“What are you doing, Edrie?” Marissa asked next to me. We were currently sitting on the grass of Thal’mer park.
“Meditating.” I responded taciturnly.
“Yes, I can see that. I meant, why?” I opened my eyes to see the girl looking at me in disgust. How could a person do work after school? Or so her expression told me.
I think that was the main problem with Marissa, she saw meditation as a chore (technically not wrong) and failed to see the good parts of it. The moment to relax, the sweet touch of mana, the expansion of one’s mana pool...
“I got a problem with my mana, so I have to meditate to fix it.” Not entirely a lie.
“What’s the problem?” She asked the obvious question, tilting her head backward, her hair fell downwards with the motion.
“You know that I have a good Soul affinity, right?” I told that innocently, only to find Marissa tilting her head.
Marissa pressed her temples with her thumbs to think harder. “No?”
“Wait… Haven’t I told you that I have a Soul affinity?” She swayed her head in negation. “Oh, damn.”
I knew that I had started studying soul magic and doing spiritual meditation recently, also only having started to cast soul spells the day before, but it did surprise me that it hadn’t come up in a conversation. Even when we went to Novela’s shop we only talked about the soul, never mentioning my own affinity. Well, in that case, I was actively hiding it. But my intention was to prevent Novela from making a slip about the true degree of my affinities.
“Well, now you know it.” I discarded the fact without any more thought. “As I was sayi-“
“No, no. You forgot to tell me something.” Marissa interjected me.
I looked at her. “And that’s…?”
“What tier is your affinity?”
I feared the question. I couldn’t say it was below medium as mages normally didn't give certain magic the effort if their affinity was lower than that. Telling the truth or saying it was high or superior would probably enrage her. And while that wasn’t a problem, I wasn’t feeling well today to support one of her tantrums.
“Medium-high.” I responded.
“What?” She responded with indignation as I expected. “You don’t only have a high Arcane affinity, but also the same affinity as I in Air?” Oh Marissa, how wrong you were, and how angry would you be if you knew the truth.
“That’s life for you.” I shrugged as the corners of my mouth went up.
“Now you are messing with me!” Marissa accused.
“I do not know what you are talking about, Miss Marissa.” I refuted her argument.
“Aaaaah!” She did a battle cry while doing a backflip from her weird position, then she spellcasted an air projectile against me.
In times like this, I wished I had learned an arcane defensive spell, but Force Shield was good enough on this occasion. I raised my buckler to block the air spell, but as I did so, Marissa rushed towards me.
She was furious, and her use of the Rush spell demonstrated it. I instantly acknowledged the fact that I had no opportunity to beat her in a fight. I might have better affinities, but she had a bigger mana pool and centered on offensive and defensive spells, unlike me who preferred more practical and useful ones.
As fighting wasn’t an option, I chose the other option. Running away. I spellcasted both Slow Falls in quick succession as I climbed a tree and looked Marissa down.
“What are you gonna do now?” I taunted her.
She obviously fell for it and jumped towards me, also having spellcasted both Slow Falls, recreating a minor Levitation spell. This is what I wanted, though. Before she reached me, Marissa had entered into the range of a Mana Vacuum, which disrupted the effects of her passive spells.
The mana-draining spell wasn’t powerful enough to suck the energy out of a concentrated ball of power as the common conjured projectile was. A passive spell that worked on low intensity, though? That was a whole other deal.
While Mana Vacuum wasn’t able to absorb all the mana from the Slow Fall spell, it still could suppress the spell synergy, lowering their power considerably.
As Marissa found that jumping high and abusing the double Slow Fall synergy was available no more, she decided to climb the tree.
That idea was proven rather stupid as I used Force cantrips to push her down. She did try to use unstructured wind magic to push herself up, but Mana Vacuum dispel the unfocused mana and forced her to use more mana than normal to achieve a mediocre height.
“Stop it!” She cried enraged.
“No, I don’t think I will.” I responded nonchalantly.
“Come back down!” Marissa ordered as she pointed at me.
“You are going to hit me if I do so.”
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“No, I won’t.” She spoke a bit more relaxed.
The little girl was easy to read, I noticed the air mana gathering in her hands. I didn’t know what she was thinking, but her acting skills were nonexistent.
I started meditating with my eyes half-open to be able to see what she was doing. My actions had provoked her, though she had chilled down as she stopped to think about her next move.
In her unending brilliance, Marissa decided to climb the tree from behind, only to find that I had spellcasted three more Mana Vacuums surrounding the tree whilst we were talking. My time at the library and the fact I had reached four-star spellcasting with arcane magic made these three-star spells far easier. Honestly, she shouldn’t have wasted that much time climbing the tree.
Marissa threw currents of air at me in her tantrum, but they weren’t focused and ended up damaging the poor tree more than me. I believe I heard a branch snap.
Perhaps, maybe in a small chance, I may had taken this a tad bit too far. Maybe. But seeing Marissa unleashing her mana pool without holding back was amusing to me. The girl actually proved quite resourceful with her magic, but she was at a clear disadvantage.
I couldn’t tell what depleted before, whether her rage or her mana, but she finally stopped. Marissa’s legs faltered as she let herself fall to the ground.
“Are you satisfied?” I asked her as I dropped graciously away from the tree with a single use of Slow Fall.
“Maybe…” Tiredness spoke for her. She may not say it, but I knew she had fun with her mindless onslaught.
“Come on, let’s go back home.”
I picked up Alatea’s book and my school equipment which lay on the ground and wiped some of the blue blades of grass on top of it. Marissa got up after a few seconds with a lazy jump. I spellcasted Cleanse to remove the dust that covered her dress after the spectacle.
“Huh, neat.” Marissa commented as we went back home.
****
I may have reached four stars with my Arcane affinity, but that didn’t correlate directly with my Soul affinity. I wish it would. It would be far easier for everyone if you magically became a better mage when you surpassed such an important milestone as the Starry Tiers, but no, the world has to become realistic and suddenly respect the laws of causality and effect to make things harder, when clearly magic just ignored them from time to time.
To be honest, the Starry Tier was nothing more than a classification made by ellari. It was just that, a way to classify spellcasters into different levels of expertise. Having said that, I still hadn’t looked up if there even was a tier for plain casters, but I suppose it should exist.
While it was good that I had spellcasted a four-star Arcane spell for the sake of learning, this didn’t mean I could spellcast every single four-star Arcane spell now on the first try. Nor with any other four-star spell of any given element.
My current prowess with Soul Touch spell meant I was at a two-star casting equivalent level with Soul-related spells. And whilst it was certainly remarkable for the time I had been practicing with my soul, I should strive further.
‘Should’ being the keyword.
Right now my focus was to equilibrate my affinities as much as possible. Spiritual meditation alone could solve this problem, but the way to go was to have similar mana pool sizes between my body and soul. Or so is what the book and Alatea explained. As my affinities fought, the only way to keep them from damaging me was to put them on the same level.
And I hear you ask, but Edrie, aren’t soul mana pools incredibly small?
Yes and no. As Novela commented to me a few days ago, her soul mana pool was only a tenth of her physical one. But that was because she wasn’t a soul mage, mystic, psychimancer, or however you want to call my kind.
This commitment meant two things.
First, I had to stop common meditation for a while until my soul mana pool caught up. ‘A while’ being probably a few months seeing how much disparity there was between the two. Second, I should avoid any conjuration of arcane spells, like I had done today.
A good reminder of how much of a moron I was.
I doubted that conjuring a few arcane spells was going to undo the balance as it wasn’t this fragile. Alatea would have told me otherwise and would’ve strictly prohibited me from using the arcane school of magic. Yes, she did certainly strike me as the kind of person who would do that.
But moderation was key in such a scenario.
And it didn’t sound that complicated to restrict me to my Soul affinity. Whilst I had grown fond of the arcane, I had followed it zealously for a decade, and now it was time to let the spiritual side of things flourish. To experiment with my untapped potential.
****
“I think you are being far too hard with yourself.” Alatea told over a cup of tea.
“How’s that?” I replied in a calm manner, the soothing aroma of the blue tea relaxed me far more than any meditation could.
“Well, it’s strange for a child to meditate this much.” The nurse left the cup on the table.
“Is it? Perhaps it was. I just find it relaxing. And besides, it soothes the pain from my soul and actively prevents further damage. I wouldn’t consider such a task as ‘hard’. It’s more like treating a medical condition. It may be a chore, but it must be done.”
“But doing a vow of renouncement as a child to practice your other affinity is going too far. You can practice both at the same time.”
“Vow of renouncement?” I opened my eyes in surprise. “Well, yes, I have told you I’m not going to use arcane magic for a few seasons, but I’m not going to renounce it. In fact, focusing myself on only one element for the foreseeable future will have me progress at greater speeds.”
“You know, Edrie, you truly surprise me.”
“I could tell you the same, Alatea.”
She sighed. “I didn’t mean it like that. And you know it.” Alatea looked directly into my eyes.
Emerald and lavender found each other. The thought hadn’t crossed me until now, but her eyes struck me as different. Not many appearances of the color green were present in Ferilyn, and definitively not in ellari irises. Yet only I just noticed because her eyes seem… normal to me.
“You have beautiful eyes…” The words escaped my mouth against my will.
The nurse sighed once more, striking me on the forehead with her finger. “Stop playing.” Alatea cut short our line of sight, painfully dismissing my slip as an infantile joke. “Come on, let’s get the work going!”
If I lamented one thing of my age is that no one took me seriously. No matter how educated or complicated the language I used was, everyone just assumed I was a child playing as an adult. And I knew I was the one who said I should feign my status and just play like the child I really was, but sometimes it was difficult.
I wanted to be there, one of them. A person you can rely on and be talked with at the same level, without any condescending looks. My father only used sophisticated vocabulary because he thought it would help me learn as a child, he didn’t think of me as an equal. To my mother, it was even worse, not a child but straight up a baby. Alatea acknowledged something was off, but equally dismissed it as an inoffensive child prank. The only one who probably acknowledged my current being the best was none other than my teacher, Algor.
The man knew I was something else. He didn’t consider me an adult, or even an adolescent, but a child prodigy. Yet he was by far the closest one to discern my real self. He knew I acted like I did because I was myself, and not an act engineered by a childish brain.
On that train of thought, Marissa was also a step up compared to the rest. I was her equal, her best friend, yet in some capacity, she knew I wasn’t just a child.
I… I should stop by now.
Where were we?
Right, my lessons with Alatea. At that moment my mind and soul were elsewhere, but I had loosely paid attention to her lectures. If only I knew it was going to be one of the last I would have with her.