Echoes

Not long after Gryn woke up, so too did the rest of our party. From the rest of our beef jerky a light stew was made for breakfast using wild plants and tubers for filler. Even though we had been hunting along the way, much of what we claimed was added to my mash.

We still had half of a pound of venison jerky left, but we would soon need to rely on our hunting to keep meat in our diets. The estimated travel time to get back home by itself was roughly five days, now. There were numerous wild foods and even grains that we could gather along the way, but processing grains would be tedious even with magic and edible plants… tasted like shit.

Meat was good. Always has been and always will.

With breakfast out of the way and the camp active emptying by the archers going out to hunt with Carth, I also set out in my own direction heading downhill. It did not take long before I started stumbling across magic herbs and such, but many of them all had the same alignments so I could only pick and choose a few of the best among them. My main goal was to find more fungi like when we had set out to increase the darker aspects of the mana field, but that did not seem to want to happen.

There were several times when I came across carrion left behind by the beasts of the forest, but either it was some scraps of bone and fur too old to grow what I wanted or it was too fresh to have rotted enough. There were other types of fungi, though, like an enriched lichen whose counterparts were useful for either coagulation or anti-coagulation. This was more valuable to be used for treating wounds by people without magic or on a battlefield, but there was plenty of it growing on the tree I found.

One of my larger sample bottles was stuff full of both lichen before another small jam jar was used to contain the remainder. This jam jar would be added to the mash.

In the perpetually wet and washed out forestry, there were a number of non-living artifacts such as more petrified wood and displaced semi-precious stones from the gorge, but from this only the combination of death and life energy from petrified wood or wild mana of unaligned stones were useful. At this point in the experiment, I needed to be cautious about the alignment of the mana field to get what I wanted.

After two hours of searching in a haphazard pattern, my radar of single-direction consciousness sweeping out at max range finally picked up some useful signatures. These were not colonized carrion, but they were something just as good.

The blip in question was a dark elemental entity not unlike the wisps, but this one was derived from the passage of time, mana, and people in the area. Places frequented by mortals and mortal magic usually held onto the impressions and residues of their passage. Especially if people died in those locations, and the Gilded Gorge areas were no strangers to death of all kinds.

In the winter, mana and water would crystallize in places like the main gorge and valley to generate brief but harsh ice storms. During the summer, this place was a prime breeding ground for various species of mundane and magical creatures and with them came predators. Now in Autumn was one of the busy seasons for mortals, and even then there were only seven other camps and all focused around the gorge.

This was not the kind of place you took a five-year-old.

All of the residual magics and lives would sometimes coalesce into a non-living entity called an echo. They were inherently dark because they stemmed more from death energy than anything else, but they were not inherently dangerous. Unless provoked.

Unlike wisps who were naturally without alignment because they were born of pure energy, echoes could appear in ambiguous mist bodies as large as a person. When provoked, the initial reaction is a complete three-sixty-degree freak out as the multiple sources of death energy experience differing reactions.

In this moment, literally anything recognizable or disfigured could come shooting out and then retract into itself a second later. However, its lack of clear consciousness and senses made it pretty much blind deaf and dumb.

Only an unknowing animal would be foolish enough to trigger the mist body and me skew-crushed.

If anybody but Gryn from my party chanced upon one of these, their immediate instinct would have been to simply turn the other way and go about their day. Gryn would have hesitated. He was more than strong enough to rip this thing apart with wind in seconds, but he was not confident without back-up of some sort.

Not only could I walk up to this mist and compress it into a small gaseous bead of nearly liquefied energy, I did. When killed, echoes will dissipate into smoke. The smoke is its own residual energy that would make a location susceptible to echo spawning. In my mana field, all that death energy and the overall amplification of my current stock should be enough.

With an echo in my empty mana potion bottle, briefly enchanted to maintain its integrity like a natural quartz, I channeled the rest of my energy into my stats for a growth of thirty in both Strength and Endurance.

In not even half of an hour I was almost leisurely making my way back up our steppe's gravelly hillside, after draining a second mana potion of course. If I really wanted to, I could have waited to tap into the amplified mana of the array, but that would have just been wasteful to my project. Having a second empty vial in the future, however, could always be helpful.

Gryn and Hilda were still the only people at camp, but they were not alone. Where Hilda was practicing some 'common' sword techniques under Gryn's very attentive guidance there was a rather large and golden orb of almost substantial light hovering about. This would have been called something like a holy or light wisp but wisp variants were not cared about enough to give actual names.

As well, nesting with the other variants I had caught was an icy gray-blue wisp who gave off a faint fog of cold that settled about the ground under it. Whoever had claimed the golden wisp had picked well for themselves, but none of the other variants seemed to be wanted. Of course, everybody was holding out in the hopes of claiming a dark wisp.

My arrival went unnoticed for the most part, confirming how involved the two of them were with one another by the level of distraction they caused. Because of this, I did not even bother disturbing them. I simply walked over to the array and took out my echo vial. Using my will to make a kinetic strainer at the end of the vial, I uncork it and watch as the echo erupts outward only to me ground down to a fine smoke.

This raw death energy was then unceremoniously sucked up by the array, tainting the entire mana field a few shades darker within seconds. In just as short a time, there was yet another fluctuation of mana from the array which finally caught the attention of Gryn and Hilda. From within the mana field was a slowly moving purple radiance akin to black light, which spoke volumes about the new wisp's alignment, but this was not what I was hoping for.

The death and darkness of the echo had only just been added to the field, though, so this was probably the culmination of the impurities in the echo's mana base. However, its alignment was more than suitable to achieve the same affects as a shade wisp even if they were not as strong. Since Hilda already claimed a wisp and would probably need a full recharge in order to contract another, this wisp would go to Gryn.

Only a few minutes later while I was preparing the goods I had acquired to strengthen the mash, another fluctuation took place. This time, a simple base wisp was born and I left it to Gryn to collect. With another grass sack of magical goods and several new blocks to heat the cauldron, I made my way almost casually into the mana field to follow the edge of the pool to the falls.

The concentration of energy here was so high that I could feel it running over my skin like ambient electricity, raising my hairs with soft zips and crackles of light and sound. As I got closer to the center, though, this mana reaction grew more and more intense until actual arcs and sparks would scatter out from my body. It seemed as if the array was subtly feeding off of me, which was honestly fine.

With my perfect and all encompassing affinity, my energy would not affect the alignment of the field except to add more of everything all at once.

However, using magic in the array to once again funnel the waterfall away from the cistern caused this mana extraction to become much less subtle. Transmutation took twice as much time and energy to perform which made climbing up to the cistern almost arduous despite not being all that high.

Heating up the blocks to rekindle the mash took more energy than I anticipated, probably from being so close to the alignment source of the entire array. However, after roughly five minutes of willing thermal energy into action, the new blocks were all glowing brightly with heat and set the cistern to boiling in moments. Then I simply dumped all of the new herbs and materials into the cistern.

If I concentrated on recovering my magic I could easily outpace the extraction of the array, but I had more than enough time to simply sit and wait. Once I had enough mana to transmute the shelf out of the way once again, I quickly climbed back down the fall some twenty minutes after climbing up. As I was climbing, though, there was a new disturbance from the mana field.

Unlike the implosion and expansion of a wisp being born, this was simply a sudden expansion and a deep shadowing of the mana in the array. The air became dark like a night sky and was so thick that I could barely even see the light of the fire outside the array. This was something I had been hoping for, such a drastic darkening in the array's alignment, but the cause was troublesome.

I could feel with my magic senses that there was a new entity within the array, but instead of hovering about like a wisp it simply stayed in place at the center of the pool where it formed. The electricity was gone from the air and in its place was an impeccably cold chill like an icy wind that was blowing so softly it simply seeped into your very core. Every fiber of my being screamed at me that something was very wrong here.

My wisp spawning array had spawned an echo.

It is not like it was impossible, the array was just a big magic conductor that filled the enclosure with different energies. Both entities shared the same spawning factor of ambient magic. It was just something I had not wanted to take the time to consider when I came across the echo.

Now, though, I had succeeded in created an echo spawn point which would probably perpetuate as the echo continued reforming inside the array. If the array was for anything but wisps, I would not have cared, but it was in fact made for bringing us wisps. Wisps were the last thing I wanted to feed an echo.

When an echo kills something like a squirrel in the wild, it absorbs their life and bodies and converts everything into an energy type of food. After a few years of continual feeding, echoes could develop proper physical bodies as a form of evolution. These physical echoes were called revenants.

However, if an echo fed on pure mana entities like wisps, they would evolve without a body into something much more dangerous than some misshapen beast. These ghouls naturally had powerful magical abilities and the ability to absorb any form of magic from certain distances away. The average ghoul could suck the life force from an adult man in three minutes from over ten feet away.

My array was the very last place that I wanted an echo to live.

If I thought I was strong enough to capture and bind a ghoul, I would not have hesitated for an instant to feed our current wisp stock to the echo. However, even with my will and stats I felt a tangible fear at the prospect of facing such a creature.

Instead, as soon as I placed my feet on the ground, I drew my ivory dagger and poured raw energy into the blade so that as it slashed through after being drawn it unleashed a wave of cutting kinetic energy through the array. A split second later, not only did the array darken to an inky black color a wisp fluctuation took place near where the echo died.

This wisp was another impure shade of dark purple, but unlike the last this one carried a brilliant core of electric blue. It had multiple affinities. Estimating the amount of time between now and the next echo spawning based on the increased darkening of the array, I forced the wisp out of the array with my will and decided to remain inside.

"Gryn, we have a problem," I call out to my older brother to let him know the mistake I made. "I used an echo to increase the dark and death energy of the array. The echo's smoke that makes an area susceptible to echoes was amplified by the array. I've already killed a second echo, more will spawn!"

"What do you need me to do?" He asks immediately, knowing better than to worry about the small details or arguing over my mistake.

"Nothing, just stay on wisp duty," I reply with some relief in my voice, glad that he was not going to make a big deal of the issue. "The more echoes I kill, the darker the wisps will get, and then we'll all get the wisps we want. Once we're done, I can use holy magic to purify the array and no more echoes will spawn. That good for you guys out there?"

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