TVisTV Book 4: Chapter 11 (RAW) (Patreon)

Chapter 11- Reflections

“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty.”

- Bertrand Russell.

At last, she had reached a true milestone: a tier-three spell, and with it, the truly important Mana Manipulation skill. Crystal Pillar would give her power. Mana Manipulation would allow her to guide that power with intent.

And intent was shaped by belief. Among all the souls in this world, no one believed in herself more completely than Seraphina de Sariens. In a world where raw belief was a temple to power, that certainty carried very real and very dangerous consequences.

Each spell was unique to its caster. Even when two spells bore the same name and belonged to the same tier, subtle differences always emerged when they were cast by different people. It was a matter of the soul’s shape, and of the burdens placed upon it.

Now, it was time to discover the shape of Seraphina’s.

She called to Crystal. “I ask the spell, what are you…”

Crystal answered as her voice rose in song as she chanted, while her hands and fingers wove additions and subtractions into the spell, altering its structure one careful thread at a time. Enough to make Crystal Pillar truly hers.

High above in the vast open blue of an early winter sky, a seed formed. It was something that was both meant to be and not meant to be. Fed and watered by light and Mana, it grew, and grew, and grew.

The power did not come solely from Seraphina herself. Rather, it drew upon the ambient energies all around her, most importantly, the sun. The Mana cost, steep though it was at fifteen points, served only to shape the spell. The rest of the energy came from the world itself.

Fractals bloomed high overhead, logic and intent blending into something devastatingly solid.

Seraphina raised one hand. Then she brought it down, and a finger of a roseblush crystal god fell from the heavens.

Tia laughed, a bright, delighted sound, almost too small for the enormity for the sku falling. The pixie spun once in the winter air, as she reached out with both tiny hands. Not to seize, control, or direct the spell, but to join it.

Seraphina felt it immediately.

A thread of something wild and old wove itself through her magic, slipping between the clean facets of Crystal like vines growing through the cracks of stone facade. For one alarming instant, her first instinct was to reject it. This was her spell, her power, her intent made manifest. Then the Resonance struck and it sang through her bones.

Crystal answered Fae. Logic answered whim. Shape answered growth. Her spell, so brutally ordered, accepted that impossible little contradiction and became more than what she had cast. The roseblush light deepened, brightened, and fractured into a thousand internal rainbows as the descending pillar caught the pale winter sun.

Then it hit the earth and the quiet patch of woods ceased to be quiet.

The impact was not merely a crash. It was the sound of a mountain deciding, all at once, that it had grown tired of standing upright. Snow exploded outward in a white ring, blasted from the ground in a rushing wave that stripped branches bare and sent frozen powder hissing through the air like fine glass. The old trees nearest the impact bent away from it, their trunks groaning, their black branches whipping beneath the force.

The ground bucked and groaned.

A pillar of rose crystal drove itself deep into the frozen earth, not falling so much as declaring itself present. Soil, ice, roots, and dirt burst upward around it. For a heartbeat, everything was light and thunder. Shards of crystal erupted from the point of impact in jagged blossoms, spearing through the snow in sharp, geometric blooms. Each facet caught the sun, broke it, and threw it back in blinding fragments of pink, gold, and white.

Seraphina felt the shockwave strike her a moment later.

Her cloak snapped behind her. Her boots slid half an inch through the snow. The trees shuddered as if an invisible giant had run a hand through them, and Kiwi let out a furious caw from somewhere above before taking wing in an undignified flurry of black feathers.

Tia only laughed harder, delighting in the chaos of the moment.

“Yes!” the pixie cried, darting in a dizzy circle around Seraphina’s head. “Yes, yes, yes! That! That was the pull!”

You have slain Unknown 1 experience gained.

You have slain Unknown 2 experience gained.

…

A deluge of messages crossed her inner eye. Inconsequential to the girl growing drunk on her own power.

The massive Crystal pillar stood in the clearing like the finger of some buried god pointing accusingly toward heaven. It was beautiful. Horribly beautiful and veined with faint threads of gold-green light that pulsed softly where Tia’s magic still lingered in its structure. Around its base, the ground had been carved into a shallow crater, snow melted into steam at the edges, roots severed cleanly where they protruded from the torn earth. A few flakes of snow drifted down, falling against the warm crystal and vanishing into vapor.

Light was the key, the young girl realized.

Seraphina lifted one hand and flexed her fingers. Then she slowly curled them into a fist.

The pillar exploded. For one impossible instant, the crystal seemed to hold its shape, beautiful and perfect and utterly still. Then the chaos within it could no longer be contained. Or rather, what appeared to be chaos. In truth, it was only another pattern, another command written into the spell by their combined intent.

The pillar burst outward in a storm of invisible shards.

They flew with lightning speed, screaming through the winter air with a sound like glass being dragged across steel. Snow vanished in cutting rings around the impact point. The nearest trees were lacerated from root to crown, their bark peeling away in long ribbons as if flayed by unseen knives. Branches severed themselves in midair and tumbled down in pieces, scattering needles, frost, and splinters across the clearing.

The snow-covered ground was carved open in hundreds of thin, precise lines. Dead leaves, buried under white frost, erupted upward in shredded fragments, only to be cut again before they could fall.

And yet not a single sharp shard touched Seraphina.

The storm parted around her as if she stood within the eye of some invisible hurricane. It curled away from Tia as the Pixie spun delightedly through the air, laughing all the while. It avoided Kiwi too, though the crow had puffed himself up on his branch and looked deeply offended by the entire affair.

The magic obeyed, for it was governed by her overwhelming will and intent.

Seraphina stared at the devastation spreading around her, at the trees bleeding sap into the snow, at the crystalline dust glittering briefly in the cold sunlight before fading away. The spell had not merely struck. It had bloomed, shattered, and chosen what deserved to be cut down.

You have slain Unknown 2 experience gained.

You have slain Unknown 1 experience gained.

…

You have learned Mana Manipulation (lvl.2)

You have gained 1 Intelligence.

Her eyes scrolled down past the plethora of death notifications, dismissing what must have been sleeping woodland creatures unfortunate enough to exist within the radius of her experiment.

There it was, the proof of her efforts. The young girl laughed with Tia, their voices joining in the cold winter air, the notes wicked and pure.

***

The young noblewoman had expected some change within herself, some fundamental shift in how she saw the world. That was, after all, the cost of magic, the price all practitioners paid each time they dragged a paradox into reality. Instead, she found nothing, which was odd and flumoxxed her greatly.

Perhaps she simply could not notice the change until it was too late, like some creeping cancer slowly rewriting and replacing her from within. Or perhaps, as she much preferred to believe, her sense of self was strong enough to keep her centered. The logic of Crystal, unlike Holy magic, might have layered itself neatly over the intrinsic structure of who she already was, reinforcing rather than distorting.

Again, it was a ship-of-Theseus problem, and probably not worth too much thought. So she decided not to give it any.

She began riding back toward town at a pace somewhere between a canter and a trot as the sun sank slowly into the horizon. She looked out ahead at the road before her, but her mind was wandering over a mathematical problem she had once seen. The plane unit distance problem, if she remembered correctly. An old question mathematicians had attacked with square-grid configurations and increasingly elaborate arrangements.

Seraphina’s mind, however, drifted beyond that, constructing higher-dimensional lattices and folding their relationships down into the plane. It seemed a far more efficient approach than the old grid-based structure.

Her horse snorted, as if in sympathy for reasons known only to itself.

The palfrey beneath her was not quite as gentle as her own Nina, and far too easily distracted by the occasional stubborn patch of green poking through the snow along the roadside. Still, its gait was smooth and quick enough to be pleasant.

Seraphina rubbed its neck and whispered soft words to it. “Buttercup,” she murmured, coaxing rather than commanding.

The horse flicked an ear back toward her and increased its pace.

Seraphina smiled faintly. She had promised it a lump of sugar from the pouch at her waist for precisely such an occasion, the amulet at her neck making sure the animal understood exactly. Inspiring others to greater performance had always been one of her joys in life.

***

With Tia perched on her shoulder, casting minor Glamours of distraction, it was an easy thing to slip back into the keep without raising too much of a fuss. Seraphina did wish the pixie would reduce the amount of inane chatter, but overall, she found it rather endearing. A bit like a budgerigar that was much too excited.

When asked about her comings and goings, Seraphina had always replied that she was merely taking rides to break up the hours spent behind the walls of the keep with suitable diversion. It was a simple enough explanation, and plausible besides, which made slipping past the guards very easy.

It was, in its own way, a form of stealth. And, the world itself seemed to agree.

You have learned Stealth (lvl.1)

You have gained 1 Charisma.

She passed by a laughing Sir Frest, who was sharing a bottle that looked suspiciously like it came directly from her grandmother’s cellar with some of his new ‘friends’. Their eyes, it seemed for the better part, slid off her. 

Now, the Charisma bonus she did not understand, but she just shrugged her shoulders as she passed her fur coat to one of the servants.

Stretching in the warm room, she sat down on a soft high backed chair, eyes going over the one of the room’s painting analyzing the golden ratios she saw in its composition. While she was lost for a moment appreciating the piece of art, the door suddenly opened.

In strode her friend, Desdemona looking quite excited.

“Is it true we are having our portraits taken tomorrow!?” she half squealed, all girlish excitement at the prospect.

It was the first Seraphina had heard of this news, her mind of late more focused on her preparations and going over the missives from the Lehman’s bank. Running a corporate empire was difficult, running one indirectly and through proxies, double so. The one good thing was that Miriam had found someone to hold the fort down, freeing her to come within the month to once again attend Seraphina as was her primary duty as her personal maid.

“Well, Desdemona, I do believe it will come out beautifully. We shall have to decide on what room we shall have our portraits taken won’t we?” she replied, all smiles.

In truth, however, Seraphina dreaded sitting still for hours at a time, or that was what her inherited memories supplied her with. Vague incidences of tantrums when an artist too far too long in rendering her raw beauty had etched itself in those same memories.

Perhaps she would have to introduce this world to basic photography?