Guild Mage: Apprentice-Chapter 163. The Eagle’s Nest

When Liv opened her eyes again, at first she wasn’t certain how much time had passed. The sun hadn’t descended yet - it was still day. There were more clouds in the sky, she thought, and a few isolated flakes of snow were falling down, tossed on gusts of wind that made them dance. The stench of burned meat made her wrinkle her nose, and she rolled over to see that the carcass of the giant eagle was still there. The absence of scavengers told her that she'd only lost consciousness for a moment or two.

Liv rolled onto her knees, and couldn’t help but cry out from the pain in her ribs. Instinctively, she reached over with her right hand to touch her side. Small bumps moved along the bones of her ribcage, pressing and tearing at her flesh unnaturally. She needed to get to Arjun, before the magic from the Well of Bones got any worse.

Her first instinct was to call out for her friends, or to send up a signal using her magic, but Liv hesitated. How much distance had they opened between themselves and Benedict’s troops? She didn’t have a clear answer, but she was certain they would have seen lightning falling on the mountain peaks. Maybe she should call a few more bolts down in other places, just to confuse them.

A bat swooped down from overhead, and Liv exhaled in relief - then hissed at the pain in her broken ribs. She reached up a hand and waved to Wren. The bat circled once, then flew back up the mountain slope. Liv managed to get herself in a sitting position, so that she could wait without falling over.

She wasn’t left alone for long: Wren returned, leading Arjun, Rose and Sidonie. “Everyone in one piece?” Liv called to them.

“You managed to get us down to the ground just fine,” Sidonie said, walking over to the corpse of the eagle. As Liv watched, the other woman unbuckled the notebook she wore strapped to her belt, opened to a new page, and produced a small pot of ink and a quill pen. “Classic growth to extreme size,” she muttered. “Definitely a mana beast.”

“You’re hurt,” Arjun said, kneeling down at Liv’s side. “Where?”

“Broke my ribs,” Liv said. “When I hit the ground. I can feel the bones crawling.”

“Can you fix her up?” Rose asked the dark-haired boy. She stood close to Liv, with one hand on the hilt of her sword, and scanned the area. Liv wasn’t certain whether her shoulder was healed enough to use the weapon - it hadn’t even been two days since her arm was dislocated, even with Arjun’s healing.

“I can heal the fractures,” Arjun said. His fingers pressed against Liv’s side, probing, and she gritted her teeth against the pain. “But I can’t re-enchant those ribs without opening her up again to get a look at the sigils and work on them.”

Liv shook her head. “It took you weeks last time,” she said. “We can’t afford to stop somewhere for that long. Just give me a bit of healing. Wren, did you see where the rift is?”

The bat, which had been circling overhead, came in for a landing and shifted, expanding into a silhouette of blood briefly before reverting to Wren’s human form. The huntress lifted her arm to point upslope from where Liv had finally rolled to a halt.

“There,” Wren said. “The summit. It’s bare rock, a sharp ridge with hardly room to walk. The eagles have a nest up there, built on top of Vædic machinery. I didn’t see anything like a waystone, but there’s installations all along the ridge.”

“Perhaps that’s why no one’s realized there’s a rift here,” Sidonie speculated. She’d set her book down on the ground, opened to a fresh page, and was now busy drawing the eagle. “That whole peak is bare rock. There can’t be much wildlife up there, so the mana from the rift isn’t growing many mana beasts.”

“Just the eagles,” Liv said, then sighed in relief as the warmth of Arjun’s healing magic flooded into her ribs. It no longer hurt to breathe: the sharp pains went away, leaving only the horrid crawling feeling as her bones writhed beneath her skin. It was still painful, and Liv closed her eyes for a moment, then circulated mana to the area. Everything felt wrong, and she pressed forward, flattening the wrong spots, smoothing them just as her father had taught her.

For the moment, her bones stilled. It was enough, even if Liv doubted that it would last.

“Can we cook some of this up before it goes bad?” Liv asked Wren.

“We should,” the huntress agreed, and took out her knife to set to work dressing the kill. Liv supervised the building of a cooking fire, then reached out to the clouds above to fill them with raw, electrical power. By the time she was finished working on the ice overhead, jagged forks of lightning stabbed down intermittently, all across the nearby peaks. It would have to be enough. Something about calling the lightning had put a stop to the falling snowflakes, which Liv took to be a benefit.

The meat of the eagle was tough and gamey, with a hint of rabbit. It wasn’t a meal that Liv would have sought out, but the explosion of mana on her tongue, spilling out from her belly with every bite she swallowed, made the meal worth it. From the uncooked part of the kill, Wren drank blood that was still fresh enough to be warm, though Liv noticed that Rosamund turned away from the sight. Sidonie, as always, had questions.

“Is blood from mana beasts more powerful than blood from regular animals?” she asked, quill pen poised to take further notes by firelight. “And how does each compare to human blood?”

Wren groaned, and wiped her mouth in an attempt to clean herself up. “Anything with mana in it is better - a mana beast or a mage. Which is strange, because we can’t actually use mana ourselves. Don’t ask me how it all works, I don’t know.”

“I assume we’re climbing up to the summit tomorrow,” Arjun said, coming over to sit by Liv’s side, opposite Rosamund.

Liv nodded. “Yes. If there’s any more of those eagles, we can’t risk travelling by air until we’ve killed them. And if we can get up to the shoal, we can use that for you all to practice. We might even be able to learn something from the ruined machinery. And if the troops do come after us, we’ll see them coming. There’s no cover up on that rock face.”

“I don’t particularly want to fall off the side of a mountain,” Rose pointed out.

“For what it’s worth, I expect the shoal extends down from the very summit,” Liv said. “I don’t think we’ll have to go all the way up right away.” She considered for a moment. “Do you think you can make the way up any easier?”

“Not if it's stone,” Rose admitted, with a slump of her shoulders. “That’s an entirely different word of power. I can only do anything with soil. I mean, I can carry stone along with the soil, like I did to get us to the Foundry Rift - but that’s like using Aluth to make a flat surface and carry something. I didn’t actually use magic on the stone, directly. And if there’s no topsoil up there, I won’t be able to affect it.”

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“That’s fine,” Liv said, and patted the other girl on the leg. Then, she winced: her ribs were beginning to crawl again. With a quick incantation, she raised another shelter of ice, and crawled inside. There, she gingerly laid herself down flat on her back, and closed her eyes. If she was going to be climbing a mountain, she needed to be able to move without her bones ripping at her flesh.

Liv focused on circulating her mana. Now that she was reunited with her friends, and had shelter from the chill of the mountain nights, she could afford to do this properly. She dove into her own body, smoothing out all the bruises and scrapes that had come from days of fighting. She worked on the mostly-healed leg wound, where Arianel Seton had propelled a shard of silver straight through her. But it was three ribs on her left side that stubbornly resisted Liv’s best efforts.

She was only partly aware of her friends joining her, as the night went on, but Liv wasn’t truly asleep - not like they were, filling the dome of ice with soft breaths and the heat of their bodies. It was odd: she hadn’t slept so close to another person since that one drunken evening with Cade, and now two nights in a row they were all crammed together for warmth.

It was not difficult to smooth the breaks in the ribs: Arjun had already done most of the work for her. Liv suspected that the sigils themselves, carved into the bone, would now be almost entirely whole. The problem was that the enchantment had already been broken, at the moment the ribs snapped. For that part of her body, it was gone, leaving a gap into the magic that Arjun had worked.

The bones of her ribs crawled and deformed, and Liv sent a wave of her mana to smooth them back out. They lay quiescent for a short while, like a fussy infant who had been soothed only temporarily, and then stirred again. As the dark hours stretched, she realized that the Elden technique of mana circulation was simply not going to solve her problem.

No matter how many times she returned her rib-bones to the correct shape, inevitably, the remnants of Costia’s magic went back to work, warping and twisting once again. And each distortion of Liv’s bones tore the flesh around them.

Instead, after smoothing her rib bones for the fifth time, or perhaps the sixth, Liv focused on her Authority. Nearly a year of training with Celestria Ward had been a level of frustration on the scale of her attempts to master adamant ice under her father’s tutelage, back in Whitehill. But against Calevis, at the Foundry Rift, she’d had a breakthrough. When confronted with magic that would have killed her friends, Liv had managed to use her Authority to stop it: she’d stood firm.

Now, she focused on that memory, that feeling, and tried to recreate it. The only magic that was allowed to exist in her body was her own - no one else would be permitted to force their spells onto her. Even the dim awareness Liv had of her friends, sheltering beside her, vanished, leaving only the darkness of closed eyes and night.

The fresh, cold air of a mountain morning surrounded her: the brilliance of sun on fresh fallen snow, ice-coated tree branches glittering like silver in the dawn. But beneath the snow something rotted, festered, like game meat that had been left to sit instead of smoked properly. It was disgusting - and the thought that something like that lurked in her body made Liv’s stomach roil. With instinctive disgust, she lashed out.

Liv pushed, grabbed, ripped and tore, scattering shreds of mana and magic out into the night, throwing them as far away from her as she could, where they would dissipate harmlessly, no longer anchored to a living body.

Someone was shaking her by the shoulder.

“Liv!” Arjun’s voice, but he recoiled with a gasp. “She’s cold. It’s like touching ice.”

Liv opened her eyes to the light of early dawn, filtered through the ice of the shelter she’d raised. She sat up, and there was no pain in her ribs. When she looked around, she saw that frost coated the ground inside the shelter, extending all around her, and that her friends had woken and scrambled back, nearly to the very walls of the dome.

“I’m alright,” she said. Liv tested her side out with a deep breath, and smiled when she felt nothing. “Sorry if I woke you all up. I had to deal with my ribs.”

“The enchantment?” Arjun asked, but Liv shook her head.

“I couldn’t re-enchant the sigils,” she admitted. “And healing was only a temporary solution. So I used my Authority to break Costia’s magic.”

That wasn’t the end of it, of course: once they’d all tumbled outside into the early morning, Arjun insisted on examining Liv all over again. In the meanwhile, Wren built the fire back up from the previous evening’s coals, and warmed some of the eagle-meat they’d cooked but not eaten. Liv wasn’t certain where the rest of the mana beast had gotten to, but it was clear someone had moved it out before it had begun to rot. Maybe they’d kicked it off the side of the mountain.

Once Arjun had pronounced her healthy, and then satisfied himself with everyone else’s physical state: such as Rose’s shoulder: they kicked dirt over the fire and began to make their way up toward the summit. Wren was the only one who’d seen the eagle nest, so they followed her, up past where trees and shrubs grew to the bald rock faces.

They scrambled up stretches of loose rock and scree that shifted and tumbled beneath their boots, leaning forward on their hands as often as not. The wind whipped around them, tearing at skirts like a great invisible hand that wanted to pick them up and throw them out into the open air, to fall and fall.

It was when they were within sight of the great, sharp ridge that formed the crest of the mountain that Liv finally crawled forward into the shoals. It was a familiar feeling, and oddly comforting, like walking into a wall of steam from the hot springs beneath Castle Whitehill. Adjusting to the density of mana took her hardly any effort at all, now.

“We pause here,” Liv said, and everyone gathered around, sitting or crouching on the rock, staying low to avoid the worst of the wind. “Everyone breathe the mana in, like I taught you, and focus on moving it through your body. Take your time, and be sure you’ve got it. This is a minor rift: if you can’t master this, I can’t take you into the Tomb of Celris.”

She watched as her friends closed their eyes. Arjun and Sidonie were still better at this than Rose, while Wren didn’t bother. Instead, the huntress crept forward, low to the rock face, and Liv let her go. She expected a better description of the ruins and the eagle’s nest once Wren had returned.

Instead of worrying about it, Liv allowed Aluth to stir, reaching out to sense the flows of mana as they entered her friends. She realized that, if Arjun and Sidonie hadn’t quite mastered the technique to the level Liv’s father might have expected, they were going to be alright without any help from her. Rose was a different matter.

The dark haired girl was breathing in just fine: no one got to the point of being an apprentice at Coral Bay without having mastered that. Deliberate breath control not only helped to center a mage, but was key to allowing an incantation to vibrate up through the body from the belly.

Once the mana of the rift entered Rose’s mouth, however, and spilled down her throat, she kept losing control of it. Liv knew that if her friend didn’t get a handle on it, she’d come away with a case of mana sickness. But that was part of why they’d come up here, wasn’t it? A chance to practice without interruption.

Liv shifted, moving over to sit just in front of Rosamund. “Down through the throat,” she said, “into the lungs. And then out, into your arms.” The next breath took mana to the girl’s lungs, right enough, but it was all concentrating in her torso instead of moving on.

“Here,” Liv said. “This way.” She put her hands on Rosamund’s chest, then lightly traced her fingers out to the girl’s arms. “Follow me.” Haltingly, the mana moved, as if Liv was drawing it after her like beads of water on a piece of glass. “Good,” she encouraged. “Good.”

When she was confident that Rose had that piece, Liv guided her on. “Now down into the legs,” she said, keeping her voice low, and tracing her fingers down. It was only when, finally, she could see the proper circulation, that she sat back, allowed Aluth to return to slumber, and looked up to where Wren had returned and was now waiting with Sidonie and Arjun.

“What did you see?” Liv asked.

“One other bird,” Wren said. “Eggs in the nest, half a dozen or so of them. It’s going to be real tough to move up there - there’s no actual flat surface before the nest. The rock just comes up at an angle on both sides and meets like this.” She held the fingers of both hands up at an angle, to form something like an arrowhead.

“Can we even walk up there at all?” Sidonie asked, with a frown.

“I think you could sort of lean into the rock, and probably use one hand to hold on,” Wren said. “But if you want to kill the bird, it’s going to be pure casting. There’s no way we could fight with knives or swords or anything.”

“That’s fine,” Liv said. “I have a few ideas. As long as there’s enough room to kill the eagle without damaging the Vædic ruins.” She looked up the rock slope, and rose to her feet. “Let’s move along then. The sooner we get up there, the sooner we’ll be safe to fly again.”