Left to his own devices for the first time in what felt like months, Ulric found himself struggling to find any motivation to move. He was safe. Actually safe, not the pretend kind you convince yourself of when you're alone in the wilderness surrounded by things that will kill you and suck the marrow from your bones, if you're fortunate enough for them to do it in that order. He was in a relatively modern setting, in that he didn't need to spend hours preparing firewood or gathering water. Or making his own food. Or hunting, or weaving rope, or however the hell else he'd been spending his time doing the million tasks required to pull himself out of the stone age, alone, with nothing but himself and the raw stuff of the glade as a resource.
"Watcher's tits, being a bush hermit was a little more involved than I'd thought in the Before." Ulric drily informed the immaculately carved woodwork of his apartment.
He'd fantasized, frequently, about leaving it all behind to live out his days in the ravaged remains of wilderness and to hell with the radiation or inevitable starvation. What he'd not quite realized fully until now was how imminent that fate would have been in his crippled condition. It would have taken two, maybe three weeks, tops, before his body shit the bed and he froze and or withered away in some half assed lean to. Ulric gave himself a double handed slap on the cheeks to draw himself out from remembering the Before.
With his safety assured, and his needs met, he found himself able to simply sit and be for a moment, absent external force. It had all the liberation of zero gravity. Unmoored, his thoughts drifted and Ulric lost himself fully to the twisted webs of his own mind. Images of battles fought zipped through his closed eyes. Strange, beautiful fey forms of Elves slid one past the other. He thought of Hal'et and her infectious laugh. Conversations rewound through his memories and he tried to figure out exactly how close he'd come to fucking everything up through an ill worded gaff or an offhand comment in the heat of one of many tense moments. Magic and a timeless dance of many Elven feet as they drummed magnificent death to their enemies filled his thoughts. He saw Geyrt's naked form in his mind's eye, soft where it should be and deliciously firm elsewhere. Abruptly Bald'rt was in his consciousness with his leering grin and his waggling eyebrows, so incredibly similar in feature to his daughter. For a moment Ulric's brain tortured him with a nude Lord of Iriel until he banished the intrusive thought and turned for an untold time to planning petty revenge for the children's class.
When next Ulric pulled himself from the labyrinth of his musings it was because he had felt the presence of the Winter storm and could smell rain. The sounds were greatly muted by Elven witchery, the citadel Irielhos absorbing and deflecting the vibration of the storm's pouring rain alongside the thrashing winds. Thunder could be faintly heard to boom and luminescent flashes of lightning poured into the room from the balcony doors. It was most certainly those searing brilliant lights that pulled him free of himself.
"Wonder how my shelter is doing…" Ulric wondered aloud.
It had been well within his planning to have been absent two weeks. Today marked the, what, tenth day since leaving? No, not even that long, four days of travel, and today marked the end of the third day amongst the elves. Right? He wasn't entirely sure. There had been so much. This must be where the lost time of the fairy folk myths come from. Just here in this room he felt like he'd lost a few hours.
Rising from the chair into which he'd collapsed as soon as he relieved himself of his gluttonous burdens Ulric ran briefly through the steps of the Elven dance, both the ones he had practiced and the ones he had witnessed. It made for a nice calisthenic routine. Get your cardio and slay your enemies all at the same time! He laughed to himself.
Mana exhaustion's headache still pulsed and a quick check of his status revealed himself to only be at around three percent, not enough to push back against the ailment. Normally, the worst of the effects wouldn't go away until five percent and it wouldn't completely vanish until ten percent. He wasn't just imagining it then, he recovered more slowly in this place than in the glade. Probably thirty or forty percent slower too, it was not a small difference. Having experienced the sheer density of mana inside the Arcanum Ulric was now positive that the disparity was in the availability of free mana, the natural flows of it through the environment. On the Ancient Plateau the air was saturated with magic, thick with it. The deep wood was still no doubt a magical hot spot but it paled in comparison with the untouched land that had been guarded for an eon by the [Forest Lord]. Perhaps it had been chosen for a lair specifically because of that mana density. Could be that those deep places in the world cultivated monstrous beings as a pond bred mosquitos, which beings not being present on Varda was proof alone that its gods still lived.
With that in mind Ulric decided that the best use of his time now was unconsciousness. It had been a long ass day. And not a ton of sleep the night before, a fact which Ulric regretted not at all considering the company that prevented it. Hell, the day before had been equally jam packed. No, at this moment Ulric was feeling the exhaustion of body, mind, and magic. Committing to his plan he stripped out of his clothes and piled into bed. Sleep took him in moments.
It was dark out when Ulric awoke. No birdsong. It was slightly jarring, he'd become accustomed to the sounds of the forest in these last few months; their vivid racket greeting him upon rising. The only sound that made it into the room was the faint roaring hum of wind. Winter's Herald had arrived in full force. Branches of the towering tree Irielhos was built into swayed with it. The entire tree rocked gently in the gale force winds. Ulric had exactly no clue as to what time of day it might be. He didn't need as much sleep as he had in his previous life, only five hours at maximum, but he'd driven himself pretty hard the day before. Black, rolling clouds with whisps of white blitzing beneath made figuring out much beyond past daybreak impossible for him. It was nearly enough to send him back to his dreams and the cozy warmth of the blankets. But only nearly.
Rolling out of bed, Ulric had learned both a lot and precious little about magic the previous day as he resettled the sheets and blankets into something approaching order. He was aware that that meeting was very much an introduction and a sounding board. The Dragons of Iriel who would be teaching him had needed to know where to start. Ulric was confident that his combination of near hopeless ignorance and impossible knowledge had thrown a wrench into their planned course of instruction. Just as well, he hoped it confused them as much as it did himself. So, towards the end of making sure he didn't waste his gift of safe harbors here in Irielhos, Ulric decided today was the day he would work on magic. The main problem with that plan was, however, that he was in a borrowed room made of wood, with fanciful carvings of priceless worth everywhere, and the only spells he could practice would destroy it. Not a fantastic starting point. However, there was something on which he could work that wouldn't set the walls on fire.
Bathe Iriel had jumped a solid thirty meters through the air. At least six body heights high. She had struck her husband and sent him crashing across a great hall with enough force to bounce. Clearly she was stronger than she looked, just as her husband had demonstrated a phenomenal robustness to escape her scolding relatively unharmed. Judging by appearance alone was just not even close to seeing the full picture.
Vedyr had mentioned something about reinforcement of oneself. Shor had then implied that gaining strength in one's ability to handle and refine mana was the only way to avoid eventually destroying one's body through weird mana interactions that resulted in turning into an elemental. All of this pointed to a more internalized way of using mana than he had thought about before. Some body magic equivalent techniques or a way to infuse oneself with mana instead of merely storing it in the core or moving it about mana channels. Where to start Ulric had no immediate ideas but that was the direction he intended to go with this day of solo play.
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Ulric grabbed a chair, wonderously carved and cushioned by what felt like some kind of springy material covered in a soft leather, also heavier than he could have picked up in his old life, and moved it one handed to the balcony door. The whipping, roiling clouds made for a majestic sight. To that marvelously rampant backdrop he horked down a few portions of meat, bread, and cheese washing it all down with water. A shame to treat such excellent food that way but Ulric wanted to get on with figuring out how to get his head around internal magic. Thus sated, he sat in his chair and closed his eyes.
The most natural starting point had to be the core. Without even checking his status Ulric could tell by the mental clarity and light feeling of his body that he was at mana saturation again. Seems his natural regeneration while sleeping was still fast enough to return him to full, even if it was slower in Irielhos than the glade. If he were doing this in the Arcanum from yesterday, he'd be willing to bet it would have been a solidly even pace compared to the glade. Environmental mana density was definitely a thing and highly variant. Ulric put that on hold though, before he burned an hour trying to outline the relationship between mana density and biomass. Instead, he concentrated on his own core, that second beating heart through which fire and ice alternated. Delicately, he took up mana like clenching a muscle, squeezing the metaphorical fist of his Will to hold a tiny portion of the cosmic vitreous or whatever the hell it was. It was real was all he could attest to with certainty, but only when you reached out and touched it. Like a collapsing wave function it transformed from indefinite and ethereal to definite and material.
Now firmly in hand, so to speak, Ulric began to harmonize this raw magical essence, tuning it to the elements with which he was familiar. At first, he tried direct transitions, water to air to earth to fire and so forth. It wasn't possible, at least not for him. The mana rebelled against such attempts, the discord between wave forms being incompatible. It felt a little like molding clay, the raw mana took shape easily to his efforts obtaining the specific mana type was a little like becoming a shape that fit with his feeling of an element, like Incendere's playful violence.
Once in that shape though it solidified to concrete and no amount of pushing would force it to obtain another shape. The attempts saw him at one moment struggling against the tuned mana he held and the next a dangerous feeling of instability, like cracks in the ice beneath his feet that sent alarm bells trilling in his lizard brain. He pulled back from the attempts to transition mana directly and, instead, reversed the tuning to return it back to its neutral form, the unfolding of the origami he'd produced back to flat paper. From there it was easy to mold again into a new shape, to attune a new elemental form.
For an hour, as best he could judge, he harmonized mana to the elemental forms he had practiced, these basic elements, simply holding and feeling them. He had practiced these types of manipulations before, in his calm evenings in the glade, but his familiarity had improved substantially. Never did he externalize the mana, use his core to manifest it outside of himself as he would for a spell. He simply held, shaped, and felt it. In so doing Ulric was certain that he was starting to find similarities between some elemental forms, like finding underlying notes shared between different chords. Incendere, Caelum, Ceraun, the elemental forms of fire, air, and lightning, they all held a distinct note of mobility. To a lesser extent Aquae had this same note but it rang not nearly so loud, as if the water would also be very happy to simply sit if left undisturbed. Terra and Infrig though, these were distinctly sounding for stability, for immobility. Ulric was starting to think that what he was observing was the underlying primordial elemental forms, the ones he'd been warned against touching directly. Motus then and Dissidia, motion and stillness were prominently related to the distinct difference in these elemental forms.
Ulric cycled between Incendere and Infrig, so very different that the contrasts could be, now that he was concentrating on them, parsed out. The difference in static and nonstatic layers aside there was a second buried note underpinning them, diverging them so heavily. A heavy component of Infrig felt…empty, as if it were a jar that deliberately poured out everything placed inside. Not a hole in the jar, it wasn't so passive, it actively tried to eliminate, a vacuum erasing whatever could not resist its impulsion. That was Nihil then, the primordial elemental nothingness. The infinite void. Ulric shuddered at the feel of it, instinctive revulsion making his skin pucker.
Incendere carried the flickering flashing undercurrent that suggested destructive brilliance, what could only be Lumen, light, energy. Terra, when he cycled it between the other elements, held most strongly the influence of weighted inertia that was Res, matter, that was so strongly dominant in its notes. Aquae held nearly as much of this firmament as Terra, which made some sort of sense in Ulric's mind, liquids being of equal substance to solids only vibrating along a higher octave, so to speak.
On and on, Ulric cycled elemental forms to peel them apart to compare their make ups. As he did he gained a greater insight into why they did not mix, or where they might. He reasoned why they could not be transformed from one to the next, and it seemed obvious. They were differently structured and different things needed to be rendered to a precurser to be formed into something new, akin to proteins obtained by consumption being degraded by proteases into amino acids that could then be used to produce new proteins.
"Or no...more like light." Ulric mused.
Mana wasn't just some blank entity, the raw mana of the world was a white light, a rainbow consisting of all things. The core then, acted as a prism, to extract only specific wavelengths which could then craft the basic elemental forms.
Ulric had the sudden intuition that the reason his brain kept turning to music and light in his internalized conceptual interpretations was that it was because the truth most closely matching reality was that mana was, in fact, a field. He remembered the bone shaking utterances of the Watcher, when the Impossible had said FIELD and how it had seemingly touched everything. Then mana reacted, somehow along a similar conceptual premise as if it held resonant nodes, harmonies, disharmonies, and interferences. The mana was an infinite wave, an overlap of primordial fields. The primordial fields must unify, somehow, to create reality. If he tried to extend the analogy to his old theoretical physics days, the mana was a wave that manifested from changes in the fields. Accelerations from the interactions between fundamentally divergent forces, that propagated through reality. Each specific type of mana resulted from a different interaction of the fields that produced it.
No wonder he'd been warned against touching primordial magic. Interacting with mana was fine, no problem, it was a transient localized energy free to be moved and changed. Interacting with primordial mana directly was trying to change the entire universe. Ulric decided then and there that he would never attempt to reach through and grab any one of the underlying notes. Taking in the ambient mana, sure, manipulating it to achieve his desires, absolutely. But never to take hold of the stuff beneath, that was playing god. Ulric had a distinct impression that when a mortal played with godstuff, they got exactly what they wanted and were unable to handle it, not being equal to the task.
Ulric remembered the emptiness of Nihil, and that thing scared the shit out of him. It wanted to devour you, that was its nature. The others weren't much better. Lumen was bright but so was the sun, it would burn through your existence with as little trouble as a blow torch popping bubbles. Motus would scatter you through the galaxy and Dissidia would entomb you in time, like sitting on the edge of a black hole. None of them were safe. He was suddenly very glad for the Watcher's oh so brief warning and the gift of elemental knowledge, without it he might have found annihilation through ignorance.
It occurred to him that he hadn't even attempted touching the magics that were more complex, things like growing plants or healing tissue. Ulric had a theoretical idea of how that might work, he'd read the textbooks on biochemistry and cellular growth, but how easy would it be to try to heal a wound and instead cause cancer? Not something he had any interest in dicking with, at the moment. Maybe not forever and certainly not without someone to show him the ropes. The peoples of this world might be ignorant about the scientific principles of physics and chemistry but they had eons of what he lacked: applied practice. They had already found methods that worked and worked well. Maybe, like their lightning magics, there were improvements to be had. But they had it all down already and Ulric would waste his entire life reinventing the wheel if he didn't pay attention to their instruction.
Eyes opening, the light available to the room had grown substantially. He would have guessed sometime around midmorning, midsunsrise the Elves had called it, so maybe, approximately 10:00am old time? He supposed it didn't really matter anymore. What did matter was that he had been lost in thought and experimentation for several hours by this point and hadn't made even an iota of progress towards body magic or refinement. Damn it brain.
He couldn't call it a total loss though. More like a sidegrade. What he hadn't progressed in internal magics he had greatly enhanced his understanding of mana as a whole and its individual constructs in the elemental forms, which might make his next lesson with the Dragons a bit more productive. Totally worth it, if only to discover that trying to touch a primordial mana form directly would be a hilariously misinformed suicide.