Neil

“You want me to take you to the Mana Concentration Room? Are you joking? I can barely sit here, I can’t walk down several flights of stairs, and forget about fighting anything.”

“Your right I was getting ahead of myself, how are you feeling now? When you collapsed you had all the signs of Mana Shock and potion exhaustion. If you can eat anything else you probably should.”

“I feel ok, still tired, my side is killing me though. Do you have any more food ready?”

“I can cook for you if you can wait, if not I have more salted meat.”

“I can wait, or actually I can eat both if that’s alright.”

Yallia turned her back on me and walked over to her pack which was in the corner of the room. She reached in and a moment later a light began pouring out of her pack. When she removed her hands she was carrying several more of fist sized crystals. Placing a few them on the desk or on a shelf the room was soon bathed in a soft light, carrying another crystal she said. “Wait here, I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Opening the door Yallia walked out of the room to the remains of the fire where she started cooking.

Sitting in the shadows of the glowing crystals with nothing to distract me I was acutely aware of just how much it hurt to even breath. “Fuck this.” I said after a few minutes of sitting.

Stifling a groan I gingerly rolled over onto my hands and knees, then ever so carefully I stood up and hobbled over to my pack careful not to put too much weight on my injured knee. Opening my pack I saw that everything had been rifled through, although nothing had been taken out.

Finding a healing potion I drank it and immediately felt the throbbing bruise in my side shrink from the entire side of my body to just a large part of it. Putting a little bit of weight on my leg I found that although it still hurt I could now walk without too much of a limp.

Sighing in contentment I put the empty bottle back in my bag and looked around the room. It looked like everything I owned had been touched and moved, but nothing seemed to be missing aside from my belt and my knves. I was about to investigate Yallia’s bags when she walked in to the room and paused in the doorway looking at me.

“Feeling better?” She asked after a moment handing me the plate of food.

“A little, but I think I’ll need a day or two and at least one more healing potion before I’m able to really walk around again.” I said as I took the food. Thanking her I sat on the desk and started eating as slowly as I could.

“Did you make all those potions I found in your bag?”

Nodding I continued to eat.

“How did you make them all? They all looked like different potions.”

“My friend Shassala showed me how to make a healing potion, and I figured out how to make the others through trial and error. The mountain top actually had a lot of different plants with different magical properties growing there, and since I can identify what they are and what they do it wasn’t too hard to figure out how to turn them into potions.”

Yallia shook her head and then said. “Healing potions are rare and expensive, and here you are downing them like they’re glasses of Kallaz.”

I didn’t bother asking what Kallaz was, given the context it was probably just alcohol and since I don’t drink any explanation was probably next to useless.

“Would you like to see me make some potions?”

With Yallias assistance I was able to make several healing potions out of the dried healing potions that I had left over from the last time I had made potions. After that I started brewing more from scratch, making sure to keep the unrefined Mana, and the seeds from the Moon Berries.

That done I started to make a simple poison from those ingredients. Shassala hadn’t collected any of the poisonous Sorath Grass so I wasn’t able to make as strong of a poison as last time, but I made due with what I had.

“What is it?”

DING

Weak Toxin

This will cause moderate Mana Shock as well as nausea and dizziness to anything that eats it, the effects can be increased by introducing it to a blood stream or equivalent.

Yallia seemed interested in exactly how I was making the potions.

“That’s it? That’s how you make potions? I always thought that it took years of teaching and practice to make potions. I could do that.”

“I think if you want more potent potions there’s more to it, but for the most part this is how I do it. Potions don’t seem to be really all that complicated. What about you, you know magic right?”

“Of course I know magic, I specialize in light and dark affinities with a little bit of air. Not the most useful affinities to have but I make them work.”

“Can you show me some magic? How many different affinities are there? Can you teach me to use other affinities?”

“Slow down slow down. There are six different affinities. Light, dark, earth, air, water and fire, they can be mixed together so make sub affinities. Most people can’t learn affinities, its’ just something that you have a skill for or not, so I don’t know if I can teach you how to use other affinities. It’s said Humans could learn new affinities, but as for how exactly they did that I have no idea. And here.” Yallia looked at me then she shimmered for a moment and I suddenly found myself face to face with myself, except their hair was terrible and she looked exhausted. Shit I didn’t really look that bad did I?

“Most of what I can do are illusions.” She said and I was faced with the extremely odd sensation of seeing my mouth move and someone else's voice come out of it.

“That’s amazing.” I said moving my face closer. Although my initial impression had been of a perfect copy of my face, as I got a closer look I could see there were a number of small errors. I was pretty sure that my nose didn’t look exactly like that, and the lips looked a little differently than mine as well. The differences weren’t enough to invoke any feelings of the uncanny valley. More like I was looking at a close relative, rather than looking into a mirror. “Can you look like anyone?”

“I can make an illusion of anything that I want but getting specific people is hard, there are a lot of little details you need to get perfect or people will see through it. I have a few faces that I have practiced more than others that I can use to escape into a crowd, and of course making an illusion in a corner to hide is always fairly easy.”

“Can you make yourself invisible?”

“That’s easy enough to do, but most people don’t realize that you can’t see anything when your invisible. Much better to just make an illusion in front of you of whatever is supposed to be behind you.”

“So earth, air, wind and fire are all easy enough to understand, what about light and dark, what do those elements do?”

“Light is fairly straight forwards, you can create light, and use that to create illusions. It doesn’t have too much combat utility but you can use it to blind or distract people. Very useful in ambushes. Dark is a little bit different. The dark affinity can be used to suppress energy.”

“What do you mean? Like making spells weaker?”

“Not just spells, all things. Dark affinity is extremely rare. Something I often use it for is to muffle sounds, or putting out lights, make a fire burn less intensely. It’s extremely versatile”

“Couldn’t you just use air magic to silence things or fire magic to put out a fire?”

“Yes, and while I can silence sounds a little with my air affinity, if I needed to slow or stop a fire, I would need a affinity for fire which I don’t really have, so dark is much more versatile.”

“Can you use it to stop someone's heart? Or their brain?”

Yallia gave me a level look before speaking, the way the shadows played over her face made her look more than a little sinister. “It is possible to stop a person's heart using dark affinity, but it’s not easy, and you have to be very close to them in order to do it. Whenever you slow their heart a little their body will usually compensate by making it beat harder and then you have to use more magic to slow it again. Usually you’d just end up slowing their heartbeat not stopping it. Same with the brain, you could render people unconscious if your strong enough, but killing them is extremely difficult. If your close enough to use dark affinity to kill someone then it is almost always easier to use something, anything else to kill them. Same with stopping a fire actually. Dark can slow a fire, or even stop it, but as soon as I stop using my magic on it the fire will start again.”

Nodding my head I considered her words, I couldn’t help but think that the dark affinity was much more powerful than she was making it out to be, but I was still in too much pain to really be giving it too much thought. Also since I didn’t have a dark affinity I didn’t see a lot of point in asking too many questions about it right now, especially since I had so many other questions I wanted to ask.

“How do most people learn to sense their Mana? Do you have any exercises that I can use to increase my Mana manipulation?”

“Most people need to spend months or even years meditating and being guided through exercises designed to help them learn to sense their Mana before they can learn how to use it. You take potions, have your Mana manipulated by others while meditating, spending hours at a time trying to sense the change in your Mana. Some people can spend years trying to learn and never get the feel for it. Others can learn to sense their Mana but then they never gain the ability to actually manipulate it.”

I couldn’t help but notice she ignored my request for lessons on how to practice Mana Manipulation, but I didn’t push the subject for now. “Using potions is similar to what I did to learn how to sense my Mana, I took too many health potions and made myself sick. After that I took potions while trying to get a feeling for what was making me sick.”

“Using potions to introduce unrefined Mana into a person is one of the oldest ways of teaching Mana Sense, but it’s fallen out of favor lately. The potions can be imprecise, and if you’re not careful repeated cases of Mana Shock can cause long term damage. “

“Really? I found it pretty easy to sense the Mana.”

“It’s because the foreign Mana enters you so quickly, if you don’t sense it when the Mana enters your system sensing it after that can be difficult. If you have someone forcing a small amount of their Mana into you slowly you have a lot more opportunity to sense the Mana rather than just everything at once.”

“What about other affinities? You must have some idea of how I could learn them, I really want a fire affinity, or wind.”

“Like I said I’m not certain but you should be able to. A lot of records survived the collapse of the Old Empire referencing that humans could gain new affinities almost on a whim, but I couldn’t tell you exactly how it was done. Why do you want a fire or wind affinity though?”

“I fought something just before I came back here, and I’m sure you noticed I had the crap kicked out of me. I feel like fire and air have a lot more combat application than water does.”

“Fire maybe but not wind. Wind spells can be very strong at higher levels but they take a lot of practice and experience to get right, and given that we’re underground I wouldn’t recommend starting fires all over the place, the smoke could be troublesome. Water is actually considered one of the affinities with the most versatility when it comes to combat, especially in tight quarters.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, water whips, spinning disks of water, even just high-pressure streams of water can cut through stone or even steel. That does require a fair amount of practice and training though and while I’ve seen them in action they’re really not something I have firsthand experience with using. It really comes down to control and imagination.”

“Can you teach me how to better control my Mana?”

Yallia hesitated for a moment before answering “I should be able to, but I have to ask, what’s in it for me?”

With a sigh I considered her question, I really should have been expecting it. “What do you need?”

“I want to rescue my father, and stop the Empire from studying these ruins. There's something here that they want, and I want to make sure they don’t get it.”

“Do you know how many people are in the Empires expedition?”

“Anywhere from 30 to 60 I had trouble getting exact numbers.”

“I’d be willing to help you rescue your father, but I don’t think just the two of us would be able to fight that many people or stop them from studying the ruins.”

“You’re right we’d need the Lamias help to fight them.”

At this I started to get a sinking feeling “Why do I get the feeling you’d only be getting the Lamia to do your dirty work for you? Fight some people they otherwise might not have any quarrel with?”

“You think I’d manipulate the Lamia into a fight they otherwise wouldn’t join? Your being awfully considerate of the Lamia considering they put you down here to die, but let me put your mind at ease. The Empire are expansionist, they have no reason to respect the Lamias claim to this land, and the Lamia will have no reason to allow the Empire access to their sacred site. They’ll start fighting no matter what we do, and when they do they’ll need all the help they can get. But if it makes you feel better then I will only make your help in rescuing my father a condition for my lessons.”

“You won’t want me to talk the Lamia into fighting the Empire?”

“Even if we’re successful here I doubt the Lamia would be too willing to listen to either of us anyways, and I have every confidence that the Empire will walk in here start the fighting on their own.”

“What if we can’t seal away whatever was found down here? I don’t want to die down here either.”

“Same, we’ll take a look at what’s down here together. If we feel confident that we can seal it away we continue, if not we plan a prison break and escape into the jungle to plan how to rescue my father with just us.”

“Alright, that sounds like a deal to me.” I said sitting up and thrusting out my hand.

Yallia looked at it for a moment a confused expression before she matched me and we shook our hands.

“For now, rest up, when you're feeling better we’ll see about teaching you some more magic.”

With that I settled back and tried to sleep.