011 - New Gihn II: Kindling
“It’s a common misconception that only mages—Players, in other words—have Semblances. All sapient characters do, whether Player or NPC. Of course, every Player-led hermetic tradition has its own conceptions… but since you’re asking for my opinion, imagine a celestial body traveling through the vacuum of space. It would have mass and that mass warps spacetime in what we observe as gravity. Your Semblance is the gravity of your mind, and the force that it exerts on metareality is magic. Modern neuro-mediated VR systems being what they are, as far as the gamemaster AI is concerned, Player consciousness is magic.”
-Excerpt from video “Dirge Magic Basics” by Player Blackbright of Karravar [kava], posted August 17, 2119.
The New Gihn revolutionaries moved as one, coordinated in their movements like a shoal of predatory fish.
But three of them broke from the pack, sprinting up the sheer rock walls of the terrain around them, only to launch themselves down at Benessel from three different angles.
Benessel could probably handle it. But battles were often decided by initiative and momentum.
Ai tilted her hand, forming a simple circle with her thumb and forefinger—her sigil. Her Semblance reached out, grasping the concepts of [Precision] and [Force] in a variation of the kinetic spell she’d used on Balala days before.
[Focused-Force]-[Rapid-Repetition]-[Precision].
She flicked her finger three times.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
Invisible hammers of force slammed into the foreheads of the diving mages. Their momentum was instantly halted as their eyes rolled back in their heads and they went limp in mid-air.
Ai wove a quick secondary net of [Air]-[Cushion] beneath them before they could fall to their deaths. She wasn’t heartless.
They hit the sand with soft thumps, unconscious but alive.
Benessel blinked, looking up at the empty air where his attackers had been a second ago. He caught sight of Ai high above, and raised his fist in a quick salute.
Ai returned it.
The remaining revolutionaries faltered, confused by the sudden neutralization of their vanguard. The flow of their [River] stuttered.
Benessel seized the moment.
“Baior! Now! Full charge!”
Baior and the other Domga riders roared and kicked their mounts into a frenzy. The golden light of [United-Charge] flared to life again as Benessel’s Semblance pressed down onto reality, brighter and more violent than before.
This time, there was no kinetic barrier in their way. The revolutionaries scattered, realizing too late that a river couldn’t stop a stampede. Heavy cavalry slammed into the wyrmbone gate.
Iron screamed in protest and hardened bone shattered as the gates of New Gihn flew inward, torn from their hinges and crushing the barricades behind them. The Avnan soldiers poured into the courtyard, Benessel and Baior at their head.
“Breach!” Baior screamed, his voice thick with battle-lust. “For Iorec!”
Ai didn’t wait to watch the melee. She dropped from the sky, her robes snapping in the wind as she dove toward the fortress. She pulled out of the dive just above the heads of the combatants, blurring past the chaotic melee in the courtyard.
She saw Sari and Balala surging through the ruined gate in the rear, the Orgawyr roaring as it tossed a brave but foolish defender aside with a sweep of its tail.
She saw Benessel dueling with a pair of New Gihn karra as they danced fluidly around him.
She saw Baior dismount his Domga to engage in melee combat with a muscle-bound rebel.
She saw Avnan soldiers maintain the [United-Charge] as they barreled through barricades and knocked over anything that stood in their way.
Ai ignored all of it as she flew past, and landed lightly on the packed earth in front of the cave entrance, dust swirling around her sandals.
The entrance was a gaping maw in the red rock, ten meters wide and pitch black. Dark as it was, Ai could feel the ancient Ve’un that protected the settlement, likely extending deep underground. It had probably been here for centuries, perhaps even millennia, used by the ancient Gihn for protection against the Veh.
“I know you’re there.” she called out into the darkness.
Movement stirred in the shadows.
Five figures emerged from the gloom, stepping into the sunlight to block the cave mouth.
They weren't the scimitar-wielding skirmishers who had fought outside. These men wore armor-cloaks of heavy, reinforced wyrmleather, their faces obscured by cowls.
“You will go no further, oppressor,” the figure in the middle hissed. He threw back his hood, revealing a young face barely in his twenties, if that, marred by a jagged, blackened scar on his cheek.
Behind him, the others did the same. They were all young. Too young.
“I’m not here for you,” Ai said, her voice calm. “Step aside. I’m here to retrieve Captain Iorec. Where's Inneol?”
There was murmuring at the mention of both names.
“Brother Inneol is extracting the oppressor captain’s final secrets as we speak,” the scarred youth spat. “He is not to be disturbed by the likes of you.”
“Look, I don’t want to hurt you,” Ai sighed, “And your friends out there are getting trampled by my friends. It’s over. Just walk away.”
The youth smiled with one too many teeth.
“Over?” he laughed, a brittle, cracking sound. “We are but [Kindling]. Gihn’s [Liberation] has only just begun.”
He raised his hands, and the four behind him mirrored the gesture. Ai felt the shift in reality instantly.
[Soul]-[Sacrifice]-[Ignition].
On the back of each youth’s neck, the Burned Brand flared to life, and that was what it was called, Ai now knew. The Brand screamed its presence into the ears of everyone who could hear its fury—
The four younger men grunted in sudden pain, while the scarred mage began to laugh as reality crackled around them. The younger men became somehow lesser to Ai’s senses, while the scarred mage became greater for their sacrifice.
[Their-Fire] was [Kindling] for [His-Fire].
He screamed, his eyes rolling back until only the whites showed.
[His-Fire] was [Kindling] for [GihnInneol].
Reality screamed under the sudden, violent transaction. The air around the five mages distorted, the light bending around them as they burned away their life force—the metaphysical essence of their existence, to force the universe to accept their demands. The heat radiating from them wasn't just thermal, but their souls grinding against the laws of physics to set her aflame.
Ai hated it when the game forced her to fight victims, because that was what they very clearly were. She formed her sigil.
The scarred youth thrust his hands forward. A torrent of violet fire, fueled by the very life force of he and his young friends, erupted towards her.
“[Burn]!” The young man shrieked. “Burn for our [Liberation]! Burn for [Gihn]!”
Ai stared at the inferno rocketing towards her.
In the game, and therefore in Varrah, there was no verifiable "soul" implemented as a game mechanic. There was no single stat, no independently verifiable thing that could be quantified as such on a character sheet. Despite the high fantasy setting, the magic system was brutally material.
However, different casting traditions developed by the player base had formed their own understanding of what the essence of a human being was. Those of a more philosophical bent tended to wax poetic about the ‘essence’ of a person, or perhaps the weight of their actions. Those more interested in natural science tended to be more mechanistic in their spellcraft.
But all of them, one and all, eventually settled on approximating the human condition with the metaphysical weight of their existence: their Semblance.
From a certain point of view, Semblance was the measure of your personal narrative when held up against the world’s. These young men, these children, were not merely up-casting a spell beyond their skill. They were using the essence of their very existence as mere [Fuel].
Ai watched the skin on the scarred youth’s hands blister and crack, not from the heat of the fire he projected, but because his body was forgetting how to hold itself together under the weight of a spell he wasn’t ready to handle. Behind him, the four other youths convulsed, their eyes rolling back into their heads as their Brands also pulsed with a greedy, parasitic rhythm.
[Their-Fire] was [Kindling] for [His-Fire] was [Kindling] for [GihnInneol].
The spell was essentially a pyramid scheme of spiritual cannibalism.
Worse, Ai could tell, now that she was up close, that the connection was baked into the structure of the Brand itself. In other words, it would remain open no matter what she did, unless she was able to figure out how to remove the Brand without killing the boys.
They had been made to tithe their "souls" to someone else, to that mage called Inneol.
Povi. These boys. The so-called New Gihn revolutionaries. Inneol would answer for what he had done. A cold fury ignited in Ai’s chest.
It was the same fury she had felt when she saw her parents’ health insurance deny coverage for "pre-existing conditions." The same fury she felt when she learned that [TheZeusIsLoose] and his guild of murderhobos preyed on NPCs and desperate newbies alike, grinding them down to fuel the ambitions of the few.
Ai unleashed her astronomical Semblance, just for a moment.
If Karravar Benessel was a whale swimming in the sea of existence, displacing reality with his sheer mass, and Sari was a playful porpoise, then the New Gihn mages were perhaps predatory fish like barracuda—dangerous, yes, but small fry.
[Ayle of Berenna]—Ai Kanbara—was the tide. She was the current, the swell of the sea itself.
She didn't bother countering the boys’ spell as she strode towards them. In Dirge terms, their collective Semblance, even as they were burning their very existence to fuel their magic, was barely C-Rank. Against her SSS-Rank existence, they were mayflies.
The flames vanished instantly. The scarred youth stumbled forward, his momentum unchecked, eyes wide.
“W-what...?" he rasped, his voice sounding thin, as if his vocal cords were fading away.
"You’re done." Ai declared.
She raised her hand, letting her forefinger coil as if to flick something. She didn't want to hurt them—they had hurt themselves enough—but she needed them unconscious immediately to sever the active link of the spell.
She flicked her finger against the air and applied [Force] against the boys.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.
Five invisible hammers struck five foreheads with surgical precision. The youths crumpled to the dusty floor of the cave entrance as if their strings had been cut.
Ai landed softly beside them, her robes settling around her ankles. Aru poked his head out from her hood, whining softly at the smell of burning ozone and charred meat, somehow made worse by the burning of the Brands.
"I know, buddy, it smells awful." Ai murmured, reaching back to scratch his chin.
She knelt by the scarred leader, pressing two fingers to his Brand. Thankfully, it had deactivated when he lost consciousness. The violent flow of energy that had been fueling his [Fire] was gone.
But even as he and his compatriots slept, a thin, insidious thread of their essence was leaking away, drawn down into the earth towards the darkness of the cave.
"Inneol’s still drawing from them," Ai growled, "Which means this won’t end until he does."
She stood up, turning her gaze to the gaping maw of the tunnel entrance.
"Aru," Ai commanded, "Track him down—there should be another scent here. We’re going hunting."
Aru poked his head out of her hood, sniffing the air. He gave a sharp bark and pointed his snout towards the tunnel.
"Good boy." Ai patted him on the head, earning her a happy huff.
Ai sped into the darkness, hot on Inneol’s tail.