Orphan At The Edge Of The World - 228 The Fool 33

Heath looked up from where he was fiddling with a familiar red coral and onyx decorated patch. “Teet ba-ag”

When it was brought to Orison’s attention, attempts to examine it or its contents nearly threw Heath into a full state of hysterical rebellion. Several minutes of coaxing and a few bribes later, Cray and the young mage were reviewing the contents. Orison set Hunter’s makeshift first spellbook and the much larger grimoire pilfered from the lich’s barrow. There wasn’t much more of interest inside.

Other useful items that may have been there had been lost along the way and Orison decided he’d rather not think about it. After some brisk trading with the kid, he was able to keep the books without a fit being pitched. Satisfied, Heath added some more shinies to his colored pebbles, candy wrappers and a surprising variety of edibles.

Stefen asked the young mage later, “Why did you give the child some lesser gems and coins? Why not a few pieces of sweets or the like?”

Orison replied, “Soon enough, that child will not be as ignorant as he is today. He’ll be smart enough to know that a couple of treats and some trash was a trick but not so much that he’d be able to figure out the true worth of what he traded. By the time he figures that out, he’ll be smart enough to notice all we give and do for him.

“It would be potentially fatal for the kid not to trust us and little loses trust faster than the feeling of being taken advantage of. It doesn’t have to be true and it takes a great deal more maturity than even some adults have to see the big picture. Besides, I don’t know the specifics of where and when he found and picked them up but he deserves something for doing that.”

After flipping through the lich’s grimoire and removing a few pages he immediately burned, he handed the book over to Stefen. “You’re a classically trained wizard, right?”

Stefan said, “The source of my arcane powers was from a devil pact. I have no desire to renew it since it has been broken. I do have some wizard’s training, though.”

Sighing, the young mage handed over the smaller journal style spellbook he’d made for Hunter. “These few spells will be a lot easier to digest if any are in your disciplines. What are they, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Stefen seemed to be slightly confused and said, “Well, I suppose you could consider me a student of sigils as I once was a pact caster…”

Orison said, “I mean within wizardry. What are your magic disciplines… the colors, man… whatever you call them, what two of the magic spectrum do you cast from?”

Suddenly enlightened, Stefen said, “I see what misunderstanding you labor in. Because you are a theurge, you labor under the belief that wizardry, perhaps all other traditions, work similarly?”

From an academic standpoint; druids, priests and pact casters fit into another category. That classification was based off the idea that such magic practices were subordinating. The caster either willingly subordinated themselves or entered into a contest of wills with greater powers, sometimes unwillingly. Casters of this type were not as clearly defined in capability, as the power of a servant caster was greatly reliant on what their supernatural superior was willing and/or able to share.

Then there was the classification of thaumaturgy. Wizards and other outlier magic casters found ways to store spells and magical effects within themselves and items. They weren’t limited by the magical spectrum because their ‘exchange’ was the learning process itself. Because they would forget and need to relearn each time, their souls didn’t take on an alignment to specific magical spectrum.

“They forget the spells but not the theory of their crafting. So, over time, the relearning process streamlines and becomes easier. Through years of study their theory likely grows to the point that some of the spells they cast escape the bounds of spectrum casting and can be retained without affecting their ‘generalist’ nature. Is any of that wrong?” Orison asked.

Stefen blinked owlishly and said, “No. Though, the time it takes to reach such an understanding is long beyond what most mortals are capable. Many prominent figures of our kingdom embraced different forms of undeath for the sole purpose of having more time to become an archmage.”

Orison didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “These poor b******s spent their lives and beyond trying to reach their personal truth of magic. They subconsciously were teasing out parts of the very laws that governed it but ignored that in favor of the effects those laws produced. My gawd, not seeing the forest for the trees.”

Stephen said, “I believe I see what you’re hinting at but these… laws… they are elusive and unable to be studied in any meaningful way directly. The effects of magic are tangible and useful. Having built a lifetime and beyond of frustration, ramming up against the incomprehensible, would you not seek shelter within the tangible and useful yourself?”

The young mage sighed, thinking about the multitude of lives that reached the tier three finish line and never realized that only a step or two further was the tier four starting line. Then it hit him. How were those couple of steps supposed to be crossed?Those ‘two steps’ required a tier three to study something that they had no way of sensing or interacting with. A lifetime of magical study gave the nebulous outline but without an elusive eureka moment or external intervention, no amount of academic study could help.

Tier threes who worked hard could find the outline of the box they were trapped in but had no tools to help them get out themselves. There were ways, however. Through a eureka moment of his own, he realized that those ‘ways’, almost every conceivable one, had powerful supernatural forces with a hand out for tolls or to snatch the gullible up wholesale.

Orison thought furiously, “Give yourself to god. Make a deal with the devil. Take in and therefore be stained by, the alien and unknowable outside of reality. Let’s not forget all the families/organizations that speckle Greater Reality like infected polyps. They only offer exploitation-like exchanges when they can’t outright subordinate and claim you.

“Why did the will of this reality ‘offer’ me even that sliver of law understanding? Nothing I do on this world shy of saving it outright should warrant that kind of reward. I suppose that it could be after I realized myself a tier four and capable of seeing the echoes-”

Stefen had continued speaking, unaware of Orison’s deep thoughts. “Then there are the so called sorcerers and a few other hedge magicians. These people refuse to use any kind of magic save what they steal or produce for themselves. They rarely make it far and are easily suppressed, overwhelmed by the greater and more efficient progress of any other type of caster.”

Orison’s heart fell to his stomach. What Stefen had described was exactly the only type of magic that had been available to him when he first arrived. That is, until he had a weak moment of ‘understanding’ where he ‘realized’ he was tier four and could sense the echoes.

He muttered to himself, “It was false understanding… I’ve been sensing false understanding. Even the tiny bit of law that was granted to me is ultimately a watered down and mercenary understanding of karma! I’m a false tier four and the world is slowly subordinating me through corruption of my understandings! It’s trying to forcefully bring me into alignment with it.

“There’s not a damn thing I’ve been doing lately that a ‘theurge’ of sufficient experience could probably do, according to Stefen’s knowledge. I need to ‘forget’ this crap and return to my roots. The world didn’t give me sh*t except for a slave collar and it’s watching on ambivalently as I slip it on, one exchanged magical effect at a time!”

The dhampir became alarmed when Orison pulled out a dagger and chopped off a finger. Stefen’s dive to take the dagger away was unnecessary as the young mage dropped it to hold the severed finger back to the stub. Cray, drawn by the commotion, came to investigate as well.

“Stand back. I haven’t lost my sh*t. I’m just trying to figure something out,” Orison spat, sounding very much agitated and crazed.

Pushing the things he had ‘learned’ since coming to this world, the young mage relied solely on his own innate healing ability. Predictably, it healed poorly and with lingering problems that wouldn’t go away. He poured his power back in and focused on micro healing.

He understood the structure and pattern of his own body. With the power at his disposal, there shouldn’t have been any issue ‘restoring’ that pattern to a fully functioning whole. Yet, something interfered. It warped the pattern and set it off kilter.

He rested for a few hours, asking for peace. He went so far as to go outside to the farthest extreme of the barrier, erecting a dirt bunker around himself to muffle noise, light and wind. Focusing all of his spiritual sight, magic and intent on the simple task of fixing the healed in flaws of his finger, he bent back into the work.

Going in to the smallest flaw he could ‘see’, he honed in on it at a trickle. The very moment the pattern slipped, he latched onto the force responsible and followed it out. Within no time, to his horror, it was the world will he sensed.

“It has to work off some principle. There’s no way the will could micromanage every tiny, nearly molecular level defiance of itself. That shouldn’t only be beyond its capability, it shouldn’t even WANT to.

“The will passively seeks to elevate itself at every opportunity and only focuses like that on things that threaten its well being. There’s no conceivable way that healing a small flaw in the joining of my cut off finger has any bearing on its safety or impedes its passive contemplation. There’s only one reasonable option left. What I’m trying to do interferes with its resource acquisition and recycling. But how?”

The young mage poured over what he understood on how the world allowed and assisted healing. “The fake karma system! If wounds and whatnot can be fixed with magic alone, then half its system is exposed to be exploitative… That’s not all. Without the little gold bits being added, anything kind of conjuration and certain transmutations that deal with material patterns are warped. We never got a chance to use them much but the durability of the things I ‘fixed’ were crap I bet.

“If I was the world will trying to make this exploitation engine float, I would have leveraged against ‘conservation of energy’ but that would have handicapped the hell out of magic. It wanted magic and for that force to be available to even the more intelligent or ‘wise’ tier twos for, I assume, wider and more potential resource acquisition?

“That part doesn’t matter to me. What ‘does’ is that it used this capitalistic fake karma system. Wait, I’ve ‘earned’ some of it. It has to honor that or it invalidates the system.”

He bent to the task of fixing his finger again. This time, when the forced slip of pattern was about to happen, he threw a few gold specks, not into the magic but at the force trying to stop it from happening. It paused briefly before trying to twist again. Orison threw a great deal more which stuttered the will’s automated opposition. He completed the healing and his finger was back to normal.

Suddenly, it reverted back to a flawed state as the force returned. It didn’t matter to Orison. He packaged up the entire experience and ‘sacrificed’ it in a wizardly version of a Presto cast and sent it along up into the echoing blanket of magic.

An invisible contagion spread. The cost of healing a finger equaled the ‘grace’ equivalent of a small cadre of divinely cursed undead. An exploitative world will wanted more not less. So, the new standard would always favor the higher cost. Many terrible things happened.

Every god tied to the world will had to instantly bear the new cost. Lesser gods and demigods became mortal and succumbed to the limitations of lifespan. More powerful gods dropped from the mid and upper limits of tier five to demigod status. But that is not where it ended.

Curses and seals broke all over the gigantic planar world. People who had been saved by clerical magic, suddenly died. Redeemed souls who were subordinated by the world will shifted from ‘good’ to ‘evil’. The domino effect continued spreading out for all of a half second before reality froze.

Still automated, the world will’s defense tried to push the backlash onto Orison. The young mage was in no way responsible for any of it. He had only healed a finger and submitted the bill to equally apply to everyone else. It didn’t stop him from being slotted for complete physical and spiritual annihilation but the world will had to stop its own automated process from completing that or it would perish as well from a very real supernatural karmic backlash.

The will was helpless but to pay a massive cost in resources to realign things properly. Because its own fake karma was inflated to worthlessness, it owed a debt to Orison for the young mage’s deeds in the undead kingdom by a default of the subordinate god who issued the curse using its fake karma.

The will reset the karmic cost of its system back to a reasonable exchange rate and otherwise didn’t change much. A great deal of harm was done and not much of it could be undone but new gods would rise where older ones fell and new lives were being born everyday. The fallen were once again redeemed but spiritually traumatized and doubting. In time, some would ‘fall’ again but not to eternal damnation. Instead, they would be freed as Sammy once had been.

As time unfroze, the will focused in on Orison, intent to ‘kick him out’. Such an action would undoubtedly kill the young mage regardless. As soon as the will focused on him, however, Orison called in his debt.

“For services rendered, I ask in return to be considered a native outsider while I am here. In return for the remainder of your fake karma, I request to be exempted from its system.” the young mage said smugly, completely unaware of the myriad ills wrought in the aftermath of his finger heal.

He was slapped back with a supernatural version of a gag order, unable to reveal HIS exploit of the will’s fake karma exploit. The young mage took it to the metaphorical chin with a kind of good sportsmanship acceptance. Afterwards, he went back to business as usual.

Immediately, things had changed drastically for him, however. He couldn’t feel the echoes anymore. After consolidating recognized and accepted concepts, he felt himself ‘step’ down from five back to three and the not altogether fake feeling of touching on laws disappeared but the soul remembered the sensation and the hardest wall of mortal kind had a crack in it for the young mage.

As a secondary consequence, Cray also took a ‘step’ backwards. Seeing it in another, Orison realized it wasn’t actually all bad. The step may have been demolished but the baptism that had came with the vanished steps didn’t actually go away. The extra touch of ‘realness’ thus lent remained within them. Orison had a sneaking suspicion that it was one of many costs that the world will had been forced to eat.

He had no idea and would have been terrified of possible retribution. He wouldn’t have been wrong, despite the world will being incredibly ambivalent and impersonal. It might not strike out in a wasteful emotion like wrath or indulge in the desire for revenge but it’s servants that had been gouged deeply by the young mage’s actions weren’t immune to the pettier side of human emotions or the inherent instinct in many things to seek to hurt something when it had been hurt.

Over the next few hours, the group was puzzled over occasional tremors in the ground. Had it been night time, they would have seen things that would have scared their souls loose from their bodies. But ultimately, the worst had passed by that evening.

The next morning, they were awakened by muffled noises. Stirring to investigate, they witnessed a slew of offensive druidic magic and a few servants of nature assaulting their domed barrier or trying to dig under it to find that it was a full sphere. Seeing the contorted looks of madness on their faces, no one was willing to ask them why they were doing it as that would require them to exit the only thing keeping them from being ripped to shreds by every force of nature the revived druids were calling.

That wasn’t all they were calling. They were calling other druids as well. The fresh set had a different plan, however. They were casting their power outward to the west. Seeing what they were doing, the ‘locals’ joined their remaining power to the new group’s.