Starbreaker

“There are rules in any society, and none more so than the society of elves, where memories are long and grudges carried longer still. To scry another individual without their permission could easily be interpreted as an invasion of privacy not unlike hoisting up their skirts to take a peek underneath. Which is to say, do so at your peril, for the social repercussions are likely to be vigorous and immediate.”

—Fundamentals of Arcane Etiquette, Elenya Starweaver

 

There was no physical library on board the ship, just as there had been no physical books to be seen anywhere on the freighter that had brought Sylvas this far. What they had was access to all of the information that was ephemerally stored somewhere in the ship through the use of their slates. Until now they had been entirely locked down to the bare minimum of access, telling them little more than a civilian would have been able to learn, but with Sir’s command, the slates had suddenly become a bountiful cornucopia.

Four hours wasn’t nearly long enough. Sylvas knew that the other students at Strife were going to be far ahead of him, just by virtue of all the different spells and techniques that they would have had available to them in the wider universe. He needed to cram a lifetime’s worth of magic into his head in a few hours. Kaya was saying something to him, but he’d slammed Clearmind back into place so that he could focus on the slate in his hands.

First up was the scrying spell he’d seen all of the Ardent using. Even if he couldn’t compete with the other trainees, he’d at least be able to see what they were and what they were doing that he couldn’t. It took him only a few seconds to find the spell, and three or four attempts at reading it through before he realized that he was lacking some of the foundations of the magic system it had been built for. He could directly channel mana, he could project it into spells as if he was scribbling out the words for it, but this magic seemed to operate on a completely different level, connected up with laws of the universe that he hadn’t even heard of until now. His gargantuan task had just become even more massive, and he quickly loaded all the recommended reading onto his slate. Kaya was still talking, so he tuned her back in. “… think we’re savages just because we didn’t come from the core worlds, reckon we’ve never even heard of…”

He cut her off. “Kaya, I haven’t come across most of the spells that they use regularly, my education was very… focused.”

“Well. Why didn’t you say so, boy? I could have been teaching you what you needed from our first night!”

“Because I didn’t realize just how limited my education was until I was face to face with the reality of the situation, so could you please just let me study as much as I can so I’m not a complete laughing stock once we get to Strife?”

She peered over his shoulder at the book-list he had collated. “Don’t you go worrying, boy, there’s plenty time for all that academic krahg. What you need is practical lessons.”

He gawked at her. He knew that she felt indebted to him after the little mana donation he’d made earlier, but he couldn’t believe how much she was willing to throw away. “And you mean to squander the precious little time we’ve got teaching me instead of studying yourself?”

“Boy, I think you’ve got the wrong idea about all this.” She chuckled as she sank down to sit beside him. “They ain’t trying to make us officers, they’re trying to make us grunts. Bodies to throw at the problem. We don’t need no education, just enough magic to blast a hole in an eidolon and call it a day.”

Sylvas didn’t believe it could be nearly that simple. Without the groundwork of the arcanum they were using, he would be navigating without a map. “The scrying spell, it requires…”

She stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “It needs you to believe it will work even if you don’t understand why it works. That’s all.”

“But how can I…”

Once again she cut him off before he could get her to understand. “Same way you trust that when you jump you’ll come down again. Ain’t for us to know why. Just to believe it.”

He had no faith in this process, but if she was right… if she was right then he could always go back and do all the required reading afterwards and focus on learning the actual spells first.

“Alright, show me the scrying spell.”

The magic involved was relatively simple, the Arcane Eye that was summoned overhead was some sort of manifestation of a higher power of insight that it would take him a long time to fully understand, but actually invoking it was as simple as forming his mana into the right shape and speaking the words, same as any other spell. He cast it, and for a second, nothing happened, then he looked askance at Kaya and almost fell over as information flooded his mind.

 

Name: Kayagrah Ormbjorn Runemaul

Species: Meteoric Dwarf

Health: 100%

Mana: 100%

First Circle Embodiment: Steelflesh

First Circle Paradigm: Clockmind

Affinity: Undiscovered

Strength: E1

Resilience: E7

Speed: F5

Potency: F9

Focus: E0

Regeneration: F9

 

“Meteoric Dwarf?” Sylvas blurted it out, feeling like it was the least intrusive bit of information that had just been dumped into his head.

Kaya smiled at his success, “Aye, some dwarves live on the dirt, my kin mine the heavens themselves.”

He stared at her a little longer, willing the eye to tell him more before it faded away to nothing, but no more was forthcoming. “What do the letters and numbers mean? Oh, and is that all there is? The Ardent seemed to have more information at their disposal than just…”

The hand that had been resting on his shoulder moved up to slap the back of his head. “Boy, I’m teaching you basics. You want advanced stuff, take a class.”

“I… thank you Kaya.”

She looked bemused. “Get a haircut.”

“I beg your pardon?”

She seized hold of the hair on the back of his head, where it was still aching from the slap and gave it a sharp tug, hard enough to make Sylvas eyes water. “I’m sure you impressed all the girlies with that mop on your head back home, but you’re a fighter now. Long hair is a good way to get grabbed. And grabbed is a good way to get got.”

Her own hair was bundled up into a braid atop her head, well out of the way.

Before he even had time to make a comment on her manhandling him, she pressed on. “Right the letters and numbers. Those I can speak to though. They’re a gauge as to how  strong whatever you’re scryin is for that attribute. Somethin that’s ranked low, say an F0, is about as strong, potent, whatever as a human man. Which is to say not at all. So if you see that, you’ve not an issue to stress about. If you see anythin higher, say a rank A, well you’d best just start pissin yourself, cause it can likely crack a planet in half, let alone turn ya to paste. Now tell me, what else didn’t they teach you?”

He tried to cover the full breadth of his lack of knowledge, but the way that his education had all been a manipulation left him in the awful position of having no clue what a normal one would have looked like. “I don’t even know.”

What should have been a stressful few hours of studying turned into an extremely rapid rush through all of the things a mage should have known by Sylvas age.

“Kinesis?”

He learned the simple spells to manipulate objects from a distance without the need to touch them, something terribly helpful to the meteoric dwarves, given the hazardous materials they often encountered while mining out the space rocks they called home.

“Farsight?”

This spell was similar enough to the scrying one that it didn’t take much longer than learning the mana-form and he could cast it. The eye manifested on the opposite side of the room and he could close his own eyes and see through it in all directions at once, which was headache inducing, but undeniably useful.

“Wards?”

He did know a great many wards and enchantments, but they had all been pretty exclusively used to shield him from the vast volumes of mana that he had to channel rather than to protect him from outside forces. The exceptions were the wards he’d placed on his door at night to keep it sealed and alert him with a noise if they were disturbed, and the shield he’d been granted to deflect spells.

By the time that the ship lurched on contact with the next jump-gate, Sylvas had three shields at his disposal. One that could block physical objects being launched at him, the original one that could block energy and one additional ward that could hypothetically block things like the scrying spell, but they didn’t have a chance to try it out before the white icons of the Ardent materialized beside them with their new orders.

“Sending spells!” Kaya slapped her own forehead, leaving a red mark thanks to her having forgotten once again about her metal hand. “Completely forgot about them, great for sending a message to folks.”

They each touched their own shield, and Sylvas was fascinated to discover that he couldn’t overhear the message for Kaya, though he assumed it was identical to his own. “Report to teleportal 1 for transfer to Strife Academy immediately.”

Kaya carried as little baggage as him, but she still insisted on clambering up into her bunk and double-checking that there had been nothing left behind. Sylvas had fully expected for their superior the lizardman to return and bark at them to get moving, but it seemed that they weren’t even being graced with that little bit of politeness. He checked his slate for directions to the teleportal, up two decks and to the rear of the ship, and then waited impatiently for Kaya to come back down.

“Don’t just stand there!” She nudged him with her shoulder as she passed, “We’ve got a whole new planet to vohrt up!”

That last word of dwarfish didn’t come with enough of a context clue for Sylvas to work out what it meant, but he didn’t dare to ask in case Kaya explained it. After a night in the presence of the chorus of her bodily functions, he was pretty sure that she was completely shameless, and he didn’t want to risk arriving on a new world and meeting the people he’d be spending his immediate future with while bearing the awful blushing he feared she’d bring on.

They traversed the AEAS Slamdunk in record time, probably moving considerably faster than Sylvas’ laps around the training bay the day before, to arrive in the presence of a bored looking human mage dressed not in the armor of the Ardent like most of the people on board, but in simple grey robes with a little white shield patch sewn onto the chest. “You kids been teleported before?”

“Aye!” Kaya said with a grin, bounding over to stand in the silvery circle set in the floor.

“I haven’t actually…” Sylvas began to say, but the man was already casting, and he had to hurry over to join Kaya in the circle. She took a deep breath in and then blew it all out. Sylvas started to do the same but was too slow. The spell caught him with his lungs full of air. Everything around them went white.

Sylvas arrived on the planet in agony. His lungs were crushed by the sudden vacuum that had formed inside him. If he hadn’t suffered through the pain of digging his own mana channels, then it probably would have knocked him off his feet. As it was, he was left gasping and flailing for a moment before he managed to gulp fresh air down into his lungs. Kaya gave him a few unhelpful thumps on the back.

They had not arrived in another pristine facility like he had been expecting. They were outside.

Inside the silvery circle set in the red stone beneath their feet, there was thick sand, and it wasn’t limited to there, the whole world seemed to be covered in it, with every whiff of wind sending up a fresh plume. Beneath the sand, he could make out vast structures that he first took for hills, but they were too angular, too even in their shape. These were buildings, vast ruins toppled all around as far as the eye could see. Some bore the marks of battle, whole sections destroyed by fire burning hot enough to melt the exposed steel beams protruding from the stonework, or marred by catastrophic explosions that left nothing but perfect spherical holes that had now been filled in with red sand. Other parts seemed perfectly intact, apart from the fact that the stone beneath them had bucked them off and sent them tumbling all around to land in heaps atop one another. This desert had been a city once. It still was a city underneath the dunes of red.

In the abstract, he had known what a relic world was, but seeing it in person was a different matter. This was what he had tried to save Croesia from. This was somehow, better than how Croesia had ended up.

This was Strife.