Chapter 11

“Teleportation is one thing, but moving a whole fleet is another. Every ship needs a mage. Every ship needs etherium to power each jump. These are ongoing costs. Investments. The promise of some mythical gravity affinity mage springing up out of nowhere has held us back for too long from refining the system.”

—The Gravity of the Situation, Captain Rakarth Hammerheart

“I’ll take it.” Fahred chuckled. “Stick with me boy, and your future will be bright and beautiful.”

Vaelith’s shoulders relaxed now that the argument was done. She didn’t make him any promises, and he appreciated that more than any amount of Fahred’s rambling.

They flipped a conjured gold coin for the first day, which Fahred won. Sylvas would have suspected that there was some sort of kinesis involved if Vaelith hadn’t been watching so closely. Then she set off to do whatever it was she did when she wasn’t drilling poor students and summoning battlegrounds, while Fahred took hold of Sylvas elbow and said, “Hold your breath.”

His gravity sense went absolutely berserk as they passed through a sudden wave of darkness, but stepping out of the other side, it quickly resolved itself back to normal. Fahred had teleported them down to the chamber where they’d been studying before.

Sylvas stomach turned over. All the gruel he’d shoveled down at breakfast came rushing back up his throat and would have splattered all over Fahred’s shiny boots if the man hadn’t danced back just in time. “Don’t worry, that only happens the first dozen times or so.”

Through heaving, Sylvas managed to blurt out, “Warning.”

“Ah but if I’d warned you, you wouldn’t have gotten the full experience.” Fahred’s smile was entirely too genial for the amount of vomit in the room. I wish I’d picked Vaelith.

The man launched into a lecture without a backwards glance at Sylvas panting to get his nausea under control. “Now you’d think that the problem with travelling greater distances with teleportation would be a higher expenditure of mana, but in fact, the issue is one of variance. Anyone with enough raw mana can bludgeon together a facsimile of your gravity mana potent enough to punch through into null-space and make the jump, but finding your way out on the other side is the biggest part of the battle. The further you travel, the more likely you are to stray, ergo the way-gate network.”

Sylvas retained every word that the man said thanks to his Paradigm, but if it weren’t for that, he didn’t think a single word would have stuck. His head was spinning, his gravity sense had been interrupted for the first time since he’d developed it, and he was having trouble feeling like he was standing on solid ground when the combination of his paradigms was trying to tell him forcefully that he should have been standing half a mile away.

“What you’ve done in selecting your paradigm actually puts you miles ahead of the rest of us, as you should be able to intuitively sense the positioning of things, at least hypothetically. Everyone else has to do some fairly complex calculations just for a standard jump, which obviously get adjusted based on gravity wells interposed between us and our target which will curve our routing. Even with some familiarity between two points that you commonly travel, random changes in local gravity on the galactic scale can still skew things, not to mention that every planet is constantly in motion, every system is constantly in motion, and the spinning of galactic spirals means…” He took a momentary glance at Sylvas blank expression then switched tact. “Once your paradigm has been developed into a working tool, you should be able to pop across essentially any distance as often as you like, so long as your mana reserves hold, and of course you don’t need to do the expensive work of converting mana to the usable type for the spells either…”

Sylvas had always suspected that Fahred was in love with the sound of his own voice, but as the lecture droned on, it went from a suspicion to a certainty.

“…The principle known as Planar Determinism means that only a single exertion of force is required, with the return from the null-space being a natural reset to your native and correct plane of existence. So while many first-time mages experience considerable anxiety about being trapped in null-space, for obvious reasons since exposure to a vacuum and absolute zero temperatures is fairly lethal, you can rest assured that your body will return to its plane of origin unless you are explicitly exerting force to keep it elsewhere.”

A piece of the puzzle slotted into place in Sylvas mind. “That’s why the Eidolons need to feed.”

“Beg pardon?” Fahred seemed quite put out to be interrupted mid-lecture.

Sylvas tried to explain. “They’re relocated to our plane by summoning, but they have to keep on exerting force to stay here. Even though each eidolon is a closed system in terms of mana production and consumption, they seek out sources of high mana like world-souls to keep themselves topped off, otherwise they’d revert to their native plane.”

For a moment, Fahred seemed to be weighing his words, then his usual look of bored indifference returned. “An interesting theory, but not exactly on topic for our current area of study…”

“Sorry.” Sylvas cleared his throat and settled back in for more being talked at. “As you were saying.”

But Fahred couldn’t seem to let it go yet. “No, no, where did you pick up that little tidbit, the mana eating thing?”

A blink drew up the relevant title from his Lockmind. “Eidolon Paradise: A theoretical extrapolation on the Otherworld by Thel-Velar.”

“Hmm. Not Greenmantle’s paper?” Fahred wiggled his eyebrows in a perplexing manner. “It is much more widely cited.”

“I only have the Ardent library to work from.”

“Remind me to subscribe you to all the academic journals in the universe, it will give you and your eidetic memory something to do as you’re shipped around like an artillery piece for the rest of your life.” The bitterness that had crept into Fahred’s voice when he’d been arguing with Vaelith was back, and it made Sylvas wonder what had happened to the man to make him hate being part of the Ardent so much without giving him the push to actually leave.

Fahred cleared his throat. “Anyway, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted. While it is technically possible to traverse any distance with the minimal expenditure of mana required to breach the null-space, the further that you travel within null-space, the further off-course you’ll almost certainly go, which means course adjustments, which is what soaks up the vast majority of your mana-pool. The tweaks. When you’re porting something big, like say, a ship, that means that for a long-distance jaunt you will require a substantial source of mana beyond your own resources, unless you happen to be blessed in two respects. Firstly with the ability to use mana with an affinity for gravity, in which case, there is lossless casting, and secondly, the ability to correctly judge the influence of the infinite complexity of weak gravity interference in the teleportation. Which, to date appears to have happened only twice throughout history. From the source of your Paradigm, and from one other gravity affinity mage who picked up the same technique a century or so later and is currently missing, presumed trapped in a black hole for all eternity.”

“A black hole.” The student stated flatly to the teacher.

The waggling eyebrows made an unwelcome return. “When I say that it is important for you to get your calculations right when making an inter-system jump without a gate, please take my words to heart. I’d hate to hear about another of you stuck in a gravity well they can’t crawl back out of. Though, I suppose with the time dilation of being so close to the event horizon it’s entirely possible that she’s already crawling out, and we just haven’t seen it happen yet. Who can say?”

“I’m not going to be sucked into any black holes teleporting around campus though. Am I?” Sylvas meant for it to be a statement rather than a question, but his nerves got the better of him.

“Not unless you ignore my instruction extremely thoroughly indeed. Or I’ve fundamentally miscalculated how much more effective the correct affinity of mana will be in producing… let’s just keep the jaunts short for now, while you’re learning.”

Absolutely brimming with confidence after that little pep-talk, Sylvas began the long, boring and arduous work of calculating how to make a jump through null-space the way that everyone else did it, since only practice was liable to make it so that his paradigm would become sensitive enough to manage this part for him. After almost an hour of scribbling down numbers on his slate, pouring over star-charts and predictions about interstellar bodies in motion and no small number of irritated and increasingly impatient tuts from Fahred, he finally arrived at a teleportation solution that might take him to the other end of the room. The incantation and spell-forms were laughably simple by comparison.

“I’m starting to wonder if it wouldn’t have been quicker to walk.” He quipped to Fahred, as the man fussed about laying wards and detection spells to stop him from going too far off course and appearing back inside solid stone.

“For this brief sojourn, perhaps. But what if you wished to traverse the whole campus?” The wizard scoffed.

Unfortunately Sylvas had an answer for that. “Pretty sure I could do that in less than an hour too.”

“What if you wished to be atop the cliff-face?”

And that too. “I can fly?”

Fahred grumbled, “Just cast the bloody spell, Cadet.”

The actual casting of the teleportation spell would be considerably shorter for Sylvas than for other mages without all the preamble of converting mana affinities, which he hadn’t even begun to study yet. As a gravity affinity mage, he could teleport almost a half a second faster than anyone else. Would wonders never cease?

In the end, after all the calculations and angle and pressure differentials were worked out, teleportation itself was a bit of an anticlimax. He cast the spell, an aperture to null-space that was exactly the same size and shape as him appeared to swallow him up. He was consumed by howling darkness for the briefest of moment and then he was on the other side of the hall, falling to his knees to make another attempt at vomiting despite his empty stomach. Bile burned his throat, but he looked back at Fahred and managed a feral smile all the same. He’d done it on his first try.

“Congratulations.” The Instructor clapped his hands. “Now do it about a hundred more times and I’ll believe you’re ready to do it without the safety bars up.”