Book 3, Chapter 50

Magic could do a lot of interesting things, including grafting properties from one type of material onto another. But I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to make Hyago’s idea work. Living stone made mana and draw stone ate it; merging them together didn’t seem feasible to me. Of course, what I was after wasn’t actually the quality of pulling in mana. It was draw stone’s ability to grow like an organic substance using the mana it consumed. If I could isolate that, I might be able to manufacture a substance that grew from its own mana generation.

That was easier said than done, however. It hadn’t been hard to obtain a few samples of the rock – Alkerist had hundreds of pounds of it just sitting around collecting dust now that they were no longer being forced to tithe their mana to their governor. I hadn’t bothered to ask for permission to take any, but I seriously doubted anyone would ever realize they were missing a few of the smaller stones.

I’d set up four experimental solutions in my alchemy lab with the goal of splitting the growth properties of the stone from the mana-devouring properties. It would be a few more hours before I got the final results, and I wasn’t willing to give up hope even if they all failed, but I suspected this would only be the first of many tests.

The upside of this whole project was that I was unlikely to ever run out of draw stone to experiment on, unlike the last time I started poking and prodding at a sample. I’d retrieved it, at no small expense, from the bottom of a thousand-foot-deep lake of pitch-black water inhabited with mutated carnivorous fish that had a taste for mana. I’d only gone through the effort because I had a strong suspicion that I’d find a large chunk of moon rock at the bottom.

There had been an oblong rock about six feet long, and I’d been momentarily excited to find it, but after dragging it into my phantom space and returning it to my lab for examination, I’d been somewhat disappointed to discover that it was mostly stone with small deposits of metal in it. Oh, they were unusual materials for this area, and I was still convinced that my theory of it being a chunk of moon debris that had fallen to the planet’s surface was correct.

But it didn’t have any special magical properties, at least not that I could tell. It was just an unusual combination of rock and metal not commonly found together. After carving off a few dozen samples and subjecting them to every test I could think of, I’d been forced to shelve the moon rock as an idle curiosity. Other than being curiously alchemically inert, there was nothing special about it.

While I let my experiments with my draw stone samples simmer in their various concoctions and baths, I spent a considerable amount of mana producing a pebble of living stone the size of my thumbnail. Just that much tapped me out, and since I wasn’t willing to eat the transference loss from my big mana crystals, that left me with very little besides the emergency reserves in the small one I had mounted in a framework of inscribed living stone. For as many months as it had taken me to generate enough mana for it, I also wasn’t willing to sacrifice it for this experiment.

Truthfully, it was unlikely to be worth it to generate that much living stone, regardless. I did it mostly as a way to eliminate an upkeep to the enchantments on the mana crystal itself. Encased in living stone as it was, it was basically impossible for the enchantments on the crystal to ever run out of mana and break accidentally. It was a clunky workaround to just having enchantments draw ambient mana, but it was the best I could do anymore.

With my experiments cooking and my personal mana reserves completely bottomed out, there was nothing more for me to do at the moment. I waited a few minutes to get back enough mana to actually leave my lab—there was no door, just a few ventilation slits that had wire meshes molded into the stonework to prevent rodents or insects from getting in—and returned to the village to have dinner with my family.

  *

My three-day vacation passed quickly, ending with another meeting with Grandfather. Somewhat predictably, he’d made no progress in repairing the rift between his loyal followers and the rebel brakvaw. The only good news was that with the assassination of their leaders, the actual fighting had stopped. At this point, it looked like the rift between them was permanent, but the rebellion had shifted completely to just getting away from Eyrie Peak and out from under Grandfather’s rules.

That meant I was finally free to approach the brakvaw flock living near Ghalin without worrying about stepping on Grandfather’s toes, or talons, such as the case might be. In order to do so, I’d expanded my workshop to include a new room that had a more sophisticated and permanent version of the ritual circles I’d used for my cross-continental projection spell a week or so back.

I put a nice, comfortable chair in the center of the circle, sat down in it, and closed my eyes. With an effort of will, I set the circle to pulling mana from one of the batteries powering the workshop. It activated, and I cast the spell that would project an illusory copy of my body out into the world. It took mere seconds to fly out of the valley and northwest past Ghalin to the brakvaw’s new nesting grounds.

Before I moved in, I did a brief tour of the mountainside they’d claimed as their own. No substantial work had been done, which boded well for me. It wouldn’t take much effort to replicate what little modifications they’d made. With any luck, they’d be amenable to abandoning that work and starting over somewhere else.

My brief scouting mission also served to help me figure out who’d taken over the flock, and it seemed to be an enormous brakvaw with a lot of silver in its plumage. At first, it almost looked like random whole feathers were a different color, but I quickly spotted a pattern, one that made me wonder if brakvaw purposely changed their colors to help differentiate themselves. Usually they were primarily black with some highlights of different colors, but this one had hundreds or thousands of pure silver-colored feathers, far more than any other brakvaw I’d seen.

I willed my projection into full visibility right next to her, causing it to squawk in surprise. Amidst fluttering wings the size of sails, I stood calmly and waited. Mana raced up and down the brakvaw as it prepared to attack me with some sort of wind shaping spell. Rather than burn some of the mana powering my projection to counter it, I just let the wind blades slice harmlessly through me.

“Hello,” I said.

Upon seeing me unharmed and making no threatening moves, the brakvaw calmed down. The mana in its body returned to its normal cycling pattern, concentrated only slightly in its throat and face as it wove the magic needed to form human sounds instead of the awful screeching and cawing they used for a language.

“Who are you and what are you doing here?” a feminine voice demanded.

“You can call me Keiran.”

It didn’t take mind reading to see the jolt of fear shoot through the brakvaw. I hadn’t thought I was that famous in their community, but I supposed my name was well-known if for no other reason than my part in helping Grandfather get back down from the floating island.

“What do you want?” the brakvaw asked.

“I want you to relocate farther away from the human village at the base of this mountain.”

It was hard to read a bird’s facial expression, no matter how big it was, but I got the impression that she was incredulous. “That’s… You’re not here on Grandfather’s behalf? To force us back?”

“I really don’t care what you do,” I told her. “I only care that you aren’t hunting humans.”

“But they’re in our territories!” she objected.

“They were here first.”

“No,” the silver brakvaw said. “This has been my family’s hunting grounds for a thousand years, since long before that collection of fake, miniature mountains the humans hide inside of was built.”

“Ah, I see. This would be where your ancestors lived before the unification of all brakvaw in one place.”

“Exactly.”

That complicated things slightly. Humans were by no means the only species to get irrationally attached to a particular piece of land, and more than a few sapient monster species had been wiped out trying to cling to their ancestral lands once a big enough group of humans set their sights on it. I doubted the human villages could push the brakvaw out in this particular case, not with their numbers and subpar magical abilities. They’d never be able to reach the giant birds on their own.

“Could you tolerate the presence of a human village in your territory?” I asked her. It wasn’t like they were even competing for much. The villages mostly survived on their fields, where as brakvaw were primarily hunters. I wasn’t sure if it was an intended secondary purpose to their waypoints that the mana served as a beacon drawing monsters in for the brakvaw to hunt, but it was certainly convenient for them either way.

If the brakvaw could reach some sort of non-aggression pact with Ghalin, it could actually work out in the villagers’ favor. Brakvaw could hunt around the village, taking the pressure off the humans living there to defend themselves from the sudden influx of monsters in the area. As far as I was aware, the villagers were wary about eating monster flesh—for good reason, considering how toxic some of them were—so they could donate their kills to the brakvaw to get rid of them.

It was easy to picture how it could all work out, but reality was seldom that clean cut. “It’s our territory!” the silver brakvaw squawked angrily. Even with the spell making her words come out in Enotian, I could still hear her true voice in it.

The logic was apparently self-evident. The brakvaw considered the territory theirs, even if they hadn’t been actively using it for the past century or three. Interlopers had to be driven away, and anything living inside their territory was fair game to be eaten.

“Let me try again,” I said, no longer bothering to act friendly. “You can either tolerate a human village that’s doing you no harm, or you can move farther west. I am not Grandfather. I don’t care to preserve your culture or your lives. What I care about is that your attacks on those humans are making my life more complicated, and I am here to resolve this issue.”

The brakvaw bristled in outrage, but I spent some of my limited mana to shoot a mild mind spike into her head. She squawked again, this time in pain. Admirably, it only took her a moment to shake off the mind spike, but I didn’t bother to hide the six duplicate copies of the spell I had prepared around me. I knew she could see them, and I knew she didn’t want me to find a reason to use them.

“I am not asking for the world here. Your flock is free to do literally anything it wants except attack the nearby village,” I said. “And I know you’re not dumb animals. You are better than your base urges. By all means, defend your territory from rival monsters that would steal your food, but those humans aren’t that. They don’t even eat monsters. There’s no harm in leaving them alone.”

“No harm but that it makes me look weak,” the silver brakvaw muttered sullenly.

“Ah, I see. It’s a matter of succession,” I said. “Your hold over the flock is more tenuous than you’d like?” At her nod, I added, “Perhaps I can sweeten the deal. What would you say if I could offer you the location of a… better… hunting ground, one rife with stray monsters and mana?”

Her eyes pierced into me and she shifted in place. “I’m listening.”