Book 3, Chapter 15

The mother brakvaw was clearly communicating with her children in some way, probably telling them to stay back in case she needed to kill me and things got messy. I wasn’t offended; it was a reasonable precaution and if a stranger had approached my family, I might not have shown as much restraint as she had in defending them. I liked to think that not trying to stop them from flying up to meet her when she’d arrived had been what prevented her from attacking on sight.

“I’m investigating these towers,” I said, gesturing toward the building. “I originally found one two stops to the west near a human town that was being attacked by waves of monsters. We discovered that the mana streams were what was drawing them into the area.”

If the brakvaw had any reaction to that news, I couldn’t tell. Reading the body language of enormous, sapient birds just wasn’t among my many talents, which put me at a bit of a handicap here. Depending on how the conversation went, I might resort to a bit of mind reading to nudge things in my favor.

“This village sounds unlucky,” the bird said. “It must have been founded between cycles, else it would have long since been wiped out.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “How long is a cycle?”

“As long as it takes. It has been many, many seasons since the last cycle, since we had fledglings ready to go find the way.”

I was clearly missing some cultural context here, but to my understanding, Ghalin had existed for at least the last century. I supposed it was possible that brakvaw reproduction cycles were measured in hundreds of years, though that seemed unlikely. Then again, they were magical creatures who might rely on mana to reproduce, in which case it was a miracle the whole species hadn’t died off.

If it did take that long for brakvaw to hatch new eggs, it would also explain why this mother bird had come at me like a bolt of lightning, only slowing down when her chicks flew up to meet her. What I didn’t understand was why the young would be left alone with the mother dozens of miles away, assuming that was the case.

“I’m not asking you to make changes to your system or anything,” I said. “I’ve already made arrangements with the village I mentioned to protect them from the monsters. I’m mostly just exploring to satisfy my curiosity about where the mana came from and what its purpose is.”

The brakvaw tilted its head curiously and asked, “You are a human finding your way?”

“I suppose, if that’s the reason your kind flies from tower to tower.”

“A rite of passage,” she explained. “We fly to the end, and then go beyond. Sometimes, those that are exceptional create a new waypoint, extend our travels. If we are lucky, that waypoint will still stand when the next cycle begins.”

“I think I understand,” I said.

“There was much argument about this cycle,” the mother said, “whether to have it at all. Too dangerous, some claimed. But it is our way. Traditions were not made to be abandoned. Grandfather had to step in. It was decided that some of us would shepherd the fledglings, to ensure the world hadn’t changed too much since the last cycle.”

I could relate to that. It felt like everything was different from what I remembered now. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have a giant magical bird to look over my shoulder during the early years of my reincarnation. I’d had to fight my own battles. It was only now that I was nearing the point where I truly felt comfortable with the amount of power I’d reclaimed that I was willing to start poking my head out into the wider world to see what was going on.

“Grandfather is the guy in charge, I take it?”

“He is the eldest of our kind, whose magic moves with sublime grace and whose voice sings with the heavens.”

Translation: old and powerful. I could work with that, and maybe this time it could be an alliance instead of a battle like it had been with the Wolf Pack’s leader. Her need for ever-increasing amounts of mana to keep her life extension magic from collapsing had left little room for compromise between the two of us.

More importantly, this whole thing was sounding like the brakvaw had a culture of exploration, one that I might be able to exploit to save myself a great deal of work in finding the places I was interested in going. Presumably, the fledglings might be discovering new horizons, but the elder generations would know where the mana streams flowing between these towers ended up.

“I think I would like to meet Grandfather,” I said. “Would that be possible?”

“We have never had an outsider come to the peak before,” the mother bird said. “It is so unprecedented that I don’t think we even have a rule for it.”

That didn’t sound like a ‘yes’ to me, but it wasn’t the death of hope, either. “Would it be possible for me to travel to the peak to request permission?”

Mother bird was quiet for a long time while she considered that, and I made sure to keep still and be non-threatening. She probably realized that I could find the peak on my own just fine. After all, her species had set up what I now suspected was dozens or even hundreds of towers with mana flowing between them, basically guiding their young on their journeys to new lands. Anyone who could follow the mana would be able to find their way back to the primary eyrie.

The paranoid part of me wondered if I was about to be attacked. That was the only way to ensure I didn’t go to the home peak. Merely promising that I wouldn’t make the attempt if I was denied permission might not be enough to satisfy the mother brakvaw. It didn’t strike me as a likely outcome to my request, but I was aware of the possibility and started shaping mana into a defensive spell, ready to be unleashed if needed.

“Yes,” the bird said, “I believe that would be best. I will accompany you there myself. Are you ready to go?”

“I am,” I told her. “What of your children?”

“They will wait for me to return before seeking the next waypoint. This will not take long, provided you can keep up.”

“Don’t worry about that,” I said. I’d need to cast elemental form to do it, but I had a solid idea of how fast the brakvaw could fly, and it was well within my capabilities to match. “One moment, and we can be on our way.”

The mother bird lifted off and started talking to her children in that strange way I’d first observed, a mixture of audible caws and chirps combined with shifting mana currents in rapid patterns, almost like they were spelling out words with some kind of code. I spent half a second considering trying to learn the language, then discarded it as a waste of time. Other than communicating with this particular species of magical bird, I couldn’t think of a good use for it that couldn’t be accomplished with easier methods.

I cast elemental form while I was waiting and let my new body drift into the air. All three of the birds turned to look at me, each one tracking the mana shell that surrounded me and made up my new body. I projected an illusion of my human form over top of myself to give them something to look at, but it was obvious that they could see past it.

After another few seconds of whatever instructions she was giving them, the mother bird flew over to me with a few lazy flaps and a continuous circuit of mana under her wings to propel her. “Let us fly, human mage.”

Then she set off, following the streamers back toward the source. With each moment, she grew bigger and bigger until her wingspan was well over fifty feet wide. I could have easily ridden on her back and I doubt she even would have noticed the weight. By the time she reached full size, the eyrie we’d left was no longer in sight and I was moving at about half my maximum speed to keep up with her.

We passed over open water at some point as we moved north, but it only lasted a few seconds before we were flying over land again. Two more towers came and went, and then I spotted what I assumed was our destination. The mountains had given way to foothills, but at the north end, they started to jut back up into the sky again, and this one was even bigger than average.

Down here in the desert, not even the tips of mountains got a dusting of white snow. In fact, I hadn’t met anyone in my new life yet who even knew what snow was. The peak we were steadily approaching was no exception, but as we closed in on it, I noticed something strange. It didn’t actually seem to have a peak, looking instead like some giant of unfathomable size had bitten the top off of it.

Scattered around that missing tip were hundreds of nests, each one gargantuan-sized, more than big enough to hold full homes. They weren’t built out of sticks or twigs like a normal bird’s nest would be, but were instead huge bowls of shaped stone covered in detritus presumably used as some sort of padding.

Also visible were a dozen of the brakvaw, many of them equally as large as my escort. I couldn’t tell if any were bigger than her, but it wouldn’t surprise me. All of them were primarily black with different patterns of color tinging their plumage. I was sure it was more than enough for them to tell each other apart, but I suspected I’d have trouble keeping them straight if I had to learn a bunch of names at the same time.

“Wait here,” the mother bird said, pulling up short when we were two miles or so from what I was calling in my head ‘Eyrie Peak.’

“How long will you be gone?” I asked.

“Not long,” she replied. “Stay here so I can find you once I have an answer.”

She flew off, leaving me hovering in the air. I cancelled my elemental form again and replaced it with a levitation spell, then sat in the sky and studied Eyrie Peak. The flowing mana patterns their kind used was interesting, but extremely vulnerable to outside manipulation. I was confident that if it came to it, I could fend them off long enough to resume my elemental form and escape.

Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that, though. I really wanted to understand where all the mana came from, though I expected there wasn’t as much as I’d initially estimated. Seeing the brakvaw using it made me suspect that the streams of mana flowing from eyrie to eyrie was eventually being recycled, and that Eyrie Peak’s output was probably only a fraction of what I’d need to create a similar system.

Getting a chance to study their mana techniques was a secondary goal of this meeting. Our world had little enough mana that if I could adapt some of their methods to cycle mana into a spell effect and then reclaim that mana once the magic was complete, it would go a long way towards increasing my available resources.

Experimentally, I tried to twist a strand of mana into something similar to the shape I needed for a simple novice-tier light spell, but connected back to my core so that the mana would flow back into me. As I expected, the magic didn’t happen since I never actually gave any mana over to the spell itself. There was some other part to this method of casting I hadn’t yet figured out.

Half an hour later, a familiar bird came winging back out to me, followed by three others. All were equally massive, but the newcomers stopped a respectful distance behind and let the mother bird approach alone. “Grandfather has agreed to see you,” she said. “These three will be your escort to his nest.”