§
I had broken through a defensive barrier into this protected space upon entry. Naturally, the residents had alarms. And naturally, they had an emergency response, in the form of this group of warriors, classically kitted out in leather armor, heavy helmets and battle axes.
I wanted to rise and confront them, but my continued deep fatigue argued against it. Instead, I closed my eyes and gave Durandal a call.
Old Man, are you able to put a barrier around us where we are? Or would the wall behind me interfere with it?
His answer, [Fortress of Gaia], immediately appeared around us.
“Goodness,” Lady Aenëe immediately responded, seeing it in her fairy sight.
If you can feed me Earth mana so I don’t have to draw it for myself, I can maintain it as long as you need, My Lady, he added.
I fed him a large dose out of the reserve in my blood core so I wouldn’t tire my pneuma drawing it.
That was enough for a good half-day if the attacks aren’t too extreme, he judged. Indefinitely, if no attacks come at all.
I replied, They won’t make extreme attacks inside this tunnel against a threat that isn’t actively attacking them.
The bubble only blocked about two-thirds of the tunnel’s width, so we weren’t even stopping traffic. I settled back with my eyes still closed and listened to the thundering feet of the dwarves arriving in double-time, followed by loud cursing as they struck the barrier while attempting to surround us. From the sound of it, they quickly worked out the extent of the barrier, and surrounded us in a somewhat wider circle than they originally intended.
“Identify yourself!” the squad’s leader demanded. It was in clear Ostish rather than the Dwarvish I had feared I would hear. Tiana never learned Dwarvish. Dwarves and Elves supposedly speak the same language, but I had no better chance of understanding the Dwarvish dialect than an average American understanding Scouse or Geordie when they speak to someone from their own town.
I was still quite tired, but I sighed, then pushed myself to my feet and properly presented myself.
“My apologies, gentlemen. I am Tiana of the High Forest, a knight of Faerie. My wounded companion is Aenëe of the Old Grove, a fellow knight. Please forgive her for not rising.”
They had drawn back the moment they saw me rise and got a good look at my fairy armor, so they already knew the truth before I announced it. Upon hearing me confirm what they were seeing, they grew much more wary.
But they were dwarves. They couldn’t just back down.
“Are you responsible for the broken entrance barrier?” the leader asked in a grouchy but less belligerent manner.
I had a lot of ways I might answer that. I was leaning toward just honestly admitting my vandalism and apologizing, but Aenëe stole that possibility from me by speaking up at that moment.
“Was that what it was supposed to be?” she wondered. “I did feel you break through a bit of tissue paper when you entered the tunnel, My Lady.”
The corner of my mouth quirked, but I managed to hold a straight face. With a wondering tone, I asked the leader, “Was that supposed to be a barrier?”
The leader’s eyes grew in indignation at my slightly mocking tone, and his mouth quivered, fighting to retort against his better judgement.
Rather than stand and wait for him, I settled back to the floor and leaned my back against the wall while answering, “Please accept my apologies for resting while you’re still here, gentlemen. Between fighting an asura and healing my colleague, I’m somewhat tired.”
Aenëe had already set the tone for me, so I had to stick to it. I smiled sweetly and continued, “I do apologize for breaking your little barrier, though. Although I doubt I did more than discharge its mana storage.”
Frankly, if it was properly designed, it had already resurrected the shield, switching to a secondary magic stone.
Digging into my belt-wallet, I retrieved an Orestanian crown. [Fortress of Gaia] has a one-way nature, in order to allow weapons to fire outward from within its protection. It did not block the coin’s path as I tossed it to the leader, who nabbed it midair with an angry glint in his eye.
“That should be enough to recharge it,” I said. “Nothing has come down the tunnel behind us, so no more harm than discharging the mana should be done. Run along and leave us alone.”
Look, that was a lot of money I had just thrown at him. Sixteen sovereigns, or two hundred fifty six shillings, if you like. A shilling will buy you a decent meal at a cheap eatery in Atius. A sovereign will buy you a meal at a nice one. Sixteen of them were more than enough to pay a mage to recharge a barrier tool.
Finally, the leader said, pointing back in the direction from which he had come, “My Ladies, our dwell is a mile yonder. Please consider yourself invited to greet our chieftain when your rest is done.”
That was about as polite a way as I could imagine for him to ask us to go apologize to the lord whose toes we had stepped on. But I wasn’t in a mood to entertain him.
“Perhaps you weren’t listening,” I answered. “We did battle with an asura. She is still out there somewhere, and we must go back out and deal with her, once we’ve recovered.”
The dwarves scowled at each other, their eyes narrowing. Nobody argued, though. They were probably realizing that something that could beat back two fairy knights was worth becoming concerned over.
“For now, I shall have to send my regrets to your chieftain,” I added. “We will return at a later date and apologize. Ah, but I can’t guarantee that we won’t accidentally break your little barrier again, when we do so.”
The leader’s scowl deepened, then he muttered a few sentences of Dwarvish. One of the dwarves took off in the direction he had just pointed.
“Then good day to you, My Ladies,” the dwarf grumped, and the squad formed up and marched to the entrance tunnel we had descended. I assume they were headed up to check the damage.
“I hope I didn’t trouble you, My Lady,” Aenëe said in an apologetic tone. “I spoke without thinking things through.”
“No,” I shook my head. “You did well. I didn’t have the energy to spend on smoothing ruffled feathers, so being abrupt was probably for the best.”
“How long would this barrier last if you left it alone and rested?”
“As long as nobody attacks, it’s semi-permanent without any help from me.”
Her eyebrows rose, but she composed herself and nodded. “Then you should rest, My Lady. You appear quite fatigued.”
I sighed and nodded. “You should, as well. You lost a lot of blood.”
I can keep watch, My Lady, Durandal stated. Why don’t you sleep?
No, I answered. I have something to do. But it isn’t physical, so I can recover somewhat while I work.
Aenëe wondered, “Did that one fellow head back to report or to summon reinforcements?”
“If they aren’t idiots, they only sent him to report,” I said. “They wouldn’t risk a battle inside their precious tunnel with a threat at our level unless we were attacking.”
With a sigh, she nodded and closed her eyes once more. Within a very short space, her breathing became slow and regular.
Once I was convinced that she was asleep, I closed my eyes once more, and cautiously reconnected with the [Blood Sigil] on Trisiagga.
Well, ‘reconnect’ is a misleading term. I can’t actually disconnect, unless I simply break the sigil and allow the condensed blood to dissipate. As long as it remains coherent, it remains a part of my blood core, regardless of its location. The separation from the physical liquid removed the significance of physical connection when I condensed the blood.
But I resumed my awareness of the sigil cautiously out of concern it could have somehow been hacked. I wasn’t aware of any way to do that, though. If Trisiagga had discovered it and absorbed the blood, it would simply part it from my possession. The very fact that I still had a connection meant she had not taken it over. But without full possession of Senhion’s knowledge, I couldn’t say for certain she had no way to use it to attack me.
At any rate, it was still safely and securely riding on her, showing me her location and listening in on her conversations. Which consisted entirely of angry mutterings of no value to me, up to this point. Yes, I had what was effectively a recording of the period in which I hadn’t been paying attention, kept in the memory of the [Blood Sigil].
Her location was reassuring. She was currently in the air above the enemy army camp. I couldn’t tell from where I sat, but judging from the way she was staring toward Prince Ged’s camp, she was trying to locate Aenëe, whom she was still calling her ‘prey’.
The use of that term made me curious. Did she intend to take Aenëe’s blood, or consume her in some other way? To vampires, the blood of magical creatures is useless, because it prevents its consumption. If I tried to drink Aenëe’s blood, I would get only the blood plasma, blood cells, etc. They constitute a bit of nourishment for my physical body, but the coil of mana and pneuma making up the non-physical component of blood, the true nourishment of a vampire, would literally dodge my attempts to consume it.
Was it different for demons? Or perhaps it was different for blood magicians? Maybe I couldn’t consume it directly, but I could pull it into my blood core?
My incomplete memories from Senhion didn’t contain that information, and I wasn’t going to try to nosh on Aenëe in order to experiment. Maybe one of my relatives would let me experiment someday. Come to think of it, Dilorè would probably happily allow it in the name of foreplay. The problem with that being the fact that she would want to continue.
I put the thought aside and focused on my next order of business. Which was, frankly, turning my mind over to the personality best suited toward meditation and self-recovery other than Fan Li, whom I can only become while overclocking my mind with extra spiritual energy.
Which fatigues my pneuma, making it counterproductive for what I needed to do now.
My choice was the master of mental control and inner space, Daq R’mion …
… the mind of the current incarnation reformed into my thoughts and memories. This was a different process than launching a parallel awareness. She was her, and then, after a moment not unlike emptying the mind to begin meditation, I was me.
The old shaman was right about how disquieting it is to find oneself a different gender and species. It might have been worse for him, considering his previous physique had two additional arms, while the current incarnation had sprouted a pair of wings at that time. I at least was dealing with the same number of limbs as during my own lifetime, as Tiana had already dismissed her wings.
Previously, she had become me during meditation, when I could largely ignore her anatomy, but this time I sat with my back against the wall, acutely aware of the differences through my body control skills. I lacked all of my electronic pathways and senses, but in their place were strange new sensations, both physical and spiritual, that supplemented my situational awareness in a similar manner.
I will admit, my hand groped one of those new differences briefly, before I caught myself. I’m glad my wife wasn’t present to see that. My embarrassment would have delighted her to no end.
My task was to recover Tiana’s vitality as quickly as possible, so I went to work. It was a process similar to spiritual accumulation, except that rather than seeking new spiritual energy from without, I sought to regulate and attune that which was already within. The ‘pneuma’ which she worried about, different from yet similar enough to the vitality of my world that I could understand it, would naturally recover as the physique released the accumulated spiritual and chemical toxins.
I remained in this meditation technique for more than four time sections– for more than an hour, in this world’s chronography– until it became time to pass the torch to the next personality.
