– Era of the Wastes, Cycle 216, Season of the Setting Moon, Day 45 –

Terry observed the dense fog in front of him. He was stunned by the intricate movement of mana that was being emitted. On the one hand, Terry was relieved to find that the lizans had been honest in their dealings with him and that their weird transfer gate had not turned out to be some kind of otherrealm death trap. On the other hand, this meant that Terry was trapped in a gigantic magic phenomenon: the Elusive Fog of Frost.

“This year just doesn’t want to end, does it?” Terry shook his head and bemoaned the insanity that had unfolded ever since the beginning of the Rising Moon. Sigille’s death and the battle at Libra City. The destruction of Arcana’s barrier and Isille’s encounter with a reaper. Their search for the blood tulips. Undead. Hellspawn. Tiv soldiers. The reappearance of the Valkyrie. Soldier infighting. Veil tears. More hellspawn. Dungeon madness. More hellspawn. Dungeon shenanigans. More hellspawn. Now this.

Terry grasped his face in his hands and inhaled deeply. “I kind of miss the times when I only had to worry about failing an examination.” He lowered his hands and observed the magical fog once more. “How exactly am I supposed to get through this?” He clenched his fists and thought of his whaka. “Somehow.” He took strength from the memory of his accepted family. “I will get through this somehow.”

Terry took another deep breath, shook his head, and turned away from the fog. “I won’t be able to glean anything from the mana movements. I’m sure better mages than me have tried.” Terry, in his amateurish opinion, felt inclined to concur with the prevailing classification of the fog as a magic phenomenon. The mana movements appeared at the same time chaotic and regular, patterns that seemed to repeat but were never quite identical.

Terry was not privy to the finer details of these classifications, but he still remembered that forbidden zones were generally side-effects of whatever happened there. An accident or collateral damage for whatever was the true goal. The magic was out of control. The mana was problematic. Hence, the corrupting effects and troublesome manifestations.

This fog, by contrast, seemed stable. Either a natural phenomenon born out of who knows what, or an intentional manipulation. Terry did not feel qualified to weigh in one way or the other. If he had to consult his gut, then the fog appeared purposeful to him, which would speak for an intentional manipulation. However, Terry was not sure if his gut could be considered an expert on high-intensity magic and permanent magic phenomena.

If this fog was the result of intentional magic, then the spellwork, ritual, or mana ability must have been awe-inspiring. The fog had already been there when folks first discovered this area nearly an era ago. Such permanency for such high-intensity magic was a daunting idea.

Terry distanced himself from the fog and sharply exhaled. After a few steps, the fog turned completely transparent. If it wasn’t for the traces of frozen everything where the frosty fog was active, it would have been hard to tell with plain eyesight that there was anything magic going on.

Terry relied on his boot mechanism to step up into the air and confirm the skyward presence of the fog as well. He had done so before, but he still wanted to probe in several other places. Perhaps it was foolish, but Terry would rather make sure that there was really no other option than to face a freaking wyvern.

Wyvern. Terry closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Probably not a cute little one either if it has the whole group of lizans stumped for ideas.

“Haah…” Terry sighed and resolved himself to at least inquire about details. So far, he had tried to maintain some distance from the lizans. He did not trust them and he definitely did not want to commit to any wyvern dealings before getting a better idea of the overall situation.

Terry raised his head and watched the clouds in the sky. “If only the Path of a Mage went into details about the Veilbinder’s dragon hunts. It might have been useful.”

Even though the Veilbinder was not the most famous dragon hunter, he was definitely the most famous person known to have hunted dragons. Hunting self-proclaimed gods tended to overshadow the whole hunting dragons thing in the history books.

By now, Terry knew the large tome, which his uncle Samuel had given to him by heart. Of course, Terry still flipped through a few chapters whenever he found some time, but by now, it was mostly because it made Terry feel like home.

During the Second Great Crisis, the Veilbinder had to overcome sheer impossible odds. Armies of mana cursed led by a near invulnerable immortal whose abilities and experience in magic surpassed those of the Veilbinder by far.

Terry recalled the sole picture in the Path of a Mage – the image of the Veilbinder at his lowest, a moment of helplessness and despair. No matter how impossible the task had seemed, the Veilbinder had stood up to face the challenge and, step by step, he had pieced together a solution.

Terry soberly recalled the parts where the Veilbinder had left his companions, not because they had a falling out, but because he had felt uncomfortable with how they had treated him as their only hope. Absentmindedly, Terry retrieved his copy of the book and flipped towards the relevant section that listed excerpts from the Veilbinder’s departure conversation.

‘Don’t look at me for hope. Don’t look at me as if I’m going to figure everything out. Hope is great if it gets your ass moving to do stuff, but not if it’s paralyzing. Do something. Anything that helps. Train. Learn. Scout. Help. Don’t just hope. Help!’

‘Frankly, I’m not sure I got this. Not at all. To be even more frank, I’m not entirely sure how I managed to get to this day. I’ve made mistakes. Don’t just blindly rely on me. I have my own blindspots. I’ve been lucky that my ideas have worked out, but just because it worked out in the past, does not mean it will work out this time.’

‘The thing is, I can’t do this without you. I don't know the future. I'm no genius either. Sometimes, I’m taking huge risks because it’s the only path forward I can see. I’m gambling my life because I have to. I can’t do this if everyone is looking exclusively at me for hope. Look at yourself.’

‘It can’t just all be on me, because if it is, then I can’t do what I do. I can’t gamble my life if my life means everything. I can’t be sure that my next gamble will work. Don’t pin all your hopes on me. I have to leave. I might have an idea, but it’s insane. Don’t count on it to work out. Do your own thing. You can count on me to try, but I need to count on you for the same. I have to count on you to not lose hope and to take over if I fail.’

Terry thought over the plans that had secured the safety of the realm back then. His mind retraced the steps in the book. The Veilbinder had pieced together several pieces of magic he had encountered by chance over the years.

The first problem had been that the ancient curse mage was capable of instantly shifting its mind and soul to every single cursed being within the reach of its magic.

The first piece of the puzzle was a magic ritual that created a localized plane shift. It was possible to roughly observe the happenings in the shifted plane, but beyond that no interaction was possible. The Veilbinder had encountered this ritual as part of a rescue mission after the First Great Crisis. The magic had been used to protect an artifact and some treasure hunters had been caught up in it. In the Veilbinder’s opinion, this lost ritual was a bigger treasure than the artifacts it protected.

The ritual was extremely effective at isolating both the physical and magical realm. It came with drawbacks, however. The shift required an activation key, which made the whole application dangerous and fragile. If the key broke, the shift could not feasibly be reversed – it was technically possible, but would require the recreation of the initial shift sequence, which required unimaginably complicated space magic. Even worse, the initial shift required the mage to be shifted with the plane, which meant being trapped inside the shifted plane that might get orphaned from space when the key broke. These drawbacks served as an explanation for why the magic had been lost.

However, none of these drawbacks mattered to the Veilbinder. On the contrary, these were additional advantages when used to isolate the ancient immortal. This was the first piece the Veilbinder came up with, because it was a perfect fallback plan. If everything else went wrong, then the ancient immortal would still remain trapped for a significant time period, even if the Veilbinder would be trapped with it. The Veilbinder had gambled on the fact that the ritual’s plane shift would succeed in isolating the ancient immortal from its mana-cursed army and thereby rob it of the ability to switch bodies.

While a fallback plan was good, the Veilbinder couldn’t be sure that the isolation would work, or how long the ancient curse mage would be trapped by the shifted plane. The Veilbinder had no desire to die either and this led to the second problem: The Veilbinder was no match for the ancient immortal in a contest of magic.

Accepting this fact led directly to the second piece of the puzzle. Since the Veilbinder felt outmatched in magic, he searched for a way to remove magic and level the playing field.

During one of his travels, the Veilbinder had once accepted a request for help in a remote location. The request was supposed to be about a haunted mountain. However, it turned out to be an ancient dragon soul that simply refused to die. It was not strictly a ghost. It was an incredibly powerful soul that had found a way to consume mana to cling to life even without a proper body. No matter how often you defeated the soul manifestation, it would rise again. Never quite dead and never quite alive. This dragon soul stood out in the Veilbinder’s memory because of its fierce absorption of mana and its undying perseverance.

The first problem with the bodiless dragon soul was that it was too weak – comparatively that is. It had taken the Veilbinder to kill it the last time, but the Veilbinder understood that the immortal curse mage would not find it an insurmountable challenge either. The second problem was that the dragon soul was bound to the mountain where its bones remained. It was not clear if the plane shift could shift the dragon soul together with the Veilbinder and his opponent.

The third puzzle piece that fit the second was a forbidden type of magic with which the Veilbinder was very familiar. A magic that used blood as the catalyst and formed the basis of many terrifying spells from the curse mages. Spells that allowed the mage unbelievable mana and life regeneration as well as heightened infectiousness for their curses. The Veilbinder had never used this kind of magic himself, but he had to face it countless times in his past battles.

This magic was forbidden because it used human blood – lots of it – and because it had mind-altering effects on the caster. It inspired a thirst for more blood until it was never enough.

There was a single reason to think of this forbidden blood magic: It could bind and strengthen even the slightest flicker of souls. The Veilbinder gambled that he could adjust the magic to match the dragon soul – to create a temporary body of blood, to bind it to himself, and to accelerate its magic absorption.

A way to shift a rampaging, mana-absorbing, blood dragon together with himself and his opponent. With this preparation, the ancient immortal would have to fend off an extremely powerful dragon soul that grew stronger with time and mana – a nice foil to any calm examination of space. Even if the dragon soul failed to kill the ancient mage, it would certainly serve as a powerful pest considering it grew stronger with the immortal’s mana.

The Veilbinder further gambled that the reason for the blood thirst inspired by the magic was the close relation to the used blood. Based on this supposition, he had no intention of using human blood. Instead, the Veilbinder went dragon hunting to collect what he needed. As another benefit, dragon blood worked better for strengthening the dragon soul as well.

When the Veilbinder returned from his preparations, the companions explained their own idea for dealing with the army of mana-cursed. Back then, mana crafting and in particular rune inscriptions, were still a fairly new branch of magic. The modern mana application was a blindspot for the ancient immortal.

The constructs were immune to the curse’s infection. That battle would become the first major deployment of battle constructs and golems in recorded history.

On the day of the battle, two among the closest companions of the Veilbinder found a note and one key-part each. The note explained the Veilbinder’s plan, what could go wrong, and that the key-parts were necessary for reversing the plane shift. The Veilbinder intentionally chose two companions that basically never agreed on anything, because if there was the slightest chance that their enemy was still alive or that the Veilbinder’s mind had been corrupted, he would rather die in the shifted plane.

In the end, their plan had worked. The blood dragon rose. It shifted to the separate plane together with the Veilbinder, the ancient immortal, and a few hundred mana cursed.

Inside the shifted plane, the dragon went on a rampage while draining mana from everyone and everything – not even magic items were safe. The Veilbinder defiantly hung onto his life while his enemies were taken care of by the blood dragon.

Outside the shifted plane, legions of battle constructs and golems faced the army of mana-cursed and the Veilbinder’s companions assisted with ranged weapons and spells.

The Veilbinder had been lucky that the blood dragon soul had instinctively avoided killing his own binding host. After a long and exhausting confrontation, the immortal ran out of mana-cursed hosts to switch to and then later out of mana to defend against the blood dragon.

The Veilbinder had been less lucky that the blood dragon had not stopped its frenzied mana feast when there was no one else around. This had led to the destruction of all the Veilbinder’s magic equipment and eventually also to the destruction of the Veilbinder’s entire mana foundation.

“...and then the Veilbinder went on to create the most astonishing parts of his legend,” mumbled Terry with a wistful smile. He sharply exhaled air through closed lips. “Puh-blblblbl.”

All nice and good, but no idea how the Veilbinder managed to hunt so many dragons without dying. Even if I knew, I doubt that I could reproduce the Veilbinder’s methods.

“Still…” Terry mumbled to himself and let his gaze run over the area. “Point of the whole story: Everyone can be beaten. Everything has a weakness. If there is none, you create one.”

Easier said than done.

“No shit.” Terry shrugged and returned back to the ground. “Better to try and fail than to give up before trying. It’s just a wyvern, not even a proper dragon, how bad can it be?” Even before Terry had finished speaking, he had already gotten the bad premonition that fate would show him exactly how bad it could be.

***

“Me and my stupid mouth,” grumbled Terry. He was close enough to the entrance to the passage through the Elusive Fog of Frost to see the wyvern the lizans had talked about. To be fair, Terry did not have to get very close, because the wyvern was gigantic.

Terry closed his eyes and sighed. Even in its coiled up form, this white wyvern was much larger than a colossal ostrich. If not for the reflective scales and visible wings, it could pass as a small mountain. In Terry’s estimate, the wyvern’s uncoiled form should be longer than most group combat training fields in the Guardian facilities, which meant that the wyvern was old as well.

Very old. Probably several centuries.

“Okay then.” Terry tried to not dwell on the mountain of scaled flesh in front of him. He turned to the lizans behind him. “I assume you— By the way, how am I supposed to address you?”

The blue-scaled lizan leader replied: “You may address me as Blue.”

“Blue?” Terry raised an eyebrow.

“I’m afraid my real name is hard to pronounce for someone of your kind,” said Blue. “I believe this name should be easier to remember as well.”

“Okay…? How do I address the rest of you?” asked Terry with a glance towards the other lizans.

“There is no need,” said Blue. “They can’t understand your tongue, Terry. I will have to act as the interpreter.”

Terry furrowed his brow. He did not recall the lizan leader ever translating anything for or from the other lizans. However, Terry had no idea about what’s normal with these newfolk and he let it go.

“Blue, I’m not exactly an expert on magical creatures of the primordial kind, but this wyvern looks out of my league,” said Terry matter-of-factly. “I still believe you have the wrong mage.”

“I’m sure that you will do splendidly, Terry,” assured Blue. “The great spirits in our blood have foretold your success.”

“Right…” Terry did not find Blue’s words very reassuring. “Okay, what can you tell me about the wyvern?”

“Over time, we’ve seen it face many mana-corrupted beasts,” said Blue. “Like those of its kind, it mostly constricts and strangles its opponents after first attacking with its horned tail or an elemental breath.”

“Any structured magic?” asked Terry with a glance at the giant snake-like body with wings.

“Can wyverns do that?” Blue’s eyes narrowed and he continued in a mutter of intelligible hisses before continuing in the common tongue of Terry’s realm: “The voice is the privilege of the dragons.”

Terry’s eyebrow raised slightly at the weird phrasing the lizan leader had used for his reply, but he chalked it up to the language barrier. “Okay, I take it that you haven’t seen anything of the kind. Then what have you tried so far?”

“Pardon, Terry?” Blue tilted his head.

“I mean what have you tried to get past the wyvern?” Terry moved his gaze back to the lizans. “You did try and probe it, didn’t you? Sneak by? Maybe a few attacks?”

“Terry, I’m afraid you misunderstand the true extent of our plight,” said Blue in an apologetic tone. “We can’t get close to this thing. Our blood won’t let us.”

What the Wastes is that supposed to mean? Terry wrinkled his forehead.

“‘Your blood’ won’t let you?” asked Terry.

“Our blood is suppressed by this creature,” elaborated Blue. “We are losing ourselves if we get too close.”

Well, that clears up precisely nothing. Terry was left only more confused. He decided to put the topic aside for now and proceed with the implications. “You mean that we know nothing and that you can do nothing and that I will have to do whatever alone?”

“I’m sorry, Terry, but I’m afraid that’s the case,” admitted Blue. He continued in a confident tone: “But the great spirits have foretold of your—”

“Yes yes, sure,” interrupted Terry unconvinced. Terry reaffirmed his desire to continue scouting the area in the hopes of finding a way to bypass the wyvern and to pass through the Elusive Fog of Frost without having to deal with the primordial beast. He quietly grumbled: “This is ridiculous.”

“Terry, we will do whatever we can to make it worth your while,” stressed Blue.

That’s not really the issue here, thought Terry. He knew that he was in the same boat as the lizans. He needed to pass through the fog in order to reach Arcana. This wasn’t about a lack of incentives.

“We are happy to please you in any way we can,” said Blue. He waved his hand and one of the grey-scaled lizans stepped closer to Terry.

Terry raised an eyebrow.

“Anything,” repeated Blue. He looked intently at Terry and his forked tongue flicked lasciviously out of the mouth that was filled with sharp teeth.

I have questions. Terry tilted his head with a frozen expression. And I’m not sure I want the answers.

A corner of Terry’s mind brought up scenes from the Chara Settlement with Devon being confused by the people around him and then searching Lizzy’s gaze for explanations. Unfortunately for Terry, there was no Lizzy around to explain the weirdness in front of him.

Terry forcefully shook his head. “Nevermind my time, I need a plan. I need more information. I need ideas.”

Blue blinked quietly and unhelpfully. The grey-scaled lizan next to him followed Blue’s lead.

Terry sighed and put a hand to his forehead.

***