Of Arms and Arcane

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As Professor Sageira and Vruulkthaz led me past the entrance, I felt like I was walking into a sort of film that I easily breached as I entered the cave. Curious about what it was, I turned around and stuck my hand toward where I encountered the film, only to discover that it was some form of weak barrier.

"What is this barrier for?" I wondered out loud.

Professor Sageira's long neck turned back to me and explained, "Just a simple environmental barrier. It keeps the dust and unnecessary humidity out. If we did not have that, this place would need a lot more maintenance, especially the artwork and decor."

Sounds handy, I might want to do something similar back home.

Shortly after, Professor Sageira led us to what I could only describe as a waiting room… at least for dragons, it was. To me, the size of a school's gymnasium.

As the two dragons seemed to be settling in to get comfy while waiting, I looked around and found some furniture stacked at the corner, so I went over to help myself to it. When I got to the furniture and saw the thick layer of dust, even with the barrier enchantment at the entrance, that told me how long the furniture had not been touched.

I picked out a chair and a small tea table, and used water instinctive magic to wash off the caked-on dust before bringing over the furniture to join the two dragons, who seemed to be talking about who they wanted to visit in the area after the meeting.

After an hour of waiting, I asked, [Are we still waiting for the elders to arrive?]

[No, they are already here, and most likely have been here a few hours ago. They are most likely using the meeting call to settle other business they have with each other before they call us in.] Vruulkthaz answered.

Fair enough, I figured. So to combat the boredom, I fished around in my luggage and pulled out a tome on the shamanistic magics of the northern barbarians of the Frozen North. Their brand of magic is crude, but most fascinating, especially the tattoo magics they use to empower their warriors. It seems to be a crude but effective combination of array magic and pseudo soul magic.

Stolen story; please report.

It uses the donor's (willing or not) blood, and through a ritual, tattoos an array on a warrior's body, draining the donor of their stamina energy, or as the tome refers to it, as "life force". Usually, when it is a willing donor from a fellow tribe member, the shaman performing the ritual would stop the life force extraction upon the donor passing out.

Unwilling donors (enemies/animals/magic beasts), on the other hand, faced a much worse fate. They would be drained to the point of death, leaving a husk of a corpse behind, but this results in a superior tattoo.

The result of these tattoos upon their activation has been recorded to surpass aura in pure power, and if the tattoo was made by draining anything besides a member of the same species, the person using that tattoo may exhibit physical and psychological changes in line with the tattoo donor's species.

For example, if a barbarian warrior uses the tattoo made from a wolf, besides gaining the savage strength of a wolf, they would gain the wolf's heightened sense of smell and even the ability to see in low-light environments. And depending on the skill of the shaman creating the tattoo, the person using the tattoo may, for the duration of the tattoo's activation, exhibit physical changes like growing an elongation of the snout, sharpened teeth and claws, and even digitigrade legs.

But all this power comes at a price. After the effects of the tattoo wear off, what researchers found from captured barbarian warriors was that they would experience the equivalent of a severe drug withdrawal, and depending on how powerful and different the tattoo was from a human, the withdrawal may be so severe that the warrior dies. And from how the author of this tome describes it, it was a horrible way to go.

After reading the details of the end results of withdrawal, I promptly turned the page to another chapter to escape the graphic depictions.

***

An hour later, the two dragons turned their heads towards the waiting room's door as if they heard something I could not. [It is time.] Professor Sageira said and led me out of the room and further down the hallway.

A short walk later, we stood before huge dragon-sized doors made of gold and studded with precious gems. If the whole thing were made of gold and not gold-plated, that alone may be worth enough to bankroll a small country for a couple of years.

As Professor Sageira pushed the doors open, and I heard the groaning of the heavy gates that I could now see was a foot thick, I was hit with a palpable wave of mana from the widening crack of the door.

Once the door was fully opened, that's when I saw it, in a terraced seating surrounding an open space in the middle, where dozens of wyrms from different species. They ranged from the size of a small house, all the way to being twice the size of Professor Sageira. But there was one thing in common. All of them exuded the same sense of mana, power, and dread I felt when Professor Sageira revealed herself to be more than human, and all of their eyes were locked on me.