Applying Exotic Metaphysics (Return, 22.1) (Patreon)

AN: Rest in peace, Julian LeFay. You helped build some of my greatest inspirations.

The tower is barely standing. Transient, drifting. It looked like a faint sketch of the White-Gold Tower in the Imperial City, only with harsh edges and angles. Now and then, light sparks from its crystals, casting faint beams of light across the ground.

Shadowrend sat perched on my nose, the lenses shifting and contorting.

The sky was empty. There was no tower there.

No one else was near. It was a blasted, wasted landscape.

But it also wasn’t a blasted, wasted landscape. It was both at once, divided. I was standing in the empty field, mostly. But through my shadow, through a possibility that wasn’t possible, the tower stood.

The beams of light, the reflections and refractions of all the colors… None of them were all in one place either. Their rays divided the world. As the sun moved, their angles changed, and each of the lights shined upon different parts of the landscape. Transforming light, or so it looked in my perception, as the grass became barren, and then clovers, and then wild flowers, long-untouched by mortal hands. 

My Ritual remembered. Mirror Magic. It was the art of division and reflection. Like a prism dividing light into its wavelengths. It was concerned with only truth, but it could reflect truth- or a specific aspect of truth, fragmented and separated.

But my Shadow Magic… Part of it was congealment, the connection between disparate shadows becoming one thing. I stood there…. And focused. Illusory copies of myself stood up. Each slightly altered, twisted forms- alternate shapeshifts of myself, booted into the world through magic.I couldn’t hold it for long- it was taking a ton of Potentia- but I wouldn’t have access to Potentia where I was going.My selves began to walk from this place. They stood in the beams. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, Violet.

I walked through each of them. Each one forced me into a different perception, a different angle of the world. And standing in all of them, in different locations… I collapsed the spell.

The tower dominates the area, pointing upward like an accusatory finger. It’s almost oppressive. The White-Gold Tower redone in red and gold, harsh edges and angles of reflected sunlight beaming down scintillating colors. 

I could feel its presence overbearing on my mind, pushing down at me. This was the Crystal Tower’s Law. It was a mirror of Aurbis, each of the beams represented a spoke of the wheel. My Sea of Maybe, I felt, wouldn’t open here. There was no maybe in this place. In fact, my potentia was… not draining, exactly, but congealing. Things were becoming more solid, more certain. I was a shadow mage, first and foremost, and this place was cutting me off from it.

So I shouldered my bag and approached the tower.

The gates were closed. On either side, Guardians stood tall and proud. White crystals grew from their form, encasing ancient elven armor. Golem bodies, Atronach souls. Ancient Ayleid replications of Dwemer artificer work. They started to approach, too fluid to be animunculi and too perfect to be mortal. They had swords stuck in one hand, and a shield in the other.

I pulled my new halberd from the mount on my lower back.

I ran my hand along the base. Bonemold, layered together with transmuted malachite instead of resin. Dwemer metal weighted brackets along the shaft for balance. An ebony blade, sharpened to a razor keenness with the best skills my Warrior could manage. A varla stone set into the back, empowering the enchantments.Instead of anything fancy… I went with something practical. A shield spell for the weapon itself. This fucker wasn’t going to break unless it ran out of power.The guardians accelerated as they saw me drawing my weapon- their slow march into a sudden lope.

First, I blasted off a destructive bolt of energy. They didn’t even seem to care- and I quickly figured why.The spell skittered off of it, bouncing back, reflecting back toward me. With a whisper of magickal intent, I contorted the fist that had cast the spell, and the destructive bolt twisted through the air, curving away from me.Of course these assholes have spell reflection. So instead… I cast a quick few spells.Fortify Strength. Fortify Speed. Fortify Endurance.

Then I shot off like a rocket.

The guardians raised their blades, readying their shields. They stood in the way, prepared for my charge. 

I jumped above them, still sailing forward as I angled myself upside-down. I shot past them- and with a burst of magic, I blasted them with raw force. Enough of an impact that it would flatten them into the ground.

Which was reflected, of course, shooting me back up and forward. 

I slammed into the gate feet-first with enough speed that my joints protested, despite the magic, and dust kicked itself up around me.It didn’t open, and I landed with my halberd’s tip sandwiched between the crack between the gate’s doors, its backspike stuck against the rear end of the gate’s lock. I tugged and twisted, trying to slice through the locked door. There was the tell-tale buzz of two shield spells scraping against one another. One, my halberd’s. The other, the gate’s lock. The two spells buzzed, both tugging at the shields while pushing at the objects the shield magic is embedded into.

Of course it wouldn’t be that easy.

… The power source was the guardians, of course. While the other external crystals hanging from the tower was meant to pull varliance- and thus magicka- from the world, they wouldn’t leave their main defense powered by something that could be targeted without difficulty.So it’d be the guardians. Mobile. Ancient, and probably intelligent by this point.

I unhooked the halberd, pulled it free, and landed at the base of the tower. This time, my back was to it… and the fight began.Sparks danced between their weapons and mine. They had shields and swords, but I had the range and mobility.

A few minutes later, I’d taken their measure. They were strong, but nowhere near as boosted as I was. Their durability was the real problem. My halberd’s bladed edge can’t do much… but the beak was. They got slower and weaker when some of their crystal was broken loose, as I’d discovered with a lucky hit. But I’d have to hit them a lot, I’d wind myself on these two, and it seemed like the crystal was growing back. This would be a war of attrition, and without access to the majority of my potions, I’d have to be careful about what I used up.The undamaged one tried to knock my halberd away from me, so it could charge in and capitalize on knocking me off balance. Instead, I balanced myself with my tail and spun on my heel- a full rotation around, and the edge of my weapon was under its feet. With a tug and a swipe, it was knocked off its feet. The soft wasteland soil compressing under its steps. The other one, slower and weaker, charged in with a sword. I dropped the weapon, dove in under its swing, and grabbed its wrist.Magicka flowed from my body, shoving into its wrist. It’s reflective ward pushed back against me. I just flexed it, flexed with my will, and kept pushing and pushing. The pressure grew greater. It slammed its shield against me a few times, trying to get it’s sword arm free. The other finally got back to its feet. Then, I felt the ward snap. In that second, with my other empty hand, I blasted it hard. The damaged guardian went sailing into the second, and both collapsed into the soil.

Interesting. I blasted one, and the momentum allowed it to hit the other one. Usually, spell reflection is a bit more metaphorical than that, able to redirect cause and effect- not just the physical magicka or spellforms. These guardians weren’t doing that. Could be they were outdated. But it meant they’d be vulnerable in ways I didn’t expect them to be.

Heh. Jsashe had been to the Crystal Tower, before. So since I’m following in her footsteps… I may as well try one of her tricks.Before they could untangle themselves, I knelt to the ground, and shoved my fingers into the soil. Magicka wicked into the ground, into the soil and stone and earth. “Sixth Circinate,” I said. I wasn’t using her magic the same way she had… But it helped the mnemonics. “Pitfall.”

The soil loosened and lifted. Stone twisted and contorted to my will. As I pushed liquid stone in, over their limbs, they sank in place. When the magicka touched their bodies, it recoiled. I let it, thus restoring the stone to solidity.Pinned and locked in place, they couldn’t do anything but writhe as I stood over them, halberd in hand.Sorry, Lovilian. You’ll have to build some new guardians when I’m done.===

“Heeeeeere’s Mary!” I called. Then sighed. Despite the grand, arching walls and ceilings, the beautiful crystal light fixtures and ancient prayers inscribed into the walls… I was still looking for the Thalmor.But there was nobody in here, either.The Crystal Tower was abandoned. Every floor was different, but this was one of the universal things. I’d been exploring this place for hours. Not only were there dozens of floors, but each floor had its own alternate versions. Many of them were research rooms of various types. Isolated labs kept in their own Adjacent Places to keep things from getting out of control. Others were what looked like training rooms, but without knowing what or how they were training there wasn’t any use there to me. There was some useful looking stuff, and some books I hadn’t read… But couldn’t keep it all with me. My kleptomaniac instincts would have to wait.

This room, however, was interesting because of what it contained.

Daedra were kept in their own containers. Small chambers held daedra of various kinds. A dremora gave me a jaundiced expression. A flame atronach shuddered in place, echoes of itself splitting adjacent to itself. A hissing, spitting scamp snarled, uncharacteristically aggressive for its kind as it threw itself against the force wall.

The notes were about the specimen, and what they were doing to them. And what I saw… was eerily similar to something I’d worked with Divayth Fyr about in the past. In fact.. I looked through their books and paperwork… and found our treatise. Notes in the margins, and some inserted pages… Including a sketch of Sessalan.Sessalan’s contract. When I’d bound him under that name, I’d isolated the aspect of him that was willing to serve. When I summoned him, I wasn’t summoning the full entity, but a fraction.

And here the altmer were using our research to further their own means. The scamp, isolating aggression from mischievous. The dremora, something about civility. The flame atronach… A division between literal and metaphorical representations of fire. Which wasn’t going to work, clearly, since this wasn’t a fire but an entity that resembled fire.

Still, I was nearly done scouring this place. Once I make sure there’s nobody hiding out, I’d be able to get to the top- the Stone, whatever it was- and deal with the Thalmor.

I stepped into the next room, some kind of Conjuration lab, and paused when I got to their circle.

A half-dozen sorcerers were standing there, in full mirror logician garb. Some of them had the same face, like a few sets of twins and triplets. They were all decked out in heavily enchanted equipment. 

“There you all are,” I said.

Arms raised in unison. They each wove a different fragment of a spell, with the clear intent of fusing them together. A quick examination of the spell had me realizing it’s some kind of monstrously strong conjuration spell.

I shoved my own banishment in- and it washed away like a fire in a flood. They tromped over it like it didn’t even matter.

The tower warped. My conjuration senses distorted for a moment, and I winced.There stood a figure in full ebony. The armor was familiar, but the sword… It had been shattered, and carefully pieced back together, small bits of melted gold and blue material welding it together. “Directive. Assault Maria Mantasoni.” One intoned, and the armor began to move.

Umbra, Reforged, stepped forward.