Chapter 15
“Healing magic is much abused by society. Used as a replacement for proper care more often than not. Just as any mind mage is forced to undergo a full scan of their own consciousness prior to being licensed to work on others, so too should every individual in the Empyrean be forced to heal from a broken bone without the use of magic. Give them the perspective on what we achieve, and on how long it takes their body to do the same, and we can only hope that a deeper understanding might be reached earlier. I say earlier, because inevitably age catches up to all of us, even those species with the greatest longevity. And when it does, the after effects of the casually dismissed injuries of youth come back in force to ruin lives. Disability is common among the elderly, and of those disabilities, almost all are the net result of some harm that has been done to them earlier in life finally manifesting. The broken bone healed with a wave of the hand will still ache when there is a temperature differential. The broken mind patched into place with magic will rebel against the chains that bind it, causing even more catastrophic reactions. Natural healing must regain its place in our society, and so too must natural good sense. Every person seems to believe that any injury that does not instantly kill them is tolerable, when in fact, they are almost guaranteed to come back and haunt them in later life. If necessary, let us restrain the use of healing to only those cases where it is vital for the preservation of life rather than the casual and offhand way that it is used now. None of which even begins to account for what happens when healing magic goes wrong, which statistically does occur in more cases than you’d likely expect. Or those cases where—”
—Official Complaint, Dr Nisse Cadria
By the time that he had been given the all-clear to begin cultivating mana again by the medic, he had nearly the full structure of his interface and paradigm planned out, with only the final piece waiting. More pressingly, he had a near toxic amount of heavy metals and miscellaneous other materials in his system that fundamentally did not belong there and would begin killing him if he did not start using them in his embodiment. It was that more than anything else that had driven the medic to finally give him the freedom to start using his magic again.
Though that had been without even letting Sylvas explain about his new embodiment, the medic simply devolving into a string of cursing under her breath for well over a minute. After that particular point in his visit, she very deliberately avoided anything resembling conversation beyond what was medically necessary.
Stepping out of the infirmary, he didn’t head up to the surface but down to one of the many abandoned chambers deeper in the structure. He wanted to be out of sight in case what came next embarrassed him, and he also wanted to be as far from others as possible in case the worst happened, and he lost containment of his mana. For others the surface would have been the wiser place, but if all of his Gravity mana was unleashed rapidly, the honeycombed structure of the cliff complex promised to absorb it better than open air ever could. He didn’t want to level the whole campus if he really screwed up.
Settling down into a cross-legged position in the long hall where he’d first learned to teleport, he closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. Mana crept slowly in as he opened himself up to it. It burned as it came, like vinegar on flayed flesh. Every inch it travelled through his channels opened them wider than they’d been since the battle, and every movement of his tender flesh around them ached. It was like he was being run through with a hot knife shaped exactly like the channels that had been carved through him. As if someone was feeding electrified wire twisted into the shape of his nervous system into the spaces where his nerves lay.
Nausea had been a constant through the past few days as he tried to keep down the supplements and food even as the world continued to lurch around him since his injuries, but now he finally lost the battle. He fell forward from where he’d been sitting to vomit across the floor, cursing himself for his weakness even as he did it.
Damn, I’m going to have to eat more to replace that. Unfortunately just the thought of doing that made him retch again.
If he’d been reliant on his old method of cultivating mana then the break in concentration would have put a swift end to it, but he wasn’t. Mana pooled inside his core now that it had traversed his agonizing channels, and as it did, he felt life returning to his body. Like he’d been walking through a world in monochrome, with the sound turned down and every sensation dampened. His second sight bloomed back to life, then his gravity sense, then all the rest. His awareness of the world blossomed out beyond the limits of his body once more and the relief that he felt was almost worth the pain of drawing in the mana to get there. Everything hurt, he had vomit dripping from his lip, and he was the happiest he had been in almost a week. Whatever else had happened, whatever else he was about to do, he was at least mage again.
Not daring to push his luck by actually casting anything, Sylvas made his way back to the Blackhall with a renewed vigor. The exhaustion and dizziness that had been plaguing him this whole time must have been symptoms of his mana starvation rather than any more sinister lingering effects of his injury. That was a relief.
Also, he hadn’t exploded, which was a relief too.
Climbing the stairs back to his chambers made his head start pounding all over again, every step made his heart hammer, every hammer of his heart thumped in his temples, and the nausea, the constant nausea that had been plaguing him since he woke up again, reared its head. His door, his room, his bed, they were all swimming before his eyes until he got himself seated, and even then, the whole room seemed to be rocking from side to side. He closed his eyes against the motion but that awful sensation of the whole world being in constant shifting motion got no better. If anything, without the world around him in sight, it seemed to get worse.
Drawing in a steadying breath, he tried to meditate, tried to master his body and command it into silence. Activating his Clearmind, he was able to filter out the information that he was receiving. His gravity sense had always been reliable for steadying things, making up feel like up and down feel like down, but right now it was the source of his current discomfort. Fortunately distancing himself from it finally caused the motion of the world to slow once more. He didn’t know if it was the rotation of the planet that he was feeling, or if whatever part of his brain managed that sense had been damaged in some way, but either way, it would have to remain quieted for now.
The poison in his belly lurched as his senses touched it. The obvious source of his nausea now that he could think clearly enough to contemplate it. Foreign materials that his body was trying to reject. A stomach that was not designed to assimilate them. That would have to be the first thing that he focused on with his new embodiment. All of his embodiments so far had followed much the same schema. He would shape the mana inside his body into the newly required shapes and embed it into his flesh, or he would press with the mana he had mastery over to reshape his body into something new.
Incorporating the poison into his body, into his system, that was something new, something alien. He’d studied all he could of his biology in the textbooks, studied everything that he could of the processes involved in this embodiment too, everything that he could learn to make the process easier, he had learned. But doing it was something else entirely. He felt like that lost and confused child locked in some tower cell mutilating himself all over again.
There was some part of him, some animal part of his brain, that rejected this whole idea. His body was his body, his mana was his mana, those were normal things for a person to have, but to introduce something alien and not only accept its presence inside him, but to change himself to accept it. That was a psychological barrier that he really hadn’t expected to run into. He’d never had anything. Never had anything real, and lasting. No home, no friends, no belongings, nothing that he could say was his except a name he’d have discarded in an instant if he had to.
And now was about to give up his body, permanently changing it in a way so he could survive.
He supposed that in the abstract his body hadn’t been his own since he signed up with the Ardent, but that felt like more of a rental arrangement, while the he was working towards change was more permanent. There would be no going back from this. He’d never be able to stop once this was done. Until now, he could have, technically. He could have closed off his magic, set it aside, lived a normal life. He’d always known that statistically people didn’t retire from the Ardent, they just fought for as long as they had the strength to and then either died or changed roles when they didn’t. Of course there was always that dull hope in all of them that someday that their vigil might be over, and they might be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor, a universe without the horror that Eidolons brought. But even if by some miracle that happened and the universe didn’t collapse as a result, Sylvas knew that there would always be another threat, another enemy.
And with this I’ll be ready to meet them, he thought while working. A weapon ready to be called and used.
The trouble with magic was that it obeyed the will of the person using it. Unless he was committed to making this change, he couldn’t. He could go through the motions, do all of the mental arithmetic required to make it work, but unless he was truly and utterly committed to the embodiment that he’d chosen, then he’d either find himself crippled for life, or he would strike himself dead.
There could be no half measures with the path he’d placed himself on.
He touched his mana, where it roiled in the heart of him, spinning around the dark center of his core. It answered him without effort. It would do whatever he commanded it to do, even if he told it to destroy him, to rip him apart from the inside. He could do this. All he needed was to commit to it.
All of the embodiments that he’d studied, all of the options that he’d weighed, he knew that this was the best one, he knew that it would do all of the things that he needed his next embodiment to do, to give his body what it needed in order to survive. He could see no other path forward that would let him address his weaknesses while empowering his strengths except for this. This was the only path forward.
I just need to take the first step.
Opening his eyes again, he was surprised to find that barely a few minutes had passed. The poison was still there in his stomach, he was still the same person, nothing had changed. Sighing, he picked up his slate from where it had been lying on the bed since the last time he’d tried to read something, and then startled. Written across the front of it was an alert with the words, “Schedule Change.”
He stared at them blankly and uncomprehending for a moment. Had Vaelith decided to pass him off to train under someone else so she could focus on a more promising candidate? It would have been a fair allocation of resources, given everything that had happened. Worse yet, he wondered if his injuries had prompted him to be benched from the tournament and relegated to watching it.
He ran his finger over the slate to open the alert and quickly read the words that appeared afterwards.
“The first round of the tournament has been moved up.” He announced to the air around him in a whisper, shock shooting straight through him.
Sylvas had thought that there were weeks left before the event was due to begin, but now apparently there was only two days.
