Book 3, Chapter 13

It took me four days to prepare for the expedition. Most of that time went toward the final set up of the valley-wide mana containment spell. By all indications, the ember bloom had anchored the magic successfully, though I suspected we’d need to take a cutting soon to mirror that anchor on the east edge of the valley to keep it stable. We’d held off in hopes the tree would seed, but so far nothing had come of it.

Once things were settled back at the sanctuary, there was nothing left to do except wait to see how the project performed. Tetrin and Hyago were both more than capable of monitoring that, leaving me free to investigate the mystery of the aerial waypoint and the supposedly extinct giant birds.

Scrying that far was costly, but I did a quick sweep to ensure I wasn’t going to teleport in on top of a monster. Everything looked clear, and a few minutes later, I appeared outside the tower. It was exactly as I remembered, except that the mana somehow felt even stronger now.

I levitated up to the top of the eyrie and examined the mana flowing through it. It was subtle, but once I knew to look for it—and didn’t have any distracting siblings around—I could see that the mana actually had a direction to it.

Whether to follow the current back to its source or figure out where it was going was an interesting question. Part of me wanted to do both, but that was still far out of my reach. In a few years, it would be a different story, but unfortunately, that left me with no good answers right now. I could make guesses and speculate on the purpose of the eyrie and the mana current running through it, but really, there was only one way to know for sure.

What decided it for me in the end was the risk of wasting mana. If I followed the current back to its source and the whole thing turned out to be a waste of time, I could at least recoup some of the cost. Judging by how strong the mana current was and how much distance it has traveled to get to this eyrie, I might even come out ahead.

At the top of the tower, perched on the roof, I reached into my phantom space to pull out my staff. My old one had been destroyed in the final battle against the Wolf Pack, but I’d replaced it with a length of ember bloom six feet long and burnished to a soft glow. It was threaded through with gold and silver formed into a swirling runic script that swept up the length of the staff, but only when the light hit it at just the right angle.

My old staff had contained a core of living stone that ever so slowly generated its own mana, but given the already-magical nature of ember bloom one, I’d opted not to repeat that. The ember bloom itself was such an excellent material for channeling mana through it quickly that I’d decided to take advantage of that.

There weren’t many spells I had the mana for that I couldn’t cast in an instant. With this staff, that number dropped to practically zero. I’d sketched thousands of runes in the wood, and with the speed that mana propagated through ember bloom, I could combine them to form any spell I needed.

The staff itself was capped in steel on both ends. Steel was an interesting metal, magically speaking. Unlike silver, which channeled mana as easily as flesh and bone, steel acted as a sort of dam, blocking mana until it built up enough, then allowing it to burst out with explosive force. For my staff, it meant an extra fraction of a second to put together the spells I would cast with it.

Unlike my old staff, I hadn’t included a mana crystal in this one’s construction. Without the mana generating qualities of living stone integrated into the staff, there was no good reason to leave the crystal vulnerable, not when I could still draw from it while it was safe inside my phantom space. That didn’t mean I’d settled for a standard mana crystal, though.

My new mana crystal was thoroughly ensconced in a cage of living stone, so much of it that it had taken me six months to generate the mana needed to form it. This one was built to last though, and even if it would take a decade for it to make enough mana to cover the cost, that wasn’t the point of that particular investment.

I’d inscribed the living stone with the runes that had graced my old staff and gotten the transference loss between my mana crystal and me down to near zero. At this point, the only way I’d be able to cast spells faster was by advancing my core to stage three so that I could draw mana directly from it to fuel my bigger spells.

I didn’t strictly need my staff to cast the spell I had in mind, but I also didn’t have any reason not to use it. In terms of mana expenditure, teleportation was by the far the cheapest for the distance I expected to go, but that was negated by the extra expenses I’d incur trying to scry that far. Flight was my standard for short distances, but this trip didn’t seem likely to end quickly.

When I needed to travel long distances to an unknown destination, my spell of choice was elemental form. Shapeshifting was a complex field, something incredibly delicate and dangerous. Temporary forms often became irreversible if mistakes were made in the transformation process, or if the subject’s mind wasn’t strong enough to maintain its sense of self. Even in my time, mages who messed around with shapeshifting were rare.

That having been said, for those of us who had the skill and power to master the art, it was a powerful tool. I let the spell wrap around me and pull a mask over my flesh. As far as the universe was concerned, as long as the mana shell covered my soul, I was no longer a human. Instead, I was an elemental being – specifically, an air elemental.

My body was still human-shaped, but I was more like a glass statue full of swirling currents of air than a flesh-and-blood person. I lifted into the air, a mere effort of will with my new body. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that my consciousness slipped through the air, abandoning the currents I’d been part of and bonding to new ones.

I hurtled through the sky via an exercise of thought, elongating my form and dragging it from one part of the sky to the next. It was an awkward method of movement, one that took some practice to master, but which allowed me to travel several times faster than by flying. It took mere minutes to find another eyrie on a mountain northeast of my starting location.

This one looked much like the one I’d discovered near Ghalin, but with one major exception. The mana current flowing into it split two ways, one leading back to the eyrie I’d come from, and one heading straight west. It made me question just how many of these eyries there were, and if they spanned the entire island. Maybe they even went beyond. I could easily picture a chain of them perched on lonely rocks amidst the endless miles of the sea, leading to another land.

I’d already made my decision about which way to explore, and this new information hadn’t given me a reason to change my mind. Once again, I choose to chase the mana streamers deeper into the mountains or wherever it was they originated from.

The next tower was thirty or so miles away, this one mostly north of my previous stop, but here I found a very different sort of surprise. The speed I was moving at worked against me, and I was already almost on top of it when I realized that there were other sources of mana inside the eyrie. It wasn’t hard to guess what those might be, and though I was too late to hang back and study the situation before they noticed me, I wasn’t shocked to see a pair of enormous birds burst out of the interior and start circling the eyrie.

My air form gave me an advantage against being seen since anyone who looked at me would have trouble discerning me from the sky in the background, but it actually made it significantly easier to detect my mana. My own core was still shielded, as always, but the elemental form spell’s shell wasn’t something I could easily hide, not with the way it stretched out as I moved from one bit of air to the next.

Whatever else these birds might be, they were clearly magical in nature. They had no problem sensing me even if they couldn’t see me. Both of them were cawing, a warning perhaps, and that sound was infused with mana. It came and went so quickly that I had difficulty discerning the patterns, but I could at least recognize them for what they were: communication.

I’d encountered plenty of monsters that could talk to each other using mana, and what these two birds were doing seemed very similar to me. Translating it, unfortunately, was a whole different problem. Whatever they were saying, I wouldn’t be able to puzzle it out just by feeling the slivers of mana their calls were projecting.

It was hard to guess exactly how big they were while they were flying, maybe five or six feet in height, but their wingspan was closer to twenty. Their talons were easily big enough to pick up a child, and I had no doubt those wickedly curved beaks could tear through the toughest hide. No normal animal would stand a chance against one of these birds, and depending on what other magical abilities they exhibited, they might very well be at the top of the monsters’ food chain as well.

Their plumage seemed to be unique, making them easy to tell apart. Both of them were black-feathered, but one had red highlights and a lighter, almost purple chest, and the other had flecks of gray on the tips of its feathers. Both of them had the same intense, golden-ringed eyes, locked on my mana.

If they were intelligent, I might be able to use a spell like mind read to communicate with them. That would only work if they understood spoken Enotian, which I had no reason to believe they could.

This would be a good test. Either I could communicate with these creatures and they would turn out to be non-hostile, or they’d attack me and I’d learn how hard they were to kill. If they proved difficult to defeat, it might be time to turn back before I encountered a full flock of them.

Both birds spread their wings to their full spans and flew straight up at me. I made a note that this method of flying had nothing to do with how true birds did it, instead being a sort of air current of mana they created under their wings to bolster them. There was no flapping involved, but if someone were to interfere with that mana, they’d start to fall until they could stabilize themselves.

It was a potential weakness, assuming I needed it. That was still to be determined, though. I willed myself forward and down to meet them half way, where hopefully we’d find some way to communicate. If not, then I’d get to learn what kind of magic they possessed that let them attack the very air itself.