Learning From Raistlin...
My consciousness opened up to the sight of the luminal space. Time and space swirled at the edges of my vision, the tumultuous fragmentation of shadow-figures displayed in the constant movement of the dimension itself. Chills crawled up my spine with a wicked wind following along behind it. Screeches and roars blistered out from all around before being snuffed out. Looking around quickly I rapidly found myself confronted with different environs than I had seen last time in the Luminal space.
Shadowy hills and embankments rose and lowered in flaking chunks. The shadow figures were somehow more inconsistent as their forms flickered with red and orange light. A scream tore out through the space before choking out suddenly with the grinding of chains. Screams and voices got closer, the noises somehow reverberating off of time itself. Stepping backwards I felt what would be considered sweat in reality gather on my form, a manifestation of my current emotions.
"Mmmmmmm... Is that fear I sense...?"
A macabre voice rung out, the rasp of it bringing recollections of metal grinding on metal. Sickly sweet screeches were mixed in with the voice as more chains rustled amidst the darkness of the space surrounding me.
A hand dropped onto my shoulder. My body locked in fear, my muscles straining in an attempt to get out of the hand's grasp only to fail completely as I was pulled backwards. A hiss resounded before a scream followed it.
"NooooooOOOOOoooooOOOOo!"
...
Opening my eyes once more I saw the luminal space once more, except it was returned to normal. Jumping forwards whilst turning I attempted to view who had been behind me. Daggers appeared in my hands, a staff hovering beside me for several seconds before they disappeared... Soon becoming defenceless and unarmed... Huffing from the sudden effort and burst of speed I noted a cloak of magic covering a man's form and red robes underneath. Raistlin. His eyes stared at me, electrified and emitting a soft golden-green glow.
"Foolish woman! No one goes to that part of this place...! That is where the evil gods and entities wonder!"
His voice compounded within space until it was as loud as earthquakes and as deafening as constant roiling waves of thunder. My hands clasped my 'ears' in the space as I attempted to use my magic to dampen the effect also.
"I- didn't know."
He snarled for a few second before dispelling whatever had been effecting the dimension surrounding us. My hands slid from my 'ears' and felt wet, physical blood having dripped from my inner eardrums.
"You magic is weak, unsophisticated. Your skills are completely unlearned and unmanipulated... Have you done nothing but waste time on your home world!?"
My hair billowed backwards as his voice carried some sort of wind with it. My clothes flapped and flopped as the wind soon passed. Looking up at the god's face I could see nothing but the scrunched grooves in his face, a half snarl gracing me with a disturbing and ominous image of the entity before me.
"This will not do!"
A flash of light emerged. A second Rasitlin stood before me, this one in travelling garb and wears. His staff was less powerful and more basic, but his face was completely placid and even looked at me with sympathy. Both entities thrummed in power, a cord of light connecting them both. Colours became dull then exploded in facets of vibrancy before both figures merged into one solidified being. MAGIC, stood before me. Not a man, Not an entity... A god.
"You will learn. I will make you learn."
"My wives they expect me...?"
"Time is inconsequential to those who wander here. You shall stay until you have learned. When you return, it will have been but a moment."
A flash of light sundered through my eyes and into my brain before I emerged in a class room. The desks were like those of my past world, except filled with runes. Magic glimmered over everything that made my desk. Looking upwards I noted that this feature was not just unique to my desk but everything in the room I was in. FLASH. Raistlin entered from seemingly no-where, his form constantly flickering between his benevolent form and his angered counterpart.
"First, we shall work on you magic control..."
"Magic, or as your brain has communicated with me, magicules... Is an essence that embodies different concepts. Fire, Water, Earth, Wind, Lightning, Space, Time, Life, Death... And many more. You can see these in the colour shifts of magicules. Altering them is quite easy for you and yet you have not touched it, a stupid mistake."
"Each element that a concept embodies is infinitely powerful. Fire may be used in conversation relating to campfires or cooking fires, but it is the representation of two different sides of Temperature variance, HOT, or COLD."
A whiteboard was summoned behind him, a piece of chalk moving on its own to begin writing.
"Elements themselves have concepts within them, rules if you will."
"Fire, to continue the example, is heat. But how does heat interact with things? Simple but also complicated. Heat can excite matter to such a point that it become a liquid or a gas. It can also influence the internal structure of molecules and the patterns they form."
"Water, a substance, but also the representation of COLD. Water is used to quench heated blades, to stabilise matter and give rigidity to their forms. Gas can be COOLED to become a liquid, liquid can be cooled to the point it becomes solid... Many worlds I have come across have varying meanings and understandings related to this process, but in magic, we use these rules to shape our ideas."
"The strange entity inside your head, it is not giving you free abilities and Skills... It is merely using its understanding of magic to bind rules, concepts and ideas to tangible uses. You could be doing this yourself with a much more efficient understanding."
"Now! Give me a basic element and some of its rules..."
I remembered every single thing he said. Physics was applying to much of what he had just mentioned about hot and cold, temperature. 'Is he using my knowledge of Earth to explain things to me?'
"Yes, now give me an element and its concepts."
"AH! Lightning! It is related to magnetism and positive and negative charges. Also it has heat within it and electricity."
"What is Electricity?"
I froze, not understanding what electricity is... I knew how to produce it, the steps required, but how it was created? I didn't know, even most scientists couldn't come up with a definitive answer on exactly what Electricity is.
"I do not know..."
"Good! You now know humility, you do not know everything and there is always something to learn. Now, from this point I would hope you understand the basic thought process for the usage of proper magic."
"There are base elements and things we can see that are governed by rules and concepts that emerge from within the greater concept. To use magic truly we have to understand these rules and slowly apply them to magics and spells we use?"
"Impressive. Moving forwards... Along with concepts themselves there is also the imaginative process. One of the most integral powers of Human-kind or any conscious species is their capacity to visualise the unseen and make these visualisations real. Magic is superbly based upon this skill. A mage that does not have ambition and imagination will ultimately fail at whatever he or she wishes to achieve. Before this point you have been using your imagination wildly with very little artisanry or detail. The entity in your mind has used the base inputs of your brain to create mere facsimiles of the true intent you had."
"You have given control over to someone or something else. THIS, is absurd. You are no mage, you are a fool with a large amount of power and a puppet for the entity in your mind. Benevolent although it may be, it is still in control of your magical outputs. I know you see an illusion of a screen with writing on it, magics outlined for you to use at any time... This is abhorrent. Limits, that is what it has placed on you, chains if it is malevolent."
"Morgan has been a constant help... If he wasn't there to help I would have died."
"I do not care. In his kindness, you have failed to learn properly, to understand magic... I will not place all blame on him as very little mages in your world have such an understanding of magic and couldn't have taught you the proper way, but I digress."
"Onto the lesson. First, you will separate this 'Morgan' from your thoughts for a time. During this time you will slowly begin to imagine a ball of lightning forming in front of you."
I closed my eyes and asked Morgan to move out of the way for a minute or so, something that he was surprisingly happy to do. Being there to control my magic all of the time must have been tiring beyond comparison for him if what Raistlin said was true. Focussing on the depths of my mind I imagined a ball of lighting crackling and popping with energy in front of me, my hand hovering nearby to its centre.
"Great. Second step... The concepts we spoke about, which ones do you wish to use for this lightning? Remember, the image itself is but a shell for the rules, the concepts... What do you wish to add to this?"
'Heat, Pressure, Energy and Magnetism... They need to be in a balance within the lightning.'
The image changed within my mind. Magicules of varying colours slowly sneaking out from nowhere and adhering to the image I had placed within my mind. Heat intensified the colouration of the lightning to a dull red-purple. Pressure condensed the lightning into a form of pure plasma, the pressure creating more heat as other concepts merged in with their interactions. Magicules being a form of energy melded with the rest of the image, making it larger and more volatile. Then finally magnetism was added and the lightning adapted to become more natural. Arcs flashed off and then re-merged with the ball of thunderous lightning.
Opening my eyes I witnessed the manifestation of what I had imagined, hovering just a few centimetres above my right hand. Power, that is what I felt. Much more powerful than when I had used most other spells. The past spells I had used felt dull and lacked precision in comparison, a facet of knowledge that Raistlin had already sprinkled into my mind just moments ago. Its form, shape, power, speed, interactions and range were all within my control.
"This is just a small use of your magic... The scale is all up to you."
"Thank you I guess. Are we done now?"
"Not even close! Don't attempt to get out of this."
I was dragged to a different room where there were numerous books splayed out. Alchemical materials and various bits of materials were discordantly placed around the room, left to hang on bookshelves or even placed on floating shelves that slowly levitated up and down nearby.
Raistlin walked over to the desk with hundreds of books on it and slammed his staff onto the ground. Thousands of books then emerged. Dread filled my stomach as butterflies followed. Turning to me the old man smiled maniacally.
"Read all of these. Once you have, we can move onto the next lesson. I'll see you in however long it takes for you to read them all."
'Morgan can you help me?'
|Denied. Do it yourself, I am officially resigning as your magical tool|
"Just for asking Morgan you can now read these as well..."
He slammed his staff onto the ground again and showed several more thousand books for me to read through. I almost threw up imagining having to read through all of these. Looking at some of the titles they were mostly recountings from other mages about the uses of different elements. Mathematics were involved in many as others were purely runic in nature.
"C-can I use magic to speed up my reading?"
"If you can manage it. Sure. Good luck."
He faded from his space within a moment, an illusionary image of what used to be his physical form being left behind, its eyes turning to me as the smile on it grew. One of its hands gestured to the books, my eyes twitching as it did so.
'Time to read... I suppose.'
...
Thousands of hours of reading ensued, with time being a hard to track currency in this space. So many books had I read now that I almost believed my brain was made of papyrus or paper. Turning the page on the last book I finally finished the last book on elements.
There was so many elements and concepts surrounding them. From Sound to Time, all of them were fundamentally different although some concepts could be used across many, such as Heat, Cold, Pressure, etc... Magic itself was foundationally different for each base element used and the concepts would have infinite different effects depending on the order you used them in. Using heat first in a fire ball for instance would ensure the heat was increased, but also increased the amount of mana needed to cast it. Where as, if you used the concept of oxygen to feed it first and then used heat, the spell would already be sufficiently supplied with the fuel it needed.
So much knowledge on the base concepts swam in my mind that I started to come up with easy ways to enhance my spells. In fact, many of the spells I had gained were all completely inefficient and had too many weakness for me to continue using them. My storm spells were disgustingly abhorrent to me now, most of them only being able to be cast due to the sheer insanity of Magicules I now had. The construction I had done was also a fluke, the amount of magicules I had used being the cost of an entire planet's destruction. When I had learnt this fact I winced at my wastage. Raistlin was right, I had wasted my talent and ability on shackles of incomplete and lacklustre spells and effects.
My skills were fine for usage as they were formed by the voice of the world, but he was still right that I had no clue on how to use them efficiently. Naturally throughout my reading I began to train in my Ultimate Skills. Knowledge Manifestation, creating various tools and weapons from my first life, making them semi-permanent by enforcing my psychic presence into the space surrounding me. Some would need more people to train it with but I had taken the first steps. In-between reading I also used my Dark Reaper Ultimate Skill, shrouding myself with a reaper's guise, summoning scythes and turning the entire room dark.
The wicked thing about using these abilities now was that I understood that my skills were just innate spells that were burned into my soul. The concepts were all there for me to suss out in future and I could even feel several that were unique, separate to the mages that I had read about. So many concepts and rules existed that I could probably keep on learning until the end of time itself. Stretching out I slowly rose my arms and used one my Phantom Legion, hundreds of wraiths emerging from pure darkness. Concepts such as shadow and life were prevalent throughout the ability but there was also a slither of something adjacent to life but also way more powerful.
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK
A door to the side of the room slowly opened, Raistlin stepping forwards as he noted the hundreds of wraith around. Furrowed eyebrows and a slight narrowing of the eyes made me immediately stop my ability, his facial expression smoothing out soon after that.
"You have read all of these books. We can now begin by teaching you how to use your eyes properly... Something of extreme importance."
"Can I see my wives?"
"Denied. Finish learning and then you can go back to them. Follow."
Sometimes his moods were rather pleasant and kind, but other times he was a tyrant, brooking no dissent. Shifting behind him I followed him through the passageways of his tower in the luminal space. From hallways and small passages to stairways and halls we seemingly walked hundreds of kilometres. Hours were passing but to him it seemed usual. My patience was wearing thin as his body language changed none whatsoever, placid features and emotionless gait guiding me through the seemingly never-ending building.
"If it is taking so long, why not use your eyes?"
His voice sung out across the frigid stones of the hallway, his form now gone amidst the momentary lack of concentration I had fallen into.
"How can they make my rate of traversal faster!?"
"Then walk endlessly through these halls... Time makes no difference to me."
His voice cut away as all that remained was the eerie silence of a weird wizard's tower and flickering magical lights that turned off and on again every now and then. Looking back and forward I felt uneasy, the trial or lesson being missed by me.
'What am I supposed to do?'
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