Starbreaker

“With the acquisition of each circle, the mage develops new senses as they are more thoroughly submerged into the magical world. Mana flows within the body can be sensed with the first circle, mana flows without the body with the second, and so on, up until the fifth circle.”

—Progression Fantasies: Why You are Investing in the Wrong Embodiment, Curgal Groenen

Sylvas didn’t bother to act offended, why would he when he had a bounty to consume after his long hours in the desert of boredom. He felt like he was spoiled for choice now, and he dithered back and forth between the two different ways in which his future would be changed before finally settling on Lockmind. It was the one he was more excited about, and it would make it easier for him to learn the embodiment once he had mastered it. Now all that he had to do was work out how to make the mana flow into his mind in the shape proscribed here at the same time as maintaining his usual Clearmind.

The instructions for Lockmind would have been so very easy to follow if it were his first Paradigm. He would have learned it in hours instead of the months it had taken him to master Clearmind if his instructions back home had been so clear. So damn simple. It almost broke his heart to remember what he had gone through when everything could have been so easy.

Now of course, nothing was so easy. As it turned out, progression was not as simple as layering one new paradigm on top of the other. They had to coexist, occupying the same space at the same time, in what should have been an impossibility. At first, he thought that he was going to have to pick apart his first circle and change its shape to accommodate the inclusion of Lockmind, but before he had even begun, he realized that it wouldn’t work. He wouldn’t be creating a second circle, just changing the first. The two contradictory states of mind would have to exist side by side, operating in the same brain.

I have to find a way to be both of these people at the same time. The one that sees everything clearly in the moment, and the one who remembers everything, forever.

In that moment of clarity, the mana flowed through him. Into the second Paradigm, flooding out to give it shape inside his mind. Clearmind had been fluid and adaptive, shifting with his thoughts to accommodate whatever he was casting or thinking, while Lockmind was solid and immovable, a core of solid steel, or rather a shell of solid steel, trapping every thought that he had in his mind. It was overwhelming. The weight of all the sensory data that his body collected, sound and touch and scent, all pressed in on him, crushing his thoughts. The part of his mind that thought of itself as himself, the part of his mind that was him, was drowning in it.

This must have been the lobotomy that Fahred had so casually warned him about. The complete destruction of himself in the tide of incoming information. The kind of thing that you could only have known about the Paradigm if you had lived through this moment. But Fahred had lived through this. If he could survive, that means I will too. Sylvas’ eyes were closed to what he might have seen, and now he shut down his other senses too, Clearmind gave him the tools to focus only on what he wanted to perceive in the moment, and he used it to shut out absolutely everything. A second framework of mana formed in his mind, reshaping it in its own image, but no longer threatening to destroy him.

He held it there, the mana forms of both paradigms, until he felt certain of them both, sure that nothing could move them, then he let his senses speak again. The press of the straps of his vest against his shoulders, the gentle movement of air brushing over his skin, the sound of his own breathing, the distant sound of the stone around him shifting as the night allowed it to cool and settle back into its usual density. Every point of data was stowed away inside his mind with no way of escaping, but it was no longer a chaotic flood. It was being filed away, the importance of it being ignored entirely, until it all became background noise just like it used to be. It would be there if he thought back to it, but it wouldn’t overwhelm him in the moment. In less time than it had taken him master pronouncing Kaya’s name, he had mastered his second paradigm.

He let his fingers dance over the surface of the slate, reveling in the sensation and the way that its papery texture was stored away in his memory for later examination as he turned to the pages about the Embodiment that had been chosen for him. He supposed that he should have been annoyed that Bulwark was chosen for him, that he should have railed against his independence being stolen but given the sheer breadth of Embodiments that were available in the Strife library this actually came as a massive relief. To have the choice taken from him, and to be given an embodiment that was essentially optimized for his own progression, was more than he could have hoped for and far from the punishment that he suspected he was meant to be suffering.

A quick glance through the pages on the slate told him everything that he needed to know, the actual process of infusing his channels and flesh with the mana would take longer. He had proceeded with his first embodiment at what would have been considered by the Empyrean to be a reckless speed, explaining the many injuries that it had caused him. He would not, of course, be going as slowly as the text told him to, not when he had more important things that he needed to be working on and a mana core so dense that it was considered to be a danger to him and others, but he would definitely be taking things easier than he had with his first embodiment. Which he calculated to mean that he would be sitting still in this cell for the remainder of the night, slowly infusing mana out from his channels until shortly before the end of Strife’s working day at which point he could forge his second circle.

It required surprisingly little concentration, really. It was more like his calisthenics exercises than anything else. He shaped the mana in his core into the specific pattern that would infuse resistance into his flesh, and he let it seep out. The shaping took only as much concentration as a flex of a bicep when lifting a weight, and the infusion was more of a release than an effort. Which in turn left his mind entirely free to be bored again.

He used Lockmind to skim back through everything that had happened since he had mastered it, reading through his sensory information like it was an old journal and finding nothing of interest or use, then he turned his attention to the slate.

It had been cleared of all information other than that which Fahred had wanted him to have, but the act of clearing it had left absences in the magic where information used to be, by infusing it with a little mana, he was able to bring back fragments. Snippets of text that with context and time he was able to construct back into the full theoretical articles that his instructor had been reading on the thing before turning it to its new purpose.

At some point, the beleaguered looking elf from the mess hall delivered a meal, but Sylvas barely even noticed his arrival until the smell of food pervaded through his concentration and he wolfed the brown slop down. Getting the unique discomfort of eating while intensely aware of all the internal organs that the food was coming into contact with as he continued to pump mana out into them.

Much of the writing on the slate was beyond Sylvas. Smug as he might have been about knowing the theory underlying the spells that he used, the theory underlying the use of magic, and his own ability to use those advantages in spell-work, there was a level of complexity here that greatly outstripped anything that he had ever encountered. He would understand it, eventually. But there would likely be years of intervening study between then and the present, as he absorbed the full breadth of magical knowledge that the Empyrean had cobbled together.

And once he had absorbed all the theory underlying what he was piecing together on the tablet, he would have a perfect copy of this very text still stowed away in his mind for perusal at his leisure. As soon as he got out of this cell, he was going to find his own slate and start consuming everything that he could lay hands on. No piece of errata, no matter how obscure would escape his sight, no appendices could conceal their dangling secrets, with this paradigm, he could do everything that he’d ever wanted to. Learn everything.

He turned his attention back to the spells that he already knew, half-formed and cobbled together as they were. He examined the places where he could change them, make them more useful to him. The Empyrean might have problems with modifications to existing spells, but as everyone was so ready to point out, I am not from the Empyrean. He had to work with the tools that he had available to him. And if he didn’t currently have access to the theory underlying some of the spells, he at least had his own general knowledge, and enough free time to begin picking them apart in his mind to try and get to grips with how they worked.

Some, like the scrying spell, seemed to tap into systems that already existed which he just had no knowledge of, and those he could not begin to decipher, but others were in easy reach. His Arcane Arrows were the easiest to adjust on the fly, in no small part because he’d been responsible for writing the majority of the spell himself, tweaking the Aion words that they’d found in other spells until he had created an amplification of destructive force. Now that he had seen some of the other spells used by other mages, the officially constructed ones rather than the cobbled together versions that he’d been able to come up with and that had proliferated through the Heralds, he could see the flaws in his own design. Yet he was reluctant to make any changes now, not when they might be noticed by his Instructors and result in him being tossed back in the brig. What he had made back on Croesia would have to serve for now, at least until he unlocked whatever affinity would grant him access to the next tier of more specialized magic.

The circle within him began to take form. One half was already in place and solid, the section composed of his paradigm, but the other half was still misty and permeable. Were it not for the first circle already hanging inside of this second one his mana core would have passed out through that fuzzy semi-circle and he would have lost it all, probably quite catastrophically. Instead, it remained pinned safely in place.

He wiped away all that he’d reconstructed from the slate, as there was no need to let his Instructor know that he was reading ahead, or capable of deciphering wiped slates, and then he turned his full attention to the sensations that his embodiment were now bestowing on him. Mostly a deep muscle ache, a sensation like he had been repeatedly electrocuted over the past few hours, and a numbness in the areas surrounding his mana channels that he chose to interpret as them toughening up, rather than as him having caused permanent nerve damage by rushing the process. His body would heal from whatever minor damage this enhancement caused, he was sure, but the long-term payoff would be more than worth it.

Just as it had the first time, when his second circle formed, Sylvas felt it click into place, like a piece of a puzzle, like an organ he had been missing. The movement of mana inside him, between body and mind began, like a secondary circulatory system, not pulsing in time to his heart beat, but always in smooth fluid motion.

The mana in his core relaxed. Or at least became less dense than it had been a moment before. Less of a weight for him to haul around. He had been so accustomed to the tension of it pressing against his circle, and his will holding it back, that he had never even recognized the situation as anything abnormal, but now that same harmony he felt within his circles seemed to flow into the mana inside him. It no longer fought and roiled, desperate to escape, and instead became as still water. Unmoving and placid, but with a depth he could draw on at any time. A well instead of a spigot.

There was so much more room in his core now. He had expected the second circle to make things easier to manage based on what the doctors and instructors had said, but he had never considered that it might multiply his capacity to retain mana. He was only holding onto what he had before at present, having drawn nothing more in beyond what was required to form the circle, but there was space now for so much more. He could fill this well up to its very brim instead of having to dip down into it each time he cast a spell. He could bring back that same surface-tension that everyone was so worried about, with his will holding the mana in place, and holding twice as much mana as before.

It would probably defy the purpose of the exercise if he went back to refilling his core to breaking point all over again, and the absence of a full core of mana also let him observe for a time, to try and detect where he was gaining the excess mana from that he was not meditating into his core. It was nowhere to be found. The whole time that he had been fighting, more and more mana had flowed into his core, coursing back through the channels of Arterium Arcanum. Tentatively he let mana flow out from his core, through his channels, into the brig, but there was no repetition of the battle. The mana did not return to him just because he was casting some out. Whatever that mystery source of power had been, it seemed that his new embodiment had solved it. Making his flesh impermeable and stoppering whatever leak had been empowering him. On the one hand, that was wonderful news, two birds killed with one stone and a problem solved, but on the other, he felt certain he would miss having that extra mana that he didn’t need to think about drawing.

He sat there in the empty cell, cross-legged and silent, doing nothing but feeling that flow of mana through that new circle, feeling where it was inconsistent and pushing the flow through more steadily, feeling where it was moving too swiftly and drawing it back into harmony. Only when he was fully satisfied that everything was flowing exactly as it should be and would continue to do so forever without further guidance from him did he open his eyes.

And saw that the world was on fire.