Tale of Eldramir

Ezekiel and his family silently entered the room after being invited in.

Opening the door, Ezekiel saw that they were in a far larger and more opulent room than its location would suggest. It was filled with bookshelves and items that were clearly magical in nature, ranging from small spheres or rings floating from stands or pedestals, to paintings and framed relics with runes of enchantment that glowed visibly even in the bright lighting.

The room was also quite large, being at least fifty meters squared. It was not quite the size of their home’s main floor, but still larger than one would think would be needed in such an out of the way area. Yet it didn’t seem too big or too small, with the various objects being well placed around the room. There were also five large windows depicting the opposing elemental symbols in stained glass.

Looking around, Ezekiel also noticed that off to the side was an area that seemed to have been hastily set up with several toys and pieces of furniture meant for children.

“Wendy, Ellen, why don’t you both go play over there for now. Ezekiel, your father, and I need to have some grown up talks, and I think you’d just be bored.” Evelyn said as she knelt down as Reya hopped from her shoulders to go watch over Wendy and Ellen. Theo also joined in after Warren nudged him off his shoulder.

The twins and the two cats went to play in the corner as Ezekiel and his parents walked up to the desk sitting at the far side of the room, directly beneath the center window with the zigzag for Lightning, and the circle for Void.

The woman sitting behind the desk was an elderly woman with hair graying from age, not Tempest mana, but still had a large amount of green in her hair, to match her eyes which were watching the Luminance family like hawks. Her eyes glanced back and forth between the twins, to Ezekiel and his parents, giving a brief smile as she watched Wendy and Ellen playing with a set of wooden swords as they ‘play fought’ with Reya and Theo.

Reaching the desk, Ezekiel and his parents sat down in the seats that were stationed in front of the desk. Ezekiel sat in the middle as Warren and Evelyn sat beside him.

The woman in front of them peered down at Ezekiel with interest, and none of the disdain he often expected from those who looked at him and knew he was a Void mage. Ezekiel couldn’t help but feel nervous, but also relaxed, as he felt like the woman in front of him didn’t judge him for his magic.

“Greetings, Warren, Evelyn, and you too Ezekiel. I’ve known your parents since before they came here and helped them settle once upon a time. My name is Lina Ashe, I am a Tier three Life Mage, and previously a Tier three Hunter.” The elderly woman, Lina, said as she leaned forwards to give a polite nod of acknowledgement to Ezekiel. He bowed back as best he could from his seated position.

“It’s nice to meet you, Miss Ashe.” Ezekiel said as politely as he could.

Ezekiel was surprised to hear that Lina was previously a Hunter, but from what he knew this could happen if a Hunter’s Spirit familiar was killed. Not only did it mean that the Hunter inquisition would become significantly weaker, but it also meant that it was far more difficult, if not impossible, for the ex-Hunter in question to progress to a higher Tier, as the backlash of having a Spirit that was intricately tied to a human’s soul and mana paths killed meant that there was usually extensive spiritual damage.

It was also well known that no one had ever broken through to Tier four without the aid of a Spirit familiar before. Which was why all the people who ran top tied guilds were Hunters, and most high-level officials in the Church of Ten were as well.

“What a polite young man you are. But it seems like you get lost in your own head quite a bit.” Lina said as she watched Ezekiel stare at her in a bit of wonder and curiosity. His face turned red at being called out so suddenly but said nothing to refute it as he knew she was right.

Warren and Evelyn just chuckled at Ezekiel as he looked at the ground.

“Indeed. Our boy is always thinking. Always wondering. It’s probably why he managed to get as far as he has when it comes to his studies.” Warren said as he reached out to ruffle Ezekiel’s hair. “That actually has to do a lot with what we came here to speak with you about.”

The faces of the three adults lost their playful expressions as they started getting right to the point. Evelyn nervously clenched her hands in front of her, whilst Lina and Warren were now stoically staring at each other.

“Indeed. Your message said you discovered something that you think will be utterly groundbreaking with regard to your son, and that you needed to speak with me as soon as possible. Given that you’ve had little contact with me since settling down, with only the odd visit once or twice a year, whilst never once introducing me to your children, I took this to mean that this was truly important. Which is why I’m taking time off during one of the busiest weeks in the year for the Church, just to talk to you. So please, tell me what exactly was so important.” Lina asked in an accusing and doubtful tone of voice.

Ezekiel figured that there must be some friction in whatever relationship Lina had with his parents, as it seemed like she was frustrated with them for more than a few reasons. He resolved to bring it up with his parents later, as it seemed like Lina was the person his parents trusted most in the Church, so it would be best to make sure he didn’t step on any of her toes, else he loses what possible support he might be able to gain.

Warren and Evelyn also realized that there was a friction that hadn’t always been there. But the fact that Lina was willing to meet with them at such short notice was a good sign. So, it was with bashful looks as they awkwardly failed to make eye contact with Lina that they explained the situation.

“To be blunt, our son has discovered a method of cultivating Void Mana.” Warren stated, deciding that there was no reason to bother dancing around the subject any more than they already had. “We were hoping to share this method with the Church in exchange for proper supervision and potential aid as he uses it and tries to further refine it moving forward.”

Warren and Evelyn were expecting some sort of surprised expression to cross Lina’s face. Maybe she would express her disbelief and doubts at what Warren had just said. But, to the contrary, neither of these responses were given.

“Prove it.” Lina simply said as she looked at Warren and Evelyn. “Your claim is quite outrageous, so I would ask you, or rather Ezekiel, prove it.”

There was no change in Lina’s expression or tone. There was no disbelief, no outrage or denial. Just a flat statement demanding that the words the spoke be proven to be true.

It was shocking enough that Ezekiel gazed up at Lina in surprise. He examined her face as closely as he could, but this was a Tier three Mage that was older and more experienced than his parents. One who had no emotional attachments to him that might be used to get a read of what she was thinking.

Seeing Lina’s lack of reaction, Ezekiel determined that there were two likely reasons. The first was that she had an impeccable poker face and was so good at controlling her emotions and expressions that nothing would be visible unless she allowed it. The second was that she had heard such claims before from others. Potentially people trying to get something from the Church.

Thinking for a second, he realized that there was a third possibility. One that he had very mixed thoughts about.

Someone else had discovered this method before him. Possibly centuries before him, and for some reason the Church was doing everything they could to ensure that no one knew about it. Which, if that was the case, he didn’t want to think about what they would do to continue keeping it a secret.

Warren and Evelyn seemed to realize something as well but understood that the best thing for them to do at the moment was to go along with it. Leaving right now would leave things up in the air in such a way that might come back to bite them later.

“Fine.” Ezekiel said as he closed his eyes, finally fed up with this nonsense and deciding that he would get this over with then and there.

“Wait!”

“Ezekiel don't!”

Ignoring his parents' protests, he began meditating as best he could in such an unfamiliar and uncomfortable area. Yet regardless of all of that, he found himself falling into a trance easily enough as the familiar sight of motes of mana appeared within his mind’s eye.

Allowing himself to see the mana around himself, he noticed the large balls of black, gold, and green mana surrounding him. The mana of his mother, and father, as well as Lina, as they were within his range of detection whilst meditating. He also felt two more sources of gold and black mana behind him. He assumed that these were Theo and Reya.

He also noticed the two spheres of mana next to him move for a moment, only to pause and back down as the green sphere of mana pulsed all of a sudden, nearly causing him to fall out of his trance. But he held onto his current state of mind as best he could, whilst simultaneously imagining a mountain growing as it reached towards the heavens above, and a great and swirling typhoon that buffeted the mountain with winds superseding the speeds of a hurricane.

His mental imagery immediately drew what little ambient mana was in his range towards his body. Deciding that he would rather prove the woman in front of him wrong than be as cautious as he had always been all these years, he did not worry about getting the ratios perfect like he tended to.

Rather, he decided that, so long as he made more Void mana than he spent spelling whatever leftover mana there was, then that would be enough, and he would deal with the fallout of the enhanced mana effects that would result in this expulsion.

Lina was a Tier three Life Mage, and he doubted that he’d suffer such serious injuries that she wouldn’t be able to heal him if the effects of the supercharged mana he expelled ended up hurting him afterwards. Flesh wounds were significantly easier to heal than wounds to the soul after all.

Thus, with a ballparked estimation of nearly equal parts Tempest and Cavern Mana, carelessly drawn into his body, Ezekiel allowed the clashing mana to meet in a looping stream, keeping enough focus to ensure that the mana within him that turned into Void mana was kept separate from the pure Tempest and Cavern mana. He needed to keep track of what he had left so he didn’t waste more than he had to expelling whatever mana was left inside him afterwards.

Like two streams funneling into a greater one as they met, the motes of Cavern and Tempest Mana merged together, canceling each other out and becoming the motes of pure white light that he was so familiar with.

Realizing that there wasn’t enough to get him back to the same mana levels as he had before he touched the relic the previous day, Ezekiel allowed himself to slow down when he noticed that he wasn’t absorbing anymore mana from outside.

He also saw that, once again, he had absorbed more Tempest mana than Cavern mana, so he used what Void mana he needed in order to expel the excess. In this case he had managed to accumulate a total of forty-seven motes of Void mana, but he had an excess of nearly thirteen motes of Tempest mana. A little less than half of the Void mana he had formed.

Pairing up a mote of his Void mana with each of the Tempest motes within him, he quickly sent the mana towards his arms, using his control over the Void mana to move the Tempest mana to his will. This was something that had become much easier than it used to be. No longer needing to expel the mana from his core directly meant that he could lessen the potential damage when the supercharged Tempest forced him backwards.

Just as the mana had reached the pits of his fingers, Ezekiel forced his hand upwards as pushed the thirteen motes of mana out of his body and into the sky. Where they immediately fused together, as they were no longer under the direction of Ezekiel’s mind and soul. A great swirling gust of wind blew outwards, throwing around papers and ruffling fur and hair as the air in the room was unsettled; most of the knick-knacks around them were blown about.

Feeling the mana leave his fingers and lamenting the fact that he only had thirty-four motes left, Ezekiel couldn’t help but feel both frustrated and proud, at the amount of mana he had accumulated in a single sitting. If he could only do this more often, then he’d breakthrough in just a couple of days.

So long as he didn’t suffer a deficit, which sometimes happened when he couldn’t keep his mental images equally formed, causing an imbalance of mana types, resulting in him spending more Void mana to expel the excess than the amount that he had created.

It was just as he was lamenting these facts that the pain of his fingers shredding into itty bitty pieces hit him like a truck, and he opened his eyes in shock whilst screaming in pain. Blood, bone, skin, and sinew flew across the room as Evelyn and Warren threw up elemental shields to defend themselves. In the back of the room, Theo and Reya did the same in order to keep the twins protected.

As he flew backwards, blown out of the chair, he finally saw a look of shock on Lina’s face. He didn’t know if she was surprised at the uncontrolled outburst of magic, or the fact that he was willing to hurt himself so much to prove a point, but as he painfully hit the ground, Ezekiel felt the flood of frustration and worry he had been holding back leave his body as his hands were flooded with pain.

He knew that his parents would be worried about his injuries, but he couldn’t help it. For five years he had kept this secret to himself. For five years he had lied to his parents, and was forced to pretend to be an invalid, incapable of magic, and incapable of contributing to society, to being the person that he wanted to be.

Finally, he had shown the world, a little of it as seven sapient beings were, that he was not broken, and that he could do magic.

“Ezekiel!” Evelyn and Warren cried out as they dove towards their son. Reya and Theo threw up walls of light and shadows to keep Wendy and Ellen from witnessing the fairly grisly scene of Ezekiel covered in blood and barely holding back groans of pain as he held his hands close to his body.

Warren immediately held his now glowing hands over Ezekiel’s to begin healing him, but before he could start, Lina was hovering over Ezekiel with green glowing hands, and a soothing numbness spread out from the stumps that were his fingers.

“Enough, Warren, let me do this. You know damn well that you’re shit at healing.” Lina nearly shouted as she focused entirely on healing Ezekiel’s hands. “You stupid child! How could you do something so dangerous! Don’t you know that absorbing mana that your body isn't attuned with just destroys it! I don’t care how lucky you were before now, but just because you lucked out with the ratios before now doesn’t mean you’ll be lucky every time!”

Lina was nearly screaming as she berated Ezekiel for his reckless behavior, but Ezekiel couldn’t feel anything but vindication.

“So, you did know! You did already know that there was a way for Void mages to cultivate!” Ezekiel said in accusation.

“Of course, I did! The Church of Ten has been trying to find a successful method of cultivating Void Mages for centuries! Nay, millenia! And every single method we’ve discovered has resulted in the eventual death or crippling of whoever tries within a year.” Lina said as Ezekiel’s fingers started regrowing. “Given what I’ve seen here today, I’d give you a week at best before the elemental mana you absorb runs rampant and kills you for failing to create Void mana.”

Evelyn and Warren were shocked beyond belief at what Lina was saying. Ezekiel, on the other hand, felt nothing but pride and validation as he had already proven himself more capable of thousands of years of historical studies.

“I’ve been doing this for five years now. The only reason the backlash was so big this time was because I decided I don’t want to hide this anymore. I saw a Tier three Void mage, and figured that I’d go for broke, and absorb all the mana I could without suffering a deficit.” Ezekiel said as he weakly bragged about his skill in this current method.

“There is no way you’ve lucky enough to get a perfect ratio of one-to-one opposing mana types to not have you spirit paths destroyed from having the wrong mana type running rampant through it. Stop lying and don’t do this again!” Lina stated in an angry tone of voice.

Evelyn and Warren were about to speak up in Ezekiel’s defense when a pair of cries echoed out from the entrance of the room.

“Mommy! Daddy!” Wendy and Ellen cried in unison. Their voices were cracked, and they sounded terrified. “Theo and Reya threw up a wall and won’t let us through! What happened?”

Evelyn and Warren shared a look before Evelyn got up and hurried over to their daughters.

“It’s okay girls. Miss Lina just wanted Ezekiel to show her something! He decided to do more than was asked, and it made a bit of a mess. Are you two okay?” She said as she walked through the wall of shadows to see Wendy and Ellen clutching each other in a scared embrace. Terrified, but calmed down thanks to Theo and Reya’s acts to comfort them.

Meanwhile, Ezekiel was explaining that he didn’t need to worry about twisting his spirit paths when gathering mana.

“You can check for yourself, the wounds I suffered were only physical, and the only reason the backlash was so big was because I didn’t bother trying to keep the amount of mana I absorbed controlled this time. I just absorbed as much mana as I could that was within my range. I now have thirty-four motes of Void mana sitting in my core right now.” Ezekiel told Lina with exasperation.

“That’s impossible.” Lina said as she finished growing Ezekiel’s fingers back. But she didn’t let go of his hands, as she used her mana to reach deeper, trying to see what damage had been done to his spirit, his soul. “Mana that’s absorbed can’t just... be... expelled?”

Lina trailed off as she got a picture of Ezekiel's soul, or at least the fingers of his soul. She had expected to see a similarly mangled mess as the Tempest mana ran rampant through his fingers, having believed that he just got lucky and the excess Tempest mana had simply gone wild when it was in his fingers rather than in his chest or brain, which would’ve immediately killed him.

But she couldn’t see any damage. His soul was perfectly fine, and the only damage she had to heal was the damage to his fingers.

Falling back onto the ground in shock, Lina just stared at Ezekiel like he was some alien being she had never heard of before. Like he had just told her the sky was lime green with purple clouds, only to find out he was telling the truth.

“What did you do?” She said as she continued to stare at him in shock. “It has long since been proven that it is impossible to safely gather mana that isn’t attuned to a person’s elemental affinity, and that once it enters the body it is impossible to expel. So how? How did you expel it, so your soul was not utterly mangled from the rampant Tempest mana you absorbed?”

“Well, when I first tried to create Void mana when I was five, I realized that I couldn’t control the Tempest and Cavern mana inside my body, but I could control the Void mana. To an extent that it didn’t even merge with the elemental mana when it came into contact inside my body. So, I used my Void mana to stick to it, and then controlled the Void mana to push the Tempest mana outside my body. That’s why I mentioned a deficit.” Ezekiel explained.

Ezekiel’s words continued to shock Lina, and Warren, who was still listening in, was also amazed. He knew that pure mana Crystals that had Void mana were used to enhance spells of other elements to make them stronger, but he didn’t realize that Void mana could also be used to manipulate the other elements as well.

There was also the fact that elemental mana did not stick to one another like how Ezekiel was describing. They interacted with one another, causing environmental effects and changes, but motes of different types of mana didn’t directly interact with one another like Ezekiel was describing without having something happen.

Heck, now that he really thought about it, Warren realized that he really didn’t know much about the different ways that mana types interacted with each other. Before yesterday, he didn't even know Void mana was made when two opposing mana types met. Although that would explain the crippling injuries that some Mages and Hunters experienced when absorbing their opposing element.

Warren now understood how, if a person suddenly found Void mana inside their body, but they couldn’t control it, it would only make sense that they would be severely injured if the mana in their body was suddenly enhanced by several degrees of power.

“Of course, that only applies to when the mana is within the confines of my body. Void mana doesn’t work like the other types of mana, so I can’t control it when it leaves my body. Which is why the mana went so wild when I expelled it. There were thirteen motes of Tempest that were enhanced by thirteen motes of Void. With the enhancement, that was as strong as a point-blank upper Tier one spell applied directly to my fingers.”

Warren and Lina grimaced at that description. Such a spell would cause even themselves, a Hunter and Mage two Tiers higher than said spell, to suffer injuries that would need healing, else they risk the loss of their fingers as well.

Lina took a deep breath to calm down, as well as to settle her face into the neutral expression she had before. She then calmly stood up, her poster straight as a board, and gracefully walked back around to her desk, which was no longer covered in the various items that it once was.

Sitting back down, she gave Warren a piercing glare before turning to the back of the room, where the wall of light and shadows had come down, and Evelyn was now playing with Wendy and Ellen, who had calmed down enough to once again be distracted by the small assortment of toys Lina had placed in her office.

Looking back at Warren, who had moved to help Ezekiel set his chair up again so they could both sit down, Lina couldn’t help but let out a tired sigh as she closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. She could already feel the headache forming. She’d have to go get some pain relievers from her cupboards as soon as this meeting was over.

Evelyn just chuckled in the background as she played with Wendy and Ellen. Happy that she was no longer dealing with Lina directly, but also reminding herself that she needed to punish Ezekiel for scaring her like that. Perhaps sending him to the Alkena’s whilst forbidding him from bringing or accessing any books while he was there would be a good plan. He could even chaperone his sisters, who she was planning on setting up a playdate with Shari and her friends.

“This is going to be just like the situation with the Morathi Alliance, isn’t it?” Lina asked nobody.

“I don’t think it’ll be that bad. If it seems like you’ve learned something new after all.” Warren said as he tried to lighten the mood.

“I don’t know what the Morathi Alliance has to do with this. But considering I’ve never even left Harkem before, I doubt I could get into nearly as much trouble as mom and dad did.” Ezekiel said in reply to Lina’s question. He couldn’t help but feel slightly insulted at what was being implied.

She just glared at both of them. Utterly unamused as she stared at them as they sat innocently across the desk from her.

“That question was rhetorical, and I know the both of you know that!” Lina spat out in annoyance.

Warren just looked to the side awkwardly, realizing his ploy had failed. Ezekiel just shrugged. He still didn’t like what she was implying about him.