Mana Mirror: Chapter Five (Patreon)

I could feel a new pool of power laying just outside of where I’d always associated my mana-garden being, much larger than the power in my ungated section of the garden.

“Cast the spell again, this time with mana from your first gate,” Orykson said.

I did as he said. It still took me almost as much time to sketch out the spell in the air with my mana – that was a matter of skill with the spell and sketching, not a matter of magical power.

But it didn’t drain the mana from the first gate the same way that it had drained energy from my ungated mana. In fact, it barely drained anything to sketch out the spell.

When it was done and I poured mana into it, that quickly shifted. My mana began to slowly drain, and I estimated I could hold the spell for maybe five minutes.

That was barely an idle thought in the back of my mind, however, because I was far more interested in what I could see with my eyes.

Everyone looked… different. It was almost as though their outer skin was turned translucent. I could see their hearts beating, the blood pumping out into the rest of their bodies. I could see the muscles drawing the blood to move. I could see blood emerging from the bone’s marrow, which gave me pause. Did bone marrow make blood? It seemed to have something to do with it, at the very least.

Even stranger than that, though, was a vibrant green glow that surrounded everyone. Some people’s glow was stronger than others, and some were streaked through with dark, forest green shades. The green swirled into a red color around the heart, pink around the head, and a dozen other smaller colors at other points.

The natural patterns of life energy in the body?

I glanced over at Orykson, trying to examine him as well, but he’d clearly used some form of counter spell to stop me, because he looked utterly normal.

It wasn’t just people, either. I could see the composition of animals, and even plants. Plants looked alien compared to humans, with their tissue looking altogether different.

I stared around myself in wonder, walking up to an old oak tree and tracing along its branches. I could see where it directed the water and nutrients to flow, absorbed by the roots and taken up to the leaves.

“It is rather pretty, isn’t it?” Orykson asked. “Congratulations on casting your first gated spell.”

“Thank you,” I said, leaning down to look at an ant on the tree. It looked almost more alien than the trees did, the biology distinctly animal, but still so different than the people on the street.

“Are you ready to open your death mana’s first gate?” Orykson asked.

I released the spell and nodded.

“Sure, but my ungated mana is still gone. Can I use life mana from my first gate to do it?”

“Pull mana from your first gate into your ungated pool,” Orykson instructed. “Just a little bit.”

I closed my eyes and did as he said, envisioning pulling a small stream of first gate mana into my ungated mana.

As the first gate mana trickled in, my ungated mana began to rapidly refill itself.

Far faster than it should have. It was like every droplet of first gate mana was creating four times as much ungated mana.

Within moments, my ungated mana was completely refilled.

After two uses, my first gate mana was already about half empty, though it was slowly refilling.

Out of curiosity, I poured some of my ungated mana into my first gate. I expected it to be a fourth as efficient, needing four times as much mana to refuel.

It wasn’t.

It took about four times as much mana as I’d expected, meaning it took sixteen times as much ungated mana to form gated mana.

I quickly cut off the flow of mana and used some more first gate mana to refill my ungated mana.

“A lesson you needed to learn,” Orykson said. “Converting power down is easy and efficient. Converting power upwards is much less efficient.”

“Good to know. If I had full life mana, and wanted to convert it to death mana to use in a spell, I’d get… about a fourth of the mana I spent converted?”

“You can increase your efficiency through training and other methods, but that’s about correct.”

“What about spells that require you to mix multiple mana types?” I asked. Orykson actually smiled at that.

“Good question. There, you aren’t mixing the mana inside of your body – doing that would make you a magical creature. Not in the metaphorical sense – that’s quite literally how dragons and other magical creature’s magic works. No, humans mix their mana in the spell. Watch closely.”

Orykson raised his hand and pulled life mana from his first gate, then a moment later, he pulled death mana from his first gate as well. He mixed them together in the air, then shaped the composite mana into a spell.

He let the spell dissolve, and flipped the book a single page to another spell.

“Now, cast this one.”

It was a similar level of complexity to the first spell he’d shown me – Analyze Life, I think he’d called it?

A few moments of sketching later, I broke open the first gate to my death mana. I half expected to appear in the same hallucination of my mana-garden again, but nothing so dramatic happened this time.

I did abruptly feel a pool of death mana open up inside me, however.

I drew power from it and set about casting the spell properly. This time, the effect was incredibly different, but almost as drastic.

I could see faint traces of ghostly light over the brown patches of the grass, where it had died in the summer. I could see bones of animals buried beneath the ground.

I glanced at one of the people walking by on the street, expecting to see their bones as well.

I didn’t.

“Why can’t I see their bones?” I asked. Orykson raised an eyebrow.

“Why would you? They’re not dead. This is Analyze Death. You’ll be able to identify dead things, death energy, death magic, as well as many types of spirit. Stopping someone’s heart is life mana, primarily, with only the faintest twinges of death mana to enhance the actual killing effect.”

Huh.

I shook my head and let the spell dissipate.

“Excellent,” Orykson said. He tore out the first two pages of the book and handed them to me, then continued speaking. “You’ve begun the first step of your apprenticeship. Meadow will visit you on Solsday, and she’ll have the location of the butcher’s shop where you’ll be using the Analyze Life and Analyze Death spells at the same time as you break down the meats brought there.”

“I don’t –” I started, but Orykson cut me off.

“Have enough mana? I know. Your mana-garden will grow as you train it, and your own efficiency with the spells will increase as well, but for now, just maintain the spells as long as you can, then let your mana recharge, then cast them again.”

“Alright,” I said.

“You should have both of the spells mastered within two months. If you manage to master them in one month, I’ll give you a reward.”

I perked up at that, and my determination redoubled. If his rewards were anything like the suits he’d bought me, they were going to be incredible assets.

“How long until I have the spell ingrained?” I asked.

“I expect you to have it done within a month of having the spell mastered. If you can do it in two weeks or less, however, you’ll gain another reward.”

The hint of a smile flashed across Orykson’s face.

“Oh, I should mention… any rewards you gain from exceeding my expectations will be free of charge. You won’t have to reimburse me for them if you fail. So… I advise you to push yourself.”

I sucked in a breath and nodded.

“Alright. I’ll have the spells ingrained in six weeks, then.”

“That’s what I like to hear. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. I’ll see you again when you’ve mastered the spells.”

Orykson snapped his fingers and vanished.

I glanced at the spells in my hand.

If repeated casting and maintaining the spell was the secret to letting it take root in my mana-garden, then…

I began to sketch the spells out into the air. My life mana was more drained than my death mana, but I’d hold onto each of them as long as I could while I walked back to the bakery.

My life mana ran out two minutes later, and my death mana ran out a minute after that, leaving me to take the walk back to the bakery just studying the spells.

Memorizing them would be of minimal help with ingraining the spells themselves, but it would help me sketch the mana out faster, and that meant less time wasted. If I was going to get both rewards, then I’d need to not waste twenty minutes sketching out two spells.

They were still more complicated than any other spells I’d seen before, though, so I hadn’t even memorized the first one by the time I got back into the house.

I was abruptly slammed against the wall as my older brother rushed at me and wrapped me in a hug.

“Mal!” he said. “Primes, you worried us! We thought you’d gotten kidnapped. You left almost five hours ago!”

I let out a strangled sound that may have sounded something like ‘gak,’ and pushed him off of me.

“Ed, I’m fine. Better than fine, actually.”

He stepped away and looked me up and down, then noticed the bag I was holding in my off hand.

“Did you really go shopping?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t spend a single silver coin, in fact.”

I reached into the bag and withdrew the contract I’d signed with Orykson, then passed it over to him.

He scanned it, skipped over the legalese, then went to the bottom.

“Orykson… no other name listed, and I’ve never heard of him before. I’m guessing he’s a mage who offered to take you on as an apprentice, then?”

“Yep!”

Ed let out a low, impressed whistle.

“What happened, exactly?”

I waved for him to follow me as I went to my bedroom and began to put away the accessories in my wardrobe, explaining the meeting I’d had with Orykson, my mana types, my legacy, and that we may be descended from an Arcanist a few hundred years back.

“Huh, that’s pretty great! Four mana types, huh… you should pick telluric as your other type. I could show you a ton of tips and tricks with combat spells with telluric mana. Plus, you’d get access to temptress mana, too! And who doesn’t want to learn to fly?”

“Tempest, not temptress,” I corrected automatically. “That isn’t a horrible idea, but Orykson made it pretty clear he wanted me to learn spatial and temporal magic like him.”

“Ooh, yeah, that’d be so cool too!” Ed said with a goofy grin. “Or you could pick lunar. Lizabeth could show you a buncha cool trucks with it, and solar mana is a pretty dope spell set too. Bolts of light and fire, purifying spells…”

“I’ve got a lot of good options,” I said. “Really, the only ones that don’t call out to me much are creation and mental. Their opposites, desolation and physical, are a bit more interesting, but not worth wasting my only new type of mana on.”

I paused as I remembered something.

“Oh! What is ingraining a spell? Orykson wants me to ingrain the Analyze Death and Analyze Life spells.”

“Really? They generally don’t bother working on ingraining spells at the Lightwatch. Mastery is generally more than enough.”

“Yeah, actually, he’s having me ingrain those before he’s even willing to teach me anything else.”

“Huh. Well, I guess it makes sense that an Occultist has high standards. Anyways…”

He tapped his chin.

“So, ingraining a spell… Well, when you first cast a spell, you have to move the mana manually. As you get more skilled and use it more, your mana-garden grows and gets used to supplying mana in that particular shape. The spell costs less and less of your mana. Once you’ve trained enough, you don’t even need to sketch it, you can just… Boom!”

He held out his hand and his skin turned a dark shade as he flooded his body with telluric mana to cast the Skin of Stone spell.

I’d already known that, but I assumed that he was working up to an explanation, so I kept quiet.

Instead, he dismissed his spell, nodded to himself, and picked up a cufflink to look at it.

“How do you even use these? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cufflink in person before…”

“Ed, ingrained spells?”

“Oh yeah! Uh… So. As you get more and more good at the spell, it takes root in your mana more and more and more and more.”

He’d said the word moreso many times back-to-back that it had stopped sounding like a real word, but I nodded for him to continue.

“Well, once you’ve gotten really good at the spell, it begins to permanently consume some of your available mana. The amount of mana you have to cast spells shrinks, and your mana recovers slower as some of the recovery flows into the ingrained spell.”

“Why would you ever want that?” I asked, confused.

“Because, it’s super useful. First of all, casting an ingrained spell costs way less mana than casting even a mastered spell does. Plus, the constant trickle of mana it absorbs from around you gives you a permanent passive benefit.”

Now that did sound better.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Well, I’ve only ingrained one spell,” Ed admitted. “Usually, you just slowly ingrain spells over time as your mana-garden grows, so you don’t really feel the loss in how much your mana grows and how quickly it recharges.”

“What does it actually do, though?” I asked, a bit exasperated. I loved my brother, but he could be a bit… distractible.

“Oh yeah. Well, the spell I ingrained is a first gate spell, Stone Strengthen. Since my legacy lets me form weapons out of stone with just ungated mana, learning a spell to make those weapons stronger made sense to me. The passive effect it bestows makes any stone I shape stronger. When I make a stone spear, it’s almost as strong as iron now, even without me pouring mana into it. A buddy of mine in the Lightwatch, he can basically see out of the back of his head, cuz he has knowledge mana and has used some spells to see around corners and stuff so much that it’s permanently enhanced his peripheral vision. Makes it hard for me to launch any sneak attacks at him. Though I did once see a goose manage to surprise him…”

That did sound quite useful – not the information that geese were apparently capable of surprising one of Ed’s friends. I doubted I’d ever use that.

But the effects of the spell did sound useful. I wondered what the effects of ingraining the Analyze Life and Analyze Death spells would be? Probably something similar. Maybe just a general sense of life and death? That could definitely have its uses…