regardless of the likely target being Raventi, with the severity of the attack and the number of dead and maimed from prominent Houses—including students from the Academy—the declaration of war was quick in coming. The border with the Kingdom of Revant has been sealed and a call for war volunteers has been issued.
>
> Be advised that any Revanti you encounter will be hostile to Crysellians within and without their designated waters. The High Council has authorized the seizure of Revanti-flagged merchant and military vessels and their property, should you wish to further bolster the tower’s coffers.
>
> Irelyni Sorrel
> Assistant Towermaster
> Elder Sage of the Ninth Circle
“Hoh, interesting,” Atheron voiced to himself.
The old elf was cautious as ever, avoiding the use of names to obstruct divination and avoid the attention of the gods. Atheron would almost consider it an indication of how important Irelyni viewed the information—if only it wasn’t his second-in-command’s usual practice. Of course, one didn’t live to such an age without being at least a little paranoid.
Yet in this case, his gut told him that the elf’s practice was well-advised. Consequential times were upon them it seemed.
He looked out over the icy seas outside his cabin’s window and smiled.
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Lightning-Sky-Eyes was furious. Whether she was more furious at herself or the Revanti assassins that intruded on her game or the Crysellian nobility for the poor defensive showing by one of their most prominent Houses didn’t matter. She had been far too complacent in playing with her food—that was certain.
Even so, the Shadewood girl had far too strong of an ability to attract danger to herself! Direct action had been required to save her once already. And now, it was only thanks to the Exter boy’s quick thinking and intervention that the opportunity to harvest a rare draconic bloodline hadn’t been completely lost.
She forced her focus back to the boy trembling under the imbuement of his reward for the second harvest. If what Tensley had heard about the girl’s bloodline being damaged, or worse, destroyed… she didn’t know what she would do. But someone would pay.
As it was, the girl had yet to leave the academy grounds since the incident, so she hadn’t a chance to verify the situation herself.
After over a century of careful effort, nothing infuriated her more than a golden opportunity squandered, and yet with how soft the Crysellians proved themselves, her justified confidence had allowed her to be careless. When next the opportunity presented itself, she should claim her meal, fully ripened or not. The appetizers would be just as fine taken as dessert.
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Phaelys’ training wand in hand, Ria furrowed her brows in concentration. The chunk of jade vibrated and moved jerkily, emitting nerve-wracking tinkling sounds like an ice flow made of crackling glass. Each spidery ‘ting’ that rang out had an almost musical quality—as if the crystal was singing. The thought tickled a memory. Weren’t crystal shapers in the old stories called ‘Crystal Singers’? Maybe the sound would grow more pleasant as she became more skilled with the magic?
Ria was seated upright in her bed in a recovery room at Healer’s Hall. A week had passed since the attack on Lord Jevaran’s estate, and today she was missing another Divinesday newcomer tournament. This week’s newcomer event was a marksmanship gauntlet, which sounded aggravatingly fun to participate in. Keira and Iselyn had grouped up with a pair of boys from their shared alteration class for the event since Zena was also still recovering.
Zena had made sure to visit Ria each day that she came into the hall for treatment, and even though Ria felt terrible about what had happened, the girl herself was surprisingly unphased, already adapting a spell to form the missing part of her arm out of conjured embers—saying it would be good practice for controlling and manipulating her ember magic.
Like many maimed by the Revanti attackers, Zena’s arm was proving difficult to restore. With the Revanti weapons enchanted to damage the astral body as well as the physical, the spiritual and magical connection to the missing part of her limb no longer existed. That didn’t mean Zena’s arm couldn’t be restored, but that it would be a lengthy and resource-intensive process similar to what was needed to heal Hulle's former maid, Cassielle.
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In Zena’s case, each day’s directed physical reconstruction also needed a Soulkeeper’s magic to stretch her astral body to include the new shape. Further, the energy pathways and spirit connections had to be rebuilt and reattached. Full restoration would take months, and Zena would still have to wait to condition and fully retrain the muscles until after the regrown bones hardened.
Zena’s situation aside, missing the tournament wasn’t Ria’s only frustration, missing a full week of classes was a further lost opportunity—and it would have been worse if not for Ranger diligently attending her classes for her while she recovered, allowing her to watch the lectures through his eyes and listen through his ears.
As for when she’d be able to resume attending classes in person, it was mainly a matter of physical recovery and observation at this point. Her body had been damaged on a fundamental level, and apparently, the more magical one’s body, the harder it was to heal with magic.
That wasn’t the entirety of it, of course. High Priestess Elora had performed extensive spirit surgery to stitch her frayed astral body back together and restore her magic pathways, but in places, she was like a patchwork doll held together with yarn and glue—or at least that was how Mina explained it.
If she didn’t strain things, the seams would heal, and she could encourage the process along using the isolation chambers, but after it healed, she would have to go through a process to excise the astral scarring. The shifting and unification of her innate affinities and the changes to how the magical structures connected to her astral body and mystic gates also needed time to settle, and needless to say, her stunt destroying the bed had extended her recovery time.
Fortunately, her ‘soul’ gate was undamaged, and her soul-strengthening exercises were fine to continue. Who knew that even with her divine bloodline, she would already have reason to be thankful that she was a mortal? Thankful that her soul resided in the divine realm, still part of the cycle of reincarnation rather than unified with her physical and astral body. She didn’t even want to think about how difficult her recovery would be if she were an ascended being such as Iselyn’s rot spirit, Malleron.
Recovery wasn’t the only reason she was still under care and observation, either. There were changes that had come with the progression of her bloodline awakening that she needed to adjust to, and since regaining consciousness, she had some time to more thoroughly explore those changes. Mina—who turned out to be her primary assigned healer—was all-too-happy to assist with the process.
The energy transformation organ on either side of her head growing into the beginnings of crystal horns—nubs of backward jutting spikes rather, but she didn’t know what else to call them—was easier to adjust to than expected. In some ways, the organ functioned like a second set of lungs, but for breathing in energy rather than air. That didn’t mean she could go without breathing normally though!
The change in her visual perception took more time to get used to. From her and Mina’s experiments, Ria could discern minute details at surprising distances, and the improved sensitivity to color differences let her see without difficulty even when the room was described as 'pitch dark' by the fourth-year Healing Hands girl. The increased detail did give her headaches at first, and during the days while she adjusted, she had to close her eyes for hours at a time to let her brain rest. Thankfully, she could still function using her energy sense like she had trained with Jarrel all those months ago.
The changes to her fingernails, toenails, and teeth proved more straightforward—orichalcum reinforced fangs and claws. Interestingly, though useless for the most part, she could channel magic through them like she used to do with her enchanted training daggers.
Her hair had gained a similar property to her new fangs and claws, a property which when combined with orichalcum telekinesis now allowed her to move her hair about at will.
Gaining the ability to perform orichalcum telekinesis innately was another change—one that she was quite excited about. Unfortunately, like her wild-talent use of fire, it wasn’t particularly efficient in energy usage when used unconstrained.
She couldn’t wait to meet with Wendra and Mina to work out a spell matrix to provide a more efficient modern equivalent. Even a basic orichalcum telekinesis spell would give her a slew of new capabilities for defending and attacking that she was excited to explore once she was cleared for combat training again. Whether she would need to get her hands on more orichalcum to fully make use of it… was another question though. At least she had her bracer to make pellets and needles and such out of.
Sadly, even as excited as she was about improving her combat capabilities, things like orichalcum telekinesis weren’t what she spent the last several days on. While confined to bed rest, the healers were quite strict about what she was allowed and not allowed to do, and at first she was only allowed to read and rest.
After the first day, some positive test results, and a lot of complaining on her part, the healers grudgingly let her paint and work on her enchantments. Getting her much less cooperative internal energy to perform the necessary tasks had been and still was an exercise in managing frustration—and that was even before taking into account the change in attunement that she constantly had to be mindful of and adjust for now.
The effort put into the paintings ended up being more useful than just for adjusting to her new unified affinity. Maybe due to her performance at her debut, the paintings sold surprisingly quickly when she asked Arthur to put them up for sale at the Enchanters Guild for her, helping ease her tight financial situation.
For her reading, other than class materials, Ria had mostly used her down time to study crystal magic from the old Vesali primer she had ‘borrowed’ and, after getting the go ahead to do limited practice on the third day, she had used the past few days to work on the apology gifts she still owed for her part in the ‘blowing up Shining Sun Hall’ incident, which she was finally starting to make decent progress on.
Ah-! Her mind had been wandering!
Ria looked down at where she had been shaping the statue’s robe and groaned at the work she would have to redo. If her focus was slipping that much, it was time to take a break.
Returning the crystal-attuned wand to her vault, she withdrew the energy from the holocube of Keira’s grandmother and set the roughed out jade statue beside it on the bedside table.
Though her current lack of precision with the shaping magic wasn’t doing the vision in her mind justice, she was rather excited about seeing her imagined design coming to life.
When doing the initial shaping to expose the block’s unblemished white jade and shifting the impurities toward the bottom of the statue, she had a moment of inspiration.
A good amount of the impurities were black in color and rather than separate them from the statue, she hit upon the idea of keeping the impurities to form a shape like an evil-looking miasma suggestive of lurking fellbeasts that got lighter in color the closer it got to Keira’s grandmother, as if it was being purified by Lady Averlee’s aura.
But that was just the beginning of her idea. By filling the impurities with her ‘fake’ shadow aura and negative emotions from attack, the contrast would cause the properties of Lady Averlee’s heavy light to stand out even more. Taking the idea to its fullest extent, she could further balance the angst of her self-loathing, hatred, and desires for vengeance by adding her understanding of divine judgment to the glyph-shaped halo planned to go behind Lady Averlee’s head.
Exposing so much of herself in the statue would be embarrassing—especially a statue that was intended to honor a master mage’s contribution to light magic, but from the holocube Ria could feel that there was an aspect of judgment mixed with concepts of 'justice' that empowered Keira’s grandmother’s magic, so starting from her own understanding would more easily allow her to shift the meaning to fit Lady Averlee’s. It was only a step further than what she had done with the aura portraits during her debut.
Of course, such an ambitious project would be impossible without the high-quality holocube of Lady Averlee that Keira’s mother had lent them.
As it was, there was still a lot of work remaining to do with the sculpting and all the enchanted gold and sunstone-dust detail work before she even reached that step, but thanks to Arthur’s help, the base imbuement for the light-attuned portions was already quite good and would only get better the more they worked on it.
Barring a major screw-up, Ria was becoming more optimistic that she wouldn’t need the second jade block for the apology gift and would be able to use it to make Keira’s birthday present—and she already had a plan forming on what she would make for her best friend.
Work done for now, Ria took deep breaths of the fresh spring breeze lazily fluttering the gauzy window drapes and let her gaze drift around the room. If all went well with Mina’s visit later, this might be her last day spent at Healer’s Hall before being released.
A slight smile formed on her lips as her eyes lingered on each of the ‘get well’ flowers she had moved from lining the wall to strategic places around the room. She might be in a foreign land several months' journey from her home village of Shadewood, but she wasn’t alone. She had friends—and fans!—who cared for her.
Thinking of her arena fans, her eyes went to her new arena armor, the saintess regalia she had worn for her debut, hanging from a nearby changing screen. Lady Vienne had repaired it while she was unconscious and restored the parts damaged by the voidstone quarrel back to a pristine state—as if the attack had never happened. The regalia really was sinisterly beautiful… but maybe she needed to have a Xernium chain shirt added to it if voidstone was going to be a problem in the future?
She could conjure orichalcum now, but she doubted conjured orichalcum could stop voidstone any more than conjured amethyst. Her bracer though… Could the orichalcum from her bracer stop voidstone if flowed to block the attack? It was worth investigating.
Also she needed to test whether magical metals were weaker against voidstone than non-magical metals. Maybe Xernium wasn’t the best choice and normal steel mail would work better?
Her thoughts were interrupted by a knock at the door, and the figure that entered at her invitation caused her to fill with equal measures of joyful relief and betrayed anger. As angry as she was with him, the unbidden surge of happiness at finally seeing him only made her more furious.
“Where have you been for the past week?!” Ria growled out.