ghost flower

Reborn Healer Chapter 2

My parents didn’t talk to me about that one strange day at all after it happened. Maybe it was because I was supposedly still too young to understand what was going on, but I suspected there was something deeper to it.

If nothing else, it pushed me even harder to learn how to read. During the first year, I hadn’t made many inroads towards reading because I just had nowhere to start. At least with language, I could use context clues. The books we had at home had very few pictures tha...

Reborn Healer Chapter 1

Author's note: I've been experimenting with a new idea on the side. I'd love to know if anyone has interest in it! I have a few more chapters, but I'm not entirely sure whether or not I'll continue it at the moment. Since you lovely folk have been with me throughout The Silent Archmage, here's a sample of Reborn Healer (title in progress).

The last thing I saw before I died was the pillar of light outside my plane window.

The first thing I saw after I died was everything. There we...

B3 Chapter 27: Ghost in the Machine [END]

After so long struggling to manage the careful balance between avoiding detection, minimizing collateral damage, and still effectively carrying a mission out, it was refreshing to finally have a playground where he could let loose.

Unlike the last time he had abruptly had to deal with paragon-class threats, Syl was at full power now with a battlefield of his choosing. Sloth had chosen to stand by him, and the Sinner didn't regret it.

Sloth knew by now that Syl had the ability to u...

Chapter 26 - The Light that Burns the Sky

Every now and again, there were events so significant that observers around the world couldn’t ignore it. This had held true since long before the dawn of magic—the eruption of Krakatoa, the Indian Ocean tsunami, the first atomic bomb. They had become more commonplace since the world had turned to one of magicians and monsters, but it was very rare for those world-shaking events to be the effect of only a handful of magicians.

Each of the magicians currently over the San Francisco c...

B3 Chapter 25 - Breaking Down

Bianca was being followed, and not in the normal way where she could just cast a stealth-type spell or find and subdue the person behind her.

No, the thing following her came in the manner of a perception-type spell that she had never seen before. Though she couldn’t tell its power level just from trying to sense it, it resisted all attempts to countercast it and clearly pierced through every stealth-type countermeasure she deployed.

It was to the point where she suspected the v...

B3 Chapter 24 - Beginning of the End

Waylan regretted his choices.

It was a bit late to say that now, but he did.

At the time, it had seemed logical. Or—no, logical was the wrong word for it. It had seemed right.

There had been no way to justify continuing to work under a Sinner. He hadn’t wanted to defy him or end his operations, of course. Waylan wasn’t stupid enough to think that trying that would end in anything but a quick and painful death.

But he hadn’t wanted to watch from a Sinne...

B3 Chapter 23 - Conquer

There was no playbook for what the new leaders of Auria were doing.

In the past, there had been multiple efforts made to make magic as widespread as possible. Most countries still considered FCDs a basic need for their citizens, and even the least talented magician tended to get access to one.

That said, only about half of the population ever awakened their ability to do magic, and of those, less than half had the potential to go much further than D-class.

At least, that was...

B3 Chapter 22 - Takeover

Bianca had been a child like any other, once upon a time. Her early years and education hadn’t proceeded like any normal child’s would have, but apart from her accelerated learning period, she hadn’t differed all that much from, say, a prismatic child.

That was what she’d thought. It had not turned out to be true. She had been different from birth, the result of decades of Aurian experimentation and the only successful result of their attempts to create so-called “blank-slate�...

B3 Chapter 21 - Return

Desperate times created desperate magicians. Desperate magicians could do just about anything.

It came at a cost, of course. Every magician who had sought to go beyond the boundary of what was humanly possible at the time ran the risk of destroying themselves and everything around them in the process. There was a reason that even the relatively safe, controlled atmosphere of the Aurian Magical Institute had produced yearly casualties. There were always those who sought to go above and b...

B3 Chapter 20 - Inhuman

Uriel hadn’t wanted to take on the name of a Sinner, but she wasn’t going to say no to the fact that she was currently able to wield influence that went significantly beyond the limit of her actual abilities.

It was just a temporary measure. There was a part of her that instinctively rebelled against it. She did not deserve the title of the magician who had been the single instrumental part of elevating her to her current heights, but she also knew that they couldn’t afford to giv...

B3 Chapter 19 - Network

Syl and Bianca stayed on careful lookout as they descended. Given the information they had gathered from their brief stay on this exoplanet, they were reasonably certain that there as a risk of the machines making an attempt on their lives here in an effort to gain proper access to the offensive and utility spells both of them had.

While they did not have confirmation on how people were being killed and restored in the form of a machine construct, both of them remembered the breakouts o...

B3 Chapter 18 - Around the Worlds

Just because the world was actively ending didn’t mean that daily life didn’t go on. Yes, it had been altered in many ways—very few if any schools around the world were still in session, most non-essential jobs had been canned, and military outfits were drafting—but there were still the little things. Someone had to keep the food synthesizers running, water plants had to stay functional, power needed to stay on.

And there were the slightly more violent little things. Natural Gat...

B3 Chapter 17 - Tea

Fourteen years ago, Katelyn Lesling had been the third Sinner on the scene in Middle America. She’d sensed the gigaton nuclear bombs beginning to detonate hopelessly late, and though she’d been a mere thousand kilometers away, she’d known that she would arrive far too late to keep the chain reaction from starting. When she’d arrived, it had been with the intent of eliminating the out-of-control magic that certainly would have decimated most of the face of the country.

Things had...

B3 Chapter 16 - Banished

There were multiple time limits relevant to Syl and Bianca’s current situation. The most obvious was their limited resources. Their pressure suits had limited supplies of oxygen, and the spell pattern refreshing carbon dioxide and maintaining pressure would eventually start failing even if they replenished it with flux. Still, there were a number of ways they could circumvent that. Food and water wasn’t something they could simply conjure, but there were spells that could keep their bodie...

B3 Chapter 15 - Madness

As of January 15th, 75 AFI, roughly five percent of the moon’s mass had fallen onto the Earth. Not all of it had made surface contact—in fact, over half of the falling fragments had been stopped and shot back up into low orbit. One unforeseen side effect of this was that it rapidly became much more difficult to track and prevent new fragments from falling.

With no infrastructure for even basic observation of outer space, humanity lacked the tools necessary to see through the dust cl...

B3 Chapter 14 - Zero

Foreign environments were always impactful on magical equipment, especially ones that had been hacked together from the scraps of two already specialized suits. Syl found that his vocal synthesizer didn’t quite appreciate the conditions around them. It could still produce sound, but it garbled to near-uselessness when he projected it outside of the suit instead of just through comms.

“Unlikely to be able to communicate with him,” Syl commed to Bianca.

“No need to worry abo...

B3 Chapter 13 - Fragment

Nobody was there to contest the moon fragment this time. This one was on the smaller end; city-sized, not state or country. It was large enough to have a gravitational pull of its own, but it was much lighter than even the last one they’d gone on.

From here, the three magicians sitting down for the Gates had a much better view of the world beneath them. Visual clarity had decreased a lot back on Earth—the amount of debris exploding from even successful fragment conflicts had covered...

B3 Chapter 12 - Calamity

Syl had been meaning to get around to restoring something of a voice to himself. It had been the least of a long list of priorities, and the process of putting an FCD together that was capable of acting as a stand-in for his vocal chords was, while not terribly difficult, time-consuming. With how crucial every minute was in their current state, he hadn’t spared any time to calibrate and create a replacement for the device he’d used for so long.

The duelist faceplate would serve as a...

B3 Chapter 11 - Domination

Syl had suspected something was wrong with the converted black site for some time now. Telemetry from sensors Incarnate had distributed alongside the food synthesizers, water purifiers, and oxygenators indicated a continued sharp uptick in flux presence there. Even when Uriel had confirmed that they were in the clear, he’d been suspicious.

Bianca had cleared her site with no difficulty. Just like Syl, she preferred efficiency over power, but where Pride was willing to overwhelm a situ...

B3 Chapter 10 - Offense

It had been a while since Syl had interfered with prismatics. The last few times he’d gone directly counter to a prismatic family, it had been under the guise of Pride, not of the Aurian archmage who’d been critical to the nation’s continued survival during the Third World War.

There was no more nation. No more normalcy to protect.

On some level, Syl regretted his role in bringing this to pass. Casting Ouroboros had undeniably been one of the catalysts for the new war to get...

B3 Chapter 9 - Defense

The strike team deployed to the Pasatiempo Viridian complex was lethally overprepared for a community of around fifty thousand refugees and woefully underprepared for a single Sinner.

Each of the Viridian facilities that had been converted had undergone a hasty, incomplete process. While the building itself couldn’t be and hadn’t been expanded far in the two weeks since the start of the war, temporary shield generators placed every few hundred feet provided shelter enough for everyo...

B3 Chapter 8 - Make War, Not Peace

World War III began on January 1st, 61 AFI. It lasted seventy-three days and resulted in over two billion casualties. In the fourteen years since, the Earth had recovered to some extent. Those two billion people hadn’t been replaced, but reproduction rates had already been high before the war, only increasing in its wake. As humanity grew more and more magical, the average citizen grew more confident in the abilities of their children to defend themselves in their world. The next wave of ma...

B3 Chapter 7: Gate

“That was a stupid risk to take,” Waylan said. “That was a Polarian paragon. You know that, right?”

“Are you dense?” Vivian replied. “Of course he knows.”

“Don’t take that tone with me,” Waylan snapped. “I don’t even know who you are.”

“I can tell that you’re still green, kid,” Vivian’s voice was measured in a way that Syl faintly remembered. He hadn’t worked with her in many years, and she’d definitely gotten more vocal in the time si...

B3 Chapter 6 - Second Mover Advantage

This was, in a word, inconvenient.

Syl had done an analysis of as many fragments as he could. It had been a little annoying to do, of course. Even with access to the satellite network that the one-star general who ran SU-317 had founded, it was difficult. A great deal of the satellites had gone down due to enemy action, a direct impact by one of the many fragments, or the side effects of the flux brought in by said fragments.

As such, it hadn’t been nearly as comprehensive a sca...

B3 C5 - Riding the Winds

On December 31st, 74 AFI, the first fragments of the entity formerly recognized as Earth’s moon entered an impact trajectory with Earth. First contact was noted by Asian satellite systems, but it was soon confirmed visually by in excess of a billion humans. 

Many first thought that it was the day beginning early. It was steadily growing harder to tell the difference between night and day. The moon had functionally exploded, but that didn’t mean that the fragments had simply van...

B3 C4 - The Job

Syl relied more on the technology that he’d brought along with him than his magic when it came to monitoring the others with him. He didn’t have the flux to spare for expansive operations, but he had a few camera drones that he could control with minimal flux output. They didn’t have much in the way of stealth, but nobody was going to stop him from hooking into their camera system.

Once he had control over parts of their security system, it was trivial to keep an eye on the split ...

B3 C3 - Your Reputation Precedes You

Struggling to maintain a spell because of the number of processes it was composed of was not an unfamiliar sensation to Syl. Struggling because his flux pool just didn’t have the fuel it needed, however, was.

With the insights that he’d gained from the tools of the machines, Syl had hacked together a spare few artifacts that could make up for his thoroughly exhausted flux pool. Rather than power them himself, he had used magic from Uriel and Jennifer to charge them, but he still had...

B3 Chapter 2 - Logistics

Dealing with field work was much more irritating when Syl was temporarily handicapped. He had nobody to blame except himself for that, of course, but that only made it more irritating.

With networks across Auria in the state that they were, it was difficult to even confirm which of the other prismatic families had conquered which segments. Nobody knew where the king was, either—any stealth measures taken by pretty much anyone were much more effective when entire intelligence webs had ...

B3 Chapter 1 - Stormwall

Magicians reacted to disaster in different ways, which was unsurprising—they were human, after all, and nothing was more human than being vastly different from a person just one short country away.

Syl, personally, was in the lab.

The Aurian responses should have been largely similar, but those too were incredibly varied owing largely to Sylvester himself.

As it turned out, face-checking the king and counteracting an apocalyptic-level weapon he’d been using as a hidden t...

B3 Chapter 0 - Private File 317-PRIDE

Aurian Magic Institute - Semester 1

[Collapsed. Click to expand.]

Aurian Magic Institute - Winter Break

In the wake of the Santa Rosa Tower incident where several hundred Cascadians alongside multiple master-class Aurian magicians were killed by the emergence of a paragon-class spell, Syl returned to class alongside Bianca. Though both of their identities risked being compromised by magicians including Uriel Indigo, Waylan R...