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[Fool]

Leviathan Cross: Secrets Not Bled, A Stone Cannot Breathe

The Tunnel Rat Mageling - 5th of Mead’s Tap, Year 1125 A.E.

With an assenting nod from his apprentice, Phineas continued.

“First and foremost, you must know—right and proper—what a magicking Path even is.”

He took another drag, this one full and downright ponderous like some wizened meister traveling the Corners in search of the meaning of life or some other sublime shite.

“All magicking Paths use a medium by which to connect them to the stuff of magick; mana in Kedweni, prakja in Qyranian, adraq in Carkoshi, vala in Strosunian, qi in Xingese, essentia in Vitaen, rukh in Cyroshi, shen in Serenese, pneuma in Akaean, so on and so forth. Many names, same thing in practice—a malleable substance that brings about magick when a magicking medium is in use. The ‘essence of existence wrung dry and made pure’ and all that.

“Fuel for the fire, so to speak.”

The smoke which oozed from the cheap pipe coiled around Phineas’ upturnt pinky as he removed the apparatus from his mouth to let out a cough.

The smoke waited, placidly—all tyke-at-mother’s-side-like—as the Aged Man polished a nonexistent stain from the poorly-varnished, and probably wrought of driftwood, Undercity pipe.

He put the lick-piece back in between his closed lips, voice coming from his spirit instead.

The coot had not had to make Eiden wait—what with the ability to speak by aura alone—but the spectacle was none the lesser for it, eliciting a chuff and a snort.

The conjured noise reverberated at the volume of polite chatter at the end o’ Dominidas’ church throughout the room, Fin’s aura somehow producing the speech from everywhere and nowhere at all. Strange that; his aura was pulled close to his skin and yet the sound was projected as if from the marble walls.

Peace-weed vapor billowed out the window and Eiden wondered if he could turn that to stone, too.

“A Path beyond the use of a particular magicking medium, is a unifying body of recorded ken; a whole leather-bound tome compared to a singular parchment leaf of a spell. It marks where all the predecessors of that Path have landed, expected achievements of a follower of the Path and hypothesis for further technique expansion of the magicks therein, et cetera ad nauseam—oh, sorry, that last one means so on and so forth till ya choke, croak, and spew.”

A chortle from Eiden and then Phineas returned to the well-trodden road of his knowledge and knowing.

“Though each mage effectively follows their own Path—no two walk the same Way—such is usually done after having reached the end of what has been writ or either veering off the well-trodden road entirely without much investment into it.

“A Path is another name for a magicking trade, how most mortals and even magickers see it. And though it is that, it is also so much more than that. I cannot specify lest I color your notions—like how a church’s glass stains the light that comes through it—or risk spoiling a lesson that should be learned by you.”

The Exorcist looked into his eyes as he spoke. He spoke with his throat this time, the pauper’s kief smoldering away in his hand. There was no magick to his voice, no imbuement of spirit, yet Eiden knew to listen; that tone brokered no dissent.

“Some things cannot be taught and only learnt. To attempt to teach them is to further separate the student from what they hope to grasp; expectations and preconceptions make one’s perception, and—if you have been payin’ due attention to the image visualization practice—influences the expression of a given magick.

“A mind made rigid with reality most ricten cannot even dare to hope to touch upon the highest possibility of the magicking Paths, the un—“

A wry, thief-caught-red-handed smile bloomed on his whiskers.

“Almost spilt, my bad. Like talking far too much. Been called a bad kirkos troupe villain for that monologue habit o’ mine before.”

The Exorcist put the lick piece back into his lips and blew out a thick plume of smog, obscuring his mug and hands for a few blinks.

When the fog cleared and he spoke, he did so with his mouth, pipe gone with the wind as if it had never been there. The bastard didn’t even offer Eiden a single—Hells-take-him—puff.

It wasn’t particularly good peace-weed, what with it being old pauper’s kief given the resinous additives and all, but a stupor was a stupor.

Fin began again the lecture without a hitch, his semblance like that of a street magician, prominent of trick and eye-dragging spectacle. The man knew how to command attention.

“Magick is far too chaotic to be entirely corralled into neat distinctions all the time, so Paths generally include various disciplines within them; think of these as the individual skills within a given vocation like how a leatherworker must know some minor chemicking, tool use, and possess a blind nose.

“Beyond this, know that a Path tends toward either one of two general flavors: telothic, in and of itself and in the pursuit of its end, and stoikheionic, in and of another and in pursuit of its fundament.

“Telothic Paths are those that worry most about the medium used to interact with magick, conceptual rather than elemental and structure over substance. These are Paths that focus on how magick is cast.

“Stoikheionic Paths, more commonly called fundament Paths—easier on the Kedweni tongue than Akaen haggle—are those who revolve around a given essence type rather than how it is manipulated. Substance over structure, specifically elemental rather than broadly conceptual.

“See these differences as those between blacksmith and jeweler; they are cut of the same cloth but of dissimilar make.”

A little will-o’-wisp bloomed on the Exorcist’s outstretched pointer-finger, a dancing ghost-fire, pure of color. The Aged Man touched the wisp with a finger of his other hand, pulling it apart into two distinct sparks held now in opposition two span from each other.

The original glowed like sun upon freshly-fallen, First Frost snow. The second, taken from the body of the first, was much darker. Closer to the flame of a forge than that of a candle, it burned the hue of burgundy.

Strangely, Eiden felt no fluctuation of mana that would signal a magick. As with a mundane fire, he only sensed its mundane spirit; an echo of physical reality and no more. Even zeroth-order techniques—his attempts at them at least—made their presence known upon the Spiritual. His mentor and experience alike told Eiden that auras tended to, as their name suggests, aurate; they spread like kief vapor, heavy and thick-like.

A magick whose pulse he could not feel felt all the more magickal.

“Smithery is focused on a particular material to an extreme,” Continued Phineas after a moment of letting Eiden contemplate the will-o’-wisps. “Metallurgic techniques but extensions of the metal being smithied.” In response to his speech, the first wisp grew eye-piercing bright for a blink. Pure of color, simple but no lesser for it, the ghost-fire was a primal thing.

“A jeweler, on the other hand—” the second wisp, of lambent red, festered a bright smolder; low and terrible light, it was of the same element of the first yet an entity unto itself, “—has many different materials with which they toil upon.”

The two sparks were snuffed with twin snaps, the sleight of hand hiding sight of their exact method of disappearance. Only their colors remained, nagging at the Rat’s memory like a knot just begging to be unraveled.

‘The sun of dawn and the sun of noon,’ Eiden realized, only to be more confused when another, second realization grew root in his mind: they were switched.

Smithery was pure of color—cold and harsh and of later in the day—and tinkery was the dying light of leftover coals—warm and ruddy and of early in the day.

The Rat would’ve thought that forging, the lowborn kind, was antecedent to the highborn cutting of gem—can’t make a proper stone without a chisel of some kind. Yet, knowing that the Exorcist truly made no mistake other than that he wished to make, Eiden also knew that the order of the sparks was on purpose.

Fin had not waited as his apprentice’s thoughts ran circles in his skull, leaving the Rat all the more confused when he returned his focus to the lecture. Good as Fin was with commanding attention, Eiden was far too easily led astray, flights of fancy all but a given.

“Sorry, Fin, I lost myself a bit in my own head—can you repeat that? I remember something about jewelers.”

The Exorcist gave Eiden an unimpressive stare, one only skin deep if judging by his spirit, before he did as he was bid.

“Metal, to a jeweler, is just as important—in the sense of expertise—as precious stone. No matter how spiffy, well-cut, and polished a sapphire may be, if it’s bound to shoddy metalwork, none’s gonna buy it.”

The Exorcist tapped his foot to the fur carpeting the ground; probably a wisent from the Pyreni foothills, before the earth gave way to marmon and thus where plains abounded and grazing beasts made their bands.

Fin sat down and waited for Eiden to do so, too, before he went on.

“A mage of the fundament Path is a blacksmith to the jeweler of the telothic Path. One is singularly focused on a single type of material, the other is a master of many. Get the gist of it, boyyo?”

“Aye,” Eiden responded.

“Good, because I am about to throw all that out of the window.” The Exorcist said with a mad-hatter grin, all amusement and mirth in the face of things no man was made to understand. The insane lived in their own little worlds, afterall.

“You see, the categories are useful for you to get a grasp at a Path’s limitations and specialties, but are not entirely indicative of whole-cloth truth. In the end, they are muddled and in constant flux. Metaphors are apt to break down when prodded too closely, anyhows.

“No single Path is either purely telothic or fundament, mostly they just tend to be closer to one of the extremes. And Paths, be it among the same type or not, bleed over one another all the time.”

Phineas took a hempen string, about finger-thick, from the many pockets inside his blacken coat and started to tie it into a complex knot, slow and steady. Its other end disappeared into the shadows the Exorcist’s leather always seemed to cast; preternatural, perhaps, given that the Rat’s accursed eyes could not pierce the black.

Twice, now, that Eiden could not grasp at a magick—no obvious auration combined with a neophyte sense of spirit left the mageling but a boy bumbling in the dark.

There was no fear in his ignorance, only the giddy excitement of curiosity.

There was so much to learn that it hurt him in a deep manner that there was so little time in a day.

“A Path is not dissimilar to a series of branches on a tree,” the Exorcist continued, his one-ended knot somehow made into the visage of a gnarly and ancient oak in the time that it took for Eiden’s attention to veer off-course and return, “some forks connecting and meshing organically with others while some are too far away and thus—” he pulled at a single loop and the oak came entirely unraveled, rendered back unto base string by a deft crook of the finger, “—entirely incompatible; anathema, even.

“In throwing one’s lot in with a fundament, one’s mastery over their chosen element is unrivaled. Yet, in doing so, once-flourishing branches are severed, never to be walked.

“A magicker that binds themselves fully to the fundament of Water cannot command even a speck of the Flame but one that walks the Path of Al-Khemia—alchemy, in the vulgar tongue—possesses middling skill over both. Telothic Paths tend to be much more welcoming to disparate elements than fundament Paths. The end welcomes all things, afterall. The beginning? Not so much. Plenty a creation myth centers around the ostracization of an out-group—an other.

“The First Children were banished from the Garden, the Wayward Servants struck from the sky and cast unto the lowly earth… No one likes another to soil their careful plans and all that. Fundament Paths are fickle for they broker no dissent, they accept only that they be the master and no other.”

With a smile that would’ve been charming on anyone with a tenth of a tenth of his wrinkles, Phineas made a grand gesture.

“And, you see, we have come full circle.” The Exorcist wrought a binding of a single loop and held it before Eiden, beckoning him to pull it; his apprentice complied, the hempen string now back to straight. With that, it retreated back into Fin’s pockets like a serpent, gone from sight but not mind. The Rat had spooked a bit before descending into a low fit of giggles.

“We threw away the thin veneer that we call truth and then put it back on just the same.” Continued Fin as Eiden marshaled his undisciplined mind back into attention. “You’ll find that, sometimes, the truth is a lie in only so much as it is not found by oneself—the truth of others is not your own. Grasping at the edges of a thing in the dark is no substitute for seeing it in the light.”

Fin had left pauses of silence in between the lulls of the lecture for the ken to seep in without worry or haste. He explained and reworded his explanations each about a dozen times for Eiden until the lad got a good understanding of the material. Phineas had even written another scrap of parchment with some shorthanded script.

Eiden put the leaf atop his table-plinth along with the previous one, Fin staring inscrutable-like all the while.