BT - Book 1 - Chapter 101

“I really thought we were past this sort of thing.” Jo stood shirtless facing away from Micah, his hand on her back.  “Seriously Micah, we had that big heart to heart and everything.  I thought we made progress and then you told me to take my shirt off.   At least buy a girl some flowers or something first.”

“It’s not like I’d be seeing anything new,” Micah responded, his eyes closed as he tried to focus on the muted flow of energy inside Jo.  “Sometimes, when you had a little wine in you-”

“Okay,” Jo cut him off, shivering slightly.  “This is a little creepy.  It’s more than a little weird that you remember us having sex and I don’t.  It’s like throwing a birthday party only to let someone else open all of the presents.”

“They’re a very fetching pair of presents, now less talking and more concentrating.  I want you to really crank your blessing.  Put everything you have into it.”  Micah’s forehead furrowed as he tried to make sense of the webwork of mana inside Jo’s body.

She stiffened, and the glowing streams of mana slowed to a crawl, dimming until he could barely tell the difference between them and the muscles they coursed through.  Micah bit his lower lip, forcing his perception deeper into Jo’s body, until he found her very core.

To his sightless perception, it looked like a crystal.  A translucent container that tasted like Mursa’s magic as it held back the thinnest wisp of mist.  As he watched, the raw cloud of energy that was Jo in the truest sense of the word twisted and sparkled inside its enclosure.

A second later, a rune began to glow on the outside of the crystal, twinkling faintly like a constellation made up of a thousand distant stars.

Micah leaned forward, his forehead almost touching against Jo’s bare back as his eager breath brushed over her skin.  She shuddered, goosebumps blossoming from his proximity.  Reflexively, Jo brought both of her hands across her chest, covering herself as she glanced back at Micah.

He didn’t even notice, his attention drawn to the impossible complex geometric shapes dancing across the surface of the gem he somehow instinctively identified as Jo’s soul.  Micah struggled with their intricacy.  The most remote corner of the runes contained almost immeasurable numbers of impossibly thin lines tracing designs that he almost couldn’t discern.

Micah needed to know what those impossible runes were.  After years of study in runecrafting, he could barely identify some of their functions.  One looked like an energy gathering and transference sigil, except the linework used to craft it was neater and more complex than any human hand could replicate.  Another was a variant on the sonic runes he used in his spear, but if his attempts at enchanting were the clumsy attempts of a petulant and particularly dull child, this rune was the life’s work of a grand-master.

Simply observing the intricate patterns seemed to clear up dozens of questions that had nagged him for years, but just as he was beginning to understand a corner of the drawings on Jo’s soul, they began to fade.  Desperate not to lose sight of the enchantment, Micah pushed.  Not physically, but with his mind.

Jo gasped as a wave of icy mist pulsed out from Micah’s immobile form before forming into a tendril of smoke that buried itself in her back.  Her entire body shuddered, spasming against MIcah’s forehead, but he barely paid it any attention.

Micah’s perception lurched forward, pushing its way through the crude meat and veins that made up Jo’s body as it quested toward her very core. A second later, he was right next to the crystal that contained her.

Vaguely he could feel Jo radiating from the enclosure, her impulsiveness, quick wit, and easy humor.  All of it pressed against Micah in a cacophony of sounds, images and smells that sought to distract him from the dimming rune.

He didn’t let it.  Reaching out with a tendril of mist, Micah brushed his perception over the glittering pattern.  It flared in his mind, all obscurity forgotten as it seared itself into his memory.

Micah fell backward, hands clutching his eyes as he let out a strangled groan of agony.  The rune pulsed brighter, it’s blue white whorls and lines burning hot in his vision as he hit the ground, whimpering.

His eyes opened, but nothing changed.  Outside of the pulsing rune that filled the center of Micah’s sight, the rest of the world was nothing but a muted and blurry grey.  Somewhere he could hear Jo shouting his name, but she might as well have been an ocean away.

He blinked again, ears ringing.  The swooping curls and geometric lines of blue fire still throbbing in his vision, albeit slightly dimmer.  Distantly, Micah noticed that his lip was wet and the iron taste of blood on his tongue.

A slim hand grabbed his shoulder, shaking him.  Jo’s face was blurry above him, her mouth moving as she shouted something he couldn’t quite make out over the steady tone of tinnitus.

That he could see her was a good sign.  The rune was still visible through his watering eyes, but it was fading noticeably.  A hopeful sign.

“-cah!” Jo was shouting.  She slapped him across the cheek, shaking the cobwebs from his thinking.  Micah looked up at her.

Other than a splitting headache and faint ringing in his ears he was all right.  Given that he was worried that his escapades might have blinded him barely ten seconds ago, that was a result Micah was more than happy with.

“Okay.”  Jo took a deep calming breath, eyes closed.  “Now that you seem to have more or less recovered.

“What in the name of the fucking Sixteen,” she growled at him, eyes snapping open as she grabbed Micah by his lapel and stared down at him, “was that.  I could feel you inside me.  Usually I’d make some sort of sex joke about that, but just before you collapsed, I saw things.  Those fucking daemons bound by chains of fire.  Mists sweeping out of a yawning portal in your chest, melting the very fabric of reality round you.”

“I’m trying to be calm, Micah.”  Her voice cracked, and Micah couldn’t help but notice that the hand holding his shirt was shaking.  “But that was absolutely terrifying.  I need to know what just happened and NOW.”

Micah blinked at her again, mechanically noticing that with her hand on his shirt, Jo’s bare chest was completely visible.

“I,” he began only to break down coughing.  “I was trying to inspect how your blessing worked.”

“Yes,” Jo cut him off.  “I remember.  Still probably the dumbest reason a boy has given for asking me to take off my shirt.”

“Anyway.”  Micah shook his head, trying to clear away the cobwebs.  “I couldn’t get as close of a view as I wanted so I tried to move closer.  Except you know.  I was already touching you.”

“Which was creepy.”  Jo nodded for him to continue.

“Which was creepy,” Micah agreed.  “At that point my perception shifted, and I passed directly into your body, and.  Uh.”

He stopped, suddenly aware of Jo’s gaze.  Micah scratched the back of his neck, looking away.

“I guess I touched your soul?”  His voice lilted upward, changing what should have been a statement into a question.

“There’s something like a zero percent chance you meant that in a romantic sense, isn’t there?”  Jo asked sardonically.

Micah shook his head.

“Look.”  She crossed her arms in front of her.  “I don’t know what you’ve learned hanging out with all of those daemon floozies, but you don’t just touch a girl’s soul without asking.  I don’t really have any context for what in the hells that entails, but it sounds like at least a sixth date activity.”

“Sorry.”  Micah winced.  “It’s just that the runes on your soul were fading.  I think you were running low on mana, and it felt like I would lose everything unless I did something drastic.  I didn’t expect you to be able to feel what I was doing, and I certainly didn’t expect the backlash.”

“That’s a story I’ve heard before.”  Jo rolled her eyes.  “Seriously Micah.  Most of the time you’re the most responsible person I know, and I hang out with Drekt so that means something.  Then, you just decide to risk your body in some sort of magical experiment off the cuff.  It’s not healthy.”

“Can’t really argue.”  Micah grunted as he stood up shakily.  “You can put your shirt on by the way.  You’ve been giving me a bit of a show.”

She looked down at her chest and back to Micah before snorting, flipping her hair backward before reaching down to where her shirt had been balled up near her feet.

“I suppose that’s why your nose is bleeding then?”  Jo asked rhetorically.  “At least that would be a less worrying reason than ‘I did internal damage to myself tampering with secrets that are meant only for the Gods.”

He just rolled his eyes at her, wiping the blood that had been trickling steadily from his nose since he’d been scarred by the rune with the back of his sleeve.

“Did it work at least?”  Jo asked.  “I’d hate for us to go through all of that just for the entire experiment to be a failure.”

“Perfectly.”  Micah smiled at her.  “I wasn’t able to take in the entirety of the rune, but I should be able to replicate your blessing.  It’ll take a fair amount of mana and it won’t be anywhere near as good, but it should still make me very hard to notice once I finish the enchantment.”

“Wait.”  His eyes widened.  “I just might…”

Micah stopped talking, instead summoning the Ageless Folio and frantically paging through it stopping when he reached the page detailing his exploration inside Jo.  His finger traced over the page.  There were three partial drawings, sketches of the sections of the rune that he could remember.

Still, he’d gotten a good look at the sigils and patterns of Jo’s blessing.  After all, it had been branded into his vision for about thirty seconds.  That should be more than enough for his Folio to record what Micah had seen.

He grimaced.  Jo leaned over his shoulder, reading from the Folio only to chuckle.

“Not quite yet, try again later.”  Was written on the page in neat cursive font, signed with a large stylized M.

“Looks like you have to do it the old fashioned way.”  Jo said with a smile.  “Experimentation and hard work.”

“It was a bit much to hope for.”  Micah slapped the book shut.  “But there’s nothing for it but to keep moving.  We should probably head out.  The Durgh army has gathered most of its strength from the surrounding caves and I still have a couple dozen enchantments to make if I’m going to have any chance to pull this off.”

“Sounds fun.”  Jo shrugged her armor on over her shirt.  “We should head back into the Western Tunnels.  I spotted the tracks of some pretty big cave lurkers over there.  I bet you could use one of them to power a dozen enchantments.”

Micah picked up his spear from where it sat on the ground.  Jo was right.  There was a time to overthink things, and there was a time to hunt.  He could worry about his discoveries later.