PSTH: Chapter Thirty-Five

Why don’t Primals eat?! This does not make sense at all! I’m… What do they subsist on? I know that their bodies are made purely of ousia structures rather than atomic structures, and they sustain themselves on essence, either through cultivating, or through battle. Great! Fine! Lovely! No problems! But then, what happens when they eat? They can eat matter, and it’s just… Gone? Is it gone? Gone forever? Are Primals matter black holes? Does it get converted into essence? Does it get turned into, I dunno, heat energy or something? I don’t know, and I’m freaking out! Can anyone explain this?

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First post of a new user on a tamer related forum, 388 Modern-Era

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A hand clamped onto my mouth as I let out a scream. After several long seconds, the pain receded from a sharp, angry one to a duller, but more constant, throbbing pain. Instead of my leg feeling like I’d been stabbed with a hot knife, now it just felt like someone was taking a stick and smacking it against my leg every few seconds. I stifled my scream and let it cut down, and Gawain released his hold on my mouth. 

I blinked several times, eyes watering, then let out a shaky breath. My eyes started to adapt to the darkness around us. Gryphon was fluttering in the air above us, but Scales, Hex, and Gabis had all been left back in the camp during our fall. Gawain and I were now laying on the ground in a tangle of limbs, backs on the ground, so we both slowly extricated ourselves. Gawian moved slowly to avoid hitting my broken leg. I turned my head, glancing around and looking at our surroundings.

We had tumbled down and over the edge of a cliff. It wasn’t an especially steep cliff, as such things went, but we were now nestled in a wooded valley, surrounded by leaves and dirt. Overhead, the crescent moon shone down on us, stars winking from high above. Several hundred feet up and to the left, I could see the light of the campfire from our camp, a stark point of light in the shadows of the camp. Behind us, there seemed to be something of a depression in the stone. I wasn’t sure that I’d call it a cave, exactly, but it might offer some meager protection if it began to rain. 

Long, boney white hands grasped at the ground above the cave, and an instant later, a face that was almost human, but not quite, peered out at us. Once again, something began to seep out of me. My heart started to hammer, and the adrenaline rushing through my system was enough to dull the pain in my legs. I drew up my anima around me, letting it pulse through the air like a shield. Even if I’d been a magian, with a condensed core attuned to an element like fire, simply pushing anima out around me wouldn’t have done anything. It needed form in order to have function. But it did make me feel slightly better. It helped fight against the fear.

“Alright, I have had enough of this!” Gawain snarled, shifting next to me. He rose from a seated position to standing, and a moment later, lightning started to spark from Gryphon’s antennae. It raced down, striking the pallid folk, and passing right through the body. The lightning pulled up a moment later, passing back out of the creature, rather than striking the leaves and starting a forest fire. It let out a horrified scream once again, and purple chains shot from it as it released a pulse of force, but Gryphon rose into the air, and the force passed over our heads.

Gawain picked up a stone and chucked it at the creature, and the stone sailed through the body. It let out another scream and a flash of force, kicking up more leaves, but otherwise doing nothing. 

It had screamed, but the lightning had just passed through the body, and now a rock. It… it really was just an illusion, and nothing more? A part of me still struggled to accept that, but it had to be true. The fear began to ease, and as it faded, so too did the sensation of something being pulled out of me. That sensation had also faded when Hex had taken her battle form. Cutting off a Primal’s gift. Cutting off the ability to feast on fear. 

Wait. Hadn’t I already started to put this together? 

Something around me snapped, some sort of arcane spell that had been seeping into my mind, infecting me with fear, making it harder to think, and making me more readily convinced by false truths. Gawain raised his hands and gray light began to play around them, raw essence giving way to the null-aspect anima used for spellcating. He built a familiar spell in his hands, Bond Primal, and extended the tether to the illusionary pallid folk. The spell didn’t land, as it fizzled in his hands, but I couldn’t blame Gawain for trying – clearly this Primal had some sort of feedback from the illusions, and utilized the stranger and more psionic aspects of Arcane aspect magic.

While the spell didn’t land, the eyes of the pallid folk went wide. Its body abruptly started to shift and change, and within moments, we were looking at nothing more than a lump of purple and black magic. It streamed down, bobbing and bouncing, trying to guide us away. Gawain turned and started to step over to follow it, then looked at me. 

“Stop lazing around and come on,” he snapped impatiently. “The Primal is leading me to it. I got a half second of images from the spell – it’s as scared as we are and has been trapped for a while.”

“I can’t, you prick,” I said. The adrenaline was starting to leave my body, and my leg was hurting again. If he kept acting this way, I’d be calling him a lot worse before long. Gawain blinked. The only reason I could tell in the low light was that the lavender glow of his eyes vanished for a moment, before reappearing. 

“What do you mean, you can’t?” 

“My leg is broken!” I snapped. 

Gawain raised his hand and cast Bond Primal again, using the half-second of connection that casting it on the illusion provided to say something, before turning and walking quickly back over to me. He knelt, then pulled me up further on the rock, before sliding my pants leg up to look at my shin. He gently ran his fingers along it, causing me to whimper in pain when he got to a spot. 

“Based on the lack of any bone and the relatively minor swelling, it’s a fracture, but it doesn't seem like a serious break. It might even heal on its own,” he said, and for the life of me, I thought he was attempting to sound encouraging. “Gabby should be able to patch you up, she’s a powerful wood element magian. For right now?”

He hummed, and with his face so close, I could make out his expressions even through the low light. He seemed to be struggling with himself, before he reached out and touched my chest, roughly where my heart was. 

“Gryphon, come on down here and cast flight on him,” he said. Gryphon floated down, moth-like wings fluttering, and landed atop my head. A moment later, I felt a surge of anima starting to build as the power flowed out of a pool and into one of the innate spellforms within a core. It trickled into me, and I felt the wind start to gently ripple around me. A feeling of being weightless came over me, like I was suspended in saltwater, and I knew that I could direct myself through the air with ease. I wasn’t using sustained blasts of air or alterations in pressure to do so, but rather, moving through the essence within the air itself. 

It should have been a relief, but there was something deeply wrong. Despite the fact that Gawain had called Gryphon to cast the spell, it didn’t feel like the anima entering my body came from the moth atop my head. No, it distinctly felt like the magic was rushing in from the hand pressed to my chest. Like it was coming from Gawain. 

But that shouldn’t be possible. Tamers like me, and like him, kept our essence raw and wild, rather than condensing it into a core. Instead of a nice, neat cell, we were a soup of primordial ooze. It was what allowed us to empower and bond with any type of primal. A fire magian could cast Bond Primal, if they took it into their core, but they still ultimately had fire aspected anima and pneuma. The spell would only take on familiar essence, only allowing them to sustain fire Primals as their bonds. Raw essence wasn't so limited. Of course, that benefit did come with drawbacks. Without the structure provided by forming a core, tamers had less pneuma and anima than a roughly equal powered magian. 

And raw essence didn’t form the neat structures that allowed for core spells. Gawain had clearly learned some spellcasting, much like I had, but if he’d truly only had raw essence as a Tamer, that would still only allow him to cast spells that utilized null aspect anima – the anima that was basically just raw essence condensed into something usable. Flight was an air spell. Without being an air magian or having a core that enabled for the ingraining of other spell types into it, it was impossible for Gawain to cast the flight spell.

Then again, there had always been something strange about Gawain’s essence. I’d chalked it up to implants, like Vince’s eye, but that explanation had never truly satisfied me. I’d known people with augmentations before, either as needed aids or by choice, and they didn’t feel like Gawain felt. 

Now, I was even less sure what was going on. Had he split his ousia in two, in order to form two spirits? No, that was straight up impossible. It was like saying you’d split a helium atom in half to get two helium atoms. Even if you were willing to go through the whole process to split it, it still wouldn’t turn into two heliums, just the constituent hydrogens. Maybe he really did have some sort of advanced prosthetic. But one that was able to serve as an entire second spirit that could condense a core? No, that didn’t make sense. We understood the structure of ousia, but putting together a bunch of muscles in the shape of a human didn’t create life. Had he– 

Fingers went in front of my face and Gawain snapped twice. I blinked and jerked, floating up into the air as I did. 

“Come on. I know we were told to stay put if we got lost, but the Primal isn’t far, and I can see the camp. We’re not really lost, we can fly back.” 

“I’m pretty sure that’s exactly the thought process that stops people from being rescued,” I said. “And I still don’t exactly trust a Primal that’s been trying to scare the life out of us. But we can see the glow of the camp fire. Alright, fine, I’ll go with you, but if we have to leave view of the fire, I’m flying back on my own.” 

“Fine,” Gawain said. 

“Fine!”