145. From Darkness, Light III (Patreon)

With the ritual’s result still pulsing far up in the sky, the sun finally had the opportunity to reveal the truth of the surroundings.

The Everstorm Towers – he counted twelve distinct rooftops from his position, but he was sure that there were at least two more towers as he caught glimpses of bright colors over the dark bushes of the topmost terrace – were built on a series of ring terraces which were slowly rising in level as you progress upwards. Why his Tower was called Black Rose was apparent immediately and when coupled with the dark green stone that was used for the construction of the incredibly tall structure itself, his Tower looked like a stalk of a soon-to-blossom black rose. All of the visible roof domes were seemingly created out of colored glass, every single shaped like different flower buds that just seemed ready to bloom.

Incredible as the view of mage-made structures was, Tercius’ attention returned to the nature around.

The gigantic lake was the real beauty of this place. Held in entire hills of cleanly washed and highly polished grey and black stone, the deep, clear waters were warmed by the sunlight. Tercius wondered how good the stone was for construction and he just had to look below his feet to get his answer.

Coming to stand on the edge of the ritual ground in the far eastern distance Tercius saw the water rushing away into dark and jagged cracks and caverns. The rains and waters of this place were, Tercius guessed, major contributors to Hippotion's massive water flow. Perhaps even the source itself.

Tercius tentatively peeked over the edge. It must be at least eighty meters down… he thought as he looked at the placid water surface of the lake.

While the omnipresent darkness had reigned, Tercius had honestly thought that all of the Everstorm Towers were situated on a rising hill. Yet whoever was responsible for the construction of the Everstorm Towers had obviously taken a page out of Grand-Master Tergaron's book on structure building. Where the Repository, a Pyramid already massive on its own, was situated on top of the even larger three-stepped Pyramid of Tergaron, all of the Everstorm Towers were built on an even bigger Tower.

Although, now that he thought about it, can this base below be called a Tower considering that its diameter was far bigger than its height?

He wasn’t sure that he could remember strict definitions of those words, nor indeed if he ever knew something like that…

In any case, half of the ritual grounds were built hanging outside of the massive base, much like a balcony. A balcony eighty or ninety meters over the lake’s waters… As he kept looking down, Tercius felt as if the ground under his feet was not solid anymore. He had the urge to go to the other half of the ritual grounds, an imperative to do so as soon as possible, but he resisted.

Besides the danger his body was warning him of, right where he stood was also the greatest sense of freedom that he had felt in a while. It was as if a set of great wings were on his back and he was ready to leap and fly.

The ritual grounds behind him were rapidly being filled with long tables and chairs and plates filled with food, all conjured from thin Amulets.

The ritual, Tercius came to overhear, would last for about forty-eight hours, and it had been enacted because the storm had not broken up in the proper schedule. Gael had told Tercius and Mistress Kalina, back when they arrived, that once a week the storm would weaken enough for the sun to breakthrough. The storm didn't weaken on its own for the past eight days, something which was known to happen from time to time, so the Magi present took it upon themselves to help it along.

Tercius closed his eyes, ignoring the noise behind him, as he went over everything he learned in the past few hours, everything he experienced, saw…

Perdinar’s tutelage had been instrumental to Tercius’ small part in ritual participation as a “Source”, yet what in hindsight stood out the most to Tercius was not what he learned of rituals – although incredibly important – but something else. Something suspicious.

As Tercius used Visualization to peer into the immediate past with far more focus than he could achieve without the skill, he saw someone who was present for the ritual, who stood around the edges of the ritual grounds as still as a stone statue and, as far as he could tell, didn’t participate in any way.

The Keeper of Everstorm Towers. Master Kayonga.

The stout old man had stood strictly outside of the ritual grounds and he had kept a large staff in his hands, back turned to the ritual all the while. That image was clearly seared into his mind, the Visualization picking it up and bringing it to focus without much issue.

The behavior of the Keeper was somehow suspicious… Which was most likely why he could remember the scene so well.

It was not long after that that Tercius found another who had behaved in a similar way to the Keeper. At some later point in the ritual, he had observed the back of an old woman, her long, white hair reaching the small of her back. She had even been standing near where he was standing right now and she too had a staff in both of her hands, seemingly primed to strike with it.

It could be just his imagination, memories, and skill playing with him, but as things stood Tercius had a strong impression that the seniors were almost expecting something to come from out of the storm.

Looking at them both now, sitting at the head table while chatting, laughing, eating, and drinking, it would seem that whatever they had guarded against was no longer an immediate threat.

Curious…

Mistress Helfira waved him over, miming for him to take a seat and eat.

Tercius obliged and as he ate his fill in silence, the conversation flowed around him. He didn’t speak, but he did listen.

Magik was the language most here spoke, so Tercius took his time catching new words and trying to see if he could find some meaning out of context.

Talks of experiments with spells, potions, and enchantments were prevalent, and he even came to find out what it was that usually attacked the ritual grounds.

“Do you know what these Night Terrors are?” Tercius asked quietly of Gael, who was sitting next to him.

Gael blinked at Tercius for a moment or two and, likely as he realized that someone had asked him a question, almost beamed a smile while still chewing a mouthful of some well-roasted fowl.

"How do I… Well, I guess that they are some kind of flying lizards," Gael said. "Only where a lizard has four legs, these have two normal legs at the back and a set of these… half-wings half-legs at the front. They fold them, somehow. Night Terrors are small in size, thin, and maybe as long as one of these bigger plates. Oh, but that if you don't count their wings and tail. Perhaps… double the plate for those? Their teeth and claws are wickedly sharp, but the true problem is that they like to attack in mass, with dozens if not hundreds of them at a time."

“I see,” Tercius nodded. “And why exactly are they called Night Terrors?”

“They like to silently swoop in on their prey from above, almost always using their sharp teeth and claws to attack and shred the neck or face, and the only time they attack is when there is no sunlight, so that’s why. My Mentor told me that their eyes can somehow see in the darkness and too much light bothers them,” Gael explained. “They are also highly sensitive to mana and that’s why they attack during the rituals. Some of them even develop a bit of resistance to mana, if you can believe it!”

Tercius perked up at that. Now that was a nice thing to have.

“Fascinating… And is that something that happens often? The attacks, I mean,”

“Well… not always, but every so often.”

“And I presume that these Night Terrors live somewhere near?” Tercius said, glancing at the tall, rocky peaks to the north.

“Well… I don’t really know. But I do know that they are fast fliers. Like, really fast. You think that they are far enough for you to cast a shield and suddenly they are right there, in your face, their tiny eyes just staring at you, their wide-open jaws full of small, pointy teeth. It's not something I'd want to see again," Gael shuddered.

“Really?” Tercius said, curious. “That sounds like a story. How did you deal with it?”

“Well…” Gael looked sheepish as he glanced around and leaned in for a whisper. “As I realized that I couldn’t finish my shield in time, I… I destabilized the mana I harnessed for the spell. It exploded right in the little bugger’s mouth and to bits it went.”

Tercius almost winced as he imagined that. What Gael did was a heat-of-the-moment decision that was surprisingly clever and recklessly stupid, all at the same time. Besides the mana recoil, which was known to cause everything from the motherload of headaches to instant knockout, Gael had likely been caught in the same explosion as that Night Terror. But if he hadn't done it… who knows if Tercius would have been talking to Gael today.

Still, it was a good card to have in the sleeve.

Sometimes you simply have to use what you have at the time, despite the risks it poses, Tercius reminded himself of that.

The conversation between him and Gael continued to revolve around Night Terrors. The more Gael shared what he knew of the beast, the more Tercius came to paint himself a picture of what the beast looked like, acted like, and what kind of skills it likely had.

A wyvern came to life in Tercius' mind, its leathery wings and lizard-like body as dark as the night it liked to prowl in.

A fast and silent pack hunter that attacked the weak points of its prey. So maybe something like Swift Wings and Muffled Flight and Enhanced Claws and Teeth along with some kind of Safety in Numbers? The first three sounded possible, but the last one not so much…

A creature that was capable of sensing mana and growing a resistance to it. So a skill of mana sense of some kind, possibly even ocular like his own, and… Mana Resistance? How did that resistance translate to skills, both those of personal nature and otherwise, he wondered. How did a skill like that interact with potions and enchantments and spells…

And… was it possible for a person to gain a skill like that? If yes, did people already have a skill like that? If they did, how good was it at its job? Was it a tiny boost or quite the contrary?

All in all, the outdoor lunch turned out to be much more pleasant than what he imagined, which Tercius attributed in the majority to the singular and interesting nature of the chosen topic.

He also learned that one of the Mistresses that resided at Tower Yellow kept a couple of Night Terrors to study, but Gael warned him that the woman was a bit hard to deal with.

As the Magi started leaving the ritual grounds on their own business, Tercius said goodbye to Gael and approached Mistress Kalina to ask her for a walk.

She agreed and they chose the lowest and outermost ring of what he came to see as nine ring-shaped terraces, each ring rising around three or so meters above its predecessor the more you went towards the top. A perfectly cobbled path led onwards, with tall bushes of dark-green, gray, and brown leaves on his right and an eighty meters drop down a perfectly straight mage-made structure to his left. Well, there was a meter or so of a stone wall to prevent such a drop, so he should correct that to at least eighty-one meters.

Tercius didn’t mince words. As soon as they were out of everyone’s view and the privacy of their conversation came to be protected by Mistress Kalina’s spells, Tercius expressed his desire to learn more about Mana Sight and Energy Sight.

“And why are those the skills you chose?”

"It is my opinion that most mages—Magi," Tercius said and immediately corrected himself. "Most magi make a mistake for leaving behind the mana sensing skill for later. I can understand the need for going about things in such a way, but I am not bound by the same limitations. The better I can come to observe something, the broader and more filled out my understanding becomes and it does so at a faster pace."

Mistress Kalina, his Mentor, smiled.

“Once upon a time, I said something similar to my Mentor. So that is the first lesson you want?

“Yes,”

"Alright then," Mistress Kalina nodded. "Transparency about personal skills between a Mentor and a Disciple is one of the major cornerstones of the relationship we formed earlier. I am bound to protect all information you share with me and the same applies to you about any of my skills you learn of.

"With that out of the way, I think you know what is next. The more I know of your skill the more I can see where it is lacking and then I can advise you where you should go with the skill and what would be the needed steps to get you there. But to do just that, I will need you to explain to me, in detail, about your skill or skills — everything from the level, to the description, and even how the skill manifests its effects in real-time. Can you do that?"

Tercius made a small pause, in which a surprising quantity of thoughts glimpsed before his eyes before he firmly nodded. "I can do that,"

“I’m listening,”

Tercius took a deep breath and dived into the details of Mana Sight.

Mana Sight [49]

A sense that allows for visual inspection of Mana.

The first two went by quickly.

“That’s quite a level you have there,” Mistress Kalina said. “If I didn’t see with my own eyes certain things… I think that even I would find it hard to believe such a thing, despite what my nose is telling me…”

"If I can ask a few things quickly since we're around the subject…"

“Go ahead,”

“What is exactly a level? And do the skills have a level limit? A permanent non-breakable limit, I mean, not a barrier…”

“Well…” Mistress Kalina said “I will start from the second question. Each skill is limited in growth to the level [100]. Do you know of skill strata? Well, regardless of which strata the skill is in, the level [100] is always the last one for that skill. It simply means that the skill has reached the peak it is capable of reaching and that no further growth is possible. As to what a level is…. I think that with what I said I also answered that question.”

Tercius nodded, thoughtful. A level was simply a representation of that growth. A measure of some kind.

The higher the strata of a skill, the bigger its starting Core. The bigger its starting Core, the more Energy and actions each level took. Tercius’ thoughts swirled around everything he knew of skills and Cores and levels and what levels did to Cores — from growing them outwards between [1] and [20] and then compressing them from [20] to [21]… But it was at [1] that each Core began…

Did that mean that a level [20] skill from a higher stratum was better than a [40] from strata just below?

It was surely not that simple. Things were far grayer here than solely black and white. There were a lot of implications here and he would have to sort them out, but not now.

Now he had to explain how his skill worked and what were the functions that he added.

“My Mana Sight works like this…”

“Well…”

"When I crossed the skill barriers I made some... adjustments to the skills, with the help of you, know what… The first of those adjustments is…"

Their feet ate the long path, Tercius drying his mouth with explanations about Mana Sight and then Energy Sight after it, all the while Mistress Kalina kept great attention to details of what he was saying and relentlessly asked pointed questions about some aspects that she thought were important.

The openness was, honestly, beyond refreshing.

He had only spoken of his skills to his family, but they didn't look at skills from the same angle which he and Mistress Kalina clearly shared.

As promised earlier, Mistress Kalina shared with him some general guidelines that Magi used to improve skills like Mana Sight and Energy Sight. Then she gave him some advice that she thought would be useful for his case. Then she gave him a list of spell names he would be starting to learn as soon as they both returned to the Pyramid, all of which had to do with observing mana with other senses. Those spells were only as powerful as some low-level skill could be, but each would give him more perspective from different angles.

He came to learn that Mana Touch, and especially Mana Taste, and spells based on them were the most sought after in certain circles because it was monumentally difficult to obfuscate mana from them. When it came to these specific kinds of skills and spells, the foreign mana was brought close to or inside a sensitive field for observation and not merely observed from outside based on its presence or the emanations it kept spreading as it decomposed into the surroundings, which made a huge difference.

The only thing keeping Mana Touch and Mana Taste from being the dominant sensing skill in the magical community was that that apparent sensitivity was used against it. All foreign mana had a natural effect on a body that was sensitive enough to feel it yet from which it didn't originate — freeze and in some cases even shock.

Even in the days of old, some Magi had realized that and developed further on that natural occurrence as they started regularly using tiny shocking or chilling spells within other spells, just so that their personal craft remained protected from thieving senses.

During a single hour of pleasant walk and constructive conversation, Tercius’ eyes were opened to a wider world and he had no intention of stopping now.

This was but the first question asked of the first person that he invited for a walk.

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AN: Anyone who wants to, please leave a comment with an appropriate name for the chapter. In some seven or eight hours, when I wake up, I will make the adjustment. 

I've had a very long day on top of which I had to help my favorite neighbors move their things into a truck and I honestly don't know if I'm more tired physically or if it's just because I said goodbye to people I knew for seventeen or maybe even eighteen years. 

Of course, comments on the chapter, Tercius or any character, and even my writing, the pace of the story and so on are all welcome. Well, when I say any, I mean any but formulated in a nice ones. I am tender today, so be mindful.

Have a good night/day everyone.