22 - Cycle

Ari knew she would have to harm the orbs to help them. It was inevitable. They couldn’t remain as they were, because they were likely already hurting from the anomalous bonds they shared, even though they clung hard to them. That pain radiated in the air, driving away the other, more normal essences, and was likely what led to the contamination of the animal and plant life in the area.
Ari would need to return them to their original, unbroken state, but it would not be easy. As a matter of fact, it would hurt them a lot.
She leaned in tentatively and said, “I’m really sorry. I’m going to help you, but I have to tell you that it’s not going to be a pleasant process. As a matter of fact, it’s going to hurt a lot.”
The essences somehow understood her intent, and they silently argued back, rebelliously trying to break her hold on them. They didn’t want to be hurt. They’d already been hurt enough.
But she had no choice.
“Sometimes you have to get hurt a little more to get better,” she murmured. It was something her mother always told her whenever she was ill and forced to take bitter medicines or suffer leeches. Ari would wail and whine, but mother remained steadfast. She would sometimes hum while she did it, to make Ari more at peace with the process.
Ari tried humming now for the orbs, though she knew they likely still couldn’t understand why she was doing what she was doing.
She would just have to make them better and hope they understood later.
This was a highly experimental plan, but the idea was to reconstruct the orbs with the stray waste essence material strewn all over this cave.
She recalled Elric’s reconstruction spell in vivid detail. She could likely replicate it, but the problem was that she didn’t want to use up all the essences in her reservoir to do that.
But she didn’t necessarily need it.
The essence in manalings themselves would do the job. They had enough brightness left to bond and release magic. They were purified, though broken, which made them difficult to use.
But not necessarily impossible for Ari.
After all, she’d initially started meditating with impure orbs, and those didn’t even have any brightness to them at all, which was why they couldn’t be used in spells.
These could be utilized technically once she got rid of their anomalous bonds.
So essentially, she was killing two birds with one stone, using the essences to heal the essences.
It would need to be quick, near instantaneous, which is where the complication came from. She would need to, bit by bit, align the Luxa and Massa particles in the right order before she ripped the orbs apart and allowed the magic to take hold.
That magic would then call to their broken pieces before they faded away, and then she would use that to fuel even more healing for the orbs.
After it was done, they would simply transform into used essences, rather than semi-used dangerous blobs.
She turned over the idea in her head again and again, trying to find loopholes. When none appeared, she decided to take the chance.
She released the essence on her finger as she sat cross-legged on the cold cave floor, assuming her typical meditative posture.
“I really hope this works,” she murmured, attuning all her focus and spreading it so that she could sense every single essence in the room and knew where they were located.
She inhaled and exhaled. Then she began to move them.
It was difficult to say the least.
Back when she was younger, she learned that essences liked to be talked to. She would simply reach out and communicate with the essences around her, telling them about her day, about everything that had bothered her. She would also ask them questions about what they were and where they came from.
She couldn’t understand their language per se, but she’d come to understand the different buzzes they gave off, representing separate feelings. Excitement. Apprehension. A greeting. A goodbye.
It was communication at its simplest, and she did it now, using her core to form as many connections with the essences as possible, welcoming them with her mind.
She encouraged them to commune with her, all the broken pieces to float and drift towards her.
She was their anchor in the leydrift.
Come to me.
She spread her internal voice far and wide, isolating sections of the manalings and drawing them closer.
They were extremely slow to move.
The scraps were easier and faster to direct towards the manalings, but they couldn’t do anything but float once they got there, waiting for the bigger components to break.
Those were harder for Ari to move, but she did it anyway, manually forming the shape of Elric’s spell but on a smaller scale, using every bit of concentration she had to keep it from falling apart.
It was a cyclical feedback relationship, but someone had to go first. The snap had to come.
Once she’d gotten the Luxa Massa in the right orientation, she extended all the internal hands she had, holding on to each essence.
Then she ripped them apart.
Reeee!
As they screamed, she whispered, “[Axiom of the Unbroken Form]”.
It was instantaneous, the scrap snapping to fill the gaps, the shrill whistling lowering to a hum once more, the surprised buzzing following it.
Once she was done, she opened her eyes.
There were no more manalings in the cave. Only unbroken used essences that now floated happily free from pain.
Some drifted close to her, flitting over her skin. She knew what they were saying.
“You’re welcome,” she said, with a gentle smile.
Just then, she heard something move outside.
Not a manaling, a real physical thing, like an animal or a human running through the bushes.
She jerked into alertness, getting to her feet, eyeing the entrance.
When no one came in, she called out, “Hello?”
No answer.
“Is someone there? Rava?”
No answer again.
She crept closer to the entrance, staring out at the setting sun. No one was there. She considered going out to search the surrounding area, but she didn’t want to waste her precious reservoir doing it.
Hopefully, it was just an animal, and no one had seen her do what she did.
Even if they had, well, she didn’t regret it. She couldn’t while looking at the happy buzzing orbs.
After about an hour, Rava returned, still muttering at her device.
“We have to go before it gets late, Arielle,” she was saying. “I couldn’t fix the leak without Garrick. We can continue tomorrow.”
“No need,” Arielle said. “I finished cleaning.”
The woman finally looked up. “Did you?”
Arielle nodded.
“Oh. Well…” She beamed. “That’s very good then. Hang on, let me check.” She twisted a few dials on her device and blinked in surprise. “Well, you’re right. No manalings sensed here. Although it does read as though there were more used essences than before, that must be from what you used to sweep.”
“Uh-huh,” Ari said, grateful that her voice didn’t shake.
“A bit more than expected, though. Gosh, I need to get this thing checked. Anyway, you did great. Garrick and I will get rid of the ones that got stuck later.”
“What if there’s nothing to get rid of?” Ari asked.
“What do you mean?”
“What happens in the cleaving channel exactly?”

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“Well, the manalings get cleaved by the artifacts in there. Sometimes, a few manalings get stuck in the vents, and Garrick and I have to do it manually.”
“What if nothing gets stuck?”
Rava sighed. “That’s practically impossible, but we can only hope. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“I think you will.”
“Ha, right. So I’ll let Dean Octavius know to add the extra units to your allotted essence for the week.”
“Thank you,” Arielle radiated from the thrill. That, plus the two hundred units in her reservoir, made her feel like a wealthy merchant who had just sold land. ,
“I have a request,” Ari said.
“What is it?”
“I would like to help you clean up waste during my free time,” she said. “Please call me if you ever need it. No one else.”
Rava was surprised. “You enjoyed it?”
“Yes.” She also didn’t want anyone else coming to slice the essences into pieces.
“I’ve never met anyone who enjoyed a mana sweep before,” Rava responded. “I can’t exactly turn down other students who might want to earn some extra essences, but it’s not like they’re breaking down the door anyway. Sure.”
Ari was pleased. That was good.
But it didn’t feel enough.
She knew realistically, Rava wouldn’t call her all the time. Even if she wanted to, Ari might not always be available, and someone else would be called, or they would just cleave the essences themselves.
It made her a little sick to think about it.
What if she told them what she knew and what she could do? That she could separate the essences without the need to destroy them?
But telling them and furthermore showing them would raise suspicion and get her into trouble.
Unless she could just do it in secret…
Would Elric let her?
She should ask him.
As they left, she thought back to the sound she’d heard at the entrance. Hopefully, it truly had been an animal. Hopefully, no one had seen her.
That would be a disaster.

---

Elric still hadn’t responded to Arielle’s message when she got back.
He hadn’t responded to it after dinner either. Quite unexpectedly, she’d sat with Riorke, Lacey, Cuthbert, and Cedric for dinner, because they’d called her over after she’d gotten her food.
She had thought they would want to discuss the assignment, but they didn’t.
Instead, they talked about tournaments, knight exams, a sport called Podu, and a whole bunch of other things that Ari did not understand.
Nevertheless, she enjoyed the companionship and not having to sit alone
At least for the first few minutes.
However, after thirty minutes of chaotic conversation and overstimulation, she was ready for solitude.
After she returned to her room and washed up, she sat at her desk with a sigh of relief.
Today had been a good day. She’d gotten an advanced spell-crafting book and homework she was excited to begin. And she had made friends.
Yet it still bothered her that Elric had not responded to her messages. Was he alright?
As she looked through the spells, she pathologically checked her messaging scroll every five minutes or so, and her worry grew with each unresponsive second.
He was likely fine, she told herself. Just busy. He couldn’t have gotten hurt. He was an Archmage after all.
However, her brain pointed out that there were still things that could hurt Archmages.
Like the immortal dragons.
Or demon swarms.
Or grand liches.
Or even a heavenly storm.
Those had been the things that had killed the last four Archmages. Archmages didn’t die often, so when they did, it became legend, and every detail was public knowledge. They usually fell to some immortal calamity, or a horde of otherworldly creatures, or even a divine enemy, like a legendary mage gone evil.
When they died, there would be a procession in their honor, a day of silence to mourn them across all the continents.
The event had never really registered much to Ari, but that was because she didn’t know any archmages in real life.
Now she did.
The world had been in an era of peace for some time. According to history books, there were more tribulations in the past, and Archmages used to die more often.
It stopped after the Peace Accord, but the tribulations could very well start again.
And if it did, Elric would need someone to help him and make sure he didn’t die.
He’d told her that he didn’t have any other friends apart from her. So that meant it had to be her job to help him.
How would she do that?
What if he needed help right now?
He hadn’t responded to her message in nearly twenty-four hours. He had told her that he would speak to her today, but he had not. The time had nearly elapsed.
Anxiety rippled through her. What did she do now?
“If you had a friend,” she voiced aloud to Lyra, who had been lying underneath her bedcovers since she’d gotten back. ’“And they haven’t replied to a message for an entire day, even though they said they would. Does that mean that they’re dead or that they’re ignoring you?”
Lyra didn’t say anything for some time, so Ari took that to mean that she didn’t know the answer, or maybe she was asleep.
She bit her lip. Should she send the follow-up message? Would that bother him? Would he not want to be her friend anymore?
She could ask him.
He’d never expressed annoyance with her questions before and had always answered them fully.
There was no reason to think he wouldn’t answer this one.
She opened her messaging scroll, penned down,
 
Dear Elric,
I hope this message finds you well.
I understand that you are a busy man, given the nature of your employment, but for that very reason, I’m worried that your lack of response within the agreed-upon response time means that you have been eaten by a dragon or devoured by a heavenly storm. It’s very distressing to me not to hear from you during the time that I expected to. Perhaps you simply got caught up in battling ancient liches, but if you simply do not want to continue our acquaintanceship, know that I will understand, regrettably, but I would need further confirmation.
I would like you to respond to this message, letting me know if A) You would like to adjust the reply timeline to allow for your busy schedule, B) You would like to dissolve or scale back our friendship to an acquaintanceship, or C) You are dead.
Obviously, you cannot reply to it if C is the case. If you do not answer this message by my bedtime tomorrow, then I will assume that you have fallen to some great monstrosity. I will mourn you and summarily avenge your death at the earliest opportunity.
Sincerely,
Arielle Blacksoil.
 
Happy with the message, she went back to studying her spells.

---

Elric appeared on an empty field, wondering what exactly his assignment was to be.
The quest menu hadn’t specified. It only mentioned that he’d been called for a special reconstruction quest, ranked urgent.
But there was nothing here. Just a vast, empty expanse with no buildings or even people to reconstruct. No war between rival clans to be settled either.
Was he too late?
Was everyone already dead?
There was no blood splatter, no stray body parts. Everything looked eerily still and peaceful.
A slow clap interrupted his thought process, and it echoed with a rankling familiarity.
Damn.
He knew immediately before turning around and, with no further context, that he’d been tricked.
“You arrived in record time, Elric,” Gio said, walking up to stand beside him. Elric turned to assess the other man, who had unbuttoned the top three buttons of his blouse. He wasn’t wearing a robe, as usual, and he’d rolled up his sleeves to reveal his arm rune tattoos.
Elric would have thought his careless appearance was simply an appeal to vanity, but he noticed that there was a trickle of sweat down the side of his face.
Gio didn’t sweat often. His body was always perfectly climate-controlled, and he didn’t sweat even in fights that would demolish other mages.
“You must truly enjoy rebuilding things, don’t you?” Gio continued. “I always thought that kind of task would get boring after a while. Like a glorified architect working as an errand boy for the ministry.”
Elric knew that Gio was deliberately trying to provoke him, but he also knew that it wouldn’t work.
Those kinds of words didn’t touch him anymore.
He’d heard it enough times from enough people, including the Celestial Assembly and his own father.
They thought he was wasting considerable skill doing the things he did and went to great lengths to let him know. What they failed to realize was that their opinions of him didn’t matter in the slightest.
The only people whose opinions had ever mattered were dead.
So Gio’s mocking didn’t hurt.
Elric was more curious about why Gio had ambushed him. “Why are you here?”
“Because I’m the one who got you assigned to this mission.”
“You assigned me?” Yes, Archmages could assign quests, but they typically assigned them to lower-tiered officials, not other Archmages.
There would need to be a special request filled in for the latter, and the requested would need to approve it first before the quest was assigned. Elric would ask how Gio had bypassed all of that, but he didn’t need to.
It was Gio.
“Why?” he asked instead.
“It was a ruse,” Gio admitted.
“I get that, but why the pretense?”
“Because of your cousin.”
Elric’s blood pressure spiked, but he schooled his face into calm.
“I was curious about her,” Gio said. “So I went to the Ministry of Affairs to look up her exact scores.”
“Yet another breach of our bureaucracy.”
“Of course,” he admitted cheerily. “While there, I talked to Mage Philip. You know him, right?”
Elric thought about it. “You mean Phineas?”
“Maybe. He’s the Master in charge of the evaluations, and he seemed to have some trouble remembering exactly how her test went. He knew some things but stumbled on details. Luckily, I have the skill to counter the Unknowing potion.”
Elric resisted the urge to chew on his teeth. Damn Gio.
What on Earth had piqued his interest so much that he would go this far to unveil their secret?
Although he often did the most baffling things for his own entertainment, such as letting Phasewalkers escape so he could capture them again.
Elric supposed that when you got that powerful without an inner purpose, it was easy to get bored.
“So,” Elric said. “What do you plan on doing with this information?”
At the same time, he readied himself. Gio was one of the most powerful Archmages who ever lived. He’d been an Archmage for far longer than Elric, but Elric was no weakling either.
He didn’t necessarily have the best battle build, but he was resourceful and creative with his talents.
He wouldn’t go down without a fight.
Why? A stray thought occurred to him. Why was he willing to go this far to protect the girl’s secret?
The fact that it was his secret, too, didn’t seem like a good enough reason. But he didn’t have a better one.
“Calm yourself,” Gio finally answered his question. “I’m not going to do anything or tell anyone.”
Elric didn’t know if he could believe that. “Then why go through the trouble of seeking out the information?”
He hummed. “I told you. Curiosity. I’m curious about someone as strange and powerful as she is. I’m also curious what she’ll become.” His lips spread with a smile that did not reach his eyes. “Hopefully, she’ll become someone who can provide me with much better entertainment than you have so far.”
“She’s not here to be your plaything.”
Gio scoffed. “The entire world is my plaything.” His eyes flashed with that mad heat. “But don’t worry. After I was done with Philip, I re-altered his brain in a far better way than your Unknowing potion did. Seriously, Elric, you need to stop using that. It’s too clumsy and unrefined. I know you can do better.”
Irritation made Elric want to forget himself and punch the other man in the face. “Unsanctioned mind alteration is illegal,” Elric said, uncaring that it made him a hypocrite.
He’d done what he did for a good reason, and the Unknowing potion had a much milder effect with fewer side effects, which was why Phineas could tell that he’d been made to forget something.
Elric typically used the Unknowing potion in lieu of other methods that could cause serious psychological problems down the line.
Gio wouldn’t have been careful to avoid that with Phineas’ brain, and his careless disregard for those around him infuriated Elric.
“Are you going to report me?” Gio said with a teasing smile. “That would be a funny turn of events, wouldn’t it?”
Elric was suddenly tired of the conversation. He wouldn’t get anywhere with Gio.
“Is this what you called me here for, Gio?” he asked.
“No, I wish. But alas…” He snapped his finger.
The sky cracked.
Elric blinked as, without warning, the illusion cleared and they were surrounded by hundreds of seven-foot demons, with large horns, green skin, and ugly, snarling visages.
They had been trapped by a webbing of light streaking across the bloodied field, and they roared their displeasure, straining against the hold, a string of light snapping from the force of their resistance.
“This is what I called you here for.” Gio didn’t look worried. In fact, he looked relaxed as he stretched.
A crow called, and dark birds circled in the sky, in wait.
“I’m going to let loose for a while,” he said as he extended his arms over his head and cracked his neck. “There are a few villages only a half a day’s journey away. I need you to ensure the battle doesn’t reach there. Your job today is to minimize the carnage and make certain I don’t kill anyone I’m not supposed to kill.”