Chapter 52: Answers And The Grind

Subject: Inis Location: Arlcada Wetlands - Inis's Camp

Respite shards, clarity shards, fine paper, a quality pen, tomes on magical theory, memgel, sewing materials, two formal outfits of a very particular style, and a handful of other miscellaneous items.

These clarity shards were fine blightsource crystals flickering deep blue with sparks of pale purple, evidence of the magic inside. That magic functioned much like a respite shard. Once crushed, it would invigorate the senses, heighten focus, and quite literally restore mental clarity.

The respite shards flickered yellow with streaks of pale green. The benefit of the shards over spells that replenished an individual’s bodily resources was that they were precast. They required no mental dance, no vira or sol price. Expediting recovery, the user traded time for the worth of the expendable crystal.

These thin sheets of shadow paper stored in a solid metal box were painstakingly manufactured from the stalks of a fickle plant. It was expensive but well worth the price, resistant to being torn, drenched, or burned.

The ink with it was guaranteed pure. It would mark paper with ease and glow long-lasting in the dark. Inis already possessed cheap paper, ink, and writing implements, but those weren’t suited to this task.

Inis couldn’t afford to carry around a library, nor could she afford to purchase a library’s worth of books. She had yet to memorize a handful of titles still kept in the wagon, as well as the thesis still in her day pack.

Memorization was hard. It required careful and diligent rehearsal, that painstaking repetition that branded her with memories she could rely on. That work was what made the loss of memory so disturbing, comparable to the icy grasp of loneliness threatening to wither her courage away.

Loneliness was a part of the journey. She avoided people because they were untrustworthy. She didn’t hate them, but they would only make the work harder. People could only be useful at a distance. A frigid distance.

The sewing materials Inis purchased would only have a part to play at a later date. For now, she had cheap scraps of fabric to practice her sewing on in the evening hours. When it came down to modifying the formal outfits, she’d need to count on a steady hand.

All in all, this purchase was quite a haul, in every sense of the word. Transporting it to the edge of the nameless wetland where she’d hidden her wagon had not been an easy task.

The wetland was not called “the nameless wetland”. It had no name and lay notably unclaimed by the regional powers that be. Inis learned this much from Mertalo. To develop the land and extract anything of value from it, it would cost more than whatever they could harvest would be worth. Prospectors, hunters, and others had told the lords this much, and no villages extended this far.

Many decades of neglect had led to the wetland receiving another owner: The Blight. It had been partially swallowed up by a festerfont, Wastefen.

Inis made camp toward the far edge of the inhospitable land from Arlcada. Here, no one would look for her. And even if anyone did, her boundary spells would make it difficult to detect her presence.

Of the places she’d had to live on her journey, this was probably the worst. The local wildlife tasted terrible, and they’d frequently tried to get a taste of Inis when she first arrived. But, after some initial adjustment to the new territory, and a little more killing of things she’d never seen before, she carved out relative peace.

That convoy driver Mertalo didn’t know where Inis had eventually ended up, but he was still surprised when she didn’t want her wagon being led to the city gates. After confirming that this was indeed her wish, he gave no complaint and the two of them parted ways.

“And now I’m practically broke. I hope this is worth it. What am I saying? I’ll make it worth it.”

Doubts were inevitable, but Inis was nothing if not tenacious.

Subject: Inis Location: Arlcada Wetlands - Inis's Camp

A soft, high-pitched chime originated from Inis’s location just as the viradart sailed through the air and pierced its target.

I don’t understand it! I can still hear the sounds of failure! Taunting me!

It shouldn’t be so hard to muffle her magic with a silent cast spell. At least, Inis had thought that it would only take a week of diligent study.

Following that, she anticipated intense practice, but two weeks later, she wasn’t even sure it was the right time to begin putting knowledge into practice.

Spell Grouping: Spell Cloak Branch: Synergy Category: Utility Description: These spells suppress the visual and/or auditory signs that an individual has cast a spell. Some advanced forms even suppress other detection methods. They add energy expenditure to whatever spell they are applied to. They belong to the “Synergy” Branch, but most mages do not use Sol to fuel their casts. Spell: Silent Cast Difficulty: Advanced Cast Type: Irregular Cost: Variable Description: A perfect mastery of this spell eliminates the auditory indicators of another spell, allowing a mage to cast discreetly.

It isn’t even one of the spells Geretta expected to give me trouble. Probably because she knew a miscast wouldn’t kill me. To make matters worse, I’ll need to practice individually for every spell I want to use it on.

Viradart was Inis’s signature spell. It was initially difficult to use, but she felt comfortable using it now. However, splitting her attention to cast it silently was harder than casting two unrelated spells simultaneously.

Two kinds of miscasts were occurring. In some cases, a viradart would manifest fully audible, with no silencing effect applied. Other times, no viradart appeared at all. The second kind hurt more, but neither felt worse than a pinch. The pain faded quickly and left no lasting damage.

The principle behind the spell was to adjust the flow of vira in one’s body, applying counterforce at just the right times. This only muffled the casting of the spell, the sign that a mage had successfully instantiated magic.

Each spell had a different aural indicator. Every quality sound could take, duration, and more, it would all let a trained mage know what they were facing. That allowed listeners to prepare an appropriate response.

Silent Cast could be compared to holding your breath while doing mental math. Sure, you could do it for some time, but your body would scream for air. You would lose track of the numbers or accidentally take a breath the moment you let yourself become lost in the calculations.

More practice. I just need more practice.

Subject: Inis Location: Arlcada Wetlands - Inis's Camp

No matter how many times she tried to bury the thoughts and focus on her studies, Inis was chased by biting anxiety, stimulating curiosity, and directionless anger. All these distracting emotions joined at one clear point.

It helped that the canisters were clearly labeled. It really did. Once again, Inis thanked her past self for her diligent record-keeping practices.

I knew it! The date is missing from this one.

The spent memgel canister in her hand had an incomplete label. The word “experiment” was crossed out with multiple strokes of the pen. Beneath that, she had messily scrawled a new title: “breakthrough”.

One of only two likely things could have happened. Either she had somehow forgotten to date this canister during her daily chore routine, and forgotten what this “experiment” might have involved, or...

...this memory was swallowed up in the lapse.

Her hands shook as she fit the canister into the headset. She flipped the heavy switch on the underside to set it to “playback mode”, hesitating for just a moment before slipping it on.

She wanted to know what happened during that time, even if it meant dredging from the depths of unconsciousness, back to a potentially traumatic event. She needed to know if there was anything there that could hurt her.

“I remember the words she gave me, and that’s enough,” Inis reminded herself. “Which ones will- Oh! I’ve never used it for something like this, but it’s a familiar one. I need to remember that ‘spoken words are loosed arrows.’”

She took a few deep breaths and exhaled slowly each time. Then she spoke the focus recitation in a calm voice.

“What harm can words do when they’ve already been spoken? The wound is already festering, or the words are waiting to burrow in. Accept what you’ve learned, or be ready to accept what you’re about to learn. Sometimes opportunity wears a coat of thorns.”

Subject: Inis Location: Arlcada Wetlands - Inis's Camp

It wasn’t as bad as she’d feared.

Inis didn’t think whatever her voice had to say would be trivial, and it wasn’t. It was also hard listening to herself talking to whoever recovered the message, accepting that she was going to die.

“I really did it, didn’t I… Lately, I’ve been so focused on the memory loss, I completely forgot how determined I was to finally move forward with that particular test. The only reason I waited so long was that I had other work to do.”

She’d gone ahead and used herself as a test subject for a novel blightseed accumulation experiment. It wasn’t supposed to be some big thing, just a test to see if there was a more efficient way of accumulating than simply swallowing the seeds.

Inis went into her wagon and fumbled for a leather binder containing her loose notes on the experiment. It was all there and accounted for, no additional unfamiliar pages, but there was some unfamiliar writing on one of the pages.

“Accumulation Reduction Conversion”… Those are the words written in this note with the steps. Did I add that after I went through with it? Oh, the acronym “ARC” is written here and also here. Must be what I decided to call it. Looks like I got more than I bargained for. Serves me right.

She was alive, but now she had a blank scar that might never return.

Despising her past self for mistakes she herself made was just an excuse to shift the blame. Inis would have to own up to it even if she didn’t remember, and focus instead on where to go from here.

Inis slapped a fresh memgel canister into the headset and switched it to record. First, she spoke the name she’d given the process along with a brief description. After recapping what she’d just discovered, she recorded her thoughts at the moment.

“It was a dangerous mistake that I can’t make again. That work is halted until I first identify the exact cause and nature of the memory loss. And there’s enough work to do that I can afford to table the project for now.”

Something inside Inis screamed in frustration. Her decision didn’t sit right with her. She wanted to believe something else other than ARC was responsible.

“I must confess to some… reluctance, but this is a logical conclusion after calmly reflecting on the facts, the reality.”

Using her virasense had become inexplicably easier, like she’d been practicing it longer than she’d lived years of her life. Maybe that was why she’d written “breakthrough” on the canister?

Then, why the memory loss?

“A possible explanation for my memory problems is related to what I said towards the end of the recording. I mentioned that I didn’t have enough respite shards. I could possibly have taken the wrong variety of shards too. Clarity shards might be necessary, given their influence on cognition and using memory as an indicator.”

Inis felt relieved and silently complimented herself for coming up with that discovery.

“But no, it’s too difficult to tell, too dangerous to experiment with again. Not… not yet, at least. I have a lot of work to do. A lot of studying and practicing and I can’t sacrifice any time.”

What if it could be a shortcut to mastering those spells? she thought. If it could be used to get stronger, and done safely, I’d only be gaining time.

She eventually settled that there would be no risky shortcuts. However, there was also the nagging feeling that too many more weeks of this would wear down her willpower.

Subject: Inis Location: Wastefen - Outskirts

Moving her practice grounds to the first festerfont on her list, the Blighted region closest to her camp, Inis tried to test the progress she’d made in a tense environment.

The pale grey branches of trees half-drowned in tainted yellowy black waters were laden with the nests of false birds.

The nests didn’t serve to raise hatchlings nor did they shelter the blightbeasts from the elements. This was fragmented and vestigial nesting behavior copied over from the templates the creatures spawn from.

They were chorth elfirmant fodder resembling small scavenger birds, sporting sickly red plumage. Weak targets were important for this test or there’d be too great a risk of failure.

The flawfethers, as the Guild labeled them, would begin building a nest, only to leave it unfinished when a target was sighted. If the creature survived, they would not return to the nest. Instead, as if reset, the surviving blightbeast would start over with another nest.

Even if the nest approached completion, it would be of such a poor construction that it would probably fall apart in less than a day. If the nest fell apart, that fact would escape the vacuous chorth elfirmant’s notice. It would only build a new nest after surviving combat with a seeker.

So many of the things the Blight did or embodied were pathetically wasteful, a trait shared with the people that fought them.

Though these blightbeasts were prevalent in all layers of bogs and other freshwater festerfonts, they were more of an annoyance than a threat. They would attack and retreat when it became clear they couldn’t win.

Their utility as defenders came in their expendability and flight. Still, even acting as the festerfont’s eyes, they occupied the bottom rung in terms of usefulness.

There will be many survivors, at this rate. Those will have to start over. When I return, there’ll be more nests.

Having made ground silencing her spells back at the camp, this trial would have proven that the same held true under pressure. She had high hopes, but she failed. She failed, she completely failed.

One in nine viradarts were silent, maybe. It was hard to tell.

Adding blightbeasts and aiming to the equation made it too difficult to concentrate on maintaining a silent viradart cast. It split her attention in too many directions.

I’ll try again tomorrow. I need to gather materials to stock up.

Most of the flawfethers she had managed to pierce left their blightseeds to sink into the fetid waters. The waters weren’t deadly on contact, but fishing them out would be more trouble than they were worth.

Staring down at the paltry pebbles she’d lost, frustration mounted. Then, Inis grinned as she got an idea.

Rather than cutting an uphill path to her destination, she could instead equip herself with some of the lesser spells in the books she bought. It would add time, but that time wouldn’t be wasted.

The Guild Archives weren’t going anywhere, and she would be significantly stronger for the effort.