Chapter 82, 1/2

Chapter 82, 1/2

Platinum rain fell upon stone boxes full of sand and seeds, soaking in, turning orange dirt into browns and tans. Bright green shoots erupted from the low-quality soil, stretching into the dim light above. Storm clouds covered the sky, but sunlight still shone through to the city below, to the Gardens, and their workers.

People harvested everything they could, and replaced the plants as necessary. Some of them had been doing this sort of harvesting for months, now. Not every farmer left for the farms of the Greensoil Republic, after all. The ‘old hands’ who chose to stay guided those who had never done this before; those who wanted first pick and free food by the right of work.

Soon enough, rice and potatoes and thirty seven other types of partially processed or raw goods began to stream into the temporary markets erected near the Human District, outside the rain. Most of that food left those markets in large crates, packed full, destined for grocers and restaurants. Tomorrow, the temporary markets would open to the public.

There were quite a few logistical problems and angry words and minor fights happening all around the Gardens, simultaneously, but the goods were cheap, and plentiful, and the Guard was on duty, making sure that nothing too disruptive happened.

In the course of the first harvest, Erick made a few discoveries. The first, was that it was easy to hold his own [Exalted Storm Aura] into the shape it needed to be, in order to rain on the Garden, by itself. The second, much nicer discovery, was that he could set an Ophiel atop his house, inside the Restful air of the [Prismatic Ward], and have that Ophiel cast [Exalted Storm Aura] almost exactly as Erick had done himself.

Without Clarity, or Sculpt Spell, or Erick’s Favored Spell, or even Aurify’s radius bonus to all auras, Ophiel had a lot larger drain on his mana than Erick had on his. For Ophiel, the 1 Mana per second of [Exalted Storm Aura] was 5 Mana per second, taking into account all the necessary shapings to keep the spell in the proper formation. But at Rest, inside the dense air of the [Prismatic Ward], Ophiel regenerated 8 mana per second.

As Erick handed the spell over to Ophiel atop the roof of Erick’s mage tower, Ophiel trilled in happy violins and energized guitars. He sang at the storm above, a hundred eyes wide open across his full, three meter body, taking in all the sights around him, making sure he was casting the spell exactly as needed.

Rain on the Gardens, and nowhere else!

Erick left Ophiel to his assignment then went to speak to Calizi and Rollo about selling his own vegetables and the market prices of various foodstuffs, but the two older incani launched into an immediate argument over the price of potatoes. That was enough of that for Erick, so he went and worked in his own garden; it had gotten some unintentional platinum rain, and needed some pruning because of that.

Erick had never rained platinum across the whole Human District before today. Some problems rapidly appeared with the rain, in light of this experiment. Platinum rain slowly, but surely, collected into puddles around the not-flat-at-all Human District. Some of those puddles became minor lakes. Some of it ran into the sandy soil of Erick’s own green space, so he shored up the [Weather Ward]s around the garden and added small walls of stone at the edges, to keep the water out.

More than a few of the growing spaces out there in the Garden were experiencing the same problems. Ophiel was raining properly, but some plots were ill-designed, or near an unintentional platinum river. People scrambled to divert the rain to where it needed to go. More than a few people raced around, creating ditches, while organizers directed them from [Scry] eyes in the sky. The only council member who seemed to have made his plots well was Kip, the man with all the rice fields. His workers had already drawn ditches into the Human District to collect the rain. Those ditches were quickly connected to the new ditches, solving most of the district’s water problems with one elegant solution.

But even with all the small problems Erick saw, no one asked him to hold off on the rain, so he got down to his own business.

With a thousand telekinetic hands made of air and intent, Erick harvested potatoes, picked tomatoes, plucked carrots, unearthed onions, and grabbed everything else that looked even the slightest bit overgrown.

Eventually, hours later, a blushing young orangescale girl interrupted him from the side of his garden, while he was still deep in the herbs and listening to Ophiel sing. It was past noon; he could stop now. Erick nodded to the girl and had Ophiel stop. The winged [Familiar] squawked at being interrupted, but he cut the rain anyway, then gladly trilled in violins as Erick offered up his shoulder as a perch. As Ophiel turned tiny and took his spot, Erick offered the girl some vegetables from his garden, but she silently shook her head and took off running, back to the edge of town.

Poi stood to the side this whole time, under his own [Weather Ward], silent, and observant.

Erick stepped out of the herbs, to stand by his fresh harvest. He asked, “Grilled veggies for dinner?”

“As you wish.” Poi said, “I’d prefer fish, but the lake is not yet carved and it won’t be stable enough to harvest for months, anyway. I think I will miss that part of Oceanside, most of all.”

Erick smiled. “That reminds me. It’s time to start trying to recreate [Teleport].”

As the clouds above wisped away on the northern winds, Poi frowned.

Erick noticed. “It’s not going to be that bad.”

“There will be explosions.” Poi added, “There’s always explosions.”

Erick laughed, as he telekinetically picked up his produce, and said, “Not always!”

- - - -

In one of the larger rooms on the third floor, where no one lived and nothing was stored and the occasional lesson was taught via conjured blackboards, Erick played around with [Lightwalk].

Lightwalk, instant, close range, 5 MP per second + Variable

You are the light.

Like all of the other ‘minimally described’ spells, [Lightwalk] was deceptively deep. He hadn’t read much on the skill, but he knew about what it was supposed to do, thanks to his talks with his daughter, back before she started sleeping.

Erick flickered into insubstantial light as the spell shifted his entire body into ephemeral illumination. He walked forward—

He stayed in place, but not for lack of trying. He put one foot forward, but his center of gravity didn’t change—

Oh! He was weightless! His back foot pressed against the orange stone underfoot, but instead of touching, his foot sort of puddled against the ground, turning into white light that stretched out from where he touched. He picked his foot up, and it came out of that puddle, the same as it went in...

He picked up both feet, and hovered in the air. He couldn’t move from his original position except to wave his hands and body around. He was a human lightward; stuck in place forever more.

Or at least until he turned the spell off. Which he did. Which caused him to fall to his butt with a little “Oof!” popping out of his mouth, and his [Personal Ward] flickering white light across his skin.

He stood up and sighed out—

He paused. He was breathing. Well, duh. Of course he was breathing. But what was odd—

He turned the spell back on, and the need to breathe... vanished? Yup. That was right. He had not noticed it before, but he did not need to breathe when he was light. Odd! Useful, too? Yes; definitely useful. Jane hadn’t ever mentioned this before.

... There didn’t seem to be a downside to not breathing.

And what was even odder, was that his brain was not telling his body to automatically breathe. He looked down. Oh. No. He had it wrong. He wasn’t exactly breathing; no air seemed to flow through his nose or mouth, but his chest was rising and falling like normal. He was ‘breathing’. Sort of?

He forcefully stopped breathing.

... Nope. His chest continued to gently rise and fall.

He said, “What is going on with that?”

It was only after the words escaped his body —they had not escaped his lips, for sure, but rather his whole self, in some odd sort of way— that he realized something very peculiar, that might have given a hint as to some stranger mystery that had been on Erick’s mind ever since he started really working lightwards.

Back when he was first learning magic, when he tried to apply for a lightwarding license from the Mage Guild, he had accidentally created a lightward that screamed. He had never been able to duplicate that effect after that day. Lightwards did not usually make noise, after all.

Properly made lightwards, anyway?

There was a book in Esoteric Magic that listed the stranger magical effects that had been observed in the world. One of the stranger phenomenon was that of the ‘uneducated lightwarder’. When someone with [Ward] below level 10, who had no formal training, tried to make a lightward, they sometimes failed in weird and spectacular ways. One of those failures was in the creation of a noisy lightward.

Now what did all of that have to do with being able to speak while he was [Lightwalk]ing?

Maybe nothing. Maybe a lot of something. Erick had no idea.

He looked down. “And my chest is still rising and falling... Hmm.”

Erick canceled [Lightwalk]. He held his breath. He activated [Lightwalk]. His chest was not moving up and down. Strange!

“Maybe it puts me in a stasis? That only looks like me? Is that it? But I can still move my limbs... But I can’t walk forward.” He shrugged, and said, “I haven’t even used the skill yet, duh. This is the next test.”

Erick pushed a point of mana and intent into the skill, exactly how he would do to cast any magic, urging himself forward. He immediately began to drift through the air of the room, disturbing nothing at his passing. He watched as the wall on the other side of the room got closer, and closer. When he struck the wall, he struck it arm first. Fingers turned to light puddles, followed closely by hands, legs, and then his face. He fully touched the wall, and became a white layer of ephemeral light upon the orange surface. His eyesight was briefly impaired, but as he thought about what was happening, he wondered why his eyesight was impaired at all. He was literally light, right now.

With that thought, and a mental turn, Erick became a puddle of light on the wall, that looked back the way he came. Another point of intent-filled mana pushed Erick off of the wall. His hands came out of the white puddle first, followed by his knee and then the rest of him. He drifted back into the open air of the room, facing the interior.

He set his feet down to catch himself, and canceled the spell. Weight returned. Breathing came back. His eyesight returned to its normal location of out from his eyes. Normalcy was restored.

He mumbled, “I wonder if shadowspiders even have lungs? Or spiracles... whatever spiders usually have.”

Erick had not really experimented with lightwards in the way he was planning, now, but he felt he should, just to see if he was misunderstanding something. He plucked a pebble from the floor with [Stoneshape], then cast a special ball of blue light around the pebble; the outside of the wardlight was solid blue, but the inside was solid white.

As he held the wardlight in his hand, he could already tell that he was on the right track.

The wardlight flickered blue around his hand, but where it touched the skin of his wrist, it was deformed. Tiny flickers of white light escaped against his skin.

He went to the door of the room, the only surface that was thin enough for this experiment, and pressed the blue wardlight to the surface.

Just as he expected, the wardlight deformed upon contact with the solid surface, turning into a disjointed puddle against the solid door. White flickers escaped at the joining. The radius of the wardlight was more than enough to fully go through the door, too, but the light did not appear on the other side.

It was possible that [Lightwalk] turned a person into something similar to a wardlight version of themselves, at the time of casting. He was able to get a version of himself that breathed, and another that did not, but neither version actually needed to breathe. Neither version needed to actually be physically whole, either, as Erick was able to smush himself against the wall like wardlight with no ill effects afterward.

Erick dismissed the blue wardlight around the stone and set the stone on the windowsill. He turned back to the room and tossed a complete lightmask into the air; blocking out all light in a meter sphere. A darkness appeared, like a black hole. Erick turned himself to light, then touched the darkness.

His lightform body did not deform against the black space, but his fingers touched the darkness, and made it solid. Or maybe his fingers turned solid? Whatever the case, the complete maskward was a barrier, unlike touching the wall, or a floor.

Erick dismissed the maskward. In its place, he conjured a shadowy space, where half of all light was blocked. Touching this dim space was like pressing his hand into wet concrete; he could do it, but he felt resistance...

Erick pulled his hand back, dismissed the shadowy orb, and went through all of his senses.

Touch was the first offender to get scrutinized, because aside from touching the maskward, which he had definitely done, touching anything else felt like a simple pressure that deformed his lightform body based on the degree he pressed into the object. Touching darkness felt like touching something real.

Poi just nodded.

Recreating [Teleport] would likely be a great deal more trouble than [Blink]. When he was experimenting with [Lightwalk]’s pseudo-[Teleport] range, he dumped a thousand mana into the spell but still only managed to travel a hundred meters. Maybe there was a range limit when it came to working the spell how Erick was working the spell, or maybe there was an exponential growth curve to blipping mana costs? It was hard to tell which theory was more true.

And then there was the matter of splitting his senses between two locations 1000 kilometers apart. Where would he even start with that requirement? Through [Scry], perhaps? But that would make a tier 2 spell, wouldn’t it?

Erick quickly came to the realization that there was a reason [Blink] and [Teleport] were both Basic Tier spells, even though you needed the first before you could buy the second. Recreating [Blink] had been easy; barely an inconvenience. Recreating [Teleport] would take a lot more experimentation.

Maybe he needed [Greater Lightwalk]? Or maybe not? How had Everlin Etherspray done it? She was the air elementassi who had created the first spatial magic for the Script, but she had died in a time of turmoil, along with every other Half on Veird. She left few legacies behind.

... Apogee had probably tracked her life? Maybe? He was a Spatial Mage, after all. Had he done that in order to try and find a way back home?

... How far had he gotten in his search?

Erick had to go see about the lake and the ranch, anyway. Maybe Apogee would be there, clearing glass?

How long would it take for Apogee to open up about his experiences as a Spatial Mage? Could Erick even get him to do that? Apogee was obviously reluctant to talk about his planar experience, but maybe he’d be okay talking about his spatial magic?

- - - -

Erick expected Apogee to be there, working among the black, spiked and puddled glass north of Spur, but he was not. Plenty of other people were. Dozens of platforms floated over the dark land, each of them carrying two or three people. By Erick’s estimations, one person had to be controlling the platform, but everyone on the various platforms seemed to be working on the glass below. At their passing, black glass turned to dark sand. Maybe it’d turn back to orange after some rain?

Not all of the land here was the same. In one part of the land a chunk of glass the size of a small house had been lifted from the rest. It was here that Erick found the organizers of the cleanup effort, all floating on their own platforms around the large protrusion; Mage Guildmaster Sirocco Zago, along with several other people that Erick had seen before, but couldn’t quite remember. Erick floated his platform, including himself and Poi, to the grouping. As he got closer, a woman there noticed him, then spoke to Zago.

Zago turned and waved at him, calling out, “Hello, Erick!”

Erick floated his platform to the meeting, saying, “Hello, Sirocco. So we’re just turning it back to sand?”

“Mostly: Yes.” Zago stepped to the edge of her platform, nearest to Erick, as she gestured to the large, uneven ridge of black glass behind her. “Except for the larger prominences like this one, it’s all getting turned to sand.”

Erick looked at the black glass protrusion again. It was kinda artsy? Maybe that’s why they wanted it? He asked, “What’s going on with that one?”

“Some of these larger pieces might hold enough remnants of the Red Dot to allow us to understand the Red Dot. It destroyed souls, after all, and not through any necromancy, but through pure power that rewrote Reality into Fire.” Zago waved a dismissive hand through the air, saying, “But that’s for the [Dispel] mages. They’ll give us some insight into unraveling that spell later, I’m sure. That’s not my field of study.”

Erick looked to the people near Zago. A few of them were silently stealing glances Erick’s way, but two people only had time for each other, and the rock. One of them was a pale orcol woman, while the other was a dark wrought incani man.

Erick said, “I heard there was some difficulty with [Dispel]ing the Red Dot.” He asked, “Was the Red Dot just too expensive?”

The wrought must have heard Erick, because he spoke up, “No.” He interrupted his conversation with the orcol woman to turn his attention to Erick, saying, “It was a 10,000 mana spell, at most.”

The orcol woman argued, “It was not that cheap.” She glanced toward Erick, saying, “25,000, at the least. It was the spell of an archmage of some sort.”

“A savant, perhaps. No one I ever heard of,” said the wrought.

Zago said, “Archmage Flatt. May I introduce to you Ranari Irinsi, and Hadragog Newfield.”

Erick said, “Hello.”

Ranari, the wrought, frowned at Erick, saying, “You realize, of course, that your premature detonation of the Red Dot was an ill conceived and almost disastrous end to Spur. Thank the gods for the real archmages like Opal who managed to save the lives of everyone you almost doomed to a fiery end.”

Erick faltered in a response, and Ranari sneered. Anger bloomed in Erick’s chest.

Erick practically spat out, “Did you try and fail to stop the dot? Yes? Okay then. Case closed.”

Ranari chuckled ever so slightly, before saying, “I’m not pretending to be an archmage, unlike some people who shall go unmentioned. All I am is a Dispeller.”

Erick did not look to Zago. He did not look to anyone else. He just nodded, and turned his platform around. He heard quiet, angry voices behind him, but he did not turn to see whatever was going on back there.

But then someone yelped.

Erick turned around just in time to see Hadragog standing where Ranari stood, and Ranari crash to the black glass below. Ranari stood up atop the glass—

Erick turned away. Seeing Ranari get pushed to the ground didn’t make him feel any better. Somehow, it made him feel worse. In a split second, his day had gone bad.

And then he felt bad for feeling bad.

When he had floated far enough away from Zago’s gathering, and his words would not easily reach anyone else’s ears except for Poi’s, Erick asked, “Did I do right, trying to stop the Red Dot? I showed you [Pure Reflection Ward]. It reflects all magic, perfectly. When Jane used it, she managed to make the Queen of the Forest kill herself on her own spell.” He looked around. “But I think when I used it, I just stressed out Opal.”

Poi said, “I have it on good authority that you did not stress Opal’s ability to shield the city. She was only able to block the Red Dot’s fire because most of it had been directed away from the city.” Poi said, “Ranari is a known misanthrope. He is a great Dispeller, but best not to pay him any mind in any social situation.”

“... How bad would it have been if it hit?”

“Messalina’s village was two kilometers wide, but the crater that replaced that location was also two kilometers wide, with well defined edges. The forest beyond her village did not burn; the Red Dot fit the location.” He added, “It is entirely possible that the Red Dot would have carved out a two kilometer hole where the Courthouse is, but it’s theoretically possible that the Red Dot would have carved all the way to the walls. It was a magnitude 9 spell, after all.” He gazed at the black glass all around them, saying, “It certainly created a fire storm 20 kilometers wide, with enough power to melt glass and burn Reality.”

Erick felt his heart drop. “Did I... Did I make it worse?”

“Obviously not.” Poi said, “You detonated that spell early, bringing it from a concentrated magnitude 9 down to a diffuse magnitude 9. That’s a big difference.”

Erick sighed into the northern wind, saying, “You’re going to have to explain that magnitude system to me some day, Poi.”

Poi smiled, saying, “But not today.”

“... I guess not.”

Erick began summoning Ophiel. He had the first one cast a full power [Prismatic Ward] across their floating platform. Then he sent out the rest with [Stoneshape], and directions to turn black glass into fine sand. When his mana came back, he summoned more Ophiel; quickly reaching the full ten.

And then they went to work, together, each of them casting an Aurify’d [Stoneshape], each of them flying in formation, with Erick in the lead. They rolled across the land turning black glass into black sand.

Not all sand was created equally. Erick knew this well before he came to Veird, or to Oceanside, to learn about such spells as [Stoneshape] in a classical classroom setting. And besides, Al spoke about the intricacies of [Stoneshape] enough to jog Erick’s memory.

The classifications of sand was determined by the size of the particles. Sand that is so fine you can’t tell the particle size is actually clay. Between being able to see the particles and clay, you have silt. Sand is anything with a particle size large enough to see; mostly. [Stoneshape] did okay making clay, but clay-making with magic was a process. That was probably what the slow moving people were making.

Or maybe they were making something else?

Whatever the case, Erick and his Ophiels went about making sand. The glass was as much as four foot deep in some locations, but mostly it was only a foot deep, or maybe two, and all of that needed to go away. They’d need clay to make the lake bottom, but other people could do that. Turning this solid, glass land, into workable dirt came first.

Poi spoke up when they were done with the first kilometer of transformation, “Guildmaster Zago has informed me that she appreciates your zeal, but would appreciate it more if you could pretend to have done enough, and let the other people also work to repair their home, too.”

Erick looked up and out. There were maybe only five other groups of people out here, but no one had gotten near each other; there was plenty of work to go around.

“... Please tell her that I’ll do another square kilometer, and then stop.”

Poi nodded. “I will inform her of your decision.”

- - - -

They didn’t want him turning the land back to sand, either up north or anywhere else outside the wall. There were no books to read. The house was immaculate; a place for everything and everything in its place. He asked Poi to ask Liquid if she wanted any more Stat rings and which kinds, but the Army’s Quartermaster declined his offer with little explanation. Dinner was in the oven, cooking away, and Kiri had already made dessert. That dessert was sitting in the kitchen, under a glass cover, right now. Teressa was out working with Merit and the Guard; she had formally transitioned to a soldier of the Guard sometime in the last few days. Erick was kinda miffed about that. Not that she would transition, or anything like that. But he was worried about her.

He was worried about a lot at the moment, but he had done everything he could do aside from more magical experiments, and right now, he couldn’t do much except for worry.

From whatever the Shades were up to, to Jane getting in deeper with Oceanside, to Rats joining up with Messalina, to the fact that there was a power vacuum for hunters in the Crystal Forest. He had hoped that Apogee might show up and take his mind off some of his worries with a good, distracting conversation, but a kid wearing a blue vest and a blue badge appeared at his doorway, carrying a letter declining Erick’s offer of dinner and clippings from his cinnamon trees.

Standing in the foyer, after the kid was gone and the door was shut, Erick brandished the letter at the air, asking Poi, “Did he take some clippings from somewhere else? I thought he would want to know where the cinnamon flavor came from!” He settled down, saying, “I was all ready to talk about the spice trade back on Earth.”

Poi seemed to lightly wrestle with some hidden emotion, then said, “I doubt he’d want to hear it.”

“... You’re probably right.” Erick folded the letter back up. He liked to hold on to the letters, and this one would be the start of a new collection. Or maybe not. He'd set it aside for now, anyway. He asked Poi, “Does Mog have any monsters to kill? Shadow monsters would be good.”

“You cleared her list weeks ago.” Poi paused. He reluctantly offered, “If you wish to try your skills against monsters from the Hole, we can go there at any time.”

Kiri called out from down the hallway, “A hunting trip?” A chair scraped across the stone floor, moments before Kiri appeared. She looked at Erick with hopeful eyes, and Sunny wrapped loosely around her shoulders. “I want to try some things with Sunny at the Hole.”

Erick saw Poi’s unhappiness out of the corner of his eyes. He said to Kiri, “Then you and I can go from here with the [Familiars] and Poi doesn’t have to worry.” He added, “Oh! And we can duel like how we used to, but without holding back.”

Kiri’s eyes lit up green, as she said, “I accept.” She paused. She asked, “Do we need to register the trip with the guild if it’s just the [Familiar]s?”

Poi said, “If you aren’t going yourselves, then that’s just extra paperwork that no one would care to record or file.” He added, “It’s only to keep track of where adventurers were last seen, anyway.”