Path of Wizardry

Sitting by the window on the third-class carriage of a rickety train was a young lady whose appearance seemed somewhat off, as if they didn't quite look entirely real. There existed an ethereal quality to her, the way her chestnut hair cascaded down her shoulder seeming weightless, or how her dull green eyes glinted strangely in the carriage lighted, sometimes reflecting purple instead. The more magically inclined might recognise something more about her, yet the other passengers rather ignored her in a way that could be called unnatural. It wasn't by any Spell or Magick that Amy Wachlund appeared that way, no, she was merely affected by something beyond her control.

Nobody accompanied her on Amy's train journey this time, leaving Harth and her friends behind on the trip back home. All throughout, she simply kept to herself, watching the rolling hills pass by as the region became more and more mountainous. Amy's mind wasn't wandering however but kept keenly focused on controlling herself, those whispering urges plaguing her every thought. She was tempted to summon Felin several times, but now she was heading to a more magically inclined part of the world, she'd be able to get away with less and less. No longer would she be able to practise as she had in public, the way she had done with Record or Witch's Cloak. Those sorts of Magicks would've had Amy jailed faster than she could blink. Even Decree or Theft of Distance, although made in her own residence, could be risky, their very nature too dangerous to be permitted. A single miscast is all it would take for the Decree to run off and target the wrong thing, harming it or them irreparably.

Spells like Decree could only be made in special association sanctioned areas, constantly monitored and guarded. All her secrets would be laid bare before them and for stuff like that, she'd be shuffled away and interrogated. After that, it would be a coin flip on if she ended up in a cell or conscripted. Gods, if they knew about Witch's Cloak, I don't even want to think about what they'd do to me. Would they try and rip it out of my mind before punishing me? Ugh.

Knowing that, Amy had come to a decision to not linger long in Evyria or any of the Empire's central cities. She might wander around for a bit, sightseeing, visiting some School friends, or checking up on Beatrice, but she couldn't imagine staying for longer than a day or two. That time would only get shorter the nearer she got to Iyrtir and from what she could tell, there was little way to avoid it.

Of course she could take a detour or two to circle around the centre, but it'd waste too much time and not in any reasonable way. There is something I need to do before heading home though, Amy grimaced, recalling the conversation she had with Felin before she left. If I want to meet my family in any good shape, I need to fix whatever's wrong with me. And the best way to do that is by waiting and that's time I don't think I have.

"Anyway, it's not like you'd be doing nothing," Felin had said. "We still have those files to investigate and from what I remember reading there should be some things in the Empire's borders to look into. A possible expedition to one of these locations would hit two birds with one stone; investigating The Forgetting and giving you proper space."

As much as she had tried to inquire about Journeyman advancement with Felin, he wouldn't budge on the matter, still keeping vague about infusions or Spellchains or Cores and the like. Instead, he begrudgingly kept on repeating the need for her to process and acclimate to her new self.

Amy, thinking rationally, agreed completely. Yet her emotional side rebelled at the thought completely, and that was only exacerbated by the murmurs of her corruption.

"Once we get to a safe place, we can start reconstructing those corruptive mental enhancements," He had continued. "Although not as dangerous as your innate corruption, removing it will help you greatly, giving you some much needed freedom to actually think."

"How do I even go about doing that?" Amy had asked. "My mana pool is all tainted. Even the smallest mote of innate mana I can rouse will carry a touch of corruption."

"What you'll need to do is really establish your dichotomy. I had touched on it before, but we'll need to discuss it in more depth now you are actually applying it. By using the dichotomy of your Fae and Unknowable, you can create a 'filter' of both Elements to try and negate the corruption in your innate mana."

"Wouldn't that just add to the corruption? My innate mana is naturally inclined to those Elements and even if the filter does remove some, it might be attracted to the mana in the filter itself and get corrupted again."

"Whilst that possibility exists, what we're trying to do here isn't; complete cleansing from the start. This'll be a gradual process of lessening the corruption bit-by-bit until it is minimal. Then, when you finish your enhancements, we'll use the overwhelming prescience of innate mana to try and flush out the rest of the corruption.

"Anyway," Felin had smiled at her cheekily, "An Element you've already touched on can help with the filter too, and not one of the Wizardly ones."

"Which one?" She had wondered, possibly thinking about Coruscation 'burning' the corruption away.

"Mirror."

"Mirror? Wouldn't Coruscation work better?"

"If you were a Mage focused on Elements that share Concepts with Coruscation, then yes, it would be a better fit. However, your usage of Mirror closely aligns with Unknowable, as you've experienced yourself, and thus can be steered towards Fae too."

"I see."

"You'd apply Mirror to the filter so that, even if the Fae-Unknowable ones cancel out, the Fae-Fae and Unknowable-Unknowable interactions would also be filtered as they'd interact with their Mirrored Element. The same, yet opposite."

As such, before she had left on the train, Amy had begun to work on Mirror again, considering the Spellform for Mirror Walk in her Record and seeing about improving it. She wouldn't be casting any workings, no, instead she'd be doing the old-fashioned method she had been taught in Schooling and what she had used for Monstrous Visage and partly Witch's Cloak. Gradual tweaking and improvement based on the runes she already had.

Amy had been making decent progress in her mind too, confident about at least elevating the Spell to Tier 5 without practicing it, but the train had arrived before she could finish her work. Thus, with it interrupted, she had little to pass the time stuck in the train as she was, it too risky to even think about casting anything, unless something nudged her into actually doing it without her consent.

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In her idleness, she noticed an occasional glance shot her way by other passengers, not out of mere curiosity at who was among them in the same carriage, but some deeper than that. Without her enhancements in place, she didn't quite have the comprehension speed to try and decipher the looks she managed to catch before they looked away but Amy did manage to look at one in particular closely.

It was a look of contradiction, one of both fascination and fright. Almost as if they were not staring at Amy but at her Monstrous Visage. It's not on, right? She couldn't help but panic, feeling at her face. Nothing. Then why am I being looked at like that? It's been too many times for it to be by chance, and it's not like it's just one creep either. And there's no way I'm mistaking that look for anything else, I've seen what happens to someone under my Spell enough times. That's definitely Monstrous Visage. But how?

Could it be related to my corruption? I mean, the Spell doesn't just have Unknowable or Fae in it but the majority of it is. Would that be enough to replicate some lesser form of the Magick? One I can't even control?

Concentrating inwards, Amy dared to focus on the nest of corruption within her and prepared to weather its influence. Demands and screams all begged for attention in her mind the instant she looked deeper, staring at the oily mass of green and purple in all its glory. She barely managed to drag her attention away, the corruption almost magnetic, and inspect the surrounding tendrils it spread through her body. Tracing a cluster of roots up to her face, she felt the ones that wrapped deep inside her mind, pumping vile mana into her enhancements, dormant as they were. And, finally, they tapped into her face, making it… monstrous.

Strangely, they seemed to avoid the eyes all-together, as if their Pure existence, entirely elevated by mana, was untouchable by the corruption's evi. But from what Felin had told her, that didn't make sense. The corruption should've propagated throughout my entire body upon ascension to Journeyman, it even touched my mind. It's the same that happened in Apprentice; ascension mana only touched my brain, yes, but it propagated to my eyes too, enhancing them beyond their Madeline form. Why then has this only affected my mind and not my eyes then?

Peering deeper, Amy remarked how strange it was to both see and look through the eyes she was examining, an action so paradoxical it made her head spin. Looking through the mana, as it were, was something taught to you early on in Mageling, using your new Sight to interpret the mana around you and in one's self as your own mundane eyes would use light. Obviously, mana was not light and so the exact workings of how one saw inside themselves was unclear, but it was magic and as such worked anyways.

Unlike Apprentice, a Mageling did not consciously enhance their eyes. Instead, they trained with them, picking out different Elements in the Ocean around them and trying to understand difficult shapes and forms in the mana. This in turn would help tune their Mage Sight and hone their skills with it until it became second-nature. Apprentice improved the natural skill she had with Sight dramatically, removing most of the effort required to actually interpret the things she was seeing. And finally at Journeyman, the depth she could see at had increased just as much as the Tier before, approaching the ability to actually see through and inside the bodies of lower Tier Mages. She couldn't determine the Tier of a Mage just yet, but she could roughly grasp their strength in comparison with hers depending on how much she could see of them.

Changing according to the demands of ascension, her eyes had become less and less flesh and blood and more akin to something like a mana construct. Where veins and arteries used to line the eyes themselves, streams of mana branched off from her mana enhanced circulatory system, becoming some strange organ of their own. Rather than seeming like dull white orbs, they almost glistened with an opalescent magic glow, and the irises themselves seemed less like the pigments of her eye colour and more like the hue of her Elements.

They were still the same green, but it was not the natural green she was born with, but the mixture of her Elements, of her path, coming together to form that same colour. The eyes are the windows to the soul, as they say. I suppose it makes sense that a Mage's eyes would be literal windows into their path then.

Still, the pressing issue of her faux-visage needed to be dealt with, unless she wanted Mages investigating her for hostile Magicks.

"Filter, huh?" Amy whispered under her breath, staring at grey peaks the train sped past.

As subtly as she could manage, Fae and Unknowable began to coalesce around her mana pool, swirling around it in an orbit that became smaller and smaller, as if attracted to that which lied within. Not wanting to find out what would happen if it did, Amy moved quickly, shifting the mana over to her face, specifically the tendrils feeding into what she recognised as the faux-visage.

The green and purple strands of mana interlaced themselves into a stitched pattern, forming a sheet that could be pressed before the tendrils. The makeshift filter floated down and merged with the phantom constructs, allowing the corruptive mana to pass through but now mixing somewhat with the filter. For a moment, Amy actually felt the effect of the visage strengthen, empowered by the undirected mana she had added to it, and she noticed someone in the carriage with her get increasingly concerned by her appearance.

Rushing to correct her lapse in judgement, Amy mustered as much will as she could to try and keep the filter in shape, not allowing even a single mote of mana to drift off and lose purpose, an effort that required the focus of an enhanced mind. Mana drifted up from her pool, this time in a forceful improvement, boosting her comprehension abilities massively and allowing her to actually process everything that she needed to focus on.

Everything falling into place, all that was left to do was split just enough attention away to finish her Magecraft, the Advanced Element needing significantly more work to gather than her familiar Esoterics. Time passed like treacle, the filter degrading more and more by the second, eyes beginning to latch onto her face and being dragged in under her Spell. Until, in a click of mana, Mirror finally flowed from the Ocean, her visualisation complete.

Amy immediately directed it to the filter, weaving it in with each string of mana, tinging the entire construct a strange silvery white. And the effect it had was immediate, those same glances drifting away as they shook off the Magick, many left wondering at how imaginative their daydreaming was to have seen what they did on her face; the crawling maggots; the wriggling skin; the dead, piercing eyes; the pale skin of a corpse; and all painting the face of an otherworldly, deadly beauty that could not be resisted.

Fae met Mirrored Fae in a clash of domination, each side trying to attain supremacy over the other and in the end destroying themselves in the process. Unknowable attempt to sneak past the filter itself, both unknown in itself and making the filter unknown as well, yet it was acting on itself. In meeting its own work halfway, the corruption fizzled out.

Regardless of the filter's work, some lingering Elements crept on past, infusing her face with that same visage-like effect. Now, however, no trace of anything monstrous remained, just a slight warping of her facial features into something strange, in neither a good or bad way. All she needed to do was keep some amount of focus towards it, lest she want the guard to come down on her for it.

It was fortunate timing as well, the city ahead beginning to come into view. Evyria, the stone fortress, sat on the edge of the mountain pass, built into and inside the rock face itself.

Even if her stay here was to be a short one, Amy couldn't help but look forward to it, the city a welcome change of scenery compared to the industrial Harth.

Sending another mote of mana away, this time it went towards her FPG, drafting a message to someone she hadn't talked to since the day she had bought the band itself.

[Amy Wachlund: Hello Rose! It's been a while. I'm visiting Evyria for a couple days, and I want to know if you'd like to meet up? Are you and George still together? It'd be nice to meet him too.]