Broken Lands

Chapter 326 – The Eidolon

Sophia’s plan was simple: start with the most basic form of magic, spellforms. They were slow but extremely customizable, if you knew how. She did. 

If that wasn’t enough, she’d try a ritual or two. She wasn’t an expert by any means, but she didn’t have to be if she just wanted to show something new. Most people who did rituals used ones that had been created and refined by others, and Sophia was no exception. She knew some of the basics but she’d only ever created one ritual.

The fact that she’d later modified it to move water didn’t count.

Still, that meant she had some options. It was too bad that she didn’t have the references with her for all of the other rituals she’d studied, but she could certainly reproduce that particular ritual. 

It was exceedingly unlikely that the Eidolon had seen it before, but she could have seen something like it. In that case, Sophia would fall back on runescripts. They were finicky and precise, but they were just as flexible as spellforms. In some ways, they were more flexible because you didn’t have to hold the whole thing all at once; you could build it over time. They were also reusable, like an enchantment, if you used the right materials. Even if the Eidolon knew runic inscription, Sophia knew that she wouldn’t know the language Sophia did. Every runescript was different, and they all had advantages and disadvantages. 

That brought her back to spellforms, which were a lot like three-dimensional runic inscriptions formed of mana, except that you had to hold the entire thing together with your aura. It was by far the easiest thing to display, if the Eidolon could see mana, and Sophia had every reason to believe that she could. There was a good chance she wouldn’t have to go farther than showing off some spellforms and how to make them.

Sophia started with the spellform she used the most, a small ball that glowed with light and could easily be moved. She had items that could do the same thing, but it was often more convenient to simply use the spell, especially since adjusting it to be more like a flashlight was easier with the spellform version.

“A light Ability?” The Eidolon sounded confused. “Why would I be interested in that?”

Sophia shook her head. She dismissed the spell, then started to build the spellform more slowly this time. “It’s not an Ability, I don’t have any Abilities that work like this. I’m just casting the spell.”

The Eidolon didn’t say anything during the time it took for Sophia to cast the spell. When she still didn’t say anything after the light glowed next to Sophia’s head once again, Sophia sent the ball up a dozen feet to light the area without accidentally blinding anyone. “Next … fire, I think. Neither one is really my strength, you know; I am not an Energy mage, I’m an Arcane mage.”

She suited her actions to her words as she started building the spellform for a heat-collection spell similar to her lightball. For all that she wasn’t an Energy mage, she did know enough about both heat and light to know that they were easy to get. In fact, for most spells, one of the goals was reducing the amount of wasted heat and light that were produced. If she wanted to, she could make a heat spell simply by building a very bad spell meant to do something else. It would be hard to control, but it would work.

It was also the exact opposite of what she wanted to do here. The point right now was to show off magic that the Eidolon didn’t know, and she surely knew how to create a mishmash of mana that leaked energy.

This time, she went for a more complicated, directable version of the spell. It took her a couple of minutes to build the spellform, but once she did, wisps of flame followed her hands as she moved them, then swirled around her. It reminded her of her feathers, somehow, which made her think of her Firewater Feathers. Could she make her own fire to turn into feathers with water?

A single glance at the fire she’d just created told her the answer. Yes, she probably could … but it wouldn’t do much good. The best fire she could make was small and used a lot of mana. As a weapon, it would be a flash of uncomfortable heat that might set simple things on fire, like hair, but it wouldn’t do the kind of damage Sweetfire’s fire did. 

The Eidolon still hadn’t said anything, so Sophia changed her tack and started to shape the fire into the shape of the spellform. It was tricky, far trickier than she expected. Raw mana simply did what she wanted, but this was fire. It seemed to want to disappear more than it wanted to move into the right shape. The lines also wavered up and down as they crossed over and under each other. It was annoying.

It did give her a bit more respect for her teachers. They made this look easy back when she was learning spellforms! 

Mana started moving in the distance. The moment Sophia shifted her attention to it, the fiery version of a spellform she’d built started to dissipate. She immediately shifted her attention back to her own spell and started rebuilding it. This was a lot harder than she expected, but if that mana was what she hoped it was, it was also working.

Sophia heard the others talking, but other than recognizing that Dav was telling Meadow about the Eidolon’s words and that she would undoubtedly say something if they’d failed or succeeded, she wasn’t certain what they were talking about. She simply didn’t have the spare brainpower to listen. She had to keep this abomination of a spellform copy going so that the Eidolon could copy it.

It took the Eidolon a lot longer than the five or so minutes it took Sophia to build her own copy of the fire spellform. Long before she finished, Sophia badly regretted her choice of spellform. It was too hard to control; she should have built a spellform that was visible in another way or maybe even one that knew how to reflect its own shape. She didn’t know how to do that offhand, but she was certain it was possible. Almost anything was, with magic.

Maybe she could build a spellform that displayed other spellforms?

No, there was an option better than all of those. She had Taika! All she’d need to do was project the image of the spellform to Taika, then have him build it as an illusion. He was good at illusions; she wasn’t. That would have been a much better choice.

It was too late to change now, but if she did another spellform she’d definitely

want to try that.Sophia really had no idea how long it took; all she knew was that it took all of her concentration and a hefty chunk of her mana to hold the spellform active, despite how relatively cheap the fire-spark spellform was for a fire-producing spell. It wasn’t something she was good with, which increased the cost, but even so she was pretty sure she’d held the spell for at least half an hour and quite likely closer to an hour when flame erupted from the area where she’d seen mana moving earlier. 

Sophia carefully held the spell as she glanced that way. There was fire in the air, fire that seemed very familiar, almost exactly like the fire she controlled with her spellform. Sophia released the spell in relief; if that wasn’t a sign that the Eidolon had recognized what she was doing and valued it, she didn’t know what it was.

The fire of the Eidolon’s spell moved to form different shapes, then was overwhelmed by a burst of light strong enough that Sophia couldn’t tell if it was there or not. When she could see again, she saw someone who had to be the Eidolon floating just above the ground behind where the spell had been. Sophia didn’t think she was imagining that she was standing at almost exactly the same distance from the now-dissipated spell as Sophia had been from hers.

The Eidolon looked almost like a negative image of a person, except that she was surrounded by a bright glow that separated into colors as it moved farther from her. The Eidolon herself looked like the night sky had formed itself into a woman, completely black and studded with stars. She wore a short robe with exceptionally long sleeves belted at the waist; other than that and her long hair held in place by hair sticks, her only notable feature was her brightly glowing eyes. 

“Congratulations,” the Eidolon stated with a slight nod of her head. “You have managed to bring something I may be interested in. Mana-shaped spells are difficult to discover and that’s one I hadn’t seen before. It seems far simpler than the ones the Guide displays, which is definitely interesting; I did not believe that they could be that simple. I assume the light spell was also mana-shaped?”

Sophia frowned, then nodded. You did shape mana into a spellform to cast the spell; she was just used to naming them after the spellform instead of the process of shaping mana. “It’s called a spellform. This one is … well, I guess it’s simple? It’s not even close to the easiest; the simplest would be one that doesn’t automatically protect the spellcaster and their allies. That makes it a lot harder to cast, but a lot safer to use. There’s usually not much reason to cast one that doesn’t have that; they’re still slow.”

The Eidolon smiled. “Show me one, then show me the spellform for that light spell you used. Oh, and the simplest spellform that can make light. Do you know how spellforms work or do you simply know the shapes?”

“I know a little, but I’m not a researcher or anything,” Sophia admitted. “I can modify spellforms, but I wouldn’t want to make one from just the parts. Here, Taika, can you make an illusion of this image?” 

Sophia sent Taika an image of the light ball spellform made of the translucent shimmering lines that were her arcane mana. There was an audible snort from Dav’s pack, then a small, mostly white head poked up out of the large pocket. A moment later, the illusion shimmered into existence. He’d even placed it conveniently in front of Sophia. 

Sophia pointed at a part of the spellform. “This is the light ball. This bit, here, is what takes the mana and aspects it to light. That’s more or less in the middle, because this way you have all of the control stuff; intensity, focus, even wavelength, though I usually keep that set to the default; like this, it only gives off visible light and it’s relatively full spectrum so it doesn’t distort colors. It will also leak a little heat and mana but there’s not much I can do about that; if I got the shapes absolutely perfect and had all the lines correctly sized, it wouldn’t leak much at all, but it’s hard to do that quickly…”

Sophia talked through the rest of the light spell, then demonstrated it. Until now, she hadn’t realized just how complicated the thing was; the part she thought of as “the focus” was actually made of about fifty different smaller bits to control where the light went. She’d just learned them well enough that she could make the entire thing reliably without having to concentrate on each individual piece. A number of other parts of the spellform were the same. 

She knew her explanations for each piece were incomplete, but she couldn’t remember it all. There was math involved, and Sophia had never been that great at that part of spellforms. She could generally feel her way through it and get the spell she needed without doing all the precalculations.

Weirdly, the Eidolon was still impressed with how “simple” the light ball was. She was even more impressed by the simple spell to make a spark or a flash of light; they were very similar, and they were definitely the simplest versions of the spells Sophia could think of.