Focusing intently on the strands of energy flowing through the crystal embedded in her chest, Anael thought she could feel some of the types of Will that the author of the sigilry book had mentioned. Ok, that one feels somewhat cold and… sad? Hmmm. This other one feels much hotter, like a fire. It almost feels hungry, and there’s definitely some fury in there. This one though, is harder to understand. I almost feel disgusted. Is it hate? Contempt? It doesn’t matter anyway there’s not anywhere near enough of it to be useful. There’s far more of both of the others and especially the hot, angry energy. Even that one isn’t enough to do anything though. Maybe that’s what that voice was talking about. If it really was His First Aspect, He would know. Perhaps I can increase how much of this I have. How in the Valley I could do that remains to be seen.
In addition to the three energies that seemed to be what the book classified as the “Emotion” category of Will, Anael had a vague sense of what some of the others were. These two both feel like they must be Belief, I can’t tell what’s different about them besides that they definitely ARE different. The rest of these are too small and vague to be sure… With that question somewhat answered, I should move on to more useful pursuits. It was growing quite late in the day, and Anael had much she wished to do. For starters, let’s see if I can’t find Kelara’s mana crystal. I can’t imagine she was using anything else to put mana into those potions. Most other methods are more expensive if anything, or require one to have an ample supply of personal mana.
Anael returned her prized book and the sigiler’s ink to the metal box she stored them in and hid them once more behind the false brick in the corner of the forge. I can’t afford to lose either of those, especially now that it might be the best way for me to become strong enough to get revenge on that bastard and every one of the soldiers that were here. Anael grabbed her pack and the shovel she had used earlier. She grabbed a few miscellaneous other possibly useful items and shoved them into her pack before slinging it onto her back and heading through the town.
Making her way between the ruined buildings, rubble, and charred pieces of what were once people’s homes, Anael began to head toward the west side of town. A walk that once took but a few minutes lasted much longer as Anael had to climb over a few larger piles of debris and take detours where some of the few two story buildings near the center of town managed to collapse into the street, blocking her path. Anael did her best not to look around yet she couldn’t help but notice the bodies of townspeople she passed by. Some were little more than charred skeletons, while others were mostly recognizable with just a few wounds on their bodies. It was probably for the best that she didn’t see the body of anyone she had known well. Considering that the town wasn’t particularly large, however, she did at least recognize the faces of a few of the now dead citizens, each one causing waves of nausea and sorrow to wash over her.
When she passed a particularly mutilated corpse of a man who must have fought for quite a while before succumbing to his wounds, Anael gave him a nod of respect and was about to whisper a prayer for his soul when she noticed that the ruined leather the man was wearing had once been a leather apron - in fact, it had been an old, stained leather apron that she was far too familiar with. Recognizing that the corpse in front of her had once been the tanner, Gillian, immediately caused her to lose her stomach, and a large portion of the lorberries she had eaten earlier in the day ended up on the ground. She quickly moved on, desperately trying not to bring up the image of that ruined corpse when she thought of the gruff, old tanner who had helped her gain the money to buy her prized book of sigilry.
Even when she was most of the way to her destination each body she passed still triggered a feeling of nausea but it was if, with each brutally murdered or incinerated corpse she saw, her nausea was lessened and replace with a growing cold fury. By the time she made it to what had once been a homely cottage with a beautiful and well tended garden filled with strange smelling herbs and rare plants, she couldn’t keep herself together without letting some of it out.
Anael’s voice was perhaps the most calm it had ever been, “I’m coming for you, you sons of whores. Death’s too fucking good for you dickless bastards, but it’s gonna have to do.” Anael fell to her knees and punched a charred piece of wood hard enough to scrape the skin off of her knuckles. If anyone had been there, watching her, they would have noticed as the crystal in her chest began to glow slightly. They would have seen it turn a deep crimson as if it were filled with wine or blood, and then be filled with strands of twisting orange. And before watching Anael stand back up, they might have sworn that they could feel the crystal watching them, as if it were a hungry beast and they were a tasty morsel of meat.
After picking her way through the charred cottage, which was far easier than searching through the larger and sturdier beams of her home had been, Anael found what she was looking for. A charred, but still intact chest sat in what would have been a corner, covered in a coating of ash. This is the chest were Kelara kept all her most expensive equipment, and potions she had not yet sold. Dusting it off, Anael noticed that, unlike every other time she had seen it, it had no lock on it. There should be a big iron lock on here, unless those soldiers looted everything in here before they left. That seems unlikely considering everywhere else was just burnt and destroyed. They seemed in a hurry. Anael opened the chest and looked inside, seeing what she was looking for and more.
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There’s the crystal, it’s even bigger than I had hoped! Judging by the size, it should be able to hold ten or twenty times as much mana as my current one does if I remember how the formula for capacity works on these things. Too bad I’ve only ever seen a few of these things so I don’t have enough experience to be sure. And here’s some potions, looks like some very nice healing potions, some potions to increase strength and reduce fatigue, and is this a mana potion? Well that’s unexpected. “Who did you make this for, Kelara?” Anael mumbled under her breath.
After wrapping the all the potions in a cloth, so as to keep their glass bottles from breaking, and placing them into her pack along with what alchemy equipment she felt was worth carrying. In the end she had chosen a rather nice mortar and pestle she had often used when helping Kelara in her work, as well as a purse with two dozen corked glass vials and a reasonably small distillation flask. All the other equipment was either too large, too fragile, or simply not useful in any potions that Anael would likely want to make while traveling.
Anael had walked almost all the way back to the forge before she suddenly realized something that she should have noticed back at the cottage - the lack of anyone (dead or otherwise) inside. I didn’t see her corpse outside and there wasn’t anywhere near enough debris inside to hide anything as large as a body. It’s possible that she was elsewhere in town, but she hardly ever strays farther than the edge of her garden. Could Kelara be alive still, just like I’m desperately hoping Harvin and Mel are?
Once she arrived back at the forge, Anael sat down on the ground, her back against one of the stone brick walls. Pulling out her knife and the larger mana crystal, she set them in her lap and took a deep breath. Time for more pain. As if I haven’t experienced quite enough of that as of late. Anael reached up to the mana crystal embedded in her chest and tried to get a grip on it with her fingernails to pull it out, but it was too well embedded and the skin around it was already well on its way to being healed. Of course it’s not going to be that easy. At least I shouldn’t have to cauterize it this time. That would require some preparation anyway. While many of the buildings in the town were still emitting plumes of smoke, and there might well be some embers she could get her hands on, it was unlikely that there were any coals hot enough to heat her knife to the required temperature. If she wanted to cauterize any wounds now, Anael would have to gather some unburned wood and start a fire of her own, perhaps in the forge. Luckily, the healing sigil should heal it fast enough with it’s new speed. Picking up her knife in one hand and keeping her other hand ready to help, Anael steadied herself. Time to see how this works. She slowly dug the knife into the side of the mana crystal so as to lever it out, gritting her teeth the whole time.
“Sodelri’s rotten cunt!” Anael cursed loudly as the crystal was levered out of its place. Not only was she digging around in her chest with a knife, but the crystal had seemed to partially bond with her skin, necessitating some cutting to free it. Worse than that though, was that when the crystal finally came out, falling into her lap and getting more blood on her pants than was already there, the healing sigil ceased functioning. Fucking abyss! I forgot that all the mana has to pass through the crystal in order to get to the component sigil that does the actual healing. At least the bypass is fine, so I won’t die. I didn’t realize how much that sigil was helping with the pain. I didn’t realize it could get so much worse than it already fucking was.
Quickly picking up the slightly larger mana crystal with trembling hands, Anael pressed it into the open wound in the center of her chest and felt the skin stretch slightly as it slipped into place and the healing sigil started its work once more. Thank Sethil it’s working. And now I’m very glad that the capacity of these crystals isn’t directly proportional to their size. If it was, a crystal with this capacity would definitely not have fit. Anael didn’t understand exactly why the capacity of mana crystals grew at such a higher rate than their size, but Zilfa had mentioned that it was due to the stability of the lattice that actually contained the mana. Somehow larger crystals with a low capacity per volume ratio were inherently unstable, and so either didn’t form, or collapsed upon reaching a large enough size. While this meant there were no huge crystals with small capacities, there did exist very small crystals with monstrously large capacities, which were, of course, even more obscenely expensive and rare than a large sized crystal of the same capacity.
As her small amount of mana, and the much more significant ambient mana, coursed through the revitalized sigil, Anael’s mouth curled into a smile. This is even better than I thought. This crystal’s capacity feels like closer to twenty five times the other, rather than ten or twenty. With the amount of power I’ll have when this thing is full, I could certainly take down and armed foe. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was enough to handle four or even five armored soldiers.
Remembering the potions she had found in Kelara’s cottage, she carefully pulled them from her pack and unwrapped one. She lifted the mana potion up to her lips and took the tiniest of sips. Feeling the mana rush through her body and fill the newly embedded crystal almost to full, Anael couldn’t help but grin so wide she felt like it reached her ears.