Ends of Magic

The Grace of the Mist was a fast ship. Nathan had been aboard for several days, and he hadn’t really appreciated how fast they were moving. But now he was in the air and trying to keep up. It was not easy. He could match pace with the ship if he spent Stamina and sprinted, but he knew that he could do better. He’d gotten new movement skills from his recent class Development, and one of his core mobility skills had recently developed. But it was one thing to have new abilities, and another thing entirely to use them all effectively in concert as you ran across the sky at high speed. So Nathan was running across the sky at high speed, trying to get used to using all of his mobility skills together with [Airwalking] to keep up with the ship.

I thought I left running drills behind in high school.

The goal was to make it unconscious, so that he could move at top speed while dodging attacks, disabling magic and taking in the battlefield. If you needed to think about a movement skill then it wouldn’t be useful in battle. But the only way to make it unconscious was to practice, practice, practice.

Impulse 2 achieved!

I was hoping for [Airwalking 8], but I’ll take it.

After running all morning, Nathan returned to the deck and settled next to where Stella was practicing with her new mana type. They’d had a party after she developed the ability to cast water spells, but now she was buckling down to do the hard work of actually learning to cast those spells. Right now she was suspending a half-dozen car-sized orbs of water off the side of the ship and working on being able to move them around without hand gestures.

“Can I get some mana?” Nathan asked, wiping his brow and shivering a little bit in the ocean wind.

Stella grunted and held a hand out towards him, dark purple fire blooming in her palm. It was enough mana that without Nathan it would have consumed her and lit the Grace of the Mists aflame for a dozen feet in every direction.

Nathan blinked at the display, but his aura was in position and he drank greedily of her magic. “Thanks.”

She grunted again, then swore as two of the balls of water collided and merged before splashing back into the ocean. “Harpy’s tits.” She turned a mild glare on Nathan. “Let me concentrate.”

He held his hands up. “Sorry for the distraction. Thanks for the mana.” He walked away from her, looking at the other Heirs. Aarl was practicing weapons forms, alternating between different weapons. Nathan watched as he cycled through the same series of attacks a dozen times, trying out a new combination of weapons with each attempt. It looked bewildering to see a series of uninterrupted attacks made with greatswords, sabers, a trident, a giant club, and more

Sarah was below decks, reading her way through the library. Nathan didn't want to disturb her. But Khachi was sitting at the front of the ship, staring towards the horizon. His armor was positively dull compared to its usual shine. He saw Nathan looking and waved him over, a troubled expression on his face.

I guess the bow is the place for deep conversations with Nathan.

Nathan sat cross-legged beside his friend’s armored bulk, taking a moment to appreciate the sea breeze and the moment of relaxation before speaking. Then he turned to Khachi. “What’s up?”

“The sun,” came the grumbled reply.

Nathan blinked at his friend for a moment and tilted his head in confusion.

Khachi gave a dark chuckle and smiled wryly. “A dim joke, but I find it difficult to discuss my current thoughts. Harder than it is to think them. For what remains inside my head is not true until it makes an impression upon the world.”

“It’s about your faith,” Nathan replied seriously. “You don’t follow Deiman anymore. You haven’t called upon him directly for a long time.”

Khachi nodded, but was slow to speak. “I follow the path of Faith, where I pay homage to the divine and receive power in return. It is possible to follow the tenets of a god and receive their power without belief, but it is mere embers compared to the flame of true faith. That was an early lesson. My class was dim before I truly accepted the tenets of Deiman as my own, and put my trust in his power.”

The wolfman’s eyes were distant. “He is the god of righteous battle. To follow the path of a paladin of Deiman is to seek injustice and face it in open combat. To be honest in your hatred and direct in your response. Deiman teaches that the best battles are the simplest ones. His disciples are supposed to stand strong against obvious evil and strike it down. It is a worthy path, and by that stalwart belief I matched you and the other Heirs in our rise to power.”

Khachi paused again, and Nathan almost responded. He had plenty of thoughts to share, but it didn’t seem like Khachi was done.

After staring at the horizon for a little while, Khachi spoke again. “Kia fights monsters. She saves people from unthinking beasts and preserves civilization. She avoids fighting people as much as

she can. I did not understand why. I saw Giantsrest and knew them as evil.” The way he said the last word made it absolute, a judgment that would brook no compromise.

“Giantsrest and the Ascendent Academy were an enemy worthy of a follower of Deiman. Even after I siezed a shard of divinity from him, it still carried the same shape, the same purpose. My power was merely a sliver of my god’s, no longer connected to the whole but still of the same hue.”

He pursed his lips. “But even a fight against such an obvious enemy carried complications I did not expect. It was not an honest war. Deiman is a god of justice through combat, of blessing the valorous so they may carry on the fight. The worthy may be healed, but his powers do not extend to mercy. But I fought and killed those compelled by their masters to oppose me. It was not within my power to free them, for freedom is not a tenet of Deiman.”

Khachi looked up and met Nathan’s gaze. His own eyes had been dim thus far in the conversation, but now they flickered with a faint glow. It wasn't quite shade of gold that Nathan was used to. “To follow your light, I twisted my own divinity away from that of Deiman. I proclaimed a virtue beyond his reach, and it allowed me to bring freedom to Giantsrest.”

The wolfman let out a deep sigh. “But now I am lost. I still believe in the tenets of Deiman. To seek out a worthy enemy, and strike them down for their evil.” He trailed off. “But any enemy beyond monsters is not so simple. At every turn I see conflict against a complicated foe. We forgave the evils of many mages I would have killed on the field of battle, even while we were allied with a killer of children. Then the city of Litcliff became our enemy through greed.” His voice was rising in tone, becoming nearly frantic as he expounded on the situations that had led to his conflict.

“But how does one fight honestly against a city? If we killed the guards who opposed us, we would have left the city defenseless and condemned innocents to death from monsters. The oligarchs took a contract against us, but their rule is not evil. We would be justified in killing them, but would it be just?” he asked, waving a hand back towards where the continent they’d left was visible as a faint blur on the horizon.

“The teachings of Deiman still resonate within my being, but hear me, I know they are insufficient for the coming conflict. I cannot fight every battle honestly. I cannot judge every enemy with the bright light of Deiman. I must change my beliefs to adapt to the reality of Davrar.” He made grasping hand gestures, as if reaching for something to hold onto. “But how? How should I forge my faith? I stand upon a precipice, and to misstep would be to lose my power.” He glanced over to Nathan, his eyes dim once more. He looked lost.

Nathan swallowed. “Well. that’s a lot. To start with, I think you’re putting too much pressure on yourself. You don’t need to solve the entire problem immediately. You followed the teaching of Deiman before, but you don’t need to write the teachings of Khachi anytime soon.”

Or ever, most likely. I did write the teachings of Nathan, but it’s heavy on chemistry and pretty light on philosophy.

He continued without a pause. “You also shouldn't expect to find a perfect answer to this problem. In fact, I would be worried if you tried because that meant you would be deceiving yourself about something. This question doesn't have a perfect answer." Khachi frowned at that, but Nathan held up a finger and continued. "You will always need to adapt your Faith to new situations, and if you don’t then you’ll eventually be caught off guard again. Trying to create the ‘perfect’ belief system is a trap, because there will always be an edge case where it doesn’t make sense. So accept that this isn’t a problem you’ll ever permanently solve.”

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The wolfman's frown lessened and he dipped his head thoughtfully, acknowledging Nathan’s point. “Yet still, I must find a new edge to hold.”

Nathan nodded in return. “Of course. But a question - what do you value?”

Khachi looked up at him, mild confusion on his face. “That is what I search for.”

Shaking his head, Nathan explained. “As I see it, your beliefs stem from your values. You decide what is most important, and from that figure out what tenets you follow. If free will is most important then you’ll always free slaves, even when they’re likely to die because of it. You’ll tell the truth, even if lying would be easier. But if you decide that saving the most lives is important then you might kill an innocent to save many more, or tell a lie to save a life.”

Khachi’s face went through a series of expressions, and it seemed like he was trying to decide how to respond. “By Quenfi’s flame, why does free will mean you don’t lie?”

Nathan shrugged. “If you lie, you deny somebody a choice to act on the truth. You make the choice for them, denying them of their free will. If you respect their personhood, then you have to give them the full details and trust them to make the choice responsibly.”

The wolfman cocked an eyebrow. “And if they choose to be evil?”

“Part of the ‘the full details’ would be warning them about the consequences of their choice,” Nathan replied. “And if they choose to be evil, then you carry out those consequences. You’re still respecting their choice to do evil by delivering retribution upon them.”

Khachi gave a low hum in response to that, brows knitting in thought. He sat back and didn’t say anything for some time as he considered Nathan’s comment.

Nathan was happy to give him the time to think. He was in deep water here - he’d only had a little bit of exposure to formal ethics, and he knew that if he tried to be too aggressive he’d get something wrong. Guiding Khachi badly now could have some pretty disastrous ramifications down the line.

Not only does his path rely on him believing in a personal code, but there's a chance he ends up as a prophet of a new religion or something. So I should be careful what I say here.

“What if I decided to save all innocents, regardless of risk?” Khachi asked, giving Nathan a questioning look.

“Then the only thing an evil person has to do is take hostages,” Nathan replied, “and they will force you to do stupid things. That’s a quick way to die.”

Khachi grimaced, nodding his acceptance of the answer. After another brief period of thought he looked up. “Then what should I value?”

“I can’t answer that,” Nathan said. “You need to decide that for yourself.”

Khachi pressed the issue. “What do you value?”

Nathan leaned back with a heavy sigh, bracing himself on his hands and looking up at the sky. “I think that if you try to define an explicit morality then there will always be a situation where it makes you do something terrible. And - look, the problem with the real world is that you never know everything.”

Life never boils down to a true trolly problem. There's always complications.

He sat forward, scrubbing his hands through his hair. “I basically believe that you should do whatever will help the most people - but with a lot of caveats. For one thing, taking people’s choices away harms them a lot. Even if you’re trying to help them, making choices for others is questionable at best.” Nathan remembered late-night college discussions, and his frustrations with what he’d heard of formal ethics.

Every ethical dilemma is so contrived, they’re fun thought experiments but hard to derive actual values from. Things are never so clear-cut, and it’s rarely your responsibility to take decisive action. But then again, I never thought I’d be in a position to truly make life-and-death decisions where the answer wasn’t obvious. And to be fair, most of my decisions have been easy. Giantsrest was an easy enemy to hate, and monsters aren’t exactly more complicated. But killing mages of Giantsrest - even those who never did direct evil? That one was harder.

“I try to care about everything, from how happy people are to what choices they are able to make. It all matters. People are allowed to do stupid things, but not when that endangers or oppresses others, because those others have just as much right to their choices. I try to think about what I’ve done so that I can do better next time.” He paused, ruminating on his mistakes, like the murders in Halsmet right after he’d gotten his assassin class.

His words were rapid and impassioned, nearly a rant. “I'm not perfect at making choices. We needed to stop the Giantsrest army to keep Halsmet free, but doing so meant drowning hundreds of enslaved soldiers. There might have been a perfect solution to kill or strip power from the mages without killing the soldiers, but we couldn’t find it. So we did the best thing we could think of, that also saved the lives of most of the Gemore adventurers who would have died in that battle. Then they lived on to protect Gemore.”

He paused, closing his eyes and breathing for a moment to calm himself down. He was surprised such a simple question had gotten him so worked up. When he opened his eyes again Khachi was watching carefully, his eyes glowing faintly. He didn’t look judgmental, just curious.

Nathan’s next words were measured. “The important thing is to become the person who will do the right thing in the moment. The most important decisions are the ones where you won’t know everything, and you don’t have the time to think it through. You need to care about the people who the decision will affect, to respect them as people with their own wants and desires. Then you pick the option that is the best.” He spread his hands wide, signaling that he was done with his explanation.

I think that’s more or less virtue ethics, if you wanted to get pedantic about it.

Khachi took a long breath through his nose, like somebody who’d just taken a hit of something potent. Slowly a smile spread across his face. “That is wisdom. I will consider it as I plan my Path."

Nathan nodded to his friend and got up, taking to the sky to get back to airwalking practice.

Tutoring 9 achieved!

Status of Nathan Lark:

Permanent Talent 1: Arcane Nullfield 8

Permanent Talent 2: Immortal Body 6

Permanent Talent 3: Airwalking 7

Class: End of Magic level 759

Bottomless Stamina : 76900/76900

Indomitable

The Undeniable Strike of the Antimage

Stamina Burn

Momentum Mastery

Stoneflesh

Arcane Nullification

Galefoot

Close Quarters Mastery

Boundless Aura

Denial of Mysticism

The Ending of Magic

Aura Projection

Selective Dispel

The Living World

Class: Spellslayer level 536

Regenerative Focus: 5460/5460

Catastrophic Blows

Battle Stealth

Mage Infiltration

Forgettable

Sneaky Blow

Antimagic Stealth

Magical Manipulation

Lethal Index

Wizard Resistance

Magic Jammer

Controlled Failure

Utility skills:

Tranquility 2

Inspiration 8

Impulse 2

Mystical Discernment 2

Alertness 10

Arcane Insight 3

Effortless Dodge 10

Mental Vault 5

Tutoring 9

Parkour 9

Visibility Control 4

High-tier Disguise 5

High-tier Battle Cry 2

Aura Control 4