Mana Mirror: Chapter Fifty-Five (Patreon)

Don't expect Monday chapters to become a normal thing, but this is an instance where the chapters I did have ran so long that I split them up into three chapters, so the vote can be Friday as per normal. Soooo.... Monday chapter this week, at least!
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I hummed and hawed for a moment, rolling the seed between my fingers uncertainly.

On one hand, I was a mage first and foremost, so taking it into my spirit would be undeniably useful.

On the other hand, enhancing the spells I’d use to transition was undeniably useful. That was one of my biggest goals right now, which… Something about that didn’t sit right with me. What would I do once that happened? Was I anything other than an extension of Orykson?

Meadow was also planning on giving me alternatives to the one Orykson had picked out for me, which just further complicated my feelings on who to pick as a mentor. She’d given me actual choices, after all, while he’d expected me to follow exactly his path. But he was strong. Was he right? Or was she?

I shook my head. It wasn’t like me to be so uncertain, but this was a big decision, after all.

Feeding the Lushloam seed to the key was another good option, and it didn’t force me to choose between my body and my spirit. I had no idea what it’d do, and it seemed like even Meadow didn’t.

Could I really turn that down?

“Meadow,” I said. “I’ve some small folk inside my key right now, they’re coming with me to see my garden and see the city. Would feeding the Lushloam seed to the key with them inside be harmful?”

“Oh, no,” Meadow said, shaking her head. “Lushloam power isn’t harmful at all, and it’s a rare, rare spatial effect that can do anything to hurt people directly. I don’t know what it will do, but it certainly won’t hurt them. If anything, it will help them.”

With that, I drew the key out from my spirit, and tapped it against the Lushloam seed.

The key hungrily devoured the Lushloam’s power, and I sent my mana senses inside it. Where the Structure-ore had been a brightly burning ball of spatial power, too much for the key to fully contain, the Lushloam’s power seemed… different.

It absorbed far more quickly for one, and where the ore had pushed the boundaries of the key, the seed seemed to reach out to the boundaries gently, then… fold them.

The power finished passing through, and the key began to change.

It glowed with a celestial light, gold and cream and silver and blue all at once, and power began to drain from my mana-garden like someone had cast a harvesting spell on me, flowing into the key.

Something deep within me, a power that my own was built on, my legacy, began to tremble. It tried to reflect… Something, only for that to form a reflection, and then that to bounce back to the starting place, three mirrors set in a triangle. My entire spirit shook like a leaf in a typhoon, and the key shattered.

My mana ran dry, and the key’s fragments reached out for my life energy, for the telluric energy in my bones, the lunar and solar in the blood, for everything I could give it.

It drained me to the brink of exhaustion, and though it didn’t take enough to be dangerous to me, it left me weary.

Somehow, I could feel that inside the key, the small folk were raising their hands, their own mana streaming out of them and into the key. Donating their power. I didn’t know why, or how, but I was grateful.

The four remaining pieces of Structure-ore, which I’d been planning to feed to the key as it grew and use for my own experimentation, all evaporated in a flash of mana, swirling into the broken shards of the key.

The fragments then reached out, almost as if they were casting harvesting spells of their own, or…

Or like the terragon’s egg.

Power from the earth, the sun, the water, the air, everything around me began to swirl into what was left of the key.

Ed staggered up next to me, looking slightly worried, but he released his mana into the key’s shards as well. Good, solid, simple telluric mana began to stream into the key. After a few moments, he was drained dry.

Then Meadow was there, her hand on my shoulder, and another hand touching the remnants of the key. A wave of life mana, rich, vibrant, and reinforced by something deeper, something that reminded me of the Lushloam’s power, yet somehow different flowed into the key. It began at first gate, but then quickly ramped up. With all of the sources of mana flowing into the key, it was impossible for me to tell what gate she was pouring it, but it felt strong. Gentle. But strong. It too touched my legacy through the bond, and the power bounced around wildly before settling.

The world froze for a long, crystalline moment. It wasn’t like a rive, though I could feel my spirit churning. I’d sort that out later, though.

No, it was simple adrenaline, one moment stretched into a thousand. Meadow’s mana cut off, and the key dissolved into a fine powder.

Then it swirled around in a whirlwind, forming together, compacting, changing, shifting…

A sharp pain shot through my mind for a moment, but then it was gone, and I felt fine.

And before me, sitting on the ground, was a tiny, slightly androgynous form. It leaned more towards a traditional feminine form than a traditionally masculine one, and with the strange connection I had, I felt like ‘mostly kinda feminine’ was the right way to describe her.  She resembled one of the small folk in stature, being maybe eight inches tall. She was made of earth and water, with drifting bits of white that resembled clouds shifting across her body.

She resembled Meadow most of all, complete with an old lady dress, but I could see aspects of Ed in her, and several of myself as well. More of myself than I’d have thought, given that out of everyone, I’d had the least mana to donate. Then again, she was a bonded growth… spirit… to me.

Or was she? I felt around inside myself, and there was a strange, tenuous connection to the spirit, but it didn’t feel like that of the growth item that the key had once been. The mana that I’d been forced to share with the key was free again, back in my spirit, but there was still something there, something I didn’t understand.

“Sealed Primes,” Meadow whispered, staring at the strange creature. “It’s a worldspirit.”

In response, the spirit waved her arms and made a sound that sounded like the babbling of a brook mixed with the rustling of the trees in the wind. It was definitely a greeting, but I wasn’t sure if it was a language or not.

“What’s… What’s a worldspirit?” I asked.

“When an extraplanar space reaches certain barriers, it can change,” Meadow said. “Rather than relying on the planar barriers of our own reality, it forms semi-solid ones of its own, called demiplanes. Demiplanes are rare, but not unheard of. A spatial arcanist can craft demiplanes with a single spell, and even a spellbinder can create one out of an extraplanar space with enough mana and stabilization.”

“How do you know all this about spatial magic?” Ed asked. “You’re a life mage.”

She gave Ed a wry smile.

“You think I decided to make an apprenticeship offer without due research? Anyways, what you were using the key for before was, a demiplane with no particular aspect. When you fed the Lushloam seed to it, I was expected it may take on a forest aspect. Aspecting a plane is simply providing enough mana and resources to allow it to transform itself into a stable mana ecosystem. Ocean aspected planes, for example, or taiga, or a thousand other types. It’s not so much an official designation as it is the completion of the mana ecosystem. But…”

She reached out and gently patted the head of the small spirit. The spirit opened her mouth and, for a second, I thought she was going to bite Meadow. Instead, she made a hungry sound, as if begging for more mana.

“Not now, dear,” Meadow said. “Regardless, I believe you have in fact aspected your key. But more than that… You’ve given it a spirit. Your key is gone, broken entirely, but it’s now formed this lovely dear right here. Why don’t you open the gate to the astral plane now?”

“Astral plane?” I asked.

“The next level of planar stability,” Meadow said, “One that’s planar barriers are stable enough to let it act as its own independent – albeit small – world anchored to our own.”

As Meadow explained, I willed the plane to open. The spirit gave me a curious look, but the doorway to the space snapped open. It felt… Strange. Rather than sending my magic into the spirit to open it, as I had when she’d been a key, it was like I was reaching into my own ungated mana to make it happen.

When I looked into the key, however, all of those thoughts fell away.

“Woah,” Ed said, and I couldn’t help but agree.

The space had been utterly transformed. Where once there had been something akin to a void about twice the size of a large walk-in closet, there was now a large plot of land that stretched for at least an acre, complete with a sky that blazed the purples, blues, and faint streaks of orange of near-dusk.

At the thought of dusk, the spirit cheered, a sound like a grass whistle, and I smiled.

“Is that your name? Dusk?”

She let out another cheer, and I nodded in acknowledgement before going back to examining the space.

Light leaked from the sky, gentle, but more than enough to see with, though the it didn’t have a sun or a moon in it.

The ground… it was loamy and rich, a vibrant black color that seemed healthy. Off to the left part of the realm was a gentle stream that started from nowhere, but cut across the landscape.

Dusk scampered in excitedly and clapped, and I stepped in, followed by Meadow and Ed. The wards around the world felt different too, more like the bwbach wards. Maybe it was the bwbach magic?

“You gave us a fright,” one of the pixies said, floating upwards to meet us. Dusk let out a sad sound like the low burbling of the brook.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t expect this much of a reaction.”

“It’s alright,” she said, looking around. “This place is a much better place to live anyways! You were planning on moving your garden here, right?”

Dusk looked at me with pleading eyes, and I laughed, nodding.

“I am,” I agreed.

“Good, good!” the pixie said. “It’s a nice place.”

It really was a nice place. Given some time to begin seeding it, planting my garden, and do other work, it could be beautiful.

“In this realm, I suspect that Dusk has near complete control,” Meadow said. “Her mana seems much like that of a dragon’s now, with a good amount of every aspect. All of the key’s abilities and then some have been transferred to her, I suspect, and… Dusk, can you make us an illusion?”

Dusk made a sound like rustling tree branches and frowned, focusing. There was a strange flickering of mana in the area, and for a moment, I thought that they would be able to do it.

Then they sagged and let out a low wind-in-trees sound.

“That’s fine dear,” Meadow said, then turned to me. “I expect that as she grows, she’ll be able to draw power from you, as well as from the inhabitants of her astral plane. She may even one day be able to channel those powers into you, akin to how a familiar does – especially if she became your familiar. You’ll also likely learn to be able to call upon some of the plane, like you could with the key, though not as much as Dusk can, and certainly not its inhabitants.”

Ed let out a low whistle, which I echoed a moment later. Dusk looked up excitedly, and they let out a whistle of their own, which sounded once again like grass whistling.

“I should head on,” Meadow said. “I’ve already stayed longer than I should have per the agreement with Orykson. He’ll understand, likely, but he’s not going to be happy with me. I’ll deal with that though, dear, don’t you worry. Oh, and congratulations to you both for your breakthroughs in harvesting.”

With that, she stepped away, and vanished into nothingness, much to Dusk’s amusement, who began clapping. Idly, I wondered how it was she did that. Ikki had time magic, but what was Meadow doing? A magic item, maybe?

“What was your breakthrough?” Ed asked curiously. I blinked and looked up at him.

“Huh?”

“I rived my harvesting spell,” he said. “There was something about the way all the power was flowing into the key, it just… Snapped.”

I felt around in my own mana-garden, and to my pleasant surprise I had more life mana than I should. It was nowhere near full, not even close, but it was sort of as if I’d drank a Mana Shock.

I traced the flow back to my Harvest Plant Life spell. It had grown, expanding upwards and downwards, ingrained into my spirit. It was now providing me with a small, but steady, trickle of life mana.

“My Harvest Life spell,” I said as we made our way back to the shops, Dusk clambering up to sit on my shoulder.

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For reference and a meta explanation: Dusk uses both She/Her and They/Them pronouns, and is a fem-leaning, which is why they described themselves as 'mostly kinda feminine'