Shadow 101

5/2 Afternoon

I looked over at Tessa, who looked distinctly uncomfortable with me showing up dressed as a member of the Defias Brotherhood and castigating a black dragon. I checked her profile, and several hours had been added to the predicted time until she was captured, bringing her back to about 100. I sighed and considered using an hour of Lethe water on her, but I didn't want to waste it. Her conditioning slots hadn't regressed, even the slot that I hadn't put anything into yet. It was probably fine. I went ahead and put in the idea I'd been toying with for a while.

Losing composure: shame, mild

I'd need to get Auffrey to teach all my girls proper manners for formal occasions at some point, but that wasn't really my top priority. As things stood, it would be enough for Tessa to always try to maintain composure to fit the noble bodyguard role I was giving her.

"Look Tessa, I work for the good of the Alliance, but I operate independently. Sometimes that means I do things that are a bit odd. It's all to protect the innocent though. I'll do whatever it takes to make a world where someone could live their whole life without losing anyone to pointless wars." That seemed to mollify her at least a little bit. That or she suddenly felt self conscious about expressing emotions. Hmm, communication talent says both.

"Drusilla. Speaking of unpopular decisions, how are you feeling about teaching me? Are your hands steady yet?"

"I'm afraid not. If I summoned anything, even Noktog, it would be completely uncontrollable. If you need an example, I can't provide it. What of shadow magic? We can go over the book together if you would like."

"I'll see if I have any conflicts" I checked my app and mumbled to myself, sitting next to Drusilla and mumbling. "Nice job with Keryn, Darcell. Abercrombie has a few hours left before he hits his next breakpoint. I'm not going to mess with the kids' week stuff. Hopefully the midsummer festival will offer something a bit more useful to me next month." I focused my eyes on her. "Alright. Let's do it."

"Well, would you prefer to read it yourself and consult me, or should I try to pick out the relevant bits?"

"What will you be skipping if I let you curate?"

"Mostly pretentious navel gazing about how the void has its own kind of beauty and is a necessary counterpoint to the light. Probably true, but only loosely relevant to the act of harnessing its power."

"Yeah let's skip that. Let me know about any cautions or warnings though."

She rolled her eyes. "People think us reckless, but reckless warlocks don't live long." Fair point.

We went over the pages that focused on technical casting, and I started to get an idea of what the focus of priestly shadow magic was. The first relevant page was, as I expected, shadow word: pain. It cost very little magical energy to use, but it came with a drawback. I could inflict as much pain as I wanted to myself, and my target would feel twice as much. It didn't directly cause physical harm to either of us, but could incapacitate someone if I was willing to take the hit. Most of these shadow spells didn't actually physically harm their targets at all, actually. Only mentally.

This book, at least, presented shadow priests as people who ripped apart the minds of their foes as the starting point, and later learned how to read, manipulate, and control minds instead. It also presented offensive shadow magic as a kind of mystical game of chicken. Sure, the priest was taking a smaller hit and deciding when it happened, and the more mana was spent the more the backlash could be mitigated, but a mind blast was the equivalent to a headbutt. Smashing your brain against that of your enemy is a terrible idea unless you are absolutely certain your brain is more capable of absorbing the blow than theirs.

The more advanced magic seemed more delicate. Stuff like hijacking someone's senses to see through their eyes, making people calm and passive, inflicting primal fear, and eventually totally overriding a target's will for a short time. All could be done dirt cheap, but at a cost to me. Also, all were nonlethal… for a certain value of the term. Drooling vegetables could be restored through the power of The Company, I was pretty sure.

Over the next few hours I tried to understand the spells in the tome, mostly by taking advantage of the starting point I shared with Seline: holy magic. Shadow words Pain and Fade were the only two I was confident I could cast. Fade was quite a bit more complex than pain, but worked on a similar principle. I could obscure my own ability to see the world, and in turn it would be twice as hard for others to sense me in the same way. If I rendered myself mostly blind, I'd also be essentially invisible, deafen myself a bit to become silent, etc. It was more complex than the blunt instrument that was Pain, but I think it's stealth applications convinced covert talent and soul talent to start riffing on each other because it clicked almost the very moment that I started discussing it with Drusilla.

There were more brutally direct spells in there as well, copied from the invading orcs that Seline had captured and interrogated. They seemed to function more like fel magic, requiring a conduit. The simplest was shadowbolt, which honestly just seemed like an edgier version of smite to me. These interested Drusilla far more than they did me, but when she read the description of the shadowy demon I knew a voidwalker when I saw one. A mass of shadows that felt no pain and drove its enemies to uselessly flail against it in an enraged frenzy? It checked out. Given how quickly Drusilla went down when someone got close to her and how deadly she was if given space, I absolutely wanted her to have a pocket tank on tap.

"Whatever you need to do to summon one of these, I'm ok with you looking into it. Just clear it with me first." I gave her a kiss at that, and a long overdue, "I'm extremely lucky to have you as my first slave." Her surprise at a toe curling orgasm from that word was worth the price of admission alone. A devious little plan formed in my head for tomorrow.

••••••••••

I tested one more thing with Drusilla before I went to check on Abercrombie; I turned her into a dragon. My dragon form had been relatively small because I was young for a dragon. Drusilla, despite looking like a hot girl fresh out of college, was somewhere in her fifties. I was not disappointed. She was still smaller than a large human, but not by much. To continued dog comparisons, she looked to be around the size of a Bernese mountain dog. I wouldn't be riding her into battle, but a dwarf probably could.

If I had absolutely zero regard for optics I now had an extremely potent fighting force at my disposal. Or I would, once I got everyone up to speed on flying. I had no illusions that I'd be able to do any kind of trick flying or evasive maneuvers just because I'd gotten down the esoteric art of flying in a straight line and landing without crashing. Speaking of which, I employed that very esoteric art to go check in on Abercrombie for dinner. It was about time I started pumping him for information about the local community.