Orphan At The Edge Of The World - 265 The Magician 23

“For your own sake, remember we all start as the fool. We never stop being the fool but most forget that. They get a touch of tangible power and think themselves the master of all. Those never cease to be anything BUT the fool.

“You are aware of your foolishness. And for that, I give you praise… Not wallowing in that sad realization, you have moved on and into the path of the magician. You have seen that the power at the heart of the magician is to make illusion a reality and to turn reality into illusion. The realization that comes with that is both terrifying and intriguing, is it not? Truth and lie, order and chaos, it’s all far more subjective than people can easily imagine.

“It is the fate of the magician to climb the Tower of Ruin. You have delved deeply into the heart of the magician’s power far more times than you know. Because of this, your key and tower have become far more than metaphor and so has its accompanying ruin. Many cycles pass and you still languish in its grip. My last act as your teacher is to give you a word of advice that you may choose to accept or ignore.

“For the Tower of Ruin to become the House of Wisdom, you must overcome the ‘dark night of the soul’. That part of your path must be walked alone because it is a path only found within. Do not fight ruin, for it is not YOUR ruin.

“All is impermanent. Ruin is only the transition between one creation and another. That which has a beginning, has an end. That which has no beginning has no end. Find where they meet and erase the distinction. If you succeed, you will become endless and you will need fear ruin no longer.”

***

Orison slowly stirred to wakefulness with pain in his side. There was a body curled against him that faintly made him think of Lily but also not. Opening his eyes, he saw short red hair on the back of a head desperately wrapping itself in his over robe. It was Patrick from the underworld version of Al’s Earth.

The poor guy’s state of undress, as well as Orison’s own underneath the soul bound robe, was nothing to overreact about. Patrick was obviously cold and there was nothing provocative about the way the redheaded young man was clinging to him. Before waking him up, Orison scanned the young man with spirit sight. Patrick was more than healthy and with the subconscious queue still fresh, the young mage wondered how he never noticed the connection before.

He muttered to himself, “You guys got it all wrong. I don’t know why Lily went about it in such an around about way but no wonder she was so evasive about the search for her ‘sister’. She was trying to find fragments of herself.”

Patrick sat up like he’d been shocked and stared sightlessly ahead for a few moments. His head was a mess of tangled thoughts and memories that took awhile to piece together enough to speak coherently. During that time, Orison assessed himself and the situation to find a couple of pleasant surprises and a great deal more disappointments.

They were inside the borrow within the buffer zone between the undead empire and the bugbear tribal spots. It was the last place the old cabin had been set down with all its functions in tact, including the ‘slide of time’ field. With all the mixed up causality Orison had performed, there might be a number of reasons why they would end up in that specific place.

Although the cabin hadn’t returned to him, the young mage did see a number of partial and whole goods, ranging from ration bars to special alcohols, in his space. It would be the stuff consumed by old companions that hadn’t made it to the higher dimensions or that had been stolen by natives. There were a lot of other random and interesting things in there as well but most of it was temporary. One or two reality jumps and the majority would be gone.

“What’s up, ‘P’ man? Your brain caught up yet?” Orison said with a reassuring smile.

Patrick looked lost in more ways than one. “N-not really. None of this makes any sense.”

The young mage stuffed one of the two triangular spacial devices into Patrick’s hand. “This is a spacial device and inside are quite a few different things that look partially eaten or drank. Trust me on this. It’s all clean and wholesome but the containers have been compromised. They need to be consumed within a few weeks. “Go slow on the stuff in the right-hand corner. It’s the good stuff but too much good stuff at once can kill you. You got that?”

The redheaded young man said, “I don’t know how to… open… it.”

Orison muttered to himself, “That’s right. Patrick doesn’t have the magical gift.”

Addressing the young man directly, he added, “The bars that are in the special foil and the alcohol in the blue/red bottles, eat a nibble of those or take a sip. Then, push what you can feel flowing in you towards the device.”

After a couple of awkward attempts, in a wondering and awe filled state, Patrick did as he was instructed. The guy was clothed, fed and slightly inebriated in short order.

“Do that a few more days in a row and you should force open enough vestigial magic channels to do it on your own as long as there’s ambient magic around,” Orison said.

“I can become a mage!?” Patrick asked, slightly hyperventilating.

Orison tapped his chin thoughtfully. “You can be an arcanist. There’s a withered reserve in you as well. So, becoming a wizard isn’t out of the question with time and patience. Oh, that’s right. You don’t know what those are in the way I’m using them.

“The first only has some channels but has to rely on a power source or ambient magic to cast. The second has a reserve but refills it from the ambient magic around them, binding it into mental storage as partially precast spells. Most of that might not be important depending on your next decision.

“Don’t feel too rushed but I need to know within the next couple of days. Do you want to become a part of a being larger than yourself or do you want to be dropped off some place where you can thrive as yourself. Don’t be too swift in discarding the first option.

“I can tell you from firsthand experience that you don’t cease to be. You just merge with them and become a part of how they perceive the world. You’ll influence them and be a real part of them.”

“The other option is to follow me through some potentially dangerous experiences and being cut loose. I’d let you tag along but you can’t keep up and situations I’ll be potentially facing in the near future are too dicey for me to guarantee your safety to any reasonable degree.”

While Patrick dealt with that and asked a few clarifying questions about his current and possible future situations, Orison was attuning spiritual learning. The young mage was interrupted from deep trance and there was a murderous amount of backlog to deal with. Tying a portion of his healing soul’s computational power to passive and continuous comprehension of the laws hidden within the things the tower consumed would one day get him out of danger. If the key popped out before then, he would deep trance to death.

In a surprising turn of events, Patrick said after a short hour of consideration, “Will it hurt?”

The young mage studied his face. “The merge? No. It won’t feel like much of anything, really.”

With watery eyes, the redheaded young man said, “Then I choose that. I don’t feel strong enough to fight against things anymore.”

Orison sighed but didn’t comment on that.

Instead, he said, “Alright. I need your help laying out a circle. If you don’t mind, you can keep your clothes and stuff but you don’t need the storage device or what’s inside.”

Over the next hour, as dusk slid over the land, the young mage had Patrick help him set up a summoning circle. The messages Duran and Medea had left in his spiritual seat were vague and mostly well wishes but the summoning circle was clear enough. He wouldn’t know the entity’s true name he was summoning after the ritual was complete but that didn’t bother him at all.

Playing that side of the summoner’s game was dangerous and followed strange rules that were hard to follow. He could understand them better if he internalized their comprehension but that would be structure poison to his own version of summoning. Despite the benefits of calling on beings with their own power to bear, he’d stick with ones made from his own comprehensions. They didn’t induce debts.

Looking at the complete circle, Patrick said, “What do I do now?”

“If there’s anything you’d like to do or say while still completely you, now’s the time.” the young mage replied.

Ears turning a little red, Patrick said, “Could I have a little privacy for a few minutes?”

Chuckling, Orison agreed and walked the perimeter of their burrow. There was a set of tracks that likely belonged to bugbears but they were a few weeks old and no other signs were visible outside of small animals. He focused on that and pretended he didn’t hear the name that Patrick shouted out before crying and numbing personal sorrows.

When Orison felt a ripple of spacial energy, he returned to see that Patrick had finished the ritual without him. The only marker that the young redheaded man had left behind were a few empty wrappers and bottles. That didn’t mean that Orison was alone in the burrow, however.

Daniel was standing in the circle. “Would you mind opening this thing. I really hate getting the same treatment as demons and devils.”

Weakly smiling, Orison cut the containment part of the circle and said, “I hear you on that.”

“I’ve been told that we’ve had many interactions with you in other branches of possibilities. Mind giving me a hand shake while I take a quick drink from my pitcher? I’d like to experience them,” he said.

Not seeing harm in it, the young mage shook the unassuming but competent man’s hand. After the first sip from the pitcher, Daniel’s eyes widened and the circle they were standing in flared to life. With a blur of scenery, they were standing above a clear pool with mud for miles around it. Vital water boiled and evaporated as Daniel ceaselessly chugged from his pitcher.

Orison was excited at first. He dug around through his possessions for the device needed to isolate the positive energy plane rip below but saw nearly all of it invalidate, canceled out by a breach of causality.

Sensing a need that aligned with its own, a slightly emotionless voice said, “Deply Rook for resource acquisition?”

The young mage waited for a few minutes to answer as he waited for Daniel’s pitcher version of a ‘keg stand’ to slow down. “Yes, deploy… Rook.”

A glass chess piece that was fashioned to look like a simple fort style castle fell out of his desolate realm, through his layered spaces and into the vital water below. What happened after that was a bit of a mystery to the young mage. He found himself wrapped up in his over robe as several consecutive pulses of power with a strong scent of decaying vegetation washed over him.

At some point, the rook had returned to the chess set locked behind the Tower of Ruin’s door. It had went unnoticed by Orison. He had went from being bombarded with shamanistic reincarnation magic to basking in the ripples of several ‘step’ rings forming around Daniel.

Within the ambient ripples were ‘living’ examples of laws the young mage was in the process of comprehending. He immediately sunk into light trance to make the most of it. A couple of days later, the remnant echoes of what had happened cleared from the environment to the point that Orison could no longer sense them. Within his desolate realm, a translucent and illusionary eighth ring was forming.

As he focused on the outside world more keenly, the young mage’s spirit sight caught the after image of fifty-four rings turning into layered shells that sunk down into Daniel. It seemed that the unassuming man was visibly reliving the experience a few more times to gain some extra insight from it. The smile on his face gave Orison cold chills. There was something broken about it.

With a desperate look in his eyes, still wearing a wide and eerie smile, the man croaked out, “Call me back.”

Daniel’s body turned to dust and the powerful soul within darted into the unknown.

The young mage muttered, “What the hell, Daniel!? Am I supposed to wait here with your water pitcher for a couple of years to make sure you’re reborn somewhere? What, and hope your new body can handle being yanked through the nothing place my key uses?… I got things I want to do, man.”

In exasperation, he prepared to call once immediately but was stopped by a communication the moment he touched the abandoned pitcher.

The slightly emotionless, almost mechanical voice said, “Request permission to acquire artifact.”

Orison frowned. “Permission denied.”

Instantly, a flurry of activity took place. The chess case fractured and broke releasing all the pieces. Orison noticed that the set wasn’t complete to begin with but after the disappearance of most of the remaining pieces, there wasn’t much left. A frosted knight, one clear and one frosted rook along with four pawns stayed. He noticed that among the rooks that left was the one that had taken the positive energy rift.

Orison smiled nastily. “You think it’s that easy to swallow up benefits from me and then leave? We’ll see… Either one of you remaining rooks capable of holding that rift?”

The voice of the knight that had saved him once before said, ��They are not sentient. The dark rook is capable. What needs to be done?”

The young mage said, “It may or may not work but place the rook up to the key in the door.”

The frosted knight turned into armored form and picked up the rook, following Orison’s request. The young mage focused and pulled using the connections the pieces had. It worked smoothly. However, after the rook had acquired the rift, it and the remaining pieces began transforming, losing their chess piece appearance.

The young mage said, “Gather up the sentient pieces and touch them to the key.”

The knight picked up two clear pawns that were growing and changing even as the knight did so. As soon as they were touching the key, Orison pulled hard enough to almost completely dislodge the key. A sense of danger erupted from the tower as it began spilling out more than the young mage could handle for long.

Orison willed the key back in and by the time the tower’s trembling stopped, it was the key and himself that were faintly trembling instead. It would be some time before the key could be used for more than a flick of use safely. The young mage didn’t feel up to much either but tried to call Daniel back to his pitcher, making the key whine in faint protest.

Daniel’s soul hovered around the pitcher for a brief moment before it would rush off again but the young mage grabbed and held it with intent. “Are either of the pawns that aren’t sentient, capable of being used as a vessel for an early tier five soul?”

The knight responded, “One is capable but not suitable.”

It ended up being unneeded. Being forced to hover close to his conduit, Daniel was able to draw on its power to rebirth. While Orison watched him grow from a nearly microscopic meatball into a person, the knight returned to ‘recharge’ mode after asking for and receiving Orison’s permission.

Nearly an hour later, Daniel had reached the size of a five year old child. The young mage’s attention was drawn away from that event by the cracking of hardened mud nearby. An older woman in rags was released from within.

Raspy and somewhere between terrified and joyous, she said, “You are plain ruthless, young man… I don’t suppose you have something suitable for me to wear on you?”

Orison looked at the woman dubiously and said, “It depends. Are you going to attack me or attempt to steal from me or my friend?”

She seemed to hover in indecision for a moment and then said, “I oath upon my core to do no harm to you or anyone present except in self defense until a year and a day have passed… No worries. I only intend to stay long enough to catch my bearings.”

The young mage dug into his space for something suitable for her to wear and a few items of convenience. In the process of handing them over, the woman raised the hand she was reaching out for the clothes with and blasted out a concentrated beam of light, puncturing through the over robe like it was paper.