In Loki's Honor

Reassessing your Skils... Evaluation completed.

You reached Master 75 on the Skill:

Bite (common): You are proficient in using your teeth to kill your enemies.

You gained the Bite Mastery (rare) perk. Your bite attacks deal double the damage and ignore half the target's defenses.

You reached master 55 on the Skill:

Claws (common): Increase accuracy and damage when attacking with natural claws.

You gained the Claw Mastery (rare) perk. Your claw attacks ignore half the target's defenses. Bleeding wounds caused by your claws bleed for 50% more damage and last 100% longer.

Nenandil complained, with the mental image of her clutching her bleeding ears.

I looked up and read the notification a dozen times. "Fuck me," I gasped.

Taeral wiggled his eyebrows, "Is that an invitation, Your Highness?" I threw a dagger at him. He caught it mid-flight. "I think that's a no."

"I got Master rank on both Skills. Did you know that would happen?" I asked him.

"No. But I suspected as much," He said. You have to trust yourself. Rely on what your heart knows. The System is a tool given to us by the gods to assist our endeavors. To give us power, to make us reach beyond our means."

I curtsied, "I bow to your wisdom, Master Ranger."

"Good," He grinned. "Now, I want you to keep shooting until you can hit five out of every dozen arrows on the bullseyes!"

I groaned.

"Last week we went over the most common elements and forms of magic," She started her lecture on the second week.

What she said was that there are as many "schools" of magic as there are practitioners. A person can have an insight on, say, airborne biological residues, and become a fart mage. The System collects the insight from the person's mind and turns that into a Skill. The most common schools were those associated with natural phenomena. Fire, ice, water, wind, earth, lightning, light, darkness, etc.

I'll one day attempt to gain a perk for Quantum Magic. Insta-win against anything. Let me flip some of those down quarks into up quarks and oops. You're radioactive now.

Except that doesn't work the way the designer intended. Because the System, being a bitch about balance, would put the cost of those effects up the stratosphere.

"Today we are going to study what magic really is. Where does the magical energy come from?" She asked me.

I don my poker face, "The Magic is what gives a mage his powers. It's an energy field created by all living beings. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the world together."

She smiled, "Almost. Your statements are sliding in order of correctness. Let me explain," The archmagister creates a blob of blue light.

"Magic gives the mage his powers. Yes. The magic available for use is displayed to us as our MP. The System constantly measures it for us and shows us the value."

She waved her hand and the ball became a mockup of a status screen. It is interesting. Everyone sees the same floating displays and not a personalized interface. People just understand what's written in the displays by fiat, just like when I knew no language before meeting the Auvani during my rabbit life I would see the interface in English. Still did.

"Magic is created by living beings, that's very correct as well, but it is not an energy field. There's no magic in the space between you and me unless someone puts some magic there. But keep in mind. Living creatures generate magic. Even the undead generates magic, which makes them a different state of life where magical processes supplant our natural biological ones. We'll talk more about that later. But what about a rock? It doesn't generate magic. But we have stones imbued with magic, found in deep mineral veins. Why is that?"

So it is not as much as being alive but being able to thought. I tried to give an answer but she had just paused to breathe.

"The dwarves found out that the world generates magic and imbues it into some gemstones as times goes by. Which means the world is alive."

That was something people believed even back on Earth. Almost every pantheon has some primal deity that represents the world itself.

"Your last two statements are false. Magic does not surround us unless someone did that. And it does not bind the world together, because worlds can exist without magic. Your original world is one such world, although I am inclined to believe that it is not as much that there wasn't any magic in your world but their inhabitants somehow couldn't access it. Using magic without the aid of the System is absurdly complicated, risky, and difficult, after all."

"You think there are people on Earth using magic without the help of a System?"

"It is inevitable. Think for yourself. Could you have moved from there to here without magic?"

"You are correct. The answer is no. But aren't we limited by the System?"

"Just like some Skills, you can and sometimes do use magic at the edges of what the System believes possible. When you pull it off, the System usually awards an improved Skill level, a perk, or even grants a new spell."

And all had already three happened to me.

After two weeks of theoretical lectures, we moved on to practical magic. They had a system in place to help young elves to cast their first spells. There were long incantations, songs actually, that the apprentice magician would sing to shape the magic through harmonic resonance and cast a spell. There were several for each element, causing the smallest of effects.

I arrived at the practical lessons thinking I would ace them with the mental image of effects and the physics behind them like I read in some stories. That went as well as trying to land a critical hit on a pool of water.

The mental image was fine, but to manipulate magical energy, you needed to make it flow through your body in a specific pattern. When you use the System, it makes the pattern on its own by reading the mental image of what you want. But when you don't have the System Skill yet, you need to do it the hard way.

Enter spell-songs. They were created specifically for the elven physiology nad were useless for other species. By singing the spell-song correctly, the resonance caused by the music within one's own body would guide the magic inside the body in the right place. Since it used minute amounts of magic, the worst could happen when botching one spell-song was minor heartburn.

And getting a Skill for singing was way easier than casting spells, so the System could assist in safely using the spell-songs.

And just like the bitten fruit app shop, there was Skill for that.

You learned the Elven Spellsong (rare) Skill. You can use your unique elven vocal cords (or another Skill to create polyphonic vocalization) to manipulate the flow of raw magic in your conduits to create special magical effects. Reduce the chance of failure and damage suffered by Rank x Magic x 0,05% (maximum 100%);

The best part, it only cost us time. No Skill points required. With my new Royal heritage perk, my Skill learning rate bonus is at 59% for normal Skills and 91% for languages.

After I improve the {Elven Spellsong} to novice six with manipulation exercises, we start rehearsing the actual spell-songs. She teaches me one for all the basics, fire, ice, water, wind, earth, lightning, light, and darkness. They were a completely different beast from the basic "push a tiny bit of magic from your heart down to your navel" vocalization exercises. Even with my perks granting me an accelerated learning rate, my ridiculous Luck stat, and the clear mental images thanks to all the CRPG I've ever played and movies I've ever watched, it still took me a week to gain each basic spellcasting Skill.

They all had the same text as if it was a 'printf' statement.

You learned the %1$s Magic (rare) Skill. You can learn and cast %1$s Magic spells.

Three months after that fateful conversation, I gained all eight. Earth magic by far was the easiest because I had an affinity Perk for that, courtesy of my Class rank-up when I was Lily in this very forest.

I sat with Sariandi at the spacious hall inside the central heart-tree of the hexagon clearing that was the soul of Fulgen. My would-be throne in two centuries from which I'd rule the elves as their barren Queen.

One could tell how much I was looking forward to that. Or to search for a way to lift that particular curse. I mean, the blessing in disguise.

I flopped on an armchair while Ikeshia served us tea and pastries. I was looking forward to peko-bread-not-scones.

"Three months! Congratulations, Your Highness," the archmagister cheered with a genuine smile and lots of creases on the corners of her eyes.

"Three whole months! Haven't you elves heard about a rest day?" I whined.

Lixiss paused what she was doing and shuddered a bit when I said "you elves".

"Normal people without your gifts take years to reach the point you are at now with the spell-songs," Sariandi remarked. "You can have a day off if you want every now and then."

I pouted, "Nobody told me anything like that. It's just work, work, work."

Sariandi leaned forward, a faint smile on her lips. "But Your Highness, nobody can tell you what to do."

I perked up and teased her, "Oh. I'm traveling to the Scorched Continent tomorrow. I have to find out what happened to one of my previous incarnations' families."

"Don't worry. We have people to do that for you," Sariandi brushed off my wanderlust with a handwave. "We'll bring you news of their descendants soon."

I huffed and puckered my lips. She was infuriating sometimes. "Great princess I am. What a failure!"

"You haven't looked at yourself in the mirror lately, have you?"

"I can spend a thousand years as a head-biting rabbit," I threatened her with fire in my eyes. The figurative kind. "I do miss that simple life with my adopted tribe of humans."

"Interesting. I wonder what repercussions that life of yours had in the world," She mused. I could tell her thoughts wandered far away from our afternoon tea and my magical exploits.

"What do you mean?" I asked with a knot on my throat.

"You are a keystone of our world, whether you or the Gods wanted it that way. An agent of change. An instrument of chaos and progress," Sariandi said with very articulate words. "That's not just my theory, by the way."

Yeah, I've done shit and kicked ass around the world, but what Sariandi said hinted at a much broader and far-reaching plan than what could possibly...

"You don't believe me, by the face you're making," the elder mage commented.

I glanced at the maids and got a glimpse of something that made me very uncomfortable. They were glancing at me as if I was some divine envoy.

"No way. Have you been keeping tabs on my exploits?" I said in half-jest.

"Of course. After the Mother announced you like the Old Soul in a divine oracle centuries ago, the elves around the world do their utmost to keep track of where you surface and what you do."

And every time I'm reminded of that, I regret those I left behind. Olive and Cerise are dead. Laila and Hannah - I never got to talk to Hannah - too. I close my eyes and see my friends dying to the barbarians. I see Marion's lifeless body at the edge of that mud pen, a throwing hatchet buried in her back.

I cried. I see locks of my pink-ish hair fall to cover my face as I cover it with my hands and let the tears flow.

I feel hands touching my shoulders and back, trying to comfort me. But my sorrows and burdens were mine to bear alone. They didn't say anything. I cried myself to sleep.

Archmagister Sariandi stayed with the Princess until she was safely ensconced in her bed. She ushered the two ladies-in-waiting out of the bedroom but held them at the antechamber.

"You've seen her sorrow," She stated.

"Yes, archmagister," Ikeshia, the senior between the two answered shyly.

"Such is the burden of the Old Soul. She witnessed horrors we can only imagine. We, the people of Fulgen, the council, wrought upon that soul a burden unimaginable for our selfish reasons. Yet she endures. The People's debt - no, the world's - to her is immeasurable. She climbed the mountain-sized body of the second Demon Lord, braved the flames. Fought for a whole day to defeat it and wrest half of the Scorched Continent from the Demon's claws."

"We learned about that, mistress," Lixiss replied.

"And she did that to protect her human family. Our ambassadors at that time visited them. She spent half a century as a banshee, haunting the underground. Yet she can weep for the memory of people that are long gone for a thousand years. Forgotten by all but her. Their memories live on inside her heart."

"I don't think it was a coincidence she became our Princess," Ikeshia risked a comment.

"It was impossible to be a coincidence. The Mother's hand was at work. For that, she incurred a great debt with the Old Soul," Sariandi revealed with a heavy voice. "No other creature, not even an elder dragon, could've at the same time stopped that ritual, survived it even through undeath and preserved the Royal bloodline. We would be lost and with the third Demon Lord at our doorstep, devouring the very soul of both Forest and People."

"She's such a kind soul," Lixiss swooned with a dreamy voice.

"No," Sariandi reproached firmly. "Do not fall for that trap. Though she feels, she loves, and she endures, she does no such things out of charity. She trades her life for power. Not that she lusts for it or greedily accumulates it. But the only reason she hadn't fled or killed herself was that we offered her power and knowledge. She will save the People and the Forest, but she will take all our secrets with her."

"A lore keeper," Ikeshia gasped. "Even though the People might vanish, she'll keep our lore, traditions, and ways of life alive with her."

"That she may be," Sariandi said and walked to the exit. "But let's hope she can save us and revive the Royal bloodline. Watch over our precious Princess. May Fate and the Gods be kind on her so she can help us."

With that, she left.

The archmagister's opinions and world views were tinted by the lenses of her own life experience. Of centuries dealing with internal and external politics, and her own quest for the pinnacle of Magic. Not the achievement and Perk, those ones, she had them for centuries already. But for the knowledge to manipulate the entirety of creation by applied Willpower. She thus failed to truly understand the heart of the one she called "Old Soul".

[1]: Woodlore or Woodcraft could be used, but the word "woodcraft" is also used to describe the act of making objects out of wood. To disambiguate, we used "Woodlore".