023 – Ashakir I: Arrivals

023 – Ashakir I: Arrivals

“Our society is predicated on hierarchy. The wise Origa and the Arila who assist them lead the People. The Karravar preside over matters magical while the godly orders of the Darra direct matters divine. Together, they ward off the Dark. The learned Kirra and skilled Dirra then form the backbone of the Republic. After them are the Shorra who handle money and navigate trade, and the Merra who toil and work to better the lives of the People. Then, below them all, are the Vekalan, who must never be counted amongst our number…”

—An Academy text describing the various castes of the Varran Republic, published 736 Y.S.

Eight days after leaving Outpost Avna, Ai finally breathed in the nearly overwhelming scent of Ashakir. She’d been stuck in a carriage for most of the journey over, trying to figure out how to finagle a detection spell for the Burned Brands.

The atmosphere here was intoxicating. The very air was a blend of flavors: peppery, sweet, and earthy spices, laid over foundational notes of charcoal smoke, ocean, and the musky warmth of large pack animals. The sheer depth and density—not to mention the pungency—was utterly unlike anything Ai had ever experienced before.

She’d been here before, during the game. Early in the Dirge storyline, Ashak had been a glorified fishing hamlet, a cluster of wooden shacks clinging desperately to the coastline while Player guilds fought over the old Ve’un anchored in the bay.

Now, Ashakir was a thriving city that stretched across the entire coastline.

From the north, the great Hill of Ashak for which the city was named shone in the sunlight, blue and white buildings lining streets that wound up the entire hill. To the southeast, the aquamarine waters of the Tranquil Sea sparkled in the harsh sunlight as they bled into Ashak Bay. Seabirds and birds and flying reptiles—dar—of all sizes and shapes flew across the horizon, hoping to catch a meal by following the Varran sailships that floated in the Bay.

Being in this new place was absolutely liberating.

It almost hadn’t felt worth being forced to travel by Golga caravan again, especially knowing that she and Aru could have zipped ahead on their own. It would’ve been a simple matter of asking for directions or a map. But she had said she was going to help Benessel. And she enjoyed chatting with Sari.

Besides, while she loved Aru to death and beyond, even she was starting to feel lonely without her guildmates’ banter to lighten the mood. Being around Sari and her mentor helped more than she was willing to admit.

So she buckled down and got it done.

It was easy for her personally to sense the Brands, on account of how deeply her Semblance ran through the fabric of reality. To use a crude analogy, those who bore the char of the Brand swam around in the figurative ocean that was her Semblance, polluting its waters with their every breath. This made them rather impossible to miss if she was paying any sort of attention.

The first step was to make a spell that she could have cast during the game era. She would still have been a SS-Rank Semblance tryhard, able to earn her living on a character narrative content distribution deal with the devs. But she wouldn’t have been nearly as obscenely powerful as she had become these days. Long story short, it was quite tricky to translate her personal magical senses into a chain of concepts that a modern Varran could learn.

She figured out that part in about an hour, and the only reason it even took that long was that she only had Inneol’s dead Brand to work with.

Still, the design of the Brands was ingeniously insidious, to put it lightly. Where any other spell would have been slowly carved, or perhaps pressed into reality like a stamp, the Brand instead wormed itself through the substrate of existence. It behaved like a parasite, weaving itself into and through the tapestry of thoughts and beliefs that comprised the world around it. All of that was to say that each instance of the Burned Brand was like a Gordian knot and cutting it would most certainly kill its bearer.

She still wasn’t quite sure just how the Brand’s designers had done it—and she was sure it was multiple designers from the jarring juxtaposition of the Brand’s structure, its tithing mechanism, and its explosively combustible functions. There was just no way there was only one mind behind its design.

But because all she had to work with was the thoroughly burned out Brand on the equally burned out Inneol, that was about the extent of what she could figure out right now.

Ai’s thoughts turned to Inneol, whose comatose body they were also transporting to Ashakir. She wasn’t going to ask what his fate was going to be. She had a good idea of what was waiting for him. If not wanting to put him under her protection made her a bad person, then so be it.

No, the real spellweaving problem lay in figuring out a semiotic structure that could be cast by someone whose Semblance was even weaker than Benessel’s. It was meant to be distributed widely as a broad-purpose spell.

Benessel was no pushover, to be sure. She couldn’t just ask him about in-game statistics that he had no frame of reference for, so all she had were her own estimates. Eyeballing it still placed him at the cusp between A and S-Rank, or perhaps at low S-Rank. Since he was supposed to be one of the most skilled mages currently serving in the Republic, that meant she had to scale the spell down even further.

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Ai ended up managing to figure it out on Day Four of their trip from Avna to Ashakir. Four whole days! Ridiculous.

It’d taken the rest of their journey for Benessel to learn to cast the spell—apparently her weave was “convoluted” and “unreasonably complex”. But he managed it in the end as well.

If she had access to a live Brand, on a subject willing and able to give their consent to her studying it, she’d have managed it in half the time. She thought of Lellen and Povi back in Outpost Avna, and felt her resolve tighten. She’d figure out how to help them, and anyone else they came across who was cursed with a Brand.

Ai took a deep breath again, reveling in the life that surrounded her.

Life in Tokyo had been all artificial air-fresheners and smog before she’d retreated into her apartment, and moldy, musty apartment-smell for the eight years that followed. The simulated sights, sounds, and smells she experienced in Dirge had been much more exciting, that was for sure, but they were nothing in comparison to the real thing. Even Outpost Avna had been a torrent of new smells and experiences for Ai, but the streets before her were on another level.

If Ashakir was a living organism, then the main street was an artery that cut straight from the city gates down into an as-yet unseen heart of the city. The entire thing was one roiling, shouting, and vibrant marketplace, selling everything from preserved fish sauce to construction materials to valuable trade goods.