Mana Mirror: Chapter Twenty Six (Patreon)

Content Warning for discussion of and mild consumption alcohol. Nobody goes on a bender or anything, don't worry!

He clicked his fingers, and a pair of glasses appeared on the table. They were short, only a few inches tall, with an oddly bulbous shape. Each one had two large, clear ice cubes inside of them.

Orykson rose and stepped over to a globe, then lifted the top hemisphere to reveal that the upper hemisphere was empty, the globe acting as a small container. Inside of the globe, there were several crystal decanters filled with different dark liquids. Orykson picked up one that had a rich amber color, then poured a little bit in each of our glasses before returning it to the globe and setting the upper hemisphere back on it.

He took a seat in his chair, then lifted his glass.

“This is witchlight bourbon,” he said. “It’s a sipping whiskey, imported from Elohi, where it’s aged for fifty years in a charred white oak barrel, and I think you’ll find its effects to be quite enjoyable.”

I gave the glass a dubious look. I’d had a few drinks before, though I’d never been drunk, and I wasn’t sure what sort of effects it would have. I took a very tentative sip.

It burned some, but it had a deep, rich body of flavor, with a slightly woody, almost vanilla flavor, and a hint of smokiness. It wasn’t bad.

Power surged from the drink when I sipped, though none entered my mana-garden. I frowned, not sure where it was going. I hesitantly took another sip, straining my mind to try and sense the movement of the mana. It slid inside me, body and soul, and seemed to soak in…

Hesitantly, I tried to pull mana out of my mana-garden and into the air around me.

It hit a wall, a total blockage of power that hadn’t been there before.

“Give it time to work,” Orykson advised. “It’s a third gate spiritual potion, and it uses the death mana to reinforce the soul’s connection to the world. A single glass is hardly going to reforge you, but once it sinks in, you should find that your mana recovers ever so slightly faster, flows through your mana-garden a tiny bit faster, and your tolerance for pills and other supplements will have increased a little bit.”

I nodded and set down my glass for a moment, enjoying the feeling of the power of the whiskey soaking into my soul and body.

“I think your time at the butcher’s shop has almost come to a close,” Orykson said. “It was valuable for you to understand the basics of bodies and their operation, but it will be unnecessary now. On Solsday, your mentorship under Meadow shall continue, but on Telsday you will be mentored by a… friend. His name is Ikki, and he is an exceptionally skilled temporal mage. He is also a figure of significant importance in Daocheng, so he will likely only be tutoring you for an hour or two, and you will be learning from those lessons on your own.”

“Aren’t I supposed to be following in your footsteps?” I asked. “When will I be learning spatial magic?”

“That will be on Temsday,” Orykson replied cooly. “I will likely only mentor you a few times, but when I do, you should find them quite enlightening.”

“How much weaker is Meadow than you?” I asked curiously. “Ikki and you can only afford to set aside a few hours, but Meadow spends a lot more time, and she’s even helped Ed. Is her time just so much less valuable?”

“She is not significantly weaker than myself,” Orykson said, and I mentally translated that to being sixth gate. “Furthermore, like Ikki and myself, she’s capable of creating simulacra. Unlike Ikki and myself, however, she is uninvolved with governments, and seems to have little personal passion for creation. When she was a Spellbinder, for example, she merely wandered around Kijani, helping anyone who she came across. Teaching and helping is simply her nature. It has made her many friends, but also many enemies.”

He sounded almost irritated by Meadow’s life, but I had to admit that I didn’t share the irritation. Wandering around, exploring the world, and helping people sounded incredible to me.

I kept that off my face, however, and merely took another sip of the whiskey.

“Regardless,” Orykson continued. “She is the best plant mage of which I am aware, and she will certainly not steer you wrong there. But for right now… We savor the flavor, and let you adjust.”

We spent at least half an hour simply sitting by the fire, watching it, and sipping from the whiskey. I wasn’t sure what lesson I was supposed to have gained from this, if any, but it was strange. Not unpleasant, exactly, but nor could I say that I liked it that much either.

He held up the book that his spirit had held, the one that he’d used to give me the Analyze Life and Death spells.

“Are you ready to open your temporal and spatial gates?” Orykson asked.

That was probably a rhetorical question, but I nodded anyways. He tore out three pages and passed them for me.

“Analyze Space, Spatial Anchor, and Internal Pocketwatch,” I read aloud. “No Analyze Time?”

“Ikki was quite insistent on it,” Orykson said. “It provides very little useful information. If you’re moving under a temporal haste spell, you’ll know you’re accelerating in time. If you’re being attacked by a temporally accelerated attack, you’ll know that you’re being attacked with extreme speed. There are few instances where you’ll need to know specifics about the flow of time in an area, and in those places, your Internal Pocketwatch is modulated to the standard flow of time, irrespective of distortion.”

“How is it so much better than the Analyze version?” I asked. “It seems like it does almost exactly the same thing?”

“Oh, it does,” Orykson confirmed. “There are a few niche cases that the Internal Pocketwatch doesn’t cover, but by and large, it does the same thing. But its spell design principles are fundamentally different. Here…”

I shrugged, honestly just glad that I didn’t have another massive spell to master. Internal Pocketwatch was about the same size as Fungal Lock, or one of Ed’s spells.

But Orykson withdrew several books from his shelf, then shook his head, and they teleported away, and new ones formed. He flipped them open, and spent a while discussing the differences in the underlying spell, and why it allowed for a simple and easy spell to do almost everything that a large analysis spell could.

Despite myself, I found the lecture to be rather interesting, and given the way that Orykson moved animatedly as he taught, and allowed me to move and talk with my hands, I felt like I internalized the information better than I would have at school.

“Regardless,” Orykson said, closing the books and teleporting them away. “You still need to open your temporal mana.”

“I do,” I said as I drew my ungated mana out and tried to form it into the Analyze Space spell, simultaneously pulling on mana from my first gate spatial mana.

There was a crack, and I appeared in my mana-garden. It seemed smoother this time, though I wasn’t sure why: Experience, maybe?

Orykson appeared next to me and surveyed my mana-garden, and I took the time to look around.

My ungated mana looked more or less the same, though there were a few churned up patches of earth, presumably where I’d begun to cast the pain resistance spell.

My life and death mana, on the other hands, were quite different. My life mana had expanded significantly in size, and the mist was faint and whisp-like. I squinted, and thought I might almost be able to make out the faintest hint of a wall in the distance.

In the garden itself, there was a small evergreen tree. It wasn’t fully grown yet, but it came up to my chest. The mana around it swirled strangely. Orykson examined it and gave an approving nod.

“There are a few inefficiencies that you could trim off, but that can be done once it’s ingrained. In truth, if there weren’t any, I’d be far more suspicious.”

Around the base of the tree, and running along the walls, was small mushrooms. They were even less developed than the evergreen, and they were strangely colorless. It had to be my Fungal Lock spell.

There was a patch of churned earth, with sprouts of something beginning to poke through, which was probably my Enhance Plant Growth spell, and it stood next to a patch of earth that had been torn up, but nothing new had started to grow yet.

We moved onto my death mana then. The fog was thicker here, and there was more of it. I certainly couldn’t see the wall. The mushrooms were there too, surrounding a standing dead tree that I presumed was Analyze Death, and along the walls as well. The dead tree had dozens of branches, more than I would have expected.

“This needs work,” Orykson critiqued. “Your Analyze Death is full of inefficiencies that you will need to correct. You also haven’t taken the same steps to enhance your death mana’s development, that much is clear.”

We walked into the spatial mana then, which was just as bare as I’d expected. I wondered what would have happened if I’d begun practicing the Pinpoint Boneshard spell. Would it have developed in here, even if I hadn’t picked spatial and temporal yet? Or would it have grown solely in the death mana’s soil?

Orykson put his hand on my shoulder and I was snapped back into my body. I took a deep breath to calm myself, and when I was ready, I sketched the Internal Pocketwatch spell and cast it.

I appeared in my mana-garden once again, but there was a… settling feeling. I wasn’t sure how else I could describe it – it was like I’d been living with a weight on one finger for my whole life, and just had it taken off. I’d learned to deal with the weight, and maybe hadn’t even known it was there, but now that it was gone, everything felt better.

I appeared back in my chair, and Orykson nodded.

“Very well,” he said. “You have six weeks to master the Internal Pocketwatch, Enhance Plant Life, Analyze Space, Harvest Plant Life, and Fungal Lock spells. But if you manage to get that done, along with your current goal of ingraining your Analysis spells, within three weeks, then I’ll increase the value of the reward.”

“I’ll get it done,” I said seriously, setting my jaw. It didn’t go past my notice that the deadline for mastery of spells had shrunk: it seemed like the reward for competence was more work.

“What about the Spatial Anchor spell?” I added after a moment. I almost didn’t want to say it, since I knew full well there were good odds it’d just result in more work for me.

“Beginning that before you understand the overlay of spatial mana is unwise,” Orykson said. “It’s going to lead to errors, and not the kind of errors that you can take advantage of, like inefficient spell arrays. These are the kind of errors that cause spell failure, or can even damage your mana-garden.”

“Understood,” I said seriously.

“See that you do,” Orykson said. He waved his hand, and I appeared back on my porch. I headed inside, and slumped down on the couch, even more tired than I’d been before. I eyed my yet uneaten pastry with suspicion.

I had an unreasonable fear that if I picked up the pastry and tried to eat it, someone was going to knock on the door.

I picked it up slowly and rose it to my mouth.

Nothing happened.

I opened my mouth.

Nothing happened.

As soon as I took a bite, there was a thump at the door. I tossed my pastry back onto the towel and stared up into the ceiling.

“Why?” I asked to nobody in particular. “Why? Have I been cursed? I don’t think there’s a pastry curse. Is there a pastry curse? Is that why dad went off to wherever he went to? Did the curse drive him away, in order to forbid me from the sweet temptation of the strawberries and cream filling?”

There was another frantic thump, and I rose to go get it.

This time, thankfully, it was just Ed, holding several paper bags filled with groceries – so many, in fact, that he’d been unable to get the door.

“Thanks!” he said cheerfully. “I got some fennel and fish. Think you’d be willing to make that codfish fennel stew for dinner tomorrow?”

“Sure,” I said, taking one of the bags to lighten his load. We put away the groceries in the pantry and the chillbox, and I finally was able to sit down once again.

This time, to my relief, I was able to eat my pastry dinner, and I finally headed to bed.