Splendour

It was many hours before Rethys' body was anywhere near functional again, taking many rounds of Restoration healing and extensive amounts of Blood magic infusions from Sevi. Even then, he remained incapable of moving or communicating in any way, locked inside of his wounded body with nothing but his magical senses to keep him company.

If his body could still feel, then the pain from it all would've robbed him of his consciousness. But since he didn't, he remained perfectly conscious despite the extensive damage done to him, remaining stuck in a strange, in-between state.

'Is this how she feels?' He wondered.

Sevi wasn't as restricted as him, for though her senses were nowhere near as intricate as his, she had access to the mind element, using it to scry her immediate vicinity, thus seeing it, and using to project her voice outward, thus being able to speak. Yet the constricted and claustrophobic feeling of entombment must have been the very same, and it was not at all pleasant.

But what lingered in his mind and refused to go away was the sight of a human at the top of these very stairs around them, smack in the middle of Yvtar.

He knew for certain that that was not a hallucination, and the implications of seeing a living person here threw him for a loop. The implications were many, and for a change, all were very, very good.

That person couldn't have been some civilian living in the surface, for Rethys knew that there was not in the surface but death, doom and decay. No, whoever that person was, it was a mage powerful or knowledgeable enough to get to Yvtar, and that, if they weren't completely insane, also had a way to get out.

He spent hours mulling over the whole thing and repeatedly running his senses around to perhaps get a better, clearer look at what lied upstairs, but to no avail.

Eventually, his body healed and moved well enough, charred skin sloughing off like a butterfly's cocoon to reveal a healed body. A changed body.

And as he sat up and thoroughly looked over himself, the result twisted his face into a very intense scowl.

"I... I am sorry. I could not heal you any other way..." Sevi uttered, her voice betraying her unease.

"It's fine. I understand." He answered, his voice calm and resigned.

Her Blood magic had further corrupted his soul, and it was mirrored very clearly on his body.

The glowing red veins running from his chest to the rest of his body grew thinner, yet their numbers increased and their glow intensified, belying their increased potency. His chest, which contained the second heart of Blood, and that he now awkwardly remembered was naked due to his shirt tearing away all that time ago, became almost completely covered in dark flesh that looked especially ominous with the veins of lifeblood running through it.

'Will my whole body look like that in the end?' He wondered.

Sevi's magic couldn't heal it seemed, only change his soul, transforming him into an eldritch... something that could heal by itself. And whenever that passive regeneration was insufficient, she would further infuse him with Blood ether to enhance and further the process.

He couldn't blame her, that was their only way of ensuring they got out of this place, she hadn't done it out of malicious intent. Even now, her actions were only driven by genuine panic from her only hope of escape having the life torched out of him.

It was pointless to cry over spilled milk, he figured.

"I saw someone at the top of those stairs, a pure, actual human. They saw us and ran away, scared too." He revealed.

"What?!" Sevi jolted. "That is magnificent news!"

"They were terrified the moment they saw us, what if-"

"Of course they would be terrified, seeing someone emerge from the lower levels." Sevi interrupted. "How have I not noticed another expedition coming here... I will busy myself with scrying their whereabouts, and you keep your senses sharp. If they came here, then they must have some way to escape. This is spectacular news!"

Rethys didn't share in her enthusiasm, remembering what he felt from that person's reaction.

"Sevi, can you make a mirror of any kind?" He asked

"I can do better." She responded as a wave of Mind magic coalesced around Rethys' head. "Accept it."

Accepting the unknown spell, his sight faded to black momentarily before it completely shifted. He didn't see through his eyes now but rather through Sevi's spell, which he guessed was scrying.

Through that spell, he saw himself, sitting on the floor, his back against the wall. He took a moment to thoroughly study his appearance, this time from a completely different point of view, and after a while, he realized something very, very bad.

'Since when am I so tall? And how did I not notice it?' He wondered.

His appearance was far from healthy, which was expected considering his stay in Yvtar thus far. He looked again like a destitute and homeless street orphan, except his current look was scaled to a more adult form. He was much taller than before, and quite a bit taller than the average person. Combined with his long, unkempt hair, he resembled many of the day-to-day slum-pushers he remembered seeing in Aldeno, rotting in their flimsy shacks at the city's outer rims.

All in all, he looked like shit, which was not at all unexpected.

What was truly unexpected was the terrifying, daemonic appearance he now sported. The corruption stemmed from his heart, or rather hearts, and spread outwards like a cancerous plague of darkened flesh, veins of crimson glow contrasting extremely with the paler rest of his body, and crisscrossing it in a manner much more disturbing than he had seen and thought thus far.

Yet the worst offender was his face, or rather his eyes, whose irises, and even a bit of white, faintly glowed with the dark blue hue of Origin. The glow itself was not unheard of, he had seen many mages during his apprenticeship who similarly at times displayed that aspect, yet the color threatened to overtake the entirety of his eyes, which combined with the rest of his body made for an unsettling appearance.

This normally wouldn't have bothered him, yet it currently had very bad implications.

"Your eyes betray an extremely high affinity for your element. Remember the cultists, their eyes entirely shining with a singular color from their failed ascensions. Your affinity may be a source of power, yet at the same time it lowers your affinity with other elements. If that weren't enough, higher affinity makes you more susceptible to ethermania." Sevi noted.

"That's not the issue here Sevi, I look like a daemon, through and through. You said yourself that anyone seeing me will strike first and ask questions never."

The Blood mage paused, thinking over Rethys' words for a bit before responding.

"It... It does not matter. We will try to reason with them, surely they will understand..." She considered. "It matters not. We will mask our auras as much as we can, and if push comes to shove, we will simply shadow them and learn from them a way to escape. This event remains a positive result for us."

Hearing her hopeful words, he wanted to tell her that there was no way someone in their right mind would try and trust anything coming from the lower levels, yet withheld his tongue.

'She'll see, I guess.' He sighed as he stood up and reached for his satchel.

The satchel was roughed up quite a lot, yet much like Rethys himself, remained more or less intact and functional despite getting completely scorched. And wiping as much soot and ash from it, slung it over his back before beginning to climb the spiral stairway.

Eventually, the stairway led to another vertical shaft, this time with no stairway, instead featuring a platform of enchanted metal, embedded into grooves and indents across the upward tunnel's surface. Stepping on the platform, it suddenly, yet also slowly and steadily, began ascending upward. And though it surprised Rethys, he felt ever so slightly pleased seeing more interesting magic at work.

"We will be at one of the lower side levels of the tower once we leave this elevator. We will first move towards its peak, to the innermost vault, before then finding whoever came here. Hopefully they are historians or explorers or what have you, but they may be looters, and we may have to oppose them if such is the case..." Sevi revealed.

The tunnel then went dark as the elevator continued rising, with only the slight glow of the metal platform's enchantments casting some very faint light. After a while, visibility was restored as the elevator ran its course.

And following a passage out, Rethys reached a grand hall that greeted him with new, wildly-different scenery.

Gone was the beige stone of the waterways, instead being replaced with beautiful, smooth ivory white stone, carved into gorgeous patterns and shapes from arcs to swirls and everything in between. The stone's surfaces were completely dotted with intricate magic circles adorned with large etherstones and even strange gems in myriads of equally complex and pleasing colors, and those colors themselves shifted continuously with the flow of the ether and the elements, creating mesmerizing patterns.

The enchantments were indecipherable, he couldn't even begin to tell what their complicated and convoluted flows of ether did, yet he felt that they did something very, very important.

Looking around, he could see high ceilings and long hallways stretching in every direction, adorned with all manner of ornate, magical fixtures from lights to doors and from floor to ceiling. All the while massive, runeless magic circles adorned the ceiling and topmost walls, seamlessly intersecting and connecting with one another for seemingly no other purpose than to look absolutely stunning, and perhaps coincidentally transport ether around.

"Dear gods..." Rethys sighed.

Seeing the sheer splendor around him, he was completely stunned. His eyes were completely overtaken with the excess of artistic beauty, and his magical senses were completely overwhelmed by the dizzying excess of magical mastery. The countless enchantments that appeared in the range of his senses were so overpowering yet harmonious that they imposed a symphony of ether that he had no choice but to listen to, not that he would ever protest it.

This place was something different, he thought, something new, something completely separate from the slums, the streets, the houses or the people that he had seen his entire life, completely unlike the boring normality that struck the rest of the world and spared this singular place for no other reason than to stupefy mortals such as himself.

The waterways seemed otherworldly, yet still understandable and thus incomparable to what lied around him now. The only thing that Rethys could think of to compare to this place would be the Origin flows of ether that the entity had shown him, and even that did not have the radiant flair that this place had.

Even the fact that this place was abandoned seemed to add to its richness, separating it from the filth of life to display pure etherical nobility. It may have once been a building, but devoid of use and intact as it was, it now stood as art.

"Built by our forebears, with magical prowess unseen since then..." Sevi mused, her voice carrying sadness and indignation. "I can only imagine how this place must seem to you, but we must keep moving. Follow the halls to the left until we reach the center of the tower, we will then continue upward towards the seats of the Council. We will find our objective there, locked within the inner vaults."

"Yeah..." Rethys answered absentmindedly, his attention completely taken by his surroundings.

And as he walked across the ancient, resplendent halls, he was only more and more impressed with the magical and artistic prowess on display. He wondered how such a civilization could fall so easily, with Sevi going as far as to describe the event as taking place in a single day.

He then remembered a certain councilor of this country. If one of the seats of power here was a raving madman, then things quickly clicked into place.

Such grandeur of magic and the ether, he thought, only to be tainted by the hand of greed, by the hand of man.

The two continued their trip through halls of antiquated greatness, seeing marvels of magic and architecture, chief among them being the giant pillar of inexplicable magic stone that ran through the tower's heart.

Rethys even occasionally glimpsed traces of the human expedition in the edges of his senses, though he opted to avoid them for now. His senses were incomparable to those of normal mages, and so he could keep an eye on them without worry.

'Is it really worth it to come here?' He wondered, questioning the sanity of anyone approaching Yvtar.

He noted the presence of at least seven of them, with a few of their signals being of a visibly inhuman nature. From that sort of distance, they appeared a just motes of light to Rethys' senses, and he guessed them to be some kind of animal.

Sevi then chimed in, revealing that her scrying had shown them to be members of others of the intelligent races, a few lithe and four-armed Iseruuf and one of the faceless Kthans. They were apparently eleven in total, seemingly possessing varying levels of power.

"Seeing its members, this expedition has probably come from Suthanis..." Sevi pondered. "Which may prove troublesome."

"How come?" Rethys asked. "And wait I know that name, isn't it a mountain near the-"

"The central Sahara of Inverra, yes." Sevi affirmed. "Imol'Suthanis is their name, a society of powerful and long-lived mages separate from any kingdom. And though their mountain home is located within the human realms, their ranks count among them many powerful mages from all the races of Tevohs. Their mages are not to be trifled with, so this may be troublesome."

"What if they go to the vault before we did?" Rethys asked.

"No, that is impossible. It is very simply no longer possible to unlock the vault by regular means." The Blood mage simply stated.

"I see."

He wanted to go right away and discover the nature of that expedition. And though he knew they had to prioritize the knowledge Sevi wanted to find, he still couldn't deny the stress of those mages potentially slipping away in the meantime; they were somewhat alerted to the duo's presence after all, and supposedly knowledgeable enough to know a great deal of things.

Eventually, after climbing many stairs and taking many elevators that showed them around more of the tower's wondrous vistas of magical art, the two reached the top of tower, the High Council's seat of power.

Rethys had expected a hall filled with so much protective magic it'd make his skin crawl, containing the most complex magic he'd probably ever see in his entire life, yet found something even more concerning.

When they entered the room, they found it completely unlocked and completely looted, which left Sevi completely fuming.

"It should have been impossible to break through the vault's enchantments without the keys!" She snapped. "And the keys should have been shattered by now, rendering this place utterly inaccessible! Ether's sake, even your magic would have taken monumental effort to get through."

"Now what?" Rethys asked as he paced around the luxuriously decorated and unfathomably cluttered room.

There was no door to the inner vault, as it was seemingly built into a world anomaly that could only be accessed by special items carried by the seats of the council and only allowing one item to be taken at a time, so had Sevi explained things.

Yet it seems that the vault had been subverted and literally popped open, with its treasures having been spilled all over the Council's room.

Strange, pearly white metallic coins, dotted by numerous ingots of unrecognizable magical metals of all colors, as well as countless magical treasures of all sorts and kinds, all gathered into a massive pile that hid the table and chairs that were once used by this country's leadership, and those too were priceless artifacts in their own right.

Rethys paused, taking his time to feel the ether around him.

"I can tell it was recent." He commented, sensing a familiar shimmer of unrestrained magical reaction in the air. "They blew it open. I think... It's much like what happened with those materials back in the cultists' place."

"Yet they kept what was inside intact and ran away with what we needed!!" Sevi seethed, her voice growing louder and angrier with each word. "The reckless fools..."

"What now? Still want to talk to try and convince them?" Rethys asked.

"Yes." She sighed, calming herself somewhat. "It matters not who or what they are, or even our strange nature. Power commands respect, and they will respect MY right to inherit MY people's treasures. If reason does not work, Blood will have to do."

Rethys nodded, figuring as much from how things had developed.

Yet just as he was about to turn around, a series of loud explosions resounded from the lower levels of the tower. And then, but a few moments later, an ominously familiar feeling overtook him.

"Really..." He sighed with a frown.

The Legionnaire was back.