“How long do you think the demon will be in there?” Ori whispered. He ground his teeth over the throbbing pain of his broken body, hiding around the corner as he waited for the demon to leave. He was so close, he could see the open door leading to the armoury and its promise of pain relief, but instead of hobbling forward, they were met by a final obstacle.
‘Patience Ori, they don’t normally stay long.’ Freya cautioned
In some ways, they were lucky to have come at the time they did, a minute or two earlier, and the demon currently rummaging through the armoury would have discovered them. Ori, exhausted and taught by stress, dehydrated but clammy with a hot sheen of sweat coating his chest. Most of all, a throbbing pain pulsed with his heartbeat from the many bruised and broken spots in his body. In general, he wasn’t in much mood to be patient or think rationally, however, there was little they could do but wait.
Using some of the knowledge imparted to him via the bond, Ori knew that the demon inside was almost certainly an Awakened at the very least. When compared to a mortal, an Awakened could have up to ten times as much raw strength, but just as often as not diversified the boon of an increase in rank to other attributes, such as senses, quickness of thought or other less tangible aspects. While most Awakened choose to do so granting them flexibility and a base for future growth, lower Demons such as the ones most often seen as guards and henchmen, tended towards speed and strength. While this made them more predictable, as in Ori didn’t have to deal with super intelligence or magic, there wasn’t really that much Ori could do against faster and stronger opponents as things stood.
“Freya,” Ori whispered. “How would you have busted out if you were at your best?”
Freya seemed to ponder for a few minutes before answering. ‘I’m not sure that I can, not on my own. These lower levels seem to be where they feed off the wills of some of their most secure prizes, but while there is little active surveillance, wards and curses protect the passages between the higher levels of Ghigrerchiax. I think your original plan of a mass prison breakout is still the best option, though while there are some frighteningly powerful individuals trapped and being fed off here, they’re at questionable mental states and as likely to lash out at you as to focus their fury at their captors. I have some ideas, based on my past dreamwalks, as to who we could free first, though.’
“Oh yeah? Like who?”
‘Celestials. Their mental attributes transcend Awakened limits leaving them best placed to survive this place's deprivation with their wits intact. I believe there is one lower down, but to free him, we’d need the keys to the shackles that bind him. And before we can do that, we need to prepare.’ Freya answered.
Movement caught Ori’s attention as the demon stepped out of the armoury into the cavern adjacent to the terraced crevasse they had journeyed. It was big, at least seven feet tall, muscular with the smaller four-inch horns that seemed to sprout from the forehead instead of from behind the skull. It wore the same greasy leather armour as the others he had seen, while it held a bunch of tools or weapons across his forearms. For a moment, Ori felt a spike of fear as he considered the likelihood of the Demon passing through their hiding spot on the way out. He watched, breath held as he wondered if he could support his weight dangling over the terrace ledge in his current state. It turned, walked away from Ori towards the far wall, and seemingly… passed through the wall as if it were a mere illusion.
‘As I said, powerful wards and an increase in demons keep us from escaping via the most direct route.’
“So, even though we know where the door's at, we can't just walk through it?”
‘Even if we survived doing so, after catching a curse or setting off an alarm, nothing good would come from it.’
Ori waited several long minutes before quickly hobbling towards the door. He tried nine keys before finding the correct one to open the armoury and it wasn’t until he was safely inside with the door locked that he collapsed to the floor as a wave of relief washed over him. He took a moment to look around, racks of blacked steel towered above. Below, drawers made out of a dark oak took up much of the floor space of a room five to ten yards across in either direction.
‘I sense the wands over here, one saturated with the aspect of life or light, should be able to heal the wounds of a mortal dozens of times over without the need of a spell or Mana of your own.’ Freya said. Ori simply grunted in response as he lifted himself off the floor, one more time.
The wands lay in organised piles, ranging from between one and three feet in length, from as thin as a pencil, to one's thick enough to double as battens. They were mostly made out of wood or bone, though the odd wand seemed to be made out of something metallic, or other materials harder to define.
Ori was drawn to the longer, bone-white wands. It wasn’t just that they visually stood out from the pile, but he also felt… a pleasant tingle that only seemed to intensify as his hands drew closer to grasping it.
“You feelin this Freya?”
‘Not exactly, I can’t feel what you feel, but this is something I hoped for, if not expected.’
“This tingling?” Ori said as he picked up the wand, it was two feet long and as thick as his thumb at the base, tapering to a blunted point Ori reckoned he could use as a shiv in a pinch, though as he considered doing so, the wand itself seemed to cringe at the thought. “Woah!” Ori said as he almost dropped it. “Is this thing alive?”
‘What you hold right now, is a Greater Channelling Wand of Light. You should not be able to hold this artefact.’
“Oh yeah?” Ori said, waving the artefact in question around in challenge.
‘Every weapon you see around you is ranked for Awakened or higher which means that without high enough attributes or affinities, a Mortal, or even most Awakened struggle to wield anything here without labotomising themselves.’
“So that’s why I couldn’t just grab one of those swords back there?”
‘I would be surprised if you could lift any off the racks.’ Despite Freya’s warning, Ori was still willing to try, but as he remembered the greasy feeling of the shiv he had barely managed to use against the dickhead demon lord, his attention was magnetically drawn back to the item in his right hand. Beyond the fine texture of the ivory, were characters carved in delicate patterns coated with silver. Each character was smaller than a millimetre and seemed to remind him of microcircuitry.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
‘Powerful wands have wills or will-fragments embedded into them,’ Freya continued. ‘I don’t know the details but they greatly improve the artefact's performance. That you can even hold this wand is a wild luck indeed and likely speaks to a high attunement to life or light magic in particular.’
Ori closed his eyes as he processed several thoughts.
‘My light.’
He remembered the strange possessive affixation Mel had given him, and while his degree in electrical engineering and optics was mostly a practical step towards a stable career, there were many alternative ways someone like him could make a living. No, with this strange attraction to not just this artefact, but the entire pile of sticks this one came from, the last barriers between himself and the reality of this realm, eroded.
Light flooded Ori as he willed the wand to fix his broken body. The Will within the wand responded with a nonchalant air as if to suggest that fixing a mere mortal’s broken bones was beneath it. In response, Ori replied with the mental equivalent of a snort and the challenge; ‘Prove it,’ ringing clearly in his mind.
It was as sudden as a flash and with a gentle shove, feedback from the wand’s will informed him of all the dead cells disintegrating, of the hematomas around pulverised bone shards reversing in time as his skeleton reset back to its optimal structure. New teeth grew replacing the gap in his molars and the hairline fracture of his jaw. Old scars and aches vanished, while fresh blood brought with it revitalisation and an absence of pain, leaving behind a mind swimming in endorphins.
“Rah! This is happening.” Ori laughed as he rubbed his now unblemished shoulder and tested the weight and his previously fractured leg.
‘What on twilight do you mean?’
“Man’s gunna be the black Harry Potter, fam? Call me Barry Potter innit?”
‘I’m almost afraid to ask, but did the spell scramble your mind?’ Freya deadpanned.
“Best you didn’t know so your opinion of me don’t sink no further.” Ori said, still riding high from the success of actually using magic for the first time and feeling normal. He inspected himself, noting even the absence of dried blood, let alone scars. Just fresh, pink, newly healed skin. His mind spun with the implications. What else could he heal with one of these wands? Could he heal a broken back? Cure cancer? The presence inside the wand seemed to scoff at such minor ailments as if he were a child wanting to use banknotes for colouring-in.
“So because this is soaking with Mana already, I could do that without any of my own magic?”
‘Yes. Unaligned Mana responds to will, regardless of whether it's inside your body or not.’
“As when it’s already under the control of a will, it is no longer unaligned.” Ori recited from his borrowed memories.
‘I estimate that you could heal a similar number of injuries four, or perhaps five times over before the Mana saturated in that wand runs out.’
Ori grasped the artefact tighter, there were other wands, some of which provoked almost as intense an attraction to him as the current one he held. But the idea that this miracle of magic would be of no use to him as soon as it ran out of Mana was vexing. Still, he picked up several more, three of which were light-aspected, four were mortal wands of force, each with thirty metered charges. The final wand was one Freya called a Nascent Channelling Wand of Lightning, it had a weak will fragment within which she suggested that he would be wise to handle with utmost care.
He had chosen those wands by simply walking through the racks of wands and stopping at any that caused him to tingle.
“What’s this I’m feeling? It starts with tingling on my skin, sometimes beneath it, when I get close enough to the source, it’s like I can feel it in my head, chiming with my heartbeat.”
‘That feeling… would suggest that you have a very strong Mana sense. But it’s strange because it’s widely accepted that one needs to have internal mana, a Mana Nexus to resonate with external mana. As your pool of Mana grows, so should your ability to sense it. But for yours to be so strong, as a mana-less mortal. Well, I would be genuinely excited to research this if our predicament weren’t so dire.’ As she spoke, Ori continued browsing the wands, while he could probably use all of the crudely made mortal wands, due to Freya’s concern over his condition, she had advised him to stick to the wands that provoked the greatest response to his senses.
He found pieces of armour he could wear, mostly boiled leather, both greasy, stinky and far too heavy to be comfortable despite the materials. Freya said that it should provide good protection against mortal, edged weapons while Ori was simply happy to be covered up for the first time in days.
Using a spare piece of fabric, he tied seven of the artefacts, including the Greater Channelling Wand of Light, into a bundle that looped around his belt. Choosing to hold one of the force wands in his free hand, he spent a few minutes looking at some of the weapons, in particular, the smaller swords and knives, while asking Freya if any were safe for him to use. Unfortunately, there were no weapons, mortal or otherwise, capable of being safely wielded by him. And not for lack of trying.
He found a familiar crude, blackened shiv, its spinal column handle made it exceptionally uncomfortable to hold. The same greasiness he had experienced while wielding the pockmarked demon lord's blade returned. Ori made to slash and jab at the open air in practise, but the weapon flew out of his grip, spinning to land with a thunk into the wooden draw in a way Ori completely blamed on ‘bullshit invisible stat requirements’ instead of his own skill, or lack thereof.
Towards the end of the alcove in which all the Wands and magical artefacts were stored, rested several staffs against the wall. Ori didn’t feel the same tingle he had felt from the wands but felt a weak Mana resonance even still. From Freya’s memories, Ori knew that arcane staves were serious artefacts of power that enabled Wizards bound to them, to draw Mana from the realm and cast spells far faster and with fewer resources than a mage. Their size allowed a greater number of enchantments, like spells and prepared rituals, but were often harder to saturate with Mana without binding to, and couldn’t be bound without the right class and other usage requirements far above his own mortal attributes.
Even still, Ori couldn’t resist picking one up. He lifted a dark and solid, wooden stave. It was straight, almost as if machined into the shape of a Bo-staff. Unlike the greasy feeling the knives and small blades had, or the impossibly heavy spears and swords he had tried lifting, he felt his mind drift as he held the staff as if lost in distant memories.
‘We can’t linger here too long.’
Ori was snapped out of his daze and stared at the staff in reproach before putting it down. His mind instantly cleared as soon as the object left his hands and he shuddered at the possibility of being stuck, mind forever adrift due to a magic item's stupid usage requirements.
“Yeah. What rank was that staff just now?” Ori asked.
‘Greater Stave of Balance,’
“Same as the channelling wand… but how come—”
‘Attunements to relevant affinities reduce usage requirements, your affinities must be high indeed if you can use Greater attuned artefact, let alone Awakened or Nascent ones.’
“Good to know. So isn’t there anything else we could grab? I’m sure we could check the stash in them drawers and find more things.”
‘And how would you carry them? We could always return, but right now, you need to get to the proving grounds.’
Outside of the armoury within a hidden nook of basalt and flakey stone, Ori faced a wall no more than ten meters away. Right hand extended like he was pointing a gun, except within his grasp lay the Mortal Channelling Wand of Force. Despite the risk of attracting attention, Ori needed to see what this wand could do.
Unlike the light wand, the strong sense of familiarity was muted and he found himself struggling to connect. His mind drifted, his breathing raced, vivid memories of being at the wrong end of a gun came to mind, the heart-pounding fear, the feeling of being caught off guard, the subsequent anger of being in that position in the first place.
‘Will and intent Ori, clear your emotions and focus on causing an effect’
Ori inhaled, held his breath, and as he released the wand of force kicked in his hand and a dull snap flicked fragments of stone from the wall infront of him. He could feel the residual static charge effect as goosebumps rose and the taste of a nine-volt battery salted his mouth.
He could heal his injuries, and now he had tools to attack with. He tightened his fist around the thin stick of wood as the realisation helped push back the tide of fear, clearing his mind enough for his determination to return.
It was time to push on.