NOVEL NEXT 122 - Uh oh! The Dungeon Might Be Malevolent! Heal The Maid!
Mary was on her feet.
"Mary?" Archmund said. "You're feeling better? After we went to all that trouble to make up and heal you?"
He was relieved. A little annoyed at the waste of all that time and effort, but relieved. Extremely relieved that she wouldn't be permanently crippled or injured.
"Alright. See if there's anything you guys want to salvage from here—"
Gelias grabbed his shoulder. "Premature, Granavale. Look."
Mary shuffled towards them. Her eyes were solid black.
Archmund opened his magic sight.
The darkness infecting her soul had spread, coiling its way around her spirit and reaching to the ceiling of the Dungeon. It coiled endlessly upward into the unknowable dark, pulling her limbs as if strings.
This was bad.
Beatrice brandished her wand. Rory raised his staff. Gelias readied his bow.
"Stop! Don't attack her!"
Rory stepped forward. "Don't worry, I'm sure I can hold her off — but not forever."
"Gemmy. You said there would be no side effects!"
"There shouldn't be! She's fighting this! You can help her!"
"How!"
But he knew the answer. He forced his magic towards her, through the ill-advised bond they'd made when he'd had her practice with his Ruby of Energy. A blast of power, overwhelming and dominating. Her spirit was far more used to his power than the malign hooks of the Dungeon, and it welcomed his magic, washing away the surface tendrils that the Dungeon coiled upon her soul.
The rot ran deeper, but the control was shallow, and she collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.
"How did this happen?" Archmund muttered as he checked Mary's pulse. She was still alive, still well, but being puppetted, even briefly, couldn't have been good for her.
"Maybe the Dungeon was influencing you all in subtle ways," Gelias said. "And when the three of you broke free, it could focus its power wholly on one who would not."
"I didn't feel influenced," Archmund said uncomfortably.
"If you had, that would be a very unsubtle manipulation," Gelias said.
Compensatory vs condign vs conditioned. Of those forms of power, conditioned power was far subtler than compensatory payment or condign violence — so subtle that one might not even realize they were being controlled at all. Nothing as violent as being dragged around by magic strings.
"Okay," Archmund said. His hands were shaking. "I… wasn't expecting this. Let's get her better."
Archmund ran his magic over Mary's spirit. Once, this would have felt an intrusion. Now, he felt unworried, glad that his ignorance and interference had joined Mary's spirit to his own so that he could supplement her waning power.
Gelias joined him. Gelias's magic wrapped his own like a cloak, an outburst, a flux into the word. Archmund met his eyes, and Gelias gave him a nod.
Without the guidance of Gemmy and the Dungeon's power, Archmund felt like a blind man, groping about in the dark, toying with powers he could not possibly comprehend. It was possible he'd do more harm than good trying to fix Mary by tripping a trap in her sou. But Gelias's abilities helped compensate for that, for Gelias was sensitive to the flow of magic, its connections, the shape of its hierarchy. If Archmund was at risk of putting Mary in a state of permanent subordination, Gelias would know. And Gelias would stop him.
But hopefully, it wouldn't come to that. Rory held his staff above Mary's closed eyes, channeling his power into his Inspire skill. His Gemstone Quarterstaff gleamed the crimson red of the heart.
He'd never tried the Skill on the unconscious, but Archmund knew that neurological activity continued even when someone was asleep or ill. That was the origin of dreams. And even if Rory's inspirational powers worked on nebulous magical principles, human bodies were still, as far as Archmund could tell, biochemical. An increase in confidence had an associated biochemical state. Wakefulness and sleep, too, were biochemical, moderated by compounds such as melatonin. He was groping around in the dark, but he saw no reason why a power capable of inducing calm or courage wouldn't work on a less-active brain.
This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.
Rory's power would imbue Mary's mind with a sense of agency, self-worth, and control, and in doing so hopefully draw her from whatever void or nightmare she might be trapped in back to the conscious world. No matter what adjustments Archmund made to her magical field, her mind would be drawn forth.
And that came to the surgical part of the procedure.
Archmund had some limited power over Mary's magical field. He could control it like he controlled the flow of magic through a Gem, moving it to and fro, back and forth. He could condense it and lessen it.
Normally, the magical field around one's soul was a natural defense mechanism to stop direct magical attacks from ruining spirits. The willpower defense that stopped those with moderately higher charisma from dominating one's mind entirely was one manifestation of it. Bodily Barrier was an extension of it to the physical world. This wouldn't have been possible if not for Archmund and Mary's unique circumstance, and something told him it would be horrifically ill-advised in any other circumstance. But he had Rory strengthening Mary's mind, and Gelias telling him if he was on the verge of doing irreparable harm.
So he weakened her magical field beyond any natural state. Weak enough for Beatrice to thread her darkness through it.
Beatrice grasped onto the shard of the Dungeon's darkness with her own.
It had been a long shot, but Gemmy had thought it would work, even if Gemmy was difficult to trust. But when he'd retrieved Beatrice, he'd seen how her purple darkness had carved out a space in the tar-black miasma of the Dungeon. Her power repelled the Dungeon's, somehow. It had a dusty material component, but in between those particles there was her magical flow of purple. He wasn't sure she was suited to be a healer, any more than he was, but he was willing to bet it all.
The dart infecting Mary, poison-black, snaking lines down her arm, became tinted purple. A pang of stress rose in Archmund's spirit, his soul and magic screaming warning, as another human's foreign magic clashed with his own.
(Why did the Dungeon's magic not raise that same terror? Perhaps the soul acclimated to Gem, becoming inured to the Dungeon's mental corrosion through slight immunization, but in a foul and twisted way — where proper vaccines protected the immune system, when one became used to the Dungeon's skeletal offerings, they became vulnerable to future incursions.)
Mary's magic, too, screamed in protest, but quieter, cowed. It was dwarfed by his own turbulence, the clash of his power against foreign substance, buffering the ragged crannies of Mary's soul.
"Watch out!" he shouted.
The darkness ruptured from Mary's arm, like a serpent jumping out of a pit, to splatter on an already-messy wall. Slowly, the color returned to Mary's cheeks, and her breathing calmed, yet she did not wake.
A vital spark was missing. He didn't know what it was.
They pulled the darkness out of Mary's body and spirit, but something was still not there.
Gemmy had mentioned that removing her from the Dungeon would heal her. Archmund had assumed being separated from the Dungeon's miasma would lead to a dissolution of the infection of her soul, and a restoration of her spirit. But perhaps that wasn't it. Perhaps that wasn't enough. Perhaps there was something immutably irreplaceable about the brilliance of the sun, the warmth of its cancerous rays, the healing of its harsh light.
But Gemmy had also said this would be enough.
Maybe it was Rory, and he just needed to bring her back?
But no, that didn't seem to be it. The tip of his quarterstaff glowed as bright as Archmund had ever seen it.
There had to be a secret that would bring Mary back to them.
He put on the Gemstone Cufflinks.
"Mary," he said. "I guess I don't really want to send you away. You've never been anything but kind to me. Please wake up."
He felt her magical field fluctuate, and her eyes fluttered, but it still was not enough.
He wracked his brain for everything he'd tried, everything he knew. Gelias's unearned wisdom beyond his years, Beatrice's touch of darkness, and Rory's mental buffs had brought them this far, but not enough.
The wrath of the dead that flowed through him when he used his Gemstone Sword, and how that felt like the lingering spiritual infection that remained in Mary's arm.
The way he'd interlinked, made free associations between the idea of light, energy, infrared light, heat; heat, fire, the sun — the sun, which gave life to all things on Earth and Omnio, that banished evil and darkness, that purged disease.
When he had first awakened to this world, he had put his faith in science. In light and heat and infrared and microwave. Yet now he was on the verge of loss, and so he felt fear. So he took a leap of faith.
The feeling of his magic mingling with Mary's in the Ruby of Energy, and how the magic flowed between them, in defiance of the laws of man, and how that meant they understood each other on a level few others could.
How he'd been letting his magic flow to her pure and untwisted — but that wasn't his only option.
He could let his power be twisted ever-so-slightly by his Gem to be not a weapon of heat constrained by the rules of the physical world, but a mystical font of warmth, the hearth, the home.
And his power flowed into her arm, against the ravaged veins and arteries and the ragged edges of her spirit, purging the last of the Dungeon's influences.
"You've got a new Skill! Cauterizing Heal!" Gemmy said unprompted, its voice like nails against a chalkboard in Archmund's mind. "This Skill allows you to use heat to burn away infections, both physical and spiritual!"
Mary's eyes opened, restored to their usual blue. She clutched Archmund's arm to her chest and smiled at him. But when she spoke, her voice was shaky.
"I dreamed I was getting screamed at. By a voice from beyond the sky."