Chapter 222: 222
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Feeling heavy and heart weary, he turned to 'Snow White' to see that Cray, moving with glacial slowness, had already taken care of with a more mundane method. Together, they moved through the remaining bodies until they had found the one that had been the residence of the young mage's soul before it had been stolen. Surprisingly, he was able to collect and reattach his suit. The storage device pin was there as well.
Under feeble, flickering spirit sight, his confusion over the equipment still being there was solved. he saw that the creature who had stolen his body was predictably still clinging to existence. It's soul was still damaged from their fight and grievously unstable after having been irradiated by Wick's light. The spiritual force the tree exuded may have been visible but was no respecter of physical barriers like suits.
The young mage offered his exposed hand and the soul pounced at the opportunity presented, mostly empty phylactery tearing out from the burning corpse of the 'son'. There was no contest. Orison may have been deathly exhausted but his soul was relatively whole and the space that belonged to it was merely essence starved. The golden essence garnered from the destroyed phylactery and the remaining spiritual essence of the offending creature would help ease the supernatural wounds he did have.
From the spiritual echoes of his nemesis, the young mage garnered a bit more of the story from the outside. He hadn't stepped to Cray and Cole but had pulled his soul marked companion through the feline young man and the vampire lord had done the rest. His lovely wife had Orison weaved into a looping mirage of BS long enough for them to get anything that could be guessed that he might have, out of him.
Hunter and Cole hadn't suffered much. In fact, Hunter was under the same kind of Candy Land crap as Orison. With a little time, it would have been possible to redeem what had been done to the budding wizard. But all in all, it was better that he had went with Cole. The debt had been completely reversed and there was no doubt that they'd stand a much better chance at successful endeavors with Cole as the captain. The last small tick of good news was that the book was still bound to the young wizard.
Had they wanted much of anything else, Orison would have been fully screwed. Had he been consciousness controlled in some other direction, same deal. But they wanted vials of fantasia and that put him in the frame of mind to think of Osomo. For all he knew, if they could get back to where they were in one piece, the revealed upper side of the stone 'top' could very well be what 'Silent Beauty' had lead him to believe it was.
While he was taking inventory and checking the progress of his and Cray's recovery, the young mage noticed something. It was something that pushed the dark clouds of their situation back just a little more. Being close to the standing stones, the sickly Entanglement Key that had been grossly overused to the point it nearly ceased to be, was taking in faint traces of something.
Bolstering the conduit's own efforts to recover with his tired will, Orison was able to see a little more clearly that the key was pulling some kind of substance from the dimensionally distorted space around the ominous stone. Not only was the key minutely restoring but the distortion was weakening, smoothing out. Whatever mysterious force lay behind the creation and use of the Hellish obelisk, its what empowered and strengthened his conduit.
The Entanglement Key was so much different than the Dannan, keystone or the silver key had been. It was so much more picky about its construction and fuel but it was also a great deal more intimate with him, an extension rather than a separate but connected thing. It suddenly dawned on him. He had made a conduit purely with the power and strength of his own uniqueness, his own soul stuff and power.
At first, he couldn't figure out how or why but then it made sense. While in the fragile state of becoming what he was, bits and pieces of shaken loose soul and his void connected gifts had intuitively created it to keep that stuff from going to waste. He couldn't be certain but he thought it might have something to do with 'The Star' card that Hunter drew. If so, 'wisdom at great personal loss' may have turned out to be one of the best cards in the deck.
Seeing the gossamer trails the archer's soul was 'bleeding' while it recovered, Orison said, "Cray, your soul is in a state of looseness while it heals. There are wisps escaping the envelope of your aura. Some of it are probably things you might not like having much, like the memories of the last day or so. Instead of letting it go to waste by releasing it, try pulling it into a familiar shape. Imbue that shape with all your understandings of it, the symbol and ability of that shape."
The archer sat down and lapsed into a deep trance sleep almost immediately. "Great. I gave you a reason to take a nap in the middle of a battlefield. Not all of these guys died. Some of them were pulled back to their contingency plan safe-houses and whatnot. The state we're in, we are not in any shape to deal with anymore surprises."
He urged his key to finish its feeding as quickly as it safely could. The fuzzy edges of the phantom key bulged as it drew harder, taking a comical shape in defiance of their grim situation. Within moments, the standing stones took on a decrepit and ancient feeling devoid of the majority of its ominous aura.
Robbed of the mysterious force that created it, the angry red veins of the center standing stone receded before it collapsed into a pile of sand. If only briefly, the sudden reversal of world will pressure that had suppressed the stone from jutting higher and becoming a much more dangerous object of a different kind, reversed. An essence phenomenon formed that looked as if the sky was flipping off the pile of sand back for all its years of mocking obscenity.
A minute trickle of 'white gold' essence joined the rest. It lay with him for only enough time for it to register he had it before it exchanged itself for something else. At the very lowest, base portion of his conjuring concepts, an understanding formed. It was a feather's tickle, an appetite wetting sample of creation law.
"See, that right there is the reason I don't go to strip clubs, Deshawn. The 'world will' just c*ck teased me and then ran off so that I'll whip out the 'hero' wallet and spend all my hard earned life trying to get another taste only to go 'home' at the end broke and still unsatisfied.
"And is the world will at fault? No, it's got troubles. It needs people to whip out those heroes and 'make it rain' so that it can survive." Orison said, disgruntled.
Despite his colorful self pep talk to distract himself from the horror of it all, the speck of law understanding represented a king's ransom of wealth in converted benefit. It held only one small idea but that was a game changing one. He cut off the sharing of golden essence to Cray and threw a tiny speck of it into a heal request cast at the world.
Unlike before, not only did it not fizzle, like any other conjuration Orison could cast with the world's help, a model warped into being and showered Cray in a gentle dusting of will shaped life essence. The tiny speck of gold and touch of magic had coaxed the world into providing nearly ten seconds worth of expensive and exhausting healing that auto directed itself to crucial areas. It also erased the hidden nastiness bad wounds tended to leave behind.
"I take it all back. The 'world will' is like a respectable young woman who wants to be wooed extra hard to ensure the man who came to court her is sincere. She just gets carried away a little bit." he muttered, feeling slightly relieved and more than slightly unhinged.
Squeezing the vestige of stamina within his newly remade muscles, the young mage picked up Cray on spaghetti legs and noodle arms and put some distance between them and the 'battlefield'. Trying to find a place to hide long enough to get some real strength and energy back into himself, the young mage managed to find a crack to hide them in. He also found an enraged badger that might have killed him if he didn't have the suit with the state he was in.
With one last world assisted healing to help along the process of converting the last of Cray's partly necrotic flesh into fully living and operational, Orison 'locked' the cramped crack. It would do little more than make it hard for the undead to sense them but that was plenty useful enough to down the last soldier in his grim fight against rest. He attempted to shift into a light trance but ended up cleanly passed out.
When he came to, he was being carried by a spaghetti legged and noodle armed Cray. The man almost collapse right there on the spot when Orison asked to be let down. Orison's dead nemesis had apparently disdained much that had been in the pin but two bars of special rations remained inside along with one unopened bottle of Doc Agave. Taking one out, he split it in half and handed it over along with a triple shot.
Grimly, Orison said, "Not the time to be holding back. We need to get as good as we can, as fast as we can. It'll be a little too much on the stamina gain but eat that entire half. Our bodies are running on fumes."
Cray nodded silently and deactivated his helmet. It was gruesome. They had tortured the man to death before turning him in a way that would keep his soul locked into his corpse. The best that Orison could figure, they had done it when they discovered that no one else could use his suit and the suit wouldn't activate without his soul.
It was beyond what a heal could do. And after the world's tiny law revelation, the young mage couldn't bring himself to rip up 'big money' just to use as cut sealer. A little bit of study would turn the small puddle of gold essence into an ocean of good rather than just an extra toe or eye. That didn't mean he had no plans to help the steadfast friend of his in desperate need.
Once the bar was finished off and the shot taken, the young mage focused on the dormant key that was still a little bloated. He attempted to augment a heal with the entanglement power to 'draw' back some of what was missing. It worked but the remedy was just as bad as the torture that caused it, probably worse. It seemed that it would only work when the archer was awake and assisting the call with his own will. Orison was glad the man knew what was going on or he might have cleanly severed the goodwill they had. It used up a good portion of what the bar and super liquor had put in Cray. It also hadn't done a whole lot off the meager two casts that the archer could tolerate before whimpering out for the young mage to stop.
After a brief rest, they were on their way again. Trouble didn't cross their path often. The remaining threats were busy licking wounds and raiding fallen comrades' holdings to concern themselves with two dangerously prickly fugitives for the moment. The few times they did run into opposition on their way to the vampire's stronghold, Orison's two astral friends came in to save the day but it became obvious that they were catching onto the rules. The young mage's loss of golden essence for calling them out quickly became more than the slayed minions were worth.
All the posturing and dramatic flair finding its way into their fights meant that his days of using them for anything but the gravest of emergencies had came. The wickedness dancing behind their eyes meant that relying on them would be little less dangerous than calling on a devil. They were by no means corrupted or truly evil but the opportunistic spirit at their hearts was no longer repressed by whatever meager gratitude they had originally felt.
When the two weary companions had finally made it to the vampire's holding, it had already been sacked and its inhabitants moved on. It was fortunate that there weren't as many intelligent undead as there had been before or they might have found themselves facing another harrowing conflict. The holding itself hadn't produced enough greed or envy for the dwindled number of undead to covet it.
With a little tweaking, the healing spell had turned into a sell one to buy two golden mote exchange on the lingering ghostly and skeletal threats that roamed the halls. Cray hadn't been a shuffling cohort on the trip himself and had garnered a few grains of gold as well. It surprised the young mage that Cray hadn't been aware of the small karmic bounty garnered.
Then it dawned on him. He was a tier four existence, on the same playing field as a demigod. He could see and interact with karmic forces because he had become sensitive to their existence. They had always been there, invisible and only occasionally felt. Not that being a tier four alone was enough. Possessing a true name and decent power of existence garnered from 'climbing' had their part to be acknowledged as well.
They didn't dare to linger too long. The holdings were nice enough that once a new power balance was achieved, some entity or another would come knocking to claim the prime real estate. Using scraps of spiritual echoes, the young mage found a few hidden caches that did little but replace a fraction of what had been stolen from him and give them a couple of magical aces to throw. The biggest haul of the whole house was intangibly gained tearing down the devil shrine and his key 'slurp breaking' its ritual summoning circle.
Having recovered some of the nutritional bars, Orison split another between them, giving the lion's share to Cray before torture healing the man some more. The second go round, they had some painkillers that the young mage wouldn't want to make a habit of using but allowed a little more recovery to happen before the archer tapped out to rest again. With what allowable time they gave themselves, they both did before resuming an early winter march north.
A few grueling days later, they were both heart sick weary and pretty much tired all the time but Cray had reached a point where Orison could look at his face without needing to resist the urge to wince. His soul had garnered enough time to study the etheric echoes of 'magics past' to piece together a mount spell along with the return of 'Create Water'. With a little more effort, he had a functioning 'create nutritional hoof glue' spell as well.
"I'm telling you, Cray. The world SHOULD be taking that golden mote away for making this stuff. Not because it deserves payment but because forcing another living thing to eat it is evil," Orison said as he shoveled another spoonful as far back past his tongue as he could without gagging.
The archer shrugged and said, "Beats boot leather and bark soup. I'll eat stink bugs first."
Struck with a bright idea, the young mage cast a new function of Presto he discovered at it and tried again. "Okay... As long as I can choke it down quick, I can almost pretend it's a decent oatmeal. I could probably pull off cream of wheat or cottage cheese too."
Cray grunted, a habit he'd picked up while he couldn't talk. Orison didn't particularly like it. It wasn't so much the sound itself but the edge of taciturn gruffness, a kind of callousness the archer had taken in and had become a part of him.
Feeling the weight of the weariness keenly, the young mage asked, "Do you regret answering the call of the card that summoned you?"
"Right now? Yeah." the archer answered without hesitation.
Orison felt like the answer had aged him years.
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Feeling heavy and heart weary, he turned to 'Snow White' to see that Cray, moving with glacial slowness, had already taken care of with a more mundane method. Together, they moved through the remaining bodies until they had found the one that had been the residence of the young mage's soul before it had been stolen. Surprisingly, he was able to collect and reattach his suit. The storage device pin was there as well.
Under feeble, flickering spirit sight, his confusion over the equipment still being there was solved. he saw that the creature who had stolen his body was predictably still clinging to existence. It's soul was still damaged from their fight and grievously unstable after having been irradiated by Wick's light. The spiritual force the tree exuded may have been visible but was no respecter of physical barriers like suits.
The young mage offered his exposed hand and the soul pounced at the opportunity presented, mostly empty phylactery tearing out from the burning corpse of the 'son'. There was no contest. Orison may have been deathly exhausted but his soul was relatively whole and the space that belonged to it was merely essence starved. The golden essence garnered from the destroyed phylactery and the remaining spiritual essence of the offending creature would help ease the supernatural wounds he did have.
From the spiritual echoes of his nemesis, the young mage garnered a bit more of the story from the outside. He hadn't stepped to Cray and Cole but had pulled his soul marked companion through the feline young man and the vampire lord had done the rest. His lovely wife had Orison weaved into a looping mirage of BS long enough for them to get anything that could be guessed that he might have, out of him.
Hunter and Cole hadn't suffered much. In fact, Hunter was under the same kind of Candy Land crap as Orison. With a little time, it would have been possible to redeem what had been done to the budding wizard. But all in all, it was better that he had went with Cole. The debt had been completely reversed and there was no doubt that they'd stand a much better chance at successful endeavors with Cole as the captain. The last small tick of good news was that the book was still bound to the young wizard.
Had they wanted much of anything else, Orison would have been fully screwed. Had he been consciousness controlled in some other direction, same deal. But they wanted vials of fantasia and that put him in the frame of mind to think of Osomo. For all he knew, if they could get back to where they were in one piece, the revealed upper side of the stone 'top' could very well be what 'Silent Beauty' had lead him to believe it was.
While he was taking inventory and checking the progress of his and Cray's recovery, the young mage noticed something. It was something that pushed the dark clouds of their situation back just a little more. Being close to the standing stones, the sickly Entanglement Key that had been grossly overused to the point it nearly ceased to be, was taking in faint traces of something.
Bolstering the conduit's own efforts to recover with his tired will, Orison was able to see a little more clearly that the key was pulling some kind of substance from the dimensionally distorted space around the ominous stone. Not only was the key minutely restoring but the distortion was weakening, smoothing out. Whatever mysterious force lay behind the creation and use of the Hellish obelisk, its what empowered and strengthened his conduit.
The Entanglement Key was so much different than the Dannan, keystone or the silver key had been. It was so much more picky about its construction and fuel but it was also a great deal more intimate with him, an extension rather than a separate but connected thing. It suddenly dawned on him. He had made a conduit purely with the power and strength of his own uniqueness, his own soul stuff and power.
At first, he couldn't figure out how or why but then it made sense. While in the fragile state of becoming what he was, bits and pieces of shaken loose soul and his void connected gifts had intuitively created it to keep that stuff from going to waste. He couldn't be certain but he thought it might have something to do with 'The Star' card that Hunter drew. If so, 'wisdom at great personal loss' may have turned out to be one of the best cards in the deck.
Seeing the gossamer trails the archer's soul was 'bleeding' while it recovered, Orison said, "Cray, your soul is in a state of looseness while it heals. There are wisps escaping the envelope of your aura. Some of it are probably things you might not like having much, like the memories of the last day or so. Instead of letting it go to waste by releasing it, try pulling it into a familiar shape. Imbue that shape with all your understandings of it, the symbol and ability of that shape."
The archer sat down and lapsed into a deep trance sleep almost immediately. "Great. I gave you a reason to take a nap in the middle of a battlefield. Not all of these guys died. Some of them were pulled back to their contingency plan safe-houses and whatnot. The state we're in, we are not in any shape to deal with anymore surprises."
He urged his key to finish its feeding as quickly as it safely could. The fuzzy edges of the phantom key bulged as it drew harder, taking a comical shape in defiance of their grim situation. Within moments, the standing stones took on a decrepit and ancient feeling devoid of the majority of its ominous aura.
Robbed of the mysterious force that created it, the angry red veins of the center standing stone receded before it collapsed into a pile of sand. If only briefly, the sudden reversal of world will pressure that had suppressed the stone from jutting higher and becoming a much more dangerous object of a different kind, reversed. An essence phenomenon formed that looked as if the sky was flipping off the pile of sand back for all its years of mocking obscenity.
A minute trickle of 'white gold' essence joined the rest. It lay with him for only enough time for it to register he had it before it exchanged itself for something else. At the very lowest, base portion of his conjuring concepts, an understanding formed. It was a feather's tickle, an appetite wetting sample of creation law.
"See, that right there is the reason I don't go to strip clubs, Deshawn. The 'world will' just c*ck teased me and then ran off so that I'll whip out the 'hero' wallet and spend all my hard earned life trying to get another taste only to go 'home' at the end broke and still unsatisfied.
"And is the world will at fault? No, it's got troubles. It needs people to whip out those heroes and 'make it rain' so that it can survive." Orison said, disgruntled.
Despite his colorful self pep talk to distract himself from the horror of it all, the speck of law understanding represented a king's ransom of wealth in converted benefit. It held only one small idea but that was a game changing one. He cut off the sharing of golden essence to Cray and threw a tiny speck of it into a heal request cast at the world.
Unlike before, not only did it not fizzle, like any other conjuration Orison could cast with the world's help, a model warped into being and showered Cray in a gentle dusting of will shaped life essence. The tiny speck of gold and touch of magic had coaxed the world into providing nearly ten seconds worth of expensive and exhausting healing that auto directed itself to crucial areas. It also erased the hidden nastiness bad wounds tended to leave behind.
"I take it all back. The 'world will' is like a respectable young woman who wants to be wooed extra hard to ensure the man who came to court her is sincere. She just gets carried away a little bit." he muttered, feeling slightly relieved and more than slightly unhinged.
Squeezing the vestige of stamina within his newly remade muscles, the young mage picked up Cray on spaghetti legs and noodle arms and put some distance between them and the 'battlefield'. Trying to find a place to hide long enough to get some real strength and energy back into himself, the young mage managed to find a crack to hide them in. He also found an enraged badger that might have killed him if he didn't have the suit with the state he was in.
With one last world assisted healing to help along the process of converting the last of Cray's partly necrotic flesh into fully living and operational, Orison 'locked' the cramped crack. It would do little more than make it hard for the undead to sense them but that was plenty useful enough to down the last soldier in his grim fight against rest. He attempted to shift into a light trance but ended up cleanly passed out.
When he came to, he was being carried by a spaghetti legged and noodle armed Cray. The man almost collapse right there on the spot when Orison asked to be let down. Orison's dead nemesis had apparently disdained much that had been in the pin but two bars of special rations remained inside along with one unopened bottle of Doc Agave. Taking one out, he split it in half and handed it over along with a triple shot.
Grimly, Orison said, "Not the time to be holding back. We need to get as good as we can, as fast as we can. It'll be a little too much on the stamina gain but eat that entire half. Our bodies are running on fumes."
Cray nodded silently and deactivated his helmet. It was gruesome. They had tortured the man to death before turning him in a way that would keep his soul locked into his corpse. The best that Orison could figure, they had done it when they discovered that no one else could use his suit and the suit wouldn't activate without his soul.
It was beyond what a heal could do. And after the world's tiny law revelation, the young mage couldn't bring himself to rip up 'big money' just to use as cut sealer. A little bit of study would turn the small puddle of gold essence into an ocean of good rather than just an extra toe or eye. That didn't mean he had no plans to help the steadfast friend of his in desperate need.
Once the bar was finished off and the shot taken, the young mage focused on the dormant key that was still a little bloated. He attempted to augment a heal with the entanglement power to 'draw' back some of what was missing. It worked but the remedy was just as bad as the torture that caused it, probably worse. It seemed that it would only work when the archer was awake and assisting the call with his own will. Orison was glad the man knew what was going on or he might have cleanly severed the goodwill they had. It used up a good portion of what the bar and super liquor had put in Cray. It also hadn't done a whole lot off the meager two casts that the archer could tolerate before whimpering out for the young mage to stop.
After a brief rest, they were on their way again. Trouble didn't cross their path often. The remaining threats were busy licking wounds and raiding fallen comrades' holdings to concern themselves with two dangerously prickly fugitives for the moment. The few times they did run into opposition on their way to the vampire's stronghold, Orison's two astral friends came in to save the day but it became obvious that they were catching onto the rules. The young mage's loss of golden essence for calling them out quickly became more than the slayed minions were worth.
All the posturing and dramatic flair finding its way into their fights meant that his days of using them for anything but the gravest of emergencies had came. The wickedness dancing behind their eyes meant that relying on them would be little less dangerous than calling on a devil. They were by no means corrupted or truly evil but the opportunistic spirit at their hearts was no longer repressed by whatever meager gratitude they had originally felt.
When the two weary companions had finally made it to the vampire's holding, it had already been sacked and its inhabitants moved on. It was fortunate that there weren't as many intelligent undead as there had been before or they might have found themselves facing another harrowing conflict. The holding itself hadn't produced enough greed or envy for the dwindled number of undead to covet it.
With a little tweaking, the healing spell had turned into a sell one to buy two golden mote exchange on the lingering ghostly and skeletal threats that roamed the halls. Cray hadn't been a shuffling cohort on the trip himself and had garnered a few grains of gold as well. It surprised the young mage that Cray hadn't been aware of the small karmic bounty garnered.
Then it dawned on him. He was a tier four existence, on the same playing field as a demigod. He could see and interact with karmic forces because he had become sensitive to their existence. They had always been there, invisible and only occasionally felt. Not that being a tier four alone was enough. Possessing a true name and decent power of existence garnered from 'climbing' had their part to be acknowledged as well.
They didn't dare to linger too long. The holdings were nice enough that once a new power balance was achieved, some entity or another would come knocking to claim the prime real estate. Using scraps of spiritual echoes, the young mage found a few hidden caches that did little but replace a fraction of what had been stolen from him and give them a couple of magical aces to throw. The biggest haul of the whole house was intangibly gained tearing down the devil shrine and his key 'slurp breaking' its ritual summoning circle.
Having recovered some of the nutritional bars, Orison split another between them, giving the lion's share to Cray before torture healing the man some more. The second go round, they had some painkillers that the young mage wouldn't want to make a habit of using but allowed a little more recovery to happen before the archer tapped out to rest again. With what allowable time they gave themselves, they both did before resuming an early winter march north.
A few grueling days later, they were both heart sick weary and pretty much tired all the time but Cray had reached a point where Orison could look at his face without needing to resist the urge to wince. His soul had garnered enough time to study the etheric echoes of 'magics past' to piece together a mount spell along with the return of 'Create Water'. With a little more effort, he had a functioning 'create nutritional hoof glue' spell as well.
"I'm telling you, Cray. The world SHOULD be taking that golden mote away for making this stuff. Not because it deserves payment but because forcing another living thing to eat it is evil," Orison said as he shoveled another spoonful as far back past his tongue as he could without gagging.
The archer shrugged and said, "Beats boot leather and bark soup. I'll eat stink bugs first."
Struck with a bright idea, the young mage cast a new function of Presto he discovered at it and tried again. "Okay... As long as I can choke it down quick, I can almost pretend it's a decent oatmeal. I could probably pull off cream of wheat or cottage cheese too."
Cray grunted, a habit he'd picked up while he couldn't talk. Orison didn't particularly like it. It wasn't so much the sound itself but the edge of taciturn gruffness, a kind of callousness the archer had taken in and had become a part of him.
Feeling the weight of the weariness keenly, the young mage asked, "Do you regret answering the call of the card that summoned you?"
"Right now? Yeah." the archer answered without hesitation.
Orison felt like the answer had aged him years.
Feeling heavy and heart weary, he turned to 'Snow White' to see that Cray, moving with glacial slowness, had already taken care of with a more mundane method. Together, they moved through the remaining bodies until they had found the one that had been the residence of the young mage's soul before it had been stolen. Surprisingly, he was able to collect and reattach his suit. The storage device pin was there as well. Under feeble, flickering spirit sight, his confusion over the equipment still being there was solved. he saw that the creature who had stolen his body was predictably still clinging to existence. It's soul was still damaged from their fight and grievously unstable after having been irradiated by Wick's light. The spiritual force the tree exuded may have been visible but was no respecter of physical barriers like suits. The young mage offered his exposed hand and the soul pounced at the opportunity presented, mostly empty phylactery tearing out from the burning corpse of the 'son'. There was no contest. Orison may have been deathly exhausted but his soul was relatively whole and the space that belonged to it was merely essence starved. The golden essence garnered from the destroyed phylactery and the remaining spiritual essence of the offending creature would help ease the supernatural wounds he did have. From the spiritual echoes of his nemesis, the young mage garnered a bit more of the story from the outside. He hadn't stepped to Cray and Cole but had pulled his soul marked companion through the feline young man and the vampire lord had done the rest. His lovely wife had Orison weaved into a looping mirage of BS long enough for them to get anything that could be guessed that he might have, out of him. Hunter and Cole hadn't suffered much. In fact, Hunter was under the same kind of Candy Land crap as Orison. With a little time, it would have been possible to redeem what had been done to the budding wizard. But all in all, it was better that he had went with Cole. The debt had been completely reversed and there was no doubt that they'd stand a much better chance at successful endeavors with Cole as the captain. The last small tick of good news was that the book was still bound to the young wizard. Had they wanted much of anything else, Orison would have been fully screwed. Had he been consciousness controlled in some other direction, same deal. But they wanted vials of fantasia and that put him in the frame of mind to think of Osomo. For all he knew, if they could get back to where they were in one piece, the revealed upper side of the stone 'top' could very well be what 'Silent Beauty' had lead him to believe it was. While he was taking inventory and checking the progress of his and Cray's recovery, the young mage noticed something. It was something that pushed the dark clouds of their situation back just a little more. Being close to the standing stones, the sickly Entanglement Key that had been grossly overused to the point it nearly ceased to be, was taking in faint traces of something. Bolstering the conduit's own efforts to recover with his tired will, Orison was able to see a little more clearly that the key was pulling some kind of substance from the dimensionally distorted space around the ominous stone. Not only was the key minutely restoring but the distortion was weakening, smoothing out. Whatever mysterious force lay behind the creation and use of the Hellish obelisk, its what empowered and strengthened his conduit. The Entanglement Key was so much different than the Dannan, keystone or the silver key had been. It was so much more picky about its construction and fuel but it was also a great deal more intimate with him, an extension rather than a separate but connected thing. It suddenly dawned on him. He had made a conduit purely with the power and strength of his own uniqueness, his own soul stuff and power. At first, he couldn't figure out how or why but then it made sense. While in the fragile state of becoming what he was, bits and pieces of shaken loose soul and his void connected gifts had intuitively created it to keep that stuff from going to waste. He couldn't be certain but he thought it might have something to do with 'The Star' card that Hunter drew. If so, 'wisdom at great personal loss' may have turned out to be one of the best cards in the deck. Seeing the gossamer trails the archer's soul was 'bleeding' while it recovered, Orison said, "Cray, your soul is in a state of looseness while it heals. There are wisps escaping the envelope of your aura. Some of it are probably things you might not like having much, like the memories of the last day or so. Instead of letting it go to waste by releasing it, try pulling it into a familiar shape. Imbue that shape with all your understandings of it, the symbol and ability of that shape." The archer sat down and lapsed into a deep trance sleep almost immediately. "Great. I gave you a reason to take a nap in the middle of a battlefield. Not all of these guys died. Some of them were pulled back to their contingency plan safe-houses and whatnot. The state we're in, we are not in any shape to deal with anymore surprises." He urged his key to finish its feeding as quickly as it safely could. The fuzzy edges of the phantom key bulged as it drew harder, taking a comical shape in defiance of their grim situation. Within moments, the standing stones took on a decrepit and ancient feeling devoid of the majority of its ominous aura. Robbed of the mysterious force that created it, the angry red veins of the center standing stone receded before it collapsed into a pile of sand. If only briefly, the sudden reversal of world will pressure that had suppressed the stone from jutting higher and becoming a much more dangerous object of a different kind, reversed. An essence phenomenon formed that looked as if the sky was flipping off the pile of sand back for all its years of mocking obscenity. A minute trickle of 'white gold' essence joined the rest. It lay with him for only enough time for it to register he had it before it exchanged itself for something else. At the very lowest, base portion of his conjuring concepts, an understanding formed. It was a feather's tickle, an appetite wetting sample of creation law. "See, that right there is the reason I don't go to strip clubs, Deshawn. The 'world will' just c*ck teased me and then ran off so that I'll whip out the 'hero' wallet and spend all my hard earned life trying to get another taste only to go 'home' at the end broke and still unsatisfied. "And is the world will at fault? No, it's got troubles. It needs people to whip out those heroes and 'make it rain' so that it can survive." Orison said, disgruntled. Despite his colorful self pep talk to distract himself from the horror of it all, the speck of law understanding represented a king's ransom of wealth in converted benefit. It held only one small idea but that was a game changing one. He cut off the sharing of golden essence to Cray and threw a tiny speck of it into a heal request cast at the world. Unlike before, not only did it not fizzle, like any other conjuration Orison could cast with the world's help, a model warped into being and showered Cray in a gentle dusting of will shaped life essence. The tiny speck of gold and touch of magic had coaxed the world into providing nearly ten seconds worth of expensive and exhausting healing that auto directed itself to crucial areas. It also erased the hidden nastiness bad wounds tended to leave behind. "I take it all back. The 'world will' is like a respectable young woman who wants to be wooed extra hard to ensure the man who came to court her is sincere. She just gets carried away a little bit." he muttered, feeling slightly relieved and more than slightly unhinged. Squeezing the vestige of stamina within his newly remade muscles, the young mage picked up Cray on spaghetti legs and noodle arms and put some distance between them and the 'battlefield'. Trying to find a place to hide long enough to get some real strength and energy back into himself, the young mage managed to find a crack to hide them in. He also found an enraged badger that might have killed him if he didn't have the suit with the state he was in. With one last world assisted healing to help along the process of converting the last of Cray's partly necrotic flesh into fully living and operational, Orison 'locked' the cramped crack. It would do little more than make it hard for the undead to sense them but that was plenty useful enough to down the last soldier in his grim fight against rest. He attempted to shift into a light trance but ended up cleanly passed out. When he came to, he was being carried by a spaghetti legged and noodle armed Cray. The man almost collapse right there on the spot when Orison asked to be let down. Orison's dead nemesis had apparently disdained much that had been in the pin but two bars of special rations remained inside along with one unopened bottle of Doc Agave. Taking one out, he split it in half and handed it over along with a triple shot. Grimly, Orison said, "Not the time to be holding back. We need to get as good as we can, as fast as we can. It'll be a little too much on the stamina gain but eat that entire half. Our bodies are running on fumes." Cray nodded silently and deactivated his helmet. It was gruesome. They had tortured the man to death before turning him in a way that would keep his soul locked into his corpse. The best that Orison could figure, they had done it when they discovered that no one else could use his suit and the suit wouldn't activate without his soul. It was beyond what a heal could do. And after the world's tiny law revelation, the young mage couldn't bring himself to rip up 'big money' just to use as cut sealer. A little bit of study would turn the small puddle of gold essence into an ocean of good rather than just an extra toe or eye. That didn't mean he had no plans to help the steadfast friend of his in desperate need. Once the bar was finished off and the shot taken, the young mage focused on the dormant key that was still a little bloated. He attempted to augment a heal with the entanglement power to 'draw' back some of what was missing. It worked but the remedy was just as bad as the torture that caused it, probably worse. It seemed that it would only work when the archer was awake and assisting the call with his own will. Orison was glad the man knew what was going on or he might have cleanly severed the goodwill they had. It used up a good portion of what the bar and super liquor had put in Cray. It also hadn't done a whole lot off the meager two casts that the archer could tolerate before whimpering out for the young mage to stop. After a brief rest, they were on their way again. Trouble didn't cross their path often. The remaining threats were busy licking wounds and raiding fallen comrades' holdings to concern themselves with two dangerously prickly fugitives for the moment. The few times they did run into opposition on their way to the vampire's stronghold, Orison's two astral friends came in to save the day but it became obvious that they were catching onto the rules. The young mage's loss of golden essence for calling them out quickly became more than the slayed minions were worth. All the posturing and dramatic flair finding its way into their fights meant that his days of using them for anything but the gravest of emergencies had came. The wickedness dancing behind their eyes meant that relying on them would be little less dangerous than calling on a devil. They were by no means corrupted or truly evil but the opportunistic spirit at their hearts was no longer repressed by whatever meager gratitude they had originally felt. When the two weary companions had finally made it to the vampire's holding, it had already been sacked and its inhabitants moved on. It was fortunate that there weren't as many intelligent undead as there had been before or they might have found themselves facing another harrowing conflict. The holding itself hadn't produced enough greed or envy for the dwindled number of undead to covet it. With a little tweaking, the healing spell had turned into a sell one to buy two golden mote exchange on the lingering ghostly and skeletal threats that roamed the halls. Cray hadn't been a shuffling cohort on the trip himself and had garnered a few grains of gold as well. It surprised the young mage that Cray hadn't been aware of the small karmic bounty garnered. Then it dawned on him. He was a tier four existence, on the same playing field as a demigod. He could see and interact with karmic forces because he had become sensitive to their existence. They had always been there, invisible and only occasionally felt. Not that being a tier four alone was enough. Possessing a true name and decent power of existence garnered from 'climbing' had their part to be acknowledged as well. They didn't dare to linger too long. The holdings were nice enough that once a new power balance was achieved, some entity or another would come knocking to claim the prime real estate. Using scraps of spiritual echoes, the young mage found a few hidden caches that did little but replace a fraction of what had been stolen from him and give them a couple of magical aces to throw. The biggest haul of the whole house was intangibly gained tearing down the devil shrine and his key 'slurp breaking' its ritual summoning circle. Having recovered some of the nutritional bars, Orison split another between them, giving the lion's share to Cray before torture healing the man some more. The second go round, they had some painkillers that the young mage wouldn't want to make a habit of using but allowed a little more recovery to happen before the archer tapped out to rest again. With what allowable time they gave themselves, they both did before resuming an early winter march north. A few grueling days later, they were both heart sick weary and pretty much tired all the time but Cray had reached a point where Orison could look at his face without needing to resist the urge to wince. His soul had garnered enough time to study the etheric echoes of 'magics past' to piece together a mount spell along with the return of 'Create Water'. With a little more effort, he had a functioning 'create nutritional hoof glue' spell as well. "I'm telling you, Cray. The world SHOULD be taking that golden mote away for making this stuff. Not because it deserves payment but because forcing another living thing to eat it is evil," Orison said as he shoveled another spoonful as far back past his tongue as he could without gagging. The archer shrugged and said, "Beats boot leather and bark soup. I'll eat stink bugs first." Struck with a bright idea, the young mage cast a new function of Presto he discovered at it and tried again. "Okay... As long as I can choke it down quick, I can almost pretend it's a decent oatmeal. I could probably pull off cream of wheat or cottage cheese too." Cray grunted, a habit he'd picked up while he couldn't talk. Orison didn't particularly like it. It wasn't so much the sound itself but the edge of taciturn gruffness, a kind of callousness the archer had taken in and had become a part of him. Feeling the weight of the weariness keenly, the young mage asked, "Do you regret answering the call of the card that summoned you?" "Right now? Yeah." the archer answered without hesitation. Orison felt like the answer had aged him years.
