What Little Remains Of Terpsichore Ironheart

I woke up in my bed, and the first thing I thought was, "When the hell did I fall asleep? It was barely even noon."

The next thing I thought was, "Oh right, I have brain damage, I'm probably going to be sleeping a lot."

And then I thought, "How long has Volex been cuddling with me?"

"The whole time," Volex said, because she could, in fact, literally read my thoughts, and was dedicated to only ever using that ability to be mildly annoying. "You got a headache that was bad enough to overwhelm your autohypnosis and your usual pain threshold, so I put you to sleep, Emily cast a pain reduction spell on you, and I carried you up here to sleep it off. How do you feel?"

I thought about it for a minute.

While I thought, I passively took in the precise nature of the cuddles. Normally, this sort of thing was just a hug but sideways, involving only one's arms. Talia, ever adventurously affectionate, tended to also wrap her legs around my hips when she did it. However, Volex had an unfair advantage in the cuddles department that simply couldn't be matched: she had wings, which were essentially a second pair of arms with very long fingers and an integrated blanket, and felt very nice, wrapped around me. She even managed to work her tail into this, wrapping it around one of my legs.

"...I feel like someone pounded a nail into the top of my skull," I said, finally. "It hurts, but... It's low enough I can go back to ignoring it." Especially because I was wrapped in the embrace of a powerful Occultist who wanted me to know that she loves me, and was literally radiating warm affection from every inch of her body.

"I'll be administering painkillers regardless," Volex said dryly. "Nothing is improved by you suffering needlessly, Joseph."

"Alright, alright," I said, closing my eyes. "Ugh. This sucks. Thanks for being here for me, Volex. Honestly, thanks for everything, just in general. You've been great, and I don't appreciate you enough."

"It's been a month, and you've been busy," Volex said with a shrug. "But... Thank you. It means a lot to me."

"I would offer you a hug, but you are already wrapped around me like a weighted blanket with tits and opinions, so I don't think a conspicuous display of physical affection would be noticeable."

"It's the thought that counts," Volex said. "Buuuut, if you think about it for a moment..."

I shrugged, and gave her a kiss.

"...I'm going to be honest," I said, after a brief pause. "I feel like I should be more weirded out about the fact you slept with my grandparents. The age thing is whatever- yes, you're older than my dad, and I'm 18, but whatever, I'm an elf, we're both immortal, I'm going to live forever provided I either stop getting into fistfights with gods or I continue to win them. If you were any other centuries-old Succubus, I wouldn't care, and this tangent would stop there. But you're not any other centuries-old Succubus, you're Volex Ironheart, the woman my dad calls 'Aunt'. It's... It feels like it should bother me, because you're my great-aunt, but..."

"Well, the reason you're not actually bothered is because I'm not your great-aunt," Volex said dryly. "We met a month ago, when you were already grown, and neither of us recognized the other as family until you brought me home and we put the pieces together. Hell, you didn't even hear many stories about me growing up, because Napoleon and Frederick didn't have stories about me- I was part of the family, I lived in their house, but I just didn't spend much time with the kids, and I most certainly didn't raise them."

I grunted.

"Honestly, you've got an unfortunate amount of Hikaano garbage floating around in your head," Volex continued. "High Elves don't consider these sorts of familial relationships to be associative... or distributive, or whatever the math term is. To High Elven sensibilities, Helen isn't your grandmother- you've met her twice, in a capacity that ostensibly had little to do with you two being family, and both after you left childhood. She's Ariel's mother, sure, and Ariel is your mother, but back in my day, your mother's mother was not necessarily your grandmother."

"Fair..."

"I mean, you do seem to understand it a little, when you say or think things like 'Jason isn't actually my grandfather because this is the first time we've met,' but you seem to also think that a key component is whether you like them," Volex said. "And, quite simply, it doesn't work that way. Just because I'm Napoleon's aunt and you actually like me doesn't make the two of us family; we have to act like I'm family, and, well... We don't. We act like an Occultist and a Familiar."

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"Fair enough, I suppose," I admitted.

"You also seem to have picked up some Hikaano nonsense about gender roles that needs to be unlearned. As a start, I will remind you that High Elves categorically did not have them, and female Mage-Knights were completely unremarkable."

I sighed, closing my eyes. "Look. I can agree that I need to hear this, but... at this precise moment, I am horizontal due to the lingering effects of brain damage, so. You might want to do this later, when I am no longer brain damaged. Also... While I do appreciate your earlier reminder that you're essentially a tutelary spirit who happens to have known my dad and grandparents, I think that, right here and now... I should probably be working towards learning how to use divine magic, the only source of magical healing I have, so that I can, perhaps, heal my brain damage."

"Don't wanna wait for Emily to do it?" Volex asked, smirking a little.

"Well... Actually, hang on," I said, frowning. "Why isn't she healing my brain damage? She's a Healer, a recognized Priestess of Asklepios. She hasn't done jack shit today, magically-speaking, so it's not that she's risking divine burnout."

"Ah, so you forgot," Volex said, nodding. "Right, well, you already asked her about it, and the answer was simple: healing someone else's brain damage is risky, because the magic is being guided by a mind and soul that isn't the one native to that brain. It's still doable, and for serious brain damage, it's still done, but Emily has judged that the damage is going to heal on its own, fairly quickly, and therefore there's hardly anything to gain from such a risky procedure. But, well, if you heal your own brain damage, that's fine. Your mind and soul are native to your brain, so there's already a natural alignment."

"I see, I see... Right, well. Wish me luck."

This would be the first time I've ever drawn on The Father's light- I hadn't had the time or energy to experiment with it before now, between the running fight with the Cult of Paimon, or recovering from heart surgery. It'd been a long fucking day, okay?

Now... The thing about using Divine magic was... I had no idea what I was doing. Divine spellcasting was a skill that could be learned, and even taught, but the fundamental issue with the pedagogy was that gaining access to Divine magic required an initiation that could only be given by a deity, and deities only gave that when they felt like it. As such, while I'd been taught by no less than Ariel Silver in the fundamentals of Arcane magic, and had independently taught myself the fundamentals of Occult magic, I had never learned the fundamentals of Divine magic, because I simply couldn't.

So I laid there, in silence, eyes closed, trying various mental tricks that were like how I drew upon Arcane and Occult magic, but which simply weren't working. Thankfully, my torment only lasted so long- I had, apparently, garnered my god's attention, and he pulled me into a vision to talk to me.

---

"Hello, Joseph," The Father said, once again wearing the face of my father. "How are you today?"

"Tired, sore, brain-damaged," I said, before shrugging. "I gotta say, fighting a Demon King is real fuckin' unpleasant. Please don't make me do that again."

"I can't make that promise," The Father said, sighing. "What I can promise you is that, next time, you'll be prepared. Now. Let's begin with your first lesson in Divine spellcasting."

---

Vital essence was a strange energy. It was the raw energy of life and death, sure, but it was the raw energy of life and death- the energies of life and death that naturally existed within most living things were different, and had certain subtle qualities that arose naturally from where they resided.

Divine magic was the channeling of vital essence, straight from the source. Making the connection, from myself to my god, to tap that wellspring of vital essence, was hard at first, but with practice, it would get easier. And it turned out, The Father didn't just understand that too much vital essence can cause injuries, he even knew why it did so.

"Essentially," he had said, "your body is adjusted for the subtle, aspected vital energies it naturally generates. Exposure to raw vital essence causes injury because excess energy escapes into the body, and overloads the metaphysical processes that sustain your life, which are, ordinarily, in a delicate, self-correcting balance. However, your body is capable of healing, and if allowed to heal naturally, it will heal such that it is stronger and more resilient than it was previously."

"Hey," I began, "since magicka comes from excess mana, or life energy, does that mean training my magicka reserves also trains my resilience to raw vital essence, or vise-versa?"

"No. Magicka cares about the quantity and production of life energy, which is broadly unrelated to the resiliency of the systems that use your life energy. There is some small overlap, and over the long eons of your eternal life, you may even notice a slight benefit. But likely not."

Admittedly, it wasn't great news. I was completely new to Divine magic, and it turned out pretty quickly that I did in fact have a very average tolerance for vital essence- The Father cut me off as soon as I was at the optimal recovery point, thankfully. It would've been nice to learn that my years of training with Arcane magic had led to me having a better starting point with Divine magic, the way it had worked out for Occult magic. As it stood, though, I could only channel enough vital essence to cast a single weak healing spell, and then that was it for my spellcasting practice for today.

"So, how was your practice session?" Volex asked, as I opened my eyes and started moving.

"I hate being a beginner at something," I complained.

Volex laughed.

"You'll want to find a way around that feeling," Volex said. "You strike me as the sort of person who's going to keep trying new things for the rest of your life."

"Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. Just... Let me kvetch, alright?"

"Of course, sweetie."