You wake up somewhat early when you hear the rustling of your mother’s armor as she puts it on for the day. You move as quietly as you can out of bed and manage to sneak out of the room without alerting Erden, giving you a brief moment alone with your mother.

She greets you, but you aren’t beating around the bush. Increasing, you find the stigma surrounding Erden to be more and more infuriating, so you question her about her thoughts on him immediately. She pauses, and then sighs, saying that you are too observant for your own good. When that visibly angers you even more, she immediately elaborates by saying that his Aether is bathed in Astral energy, a common indicator of the use of destructive magic, especially thaumaturgy and Black magic.

It is a familiar complaint. Your mother, well-versed in the arts of being a Paladin as she is, has acquired the intuition required to sense swathes of aether within a person. A skill which you certainly could have refined yourself, had you been accepted into their ranks. As it stands, you can only detect massive quantities of disrupted aether-- something most animals can do by instinct.

When Mizu first started to get into thaumaturgy, your mother was able to notice the changes in her over time. Originally, she was in favor of the use of destructive arts if it meant a safer city-state, but in her eyes the disruption of aether is dangerous at best and fool-hardy at worst. While she is often private about her thoughts on the matter, she has lectured you no small number of times on the subject.

Too much Astral aether will eat away at your soul if not balanced out properly, and your mother is almost on the verge of recounting her favorite cautionary tale, The Fallen City of Mhach, before she is cut for time. As she leaves, you protest that Erden has never practiced the dark arts, to which she replies that he needs help, one way or the other.

She apologies if she came off as rude to him or to you, and wishes you both a good day. After taking a deep breath, you wish her the same. You brew yourself some coffee from what she has available, and around an hour later Erden wakes up, suffering from a terrible case of bedhead.

You both meet up with Mizu later in Western Thanalan as promised, where she is standing dramatically atop a large boulder. Once she notices you, she strikes a dramatic pose and commands you to BEHOLD the magnificent power of thaumaturgy. She slowly and carefully crawls down the large rock before running over to you and holding her staff aloft. She instructs you to ‘stand back,’ which you do-- by around thirty feet.

She channels aether into her staff for...a while. A few minutes, at least. Erden looks to you a few times to see if he should be doing anything, but you silently indicate to just keep waiting, so he does. You skim through the pages of your tome and pull up your temperamental shielding spell, and also summon Brick for good measure.

“I...CAST…!!!” Mizu begins to shout at the top of her lungs, drawing in some attention from the nearby refugees. “THE ULTIMATE DESTROYER OF ALL THINGS IV!!!” The surge of aether from Mizu to the rock is so large that you can visibly see streaks of it rip away from her form. Once the spell completes, a pillar of lightning manifests from the heavens and strikes the stone a thousand times over. The resulting explosion is powerful enough to knock her back a few feet and onto the ground, knocking her out cold.

You quickly deploy the barrier in front of her, which is just strong enough to endure the shrapnels of rock that would have likely killed her in this state. By the time the dust settles, the massive boulder exists only in your memory. Fragments of ore litter the ground, though in such small pieces it is hard to argue they will ever see much use.

In hindsight, this is very funny. In the moment, you and Erden panic as you try to assess how alive she is. No healing magic you possess will be of any help, as her “injuries” are purely that of exhaustion. Lightning also courses through the ground, but to your good fortune none of it is coalescing around Mizu’s body. Brick runs in and drags her away from the powerful magic, and just a short moment after he does so, sparks of lightning crash into the area she had just occupied.

Lightning continues to run through the nearby ground and manifest randomly to strike from the heavens in that spot for the next two hours. The Brass Blades are not very happy about it, but settle down once you argue on Mizu’s behalf that this was an experiment in the military’s best interest, since she is a member of the Thaumaturge’s guild. Since nobody was harmed, you are simply issued a warning. You are grateful indeed that these particular blades did not know how many of these ‘warnings’ Mizu has acquired.

Once you get Mizu back into the city, Erden seems...tired. He tells you he is simply hungry, but insists that Mizu’s condition is much more serious than his, and he is right, but only because the bar is rather low. You bring Mizu back to the thaumaturge’s guild and greet Yayake who gives a tired sigh before rustling under the table for Ether kits. When she hands you one, she welcomes you back to the city.

You give Mizu the Ether kit and lay her down on a resting bench in the back of the guild, and inform Erden that she will be out like this for another few hours but be fine once she wakes up. Probably. He is obviously worried, but trusts your word on the matter, and so you two go out to get a quick bite to eat in private this time.

Erden asks what you think he should get, and so you both get your favorite meal-- Crab Bisque soup with crackers on the side. It seems he was just as hungry as he claimed, as he slurps down the whole thing and even gets a second order of it.

In the middle of the meal, he asks if arcanistry is something you could see yourself doing forever, which you suppose you could. Maybe, just maybe, you could return to being a paladin, but there’s something delightfully free and adventurous about investigating long-lost runes and combining them to make new magic to help people. Sometimes, you’re not even sure if being a paladin was ever your dream, or if it was just your mother’s.

You ask him what he wants to do, and he pauses on that. Clearly, he doesn’t want to be a farmer forever-- he seems to have bigger sights, bigger goals. He tells you that he isn’t completely sure, and you say that’s perfectly okay-- nothing wrong with taking your time to make decisions. He’s considering becoming an adventurer, sort of like you-- just after slightly different things.

Finding magic ruins certainly sounds exciting to him, but he admits that he does not have the smarts to unlock arcane geometries like you do. This compliment almost feels hollow, though of course not by his design. The rut you’ve hit with the shield spell has partially shaken your confidence in your ability to make good spells, you just try your damnedest not to let it show.

Once you both finish eating, Erden seems to be in much higher spirits, and even asks if you two should spend some time investigating local geometric symbols which makes you so happy you almost start crying.

“You’re a man after my own heart!” You tease him, flipping to the back end of your grimoire to pull up your more experimental drawings.

“Hm...I guess I am.” He confirms, which makes you light up like a Starlight Celebration tree. A moment of clarity and intimacy which is immediately followed by a barrage of awkward stammering and muttering and gentle laughs.

On the subject of magic ruins, you are very curious as to the ruins of Sil’dih, a city which historically is said to have turned its own into zombies in an attempt to win the war with Ul’dah. Monstrous and unethical, yes, but likely chalk-full of leyline drawings and runic patterns that thaumaturges are often just as fond of as arcanists.

Most thaumaturgy spells when placed into the press of arcanistry is a flat miss-- thaumaturgy hinges so heavily on the manipulation of aether within oneself that pressing it into a book results only in weak, worthless attacks with very little exception. Surely, though, there must be something worth researching in the field that can help develop arcanistry. At the barest of minimums, there could be some treasure available within the lost city.

You have yourself, Mizu, and Erden, but could really use a fourth person to brave the city with you. Luckily, you are much less out-of-your-depth in Ul’dah, and simply approach The Adventurer’s Guild for assistance. If your encounter in Gridania was anything to go by, very little healing is actually required to get the job done as long as you approach situations tactically. Then again, Mizu is coming along, so it’s hard to decide.

The simple truth of the matter is that healers are difficult to find so far from Gridania, as conjury is usually the most reliable method to get the job done. Arcanistry definitely has the potential to surpass conjury in this regard, but healing is a relatively unexplored field for the artform. You hope that you will be enough as a healer, but you spend a lot of time penning down slight modifications of your healing spells that may come in handy.

First, a simple Resurrection spell is in order-- a tremendous surge of healing aether that can pull someone back from the brink. It will require a lot of focus to get off correctly, so it won’t be of much use in combat. Secondly, while Rejuvenate is great, a more direct form of healing is also in order to make sure Erden doesn’t get overwhelmed in the middle of a fight. The problem is, Physick, which comes included as one of the Grimoire core set, is complete and utter garbage, and you can’t quite figure out why. In a pinch, you suppose you always have Clemency.

You get so wrapped up in your spellwork that you don’t even notice that Erden both put out a notice for our group and found someone to fill the role already. His name is Himoto, an Au Ra man with a lance and penchant for Geomancy, which from your understanding at the time was like conjury but weirder.

Instead of deriving power from the elements, you instead derive power from the planet-- whatever the hell that means. Himoto does not speak-- like, at all. You never catch a single peep from him, he only smiles and sometimes nods his head. Despite this, Erden has not seemed to have any difficulty at all communicating what you both plan on doing.

“He doesn’t want money or anything-- he’s looking for a gem.” Erden explains.

“What kind of gem?”

“Some kind of jewel that belonged to his people in The Ruby Sea. Rumor has it, many thieves stow their goods within the ruins of Sil’dih since the guards don’t look there.”

“Well...alright!” You shake Himoto’s hand and agree to leave once Mizu has recovered in full. Himoto returns to his Inn room at The Quicksand in the meantime. Since you estimate she won’t be in a good state to do adventuring until tomorrow, you decide to return back to your mother’s home until the next day.

On the way home, you are accosted by high ranking Brass Blades about the disturbance Mizu caused earlier, and you are told you will need to pay a fairly severe fine for the disruption it caused-- near a hundred thousand gil. They inform you that Fyrgeiss, the chairman of Amajina & Sons Mineral Concern, has filed the spellwork as destruction of private property, as the boulder destroyed contained semi-precious metals and was technically within the borders of one of his mining quarries.

You know Mizu, and you know that she can afford this fee-- you also know that there is no world where she would actually let you cover this bill for her, so you simply pay the fine they are asking for and resolve to ask Mizu about it later when she is hearty and healthy. Erden seems upset that you are being forced to pay such a ludicrous fine for what was actually done, but you tell him that’s simply how it is in Ul’dah.

Something seems off about Erden on the way home, but you can’t quite place it. Before you call it a night, you ask if he’s okay-- if everything is okay, and he says yes, and that he just didn’t think Ul’dah was so cut-throat with its finances. So...monopolized and corrupt, he puts it. He calls it a night earlier than you, but you stay up tinkering with the runes your mother gave you more.

You make enough adjustments to Ruin that you are able to recreate Holy Spirit, though with a tremendous amount of aetheric efficiency compared to the original spell. Of course, it is slightly weaker, but over the course of a fight it more than makes up for it. You put your grimoire on the nightstand next to the bed you both share, right next to the choker you bought Erden. You have a long day ahead of you, so you try your best to get a good night’s sleep.