20demayo Chapter 19: Circle of Restoration
Chapter 19: Circle of Restoration
Chapter 19: Circle of Restoration- Excerpt from
Aliandra
A point of light coalesced somewhere in front of her and expanded into a violent flickering and roaring rush of sound and pain as her awareness reluctantly returned to her bruised and battered body.
Ali found herself lying on her back, unable to do more than hang onto her painful breathing as her senses screamed, informing her, with a chaotic deluge of signals, that all was most definitely not ok. There was so much that it all blended into one overwhelming scream of pain, running together and leaving her unable to even identify her injuries. Unwilling to try moving yet, she simply lay on the comfortingly cold stone, staring up into the mostly dark room.
She lay for a while, wondering if she was dreaming, or perhaps she had stumbled into some sort of afterlife.
After a few minutes of simply being, she summoned the energy to call up her notifications from before.
Her mind took its time processing the information. Somehow, about halfway through the messages, she realized that it meant she had actually survived, and no, she wasn’t in fact dreaming. Besides, there was far too much pain for that.
Slowly, she tried sitting up, immediately falling back to the ground as a fresh surge of pain crashed through her body. By her nearly full mana pool, she judged that she had been unconscious for nearly an hour, but her health was still critically low.
Ali knew she was seriously injured, but she had no idea how she was going to find a healer down here.
She painstakingly levered herself up into a sitting position. After fighting back the waves of dizziness and dimming vision, she finally took a good look at herself. Her arms and legs were charred from the flames of the fireballs, and her ears still rang painfully. She lay there in a disconcertingly large pool of her amber blood, with her right ankle bent at an impossible angle, clearly snapped. Her body involuntarily recoiled as the sight of her savaged leg recalled to her mind the sounds and pain of Mato’s brutal attack; the feelings of her flesh being torn by his powerful jaws, and her body flung back and forth crashing against the stone before she had passed out.
Holding her breath, Ali turned quickly,
She settled her body, shifting herself into a position of marginally less pain, and began to read, the subtle magic of her Runic Script skill working continuously to help her understand the complex inscriptions. A sudden howl from beyond the stone slab and the arched doorway snatched her attention away from the pages, and she shivered as her mind instantly conjured terrifying images of what it might be.
she scolded herself, but her heart was more nervous than annoyed – worried more about the spine-chilling sound than her struggles to concentrate.
She directed her attention back to the magic runes in the book, tuning out her surroundings and trying to ignore her fears. Slowly, the world faded from her attention, leaving her alone with the delightfully complex magical text. Her mana ticked down as her Sage of Learning began to pull at long-forgotten memories of magic studies from her youth, stitching them with runes she had briefly seen and not understood in books at the library, trying to make sense of what she was studying.
Her focus deepened as she struggled to understand the delicate structure and interplay of the magical connections inscribed before her. She absently brushed the beading sweat from her face as her sense of time passing began to fade. For a simple, low-level spell, the complexity was extraordinary, and Ali threw herself fully into her task.
She barely noticed the chime and the notification of her skill increase, but its effect was extraordinary. Immediately, the runes she was reading snapped into sharper focus as her new clarity began to unravel the significantly more complex layers below the superficial, and subtle interplay of meaning and connection they created in symphonic coordination. Her mind filled with a rush of new information, possibilities, and a sense of wonder, all the while, the voracious Sage of Learning consumed her mana in an accelerating torrent. Ali felt frustratingly close to understanding, but as tantalizingly close as she felt, it still eluded her. She pressed on, gathering her will and focus, and began to re-read the entire text.
Suddenly, understanding blossomed in a cascading chain reaction within her mind. Falling back with a gasp, she saw each of the runes, concepts, and layers as if they were complex glowing puzzle pieces floating within the expanse of her mind. All she needed to do was sort them and fit them together in the correct arrangement. She reached out and nudged one piece, connecting it to its partner in a thrilling spark of understanding. As she examined the new configuration, she saw an additional connection that now seemed obvious. Reaching again, she coaxed the next piece to connect, building upon what she had just learned. Each time, understanding advanced, and her cascade accelerated like an avalanche which suddenly culminated in a pristine and clear picture, a circle of magic hovering, glowing, pulsing within her mind.
Her awareness slowly returned to her body as she held the image within her mind. She was surprised to find her body drenched with sweat and trembling from exertion. But she had it – hovering in crystal clarity was the first magic spell she had fully grasped, completely understood.
, she thought, allowing some time for her breathing to return to normal. she thought looking at the decimated remnants of her previously almost full mana pool. After she had recovered a little, she patiently deconstructed each of the items in her little bundle of loot, refilling her mana once more.
she thought, shuffling and dragging herself along the floor to where Mato lay. His breathing was noticeably weaker now.
There was no choice. She would either succeed in time, or she would fail – and they would both die down here in the darkness, posthumous victims of the vicious Kobold Fire Mage.
Diligently, Ali reviewed the glowing magical construct in her mind and then she began channeling her mana into her Runic Script skill. Intense magic shot forth from her hand in a bright green glowing stream, flecked with golden sparkles as she wielded her skill to duplicate the runes she had pictured. It didn’t matter that the ground upon which she scribed her magic was stone covered with congealing blood, her skill simply etched the spell-work directly onto the stone.
The task was every bit as hard as she had anticipated – she mustered her focus and concentration to the extreme, striving to replicate exactly every tiny detail, every minuscule but essential connection. As she worked, the pain and exhaustion racking her body grappled with her mental focus, causing her to falter and lapse repeatedly. Each time she did so, she had to reset the entire rune she was working on and rebuild it from scratch. With painstaking slowness, running entirely on the force of her willpower, she grew a circle of glowing runes around Mato’s fallen body.
Her vision was beginning to fade in and out by the time she reached the last few runes, sheer exhaustion taking its toll. Ali blinked the droplets of sweat out of her eyes and restarted the rune she was focused on, correcting a mistake. It was a silly mistake, but she had stopped chiding herself for them, reduced to merely hoping she would be able to hold out long enough to complete the construct. She swayed as she caught herself before passing out, and readjusted her mana, just in time to avoid making yet another error.
Suddenly, surprisingly, there was nothing more to scribe. The circle closed with a snap and a rush of magical energy as the entire ring of intricate runes flared brightly in green with accents of gold. A substantial chunk of her mana surged out of her into the ring as her body staggered from the waves of exhaustion.
She stared blankly for a while at the glowing magical construct. Within the circle, ethereal green aurorae began to dance, rising into the air like ghostly flames shot through with flickers of golden sparks and barely perceptible translucent shapes that looked like leaves floating on a breeze. Mato’s breathing began to slow and deepen as the magic flowed through his body. Ali cast Identify to see what she had made.
She knew she should feel more, but all that came was a sense of profound relief that she was done and could now let go. Thinking nothing of the danger, she crawled into the runic circle and collapsed beside Mato. The green aurora caressed her skin like the afternoon sun shining down on her face as she lay upon a grassy bank. She released herself into its embrace and finally allowed her consciousness to fade.
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