147. Touched by Shadows (Patreon)

“Something feels different,” Flukas commented as he and Lukas meditated side by side. Mira and Penelope hadn’t yet returned. Fleeing Elder Wyrmkin forces delayed them. The Arcane Chronicler clone had sacrificed himself to distract and slow them, in the hopes of the Jotun catching up. As a result, he had ‘returned’ early. “I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

“It’s our connection to shadow magic,” Lukas replied, looking inward. Shadows coiled and twisted inside of him. They felt like they were seeking purpose. The shadows sought purpose. They desired shape. “I think that’s the first time I pushed Shadow Step since its creation. I’ve never used it as many times in a row in a handful of minutes.” He paused for a moment, trying to remember the sensation. “It almost feels like I merged with them. Like they’re inside of me.”

“You know if the others were here, they would make fun of your phrasing. Mostly about how the shadows got inside of you. But I’m better than that. I’m Flukas.”

“Actually, you’re Zwei. Henceforth, the title of Flukas is reserved for Super Clones with your ability or Spellweaver.”

“That’s not fair. I do all of the heavy lifting.”

“No. Your ability does. Every dispellment and resummoning creates a new clone. You might feel a kinship to the memories connected to the previous version of you and personalities match, but you’re not really the same person, are you?”

“Same difference,” Flukas grumbled.

Lukas didn’t care what the clones called themselves. He occasionally enjoyed pulling their legs. The clones did the same to him all the time. 

“I think I get what you’re talking about, though,” Flukas continued. “There is an emptiness inside of me, and there is nothing but shadows. Except they feel…” He trailed off for a moment, as if struggling to find the right words. “Alive doesn’t feel like the right word.”

“Unfulfilled. I can’t put my finger on it either.”

“Do you think we made contact with something over all the Shadow Steps? Some sort of soul connection, maybe?”

Lukas shook his head. “I think this is our soulspace awakening and shadows, as our strongest arcane connection wants to fill it.”

“Confluence ability incoming?” The clone’s pitch rose with excitement.

“Perhaps. Get the plans.”

Flukas stumbled, jumping to his feet and rushing to the office. The clone had approached the job of designing the Shadowsteel Fortress as an exercise in arcane architecture. At a glance, the blueprints appeared daunting. Flukas had numbered each room and overlaid it with the primary spell each of them would contain. It was a tapestry of spellforms and obsession. Only a brain empowered by the magic of Arcane Chronicling likely had the ability to comprehend the document as a whole. Lukas had to settle for only focusing on a small section of it.

“I have to admit, you did an excellent job of making my vision come to life,” Lukas stated.

“Clearly not a good enough job to continue holding the title of Flukas,” the clone grumbled. “Number names are for the crappy, unimportant roles.”

“Eins—”

“He gets to hold onto his name. Mine gets changed all the fucking time.”

“Well, we’re all sorcerers, and this solidifies that you’re a wizard. How about Wiz?”

“That’s just asking for jokes at my expense.” The clone rolled his eyes. “Merlin, perhaps?”

“Fine.” Lukas sighed, focusing on the central chamber. “You can be Merlin if you can help me assemble this.” He tapped the hexagonal room. “There is too much for me to hold together on my own.”

“We’re going to need a Spellweaver for this,” the clone now titled Merlin said, pointing at a section. “That number highlights how many are needed for this room. It’s too much work for just one person or clone. We’ll need to work in unison to get the structure up and then in perfect harmony to get the spell going. Otherwise, it will collapse, and all the invested magic will go to waste.”

Just over half the clones were still out in the field. The newest specialized clone, Oberon, was in the workshop below, practicing his mastery over dreafire. As with most passive shard abilities, it progressed slowly. Only repetition and endless practise would get it to the necessary ranks. Lukas had never upgraded a shard with an essence from the same source and couldn’t wait to find out how the Essence of Dreamfire would upgrade Dreamfire Core. He hoped it would take the ability to new heights. Losing a few hours of training wasn’t going to make a massive difference, so he dispelled the clone and resummoned him as a Spellweaver.

“I’ve been dying to try proper circle magic,” the Spellweaver stated, bouncing on the balls of her heels excitedly. He spun on his heel and clasped his hands together. It was exaggerated and annoying, more suited for the likes of Bowie. “That’s what we’re doing, aren’t we?”

“Less talk and more focus,” Lukas said. “I think it's best if we move down into the basement.” He tapped the spellform etched into the room design’s edges. “Just in case we lose control and things get out of control.”

“Understood.” The clones nodded. They descended together. Lukas took the lead while the Arcane Chronicler gathered all the necessary paperwork.

Excitement brimmed inside Lukas, brushing aside his irritation with the Great Silver Dragon and the relic she had tied to him. He had expected the creation of a confluence ability to take considerable time and research. It seemed natural evolution and arcane growth were the key. It felt as if his connection to his abilities, senses, and natural understanding had reached a point allowing him to become something more. 

The basement remained mostly empty. Eins’s materials stood stacked in a corner along with creations for sale. The clones had warded the area to mute arcane effects and protect the rest of the building from spell-training mishaps. Lukas had the protective measures installed after a storm spell went out of control and ripped holes through the ceiling and into the ground floor. Several workstations were damaged, and the forge needed to be replaced. Eins complained endlessly about having to use the Portable Phoenix Forge again.

Merlin and the Spellweaver worked together, drawing a spell circle directly on the matte grey stone floor using chalk. It had two external layers and contained a triangle. Three circles, large enough for each of them to sit in, occupied each corner. 

The clones had extensively used circle magic, but hadn’t had the opportunity to use it except to help Eins and Zwei complete arcane projects and attach powerful enchantments to crafted objects. 

“That’s your spot,” Merlin said, pointing at the corner where the spellform was densest. Lukas occupied the spot with his legs crossed. Once the clones took their spots, the trio channeled magic into the powdered chalk mixed with blood, and the ritual began. “This is exciting. Do you want to lead or should I, boss?”

“It’s easier having you follow me than following you,” Lukas stated.

“That’s because, unlike you, we’re perfect,” the Spellweaver stated.

All Lukas saw within himself was complete and utter darkness. The shadows blended in perfectly with them, but he felt their presence. They stood as sand dunes, shifting under powerful winds. Except they were all moving toward the source of the stimuli, which was him. Then, the clones’ minds linked with his, and they too entered the mental space, and the dunes divided their attention between Lukas and them, before stilling as if torn between the three points of attention.

The trio moved in unison, shaping the shadows around them all at once and starting with the support structures. Since the construction was taking place in Lukas’s soulspace, he didn’t need to worry about the laws of physics. They built the room outward from the center. It was like a buckyball, with each side a hexagon. The center was a hollow frame, suspended in a room of the same shape. Lukas and the clones used Quicksilver for the first and Shadowsteel for the rest.

Somewhere between minutes and hours passed. Lukas couldn’t tell. He only felt zen of the kind when casting or modifying complex spells. Even though he was in a space that didn’t yet have material presence in any universe, Lukas felt something taking shape and expanding within himself. 

There was a chance that the soulspace would solidify even if they successfully created the room. Lukas could only hope that the second stage, attaching a spell to the space, would do the job. His breath caught in his throat when the structure wobbled in the latter half of the process. It started with the floating hexagon in the center; it lost its rigidity for a moment as the Quicksilver returned to its liquid state. 

The instability spread to the rest of the structure when Lukas’s concentration faltered, and the joining point between two hexagons returned to its intangible, shadowy form. It was then that the second value of circle casting showed itself. The process didn’t just make it possible for magic users to reduce the mental stress of a spell but also to divide the work between themselves. When one struggled, the others could bear the load for a moment, ensuring that all the time, effort, and energy investment didn’t go to waste. 

The clone stabilized things while he attended to the central floating frame. Lukas felt silly as soon as he had a closer look at it. Even though the Quicksilver lost solidity, it held its shape. In fact, the clones appeared to have added an adapting spellform that made it periodically shift between solid and liquid states. Merlin had told him about it during the brainstorming process, but Lukas had forgotten all about it. 

Once the structure was complete, the spell shaping began. Lukas’s role was simple. He provided raw storm energy and opened his mental processing power to the process. The Spellweaver did the same. Merlin used his encyclopedic knowledge of magic and eidetic memory to wrestle the storm energy under control while printing the spellform into all of the Shadowsteel surfaces. 

It started as a spark in the center of the Quicksilver cage. No sound escaped it and there was no air in the space to ripple because of the pulsing soundwaves, but Lukas knew they were there. He felt the storm energy core flicker to life in the metaphysical space within himself. His heart rate picked up as the idea finally felt real. He had awakened his soulspace, and they were installing the first structure within it. 

The energy first appeared as large floating wisps within the Quicksilver cage. They rapidly revolved around one another before coming together and merging, growing larger. It rotated rapidly as lightning arced off the spear and danced off the cage’s insides.

Merlin’s reasoning for the cage’s frequent liquefaction came back to him. The storm energy core was likely to stress its container, causing warping and breaks. The liquefaction would force the structure to return to its original shape. According to the clone’s calculations, the state change would also help prevent overloading. Lukas hadn’t verified the claim, but he had reached a point where double-checking the clones’ work no longer felt unnecessary. The unique abilities gave them a degree of individuality, but at the end of the day, they were still a part of him. 

The core stopped growing once it was a tenth the size of its container, stabilizing as a rapidly rotating sphere. Its cage rotated slowly in the opposite direction. When Lukas heard humming, he knew air now existed within the structure. The Quicksilver frame didn’t just contain the lightning but also the sonic half of storm energy. Lukas had worried that the first attempt at cementing the soulspace was going to fail.

I should’ve trusted Merlin’s ability. It was me who almost fucked this up.

All of a sudden, it wasn’t just Lukas’s consciousness that was in the soulspace. He found himself physically present in the giant buckyball of a room. A moment later, he wasn’t alone. None of them floated. The designs didn’t involve adding gravity or any physical laws. They had manifested because of the creator’s intent. A space within himself without gravity didn’t make sense to him.

“It’s gorgeous, isn’t it?” Merlin asked, gleaming with pride.

Lukas failed to answer as his mouth hung agape. He couldn’t just hear the storm energy core. The air carried its heat on top of its sound. The brightness stung his eyes, and dry heat burned his face. It didn’t take long for beads of sweat to form on his temples.

“Incredible,” was all Lukas managed to get out. “That thing ate almost all my magic but its so worth it.”

“This is just the beginning, boss. There is plenty of room for the core to grow.”

“Do we want to?” the Spellweaver asked. “It’s uncomfortable in here. I’m sure this place will be an oven before long.”

“That’s because there is nowhere for all of this energy to go,” Merlin explained. “The central chamber will cool once we give it purpose and funnel the lightning away from here.”

“Until then, we can roast whoever we drag in here.”

“I think we need to put in a lot more work before we’re ready to pull this chamber into the outside world or bring anyone in here,” Lukas said. “This is an excellent foundation to build around, though. However, I feel all of this energy at my fingertips. It's begging for me to unleash it.”

“Take advantage of this while you can,” Merlin said. “You have refined storm energy ready to channel into spells. We won’t have to work too hard to unleash it. That’ll change once there are other rooms in here, though, and all of this magic is given purpose.”

“What’s next?” the Spellweaver asked. “The spell chamber?”

Merlin shook his head. “We’re going to build Eins a forge once our energy has recovered. Pulling materials and projects in here will reduce our reliance on the journal and make it easier to move.”

“Connecting this place to Shadow Armory will be invaluable,” Lukas said. “I want to see if we can connect the dracosteel node to the core, too. Imagine what’ll be possible if we make this place a part of it.”

“I can make it priority three on the list,” Merlin said. “The forge and spell garden take priority. In fact, the garden should come next. The first will reduce the stress on the core chamber more, but the garden will make our casting of predesigned spells faster. There will be less mental stress, too, as we won’t have to picture the spellform or hold it accurately in our mind’s eye.”

“That might be true, but the garden will take more time. It’s better to get a quicker project out of the way first.” Lukas shielded his eyes from the core. The discomfort had grown past stinging into the lower realms of painful. “Do you need me for the connector passageways?”

Merlin shook his head. “We can manage them without you. Rest up, boss. We need you in peak condition and full of energy for what comes next. This isn’t going to get any easier.”