§095 What the Princess Summoned (Patreon)

They say he walks the land in strange forms, the better to spy on his domain. If they see a beggar in the street with sharp eyes, or a cat that sits too long in one place, they point and say to each other, "Mind yourself. He is watching."

— "Dark Lord Dalvoorde." in Ancient Lords of the Muse Valley

Princess Mariella — Avimore

Rebecca's pride turned to disgust. “What in the name of all the gods is that?”

“It’s very … blobby,” agreed the court magician. “Not what I would expect after spending so much mana.”

Mariella, disinterested until now, approached the circle for a better look. If this was something new, then it was worth observing even if it was unattractive. Other magicians gathered to see what their maximum effort had wrought.

Inside the containment circle lay a viscous puddle of something. Colors swam over its smooth surface as the blob twitched and vibrated in sporadic moments. Whatever it was, it was definitely magical – its mana shone clearly through the containment barrier and outshone the court mages. The creature might be stronger than any of them.

Almost as soon as Mariella had that thought, the blob sucked its mana into itself until it couldn’t be detected through the circle’s emanations. The effort seemed to invigorate the creature, and it drew itself together until it was almost spherical. It reminded her of a dewdrop resting on a flower petal, reflecting dawn’s colors.

The blob started to move. Just a little at first. It shimmied side to side, its many colors changing as the surface wobbled. It jiggled up and down, and waves of motion rippled through it. Then, it started to roll. It went slowly at first, its pliable surface shaping itself to the ground and pushing the rest of it over. It traveled twice across the containment circle. As it did so, the colors settled into a happy, sunny yellow.

It was oddly compelling to watch.

“I can’t ride that. It’s disgusting,” complained Rebecca, "and it's small."

“But it’s new,” said their tutor. “I don’t recall seeing anything remotely like this. You should try to form a contract with it.”

“I refuse. Get rid of it,” commanded the princess. 

“It’s your summons. Use the Disband spell to send it away.”

Rebecca raised her summoning wand and chanted the words to the spell. Disband was far shorter than Binding Summon, and they had used it repeatedly in the last few sessions. Everyone expected the blob to disappear, but when Rebecca finished the spell, nothing happened. The blob was still there. Instead of going away, it looked healthier. Its surface was glossy and reflective, and it had shaped itself into a perfect sphere. It was rolling quite rapidly, around and around its jail. The circle was a permanent fixture of the yard, sized for flying mounts, so the area was quite large. Yet the blob (now a ball) kept accelerating until it could roll around the perimeter in only a few seconds.

“Why won’t you go away?”

“Maybe it’s curious,” offered Mariella. “It doesn’t want to go back yet.”

“Well, it’s occupying my circle, and I want to summon something better. Go home, blob!” Rebecca fired a Stinging Nettle spell, one of the now-forbidden summoner punishments, at the blob. The blob dodged the flying thorns with ease and came to rest in the center of the circle. Spring sunlight glinted off the surface of the creature.

“Some spirits want you to show your strength,” said the tutor.

Mariella disagreed. “I don’t think this is a good idea. You should try Disband again.”

“It’s defying an Imperial Princess. It needs to learn to mind its betters.”

Mariella took several steps away from the circle. She didn't want to be a part of whatever happened next.

“Mana to fire, fire to deadly flame,” started Rebecca, while the court magicians stood by and watched avidly. Why weren’t they stopping her? It would be just like Father to give orders to let a princess blow herself up with magic she couldn’t control. Mariella didn’t listen to the rest of the Fireball spell because she was too busy watching the summoned creature. It turned an ominous black.

“Wait!” she cried, but too late. A thick mist suddenly filled the circle. Something heavy hit the containment barrier, then hit it again. The premise of the containment field for spirits was that magic could go in, but couldn’t get out. Mariella wasn’t sure those rules would apply to a spirit they’d never seen before. Doubly so for one that required several crystals to summon.

The expected fireball shot into the circle, but never exploded. Instead, the magic structures Rebecca had built came apart at the seams, and the mana was gone. It didn’t go haywire or turn on the caster; it simply went missing.

"That's interesting," said their tutor. Mana Sense was a required skill for court magicians, so he could see what the spirit had done at least as well as Mariella could. "Princess Rebecca, if you don't want it, allow me to entice it onto my roster."

"I want it gone!" Rebecca was fully in the grip of one of her recent moods, lashing out instead of considering what anything meant. She'd been like that ever since she gained her Noble class.

"Sister, please stop. You might anger it."

"All the more reason to drive it out right now!" Rebecca drew an engraved wand from her robes. It was a tiny thing, the length of a pinky finger, but in her hands it shot a deadly Fiery Spear. She sent several of the white-hot jets of flame into the misty containment area, but nothing changed. She sent twelve of the deadly spells into the circle, and the smell of scorched stone lingered in the air. She panted from the effort, and her wand wavered.

They waited to see if the mist would dissipate. Instead, it broke free of the containment circle and spread along the ground, covering the yard in mist up to their ankles.

"The containment's down!" shouted their tutor. "Put it back up!"

Magicians rushed the circle and began filling it with mana, but Mariella thought they were too late. When the containment fell, she didn't feel any mana inside. Whatever it was, the spirit was long gone. Either it had disbanded itself, or it was loose in the palace.

Taylor – Avimore

Taylor was a slime, and he was loose in the Imperial Palace. 

It had taken a minute to get the hang of this new body. His senses were interesting: he could navigate around anything that had mana, and for everything else, he had a mana-based echolocation. Being able to control the shape and color of his body, however simplistic, was liberating. And, to his great surprise, rolling was fun!

While the idiot flame princess was trying to roast him, Taylor managed to open a narrow gap in the barrier and pour himself through it. It helped that he didn't care if he died. If that happened, he would only end up back in his own body. So there was nothing to lose and everything to gain by escaping and having a look around. How often would he get a chance to snoop around the Imperial Palace?

Escape was almost disappointingly easy. While everyone's attention was focused on the flashy fire spells, Taylor tried to make himself transparent and made his way to the wall enclosing the practice yard. He bounded up to the top with Airwalk, collapsed the circle's barrier, and threw himself over the other side at the same time. While they were searching for him in the yard, he had already left.

Helpfully, his class logged a new title:

Title awarded: [Free Spirit] You decline to be bound, even when the cage is gilded.

Beyond the Imperial Practice summoning yard was a formal garden. He rolled  silently along the paths of packed, crushed stone, watching for other people while enjoying the plants on display. They had examples from all over the empire, in beds that were magically controlled for the plants' native temperature and moisture. He'd seen many of them before, and could name their native ranges without reading the neat brass plaques. But there were plenty he didn't recognize, including some from the northern continent.

Taylor stopped, appalled at himself. Why did he cancel the barrier? If he had left it alone, the mist would dissipate in time and reveal the empty circle. The mages would have assumed he disbanded. But no, he wanted to confound the court magicians, so he took down their containment. 

He was too busy showing off to think about his goals. Soon, they would form a proper search party to look for him. It was the kind of behavior he was constantly warning Kasper against, with exactly the consequences he would expect. However, there was nothing he could do to change it now. Taylor decided to roll along before they mustered a search party. 

 That was when he noticed the rocks inside his body. His slime body had somehow picked them up while rolling, and they were now suspended in his gelatinous inner self. With focus, he was able to push them out and go on his way.

Beyond the garden was a palace. It wasn't the emperor's palace: that one was larger and was built in three joined sections. This one was a single rectangle of pillars and porticoes, two stories tall, painted a salmon color. Or at least, it looked salmon-colored to Taylor's slime senses when he bounced thin waves of mana off of it. It was likely one of the minor palaces, inhabited by a concubine or a favored child.

There were people watching the front door, standing with military praxis weapons at the ready. Rather than try to sneak past them, he looked for open windows on the second floor. He rolled to the side of the building, snuck past the washing maids in his hopefully-transparent form, and found an open window on the back side of the mansion. It was only open by a couple of inches, but that was plenty for a slime. He slipped inside, intending to explore.

Within minutes, Taylor was bored. It was a lovely palace, with high ceilings and very clean floors that tasted of lavender soap. He found a music room, where a boy of nine or ten years practiced scales on a magical pipe organ. Only a noble child would learn an instrument that was so prohibitively expensive and completely immovable.  He needed a decent amount of mana simply to play it, which was provided by two nearby servants who had their palms laid flat against an adjoining magic circle.

Moving on, he found a library, much smaller than his own, containing mostly textbooks. He perched himself on a plane of force and scanned the magic section, but didn't find any worthwhile titles. He owned most of them, and the rest were by authors he'd learned not to trust.

There was one bedroom outfitted for a young prince, and two more decorated for princesses. One of the princess's rooms looked lived in. The other had been empty for a long while.

At the far end of the second floor, Taylor let himself into the final room as he had the others: by slumping into a puddle and flowing under the door. Two women occupied the room. One was sitting in a rocking chair, snoring. She kept a book and a pitcher of water on the table next to her.

The other woman was lying in bed, her skin slack and sickly gray.  Taylor did what came naturally and let himself onto the bed, next to her face, to get a closer look. Up close, the woman was too drawn from illness to determine her age, and her hair was thin. She seemed very old, but he extended his senses and gently examined her anyway.

She was corrupted. Even worse, she had a corruption-borne illness Taylor had read about but never seen. Abnormal growths throughout her body fed off her own mana and converted it into a type more suitable for mana beasts. According to what Taylor had read, if it advanced far enough, she wouldn't just die: she would become a mana beast like those found in dungeons.

It was a shocking malady to find inside a palace, far away from wild mana vents and dungeons. When a vent opened and went unaddressed for too long, the high levels of mana could have two effects: either it mutated the life around it or made everything in the area sick. Corrupted mana, the second kind, didn't normally kill outright; it ate at the cohesion of all matter, making it impossible for anything living to thrive in the area.

If corruption was severe enough, it created mana beasts. But mana beasts could only range so far from the source of their power. The exception to that rule was if living things, usually animals, came in contact with contaminated objects and developed this level of the disease. It wasn't something that spread easily, but whatever died from it would quickly liquify, then rise again as a mana beast. 

How did this woman, who was a member of the imperial household, come into close enough contact with corruption to develop such a severe illness? Had she encountered it while traveling? Or had she been poisoned on purpose?

Given Taylor's access to the divine attribute and his recent improvements in mana control, treatment was actually straightforward. All he had to do was purify the hundred or so growths that were responsible for making her sick. None of them was very large, and it didn't matter which one he cured first. The important thing was to get them all.

Rather than let his patient waste away any longer, Taylor went to work immediately. He slipped under the neck of her nightclothes to reach her skin and spread himself over her torso. One by one, he purified the corrupted growths, destroying each one thoroughly before proceeding to the next. He could disintegrate most of them in moments, but a few of the larger ones took several minutes each.

Once he was sure he had thoroughly purified her thoracic area, he worked on her limbs and pelvis. He spent well over an hour and a great deal of mana on her. Her body wouldn't like removing all the dead tissue, and her caregivers would need to feed her well, but her chances of a full recovery had gone from none at all to favorable.

Taylor bounced to the window, carefully extended a pseudopod to push it open, and bounced back to the bed. He was tired and let the spring breeze wash over him. He could taste a hundred exotic flowers, water from a fountain, and potatoes roasting in another building. Distant chimes of metal on metal reached him from a practice yard while, even farther away, someone sawed and hammered wood.

That's where the princess found him, dozing next to the old woman. She wasn't the fire princess but the other one, the one smart enough to step back when idiocy took over.

"What are you doing to her? Get away!"

Taylor bounced away and landed on the windowsill. He bobbed up and down in what he hoped was a congenial, non-threatening manner.

"Stay. Right. There." The princess drew her wand, the one with the celestine gem on the end. The girl intended to disband him, or add him to her roster, using a tool he helped design. How ironic.

Taylor threw himself from the window. By making himself much larger and therefore less dense, and very wide, he floated down on the spring breeze. Several people caught sight of the weird monster and raised the alarm. Bells rang against the hard sides of the palace. But they never caught him. Before he touched the ground, Taylor found the magic keeping him in the mortal world and unwound it, disbanding himself.

 After all, he had a rule: No princesses.