4.34 Elemental Development

“They’re here!” Piranin called out as she pushed through the doors into King Grundrik’s private rooms. “Humans, your majesty! I saw them with my own eyes.” 

Grundrik looked up from the report he was reading and scowled at his excitable young aide, pressing down on her mind with his power. She shivered and dropped to a knee, bowing her head. New help always needed a bit of breaking in, he found, to learn proper respect. This one had only joined him a few weeks ago, when he’d sent his old one off to replace an overly ambitious viceroy.

“You will knock and wait for my word before entering,” he said calmly. “Protocols and proprieties exist for a reason, and no foreign diplomat is so important that you may interrupt my work.” 

She shivered and grew pale over the space of a few seconds. After a moment, he nodded and continued on, “Where are they from? Who brought them?”

“I’m sorry, your majesty,” she gasped, the words tumbling out too quickly. “Some no-name ambassador brought them down – one of Queen Zorgrun’s. I don’t know where they’re from, but it must be Madzhur, right? Or the Kallrixians?”

Grundrik grunted and dismissed the young woman with a wave. He was gratified to note that she was out the door even faster than she’d burst in. Madzhuris wouldn’t be too bad, or Kallrixians. They already had a Kallrixian – a priest of some kind along with a bureaucrat – but it hadn’t gone anywhere. Neither of them had crossed paths with Grundrik’s armies, bringing only hearsay to the imperial council. Who was to say who had attacked whom first, and why?

These humans would be no different. They were just props for his adversaries to trot out in front of the council, seeking to discredit him and to slow him down. But it wouldn’t matter. He looked down at the report in front of him – a map of the city depicted in three dimensions with nine carefully selected points mapped out. The stones had all been placed in the last week. He’d offered them to the city as a gift, which they had, of course, accepted. Refusing would have had difficult political implications that the city government couldn’t afford and besides, they were incredibly valuable.

Infused soulstone was the very best warding substrate, provided that a warlock and a mage worked together to construct the wards. They would be able to draw additional power from the souls trapped within at need, at least for a while. The process wasn’t well understood outside the Overcroft dominion and his peers lacked the stomach to perform the research necessary to develop their own.

It was a kingly treasure and, if everything went to plan, they would protect Kostrom from virtually any assault imaginable. If his peers betrayed him… well, a soulstone was still a soulstone.

Grundrik had already won. The only question left to answer was how bloody that victory would have to be.

***

Bernt picked at an unfamiliar mushroom dish and tried not to grimace at the oddly sour smell. It appeared unappetizing, but he could sense the mana in them. This was a magical material – he couldn’t let that go to waste.

Whatever else one might say about the Duergar Empire, they were generous hosts. They’d been given an entire complex of rooms, enough that each of them had their own private space and sanitary facilities, plus a private meeting room, a common lounge area and their own kitchen. Despite that, Duergar servers had arrived just a few minutes later bearing trays of food.

The others chatted amiably, discussing what to do next. Estrid wanted to go back up to the garden to explore – she was especially interested in what plants would grow here in such poor soil and low light. Nirlig and Elyn wanted to see if he could find an interpreter to guide them around the tower and meet the people.

Bernt took a bite of the mushroom. The texture was surprisingly delicate, with a strong earthy flavor, but when he swallowed them down the expected warming sensation didn’t come. Experimentally, he tried to take it through what he thought of his “digestion” process anyway but again, nothing happened. Curiously, he speared another mushroom with a fork and focused on it specifically. Sure enough, it had mana running through it. It should have worked.

“Nobody is going anywhere for now,” Jesra said sternly, reserving her sharpest glare for Nirlig, for some reason. “This is a delicate situation, and the way you present yourselves here has diplomatic consequences. Taresh has been eager to cooperate with us so far, but he’s just a provincial diplomat. It’s obvious that he’s trying to leverage us for his own benefit. I need to speak with the imperial council, or at least someone who actually matters here, before you go running around potentially causing an international incident.”

Realizing that he might have stumbled across something interesting, Bernt retrieved his bag from where he’d hung it and dug through, pulling out his notes. The salamander – the one he’d read about in Gobford what felt like a lifetime ago – hadn’t consumed just any kind of magical material. Not all of them were compatible. And if that was true one way…

Bernt found the strange spellform that the elemental had shown him earlier with a glyph at its heart that he’d never seen before – one that supposedly “awakened”. The elemental had said that it was part of him.

Focusing inward, Bernt went looking through the convoluted channels of his spiritual sea. It was difficult to make sense of the specific spellforms built into it. He’d begun mapping it out in diagrams after his most recent letter from Pollock, but progress was slow. Fortunately he didn’t need to identify the entire thing – he just had to find that one glyph.

He could, of course, try shaping the spell as a mage and simply casting it – but he wasn’t sure that would work. The way the elemental had felt, this wasn’t as simple as just a spell. It was a more direct application of his will. A deeper connection. 

“You, especially, aren't going anywhere,” Jesra said, pointing at Bernt. He nodded distractedly, barely paying attention. “You’re our only direct witness to the Duergar attack on Halfbridge, and we’ll need you to testify in front of the council. Your testimony should be the only thing they learn about you. The last thing I need is someone coming forward to try to disqualify your statement on the basis of your character or some stupid nonsense like that.”

“Okay, that’s fine.” He would be busy with this for a day or so at least. There would be time to explore later. There, up and behind the core of his newest investiture, wrapped around his spine was the glyph he was looking for. The spellform was folded oddly and woven through another mess of channels in a way that had to cause some interactions. He could separate it out, but it would take hours to figure out exactly where one spellform ended and the other began.

But… those spellforms had to have been placed this way for a reason. Indulging his curiosity, Bernt picked up the mushroom between two fingers and cast directly into it, pinching off large portions of his sorcerous mana network to isolate this particular formation. He felt the spell tug at his spirit, drawing some of himself out with it. That was probably a good sign, right?

A dull pop sounded and smoke rose as the mushroom collapsed into stinking goo that ran down Bernt’s hand, dripping down onto the floor. It swirled around unnaturally for a moment, before going still. A second later, Bernt felt his spirit recover as the spell unraveled and the lost sliver of magical potential returned.

“Ick!” Ina made a gagging noise, and pushed away her own plate of mushrooms. Elyn and Nirlig were standing, and the latter had a knife out looking around for attackers. Dalbrand had his focus on his hand, though he wasn’t casting.

“What was that?” Jesra asked, looking around cautiously. She’d raised a hand as though to cast as well, though she didn’t appear to use a focus.

“Oh. Sorry.” Bernt’s face flushed. “I was just trying something.” He incinerated the strange substance with a cantrip, conjured a bit of wind to clear the smell, picked up his bag and cleared his throat. “I’ll… finish up in my room.”

“Don’t damage any Duergar property,” she warned, “and don’t go anywhere!” 

The embarrassment of the moment was gone before Bernt even made it to his room. That hadn’t worked at all – which meant he might be right! Of course, there were still a lot of questions to answer. Was it something inherent about his spirit, was it the spiritual sea, or was it the investitures?

The spell he’d just cast only used the portion of his sorcerous mana network that he routed his mana through, but he couldn’t completely avoid using the rest of it – the mana still had to complete a circuit, somehow. More importantly, his sorcerous spells always used his normal mage investitures.

That alone might be enough reason for it not to work on a mushroom or, for that matter, a rock. On the other hand, though, he also couldn’t consume the mushroom’s magical potential. It wasn’t necessarily related, but felt like it was. It was enough to look deeper.

Excitedly, he dug through his bag again, coming up a moment later with one of the only two magical materials he still carried from the Phoenix Reaches. He’d consumed everything he thought he safely could, including the cinder tree bark and the tailfeather, which he’d ground up to try to make it more palatable. 

In all, he’d eaten more magical materials than it would take to make an archmage. Despite that, he hadn’t managed to consume enough magical potential to grow his mana network further yet. He wasn’t surprised by that, considering how slowly magical creatures and cultivators seemed to grow in power, but he wondered what made the process so inefficient. He didn’t know enough about soul magic to guess, but he would look into it if he ever found the time.

The antler was the only thing he had left, besides what remained of his shard of termite clay. He took it to a bare corner of the room and focused on it. Then he stopped, raised a temperature barrier to shield the rest of the room, and started over.

A bit of his spirit was drawn out of him along with the spell once more, but this time the result wasn’t anything so simple. Bernt could feel his own intention, to bring this bit of antler to life, clash against reality. It was a foreign will, in a sense, but too simple to come from something that was alive. The antler was a thing, a piece of something that had been alive. It was not a living thing in its own right. Bernt’s spell disagreed with what it was, and it resisted.

But Bernt knew it could become a living thing. If a cinder tree could ignite into an elemental, then this discarded antler could, too. It was a pyromantic magical material, so at least some aspects of “life” would be written directly into its spellform – at least the sort of life the elemental knew. Bernt couldn’t prove it without a lot of experimentation and testing, but he was certain he was right.

Wrestling with the strange will felt less like having an argument and more like pushing open a door. After a moment it was done. The antler burst into a bright, liquid flame that seemed to stretch and roll, coiling itself up into a ball over the material as it was consumed. A moment later, the fist-sized glowing ball of liquid flames reshaped itself, taking on a humanoid appearance and landing on the ground in front of him. The tiny thing stared up at him, totally still.

Was… was that a flame sprite? Was it… awake?

“Um… hello?” Bernt said. Nothing happened. Experimentally, he held out a hand toward it. Maybe he could communicate in impressions, like he had before.

The moment his finger made contact, power rushed into his mana network, flowing up his arm and into his core as if it knew exactly where to go. Heat filled Bernt as the tiny elemental’s power settled into him.

Now that was interesting.