Chapter 20 #2
Excellent hearing, Alsen filed into his mind. “The Pellicle. He’s describing it too visually.”
Luna set aside the book she studied. “If it’s like the dream world, then mages where I come from got high as a kite to travel to it.”
“The… what?”
“The Dream world. Like, the layer where souls reside. Dreamwalking is kind of big in my world. That’s why Dreamwalker is called that.
But many mages could do it. We even had one in our unit.
When we needed to relay a message to the main command without getting intercepted, he got high, went to the dream world, and relayed it through that. ”
Alsen paused. He had never heard of that.
But… it might well have been that the mages of his world never discovered it.
In Luna’s world, they had a mage that did, apparently the Dreamwalker, and others learned from him to the point where it became common knowledge.
A common skill. “What did they get high with?”
“Mushrooms, usually. We had these yellow and purple mushrooms that knocked you out for like half a day. Those were great when you ground them into dust, and put them into a stew. They were expensive, though, so we couldn’t do that often.”
Right. He needed to use techniques of mages from another world, to which his only connection was an ex-werewolf without the tiniest shred of magic. Wonderful. “I suppose you wouldn’t know how to dream walk, would you?”
“Nope. That’s mage bullshit.” She smirked. “But I’m an expert at using a dagger to motivate a mage to do it for me.”
Exactly what he needed. He put the book aside. He had a lead to follow, now he needed to find some concrete method. That would require someone to have written it down in the first place.
Given how many spell descriptions he had seen in the books so far, zero, he didn’t like his chances.
Unless there were some surviving practitioners, of course. Old priests, hidden temples, forbidden texts that escaped the purge. But that was a different search for a different day.
“I’m great at making the mushroom stew, though,” Luna pitched in.
“Did anyone ever dream walk from that?”
“Nope, but things often got really freaky and really entertaining. Maybe you’ll figure out how to dream walk from it.”
With a grunt, he went back to the shelves anyway. If there was any text, any reference at all, to the use of perception-altering substances in magical research, he wanted to find it.
An hour later, he hadn’t.
The library’s collection, extensive as it was, contained nothing about psychoactive substances in the context of magical study.
Plenty of herbalism texts, a few alchemical references, and one book about poisons that Luna had on her own reading pile.
But nothing connecting altered perception to magical access.
He even tried looking for the substances themselves. Any reference to psychedelic compounds, mind-altering herbs, anything that might grow in this region. The herbalism texts were practical, focused on healing and cooking, with no mention of recreational or experimental uses.
Finally, he searched for permanent curses and buffs. Luna’s curse, or buff, or whatever it was, needed to be removed. After another hour of research, he could confidently confirm that placing such a buff or curse was wholly, completely, and utterly impossible.
Except that she clearly had it.
Mirella found them as they were reshelving the books. She leaned against the alcove’s entrance, arms crossed. “Have you found that which you seek?”
“Some of it,” Alsen said. “The Pellicle is somewhat mentioned in some of the texts, but the practical knowledge I need seems to have been destroyed with everything else.”
She nodded, unsurprised. “That’s the shape of it. The dragons were thorough. Whatever the old priests knew about the deeper workings of the cosmos had been buried in their graves.”
Or existed in hiding. But he kept that thought to himself. “Thank you for the access.”
“You helped save this place. It’s the least I can do.”
They left the library after the moon had already climbed into the sky, shining through the canopy. The construction crew was breaking for the day: tools were being gathered, and workers stretched sore backs. The eastern wing’s new timber skeleton glowed warm in the orange light.
Luna set the pace, heading south toward the trail. “Well, that was productive.”
“I learned what the Pellicle is. That’s not nothing.”
“I wasn’t being ironic. Our next logical step is shopping for drugs and getting high. That’s going to be a lot of fun.”
Not his precise plan, but it was indeed the next logical step.
They walked south, retracing their route. Luna found the trail faster this time, her memory for terrain apparently better than his memory for maps.
As they walked, Alsen pulled out his spellbook. He had written all his current spells, but he needed to work on his shields. He quickly referenced his original transcription of the only shield he knew.
The problem was straightforward. His current shield was a wall of force projected in front of him. That didn’t suffice.
In the case of the scorpion ambush, it wouldn’t have been useful at all against enemies coming from different angles. Especially from the bottom and the top.
He needed an omnidirectional shield.
The obvious problems with it were energy distribution, as a sphere would naturally consume much more strength, sound, and oxygen.
If the shield were to cut him off from the rest of the world, he would both be unable to hear what happened outside, and he would eventually suffocate.
He returned to the spellbook, thinking as he walked.
Luna watched his path to make sure he didn’t walk into a tree.
Suppose he made a sphere, then he could solve the oxygen problem by creating it large enough.
Fights weren’t terribly long, as far as he experienced, and he could always turn the shield off for a few seconds, and then re-cast it.
He also needed to fly with it, though. Making a shield only to lose his best defense, flight, wouldn’t be all that useful.
A couple of hours later, he came up with the basic concept. He already had two spells that functioned through him creating multiple compressed motes of energy and doing something with them.
So, he drafted a schematic in his mind, and produced forty motes of energy pre-molded for shields. He spread them around himself into a globe, and then pushed into them, having them project a shield between each other.
A heavily segmented globe of shield enveloped him. It collapsed the next second due to him misbalancing the power distribution. But it was a start.
With a large enough sphere, he would have enough oxygen for a fight. He spent the rest of the day tinkering with it, and the next one too. On the eve of the third day, he could keep it up for over five minutes.
That had to suffice. Now, he needed strength.
Luna had just been skinning another deer, readying herself to turn another prime piece of meat into a burnt dinner.
“Could you throw a dagger at me?” he asked.
In an innocuous move, Luna slightly turned, and threw a dagger. It whistled past Alsen’s ear, lodging itself into the tree behind him.
Alsen blinked, his sweat turning a notch colder. That was close. Intentionally so, but still. “I meant when I’ve got a shield up.”
“You mean the blue shiny globe?”
“Yes, that.” He got up, summoned the shield, and they tried again. And then a whole lot more through most of the evening.
The shield worked… mostly. It deflected the dagger. But every deflection drained some strength from it, so it either eventually collapsed the section, or spread the power distribution too thin for it to block anything.
He could refuel the shield, but that took a few seconds of focus. Too much for a fight.
He did figure out how to spin it a bit, so a collapsed section would move out of the primary line of fire. That functioned as a workaround.
The larger problem was casting spells out of it. He could fire indirect missiles from outside of it, so that wasn’t a problem.
Yet the lance or the twin dawn would require him to turn off the shield. He could let it fade, cast the spell, and then re-summon it.
That cost a lot of strength, though, while creating an obvious weakness.
He left that for further research.
The next day, they walked towards Vellhorn.
Once again, they saw the villagers undergoing the ritual of sending a grandparent downstream to the waterfalls. Alsen’s shock of seeing it the first time was long gone.
They didn’t stop to watch this time.
They reached the city in the late afternoon, entering through the western approach.
The city sprawled before them, the same disorganized mess of buildings and streets and market noise that had greeted Alsen the first time.
The dragon still lay on its hills of gold in the distance, visible from nearly everywhere, a permanent reminder of who owned the place.
They booked a room at an inn they hadn’t been to yet. It had a top-floor room free, which was all they needed.
The innkeeper didn’t recognize them, but he recognized the gold they paid with.
Alsen washed, ate, and sat in the common room with ale and his spellbook. He wanted to refine the omnidirectional shield, but he also needed to work on other spells.
Luna sat across from him, eating her second pork tomahawk steak. She ignored all the vegetables, bread and garnish. “So,” she said, “To get the drugs you need, I’d need to find the local underground.”
“We can look for it together.”
“That’ll make it more expensive. I can pass for someone who frequents those types of places. You can’t.”
He put the spellbook aside. “Did you frequent them at home?”
“Yep. Once you see a couple, you can find all the others. The markings and customs change slightly city to city, but the idea is always the same.”
“I’d like to see that.”
“You’re paying then.”
He would be paying anyway. She finished the meal, and they headed out.
As if he would miss the chance to see the local underground.