Mana Mirror: Chapter Fifty-Four (Patreon)

Edit: I accidentally published this now, rather than scheduling it for the morning, so, uh... Chapter's up early, IG.

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“We need you to get rid of the monster!” she declared. “We don’t care how you do it, just so long as you do.”

“What is it?” I asked. “I’ll do my best to.”

“It’s a big ol’ cat creature,” the pixie said. “It can see in the dark, and it seems to eat everything – rabbits, birds, and us! I don’t think it’s sapient, but it doesn’t seem to respond to any optical illusions. Auditory illusions seem to confuse it for a half a second, but not long enough to do anything.”

“Does it use magic?” I asked.

“Hmm. I think so? It’s able to mask its presence from mana senses really well, but not perfectly.”

I paused. The flickers of mana that I’d felt all around me… Had that been this cat-creature?

“It has strong aspects of abnegation, most likely,” I said. “I met someone who could mask themselves with an abnegation spell.”

“Bwbach magic has a lot of abnegation in it,” the pixie said. “Not me! I’ve got mostly solar, with some creation, tempest, and mental!”

As she spoke, her glow brightened, and I had to stop myself from smiling.

“Does the cat use anything other than masking its presence and seeing through illusions?” I asked.

“Hmmmm… Nope, I don’t think so. It’s just big. Too big for us to fight, and we don’t have combat magic, like I said. It’d come up to your knee or so.”

That was a surprisingly big cat, certainly. Far bigger than should roam a forest like this – foxes were about the biggest thing that I normally saw out here, and mostly they just ate garbage and screamed.

“How did it get here?” I asked, a bit confused.

“About a half a moon cycle ago, a group of very fancy looking humans came by to try and get a moonlace pixie as a familiar,” the pixie said. “They had a big black bag, and while the smaller human set up a ritual to try and call the pixie, one of the bigger ones went off with the big bag, and opened it to dump out the cat-thing.”

I started at that. I remembered that mission – I’d almost picked it, since they were giving away a compact communication mirror.

“What?” she asked, seeing my surprise.

“I… I think that I may have an idea who did that,” I said. “I can report them to the Wyldwatch, if you want, but it may not go anywhere.”

“Hmm, maybe,” the pixie said, shrugging. “If you want to try, you can. We just want the cat monster gone. Do you think you can do it?”

With my harvesting spell running, and the fact I’d not really been expending mana on anything other than a handful of spells, I was pretty well topped off on magic. I wasn’t a perfect combat mage, but with my multiple layers of defense, and my Fungal Lock to capture it, I thought I could do it.

“I can,” I said.

“Good!” she said. “My name is Firtha, and I am the town’s guardian. I will ask you to keep quiet about the town itself. Everyone knows there are small folk in the forests, but this village is less known.”

I shivered slightly as she said her name, though I didn’t know why.

“I’m Malachi,” I said. “And I will.”

She nodded and waved her hands, and a moment later, there was a burning sensation on my left shoulder. I let out a soft cry and glared at her.

“What was that?!”

“I marked you with my magic!” she declared proudly. “It should help you see the tiny folk like us, and it’ll let you bypass this villages wards. If you can get rid of the cat-monster, then come back, and you’ll be given a reward.”

“Thank you?” I said, though it sounded kind of like a question. She nodded and hopped off the branch, her butterfly wings spreading out to catch her as she soared out to the village.

I closed my eyes and focused, spinning my mana around in my mana-garden. First, I conjured Briarthreads, then I set my Pinpoint Boneshard spell to orbit around me, though I made sure to have it covering my head as well. Finally, I sent power to my Fungal Lock, not casting it, but keeping it prepared.

Then I opened my eyes and stepped out of the village’s wards and back into the forest. I threw a glance behind me, half expecting it to be gone from my sight, but this time I could see it. I wondered how many times I’d passed the village while searching for the wild roses.

I shook my head to refocus, and swept out my mana senses as wide as I could. It was under a mask to hide, sure, but I’d felt a few flickers already. Over my shoulder, my peacepyre glowed cheerily, then shot off to the west.

I frowned. Had the peacepyre understood the pixie’s request, in some way? I didn’t think it was that intelligent, but she had said they were allies…

And hey, the peacepyre did respond to minute fluctuations of mana, so I followed it to the west until it abruptly stopped and began darting north.

For several minutes, the peacepyre led me around, until I realized that I had an idea what might be happening. The cat was probably an ambush predator, and I was clearly prepared for it. Hunting it down would be hard – it had far more ability to move around the forest than I did.

No, I needed a new solution. I let my spells fade and sat under a tree, tapping the bottle at my waist to signal the peacepyre to go back into the bottle, which it obligingly did. I kept my mana tensed inside my garden, prepared for an attack, but not expelling any obvious spells.

Then I closed my eyes. There were good odds that I wouldn’t be able to see the cat anyways, and I needed to sell the illusion.

Ten full minutes ticked by without anything happening, and I was starting to get fidgety, playing with a blade of grass between my fingers.

Then I felt a flicker of mana above me. My eyes snapped open, and I called my Briarthreads spell around me. The cat’s claws struck the threads, and it let out a yip of pain as it was pushed to the side. I felt a touch of guilt spike within me. I didn’t enjoy hurting it – I definitely needed to pick up some sort of pure defense spell in the future.

When the cat landed, I flicked my fingers out and caught it in a Fungal Lock, then quickly layered two more on top of the first one. With the cat well and truly bound, I walked over to examine it.

It was large, about the size of a big dog like a husky, with brownish gray fur and sharp teeth. Its feet were slightly webbed, designed for swimming and movement in a watery area, and its ears were large and almost bat like.

It would have been beautiful, if it had been taken care of, but the poor creature was thin – there was obviously something with this habitat that was making it sickly. I was half afraid that I’d see signs of abuse from the people who’d dropped it here, but it didn’t seem like there were.

Probably a rich family that’d gotten bored of their exotic pet, or else it’d outgrown their expectations. Still, as I approached, the cat flinched back and hissed loudly. It clearly had suffered some from negative treatment, even if it hadn’t been physical.

Honestly, that was probably why it’d attacked me. It had every reason to dislike people. Primes knew that if I’d suffered like this cat had, I probably wouldn’t like them either.

I broke the bracelet that Meadow had given me, and after a few minutes, she approached with Ed.

“Why have you captured a giant cat?” Ed asked, sounding confused.

“And why is a Bodmin Moorcat out here? This isn’t their territory,” Meadow asked.

“That’s exactly why I captured it,” I said. “It had resorted to attacking small folk in the area.”

I was careful to not mention the town itself, but I felt that saying that was safe enough.

“That’s… none too surprising, unfortunately,” Meadow said. “They don’t leap as well as most cats, so catching birds is harder here, without water to hide in and ambush from. They’re okay climbers, but… This isn’t their habitat.”

“I’m going to hand it over to the Wyldwatch,” I said. “They can get it out to the territory that it belongs in. Probably the Bodmin Moor, if I was to guess? Anyways, I called you all to let you know. I’ll come back to look for the flowers after.”

“You didn’t find any?” Meadow asked in surprise. “We found a small patch and dug them up, then placed them in my storage ring.”

“Oh,” I said. “I… No, I haven’t. I’d still like to come back real quick though.”

“Why?” Ed asked.

I shrugged, not saying anything. I didn’t want to draw more attention to the small folk than I needed to, after all.

“That’s fine, Ed and I can wait on the trail for you,” Meadow said with a gentle smile, as she looked at my left shoulder. I shifted it uncomfortably, then turned to pick up the cat. I wished I’d been able to summon a floating disk or something like that, to help carry the cat, but instead, I was forced to just grab onto the mycelium of the Fungal Lock spell.

With Ed’s help, carrying it the mile to the office wasn’t too bad, though they were certainly surprised to see it.

“What’s… Huh?” asked a woman with neon blue hair and a western Elohi accent. “Why are you carrying a Moorcat?”

I explained how I’d found it hunting out in the forest while foraging for wild roses, and she nodded as she fetched a cage to keep the Moorcat in.

“There is one more thing,” I said. “I think that it was probably released about two weeks or so ago, based on the evidence that I’d found from its scat, markings, and testimony of the local small folk. Around the same time, there was a family who’d posted for assistance in guarding them while they tried to contact a moonlace pixie. It lines up… uncannily well. I may look into the person who put up the posting, and see if they’ve done anything suspicious that could hide smuggling in a Moorcat.”

That was close enough to the truth for me. If it came to nothing, then it came to nothing, but it might be enough to get some animal smugglers in trouble, and that was enough reason for me to do it.

We spent a while filling out paperwork before we were free to go. Before we did, I looked at the woman and had to ask.

“Do you have a sister or something who works in the library? I met a librarian who looked uncannily like you.”

The woman froze and stared at me, then groaned.

“I leave Elohi to get away from my parents, and they send one of my sisters after me? Ugh! Thanks for telling me.”

“No problem,” I said as I left. I didn’t know what that was about, but I wasn’t about to inject myself into someone else’s family business.

After that, we headed back onto the trail, and I returned to the tiny pixie village. The guardian, Firtha, glowed excitedly as I crossed the wards.

“You did it!” she said happily. “I saw! It was cool! You’ve got good plant magic.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Uhuh,” she said. “Stay here while I get your reward!”

She buzzed off, returning a few moments later with a large seed. It looked about the size of a walnut seed, though it was a rich ochre color, with streaks of blue, green, red, and even thin strips of a silvery color. She was clearly struggling to carry the large seed, so I held my hands beneath her to let her drop it.

She did, and I ran my mana senses over the seed. It was… Complex. It almost reminded me of Ivy’s magic, bursting with life and vitality, a blend of all sorts of magic in a pattern that was hard to mimic.

There was something deeper though, something that hummed on a fundamental level that I didn’t understand.

“It’s a seed! It’s good for a lot of things, I think,” she said. “I do have one more request, though.”

“What is it?” I asked. I hoped there wasn’t another Moorcat around.

“Can I make that mark permanent?” she asked. “It’d help you fight off some illusions, especially smallfolk ones, so it’s useful to you, but it’s mainly for our town. I mainly ask because… There have been plenty of times our town’s needed or wanted something that humans have got, and it’s pretty hard to do on our own.”

“Oh! Sure, that sounds nice, actually.”

Firtha clapped, and it sounded like tinkling bells.

“Awesome! Would you mind if a few of us occasionally came with you to live with your plants?”

“How’d you know I had plants?” I asked.

“You’re a plant mage,” she said, as if it was obvious. I laughed – maybe it was obvious.

“I don’t mind,” I said. “It could be fun to have people hanging around my garden.”

I called my spatial key, and opened the doorway. The inside was still a mess, with boxes of lights, lumber, nails, and other random things I’d need for turning it into a greenhouse.

“If anyone wants to go, they can come in here,” I said.

To my surprise, almost two dozen members of the town came in – pixies, bwbatches, and even two naiads. It was still only a fraction of the town’s population, but I hadn’t expected so many.

I closed the key, thanked Firtha again, then met up with Meadow to find her staring at me.

“Where in the world did you get a Lushloam seed?” she asked, sounding genuinely surprised.

“Huh?” I asked, then recalled the seed from the key. “You mean this?”

“Yes indeed,” she said. “That’s the seed to a Lushloam tree.”

“I took that by the way you called it a Lushloam seed,” I said, a hint of amusement entering my voice. “But what does that mean?”

“Lushloams are exceedingly rare trees,” Meadow said. “They don’t sprout until third gate, maybe second if they’re provided with enough mana, but what they do is invaluable.  A fully grown Lushloam tree can convert a barren, droughted, overharvested piece of land into a vibrant field of nature.”

“Really?” Ed asked.

“Indeed. But that’s only one use. I can think of three others for you, Malachi. You could feed it into your key. I don’t know what it’d do with the power of a Lushloam, but it’d certainly be impressive, I can assure you of that.”

“What are the other two?” I asked, curious. That sounded pretty dang good to me. A bit wild and chaotic, but I fully agreed that whatever it did would be impressive. Meadow had been surprised by the seed, so it had to make at least as much of a modification as the Structure-ore did.

“Eat it, and either let it digest into your body, or pull it into your spirit. It’s filled with an absurd amount of mana that grows with you. If you let it digest into your body, it would send the life energy to reinforcing your own, your muscles, and body. The life would mix with other things in the seed too: telluric could go into strengthening bones, solar into improving the immune system, lunar to the kidneys and liver, so on and so forth. It would almost be like taking in a second legacy of physical reinforcement. It may start out weak, but it would slowly ramp up over time with your own mana. It’d also pair well with the transition spell you’ll learn at second gate – Orykson has one picked out for you, and I have four others in mind, to give you options, regardless of if you keep him as a mentor, or choose me. It would pair with that spell very well, and enforce its power.”

Ed let out a long, slow whistle.

“Those sorts of things are rare. You could probably sell that for… I don’t even know how much,” he said. “Maybe half a million silver? Maybe a bit more or less, depending on how it sold. Plenty of rich people would love to essentially purchase a new legacy for their kid who got a terrible one.”

My mouth hung open at that. That amount of money could straight up buy me a house. And not a tiny one either. A nice house, at least by my standards. A two or three bedroom for sure, depending on what part of town I was in.

“Oh, I suppose you could sell it,” Meadow said with a nod. “Or you could take it into your spirit. Much like the seed could go to reinforce your body, it could do the same to your spirit. It’s no match for truly having the perfect blend for every mana type done exactly, but it could help by quite a bit, making every spell more efficient and powerful, denser. It would pair especially well with your Depths of Starry Night technique.”