Vignette - Essence Magic

“Life is Magic. And what is the truest form of life because that is also the truest form of magic. It is in the blood! Only blood holds the very essence of life and so collected blood will also contain the essence of magic. That stored magic will empower spells far greater than any one mage can manage.”

“We will pour blood through spells carved into our homes for health and comfort and into our defenses for safety. So gather the blood of those that attack our walls. Bind it to us with willing offerings of our own blood then let it trickle forth to power our lives! It comes full circle encompassing all things.”

“In blood we are born, pumping blood keeps us alive, and in blood we eventually die.”

Chapter 34

“..Gruesome.”

Timothy wasn’t sure who made the comment, but he couldn’t argue with it. The view before him did not look sanitary. The southeastern town was ringed in an obsidian esque black wall, it did not look entirely like stone but what else it was Timothy could not say. There were massive runes carved into its surface. Easily standing out as they were coated in bright red blood. It didn’t fill him with confidence in it’s owners.

Unlike the other towns, this place was not directly on the river. Instead it was situated on a hill maybe thirty yards away from it on the south side. Despite that it still had a moat, although as he took another look, gutter might be more accurate.

Moat or gutter, it didn’t run with water. The constant trickle of life giving red trickled through the runes to slowly fill it, but where it drained to Timothy didn’t yet know. Rising above the menacing walls was a village of dark towers of the same material. Running like veins through these towers were channels of blood that eventually fed the walls.

“How the hell did you not notice this when you first found this place Timothy?”

He grimaced “I was running rather low on charge and only gave it a cursory glance from high above.”

Jenney gave him a doubtful look before speaking again, “So we have delusions of godhood to the east and now bloody lunatics to the south west? Did we win the lottery with Paradise as our first contact?”

Da winced at the atrocious pun before attempting to de-escalate the situation, “Like with Templeton, we need to reserve judgement. Just because they have rather -colorful- methods does not mean they are insane Jenney. Nor even that they are evil! Let's gather a bit more information before lining them up against a wall in absentia hmm?”

“Fine Da, you investigate the blood cultists and find out that they love bunnies and long walks on the beach. I need to do some stuff in my garden.” She stomped off to the ladder without giving anyone a chance to argue.

“That went pretty well.” Timothy opined, with a small smile. “At least she didn’t go straight to ‘off with their heads!’”

“Right Timothy, you go ahead and tell yourself that. In the meantime how about we take a closer look. If we do find humans on bleeding racks we ARE going to have to do something.” Arthur, ever the practical one, pushed them back to the main point.

Thankfully it was not a hard point to disprove, a minute of searching revealed the sanguine source. A half dozen hogs hung by their heals over a vat with their throats cut. Blood drizzled down into the vat in steadily increasing quantities from left to right. Then a small squad of workers came by. They turned a large crank moving the line of corpses a swaying unit to the left, where the endmost pig that was no longer leaking was removed from the meat hooks and carried over to a nearby alcove for immediate butchering. A fresh hog, dragged over in a hand cart pulled by a dozen straining men was carefully manuverd onto a fresh hook to the right of the cable. The group worked together to hoist the pig into position, then with a smooth familiarity slashed its throat.

“Well, it’s not human and it's very efficiently done. How long do you suppose it takes to drain a pig like that?” Gareth was a bit green, but he was the same whenever a pig was butchered in Runehold.

Timothy looked to his Da, it was not his area of expertise.

“In the old world I would hang a deer for a day to let it bleed out. We would use bags of ice to keep it from spoiling though. Not sure how long you could get away with in this climate.”

Timothy looked a bit closer and found what he expected to see: “Decent amount of disruption in the magic field around that room, I would need more time to look at it, but I am guessing it’s a preservative effect. Considering they are still alive and that is definitely dinner over there.” He flexed the pool's point of view over to the pig now being efficiently butchered.

“So they bleed pigs and pour the resultant blood down the well? I know we haven't seen any flies but how is that not a magnet for disease?” Gareth inquired.

Timothy stared at the twisting magic field, trying to fish out at least a basic meaning to what he saw, till a cleared throat brought his head back up to see a circle of the council sans Jenney looking at him with expectation. “What? How would I know?”

Mama chuckled, “Come now Timothy, you are the victim of your own success. You figured out Paradises and Templetons crazy magic gimmicks.”

“I will probably figure this one out as well, but it’s not something I can do in an instant. You have to give me some time.” Besides, saying he figured out Paradise was a bit of an exaggeration. Freaking spirits still confused the hell out of him.

“It’s gonna get boring in here while I try to feel out the resonances, stay if you want but I imagine most of you have things you need to do.” Standing up and shaking his legs out for a moment, he walked over to the sideboard to acquire some writing supplies and a bottle of water. It still felt weird to drink from a condensed dirt container.

The grumbling died down as the grumblers made haste to vacate the room. Apparently the opportunity to study new magic in depth for hours at a time didn’t appeal to them…. Big surprise. They didn’t know what they were missing!

The following hours flickered past in a blur as he teased out hints and echoes of the possible from the chaotic mess of the background magic field. It was slow and meticulous work but never tedious. Looking at the physical results and trying to connect them to a particular melody line in the cacophony of a hundred spells hiding in the 10,000 member orchestra that was nature.

It was quite literally enthralling. It was a steady drain on his will just to stay coherent, much less observant. He chuckled remembering a few wuxia books he had read before. Falling into nature and forgetting yourself always seemed to provide some massive leap in insight. Too bad it wasn’t that easy. Becoming one with this beautiful mess could result in a dozen wasted hours or perhaps insanity. Even when he’d read, and enjoyed, those fictions he was amused by how they misunderstood the nature of understanding.

When the sense of self goes away it leaves the subconscious. The instinct rather than the intellect. Much like a dog, the instinctual self could be trained to do truly impressive things. But it’s not something the trainee can really explain.

Take tying shoes for example. Everyone has done it so many times but they still can’t write a step by step guide for it. At least not without untying and retying their shoes a couple of times and backing out a process. They just do it. But just ‘doing’ is not a stable foundation. You have to step past how to do it, and begin to understand why.

‘You can’t teach the dao!’ Timothy snickered to himself. Because they never really understood it. Instead, the dog of their subconscious did tricks on command. Chuuni commands!

Working magic required understanding and the focusing of will into intent. No gazing at their naval for a thousand years and waking up enlightened. Solid work, dancing on the edge of a knife, stabilized only by the power of a strong will.

He had that strong will, but it was too much to wade through without help. Help that came from watching people directly cast the spells. The image he had centered was just one such clue. Three men with very similar features, black hair with obvious brown to blonde roots, narrow planar faces and the body of a recovering anorexic. Coming from someone as wirey as Timothy that was saying something. All they needed was black eye liner and fishnet to complete the stereotype.

They stood inside an inscribed triangle centered on a pit of blood. Surrounding the primary three was a circle of fifty others standing just outside an circumscribed circle. The entire stone floor sloped in towards the pit of blood while a story above the clothes line of bleeding hogs continued to slowly drip into the pit.

The ritual, for ritual it had to be despite a lack of silly hooded cloaks or other such melodramatic paraphernalia, began with a simple chant from the primary three. “Blood is life, life is magic. Let this blood be purified to essence and let the essence carry our will. “

The 50 extra’s yelled in time, “WILL”

“Protect our people from the beasts at our gates.”

“PROTECT!”

“Essence of life, you are the antithesis of sickness. Ward out people from affliction.”

“WARD!”

“Essence of life, encompass our crops in life and let them grow.

“GROW!”

Finishing the final response all 53 people drew a small bone needle and punctured their index fingers to drip a single droplet of blood into the engraved lines. Lines that in defiance of friction did not soak up the small amounts of blood. Instead the outer circle soon had a solid loop of very liquid blood. It stood stable for a second then quickly poured through the triangle and into the pit without leaving any visible residue in the channels.

A pit that soon started bubbling and spitting out smoke as its color and texture changed from the dark clumpy red black of clotting blood to a deep crimson that was as smooth and fluid as hot syrup.

A fact that became apparent as sluice gates were opened on the floor below. Blood began to flow down carved stone channels throughout the town. Some traveled to growing fields of vegetables and grains where it flowed through a series of carved words in an unknown language before dripping down to water the plants.

Another small trickle fed a circle of stone obelisks surrounding a residential tower. Yet more traveled to the walls before trickling down and activating the defensive wards carved into the outer face.

Timothy, in a burst of intellectual brilliance, responded with the first thing that came to mind. “Wow.”

No one stood at the end point of each stream of blood to activate the enchantments. The stream of not quite blood activated the enchantments without a human in the mix… unless the human was still in the mix, just at one remove. Humans filled the pool of blood with their will, with their intent and that intent reacted with the carven wards to accomplish the intended goals, and keep accomplishing it for a significant length of time… Brilliant!

Brilliant and, while somewhat grotesque, in no way that he could see, evil. Not that he was sure what evil was… Probably long pigs hanging on the bleeding racks rather than giant pigs. No. A couple goth siblings or cousins got together to use blood magic for the betterment of humanity. Ya, no problem using that to convince the council!

Continued observation turned up lots of interesting information about how their particular breed of magic worked, but did nothing to disprove his earlier hypothesis. The residents seemed happy and secure, the trifecta of what he assumed were pathfinders lived in relatively larger homes but did not appear to be excessively lording it over their neighbors like, Bensen , others might have in the same situation. It was a bit hypocritical to try and define how much lording was an appropriate amount anyway. He was sitting in a tower of his very own after all.

No, despite their eccentricities they appeared to genuinely care about their people and worked long hours into the nights to keep them safe. In the world they now lived in that made them damn near saints. It was odd that three people had mostly the same style of magic though. Even if they grew up loving the same games or shows, Timothy figured that seven years developing magic alone should have made them diverge a significant amount.

It wasn’t something he could figure out without speaking to them, or listening in on conversations for a very long time. A very boring and inane length of time… Which brought him to this moment, an evening council meeting a day later.

“-you can see they seem to genuinely care about leading. Their people are happy and well fed. They don’t lord it over them to a massive degree. I vote we make contact. Certainly seem like better neighbors than Templeton.” Timothy finished summarizing his observations while attempting to read the mood. Attempting and failing. Developing poker faces had far outreached his novice attempts at people watching.

Predictably Jenney was the first to break the ice, “So let me see if I understand you. We have a group of goths doing rituals over bubbling lakes of blood, but those rituals are purely for the betterment of their residents and since the blood isn’t human that makes it ok?”

A bit of hyperbole but, “Pretty much.”

“...and you don’t see how insane that is?”

“Meh, new world, new rules. If we judge everyone we meet based on old world standards then the entire surviving world is likely filled with straight up nut jobs, us included. Afterall you are a crazy plant lady mumbling about ‘double, double, toil and trouble’ over a smoking cauldron while I sit around a pool and peep in on our neighbors.”

Snickers traveled the room, including one drawn reluctantly from Jenney herself. It gave Timothy some hope, it was dangerous to take yourself too seriously. “Frankly if we were ok with contacting Templeton I can’t see us objecting to this lot.”

Even Jenney could not deny the merits of that particular observation. Compared to that cow pie nearly anything looked appetizing.

Seeing the consensus his da Joe stepped up to work out the specifics. It did not take too long. They had, afterall, done this twice before. If they didn’t have a pretty good idea of what was needed then he might as well shoot himself now and save on the frustration.

Freaking bureaucrats… He would not have it! If he had to sit through the damn meetings they had to keep that sort of stupidity to a minimum.

The steadily increasing reach of the wardstones made it possible to watch his near neighbors without quickly consuming the charge in his scrying pool. This was an excellent tool for mapping out the river path, and he had spent a considerable amount of time doing just that for the coming diplomatic trip. Still diplomacy was his fathers problem. The Nellie would soon sail but he had an hour or so of free time before he would be needed to safely guide her through the swamp. Arthur could do it about as well, no doubt. But with Ma and Da on board he wasn’t taking any chances.

In the meantime he had a burning question that needed answering. An answer just for him, no reason to get everyone else's shorts in a twist. Since the pattern seemed to hold for the five surrounding towns, even if one of those had been destroyed and the other might have died before they constructed anything, or might not have been there in the first place. The question was did it hold true in the wide world beyond? He now had wardstones in the vicinity of each neighboring town and he planned to abuse that access to search for humans beyond them.

He carefully arranged the linking enchants to start his search. From where it started at Paradise he prepared to do a sweep beyond. He had five fully charged human specific alarm enchantments with an eight to twelve mile range on them. One for each probable town site.

Holding his breath he started the first sweep. Barely a twenty degree turn was required before the sound of his own voice chanting “wh,wh,wh,wh,wh,wh,whine!” called out. Having attempted to make each type of alarm sound like the creature it detected, he had added that as the default human sound after a particularly trying council meeting. Arthur at least got a kick out of it. This particular sound was of hundreds of voices all on top of one another. Definitely a surviving village.

He marked the bearing on a small personal map, dye brushed on to tanned pigskin rather than carved into something more permanent. A few quick adjustments to the range of detection revealed the town to be around 9.7 miles west and maybee 10 degrees north of Paradise.

He repeated the test for the rest of a circle and detected another town to the north and a bit east. The map was beginning to be filled in, not considering the three villages that were almost between Paradise and Runehold there were two more beyond it. Three in a spread about Templeton another two from the village ruins to the north of the swamp not including the village detected from paradise. Only one more to the south and a bit west of Bloodhaven.

A few maximum height views allowed him to sketch in the general shape of the river and the many subsidiaries that bled into it. Assuming that each of the new towns were on a water source this gave him a decent outline of the surrounding twenty plus miles. There were mostly rivers as the water source to the west but there was a large lake to the east of Templeton that seemed to have villages situated around it.

It was an outline that would be very useful in the future for Regi, but Timothy didn’t plan to pass it around yet. They didn’t have the resources to rapidly expand out at the moment and the knowledge that any of those villages needed help might drive them to overcommit.

He felt somewhat guilty about protecting his family from their own good nature, but they didn’t live in such a safe place that they could tolerate white knight syndrome.

He felt a bit guilty about it. It felt condescending when he was on the receiving side, even insulting at times whether it was seatbelts or absurdly obvious warning labels. The ridiculous ‘Do not attempt to stop chainsaw blade with hands or genitals’ from a swedish manufacturer still cracked him up. He felt slightly hypocritical repeating that sort of behavior onto others. ‘For your own good’ had excused alot of stupid shit through the years.

Enough, you lined up the logic and made your decision. Let it go. Guilt is for Catholics, leave that to mama and move on.

He shook it off and began rolling up the map and packing away the human sensors. He would have company soon and while Sherlock Holmes they were not, it wouldn’t do to leave obvious clues lying about.

Finishing up he unlocked the hatch and leaned back to relax and wait. There was a long, tedious evening ahead. Filled with diplomacy, but who knew, perhaps at the end he would have some new people who were worth talking to. For that matter, now that the pool was capable of both listening and speaking he should probably start having discussions with Oscar’s lot as well.

Like most good ideas, it would take time to set up. He had everything he needed to speak with Paradise. Problem was the scrying pool could only target one location at a time, so bringing Bloodhaven into the conversation would require another pool. Since he hoped to make this meeting a regular thing there was no reason to make a new fancy targeting mechanism for the pools. A fixed target based on the closest rune stone would do the trick quite nicely.

He wrote a few quick notes as Arthur climbed up into the room, quickly followed by Jenney, Regi and bringing up the back, Gareth. He ignored them for a moment, trying to finish getting his thoughts written down.

Can’t let them figure out how easy it is for me to spy on them… maybe give them a linking rune via the boat and use it to target the end point of the connection in whatever room they want… Ya, that should do the trick!

“Are we interrupting something Timothy?” Arthur's voice dragged him away from his dastardly plotting.

Looking up, they had all found a seat along with a beverage from the sideboard while he’d been woolgathering. “My bad, my bad. Let me get this started.” Long hours of practice made the ensuing activation and targeting of the Nellie a sinch. All it took was a quick check of the linked miniature on the map table to find her location on the river, then a few adjustments to attach to the closest runestone.

With the usual, but still breathtaking, clarity the dark purple ship came into focus. Dancing on a bow wave and with a train of white water behind her against a backdrop of looming jungle trees. They even had an entourage of leaping fish. The sight was better than a painting though it lost some of its charm when you realized the jumping fish would happily eat the crew!

How quickly the incredible becomes normal. Hours spent watching could numb a person to the wonders of casual magic. It was something Timothy worked hard to avoid. Every activation of every tool was a joy he wanted to keep fresh in his soul.

Even when it's just babysitting a boat through the swamp! He adjusted his seat on a small vine cloth cushion and prepared for a boring afternoon.