tobiasbegley

PSTH: Chapter Thirty-Two

Arcane essence! A very arcane subject, that’s for sure, pun fully intended without any remorse. It perhaps offers the least benefits to a person’s pneuma out of every type, barely better than raw essence flowing from a spirit without a condensed core. Even null essence pneuma is stronger, fas...

PSTH: Chapter Thirty-One

There’s a lot of discussion around the phrase ‘War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!’ and its use in Pre-Arrival culture. Some, such as myself, believe that the phrase was an ironic one. With a culture dependent heavily on an inherently limited resource, and with the proto-Obsidian ...

The Third Step: Chapter Fifty-Eight

I sat in the waiting room, a handful of other people buzzing around me, Dusk sitting on my shoulder. I took a long, slow, deep breath as I prepared for the first round of the Elysian Mastery Tournament.  

True to his word, the Craftsman had left my staff sitting on the nightstand ...

The Third Step: Chapter Fifty-Seven

As soon as I spoke, the entire demeanor of the Craftsman changed. He stretched, popping his back, and I caught a flare of a strange, layered, complex mana that I wasn’t able to identify fully before it vanished. He scrabbled around in his pockets, looking for something, then removed a marble gl...

The Third Step: Chapter Fifty-Six

After the official opening of the tournament, it was late, but not so late that I wanted to immediately return to bad. Instead our gaggle of people meandered around the accommodations of Silent River Sect. The atmosphere there was electric, as competitors rushed from place to place, ate from the ...

PSTH: Chapter Thirty

Shade essence! Finally, we’re back in the category of reasonably named things. We’ll start with the first thing: shadows aren’t real. And that’s true if you’re removing essence from the equation. But shade essence is undeniably linked to shadows, and is one of the more conceptually grou...

PSTH: Chapter Twenty-Nine

Does the differential between a magian’s strength and the strength of the ambient essence matter? First of all, let’s acknowledge that once you’re above the strength of an area’s ambient essence, standard cultivation will drop off a cliff, and set that aside. There’s no denying that, bu...

PSTH: Chapter Twenty-Eight

Combat essence… It sure is a weird one. It’s another essence type with multiple proposed other names: somatic, bodily, corporeal, form, meat, enhancement. The issue is, none of them fully encapsulate the type. It’s great at empowering people, sure, but there are a handful of unique aura spe...

The Third Step: Chapter Fifty-Five (and a Half)

A wine glass tumbled from Atsila’s fingers as she stared up into the sky where the flash of light had come from, even as Ama fed her a stream of information via their bond. An instant later, a dozen different emotions raced through her, but there was one dominant one: Frustration. 

T...

The Third Step: Chapter Fifty-Five

After Kene’s grandmother broke the tension, things relaxed, and we began to stream together toward the central arena where the opening ceremony would be held. I put my mask on shortly before we entered the absurdly busy entry hall.C Even though all of the tickets that I held were putting us in ...

The Third Step: Chapter Fifty-Four

“You’re going to jinx your next ascension if you keep muttering to yourself like that,” Kene said, causing me to let out a sigh and lean my head against the window. Kene had at first simply told me that I’d experienced a pretty normal fourth gate ascension, reminding me that my third gate...

The Third Step: Chapter Fifty-Three

I considered for a long moment, before I looked at Rebecca and nodded. I had known that there was a risk of Dawn’s true nature leaking eventually, but there had to be a reason that Meadow had insisted that we get her a mask and pass her off as the shade of a solar-aligned sky estragon. We’d g...

PSTH: Chapter Twenty-Seven

Why do eyes start glowing when a person gathers enough essence into their body to ignite it and actually form the right mix of ousia, anima, and pneuma that we call essence, rather than the tiny pools modern people are born with? The answer is a lot more complex than you might expect, but it esse...

PSTH: Chapter Twenty-Six

Toxic essence, or poison essence, or venom essence, or what I like to call it: pedantry essence. “Oh, anything can be toxic in a large enough dose, toxicity is a scale, not a binary”, yeah yeah, we know. But when you say something is toxic, we all know what it means. I’m not going to slap a...

PSTH: Chapter Twenty-Five

Thank you, thank you, you’re too kind. Well. I suppose since John gave the announcement of what I’m here for, I can jump right into it: the synthesis of essence based items, like essence stones, essence hearts, and mystic jewels. If you look on screen, you can see we’ve managed to successfu...

The Third Step: Chapter Fifty-Two

We still had several days in port, and with our distance from the Sekhem Court, I seized upon the opportunity to see a better run part of the country. I wasn’t sure if I was just going through a particularly unlucky streak and running into the problem areas of just about everywhere I came acros...

The Third Step: Chapter Fifty-One

To my disappointment, the Skehem Court did not allow me to see their ritual chamber. I supposed that was to be expected – they were already giving me materials for it, if they also let me see the spellwork and enchantments, then to their minds, it was as good as leaking the entire ritual to the...

The Third Step: Chapter Fifty

“Tell me more about this earring,” I said. “You’ve placed it on par with two favors or an entire selection of personalized rewards right from the Storm King. Why?” 

“It’s a powerful artifact, constructed out of a bloodruby set on a chain that is a tripart alloy of mana-en...

PSTH: Chapter Twenty-Four

Lightning essence! It’s got two main attributes that make it stand out: speed and power. When powering pnuema, it has a strong preference to empowering speed, and when its anima is used in spells, they tend to hit really hard. There’s actually something interesting with that. Did you know pre...

PSTH: Chapter Twenty-Three

A fascinating insight from our recent history is to look at the way essence awakening and average essence levels in people have changed. Three centuries ago, it was far more common to awaken one’s essence and begin cultivating as a magian or tamer. And yet, despite the number of cultivators dec...

PSTH: Chapter Twenty-Two

Now, we can all agree to be mature adults and not make any obvious jokes, right? Right. Wood essence! It’s a complex and powerful type of essence, which covers a variety of spells from plant manipulation, to healing magic, to imposing several types of status effects. It’s actually called wood...

The Third Step: Chapter Forty-Nine

“So, you do not wish to join the Sekhem Court. Yet you have nearly killed one of our best young masters, caused large amounts of property damage, and forced yourself into a meeting without even bothering to show a modicum of respect,” Prince Dhruv said, looking at the fox with a level gaze th...

The Third Step: Chapter Forty-Eight

Eugene watched as the diminutive fox boy teleported into the ballroom, a storm of emotions on his face. Two of the Khet vampire guards raced in after him, using their legacy-empowered bodies to keep up, though not by much. He let out a sigh and stepped forward, even as the other, lesser servants ...

The Third Step: Chapter Forty-Seven

Power. 

The Sekhem Court respected power above all else. This wasn’t entirely the law of the jungle, but the concept of might makes right was ingrained into the vampiric culture of the region. 

These guards were vampires, each of them with massively empowered bodies. I was...

The Third Step: Chapter Forty-Six

At this point in my life, I’d been to several ports in other countries: Crysite, Delitone, Dragontooth, Fitiavanna, and Obsidian Forest. Each one of them was unique and different, and caused me to wonder what other people saw as strange when they visited one of Mossford’s ports. The port to t...

PSTH: Chapter Twenty-One

A curious quirk found in every system of governance is that it’s susceptible to mass manipulation from a person possessed of presence and a powerful platform. You can find it all across history, both ancient and modern: the fall of the Roman Republic. The Greenlord Alliance overthrowing the Val...

The Bloody Conqueror

Avartagh lounged about, watching his army as they re-organized. Taking this castle was a major coup for their conquering. It wasn’t the hardest battle Avartagh had fought – that would have been killing Thornfront’s Occultist, a strange creature known as the Deerling. But it had perhaps been...

PSTH: Chapter Twenty

Ice, ice, children! A popular song from before magic came back, as well as the topic of our particular conversation today. Some essence types lean more heavily toward a pneuma focused build, like combat, while others lean more heavily toward anima and spellcasting as a whole. Ice definitely falls...

PSTH: Chapter Nineteen

Any species with essence possesses an innate power that operates with no need for external power. We call these ‘gifts’, though other names have been used: talents, legacies, species’ attributes, and more. Whatever you call them, there is an interesting difference between biological creatur...

The Third Step: Chapter Forty-Five

After arriving back on the boat and showing them what I’d gotten, life quickly fell into a somewhat familiar routine. Orykson analyzed the spear ghostgift I’d gotten, and stated that while it wasn’t a replacement for the true Bone Spear spell, it should expand the combat power of Pinpoint B...