Vex was in the Ashion section of the tower, doing his damndest to ignore Irvis' frozen body.

Something about it was unnerving. There were times he looked away and could swear that Irvis' eyes were following him, somehow — those eyes remained full of hate, in a way that made him shiver. But anything he did to interfere with his father's magic might also free Irvis early, and Vex wasn't ready to deal with him.

The more time he had to study Irvis, the more uncertain he was about whether he could deal with Irvis at all. Even if Derivan, Misa, and Sev had all been here with him...

His mana sense told him a lot of things. Irvis' entire body was made out of exactly one mana aspect, though whatever aspect it was, it was nothing Vex had ever encountered before. It was more alive than any form of mana he'd seen before; every piece of Irvis showed individual, identical reactions.

His... his not-father's freezing spell was far more complicated than he'd thought, too. There was a reason it had taken his entire being to cast. This was a propagating stasis spell that was alive, in its own way, the mana imbued with bits of Karix's soul; every time Irvis tried to break free, the ice-infused energy reacted, attacking that piece of Irvis until it was once again frozen solid — imbued with too much ice-aspect to be able to move.

But even that was fading away. It would take a while — Karix had definitely managed to buy him time — but the spell that would have lasted for centuries on anyone else was only going to last for about an hour on Irvis.

The problem was that he'd studied just about everything he could through the ice. His glyph couldn't make it through the potent ice to understand what was going on with Irvis in detail, which meant he couldn't spend his time probing for a weakness.

Vex turned his attention back to the rest of the tower instead.

Behind the broken rubble was a mess of books; the Ashion section of the dungeon was constructed like a library, no doubt a reflection of his family's propensity for study and magic. There were traps here, he knew. He'd heard plenty of tales from others that had been here. Sometimes delvers would bring materials out of the dungeon and to him, and it was from this dungeon that he'd gained some of his study material...

Having access to this library would have made him happy in nearly any other situation.

Instead, Vex searched. His bonus room was probably somewhere here — but trigger conditions for bonus rooms were strange. His room had been , and so he could only guess that the trigger conditions were in some way related to that, the same way Misa had gained access to her room by replicating the conditions in which she had lost her village...

...except he had no such event in his past. He'd never been disconnected from the system. The closest he'd ever done in that regard was when he'd helped Derivan break free from it, and that had happened after the dungeon had created the bonus room...

...what type of magic had he used back there?

Vex paused, struck by the thought. He'd never considered it — too relieved that he'd been able to help, and then too caught up by everything that had happened afterwards, maybe. That didn't feel like it was enough to explain him completely forgetting to explore this branch of magic. It didn't explain the fuzziness with which he remembered that notification that had appeared when he'd cast his spell.

WARNING: ###### aspect magic is not allowed—

He'd known what that aspect was.

He'd understood that magic, when he was casting it, but that knowledge had been taken away from him at the same moment the box had appeared. It was part of the reason he hadn't focused on it with the intensity he otherwise would have. A magic that could interact directly with the system, that allowed him to act on it maybe the same way Derivan could with Patch and Shift — having access to that would have changed everything for him.

No wonder it had been locked away.

Even now, the memory was blurred and fuzzy to him, but now that he knew where to begin...

Vex felt his feet taking him to a particular section of the tower's library. It was a small, shadowed section in a corner that was uncomfortably close to Irvis' frozen body, but Vex did his best to ignore it; instead, he scanned the books. More than half of them were traps, if he remembered what the delver reports had said correctly; the Ashion tower tested knowledge and perception and magic, all aspects that their family purported themselves to be experts in.

Half of the books were layered in just the faintest shimmer of Illusion — those were easy enough to dismiss as fake. Another few books appeared not to be magical at all, but they were bound in a way that Karix would never have allowed in their personal library, and so Vex dismissed those as well. He'd come back to those later, but he suspected it was the sort of detail he was supposed to notice.

It got harder from there. He picked out an older-looking tome, glancing at the cover; The Origins Of Magic, embossed in gold letters onto green leather. He frowned at it and put it back. The capitalization of the title wasn't correct.

Another book he rejected for having inconsistent kerning, and a third one he put back because he noticed the book didn't have a shadow. Vex went through them like this one by one, until he found a book that didn't have any flaws by his father's standards.

He took a breath, sat down, and opened the book.

Aspects of Magic

You may access more of the contents of this book by channeling different aspects into it.

Vex couldn't help but raise a brow. A magic test, after all that? Why not just start with the test to begin with? It was an easy enough test, though — his class as a [Chromaturgist] had given him particular affinity with even the most esoteric of aspects. Irvis' aspect aside, it wasn't difficult for him to channel a whole spectrum of the different types of mana he had access to.

Fire, water, earth, air, light, and dark; all the same elements he had access to in the form of glyphs. Arcane, for the esoteric, to represent a type of mana that would change and adapt. Necrotic, to represent rot. Life. Plague. Blood. Stranger aspects like one that, as best as he could tell, represented English, though he'd never been able to craft a useful spell out of it.

And then, like a fireblossom, text bloomed on the page in front of him.

If you can see this, you will likely have already realized that mana aspects are largely arbitrary. There are a few great secrets about magic, and here is one of them: aspects do not exist. The lines are not as distinct as the mind makes it seem, though thinking about it in that way certainly makes your spells easier to understand and cast.

The truth behind aspects are simple: they are small facets of a conceptual sphere. Anything you can conceive of is likely to be an aspect within the mana, though many of them are redundant and overlap with one another. Yet all of them are useful, and specificity can be immensely beneficial. To find an aspect of roads, for example, would be to craft a spell stronger for traveling on roads than any spell using an aspect of travel could be.

Vex paused in his reading here, his brows furrowing in thought. Here was a realization spelled out for him that had already been percolating in the back of his mind, perhaps for years: why did mana divide itself into aspects? The categories seemed so arbitrary, and the elements themselves were based on an archaic understanding of the world...

This explained a lot about why the elements existed as they did.

And if aspects were simply a representation of any conceivable idea — then could there be an aspect for the system? Or was the system an outside element, something that mana couldn't intrinsically represent?

...There was still the question of how glyphs fit into all of this. Vex thought he could see the bits and pieces, the holes in the explanation where glyphs would have slotted in, if all knowledge of them hadn't been erased. Glyphs represented art, and art represented what the book called the 'conceptual sphere'; the breadth of ideas that all living people had come up with.

If that were true... then magic was much, much broader than he had assumed. He hadn't even considered an aspect of roads, and yet reaching for it with [Multichromal Mutation] was as simple as thinking about it, now that he knew. Many of this other attempts to use that skill had been difficult, requiring a thorough understanding of the aspect he was trying to reach, but understanding what aspects were —

—Well, it didn't make using the skill completely trivial. But it certainly made it easier.

Vex wanted to start iterating through all the ideas he had — and he had so many, now that he understood more about how these aspects came about — but something gave him pause, and it wasn't just the fact that Irvis was beginning to thaw.

It was the information he received, in a very familiar sort of way, of an attack. Of a multitude of attacks. Vex had to put down the book to parse the rush of knowledge, because the flow was stronger than it had been the first time Derivan had used their combined Sign to block an attack. A small part of him managed to mentally reach out and call out the system menu again, to see if the interference had faded, but he stumbled and had to lean on the wall to steady himself before he could read the chat.

Instead, he focused on his mind. If Derivan was using their Sign, he was trying to tell him something; if he was just blocking one of Misa's attacks or something...

But he already knew that wasn't the case. Derivan wouldn't have used it for something as trivial as that; the circumstances under which he would try to contact Vex in this way were few and far between, and Vex had no reason to think this was anything less than a real attack.

He was, of course, right. But more interesting — and more alarming — was the nature of what was attacking his friends. He felt a part of his mind chugging along, automatically sorting the information he'd gathered, and parsing it together with what he'd just learned.

—

Aspect of Hatred, Irvis

A physical manifestation of a single aspect in the mana, given life through a concentration and manipulation of Reality. This particular form of manifestation allows him to manipulate aspects of reality that are not normally accessible without the use of a Reality Shard.

Poison Fang, (26)

A poisoned bite. The specific poison varies, but are almost universally drawn from shifted realities that have been rendered uninhabitable, usually due to the actions of poison mages in Elyra. Plague aspect variant.

Discordant Sound, (32)

An infectious sound, gathered from an unpatched Bard class. The sound does physical damage through a quirk in system-assisted physics and possesses a quality that will cause listeners to sing along, damaging themselves in the process. Sound aspect variant.

Biting Sight, (47)

A broken image of something that has been erased. To look upon it is to wipe away any memories that would otherwise be associated with that image, as the associated infolock spreads to any memories that are 'contaminated'. Mental aspect variant.

—

Vex swallowed. That was probably why he'd struggled so hard to process everything — over a hundred distinct attacks, even if many of them were the same ones; he wondered if that was related to why Misa's health costs were per-attack. Perhaps the system had to process each one individually, the way he'd had to.

More importantly, this meant his friends were also being attacked by Irvis... and a more powerful version of him, if this was any indication. Vex glanced at Irvis' frozen body, feeling a slight chill come over him that had nothing to do with the ice magic that kept the living Aspect in stasis.

If there was more than one of him, he wasn't necessarily safe.

And with Derivan and the others in trouble, he had to decide what to do, and quickly.