Chapter 41: Ch. 37: Recollections

 

Lastly, yet most importantly, the Third Law of Magic affirms that if more than one spell, cast independently of one another but in opposition such that they are in conflict, they are bound to counteract one another in accordance with the precursory laws. Learning this is instrumental when studying the effects of magic upto the fifth tier, especially when approaching the realm of area of effect spells such as domain spells and aura magic. Wysterl Weisermann. The Fundamentals of Magic.

---

“...the unnavigability of the wood is hence compounded because spatial, translocation and scrying magics are distorted, which follows that time also suffers from the same effects. Though it is not common knowledge, and our time magics are found lacking for the sake of experiments into the matter. However, it has been hypothesised that time flows differently the closer you get to a denser locus of magic; see the attached appendices and references. Therefore I second the postulation that the Faeriweald's Shallows are spatially incongruous to the Midwealds…” Arthur's voice trailed off.

“Well?” Nora said, rubbernecking from her perch. The tupperware had been cleaned out. One empty cup that had the lavender scent of Valerian tea was almost empty, the purple dregs long gone cold.

Unfortunately, whatever effects he’d been afflicted with from working in the dungeon core still lingered, so he settled for water. Hopefully, it would go away on its own.

“ Magic is truly strange,” Arthur said, gazing around the glade. He put away the journal and turned his attention to the map.

“ I think you're the one that's truly strange, Master Arthur,” Nora chuckled. “ How can you not know that none would dare the Great Faeriweald because it is faerie-touched? Though I suppose it is fortunate that you have that journal to fill in for you, having lost your memories and all. Hmm, Am-nee-zuh you called it? For all her mind healing, Mastresse Venera hasn’t mentioned a word of it.”

“ I thought she was a [Psychic]?” Arthur said, with a one-arched eyebrow.

“ A matter of semantics,” Nora said, smiling wanly.

“Hmm,” Arthur said, stewing on that revelation. “ So she really was reading my mind, huh?What use was this ring then?” He murmured, rolling his fingers over his ring of obfuscation.

“ I am surprised as well,” Nora said. “ I am sorry I cannot offer much in the way of its workings,”

“ Nah, it's okay—” Arthur forestalled her. “ I should have read more on it. I think general obfuscation means to protect against scrying, I think, and it cannot affect truth detection skills. Maybe there was a toggle in here somewhere—”

One thing had led to another, and soon enough, Arthur and Nora had unpacked everything that had surrounded the dungeon debacle and the oasis. There was a lot of back and forth, a lot of questions and reacquaintance with one another. Arthur started peeling back the layers of what really made Nora…Nora. The reverse was also true for the dhampir.

Firstly, Nora was twice as old as Arthur, but in human years. However, she was relatively younger because of her vampiric heritage; it still made Arthur feel responsible for her somewhat but the girl was adamant that she was mature enough to take care of herself.

Leaving out the part about meeting a dragon, Arthur also shared that he was not exactly human either. With that, Arthur realised the extent of the geas. It inhibited him from talking about Aeskyre and her whereabouts.

In hindsight, it was a plausible security measure and its blanket effect made it so anyone with psychic abilities would have a hard time peering past the veil of his memories.

Nora was a [Blood Healer], which meant that she had the vitalis affinity, a rare affinity that manifested inherently or as a derivative. Beyond that, there was not really a need for oversharing until the time was right.

All they needed to do was gather information that would be valuable for the immediate future. They took stock of the amount of supplies they had at hand, plotted their destination, and made known their collective skills both utility and combat . Nora's translocation ability, [Shadow Walk] was brought up.

Arthur had seen it first hand, and Nora confessed that she’d been keeping it from the clan. Though she’d stayed with them for close to two decades, that was the extent that she kept her abilities under wraps. Her history before the clan was a sore spot, so Arthur did not pry. She would tell him in her own time.

“It's instinctual,“ Nora said. “ I don’t really remember much of it besides knowing that the veil is thin between reality and its shadow. Time spent there is insignificant. “

“ You can stay there for as long as you’d like?” Arthur asked with a one-arched eyebrow.

“ No,” Nora shook her head. “ It seems to be tied with how long I can hold my breath. My vitalis affinity makes it so I do not have to do it as much. The longest I’ve stayed in was one par’quartz.”

‘ Ah, that’s around 75 earth seconds.’ Arthur thought. ‘ A human can only breathe for 30 seconds, or in this case 30 kardions,’

“ And that is also contingent on your mana pool, right?” Arthur asked.

“ I would think so,” Nora hummed, looking at the glade, as crepuscular rays broke free from a cloudy sky. ” However, I don’t remember the limits. We shall have to try and see if moving you along will affect it.”

Given the amount of distance they would have to traverse around the Faeriwealds , it was important that they both knew their limits. The mechanics of how the [Shadow Walk] ability worked were not lost on Arthur. Obviously, a rational explanation existed, but he did not have much time to mull it over because they had to start moving.

“Do you think they’ll know we’re alive?” Arthur asked, as he cleared up the utensils.

“ The clanhead has an uncanny intuition,” Nora said. “ He has a pact class that lets him borrow the power of an extraplanar entity, which means he could be capable of scrying us.”

“ Like a Primal?”

“ No…” Nora shook her head. “ I don’t think I should mention such extraplanar entities unless we seek to attract their attention. They are not exactly known to be benevolent.”

“ Riiight, lucky us. Glaggis’ journal mentioned that we are potentially unscryable so long as we stay in the weald,” Arthur shivered, “And you wouldn’t happen to know what class it is would you?”

“ [Warlock],” Nora whispered. Her voice seemed to echo through the glade. Arthur thought the ambient sound and the air had stilled for a while. He shook his head and moved down from the perch to get the tent.

---

The Shallows of the Great Faeriwealds were less affected by whatever phenomenon Glaggis had described in his journal, a handy tidbit since they wanted to avoid detection by any forms of magic while making sure they didn’t lose their bearings. Mostly, it was for Nora’s sake until they found a ring of obfuscation that would suit her.

The duo travelled within the cover of the trees, making use of the day while it was young. It was barely midmorning, and a little sleep was sacrificed to cover more ground. Most of their journey was covered by short bursts of Nora’s [Shadow Walk] and then coasting by hoverboard below the trees' canopies.

Embarrassingly, Arthur could not get used to the disorienting motion of stepping through the shadows. His mana sickness and the inertia of sudden movement were enough to turn him green around the gills. It looked as though he was going to lay off spellcraft until he felt sure his thaumovasculi wouldn’t twinge like fire ants were crawling inside his veins. Those were the healer’s orders too.

While also meant to throw off any predators, alternating their modes of movement was also meant to let Nora recharge her mana pool and allow Arthur’s condition to recover. Not that he didn’t trust Nora to fight off any beasts of the weald.

On the contrary, after she’d narrated how she fought a golem to a standstill, Arthur could trust her to do anything. If it came to it, he did not want to be a liability.

To cover their tracks through the undergrowth where leaf litter and brushwood could be easily disturbed by their passing, Nora used one of her skills, [Shadow Shroud] which masked their scents and sounds. Given her skillset, Arthur was starting to build a mental picture of what Nora was truly capable of, but he did not want to give voice to it.

Nonetheless, the duo’s movements through the maze of green was furtive and vigilant. For two lone travellers, the forest was an unknown place and given the nature of the Faeriwealds they knew that monsters were about and they could not afford to let their guard down.

The destination was a caravan route that meandered around the narrowest part of the Shallows. There were outposts and waystations that way, and the enchanted wealds were relatively smaller towards the Southwest before they met the Chasm running from Northwest to Southeast.

While his compass would have been affected, Arthur’s navigation skill , [Veres’ North] did not budge in its accuracy. Nonetheless, turning his neck to face North everytime they corrected their heading was giving his neck cricks. As they were not hurting for supplies, their timeline of arrival to the route was deemed arbitrary. Everything was conjectured at that point.

At intervals, the two would stray close to the treeline that marked the boundary with the Humpbeast Ridges to get an inkling of how much time had passed.

At one of those intervals, they realised that dusk was falling as they came to another, much smaller glade. Travel-weary and hungry, they made camp for the night in a hollowed out tree. Arthur took the first watch while Nora slept off her exhaustion. The two had covered days’ worth of travel they would have otherwise spent walking on foot.

---

The hollow of the tree was just large enough to drop the tent there to guard against the cold as they took turns sleeping. Nora had confirmed that there weren't signs that any beast had been there recently; the only thing they could smell in there was moist earth and rain.

And as Arthur kept watch, he had only had the chirping of insects and the moaning of wind for company. All he could do was stare at the canopy to catch glimpses of twinkling creatures flitting through the air.

Occasionally, some of the larger, albeit shyer denizens of the Faeriweald would lope across the glade; the nose-horned deer, a couple of pygmy hogs that had moss and fungi growth on their coats, even a trail grouse hen or two with their flock of chicks.

As the night fell, the ambient noise of nocturnal creatures rousing around him was a reassurance that there were no predators nearby, at least not in the immediate vicinity. His dwarven goggles could still pick apart the details, and the chromastone lantern was behind him so he could avoid light blindness.

He had his sword out and wardstones set in a perimeter further away from the hollow of the tree. Hopefully, Arthur would not need to use it so soon. But it felt like forever since he’d last swung it, and the phantom aches made him leery of using magic. He made sure that he would continue to practice with his sword, especially the next tier of Velkyr swordcraft that he’d started way back.

Left with his thoughts, his mind could not help but stray to the events of the last couple days. It felt like a nundine had passed when it had barely been five days. The run in with the bandits had tilted his world view on its head. Time and again, he would find himself trying to rationalise the happenstance.

A sense of guilt twinged in his breast for the wanton loss of the life of the unnamed girl. As for Livierre, she’d been nothing but a hanger-on. A bit free-wheeling maybe, but there at the end, it drove home just how layered people could be, like alliums. Arthur thought Livierre was not necessarily a bad person because she had been looking out for her clan but that didn’t make her purported death any less weightier.

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However, he recalled Aeskyre’s words and realised that his outlook was going to have to change soon if he wanted to survive. Arthur had objectives, his aership already being the first, and strength not to be beholden to any power which was the second.

The aership was only a means to an end, freedom being part of it. What he was really after was unanswered questions. That said, he could either use the pursuit of those objectives to cope with his missing memories or act on them.

The grief at being torn away from everything he knew was still simmering beneath his consciousness, along with the memories he’d lost. He had been grappling with experiential avoidance.

‘Memories I can regain at the touch of a button,’ Arthur sighed, mulling over his phone. Were he to go on putting it away, sooner or later, a time might come when he’d regret it. Just a few quartz a go, he might not have come out of things alive. And there was the lingering feeling that more things were still to come, and yet life on Eryth would not afford him the luxury of putting things away.

But then again, would the memories change anything? Would they give him more things to strive towards? Or would they plunge him deeper into a crisis of existentialism? It was a catch-22 for him. However, the only person he would have talked to about all of it was back in Sturm's Keep and he already knew what her answer would be.

“You know this is just blissful ignorance,” Arthur exhaled, hands trembling as his eyes grew hot. He’d been holding on to it for a while, but perhaps he’d reached the slippery slope that he’d been avoiding so far. Everything from his departure in Sturms Keep to his arrival in the Dust had been one long gauntlet of intense emotions after another.

“ Or maybe they are memories I unconsciously repressed for my own good.” was his counter to the first thought. Fear of the unknown. What could his repressed memories possibly be hiding? Would they leave more unanswered questions?

Sniffling, he shook his head and stared at his sheathed dagger. The otherworldliness of the Faeriweald was beginning to creep as the moons shone. Removing his dwarven goggles he noticed some of the shrubs shimmered on their varicoloured leaves like begonias and crotons with neon inlays along their veins.

Wiping the tears with the back of his palm, he swallowed thickly and steeled himself and then looked askance to check if Nora was undisturbed. Satisfied that the dhampir didn’t so much as stir from her sleep, he willed a familiar gadget into his palm.

The screen was blank, a crack spiderwebbed from the bottom left corner. It was a sierra blue, thin bezels of surgical-grade stainless steel with oblong edges. Antenna bands were clearly demarcated, a tri-camera set-up sat at the back, glistening with chrome accents.

It must have been quite a sharp impact that broke the screen protection, not a fall, but something else. He noticed where the bottom left bezel seemed to be slightly warped as though someone had tightened a vice on it.

“ Damn the stages of grief,” he said, heaving in a lungful of the weald’s air. “ Here we go―[Basic Repair]!”

---

Why did [Basic Repair] charge a battery? The first time, Arthur had rationalised that it was because there was something broken. A drained battery was a broken circuit and therefore, magically fixed it by reverting it to its optimal state. Would that have worked if the phone was at say, 50 percent charge? Arthur thought it would have failed.

A more plausible supposition was, every charge and discharge cycle of the lithium ion battery meant the electrolyte degraded. [Basic Repair] fixed this degradation and that counted as repair. Or maybe it was both of the two? Arthur didn’t have much time to puzzle that as the phone battery was instantly full and back to its pristine factory condition.

”There is danger in knowing too little,” he breathed as he felt the haptic vibration of the phone's awakening in his hand.

“ If I am going to have people on my trail—I need all the advantages I can get,” Arthur murmured. The feeling of not knowing what he didn’t know had finally pushed him over the edge. The screen lit up as the phone logo faded in from left to light, twinkled once before the screen transitioned into the lock screen.

The network bars were empty. There were a couple of notifications, mostly ad messages, a missed alarm. He touched his thumb to the in-screen scanner, and the phone unlocked with a chime. Both the lock screen and the home screen were all generic wallpapers, nothing sappy, just abstract silhouettes and neutral palettes. He went into his messages. Somehow he didn’t feel like he’d been a call kind of person. There, at the top of unread messages, was one name.

‘Sammie,’ His blood turned glacial as he felt his gut churn in apprehension. He almost dropped the phone as an unexplainable feeling of filial familiarity hit him like deja vu. His thumb tapped on the threaded message tab and read message after message. As he scrolled up the timestamps, a headache began to build up but he grit his teeth and powered through.

Dread built as a distinct feeling of the ground being pulled from under him subsumed his thoughts as he went back to the latest message. With almost quivering fingers he exited the messages app with two sideswiping gestures of his thumb.

The metallic tang of blood entered his awareness, something salty dripped into his lips. He clicked on the gallery icon and scrolled until he arrived at a ‘favourites’ folder, his breathing was becoming increasingly laboured. The first was a video―darkness encroached the edges of his vision.

“...thur!”

Someone grabbed hold of his head between their palms. They were cold. Crimson eyes, platinum blonde hair, the scent of leather, blood…his own blood.

“ Look at me Arthur!” she whisper-shouted, almost hissing. Her eyes darted to the side as if she was embarrassed to even look at his face. One of her fangs was biting into her lower lip. Arthur was startled out of his daze, fumbling and almost dropping the phone in his hands. The scabbard braced against the crook of his arm, and the side of his face slipped, but he caught it just before it fell.

“Nora?” Arthur rasped, finding his throat dry. He banished his phone to [Inventory Chest] as he regarded the dhampir. He grimaced as pins and needles assaulted his calves, he’d been sitting for too long. Nora must have probably come to relieve him of his watch when she found him.

“ I think we have been going through this the wrongway,” Nora said breathily. There was an almost feverish stutter to her voice as she tentatively pulled her hands away from his face. Even standing at a distance, and under meagre moonlight Arthur saw her eyes were dilated as if intoxicated.

‘Frag! Nora,’ Arthur thought, pulsing [Cleanse] to magick the blood away from his nose. He flinched at the ache that flashed in his veins as though an intravenous syringe had been jabbed into the crook of his arm. Nora let out a relieved sigh, as she blinked away her almost entrance state. Her dilated pupils settled back into their normal apertures.

“ What do you mean?” Arthur murmured, taking cold gulps of the woody air as he brought his sword to his lap. The tang of blood was gone, but a throbbing headache made him pinch his eyebrows, as he squinted at the dhampir. The woman had suddenly moved several paces in a blink; her [Shadow Walk] no doubt.

“ Your blood, Master Arthur…you told me you were part human,” she muttered, pacing on the leaf litter. Arthur froze. There was no sound that rustled from the deadfall. “ You mana sickness will only get worse unless―”

“ Unless?” Arthur inquired. His face was scrunched up as the migraine assaulted his temples. ‘ Damn…did this happen because of those memories?’

“ Unless we find a way of burning it out of you,” Nora sighed, cradling her forearms like a withdrawal patient. “ Your blood has retained too much of the mana from…whatever transpired in the dungeon.”

Arthur had the sudden urge to slump as he traced whorls on his forehead, as though that would assuage the hammering.

“Your heritage is dragonkin isn’t it? That would explain the scaly arm,” she said as her gaze flitted to his sleeved arm.

‘Where’s a painkiller when you need one?’ “ Perhaps,” Arthur answered, smiling weakly. Dragon blood would make him dragonkin of course. Some of the more humanoid of the race had less dominant traits, like feline eyes, scale-like freckles on their cheeks. The rarest even had wings and tails. Most had their inherent magic.

Arthur felt guilty for the half-truth. Not that he didn’t trust her after they both came to the edge of death but the geas in his head was there for a reason. He was feeling as though someone kneaded his brain like taffy.

“ How do we go about this then?” Arthur groaned. He noticed that the dhampir was still keeping her distance and her cheeks were flushed.

‘ Well damn…don’t tell me my blood is some kind of drug,’ he left unspoken. He could almost feel the embarrassment and awkwardness emanating from the dhampir.

“ I …ah,” Nora hesitated. Flustered is what she was.

“ Breathe Nora,” Arthur said. It was becoming harder and harder to think the pressure was building up as if his head was a steam kettle . ‘I think this is getting worse,’ he thought, slinging his sword over his back as he slid down the root. He grunted as pain suddenly blossomed at the back of his knees.

“ Arthur?” Nora said worriedly approaching him. She stood on her toes as her hand went to his head. “ Pits ! You have a fever,” she hissed. Despite that, Arthur was not so indisposed to miss the way she’d been holding back like an addict gone cold turkey. It really was his blood.

The more he became aware of it, the more the power seemed to thrum in his veins until an electrical buzz seemed to tingle in his extremities. He had a sudden urge to let some pressure out, like a sneeze building up and one that he knew he’d lose, or worse, blow his eyes out if he fought against.

“ Get away from me Nora,” Arthur slurred as if in half-sleep as he shouldered past her. “ Stay away,” he slurred, staggering. His face grew warmer and the pressure mounted in his eyes, making them water. He tasted ozone in his mouth, electric and acidic like batteries. Inadvertently, his [Draconic Sight] faded in, colouring his vision in wisps and motes.

“ Frag!” he cursed, almost blinded by the view as the weald seemed to press back on his eyes. He felt his hair crackle with static. The tingling in his extremities grew worse, his nose, the tips of his ears, fingers, toes, and tongue felt like they were burning. Even his bones felt as though they would spontaneously combust.

“ Primals! Master Arthur!…your eyes and hair. What is happening to your eyes?”

However, Arthur no longer had the luxury of caring; he was running. He jumped, hoverboard appearing under his feet sending a spike of pain as though something had been yanked out of him. That was enough to make him keel over and plough into the grass.

“ Arthur!” Nora cried in alarm.

“ No! Stay away Nora!,” Arthur snapped, choking as he spat out the grass and earthy taste of sod on his tongue. His mind went back to the hazy memory of glazed sand statues. He crawled towards the centre of the glade, clawing himself up. Then he felt something reach critical mass, and at that moment, his mind latched onto one thing―Nora’s safety. So Arthur drew his sword.

“ Master Arthur!” Was all he heard before his sword plunged and the world went white.

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