Eirlathion POV
Eirlathion was sitting in a corner of the ground-floor room of his house. He sat cross-legged with his hands in a relaxed position, his eyes closed peacefully. Inside his mind though, he was quite active at this moment.
He had to stay downstairs in order to be accessible to the children in case something went wrong, but they really rarely bothered him. This meant that he had ample time to himself in a house where three of the four other people in it produced an unmatched abundance of spirit energy. In this situation, there was no self-respecting elven mage who would not attempt to cultivate and progress their access to the magic of this world.
Elves produced mana naturally. This gave them a very large advantage in the area of magic at lower levels. It was as though they started their life at what humans call the fourth level of mage craft. However, the elves also naturally lacked the spirit energy needed to bind mana to their spell slots, and on top of that they needed to consume spirit energy just to live.
They could get enough spirit energy to just barely sustain themselves from the plants and animals of the forest, but in order to train as a mage they either needed access to a human, preferably a child, or train their craft in the presence of the fey royalty who had taken in such an amount of spirit energy over their lives they had re-shaped their own souls in order to produce spirit energy as they would if they were a member of a different race. The latter, of course, was an option available to only the most privileged who had received the special interest of the fey court.
Humans only needed to form their own spirit energy into a vessel and begin to bind mana that they had received from outside themselves. Any member of the fey however needed to gather a great amount of spirit energy just to create such a vessel. In Eirlathion’s case though, he had such easy access to any excess spirit energy Gaerien hadn’t gobbled up with her astounding appetite for the stuff that he found it fairly easy to cultivate.
That such a small child could consume such an outrageous amount by herself was another matter entirely. He had not payed it much mind since the prospect of Aerien producing her own spirit energy was so outrageous. Meanwhile, for a child to require so much spirit energy a mage could form a rank seven spell vessel with it every day could be easily seen as a handicap. He had not paid much attention to this before since it was natural for a child to need a lot of spirit energy, but what she was consuming was several tens of times greater than what any child ought to need. Gaerien’s case may in fact be every single bit as strange as Aerien’s, only in her case something may actually be wrong with her. Perhaps it is a lucky thing for her to have been born with the good fortune to have a sister who could make up for it and two humans at hand with such phenomenal spirit energy of their own.
Despite all the energy that Gaerien consumed though, there was still a fair amount left over that he could utilize as well, and because of this his progress since living with these children really was amazing. For decades leading up until now, Eirlathion hadn’t been able to form a single new spell vessel. However, in the six months that he had spent every day in the nursery he had built up his spirit energy and managed to significantly expand his foundation, forming new spell vessels for the second, third, and fourth ranks. He already had a few spell vessels at those ranks, but having more expanded the amount of magic he could use in any given day.
This however also helped to expand his foundation. A mage needed several lower rank spell vessels before they could even attempt to form one of a higher rank. The bare minimum was two of the rank below it before you could attempt to form one of a higher rank for the first time. Just the day before, Eirlathion had finally accomplished it. He had formed his very first spell vessel of the fifth rank, bringing him into what the humans referred to as the ninth level.
It was not anything truly impressive, especially compared to the royalty of the fey. It would be at the fifteenth level that your soul was re-formed to produce spiritual energy as they did. However, among the elves, this placed him as one of the most accomplished mages in his entire life time. Given the inherent difficulty for the fey to cultivate, the only reason the royalty were able to gain such high feats was due to the infinite lifespan enjoyed by the faeries. Unlocking fhe fourth tier of magic is normally the farthest an elf ever progresses, and Eirlathion had just unlocked the fifth due to these children.
He had yet to attempt any use of this newly unlocked level though. He had only formed the vessel. This only gives him the ability. Now comes the second part. This is what’s considered to be the hard part for humans. However, this is the one area the fey actually have the advantage once they have surmounted the hurdle of forming the spell vessel in the first place. Now he had to bind mana to it in order to ready it to handle a spell.
Binding the mana was, of course, a far more simple process. All he had to do was focus on the form he had created the night before and line the edges of it with the mana produced from his own body. It was ideal for a fey to use their own mana. This would allow them to far more easily regain expended spells, and they could avoid the backlash humans often felt from spell casting that often even caused them to loose memory of having ever studied the spell they just got done casting. This was all the result of the humans using borrowed mana that was not their own. The humans were capable of advancing faster, but this backlash was something they faced as though in compensation for their rapid advance.
Eirlathion did not think this spell vessel would be prepared today for use, it might even take in excess of a year or two, but thanks to the children he was already a lot farther along than he would have ever thought possible. But, more importantly, the formation of a new vessel at a rank higher than he had ever achieved before would help to extend his life span by nearly a century. He could afford to wait. For now, he was only doing this as a good use of his time as he waited for Túeth, the mother of the girls, to come.
Eirlathion was snapped out of his concentration as he felt a pulse run through the house. This was the mana of someone coming from outside his home. For the elves who were all born with the ability to produce mana and learned as children how to manipulate it, this was equivalent to what humans would consider “knocking.” There was nothing like a door on their homes, and so they always alerted each other with this method if they wanted to enter someone else’s house.
Eirlathion gave a smile, he decided he wanted to try something that not many elves could do. Most would have to go to the wall they wanted to have open. However, in Eirlathion’s case, his mastery over his mana flow was precise enough he could do it from here. Without even getting up, he placed his hand on the floor and focused on the wall near the entryway to his house. The wood of his home reformed at that moment, creating a doorway to admit his guest.
“Come on in,” Eirlathion greeted her, still sitting on the floor. While he may have a rather low vantage point, the position of this corner of the room actually had a clear view of the entire lower floor, including the entryway. As such, he and Túeth had a very clear view of one another, and he saw the confused expression on her face when she did not immediately see him and then heard his voice coming from so much deeper in the room than she was expecting.
“Glad you could make it.” He said, as he rose to his feet, the opening closing behind Túeth in the meantime. “The girls are upstairs with the humans, I took the two amazing young boys along with them. With how powerful their spirit energy is, it was rather believable that only the two of them would be enough.” Eirlathion had not abandoned his caution before talking so openly about this subject. The sound isolation spell he had cast on Túeth’s house when he had visited was temporary and did not last a long time. However, for his own house, he had enchanted it with a permanent version of the same spell. Simply by having the door closed, it was no longer possible for any sound to escape to the outside and no form of magical scrying or listening could penetrate it.
“Ah, right.” She said. However, a moment after this exchange, a very concerned scowl passed over Eirlathion’s face. “What’s wrong?” Túeth asked, having noticed this expression.
“I think it’s Aerien.” He said. “There’s something I didn’t really tell you before, it’s the most unbelievable part of this whole thing. I told you that she can produce her own spirit energy, but... it’s not consistent. When I gave her the sleeping medicine to disguise how healthy and energetic she was, she completely stopped producing spirit energy and began consuming it instead. Basically, she was no different from a normal baby when she was asleep.”
He could see the confusion on her face from his explanation. Why was he telling her all this now? He was certain she was wondering about it, but there was a reason, and it concerned what he just felt. “As soon as I started talking to you, the spirit energy in this place started dropping like a stone. I think Aerien heard us down here. I told her a few days ago, the day right after I visited you, that if there was ever somebody other than the five of us in the house that she should start acting like she’s sick. I didn’t think though that she actually had a way to control her ability to produce spirit energy to that degree. She seems to have just completely ceased to do it at all.”
He saw Túeth’s brows crease with his explanation, her face now filled with skepticism and annoyance. He had predicated her coming over here on the fact that Aerien had this amazing ability in the first place and the chance it offered to save her daughters. With it seeming to suddenly disappear the moment she walked in the door, it must look as though he was toying with her. The image this created certainly was not good.
“That girl,” he said, shaking his head at himself. This was quite the situation she had just put him in, there really were very few correct words that could be said in this situation given how unbelievable all of this is in the first place. He would not believe it himself if he had not watched these girls grow up, having been at their side every day since the week after their birth. “Aerien is incredibly smart for her age, so much so that it’s downright scary. If you can come on up with me, I’m sure I can have a talk with her. I can’t really predict how she might behave toward you, but I hope you are able to get along.”
“Alright,” Túeth responded. “But, you had better be telling me the truth. I got my hopes up when you said they might be saved, if you just said this to get me here...”
“I assure you I did not!” He cuts her off. It seemed she took this exactly as he had feared she would. “If she responded like this to what I said to her, that means she listens to me. I’m pretty sure I can convince her out of this little act of hers, and then you will be able to see what I was talking about.”
With a stone-faced nod of his head, Eirlathion began ascending the stairs to the second floor with the expectation of Túeth to follow. When he came up and saw the children, Aerien was laying limply in Levin’s arms. Or rather, he was pretty sure it could only be Aerien since it was Levin’s arms she was laying in. With her having somehow halted her production of spirit energy, he no longer had his own easy way to tell the girls apart. If the boys were not near them right now, they would just look like two identical babies and there would be no way at all for him to tell the difference between them.
As for Gaerien, she seemed to be extremely restless. He was pretty sure Aerien was somehow faking being sick, but Gaerien looked like she may be really having problems. She was clinging tightly to Rolwen’s shirt with both hands, and kept making little whimpering and fussing sounds like she was right at the edge of breaking into full tears. Rolwen, for his part, seemed to be doing a good job of soothing her. Normally, Gaerien didn’t seem to show a particular amount of interest in Rolwen and it was more like she tolerated him. Now, however, it seemed as though he was the only thing in the world that could keep her calm.
Eirlathion let out a sigh and began channeling his mana into his eyes to get a better look at what was going on with them. Since he was just thinking about Gaerien’s case earlier, now might even be a good chance to see what was going on with her. However, what he wound up seeing made absolutely no sense at all.
When he looked over to Gaerien, or rather, the child that Rolwen was holding, he actually saw very little in terms of spirit energy going either direction. Rolwen’s spirit energy just seemed to radiate out, passing right over her without being consumed. Meanwhile, the child laying limply in Levin’s arms seemed to be absorbing almost all the spirit energy in the room. Not only that, there was also something very wrong about how the energy was moving. It did not look like it was nourishing her in any way, and it was also not being converted into mana. It was like all the energy in the room was just being destroyed when it came into contact with her body.
“What!?” Eirlathion shouted as he took all of this in, just as Túeth was reaching the top of the stairs. He dashed out toward the child laying in Levin’s arms. Her breath was weak and coming in gasps, and her eyes were unfocused. He could feel her pulse racing as he reached down to help Levin support her head, and she began to squirm uncomfortably in his grip. “Levin, did you and Rolwen actually switch the girls!?” He demanded.
“What?”He responded, looking back at Eirlathion in confusion. Was he wrong? Well, if he was wrong, it meant that instead of this being Gaerien having troubles because Aerien had intentionally shut down her flow of spirit energy, if this was really Aerien he was cradling right now then it might mean that she somehow damaged herself while doing whatever it was that cut off her flow of spirit energy.
“Alright,” he said, looking up to the child that Rolwen was holding, “I don’t know which one of you is Aerien, but whoever it is, I want you to stop this right now!” He said, and then pointed one finger at the chest of the one in Levin’s lap. “She’s seriously not doing well, and if you don’t fix this problem if you can, then she might be in serious danger!”
“Whah-huh?” With that reaction, the child laying half in Levin’s lap and Eirlathion’s hand seemed to have a startled convulsion run through her entire body, and then just like that all of the symptoms he was seeing were just gone. What’s more, the rate of her spirit energy consumption slowed down to what one might see in a normal elf child. Nothing at all like Gaerien’s consumption rate, only something that one might consider normal. A moment later, this reversed and then he started feeling spirit energy coming FROM her.
“Aerien!?”It actually was Aerien after all then. That meant she had done something really crazy to herself just to pretend she was sick. The real question though was how exactly she had done it. Yet another mystery about these girls had just opened up in front of him, and this one seemed a lot more serious in nature than anything that had come before. If Aerien could do something like what he just saw to herself, if something had gone wrong, she very well might have wound up killing herself with it. “I don’t know what it was that you just did, but NEVER do that again! Do you understand me? That was dangerous! That was very very bad!”
(Wh... what!? But... but you said!) Aerien began to whimper and cry from Eirlathion yelling at her.
(You said to act like they were sick when someone came over!) Levin declared defensively as he wrapped his arms around Aerien and held her in a defensive posture as though to protect her form him.
(Oh in the queen’s name!) Eirlathion said in exasperation as he stood up. (This is Aerien and Gaerien’s mother! You don’t have to pretend like that in front of her!) He was not yelling, but he was using a much harsher tone with Levin now than he had intended. He was still rattled about what Aerien had just done to herself because of something he had said.
Well, this is definitely going to slow down the plans for getting help from the fey royals. There is simply no way he can leave Aerien alone without someone well versed in magic, at least not until he can teach her to control her mana better. And, it seems he had better start on her lessons immediately at that. It was simply unheard of to start trying to teach a child to control mana when they weren’t even a year old, but there were a lot of other things unheard of for a newborn that Aerien was also exhibiting. So, what’s one more to add to the list?
Author's note
I believe Eirlathion said it before a chapter or two back, absurdly intelligent children just find different ways to get into trouble. I will confess, the last 1/3 of this chapter, basically from the moment Eirlathion reached the top of the stairs onward, kinda came to me while I was in the middle of writing. All of it comes 100% from the lore though. My writing style is to firmly establish the lore and the characters explicitly for moments like these. When both those pieces of foundation exist, it can all click and your characters themselves can decide to give you a helping hand whenever you're stuck.
I'm really glad I got an assist like that too. It actually solved a few problems I was having where things were not quite going the direction I was wanting them to go. Things are looking remarkably on track now though. Also, it helps in avoiding Aerien becoming infallible. She's gotta mess up somewhere, but I don't want her to just be an idiot. If she messes up, it's gotta be in a way where only an incredibly small fraction of the readers can see it coming. If the readers who see it coming exceeds 25%, I did something wrong.
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I feel like I'm gaining knowledge from reading this and all the comments.
That was kinda the point actually. If the author has some kind of deep knowledge on some subject that not everybody knows, by all means try to work it into your writing. If properly implemented, it can make the work a lot more interesting.
EDIT: *Scrolls up to look at chapter.* .... hmmm... Kinda interesting you should put that comment on this chapter. I think the stuff included here was 100% metaphysical and not much to do with any of the IRL knowledge I put into this thing.
@Jemini Honestly that's why I love this story and I hope more people get to read it. It's also cool that others in the comments have different questions and theories about what's going on because then it makes more of an interesting experience. It's also a good learning experience since I can learn how to incorporate knowledge without making it boring. Thanks for the updates ♡
- A note on your note, but I just put this comment here because I didnt want to forget about it after I caught up.
Thanks for the chapter!!!!! Interesting, very interesting. My thoughts are somewhat similar to those of MarkofWisdom-dono. However, I am assuming that Spiritual Energy is merely being misperceived as being destroyed.
After all, Aerien's mediation method happens to siphon energy to cleanse the body and then send the energy into the void. In a way, this could be thought of Aerien cultivating an unique connection to the [Void] which allows her to absorb and release energies into gap between worlds or into other worlds. The point is that her ability looks like anti-magic but is not really anti-magic........She can worry about the effects of any connections to Void powers later.
....As for the spell slots thing, I too wish for more lore around that. Why is spiritual energy needed to bind Mana? Why is there a system of spell slots, and who created it? Was the current magic system actually a world system/spell created by a great person with the intent of mass producing more mages with less chances of corruption (like Night Ranger novel)? Are there other magic systems, or can someone create another magic system despite the risks? How does Magic Resistance works, and what ways does this type of mystical immunity relates to Dark Elves?
Must the same rank of mages have the same amount of internal Mana? If the number of usable spells is fixed, how do magic skills/techniques come into the equation? For example, can someone learn to continuously channel Fireball or repeatedly cast Fireballs (as long they don't turn off the spell slots)?
With enough background lore, I hope these questions can be answered over time. After all, it is a whole different story when considering whether alchemists exist or whether warriors can use superhuman/supernatural skills. Plus it would be nice to know the limitations of Magic and Mana usage.......For all we know, many mages might be scholars or seekers of True Magic.
Truth, I have been meaning to ask this for a while, but, are you living in my head or something? It was one thing early on when you hadn't caught up with the story yet, but now you are doing it with things I haven't even written yet.
Unfortunately, the lore chapter I have planned to release this Friday will not be covering these subjects. Well, for the most part. It's basically going to be the backlog of all the conversations Aerien and Gaerien were having each night, or at least the important ones, since they discovered they could communicate mind to mind. Gaerien doesn't know these things, and therefore she can't share them. Maybe the lore chapter for the end of the next arc will have the same thing for lessons from Eirlathion or something and more of those details can come out.
I'm trying to release the lore as organically as possible, it kinda goes against my pride to drop it in a manner not connected to anything a character in the story would present.
So Aerien ending up doing something that made her able to destroy spirit energy? That sounds very interesting. I wonder if she'll be able to harness that trick to interrupt the spirit energy flow of others, like attacking a nerve or pressure point to disable a limb, she might be able to eventually throw little darts of whatever that was at enemies and disable their spell slots or spells. This also has the possibility of letting her break magic locks or other permanent magical enchantments if she can utilize it-cut off the magic flow and break the spell.
Well, all of that only applies if it was an accidental affect she applied to herself instead of just something going wrong with her body
I also like you introducing some more background lore about the spell slots and how mages get stronger, as well as how spells work in using both spirit energy and mana. When building a higher level spell slot do the lower level ones just act like a foundation to allow more growth, or are they consumed when making the higher level spell slot? If it's the second one would people need to constantly make lower level ones and combine them into higher level ones to expand their spell slot capacity?
Wow! I was basing this on the D&D spell slots, so I was definitely going with the former. Didn't even consider the latter. That seriously would make cultivation a lot harder for mages.
Hmm.... Well, as appealing as it is to make it harder on them, I think I'm still going with the 1st one that they act as a foundation. It's just barely early enough that I could still get away with a lore change, but it really feels like a bad idea to do so after I've already gotten this far.
While the second option would make it harder for them from a lore perspective, I don't think it would affect the story too much overall except for it enabling a possible plot point of someone trying to advance too fast and burning all their low level spells slots to make/attempt to make a higher level one, and ending up with no spell slots ready/available for some emergency, event or conflict-think something like a mage student fumbled and now is unable to cast any low level spells the night before a test. Or maybe as someone who too heavily specializes in high level spells and doesn't have any low level spell slots because they always burn them at the first chance to get higher level ones-I've seen this sort of character in some series as people that have a lot of magic firepower, but difficulty in precise control-so they could easily launch massive battlefield wide destructive spells but be unable to cast small precision spells like magic cleaning or artifact creation.
Such a thing could be done in a different way for the first method though, I remember watching a D&D opinion video on how the people in the video thought that when someone encounters an enemy wizard at the end of the day or at a random time during the day, they wouldn't be likely to have all spell slots filled and prepped with combat spells unless they were expecting trouble-they'd have some spell slots exhausted for daily castings or other routine spells and would have filled spell slots with non-combat spells. So you could do it where a mage has to enter battle with some/all of their spell slots exhausted or filled with non-combat spells.
Something I thought of was-since the lower tier spells slots form the foundation of higher tier ones, how dependent are the higher tier ones on the lower tier ones? Are they independent once formed? What happens if a lower tier spell slot is removed, damaged or tampered with for whatever reason (curse, illness, spell gone wrong, etc.)? Would the higher tier spell slots that are associated with the lower tier one become unusable/unstable? If that is the case, a possible sneaky way to deal with high level spells enemy mages could cast would be to poison/curse them in such a way to disable their low tier spell slots and have that interrupt every spell slot tied to those disabled spell slots.
Also to consider in that case would be if this is a known tactic or not and the reactions to it-if it's a known thing and highly frowned on, the curses/poisons that could cause those spell slots disabling effects could be extremely illegal and reviled and used by assassins. If it's a new thing from someone like Aerien or Gaerien (possibly used in a different world, but unknown in their current one) it could be a trump card for them against their enemies.
An example of this type of thing in other media are love potions-some stories/games treat them as little jokes that young people can play on each other, while others have them as highly illegal contraband that are viewed as mind control or tampering with someone's will and if someone has s*x under their influence it is considered rape. It could even be a mix of the two-in Harry Potter love potions are pretty frowned on but didn't seem to be illegal, and in the last book/movie were openly sold in the magical joke shop with an offhand remark that they were very popular for girls to buy and use on someone they wanted as their boyfriend. But there was a significant background event/detail that Tom Riddle/Voldemort was conceived because his mother used a love potion to drug his father into sleeping with and marrying her, and when she stopped drugging him with it he was extremely angry and immediately left her.
Hope this sparks some ideas for you
Also-agreed it's probably best to stick with your original intention, otherwise it's highly likely to be forgotten at some point in the future when you're writing something still going with the original premise, and have to rewrite a chunk of the story. I've run into that myself
Ah, classic DnD magic system but rationalized. Good, good.
Yeah, I was thinking about going with the weave justification later editions of D&D put in to justify it, but that just sounded like it had too many problems (not the least of which would be copy-right issues with a company known for draconian enforcement.)
Making it incompatible mana grants a lot more possibilities though, and also casts a clear deliniation between the elves and humans in their advancement process. Humans advance faster, but have to deal with the backlash and forgetting their spells every time they cast. Elves advance a lot slower, but they don't have the forgetting spells backlash issue. This also, interestingly enough, conforms CLOSER to the original TSR version in which there were level limits on the non-human races, a level cap that existed for every race other than humans. Much slower and more difficult advancement would certainly explain why elves are not likely to advance as far in a class.
I too like to completely flesh out the lore and mechanics of how everything works before I make any of the actually story concrete.
from spell casting that often even caused them to loose memory
--> "...lose memory"
Feck, it scared me too
Thanks for the chapter!