The cafeteria was serving fish. Must have been a Friday, Ulric mused.
When he asked if the fish were fresh caught she assured him that ice fishing was a consistent source of sustenance during the long Winter. Upon inquiry as to how long fish could be stored, Geyrt told him that there were cold rooms supported by Infrig, cold magic, that would keep food preserved nearly indefinitely, alongside the application of Sano, healing magic, that prevented the growth of microbes. Not that she called it as such, she described it as a spell work that prevented "spoilage".
Ulric was pleased to know that the modern convenience of refrigeration was present. That, alongside plumbing, were two of the greatest nods to human, well, persons, comfort that he could think of. Electricity provided a potent luxury to life but a functioning bathroom and kitchen were what he considered vital. If those two facets of modern existence had not been present, Ulric was fully intending on leveling up civilization. Mostly though, Ulric had no intention of reintroducing modern technology to Varda, for fear of someday leading it down the same course that had eventually led to the destruction of his birth world. Even minor things, precision machine tooling, lathes, drills, and the like, while he might make them for himself, eventually, were not items he would want to be released freely, to say nothing of combustion engines and motors and explosive powders. It was too risky.
About two hundred years before Ulric's birth, the Earth had been, in generous terms, looted. A near century of surging overpopulation, catastrophic resource exploitation, tragic waste, and thoughtless consumption had driven the world over the brink. Around 2060 the collapse of food webs and agricultural centers led to a global famine, which, accompanied by violent storm seasons and vicious heat in the equatorial regions made large swaths of latitude uninhabitable. Economic systems that had, for a century, been unsustainable, vanished almost overnight and took with them the governments that had been propped up mostly by modern comforts and sheer societal inertia. When real suffering hit the populace they revolted immediately. The post-industrial nations underwent a dramatic civic uprising that spread globally.
Sooner, rather than later, somebody had the bright idea to try to turn the militaries against the populace under the guise of Serving the Public Good and what followed made the French Revolution look like a birthday party at a pizzeria. There was a time when being a known congressman, attorney, judge, or member of basically any government apparatus that wasn't the EPA, FDA, and National Park Service got you boiled in a kettle in public squares. Similar attitudes abounded globally, especially in the more draconian places that had been suppressing their populations for a generation through social engineering and good old-fashioned government-sanctioned massacres. What was left of the world political stage lasted only a decade or so longer before a nuclear war initiated by some seventh-generation lunatic on the Korean peninsula in a hidden mountain fortress, in tandem with an aging sovereign in the Kingdom of Siberia, who was determined to be remembered as the conquerer of Asia right up until he evaporated, put a final, definitive end to the old paradigm.
That nuclear war saved the world, ironically enough. Not only did the war destroy what was left of the more virulent elements of humanity but it eventually provided a solution to the global warming that was suffocating the planet and heating its seas. The surviving amalgamated nations of Euromerica, the Sino-Pacific Republic, New South Africa (which now encompassed the entire African continent, the Middle East, and Australia), and a smattering of city-states tried to get things under control, with some success but the situation was declining rapidly. Fisheries were decimated, food scarce, and the only reason there wasn't more famine was that disease, war, and nukes had already decimated the population.
Agriculture and modern infrastructure were largely inoperable because not enough qualified people were left to maintain and repair the production and manufacturing facilities. Not to mention there was the continued warming and radiation to be considered. The global population was halved by 2100, and there was no way to provide the people needed to revive the old world as it had been, nor was there the will to try. Internet archivers, who managed to preserve hard copies of science literature, instruction manuals, engineering schematics, art galleries and libraries, that sort of thing, were largely to thank for the resistance of humanity to another dark age. There was a memory of the "golden era", if not the capability of producing it.
A decision was made amongst the people left to use some of the last weapons on the arctic circle's remaining glaciers to blast enough ice into the atmosphere to bring on a mini-ice age and reverse the heating for long enough to buy humanity time to enact a more permanent solution. The nuclear cat was already out of the bag and fallout filters were already installed on most buildings. Irradiated water and soil were already becoming facts of life, there mechanisms for being dealt with already in place, amongst the regions with the wherewithal to enact those solutions. The places that didn't faded away into oblivion within a few short years. The decision was not hard to abandon the surface for rapidly excavated and fortified subterranean shelters. A few generations of living in what amounted to mass fallout shelters in subsurface mining complexes preserved most of what was left of the human race from the immediate radiation threat. Hydroponics, synthetic meat generators, and ruthless recycling of nearly everything allowed the buried populations to persist. Even so, there were less than a billion people left by 2120. A tenth of the population of the precollapse.
What was left was a hardened core of humans determined to survive, to thrive. As usual, it wasn't until the pressure was on that people showed their mettle, their greatness. Hidden away beneath the earth, there was a renaissance in culture, science, and government. The Second Enlightenment or, as the more morbidly humored called it, the Nuclear Alarm Clock, revolutionized what was left of the world. The global heating was solved through massive-scale carbon scrubbers in the oceans which were then utilized to create carbon fiber structural components, graphene materials, graphite batteries, solar harvesters, and still more tons of the stuff were sequestered in rock.
Fusion power plants were completed, en masse, over the next two decades solving the energy problems that threatened to reduce civilization to the stone age, since electrical grids had mostly disappeared when the mining companies providing their fuels were beheaded, sometimes literally. Free energy greatly expanded the industrial and transportation capabilities of the nations and a worldwide power grid was soon re-established. Public transportation along super trains accompanied the grid and, in a half-century of combined efforts, there was a web of public transit systems in place, like a circulatory system pumping civilization back through the withered flesh of the world. Many of these systems were buried in Earthquake proofed tunnels at a depth around that of the Marianas trench. Radioactive material was still a problem topside and you didn't want to move irradiated dust any farther than you absolutely had to.
Gene therapies, long languishing due to puritanical restrictions of long-dead politicians exploded, just in time to head off the looming genetic extinction by fallout exposure and the bottleneck of survivors in somewhat isolated population centers. Cancer rates had climbed by over two thousand percent since the war but viral gene overwrites from stem cell templates and genetic maps brought that down to a solid 0.005%. The funny part about that was that the viral delivery systems were so easy and cheap to employ that it was virtually free to anybody who needed it. Almost nobody was born defective, diseased, or died of cancer at the time of Ulric's birth. Designer genes were the hot fad when Ulric had grown into manhood, choosing eye, skin, hair color, and things like that. He'd played it naturally, mostly because he hadn't really given a shit. He'd dated a girl with glow-in-the-dark skin once though and that had been a surprisingly entertaining adventure.
Energy and medical technology advancements, coupled with the revision of economic theory to prevent generational wealth aggregation, total education reform, representative governmental overhauls emphasizing protection of voting integrity and surgical application of law helped lay the groundwork for a better world. All in all, the emergent governments that survived the collapse of the old civilization had turned a new leaf. Too late, of course. Always too late with humanity.
It was almost a century post-collapse before humanity returned to the surface. Some didn't, they lobbied to make the surface of the planet an ecological preserve, and proclaimed that Homo Sapiens did not deserve a second chance to go forth and prosper above. When Ulric was born, a scant fifty years post re-emergence it was mostly clear that the Earth would recover environmentally, especially since speciation seeding projects were showing promise and the climate was settling into its new, more temperate, status. Most of the fallout had long since settled into the ground, though background radiation was still producing accelerated mutation rates in virtually all ecosystems. Of the old majesty, little remained. High was the price of survival, and creeping were some of the habits which had made that survival necessary, such as somewhat premature business promises that created the working conditions which had led to Ulric's rather accelerated decline, both physical and mental. Still, enough had remained or been established that Ulric's developing passion for hiking and pretend savagery had taken him through a vestigial memory of the forests that had existed before. In 2193, the year he died, he had abandoned hope that he would ever see anything close to the glory of the world as presented in the archives of one St. David Attenborough.
The Elven forests of Iriel, the [Plateau of Ancients], these were as Eden rediscovered to Ulric. They were priceless beyond measure. He felt some of what the Elves felt for their precious wood. But where they guarded the memory of their fallen ancestors, he mourned a world ruined long before he could experience it's grandeur. It had been months since Ulric had thought, for any real length of time, about the fate of his old world. Mostly it hadn't occurred to him since he'd first laid eyes on those exalted arbors on the Plateau and had experienced the joy of forests primeval. A gift, he reminded himself yet again, was this world and this life. A gift he was going to enjoy to its fullest. Just as soon as his muscles stopped aching from Idra'se's lessons. It helped, always, to keep things in perspective.
Technology, magic, the interplay between the two, Ulric was looking forward to seeing how these unfolded. He'd already lived a life devoid of magic but full of technology. He could already see potential in a land saturated by the possibility of mana, mysteries seemed to unfold before him on a daily basis. He could also see a people for whom the forces wielded by magi might make the intractable problems of his homeland trivial. Even something like refrigeration, a technology some might view as fundamental to modern existence, was rendered inconsequential before the might of arcana. Ulric had barely experienced the civilization of Varda for a week, who knew what other marvels were taken for granted? It was going to be fun finding out, is all of which he was certain.
Looking forward, he banished the failures of his people and the scarring of their world from any further consideration. That was done, after all. Ulric Einar of Earth was dead and Ulric Einar of Varda was on an adventure to discover what this land had in store for him. The uncharacteristically whimsical nature of his own mind he attributed to the endorphin rush of being pushed to physical extremes, the runner's high. Between that and the dehydration from overindulgence last night Ulric was, perhaps, a little loopy.
Some calories and fluids would help greatly in putting things to right so he set to the fish platter with a will. He plowed through a near kilo of fish blackened and served over a rice-like grain of a plant aptly called [River Wheat], on account of it grew naturally in the shallow waters of swamps and flood plains, though this had been cultivated by the Zelussin. The cuisine returned his more usual cheer and he turned his mind to absorb what he'd learned from Gother and Idra while he ate. A little jam fruit and some kind of citrusy, minty tea to wash things down concluded his meal. He'd have liked to shake hands with the chef, it was delicious, especially when you considered the sheer amount of such food needed to be prepared to support the hard training Iriel'en warriors of the fortress.
Geyrt had taken notice of her Honor's odd mood but, as per usual, said nothing. His down moods and strange tangents of thought were generally quick to pass and she could only aggravate them by prying. He was pushing hard and she would see to it that nothing interfered with his developing the skills that would become swiftly necessary to hold his position when the world at large learned of the new guardian of the [Plateau of Ancients]. It would not do for that to happen, not yet. Part of a Shadow's responsibility was to put their Honor into the best position possible to cultivate alliance or defeat threats. Ulric Einar was not ready to face those who would exploit the abundance of the Elder trees or the life they sustained. Certainly not in the numbers that would come should Prespang be given reason to believe that the new guardian was lacking in strength or cunning. Iriel would buffer much of the worst of this, few would risk the ire of the Deep Wood Elves on a whim, however, there were many forces walking the world and not all of them could be expected to act with reason, not when untapped riches suddenly were left unattended. Her father would expect her to keep her new Honor on the straightest path to power. It was her mission, now.
Geyrt Iriel, formerly master Hunter and, at one point, well on her way to taking her mother's title of Heartwood Spear, mulled over many such things while she completed her meal. Her new place in life was bitter, at times. At other times though she felt like she had been given a puzzle to solve. The status didn't lie, her Honor was an anomalous creature. Sometimes naïve as a newborn, sometimes prescient as a wisened elf. Most of the time relaxed, almost casual about even the most critical of tidings, but there were times when a look like a hungry [Fell Wolf] was in his eyes, such as when the fool Morion had overstepped. The enigma and her Father's surety that the future would include a heavy shaping by this Reforged were of some relief to her. She would be there firsthand to witness the unfolding and would be in the thick of it now. When she chaffed at this new arc in her life she recalled lamenting that her life had taken on a note of redundancy, of boredom. Hunting Lesser Beasts, scouting for intrusions, and acting as her Father's voice in neighboring provinces when needed, it had begun to wear thin. Now she had all the novelty she could ask for, and then some.
The only problem was that she had traded her previous existence for it. Ask the [Fate Ape] for a boon and watch the finger of his paw curl; never was the wish granted without a catch. She watched as the bizarre man finished stuffing himself, the volume of food consumed being somewhat impressive after such intense physical exertion. If he cramped she would mock him viciously. Eager for the chance and keeping note of the time, she chivvied him out of his seat, that they could arrive at the arcanum in a timely fashion. Her Mothers would not be kept waiting, and she looked forward to perhaps tripping him on the way, if she could arrange it without detection. Their overt hostilities were mostly behind them now but she still had not satisfied herself for the insult he'd given her on their first meeting. She'd only tried to kill him, he had had no call to say such things and it would likely be years of creating small inconveniences or minor wounds before she had collected her due. She nearly smiled at the thought of exacting her punishments.
Something must be in the air today, Ulric thought. First, he'd gone on a trip down shitty memory lane and then his Shadow had been oddly pensive during the meal. Nobody had talked, of course, Iriel'en didn't speak during meals as a general rule, but her expression had been off. Now an evil smirk was on her lips and she had the look in her eyes she got when she was about to do something someone else would regret. He first considered if he was the target before dismissing that possibility, he'd not done anything to her worth mentioning since teasing her that morning with her dad and brother. So someone else must have done something, the poor bastard, whoever they were. In any case, he took seriously her reminder to be on time for the meeting with the Dragon Ladies and ignored the slight discomfort of overindulging in dinner after exercise.
Off they went, the frigid air blasting Ulric in the face like a bucket of ice water. He relished it. Winter was his favorite month of the year. Something about the stark beauty of leafless trees, a sheen of frost on branches scattering prismatic light, and the still, heavy air just did it for him. Geyrt did not appear to enjoy the cold, frowning briefly at the exposure to a cutting gust of wind. Ulric wondered, briefly, what his camp would look like right now, whether there would be snow on the plateau and how that might look on the dense, skyward roof of the Elder canopy. He didn't have long to contemplate it, they had arrived at the massive artifice that was Arcanum. Carved doors swung weightlessly on their hinges and Ulric followed his Shadow through empty halls to the practice arena.
He breathed deeply when he felt the heavily magical pressure settled comfortably upon his shoulders. Vaguely reminiscent of being underwater, the air pushed on his body in this place, like it did on the glade. He hadn't known how dense was the mana in the [Forest of the Forgotten] until he'd descended to the forests below. It was like being on a mountain top in comparison, the mana was much thinner. Irielhos was slightly better than the wood it guarded, the heartwood of which everything was constructed was dense with magic and radiated that aura throughout the fortress. It felt like coming home to enter this space.
Down below, in the central arena, stood Geyrt's Mothers. Vedyr, Shor, and Bathe, each radiant in their own unique way stood ready to begin instruction. Geyrt and Ulric made no delay in descending the wide stair to stand before them. Almost immediately Vedyr and Bathe wordlessly took Geyrt aside to the leftmost arena a simple gesture, enough to have her double timing to leave him standing, somewhat awkwardly, under Shor's intense scrutiny. The masklike face and cutting ruby eyes drilled into his brain, searching for flaws and finding many, at least to Ulric's perceptions.
Eventually, the implacable Elven Queen let up with her stare. Relief flooded through him, he didn't know how long he could take that kind of silent judgment. She was like one of those interrogators that just kept applying pressure until the prisoner cracked.
"It is good that you have returned Glade Chief. I have thought much on what you showed us last time and will have to make adjustments based on the extent of your own experience. In many ways this makes my task more difficult. Were you completely ignorant I would have clear ground on which to build foundations. But you have already laid foundations and tearing them out would be too difficult at this point." Shor began, mild annoyance seeping through.
The mysterious woman suddenly grinned and her intensity nearly burned. Leaning forward, her brassy voice held excitement that trilled alarm bells in Ulric's brain.
"But the opportunity that has arisen! A Reforged that retains their memories, memories of a distant world! It contaminates your approach to magic, pervades it with oddities that I have never seen. So!" The woman clapped loudly to punctuate her enthusiasm before returning to serene calm. The switch was giving him mental whiplash.
"Instead" Lady Shor Iriel continued, "of trying to force you along the pre-laid track let us throw convention to the wind and follow wherever your personal intuition leads. Let us begin by this: What is mana?" She finished, laying out the question from which she might begin to crack open Ulric's perspective on magic.
It wasn't an entirely unexpected question, but it did take him by surprise that she'd asked so quickly. A mind like a Swiss clock the woman had to have. She had surmised that the differences in Ulric's abilities with magic, compared to his Elven counterparts, lie in the fundamental basis of their interpretations of what mana was and therefore could do. This understanding shaped everything to come, the approaches to spell work, the limits of what some mages could do compared to others, and the advantages that insight into the nature of mana could confer to the caster.
Ulric had thought long on what mana could be and do, had spent hours in the glade staring into a campfire while his mind wandered the corridors of his own mind searching for answers. He had few, had only the vaguest impression of pieces that fit to build a greater whole. But he also had an entire lifetime of absence, in which his technocratic society had explored through mathematics and dedicated experimentation the limits of the known universe. This gave him some ideas about what mana could not be. Sometimes, knowing what a thing wasn't, a view of its negative, was better than the thing itself. Ulric didn't worry about being wrong, most scientists, unless their impartiality had been destroyed by greed or pride, the chief sins of the scientific mind, accepted, even embraced the experience. Being wrong was merely a step along the path, sometimes a bridge across an intractable problem to discovering what was right. The journey to knowing, to Solving the Problem, had driven him in his old life. He no longer had that as his sole reason for being, but he still enjoyed the process of discovery.
Ulric took a few moments to arrange the stray hairs of his ideas before he began to explain his hypothesis for mana.
"Mana is…potential. It is possibility that can, upon reaction with what is, be made into real." Ulric said in a measured voice.
"In my old world, we interpreted the universe as the moment-to-moment product of the interactions of wavelike forces. Like ocean waves from different winds driving independently but forming a varying surface of the sea when they met. The sea was different in every moment, depending on what forces were at work but the water was constant, more or less. Since coming to this world I have come to believe that mana is the water of this universe, it is the background onto which form is given by the interaction of the forces of the cosmos." Ulric finished, some thoughts congealing as he spoke them, where they had formerly been only impressions in his own mind.
Beginning to become excited by the new paths opening he hurried onward, before the moment passed.
"Potentials don't have to be real, in the moment, to exist. They describe what may happen, a reservoir of what might change in a system, the upper limit on what is possible in the future. Since mana can be, as I understand it, anything, then it represents the potential for everything that might happen. The only thing I know to call the potential for everything that was or will ever be is, the universe. Mana is all, and reality is the consequence of choices and interactions between the results of those choices in the universe imprinting that mana with definite form. Who made the first choices or why I do not know, any more than I know what caused the Big Bang of my old universe's birth. All I can do is conjecture that something stirred the mana to cause existence to happen. Everything else is a consequence interacting with another consequence, interacting with a choice made in the present moment to create the future." Ulric said, getting somewhat lost in the abstractions his mind was attempting to describe.
His conclusion wasn't definite, wasn't precise, didn't have the elegant beauty of a mathematical proof or a scientific law, but it didn't feel wrong either. Trust in yourself you must, young Padawan. It was a maxim from ages ago in his culture. He'd employed it against his coworkers frequently, to their irritation when he would go on to find the right path forward while following a hunch. He didn't know if his hunch here would produce similar success or hit a wall as had happened on his final project before ending up in the ancient glade.
Shor's expression didn't change in the slightest as he'd rambled. He might as well as told the floor beneath his feet for as much visible impression as he observed. But the gears were turning, they had to be. According to Brighteyes, this Elven Queen was largely responsible for holding the Orlethrem clans in lockstep with Iriel, by virtue of her penetrating grasp on the movements of all the players, big and small, and how they were best levered into positions she saw as most befitting her husband's shared vision for the Elven people. She was also rumored by Brighteyes to be a wildly powerful sorceress, though he'd never seen her employ overt means to obtain her ends.
Arms crossed over her chest, the Crimson Sphinx's finger tapped her upper lip as her unfocused gaze absently took in the entire room. Clearly she was processing his statements, parsing them through the, unfathomable to him, experience of an already trained Elven mage. Eventually she seemed to reach an end to her deliberations.
"There is an element of similarity in your conception of mana and our own, fortunately, or I would be at a complete loss as to how to create enough commonality to give you useful instruction. Let us start with the major proposition: mana is possibility and possibility creates reality. This is approximately the conclusion at which most mages arrive, though most do so much later in life than you have, the benefit of your previous life showing." Shor's hand fell away from her mouth as she explained, to turn palm up.
A brilliant sphere of light blossomed into existence a few centimeters above her hand, to hang still in the air. Abruptly the sphere became a roiling ball of flame. Her voice had returned to its normal melodically high pitch as she described the manipulations being enacted in her upturned palm.
"First is the unaspected mana, the stuff of the universe as you described it, potential. The core is an instrument that allows beings to gather this potential and refine it to a point that it takes on physicality. The stronger your core becomes the faster it is able to do this. Pure mana can become anything, it is, as you say, possibility incarnate. We then tune this possibility to a specific outcome, doing this by harmonizing the pure mana to hold a specific form." the woman lectured calmly.
This was familiar ground, he'd already sort of gotten a feel for this process when he'd worked out the basic elemental forms. It had helped greatly that he'd been given the knowledge of the primordial mana types from the Watcher. Absent that he'd almost certainly have cindered himself or blipped himself out of existence. He kept his attention on Shor's words as she went on with a slightly contemptuous tone.
"What is important for a novice mage to understand, and this is a lesson that has killed more would-be archmages than any other, is that mana cannot exist in any form that does not already exist, that has always existed. The primordial forces are laws engraved onto the universe, when you hold pure mana you actually hold mana balanced between these primordial forms. Forgetting this places you in jeopardy of calling one of the primordial forces, of trying to create something new and, in your hubris, holding too tightly what mortals should not. To create flame you must balance the primordials to embody motion, energy, light, heat and so on. That means pruning out the elements of immobility, darkness, emptiness, and such. You create specific elemental mana by rearranging the balance of mana. You know this already, perhaps instinctively, because you have created elemental spells."
Next she did what he'd decided back in his rooms during his study was blatantly impossible; she transformed the ball of flame into a solid crystal of ice. Ulric's mouth dropped open at the sight. How the fuck had she managed to do that? He didn't realize he'd said that part out loud.
A small satisfied smile appeared on the Elf woman's face. Just to rub it in she then made ice into a cylinder of water which immediately blipped into a swirling little vortex of air, which then became a dark orb of shadow that appeared to eat light, which then became a ring of lightning. Unironic witchcraft.
"I see you have already fallen into one of the beginner's pitfalls. That you can cast from each of the basic elemental forms indicates you have learned to recognize the part that the primordial plays in them, you have learned to tune the balances. In doing so you came to reason that one element could not become another because the mix of primordials was too dissimilar. Let me guess: you cannot turn one element into another unless you first return to unaspected?"
Her smile widened to became a true grin, as if a prank had been pulled. Ulric was, apparently, the victim of said joke. She allowed the lightning ring to fade as she returned to her normal relaxed stance, arms lowered and hands with fingers interlaced.
"You have forgotten the first truth: mana is everything that is or will be. A mage, by touching mana, touches all of possibility. What law says that any particular type of mana must always be that type? Why cannot what may be Desidia at one moment not be Motus the next? Ever changing is the universe, which means in flux is the nature of mana. What matters in this is that the mage Wills it to be so and that the balance is held. You thought the ratios locked into stone, as if that which you held was eternal. If you truly understand the nature of the primordials then tuning one to the other is as easy as imagination. What is still may move, what is alive may die, what is dark may be lit, if only you will it so. That is the truth of a mage." Spoke the Crimson Sphinx.
Ulric was confused. If polar opposites could become one another then what even were they in the first place? Realization hit him like a brick and that's about as smart as he felt when it did. It was observer effect. Mana wasn't just anything, it was everything, right up until you forced it to be something specific. Where was the electron in the box? Inside the box. Until you looked, and then you forced it to be somewhere. What type of mana did he hold? All types, until he needed it to be something specific. That was why the untempered core catastrophe was inevitable. Unaspected mana was all too happy to be influenced into something specific, all you had to do was hold an aspected mana close to it and bam! Everything turns into something specifically. It was a good lesson. Thought became reality on Varda. The core, the ability to touch reality directly was limited fundamentally by the limits placed by the caster. The universe didn't give a damn, it simply was. There was no reason for that star to be over there in that galaxy, it just happened. And if it went nova and disappeared the universe would be, essentially, the same. If you wanted something to move, then move it. If you wanted it to stop, stop it. It really was that simple. But profound.
Magic was far, far more dangerous than he'd imagined. You could do anything. Or, at least, you could try. He asked the question that burned now in his mind.
"What happens to a mage that attempts to Will into existence something that is impossible? What happens if I try to turn back time?" He asked, suspecting the truth.
Shor nodded her head in acknowledgment, happy that her student was catching on.
"What has already happened is no longer. It does not exist. There is no possibility left to the past and so there is no mana. What would happen is that you would attempt to place yourself in a reality in which mana does not exist and would, since mana is everything, cease to exist yourself." She said deliberately, making sure that he understood the implications in her direct answer.
Ulric chewed on that for a moment.
"Then trying to, say, travel into the future is like trying to become mana, you would become a part of everything and be destroyed because no individual mind can be all that might be." He ventured.
"Just so, Glade Chief. I am glad that you are not stupid. It bodes well for your lifespan." the woman said without sarcasm.
"Since you have already taken the first steps into mage craft and your understanding of mana is sufficiently nuanced, I think it best that we spend the rest of this day building upon what you already have, before I begin to break new ground. It is a unique challenge, having a studied mage that has so little actual magical experience to train. I will make sure that this will be good for both of us." the Sphinx told him without inflection.
Ulric ignored the obvious double entendre. He didn't care how stacked she was, not only was that particular bosom well spoken for, but the woman herself was downright unnerving. She made him think of a particular graduate professor of solid state electronics and quantum computing. The man had a way of being able to use only words that you knew to hold a conversation that was outright impossible to follow. Ulric had attended the man's lectures, all of them, had sat in on various optional presentations of his research, hoping to find a clue what the hell he was talking about, all for naught. The words were familiar but they were employed in such a way as to be entirely foreign, like speaking to a chaos beast from another dimension. The man's brain just did not function on the same wavelength as everyone else's. Shor Iriel was the same sort of creature. Trying to follow her train of thought was like finding the end of a moebius strip. And worse, she knew it and enjoyed dragging her victims into the deep water, like a Siren singing sailors to their deaths.
The remainder of the "lesson" was mostly Shor confusing Ulric with abstract descriptions on matters Ulric had already considered well settled in his own mind. That she was able to confuse him so easily made it patently obvious that he needed to go back to the drawing board with a few things. For all of the headache he ended up with, the time was well spent. By the end of it Ulric had a better grasp on certain parts of his methods for casting his basic spells and some hints on how to improve them. Among the things Shor discussed that were not obtuse was the ranks attached to his spells.
He had evolved his [Voltaic Grip] and, in doing, learned for himself that heightening your understanding of your own spells to be able to make them do different things allowed them to evolve. Any one spell could serve as a starting point to branch out into different spells. The ranks on a spell indicated the completeness of your mastery of any one spell, the fluency of its casting and the precision of its power. The old adage was apt "Practice makes perfect". Small adjustments in mana flows, improvements in direction of power or subtle refinements in visualization to more fully see the spell to its intended outcome, all of these caused a particular spell to rank up.
The ranks seemed, to Ulric, arbitrary. But Shor assured him that there was a very qualitative difference in the outcome between a mage casting a rank I [Sunlance] and a rank V [Sunlance]. The rank I mage would require a completely cloudless sky, a minute to gather the light necessary to ignite their spell, and its power would spread over a circular area of a meter or two in diameter that could set logs ablaze while the rank V mage could cast under a thunderstorm, in a matter of a few moments, and produce a beam of solar energy a finger width that would sublimate metal. By her own words, it was rare the mage that could bring a spell to rank V, to obtain the Akashic designation of a master rank spell. Such was generally used as one of the preconditions to be called an Archmage.
When Ulric asked Shor if she could cast rank V spells she only quirked her lips slightly. For all future purposes he was going to consider any spell of which Shor professed familiarity as being at rank V. She gave off that kind of vibe.
He wasn't the only one who had been run through the wringer. Geyrt looked much worse for the wear and Ulric wasn't sure he should even ask. Her first act on returning to his side was to glare at him like he'd slapped her bottom and asked for a sandwich, before a harried glance at her Mothers dissolved the hate gaze into a carefully blank slate. If Shor hadn't already cooked his circuits he would have been completely baffled but he was well beyond the capability by that point.
"Tough day?" He asked innocently.
Vedyr and Bathe Iriel turned mildly put out gazes to their daughter and spoke in unison.
"She is stubborn." the Elf women said, musical frustration in their voices.
Vedyr continued with heat enough to burn the unwary, "And thinks too highly of herself for one of so little experience. You are a hundred years too young to argue with me sproutling, now go to your Honor and be grateful that he does not have you scrubbing his small clothes when you show him temper."
Geyrt wilted under the scolding and visibly tried to summon the ground to close over her. Alas, this magic was beyond her.
Ulric cleared his throat mildly and made for a tactical retreat.
"Thank you Lady Shor, for your instruction. I can't claim to understand all of it but I will do as best as I can to remember and give it due attention. Already, you've helped me to see a few failings that need addressing." He told her earnestly.
"Ladies Vedyr, Bathe, thank you as well for taking care of my Shadow, I'm sure she grows under your tutelage." He continued.
Bathe made a sound very similar to a snort, though, of course, a lady as refined as she would not be responsible for such a sound.
Vedyr made no bones about her stance on things.
"She had better, or I might yet cut her short." Said the dark woman with the loving urge to murder only a parent knows for their children.
Well. That fairly well put a dash of cold water down his shorts. Hastily he bade them good evening and managed to prevent his rapid walk from turning into a run.
Awkward silence accompanied their walk back to the apartments. Ulric had grown old enough to know when to keep his mouth shut and employed that wisdom when they entered, merely offering a polite "good night" to his Shadow when she fled to her small room. The day had been long. Very long. Shrugging it off, Ulric stripped down to skin and turned down the mana lamps before laying down in his bed. Sleep claimed him immediately.
The cafeteria was serving fish. Must have been a Friday, Ulric mused.
When he asked if the fish were fresh caught she assured him that ice fishing was a consistent source of sustenance during the long Winter. Upon inquiry as to how long fish could be stored, Geyrt told him that there were cold rooms supported by Infrig, cold magic, that would keep food preserved nearly indefinitely, alongside the application of Sano, healing magic, that prevented the growth of microbes. Not that she called it as such, she described it as a spell work that prevented "spoilage".
Ulric was pleased to know that the modern convenience of refrigeration was present. That, alongside plumbing, were two of the greatest nods to human, well, persons, comfort that he could think of. Electricity provided a potent luxury to life but a functioning bathroom and kitchen were what he considered vital. If those two facets of modern existence had not been present, Ulric was fully intending on leveling up civilization. Mostly though, Ulric had no intention of reintroducing modern technology to Varda, for fear of someday leading it down the same course that had eventually led to the destruction of his birth world. Even minor things, precision machine tooling, lathes, drills, and the like, while he might make them for himself, eventually, were not items he would want to be released freely, to say nothing of combustion engines and motors and explosive powders. It was too risky.
About two hundred years before Ulric's birth, the Earth had been, in generous terms, looted. A near century of surging overpopulation, catastrophic resource exploitation, tragic waste, and thoughtless consumption had driven the world over the brink. Around 2060 the collapse of food webs and agricultural centers led to a global famine, which, accompanied by violent storm seasons and vicious heat in the equatorial regions made large swaths of latitude uninhabitable. Economic systems that had, for a century, been unsustainable, vanished almost overnight and took with them the governments that had been propped up mostly by modern comforts and sheer societal inertia. When real suffering hit the populace they revolted immediately. The post-industrial nations underwent a dramatic civic uprising that spread globally.
Sooner, rather than later, somebody had the bright idea to try to turn the militaries against the populace under the guise of Serving the Public Good and what followed made the French Revolution look like a birthday party at a pizzeria. There was a time when being a known congressman, attorney, judge, or member of basically any government apparatus that wasn't the EPA, FDA, and National Park Service got you boiled in a kettle in public squares. Similar attitudes abounded globally, especially in the more draconian places that had been suppressing their populations for a generation through social engineering and good old-fashioned government-sanctioned massacres. What was left of the world political stage lasted only a decade or so longer before a nuclear war initiated by some seventh-generation lunatic on the Korean peninsula in a hidden mountain fortress, in tandem with an aging sovereign in the Kingdom of Siberia, who was determined to be remembered as the conquerer of Asia right up until he evaporated, put a final, definitive end to the old paradigm.
That nuclear war saved the world, ironically enough. Not only did the war destroy what was left of the more virulent elements of humanity but it eventually provided a solution to the global warming that was suffocating the planet and heating its seas. The surviving amalgamated nations of Euromerica, the Sino-Pacific Republic, New South Africa (which now encompassed the entire African continent, the Middle East, and Australia), and a smattering of city-states tried to get things under control, with some success but the situation was declining rapidly. Fisheries were decimated, food scarce, and the only reason there wasn't more famine was that disease, war, and nukes had already decimated the population.
Agriculture and modern infrastructure were largely inoperable because not enough qualified people were left to maintain and repair the production and manufacturing facilities. Not to mention there was the continued warming and radiation to be considered. The global population was halved by 2100, and there was no way to provide the people needed to revive the old world as it had been, nor was there the will to try. Internet archivers, who managed to preserve hard copies of science literature, instruction manuals, engineering schematics, art galleries and libraries, that sort of thing, were largely to thank for the resistance of humanity to another dark age. There was a memory of the "golden era", if not the capability of producing it.
A decision was made amongst the people left to use some of the last weapons on the arctic circle's remaining glaciers to blast enough ice into the atmosphere to bring on a mini-ice age and reverse the heating for long enough to buy humanity time to enact a more permanent solution. The nuclear cat was already out of the bag and fallout filters were already installed on most buildings. Irradiated water and soil were already becoming facts of life, there mechanisms for being dealt with already in place, amongst the regions with the wherewithal to enact those solutions. The places that didn't faded away into oblivion within a few short years. The decision was not hard to abandon the surface for rapidly excavated and fortified subterranean shelters. A few generations of living in what amounted to mass fallout shelters in subsurface mining complexes preserved most of what was left of the human race from the immediate radiation threat. Hydroponics, synthetic meat generators, and ruthless recycling of nearly everything allowed the buried populations to persist. Even so, there were less than a billion people left by 2120. A tenth of the population of the precollapse.
What was left was a hardened core of humans determined to survive, to thrive. As usual, it wasn't until the pressure was on that people showed their mettle, their greatness. Hidden away beneath the earth, there was a renaissance in culture, science, and government. The Second Enlightenment or, as the more morbidly humored called it, the Nuclear Alarm Clock, revolutionized what was left of the world. The global heating was solved through massive-scale carbon scrubbers in the oceans which were then utilized to create carbon fiber structural components, graphene materials, graphite batteries, solar harvesters, and still more tons of the stuff were sequestered in rock.
Fusion power plants were completed, en masse, over the next two decades solving the energy problems that threatened to reduce civilization to the stone age, since electrical grids had mostly disappeared when the mining companies providing their fuels were beheaded, sometimes literally. Free energy greatly expanded the industrial and transportation capabilities of the nations and a worldwide power grid was soon re-established. Public transportation along super trains accompanied the grid and, in a half-century of combined efforts, there was a web of public transit systems in place, like a circulatory system pumping civilization back through the withered flesh of the world. Many of these systems were buried in Earthquake proofed tunnels at a depth around that of the Marianas trench. Radioactive material was still a problem topside and you didn't want to move irradiated dust any farther than you absolutely had to.
Gene therapies, long languishing due to puritanical restrictions of long-dead politicians exploded, just in time to head off the looming genetic extinction by fallout exposure and the bottleneck of survivors in somewhat isolated population centers. Cancer rates had climbed by over two thousand percent since the war but viral gene overwrites from stem cell templates and genetic maps brought that down to a solid 0.005%. The funny part about that was that the viral delivery systems were so easy and cheap to employ that it was virtually free to anybody who needed it. Almost nobody was born defective, diseased, or died of cancer at the time of Ulric's birth. Designer genes were the hot fad when Ulric had grown into manhood, choosing eye, skin, hair color, and things like that. He'd played it naturally, mostly because he hadn't really given a shit. He'd dated a girl with glow-in-the-dark skin once though and that had been a surprisingly entertaining adventure.
Energy and medical technology advancements, coupled with the revision of economic theory to prevent generational wealth aggregation, total education reform, representative governmental overhauls emphasizing protection of voting integrity and surgical application of law helped lay the groundwork for a better world. All in all, the emergent governments that survived the collapse of the old civilization had turned a new leaf. Too late, of course. Always too late with humanity.
It was almost a century post-collapse before humanity returned to the surface. Some didn't, they lobbied to make the surface of the planet an ecological preserve, and proclaimed that Homo Sapiens did not deserve a second chance to go forth and prosper above. When Ulric was born, a scant fifty years post re-emergence it was mostly clear that the Earth would recover environmentally, especially since speciation seeding projects were showing promise and the climate was settling into its new, more temperate, status. Most of the fallout had long since settled into the ground, though background radiation was still producing accelerated mutation rates in virtually all ecosystems. Of the old majesty, little remained. High was the price of survival, and creeping were some of the habits which had made that survival necessary, such as somewhat premature business promises that created the working conditions which had led to Ulric's rather accelerated decline, both physical and mental. Still, enough had remained or been established that Ulric's developing passion for hiking and pretend savagery had taken him through a vestigial memory of the forests that had existed before. In 2193, the year he died, he had abandoned hope that he would ever see anything close to the glory of the world as presented in the archives of one St. David Attenborough.
The Elven forests of Iriel, the [Plateau of Ancients], these were as Eden rediscovered to Ulric. They were priceless beyond measure. He felt some of what the Elves felt for their precious wood. But where they guarded the memory of their fallen ancestors, he mourned a world ruined long before he could experience it's grandeur. It had been months since Ulric had thought, for any real length of time, about the fate of his old world. Mostly it hadn't occurred to him since he'd first laid eyes on those exalted arbors on the Plateau and had experienced the joy of forests primeval. A gift, he reminded himself yet again, was this world and this life. A gift he was going to enjoy to its fullest. Just as soon as his muscles stopped aching from Idra'se's lessons. It helped, always, to keep things in perspective.
Technology, magic, the interplay between the two, Ulric was looking forward to seeing how these unfolded. He'd already lived a life devoid of magic but full of technology. He could already see potential in a land saturated by the possibility of mana, mysteries seemed to unfold before him on a daily basis. He could also see a people for whom the forces wielded by magi might make the intractable problems of his homeland trivial. Even something like refrigeration, a technology some might view as fundamental to modern existence, was rendered inconsequential before the might of arcana. Ulric had barely experienced the civilization of Varda for a week, who knew what other marvels were taken for granted? It was going to be fun finding out, is all of which he was certain.
Looking forward, he banished the failures of his people and the scarring of their world from any further consideration. That was done, after all. Ulric Einar of Earth was dead and Ulric Einar of Varda was on an adventure to discover what this land had in store for him. The uncharacteristically whimsical nature of his own mind he attributed to the endorphin rush of being pushed to physical extremes, the runner's high. Between that and the dehydration from overindulgence last night Ulric was, perhaps, a little loopy.
Some calories and fluids would help greatly in putting things to right so he set to the fish platter with a will. He plowed through a near kilo of fish blackened and served over a rice-like grain of a plant aptly called [River Wheat], on account of it grew naturally in the shallow waters of swamps and flood plains, though this had been cultivated by the Zelussin. The cuisine returned his more usual cheer and he turned his mind to absorb what he'd learned from Gother and Idra while he ate. A little jam fruit and some kind of citrusy, minty tea to wash things down concluded his meal. He'd have liked to shake hands with the chef, it was delicious, especially when you considered the sheer amount of such food needed to be prepared to support the hard training Iriel'en warriors of the fortress.
Geyrt had taken notice of her Honor's odd mood but, as per usual, said nothing. His down moods and strange tangents of thought were generally quick to pass and she could only aggravate them by prying. He was pushing hard and she would see to it that nothing interfered with his developing the skills that would become swiftly necessary to hold his position when the world at large learned of the new guardian of the [Plateau of Ancients]. It would not do for that to happen, not yet. Part of a Shadow's responsibility was to put their Honor into the best position possible to cultivate alliance or defeat threats. Ulric Einar was not ready to face those who would exploit the abundance of the Elder trees or the life they sustained. Certainly not in the numbers that would come should Prespang be given reason to believe that the new guardian was lacking in strength or cunning. Iriel would buffer much of the worst of this, few would risk the ire of the Deep Wood Elves on a whim, however, there were many forces walking the world and not all of them could be expected to act with reason, not when untapped riches suddenly were left unattended. Her father would expect her to keep her new Honor on the straightest path to power. It was her mission, now.
Geyrt Iriel, formerly master Hunter and, at one point, well on her way to taking her mother's title of Heartwood Spear, mulled over many such things while she completed her meal. Her new place in life was bitter, at times. At other times though she felt like she had been given a puzzle to solve. The status didn't lie, her Honor was an anomalous creature. Sometimes naïve as a newborn, sometimes prescient as a wisened elf. Most of the time relaxed, almost casual about even the most critical of tidings, but there were times when a look like a hungry [Fell Wolf] was in his eyes, such as when the fool Morion had overstepped. The enigma and her Father's surety that the future would include a heavy shaping by this Reforged were of some relief to her. She would be there firsthand to witness the unfolding and would be in the thick of it now. When she chaffed at this new arc in her life she recalled lamenting that her life had taken on a note of redundancy, of boredom. Hunting Lesser Beasts, scouting for intrusions, and acting as her Father's voice in neighboring provinces when needed, it had begun to wear thin. Now she had all the novelty she could ask for, and then some.
The only problem was that she had traded her previous existence for it. Ask the [Fate Ape] for a boon and watch the finger of his paw curl; never was the wish granted without a catch. She watched as the bizarre man finished stuffing himself, the volume of food consumed being somewhat impressive after such intense physical exertion. If he cramped she would mock him viciously. Eager for the chance and keeping note of the time, she chivvied him out of his seat, that they could arrive at the arcanum in a timely fashion. Her Mothers would not be kept waiting, and she looked forward to perhaps tripping him on the way, if she could arrange it without detection. Their overt hostilities were mostly behind them now but she still had not satisfied herself for the insult he'd given her on their first meeting. She'd only tried to kill him, he had had no call to say such things and it would likely be years of creating small inconveniences or minor wounds before she had collected her due. She nearly smiled at the thought of exacting her punishments.
Something must be in the air today, Ulric thought. First, he'd gone on a trip down shitty memory lane and then his Shadow had been oddly pensive during the meal. Nobody had talked, of course, Iriel'en didn't speak during meals as a general rule, but her expression had been off. Now an evil smirk was on her lips and she had the look in her eyes she got when she was about to do something someone else would regret. He first considered if he was the target before dismissing that possibility, he'd not done anything to her worth mentioning since teasing her that morning with her dad and brother. So someone else must have done something, the poor bastard, whoever they were. In any case, he took seriously her reminder to be on time for the meeting with the Dragon Ladies and ignored the slight discomfort of overindulging in dinner after exercise.
Off they went, the frigid air blasting Ulric in the face like a bucket of ice water. He relished it. Winter was his favorite month of the year. Something about the stark beauty of leafless trees, a sheen of frost on branches scattering prismatic light, and the still, heavy air just did it for him. Geyrt did not appear to enjoy the cold, frowning briefly at the exposure to a cutting gust of wind. Ulric wondered, briefly, what his camp would look like right now, whether there would be snow on the plateau and how that might look on the dense, skyward roof of the Elder canopy. He didn't have long to contemplate it, they had arrived at the massive artifice that was Arcanum. Carved doors swung weightlessly on their hinges and Ulric followed his Shadow through empty halls to the practice arena.
He breathed deeply when he felt the heavily magical pressure settled comfortably upon his shoulders. Vaguely reminiscent of being underwater, the air pushed on his body in this place, like it did on the glade. He hadn't known how dense was the mana in the [Forest of the Forgotten] until he'd descended to the forests below. It was like being on a mountain top in comparison, the mana was much thinner. Irielhos was slightly better than the wood it guarded, the heartwood of which everything was constructed was dense with magic and radiated that aura throughout the fortress. It felt like coming home to enter this space.
Down below, in the central arena, stood Geyrt's Mothers. Vedyr, Shor, and Bathe, each radiant in their own unique way stood ready to begin instruction. Geyrt and Ulric made no delay in descending the wide stair to stand before them. Almost immediately Vedyr and Bathe wordlessly took Geyrt aside to the leftmost arena a simple gesture, enough to have her double timing to leave him standing, somewhat awkwardly, under Shor's intense scrutiny. The masklike face and cutting ruby eyes drilled into his brain, searching for flaws and finding many, at least to Ulric's perceptions.
Eventually, the implacable Elven Queen let up with her stare. Relief flooded through him, he didn't know how long he could take that kind of silent judgment. She was like one of those interrogators that just kept applying pressure until the prisoner cracked.
"It is good that you have returned Glade Chief. I have thought much on what you showed us last time and will have to make adjustments based on the extent of your own experience. In many ways this makes my task more difficult. Were you completely ignorant I would have clear ground on which to build foundations. But you have already laid foundations and tearing them out would be too difficult at this point." Shor began, mild annoyance seeping through.
The mysterious woman suddenly grinned and her intensity nearly burned. Leaning forward, her brassy voice held excitement that trilled alarm bells in Ulric's brain.
"But the opportunity that has arisen! A Reforged that retains their memories, memories of a distant world! It contaminates your approach to magic, pervades it with oddities that I have never seen. So!" The woman clapped loudly to punctuate her enthusiasm before returning to serene calm. The switch was giving him mental whiplash.
"Instead" Lady Shor Iriel continued, "of trying to force you along the pre-laid track let us throw convention to the wind and follow wherever your personal intuition leads. Let us begin by this: What is mana?" She finished, laying out the question from which she might begin to crack open Ulric's perspective on magic.
It wasn't an entirely unexpected question, but it did take him by surprise that she'd asked so quickly. A mind like a Swiss clock the woman had to have. She had surmised that the differences in Ulric's abilities with magic, compared to his Elven counterparts, lie in the fundamental basis of their interpretations of what mana was and therefore could do. This understanding shaped everything to come, the approaches to spell work, the limits of what some mages could do compared to others, and the advantages that insight into the nature of mana could confer to the caster.
Ulric had thought long on what mana could be and do, had spent hours in the glade staring into a campfire while his mind wandered the corridors of his own mind searching for answers. He had few, had only the vaguest impression of pieces that fit to build a greater whole. But he also had an entire lifetime of absence, in which his technocratic society had explored through mathematics and dedicated experimentation the limits of the known universe. This gave him some ideas about what mana could not be. Sometimes, knowing what a thing wasn't, a view of its negative, was better than the thing itself. Ulric didn't worry about being wrong, most scientists, unless their impartiality had been destroyed by greed or pride, the chief sins of the scientific mind, accepted, even embraced the experience. Being wrong was merely a step along the path, sometimes a bridge across an intractable problem to discovering what was right. The journey to knowing, to Solving the Problem, had driven him in his old life. He no longer had that as his sole reason for being, but he still enjoyed the process of discovery.
Ulric took a few moments to arrange the stray hairs of his ideas before he began to explain his hypothesis for mana.
"Mana is…potential. It is possibility that can, upon reaction with what is, be made into real." Ulric said in a measured voice.
"In my old world, we interpreted the universe as the moment-to-moment product of the interactions of wavelike forces. Like ocean waves from different winds driving independently but forming a varying surface of the sea when they met. The sea was different in every moment, depending on what forces were at work but the water was constant, more or less. Since coming to this world I have come to believe that mana is the water of this universe, it is the background onto which form is given by the interaction of the forces of the cosmos." Ulric finished, some thoughts congealing as he spoke them, where they had formerly been only impressions in his own mind.
Beginning to become excited by the new paths opening he hurried onward, before the moment passed.
"Potentials don't have to be real, in the moment, to exist. They describe what may happen, a reservoir of what might change in a system, the upper limit on what is possible in the future. Since mana can be, as I understand it, anything, then it represents the potential for everything that might happen. The only thing I know to call the potential for everything that was or will ever be is, the universe. Mana is all, and reality is the consequence of choices and interactions between the results of those choices in the universe imprinting that mana with definite form. Who made the first choices or why I do not know, any more than I know what caused the Big Bang of my old universe's birth. All I can do is conjecture that something stirred the mana to cause existence to happen. Everything else is a consequence interacting with another consequence, interacting with a choice made in the present moment to create the future." Ulric said, getting somewhat lost in the abstractions his mind was attempting to describe.
His conclusion wasn't definite, wasn't precise, didn't have the elegant beauty of a mathematical proof or a scientific law, but it didn't feel wrong either. Trust in yourself you must, young Padawan. It was a maxim from ages ago in his culture. He'd employed it against his coworkers frequently, to their irritation when he would go on to find the right path forward while following a hunch. He didn't know if his hunch here would produce similar success or hit a wall as had happened on his final project before ending up in the ancient glade.
Shor's expression didn't change in the slightest as he'd rambled. He might as well as told the floor beneath his feet for as much visible impression as he observed. But the gears were turning, they had to be. According to Brighteyes, this Elven Queen was largely responsible for holding the Orlethrem clans in lockstep with Iriel, by virtue of her penetrating grasp on the movements of all the players, big and small, and how they were best levered into positions she saw as most befitting her husband's shared vision for the Elven people. She was also rumored by Brighteyes to be a wildly powerful sorceress, though he'd never seen her employ overt means to obtain her ends.
Arms crossed over her chest, the Crimson Sphinx's finger tapped her upper lip as her unfocused gaze absently took in the entire room. Clearly she was processing his statements, parsing them through the, unfathomable to him, experience of an already trained Elven mage. Eventually she seemed to reach an end to her deliberations.
"There is an element of similarity in your conception of mana and our own, fortunately, or I would be at a complete loss as to how to create enough commonality to give you useful instruction. Let us start with the major proposition: mana is possibility and possibility creates reality. This is approximately the conclusion at which most mages arrive, though most do so much later in life than you have, the benefit of your previous life showing." Shor's hand fell away from her mouth as she explained, to turn palm up.
A brilliant sphere of light blossomed into existence a few centimeters above her hand, to hang still in the air. Abruptly the sphere became a roiling ball of flame. Her voice had returned to its normal melodically high pitch as she described the manipulations being enacted in her upturned palm.
"First is the unaspected mana, the stuff of the universe as you described it, potential. The core is an instrument that allows beings to gather this potential and refine it to a point that it takes on physicality. The stronger your core becomes the faster it is able to do this. Pure mana can become anything, it is, as you say, possibility incarnate. We then tune this possibility to a specific outcome, doing this by harmonizing the pure mana to hold a specific form." the woman lectured calmly.
This was familiar ground, he'd already sort of gotten a feel for this process when he'd worked out the basic elemental forms. It had helped greatly that he'd been given the knowledge of the primordial mana types from the Watcher. Absent that he'd almost certainly have cindered himself or blipped himself out of existence. He kept his attention on Shor's words as she went on with a slightly contemptuous tone.
"What is important for a novice mage to understand, and this is a lesson that has killed more would-be archmages than any other, is that mana cannot exist in any form that does not already exist, that has always existed. The primordial forces are laws engraved onto the universe, when you hold pure mana you actually hold mana balanced between these primordial forms. Forgetting this places you in jeopardy of calling one of the primordial forces, of trying to create something new and, in your hubris, holding too tightly what mortals should not. To create flame you must balance the primordials to embody motion, energy, light, heat and so on. That means pruning out the elements of immobility, darkness, emptiness, and such. You create specific elemental mana by rearranging the balance of mana. You know this already, perhaps instinctively, because you have created elemental spells."
Next she did what he'd decided back in his rooms during his study was blatantly impossible; she transformed the ball of flame into a solid crystal of ice. Ulric's mouth dropped open at the sight. How the fuck had she managed to do that? He didn't realize he'd said that part out loud.
A small satisfied smile appeared on the Elf woman's face. Just to rub it in she then made ice into a cylinder of water which immediately blipped into a swirling little vortex of air, which then became a dark orb of shadow that appeared to eat light, which then became a ring of lightning. Unironic witchcraft.
"I see you have already fallen into one of the beginner's pitfalls. That you can cast from each of the basic elemental forms indicates you have learned to recognize the part that the primordial plays in them, you have learned to tune the balances. In doing so you came to reason that one element could not become another because the mix of primordials was too dissimilar. Let me guess: you cannot turn one element into another unless you first return to unaspected?"
Her smile widened to became a true grin, as if a prank had been pulled. Ulric was, apparently, the victim of said joke. She allowed the lightning ring to fade as she returned to her normal relaxed stance, arms lowered and hands with fingers interlaced.
"You have forgotten the first truth: mana is everything that is or will be. A mage, by touching mana, touches all of possibility. What law says that any particular type of mana must always be that type? Why cannot what may be Desidia at one moment not be Motus the next? Ever changing is the universe, which means in flux is the nature of mana. What matters in this is that the mage Wills it to be so and that the balance is held. You thought the ratios locked into stone, as if that which you held was eternal. If you truly understand the nature of the primordials then tuning one to the other is as easy as imagination. What is still may move, what is alive may die, what is dark may be lit, if only you will it so. That is the truth of a mage." Spoke the Crimson Sphinx.
Ulric was confused. If polar opposites could become one another then what even were they in the first place? Realization hit him like a brick and that's about as smart as he felt when it did. It was observer effect. Mana wasn't just anything, it was everything, right up until you forced it to be something specific. Where was the electron in the box? Inside the box. Until you looked, and then you forced it to be somewhere. What type of mana did he hold? All types, until he needed it to be something specific. That was why the untempered core catastrophe was inevitable. Unaspected mana was all too happy to be influenced into something specific, all you had to do was hold an aspected mana close to it and bam! Everything turns into something specifically. It was a good lesson. Thought became reality on Varda. The core, the ability to touch reality directly was limited fundamentally by the limits placed by the caster. The universe didn't give a damn, it simply was. There was no reason for that star to be over there in that galaxy, it just happened. And if it went nova and disappeared the universe would be, essentially, the same. If you wanted something to move, then move it. If you wanted it to stop, stop it. It really was that simple. But profound.
Magic was far, far more dangerous than he'd imagined. You could do anything. Or, at least, you could try. He asked the question that burned now in his mind.
"What happens to a mage that attempts to Will into existence something that is impossible? What happens if I try to turn back time?" He asked, suspecting the truth.
Shor nodded her head in acknowledgment, happy that her student was catching on.
"What has already happened is no longer. It does not exist. There is no possibility left to the past and so there is no mana. What would happen is that you would attempt to place yourself in a reality in which mana does not exist and would, since mana is everything, cease to exist yourself." She said deliberately, making sure that he understood the implications in her direct answer.
Ulric chewed on that for a moment.
"Then trying to, say, travel into the future is like trying to become mana, you would become a part of everything and be destroyed because no individual mind can be all that might be." He ventured.
"Just so, Glade Chief. I am glad that you are not stupid. It bodes well for your lifespan." the woman said without sarcasm.
"Since you have already taken the first steps into mage craft and your understanding of mana is sufficiently nuanced, I think it best that we spend the rest of this day building upon what you already have, before I begin to break new ground. It is a unique challenge, having a studied mage that has so little actual magical experience to train. I will make sure that this will be good for both of us." the Sphinx told him without inflection.
Ulric ignored the obvious double entendre. He didn't care how stacked she was, not only was that particular bosom well spoken for, but the woman herself was downright unnerving. She made him think of a particular graduate professor of solid state electronics and quantum computing. The man had a way of being able to use only words that you knew to hold a conversation that was outright impossible to follow. Ulric had attended the man's lectures, all of them, had sat in on various optional presentations of his research, hoping to find a clue what the hell he was talking about, all for naught. The words were familiar but they were employed in such a way as to be entirely foreign, like speaking to a chaos beast from another dimension. The man's brain just did not function on the same wavelength as everyone else's. Shor Iriel was the same sort of creature. Trying to follow her train of thought was like finding the end of a moebius strip. And worse, she knew it and enjoyed dragging her victims into the deep water, like a Siren singing sailors to their deaths.
The remainder of the "lesson" was mostly Shor confusing Ulric with abstract descriptions on matters Ulric had already considered well settled in his own mind. That she was able to confuse him so easily made it patently obvious that he needed to go back to the drawing board with a few things. For all of the headache he ended up with, the time was well spent. By the end of it Ulric had a better grasp on certain parts of his methods for casting his basic spells and some hints on how to improve them. Among the things Shor discussed that were not obtuse was the ranks attached to his spells.
He had evolved his [Voltaic Grip] and, in doing, learned for himself that heightening your understanding of your own spells to be able to make them do different things allowed them to evolve. Any one spell could serve as a starting point to branch out into different spells. The ranks on a spell indicated the completeness of your mastery of any one spell, the fluency of its casting and the precision of its power. The old adage was apt "Practice makes perfect". Small adjustments in mana flows, improvements in direction of power or subtle refinements in visualization to more fully see the spell to its intended outcome, all of these caused a particular spell to rank up.
The ranks seemed, to Ulric, arbitrary. But Shor assured him that there was a very qualitative difference in the outcome between a mage casting a rank I [Sunlance] and a rank V [Sunlance]. The rank I mage would require a completely cloudless sky, a minute to gather the light necessary to ignite their spell, and its power would spread over a circular area of a meter or two in diameter that could set logs ablaze while the rank V mage could cast under a thunderstorm, in a matter of a few moments, and produce a beam of solar energy a finger width that would sublimate metal. By her own words, it was rare the mage that could bring a spell to rank V, to obtain the Akashic designation of a master rank spell. Such was generally used as one of the preconditions to be called an Archmage.
When Ulric asked Shor if she could cast rank V spells she only quirked her lips slightly. For all future purposes he was going to consider any spell of which Shor professed familiarity as being at rank V. She gave off that kind of vibe.
He wasn't the only one who had been run through the wringer. Geyrt looked much worse for the wear and Ulric wasn't sure he should even ask. Her first act on returning to his side was to glare at him like he'd slapped her bottom and asked for a sandwich, before a harried glance at her Mothers dissolved the hate gaze into a carefully blank slate. If Shor hadn't already cooked his circuits he would have been completely baffled but he was well beyond the capability by that point.
"Tough day?" He asked innocently.
Vedyr and Bathe Iriel turned mildly put out gazes to their daughter and spoke in unison.
"She is stubborn." the Elf women said, musical frustration in their voices.
Vedyr continued with heat enough to burn the unwary, "And thinks too highly of herself for one of so little experience. You are a hundred years too young to argue with me sproutling, now go to your Honor and be grateful that he does not have you scrubbing his small clothes when you show him temper."
Geyrt wilted under the scolding and visibly tried to summon the ground to close over her. Alas, this magic was beyond her.
Ulric cleared his throat mildly and made for a tactical retreat.
"Thank you Lady Shor, for your instruction. I can't claim to understand all of it but I will do as best as I can to remember and give it due attention. Already, you've helped me to see a few failings that need addressing." He told her earnestly.
"Ladies Vedyr, Bathe, thank you as well for taking care of my Shadow, I'm sure she grows under your tutelage." He continued.
Bathe made a sound very similar to a snort, though, of course, a lady as refined as she would not be responsible for such a sound.
Vedyr made no bones about her stance on things.
"She had better, or I might yet cut her short." Said the dark woman with the loving urge to murder only a parent knows for their children.
Well. That fairly well put a dash of cold water down his shorts. Hastily he bade them good evening and managed to prevent his rapid walk from turning into a run.
Awkward silence accompanied their walk back to the apartments. Ulric had grown old enough to know when to keep his mouth shut and employed that wisdom when they entered, merely offering a polite "good night" to his Shadow when she fled to her small room. The day had been long. Very long. Shrugging it off, Ulric stripped down to skin and turned down the mana lamps before laying down in his bed. Sleep claimed him immediately.
