Transplanting lunar flora almost never succeeds. Even Terluna, the moon with a climate most similar to Neptus itself, has a sufficiently different chemical composition that the majority of Terlunan plants will never survive on the planet below, and it takes specific intervention to grow even a handful of planetary trees here. Those few cross-breeds capable of taking root in either place are the result of a hundred years of experimentation. So when you see a familiar tree, stop and remember just how much has gone into making its existence possible.
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Raina looked up from her book, as a thought occurred to her. "You said that this would be my Reforging Quest, at one point.” She and Jair lay sprawled on the library rug and armchair, respectively. “Is that still the plan, or was that just to placate the headmaster?"
"Whatever you prefer."
"Well... my sword isn't exactly..." she rolled over onto her side and toyed with her hair sheepishly where it flopped down across her face. "I think I broke something."
"Yes, well, I've broken more things than one. Time, for instance, and I have it on good authority I'm well on the way to breaking reality itself. So you're in expert company.” Jair set the book aside, swung himself around so he was sitting properly, and leaned forward with his hands clasped and elbows on his knees. “Let's see what we have to work with."
Raina nodded and sat up, setting her own book aside. She hesitated only briefly, then took a breath and held out her hands.
The sword appeared, a blade-shaped void that sparkled with countless tiny multicolored lights. They seemed simultaneously contained within the slender blade and seen from a vast distance, like a captured slice of the night sky.
"Huh, that's new," Raina said, tilting the blade up to look at more closely. "It never used to have stars before."
"Didn't it? That's interesting. Have you looked at its soulmap?"
"It was just the standard steel lattice until I shoved it into my soulspell void, then—"
"Wait. Soulspell void?"
"There's a gold cage of a sphere around where my soulspell should be, but inside is just emptiness. No spark, no pattern, no symbol. Nothing anyone says should be there. Void. I think that's why I never manifested anything even though I've been trying for months. I don't have anything to manifest."
"Intemporality," Jair whispered. "Your soul knew its fate, and developed accordingly. Why waste energy building something that'll be obsolete before it's finished."
"What's that? You know something about void soulspells?"
"Suspect. It's a theory I've had for a while. Sometimes people... even across different timelines, seem to..." he shook his head. "I can't really describe it. It's more a sense I have sometimes. And yours... I never noticed, but I never really looked. I think... I didn't want to know."
"I don't understand."
Jair shook his head and waved it away. "If your soul knew you were doomed, then that would mean I was fighting an impossible fight. That my goal was doomed from the start. But my soul defied its fate, with Maelstrom's help. So I'm willing to bet we can help you defy yours."
"And this doesn't have to do with the whole, breaking reality itself thing, does it?"
"Maybe.” He grinned. “Just give me forewarning if you're ever inclined to shatter continents and wreak death and destruction across all the lands, and we can find someplace properly deserving of it rather than smashing up our homeworld, a'ight? I can think of a few vampire clans who could do with a bit more destruction in their backyards."
Raina giggled, but there was an uneasy note to it. "Right. I'll be sure to warn you in advance if I decide to be evil."
"Oh, no need for that. You be as evil as you want. As long as global destruction is off the table for now."
"For now."
Jair shrugged. "Who knows, maybe I'll decide the world needs some good-natured depopulation and the continents aren't small enough. With how Maelstrom is now, it wouldn't even be that hard."
"How... is Maelstrom now?"
"Unstoppable. It works best on living things, but I could topple a mountain if I had enough time. Would probably squish myself in the process, but at least then I'd see if Temporal Reversion still works."
Maelstrom, lying on the table beside him, flared up with heatless green fire. The stars in Raina's sword pulsed softly, matching the other sword’s flickering.
They both turned to stare at Maelstrom, then Raina's void-sword, then each other, in perfect sync.
"I think they're mocking me," Jair said lightly, shaking his head, then turned back to glare at Maelstrom. "You know I want to know, but you keep ignoring me."
Maelstrom's flames darkened to black and danced in low pulses. Raina's stars blinked out entirely, then reappeared in a circle around the hilt area.
"One of these days, I really need to learn how to speak soulsword," Jair lamented.
Raina was staring down at her sword again, the stars pulsing softly beneath her fingers, with a confused sort of awe.
Jair sat up straighter and scooched closer. "Something interesting happening?"
"I... think so? Let me meditate a bit, I have to look at the soulmap."
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Raina Serin hovered within herself, staring down at the galaxy that had once been a complete void. In the past several days, she'd gone through the most thrilling and terrifying sequence of events she'd ever experienced within her young life.
Sure, the occasional assassin got in, and she'd been kidnapped for ransom twice. Once, back when they'd still been living at the oasis, creatures from the dungeon had escaped and come looking for blood.
All of that paled in comparison to being snatched away by a real, live, dragon.
Not just a normal dragon, an ancient matriarch so large that she could squash half the oasis by sitting on it. Her claws alone were like oversized pillars when they closed around her, so big she hadn't even been properly grasped, more like enclosed in a solid cage of scales.
Not the most comfortable way to travel, being thrown about with every buffet. She’d been bruised all over by the trip; by the time they actually landed in the volcano it was almost a relief. At least, until she ended up crushed by the dragon’s massive constrictive neck. That had been worse. She’d come so close to passing out. Almost wished she had.
Then the dragon was roaring and Jair was screeching and she had no idea what was going on.
Even having seen it, experienced it, she struggled to mentally grasp just how huge Ryenzo had been. She'd seen dragons, she’d been in groups that hunted them down even, but those little draklings were nothing compared to this.
The fact that Raina specifically came to this creature's attention was terrifying beyond reason. If not for Jair and his absolute confidence that they could deal with the situation, she'd probably have collapsed long ago.
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In the end, he’d been right. Raina survived, and Ryenzo apparently had not.
All of which culminated in her, Raina Serin, sitting and meditating on her shiny new no-longer-a-void soulsword.
She'd never gotten this far before. Every other time she focused on her soulspell, she found nothing. Until the most recent time, right before her kidnapping, when she'd recognized her soulspell’s nature to be a perfect void.
Now finally, for the first time she saw what she'd always been told to expect. Sparks of light.
Normally, people had only the one spark of light. Soulspell, singular. Each person's soul developed around a single primary power concept, and went all in on that. You may only be able to generate a drop of water, but you could generate a perfect drop of water and do it anytime you wanted.
Soulspells ranged from extremely simple to unbelievably complex. Some were so simple they'd been successfully imitated in spells or even constructs. Others were so complicated that even copying a fraction of them would be a life's work.
Jair had described his soul as having two, with Maelstrom tethered to his soulspell in an orbit, but that was an extreme exception.
Raina had over a dozen.
She focused in on the largest star hovering in her void of a core, something pale greenish-yellow. It was easily half again the size of the next largest, a sky-blue glow which itself was two or three times as big as the next.
Most were very tiny, barely noticeable.
The star she’d picked tasted sharp. When she tried to touch it, it sizzled in her mind and threatened to melt through… something she strongly felt shouldn’t be melted.
She backed off, uncertain. Maybe don't start with that one.
She picked the smallest one instead. A tiny single spark of pinkish red flame, barely bright enough to be seen, drifted around the outer edges as though afraid of being noticed.
As she focused on it, it grew and expanded in her perception. It gave her an impression of connection and observation, but as she probed deeper to force its soul to unfurl into its soulmap, she found it wasn't a soulmap. It was a delicate edge, a circle of fragile pink lace, as empty inside as the rest of her. Like her soulspell in microcosm, a boundary with no contents.
Raina backed out of the fragile construction and moved to the next. This was a deep orange, and emitted a feeling of warmth. Not destructive like fire, something comforting.
When she pushed closer, it too was only the barest outline, without anything in the center. Square shaped and flickering in texture, but hollow.
Her sword was there too, hovering exactly where she'd left it in the center of where her soulspell should have been. Its soul looked ugly and out of place, a dull metal blob, but at least it was a solid thing in this world of hollow shells. The stars drifted around it, sometimes passing through it or bumping into it and bouncing off.
At first she couldn't tell what made a star likely to interact with the sword or ignore its existence entirely. But as she watched longer, certain colors stood out to her. The orange drifted through it, the pink skittered around it as though the sword emitted a reverse gravity bubble holding them away, the green tapped into it and bounced off with a grumpy flare.
Without warning, all the stars flared up brightly, each pushing the others away until they were perfectly equidistant from one another.
Golden light flooded in as the outer boundary of her soulspell grew inward to form a spiderweb of connections. It started from the outer edges of the intangible barrier and grew inward rapidly. Each thread was its own intricate tracery, like some kind of elegant filigree.
The new pattern was chaotic yet orderly. Each of her hollow stars received its own custom slot. Golden light linked them together and held them in place, their drifting stilled without infringing upon their domain, like a custom setting around a collection of gemstones.
The new network of interconnected light filling the space did not approve of the sword, however. An angry hum built up, resonating sharply between the growing pattern and the weapon at her core.
The dissonance grew stronger and stronger as more of her space filled in, rising in intensity by the moment. She felt as though it would tear apart from the inside, then with a wrenching shriek, it did.
The final piece of the setting snapped into place, locking in around the twenty or so stars, and violently evicted the sword she’d worked so hard to insert.
Her eyes snapped open and she shuddered violently. The sword clattered to the floor in front of her, no longer shaped like absence, no longer made of void.
She’d not noticed any negative effects from putting her sword in initially, apart from it becoming a non-item and not existing except in her hand, but it had definitely torn something on the way out.
That was different.
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Jair waited until she was breathing steady and untroubled, then tapped one finger lightly on the black sword's surface. Then immediately jerked his hand back.
The blade was as hot as if it'd just been forged, the flesh on his finger melted in the instant of contact.
"Dovak," he cursed softly and jumped to his feet. Raina had a bottle of water packed to take with her, so he used that to quench the immediate burn, but the finger still throbbed painfully.
"Not worth reverting over, I suppose?" he asked Maelstrom grumpily, as he held the finger in the bottle. Not that he’d have actually reverted over something so trivial, but now that he’d finally understood Darkflame he wanted to make a start on re-learning his old soulspell.
The sword's flames had died down by now, and did not flare back up.
He instinctively reached into his soulspace for the frostvine nets he'd been storing there since before the whole thing with Ryenzo got weird, but whatever the seascourge had done when it tried to eat him from inside his own skull, it'd emptied his soulspace entirely.
At least that hadn't collapsed, a soulspace was much harder to rebuild than a manabody, but it did mean there was nothing useful in it. Only a few handsful of the sand that always seemed to find their way in whether he wanted them there or not. He tossed them out the window, knowing full well that there would be more the next time he checked.
Immediate crisis dealt with, he summoned Maelstrom to his hand and tapped its point gently against the tip of Raina's sword.
At the contact, Maelstrom immediately pulsed brilliantly gold, then flickered through a dozen different colors he'd never seen from it before—green, white, red, pink, several shades of blue, purple, yellow.
With each pulse, another star raced up Raina's sword from the tip to join the constellation orbiting beneath her hand.
Jair's immediate instinct was to yank Maelstrom away, were it not for the way it felt.
With every star, Maelstrom's soul relaxed, its and Jair's entire self being eased of a burden he hadn't realized they'd been carrying.
The last pulse of color faded, then Maelstrom's gold pattern flared up one more time. Satisfied.
Raina dropped her sword with a yelp and jumped to her feet. "What was that?"
Jair stood and put a hand on her shoulder to steady her. "Describe it."
"Uh. Uh... we were... I was... there's..." she frowned, shaking her head. The sword lay where it'd fallen. "Huh. It's..."
No longer made of void, a simple silversteel soulsword, identical to every other.
She shivered and made a disgusted face as though spitting out something disgusting. "So that's what throwing up your soul feels like."
"You were using your soulspell like a soulspace, and it didn't like that?" Jair guessed.
Raina shook her head. "I don't know how to explain it, it's almost like... my soulspell is ravenously starving, so it ate the sword because it was the only thing available, but then the sword picked up these stars somehow, so the soul spit it back out and ate those instead? I... don't quite understand, it's very confusing. But the sword definitely didn't belong in there. Soulsword or not, it's not meant to be that deep inside."
Jair chuckled. "Things don't always have to do what they're meant to. What's your soulspell look like now?"
Raina took a breath, then nodded and sat back down, but didn't close her eyes for a long moment. She just stared at the sword. "I'd thought..." she shook away the thought, chuckled self-deprecatingly, then nodded and sank into meditation.
Jair considered the mundane weapon lying before him. "Think it'd be safe to pick up this time?"
Maelstrom remained inert.
"I'm doing it."
He reached out with his other hand, brushed one finger very gingerly along the sword's blade. Cool silversteel. No burn, no spark. He looked at Maelstrom. No reaction there either.
He wrapped his fingers carefully around the hilt and lifted it. Exactly like every other soulsword in the Institute.
"Remember when you looked like this?" he asked Maelstrom, and the sword seemed to dull faintly. Jair laughed. "Vain, are we? Don't like not being special?"
He flipped the soulsword a few times, verifying the perfect balance, then held it flat on his palms and inspected it.
─ Soulsword
─ Rank: ***?mon
─ Class Requirement: Mageblade
We hunger.
─ Bound to *?*???* & ****??*?
Jair raised an eyebrow and set the sword back on Raina's lap. "Being a bad influence on your fellow swords?"
Maelstrom ignored him.
“Or,” he mused, “perhaps it’s because she left some pieces of it inside.”
It shouldn’t be easy to injure a weapon’s soul, or change it, but Raina was an existence which should not be. So was Maelstrom. The intersection of the two of them was proving to be delightfully destructive to anything that was ‘supposed to be’.
Just the way Jair liked it.
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