Arcane Apocalypse ~ 182 (Patreon)

“This is awesome!” Mia squealed in joy as she kicked off the ground and bounced into the air. It was a light kick, but she sailed nearly three metres up into the air, where she hovered before gravity reasserted itself. Even then, instead of falling, she merely floated down with the grace of a feather. “Totally worth sacrificing Light Ward for!”

The enchanter think-tank had figured out how to turn the spell into a magical effect with Gabe’s help; it’d taken a while, but by now every delver had a ring holding a Light Ward enchantment. There weren’t that many of them; the process took three of those Light Elemental Mana Gems the Rift always gave, but there were enough so that Mia no longer had to waste a page of her spell book on the spell. 

Which was what allowed her to swap it out for the Featherweight spell from the junior-grade alteration runic lexicon. 

She had another few empty pages, and her Runic Model still had some space despite her rather fervent attempts to fill it. Her new runic lexicons were full of awesome or useful spells, occasionally both. Featherweight certainly belonged in that exclusive category, though it was leaning more towards awesome than useful.

After all, it was a ‘concentration’ type spell which she had to focus on and then focus some more to maintain a steady stream of mana for the spell circle. Both things she doubted she would be all that capable of doing while falling to her death. To make it worse, the spell only worked if her mana was in its Order Aspect, having a disturbing tendency to drop her on her face whenever she attempted to cast it with Chaos Aspected mana. 

It was a bummer, but the problem was not without a solution. The spell could be altered to be a duration-based one-and-done type of spell and including an aspect-converter runic string wouldn’t be all that hard either. It would take time though, and lots and lots of strenuous work to make the resulting spell just as efficient as the current version. Tacking on custom functions tended to destabilise spell circles, and she’d have to spend time optimising it. Maybe she could add in a pre-cast functionality as well if she could manage it without bloating the spell too much. 

If she managed all that, the spell would finally be one truly worthy of being in her arsenal. Until then, it was mostly just for fun whenever she wanted to feel like a helium balloon, though with some niche application. Maybe if she had to get down from a rooftop but didn’t have Sparkle on hand to Spirit Blink down? Hmmm.

There was an alternative, the Junior-grade Kineticism spell called Kinetic Dispersion Shell that could fill in the same niche. It worked through a different method, instead of making the caster lighter it dispersed kinetic forces beyond a set threshold into the caster’s surroundings. It basically negated fall damage … or just about any purely physical blows. It was neat, but a rather cumbersome spell that required a good deal of focus and ate up mana faster than a black hole. She could survive belly flopping onto the asphalt from ten stories high if the spell was active, but it ate through her entire mana pool in the span of less than half a minute.

A sudden gust of wind caught her just as she reached the apex of her jump, launching her even further into the air and causing Mia to laugh in joy as she spun head over heels. She crossed the ten metres mark, cresting over the rooftop of a three story building before she slowly began her descent. 

“Well, that looks fun,” Lina said, sounding somewhat sour about the fact that the spell only worked on the caster. It had a version called Lighten that could be used on inanimate objects, but not one that worked on other people.

“You can walk on thin air, you won’t be getting any pity from me!” Mia said as she touched down softly, grinning from ear to ear. “I bet you could do the same thing with practice anyway.”

“I’ve been trying for weeks!” Lina snapped, though instead of anger it was just a general annoyance that seemed to be aimed primarily at herself. She huffed, then gave Mia a dramatic side-eye. “But here you go, managing the trick I’ve been working on for so long in a single afternoon with your cheating magical squiggles.”

Air Elemental Infusion lightened the weight of the caster, after all, air weighed very little so an Air Elementalist should be very light as well. Except, it was hard to focus on a single aspect of an element when using Elemental Infusion, so from what Mia knew, Lina only managed to cut down a fourth of her weight with it so far. It was impressive, but that still left her with three-fourths while Mia could get down to less than one-tenth with her new spell. 

It required no practice on her part. Just the runes and the spell circle … or as Lina called them: magical squiggles.

It didn’t require anywhere near the same amount of effort as Lina’s trick, which was an effort of pure manual elemental mana manipulation. So there was some truth in Lina’s words, alas … 

“Sounds like a skill issue to me,” Mia said with a pompous huff and an imperious upward tilt of her chin. It probably wasn’t as imperious as she would have liked, considering she was pint-sized, but she had to work with what she had.

Which of course, earned her a faceful of pressurised air as if someone had taken a grassblower to her face. She sputtered and blinked, but the vile blonde witch she was friends with for some unfathomable reason just giggled at her. Even Camie glanced up from the book she was reading with a small smile, the traitor. 

They were out in one of the abandoned parks, just the three of them now that Anna and Nikki made excuses to escape. It was unfortunate, but neither of them apparently liked to spend too much time on leisurely stuff. Technically, Mia was testing her new spell and doing some spellcrafting, while Lina trained her Air Manipulation and Camie worked on her Blood Magic. However, they … hadn’t gotten all that much done besides messing around.

Not like they were in all that much of a hurry. Mia usually trained or studied alone when she wanted to maximise productivity. The smallest of annoyances could snap her out of her focus quite easily, and once she lost her flow, getting back into it was hard. Her new Orb helped with that, staring into that thing and pondering some arcane mystery was a great way to slip into ‘the flow’, as it were. Whenever she got stuck, hit a roadblock, or just ran out of ideas, the Orb just … nudged her in the right direction. It didn’t feel like it was actively helping her, more like it was merely pulling new ideas and novel approaches to a problem to the forefront of her mind. It made it practically impossible to burn out and get stuck while working on some creative or intellectual pursuit related to the arcane mysteries.

Having an Orb to ponder also tickled Mia’s fancy quite a bit. She was yet another step closer to becoming the perfect archetypal wizard, which would always be a joyous occasion worthy of celebration. 

But she’d have gone mad long ago if she spent all her time doing that. She didn’t want to neglect her friends, especially now that just calling them was out of the question. With the loss of computers and TVs, hanging out was just about the height of entertainment, especially when mixed with some magic.

After a while, Mia settled down next to her girlfriend while Lina ran off to practice her air-running a bit more. It looked fun, and Mia could tell Lina was getting better as well. She looked almost ethereal as she hopped and skipped through the sky on invisible platforms of air, giggling like some nymph. 

Mia returned her focus to the spell she’d been fiddling with before testing Featherweight, which was her trusty Arcane Shield spell. She was trying to see whether it was feasible to fuse the Arcane Shield spell together with the Kinetic Shield spell from the Kineticism lexicon. If she could manage, her shields would become near invulnerable to mundane weapons and blows. Hell, the Kinetic Shield even had an upgrade which allowed it to reverse the momentum-vector of objects striking it. 

Just imagining fighting an ogre and using that spell when it tried to smash her into paste with a club, only for the club to bounce back into its face with the same force made it a tantalising prospect. 

“Whatcha working at?” Mia asked, having grown bored of her work after roughly half an hour of repeated failures. Just to be sure the vampiress couldn’t ignore her, she dropped her chin on her shoulder to peer down at the book she had been reading for little over an hour now. 

Camie glanced at her, throwing her an amused side-eye. With a small huff, she visibly relaxed and let go of her focus … or rather, the target of her focus changed. 

“I’m trying to find useful memories to refine my new spells with,” Camie said, a near crimson fingernail tapping at a page where a spell diagram was depicted. “These spells shown in the runic lexicon are rather … simple, very neat and efficient, but simple. I have memories of my ancestors refining each into hundreds of different variants for every niche they could think of. The spell circles are simple enough in these Novice and Junior spells that an old enough vampire of Rank 2 or 3 could free-cast them.”

“Blood Mark,” Mia mumbled, reading the spell’s name aloud. “Sounds delightfully edgy … tell me about it?”

Camie indulged her, she always did. Mia loved her for it. Listening to her girlfriend’s pretty voice as she talked about her magic was just what she needed to recharge.

*****

It would be a barefaced lie to say Mia wasn’t worrying herself sick as she walked into the Lair. The Shade, as they’d taken to calling the monstrously powerful creature that Mark’s parents now served, had appeared during Mark’s last visit and kindly requested that Mia present herself for an audience. 

Gabe had spiraled a bit, but Mia convinced both him and herself that if the Shade wanted her dead, he would have easier ways to do it than to summon her. 

It was nerve-wrecking, doubly so because even Mark’s parents had no clue what their master wanted. She had been summoned for an audience and told nothing else besides to come at her ‘earliest convenience’, which everyone knew was a euphemism for ‘get your ass over here right now, or else … ‘. So of course she came. As far as she and everyone she asked knew, she hadn’t broken the terms of her guest rights in any way, so by all accounts, she should be safe.

As she walked towards that stone archway leading into the entrance hall of the Lair, Mia felt that old desperate loathing bubble up to the surface of her soul. Maybe the creature just wanted to talk, ask something inane, both Gabe and Nikki said all old beings were more or less eccentric, so for all she knew the Shade just needed help understanding a concept he read in a book from Earth. 

It made no sense why he would ask for her though, not when he had Mark’s parents on hand if he had need of an Earthling. 

Lina’s suggestion that he wanted to reenact some vampire-fae romantic-fantasy play with Mia and Camie in the leading roles was not any more likely, but it’d at least banished most of the mounting dread from Mia’s heart. It even managed to drag a snort and a smile out of her. 

All the same, the fact remained that she hated feeling helpless ever since she’d been given a crash course in it by the monsters, and even if this wasn’t intentional, she hated the Shade for making her feel it all the same. All Lina’s jokes and the others’ more rational explanations managed to do was keep her from panicking and cool her hatred into something colder.

Hatred, anger and loathing all came so much more freely since her change into a Halvyr. Was this also something that stemmed from her race, or maybe it was just a coincidence. It could just as easily have been caused by any one of the traumatic events she’d been forced to live through in quick succession. Or maybe her rising self-confidence and Will also had a role to play.

It didn’t matter. Where it stemmed from didn’t change a thing. 

Mia barely managed to keep herself from shrieking in fright when the Shade was suddenly there. Between one moment and the next, it just popped into being right in her path a few steps ahead, its immense magical presence weighing on the world around it in a way that was impossible to grow used to. 

“Greetings,” he said, featureless oval head nodding slightly as the creature clasped his hands behind his back. “Your promptness is much appreciated."

Didn’t have much of a choice, did I? Mia thought, though she dared not say it. She doubted the Shade would appreciate the sass.

Instead she just nodded, wariness and nerves keeping her tense as a coiled spring. She did not trust her voice just then anyway, suspecting it would quiver from the stress.

“It’s come to my attention that you have inquired about my collection of arcane knowledge,” the Shade said and Mia tensed, which the creature seemed to notice, tilting his head. “Worry not, I understand. Perhaps had I been a few millennia younger I would be gravely offended at what my younger self might have seen as you coveting my … my collection, but I am not. I understand that it is a source of greed, I would have been more offended had you not felt envy upon hearing of it.”

A few millennia older? Mia thought numbly, while some tension drained out of her form. It didn’t seem like the Shade was angry, or planning to kill her. That was good, better than good, really. The fuck does he mean ‘a few millennia older’ though? 

Gabe said no one above Rank 1 who wasn’t born on Earth should have been able to pass the barrier around Starhaven. He’d also claimed that no magical creature should have been able to survive the last few centuries on Earth where mana and magic did not merely dry up but were actively suppressed. 

Carmilla’s situation could attest to that. Even mighty vampires were reduced to mere shadows of their former selves and withered away, and only by taking some rather peculiar measures did their bloodline even survive into the modern age. 

So then what’s up with this creature? How did he survive where all others perished? Or is he lying? 

Even that castoff idea that the Shade might have been another returnee like Gabe no longer held any merit, if the Shade could be trusted on his word. 

“Yes … ?” Mia finally answered hesitantly after the silence started to stretch into awkwardness, and she noticed the Shade seemed to have felt zero pressure to break it. 

“Do you still covet it?” He asked, and Mia stared at it for a long moment, but couldn’t glean any information from it.

The Shade’s voice was disturbingly generic and monotone, and its body language might as well have been non-existent. What little motions its body did seemed to be entirely intentional, likely attempts at mimicking human non-verbal communication. Otherwise, the Shade was still as a statue, and its faceless head wasn’t of any help either, what with how it lacked any expressions at all. 

Mia gave it a searching look, trying to find any sign of impending violence if she looked like she was about to say yes. Of course she found nothing, the Shade was a blank sheet of paper as far as expressions and non-verbal hints went. In the end, she decided to give a slow, cautious nod.

“Good,” the Shade said, nodding and Mia breathed a soft sigh of relief under her breath. “I shall assign you a quest, should you accomplish the tasks set within, I will reward you with tomes and grimoires of your choosing from my collection. Do you find that agreeable?”

“A quest?” Mia asked haltingly, feeling like a mouse walking into a trap, but damn if that cheese didn’t smell heavenly. “And … why me? My brother is much more powerful than me.”

“A quest, yes,” the Shade said. “And because you are the one I assumed would be most tempted by what I could offer. You remind me of one too many overly curious Mage I’ve had the displeasure of having met, but for a change that covetous nature you Mages have might be to my benefit. You may acquire the help and services of others as you wish, I care not how the task is accomplished, only that it is.”

“What could we do that you can’t?” Mia asked, feeling maybe a bit more confident now than she should have. Thankfully, the Shade didn’t seem to take offence at her question.

“I am limited in ways I feel no need to divulge, I will say no more than that,” the Shade said. “I require someone to handle some matters, acquire certain things for me. You and any who assist you shall be handsomely rewarded, should you succeed in all tasks.”

“I see,” Mia said warily. This deal seemed a bit too good to be true, so it probably was. Either it was a trick, some form of deception, or these tasks would be an absolute pain in the butt. “And what tasks would you want accomplished?"

“Do I have your agreement, then?” The Shade asked.

“I would very much like to know what you want me to do, and if there are any … penalties on failure before I agree to anything,” Mia said, trying to keep the nervousness from showing. She wasn’t really in a position to negotiate, as far as she knew, but she was betting on the Shade wanting a willing gopher and not someone he’d just threatened into doing his bidding. 

Although, what if he is more limited than we thought? What if I am, in fact, in a position to negotiate?

“I require certain materials, items, reagents, objects of power, that I would have you gather,” the Shade said after a lengthy pause, through which Mia barely resisted the urge to fidget. “They are found scattered about, so the quest would take you on a journey. One item in particular, I have only managed to locate inside one of the newborn dungeons.”

Well that was a much more even deal, though it might even have been tilted vastly in the Shade’s favor depending on how rare his collection of tomes was and how troublesome gathering all the items from his list would be. 

Gabe could handle most of the gathering if he could be convinced to help, though if some things could only be acquired from Rifts, Mia would need to get her own hands dirty, and convince the rest of the party to help. 

“You hesitate,” the Shade noted. “Why?”

Well, why not be honest? “I have no idea how much actual use your tomes would be for me, and whether it wouldn’t be a more worthwhile way to spend my time to continue delving nearby Rifts.”

“I see,” the Shade said. “I don’t suppose you will take my word for it?”

“How could I?” Mia replied with a sardonic smile.

“And you would have the resources of the Astral Court before long as well, a reasonable concern that my collection wouldn’t live up to it, if aggravating,” the Shade said. “But you would get access to mine years before you could ever leave this Realm and peruse your ancestors’ libraries. Furthermore … I suppose I could ‘sweeten the deal’, as it were. You may choose a single item from my treasury as well, once the quest is complete, and I shall vow to serve as the guardian of this town of yours for a hundred and one years.”

“And there aren’t any penalties for failure? Or time limits?”

“Not unless I see evidence of intentional abuse of my good will and trust,” the Shade said. “You would find that my displeasure tends to be unhealthy for the recipient of it. If you fail, you fail and don’t get anything. It is trying to cheat or deceive me that you should be concerned about.”

Again, that was almost too good to be true. She was really starting to feel like the Shade was either desperate or the quest was going to be an incredibly challenging endeavour. 

A century. If he is truly as powerful as Gabe suspects, Graz will be safe for a hundred years. 

Mia couldn’t accurately guess how valuable the tomes or even the items from the treasury would be, but she knew what a hundred years of safety was worth. 

I don’t really have much of a choice, do I? Besides, in the worst case scenario we just don’t do the quest. 

“Can I think it over?” Mia asked.

“Since there is no penalty on failure beyond my annoyance, which I shall attempt to restrain enough so as to be unharmful to you and yours, I would have your answer now.”

Mia chewed on her lower lip in consternation. She would have very much liked to spend a week talking this over with the others, but the Shade was right, there was no downside to this on her part. Theoretically. 

She didn’t want to test just how unhealthy having the Shade annoyed at her would turn out to be. 

I wish I had that pact-making trait right about now. Fuck. It’d be really useful to make his promises binding.

Alas, there was only one answer she could give. Just the mere promise of a century of guardianship over Graz would have been worth however much trouble this quest turned out to be, and the other rewards just further tilted the balance in favor of saying ‘yes’.