NOVEL NEXT Life 25 - Chapter 24 - Replaced
Eleanora
> You gained +5 Endurance, +5 Mind, +10 Willpower, +5 Magic.
> You unlocked the Ego Attribute.
> You gained +5 Ego.
The illusion faded but the fog blocking the arena bubble remained. Her torn robes were intact, except where she'd soiled herself. The trees, branches, wolves, her spell, all of it disappeared in a puff of smoke. But her nerves were still in tatters and she was shaking.
The pervasive darkness was what unnerved her. She decided she hated it.
Then she saw a glow from behind, casting a long shadow of a girl sitting on the stone floor. Warm shining arms wrapped around her, a nurturing and calming embrace. It was soft, warm, like a mother's embrace.
"Be at ease, Eleanora," the same voice as before melted away all the dross around her heart and over her mind.
She closed her eyes and felt warm tears stream between her eyelids. She sobbed, the hug tightened, and Eleanora felt a pair of soft breasts press against her back. The calming smell of wildflowers and Spring melted her sorrow as she let herself into that embrace.
"You completed your Quest," the woman told the girl. "You found your strength."
"Goddess? Is that you?" Eleanora asked with a faint whisper. As if the embrace would end if she raised her voice, the dream after the nightmare would end.
"Shh. I'm of no importance," she replied. "Your mind is. I want you to look inside your soul, Eleanora. Quiet your mind, let go of your fears. All the dark feelings your experience brought up, shed them like a pupa sheds their shell to hatch into a gorgeous butterfly."
"I can't. It's too painful!" Eleanora whined.
"You can," she grabbed her hand, sending a comforting jolt of warmth up her arm. "Come with me. Come with me to the light. Let all the darkness in your heart behind in that ugly forest. Trust me and let your body relax."
It felt like an order, and Eleanora felt sleep almost taking over her. She felt the weight leave her, her body becoming light as a plume. In that embrace she placed her trust, in that voice she found her guidance.
She felt as if she was flying over the oceans, over the mountains. She was going around the world but she didn't dare open her eyes. Then she slowed down and descended slowly. She felt the warmth of the sun and the rustle of grass as Eleanora and the woman hugging her landed on a grassy field.
"Open your eyes," the woman said. Eleanora obliged.
She saw the blue sky, cotton-white clouds closer than they should. She felt the grass behind her and she knew she was leaning on the woman's lap. The arms were still crossed over her chest, binding her in a protective shell.
Her tears stopped. her aches soothed. Her weariness vanished, her breathing and heartbeat calmed down. She was at peace. She was in heaven. Eleanora spent a moment close to eternity there, feeling the grass, the softness, and the warmth of the arms embracing her. She was fine.
The forest and the wolves now felt like a bad dream. But as she remembered the wolves, she felt no fear. No, she could feel her childhood trauma there, in the back corner of her mind. But it looked so small. On second thought, it wasn't smaller than it was before. It was her mind that was bigger. Stronger. She'd killed the wolves, she'd found her magic. She felt complete, whole. She knew that if she saw a wolf now, she would scold the creature like one scolds a mutt that chewed on one's sandals.
"Thank you," Eleanora said to her hostess.
"You're welcome, my child."
"Where are we?"
"If you dare believe my words, we are in my abode floating above Windemere."
Eleanora opened her eyes.
*
*
The grassy lawn ended a few dozen meters to the north and south. To the east, she saw an orchard with dozens of trees she didn't recognize. To the west, a palace carved of the purest white marble, with a grand fountain in front. She looked up and she saw a smiling face of a young woman with long fox ears poking up.
"Welcome," the fox-woman said.
"Windemere is gone. Destroyed," Eleanora lamented. "Is this another dream?"
"Windemere was a place, but what gave Windemere life was its people. My people. So long they remember, Windemere will one day be reborn."
"The silk-folk? Very few of them remain."
"All of my children. The people of the cloth. The beast people. The elves of the stars. The rainbow-scaled lamias. And their children. And you."
Her eyes stung all of a sudden as she felt the pull of kinship tugging her heart. What the fox-woman said was true. Eleanora, the half-satyr, was a child of the Matriarch. Said Matriarch ran her fingers over her head, holding right above her ear and pulling her head to nestle between her shoulder and collarbone. She could hear the Goddess' heartbeat.
"I believe," Eleanora professed. "I believe in Windemere. I believe there's a home for all of us."
The Goddess sighed, "Back in the day, you'll get an enchanted [Tabard] for what you just declared. Alas, it is lost now. So you'll have to be content with just a kiss, child."
The fox-woman kissed Eleanora's forehead. The girl closed her eyes, and she felt the illusion around her vanish. Once more, the grass underneath her became hard polished stone. Then sound and light returned as the bubble around the arena vanished.
"Eleanora!" Cried the voice of a worried Elizabeth.
*
*
*
*
Using Illusion magic was pretty draining. Not the MP but the mental energy required to keep the details convincing. Snapping dry twigs in the rain, putting the thunder before the lightning, the owl calmly hooting out of nowhere in the middle of the chaos, I almost screwed up Eleanora's trial a dozen times over. If she was this much perceptive or this little calmer, she would've noticed and the magic would break.
But it ended well. Eleanora overcame her trauma, found her branching path, stabilized her magic, and unlocked the hardest Attribute to raise. But even the paltry five points she gained would increase her self-esteem and sense of self by an order of magnitude.
Elizabeth rushed in and repaid the favor as she hugged and comforted Eleanora.
"I'm okay! I'm okay!" The girl grinned, feigning her usual bubbly demeanor. I knew she was still unnerved but she would recover. Back on Earth what I did to her would be torture and would leave the girl a sobbing husk for a long time but here, with the System and superhuman Attributes, it was just an exercise in exorcising one's inner demons.
Like a worried mother, Elizabeth turned the teenager's head sideways, back and forth, checked her arms. Then she yelped and jumped.
"I got a branching Path!" Eleanora shared excitedly. "I'm a [Sorceress] now," she revealed, leaving the "bog" part out.
Elizabeth wasn't enthused. "[Sorceress]?" She stole a glance my way.
Barbara approached and picked me up. "What's the matter with sorcery?" She asked out loud, probably intending to have anyone answer.
"They are wild and uncontrolled," Elizabeth said as if it was enough.
Elizabeth sputtered. She glanced at Isaac, then at Eleanora, and then back at me. "And all I got were three Proficiency points," she lamented.
*
*
With a little MP expenditure on my part, the four students trained for five hours every day, over two weeks. Nothing out of the ordinary happened, we just hammered the basics.
For Barbara, it was drawing speed. She took forever to create one magic circle and complained that she would just use [Spell-Shards] if push came to shove. I ignored her whining and pushed her harder yet. When she didn't improve, I decided to forget about making her draw the diagram, and skip to the advanced technique. Realization.
If a mage had a perfect picture of the spell diagram they wanted, the whole diagram could appear at once, without being drawn. Most [Wizards] never reached this stage but they drew so fast it was almost like they did the whole circle at once. But it wasn't.
Barbara did that to some degree when she connected to one of the shards of the diagrams engraved on the rubies atop her staff. But I wanted her to do that in thin air. This way, even if the [Crystallomancer] didn't have her crystals to mance with, she wouldn't be defenseless. Never mind that I wouldn't ever leave her side. But I knew better than to just pretend nothing could separate us.
The halfling girl had a {Firebolt} spell diagram floating in front of her. The diagram for {Stone Shot} was exactly the same except for the Essence. Marlowe's theory of interchangeable diagrams said she could swap the outer layer, the Essence section without disturbing the rest of the diagram. But she froze under the watchful gaze of our three friends sitting outside the hexagon on chairs borrowed from the central cafeteria.
"I couldn't hold the diagram that long," Eleanora remarked. "Barbie has quite the Willpower."
"No wonder the System made you switch paths," Elizabeth quipped. "I feel sorry for your MP pool."
The half-satyr girl poked her tongue at the taller one. "Nethe said he'll help me get an Ability that will allow me to reduce my MP costs. Should make my sorcery cost as much as a wizard's spell."
"Still a waste," Elizabeth scoffed.
"And [Sorcerer] has so many interesting Perks!"
"Shh. You're going to distract Ambrose with your bickering," Isaac shushed them.
"I can't," Barbara whined. "My head is throbbing. If I try to draw something, the circle will dissipate." And the diagram wobbled, leaking some energy to the air.
<{Counterspell!}> I cast to make her unstable diagram.
She wiped her brow with a handkerchief, then did as I told her. "What should I do?"
Barbara whimpered, then complied. Her diagrams took forever to appear, each line looking like congealed quicksilver oozing down a notch on perfectly flat ground. As she slowly turned around, the diagram wobbled but steadied itself. She had minor Earth affinity due to her Class so it was easier to keep an Earth spell circle outside her sight.
Elizabeth pursed her lips and leaned next to Isaac. "I see why you were interested in hiring her. Too bad you bit more than you can chew."
"I have no regrets," the Lord whispered back.
Barbara drew the other diagram. She now had a spell in front and another behind her.
"Okay," she obliged.
The diagrams fluctuated like a bad tube TV but it was nowhere near the unstable mess Eleanora usually scribbled. They would hold.
The interior of the {Stone Shot} circle vanished. Only the Essence part remained. I held back to not let my triumphant shout ring either vocally or mentally. What she just did would be impossible for the other three, and their faces showed they knew it. Barbara was slow to draw, but she could keep complex shapes in her short-term memory. My hope was that she could evoke them from the long-term one, skipping the painful dredge of the drawing stage entirely. But she couldn't hold it for too long. Already sweat beaded on her brows.
"I can see it!" She shouted.
The hollow disk split. One was faint, the other was wobbling.
"Slap it over the {Firebolt}!" She said on her own. The faint copy moved across her body and latched to the diagram in front of her. The other one dissipated into a puff of glitter. For a brief moment, the {Firebolt} diagram refused the attachment but then the Essence of Fire disappeared. As the MP circulating in the circuit flooded the new Essence, I felt the whole diagram click in place.
In my perception, time slowed to a crawl.
*KAPOW*
Then it blew up.
{Prescience} from Mental Mastery had given me an advanced warning. I instantly teleported through the Ethereal and appeared between the spell circle and Barbara. As ribbons shot to the ground to anchor myself, paper spread out of my folds forming a shield that blocked the explosion even though most of it was channeled to the iridescent "soap bubble" of the training arena.
> You took 9 HP of damage from the explosion (Base 250 (-104 hardness) x6 spell level x3 blast proximity x0.07 Titan Body x0.05 Training Arena)
"Nethe!" Barbara shrieked.
She covered her mouth as she picked me up. "I'm so sorry!" She mumbled with tears forming at the corners of her eyes.
I dropped the arena enchantment. Soaking the blast drained the battery Core array, they deserved some rest. The other three joined us.
"Are you okay?" A worried Elizabeth asked.
"Was that a {Teleport} spell?" An overexcited Eleanora probed.
"The enchantment protected them. That blast wasn't lethal," Isaac mansplained. "Besides, Netherbane is tougher than steel."
Elizabeth glared at him for a moment, then ignored him to poke and prod Barbara.
She giggled as Eleanora more tickled than checked, then they left her alone. "I'm okay, guys. Nethe protected me. I got two Proficiency points!"
"What you did was amazing! Too bad it blew up," Eleanora cooed.
"Yes, quite impressive," Elizabeth nodded.
*
*
We conveyed in the extradimensional facility four hours in the morning, then four hours in the late afternoon through early evening. Plenty of time to socialize and even go to this or that student party in the late night. No class and no freedom to leave the campus led the student body to party harder than ever.
Already a few babies were in the oven, but I digress. The kingdom would need more population, that wasn't the problem.
The problem was that our brief lull was almost over.
The Prince's party was right around the corner in just a couple of days and Isaac wanted us to visit the Palace to start the knighting procedure. Allegedly, we would receive our titles during the party with a lot of other aspirants.
We had the gift, now all the ladies needed were new gowns. The kingdom's high society decided to ignore the destruction outside and party like everything was fine just like some dog in a burning room.
And the best way to ignore the pain and suffering of the commoners was in style.
Even if such style was a few thousand years old. Maybe Buried somewhere in mom's item box.
The thing was, the ladies needed new couture.
If only they knew someone with a few hundred [Silkweaver] Proficiency... Wait, they did.
That's how I found myself cornered by fashion-hungry teenagers in the training grounds, while Isaac enjoyed some enviable exile in his bedroom. He wasn't allowed in today.
I resigned myself. At least I didn't have to bear witness to it. It was mom's problem.
"Okay, I'll do it," I told the trio of giddy gushing gals. They promptly squealed in unison.
> Suppress Curse.
*
*
Fashion, it seems, was apparently cyclical.
The three selected clothes looted from Lonid's Royal family when Haru made Mirina's parents and siblings homeless. The [Princess] had a lot of female siblings and these, in turn, had huge wardrobes. With a little help from mom adjusting their gowns, they now fit like a glove.
Isaac wore a traditional cavalry dress uniform. Lots of shiny brass, a tight waist, and a saber hanging on his waist.
We boarded the carriage and finally were let out of the campus, if only for the evening.
The carriage shook and tumbled on the still-broken streets but we could see the magical lights floating above the palace as we crossed the front gate. The lawn was perfectly manicured and not a single piece of rubble was in sight. The lights replaced the starlit sky as the dust cloud now was threatening the growth of plant life. A new Age of Eclipse? Certainly, hopefully, not.
I felt a shiver in my spine, a trembling in my pages. Meetings with Royalty historically went bad for mom and her many incarnations. Would I be exempted from it?
Only one way to find out.