Published at 24th of February 2024 10:33 am

Chapter Book 2, Chapter 2

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Since my reincarnation in the village of Alkerist, I’d been forced to make do with almost no mana and no equipment. My workshops were a world away in the Night Vale, a place I couldn’t even point in the right direction to right now. I’d made some rudimentary devices by making liberal use of stone shaping spells to form the runes directly into the rock, but they’d been crude by my standards.

The crucible was my first step in rectifying that. It had been designed both to hold my mana and to help me channel it into more complex projects. I’d just needed something worthy of the effort to place in the center of the ritual circle I’d carved into the floor.

Weyland was a thrifty bastard and a savage haggler. Perhaps sensing my desire, he’d cleaned me out of everything I’d brought with me while loudly bemoaning his soft-heartedness at giving a little kid such a good deal. I’d done my best not to roll my eyes and made a swift exit with my prize before greed pushed the fat man to try to get even more out of me.

Now I was ready to create the first staff of my new life. I’d thought long and hard about what I needed from this staff, and I’d decided to go with something unconventional. Usually, a mage’s staff would house enchantments or have inscriptions carved on its surface that allowed for easy access to various spells they used regularly. Combat staves were particularly popular and generally held magic used for both offense and defense. A utility staff might focus more heavily on transmutations or divinations.

My staff wouldn’t have anything like that. I didn’t need it, not when I had dozens of spells available to me that I could cast with a moment’s notice to accomplish the same thing. Instead, I would form something that would assist me with my most pressing two issues: mana generation and storage.

I transmuted a chunk of stone into silver, a metal that was surprisingly worthless here. Bartering was the way of the world out in the wastes, and I’d yet to encounter any sort of currency system since my rebirth. The communities were too small to need it and lacked anyone with the skills to do anything with precious metals anyway.

The majority of the silver went to forming the cradle, a C-shaped housing for my mana crystal, with the rest being teased into long, thin threads that I wove around the staff itself to seal the two materials together. The combined pieces took on a shape something like a shepherd’s crook, though my version was a bit more sharply angled. I placed my mana crystal in the center of the C and backed out of the ritual circle to take my place between the pillars.

Over the last few days, I’d stored up more mana in those pillars than I could have produced in three months back when I’d first awakened. Each one was a pseudo-crystal in its own right, and the inscriptions I’d placed on them would shape that mana to my will. I only needed to activate it.

As a general rule, mana was invisible to mundane senses. Learning to see and feel mana was the first step in becoming a mage, followed closely by figuring out how to manipulate it. Those two skills were the foundation of magic as I knew it, though there were plenty of other traditions that approached it differently. I’d yet to stumble across one that wouldn’t have been stronger and more efficient if its practitioners had been better educated, and until I did, I would remain convinced that my way was best.

It would have looked strange to anyone blind to mana to see me standing there in a cave, waving my hands around like I was conducting an orchestra as I manipulated the crucible. To my eyes, runes flared to life as I commanded the magic to activate. More mana than I’d ever worked with at any single time since my rebirth flooded the ritual circle, washing over my nascent staff and infusing it with magic.

First came the crook of the staff, the place where the magic would reside. This staff would be my companion for years to come, and I needed it to be one I could trust not to break. Enchantments of durability were laid into its length as well as spells to repel all manner of dirt and grime. Vain I might be, but a proper mage didn’t wield a staff smudged with finger prints and caked with dirt fresh off the road.

The next step was where the crucible really shone. If all I’d wanted was to enchant a stick of wood, I would have had no need of such a complex and costly set up. The crucible petrified the core of the staff, turning it from seasoned hardwood into something far greater. Then the runes I’d so painstakingly carved upon the pillars impressed themselves on that petrified core, out of sight but fully functional. There would be no reading my staff’s purpose with a casual glance.

I didn’t use all the runes, of course. There were thousands of them on the pillars, and no matter how small and fine I’d carved them, there were considerations of physical size that would prevent more than a bare fraction of the runes from being imprinted on the staff. But that was the whole point of the crucible. Next time, I’d use different runes to create something else. And the time after that, I’d use still more of the runes.

They were all represented here, in practically infinite variety. I had but to pick and choose which ones I wanted copied, supply the requisite mana, and watch the magic happen. Of course, I still needed to guide the process, and it was a considerable strain even at my level of skill. No amateur magician would find this crucible and be able to wield its power effectively.

My goal here was to make a staff that could generate its own mana, a seeming impossibility due to the simple fact that dead things did not generate mana. Once upon a time, this staff had been part of a living tree, but those days were long past. So over the next half hour, I transmuted the core into something else, something unique.

Living stone wasn’t really alive, not in any technical sense. It had gotten that name because it mimicked one very important property of living creatures: it produced mana. It was a well-known fact that the dirt and rocks of the world did not produce mana themselves. Instead, they served as a conduit for the world core itself, which radiated mana in every direction until it filled the ground and the air, though in my case, I was living on a scar on the surface of the planet that blocked mana from coming up.

Someone, thousands of years ago, had discovered a certain type of stone that had similar properties as the world core itself, one that touched on the Astral Realm and generated its own mana. It was ridiculously rare to find in nature and ruinously expensive to transmute—not to mention a master tier spell of great difficulty—but I’d saved up the mana to make one single pound of it, stretched out needle thin in the core of my new staff.

It would take me over four days of doing nothing but generating replacement mana to match what I’d just spent. Since I had no intention of not using magic in that time, I suspected it would actually require better than a week to rebuild my reserves.

I spent another hour putting the finishing touches on the core, imprinting it with a variety of runes that would greatly extend the range of my spells, allowing me to cast those that required physical contact through the staff. I also included runes to guide the staff back to my hand if I should become separated from it, as well as a robust set of all-purpose runes to enhance my spellcasting. Spells channeled through the staff would be streamlined, faster, cheaper, and more powerful. It would act as a focusing implement for conducting future rituals, and as a guardian while I slept. Most importantly, it would reduce the transference loss of mana between me and the mana crystal I’d embedded in it.

When my work was done, I held out a hand and willed the staff to return to me. It rose up in the center of the ritual circle and snapped through the air to my hand in an instant, so hard that my palm stung from the impact. I made a mental note to tune the enchantment feeding the runes later. For now, I was exhausted and drained.

I placed the staff in the deep shadows near the entrance to my cave hideout and slid mana into its wards. If anything tried to enter while I slept, the staff would repel them and alert me. I’d handle the problem from there, probably by blasting the intruder with one of any number of nasty conjurations channeled through my staff.

I settled down on the hard stone that I’d reshaped to fit my body and spent a brief moment reflecting on how nice it was to be young again. In my first life, I’d grown sick of sleeping on hard stone by the time I was twenty. In my twilight years, I’d literally slept on a cloud of air and still woke up with aches and pains in my back and joints.

My new body, by contrast, never hurt at all, or if it did, I bounced back from it by the next day. I’d barely even touched healing magic since my reincarnation, which was honestly a relief. Healing spells were expensive and I’d been spending something like twenty times as much mana as I could currently generate just keeping myself alive in my old body.

Sadly, that was about the only thing that had gone right for the first year and a half of my reincarnation. It seemed like all I’d done was rush around putting out fires and discover new problems that had global implications. That was why I was out here by myself in the wastelands now, to have some time away from other people’s fires so I could prepare myself to dig deeper into some of the mysteries I’d encountered.

I was starting to suspect I’d underestimated how long it had taken for my soul to be returned to Manoch after my death. Somehow, the planet had lost one of its moons while I was gone, and I’d stumbled across some sort of language-based curse that had completely wiped out the written form of Enotian. I had no idea what language people were writing in now, but it didn’t match what everyone I’d met so far spoke.

I could only hope that Derro would contain some answers for me, but I wanted to be well prepared before I set foot in that city. I’d already had a run in with a cabal known as the Wolf Pack that had resulted in me killing two of their mages, and I wasn’t sure exactly how much information their spy had reported back to the cabal before I’d caught him. They might have a good description of me, and besides, a child mage stood out regardless.

I even had one of their signet rings, something I’d kept to use as a focus for an area-wide scrying spell to search for any other copies of the same signet coming within miles of me. Twice, I’d found and successfully ambushed groups of mage-led hunters moving towards my home village in the last month or so.

An ambush was one thing, but if I was going to be attracting anyone’s notice, I needed to ensure I could defend myself. My new staff was the first step in making sure I could. Tomorrow, I’d make something new, something less complicated, but no less vital. I just needed to decide what form it would take.

I closed my eyes and tried to pretend I still had a bed to sleep on. Maybe that ought to be my next acquisition, rather than something to use in a fight. Even sleeping on sand itself would feel better than what I currently had. Now that I thought about it, I wondered why it had taken me so long to think of that.

With a grumpy sigh, I sat up and began casting the transmutation magic needed to turn stone into a large pile of fine sand. That was going to be everywhere when I woke up, to the point where I’d need magic to clean myself off, but it was infinitely more comfortable than bare stone.

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