4.31 Spark of Life

I hope you guys like mad science magic, because that's pretty much the whole chapter today.

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Bernt looked over the other spellforms on the wall, trying to make sense of what the elemental was trying to do. “Life” was what it had been talking about when it had made his spiritual sea. It had, judging by what he’d seen in its mind, apparently also managed to ignite a cinder tree and transform it into some kind of newborn fire elemental.

If these spellforms here had anything to do with it, though, Bernt couldn’t tell how. They were just bits and pieces of spells that defined different fuel sources, size, rate of mana consumption, targeting, shape and other parameters that Bernt couldn’t even identify.

“I don’t understand,” Bernt said, turning back to the elemental. “What do you want to know from me? I don’t understand this at all. How can this help you understand life? It doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

Voices murmured behind him, but he ignored them.

“Observe,” the elemental said, and raised a hand, placing it on Bernt’s arm.

Bernt hurtled along cataclysmic winds suspended in a sea of light. He could sense heat and energy everywhere, so dense and powerful that it took effort just to hold his own form together. Far, far below, though, he could sense the true source – the core. The endless winds crashed down into it, but only light came out. Light, and life. Perfect, pure energy. Sparks of newborn living flame cascaded around him and a few orbited him in greeting a few times before moving on. It was a true fire, one that took dead matter and transformed it into life and energy.

Then he found himself in a cramped tunnel once more, keeping his heat contained to preserve the specimen before him. The little scaled creature, a kobold, was trying to stab him with a spear, but when it drew the weapon back, nothing remained of the portion it had tried to bury within his flames. 

The elemental felt disappointed, and Bernt realized that it didn’t fully understand weapons, despite the knowledge it had gained from the portion of his spirit it had taken. It had hoped the little creature might be attempting to communicate, just as Bernt had done. After all, it was shaped like the human had been, and its spirit spoke of fire.

The elemental was about to leave when a faint shiver of energy inside the kobold’s body caught its attention. What was that. It leaned forward to get a better sense of it, and found a revelation. A sea of life hidden beneath the creature’s dead exterior. Every movement was accompanied by millions of miniscule sparks of energy, tiny sources of heat and force and transformation as one sort of matter changed subtly, transmuting into another. It was fire, of a sort. A lesser fire than the one it knew, but still… what did it mean?

The vision faded, but the elemental’s hand was still in his arm as it pushed more thoughts, impressions and finally questions into Bernt’s mind.

It was proof. Life, even here, was fundamentally fire – a different sort of fire for a different sort of life. Perhaps even the still, cold one whose will barred his way forward here had it. Was this why the cinder tree could be awakened, while the hare was destroyed and the stone simply melted? And why would a dragon – a creature with sufficient energy – hold to its mortal, fleshy body when it could be free of it? Did it, too, cling to these lesser flames? What did they create?

Most of that didn’t made sense to Bernt, despite experiencing the elemental’s alien thought process firsthand. How could all life be full of fire? Still, he did have a few answers. A red dragon’s body was totally immune to fire, and as a sentient being, it would have supreme control over its own spirit. It was obvious. Maybe an elemental like this could make even a dragon feel warm, but it couldn’t transform its spirit like it had that of the cinder tree. It would never allow it. And the hare’s spirit would have left the plane at the moment of its death without a warlock ritual and a soulstone to capture it – not that a hare’s soul would be worth capturing.

The answers were just Bernt’s gut reactions and impressions, delivered just as quickly as the elemental could even transmit its questions. But it seemed to have no trouble understanding him. It still felt confused, but it seemed to accept his response as an answer. Instead of following up, it sent another thought about the rock – the magical material that had simply melted when exposed to its flames, resisting its attempt to “awaken” it.

This time, Bernt didn’t have an answer. He didn’t know how it had made an elemental out of a tree, so how would he be able to troubleshoot the process for a rock? Of course, that wasn’t precisely true. Bernt had made something like an elemental before, on the very day that he’d first met this one, but it hadn’t been quite right. It hadn’t had its own spirit – not really. Instead, the spell had borrowed a portion of his own spirit to give it “life’, as it were. He’d used it to destroy a warlock that he’d later learned had been possessed by Zijeregh, a powerful whisperer demon.

Bernt felt mild surprise from the elemental, then it let go of him and returned to the back wall. It extended a finger leaving glowing hot marks on the glassy surface as it sketched out a spellform. Curious, he followed, examining the unfamiliar glyph at its center. It wasn’t a fire spell, like the others.

“What does it do?” he asked out loud, resolving to write it down as soon as he could get his hands on his papers somewhere they wouldn’t catch fire immediately.

“It awakens. It is a part of you. Test it, return and explain. Tell me why. I will continue to search for answers here.”

Bernt winced and looked back at the others. Dalbrand was watching like a hawk, Elyn stood behind him, still holding her flute, and Xul’evareg was leaning against a tunnel wall, looking bored. “Oh… actually, I was sent here by the others to ask you to leave… this is an important trade route. The goblins…”

The elemental made a fluttering noise, accompanied by an exaggerated shrug. “There were many specimens here. Not many, now. I will move on. Find me above.”

Bernt coughed and very carefully did not ask what had happened to these “specimens”. He did want to meet this elemental again, though. Unlike Song, it didn’t seem to mind teaching him about sorcery – at least as it understood it.

“Could you be more specific? Maybe a specific mountain? How will I find you?”

It rose off of the ground, levitating up and growing thinner as it began to lose its shape.

“Look,” it replied simply.

“Wait!” Bernt called out, remembering only now that he still had questions. “Can I use this to make more people like me?” Bernt pointed to the spellform and then down to his spiritual sea, the sorcerous core of his spirit. “Is this how you made me into… this? A sorcerer?”

The elemental dropped back to the ground and tilted its head to the side in thought as it resumed its humanoid shape.

“No,” it crackled after a long moment and ran a red-hot hand over the spellform diagram. And still, it hesitated. Then it dissolved into a roiling mass of plasma, flames licking out from it, and a single tendril lashed out, laying itself on Bernt’s shoulder as it rose up into the air again. “New life grows from itself, its own potential – a new will,” its voice came. “You are not a new will.”

Directly from the elemental’s mind, Bernt received a far more thorough explanation. What the elemental had done for him hadn’t involved a spell at all. The strange sorcerous investiture that he’d been given hadn’t grown – the elemental had shaped it directly, claiming the spirit of the flame sprite as part of itself, and reshaping it using its will alone before effectively cutting it off and allowing it to graft itself into Bernt. He could feel its memory of the act and it was… self-mutilating. Not unlike the sensation of having a piece of his own spirit torn out – his side of the deal that had made him into what he now was.

Could Bernt do something like that to himself? He doubted it. Even notwithstanding the trauma, the technical skill involved made forming a mage investiture look easy. There was no way he could try something like that without killing himself. Was this what Song had been talking about? Had one of his elders reshaped and torn apart their own spirit to birth their next generation?

Bernt shuddered at the thought. No wonder the cultivator had counselled him against it.

Still, Estrid had been right. He’d definitely learned something.

***

“What did you tell it?” Elyn asked. The room was cooling rapidly, helped along by an aeromancy spell Bernt had just cast to draw cool air from the tunnels below them and push it through the newly vacated chamber. Still, Elyn and Xul’evareg remained inside Bernt’s protective temperature barrier for the time being.

Archmage Dalbrand, for his part, had crossed the room almost immediately, apparently unbothered by the heat and examined the back wall. The spellforms there had lost their glow almost the moment the elemental had disappeared, flowing up through a crack in the ceiling so narrow that Bernt could barely make it out now. Their shapes were still faintly visible in the glassy stone. 

“I asked it to leave, and I promised to do some research for it,” Bernt replied truthfully. “It wants to know why some magical materials can be turned into elementals and others can’t.”

Dalbrand turned to look at Bernt, wearing the dazed expression of a man who had seen too much.

“We’ve found an elemental doing magical research,” he said as if trying out the thought for the first time. “ An elemental that wore your face... I’ve never heard of something like that happening before – didn’t know they could. Why would it do that?” 

“I don’t know,” Bernt lied, trying to sound like it didn’t matter.

The archmage stared at him for a second, grunted and shook his head. Then he straightened and his gaze sharpened. “It was communicating, sticking its hand in you like that? Is that a sorcery thing?”

Bernt nodded. “Sort of, yeah. I can’t be burned. In theory, it would probably work with anyone. It was touching its spirit directly to mine. The elemental that helped me become a full sorcerer did it, too. It feels like a familiar bond, but more chaotic. I think it’s how they talk to each other.”

He doubted that was actually true. The elemental had seemed as startled as him when he’d first touched its limb back in the Phoenix Reaches and made the mental connection for the first time. But Bernt wasn’t eager to tell Dalbrand – or anyone in the Beseri government – that he’d summoned a fire elemental of unknown power with an apparent interest in magical research that he himself couldn’t begin to understand the depth of. 

“Social fire elementals…” Dalbrand said to himself, shaking his head again. “And spellforms, written in our notation style. Ugh,” he spat on the ground and rubbed at his temple. “As if I didn’t have enough to worry about. Come on, we’re leaving! Time to get Minister Jesra. The Madzhuris aren’t going to wait around for us to figure this out – we have a meeting with the Duergar Council to arrange.”