It was Zenos’ second day on the mountain. After a breakfast of left-over stew and exercise at the track, Mad approached him for his next lesson.
“It’s time to learn about lateral spellcasting,” Mad said as he slid down the hill. There were sticks in both his hands.
“Is that different from regular spellcasting?” Zenos asked.
He had just completed fifty crunches. His cheeks were red and he stank of sweat. Nonetheless, he was happy to do anything else. Mad tossed him a stick and Zenos caught it in the air. It was four-feet long and an inch thick, and mostly straight. It had been stripped of its branches and bark.
“All adventurers can use magic, and most monsters as well,” Mad said. “To fight with magic, you need to think in unconventional ways. No fireballs here and there, you must use your head.”
“I understand how magic works,” Zenos said. He swung the stick, twirled it in his hand. It was crude even for practice, but it had good balance from end to end.
“Well, prove it to me,” Mad said and retreated up the track. “I’ll stand back here and you try to charge at me. You can use any counter spells or abilities you know.”
All I have are my Eyes, but would they affect him? Zenos thought. Maybe I should just run at him and see where this is going.
“Are you ready?!” Mad shouted.
Zenos nodded and again twirled the stick. “Ready.”
“Go!”
Zenos broke into a sprint.
Mad raised his staff. “Levitate, Level 1!” He pounded the ground.
Zenos slipped upwards and Mad’s spell suspended him a few inches over the track.
“Mad!” he shouted, struggled against the air.
“Lateral Spellcasting is a thought school based on using fast-casting, low-mana cost spells in unconventional ways,” Mad said. There was a big smile on his face. “It does not strictly require a spell to be Level 1, so long as you’re taking advantage of circumstances to give a small spell an out-sized effect.”
Mad knocked his staff on the ground and Zenos was dropped on his stomach. As he clambered to his feet, dirt, pine needles, and filth had clung to his gray pants and white long sleeve. He brushed himself down.
“All you did was make me float,” Zenos said, wiped dirt from his cheek.
“With three words I stopped your movement and made you an excellent target for my party members,” Mad said. “Now, go back to where you were standing and try again.”
Zenos sighed and returned to his starting position.
I’ll use the Eyes, he decided. The moment he opens his mouth, I’ll give him an order, and even if he resists it, it’ll throw him off. He twirled the long stick in his hand. Once more.
“Go!”
Zenos sprinted, his predatory eyes tightly focused. Mad said nothing. The smiling necromancer stood ahead; his eyes were shut even as Zenos closed in.
Could he know about the Eyes?
The idea flit through Zenos’ mind. The Eyes of the Emperor were restricted by access and availability to other eyes. An opponent with open eyes and direct eye contact was the easiest to control, whereas those with closed eyes were difficult to affect. It was possible Mad knew about that trick. Though it would never have worked against the demon emperor, Zenos’ eyes were weaker in Adohas.
It doesn’t matter. Zenos steeled himself, held his stick with both hands and lunged. I’m already close enough!
A string whipped around Zenos’ boot and yanked him backward. He dropped forward and planted his face in the dirt. His stick fell a few inches short of Mad’s feet. The string pulled Zenos up off the track and into the air.
Zenos glowered from where he was hung, five feet in the air by his left boot. He was upside down, his blonde hair tossed and dirtied by mud. He looked like a used paintbrush.
“Did you know what happened?” Mad asked with a smile as he opened one eye.
“Anima,” Zenos growled.
“Oho.” Mad chuckled. “But I didn’t say a single spell word.”
“The hair that led us to our first camp stayed lit for an hour,” Zenos said. “You could have cast that spell in advance… and left it in wait until I got too close….”
Zenos blushed, blood was rushing to his head.
Mad pounded the ground and the string released Zenos. He fell to the mud for the third time that day. At the rate things were going, his noble white long sleeve and gray pants, purchased from fine tailors at the best boutiques in Bastilhas, would be ruined by the end of the day.
“Anima is a spell that animates an inanimate object with a spirit of the departed,” he said. “It’s especially useful because of its long duration, which means you can create all sorts of anima in the hours before battle. Remember that sometimes you’ll have a spell to counter, but I wouldn’t bet your life on it. Assume every enemy has prepared spells ahead of time, and that those spells will act autonomously even without their master’s awareness.”
Mad blinked at Zenos.
“Are you going to get up?” he asked.
“This mud suits me,” Zenos said.
Mad’s lip slanted and he scratched his head with his stick. “Was I too hard on you?”
Zenos pressed up from the ground and stood back on his feet. “No,” he said with an exasperated sigh. “I could cast magic in my previous life, but there were few sorcerers besides myself. Truthfully, I hadn’t considered these things before.”
“I had expected you to use some counter magic,” Mad said.
“But for my eyes, I don’t know any.”
Mad knit his brows together. “Really?”
Zenos nodded, brushed the filth from his stained clothes. “Though I knew magic before, none of it carried over to this world,” he said.
Mad raised a hand to his chin. He made thoughtful glances as he paced around. “I sensed that your mana was quite low when I met you,” he said. “But your eyes made me think you had hidden your potential with some sort of magic.”
“You thought that even after I told you I wasn’t an adventurer?” Zenos asked.
“No, after that I thought you were just very untalented,” he said.
Zenos frowned.
Mad smirked. “You are untalented,” he said and stepped in to pat Zenos on the shoulder. “But I don’t think you’re talentless.”
Zenos sniffed loudly. “Is that another way to say I stink?”
Mad laughed and walked around him. He picked up Zenos’ coat from where it lay by the track. “Let’s take care of that next,” he said, bundle of gray in his arm. “Do you remember how I said our stew had enchanted water? It’s time to show you where the hot spring is.”
“Hot spring?”
Mad led the way back up the mountain, but instead of turning left and heading south to their campsite, they turned north, and traversed a narrow trail around a ravine. Across the mountain, a fair distance from the dungeon proper, they arrived at a dwarf colossus carved of stone. It stood at a ten-degree tilt, twenty meters tall and half buried in the mountainside. It was covered in greenery, vines, and tangled by the naked roots of young trees. They were nourished, not by the water that poured from its open mouth, but by the humidity of the steam it created.
“This hot water is sourced somewhere deep underground, below even the lowest level of the dungeon,” Mad explained. “It fills these… squares. We call them baths, but we’re not sure what they were supposed to be.”
At the foot of the statue and down the hillside were large squares, each ten feet across. They erupted from the ground like the campsite ruins and appeared close or stacked atop one another. When the water from the colossus filled the bath beneath its feet, the water from that bath overflowed into the next one below it. In that way, many baths were filled or flowing from one to the next in what looked like a terrace of steaming waterfalls.
Mad set Zenos’ coat on a long, flat stone by the riverside. He began unbuttoning his own. “The adventurers would use these baths for bathing, laundry, and cooking. Not that the same time of course, that would be unsanitary.”
“You said these waters were enchanted,” Zenos said. “What do you mean? Is it magical?”
“The fountain of youth,” Mad said. “How do you think I stay so young?” He removed his black undershirt and revealed his fit, hairy chest.
Zenos frowned at him. “You’re joking,” he said flatly.
“There’s mithril in the water,” Mad clarified. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to take a bath and do some laundry. You’re welcome to join me, but I understand if you’re shy.”
On the palatial terraces of Darigon, Zenos had enjoyed bathing in a private pool. It was surrounded on all sides by a colonnade of white marble and attended by his servants, who were blinded by mana-limiting masks, such that they could only see a faint outline of the energy in the room. In the past, Zenos had taken many precautions to prevent anyone from seeing his body.
I’m not excited about the idea, but… I don’t know if I can stand wearing this filth for a moment longer.
Zenos undressed down to his boxers, like Mad. They washed their clothes in the running water and hung them up to dry on a well-used clothes line. By the time they were done, the sun was setting, and they had taken seats in Mad’s favorite bath. Zenos looked down the mountain and over the trees. The purple-pink horizon was reflected in his serpentine eyes.
“I hate dungeons,” Mad said. He made a cry of satisfaction that startled the roosting birds. “But I love this water! How could such good come from such evil?”
Zenos smiled to himself and reclined in his stone seat. Water gurgled around his chest, eased his aches by its soft caress, and rejuvenated his spirit by its warmth. Mad was onto something, the water was certainly magic. Zenos could tell, if not by the preternatural comfort he felt, then by the cyan color of the water which was apparent to his cursed eyes.
The Eyes of the Emperor could always see magic wherever it was, Zenos thought as he closed his eyes. And yet, since I arrived in Adohas, I have seen hardly any. The auras that were once so obvious are gone. I wonder if that’s because my eyes are dormant. Even so, the quality of this water is clear. It shines like mithril itself.
“Hey, Zenos?” Mad asked from across the bath. His ponytail was undone and his long black hair fell around him.
“Hm?”
“Those scars….” He pointed at Zenos’ chest. “I noticed them earlier, when I was doing your bandages. How did you get them?”
Zenos looked down. There were welts all down his chest, across his shoulders, and upper arms. It looked as if he had been beaten many times with a hot iron and the injuries were left to harden in oval callouses.
“I’m not sure,” he answered.
Mad nodded. “Then, I’m right in assuming that… your body had a previous owner?”
Zenos frowned. “Yes,” he said.
“Do you know who it was?”
Mad stared hard at Zenos and the Eyes of the Emperor reacted with orange light, drank of his thoughts. I have to know, Zenos heard Mad’s voice in his head.
“Yes,” he answered. “Anton Eddleston was his name.”
Mad’s eyes rounded. “Eddleston?!”
Zenos blinked. “Did you know him?”
“No,” he said, “but the Eddlestons are famous in Bastilhas. They’re one of the seven noble houses, best known for Duke Eddleston and Jessica Eddleston, who became the First Sorceress at a very young age.”
“That was his sister,” Zenos said.
“I guess that’s why you’re dressed like a ponce.”
Zenos folded his arms. “Should I dress in rags like you do?”
“I mean nothing by it,” Mad said. “But you don’t see fine tailoring like that on Adheim. I thought it was strange.”
Zenos pointed at his eyes, but there wasn’t a smile on Mad’s face. Where he would usually crack a joke, he instead turned his head and chewed on his thumbnail.
“So, Anton is dead,” he said.
“Yes,” Zenos said.
“Did you kill him?”
Zenos shook his head.
Mad frowned, his hand clenched in a fist. “Then it was the Atilonians. Damn them.”
“From what I gather, Anton was trying to escape Bastilhas,” Zenos said. “The Atilonians ambushed his caravan in the mountains and he was killed, among many others.”
“They must be exterminating the nobility,” Mad said. The baleful eyes that watched the dark tree line looked alien to his face. “Killing king Kalen wouldn’t be enough for the Atilonians. They need to kill the branch families, the cousins, uncles, and nephews. Anyone that could claim the throne of Bastilhas is a threat to their hegemony.”
“Have they done this before?” Zenos asked.
“Many times,” Mad said. “Too many times.”
Zenos sighed and relaxed against the wall of the bath.
“How did you come to be in Anton’s body, though?”
“He died… and I was resurrected,” Zenos said. He ordered the sequence of events again in his head. “I didn’t just fall into this world. I was brought here.”
“But, then how did you end up here?” Mad asked.
“An accident,” Zenos said.
Should I have killed that kid? If I had, I wouldn’t have been shot in the back. I would be somewhere in Bastilhas. If I had searched for Amarytha, would I have found her?
“Resurrection is rare,” Mad said thoughtfully. He turned his head up and looked the stars that shined dimly in the throes of day. “Accidents happen frequently. I’ve never heard of a resurrection that crossed worlds, though.” Mad stared again at Zenos. “Do you know who brought you back? For what purpose?”
Zenos shook his head. “No.”
“It’s borderline necromancy,” Mad said and the conversation ended.
It was late when they left the bath. Their clothes were still wet and the both of them were soaked in their boxers, but Mad resolved that with a spell.
“Dry Clothing, Level 1,” he said and snapped his fingers. The spell dried everything from the clothes on the line to the boxers they were wearing.
“Couldn’t you have done all our laundry with magic?” Zenos asked.
“It’s best not to lean too heavily on spells for every little thing,” Mad said. “And magic alone doesn’t replicate a wash in that river. Have a feel.”
Zenos rubbed the fabric of his coat and it was indeed much softer than before. He marveled silently at the pleasant texture.
“Anima, Level 1,” Mad said and a brass ring fit to his index finger shined with white light.
“Not using your own hair this time?” Zenos remarked as he pulled up his pants.
“Someone got my knife stuck to the belly of an automaton,” Mad said, smirking as he dressed. “I expect you’ll get it back before the end of our days, won’t you?”
They laughed. Later, Zenos sat in the dark of his tent. To outside eyes he would appear to be staring at total darkness, but his vision was filled with the translucent blue that was his player manual.
He studied further on the details of the player system.
There were little more than three weeks before he had to make good on his quest.
