Chapter 15
“I really hope I’m not interrupting something,” Fara said as she cracked the door open.
“Fuck, Rys, you’re so fucking big,” Vallis shouted suddenly.
Fara froze, then glared at Vallis, her tails weaving a pattern behind her. The merchant laughed and danced behind the desk in Rys’s study.
Rolling his eyes at their antics, Rys tried to maintain the fireball in his hand. It wobbled in the air, shifting in size rapidly every second. A loud slap filled the room and Vallis swore.
“So, rather than having sex, you’re practicing evocation,” Fara said a moment later, leaning over his shoulder.
“I can have sex anytime, but the sooner I learn this, the better,” Rys said.
“Ah, I had been wondering about the lack of wild orgies,” Fara said.
Rys finally lost control of the flame and it went out. He sighed. Leaning back in his chair, he rubbed the bridge of his nose. He must be doing something wrong. While he had the basics of controlling the energy down, he couldn’t maintain a spell to save himself.
“Is that something you really wonder about?” he asked Fara to take his mind off his failed attempts at evocation.
“You’ve brought up succubi before. I expected a harem of beautiful devils rotating through your bedroom by now. Isn’t that what the soundproofing is for?” she asked.
“You noticed that?” he asked.
“The massive magical wards around every bedroom in the manor? No, never noticed them,” Fara said sarcastically. Her tails hit Rys in the head. “I’m a mystic fox. I reckon I can sense a lot of things you can’t, no matter how much secret, ancient knowledge you have in your head about magical theory.”
“I don’t recall keeping much secret magical theory to myself,” he said.
Vallis wandered up to him, rubbing a reddened cheek. She kneeled next to the desk and put her elbows up on it.
“Bullshit,” Vallis said. “When I first started helping you with evocation, you were saying nonsense about planes, sympathetic connections, and the origins of energy. I still can’t believe I’m teaching you this.”
“You nearly became a mage. That’s something,” he said.
In truth, Rys wanted to learn evocation on his own, but it had proved harder than he expected.
He had spent weeks poring over books on evocation to no avail. Even Darus’s knowledge Gift hadn’t been enough.
Rys knew the theory inside and out. In fact, he arguably knew the theory better than the man who invented the damn thing. Darus’s knowledge Gift was the equivalent of Kushan’s original notes but with annotations from somebody who knew magical theory from the Infernal Empire.
But something was missing. So Rys had asked Vallis to help him. Surprisingly, that had helped. But results were slow.
“You’re learning faster than I ever did,” Vallis said. “I spent eight years as an apprentice. And that was after seven years of learning magic at home.”
“I take it that becoming a mage is a slow process for most humans?” Rys asked, curious.
“It’s a lifetime’s work. You don’t decide to become a mage—somebody decides you will become one, usually when you’re very young,” Vallis said. “I showed magical talent when I was five. Set a merchant’s stall on fire when he didn’t give me free candy.”
“That was awful,” Fara muttered.
“Greatest achievement I had for years,” Vallis said. She shrugged. “Once you show magical talent, it’s then a matter of money. Or connections. We had both, so I was sent off to Tarmouth when I turned twelve.”
“Then you spent eight years as an apprentice?” Rys asked.
“Pretty much. There are three stages of apprenticeship, with the final one involving a proper thesis and assessment to determine that you’re fit to be a mage,” Vallis said. “After that, you become a proper mage. The ranks within the mage towers are: adept, journeyman, magister, grand magister. There’s also archmagister and archmage, but those are special.”
“You compared my magic to Fara’s when we first met. Where would that put me as a rank?” Rys asked.
Vallis’s eyes widened. “Uh…”
Fara chuckled. “Somewhere extra special. Mages are researchers for the most part. A magister spends most of his time in a research lab. The ones who fight are few and far between. They call them combat magisters, because they’re given the rank for political reasons.”
Rus supposed that nobody wanted a bunch of pipsqueak mages bossing around the security, just because they weren’t researchers. But it raised major questions about how mage towers worked.
“Your evocation isn’t great, though. You’re definitely still an apprentice,” Vallis said.
“Thanks,” Rys said drily.
Vallis winked at him and waved her head back and forth.
Raising an eyebrow, Fara asked the obvious question, “Why bother learning? I feel that you’ve forgotten more about magic than almost anybody I’ve ever met.”
“I didn’t learn all of that through osmosis,” Rys said.
“Through what?” Vallis asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” Rys said. “Staying up-to-date on magical theory is a constant process. Infernals constantly thought they knew everything. They were wrong about a lot of things. The angels knew a lot more, but getting knowledge from them is like getting blood from a stone. The very concept of evocation contradicts a fundamental magical ‘law’ I accepted.”
“Which is?” Fara asked, her eyes narrow.
“Evocation uses the ambient magical energy around the user. That’s fine. But it also allows something without a magical essence to manipulate magical energy outside of itself,” Rys explained. “That’s what magitech does. Non-living things can manipulate magic. The possibilities that allows are mind-boggling. You could build an army of self-powered constructs capable of conquering the world.”
“Of course, your first idea is to use it to conquer the world,” Fara muttered.
“Pretty sure that already happened,” Vallis said. “It’s called the Golden Age of Magic. Mages invented a ton of stuff, but things got out of control. A lot of cities were destroyed and I know that Azrael got involved at some point and fought a huge dragon.”
“That’s less impressive than it sounds,” Rys said. “Fighting the dragon, that is. I’m very impressed by the part where human mages invented a lot.”
A quick check on his knowledge Gift confirmed that the Golden Age of Magic was one of the most significant events in history. Getting Darus to shut up about it was hard, particularly given they’d played a key role in the events. Vallis likely didn’t know much about it, beyond the basics.
“But I’m curious,” Fara asked. “About magical energy. I think I know how it works, but I want to hear you explain it. All of it. Because you said something about my tails before that confused me.”
Ah, so that was her interest in this. Rys had wondered why she had hung around.
“I can’t promise you’ll follow everything,” he warned.
“Try me,” she said.
After both women pulled up chairs, he settled in for an explanation.
“I’ll start with some knowledge that has been lost over the centuries: basic planar theory,” Rys said.
“Really? That’s where we’re starting?” Vallis asked with a groan.
He ignored her, noting Fara’s interest.
“We exist on the material plane, but there is also the magical plane—sometimes called the sorcerous plane—and the astral plane. The material plane is where everything interesting happens. The other two planes are basically gigantic blobs of energy.”
He drew a glowing circle on the floor between them. “Imagine that this is Harrium. The first thing you need to realize is that Harrium has its own material, magical, and astral planes. These are the local planes. All magical and astral energy in the world manifests locally. Our magical essences exist in this world, because we are native to Harrium.”
“So a divine being is one from planes that aren’t local?” Fara asked.
“That’s right, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves,” Rys said.
He then drew a dozen other circles around the first one. “These are the magical planes of other worlds. Collectively, we call these the ‘greater magical plane’ because they’re not ours. Hell is one of these. Magical energy from any plane other than the local one needs to be processed, or else bad things happen.”
“So infernal energy isn’t unique?” Fara asked.
“Nope. We just know a lot about it because Hell is one of the few worlds connected to Harrium, due to the Emergence,” Rys said. “The Emergence caused a ton of portals to connect several other worlds to Harrium. Those worlds aren’t even connected to Harrium anymore, but because we know about them, we can still connect to them using magic.”
The same could happen with other worlds, but finding other worlds was harder than it appeared. Rys had found that out the hard way. The greater planes were vast, and mostly empty. The same could be said of the space outside the planet, apparently. It was mostly void.
He got rid of the circles. “The other major plane is the astral plane, which is the plane of souls. It works differently. Our souls don’t exist in the local plane. They exist in the greater plane, which is basically a huge space somewhere.”
Rys drew a bunch of circles close together, connected by lines to elsewhere. “Imagine the greater astral plane as a gigantic mass of balloons. It’s infinitely large and the souls of every world connects to it. The only reason this matters is because the relative location of a soul affects a person. A soul in the ‘justice’ location of the astral plane will be more likely to want to see justice done. Same can be said for concepts like ‘order’ or ‘chaos,’ and some souls have more complicated concepts.”
Fara and Vallis looked at each other.
“Is that really how my soul guides me in life?” Fara asked, troubled. “I have a more orderly soul, so I obey others?”
“I mean, it’s a ball of energy,” Rys said, amused. “How did you think it guided you? You are your own person. What you are can affect your decisions, but you make the final call in the end. It’s different for beings like angels, though. But even they can do more than they choose to.”
“Really? Like what?” Vallis asked.
“Sex, for one,” Rys said. “But the angels did rule a continent once. They did some questionable things.”
After erasing the glowing diagram of the balloons, Rys leaned back. “Anyway, you asked about your tails. Planar theory matters for one reason: when you’re trying to use magic, you need to use magical energy. Whenever you use a spiritual technique, you first convert astral energy into magical energy, then cast the technique.”
“That seems inefficient,” Fara said.
“It is for everybody else,” Rys said. “It’s why spiritualism is usually awful. Astral power cheats by bitch-slapping reality with astral energy directly, but this directly overwrites reality. There are side-effects, and using astral energy is lethal for most races. So us mere mortals have to convert astral energy first.”
“But foxes are better at it?”
“Maybe? I don’t know. Your tails look like a gigantic ball of astral energy. I’d love to get a look at one, but you seem attached to yours,” Rys said.
Fara hugged her tails and glared at him. “You’re not touching my tails.”
“I don’t plan to do anything to you,” he said, raising his hands. “I can learn enough from seeing you cast magic.”
That was a lie, but Fara was far more valuable as an ally. Plus, there was an entire race of foxes. Surely, he could get his hands on one eventually.
“Gonna admit, I didn’t follow half of that,” Vallis said with a shake of her head. “But I can tell that you can’t use evocation still. How about we get back to your practice?”
Vallis grinned at him, and he resisted the urge to glare at her.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Fara said, rising from her seat. “Thank you for the explanation. It was surprisingly illuminating.” She gave them a look. “Maria is coming tomorrow. Don’t stay up too late.”
“I’ll only ride his cock until midnight,” Vallis said with a wink. “You can trust me to be responsible.”
“Don’t make me slap you again,” Fara warned.