Aster Fall, Ch 21: A New Weapon (Patreon)

The essence from the pill was a small, icy star. It struggled in his grasp, but it was a single point compared to the seventeen that were already in his blood.

It had no chance against the force he exerted against it.

The essence rose up into the air as the pill around it crumbled, turning to dust that blew away.

With a jerk of will, he pulled it toward himself. It flew toward him, its color changing from ice to crystal blue as it hit his body and sank into his blood.

A moment later, it fused into the network of essence stars that were already there.

Instead of immediately turning into an 18th star, the essence diffused outward through the ones that he already had, strengthening them.

The network became a little stronger, the resonance between the stars a little louder.

After a moment, he felt a new 18th star starting to form on its own. It was different from the other times, and not instant.

The feeling of strength stabilized as the star rested there, half-formed. It gave him the sense of something just born that was able to grow if he fed it more essence.

As the dust of the pill blew away, he looked down at where the pill had been, rubbing his chin.

It was strange, but he was pretty sure he knew what was going on.

Each time he’d gained a new star, it had been because he’d just killed an Outsider and then pulled their essence from them.

That was one path, what he might call the path of life essence.

This pill was something else. The essence in it had been touched by the Outsider, converted to whatever form this was, but underneath that it was some type of distilled energy.

When he'd absorbed it, he'd converted it to his own type of essence, which was why it had turned the color of his crystal flame.

The new star that was starting to form in his blood was interesting...evidence of a path he hadn’t considered.

This was the second path, something like natural essence.

Maybe it was the essence of the herbs from the pill, or of the ice attribute elements that made it up.

Whatever it was, it was supporting his growth, rather than adding to it directly.

Perhaps this was how Outsiders grew in power without killing one another.

He studied the difference in his essence stars, deciding after a moment that it had strengthened him by five percent or so.

It wasn’t as good as killing an Outsider and taking their essence directly, but if he could find enough of these pills, or figure out how to make them...then perhaps he could advance his essence base that way.

The information was more useful than the strength from the pill.

He'd thought it might be life essence at first, but he supposed it would have been strange for the Outsider to put its life essence in a pill, if it were even possible.

It would have required sacrificing part of itself and giving it to a minion. That wasn’t likely.

Outsiders were selfish.

The more he thought about it, the more interested he was in how these pills were made and how much he could strengthen his essence by eating them.

The alchemical pills he’d heard about before were different. They focused on healing, restoring mana or stamina, boosting Strength and Constitution, and so on.

High-tier Alchemists could supposedly create pills and elixirs that permanently increased your attributes, but he hadn’t seen them yet.

He would have to look more into alchemy if he had time.

However the Outsider was making these pills, it seemed like he was handing them out to his followers. That implied a level of intelligence, but it wasn’t clear what the goal was.

It was also hard to believe the Outsider was giving out these pills to save its minions. That showed a level of concern that went against everything he knew about Outsiders.

Greed, power, vindictiveness...certainly, but not concern for others.

The most critical question was what level the Outsider was and what abilities it had. All he could say right now was that it was probably stronger than the wyvern.

He brushed the remains of the pill away from his table as he turned his attention to the array of crafting materials in front of him.

He picked up the scorched mithril bracer, turning it from side to side as he examined it. The sorcerer had been wearing it, but it wasn’t possible to tell what the enchantment had been.

It could have been offensive, defensive, or something stranger, like a training aid that attuned his energy more easily to ice.

Whoever had placed the original enchantment hadn’t bound it well to the material. Now, it was just a blank piece of mithril.

The question was what he needed it to be. He needed something that was made for him.

A bracer was a good idea, since it would leave his hands free to cast. The Staff of Withering Stasis was powerful, but it always felt like it was getting in the way when he held it.

Perhaps something that would help him channel Starfire more quickly...or that held a spell he couldn’t create directly, like Altey’s ice wand.

A battle artifact. Something to help him kill wyverns.

Ideas began to flicker through his mind, combining into runic patterns and then swirling away again, as his eyes went distant.

The last weeks of practice had significantly bolstered his enchanting skills, especially as he worked his way through the simple runes and made them his own. There were only five of those left that he didn’t understand.

All of them were focused on illusions, appearance, sound, temperature, and other things for daily life. Learning them had pushed him well along the path to being a basic Illusionist, at least when it came to crafting items.

They had taught him a lot about combining runes as well.

Everything he'd learned from the amulet poured through his mind as he considered the best way to bind an enchantment and to bolster it, as well as how to design something more complex than he ever had before.

After a while, a piece of chalk appeared in his hand and he began to sketch on the work table, creating a runic diagram.

---

Sam’s hands flickered as he pulled the portable forge from his dimensional vest and placed it in front of him. To his right, the wyvern core, mithril bars, and some other items were gathered.

The runic pattern he'd created for the bracer was laid out on the table in front of him.

He’d spent hours working on it, refashioning it into distinct parts, considering what he needed it to do, and then ripping it apart and rebuilding it again.

Each time, he considered how the enchantment was built from its smaller parts, unified together to a greater purpose.

That was the single most useful concept he'd learned from the illusion amulet.

As best he could tell, the difference between an Advanced enchantment and an Expert one wasn't in the quality of the individual runes.

It was that an Expert enchantment was a complex network, binding together multiple patterns to a more powerful effect.

There were some other details, including the level of the Binding pattern and the support structure for the runes, but he was fairly sure that he was on the right track.

An Expert enchantment wasn't just powerful...it was artful, blending concepts and building on them.

That was also why he needed to use a better method to engrave it than he ever had before. The plan for how to do that was hanging in his mind.

In the beginning, he wanted the bracer to do many different things, but as he continued to work on it, he realized that he was only diluting the potential of the enchantment.

It would be better for it to do one thing well.

He had the mithril rings and the blank amulet to use for other effects, once he was done with this.

In the end, he’d boiled the concept of the bracer down to a single concept.

Star.

The pattern that was laid out on the table was complex, but the intent was simple.

At the heart of it, there was the single rune for star that he was using to focus Starfire.

All around that, there were buffering, stabilizing, clarity, storage, and enhancement patterns, as well as an ornate rune pattern with five key runes: crystal, flame, focus, construct, and projection.

Those runes surrounded the central star rune in five gleaming points, marking out its arms.

Prominent sections of the pattern were dedicated to focusing his crystal flame and to conceptualizing runic constructs, but they all fell under that single concept.

The illusion amulet had come in handy there, giving him the necessary runes for attuning energy, projecting images, and constructing models.

If the bracer worked as he hoped, it would be attuned to his crystal flame and to that single concept of star.

It would also be able to store some of his essence as charges, giving him an offensive artifact if he were out of energy, one that was better than a simple wand.

On top of that, by channeling his essence through the pattern, he would empower the star rune at the center. The rune would then coalesce, allowing him to manipulate it quickly.

He'd designed it as both a weapon and a training aid, one that would help him to reinforce his knowledge of star.

It would reflect his understanding of the rune back at him as he shaped it again and again, engraving its meaning in his mind.

He’d left a bit of space at the center of the pattern so that he could add to the star rune if he learned a more advanced form of it.

The more he used it, the better his understanding of star would become, and the more powerful the artifact would be.

The flame pattern around the outside would let him use the charges directly too, like a miniature version of his Starfire spell.

He’d debated adding a defensive shield, but he already had one of those in the Amulet of Swirling Winds and it would have altered the purpose of the bracer too much.

He was planning to use the mithril rings to make lifesaving artifacts after this, similar to what the sorcerer had. They would trigger when an overwhelming force threatened the life of the wearer.

He needed a bit of the mithril from the bars for his bracer, but he could melt down the rest to make more rings, so that everyone had one.

He reached out and picked up the wyvern core, examining it before he placed it next to the mithril bracer.

Then he picked up the bracer itself, holding it steady between his hands. Crystal flame poured through his arms as it began flowing into the material.

His awareness sank into the metal, flowing through its structure as he searched for impurities and burned them away. The metal began to glow, brightening to a silver-cerulean glow.

Mithril was a complex and extremely durable metal. The damage from the battle had added some flaws to its structure, but they weren't significant.

The structure reformed itself as he worked.

It would take him a little while to purify it for his purposes and to erase all traces of what had been here before.

---

Hours passed as the sun outside set over the valley. The sunset was visible through the window, which faced to the west, toward Highfold.

In the distance, the mountains towered, bringing an early evening to the valley as the sun sank behind them.

Aemilia and Altey had moved the table over near the window, watching the road that led away from the inn as they kept an eye out for Jeric and Krana.

Aemilia’s eyes turned distant, gleaming with golden light from time to time as she looked for where her husband had gone.

On the other side of the room, the corner of the room around Sam burned with flickers of crystal flame and heat that washed outward, crashing against a translucent ward that he’d erected.

If it hadn’t been there, it was likely he would have burned down the inn.

He’d moved all of the wooden items out of the area around him and collapsed the portable table, bringing it down to knee height as he sat on the floor behind it.

As for the floor, he’d had to take a few extra minutes to engrave a ward on that as well, so he didn’t burn it.

The area around him was filled with crystal flame, swirling in a vast spiral around the inside of the ward.

In his hands, there was the bracer and his stylus. The bracer gleamed a bright silver-blue as it absorbed the energy from his aura, which was constantly pouring into it.

Carefully, Sam inscribed a line on the bracer. Then he turned it gently to reach the inside and did the same again.

The stylus glowed with a brilliant flare of crystal light as his aura poured through it, the cutting force reaching into the center of the mithril as he engraved the rune into the internal layers of the material as well.

The runic pattern was nearly complete. It wrapped around the bracer from every angle, flowing through its inner and outer layers.

The material was better than anything he’d ever used before, and the amount of effort he was putting into the creation reflected that.

The bracer absorbed his aura like a desert, its structure continuing to change as the essence in it increased.

The wyvern core was embedded on the surface, near the back part of the bracer that would be closer to his elbow. He'd also mixed in a number of materials to enhance the mithril, including sacred Earth mana and several types of gems.

Normally, an Ice and Wind-element core would have conflicted with Fire, but Crystal Flame wasn’t really a Fire enchantment. The rune for Flame was not the same as the element of Fire.

You could have an Ice Flame, or a Star Flame, or an Earth Flame. It was a matter of projected energy.

Instead of conflicting, the core added stability, acting as a cooling force that brought extra clarity and crystallization to the focus enchantment.

Wind wasn’t a problem either, thanks to its typical habit of increasing the energy of other things.

It was past the middle of the night and nearing the small hours of the morning when he finally added the last lines to the enchantment, finishing the durability and self-repair runes, as well as the binding pattern that pulled it all together.

Without hesitating, as he completed the last line and set down his stylus, he reached out with an expectant hand and touched the activation sigil that brought it all together.

A liquid wave of crystal flame surged through the runes and raced around the bracer.

Instead of filling the lines with mana, he’d attuned the bracer to himself and every line of the enchantment was filled with condensed crystal flame and his essence.

The enchantment pattern burned outward from the bracer, forming a three-dimensional sphere in the air that was made from crystal blue flames. All across the surface, the runes from the bracer began to appear, lighting up one by one.

Lines of burning essence shot across the space inside the sphere, connecting the runes to the ones on the opposite side.

Then a line of energy shot out from that side, connecting back to another part of the sphere.

Before long, an intricate network of crystal flame was burning in the sphere, the connections between the runes forming hundreds of lines inside.

At the heart of the sphere, surrounded by all of those lines, the star rune floated in space. Around it, the other five key runes formed the tips of a star, giving it a frame.

The sphere spun around the runes, feeding energy into them.

Sam’s eyes traced the connections, one to another, as he made sure that there were no flaws in the pattern.

Then his will swept into the sphere, flowing through it as he poured even more crystal flame and essence into the pattern.

The sphere began to burn brighter, flickers of flame pouring out of it, and then it shrank, reducing swiftly as it collapsed back down into the bracer.

The runic lines etched themselves more deeply into the surface as his essence filled them, finishing the final step in the process. The bracer glowed as bright as a star as the pattern finished etching itself into it.

Then the pattern faded away, invisibly embedded into the surface of the bracer, which glowed with a bright cerulean crystal light that rippled over the silvery mithril.

A chime rang out in Sam’s mind as a thousand small bubbles of experience flooded into his body, floating through his meridians as they sank into him.

An ornate, silver-bordered notification appeared, its style archaic and authoritative.

Congratulations, Scion. You have created your first Expert enchantment.

You receive bonus Experience for your Enchanter profession.

You gain 50,000 Class Experience.

You are now a Level 30 Enchanter.

For creating an Expert enchantment before reaching the Expert tier, you have demonstrated significant ability.

Your Skill: Essence Control is upgraded to become the Ability: Essence Control, granting you increased effectiveness.

It is now assigned to your Innate Abilities.

Your Ability: Essence Control has reached the Expert tier.

A whirlwind of energy from the World Law poured into his body as he felt the spark of the ability flaring to life in his mind, resonating through his meridians and bones.

At the same time, a new awareness poured into his mind and raced along his nerves, deepening his ability to control essence directly.

In many ways, it was a confirmation of what he’d already been doing, but he could feel an added depth to the ability that hadn’t been there before, making it easier than ever to manipulate essence.

It took a little while for the whirlwind of energy to fade away, and when it did, peace returned to his small corner of the room.

The bracer he’d just created floated up from his hand, hanging in the air in front of him as he examined it.

Starflame Bracer (Expert, Unique)

[Enchantments: Focus of Crystal Flame, Runic Construction, Starflame.

Focus of Crystal Flame: The enchantments inlaid into this bracer focus the unique energy of crystal flame, assisting the wearer in channeling it into a runic construct.

Runic Construction: Assists the wearer in training their energy to form runic constructs, clearing the mind to focus on the forces of nature.

Starflame: Releases a focused spell of Starflame. The drain on the bracer’s charge is variable, from 1 point to 20.

Material: Purified Mithril.

Attributes: +6 Aura, +6 Intelligence.

Charges: 200/200.

Duration: Permanent. Attuned.]

Sam looked over the information and nodded, satisfied with the result.

Now, he had a weapon of his own, rather than just relying on combusting auras.

He reached out and slid it onto his left arm, where it clicked with a resonance that he felt in his soul as it secured itself, shrinking slightly to fit.

He looked up, glancing around the room, but his father and Krana hadn’t returned yet. When he touched the amulet on his chest, he sensed their presence, still distant in Highfold.

His mother and Altey were asleep, but from the unlined look on Aemilia’s features, she wasn't worried yet. She'd been watching them all day.

There was just enough time left for him to catch some sleep before dawn. In the morning, he could work on the rings and some healing scrolls.

There was still a month before the festival, but that wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things.

If he wanted to survive the festival and explore the ruins, and clear out the Outsider that was living there, he was going to need some more levels.

The same was true for his family. They all needed to be stronger to ensure their safety in the world.

That meant some hunting expeditions would be necessary...up into the peaks surrounding the valley where there were monsters to fight.

Perhaps even more wyverns.

The Guardian Star flickered on his hand as it sensed the Flaw, pulling him toward it like a void in the night sky.