Chapter 27
Honor among the High Elves revolves around their perception of beauty. The longer the ear, the wiser the speaker. The lighter the hair color, the closer to divinity, or so their proverbs say. The brighter a natural hair color is, the more revered the individual as being a pure soul. Albino High Elves, once thought to be prophets from a long-lost master species, are now pop icons, cultural influencers, and holo-vid stars. Because of this aspect of respect revolving around hair color, dying hair is heretical among many High Elf houses. Even High Elf members of warrior scholar persuasion or royal military still only dye the tips of their hair to display mage class or caster type, their roots still untouched and “untainted.”
Day 166 Castestday
Two days after Rose had told me to hide the baggy and the small square of plastic was still at the forefront of my mind. I had hidden the pouch in a roll of socks at the back of my locker. I was trying to focus on my magic class at that moment, but my mind kept drifting back to the mystery substance that could possibly get me kicked from the academy. That distraction didn’t change until I got those strange results that day.
It didn’t help matters that all of my courses, save a select few on magic, were run by Thallos. I dreaded my courses with him because of how brutal they were. Thallos had taken to crossing mundane topics such as mathematics, history, or literature with brutal physical training. I’d like to see you mentally puzzle out the quadratic formula while trying to keep your head in a non-caved-in state. If Thallos was brutal as it was, I was truly terrified of what he would do if he caught me with an illegal substance.
At that moment on that day, I was in a reasonably safe magic course. Master Mystagogue Neckar was a nonentity in my courses after her outburst. The instructors to take up her role in my education were a pair of High Elves, twins, one male, the other female. Lucas and Patrisha Zenwel. The Zenwel twins were the height of Elven culture at the academy. Their platinum blond hair marked their station as two of the highest and most respected of the Elven nobility. The two looked so alike that I couldn’t tell which Mystagogue was which at times. Lucas’s fine Elven features were so narrow and soft that he could have been a woman. Meanwhile, Patrisha had so few feminine curves that she could have been mistaken for an Elven boy. Both of them wore the exact same haircut, shaved to near-stubble on the sides that reminded me of a thin layer of snow, and a long punk cut on top that was perfectly quaffed with gel to keep it standing and looking both fluffy and spikey.
They both dressed in white robes so pristine they seemed to glow. In fact, silver embroidery work and seams did give off a subtle shimmer that made the entire ensemble incandescent. Old-style theater masks covered half of their faces in silver detail work and white gems. Lucas’s mask was worn on the right side of his face, baring a comical grin. Patrisha’s mask was worn on the left side with a mournful frown. Both masks were mounted with a monocle over the one eye of said mask. Those masks were the only way I could tell the two apart.
The odd pair worked together flawlessly. Finishing each other’s sentences, handing off tools, and teaching props without a moment of hesitation or break in lesson flow. One of them was a Sorcerer, and the other was a Wizard, or so they claimed, but I couldn’t tell which was which. They each had both types of spell focus. A strange set of interlocked rings around a gemstone, known as a Catalyst Gryo Prysm for the Sorcerer, and staves, each topped with a gem and carved from tip to tip with formulas for the Wizard. The way they taught was mind-bendingly confusing. For the sake of simplicity, to convey how this first section of the class went, I shall label them. The man, Lucas, will be Snowflake A, and Patrisha Snowflake B.
The two circled me as I stood in the center of the very same library where the Gnomish master had lost her cool and went on a rant within. I stood tall, hands clasped behind my back as the twin instructors circled me, one pacing clockwise, the other cantered counterclockwise.
“Tell us, young one-” came Snowflake A, his tone reflecting that he thought I was going to fail this next quiz.
“-How is myst organized?” Snowflake B finished.
“The Elements.” I answered simply.
“Correct,” Snowflake B begrudgingly complimented. They seemed to think that because I was a Darkling and a commoner, I wouldn’t know how to reach four by counting on my fingers. I had decimated every question the pair had thrown at me for the past half hour. The vast majority of the questions had already been covered in the Mystechnology Basics class. The Mystagogues claimed it was gauging my skill to see where my weak points were. Personally, I thought they were looking for an excuse to claim I was too stupid to teach.
“What are the two-” Snowflake B verbally jabbed from my left.
“Organization types of Elements?” Snowflake A barbed from my right.
“The four Core Elements: Earth, Fire, Wind, and Water. Then there's the Compound Elements. And lastly, the Six Dualities. The Dualities of Choice, Creation, The Cycle, The Dichotomy, Progress, and Synergy. Do I need to break them down further?”
“We know that-” started Snowflake A.
“You have a firm grasp of the basics, but-” Snowflake B continued.
“Can you tell us how someone’s talent for an element is measured?” Snowflake A finished.
“Elemental control capacity is referred to as Affinity.” I answered blandly, only half paying attention. My thoughts were wandering back to the baggy in my locker.
“Good.” They said in tandem as they stopped in front of me, shoulders parallel. From how cleanly they worked together, I expected their faces to be blank of emotion, like automatons. Instead, Lucas flashed me a false grin that mirrored that worn by his mask, revealing nothing, while his sister closed in. “Tell us-” Lucas started from behind his sister.
“Have you had your Affinity levels tested yet?” Patrisha finished.
I shook my head in answer, trying to keep an eye on both of them without looking like a buck in the crosshairs. In the span of a breath, the woman snatched my right hand, slit the pad of my thumb with a small penknife that seemed to simply appear in her right hand, and pressed the bleeding appendage to a print scanning device she produced from a pocket or her robes.
“Ouch!” I hissed as I reflexively tried to yank my hand free, but the meager-framed Elven woman had a grip like an adamantine vice. I was only just starting to put up a struggle against her when a message popped into my HUD. In the center of my plain of vision was a blue-framed holo-window displaying a red bar notifying me that something was downloading. I stopped any attempt to struggle when the download was complete. A bar graph displaying Elemental Affinity levels took up my view, and I was both astounded and confused by what I read there.
Earth: 10
Air: 16
Water: 10
Fire: 26
Fate: 0
Chaos: 08
Synthesis:0
Ruin: 26
Life: 0
Death: 28
Lumina: 0
Umbra: 30
Stasis: 0
Morphic: 26
Resonance: 0
Distortion: 24
“Interesting.” pondered Lucas
“Fascinating.” gushed Patrisha.
“What? What’s so fascinating?” I asked, even as I minimized the window to hover at the edge of my vision.
Lucas paced back and forth in front of me as he feverishly typed away on a holo-keyboard to fill some document. Meanwhile, his sister was back to circling me even as she made motions that made me think she was dealing with a canopy of windows blocking her view of the real world.
“Your scores are what’s fascinating,” Lucas explained, his focus almost solely on his new project.
“The chart is supposed to range from one to thirty.” Patrisha mumbled at me in her pacing. “The average score for practitioners as they are discovered is between six and fifteen.” She flicked me a chart of averages as she spoke.
“And there are very few affinities that score above twenty.” Lucas waved a finger as he wagged his tongue in lecture.
“You are an oddity in several regards.” Patrisha muttered as she cupped her mouth in one hand and rubbed her cheek with one finger in thought.
The original chart of my readings came back to the forefront of my focus. The readings for Fire, Ruin, Death, Umbra, Morphic, and Distortion were lit purple as Lucas continued on. “You have six elements scoring above that twenty, one of which is an extraordinary thirty.” Lucas continued.
“Yet, while most of your negatively aligned scores are excessively high in most areas, your positively aligned scores are nonexistent with flat zeros across the board.” Patrisha followed up.
“Having low positive scores isn’t unheard of, but-”
“The reality of your scores is unprecedented.”
“Negative polarities are almost all shockingly high, while positive polarities are completely nonexistent. You should be dead, child.”
“Dead? Is it really that bad?” I nervously asked.
“Bad? No, no, no.” Lucas corrected. “It’s more of a curiosity than a negative. Normally, all casters have at least a minute affinity for the positive elements, even if it’s only a score of one. But You have no positive affinities. By this standard, with no Life affinity, that would normally mean that you have no access to Life Myst, meaning you should be dead. But unless you are a Blightling and hiding it, you are a puzzle indeed.”
“A perplexing quandary that has me flummoxed.” Patrisha accounted, her tone reflecting a deep brooding over the topic.
“Wait,” I said as I looked over the chart again. “Ok, so I understand that I have a zero affinity for the positive elements, Life, Fate, and the like. Meaning I can’t use them, correct?”
”More than just that. While you can’t use any positive polarity elements, the passive side effects are what have us curious. Having a zero affinity score for Life is only one perplexity. We honestly have no idea what it means for you to have zero scores in Fate, Life, Lumina, Resonance, Stasis, and Synthesis. With a zero Fate score, does that mean that any form of scrying spell won’t be able to find you? How do you fit into the Fate tapestry with a score like that?” Lucas said as he focused on his holo-screens. He seemed completely absorbed in this new puzzle.
Patrisha turned to look at me with a scrutinizing gaze. She seemed to look at me like a strange new creature or piece of Primordial technology and not like a sapient being. “With a Lumina score of zero, does that mean that you can’t be blessed or enhanced with the element?”
Lucas’s head popped up, his focus on his screens snapped by a sudden thought. He turned to his sister, completely ignoring me. “What about Synthesis? What potential side effects could be caused by a zero score in that element? Can he not have children maybe? Or Resonance? That is a key factor in the body's rate of function. Shouldn't his heart rate and neural processing be inconsistent?”
“I don’t even know where to begin studying that puzzle.” replied his sister as she turned away from me to pull up some other window or document on her therra.
I looked between the two in confusion. “I’ve never had any issues with magic in my life up to this point. Admittedly, I’ve never had anyone try to cast Lumina magic on me or Scry me, so I do not know what will happen. But most of my negative element scores are elevated to an uncanny degree. Meaning I should be able to use them with little effort, correct?” I asked, hoping I understood the concept correctly.
The two stopped what they were doing at the exact same time to look at me.
“Not quite.” Patrisha started.
Lucas stepped forward, raising a hand, palm up, in a position of reverent inspection. “The higher the affinity,” He clenched his hand and pulled down as if drawing something down with significant force against just as substantial resistance. “The stronger your control over the element.”
Lucas stepped back as his sister took center stage to continue the explanation. She held up two fingers, one on each hand. “If two casters tried to control the same stone,” she bobbed the finger on the left, “the control would fall to the one with the higher stone affinity even if the other,” she bobbed the finger to the right. “Is at a higher Mage Circle.”
I rubbed my chin as I looked at the floor in thought. “Got it. So, with my score of thirty in Umbra would mean that no one could overpower my control over cursing?”
Patrisha looked at the ceiling and wobbled her head from side to side in a motion conveying the meaning ‘kinda’. “There is a way for someone to overpower your Umbra control, but it would be very difficult. In order to take control of Umbra element away from you, if the two of you were trying to take dominance over the same source, they would have to expend Vells by a factor multiplied by your difference in affinity.”
“If someone of an AS or Affinity Score of twenty-nine with the Umbra element tried to wrestle control away from you, they would have to spend two Vells for every one you spent for control. And the lower the AS going against you, the more they would have to spend to take control over the same shadow as you.” Lucas continued.
“The shadow?” I asked in puzzlement. “I thought the Umbra element was only used for hexes and curses.”
The twins both looked at me like I had just spat out an angry opossum at their feet. “Fragment’s grace, no.” Patrisha admonished.
“With a lower affinity for Lumina or Umbra, one can normally only use them for minor blessings called boons or minor curses known as hexes, respectively, true,” Lucas spoke with a finger pointing up in some odd sign of his educating me on a common topic. “But with enough raw power or talent in Lumina or Umbra, you could forge a weapon of pure light or shadow.”
“Or with a bit of Air Myst added to a spell body of Umbra Myst, you could Shadow Step, or teleport from one shadow to another, that you know the location of, within range.” Patrisha explained. “The same can be done with Lumina and Air, except as the spell Flash Step.”
Now, that sounded like it could be rather useful. I decided then and there that I was going to work on both of those Umbra abilities. But first, I needed to learn how to draw upon my Mystwell.
“This all sounds awesome,” I spoke up, “but the topic I was trying to get to is why my Chaos score is so poor.”
The two looked at each other before both turned back to me to give me a simultaneous shrug in the same manner. “You can’t have astounding talent in all elements.” Lucas stated.
“You’re always going to have those few elements that you have little talent with.” Patrisha pointed out. “For most other people, that score is taken out of the equation of affixing a classification to a Mage. Normally, all that matters is which affinities are strongest. Score regardless. But in your case, you have four null stats, two averaged affinities, three slightly above average affinities, four bafflingly high affinities, and one weak affinity. Just because your type of Mage gives you access to all negative alignments doesn’t mean that you are going to have equal talent in all of them.”
“Regardless of the results, we can discuss them later. As of now, you are late for your next course.”
