Beers and Beards

Chapter 32: Burn it with Fire

It turns out that Diamond is a fairly powerful mage.

I say that because I had a front row seat watching her wipe out the entirety of the swarm by herself. The guards kind of helped, mostly by acting as meat shields while she rained down various forms of fiery destruction. Balin had stayed behind to rest and recuperate, but my regeneration had me back at full health. Honestly, it was pretty amazing, and I was man enough to admit that Barck had given me something nice there.

My first experience with real magic was leaving me both amazed and disappointed. It was certainly awe inspiring, but there was a lot less ‘Oh fires of Gehenna strike down my enemies’ and a lot more drawing. In order to cast magic, Diamond would trace patterns in the air with a crystal-tipped wand, and a glowing trail would be left behind. Those lines of power would coalesce into a series of symbols that transformed into magical fire.

“Copperpot, this is going to get us killed!” I hissed as a trio of fireballs rocketed through the air barely two dozen paces away.

Why were we immediately walking back down the tunnel while the attack was still ongoing? Because Copperpot was a MASSIVE NERD.

“One moment.” Copperpot leaned over and examined something on the wall. “We still need to check whether or not the boomdust experiment was a success, and we can’t let something like an attack by an entire nest of monsters distract from that. ” He took a few notes while I twiddled my thumbs and worried about Lillyweather; Doc Opal had hissed and shouted and transported her back to camp. She was still alive, and they’d called for the [Healer], but it was going to be a near thing.

“Why can’t we do this later? I was almost eaten!”

“With all the guards here as well as Statustician Diamond, we don’t need to be concerned. Last time we were ambushed and had a large number of non-combatants. We now have overwhelming firepower and no civilians.”

“Except us, and the volunteers.” I looked around at the two dozen miners that were killing any worker ants that got past the guards and the fire.

“If you volunteer to fight, you’re not a civilian anymore, you’re militia. The City of Minnova Ordinances are clear on that."

“I’m not a volunteer, I’m management!”

Copperpot snickered. "All the more reason to ensure this entire thing went off without a hitch. You had a question that you wanted to ask earlier?” Copperpot closed his notebook and put it in his pocket before turning to face me.

“Oh, we’re doin’ this now? Fine, how does magic work? It’s… not quite what I expected.” I waved my hand toward the intricate light show.

“Well, explaining things to an amnesiac should make for a fun thought experiment, so why not? Do you know what the elements are?”

“Matter, Aether, Nether, and Magic.”

“Correct! I read Doctor Opal has been training you, and she’s done a fairly good job as far as I can see. Matter is the physical, Aether is the immaterial, Nether is the space in between, and Mana makes it what it is.”

“I get most of that, I just didn’t really understand Doctor Opal’s explanation of magic.” I pursed my lips. “How does ‘mana make it what it is’? Also, I thought the element was magic?”

“Ah, technically mana is the actual element, and magic is how it can be manipulated. They are often conflated. Now, let’s take this rock as an example.” Copperpot held up a piece of grey stone. “It’s almost all matter with no aether in it. Nether keeps it from breaking up into a bunch of smaller rocks.”

I translated the lesson into basic Earth chemistry as Copperpot talked. As far as I could tell, matter and aether were different forms of atoms and nether was forces, or not, because that was all earth knowledge.

“The entire stone is also filled with a small amount of mana.” Copperpot continued, breaking my train of thought. “You can’t see it without [Manasight], but the mana is what makes it rock rather than any other kind of matter.”

I thought about that for a moment. “So mana is the flavour? It’s what makes chicken taste different from beef?”

Copperpot chuckled “Yes! I’ve never heard it put that way before, but that’s pretty close.”

“How does magic work then?”

“Do you see the diagrams Diamond is drawing in the air there?”

“Yes.” We watched as she completed a rather large set of glowing circles that resolved into a curving flame that arched back and forth down the tunnel. It practically evaporated everything inside it, including another ant brood guard.

“Those are concentrated mana, which even someone without [Manasight] can see.”

“That's neat!”

“She's drawing it out of her own body using the wand as a wooden spoon and using it to cook the surrounding aether into a new spicier flavour.” Copperpot smiled, “This is a useful analogy!”

“Drawing it outta her body? That sounds dangerous.”

“It absolutely is! People that use magic without understanding it can draw out too much mana, and it isn’t pretty.”

I shivered, imagining a dwarven body losing everything that makes it ‘dwarf’. “What about the symbols?”

“It’s a lot of math and specific arcane patterns that tell the mana what flavour it needs to be. As a fire mage, she then forces that mana into the surrounding aether to transform it from savoury air flavoured aether to hot fire flavoured aether.”

“I thought she was a [Statustician]?”

“What? No, well, it’s complicated.” Copperpot pointed to a portion of the tunnel and shouted. “Rafter crew, that needs to be shored up!” I waited patiently as the rafter crew went up and repaired some damage the blast had done to the existing rafters.

“The blast damaged the tunnel further back than I was expecting. That’s good, as it means the boomdust has more power than we first thought.” Copperpot mused under his breath before turning back to me. “Where was I? Ah yes, a fire mage. [Statustician] is Diamond’s Title, but her school of study is fire magic.”

“So, you don’t need a specific Title to use fire magic?”

“A Titled [Aethershaper] could achieve similar effects, but it wouldn’t be magic. They have Blessings that allow them to change the mana of the aether directly, without needing to shape their own mana first. It’s more elegant, but limited. A mage usually refers to anyone with [Manasight] that decides to learn the magic formula necessary to change their mana and force it into their surroundings.”

“Can you tell me some more about those magic formulas?” Those were what I needed to learn to do magic on my own!

“Yes. Learning all the necessary arcane formulae for any kind of magic is a long and difficult process, so most mages focus on a single school to study. Diamond is a fire mage because fire is a powerful school. Also,” Copperpot leaned in to faux-whisper conspiratorially. “I don’t know if you noticed, but she likes red.”

“I HEARD THAT, you old curmudgeon!” Diamond called from ahead of us. Copperpot chuckled.

“There are many schools of magic, too many to list, but they all work the same. There’s a lot of math involved as well, because it isn’t just enough to memorize the symbology, you need to take into account the ambient mana as well.”

“That... sounds complicated.”

“It is. It’s why most mages are in school for nearly fifty years or more. It’s also why dragons and elves usually have more powerful mages, as they simply live longer.” He shrugged.

We walked in silence for a while as I mused on this new information. I wasn’t that hot at math, and the thought of putting in fifty more years of schooling right as I entered a new world was horrifying at best. Magic would have been worth it, but would I have been able to earn Archis’s blessing in the first place?

Honestly, at this point I was cooling off a bit about Barck’s blessing. I would have literally died twice today without it, and it really did fit me pretty well. I still have a ton of questions for a [Priest] later. Like: was the forced blessing the Gods’ way of saying, ‘Nobody else wants you’? In the meantime, regardless of the reason, Barck remains a bastard in my books for stealing my choice.

We eventually reached ground zero, and it was…

“Wow…” whispered Diamond.

“By tha Grace of Lunara…”

“Tiara’s Teats!”

“Muh leg!” We all turned to one dwarf that was beating in the charred head of an ant that had somehow survived our initial onslaught. Some of the miners hustled him back up to our base camp in the dive tunnel.

“This certainly exceeded my expectations.” Copperpot mused.

“Who cares? It worked!” I hollered. I grabbed Copperpot’s hands and danced around, laughing. “It worked! Haha! We’re free! Someone go tell Balin! It’s amazin! Hell yeah boomdust!”

An enormous hole had been blasted out of the mountain, and carved a cylindrical cavern roughly five meters in diameter and twenty meters deep. The area was filled with rubble and dust and the charred bodies of ants. The guards were currently blocking a large crack in the wall that was filled with more stoneants. It was mostly worker ants attacking at this point; the soldiers and brood guards had been in the first few waves.

Copperpot extracted himself from my grasp and smiled. “Don’t get too excited Pete, we still need to complete our report. Celebrations are for the tea shop afterwards.”

“You mean the bar, come on Copperpot, give me a cheer!” I could barely contain my excitement as I took it all in.

He harrumphed and then pumped his fist. “What did you say? Hell yeah? An interesting turn of phrase. Hell yeah boomdust!” I joined in and our voices echoed off the rocks until Diamond turned an angry glare in our direction.

Copper coughed and pulled out his notebook. “Let’s stop and check the integrity of the walls, I don’t want anyone getting crushed. I wish I had my students for this, but I don’t want to risk any more of them.” His glasses telescoped outwards and he began writing.

Some time passed while the rafter crew did some raftering and Copperpot did some engineering, the guards did some guarding, and Diamond did some firing. I ended up helping Copperpot take some measurements after I got bored. Apparently, tape measures are universal.

Eventually everything was done, and Copperpot waved to the Guard Captain and Diamond. “Everything is good to go! You can head in now!”

“Aye sir! I’ll leave two guards and the militia here with you, the rest of us will go deal with the queen.”

“Make sure Diamond doesn’t destroy anything important or load-bearing! It’s not too often that we get to come in the back side of a nest like this! Leave something for the research teams!”

“I know what I’m doing, Copperpot.” Diamond huffed, as she followed the guards into the crevice.

The rest of us watched them go. The miners, mostly armed with pickaxes and thin leather armour, moved in to block the opening. A few ants trickled out, but it was clear from the sounds coming from the hole that the hive was busy dealing with something else.

“What is the queen going to be like?” I asked, as I chewed my lip.

“The queen isn’t actually that big a deal.” Copperpot said, as he sat down on a rock to rest. “She’s mostly an immobile baby factory. The bigger problem will be that she’ll have several brood guards with her.”

“Will they be able to handle it?”

“Oh, Diamond is exactly the dwarf needed to handle something like this. A narrow space with a limited number of enemies that cannot receive further reinforcements, and no need to worry about causing fires? She’ll take them apart.”

“I thought you said not to damage anything load-bearing?” I sat down beside Copperpot, only now realizing just how tired I was.

“That was just to tweak Diamond’s beard. Nothing in there should be really flammable, the ants build with saliva and stone. We just need to wait for them.”

Indeed, it was barely half an hour before the ants stopped trickling in, and then Diamond and some banged up guards emerged from the tunnel. They were carrying one guard, though they didn’t seem overly worried.

Diamond smiled at us as she approached. “Alright Copperpot, we’re done. We have an injured member, so we need to head up. I’ll leave the clean-up of the site in your expert hands.” She walked away, whistling.

Copperpot turned to watch her leave. “Damn, she got us. Alright Pete, go grab a mop and start cleaning.”

“Excuse me?”