Once or twice, he started to say something vaguely stupid before stopping himself. If he wasn't careful, she'd think he was trying to figure out a way to leave her behind. No telling what she'd do then. Ulric wouldn't put it past her to simply disappear and follow him from a short distance without him being able to do anything about it. It galled him slightly but out here in the wilds of her homeland, Taipan was his superior in most ways that mattered. At least, it bothered him until he remembered that her potent self was watching his six against a comedically dangerous environment and an untold number of eventual enemies. That was a far greater comfort to him these days, especially now that she meant it and not merely as a begrudging duty.
As was the usual, when he was allowed to relax, Ulric started to drift. It wasn't a good habit, but what was the point of having an Iriel'en scout with you if you were just going to do what they were, but worse? Leave the lady to do her thing and work on figuring out this magic shit a little. Deliberately trying to turn inwards, Ulric concentrated on the feeling of mana within himself.
The awakening of his core had given him one unmistakable advantage. Ceraun, lightning magic. According to Instructor Gother, it was among the more deadly and rare attunings, being so difficult to concentrate in one location without being actually hit by a lightning bolt. Especially for the mages of this world who were unable to join themselves properly to the flow necessary to wield the magic as it was intended. Ulric now knew that wasn't just his arrogant opinion, the colossal elemental sitting up there in the upper atmosphere of the planet had made its own viewpoint clear to him in that singular moment. Connection was necessary to make Ceraun work. Mages keeping themselves isolated lost a greater part of their potential, hah! Get it? That they could wield using this magic.
Ceraun had the penultimate determining factor of a conflict: speed. It was fast, nearly instant, so far as living things could react. What was the ultimate king of conflict you ask? Range, of course. It didn't matter what you did if you couldn't reach your enemy while they could reach you. Ulric could think of a few ways to cheat, such as tying the spells to nodes as he had done with his [Lightning Javalin].
Maybe one day he'd found a school of magic built around the laws of his old world, the Ohmic school. Or should it be the Maxwellian? The Ohmaxic school? The Ohmaxic.
Chuckling to himself about the inanity of it he returned to his meandering. Ceraun. He was newly awakened to it but already he knew his limits had changed vastly with regards to this power. The horizon was much farther away. And just beyond that horizon sat the creature who shared a name and a source for this elemental energy, calling.
Pulling gently from his core, Ulric gathered a small piece of that power, just a whisper. Immediately he held a potent force waiting for release. He held it in abeyance, feeling it.
Now occupied fully he left his surroundings to Taipan, trusting her to detect any problems. Meanwhile, Ulric sent his mind back to that first day with the Watcher, back to the flash of insight given to him into the nature of Varda's mana, into the nature of this entire very possibly parallel dimension. Ulric had never had reason to believe that he'd remained within the same effective universe of his prior life. Subtle differences kept cropping up. Take magic, for example.
The magic of this world had been described to him as a field, an ever-present distribution of energy. Ulric envisioned the primordial mana types as being the four wave generators, the background radiation of the world, and everything else resulted from the interference pattern of those waves interacting. Everything, the dirt lying below the snow upon which he trod, the air he breathed, down to his own body, it was all a harmonization of those four firmaments, each consisting of an opposing pair. Eight pulses of existence.
Lumen and Caecus, the light and the dark, Vita and Mors, the life and death, Motus and Desidia, the moving and the still, and, finally, Res and Nihil, the matter and the void. It didn't gel with the physics of his old world, not as they'd been described. Gravity, Electromagnetic, Nuclear binding, Nuclear unbinding. That was essentially what his old peoples had boiled the universe down to. Even those were thought to be merely the separations of a greater field, a unified force that had broken down. Nobody had managed to crack the code on it though. Some of the mathers said they had it figured out, hidden dimensions accounted for the discrepancies, and held the missing pieces of the puzzle. Mathematicians weren't to be trusted. Any time that sort ran into problems, they just invented new dimensions into which they could hide their mistakes.
Were they wrong? He confessed to not being able to follow them through their arcane definitions and proofs spanning chalkboards. Mana might have been hiding somewhere in those scribbles all along. Here and now though, it all boiled down to the FIELD, as the Watcher had called it, the interaction of those eight primordial waves.
The lovely insanity of waves was how they liked to mix with one another. They interfered, building here and destroying there. The patterns of their interaction is what produced tangible reality, a weave of intangible interferences that built the tangible universe. When you rode the ocean you sat on top of the sum of a great web of energies that coalesced into the wave that lifted you up. The only difference that mattered to him between his old world and this one was that he had different names for the sources of those energies.
That, and that here, in this world, his core could touch that web, draw the barest whisper of it into himself to reach out into it. Ulric had never been able to suppress a childlike awe at this fantastic connection between the creatures of Varda and the world itself. No wonder some manifest construct like the Akashic record would exist.
Ulric decided that the first thing he needed to do with this magic was to refine his control of it. Currently, it was actually too easy to move. The normal mental routines that he'd used to harness his energies were too rough, they drew too strongly on the mana and Ceraun rushed headlong, on the edge of his ability to guide it.
The source of his current difficulty was the same reason as he was currently unable to use Infrig: Ceraun moved. The magic surged in an endless waltz of positive joined to negative trading places as they tried to unify. Ulric was currently unable to convince the mana to rest, which meant his attempts to revert it to unaspected mana were constantly hindered by being unable to balance the Motis and Desidia. Always too much motion to his energy. And he was fucked if he knew how to stop it.
Maybe that was why mages crippled their own growth, refusing to pass through the critical point of awakening their cores. They were able to access the purely balanced mana, the ultimately flexible form of magic. Sure they'd never be able to cast with the raw power and speed of an awakened core. But they could draw on all the elemental forms with equal ease, so long as they had the conceptual knowledge to construct their spells. Ulric almost giggled at himself then. Yeah, sure he told himself, all you have to do is know everything to take advantage of not awakening your core. Easy peasy.
There it was then, the mistake of choosing to forego the danger of awakening. A mage could choose to have it all, but weaker, slower, and requiring far more training to actually leverage that flexibility. It was a good choice if you were omniscient. For everybody else? You got steamrolled by a half-trained adept who could crush you before you developed a counter.
A little like he had against that pyromancer. If that arrogant fucknuts hadn't let himself get distracted, had just followed that first fireball with another one, Ulric wouldn't have been able to do anything about it. It may have been that his counterstroke wouldn't have been able to cut through that odd shield the mage had deployed that soaked up his [Cinderpearl].
Ulric pushed the little fragment of Ceraun to move and it did so instantly. He imagined it swelling into a sphere and, once again, it reacted immediately to his will, before it fizzled out. Curious, Ulric summoned another bit of mana and tried to guide it into a gradual swell. It died out around the same time as the last.
He slapped his forehead, drawing a small shake of Taipan's head. As she would say, he was letting the worms in his head do all the thinking. There was not a small concern in his periphery that an actual brain-eating worm existed in Vardan ecology that could drive its hosts mad. Dismissed. Einar, focus on impossible magical bullshit before you kill yourself.
Magic required intent, understanding, and will. He was basically just hovering around the edges of two out of three here. He didn't actually have a direct intent, just a vague idea coupled with a near lack of understanding about what he was actually trying to do. Alright. Something concrete. Think of it like writing code, and the spellform is a program. It demands precision and specificity to run correctly. Uncertainty, poor definitions, and open-ended concepts were going to lead to problems. Using this mindset was one of the keys to Ulric's spell potency and efficiency, he visualized his spell castings as algorithmic routines with context-sensitive adaptations and subroutines to smooth outcasts. The first spell he cast would be messy and, potentially, slow but the subsequent ones would be refined to near automatic.
Ulric changed his methodology. Instead, he envisioned forming a very thin shell of Ceraun, sort of like the one he'd manifested during the awakening. This one wasn't hardened though, he intentionally left it whispy, like a cloud. Ulric was trying to use the shell of energy like an extra skin, he could feel the movements of the energy he held, and, if he concentrated, he could feel its response to the outside world, instead of closing himself off from the mana around his body he was making himself sensitive to it. Ulric concentrated on this field, oscillating it to increase its resolution. His core facilitated the connection, wrapping the Ceraun around himself and transmitting fluctuations in the sinusoidal wave to bring the world to life around him as a man blind so long he does not understand sight when it returns to him.
The spell locked into place, mana snapping to a rigid bubble. Suddenly Ulric's skin was awash in a flood of new inputs, awareness flashing over him. It was like being covered in ants. He yelped, then again, slapping his hands over himself and dropping the spell.
*PING*
"Fuck!" Ulric cried, startled again by the bell tone in his brain. He dismissed the Akashic update instantly and canceled the spell before his skin peeled itself off and ran away, or so it felt.
Taipan jerked, spinning to scan her environment and an arrow suddenly appeared in her somehow already-drawn bow. That was impressively fast. The former Hunter had gone from a ready to a nocked and drawn arrow in about half a second. Fucking spooky. Ulric swore again on the Watcher's mysteriously perfect boobs to try not to find himself on the receiving end of Taipan's bow.
Finding nothing requiring immediate death Taipan directed her startled gaze to Ulric, eyes narrowing as she did.
"Sorry." Ulric apologized sheepishly. "That was my bad. I tried a spell to detect the shapes and positions of things around me with magic. It feels weird like you wouldn't believe."
Taipan relaxed the draw slowly staring wordlessly at him the entire time. She did not let up her glare as she shouldered it and placed the arrow, poisoned, of course, back into its specially prepared quiver that kept the toxins coating the large spear points fresh. Point taken, don't scare the scary lady while she's scaring other scaries.
His Shadow apparently arrived at some new conclusion based on this information.
"Glade Chief, you are doing it again. I see it in your sinister gray eyes. Mine ears can hear the pulleys and gears spinning in your skull. We will run now, and, perhaps, give you something to concentrate on that does not involve startling me into shooting you on accident." Declared Taipan evenly.
With that, Taipan set a hard pace, her long legs carrying her effortlessly across the snow. Ulric had little choice but to extend his own stride or be left behind. He could have just kept walking, she would have stopped, probably, but he couldn't fault her. They really did need to get a move on.
The pair of them jogged a solid quarter kilometer per minute, a nice cruising speed. Taipan was about twenty-five meters ahead and kept that separation for a half hour. Say this for her, she knew how to keep a body from getting too contemplative when she had a mind to. Ulric's body settled into the run and he took in the frosted wilderness, tamed, for now, but growing ever wilder as they moved away from Irielhos.
Ulric picked up his pace to close the distance to his Shadow and she sped up to prevent it. Ok, well, perhaps he should have let her know he was going to experiment. Putting on some more speed Ulric pushed to shrink the distance as the terrain began to whip by. Again Taipan accelerated and, naturally, the two ended up in a full-tilt sprint as Ulric refused to let her win and she was determined to force him to catch her.
Taipan was insanely fast. Ulric was, in a straight line, ever so slightly faster, once he got up to speed.
The weights of their packs, barely even noticed earlier began to tell on them as they ran a pace to make an Olympic gold medalist sprinter weep.
Ulric was gaining on her. Slowly. Painfully even, his legs burned under the effort and his heart hammered. Deep, steady breaths kept him flush with air but he was outstripping his ability to keep up with the demands of his body.
All thought vanished, and his focus narrowed on keeping pace, on placing his feet to avoid eating absolute shit on the snowy path that curved, rose, fell, and turned as they ribboned through the forest at breakneck speed.
After near to three minutes of his absolute best, he was starting to flag, his rhythm unsustainable. Taipan was only a few steps ahead. She must have heard him approaching because her ears twitched and she turned her head to look back. A rare mistake from the Elf.
She missed the near-invisible rise of snow that indicated a hidden root. Her toe snagged on it pulling her leg up short as she flew past. The graceful elf hurtled forward, hit the snowpack on her side, and careened off the curving trail into a snow bank blasting a cloud of powder into the air to mark her demise.
Ulric slowed to a light jog and was just pulling up to see if his Shadow had survived the crash when a hidden foot lashed out, hooking behind his heels and jerking him off his feet to tumble into the bank on his back.
Laughter like a chorus of bells escaped the snow bank as Taipan rose from her own wreckage unphased. Ulric watched her dust herself off and found himself entranced by the unbridled glee on her face. It was a rare thing that this guarded Elf let anyone see her unbound by propriety.
He found himself joining her laughter as he rolled to his feet and slapped the snow from his clothes.
"There now Ulric, that is how it is supposed to be! Only the here and now when you rove out. Every footstep is the one that hides a [Bronzescale Krait]! Let yourself free of your own mind and enjoy the moment's gift." Taipan declared, hands on hips, a wild grin plastered on her face, standing as if the conquering general on a field of battle.
She was probably the most beautiful creature he'd ever seen.
Ulric saluted hand to his forehead and at attention.
"Aye, Aye, Admiral Taipan, goddess of the forest folk! This one hears and obeys!"
She took his mocking salute as her due and waded out of the waist-deep snow back up the slight rise onto the trail. He followed in her trail and the two recovered their breath from the exertion. A good few minutes bled from the day before either offered a sound other than their own trail-breaking in the snow.
It had been a long, long time since he'd had that kind of run. Probably not since he'd raced through the trees with Brighteyes forever ago. He felt incredible, like a lit furnace. Melted snow escaped from the short crop of once-dark hair that had regrown silvered. At least his facial hair was the old dark brown nigh unto black. He was lucky he'd been able to regrow hair at all given the extent of the damage. He'd just have to live with looking like a well-kept grandfather now.
Taipan leveled an appreciative glance towards him, her green eyes drinking him in. There were people who would kill for that look. Ulric had a sneaking suspicion that he might be one of them, which made no sense, he was about as far from a beating of the chest Übermensch as a man could get. Still. Vavoom.
"It still bothers me that you are cheating like this Ulric. You should not be able to keep pace with me." Taipan whined, rehashing a topic they'd already discussed.
Ulric lifted his chin to the sky, to allow the rest of the world to bask in his glory.
"Behold! The greatness of Eternal Gaze's workings are upon my flesh Taipan. I will accept your praise as it is only right and proper. This chest. This bloody chest. These immaculate shoulders. Taipan, I do not want to alarm you, but I have the finest ass ever put upon a man of this world." Ulric gloated playfully.
There was a nonzero possibility that that was even true, so long as he didn't compare himself to the almost alien beauty of the Aes'r. He could take no credit for the fuckery enacted on his being by the Impossible during his reforging, but he would gladly accept the gift in all its meaty goodness.
Taipan scoffed softly at the brag before readjusting her pack.
"If you are so proud of it, then why do you never let me play with it, Ulric? You are keen to busy your hands with mine own rump." She noted.
"You know why, Taipan." Ulric declared in mock severity. "Some things, no matter how appetizing, are not to be bitten and your teeth are, like, crazy sharp."
The bleeding had taken nearly a minute to stop and he didn't doubt there might be a scar. Henceforth he had declared that her privileges were revoked until he could be guaranteed that she had learned her lesson. From him. With a great many examples.
"Fine. Be that way, selfish Glade Chief. A few joy scars are nothing to a warrior, you will learn this in time." Pouted the Elf.
Her own hide was, Ulric had observed, distinctly free of markings. Clearly, she was a slight sadist. Which he already knew. It would always bear keeping in mind that way, way back when, Taipan had known she'd used a poisoned arrow on him and had decidedly not mentioned that fact at any point until her little brother had demanded an antidote for it, as she had been hoping he would expire before anyone realized. It was just the way she was built. Maybe [Snake Charmer] was doing something after all, she caught him off guard less frequently and he sort of stayed on top of navigating her various quirks. Or, you know, it might have been that he'd spent more intimate time with this Amazon Elf than any one sentient being since his own family. He thought of himself like an experienced river kayaker. Just because you knew where the dangerous rapids and rocks were didn't mean you'd avoid them forever.
Ulric had passed beyond the point of obsessing over the future. He was here to ride the wave, not worry about the weather.
"Uh huh, you just remember that next time I get a wild hair to put a ring of scars smack in the middle of your butt cheek. Say, what made you decide it was a good idea to start bumping uglies in the first place?" Ulric asked, before he could think himself out of the question.
"Bumping uglies?" Taipan inquired, with a tilt to her chin that suggested he might be playing with fire. Not literally. This time.
Ulric had stymied her with euphemisms again.
"Ah, uh, sex, fucking, you know cause you sort of just er…mash stuff together down there gopping all over each other until everybody's a worn-out wreck." Ulric said, in what Varda would have regarded as the best attempt a man ever made at never doing a thing he described doing again, if a planet cared to pay attention to the things crawling across its surface.
Taipan was now aiming the pointed consideration her eyes took on when she was making a particularly tricky bow shot at him. She did not actually have her bow off her back so he wasn't immediately concerned but his socks had been finely marinaded this day.
"Glade Chief, firstly, it is well that I know this habit of yours to attempt humor through gross exaggeration and irony, and that your comment just now is just that, as I would otherwise be tempted to put another arrow in you for referring to my sex as an 'ugly'. Which it is not.” The Elf informed him calmly.
“As you had better know if you ever plan to see it again." Growled his Shadow warningly.
Back to her overly casual tone she continued reining him in gently, "Secondly, it is also well that you have not ever attempted lovemaking in the way you have just described or I doubt Hal'et would ever have let you walk from her boudoir with all your fingers attached. For myself, I will simply remind you that we are alone in the wilds and no man, woman, or beast will ever find you should I decide that to be the case."
"Yes ma'm." Ulric apologized, having no doubt whatsoever that out here, after dark, it would be unlikely he'd ever actually know from what direction he'd been killed in cold blood.
Taipan was a formidable woman all day but it was when the Twins faded that she became truly frightening. Nightblade was a rather narrowly focused class built around assassination from the shadows and she'd been practicing its finer aspects for around thirty or forty years.
"Good, Glade Chief. It is just as well that you are so attentive in the act of sexing me or I would be less generous and you less full of blood." Said his Shadow without a single indication as to whether or not she was joking.
She had a certain history with regard to that latter part and a poker face that a Senator about to cut corporate tax rates would weep for. Such was the danger of snake handling, you always took a chance when you handled them, no matter how comfortable the two creatures might be with one another.
However, she had let him off the hook so Ulric would not look this gift horse in the mouth.
"You are wise and merciful and beautiful Taipan. Your sexy bits are not ugly, are in fact biological art sculpted by the hands of the gods to reflect the magnificence of your line and I will treat them with the respect they are due for all of mine days." Ulric capitulated, choosing the path of the only hope for valorous men to die of old age.
A simple acknowledging nod and a shimmy of hips intended to remind him of his place in this world were all the subsequent sign that Taipan was willing to forgive Ulric's poor jest. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. He refused to stop playing the game though, her laugh was worth the risks, a magic all its own. Ulric almost failed to note that his Shadow had very adeptly sidestepped his question to leave his curiosity unsatiated.
It was a funny old world was this Varda. On the one hand, a man was surrounded by mystery and splendor and sights fantastic. On the other most of those mysteries were actually wyrd riddles designed to test the mettle of all who encountered them, the splendors were contested over with metal, blood, and fire, and the sights fantastic frequently hid traps to slay the unwary.
Ulric wouldn't have it any other way.
Once or twice, he started to say something vaguely stupid before stopping himself. If he wasn't careful, she'd think he was trying to figure out a way to leave her behind. No telling what she'd do then. Ulric wouldn't put it past her to simply disappear and follow him from a short distance without him being able to do anything about it. It galled him slightly but out here in the wilds of her homeland, Taipan was his superior in most ways that mattered. At least, it bothered him until he remembered that her potent self was watching his six against a comedically dangerous environment and an untold number of eventual enemies. That was a far greater comfort to him these days, especially now that she meant it and not merely as a begrudging duty.
As was the usual, when he was allowed to relax, Ulric started to drift. It wasn't a good habit, but what was the point of having an Iriel'en scout with you if you were just going to do what they were, but worse? Leave the lady to do her thing and work on figuring out this magic shit a little. Deliberately trying to turn inwards, Ulric concentrated on the feeling of mana within himself.
The awakening of his core had given him one unmistakable advantage. Ceraun, lightning magic. According to Instructor Gother, it was among the more deadly and rare attunings, being so difficult to concentrate in one location without being actually hit by a lightning bolt. Especially for the mages of this world who were unable to join themselves properly to the flow necessary to wield the magic as it was intended. Ulric now knew that wasn't just his arrogant opinion, the colossal elemental sitting up there in the upper atmosphere of the planet had made its own viewpoint clear to him in that singular moment. Connection was necessary to make Ceraun work. Mages keeping themselves isolated lost a greater part of their potential, hah! Get it? That they could wield using this magic.
Ceraun had the penultimate determining factor of a conflict: speed. It was fast, nearly instant, so far as living things could react. What was the ultimate king of conflict you ask? Range, of course. It didn't matter what you did if you couldn't reach your enemy while they could reach you. Ulric could think of a few ways to cheat, such as tying the spells to nodes as he had done with his [Lightning Javalin].
Maybe one day he'd found a school of magic built around the laws of his old world, the Ohmic school. Or should it be the Maxwellian? The Ohmaxic school? The Ohmaxic.
Chuckling to himself about the inanity of it he returned to his meandering. Ceraun. He was newly awakened to it but already he knew his limits had changed vastly with regards to this power. The horizon was much farther away. And just beyond that horizon sat the creature who shared a name and a source for this elemental energy, calling.
Pulling gently from his core, Ulric gathered a small piece of that power, just a whisper. Immediately he held a potent force waiting for release. He held it in abeyance, feeling it.
Now occupied fully he left his surroundings to Taipan, trusting her to detect any problems. Meanwhile, Ulric sent his mind back to that first day with the Watcher, back to the flash of insight given to him into the nature of Varda's mana, into the nature of this entire very possibly parallel dimension. Ulric had never had reason to believe that he'd remained within the same effective universe of his prior life. Subtle differences kept cropping up. Take magic, for example.
The magic of this world had been described to him as a field, an ever-present distribution of energy. Ulric envisioned the primordial mana types as being the four wave generators, the background radiation of the world, and everything else resulted from the interference pattern of those waves interacting. Everything, the dirt lying below the snow upon which he trod, the air he breathed, down to his own body, it was all a harmonization of those four firmaments, each consisting of an opposing pair. Eight pulses of existence.
Lumen and Caecus, the light and the dark, Vita and Mors, the life and death, Motus and Desidia, the moving and the still, and, finally, Res and Nihil, the matter and the void. It didn't gel with the physics of his old world, not as they'd been described. Gravity, Electromagnetic, Nuclear binding, Nuclear unbinding. That was essentially what his old peoples had boiled the universe down to. Even those were thought to be merely the separations of a greater field, a unified force that had broken down. Nobody had managed to crack the code on it though. Some of the mathers said they had it figured out, hidden dimensions accounted for the discrepancies, and held the missing pieces of the puzzle. Mathematicians weren't to be trusted. Any time that sort ran into problems, they just invented new dimensions into which they could hide their mistakes.
Were they wrong? He confessed to not being able to follow them through their arcane definitions and proofs spanning chalkboards. Mana might have been hiding somewhere in those scribbles all along. Here and now though, it all boiled down to the FIELD, as the Watcher had called it, the interaction of those eight primordial waves.
The lovely insanity of waves was how they liked to mix with one another. They interfered, building here and destroying there. The patterns of their interaction is what produced tangible reality, a weave of intangible interferences that built the tangible universe. When you rode the ocean you sat on top of the sum of a great web of energies that coalesced into the wave that lifted you up. The only difference that mattered to him between his old world and this one was that he had different names for the sources of those energies.
That, and that here, in this world, his core could touch that web, draw the barest whisper of it into himself to reach out into it. Ulric had never been able to suppress a childlike awe at this fantastic connection between the creatures of Varda and the world itself. No wonder some manifest construct like the Akashic record would exist.
Ulric decided that the first thing he needed to do with this magic was to refine his control of it. Currently, it was actually too easy to move. The normal mental routines that he'd used to harness his energies were too rough, they drew too strongly on the mana and Ceraun rushed headlong, on the edge of his ability to guide it.
The source of his current difficulty was the same reason as he was currently unable to use Infrig: Ceraun moved. The magic surged in an endless waltz of positive joined to negative trading places as they tried to unify. Ulric was currently unable to convince the mana to rest, which meant his attempts to revert it to unaspected mana were constantly hindered by being unable to balance the Motis and Desidia. Always too much motion to his energy. And he was fucked if he knew how to stop it.
Maybe that was why mages crippled their own growth, refusing to pass through the critical point of awakening their cores. They were able to access the purely balanced mana, the ultimately flexible form of magic. Sure they'd never be able to cast with the raw power and speed of an awakened core. But they could draw on all the elemental forms with equal ease, so long as they had the conceptual knowledge to construct their spells. Ulric almost giggled at himself then. Yeah, sure he told himself, all you have to do is know everything to take advantage of not awakening your core. Easy peasy.
There it was then, the mistake of choosing to forego the danger of awakening. A mage could choose to have it all, but weaker, slower, and requiring far more training to actually leverage that flexibility. It was a good choice if you were omniscient. For everybody else? You got steamrolled by a half-trained adept who could crush you before you developed a counter.
A little like he had against that pyromancer. If that arrogant fucknuts hadn't let himself get distracted, had just followed that first fireball with another one, Ulric wouldn't have been able to do anything about it. It may have been that his counterstroke wouldn't have been able to cut through that odd shield the mage had deployed that soaked up his [Cinderpearl].
Ulric pushed the little fragment of Ceraun to move and it did so instantly. He imagined it swelling into a sphere and, once again, it reacted immediately to his will, before it fizzled out. Curious, Ulric summoned another bit of mana and tried to guide it into a gradual swell. It died out around the same time as the last.
He slapped his forehead, drawing a small shake of Taipan's head. As she would say, he was letting the worms in his head do all the thinking. There was not a small concern in his periphery that an actual brain-eating worm existed in Vardan ecology that could drive its hosts mad. Dismissed. Einar, focus on impossible magical bullshit before you kill yourself.
Magic required intent, understanding, and will. He was basically just hovering around the edges of two out of three here. He didn't actually have a direct intent, just a vague idea coupled with a near lack of understanding about what he was actually trying to do. Alright. Something concrete. Think of it like writing code, and the spellform is a program. It demands precision and specificity to run correctly. Uncertainty, poor definitions, and open-ended concepts were going to lead to problems. Using this mindset was one of the keys to Ulric's spell potency and efficiency, he visualized his spell castings as algorithmic routines with context-sensitive adaptations and subroutines to smooth outcasts. The first spell he cast would be messy and, potentially, slow but the subsequent ones would be refined to near automatic.
Ulric changed his methodology. Instead, he envisioned forming a very thin shell of Ceraun, sort of like the one he'd manifested during the awakening. This one wasn't hardened though, he intentionally left it whispy, like a cloud. Ulric was trying to use the shell of energy like an extra skin, he could feel the movements of the energy he held, and, if he concentrated, he could feel its response to the outside world, instead of closing himself off from the mana around his body he was making himself sensitive to it. Ulric concentrated on this field, oscillating it to increase its resolution. His core facilitated the connection, wrapping the Ceraun around himself and transmitting fluctuations in the sinusoidal wave to bring the world to life around him as a man blind so long he does not understand sight when it returns to him.
The spell locked into place, mana snapping to a rigid bubble. Suddenly Ulric's skin was awash in a flood of new inputs, awareness flashing over him. It was like being covered in ants. He yelped, then again, slapping his hands over himself and dropping the spell.
*PING*
"Fuck!" Ulric cried, startled again by the bell tone in his brain. He dismissed the Akashic update instantly and canceled the spell before his skin peeled itself off and ran away, or so it felt.
Taipan jerked, spinning to scan her environment and an arrow suddenly appeared in her somehow already-drawn bow. That was impressively fast. The former Hunter had gone from a ready to a nocked and drawn arrow in about half a second. Fucking spooky. Ulric swore again on the Watcher's mysteriously perfect boobs to try not to find himself on the receiving end of Taipan's bow.
Finding nothing requiring immediate death Taipan directed her startled gaze to Ulric, eyes narrowing as she did.
"Sorry." Ulric apologized sheepishly. "That was my bad. I tried a spell to detect the shapes and positions of things around me with magic. It feels weird like you wouldn't believe."
Taipan relaxed the draw slowly staring wordlessly at him the entire time. She did not let up her glare as she shouldered it and placed the arrow, poisoned, of course, back into its specially prepared quiver that kept the toxins coating the large spear points fresh. Point taken, don't scare the scary lady while she's scaring other scaries.
His Shadow apparently arrived at some new conclusion based on this information.
"Glade Chief, you are doing it again. I see it in your sinister gray eyes. Mine ears can hear the pulleys and gears spinning in your skull. We will run now, and, perhaps, give you something to concentrate on that does not involve startling me into shooting you on accident." Declared Taipan evenly.
With that, Taipan set a hard pace, her long legs carrying her effortlessly across the snow. Ulric had little choice but to extend his own stride or be left behind. He could have just kept walking, she would have stopped, probably, but he couldn't fault her. They really did need to get a move on.
The pair of them jogged a solid quarter kilometer per minute, a nice cruising speed. Taipan was about twenty-five meters ahead and kept that separation for a half hour. Say this for her, she knew how to keep a body from getting too contemplative when she had a mind to. Ulric's body settled into the run and he took in the frosted wilderness, tamed, for now, but growing ever wilder as they moved away from Irielhos.
Ulric picked up his pace to close the distance to his Shadow and she sped up to prevent it. Ok, well, perhaps he should have let her know he was going to experiment. Putting on some more speed Ulric pushed to shrink the distance as the terrain began to whip by. Again Taipan accelerated and, naturally, the two ended up in a full-tilt sprint as Ulric refused to let her win and she was determined to force him to catch her.
Taipan was insanely fast. Ulric was, in a straight line, ever so slightly faster, once he got up to speed.
The weights of their packs, barely even noticed earlier began to tell on them as they ran a pace to make an Olympic gold medalist sprinter weep.
Ulric was gaining on her. Slowly. Painfully even, his legs burned under the effort and his heart hammered. Deep, steady breaths kept him flush with air but he was outstripping his ability to keep up with the demands of his body.
All thought vanished, and his focus narrowed on keeping pace, on placing his feet to avoid eating absolute shit on the snowy path that curved, rose, fell, and turned as they ribboned through the forest at breakneck speed.
After near to three minutes of his absolute best, he was starting to flag, his rhythm unsustainable. Taipan was only a few steps ahead. She must have heard him approaching because her ears twitched and she turned her head to look back. A rare mistake from the Elf.
She missed the near-invisible rise of snow that indicated a hidden root. Her toe snagged on it pulling her leg up short as she flew past. The graceful elf hurtled forward, hit the snowpack on her side, and careened off the curving trail into a snow bank blasting a cloud of powder into the air to mark her demise.
Ulric slowed to a light jog and was just pulling up to see if his Shadow had survived the crash when a hidden foot lashed out, hooking behind his heels and jerking him off his feet to tumble into the bank on his back.
Laughter like a chorus of bells escaped the snow bank as Taipan rose from her own wreckage unphased. Ulric watched her dust herself off and found himself entranced by the unbridled glee on her face. It was a rare thing that this guarded Elf let anyone see her unbound by propriety.
He found himself joining her laughter as he rolled to his feet and slapped the snow from his clothes.
"There now Ulric, that is how it is supposed to be! Only the here and now when you rove out. Every footstep is the one that hides a [Bronzescale Krait]! Let yourself free of your own mind and enjoy the moment's gift." Taipan declared, hands on hips, a wild grin plastered on her face, standing as if the conquering general on a field of battle.
She was probably the most beautiful creature he'd ever seen.
Ulric saluted hand to his forehead and at attention.
"Aye, Aye, Admiral Taipan, goddess of the forest folk! This one hears and obeys!"
She took his mocking salute as her due and waded out of the waist-deep snow back up the slight rise onto the trail. He followed in her trail and the two recovered their breath from the exertion. A good few minutes bled from the day before either offered a sound other than their own trail-breaking in the snow.
It had been a long, long time since he'd had that kind of run. Probably not since he'd raced through the trees with Brighteyes forever ago. He felt incredible, like a lit furnace. Melted snow escaped from the short crop of once-dark hair that had regrown silvered. At least his facial hair was the old dark brown nigh unto black. He was lucky he'd been able to regrow hair at all given the extent of the damage. He'd just have to live with looking like a well-kept grandfather now.
Taipan leveled an appreciative glance towards him, her green eyes drinking him in. There were people who would kill for that look. Ulric had a sneaking suspicion that he might be one of them, which made no sense, he was about as far from a beating of the chest Übermensch as a man could get. Still. Vavoom.
"It still bothers me that you are cheating like this Ulric. You should not be able to keep pace with me." Taipan whined, rehashing a topic they'd already discussed.
Ulric lifted his chin to the sky, to allow the rest of the world to bask in his glory.
"Behold! The greatness of Eternal Gaze's workings are upon my flesh Taipan. I will accept your praise as it is only right and proper. This chest. This bloody chest. These immaculate shoulders. Taipan, I do not want to alarm you, but I have the finest ass ever put upon a man of this world." Ulric gloated playfully.
There was a nonzero possibility that that was even true, so long as he didn't compare himself to the almost alien beauty of the Aes'r. He could take no credit for the fuckery enacted on his being by the Impossible during his reforging, but he would gladly accept the gift in all its meaty goodness.
Taipan scoffed softly at the brag before readjusting her pack.
"If you are so proud of it, then why do you never let me play with it, Ulric? You are keen to busy your hands with mine own rump." She noted.
"You know why, Taipan." Ulric declared in mock severity. "Some things, no matter how appetizing, are not to be bitten and your teeth are, like, crazy sharp."
The bleeding had taken nearly a minute to stop and he didn't doubt there might be a scar. Henceforth he had declared that her privileges were revoked until he could be guaranteed that she had learned her lesson. From him. With a great many examples.
"Fine. Be that way, selfish Glade Chief. A few joy scars are nothing to a warrior, you will learn this in time." Pouted the Elf.
Her own hide was, Ulric had observed, distinctly free of markings. Clearly, she was a slight sadist. Which he already knew. It would always bear keeping in mind that way, way back when, Taipan had known she'd used a poisoned arrow on him and had decidedly not mentioned that fact at any point until her little brother had demanded an antidote for it, as she had been hoping he would expire before anyone realized. It was just the way she was built. Maybe [Snake Charmer] was doing something after all, she caught him off guard less frequently and he sort of stayed on top of navigating her various quirks. Or, you know, it might have been that he'd spent more intimate time with this Amazon Elf than any one sentient being since his own family. He thought of himself like an experienced river kayaker. Just because you knew where the dangerous rapids and rocks were didn't mean you'd avoid them forever.
Ulric had passed beyond the point of obsessing over the future. He was here to ride the wave, not worry about the weather.
"Uh huh, you just remember that next time I get a wild hair to put a ring of scars smack in the middle of your butt cheek. Say, what made you decide it was a good idea to start bumping uglies in the first place?" Ulric asked, before he could think himself out of the question.
"Bumping uglies?" Taipan inquired, with a tilt to her chin that suggested he might be playing with fire. Not literally. This time.
Ulric had stymied her with euphemisms again.
"Ah, uh, sex, fucking, you know cause you sort of just er…mash stuff together down there gopping all over each other until everybody's a worn-out wreck." Ulric said, in what Varda would have regarded as the best attempt a man ever made at never doing a thing he described doing again, if a planet cared to pay attention to the things crawling across its surface.
Taipan was now aiming the pointed consideration her eyes took on when she was making a particularly tricky bow shot at him. She did not actually have her bow off her back so he wasn't immediately concerned but his socks had been finely marinaded this day.
"Glade Chief, firstly, it is well that I know this habit of yours to attempt humor through gross exaggeration and irony, and that your comment just now is just that, as I would otherwise be tempted to put another arrow in you for referring to my sex as an 'ugly'. Which it is not.” The Elf informed him calmly.
“As you had better know if you ever plan to see it again." Growled his Shadow warningly.
Back to her overly casual tone she continued reining him in gently, "Secondly, it is also well that you have not ever attempted lovemaking in the way you have just described or I doubt Hal'et would ever have let you walk from her boudoir with all your fingers attached. For myself, I will simply remind you that we are alone in the wilds and no man, woman, or beast will ever find you should I decide that to be the case."
"Yes ma'm." Ulric apologized, having no doubt whatsoever that out here, after dark, it would be unlikely he'd ever actually know from what direction he'd been killed in cold blood.
Taipan was a formidable woman all day but it was when the Twins faded that she became truly frightening. Nightblade was a rather narrowly focused class built around assassination from the shadows and she'd been practicing its finer aspects for around thirty or forty years.
"Good, Glade Chief. It is just as well that you are so attentive in the act of sexing me or I would be less generous and you less full of blood." Said his Shadow without a single indication as to whether or not she was joking.
She had a certain history with regard to that latter part and a poker face that a Senator about to cut corporate tax rates would weep for. Such was the danger of snake handling, you always took a chance when you handled them, no matter how comfortable the two creatures might be with one another.
However, she had let him off the hook so Ulric would not look this gift horse in the mouth.
"You are wise and merciful and beautiful Taipan. Your sexy bits are not ugly, are in fact biological art sculpted by the hands of the gods to reflect the magnificence of your line and I will treat them with the respect they are due for all of mine days." Ulric capitulated, choosing the path of the only hope for valorous men to die of old age.
A simple acknowledging nod and a shimmy of hips intended to remind him of his place in this world were all the subsequent sign that Taipan was willing to forgive Ulric's poor jest. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. He refused to stop playing the game though, her laugh was worth the risks, a magic all its own. Ulric almost failed to note that his Shadow had very adeptly sidestepped his question to leave his curiosity unsatiated.
It was a funny old world was this Varda. On the one hand, a man was surrounded by mystery and splendor and sights fantastic. On the other most of those mysteries were actually wyrd riddles designed to test the mettle of all who encountered them, the splendors were contested over with metal, blood, and fire, and the sights fantastic frequently hid traps to slay the unwary.
Ulric wouldn't have it any other way.
