BECMI Chapter 121 – At the Tower of Daffid the Red

“Elder,” I greeted the Wizard, having announced myself with Magevoice from three miles away. I didn’t know if I was bothering Daffid the Red in the middle of something, and if he wanted to shoo me off, well, that was completely understandable. The things I’d been doing with my magic gave a lot of spellcasters the heebie-jeebies, as well as making them extremely envious of my power.

I wasn’t Rank M yet, but the escapades I’d undertaken, ruthless as they were, were still good for my advancement. Of course, I effectively had FOUR tranches of advancement to fuel, so earning massive amounts of Karma was a requirement, especially since the power of those I was opposing was only going up.

I had even directly met two Immortals, although both of them had been in mortal guises and unaware I could tell they were Immortals ahead of time.

Daffid the Red had a full head of thick red hair even into his older years, which gave him his moniker, and which he played into. He was waiting at the base of his tower as I skimmed along the surface of the mountain trail up to his abode, a thing of switchbacks and narrow foot traverses that only the most nimble of fools would dare afoot.

Most visitors came via teleportation or by flying.

“Lady Edge,” he bowed carefully to me, at once very cautious of me and also distracted by my appearance… not to mention the extremely large Bat and the impressively muscled dragon with me. “What brings you down to the south? I had heard you were… busy in the west.”

“My business in the west ended with final termination of the Khirifi. If there are a thousand of them left, I would be surprised, and the Korshwa are hunting them down as they can.” He stared at me in some disbelief. “I ignited a volcano under the ancestral temple of Gulguz and consumed the last of them with the fires they’d sacrificed so many others to over the years. They screamed as they died, just like their victims, and their god looked on and could do nothing.”

He took a deep breath. “That… is most impressive, and most disturbing, Lady Edge,” he admitted candidly. “I do not know of another spellcaster who could have prosecuted them with such speed… or such determination.

“But, please, my manners. Come inside and let us talk.”

Like most mage towers, the bottom area was the public one, with comfortable seating and a table to sit at and eat. Upstairs would be his study, library, and sleeping area.

Magic naturally was able to preserve food, and meant he could go to wherever he wanted to in order to pick it up fresh or hot or whatever.

Thus, hot bread with butter, honey, and a sprinkling of salt came with a fine elven wine from one of the coastal Ceruil clans, and was palatable all the way around. Overly-sensitive tastebud placation, successful!

“It was mentioned to me that you intended to visit the Palace of the Gods, Lady Edge,” the archmage began carefully. “The reports of how you handled yourself and your familiarity with the… advanced technology, I believe it is called, of the invaders, clearly indicated that you have some familiarity with them and the power of their devices. Nevertheless, having seen the Palace myself… are you certain you are prepared to deal with them, and the impressive number of lethal constructs that patrol for miles about the place?”

The first attempt by Darkmoor (as well as others by the Empire of Iberon) had run full into the problems that the captain of the was getting more and more mentally unstable with the pressure of his position and the conflicting demands of his crew and Federation protocols.

Those protocols manifested themselves as warbots with impressive firepower, a complete lack of mercy, and no morale problems whatsoever. Indeed, recovery protocols just recycled them if they died for reassembly by the printer-factorums inside the ship itself. They would only run out of robotic defenders if pressed for a very long time.

Between the warbots on the ground and the number of dragons in the area (who had also quickly learned to avoid the particle beams and lasers of the warbots), those who came to sight-see also tended to die rather quickly. As a result, opening diplomatic channels had not been possible.

I was going to change all that, and in doing so jumpstart the rise of the Kingdom of Darkmoor that had made itself a flaringly bright legend that had endured for four thousand years, long, long past its Doom.

“This will mean little to you, but I have the ability to access the command net and thus the command codes for the defensive automatons, allowing myself to be recognized as a friendly. I will not have the same problems with them as previous visitors.”

“I see,” he sighed, shaking his head. “The future must be powerful and learned, indeed, to treat such alien magic so carelessly.”

“It is about exchanging information. About contrasting, comparing, testing, and improving on what has come before. The Art of Magic is actually the Craft and the Science of magic. It profits immensely from free and easy exchange of information between learned individuals, practitioners, and students.

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“It dies horribly when the many geniuses who make up its practitioners hoard their knowledge, kill their rivals and competitors, are killed in turn without passing on their knowledge, and all their lore passes into nothingness, as if it had never existed at all.”

He considered that viewpoint soberly. “You speak of things like the Imperial School of War Magic?” he asked cautiously.

“Perhaps when it was first founded, but even then, the key was to create Wizards to feed the war machines of the Empire, not to expand the heights and depths of magical learning. There are more of such things in the future, and they do keep their spirits of sharing and discovery more intact over time. However, the chaotic and self-important nature of Wizards do tend to exert themselves over time, and few manage to retain the camaraderie and spirit of wonder and learning that pervades them during their learning years. They graduate, they grow more powerful, they run headfirst into politics, rivals to their own ambitions emerge, they learn deeper secrets, convince themselves they know better than others how to be a mighty spellcaster, and paranoia and caution does the rest.

“Like you yourself, they tend to be lonely older men, afraid of involving themselves in to the troubles and triumphs of others for fear of creating emotional ties that will interfere with their investigations into the source of magic and its infinite depths.”

All delivered in a perfectly deadpan delivery that nevertheless was causing him to blush deeply.

He was an archmage in a tower sitting on the edge of nowhere, watching dragons fly by in the distance. He was pretty much the picture of a lonely, private spellcaster who did not want the ties and obligations of being a recognized wizard of Darkmoor, even if he supported their independence and did not move against them.

The Iron Graf and the Cabal of the Arcane also had not managed to recruit him, and didn’t dare piss him off, either. He might have not been one of the grand old bastards who dominated the heart of Iberon, but he was out here and active, capable of things no one else in the North was capable of… until Brittabelle and I showed up.

Not many people knew that we could actually Cast IX’s, however!

“Is that why you have come? To sell me more of your spells?” he asked dryly.

“The price I charged for the magic I sold you was a tithe of what you were willing to pay,” I sniffed, and he couldn’t help but smile slightly at that observation. “And yes, if you wish, I am willing to engage in a trade of knowledge. My standards are not low, however, and my thirst is great and hard to slake when it comes to matters magical,” I warned him aloofly.

That only seemed to stir his interest, and his wariness. “I have discovered many things in my time out here, studying both the Palace and its guardians, and the large number of dragons in the area,” he ventured carefully. “If we could work out a fair exchange of information…”

“If you will trust in my judgment as to the value of what you have uncovered, I will compensate you accordingly, Elder Daffid,” I declared primly. “I am not a miser, and will be happy to give you either what you want, or what you need, as the case may be.” I leaned forward slightly. “You are working against the fact that I have thousands of years more accumulations behind me than do you, Elder. Come, impress me with what you have learned.”

He took that as the challenge it was, and began laying out his studies and his lore, and even the spells he knew, along with treasures he’d won in magical conflict, purchased, or simply made himself over time.

He was pursuing the very proper path of a Wizard, discovering new spells and magical knowledge, making magical items, and identifying and taking apart magical beasts and materials to learn more about them and magic in general.

He was, however, doing this mostly alone, as exchanging spells just wasn’t a thing any but the closest friends among wizards did, which was rank inefficiency from my point of view. While there was something to be said for inventing the fifty-seventh way you could throw a , the proper way to do things was to make the common spells easily accessible to everyone, and then encourage them to make custom spells outside the standard box of said spells, thereby pushing the knowledge of magic further and farther.

So it was that he eventually was showing me each and every one of the spells that he knew, almost in disbelief that he dared trust me with such things.

I reciprocated first by doing analysis of all those spells, showing him ways to modify them, Upcast them, Downcast them, and potentially Meta them that had the blood draining from his face and his eyes almost burning with hunger at some of the spell formulae and diagrams that I brought out to show him.

This naturally led away from talks on specific interpretations of magic, the ‘Schools’ and ‘Elements’ theme, and down into the intricacies of metamagical effects, always considered the rarest, most cerebral, and highly prized types of magical spells that existed out there.

His astonishment when he realized that Metamagicks didn’t just exist as spells, but also existed as basically disciplines of thought applied to spells that could be applied piecemeal and as desired to spells to alter them in desired ways nearly sent him to the floor. It cracked open everything he knew about magic, and made him realize that the magic of magic was magic itself, and true knowledge of magic wasn’t memorizing what worked, it was understanding how and why something worked, and the spells were just tools made to make use of that knowledge!

He also ended the day in possession of half-a-dozen higher-Valence spells he hadn’t possessed, as well as a diagram of and its permutations up, down, and sideways that would likely consume his research time for months.

All in all, not a bad way to spend a day.

“Ah… what is this?” Archmage Daffid asked, blinking at the scene outside.

There were four creatures outside of his tower, not two, and two of them were dead.

Well, the young red dragon that had been rash enough to think it had found itself an easy fight was most definitely dead, with a long Lance sticking up through its jaw and out the back of its skull. Half its hide was opened up, slabs of ribs and its organs had been deftly removed, and a big clay jar of its blood was sitting off to one side.

There was a skeleton with roses in its eyes and wearing a proper suit working away searing those ribs, too.