PSTH: Chapter Twelve

Alright y’all, it’s time for water essence. There are probably more water Primals than any other type of Primal on the planet, given the number of oceanic essence hearts out there, but it’s one of the less common types for most people to actually interact with. It’s a hard type to put into a single niche. There are water spells that are good for offense, defense, speed, and utility. But that flexibility often means that it’s got a little bit less oomph than essence that’s a little more specialized. Generally, of course. Some exceptions include…

-

Intro to the third in a video essay series about essence types and their unique factors, 454 Modern-Era

-

I expected the Felimalio to either accept the bond, or to reject it. Maybe hold onto the extended anima for a few moments to get a sense of who and what kind of person I was, then make a decision one way or the other. An unaccepted, yet not denied, link couldn’t transfer anima or pneuma, but it could still give a sense for emotions.

Instead, I got… none of the above. 

The Felimalio did hold onto the bond, but I didn’t get the sense they were sensing me out. It was more like something else was preventing the bond from forming, and it had to fulfill some sort of prior obligation. It wanted out, and it could break that obligation – despite the best efforts of many Obsidian Kings, mind control magic didn’t seem to exist. But it didn’t want to abandon that bond. 

It then extended more out to me, reaching out for help. I frowned, but nodded, and the Felimalio turned and began to trot up the tunnel. Scales and I followed a moment later, and we continued making our way up the tunnel. As we did, we passed by a bat-like primal. Then another. Then another. Each time they appeared, they eyed our group, before relaxing as they noticed the Felimalio.

I frowned. There shouldn’t be Primals down here, not with the essence all screwed up like this. One could be a fluke, but this was entirely too many. On top of the strangeness of the essence itself, and the survival of the ghost, I did not like how many questions were starting to pile up. 

After what felt like twenty minutes of walking through the criss-crossing tunnels that went up, down, looped in circles, and crossed other tunnel paths, we emerged into a large, open cavern. The chamber was massive, with dozens of tunnels leading in and out of the chamber. Through several of them I could see the shaft where we had fallen, including the faint glow of Vince’s red magic trailing down from above, and the glow of the flashlight and augpad from below. 

Throughout the room were slabs of fungi and rot that could have once been wooden crates or tables or something, but my eyes were drawn to the pulsing essence heart in the center of the room. It looked somewhat like a human heart, but the size of my entire torso. It was made of the same opalescent shimmering stonelike substance as an essence stone, and it was shedding absolutely enormous amounts of power. It was also covered in enchantments, with more rings of magic around it on the floor. I angled my augpad up to let it light up the ceiling.

Enchantments were carved all through the cavern roof, and despite the fact that they were centuries old, they looked to be in decent condition, though a large part of that was due to the wasteful amount of gold and crystal used in the design, keeping it from decaying. I studied its design, trying to make out what I could, and felt my mouth go dry. 

I wasn’t about to pretend to understand the full scope of the enchantment, even though it was hundreds of years out of date. But I could recognize elements that would, eventually, be standardized into common spells. Convert Element, a spell to help magians convert their essence to power items or craft more complex enchantments. Absorb Ambient Essence, which did exactly what it sounded like. Store Anima, which also was very straightforward. 

“That’s how the Obsidian King got so powerful,” I said, my voice coming out as a whisper. “He stole power from an essence heart. He must have killed the heart guardian, then had his enchanters build this… thing.” 

I looked at the Conversion part of the spellforms, then swore. It was producing massive amounts of shade element essence, then storing it away to be absorbed, which explained pretty much every sort of weirdness we had come across so far. 

With the essence from the heart both being forcibly aspected, and most of it being drained away, it was no wonder that none of us were able to cultivate. Taking in essence someone else was absorbing was absurdly difficult, as was taking in aspected essence different to your own, at least not without help. Together?

The reserves of power weren’t nearly as full as they should have been if an essence heart had truly been being used as a battery for hundreds of years, which explained how the ghost had survived for so long. Any time it was at risk of un-aspecting and dissolving into ambient essence, it just floated down here and took more of the stolen power. 

The essence heart ability to link to an unlimited number of Primals and use them for protection was probably the pre-existing condition that was stopping the Felimalio from accepting my bond. It wanted to go out and explore, but the heart was being constrained by these enchantments, which were doubtlessly painful for the heart.

It even explained the tunnels. When essence hearts appeared, they tended to warp the terrain around them. Essence traveled with less loss through air than water, and even less loss through water than stone, which meant they tended to create stone flumes to channel essence through air. Even now, we weren’t sure why their creation tended to create channels to help feed essence into the world, but they did. 

I just hadn’t really considered it because there weren't any essence hearts near the village. At least, there weren’t supposed to be. I’d somewhat just assumed someone had checked out the island for one, and I still suspected that someone had, but with the heart so contained, it hadn’t registered. 

Once I got over that surprise, though, I was only left with the surprise that the Obsidian King had attempted to harness the heart, instead of just destroying it and absorbing the resources. The dust created by the destruction of an essence heart was absurdly potent, and using it to advance in a similar way to using an essence stone was quite literally one of the least of its applications. 

The Obsidian King…

My eyes widened and I turned back to the lumps of mold and fungi that might once have been boxes. I mentally imagined them as boxes, then shifted to the nearest entryway to the spot where the ghost had attacked us. It was a few feet up in the air in a slight overhang., so I couldn’t quite get up there, but I did my best to hold the visual in mind, then overlaid it with the image that Vince had found. 

It wasn’t a perfect match, as it looked like the Primals had gone through most of it. The food and essence stones were pretty much gone. But it was still close. 

I strode over to where I remembered the egg being and pulled a towel out of my pack, then wrapped it around one hand, then wrapped another around my mouth. I shoved away dirt, rot, moss, mold, and mycelium. Then the light of my augpad fell onto a shiny white egg with yellow spots, black swirls, and purple slash-shaped marks. My breath hitched as I finally saw what we had come here for. 

I was about to pick it up when I felt a persistent tug on my spirit, and on my pants leg at the same time. I turned to see the Felimalio tugging at me, trying to bring me to the essence heart 

I leaned down and tried to compose my thoughts. Primals weren’t sapient, but they had a surprisingly high ability to interpret emotions. I focused on my helplessness, and then on patience, trying to explain to the Felimalio that I didn’t know how to fix it, but that I would bring someone who could. I wasn’t just ignoring the pain of the essence heart, I was just helpless. 

I wasn’t entirely sure that I succeeded, but I also didn’t think I’d entirely failed. The sense I got from the Felimalio was more resigned than it was upset, and it curled up into a ball, placing its glowing purple smoke tail over its head like a sleep mask. 

I walked over to the tunnels leading to the shaft down which Laurel and I had fallen and called out. 

“Hey, Vince? Laurel? Once River gets a handle on the teleports, you should come down here. The Obsidian King did something weird to an essence heart. Also I found your egg!” 

“There’s an essence hea–” Laurel started to say. In the same instance, Vince spluttered out. “You found an–?” 

There was an awkward moment of silence as they both stopped speaking to let the other go, and Vince continued. 

“Hold on. I’ll be down in a moment. You keep working on getting them out, River.” 

“If you can get your warps about five feet down and to the left, you can actually warp right into the tunnel with me, River!” 

There was a few moments of silence, and then a flickering ball of blue light, swirling with arcane element magic appeared in the tunnel overlooking the essence heart. Vince stepped through, and an instant later, River appeared next to him. Vince surveyed the scene beneath him, waving to me when I waved to the pair, then leapt down from the ledge, absorbing the fall with a flash of pneuma. 

River took a few steps down the tunnel until I couldn’t see him any longer. Several long moments later, he returned with Laurel in tow, and I figured he must have been able to chain a few teleports back and forth, using the line of sight he’d lacked from the surface. When they appeared within the chamber, Laurel spoke.

“This… wow. It’s kind of impressive, in a horrifying sort of way.” 

“Can you break the formation?” I asked, and River gave a humming sound. 

“Break it? Sure. But I don’t want to release all that shade anima at once. That would disrupt the local environment even worse than it’s already being disrupted. I also don’t have the ability to reshape gold and crystal into something that can more gradually release it, then break the formation.” 

“What if you had someone capable of absorbing and releasing the anima?” Vince asked, looking at me. 

“None of us have shade Primals, though,” Laurel asked, then looked at me. “Did you bond one?” 

I gestured to the Felimalio, still curled next to the essence heart. 

“I extended a bond offer, but she wants us to heal the heart first,” I said. “But if it’s to help the heart…” 

I knelt and extended the general idea of the plan, breaking it up into as simple chunks as possible. The Felimalio listened attentively, then rose, stretched, yawned, and accepted the bond. 

All at once, the anima that I had been extending locked away. Some of my own ousia froze up, locking into place, maintaining the bond and merging our essence together. The tenuous mental connection solidified, and my spine straightened. My shoulders rolled back, and I blinked rapidly. 

“What’s their name?” Vince asked. 

“Hex,” I said. A small part of the back of my mind had been working on that ever since she’d not refused the bond. 

“Right, well it’s time for you and Hex to get to work,” River said, stepping forward and indicating the spells on the ground and walls that stored the shade anima. “There’s a lot of anima in here. If you ever wanted a blank check for magical power, this is it.”

I nodded, reached out, and tapped my hand to the symbol for the anima tap, then drew in the magic. Energy rushed through me, so much that I nearly staggered and fell over, even as I began to feed it into Hex. She shuddered, then waves of darkness exploded out of her.