Book 4 Chapter 55: Conflicting Values

++As other families breed for wealth or status, so do the magician families breed for talent. The years have made these generational efforts very pronounced in effect. A dribble of Voret generic material is like unto a river of nitroglycerin.++

- Aravon Voret; perhaps unsurprisingly, pitching a marriage offer

A month passed after my breakthrough with the mask.

With the artifact restored to something approximating full functionality, the flow of divine power was orders of magnitude greater than before. Enough so that, to actually manipulate it in any way safely, I could only carry out my experiments in my pocket space. The leyline near my first refinery may have stifled the magical signature, or it may not. I simply did not know enough about divine magic to be certain of how it would interact with such a large volume of purely arcane power. The risks were perhaps not that great, but the price of failure was essentially beaming my precise location paired with the words; ‘something dangerous and unknown is afoot, come quick!’ to the world’s Demigods.

Perhaps I could take chances like that if these experiments ever yielded the fruit of true divine power of my own. Until that day, I would remain cautious and resume my shield of secrecy from the threat of divine fire.

And it was looking, more and more, like these experiments would yield fruit. The initial hurdle of actually making the magic do more than nothing having been cleared, Sethira and I had graduated to the stage of probing it in different ways, with different frequencies and at different times. Mindlessly agitating the mana from without and noting down each new way in which it behaved.

Most efforts did not result in it doing anything at all, divine magic was vastly more inert than the arcane kind, but each reaction was more knowledge.

More knowledge let us better aim our next probes, marginally raising their success rate, reducing the time until we triggered another reaction. The next reaction, always, meant more knowledge.

It was not the sort of experimentation that would have worked with Nu’chista’s flesh. The Demigod had gone essentially catatonic by now, staring out vacantly at nothing from his cage while Sethira and I worked. It was a shame I had long since finished my experimentations upon him, because he seemed to have finally evolved into the perfect test subject.

Still, I was hardly going to complain. With such a wealth of knowledge at my fingertips now, prospects of pseudo or full divinity were rising by the day. I still could not produce an estimate of exactly when I would manage to make myself even a prototypical divine body, perhaps years or more, but I did know that it would happen. The hypothetical had turned into the theoretical, and now I simply needed to further that transformation into the practical.

The most vital step for that was so obvious that only a drooling simpleton could possibly have missed it. Sethira differed from my opinion in what that was, of course. Uncharacteristically stupid of her.

For her part, she was attempting to establish a link between divine energy and the Depths, hoping to use the artifact and its mana signature as a sort of mechanism by which she might manipulate the undercurrents of reality.

Utterly laughable compared to my own, brilliant scheme. I was aiming to find a way to reliably convert arcane mana into divine magic and vice-versa.

Now that I was producing predictable reactions from the divine mana, I was able to infer a few more of its qualities. It was far, far denser than arcane magic, akin to the disparity between coal coke and dry leaves as far as energy density went. Greater, if anything. In theory this allowed it to do the same tasks but faster. Provided one did not run out, one could essentially use divine magic as a force multiplier for whatever they might do with arcane mana.

As always, though, there was a hitch; this density went both ways. It blew up the power requirement of any magic or spellwork by a proportional amount. If one wanted to use divine magic to output, say, twice as much energy, one needed to have twice as much mana to fuel that output.

That was a problem for later, however. Right now I still needed to make the conversion in the first place. That was proving immensely tricky for all the reasons a person familiar with mana would guess.

My ultimate problem was that the mask did not serve as a source of outputting divine energy, whatever power it held seemed to be deeply covered within it. If my damned eyes worked to perceive divine mana as well as arcane mana, I could uncover the secret with a glance, but as things stood I could not even verify whether it was equivalent to an enchantment, let alone how it worked if it was.

Fortunately, Sethira and I had ample room to pursue our different approaches in the vast void of my pocket space. Unfortunately, we were held in proximity by the presence of both the mask, now the most important thing either of us had access to, and Nu’chista.

Yes, just a month after our initial breakthrough, the Demigod became important again. His body was an active, living thing that used divine magic just as my father’s did arcane. Prodding and studying that was the natural answer to working out where the energy came from.

A source detail worth noting: this chapter was copied without consent from the author's publishing page, where reading supports the writer.

Sethira seemed to have similar ideas, though, and so we began to get in one another’s way.

Neither of us has ever been patient, nor tolerant of inconvenience. We yelled, we shrieked; we did, in fact, hurl magic missiles at one another more than once, though never quite with lethal intent. At least not factoring in our new bodies. It was a great clash of wills such as we had not experienced since the last time we worked together, intense enough that I was actually given a reprieve from Sethira ogling me right up until she started accusing me of attempting to deliberately distract her out of spite with my backside.

That she happened to be right was no excuse for the unfounded accusation in my view, and so it started another row between us which ended only with a distant explosion rather like a train crash in force.

We cooled off after that. Somewhat.

I headed off to take some time to myself, while Sethira did much the same but in another direction. We had both grown rather over-accustomed to one another’s company of late. Sometimes I feared we were too alike to bear one another’s presence for long, planetary egos have a tendency to collide.

Where Sethira went, I did not know, but I simply retired to the comfort of my new mansion. It was long finished by now and all but sparked in the sun, a great testament to Vornholt wealth and connections. Most of history’s great kings and emperors stayed in palaces that were smaller than my new home. That was by design. It was certainly no Dread Fortress Of Unfathomable Darkness, but it was a vaguely Dread Fortress-shaped step in the right direction, and that soothed me whenever I retired to it.

I kept my mansion as scantily-staffed as possible, having maintained a general dislike for people throughout both of my existences and only reluctantly tolerating the need to have mortal labourers around to prepare the food, hot baths and heated bedding that my new body found so pleasurable. Besides those working for me, there was a single, new exception to the contents of my mansion. My new husband.

Ilgryn seemed to have settled in rather nicely, despite how unusual our marriage arrangement actually was in Garamon. Perhaps it helped that we were relatively far from all the political nerve centres of the world.

Whenever we returned to Garamon, or set foot in one of the higher-society spaces of Poloira, he would likely be subjected to the sort of mockery that might flay a normal man. This world was funny about that. Women were not just beneath men by nature, but by necessity. A man needed women beneath him to prove he was a man, and a wife who stood as his equal, let alone superior, was the greatest possible notch taken out of his masculinity.

But Ilgryn did not seem to mind. I was not certain why, perhaps he just understood how stupid the whole notion was. For whatever reason, my new husband appeared immunized against the casual mockeries of wider society. It was no doubt part of why we got along so well—he did not find my very existence a challenge to his identity.

He was reading when I entered. A book in one hand, his other resting on the head of a cat.

Ilgryn liked cats. He had gotten three, or rather brought three with him, since moving into my mansion. Two dogs too, both ridiculously large, doting creatures that seemed to sense how much I did not care for their company and take it as some sort of personal challenge to change my mind through the application of suffocating friendliness. My husband looked up and smiled at me as I made my way over to an armchair.

“You look like you’re in a good mood,” Ilgryn remarked dryly. “Something happen?”

“It is none of your business,” I growled, leaning back for a moment and trying to relax, working the bundled anger out of my joints. When I looked back, Ilgryn was frowning at me, eyes frosted over.

“I don’t know why you’re in such a bad mood, but I know it’s not because of me,” he said icily. “So I’d appreciate it if you didn’t use me to vent your frustration about it.”

My instinct was to argue, and I prepared to do so. Then I met his eyes and saw that there was no hostility in them, just a stern stare of…disappointment.

It made me think about other disappointments, about family, and about my oaths to family. It made me feel momentarily petulant and immature.

“I am sorry,” I said at last. Apologies always tasted bitter on my tongue and threatened to burn it on their way out.

Ilgryn met my gaze and nodded shortly. “Good. Okay, thank you. I know this is all still new, but I don’t intend to have this be the sort of relationship where one of us just…takes things out on the other. Not me with you, and not you with me. I’ve seen that happen before. I don’t want it in my own home.”

He had a way of wording everything that infuriated me. He was contradicting me, instinct told me to turn this into an argument, but I could not fault what he was saying nor how he was saying it. A uniquely frustrating sensation followed, one of pent up irritation and no outlet I could rightly use for it.

At the end of the day, I had seen the sort of household he was talking about as well. I did not want it either.

The talk of households, however, brought us back on to another matter.

“We need to have a child soon,” I told Ilgryn. I was thinking of the fae queen as I said it. The sooner I squared that upstanding debt, the sooner I could begin negotiating other, more favourable deals from my newly strengthened position.

Ilgryn did not react the way I thought he would.

He leaned back, eyes widening and face stiffening, one hand curling into a fist around his book and the other lifted up over the cat to keep from hurting it while those fingers did the same. He took only a second to smooth his features over and reply, but it was long enough. “I’d sooner wait a while,” he told me evenly. He said it with enough control that his true feelings were barely audible.

Audible, though, they still were. “Okay,” I replied. I was not sure what this was, but I had a few suspicions. Ilgryn seemed to like me and enjoy my company. He just did not have any interest in my body. I felt irritation burn again. I needed children, they were vital pieces in the next stage of my grand game.

And yet I had given Agrian my word, all those years ago, about how I would treat family, and forcing myself on Ilgryn was as flagrant a violation of that as I could imagine.

I took my leave in silence.