Walter awoke with a start. He felt strange, and his senses told him nothing about his surroundings. Disoriented, it took him a while to remember that he wasn’t still in his laboratory, that he’d finished the Immortalizer and become Edwin.
What’s going on?
Now fully awake and calmed down, he took stock of the situation. When a mage became a lich, their mind and their entire self turned into pure mana and rested in their core. That’s how they could live as animated skeletons without a brain or other fleshy bits, the bones were just for moving around. When creating his new body, Walter had encased his core in a mana crystal shell and buried it in Edwin’s chest. To gain access to Edwin’s brain, senses and the rest of his body, Walter was connected to it by an intricate ritual grown into the mana crystal. This ritual, like the magical enhancements of Edwin’s body, were powered by a trickle of mana overflowing from Walter’s core. The overflow was constant, as there was no way for Walter to tap into his mana and deplete it.
So how is it possible that I’ve lost connection to the body?
Had the crystal itself been damaged? That would be a disaster. It was possible, though he didn’t remember taking any damage that could have threatened it. The next step in the connection was the tissue directly around the crystal. It worked mostly through his aura, but it required a physical aspect as well. Again, no attack had pierced Edwin’s ribcage. Walter had chosen the inside of Edwin’s spine as the most protected part of the body leading to the head. The wolf had definitely tried to bite his head off, but he’d never gotten close. Lastly, Edwin’s brain. It was where all the information intersected and where the fleshy body was controlled from. Naturally, if that didn’t work, Walter had nothing to connect to. But his head had been safe too…
Being confined to the inside of his core meant that Walter had access to his mana again. For a while, he simply basked in the unbridled power that made up his being. After months of being magically blind, he felt brighter, denser, more powerful than he remembered. While he had been Edwin, he hadn’t missed it much, but now that it was at his fingertips again, he wondered how he ever got the idea of letting it go. Though he didn’t sympathize with their cause, he wholeheartedly understood the faction of mages that saw themselves as naturally superior to normal people. Compared to mages, mundanes really were blind, deaf and missing both arms and a leg.
Walter took control of his mana, rejoicing in the ease with which it flowed to his command. He gripped it firmly, taking care not to use more than a small amount, then pushed it outwards. His efforts ended at the outer wall, the crystal prison he’d built for himself a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. If Walter hadn’t known that there was a way for mana to get through, he might have considered it impossible right then and there. He gathered a little more mana and pushed harder. Still, nothing happened, but Walter was done playing games. He increased the pressure more and more, getting to the point where a small voice told him to stop, else he might compromise the structural integrity of the crystal. Just as he was about to give in, he felt power flow through the hair-thin lines of the embedded ritual. Satisfaction pulsed through Walter’s core as the connection began to reestablish.
--- ----- ---
Edwin groaned and opened his eyes. He was lying on his back, the bleak, grey sky visible through the forest’s canopy.
“He’s awake!” Salissa’s voice called next to him, the unexpected noise making him flinch. The mage leaned over him, a worried look on her unusually pale face.
“Why does it still hurt?” Edwin asked groggily. After the unnatural clarity of Walter’s mana core mind, Edwin’s thoughts felt slow like molasses.
“Of course it hurts, you idiot, you ran off to duel a direwolf and got mangled!” Bordan’s voice sounded exasperated. Edwin raised his head and met the man’s angry glare. He was wrapping bandages around Edwin’s legs, something which he had to have been doing for a while, as Edwin was starting to look like one of the mummies an ancient race in the old world used to bury.
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“Ah. Yes, I remember.”
“You’ve lost a lot of blood, you’re lucky you woke up at all! What demon rode you anyway? You can’t just go off and wrestle a direwolf!”
Edwin looked over to the side, where his former foe lay motionless.
“Yes I can.”
Bordan shot him a flat look. The man was clearly unimpressed with Edwin’s wit, though it did seem to make him calm down a little.
“How long was I out?” Edwin asked while looking around curiously. Somebody had unstrapped the shield from his left arm, and Salissa was just finishing up a bandage on his right one. He couldn’t see his legs under the thick layers of cloth, but his gambeson had seen better days. Its left side was mostly untouched due to his shield, but the right half was unrecognizable. The two wolves’ claws and fangs had repeatedly torn into the protective garment to the point where the thick cloth was ripped open, the quilting destroyed and the stuffing scattered over the forest floor. On top of that, his entire body, where it wasn’t covered in bandages, was caked in mud and dried blood.
“Just a few minutes.” Salissa answered him as she put a final knot on the bandage and sat back.
“Oh. Good.” Walter’s struggles with the crystal had felt like they’d taken a long time, but apparently they hadn’t. “What happened?” He asked. “I kind of lost sight of you guys.”
“Oh really?” Bordan asked sarcastically. “We didn’t notice.”
Edwin looked at him with a pointedly raised eyebrow and Bordan sighed.
“You ran to fight one of the newcomers, but the other one went for Leodin and Salissa. I was too slow to stop it, but thankfully Salissa managed to kill it somehow. We wanted to come help you right then, but the wounded one came back for round two, and it took us a moment to take care of it. After that, Leodin and I came to help you, but you were already done.”
“Right…” Edwin said slowly, remembering the fight. He sat up with a start, to the immediate protest of his nurses. “Wait. I saw you kill that direwolf, Salissa. How did you do that?”
“I’m not sure.” Salissa admitted uncomfortably. “I was shooting arrows at it while it came at me, and when it was right in front of me…” The girl trailed off and swallowed, looking even more pale. “Erm, I just managed to grasp another arrow and I pushed it into the wolf without letting go. I burned through all my mana in an instant and blacked out. Apparently, it died.”
“Really?” Edwin said, his eyes sparkling and his pain forgotten. “Fascinating! If what you’re saying is true, you managed to push your grasp through its aura without losing it!”
“I thought that wasn’t possible.” Salissa said hesitantly. “At the college they said you couldn’t use magic within a living being’s aura.”
Edwin laid back down, looking up at the sky in thought. “That’s generally correct, and if you’d tried to form your grasp inside the wolf’s aura you would’ve failed. When a magical construct, like a grasp, enters an aura of something other than the caster, its structure immediately starts to dissolve as the two energies clash. Theoretically, if you pour enough mana into it quickly enough, you can maintain the structure by balancing out the loss caused by the degradation. It really is highly theoretical, though, and you shouldn’t have been able to do it.” Edwin raised his right arm to scratch his chin, only to realize that his hand was completely encased in bandages. He used his left instead. It had been a while since he'd had a magical conundrum to crack, and he thoroughly enjoyed it.
“My initial hypothesis is that the fear of mortal danger allowed you to expend your mana much faster than you would usually be able to. Assuming that you linked instead of brute forcing, that should generate enough force to stop the wolf, while at the same time allowing you to prevent the grasp from degrading just long enough to apply that force. This is an unlikely event, mind you, but well inside the realm of possibility, and it lines up with documented precedent. If I’m correct – and I assume that I am – the real question is this: If all this force was concentrated on a single arrow, why didn’t it just pass through the wolf and exit out the other side?”
By the end of his rant, Edwin had a wide smile on his face. Salissa met his eyes with a confused look.
“Erm, I don’t know? I don’t remember it that well, but the arrow went in easily, and then there was…resistance. Maybe it got lodged in a bone?”
“A good idea, and certainly a possibility.” Edwin answered with twinkling eyes. “I happened to look over while you got jumped, though, and the angle didn’t seem to line up with any bones that could catch an arrow with that much power behind it. I have a different idea, and we can figure out the truth easily enough by taking a look at the wound canal.”
Edwin started to push himself to his feet, when a resolute Bordan pressed him back down. Edwin tried to struggle at first, but when he realized that his legs and his right arm still didn’t properly respond to his commands, he begrudgingly obliged.
“You’re going nowhere, you madman.” Bordan said. “You’ll stay right where you are until Leodin comes back with help from the village so we can move you. In fact, why don’t you use the time to explain how the hell you know all that?”
“Ah.” Edwin said. “Yes, that.”