The Effaced: Chapter Nineteen

We spent a while working back and forth on the Arenamaster, rehashing some of the information that Zone and I had gone over. 

Rhys thought that he might be able to call on some of his father’s friends to check and see if any of them had heard about her escape – he hadn’t heard anything about it, and it should have made news, but it was possible that it was being covered up in order to preserve the mage prison’s fortress-like reputation. 

“But for all of this, there’s something that we haven’t discussed,” I said, leaning forwards. “You know why he was killed, don’t you? I only know that there was something going on with the budget and the lab. I don’t know what it was.” 

Hadiya sighed and glanced at Kelly, then went quiet for a moment. Eventually, she decided to trust in the power of the contract magic. 

“Tell me, what are the available options for a non-mage who wants to go into the mage fields?” Hadiya asked. 

“They sign up to get an aura spark, with the submissions of how they’ll be helping out society with the spark. Until then, they can use a pre-built draining array, so long as they have an aura crystal or aura generator. But they still have to purchase draining arrays that have already been activated, and most companies only sell one use versions.” 

“They can also try to get an aura spark through the black market,” Kelly said. “Though if they’re too old that can be risky cuz they’ll get investigated or something.” 

Hadiya nodded to us, then removed a sheet of paper from her desk. She drew out a basic enchantment, little more than a single-use light glyph. 

“I was not fortunate enough to develop an aura,” Hadiya informed us as she drew. “Nor was I selected for an aura spark, either legally or illegally. I don’t have an aura at all.” 

She pressed her fingers to the runes on the paper and spoke several words. There was a faint spark as she tapped each rune and sparked it to life, then she waved her hand and activated the enchantment. It flared with light for a moment, then burnt out, the runes vanishing, consumed as fuel. 

I stared at her. 

“If you don’t have an aura, how did you do that?” Kelly blurted out, asking what I was thinking.

In response, Hadiya rolled up her sleeve and exposed the faintly glowing tattoo that I had noticed before. It was a complex, twisting knot of magic, swirling with multicolored light. 

“Behold,” Rhys said, sounding both proud, sad, and tired. “The reason behind the death of my father. The aura tattoo.” 

I studied it. The design didn’t look much like any spell or language I recognized. While that was hardly impossible, since nobody could be versed in every possible dead language used by spellcraft. 

Language could also come in a variety of different forms, so it wasn’t like the fact that it didn’t look like a language inherently meant that it wasn’t one. Lots of languages from the southern half of the continent, like Ulacto, didn’t follow the same formatting that language I knew did. 

But it looked… artistic. Like the kind of thing that someone would get for fun, rather than a specific magical design. Even the druidic enhancement tattoos that had made their way up from the south, which didn’t resemble spell language as I knew it, had a certain… order. 

It took me a moment to realize what was going on. 

“You’re obscuring the real design with glowing ink, aren’t you?” I asked. 

“Not just glowing ink,” Hadiya said. “We’ve nested it with false runes, false enchantments to obscure it, false leads that just trail off to otherworldly minutiae, and more. Even an archmage dedicatedly studying one of the tattoos is going to struggle to get more than halfway there.”

She said the entire thing with a smirk – not on her face, but in her voice. She was absolutely smug. 

“Hadiya was the project lead for the designs,” Rhys informed us. “It was also the first time I was brought onto working on the project.” 

I didn’t eye Rhys suspiciously, but it took an effort of will to not. Why was an expert in ancient, esoteric magic that was essentially no longer relevant to the modern day helping out in the creation of aura tattoos?

“What does it actually do, though?” Kelly asked. “If it just makes aura, isn’t that just the same as having an aura generator on your arm?” 

“Ah, that’s the critical difference,” Hadiya explained. “A generator simply produces a stream of clear, pure aura. It can be used to power enchantments, and with a draining spell that’s set up by a mage, or if its got the spell programmed into it by a mage, it can be used to activate rituals. Do you see the problem?” 

Kelly thought about it for several long moments, his eyes darting around. I opened my mouth to answer for him, but he shushed me, and I shut up. 

“It all comes back to mages,” Kelly eventually said. “The generator provides power, but a mage needs to build the tool for someone without an aura to turn that into a spell, regardless of if it’s draining to activate the spell, or building it into the generator, right?” 

“This can be guided by the person who its tattooed on, like activating an enchanted wand,” Haidya said, and the tattoo flared slightly brighter. 

A tiny band of white-green-red light flowed out around her hand. 

The aura was tiny, its total volume probably no bigger than my pinkie finger. 

But Hadiya flicked her fingers and a tiny spark flowed to her fingers, then snapped back to the tattoo. 

“It’s not much,” she said. “Aura exercise can’t improve its density. It’s incredibly hard to shape – even creating a spark to imbue into a rune takes significant effort. It is unlikely that even most glyphs will be doable without significant practice. It also cannot accept foreign aura or changes, which means no familiars, boons, or bargains with other planes, nor any rune bonds or arch-stars.” 

“But it’s still an aura that you can directly control and manipulate like a mage?” I asked, leaning forwards. 

“It's an aura that I can control, generated through similar means to an aura generator – which is to say, it draws on principles other than the draining of ambient aura,” Hadiya said. “I can power foci for short bursts, but more importantly, I can activate runes.”

I leaned back in the chair and let out a slow breath. 

If she could activate runes with it, that meant that she could become a witch. She could build ritual magic of just about any sort: make enchantments, wards, alteration rituals, abjuration rituals, divinations, curses, siege rituals, or more. 

There would be a few things, like portal magic and necromancy, that would be out of her scope, but she couldn’t have done those with the older methods of using a draining array either. 

I worked through the ramifications in my head. Somewhere between one third to one fifth of the citizens of Elderglass were mages, though getting an exact count was difficult.

Of those, most went on to be enchanters or wardcrafters. Usually not designers – lots of people didn’t cut it out to design entirely new enchantments from the ground up – but they were implementers. 

It was easy to overlook, but in the city that was never dark, everything came from aura. Everything. 

The lights on the ceilings of every building from the ground up, and in all of the more reputable parts of the undercity? 

The pipes that moved, compacted, and converted waste into fertilizer to be shipped to Igmanis and Durtare and Saxum? 

The pipes that moved, heated, and cooled water? The power sockets that could run foci like toasters, vacuums, and radios, and indeed, the production of those things in and of themselves? 

The airships that hung in the sky above them? The automobiles on the streets below? The skyskips that flew through the air?

Every single one of those things was powered by aura, and almost all of them needed an enchanter to build them. Frequently it was a paired duo of a metal mage like him to shape the runes and repair enchantments that had been tied into an aura generator, and an enchanter to activate said runs and set the enchantments into the generator. 

And that wasn’t even taking specialty services like the memory banks, demonic bond services, and personal defensive ward sellers into account.

The entire city ran on aura and ran on mages. If you had an aura and were willing to learn the spells of a trade, you could make a living. It might not be enough to get you into the highest levels of the city, but it was enough to comfortably support yourself.

By the void, he’d told Kelly to do exactly that. The kid had a mind rune bond, after all, so he’d told him to learn the spells to work at a memory bank. 

For every enchanter employed by a lab to do cutting edge research, there were a hundred or more ordinary enchanters and metal mages who kept the city running smoothly.

But if there was a way for anyone to get an aura… 

Well, the rich would massively benefit. They already would frequently refuse the tax benefits or the cash payouts for selling an aura spark to the city in order to keep the aura among the wealthy. 

The children of the rich often also had better chances to get an aura spark – not for some grand, conspiratorial reason, but for something far simpler than that. 

If you were born into a wealthy family, you could get into better colleges, make better connections, and had the support needed to devote your time to improving the city. As such, it was far less risky of a gamble, and far more appealing of a possible bonus for the city to invest an aura spark into you than it would be to invest in a kid from the undercity who just wanted a chance to work as a repair mage in order to survive.

For all that Rhys was nice and amenable, if he hadn’t been born with an aura – which I gave even odds – then the odds he could have gotten a transplant were infinitely higher than Kelly’s. 

With the ability to provide a tattoo that would allow people to become enchanters… 

I leaned forwards, staring at Hadiya intently. 

“This was why Rhys’ father was killed, wasn’t it?” I asked.

“Something along those lines,” Hadiya said. “With our current thi- our current second generation tattoos, they’re too expensive. Almost a hundred and forty-thick panes.” 

I paled. That was a fifth of the cost of an entire apartment, and a decent quality apartment, like my own.

More expensive than getting an aura spark through the black market, certainly. Trying to adjust the prices I knew as a kid for inflation was hard, but by my estimate, getting an aura spark through the black market was probably going to run someone a little more than sixteen thousand thin-panes.

It was the kind of thing that could be sold to some of the rich who were willing to show it off, but…

“What if those people who got a tattoo later went on to get an aura spark, or to awaken their aura late? There are cases of people as old as seventy awakening an aura after a deeply traumatic event.” 

If it allowed someone to practice witchcraft, as well as another path like sorcery or Druidry, then it would be worth it for every rich mage in the city to purchase one.

For the first time, Hadiya looked… discontent.

“As it stands, they would be unable to take an aura spark or awaken their aura,” she said after several long seconds. “It’s still a significant improvement from our prototype, first, and the subvariants of the second generation versions…”

I squinted at her. That was interesting, and suggested that the tattoo was a bit more invasive than something like druidic bolstering tattoos, or getting a spell tattooed onto your body to give you an extra spell to use in combat – force armor was always a popular choice there.

Those needed careful balancing, since they interacted with the human body, and couldn’t use most standard anchors, making them more limited, but still useful. They didn’t interfere with magic at all. Demons could even offer demonically empowered tattoos to non-mages, though they usually worked like a self-charging magic item. 

But for it to prevent taking an aura spark suggested it was altering their fundamental connection to aura. 

“We are hoping to remove this in future iterations of the design,” Hadiya hastened to add. “Imagine how useful it could be for people to be able to use their tattoo to practice witchcraft, while pursuing a different field like druidcraft or sorcery with an active aura. Thus far, the results have been… Less than ideal.” 

“Hold on,” I said. “Go back. As fascinating as all of this is, you said that you were working with Senator Ermonte on something kind of like this, but not exactly. What exactly were you two working on? There’s no way it was these tattoos.”

There was something going on here, something I wasn’t supposed to know about. I could practically smell it.

I just hoped that it was an ally hiding behind the metaphorical curtain, not an assassin.