Today was a normal day like any other. It was the second day of the week once again, and after having devoured Alatea’s book, I planned to give it back to her in the afternoon.
While I had made no progress towards my quest of balancing both of my mana pools (which was a serious undertaking), I did manage to make huge advances in soul magic and spiritual meditation. I was already able to cast advanced two-star spells from the soul repertoire, and my soul had stabilized thanks to the non-stop spiritual meditation.
The nurse, and soul practitioner, confirmed to me that my elemental affinities started to battle for supremacy after I casted soul magic for the first time when she examined my soul in more detail. Although it was an inconvenience, a painful one at that, the problem was easily resolved. At least temporarily.
According to the book, no real solution was found for dual element wielders who wanted to delve into the soul. The meditation led the elements to a state of equilibrium, not eradicating the problem, only delaying it, or at maximum stopping it for an indefinite period.
It wasn’t a life-ending situation, though. Alatea said that my inner battle wouldn’t kill me or anything close. It would and did hurt me severely, but the end result of the battle (if I left it unhanded) was that one affinity would overcome the other one and I would lose the defeated affinity.
“Lost as truly lost?” I asked Alatea that time.
“Yes.” She nodded. “Elemental overtaking is one of the few found instances of null affinity in ellari. It can happen with other affinities beyond Soul, but those cases are so so rare they can be counted with one hand.”
“So if I don’t keep my spiritual balance I will lose one of my affinities?” I spoke aloud to myself.
“That’s what I said.” Alatea took a sip from her cup. “Though there’s a positive in such battle.”
“How?” I doubted losing one affinity was a positive outcome.
“Once an affinity overtakes one, the winning side grows in strength.” Nurse Decourse explained. “Normally one step up the elemental ladder, but it isn’t a guaranteed result.”
The gears in my mind began to grind at maximum speed as a hypothetical scenario played through my head. If I upgraded one of my affinities (which was a passive occurrence for adult ellari) and then made that affinity win the battle, I could technically become a true affinity user.
Hmm…
That prospect was incredibly tempting, but I had no assurance it would be the case. I would keep that idea in the back of my head, though.
Right now my objective was that both sides of the battle arrived at a standstill.
Meditation was part of my daily routine, and I wasn’t going to die if I skipped it for one day (which I didn’t plan to do either way). Unless I used excessive arcane magic without balancing it with soul magic, I shouldn’t have to worry. So, my current timetable basically erased the possibility of losing control once again.
As the school bell rang, Marissa talked to me.
“Come on, Edrie! Let’s go to the playground!” She exclaimed as if the playground was going to run away from her any time soon.
Menial topics complemented common conversations as we had breakfast together. My lunch box contained a well-preserved fruit salad, while Marissa had a cheese sandwich. Both of us took pleasure in our food, but as I saw Marissa’s predator gaze upon my lunch box, I decided to give her a strawberry.
“Yum~” Marissa savored the red fruit and took her time before swallowing it. “Edrie, you are the best!” She hugged me.
With a swift motion, I avoided my fruit salad from spilling out of my lunch box. “Yes, yes. Now let me finish my lunch.”
“Oh, just one more b-“
Marissa’s voice was overcome by a deafening siren. The children at the playground look around confused for the noise’s origin, while the few teachers present had fear plastered on their faces.
That alarm… a nuclear siren? I held my head as it began aching, not from the ceaseless alarm, but from the unknown memories residing in my soul.
“What’s happening!” Marissa cried next to me. The noise was so loud that I almost couldn’t hear her even at this distance.
Then, the sky turned red.
A wave of heat was displaced above the city as the sky burned. An enormous silhouette appeared from the cloud of smoke left by the thermal explosion.
“A dragon!” Marissa confirmed everyone’s doubts as the airborne creature unleashed its deathly breath upon Ferilyn.
Why was a dragon here? Weren’t we amicable with the Houtz Imperium? What was happening?
An impossibly big creature showed its might before the city. A head larger than a building, wings extending further than neighborhoods, and a tail longer than the tallest tower.
Children contemplated the rare creature in the air with owe, teachers, on the other hand, had a totally different reaction. They were paralyzed. This was enough information for me. It wasn’t a show by an illusionist or a simulacrum, what flew before us was the real deal.
From the red sky, a volley of fire descended on the city. They hit the coastal district of Lan’el, which was pretty close to Thal’mer. Even if I couldn’t see much more from my viewpoint, the overwhelming heat assaulted me either way.
Before the red reptilian could damage the city further, another silhouette materialized in the sky, albeit much smaller, only a blur in smoke-clodded skies, projecting a huge barrier blocking the dragon’s breath. The violet shield extended for kilometers, an immeasurable feat of magic. I couldn’t even comprehend how they managed to do so.
Without giving the invader a chance, yet another mage appeared in the sky. This time instead of a defensive spell, the ellari defender invoked lightning from the skies. The thunderous aftermath was as powerful as the instantaneous brightness of the lightning. Sparks of static electricity reached me even when the battle occurred hundreds of meters up in the air.
Electricity and fire collided with each other, generating impossible amounts of smoke as if a storm was gathering on its own.
By now, children and adults had noticed that this was a very real battle happening at the Ferilyn airspace.
The arcanist was in care of damage control, avoiding more catastrophic attacks by the airborne behemoth. The electromancer focused mainly on attacking, their speed was unmatched, as fast as the lighting they wielded. Even with the dragon’s air supremacy, the agility of the thunder jumper mage was unprecedented. They only needed moments to attack the invader, and instants to teleport elsewhere.
No, it wasn’t teleportation.
The clouds and smoke occluded the sight from the battlefield, but the mage wasn’t teleporting around. The electromancer dashed. It was that fast.
The repeated electric assault was beginning to pay a toll on the dragon’s body as its movements became ever-so-slow. The mana weaver protected the city with a mantle of pink energy, blocking incoming meteorites from the red death.
I couldn’t tell if it was the Meteor spell casted over and over again (if that’s the case, that arcanist had some prodigious defensive talents) because it looked like a never-ending meteor rain. A thousand fireballs were blocked by the kilometric barrier, yet it didn’t falter.
Still, the arcanist found themselves at a loss. Even when their barrier held strong, they were incapable of blocking loose projectiles, which ended up hitting random spots around the coastal line of the city.
As the fireballs hit the city I suddenly was hit by unmeasurable pain.
I looked around in a daze. No pyroclasts had fallen nearby, the school was far away from the conflict, a makeshift translucid barrier made by the teachers protecting the place. Yet, the pain only grew larger and larger as more fire rained on the city.
It wasn’t physical pain. It was my soul. And it was aching.
Did I hear the cacophony of the River of the Damned louder and louder? Why? Why now of all times?
I grabbed my shirt in pain, trying to clutch a pain that didn’t really exist.
I felt the cries, the pain, the… death.
My vision shifted back and forth between the fiery hellscape that the city had become in a matter of seconds and the inert caverns which hauled in screams.
Oh…
I exhaled as a divine revelation struck me true.
All this time, every attack I had when I felt the river’s calling, it wasn’t directed at me. The river was calling the people who were dying, not me. If one factored the long ellari lifespan, it made sense in a macabre way, sometimes I would spend months or years without suffering an attack, and then multiple would come days in a row.
My thoughts were interrupted when the dragon's deafening roar filled the ellari city with an enormous cacophony, echoes of the voice still lingering in the place after seconds. The voices of the dead and the roar superposed in a metaphysical doppler effect. Though I couldn’t hear it because of the noise, I saw glass panels exploding before such a display.
Soon it was noticed that the roar wasn’t a cry of pain, but a war cry as more dragons appeared in the skies. Blue, green, brown, purple, black… A myriad of flying titans covered the red canvas the sky had become.
The ellari mages weren’t faced by them, as the two of them stood at a standstill before our side responded with reinforcement. While the dragons were in the tens, our forces were in the hundreds.
Mages of all types could be seen in the air: pyromancers, aeromancers, umbramancers, et cetera. But our legion was composed primarily of force mages and arcanists. The most common ellari affinities.
Both sides had now reached a real standoff.
While the Houtz dragons flipped their wings, the Ferilyn mages crackled their mana. Although I didn’t have a good view of what was happening in the air, both sides knew what was going to happen if a battle broke out in the middle of the city.
The first offender, the red dragon opened his mouth to talk. “People of Ferilyn!” Their monstrous face was able to recreate ellari speech with ease. “I came today in a show of strength as you have committed an unf-“
Before the dragon could talk even further, their voice was dispelled by some force. Enraged, the dragon looked for the cause, only to reveal itself.
“My people!” A titanic hologram was projected in the middle of the city, on top of the Arcane Sanctum, also known as the High Arcanist’s tower. “Here I am, the High Arcanist to protect the denizens of Ferilyn!” The majestic figure revealed his status.
The projection, which had the same size as the impossibly tall tower, talked. It moved fluidly despite its tremendous size and showed a young ellari man wearing a perfectly crafted tunic armor, full of engravings and gemstones. Alongside him, a staff floated. The bottom resembled the trunk of a tree and the staff’s top the canopy of one, and every ending of the branches was accompanied by yet more gemstones.
“The evil dragons of the Houtz Imperium have declared war on us, but I won’t let any more ellari blood be spilled!”
Cries of joy were heard over the city as the people were comforted by the High Arcanist’s words, the strongest mage in the world. I didn’t know why, but this situation seemed wrong to me. Something was off, and I wasn’t talking about the river. The air was weird.
Instead of giving the order of attack to the ellari legion, the High Arcanist rose his staff as a rift of arcane energy opened in the skies. The sizzles of such cumuli of energy were heard across the city, more so than the previous dragon’s roar.
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Expecting the worst outcome, the dragons did a tactical retreat, running away from the city. Strangely enough, the ellari mages didn’t give chase to them, as if they knew what was going to happen.
Once the dragons were far enough, the High Arcanist directed to his people once again. “No dragon shall enter Ferilyn henceforth!” His staff hit the ground as a shockwave covered the whole city.
The considerably small rift in the sky began to grow bigger and bigger, as it expanded into a spherical shape. An anxious dragon shot an oversized fireball towards the rift, only to be deflected by hundreds of shields packed on top of each other. The ellari mages, though still, had stated their presence again.
A curtain of arcane power fell on top of Ferilyn as the city was protected by a veil of magic. The High Arcanist’s attack that the dragons had feared so much to even retreat was, in reality, a defensive spell. In a coordinated matter, the dragonkind threw all their offensive spells towards the arcane veil.
No matter how many almighty dragons poured their energy onto the onslaught, the barrier was unscathed. This wasn’t the work of the legion of mages, but just of one man, the High Arcanist.
People around the world would remember this day as the one when one ellari deflected an entire army of dragons and protected his city with an unbreakable dome of impossible proportions.
And that dome was here to stay.
****
The fire raged on still after the erection of the violet dome. Grey-red fumes and muffled cries lingered in the Lan’el district. Ruined houses by the hand of the mighty red dragon laid carbonized on the ground.
After a full hour of bombardments, the dragonborn finally gave in and retreated, no more attacks made it to the city, the red sky substituted by one of violet.
Some were lucky, dying instantly with the great combustion made by the pyroclasts, others less so as they had died minutes after by air intoxication. Orphan children roamed the streets, looking for their missing parents. Adults helped each other in a makeshift effort as they waited for the rescue teams.
Hydromancers were fast in their arrival, no more than five minutes after the High Arcanist’s announcement had passed, yet many lives were claimed in a such small window of time.
While the water mages took care of the flames, as so did the occasional pyromancer bending the fire around them, healers organized tents to bring help to the ones in need. Whether they may be nature, water, light, or soul mages, they were depleting their mana faster than the rate of the injured came. Not even the single light mage at the place could help the congregation, soothing their pain was the only option.
Fire control was progressing well as most ellari buildings were made of stone by the skilled geomancers of yore. That didn’t mean the fire hadn’t propagated elsewhere. While the dragon’s barrage was mostly concentrated on the port district of Lan’el, it had expanded towards the Shal’mar and Thal’mer districts.
Thankfully the Thal’mer park wasn’t burned in the slightest as it was the highest concentration of trees on the island, it was also the most enchanted against fire hazards.
The ellari mages noticed the problem that was their overpopulation of force mages and arcanists, so now the most basic elements which other races had plenty of were lacking. The redirected water from the ocean helped the hydromancers in Lan’el, but the other districts which weren’t water adjacent depended solely on the conjurers’ mana.
More magic wielders came flocking to the affected zones, pyromancers and aeromancers helped the areas ignored by the water mages, albeit to a lesser effect. The fire wielders absorbed the flames and the air masters deflected oxygen near the fire, therefore asphyxiating the flames. Wind walls were created in order to stop the propagation of fire.
A mage observed the heartbreaking sight from the top of a building, his hand was closed with such a force that his nails drew blood, and his jaw was so clenched that it seemed like his teeth would pop out.
“I was slow…” He condemned himself. “If I had been faster at the attack, or refused the ordered standoff… I could have helped them. The lost lives…”
“No, you weren’t.” A feminine voice from behind said as she put her hand on his shoulder. “We did our best to hold the Emperor’s Right Hand.”
“That’s the problem!” He looked at her, trying to hold his tears. “We only held the wyrm! We didn’t damage him! He just toyed with us…” His legs faltered as he fell to the ground.
“Shhh, don’t say that. We did our best.” She kneeled and comforted him in an embrace, his head resting at her bosom. “That ‘wyrm’ is the strongest dragonborn from the Imperium since centuries ago, and we managed to hold it. You should be prouder of yourself.”
The man sighed as he sat at the edge of the building, his legs hanging out.
“This is the first time I have seen so much activity on Ferilyn.” He told with a half-sob. “I would’ve hoped such an event was reserved for a festival or something, not… this.”
“I know.” The woman sat next to her, caressing slowly his arm. “Mages don’t tend to work well with each other, yet look now perfect coordination.” The last part was said with a hint of affliction, bothered by her own words.
“We do work well.” His voice finally conveyed humor.
“Of course we do, I would hit you otherwise.” The woman said as she looked at the aeromancers flying around a tower to stop the flow of cindery air.
The mage snorted at her words. “Can I tell you a secret?”
“Can you?” The woman quipped.
“You are inarguable.” His companion responded with a smile, and slowly nodded for him to proceed. “Back there, in the air, I felt like I was going to die. My arms are still numb from the electricity.”
“I wouldn’t let that happen.” For the first time, her voice transmitted seriousness.
“I know, I know. Your shields are second to none in the…” He stopped to look at the absurdly large dome surrounding the city. “Your shields are third to none in Ferilyn. I knew you wouldn’t falter. But I fear I would.”
The arcanist couldn’t hold her laugh after his partner's correction. “You are not wrong, the High Arcanist has certainly shown his might for the first time.” Then she gave him a warm glance. “But I know you, the entire island would need to burn before you were on your knees.”
While she had trouble protecting limited parts of the district, the ellari leader protected the whole city without breaking a sweat. He wasn’t called ‘the strongest mage of the world’ for nothing.
A comfortable silence between them was exchanged. As both their mana pools were completely depleted, they couldn’t do anything but watch. Sure, they could assist people on the ground, but they felt like collapsing any moment from now. They would only be a liability.
“What’s going to happen now?” It was the barrier master who broke the silence.
“To be honest, I don’t know.” Replied the electromancer. “The Imperium has declared war on us, but why? They can’t win.” He gave his words a second thought. “At least at the offense, that is.”
“That’s what I was thinking, why now? Why such massacre?”
He noticed that his companion’s eyes were swollen from crying. ‘Why did she have to see this? Why must the purest person that I know, a pacifist like her, be on the battlefield?’ The man lamented himself at his incapability once more, remembering the choices he made that led her to this cruel life.
Whilst those veterans rested on top of a burnt house, a teenager crawled through the endless debris, the smell of brimstone, and the pain assaulting him everywhere.
His eyes were itching, but he couldn’t move his hands. He needed to crawl to survive. His lungs were in flames, the bad air poisoning him. His consciousness drifted on and off, fighting to escape from the scaffolding on top of his. The callouses on his hands began to trickle a warm magenta liquid.
The visibility was poor, either by the black smoke or the faltering eyesight. But the last vestige of information that was given by his eyes was burnt in his pupils. Tens of dead ellari, some burnt, others just asphyxiated. The worst part was recognizing some of the faces.
‘Damm… dragons…’ As blood trickled across his forehead, his thoughts were interrupted. ‘Pain…’ Yet another of the victims of the first conflict of the draco-ellari war. “…to them…” And then his thought was spoken for the last time, as the blood was recalled from the ground back into his body. A magenta cocoon formed around him.
****
The Wyrm's Landing fatalities had taken a toll on the ellari population. Where the previous lively and full streets had become a dull and sad place. More than sadness towards the death of our compatriots (though they still lamented the losses) the unaffected populace had their ego hurt more than their heart.
The ellari people were but a proud and strong nation, and those lizards had attacked us. Ellari lacked empathy by nature, or so I was told, we felt more insulted than wounded by the death toll.
Years had passed in a flash since the devastating event, while the city’s beauty had been restored, its soul still ached. The Lan’el district had been greatly remodeled, the commercial port was substituted with garrisons and military docks. Though the latter wouldn’t be of much use while the dome stood up.
The remodeling trend expanded to Thal’mer too. Now a grand arch bridge connected Thal’mer and Lan’el, allowing slow boats and gondolas to circulate below it. It seemed as if the attack had done more good then bad as the previous stagnant civilization had been kickstarted into progress once more, like those tales of ancient might told in boring History classes.
“Everything has changed, eh.” I couldn’t hold my sigh as I sat. His sighing obsession had passed onto me. He looked at me from my right, his face telling ‘what are you talking about?’ I ignored him.
Ferilyn wasn’t the only one that changed, Edrie did as well. Since the day of the attack, he focused more on magic, especially his odd soul affinity. He always had behaved like an adult, at least in those moments he didn’t. But the invasion made him more serious, more focused. Yet more alienated, more so than normal.
He still played with me and laughed at moments. Everything was normal from an outside view, but inside was a different story. Edrie was driven to be better and stronger. It was not because of revenge like those blood-driven psychos that popped up from time to time, I didn’t get that feeling from him. He just wanted to be better than yesterday.
Or so he explained.
Most of his time after the Wyrm’s Landing had been spent either meditating or reading. He had become so proficient, that he could cast whilst meditating, a thing I thought previously impossible.
With the help of the soul practitioner, Edrie had progressed at gigantic steps in soul magic, to the point that he reached my equivalent proficiency in Air. He was practicing two different elements, yet he was better than I at both.
Yet because the nurse left for some reason the day after the attack, Edrie’s mood worsened. He still progressed, but I fear his unhealthy focus on the soul was provoked by that woman’s departure. He wouldn’t talk with me about soul-related stuff.
I couldn’t help to admire his passion for magic, however insane as it may be. Edrie didn’t forget about me though, giving me tips with spellcasting whenever I needed them.
He was being taught, teaching me, and practicing two totally different types of magic, and he strode forward without a sweat. At times it seemed as if he could carry the weight of the entire world on his shoulders, yet other times he looked too brittle and feeble like he would snap at a moment’s notice.
Those moments always reminded me of when he suddenly had a nosebleed in the playground. It was too sudden, like the Imperium’s attack. But after he faltered, he only rose even higher than before.
I didn’t want to stay behind; I wasn’t allowed to.
Every Scorch I went with him to the Open Archives of Ferilyn (which was unscathed after the bombardment thanks to complex defenses and enchantments) to study. Surprisingly, he was the one who suggested that we should study more subjects than magic, and that allowed me to have the best grades every year since then. Well, the best after him obviously.
Mom and dad were extremely pleased with my outstanding grades, and they managed to save enough money for future education, freeing Edrie and his father from the promise he had made so many years ago.
Edrie focused on foreign languages, learning draconid and human, of all languages. I could understand why he was learning the language of the enemy, up to some extent, but why human?
Those beings were weak, tramped by every one of their neighboring races, only surviving by sheer luck. Though Edrie thought otherwise, being charmed by their cunning rather than despising it.
Today we were at our graduation from basic education. Edrie was twenty-two and I had recently turned twenty-four years old. The headmaster’s farewell speech was as boring as was his introduction when we first came to school. He did add a memorandum to the facts of the Wyrm’s Landing, as ten years weren’t a long time for our long lives, even if Edrie didn’t share the same thoughts.
No one really paid attention to the man’s words, not even the ever-serious Edrie. If I didn’t know better, I would bet he was meditating at this exact moment. In a few years, he managed to obscure his mana signature, honoring the arcanist’s title of mana weaver. Whether it was soul or arcane mana, I was unable to detect Edrie’s inner manaflows.
And not to show off, but I became quite kindred to the movement of currents, whether physical or magical, thanks to my training in air magic. To be honest, this only showed how incredible was the ellari at my side. It had reached the point that not even Accord was able to discern Edrie’s mana movements.
A laugh escaped from my nose, Edrie gave me a bad look, telling me to behave.
Yet I laughed once more at his serious expression. It was cute how he thought he was intimidating when he was by far the most androgynous ellari I had met. He looked more feminine than I! With his long hair and those beautiful insanely long ears…
Ehem.
For some unrelated reason that made me think about his small mana pool. He told me that wasn’t the case as he reinforced his soul, that it was no longer small and it was actually bigger than mine, but I didn’t believe him. Being proficient at two magic types had taken a lot of time from him, the spiritual meditation was the biggest factor.
Edrie explained to me how half his mana pool was now situated at his soul to ‘keep equilibrium’ but not even a few years of theory classes were able for me to understand such a convoluted subject.
What I did know is that spiritual meditation was awfully slow in converting mana, and as soul magic consumed too little mana, his increments on the mana pool were slower than I. Novela said that I was deep blue, while Edrie currently had a blue mana pool. Only a level of difference on the mana scale, but a difference, nonetheless.
We were about forty people graduating, fewer people than when Edrie and I came to school in the first year. We had never made any friends after skipping those four years, we only needed ourselves. Sometimes I thought to myself that we would skip more years, so I never bothered building other friendships, even if that didn’t end up happening.
I started thinking a bit like Edrie, about how superior we were intellectually, but even more so to appreciate the effort beyond the power. We weren’t innately better like the high ellari thought they were. Our constant effort, far bigger than any done by our classmates, was what made us greater.
After all, he was who told me to meditate each day rather than occasionally. That was also the reason why I now had more total mana than him. It seemed that higher elemental affinity meant that you had a harder time gathering mana. But it wasn’t right how he was so behind after working more than I did when I was a medium-high affinity user and he was a high one.
Did he obtain a better affinity? No, that was not possible. You couldn’t upgrade an elemental affinity over a few years, mages took decades to centuries to do so.
What was the reason then?
I left my thoughts aside as the closing event ended; I was no longer a student. I wish mom or dad would have been here to see the event, but access to it was restricted, it wasn’t because they were just working. If that were the case, Edrie’s mom would be present. And most probably cheering like a madwoman.
Did you know? That was probably why the event was kept to such low attendance.
In an untold manner, I followed Edrie to the playground. In retrospect, a lot had happened here. Edrie had that nosebleed the first day of school, here was where we had our meals most days, and where we saw the Wyrm’s Landing unfold. Yet we didn’t stop and continued the cobblestone ground to the open grass fields behind the school.
The school was situated on a small hill and gave an impressive view towards the city. Here we could see the twelve districts that formed up the city, one for each star. The most notable was the one where the Arcane Sanctum was located, Sin’fal.
And whilst the mighty tower was a sight to behold, Edrie’s sight was focused towards the Lan’el district, the one which received headfirst the onslaught of the dragons more than a decade ago. More specifically, his eyes looked at the violet at the horizon that encompassed the sky.
“What are we going to do now?” I said to break the silence.
While the question was rather transitory and devoid of greater significance, to me, it had a deeper meaning. A lot had changed since then, and I had no idea what to do now.
Edrie responded to me with a smile charged with a lot of emotions. His eyes shone with a purple light, looking directly at me.
“What do you think about taking down the violet sky?”
End of book 1