In this world of darkness there was nothing but pain. Dull, constant, thrashing pain. Neither time nor space existed in this place, no. Nothing could be perceived. Nothing except for pain—raw and pure. This was a realm of indefinite torment, though its purpose was not known. There were no memories nor foresight in this moment, however long it lasted. Not a single thought could be formed but that of agony.
The world shook, threatening to shatter as a rhythmic pounding assaulted ceaselessly, its origin, indeterminable. Soon the banging came into focus and its percussive blasts grew louder, reverberating through this place and her very soul before echoing off to eternity. The overbearing cadence grew louder still the closer it came, as if the distance between them was both infinite and nonexistent.
As it approached it felt like it was always there.
Bang! Bang!
Bang! Bang!
Finally, there was a crack that split the whole world in two. The darkness, the pain… It all receded above or below to make way for the dawn that never should have come. Light poured in, washing everything away to the furthest depths of her mind.
Now entering the world of cerulean radiance, the first thing that could be recognized was a little white doll with skin like unbaked clay and an unfinished face. Two black pearls held a look of fear and concern while frail fists swung desperately.
“N… Nina…?” The little salt nymph was pounding on Cira’s forehead with dire abandon, and her beady eyes jolted at the voice, arms slowing to a pause. Cira tried to take a deep breath, and something caught in her throat, making her choke and jerk forward as she coughed out a cloud of white powder. Nina took to the air and Cira felt her arms stick to the ground as she tried to roll over to inspect herself. “Gah, what is all this?” She brushed the powder off her face and chest, realizing she was smearing blood everywhere now as well.
“Is this prima salt…?” She looked at Nina with wide eyes before noticing the hundreds more of her friends clustering above them in the air and swarming the spring chamber.
Looking at herself now, it was like it had been snowing while she slept. Cira was completely coated in a thick layer of salt and every inch of exposed skin felt jittery and warm. Were it not for the throbbing pain which stabbed the back of her mind, she would think nothing was wrong. “Urghh… Greater heal.”
She let those meager effects set in and reinstated her array, downing more dimnut tonic. The pain hardly subsided, but it dulled the edge a little. Strangely, she didn’t feel the intense mental strain she expected, but there didn’t seem to be much else she could do for the intense headache. She stood up and put a finger out for Nina to sit on.
This prima salt is no joke. If I weren’t coated in the stuff, I would probably be dead.
“Did you and your friends save me?” Nina just stared back at her, none of the worry Cira though she saw marred her face any longer. “Well thanks.”
That rush from taking a mana potion occurs from the sudden rush of energy attaching to your soul, the rush is simply reflected in the corporea. So, the prima salt kept her body in a constant agitated state as if the soul were gaining energy, despite the body actually dying. It was a precarious needle to thread between life and death, and Cira gulped thinking about how close it actually was. Her body held out just long enough to recover to a conscious state.
Was it on purpose though? Cira gave the little nymph a compassionate boop on the head, pushing the conjured hat down over her adorable little unformed face. “Maybe you’re smarter than I give you credit for, Nina.”
The other nymphs had begun to disperse, lazily floating around the spring chamber now. Cira noticed her tangled cluster of rivers still took up most of the negative space in this chamber. Washing everything out, it reflected the vibrant blue off every surface. Water covered the ground and shimmered in the light.
Cira could feel it now. The Staff of Springs worked its way down Fount Salt steadily, through every single nook and cranny the water found from when it gushed out of the spring itself all the way down to the bottom. There were tens of thousands of paths, some absurdly huge rivers and spillways, and others as thin as a hair. Most of them cut off and were easily disregarded, but still, a great number made it all the way down. Often, they would converge only to split off later somewhere completely different. Some even spiraled around the island without reason.
None of this would generally be possible for Cira, or even her father, using standard methods. As Aquon’s watery embrace gradually enveloped Fount Salt, it was in effect becoming larger. Monumentally so. As this continued, it offset the aethereal strain the sorcerer took on directly by taking over most of the processing work, as of course the spring knows its constraints.
No, the Staff of Springs wasn’t sentient. But it was a spring, artificial and finite or not. Depending on the sorcerer’s beck and call, it took on many forms. The form it took today, ‘Spring Sense’, forced it to (temporarily) take over a spring, the existing spring becoming an extension of it. Previously only tested on incredibly small islands, and it was not a good time for our young sorcerer.
As the spring assimilated into Aquon, so too did the Staff of Springs into its wielder. As when Lomp jumped in behind her days ago, she felt as if she gained tens of thousands of fleeting limbs. Every path the water took was known intimately to Cira, and she could hardly comprehend what she was perceiving. It came in flashes, and she struggled not to focus on too much at once or her head flared up again. There was a balancing act at play.
The other day she felt a searing pain in her head, but Aquon was small when it found Lomp. So very, very small, she now realized.
Nina had taken to sitting on her shoulder again, as the shining jewel she usual resided in had grown to the size of three men and hung above the spring like a beacon. Many nymphs could be seen circling it with slow flapping wings.
Aquon had indeed progressed a great deal while she slept. It had long since hit the pump and found its way to the top, now nearly meeting her again from above. The amount that made it back down made Cira concerned about their current infrastructure’s longevity.
Soon, every drop of water on the island would be under Cira’s influence though. She waited. Patiently. Messing around with her array in the meantime, she managed to fine tune it to make this all a little easier on herself. She was able to take steady, even breaths to calm her mind, hopefully bringing the pain down with it.
Hours passed. It was impossible to say how many, as Cira sat next to the spring with her eyes closed, slowly expanding through the islands. There was no way to describe how she felt. With every passing second hundreds of threads opened up in her mind, only to cut off or disappear into another. For a time, she had nearly forgotten she was a small human sorcerer rather than an endless network of waterways.
Her miniscule self came back to the forefront of her consciousness as the moment she’d been waiting for arrived. Excess water was allowed to spill off into the sky, leaving shrouds of mana clinging to the bottom of the island or anywhere a stream exited. Meanwhile above, the water had finished finding its way back long ago.
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The rumbling that shook the whole island rapidly grew to a climax before abruptly falling off. All the island’s water burst with increasing light as the dull whirring of mana echoed through everything, everyone, and likely miles away in the sky. That died down as quickly as it started, leaving the water with its prior, much more subdued cerulean shimmer.
All was now still on the island of Fount Salt, but Cira still had no idea what was happening, nor what happened while she was out. Spring Sense was only the first step.
With Cira’s dominion now established, her body was one with the spring and countless rivers alike. But her domain was not yet complete. This was the part that scared her the most, but with Aquon’s inconceivable conquest and an utterly clear mind, there was no hesitation.
“Spatial Sight.” Her calm words echoed across the still chamber, laced with power. Just as her trip down to Deep Falls, it was cast from each appendage that was a part of Aquon. Next there was a shift, almost like the whole world jerked one foot to the left and back within the blink of an eye. Contrary to expectations, there was no pain.
The Staff of Springs gladly took on the load, using mana that was already in place along its entire length, without anything routing through Cira except for the limited information she desired.
Cira could now see everything. What once was a pearl on the horizon turned out to be a blemished stone turned over and harshly polished in the tides of time since an age she couldn’t conceive of. It didn’t look pretty at all, especially under the night sky. Just an aimless lump. Still, the scale was baffling to her, even as she stood now. She guessed the Last Step to be nearly ten miles deep, so that made the island four or five times that from top to bottom, half that around.
It really put into perspective how truly massive the sky was. If she didn’t know any better, Cira would say it was endless. For a moment she was struck with awe, and then terror at her own being. Looking at Fount Salt now felt no different than looking inside her own ribcage with the same spell. A chill ran up her spine, and she was grateful for it. It kept her grounded. She realized her feet were still touching the ground.
A few deep breaths, and she pulled her eyes back up. “No time to dawdle, Cira… I need to check on everything.”
She trained her focus to the top, and her gaze fell down on the city of Uren. The lower levels had taken a lot of damage, many of the tin shanties having fallen over. She noticed a lot of wounded, those that weren’t were either hidden inside or panicking in the streets.
“Shit… This is a disaster.” She frantically scoured the surface for signs that she may have killed someone. In the slums there were many trapped under stacks of metal, and some stabbed through with rebar, bleeding out. “Shit, shit, shit! What have I done?!”
Without thinking, she started flipping sheets of steel over and putting them back together, pulling bodies out of the rubble as they shined with a golden light. The water from each reservoir lit up as she desperately tried to reverse the ruin she brought upon the city.
To her great relief, no one had died. There were more than she cared to admit that would have if she let it go much longer, but Cira couldn’t rest yet. There were many, many more places where people lived, and all of them were underground. She could only hope this old island stood strong.
Before finding out for herself, she took a quick glance around. The infirmary had even more people than before, but it seemed they were regaining order since the island stopped shaking. There were spilled barrels of underworm strewn about the salt. Slowly curing, she was sure. Either way, they were getting it under control up here.
Looking towards the silos, she didn’t see any suspicious ships, meaning the Astral Witch had yet to land. The last thing she wanted to see was Pappy. He was in his office all alone, hiding under his desk and shivering. As sound waves travelled through space, she could perceive his words. He grumbled nervously between heavy breaths, “Never shoulda asked that crazy goddamn girl for help… So much worse than her dad.”
There was much to attend to inside the island, but one process that would take a great deal of time. To get that started she shifted her gaze to the very bottom. Zero Stratum and the New Shore District.
At her whim the megaliths began to melt. Months of Nanri’s soul-crushing labor and millions of tons of pure titanium collapsed in on itself slowly like a ruined souffle. Reduced to naught but raw material in the hands of the sorcerer.
Much of it dripped away and condensed, forming innumerable orbs of raw metal. She pushed some aside for the reconstruction of Zero Stratum and pushed the rest away so it could float up to Uren or anywhere else along the way.
With the remainder of the melting structures, she pushed it up the river. Up all of them, really.
As many different paths as the water took, she couldn’t possibly retain them all. There were a few main exits where it fell into the clouds, but what concerned Cira more was how many places water needed to get to. Uru, Nymphus, and Uren were the main cities, but it seemed there was another one where she guessed the worm farms were, not much smaller than the others. It was built like a taller Uru but with no evident light laws.
Aside from this, she was still busy trying to count the myriad of settlements. Some were smaller than deep falls, while another seemed to span an abandoned river across the entire width of the island. Most of these places looked like they had just experienced a flood and she found even more injured.
Whatever happened to them didn’t seem to last for long, but the now small creek which spanned an easy twenty miles had people washed from one side of the settlement to the other. It looked like a pilgrimage of bloodied villagers climbing back up the various rocks and ledges. Cira spent a few minutes here. She couldn’t give them a lift, but she healed them all. They were frantic for a moment, grabbing onto the walls or each other in case they got swept away again, then were thrown for a loop as their creek’s luster briefly switched from cerulean to gold and back again.
There were over two hundred settlements, between random villages and smugglers’ dens, then counting a couple hermits she noticed. Without caring what their deal was, she plotted out her path. A vast majority of the waterways could be bypassed and would get abandoned, while titanium slowly crept up the island, lining those she decided to keep and continuing to push material further and further up.
Now that her sorcery had begun, she could turn her attention to somewhere she’d been dreading to look. To her surprise, Nymphus didn’t look that bad. She saw the mayor huddled up with all his citizens in some big building with an Earth Vein insignia on it. Still, she scanned the crowd for wounded and found a few, knocking a team of healers off their feet as random people among them started glowing without notice.
Next was Uru. This city didn’t fare as well. Many of the buildings relied on their light weight and weren’t constructed with tremors in mind. She found a lot more wounded, but Earth Vein had a large presence here, seemingly working with the church. They had tents set up for the wounded and others removed debris. Again, she healed all she saw.
“God damn, I’m nothing but a hack.” Cira was kicking herself, “I should have listened to Dad.”
She was going to check on her minions but spun around when she remembered something important. With a tough expression, scarlet light bathed her face. “I’m already down half…”
A great deal of deritium had already been expended. When she focused, she could see it dissipating ever so slowly, but constantly. At this rate she had six hours left if she was lucky. It was a tossup whether that would be enough to finish the rivers, but there was so much else she wanted to do.
“But what is this feeling… It’s like it’s everywhere.” The deritium had an ominous pervasiveness that you could feel in every fiber of your being, and Cira certainly felt it in front of her. But her being was great, and she felt it everywhere. It was inside her body. There were multiple subtle pricks she couldn’t quite pin down.
“No… While I was sleeping?!” She patted her chest up and down and realized that’s not what she was feeling. “Impossible… there’s more?”
Pulling her focus back out to the entire island she focused on one thing, and one thing only. That dreadful scarlet sensation. It felt like a hole in her lung. Then more appeared as she searched. Little smoldering holes in her otherwise beautiful, immaculate, and monolithic form. “Four… Five… No… There’s six more?!”
Indeed, the deritium was no small issue for Fount Salt. With a total of seven more stones like the one she harvested and consumed to begin her slew of miracles. Now that she was attuned to the feeling, she could tell it had soaked deep into the salt wherever water ran. The most uncomfortable sensation was feeling it in the water. Like cancer of the bones which she could see in three dimensions as if touching it with her hand like I blind man would, but in incomprehensible definition. It was the most tumultuous feat of sensory absurdity that Cira ever had the displeasure of experiencing.
“This deritium is a bigger problem than I thought…”