Mana Mirror: Chapter Forty (Patreon)

Meadow arrived bright and early the following morning, and when I opened the door to greet her, she frowned and leaned on her weathered old walking stick.

“I see you’ve had your first training accident,” she said.

I nodded and explained what I’d done the night before. She listened calmly, then clucked her tongue.

“Well, it could have been much worse. Let’s get you started with a nice cup of chai, and then we’ll see about your lessons for the day.”

“Okay,” I said, then snapped my fingers. “Oh, and before I forget. One second.”

I sped up to my room, then returned with my jar of buttermilk-moss mixture, and a large lump of stone.

“I got some Pointer Moss,” I said, tapping the jar. “It’s not ideal, but it can be incorporated into the staff and serve as a source of first gate spatial mana for me. I also got a spatial lodestone, which should help form the staff too.”

Meadow’s eyebrows raised, and a small smile appeared on her wrinkled face.

“Excellent work so far, Malachi. You’ll still need a source of death and temporal mana, to help balance out the overall flow of mana in the staff. No need for any extra life components, since you’ll be integrating so many sources of it with your plants.”

“Do you have any suggestions?” I asked as Meadow led me out back and we started to paint the moss mixture onto the emperor tree.

“Hmm,” she said, thinking. “Well. I’m not as familiar with temporal components or death components as I am life ones. That being said, anything dead does slowly accrue death energy. If you found some old bones, fallen logs, or that sort of thing, they would work wonderfully, especially if they’re from deep in a forest, where nature has been allowed to run wild with energy. Outside of that, there are things like Marshdrops, which are a naturally forming mix of many types of mana that form at the bottom of marshes. They’re…”

She eyed me, and then grinned and gave me a wink.

“Well, they’re not unlike a terragon’s magic, but they do have a large amount of death, and would work well. Then, of course, there’s paper items. Many a book has eventually gathered enough death energy to turn into a natural death locus item, like your lodestone. Then there’s items from the desert or the glaciers – summer and winter are both mass provokers of death, but… I do think those are slightly out of your reach for right now.”

Bones from a deep forest, marshdrops, or books.

Framed a different way, that was either Kene, Ivy, or Alvaro.

Delford Forest had a lot of magic, as evidenced by the trolls and other magical things found around there.

Teffordshire was built atop a marshland – I’d even seen multiple marshes as I approached the manor, and that wasn’t in Teffordshire itself.

And there was no better place to look for a magical book than in the library.

I sighed and finished painting the moss on the tree bark, then focused and cast my newly mastered Enhance Plant Life spell, mixing my life and spatial mana in equal measure. Mana streamed out of me, the moss like a thirsty man in the desert, and the moss shifted from a thin paste into a vibrant greenish-blue that coated the trunk of the tree.

I walked around the garden, feeding mana to each of my plants, and Meadow watched me.

“Very good, dear,” she said. “But now it’s time for the next three steps in your career as a life mage.”

“What are they?” I asked curiously as I sat down in the clover across from her. “I assume Ed can’t learn from them, since you haven’t woken him up?”

“Oh, he can learn from one of them, and we’ll fetch him in a moment,” she said. “But first and foremost, do you know why you learned Enhance Plant Life, rather than the more basic Enhance Plant Growth spell?”

“Alchemical uses?” I guessed.

“That’s one potential path,” Meadow agreed. “And, if you’d like, we can study that. Orykson’s told me a bit more of his plans, and I’ve been forced to adjust my own, so the second gate briar spell is off the table now. But we can spend your second gate focusing on alchemy, if you’d like, or refining other skills.”

“What’s the plan he has for me, then?” I asked curiously.

“Oh, I’m sure he’d dislike it if I spoiled his plan, but it’s safe enough to tell you that your second gate life mana will be largely devoted to transitioning you in a way that will interact well with your magic, regardless of what sort of other life spells you pick.”

I nodded at that, and she continued speaking.

“The reason I had you learn the Enhance Plant Life spell was simple enough – plants, as much as anything else on the planet, have an energetic substrate. You can use Enhance and Harvest Plant Life to manipulate them, which is the foundation of alchemy, like you pointed out, but there’s more to it than that.”

She waved at the cluster of three mana producing plants – the Emperor’s Tree, Blood Carnations, and Pointer Moss.

“These all produce power that can easily be converted into mana, yes? Why don’t you point out what substrate is responsible for that?”

I sent power into my Analyze Life spell, and examined the plants, looking for the commonalities, like Kene had taught me. After a few moments, I shook my head.

“I can’t. There are at least seven or eight flows they all share, and I don’t know which one of them creates the pooling effect.”

“They all do,” Meadow said with a smile. “At least to some degree. There is no single energy-pooling function. But there are multiple functions that can all be strengthened to help its magical generation. Why don’t you try feeding just those functions, rather than feeding the plants overall?”

I focused, and the mana spun out of me, sliding into the patterns of the plant. It wasn’t easy, but Kene had made me practice on leaves. Compared to that level of precision, targeting the substrate in an entire plant was easy.

Meadow’s eyebrows raised and she smiled.

“Very well done. Have you done some of this already?”

“A little bit,” I said. “I was taught the basics of it by a… friend.”

“Well, they taught you well,” Meadow said, dipping her head. “I admit, I’d expected you to take longer to manage that. Let’s move on to the next topic, then. Go wake up your brother.”

“No need,” came the sleepy voice of Ed from the doorway. “I noticed when you arrived and started getting ready.”

Meadow nodded and gestured for him to join me on the clover across from her.

“Now,” she began, “this next topic is one that applies to every mage. It’s a small matter, the kind of thing that’s easy to overlook, and easier still to neglect. Mana-garden cultivation. Ed, you already have begun reworking your first gate, so you’ll likely have an easier time with this than Malachi, so let’s begin in your mana-garden.”

“How?” I asked. “I haven’t learned Analyze Mana-Garden yet. Also, is there a way to use life magic to analyze someone’s magic like that?”

“Anyone can learn to enter their own mana-garden on their own, with nothing more than meditative exercises,” Meadow said, “but for today, we will simply be using potions to spiritually enter Ed’s garden.”

She removed a vial of inky black potion and took a sip, then handed it to me, then to Ed.

A moment later, we stood in Ed’s mana-garden. The ungated mana in the center looked similar to mine, though its walls were higher than my own, and…

There was a pile of rocks off to one side that resonated with first gate telluric mana. I frowned and pointed at them.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“That’s what I’ve been working on,” Ed said proudly. “Remember how we talked about me getting some new first gate spells? Well, in order to make room for new stuff without diminishing my total mana, I’ve had to expel mana.”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll do the same stuff for a staff, and it can be sold to enchanters or alchemists.”

“Right,” Ed nodded. “Well, I’m not great at expelling it all yet, so instead, I’m stacking it in here, and expelling it when I have the spare time.”

My eyebrows raised. It was easy to forget that my brother wasn’t entirely made of muscle, but he was a competent enough mage, and a lot stronger than I was. It made sense.

“It’s a good short-term solution,” Meadow said. “But those skills are ones I’ve already touched on before. Today, we’ll be doing something similar, but a bit different, and one more useful to you, Malachi.”

She led us through his first gate and into his second. It was dominated by a massive statue of Ed, holding his spear. It was smooth and polished, beautiful, and shockingly large.

“How much of your mana does this ingraining take?” I asked Ed.

“About a third of it,” Ed said, “but it makes me a lot tougher and a fair bit stronger. I definitely don’t regret pushing it to ingrained. You and Meadow actually helped me make that decision, with how much you’re pushing yourself.”

“Oh, stop it dear, you’re going to make me blush,” Meadow said, patting his shoulder. “It’s well done, and its clear you’ve built a great understanding of the spell. But it’s not perfect.”

“What do you mean?” Ed asked. “It’s done, there’s no stage after ingrained.”

“It’s ingrained,” Meadow agreed. “But look here.”

She pointed at the base of the statue, which was just a large lump of rock.

“Rather than a carved and polished pedestal, your inefficiencies in the spell have been allowed to build up, forming a stone you stand on. This is nearly perfect, but not all of your spells are.”

She pointed at another spell, which was a roughly-carved statue of a man with a shield. Its base was a huge lump of rock, rather than a pedestal, and the lump was almost as wide as the statue was tall.

“Stoneshield,” she said. “You’re close to mastery with the spell, but it’s full of inefficiencies and flaws.”

I grinned and elbowed Ed.

“I think I’ve heard Liz say the same thing about you.”

“Hey, you little!”

He waved his hand, and I was thrown back into the stone wall on a crashing wave of mana. It didn’t hurt, so I stuck out my tongue.

Meadow watched us, a small smile on her face, and shook her head.

“Now now, none of that. You can rib one other when it’s not lesson time. Ed, why don’t you cast that Stoneshield spell?”

He frowned, the effort of trying to sketch it in the real world without losing his grip on the mana-garden illusion clearly putting a strain on him. After a few seconds, though, the statue lit up, mana running through it.

“Now,” she said, nodding to the base of the pedestal-rock. “Start chipping.”

“What?” Ed asked.

“This only works while you’re casting the spell. You’re flowing power through it as you alter its metaphysical form, and you can remove small inefficiencies in the spell. It’s not fun, or easy, but it will give back some extra mana that was otherwise going to waste being solidified in your garden. Not only that, but it will increase the power and efficiency of the spell.”

Ed walked up to the statue and tried to pull at the base of the statue. Instead of stone, it was like his hands hit natural clay. Small bits came off, staining his hands and falling to the ground, but it was still hard and didn’t budge easily.

“That’s enough for now,” Meadow called, and Ed cut off the flow of mana.

“Now, Malachi’s turn.”