H - 129: A Mage Should Be Better (Patreon)

In her personal lair, Emeralaphine strode through one of the multiple gateways to pocket dimensions she kept standing about, most disguised as the sort of obviously valuable but still mundane objects one would expect to find in a dragon’s lair. This one was a freestanding full-sized mirror, enchanted to display the face of whomever the viewer most bitterly envied. It had been one of her more impressive feats, not only adding a dimensional gateway spell to it without disrupting the original enchantment, but hiding it fully beneath the original.

It would have been too complex to key it to allow only herself to pass, but that was acceptable, as anyone else who stepped in here without her blessing would encounter the defenses.

Briefly.

This pocket dimension contained only gateways to other pocket dimensions, all of which were charmed to permit only herself to pass through, each housed in a dedicated stone portal. Emeralaphine stepped between two of them and through a gateway along the back wall which was disguised as an anonymous piece of stonework.

The space beyond was sizable, and mostly empty, one of the spell laboratories she kept meticulously clear until she needed it for a project, over the course of which it would begin to be filled with whatever paraphernalia proved necessary for the task. Some crates of reagents and pieces of equipment had already been deposited along the walls, but the only item of real significance established yet was the huge glass bottle in the center of the room.

It was a bottle in the sense that it had a neck and a stopper, though they were permanently sealed. Glowing runic engravings along the glass kept the air within permanently fresh, and allowed the unhindered passage of sound back and forth through the glass; to these she had added some more detailed enchantments to ensure the health and comfort of a mortal occupant. She’d originally designed the bottle as a terrarium for non-sapients, specifically plants and fungi. The augmentations were easily made, however.

As was the spell circle laid out on the floor around the bottle, blocking this particular occupant’s access to magic.

It wasn’t reinforced Timeglass, but it sufficed.

“I figured it out,” said the woman in the bottle upon her arrival.

“Did you, now?” Emeralaphine replied pleasantly, pacing forward and enjoying the deliberately ominous way her talons clicked upon the stone floor. She had practiced the gait which produced and maximized the effect, which she would rather die than admit aloud. “And what have you figured out?”

“It’s embarrassingly obvious in hindsight,” Cora d’Acron admitted, staring flatly at the dragon. “The sympathetic boundary principle. I didn’t even think to apply it to such a case, but…here we are. Obviously your mere existence as a magical creature didn’t shatter Hazepfell’s Nail, ergo the magic contained within your body exists in a segregated system separate from its access. And by extension, you could still apply magic to anything inside your body without triggering it. Elementary, in hindsight.”

“Don’t beat yourself up—about that, anyway,” Emeralaphine said with an approving nod. “It’s the oldest story in the oldest book. The greatest danger to a mage is not a more powerful mage, but some jackass with a clever and completely mundane trick the mage didn’t anticipate, because mages are predisposed to consider only magic. Wiser than you have met more embarrassing fates. How are your limbs?”

Cora held wiggled her bare toes and held up her left hand; that sleeve and her trouser legs were both ragged and stiff with dried blood, marking their disastrous encounter with dragon teeth, but the skin beneath them seemed completely healthy.

“Everything appears to be normal. You even preserved my writing calluses and the fencing scar. I got that when I was fourteen. Hells, it’s exactly as faded as I remember from the last time I glanced at it.”

“Details matter; anything worth doing is worth doing to the utmost of one’s ability. Any lingering pain? Numbness or tingling?”

“I know the symptoms of regenerated tissue rejection, and no. Everything is… To be honest, better than it has been in a while.”

“I should think so,” the dragon said archly. “You have been driving yourself absolutely into the ground, young lady. Some enforced rest was exactly what you needed.”

“The giant fangs were what I needed,” Cora replied stonily. “What possible satisfaction does it give you to make me linger like this? You know how this ends. Did you just always want an over-large, increasingly insane paperweight?”

“Even the way you speak is noticeably more lucid,” Emeralaphine said with an approving nod. “Good, good, progress. Now, I have a question for you.”

Cora sighed sourly and slumped back against the glass wall behind her. “Well, it’s my busy period, but I’ll see if I can pencil you in.”

“During your rather spectacular tirades in the courtyard, and while I was reassembling your limbs, you made it clear you were pursuing some kind of deeply personal vendetta against me in particular. So I have to ask…”

Leaning her head forward slightly, Emeralaphine narrowed her eyes, studying Cora closely. Then she spread her arms in exasperation.

“Have we met?”

Cora glared back at her, stubbornly silent now.

“I have struggled and failed to come up with anything I’ve done that would personally offend anyone during the entirety of your lifetime,” the dragon continued when the mage refused to respond. “Unless you are secretly a member of the Adjantic Order who somehow not only attained immortality centuries ago but concealed the means by which you did so from my senses? In which case, you can just sod right off. Your nasty little reprobate friends had it coming and I’d do the same again. Those were genuinely the last people I can think of who even might have a personal problem with me.”

“A mage should be better!” Cora roared, suddenly lunging upright and forward to pound her fists against the glass. “I know your history, I know the things you’ve done, what you’ve contributed to—how you’ve advanced knowledge! You participated in research, trained apprentices who went on to become archmages, you…you… You spent centuries, millennia, as someone who cared! Who helped the world, who helped shape what civilization knows about magic. And what are you doing now? Squatting in the basement of Atraximos the bloody Dread, raising his hatchlings, contributing nothing to anyone! It would be less offensive it you actually raided our kingdoms alongside him. How dare you?!”

She broke off abruptly, breathing so hard her entire body heaved, wild-eyed and with her hands clenched into trembling fists. Emeralaphine stared at her, blank of expression.

Their eyes met, and held, and the seconds ticked on as Cora’s breathing began to settle.

“That’s it?” Emeralaphine finally demanded. “That is all? You declared a bitter, personal vendetta against me on a point of…general principle? On the subject of mages who should be better, that is one of the daftest things I have ever heard.”

“Yes, I’m sure principles as a concept are meaningless to a wild beast,” Cora sneered, leaning forward with both hands against the glass. “But if that’s so, it’s by choice. I know you know better. You’re not this…disappointing thing because you don’t have any other option.”

The dragon tilted her head to one side, looking thoughtful and entirely unperturbed. “A follow-up question, if I may.”

“Well, clearly my time is yours,” Cora snorted, throwing up her hands.

“Did you begin feeling this way about me before or after your second use of self-conjuration?”

Cora jerked backward a full step, then folded her arms and turned her head away to scowl at the far wall. “Don’t try to minimize—”

“Never mind, that’s a good enough answer. You know, young mage, a mind is fundamentally a machine whose purpose is to recognize patterns.”

Cora squinted at her in confused suspicion.

“A disordered mind is often one which finds and reacts to…incorrect patterns.” Emeralaphine began pacing in a slow circle around the container; Cora stubbornly remained in place, scowling forward and refusing to turn and keep the dragon in her field of view. “I am no expert in mental illness, but a pattern I have noticed is that the mad are often forming wrong conclusions by drawing links between things which are unrelated, and ignoring evidence which does not support a pattern to which they’ve developed an emotional attachment. Really, the same mechanisms which are the root cause of anyone being wrong about anything, only magnified in scale. In particular, a disturbed mind will often protect itself from pain by transforming a dangerous topic into a more distant one to which it can find a parallel.”

She had come fully back around to the front, now. Cora stared at her through narrowed eyes, silent.

“I made a compromise, once,” the dragon said, simply standing before her again. “In a moment of…not merely weakness, but desperation, I accepted a bargain I knew would have damning consequences. Reasoning, at the time, that I was a capable person who would find a way to get through it all…intact, if not unscathed. And so, condemned myself to a spiral of consequences whose immensity I had underestimated. In a sense, I was a victim…and yet, I had no one to blame but myself. Truly, Cora d’Acron, I did not imagine you would know that about me. But now I find you are much more aware of my story than I anticipated.”

Emeralaphine tilted her head again, considering the imprisoned mage pensively. Cora, her own expression growing more wary, took an instinctive step backward.

“Parallels,” the dragon said after a short pause. “I think you will find, once you are more rational again, that I am not the mage you actually hate. Hopefully, by then, you will have the mental wherewithal to recognize hatred itself as the pointless distraction it is.”

Cora flinched, stumbling fully backward until she impacted the other side of the bottle, catching herself against the glass with both hands.

“There is…not going to be an… again,” she said hoarsely. “You know that. You know it! Why won’t you just end this already?”

“Don’t be absurd,” Emeralaphine scoffed, flicking her claws in a dismissive gesture. “The thing hasn’t been done because it is prohibitively difficult, not because it or anything is impossible. To cure brain damage, we must simply restore the brain, a poorly-understood biological machine comparable in its intricacy to the galaxy, to its correct state. Piece by microscopic piece, in as many billions of individual operations are necessary. No, I can’t blame millennia of mages and healers for washing their hands of it.”

She grinned broadly, avidly, and Cora could only stare in disbelief.

“But that is what makes it fun. Don’t you think?”

“You’re crazier than I am,” Cora whispered.

“Nonsense, the necessary steps are conceptually quite simple. We must build a complete model of the human brain, and then use that to locate and remedy the specific damage caused by self-conjuration.

“Oh, is that all?!”

“A mage should know better than to be melodramatic,” Emeralaphine chided. “The fundamental problem with both operations is the ability to process absolutely incalculable amounts of data, and channel it through an interface which sorts it into patterns comprehensible and usable to a sapient mind. Fortunately, I designed just such a thing only a few decades ago as an intellectual exercise! Of course, now I have to actually build the damn thing, which is going to require the acquisition of some rather rare components and materials… Oh, and test it, because I will obviously not be performing brain surgery with experimental equipment.”

She began pacing animatedly back and forth in front of the bottle as she continued.

“As for building the model, once we have the information processor up and running, I’ll just need to rig up a very specific application of temporal scrying to track the entire growth of the brain from conception to death. Numerous brains, in fact; a model based on a single or even a few specimens will not be useful. We are even more fortunate in that regard! The project I just finished involved temporal scrying and the construction of coherent narratives from a lifetime of actions; I can already think of several ways to apply what I learned to this new goal! I shouldn’t even need to secure research subjects or dissect anyone. So long as I scry only backwards in time, I can pick any selection of individuals who ever lived, chart the neurological development of a few hundred subjects across their lifetimes, and none of the time travel gods should take exception. I might have to explain myself to a few of them, but so long as one doesn’t alter the past or peek into the future, the case can easily be made.”

“Why?” Cora whispered.

Emeralaphine stopped, blinking, and turned back toward her. “Why the hells not?”

“Why would you go to such an effort for me?”

“Oh, come on, is that a serious question?” The dragon grinned. “Percy was quite upset by your fate, and while I am only sort of vaguely interested in her personally, my daughter cares about her very much, which makes it worth my while to make her happy. My husband will also be pleased; I do care greatly about his opinion, and while I don’t believe he’s particularly attached to you, he approves of compassion in general. I, as a matter of principle, hate to see a promising mage wasted. And think of what this project will yield in terms of advancing science! The actual cure for conjuration sickness will not be widely available at first; this thing is going to require the expertise of a grandmaster archmage and the resources of an elder dragon’s hoard. But what we will learn in the process will advance medicine considerably—and we must not undervalue the contributions of future colleagues. Once I make the method known, others will refine and improve it, making it steadily more accessible. You may be the first successfully cured case, but once it is done, you will not be the last. I am also not too proud to admit there’s an element of sheer ego involved! It has been far too long since I had my name attached to a significant magical discovery. You weren’t wrong about that. Ah, how I’ve missed that—but with Fuckboy the Dread out of the picture, I can finally get back to being me again. And of course, all of it is only sweetened by the prospect of rubbing Izayaroa’s nose in it.”

Emeralaphine grinned more broadly, making squeezing motions with her claws, which caused Cora to press herself against the back wall of the bottle.

“Really just grab her horns and grind her whole snout into my superiority. Oh, I cannot wait.”

The mage stared at her, mouth slightly open. Gradually, in silence, Emeralaphine’s avid expression faded to a more composed little smile.

“It’s usually like that, you know. In any given dilemma, there are probably half a dozen purely pragmatic reasons to do something kind, and maybe one or two to be selfish. But the selfish option is so often rooted in some primitive survival instinct—in greed, lust, fear, revenge, or laziness. And so, under pressure, the undisciplined mind will often choose to be a miserable little wretch. A mage, as you pointed out, should be better.”

“Do you actually…” Cora paused, and swallowed heavily. “Don’t jerk me around. Even a housecat will only torment a mouse so much before ending it. Do you actually believe you can do this?”

“When attempting what has not been done before,” Emeralaphine said more seriously, “there are no guarantees. But genuinely, I see no reason why not. There is no fundamental law of magic or reality making it impossible—the task is simply very difficult, for reasons we can plainly see, and for which countermeasures can, in theory, be devised. This will not, however, be finished this week. Or this year, in all likelihood. And in the meantime, a mage with advance conjuration sickness can still not be wandering around at liberty, for obvious reasons. So I’m afraid this will be goodbye, for now.”

She stepped back, gesturing with one claw, and another spell circle faded into being on the floor around the bottle, glowing with light in shades of scintillating blue and purple.

“No!” Cora squawked, jumping back and then literally bouncing off the walls as she instinctively attempted the impossible task of escaping the circle. “Don’t you—I know what that is! It’s a standard formation! Did you think I wouldn’t know a sleeping curse when I saw one?”

“Oh, come now,” Emeralaphine said in annoyance. “You’re a professional—you know better than that. It’s the dosage and the purpose that make the poison. You have to be kept confined, and keeping you awake in there for what is going to be months at least would be unimaginably cruel. I am placing you in suspended animation entirely for your own good. Also,” she added, raising an eyebrow, “I have a personal hypothesis that enforced rest will help treat the symptoms of conjuration sickness. Might as well test that out while we’re here anyway, eh?”

“Don’t you dare!”

“You are being silly. Good night, Cora. When next we speak, I expect to have better news.”

The light flashed and the circle’s shifting glow intensified into pure white, and Cora’s eyes rolled up into her head as she slumped bonelessly to the floor of her bottle.

She came to rest hovering above the ground before she could impact the hard surface; Emeralaphine slowly lowered her outstretched claw, and Cora drifted down to rest upon the bottom with her limbs outstretched, none caught in an uncomfortable position.

“I’m rather looking forward to it,” the dragon mused aloud. “You seem like you’d be a rather interesting person, when you are actually yourself. Now then!”

She turned and strode back toward the portal, thinking aloud.

“I am going to need so much quartz. And not just any quartz; the necessary purity only comes from three known deposits, and I don’t care to contend with any of the current owners. I suppose the least troublesome option will be to locate a new one. With my luck it’ll be at the bottom of the sea or some such nonsense. That’s the thing with big projects like this, everything continually spirals out into a dozen little new ones…”