4. The Search For Magiq: Peering Arts

[Saberlane]

Below is the gist of what was sent to Eaves this morning:

Ascender’s gone. The veil spell (called Determiner 12) had a history of being volatile enough to destroy the caster, and the recent changes that were made in an attempt to stabilize it did not change that. The memories that Peering Arts dug up were what got caught up in what we assume was the calling the corners part of Determiner 12 as it was cast.

Other important things from the last two journals:

• Determiner 12 is made of pieces of twelve spells, making a three-tier protection against what the spell deems a threat/unnecessary with occasional allowances for messengers to come in and out.
• A long meeting decided that they would use the spell, and that the Mountain and the Mounties in the forum would be within the protections of it.
• Ascender spent two weeks “looking for a magiq ring to protect him from the spell”, which we read as “set his affairs in order.”
• Endri knew that the creepy mirror lady was coming for Ascender and called him on his BS before he cast the spell.
• Endri was the one that requested that the Guide be the determiner, and that the forum folks be the primary target for protection should things look like both groups couldn’t safely be boxed in together.
• Ascender has a daughter out there somewhere whom he’s never met (perhaps some of what he did during that two weeks relates to her?)
• Knowing now that D-12 wasn’t a unilateral decision of one person, maybe find a way to allow more communication through without taking a block of magiqal C4 to it and leaving us completely exposed.

Here are the full contents for the Light and Aether journals:

@Cirydae

It’s been over a month since the lighthouse. Most have chalked it up to a one-off attempt to topple our confidence, a blind swipe to get at us and what’s left of Monarch’s Mountain, and that the informant was left behind at the lighthouse. They’ve all gone back to research, excavation, and unraveling the mysteries of the Mountain and what they knew.

But I’m not sleeping. I can’t.

Yesterday, Endri, Bash and their team cracked it. They managed to salvage the safeguard from one of the dead drives. It’s a complicated piece of magic the Mountain called “Determiner 12.”

It’s a proxy. A magimystic doorman of sorts that’s imbued with all manner of telemantic spells as well as leaving room for the practitioner’s intention and discretion. If performed correctly, it’s believed to provide three-tier protection against both physical and virtual places and groups. It will protect those allowed within the walls of the spell. It will continuously determine who at any given time should be kept out (or doesn’t absolutely require access), and will also in rare occasions allow “messengers” that exist outside the wall to communicate through the wall without having direct access.

They’ve been building this for the better part of a decade. At first, like all things, I thought the Mountain was overthinking it instead of performing it, but the few who stayed behind with us told us stories about a handful of attempts to cast the spell in preparation for Silver raids or the Joradians failing. In each preparation, the practitioner was killed. The spell is made of pieces of twelve spells, and because of that, there are unseen flaws and narrative conflicts that cause echoes and reverberations which end up catching the practitioner in wave after wave of magimystic energy. It is costly, messy, incomplete, and extremely dangerous. Endri, Bash, their team, and their unnamed accomplice (I’ve told them not to tell me their name) have spent weeks trying to find the flaws and patch them. In partial tests, new defects always appear, new conflicts arise between the different spell types. With what little we know, and what little power is left, this may be the best we can do.

It was always considered a worst-case scenario. Not only because of its level of authority and that it’s nigh-unbreakable, but also because you’re putting your life in the hands of some external object that makes the determination for you. They first considered making a person the determiner, to better control and humanize the spell, but they feared that a human would be mentally torn apart by the countless variables and choices flooding through them.

We had a long meeting about it in the front sitting room. I was the last to arrive.

Questions were bandied. Could we fix the flaws? Should we even try? Is there some alternative? Could we protect the caster? Who should we protect behind the wall? There was unanimous agreement that the physical manor and the virtual collection of mountaineers should be behind the wall. I didn’t say anything. I just watched the room, full of those who followed me here. How long this road has been, and no one knowing what would happen next now that we “saved the world.”

Finally, I spoke up. I admitted that I knew of something that could protect the practitioner. An object the '94s found when they tried to open The Book of Briars. It’s called a bearer’s band. Similar to the charmed tokens we found, it’s a ring that can withstand magic for a brief period before needing to recharge for years. Only a few of us knew about it, and it was never used because the mountaineer who kept it safe was caught by the Storm. I told them I thought I knew where to find it. I told them I would wear it and perform Determiner 12. They debated and discussed, but I’d already made up my mind. I left that night without anyone knowing.

————
Two weeks. That’s how long it took to do what I needed to do. When I came back, I told them about my search. How it was hidden, where I feared it would be, how difficult it was to obtain, but how I managed, in the end, to find it and bring it back. I told them I was ready to perform the spell.

Every word a lie.

@Cirydae

@SabineBean

Knatz heard glass shatter in the middle of the night and found Wyckstrand in the basement, dead. Starved, withered, his bare feet nearly worn to the bone. We found blood all over the back walls of the manor garden. He’d been clawing against the protections for what looked like weeks. And he finally got in. The Joradians had failed. Maybe just the manor. Maybe everywhere. Maybe not completely. But enough. There was no way of knowing given what little time we now had to act.

Endri, Knatz, and I buried him in the garden without waking anyone. Endri asked me to meet her in the library to go over the particulars of the Determiner one more time. I sat with her in the dark, in the middle of what’s become her base of operations. She slid a cracked hand mirror across the book-crowded table.

Of course she knew.

It’s not just dreams, the woman with the claws. She’s been trying to reach me. Reach into me. I could hear her, looking for ways past the protections. It started when Wyckstrand first came to the door, and I answered. She must’ve been inside him, and sensed me, reached out for me. I could feel hints of her, hear her whispers, and now that we’re exposed, there would be nothing to stop her from coming for me. She wants something, needs something. She’s desperate, and she believes either the monarchs, the mountaineers, or both can help her get whatever it is she’s hunting.

She knew why I lied. Everything we’ve tried to do here, every potential solution we have at our disposal, it will all shatter if their leader falls to the Silver. I made them trust me. Reassured them. I told her I never let on that my storm-wracked mind could be especially ripe for manipulation. Maybe I never really believed it myself. I should’ve planned for this. After all the '94s, after Augernon, I should’ve known.

All I wanted was to guide them, find our way to the top of the mountain. But I was a liability to them now, for no other reason than answering the door. Simple as that, and it’s all done. The ring I brought back is powerless. It’s a lie to reassure them, and Endri knew it from the moment I brought it up. The last lie I’ll tell them. The last truth I hide.

I thought she might try to fight me, try and come up with an alternative to me performing the spell, knowing it will kill me, but she knows how dark the path we’re climbing is about to become, and one weak link could destroy us all.

We agreed. The spell has to be cast, to give them all a chance at making something of the new age. And I can’t be on this side of the wall given what I know, or how well I can hide and lie and convince. I’ll compromise everything. And it just so happens that someone has to cast a spell that kills. It has to be me.

Endri had one request. If the spell starts to fail, if anything goes wrong, she wants me to focus on the mountaineers and the Guide to Magiq as the determiner. Given the chaotic nature of the spell, any number of things could go wrong and not splitting my focus between the manor and the mountaineers could be the key to it working, if it works at all. I didn’t have to ask who would protect everyone else. She will. She has become more of a leader than I ever was. Brave and just, but also compassionate and honest in a way I was always too afraid to be.

I don’t want to go. I don’t want to leave without ever having seen a magical world realized, without ever having met my daughter. But I can’t risk whoever is out there getting in and destroying it all. I’ve been touched by the Storm itself, but I have never felt a darkness like the shadow in the mirror — the shadow in me.

I wanted to sit there for hours. Share stories and secrets. Talk about old friends. Everyone we lost. There was so much more to say. So much I wanted to do.

But it was time to go — one last bit of magic. A final climb, and then —

[Fury]

How long was it before Eaves replied last time… It feels like this time is taking longer. Hope Eaves is ok.

[Strix]

3 days or thereabouts, a second bout of huge spell sickness may be harder to recover from especially so soon after the last time.

[WyrdOne]

I go on hiatus for a few months and people are casting spells and going on magiqal yet dangerous journeys without me? But yeah, I hope Eaves is okay too, it’s kinda worrisome.

[Fury]

Very true.

[Sellalellen]

A new reply on Mountaineer Recap: The Week of April 9th

[Nimueh]

Oh my, this isn’t sounding good… Guys, we need to do something. I’m not sure what, but I don’t like the thought of our friends going up against the Silver without us.

[Rimor]

I don’t really know how much use we’ll even be if we could help them? They’re already almost out of magiq, we don’t really have any left either and the silver have a lot of magiq. So we’ll be basically fighting with sticks again a very magiqually powerful enemy. Frankly I don’t like our odds in that situation at all, personally I think we should stay behind the wall Ascender created to protect us.

Unless of course we can find a way of breaking the wall without destroying it’s magiq so we can use the magiq against the silver. It was created with a lot of powerful and potent magiq after all. We know that the keystone of the wall is the guide to magiq and thus is its weakest point if we wanna try and carefully undo the enchantment. However f we do managed to do that then we kill off the last remnants of Ascender entwined with the 6 spell anchor points.

So we’re left with three/four decisions in two parts, part one is if we even help or not (Considering we’d be fighting a superior enemy). Part two is if we do help then do we finish off Ascender to save the Sanctuary or loop back to not helping and letting fate decide.

EDIT: I feel that I should also point out that Ascender died to protect us so do we really wanna throw his sacrifice away?

[Ashburn]

Yes, he died protecting us, but certainly not with the endgame of being a butterfly preserved in a glass case, a relic kept away from the outside world for the rest of time.

We’ve become stronger since then, both in numbers and with finding the aliquary if it comes to it.

I think we need to get out, we just need to be certain that we’re as prepared for what’s outside as we can be before we break the seal (however we manage that).

[BrokenVoid]

Unfortunately Eaves didn’t seem to have any insight into rewriting the wall spell which was one of our main hopes. That would at least let us confer with the rest of our allies on this.

[Rimor]

We don’t know how to use the aliquary or how it’ll help us or if it’ll even work with how little magiq there is left

[BrokenVoid]

And of course if everyone outside is functionally out of magiq that means we’re probably not far behind.

[Cj_Heighton]

but the aliquary has an entire stock of magic of its own?

[BrokenVoid]

True, and perhaps we could fashion a spell resembling what we used in the cataclysm where we drew magiq from objects. That would allow us to use the magiq stored in the aliquary

[Cj_Heighton]

so, all we gotta go, is use the aliquary to hit the book.

they said the door to this was the guide to magiq. we might need to destroy it again.

[Robert]

Random crazy idea:

We may or may not be able to take down the veil. We have the alchemical sigils, and those are powerful, we have the aliquary, we have the name of the spell and some form of it’s basic instructions. That might not be enough to crack the veil. Even if it did, it might destroy the Guide.

But what if we could move the veil? Move it from us to Sanctuary? Just unravel it with the sigils and aliquary enough to relocate it and rebuild it? (Maybe with a better mechanism for communicating in/out of it.)

We’d have to recreate large sections of the spell. Unless we could find a way to contact Endri or Bash. They’d know enough about Determiner 12 to give us some pointers.

[BrokenVoid]

You might be right, it would probably be easier to just rework the existing spell, edit the whitelist as it were, so that we’re no longer hindered by it. We definitely need to be sure we’re ready before we attempt that though.

[Hekate]

Hang on, hang on, hang on… The Silver can’t attack them if the can’t find them. If they’re using a magical echo location to seek them out, what if we can send out a “red herring” pulse? Throw them off track?
Instead of of breaking or moving the veil, what if we make use of it in its current function?
Like… Ugh, the shapes in my head are so clear and putting them in text is an utter vexation.
Little Red House. The story and the items and the faith in the process - the utter dedication of everyone invested in it - created one of the most magiqal and influential spells pretty much ever, yeah?
So… Let’s write a new story, one that protects all who protects magic, use the veil and the sigils as the artifacts, doubling the power of Ascender’s sacrifice in pulling double duty for the veil, and our additional layer to it. Then we use the magiqal resonance of the veil as a… a… I don’t know… focus… new keystone, but we use the story to change the shape of how it works - use its magical density and resonance to create a new magical pulse that can 1) disrupt the Silver’s echo location attempts and 2) act as a beacon… magiqal morse code… conduit… vibration that carries messages and magiq… magiqal message in a bottle in a mundane ocean… kind of thing.
Is that possible?
Did that even make sense?
Oof. Poor Eaves - that message carrier nausea is no joke and I think I just accidentally caught a bit of it…

[Robert]

Ooooo. So you’re saying instead of breaking or moving it, we expand it to everyone the guide has (or would?) ever approved of? Wow, that’s a heavy idea. I like it, but it’s kinda scary.

Everyone who cares about magiq would be inside, so we wouldn’t be out of communication. But would that leave the Silver to run rampant over the ‘normal’ world?

I’m gonna have to sleep on this one. That’s a great big idea. It’s crazy. I love it.

[Hekate]

I’m hoping that the magiq-locator bounce would ultimately trap the Silver in an echo chamber of their own making, but I have no idea how to specify that or weave it into a spell. I, too, also shall sleep on it, and maybe someone else can come up with a more efficient idea in the meantime