54 – Borrowed Power

An artifact that allowed the sharing of mana. Saffra hadn’t known such a thing existed. Could exist. A person shouldn’t be able to share mana. Rituals and enchantments came close, she supposed, since those allowed for collaboratively fueling some grand working, but they weren’t the same as spellcasting, even if the different disciplines used the same language of the arcane.

Lady Vivi held the codex out, and Saffra hesitantly accepted.

She nearly toppled over as it dropped into her grip.

Vivi lurched to help, but Saffra recovered, straightening out with a firmer hold on the codex.

“It’s heavy! You made it look light!”

“I didn’t—” Vivi paused. “I didn’t realize. I suppose I should’ve.”

At Lady Vivi’s level, even a mage would be ridiculously strong. The reminder caught Saffra off guard for some reason. Despite the magical might her mentor displayed so often, Saffra hadn’t internalized that Lady Vivi, despite her small frame, possessed an enormous amount of physical might, too. Though they could meet each other’s gaze without either of them craning their necks, and she was arguably slimmer than Saffra, Lady Vivi very likely could pulverize stones into dust with her bare hands. And that was without enhancement magics.

Lugging the book up—the thing had to weigh thirty pounds or more—she paused one more time to eye the cover. Something about it set her on edge. The simple, minimalist design radiated an ominous aura. The black cover, despite its glossy smoothness, didn’t seem like metal or obsidian, though she had no clue what it could be instead. She swore the book had a…a presence. Like it was alive.

Some deep, instinctual part of her told her that it was hungry.

She itched to know what an [Inspection] would say. Undoubtedly, for Lady Vivi to have taken a special interest in the item, it was the sort of relic found in the deepest alcoves of the High King’s vault.

…Or the Dragon King’s vault.

“You want me to use it?” Saffra asked.

“You should be able to. I found the process simple, and there isn’t a level requirement.”

Saffra flipped open the cover to the first page. Her brow furrowed, and it took a second to recognize the symbol glowing inside: Galdrust. Reservoir. That confirmed what Lady Vivi said about the book’s purpose, not that Saffra had doubted her.

Focusing on the rune, she opened her magical senses, wondering whether this really would be intuitive. Items were often easy to activate, but something ‘intuitive’ to Lady Vivi might be impossible for any mortal caster.

The moment she focused on the page, she felt something—or maybe she’d felt it the whole time, and only now noticed. A tug. A pulling in her gut. An offer to link, to open herself to the book and accept its bounty, or to offer her own mana in supplication. With reluctance, and even more fascination, she hesitantly accepted.

An ocean.

She stood at the bottom of an ocean. All other senses fled her as she became aware of a great, titanic pressure. Mana, enough of it to drown the world, a continent-sized mass of pure, unbridled energy. Churning all around her was the power to flatten a mountain, wither a forest, boil the sky. It pressed down on her. Into her. From all directions. She was a gnat lost in the deep currents of the abyss, leviathans swimming all around her.

The link broke, and Saffra found herself screaming, having dropped the book and backpedaled with such haste she’d tripped and fallen into the snow—and then kept pushing herself backward, scrambling on all fours. She stopped, abruptly, getting control of herself.

“What? What is it?” Lady Vivi had followed, even her stoic expression breaking into alarm. “I was certain it would be safe. What happened?”

Safe?

Saffra supposed that wasn’t…wrong?

She hadn’t been in danger. For all the pressure that ocean of mana had exerted on her, wanting to be grabbed and used, the sensation hadn’t hurt. Or even been threatening. Except in the way an ant standing underneath a suspended boulder might feel threatened.

“M-mana,” Saffra managed to stutter out. “That was—yours?”

How many years had it taken Lady Vivi to gather that much? Decades? Centuries? Saffra knew how strong of a mage Lady Vivi was, but she wasn’t that strong. That was…enough raw energy to crush the Colossus within her fist like some fragile bird. She understood that on a primal level.

Or…it felt like that. She knew she couldn’t trust her instincts, not for magic on that scale. But still. Surely even for a level 1900, that book held years or decades of mana. How could a single artifact contain it? How did the book not explode and erase the entirety of the Icevein Craters, and her insignificant existence with it?

“Are you hurt?” Lady Vivi asked, having crouched down next to her, deeply concerned.

Swallowing—and her cheeks heating up—Saffra climbed to her feet and dusted the snow off.

“I’m—I’m fine. Sorry. It caught me off guard.”

“You’re not hurt?” Vivi insisted.

“No. I wasn’t in danger, you were right about that.” A flashback to that ocean of primordial energy, and Saffra’s skin went cold. “Just…” She swallowed. “That was your mana?”

“It was.” She watched Saffra carefully. “I should have partially filled a different page. The quantity was too much, wasn’t it?”

Saffra tittered, slightly hysterical. “It was a lot.”

That was one page? She had thought she’d been looking at the entire book’s contents. The codex could hold more power than that? What in the world was that monstrous relic?

Vivi pointed her staff at the book, plucked it from the snow, and levitated it over. “I can find someone else to do this. I shouldn’t have asked you.”

“No!” Saffra blurted out. “It’s fine.” The mortification settled in. Had she actually screamed? That was so dramatic. “It just caught me by surprise. Sorry for dropping it.”

Lady Vivi studied her evenly, and Saffra could tell she hadn’t convinced her.

She insisted, “Please. I want to. I wasn’t ready, but I am now.”

And she meant it: she did want to. Not just because she needed to pay Lady Vivi back in whatever tiny ways she could, but because getting to use an extremely rare artifact to channel someone else’s mana? Lady Vivi’s mana, and that quantity of it, or even a fraction? She wanted to experience that for her own sake.

This book’s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

The earnestness of her voice, at least, seemed to sway Lady Vivi, though only after a long hesitation. She flipped the book open and turned to the second page. Saffra dimly perceived an immense flood of mana moving from her mentor into the page, though, with how expertly controlled it was, she couldn’t get a grasp on how much.

“There. I should have done that from the start. I didn’t realize it would overwhelm you.”

No, Lady Vivi didn’t always think things through; Saffra had picked up on that a while ago. Like a whale swimming through the deep, Lady Vivi had only a vague awareness of the vast currents each of her movements resulted in. The sheer insignificance and frailty of everything around her. Saffra wondered if she herself could keep aware of such a thing if she were in Lady Vivi’s shoes.

Saffra properly braced herself for the second time she linked to the book, this time to the weaker page. With the first experience as her standard, the enormous quantity of mana that consumed her awareness was, certainly, lesser than before, but that was like comparing the Maw of the Abyss to a regular Kraken. Lady Vivi must have dumped her entire mana pool into the page. Surely.

Saffra struggled to come to terms with the fact she probably hadn’t. That even this was only a portion, and perhaps not a majority, of the mana that the immortal carried around with her at any given moment.

As much as one half of Saffra’s instincts had always told her that Lady Vivi was harmless, there was another part of her that was terrified of this eldritch creature.

“I can feel it,” Saffra said, not letting the veritable lake of mana overwhelm her. At least it wasn’t an ocean this time. “You want me to try casting?”

“Something simple. I’ll intervene if you find it unwieldy. Start small.”