ghost flower

Reborn Healer Chapter 2

My parents didn’t talk to me about that one strange day at all after it happened. Maybe it was because I was supposedly still too young to understand what was going on, but I suspected there was something deeper to it.

If nothing else, it pushed me even harder to learn how to read. During...

Reborn Healer Chapter 1

Author's note: I've been experimenting with a new idea on the side. I'd love to know if anyone has interest in it! I have a few more chapters, but I'm not entirely sure whether or not I'll continue it at the moment. Since you lovely folk have been with me throughout The Silent Archmage, here's a ...

B3 Chapter 27: Ghost in the Machine [END]

After so long struggling to manage the careful balance between avoiding detection, minimizing collateral damage, and still effectively carrying a mission out, it was refreshing to finally have a playground where he could let loose.

Unlike the last time he had abruptly had to deal with parag...

Chapter 26 - The Light that Burns the Sky

Every now and again, there were events so significant that observers around the world couldn’t ignore it. This had held true since long before the dawn of magic—the eruption of Krakatoa, the Indian Ocean tsunami, the first atomic bomb. They had become more commonplace since the world had turn...

B3 Chapter 25 - Breaking Down

Bianca was being followed, and not in the normal way where she could just cast a stealth-type spell or find and subdue the person behind her.

No, the thing following her came in the manner of a perception-type spell that she had never seen before. Though she couldn’t tell its power level ...

B3 Chapter 24 - Beginning of the End

Waylan regretted his choices.

It was a bit late to say that now, but he did.

At the time, it had seemed logical. Or—no, logical was the wrong word for it. It had seemed right.

There had been no way to justify continuing to work under a Sinner. He hadn’t wanted to de...

B3 Chapter 23 - Conquer

There was no playbook for what the new leaders of Auria were doing.

In the past, there had been multiple efforts made to make magic as widespread as possible. Most countries still considered FCDs a basic need for their citizens, and even the least talented magician tended to get access to o...

B3 Chapter 22 - Takeover

Bianca had been a child like any other, once upon a time. Her early years and education hadn’t proceeded like any normal child’s would have, but apart from her accelerated learning period, she hadn’t differed all that much from, say, a prismatic child.

That was what she’d thought. I...

B3 Chapter 21 - Return

Desperate times created desperate magicians. Desperate magicians could do just about anything.

It came at a cost, of course. Every magician who had sought to go beyond the boundary of what was humanly possible at the time ran the risk of destroying themselves and everything around them in t...

B3 Chapter 20 - Inhuman

Uriel hadn’t wanted to take on the name of a Sinner, but she wasn’t going to say no to the fact that she was currently able to wield influence that went significantly beyond the limit of her actual abilities.

It was just a temporary measure. There was a part of her that instinctively re...

B3 Chapter 19 - Network

Syl and Bianca stayed on careful lookout as they descended. Given the information they had gathered from their brief stay on this exoplanet, they were reasonably certain that there as a risk of the machines making an attempt on their lives here in an effort to gain proper access to the offensive ...

B3 Chapter 18 - Around the Worlds

Just because the world was actively ending didn’t mean that daily life didn’t go on. Yes, it had been altered in many ways—very few if any schools around the world were still in session, most non-essential jobs had been canned, and military outfits were drafting—but there were still the l...

B3 Chapter 17 - Tea

Fourteen years ago, Katelyn Lesling had been the third Sinner on the scene in Middle America. She’d sensed the gigaton nuclear bombs beginning to detonate hopelessly late, and though she’d been a mere thousand kilometers away, she’d known that she would arrive far too late to keep the chain...

B3 Chapter 16 - Banished

There were multiple time limits relevant to Syl and Bianca’s current situation. The most obvious was their limited resources. Their pressure suits had limited supplies of oxygen, and the spell pattern refreshing carbon dioxide and maintaining pressure would eventually start failing even if they...

B3 Chapter 15 - Madness

As of January 15th, 75 AFI, roughly five percent of the moon’s mass had fallen onto the Earth. Not all of it had made surface contact—in fact, over half of the falling fragments had been stopped and shot back up into low orbit. One unforeseen side effect of this was that it rapidly became muc...

B3 Chapter 14 - Zero

Foreign environments were always impactful on magical equipment, especially ones that had been hacked together from the scraps of two already specialized suits. Syl found that his vocal synthesizer didn’t quite appreciate the conditions around them. It could still produce sound, but it garbled ...

B3 Chapter 13 - Fragment

Nobody was there to contest the moon fragment this time. This one was on the smaller end; city-sized, not state or country. It was large enough to have a gravitational pull of its own, but it was much lighter than even the last one they’d gone on.

From here, the three magicians sitting do...

B3 Chapter 12 - Calamity

Syl had been meaning to get around to restoring something of a voice to himself. It had been the least of a long list of priorities, and the process of putting an FCD together that was capable of acting as a stand-in for his vocal chords was, while not terribly difficult, time-consuming. With how...

B3 Chapter 11 - Domination

Syl had suspected something was wrong with the converted black site for some time now. Telemetry from sensors Incarnate had distributed alongside the food synthesizers, water purifiers, and oxygenators indicated a continued sharp uptick in flux presence there. Even when Uriel had confirmed that t...

B3 Chapter 10 - Offense

It had been a while since Syl had interfered with prismatics. The last few times he’d gone directly counter to a prismatic family, it had been under the guise of Pride, not of the Aurian archmage who’d been critical to the nation’s continued survival during the Third World War.

There ...

B3 Chapter 9 - Defense

The strike team deployed to the Pasatiempo Viridian complex was lethally overprepared for a community of around fifty thousand refugees and woefully underprepared for a single Sinner.

Each of the Viridian facilities that had been converted had undergone a hasty, incomplete process. While th...

B3 Chapter 8 - Make War, Not Peace

World War III began on January 1st, 61 AFI. It lasted seventy-three days and resulted in over two billion casualties. In the fourteen years since, the Earth had recovered to some extent. Those two billion people hadn’t been replaced, but reproduction rates had already been high before the war, ...

B3 Chapter 7: Gate

“That was a stupid risk to take,” Waylan said. “That was a Polarian paragon. You know that, right?”

“Are you dense?” Vivian replied. “Of course he knows.”

“Don’t take that tone with me,” Waylan snapped. “I don’t even know who you are.”

“I can tell t...

B3 Chapter 6 - Second Mover Advantage

This was, in a word, inconvenient.

Syl had done an analysis of as many fragments as he could. It had been a little annoying to do, of course. Even with access to the satellite network that the one-star general who ran SU-317 had founded, it was difficult. A great deal of the satellites had ...

B3 C5 - Riding the Winds

On December 31st, 74 AFI, the first fragments of the entity formerly recognized as Earth’s moon entered an impact trajectory with Earth. First contact was noted by Asian satellite systems, but it was soon confirmed visually by in excess of a billion humans. 

Many first thought that i...

B3 C4 - The Job

Syl relied more on the technology that he’d brought along with him than his magic when it came to monitoring the others with him. He didn’t have the flux to spare for expansive operations, but he had a few camera drones that he could control with minimal flux output. They didn’t have much i...

B3 C3 - Your Reputation Precedes You

Struggling to maintain a spell because of the number of processes it was composed of was not an unfamiliar sensation to Syl. Struggling because his flux pool just didn’t have the fuel it needed, however, was.

With the insights that he’d gained from the tools of the machines, Syl had hac...

B3 Chapter 2 - Logistics

Dealing with field work was much more irritating when Syl was temporarily handicapped. He had nobody to blame except himself for that, of course, but that only made it more irritating.

With networks across Auria in the state that they were, it was difficult to even confirm which of the othe...

B3 Chapter 1 - Stormwall

Magicians reacted to disaster in different ways, which was unsurprising—they were human, after all, and nothing was more human than being vastly different from a person just one short country away.

Syl, personally, was in the lab.

The Aurian responses should have been largely simila...

B3 Chapter 0 - Private File 317-PRIDE

Aurian Magic Institute - Semester 1

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Aurian Magic Institute - Winter Break

In the wake of the Santa Rosa Tower incident where several hundred Cascadians alongside multiple master-class Aurian magicia...