106, 1/2

Mercy was an elmen of contradiction. Where all the other elmen rushed forward, to burn or to freeze or to swallow in power, Mercy sought to end all fights before they began. With a touch of ens paw, or a swipe of ens claw, Health and Shield were ripped asunder, but nary a hair was hurt on those whom Mercy fought. All rejoiced at Mercy’s mercy. To leave foes defenseless, to demand peace before Blood had been spilled, en was the most steadfast of all the elmen. En would never hurt without cause, and when cause came, en broke defenses like they were nothing, and like always, the other side gave up when all their defenses were laid low.

In this way, Mercy built a kingdom on kindness, a republic on rational war.

Ens pursuit of bloodless war was unlike what most of life demanded on the Continent, but ens very nature had turned enemies to friends, and with those friends, en pushed back the Monsters.

Look now to another side of the land, where an elmen named Destruction kept ens land free of Total War by spilling the Blood of all. Man or Beast or Monster, it mattered not, for Destruction tore at flesh and bone, ripping and breaking, in a way totally unlike Mercy. En attacked through it all, hoping for lasting damage, assisting ens most vaunted companion, Blood.

In this way, Destruction built a sparse kingdom by killing, a republic based on rampaging war.

Ens pursuit of a Bloody War was easily accepted by life on the Continent, for Monsters gave no second chances, and no one knew of Mercy around these parts.

Except for one.

Blood was ancient. Beyond ancient. More ancient than the stars, but not as Ancient as The Six. En had planned wars before. Many, many wars. En was planning one right now. This would not be ens last, and it was far from ens first. En did all this to birth more of ens kind, to increase ens power. For en was always at war with that wonderful child of Light and Water; Healing.

Healing wished for no war. No fighting. But that was not the Continent. War was a constant on the Continent, and so Healing had a job to do. En fixed up the broken bones. En put the flesh back together. En restored the Blood in the Body. And most importantly, Healing restored Health. And thus en made more war for enself, for blood contained was not the blood Blood wanted.

Blood was a bit of a bastard, for Blood was Blood, but under Health and Shield, Blood was more blood than Blood.

And here is a secret: Mercy was born from Blood, twice removed from the Six and a step to the center, off the path. Mercy was an agent of Blood in all but action.

Here is another secret: Healing was sibling to Blood. Another side of the coin, another side of the sphere. They were both one step from the Six, and Healing made Blood’s life all that much harder.

Here is another secret: Healing loved Mercy, like an aunt loves a nephew, for ens job was never done; Monsters were dangerous enough that Total War was a true tragedy best avoided. Mercy brought Health and Shields low, yes, but en did not harm past that.

And yet Mercy and Blood fought.

And here is the final secret, that is not so secret at all: While Healing, Mercy, and Blood, were all related, Destruction was of something else. Something aligned with the Darkness, because, as ens core, Destruction wanted to tear it all apart. War. Total War. Monsters. Kill them all and let the Gods sort them out. That was Destruction’s only way of life.

Theirs is the Story of the Continent, but it is only a small part of the Greater Whole.

 

– – – –

 

Erick left ‘Esoteric Elements’ open on his lap, and sat back in his chair. He looked around. Ophiel twittered on the perch nearby, happy to sing to himself in violins and harp sounds, while Kiri read her own books on the other side of the library. He turned back to his own book.

‘Esoteric Elements’ was mainly a book of multi-part stories each crafted to impart an impression on what each Element did, and how they were related to all the other Elements in their core story, and later on, how those multi-part stories each interacted with other multi-part stories that involved other ‘elmen’. The multi-parter Erick was reading now, was mainly about Mercy, Blood, Healing, and Destruction. Flipping ahead a bit, the next section was about River, Ash, Tree, and Rain, and had almost nothing to do with Mercy’s story. Mercy, by its part, had almost nothing to do with the previous section. But there was a common thread among them all.

The Six were always in the background, giving out boons to their close ‘elmen’ and disadvantages to the ‘elmens’ of the other Six, but Stone, Fire, Water, Air, Light, and Shadow, never took center stage. ‘Esoteric Elements’ was a story book of the children of the Six, aimed at children. This was a book that parents could read to their own youngsters, and when those children were older, and Matriculated, they could read the whole of the book, themselves.

The child parts were juvenile, for sure. A basic overview, at best. But still helpful for a multitude of reasons. The stories gave the reader a decent grasp of what the Elements were supposed to do.

But the true worth of the book was revealed in the other half of the text. At least half of the book, maybe slightly more, was written in Ancient Script, in footnotes to the sides of the text, crafted into the ink paintings, and with longer descriptions after each story, explaining, in detail, what the Elements were. Almost more importantly, were the spells that came after the stories. One example was always an [Elemental Bolt]. The other was always a [Ward] defense. These spells, when crafted correctly, would even have the Pure spell tag in their titles.

Erick could easily see how Esoteric Elements would keep a child’s imagination stoked for their entire life. From stories told when young, to well into adulthood when they implemented these spells on their own, and then past that, when those adults then had children of their own, and they passed this tome down to their own children. Some of the stories were actually good.

… Jane would have loved a book like this growing up. She would probably love to read it right now, too.

Jane was currently out with the Army, doing whatever it was she was doing. Talking to Killzone, most likely. She’d be back for dinner, and so Erick was going to make a good dinner. He did not expect Jane in the house until then.

He turned back to the book, and turned the page. Written in scratchy Ancient Script, Blood was described as the pointed lifeforce of a person turned into damage, or defense.

 

 

 

With some quick math, and thinking of his own Stats as if he were using his Crown of Stats…

He could cast an Ophiel for 225 mana. Each Ophiel had 17,000 ‘Health’.

With [Pure Blood Bolt], he could be firing off 85,000 point [Pure Blood Bolt]s every few seconds. Slightly less because each Ophiel would need to get into position, of course, but still. 80,000 point Bolts!

Actually. No. That was too simple. Erick looked down upon [Pure Blood Bolt] and felt his heart beat. He had a better thought. Any Bolt spell with Variable in its cost would work. He could do this with any Element. Maybe.

Theoretically.

There had to be a reason people did not do this.

… Probably had to do with high-cost Bolt spells not being very ‘unerring’, and easy to dodge. Maybe.

He asked Kiri, “Hey, Kiri?”

Kiri jolted from her reading. She looked up. “Uh— Huh— What?” She came out of her flow, and said, “What?” She looked ashamed. “Uh. Sorry. I was kinda in a… I should have been watching you.”

Erick flicked his eyesight through Ophiel toward Candlepoint. Nothing was out of place. He came back, saying, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll tell you if I’m actually doing anything before I do it. Anyway! Which Element do you think is best for Variable cost to inflict damage?”

“Like, spending Variable mana to make a spell deal Variable damage?”

“Yes.”

“Hard to do for damaging spells. Easier to do for defensive spells.” She glanced to Ophiel, sitting on his perch, and Sunny, sitting in a coil on a nearby shelf. “Usually you don’t want to spend Variable Mana to achieve an attack, because it can be avoided, and then you have no mana in the pool. But with Ophiel—”

The feathered lump trilled to hear his name.

“—yes yes. With Ophiel, I could see that…” She thought. Her eyes went wide, as she excitedly said, “You can do this with any Element. Pick the one with the best secondary effect. It could be very… Impressive…” Her voice trailed off. Mirth vanished. She said, “I don’t know about this. It seems wrong. The goal is high damage low cost. The goal is to kill the target in one spell, and then be able to do that 50 more times. But with this idea, and with our [Familiar]s… This idea of yours has merit, but I feel like I am overlooking something fundamental. But now that you’ve brought it up, I think I’ll make a Radiance one. Or perhaps Fire. Something to burn for a while…” She decided, “Yes. Burning for 2 times cost would be decent. Or perhaps Firelight… something.”

That was another thing that had been bothering Erick. He asked, “About that ‘Radiance’. Why did you and I get ‘Firelight’ when we tried for Fire and Light combos?”

“That’s a regional variation.” Kiri said, “I went over my spells and though some say ‘Firelight’, I made one just now with Sunny, out in the Forest, that says ‘Radiance’. They’re different words in Ecks, but they’re the same word in Ancient Script.” She added, “Language drift, or poetic license from the Script and Rozeta, or spell descriptions that are only capable of showing you what you already know; take your pick. The debate over spell descriptions has been going on in arcanaeums for a long, long time.”

Erick went over his full Status, looking for discrepancies in naming conventions.

He found one.

He said, “My [Carving Radiance] is ‘Radiance’… But the spell description says Firelight.”

 

 

Kiri smirked, as she read her book, saying, “Yup. There’s a lot of that.”

Erick looked over his Status a bit more. A few spells in particular stuck out like sore thumbs: his ‘Plasma’ spells that he got from his attempts at making [Death Spiral Fire]. He turned back to his book, and looked up ‘Plasma’ in the table of contents, and found a nice little story, and a whole section on Plasma written in Ancient Script.

Plasma was an extreme form of Fire and Air, a variation on what was more commonly referred to as ‘Sun’. Fire was not actually Plasma, so it made sense that Plasma was cousin to Fire, but that still didn’t sit right with Erick. To him, Plasma was closer to Lightning. Fire and Air simply didn’t get hot enough to strip the electrons from the atoms and have them flow around in the nebulous soup that was Plasma. But maybe it was the flowing nature of Air that made Plasma come about? Or perhaps, Plasma needed Air, because air contained oxygen, and that was why—!

Plasma was cousin to Fire, and mixed with Air, because Plasma needed oxygen to burn hot enough to become Plasma! Oh man! Erick almost wanted to send a telepathic message to Syllea, right then and there. But that would have been rude. Besides: Erick had a perfectly great person to talk to, right here.

Erick asked, “Kiri? Have you ever experimented with Plasma?”

“Yup.” She lifted up the book she was reading, saying, “This ‘Dawning Sun Style’ from that bookshop is partially about Plasma, or more commonly called ‘Sun’. More about Radiance, though. Plasma is only used for battlefield movement. The majority of the magic here is a part of something the author calls ‘Breaking Dawn Radiance’, and is made for suddenly impacting [Strike]s and casts.”

Erick’s revelation about Fire, Air, and Plasma would have to wait. It probably wouldn’t have been a revelation for Kiri, anyway, seeing as how he had already told her about the interaction between fire and oxygen.

For he had literally never heard of a ‘Style’, before. Or maybe he had?

“What’s a style?”

“The tribes of Nelboor are famous for their ‘Styles’, but I never learned any. There was never any point when [Evasive Stance] was right there, and all of my enemies are monsters.” Kiri said, “Styles are magic blended with warrior skills, and they require training and assistance in order to learn from a master of whatever style you wish to learn. Think like this: instead of creating [Hunter’s Instincts], you create [Shadow Instincts], or something, along with a hundred [Strike]s, or [Block]s, or whatever. I’m not really sure how it all works, but I have heard that true masters of a Style are unto warriors what an archmage is to a mage. I don’t really believe that, though. Those people are all over in Nelboor anyway, always fighting wars. You never see them around Spur. I never saw any in Tower Town, either.”

Erick hummed in thought, then said, “Thanks, Kiri. Oh, say? I ask you a lot of questions, but you haven’t asked me any in a while. Got any?”

Kiri smiled a little. “No. You’ve done a great deal for me, Erick. You say such interesting things sometimes, that they lead me on whole different paths of inquiry into magic.” She pointed to the book on Erick’s lap, saying, “I didn’t know about the Esoteric Elements until you bought that book at that shop. And that led me to this book.” She held up ‘Dawning Sun Style’. “Which is very interesting. Probably not something I wish to pursue, though.”

Sure, she said that he was doing enough, but Erick didn’t feel like he was contributing nearly enough to this teacher-apprentice relationship. So Erick said, “Then here’s another bit of interest for you: ‘Plasma’, according to this book, is a form of Fire and Air, which is sort of how I think of it too, but not at all, because Fire is not Plasma.

“Fire is the transformation of some burnable substance into something else, and burning typically only occurs when Oxygen is present, and is therefore able to chemically react with the burning substance to release the stored chemical energy in the form of Heat and Light. Fire is therefore actually rather close to Decay, and I imagine that I will find this out when I read far enough in this book, if this book is realistic at all.

“I think, that the understanding of Plasma as a combination of Fire and Air is correct, but only in a surface understanding. The true nature of such a combination, and how to get ‘Plasma’ in your spell description, is to feed oxygen, or ‘Air’, to a fire, and thus make the Fire work to Decay the target in a more robust manner.

“But that Elemental Plasma is not the true nature of plasma.

“The point of that tangent was to say this: The true nature of plasma is as a system that is so full of Energy, or Heat, that the electrons are stripped from their atoms and everything is floating around in a soupy mess of very hot particles.” He added, “With that as the basic idea of the true nature of Plasma, then you can refine that idea into something like cold Plasma, and completely ignore the Fire aspect of normal Plasma spells.

“As far as I know, lightning was the most common form of plasma back on Earth, because normal fire from burning wood just doesn’t get hot enough to turn particles into a free-flowing soup of itself. There was also plasma in light fixtures, to cast pale glows that a lot of people used in office buildings. That form of plasma was a cold plasma; it was just used for its electrical conductivity, and when you passed an electrical current through that plasma, it created light. It did that job quite well, since it was a mass of free-flowing particles, and the electrical conductivity of plasma is usually rather high.” He finished, asking, “Now… How much of that seemed reasonable to you?”

Kiri’s eyes went wide as Erick spoke, but quickly narrowed. He had hit upon some fundamental incompatibility somewhere in his little speech, but she listened without interrupting. It was only when Erick was done, that she said, “I am not sure of this Fire and Decay connection. I mean… I can see that Fire acts like Decay… I’m not sure of this Cold Plasma idea, either.” She added, “You never talked about plasma before, when you spoke of lightning?”

“The true nature of Plasma completely slipped my mind until now.” Erick looked to one of his spells, then pushed it across the room, floating it to Kiri, saying, “By the way, have you tried making this one?”

 

 

Kiri read the spell, her eyes going wide again. She smiled, saying, “I could try.”

“You could probably do a lot more than that, knowing that the true nature of Plasma is as a collection of loose Particles without any true structure, instead of as some combination of high Fire and Air magics. In a similar vein, Radiance is probably more of an Infrared Light, sort of thing, instead of as a mix of Fire and Light ideology.”

Kiri paused, as she turned back to her ‘Dawning Sun Style’ book, with new ideas behind her eyes.

Erick thoughtfully said, “Maybe that’s why I only got ‘Radiance’ on a few of my firelight spells, instead of on all of them. I was going for the magic angle instead of the Infrared angle.”

Kiri offhandedly said, “I don’t know. There’s… There’s so much inside of all of what you just said…” Her voice trailed off.

Erick went back to reading. But he did not start at the beginning. He skipped around, looking for clues among his crafted spells, and how they related to these other ‘Elements’. One of his most interesting spells was [Vivid Gloom].

 

 

[Vivid Gloom] had ‘Radiance’ in the spell description as well as a whole bunch of Decay effects, but the main thing that caught Erick’s eye was the name, itself. ‘Gloom’ was Air, shifted towards Shadow.

The ‘Radiance’ part made a lot of sense. The spell was based upon Light of all sorts, but trapped into a space to inflict damage in that space. The trapping itself was sort of like a ‘Shadow’ effect, since Shadow came from Light easily enough, and the spell did turn all of its power inward, sucking in all light and making a void-like space. The ‘Decay’ part also made sense. Erick was going for Extreme Light, which was Veird’s term for ionizing radiation; the sort of radiation that ‘Decayed’ magic itself, or rather, removed the intent from ongoing magic. Nothing Erick knew of actually destroyed mana itself.

The ‘Gloom’ part of the spell, though… That was interesting.

Why did Rozeta call it ‘Gloom’? She named the spells—

Erick had called it ‘Gloom’. He remembered, now. Mystery almost solved, but his spells didn’t always come out the way he called them. The Script and Rozeta named all magic, as it was created. Could this here [Vivid Gloom] be some sort of interaction with his own Airy nature, according to Syllea’s dice that he had rolled?

He smiled a bit, as he wondered at the complexity that Rozeta dealt with in a single day. All these little words and hints inside all of these little blue boxes painted a vast mural of the truth of the Script, but even that mural was a small thing, compared to the enormity of mana itself.

Magic was wonderful.

For about the hundredth time, Erick was glad that he met Al, and was turned on to Scion of Focus. The time since then had been kinder to Erick because he never ran out of mana, except in extreme situations. But anyone fighting Bulgan would have run out of mana, too.

… they probably would have fought better than him, too. But Erick could work on that!

With ‘Esoteric Elements’ sitting open on his lap, Erick pondered a question he had picked up and put down more than a few times. He could switch his Scion. He could go to Irogh and pick up a quest to switch to Scion of Balance, and after completing it, his Regen would drop from 35,000 to 20,000-ish, but he could also double his base mana from 8220 to 16,440. That much mana would allow him to do much larger spells. Maybe, if he figured out some good ‘Variable damage’ spells, that much of a difference would be massive. And maybe if Jane were in his position, she would have chosen to switch.

But Erick liked his current build.

He returned to his book, and read about Radiance. It wasn’t long before he wanted to check on something, so with a bit of [Lightwalk] lightform, he picked up a book off of the shelf; the one Anhelia had given him to help him make some good light spells, to fight Shades. Most of Anhelia’s book was written in Ecks, but the spell formulae were written in Ancient Script. She had called her Fire and Light spells ‘Firelight’, both in the Ecks part, and in the Ancient Script part. Meanwhile, in ‘Esoteric Elements’ they never used the word ‘Firelight’, instead opting for ‘Radiance’. With a bit of cross referencing, Erick saw that Firelight and Radiance were almost the same word in Ancient Script. One had a scratch in the center of the word, the other did not.

For a long moment, Erick sat there, confused.

He had read the words just fine, and could even write those words down, but this particular understanding of ‘Firelight’ and ‘Radiance’ as the same word did not come to him until he did some language delving of his own. He had learned both Ecks and Ancient Script through [Language Acquisition], though, so there were bound to be some oddities here and there. Was this just one of them?

He decided to leave that alone for now. He was never that good with languages. Thank the gods for [Language Acquisition]! The answer to this discrepancy probably had to do more with the fact that mana was possibility, and possibility was shaped by language, so if a person didn’t have the right language for something, then that thing wasn’t a possibility for that person. But Erick had no idea where he was going with that thought, so it sort of flowed away from him without much care beyond ‘oh, interesting trivia’.

He returned to reading about them elmen on the Continent, and how they all worked, fought, played, and birthed each other.

Some parts of the book were weirder than others.