Surviving Arkadia

The Bestiary was a true tome. It was heavy and leather bound and when I opened it I was slightly horrified that Amris had handed it to me so casually. It was an illuminated manuscript. It had to be hundreds of years old. Maybe it wasn’t as old as such a thing would have been on Earth. I had no idea when movable type was invented on Arkadia, or how quickly it was adopted, or even if it was adopted, perhaps mass production was done by some kind of spell here.

Then I realised that of course he had handed it to me. The book was old enough that anyone else might have trouble reading it.

I opened the book to one of the bookmarks. I was rewarded with a picture of an ancient walled city. The sky above the city was marred by black clouds from which tentacles descended. In the city people fought the tentacles off with weapons, hand tools and broken furniture. In the centre of the image there was a tower and inside it a person working on a magical ritual of some kind. Two of the tentacles were reaching into the tower and pulling at the robes of the person inside.

That person was holding an orb in both hands. The orb was gilded, presumably with real gold leaf, and I think that was meant to indicate that it was glowing. There was a scroll banner under the orb with very small writing on it. Too small for my Hyena eyes to focus on. I squinted at it, trying to bring it into focus.

“Here.” It was Gertrude, handing me the magnifying lens that she wore on a chain around her neck.

“Thank you.” Under the magnifying lens the Gothic lettering on the scroll swam for a moment before becoming the words The Source.

“Surely not the Source,” I said. “I’d have thought it would be bigger.”

“It’s probably meant to be allegorical,” said Gertrude.

“No,” said Roly. “It’s about how people used to use the Source. Geraldine knows this better than I do, she’s the historian in the family, but I know a little from my medical training. In the old days people would use Source accumulators to collect the source and then use those to power spells and magical devices. Over time magical devices got a lot more efficient and either used ambient Source, or just got manually topped up every few weeks. These days most people cast by channelling ambient Source through their bodies. It’s quicker but it’s tiring, by which I mean it causes Fatigue. That means you can only cast until your capacity for Fatigue is reached.”

“Unless you have the Exhaustion Casting perk,” said Trudy.

“Well yes,” said Roly, “But there’s a perk exception to practically every rule.”

I closed my eyes in curiosity and the skill tree popped into existence in the darkness.

EXHAUSTION CASTING - WHEN THE FATIGUE BAR IS FULL CONTINUE TO CAST USING EXHAUSTION. MAY CAST UNTIL THE EXHAUSTION BAR IS FULL AND WILL THEN COLLAPSE AND REMAIN UNCONSCIOUS UNTIL THE EXHAUSTION BAR EMPTIES AND THE FATIGUE BAR IS AT LEAST ONE THIRD EMPTY.

The perk could be unlocked by having a whole bunch of very technical sounding scholarly skills, or by achieving several feats of endurance, but there was one group of people who got it as a starting perk. The Fever Touched. I hadn’t realised that when Trudy had talked about them she was dropping capital letters at the start. I couldn’t see the full details of the Fever Touched build. Perhaps that was one of the hidden options in the character selection?

Looking back at the EXHAUSTION CASTING Perk I noticed that using it was the prerequisite for another perk.

SACRIFICE CASTING - WHEN THE FATIGUE AND EXHAUSTION BARS ARE FULL, CONTINUE TO CAST USING HEALTH. MAY CAST UNTIL DEATH. IF CASTER STOPS CASTING, LOSES CONCENTRATION, OR HAS A SPELL FAIL, THEY WILL COLLAPSE AND REMAIN UNCONSCIOUS UNTIL THE EXHAUSTION BAR EMPTIES, THE HEALTH BAR IS AT LEAST HALF EMPTY AND THE FATIGUE BAR IS AT LEAST ONE THIRD EMPTY. ONE IN THREE CHANCE OF PERMANENT 1% REDUCTION IN HEALTH BAR EVERY TIME SACRIFICE CASTING IS USED.

“Did everyone else know that people with the Fever Touched trait get Exhaustion Casting as a starting Perk?”

“What?” said Trudy and Roly, almost as one.

“And if they use the perk they can unlock Sacrifice Casting,” I said.

“That makes sense of something,” said Gertrude. “There are stories in the Archive of the first defence of Moonstone that say that two of the three Founders cast themselves to death. I always thought it was hyperbole and that they’d just died in the fighting but the contemporary descriptions of them certainly sound like Fever Touched people.”

I looked back at the city in the illustration. It didn’t look like Moonstone, much too tall and angular and also definitely not in the sky.

“So was the founding of Moonstone after people stopped doing whatever this dude is doing with a ball of the Source?” I said, pointing at the image.

“Well after”, said Gertrude. “There’s about two hundred and forty years between that image and the founding of Moonstone.”

I mentally wrestled with the angular lettering and the archaic language of the rest of the page until I mostly understood it.

“I think it’s saying that the void squid is a source eater. It says something about Mages needing to be particularly wary of the void squid because, unlike other source eaters, it can appear anywhere with very little warning.”

“I think we have a whole book on Source Eaters” said Amris, who had finished laying out multiple trays with different beverages and snacks. “From memory there are a lot of magical beasts that consume Source rather than food. Most of them are harmless, or even useful. Things like the Blitzenpaards that will consent to be harnessed for work if you can feed them enough Source. Some are attracted to anything that accumulates source and will try to eat it.”

“That reminds me of something,” said Gertrude. “Keep going, I’ll be right back.” She swept back into the Archive building, moving faster than I’d ever seen her move.

“Maybe we should consult the book on Source Eaters?” said Trudy.

Amris went back into the library as I turned the pages of the Illuminated Manuscript looking for the second bookmark.

The illustration of the giant spider crabs was much more gruesome. The title of the page revealed that they had multiple names in different places, being variously known as Robber Crabs, Spiny Scorpion Crabs and as Bone Thief Crabs. The images showed them picking over the corpses of sailors buried at sea, clawing their way into the holds of wooden ships in search of gilded Source globes, and carrying children away from a structure on a cliff that could have been a school, or a hospital, or maybe a palace, but looked too big to be a home. I decided not to dwell too closely on the details of the picture.

The florid language of the text beneath the picture sounded mostly like the sorts of tales that sailors spun in dockside taverns to scare the crap out of each other but there was one thing that had the ring of truth. It said that the Robber Crabs were drawn to the bodies of those ‘rich in the source’.