Chapter 3
“Magic is an art. Magic is beauty. Magic is grace. Magic is everything and anything that the user projects onto it. An artist sees every spell as the brushstrokes of creation, a builder sees every spell as a building block that they’ll use to construct a more beautiful world. Magic is a tool, and for a soldier, every tool is a weapon.”
—Treatise VII of Practical Combat Magic, Fal’Vaelith
Sylvas stared down at the slate for a moment, being careful not to make eye-contact with the instructor and give any emotions away. From what he’d been able to gather in his research into the Empyrean, the old-fashioned master and apprentice method of training mages had long ago been done away with, but in certain academic circles, the practice still carried on in a more informal way. With the older and wiser mage instructing the younger, with the intention of them carrying on whatever research or work that the older mage had intended to complete in their lifetime but had more recently realized might very well stretch beyond that time. That was not what the current situation was, but what it was, Sylvas was still trying to decipher. Fahred had taken an intense interest in him ever since he’d arrived on Strife and shown an aptitude for rewriting spells, and with each new revelation about himself, from his aptitude to his affinity and now this latest discovery about his destructive potential, Fahred had been trying to tighten the ties that bound them. He had been trying to claim Sylvas as his own just as surely as all the suitors who had been sending him overtures to marriage. Fahred recognized the potential in Sylvas, and he wanted to get his hooks into him before that potential was realized and he slipped out of his reach.
There was a time when Sylvas would have longed for this sort of thing. When the idea of someone, anyone, caring about him enough to try to lay claim to him would have been not just flattering, but affirming, and he would have accepted such an offer without a second thought. But he had grown up a lot since he was the lost and lonely orphan, and even more with the forced confrontation with his past that Vaelith had instigated to fracture his psyche. Now he could see that this was just one more in the long line of “mentors” who wanted to use him for their own ends.
Yet at the same time, he couldn’t reject Fahred outright. The truth was, the man did have a wealth of information that would be incredibly useful to him, not to mention one of the sharpest analytical minds on the planet. If there was anyone on Strife who might be able to help him to understand his true capabilities then it was Fahred. If there was anyone who could look at the things Sylvas had done and tell him how he’d done them, it was this man.
Flicking his finger across the slate, the text on the subject that they were meant to be studying appeared. Sylvas had made it three pages in before realizing that he had already read it in the days following Vaelith’s adjustments to his brain. It was for the best, he had enough focus to listen to Fahred’s rambling lecture at the same time as he pondered what his next move should be, but if he had to integrate the text from his eidetic memory into his conscious thoughts at the same time, he felt certain he’d have tripped himself up.
Fahred had taught him spatial magic as soon as he’d been able to do so. He’d offered up a future to Sylvas that didn’t revolve around endless war with the Eidolons, which sounded tempting even now. It was with his help that Sylvas had developed his second circle and the Lockmind that now formed the basis of so much of how he viewed the world. There was no denying how important he had been to Sylvas development. But none of that meant that Sylvas truly trusted him. Fahred had made no efforts to disguise his ulterior motives and his disdain for the Ardent as individuals and as an institution.
The bottom line was that Sylvas still needed him. He still needed to learn what Fahred had to teach. He still needed to develop his magic to the level that Fahred had achieved. It didn’t matter if he planned to use Sylvas for his own gains, Sylvas needed to use him first. He would accept Fahred’s proposal. He’d drain the man of every drop of wisdom that he could. There was no more rational course available.
While he’d been sifting through his thoughts on the matter, the lecture had rolled on. Fahred had explained the various methods that more advanced mages used to maintain multiple spells at the point of near-casting at the same time but had not yet broached how to maintain spells that had been cast, which was where Sylvas interest lay. “It is all very well to rely on embodiments and paradigms to fill in the gaps in your performance in some situations that you shall be encountering in the field, but it goes without saying that there will inevitably be just as many situations in which you will find them to be entirely useless. Sometimes what you need is two spells at the same time. While there are some rather brutal methods designed by more savage cultures that will allow you to fragment your consciousness into multiple parts with the intent of using these traumatized shadows of yourself to maintain spells in a recursive uncast loop, as seen in ‘diagram g’ on your slates and the board, you lose control over said spells, and they’re unfortunately non-simultaneous, so much as they are rapid-fire in their activation. With the correct abridgements to certain spells and expansions to others, one can simulate simultaneous activation by delaying the time between casting and effects occurring, but this is not simultaneous casting, merely a clumsy approximation reserved for those incapable of using the correct methods.”
It felt like this was a deliberate dig at Sylvas and more specifically at Vaelith, but he supposed that nobody else in the room knew exactly how he or the elf cast their spells with such speed, so Fahred probably considered it to be a private joke. Though given that Fahred’s last attempt at a joke had almost resulted in Sylvas being murdered for accidentally teleporting into an Instructor’s locker while they were shower, he felt that his sense of humor had dried up a little.
“To simultaneously cast means to split one’s attention across two extremely complex tasks where there is no margin for error or confusion, to provide the necessary mana to each of the spells that you are casting in the correct volumes, and to do so, typically, in less-than-ideal conditions. Alternatively, as you will learn once you have mastered the fifth circle, it can often mean combining two spells into a single one and casting that, or in the case of some particularly complex magic, it can mean a combination of all of the above. If you ever want to break through into the heights that magic can offer you, then you need these skills. Even if you never mean to be on a battlefield, having the capability to craft spells that produce multiple simultaneous effects, or to cast the more complex spells that require that level of focus to encompass, is a vital part of your progress from mage to wizard.” Fahred was a man who was truly in love with the sound of his own voice, and while Sylvas found most of what he said to be pleasant enough in addition to being informative, what he was hearing now about more complex “higher” magic did not entirely ring true. After all, he had preformed a spell drastically more complex than anything he’d seen here on Strife back when he was barely a first circle mage to summon the Eidolon that had destroyed his world. It had taken the casting focus and concentration of a dozen mages to achieve, nobody’s more than his.
Looking back on it now, the summoning contained components of dozens of different individual spells. Spells that he could have picked apart from it, if he’d ever been given the time, much like he’d managed to cobble together his own spells from others that they’d learned in the tower. He didn’t have the eidetic memory then that he had now, but he had memorized everything at the time with a devotion bordering on the fanatical, and if he ever needed a reminder, the Aion words that he’d spoken were still carved into his flesh.
At this point, Sylvas had come to accept that there were elements of his old life that were entirely bizarre compared to what everyone else in the Empyrean considered to be normal, but that had no correlation to his capability. According to Fahred’s logic, he shouldn’t have been able to cast the spell as he had. With all of the myriad pieces of it to be slotted together at the end. According to Fahred, that should have been beyond his capabilities, particularly back then, before he’d developed his focus.
At the time, he’d pushed such thoughts away. There were more pressing concerns to be dealt with. And the massive piece of black etherium that he’d been given to channel into the spell had been a wonderful little explanation for anything that didn’t add up. Of course he’d been able to cast far above his level with all that power. Of course he’d been capable of summoning a planetary annihilation class Eidolon essentially on his own with all of that behind him. Yet by Fahred’s description, it would have been a matter of Focus, rather than raw mana, and unless some of the protective spells that had been layered over him in the run up to the summoning were boosting it beyond recognition, then Sylvas had just uncovered yet another mystery for them to poke at.
Exercises were sent to their slates, simple combination spells to run together multiple effects in the heat of battle, the connective words that would be used to extend a spell’s casting or join a pair of spells together. It was all troublingly familiar to Sylvas. He had read and written with these spell components since he was scarcely old enough to walk and talk. No wonder it had come as such a shock to the Ardent that he could modify spells if they didn’t teach their own people how to do it to even this most basic degree until they were at this stage in their development. The silliest part of it was that alongside these very basic instructions on how to modify spells were myriad warnings against actually using the techniques that Fahred was trying to teach. He understood that there were risks involved in modifying spells, introducing infinite loops unintentionally or scaling a spell to the point that it was self-destructive to cast it, but surely when they were at this stage in their education, the training wheels would have to come off.
After that exercise, Fahred’s lecture became less intense and markedly more dull, as he began explaining the various spells that could be cast with ongoing effects but severed from their original mana source to be attached to some device storing mana, some enchantment which gathered mana, or some secondary spell that had a similar effect. This was how the majority of magic that appeared to be simultaneous was performed, according to Fahred. “Pretensions of grandeur.”
The spell would already be in effect, with only a spell-form left to serve as a control for it. It was how Vaelith managed the constructs she deployed in their training, along with adjusting the environment that they were fighting in. It required a substantial amount of mana more than any of the students could really muster, but actual focus and competence required to perform the spells was relatively low, and once the spells were active, they were essentially foolproof unless someone deliberately dispelled them.
Once again, it felt less like an important subject to lecture on, and more a deliberate attempt to needle at Vaelith’s teaching style.
From what little Bael had been able to gather, while all of the instructors where in their fifth circle here on Strife, a good number of them had seen little in the way of front-line combat when compared to Vaelith and Fahred. As such Sylvas couldn’t help but wonder if this one-upmanship had something to do with that. He also wondered, not for the first time, whether he had become some sort of trophy in the conflict between the two instructors. A prize that the two of them were both trying to claim for themselves so that they could lord it over the other one. It would explain the intensity with which they’d been competing to mentor him in Hell Week.
The class, and the lecture, rattled on for a while longer, but the main portion of the important material had now been covered and they were covering minutiae that Sylvas suspected the rest of the room had already forgotten by the time that Fahred had finished saying it. The ongoing warnings not to abuse the information that they’d been given as it was all just preparation for when they finally reached their fifth circle amused Sylvas greatly. He could already see where he could slot these specific spell-forms into his existing “ready-made” magic, and where the enchantment-fueled ongoing effects might slot into his plans for the future.
Before he knew it, the lecture was at its end, everyone was filing out and Fahred was there, perched on his desk, staring at Sylvas like the last puppy of the litter, hoping that somebody might take it home. An effect somewhat spoiled by the glowing blue of his eyes. Sylvas had not encountered many puppies in his life, but he felt certain that none of them had glowing eyes or fur that drifted around them as though they were submerged in water. The man was waiting for an answer, and Sylvas was ready to oblige him.
The trick, he supposed, was in getting what he wanted without committing too much in return.
