“Come now, child. Let the stars reveal your place among the tapestry of fate.”
Within a rarely seen domed building in the Esharian capital of Balrech, Tahir stood and marveled at the sight before him. He felt a little weary about coming to a fortune teller who read fate by divining the stars in the daytime, but he found himself pleasantly surprised. The room had no windows, blocking out all sunlight, and a combination of the domed ceiling and what Tahir guessed to be some sort of illusion magic created a mirror of the night sky above him. With the addition of faint lines between the stars to mark the various constellations.
He stood there to get some professional, or in this case divine help to determine his next course of action. The Redcloud guild he worked under had a rare sponsorship opportunity, and the deadline to submit an application was in a month. They only let guild members with a gold ranking apply, and while Tahir had a silver ranking, only one rank below, as things stood he could do a different mission all 45 days between now and the deadline and he wouldn’t be any closer to qualifying for a gold ranking. Which brought him here. If the sponsorship was in the stars for him at all, maybe a reading from the heavens could tell him how to get there.
The fortune teller stood in the center of the room, a wizened old woman who gave him a patient gaze through errant strands of long gray hair. She also shared his warm brown skin tone, something rare for Tahir in Esharia, but it gave him a sense of familiarity he otherwise wouldn’t have and calmed his nerves a bit. He moved forward, coming to a stop in front of the fortune teller and waiting for her instruction.
“Bring your arm under the starlight. Let it bask in Noxulla’s canvas across the heavens.”
After a moment, Tahir brought his arm out before her. Stars and the great expanse that fills the void shone along it, and yet another new constellation connected itself as he watched. A zig-zagging set of lines running across his forearm that ended in a circle of stars on the back of his hand. He also spotted something else, something dark curling around his arm and stopping just before his wrist.
“Worry not, child.” The fortune teller took his arm to examine before Tahir could ask about any of what he saw. “I have seen many like you before. Seeking a clear path forward when all seems murky, at the end of their rope, and on the precipice of something grand.” With one wrinkled hand, she began to trace the constellation along his arm. “Your fate is that of the mountain range. The long climb. Peaks and valleys of trials and tribulation, challenge among challenge. Should you rise to the occasion, you will find yourself at the summit.” Her tracing ended at the circle of stars, with nothing in the center. She squeezed his hand and gave a hearty chuckle before speaking. “Now, for the reason you are actually here. Your soul is full and healthy, that much is certain, it is but a blank slate, you have no affinities to speak of.”
Tahir tensed, glancing between her and the constellation on his arm. No affinities in magic or aura. As told, essentially, by a goddess herself through her followers. She told him he had a path full of challenges, but he struggled to imagine rising up to anything past what he’d been doing for the last year, keeping in mind the information that ultimately led him to seek this fortune teller in the first place. Was he screwed?
As if sensing his worries, or maybe seeing his expression, the fortune teller squeezed his hand again. “Calm yourself. Though you do not what you seek, you are not without a way forward. I have seen your soul laid bare. It is full of empathy and love for others, and as long as it remains as such, you will never stand in place or stagnate.”
Tahir wanted to ask what that meant, but he supposed if he could get exact answers from fortune tellings like this, he would have had to pay a lot more than 10 gold pieces. “Thank you. I’ll keep all that in mind. I did want to ask about-” He trailed off. While talking he glanced down at his arm to find that coiling black marking gone, leaving only the stellar map and constellation on his arm. “-something that was on my arm, but isn’t anymore.”
“Perhaps a sign from the goddess.” The fortune teller looked over his arm once more, and determined that she couldn’t see anything else either before releasing it. “There are few things that can hide from fate. If what you saw concerns you so, perhaps it will appear in another reading, but otherwise it should have no bearing on your future.”
Maybe that was that. With only 35 gold pieces to his name, spending another 10 to confirm something he saw didn’t seem like a very sound financial decision, so Tahir put it away as something to maybe do in the future.
“Now, while I have your fate laid out before me, would you like to know anything else?” The fortune teller asked with a smile and a wink. “Your love life, for example.”
That snapped Tahir back to the present as he coughed. “No thank you, I’ve learned plenty.” Much as he wanted to be frugal and get as much as he could from a single reading, he already had a lot to think about, and cryptic messages about his future prospects in love would only complicate things.
Another hearty chuckle came from the fortune teller as she walked and motioned for him to follow her out into the waiting room of her building. “Then our time here is concluded. I wish you well, and do give Theo my regards.” She closed the door to the domed room, then made her way back to a seat behind a sizable desk and picked up a pair of knitting needles that he’d seen her working with when he entered. “And remember what I’ve told you. Your empathy will be your way forward, that is assured.”
After promising he would give regards to the friend who’d sent him by the fortune teller’s way, he thanked her again for the reading and set off into the noonday rush of Balrech. Thankfully, he could find next objective in Esharia’s capital close by. Half an hour of weaving through crowds, carriages and automobiles along the streets and he found himself at the Esharian royal library. The second largest library in the entire kingdom, outside of the one in his hometown.
If he had one skill from growing up in an orphanage attached to that library, it was research. That he could reliably find what knowledge was available in a library continued to be a boon to him in his year of working under the Redclouds. He hoped it would hold up here as well as he started to comb through different styles and sources of magic and aura use.
Of course, anything better than theory and basic spells for any kind of magic would be locked in the vaults of royalty, mage’s guilds or in the spellbooks of the mages that created them, and the same could be said for aura techniques. Basic spells and techniques only benefited people who could use magic or aura, and even multiple mages or aura users could hardly win against someone with access to spells even one tier above them. Considering this, and the years it normally took for someone learning basic magic or aura use to even begin to consider inventing their own, the basics of everything stayed open to the public.
The amount of people it inspired to join Esharia’s mage collective or the army to learn stronger spells or aura techniques probably outweighed any trouble that might come from it as well.
In any case, Tahir collected and combed through tomes of basic magic. Looking for something he could learn with the fortune teller’s reading of empathy in mind. He couldn’t exactly refute the reading, but at the moment he couldn’t see how empathy or his having a large amount of it would lead him to getting the Redcloud sponsorship. If the solution did exist in this library, though, he would find it.
He skimmed through dozens of treatises and essays on magic and aura. Elemental magic, basic body strengthening uses of aura, even all the way to basic necromancy. Some of the more dangerous magics like the magic concerning charming people, or necromancy that actually involved animating corpses, wouldn’t be kept in the library for obvious reasons. Tahir could get preliminary access to some of those by using his silver Redcloud pocket watch at Esharia’s mage’s collective due to the relationship the guild has with the kingdom, but he’d keep that as a last resort.
Tahir had gone to the fortune teller to find out if he had any affinity for any kind of magic or aura. From what he knew, some people were predisposed to have an easier time using certain kinds of magic or aura techniques. If he could sling a bolt of fire four times before his mana pool ran out, someone with an affinity for fire magic could easily shoot eight with the same amount of mana. Without any of those affinities, Tahir had to find something that would help him in a fight without almost immediately draining his mana pool. Normally, one’s mana pool would grow as they used magic, and the same followed for aura, but this situation arose because Tahir accidentally stunted his growth for both pools.
It seemed like such a good idea, in hindsight. Over the past year as a member of the Redcloud guild, near constant practice in the first four months as a bronze member had him unlock his ability to use magic, his mana, . The past four months, while he continued to use his magic, he switched gears and practiced to unlock his aura pool, the energy of the body which he would use to empower it. In doing so, he touched upon an aspect of both energies that evaded him in all of his own research from unlocking the use of both pools.
If the two sources of energy were close enough in capacity, the growth of both of them slowed down considerably.
If Tahir wanted to unlock both, the better practice lay in waiting three to five years to have his mana be unquestionably dominant within his body. Then he could continue to grow both. As things stood now, the energies competed in his body, and it would take him years to unbalance the two toward one or the other. A strange development to him, since all the stories and reports he read about people who could use both aura and mana never talked about this unbalance of energy. He had a theory that people with an affinity ignored the slowed growth by being able to use their magic or aura much more often than someone without one, but with no affinities to his name, Tahir couldn’t personally confirm.
Which left him looking through different sources of magic. Initially for low mana costs, but the thought of empathy and how it might help a certain magic type remained in his mind. After hours of research with a break in between for food and drink at a nearby stall, he found something as the sun began to set. Spirit magic.
Making a connection with a spiritual being across planar barriers. Creating a contract and invoking it which partially melds one’s soul with that of the spirit and allows that spirit to manifest. From what Tahir could tell, spirits generally fell into four tiers of power: from tier zero to tier three, and invoking a spirit used more mana the higher the tier. Tier zero and one spirits could be invoked by the average mage, so they would work for Tahir’s current mana pool, but several problems existed with the magic.
With the rituals he could find in the library, he had no choice regarding which spirits might want to make a contract with him. The rituals themselves basically sent an offer out and brought spirits around to answer. He found another issue in the fact that summoning spirits higher than tier zero would require him to visit a place where planar barriers were. The ley line crossing in Balrech fit that description, but the Esharian mage’s collective had control of it, and he’d have to pay likely more than the 35 gold Tahir had on him to access it.
So Tahir would have to work with tier zero spirits for now if he wanted to try this. Probably a good thing for him, since it also avoided another issue he’d found from diving further into the research of the magic other mages had done. It was possible to mess up the contract; meld the souls together too much or give the spirit too much leeway in the invocation. When this happened, the spirit could possess the summoner, controlling their body until the bond ran out of energy. Even divine spirits could run amok and wreak havoc this way, and the possibility of this caused most scholarly pursuits concerning spirit magic to be abandoned past tier zero.
He didn’t usually go with the first possibility that had promise when he went through research, but after hours of pouring over tomes of magic and magical theory, he felt like he wouldn't find much of anything else. He only had a month to make this work. The last Redcloud sponsorship happened five years ago, and he had no way to tell when the next one would come around. At the very least, he could come back and wouldn’t have to do all of the reading he’d already done.
He quickly left the library and made his way to Esharia’s mage collective headquarters to buy the materials needed for the ritual. He looked up at the building’s tall spires as walked through the front doors. With the massive size of the building and proximity to the royal castle in the city’s center, it created an imposing image indeed. Tahir recalled his earlier visits - one to buy a wand, and a few more over the course of the year to buy materials for various basic spells and rituals. He didn’t consider himself a regular by any means, and if he happened to need to spend hundreds upon hundreds of gold on magical components he’d probably ask around at the Redcloud headquarters for a local and independent seller. The collective worked as a first and obvious choice; he never felt like they extorted him for any components, or his wand, even if the latter didn’t come cheap by any means.
He passed by the general receptionist at the lobby. One of the iskarai -- the horned ones, over whom scholars continued to argue about whether they were of fiendish or draconic descent -- with pale grey skin and long white hair. He barely glanced in her direction past a nod and friendly smile as he walked through, but he felt her gaze on him throughout his walk toward the material supply. Had they met? He found himself curious, but decided not to ask. Last thing he wanted to be was a customer wasting time, when they’d normally be closing regular operations when the sun went down.
The thought and concern over it left his mind, though, as he entered the material supply store and checked the list that he’d written down. Gathering by the vial and bottleful, the collected materials cost him about 25 gold. Most of his remaining funds. He spent around two gold a day between his inn room and maintaining his equipment, so the ten gold he had would last him another five days or so. After the ritual he’d focus on earning some money, but this was the lowest he’d been in a while. Since he had started a year ago, earning around five silver pieces a day from the bronze requests on the job board.
He could work his way through this -- if not to get the sponsorship, then at least to make sure he didn’t stagnate and spend the next several years unable to increase his mana or aura pools, and thus unable to learn stronger magic or strengthen his uses of aura. He’d come this far after all.
The inn Tahir stayed at operated in collaboration with the Redcloud guild and various others in Balrech. Designed to cater to all manner of adventurers and travelers, the room Tahir rented strayed on the larger side, and definitely had the cost to match. Between his equipment, clothes, and any materials he collected to sell later, he needed the space. By clearing furniture out of the center of the room, it also provided ample floor for him to draw the ritual circle. Wide enough for him to comfortably sit or stand in. All things considered, setting the ritual up didn’t take long at all, but his nerves made it feel like ages.
Most of it stemmed from the inherent uncertainty of setting up a ritual he’d never done; practicing unknown magic without utmost care could lead to disaster. Hell, people without an affinity toward a particular magic basically needed a teacher to guide them through channing mana properly so that they didn’t blow their fingers off, and that was before they even went to casting a spell. Tahir didn’t worry too much, since he always double and triple-checked his preparations. The thought of him wasting this time and money on the ritual built up the other aspect of his nervousness.
Once he’d finished drawing the circle and putting the materials in place, Tahir sat inside the circle and, after taking a deep breath, began the incantation for the ritual. As he spoke, his vision blurred and the surroundings of his room fell away from him. All became enshrouded in a light blue as his mind shifted away from the physical world and connected to the realm of the ethereal. A transition plane, and one that worked as a medium for contacting spirits. The ritual brought his mind here and used his soul as a beacon to the spirits in. With this version of the ritual, it created a weak beacon so only tier zero spirits would respond.
Tahir floated, looking around at a sea of blue that went on indefinitely. He could feel the magic working on his soul, sending out a silent shout to get the spirits’ attention. Seconds went by as Tahir’s head turned left and right, up and down across the expanse, wondering just how long it would take for him to get a response.
As he waited, he spotted several bright pulsing lights making their way toward him. Spirits, he realized, coming to a stop and hovering around him in response to his call. Dozens of them in fact, far more than any of the research at the library had suggested. Once he got past the surprise, he began to focus on them, creating a very brief mental link that would give Tahir an idea of their abilities.
Doing this for dozens of spirits and pausing between each one to make sense of the information planting itself in his mind took quite a bit of time. Enough that he knew that he couldn’t spend that much time deliberating, since the ritual only lasted an hour. He felt completely floored by the choice of options, but thinking in terms of picking something that would help him with his work at the Redclouds allowed him to make a selection.
He sent out his intent on making a contract toward an orange, flickering light. A tier zero spirit of fire. Tier zero spirits didn’t manifest physically so much as grant the caster benefits through their bond. Tahir used fire spells often enough offensively that any benefit would be a boon to him going forward. The spirit seemed to accept pretty readily, and Tahir shuddered as he felt a connection form to his soul. It wouldn’t cause any actual change until he invoked the spirit, but it was a new, odd experience for him.
The space around Tahir blurred for a while before stabilizing. Tahir knew this as a sign of the ritual’s magic fraying, having completed its task. He didn’t expect the space to stabilize again, however. As he gazed around at the spirits still present from his call, he wondered. Rituals like this usually manifest problems immediately if he did the preparations wrong. Everything worked as intended -- maybe a little too well, considering the sheer number of spirits he brought to him. He was only supposed to bind to one, but…
Taking a deep breath, he sent a similar intent to bind with a gray light closeby; a tier zero spirit of the wind. Almost immediately, the signs of magic fraying intensified. The ethereal plane fell away as Tahir’s mind connected back to his body. In that rush, however, he felt the wind spirit’s connection to his soul form alongside the spirit of fire.
As it closed, the magic shoved Tahir back into his body so abruptly that he nearly fell backward before he caught himself. He’d really done it there - bound with two spirits at once instead of one as outlined in the ritual. He could see the results of having slightly overtaxed the ritual, which made use of ambient mana from the formless void instead of his own. The chalk circle and material components were gone, but he could see a faint burn matching the ritual circle. That’s going to cost me my deposit, I think.
Oh well. The memories of everything that happened ran rampant in Tahir’s mind. He sat up from the remnants of the ritual and rushed to a desk to record everything down on pencil and paper. The number of spirits that responded to the ritual, the ability for him to bind with two in a ritual clearly designed for one. Did they have something to do with his soul being full of empathy? He thought it might help him in binding with the spirits, but based on the research he did, this didn’t seem normal. His curiosity ran rampant and he noted down his experiences, thoughts, and notes, but glancing at the moonlight peeking through the window clued him into the time, and forced him to hold off on any further experimentation. 44 days left, but Tahir went to sleep full of hope and wonder instead of the fear and uncertainty that plagued him earlier in the day.
