Ryn of Avonside

Apparently, a flying mage was enough to make them use an anti-mage weapon more intense than enchanted arrows, because my shield suddenly sparked when a blob of shimmering, fiery-red Faerah Conflagration energy splashed against it. Looking down, I spotted the man responsible as he furiously tried to reload a rudimentary magitech rifle. He wore clothing similar to the Reti people, from Neub, I noticed, but with a more… primal twist. The stitching was fine, but the leather and fabric wasn’t as well crafted, and it was all more functional and rustic in general. Perhaps this was a steppe nomad raiding party?

Raising my hand, a beam of fire lashed out from the palm while fiery, artful flowers rushed up under my skin. It splashed over the magitech rifleman, searing his fur armour and skin alike, and he let out an awful scream. The weapon fell with a clunk into the dirt.

My dramatic casting might've been effective, but since I was floating in the air, it also got their attention. Multiple arrows flew in and impacted my shield like birds hitting a window.

Annoyed, I raised my hand again, but faltered when I saw another man scramble for the gun. It reminded me of a desperate film hero going for the dropped weapon in the face of the big bad.

My hesitation allowed him to get a shot off, and it hit my shield with a hissing thump. Quickly, reflexively, I blasted him with magenta lightning. With a pained cry, he dropped the gun and fell backwards, spasming. That spell wasn't true lightning though, so he lived, even if he was down and out for now.

Just to his left, Eilian cut another man down and howled an incomprehensible obrec battlecry. The bandits were faltering, and in that moment, she extended her sword and tore one of the archers off the ground, across the intervening space, and onto her sword.

The terrifying display broke them, and they turned, running. Thank god. Killing people was… I mean, I could do it these days, but it was still awful.

“That's right, fuck off!” Adam swore loudly. To give force to his words, he picked up a stray fist-sized stone and let it fly with the full might of his magical power armour behind it.

It flew out with incredible speed and cracked into a man's arm. There was a snap and he fell. His friends left him to scramble to his feet on his own.

“I fucking liked Jenna,” he added, with a lot less force. “She was cool…”

“She’s still alive,” I said gently, touching down in the grass beside him. “I got her into my grove and the buns were sent to get help.”

Relief flooded his features, and he turned, lifting me into a grateful hug. “Thank god. Thanks, Ryn.”

“I mean, I just killed a guy but okay…” I said, unsure how to react to the big guy.

Putting me down, he brushed dust off my shoulder and gave me a faint smile. “Who cares. These fuckwits attacked us, they pay the price.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, but I was saved from answering when Eilian picked up the guy who I hit with my magic electricity. He squealed and tried to thrash out of her grasp, but it was augmented with telekinesis. Without a word, she threw him stumbling upright, then slapped his ass with the flat of her sword. He didn’t need further prompting after that, and began to hobble desperately after his friends.

“A bunch of nomad fools get one magitech gun and think they can take on two mages and their buff, armoured friends,” the obrec woman commented with a shake of her head. “Fools.”

“What do we do now?” Grace asked, looking after the bandits. “We have to stay until we can get the others back out here, since their location is still set here.”@@novelbin@@

A spark of idle curiosity caused me to look back and flick into mage-sight. I was wondering if there were multiple mage-marks — one for each person. Instead, I saw my own mage mark hanging in midair. It had a bit more… size to it than I was used to seeing with, say, Catherine’s one. Maybe it was all aggregated into one mark, or—

“Let’s get back to the grove,” Duncan said with a gruff, almost comically disapproving frown at the fleeing wounded man.

“Gather over at the mark, though,” Eilian interjected before I could just yoink the lot of us. “That way you can protect everyone when you arrive, since they’ll be popping out over there.”

Ah, right, that made sense.

It was also the kind of thing that I felt should be mentioned in our various books on magic, but it hadn't ever actually been spelled out so clearly. With that thought, I pulled my phone out and wrote a note for myself. Maybe I could do something with all these idle musings — write a book or something — Ryn’s Succinct Magical Primer. It could be a book with all the bullshit mysticism pulled out, replaced by base, observed facts.

We moved over to my grove while I thought on that, and found Melody waiting for us. Her normally jovial expression was sombre, and I felt a sudden spike of anxiety. Oh no… did Jenna…

Relief softened her features when she did a quick eyeball of the group and saw none of us were injured. “Thank fuck. Jenna is down in Verburch right now. We have a few medics, and they're getting help from some bun mages…”

I tilted my head and glanced out into the forest towards the lower caldera. “Help from a bun? How?”

Melody shrugged, then stepped up hurriedly when I started walking towards Vurburch. “Something about growth magic being good for speeding up the process? I dunno, it just seems like the buns can make any surgery or whatever less dangerous?”

“Okay, I think I can see how that would work,” I agreed idly as I began to think about all of this healing business in more detail.

My horrific pain spell used the idea that once the… magic skin? What the hell did we even call the innate aura of protection that living things carried? In Anve it had words rooted in the words for soul and wall. In Obrec, from what I could tell, they called it the armour of life. In English… magiskin? Ew, no… no way. Considering how Avonside used to be a university, maybe I should go all scientific? Dip my metaphorical toes into latin. I could call it the… fuck, what was that word again? Arca— Arcere? Arcentia… Anima Arcentia? That sounded super fancy, I liked that.

Back to my horrifying bone-shattering torture spell though, it worked by piercing the anima arcentia with a physical tendril of plant matter, which used the plant’s weak anima arcentia to create a sort of hole. Since Garden magic was naturally adapted to bypass the anima arcentia of plants, I was able to push magic through that gap and into the person.

Growth magic, channeled through a hole like that, interacted with the human body in the same way it did with plants — it made them grow according to their body’s natural process. In the horror-spell’s case, it healed physical trauma the moment it happened. With the buns though… if they were following in that example, then using the magic under the direction of a proper medical professional would do some real good. It was more of what I’d already done, except with a lot more skill and knowledge at their disposal, unlike the aimless trickle I’d used to barely seal all the holes where there shouldn’t have been any.

“Ryn?” called Grace, and I turned around to see her and Duncan standing where we’d returned.

Clearing my throat, I asked, “Uh, yeah?”

“We’ll let you go down there… I think having the whole gang troupe into the clinic would be more disruptive than helpful…” she said apologetically.

“Right,” I said, looking over at Adam, who was still with me. Eilian had transported to her own grove when she made the hop back into the Garden, so she’d have to fly over into my grove first.

“I’ll get the buns working on something nice for dinner — something heavy so we get knocked out and can sleep easier,” Duncan said with a small, wry smile.

A smile tugged at the edge of my mouth. “Sounds good. Thanks.”

Down in Vurburch, we were directed towards a new building — built in the village near the shore of the lake. A hand-carved wooden sign told us that it was the clinic. It was small, barely more than a cottage, but inside we found Dr. Ross and Tom, both of whom were anxiously sitting in silence, staring at a closed door.

“Is she okay?” I asked, snapping them both out of their thoughts.

Dr. Ross looked pained. “Not sure. The medic felt confident. She said that there might still be foreign material inside, and that she wanted to make sure everything was lined up and going to heal properly before adding more of that magic stuff, but… well…”

“Right,” I said, and in that moment, the focus and instinctual clarity that came with a crisis vanished, and my hands began to shake. “S—so I did okay? I was just reacting…”

A handmade, soft-looking sofa was free, so I dropped myself into it and joined the two men, staring off into space. Fucking hell. It was wild to think that a person I knew, who I vaguely liked but didn’t really interact with on a deep level, was on the other side of a door while fate rolled the dice. Fate better weight its damned dice.

“She said… uh, she said that a proper medic could’ve done better,” he said, with the sort of bluntness that I knew he wasn’t trying to be mean, but it still made me wince. Seeing this, he added quickly, “She also said that you got the important stuff done— look, it was combat, Ryn. Our actual medic was busy putting himself and his armour in the way of more arrows. I think perhaps in the future, you should make sure your defender and your healer isn’t the same person?”

Right. Right, that was definitely something to relay to Troy. Shit, was it my fault that I picked a team like that? Perhaps I should’ve—

Urgent panic flashed through me like a wave of white fire when I felt something touch me on the shoulder, but I relaxed when I saw it was Adam. He slumped into the sofa beside me, then winced and reached around to pop some clasps on his armour. The front plate came off, and— right, he got hit, but the arrow only barely got through. His light gambeson thingy had a dark patch of blood, though. He pulled some laces and tugged the garment down a little so he could see the wound. It was a puncture about two thirds of an inch wide, and from what I could see, about the same in depth.

“Can I?” I asked.

Glancing down at the hole, then up at me, he grinned and asked, “What will it do?”

“Probably give you a mean scar,” I said, unable to meet his gaze. “Actually, I should just let the medics see you. There’s no point in me messing with it when we’re inside the clinic. I could make it do all its natural healing in like, two seconds, but… nature is really stupid. It’s why I only healed Jenna enough to get her here safely — The medics could, you know, still easily fix things if I did something wrong.”

Looking conflicted, Adam glanced down at the small hole, then shrugged. “Okay. It sounds like it would make a mean scar, though.”

Despite my high-strung mood, I smiled. “They have buns in there, right? They can give growth magic when the medic calls for it, and maybe they’ll let you have a scar.”

“That would be so sick.”