Chapter 221: Spirit Realm

Thaldorien: It’s real then?

Val’korr: The Spirit Realm? Of course it’s real, boy. Are we a little slow today?

Thaldorien: Careful, old Troll. Your third-tier ‘cantankerous’ skill is showing.
 
Val’korr: Pfft. Someone has to keep you whelps in line. What? Did you think Artur was going to do it?

Thaldorien: Waiter, another coffee for my grumpy friend.

Val’korr: A cup of that Elvish tea might work better.

Thaldorien: So, the souls of the dead travel to this Spirit Realm when they depart?

Val’korr: They do. It’s far more profound, though. I believe the souls of the dead create the Spirit Realm. It appears to be a holding space until they pass on to the next cycle.

Thaldorien: You know we don’t believe in reincarnation, right?

Val’korr: Your loss.

Thaldorien: It’s a real realm then? We could traverse it?

Val’korr: Yes… but… what is real? What does that mean? Unlike most realms, the Spirit Realm is woven from soul magic, memories, and echoes of reality. It is a fractured place, inhabited by dangerous Spirit Beasts. Magic is tenuous and hard to use there. The whole realm twists perceptions and shifts along endless possibilities and echoes – if you’re not careful, you can lose your way. You do not want to get lost there.

- Conversation in an unnamed Dal’mohran cafe between Val’korr [Seeker of the First Age] and Thaldorien Stormshaper [The Inscrutable], Elven King of Dal’mohra.

Aliandra

It surprised Ali that Gara had held back for the entire fight, not risking herself against the shaman and the warriors, only occasionally offering her own blood as supplemental healing. But perhaps she had been focused too much on the trolls’ reputation as arrogant and superior. She had personally attended the lectures of visiting Troll speakers at the university in Dal’mohra and knew how smart some of them could be. At least Gara could tell just how outclassed she was on the battlefield and had acted intelligently.

“Come on, Ali,” Malika said. “You’re slow.”

“I know,” Ali said, deconstructing another tree and the beautiful orchids that sprouted along its branches. They had gone off-road, venturing deep into the jungle in search of the special mushrooms Gara had mentioned, but upon seeing the orchids, Ali had immediately decided to add them to her repertoire. Her father’s grove had been full of beautiful flowers just like them and recreating it had instantly become her goal.

Before he had left to scout, Calen had given them a general direction to follow and, while Mato seemed to have no trouble moving through the dense overgrown jungle, Ali and her entire entourage were slowing them down immensely. On her own, she could have zipped past above the brush, but she was dragging two enormous Armored Drakes and all the rest of her minions through a jungle. Eventually, she had to resort to deconstructing some of the trees and bush that blocked their way, but waiting for her magic to clear a path took forever. On the plus side, she had already inscribed several new tree species, vines, and several pretty orchids into her Grimoire that she might be able to put to good use in her jungle when they got back home.

“Wait!” Mato’s voice brought her to a halt right as she was about to step through the space created by an evaporated tree. “This is Calen’s bow!” His voice rang with concern as he turned back to face them holding the enormous bow Calen favored.

“Where could he have gone?” Ali asked. No way would Calen ever willingly drop his prized weapon and just walk off.

“The half-elf is that way,” Gara said. “I can smell him.”

Ali turned in surprise. She had asked a rhetorical question, in Common, but Gara must have intuited the problem from no more than the sight of Calen’s bow. I didn’t even consider tracking him by smell.

“Gara says he’s over in that direction. Let’s go,” Ali said, slipping her awareness into the senses of her Blood Shaman so she could keep track of the scent directly, even though the shaman was probably much better at it than she was.

It was a desperate ten minutes of crashing through the forest, chasing the scent of Calen’s blood before they burst out into a clearing where Ali was confronted with the bizarre sight of a cackling, painted troll breathing sparks of light that floated off into the air, as he poked a carved and decorated leg-bone at a frantically hopping little green frog that identified as a level sixty-eight half-elf.

Witchdoctor – Troll – level 80 (Soul)
Archer [Rift Warden] – Half-Elf / Frog – level 68 (Light)

“Calen!” she shouted, recognizing him both by the shaman’s Scent of Blood skill and by her own Identify. The grizzled troll whipped his head around and waved the grim bone in his hand, and Ali was hit by a wave of dizziness that made her stumble. Suddenly, everything swelled out of proportion.

“Ribbit!” she shouted. Confused, she tried again, but the only thing that came out was more croaking.

“Ali!” Malika shouted, an edge of panic lacing her voice.

You have been cursed with Frog Hex
You are a frog.
Strength is reduced to 5.
Damage has a chance to dispel Frog Hex.
Curse – Duration: 2 minutes.

Shit, I’m a frog too! Ali realized, her mind catching up to the notification. The witch doctor conjured an earthenware jar and scooped something out of the air with it, before tossing it over towards her. On instinct, she summoned her barrier, causing a sphere of golden magic to surround her body protecting her against the enormous jar that shattered all around her. It was that moment that flipped her perspective. It wasn’t an enormous jar – it was a regular jar. It was her that was a tiny frog. She had created a frog-sized barrier to protect herself without thinking.

“Get him, Mato!” Malika yelled.

That means my magic still works, Ali thought. She fired several barrier shards at the spiders that sprang from the wreckage of the earthenware jar, explicitly having to recreate some of them to make them the proper size, rather than miniscule to match her current form.

Mato and Malika charged the Troll, but a flare of mana shimmered through the air and the troll suddenly vanished. Ali’s frog eyes widened in surprise. It wasn’t a teleport spell; it was something else. She could still see his mana, but it was diffused as if his form was spread out in some indistinct location, as if she was observing it through frosted glass.

Without anything to attack, Mato and Malika milled about in confusion, while Ali’s minions – the ones that were not currently hopping and croaking – spread out in the clearing.

“Spirit Walk,” Gara declared cryptically, ducking down behind a tree.

What is that? But Ali couldn’t translate for the others. With nothing better to do, she turned to Sage of Learning and began to analyze the structure of the mana formation sustaining the Frog Hex. I’m going to need to be able to dismantle this, she thought, knowing they had not seen the last of that eccentric troll and his tricks. She was about halfway through tracing all the magical structures in the curse when an intense flash of mana from across the path caught her attention.

“Behind the tree!” Gara shouted, but only Ali could understand her.

“Ribbit!” Ali shouted, trying to warn her friends, but she had forgotten she was still a frog. The troll witch doctor appeared on the edge of the clearing and five wavering beams of coruscant blue light shot forth from his hand, striking Malika, Mato, and three of her non-frog minions simultaneously, flickering and pulsing as they drew energy of some kind from each of them. The witch doctor seemed to swell with power as the spell continued. Mato, of course, charged him immediately with Malika sprinting close behind him, but the witch doctor shimmered and vanished again.

Finally, Ali finished her analysis, and cast her Dismantle, immediately dispelling the curse on herself – a vastly easier endeavor than the necromancy she had dismantled last night. Her body twisted and warped as the world shrunk to more normal proportions. She patted herself down, checking everything, but she was thankfully back to normal.

“What was that beam?” she asked.

“Mana and health drain,” Malika answered, still scanning the surroundings for the troll. “You ok?”

“I’m fine.” Ali glanced about, seeing four other frogs: her minions and Calen, and suddenly realized she hadn’t made the correct choice. I can still use magic as a frog. But, freed from the hex, Calen would have been able to shoot the troll with his bow wherever it appeared. Now she had twenty-five seconds left on her recharge before she could use Dismantle again.

The witch doctor appeared again on the far side of the clearing from where he had disappeared. He cast his Frog Hex on Mato this time, and Ali fired several barrier shards towards him in an attempt to fill in for Calen. The witch doctor unleashed his drain beams a second time but canceled them abruptly the instant Mato transformed directly from Frog Form into Bear Form. Three incendiary hellfire fireballs detonated in the undergrowth, passing right through the ripple of the fleeing witch doctor.

“This guy is super annoying!” Mato declared as he switched back to his normal form.

“How did you dispel the curse?” Ali asked. She still had some time left on her recharge, but Mato had simply broken it directly.

“It’s a shapeshift,” he said. “I just changed forms, and it went away.”

Well, that’s handy, Ali thought, but it didn’t help anyone other than the Beastkin. As soon as her recharge expired, she dispelled Calen’s curse and he had barely finished transforming back when the witch doctor reappeared and cursed him again.

“Stop that!” Ali yelled, voicing her frustration.

The troll cackled and turned. “Begone,” he said, pointing his leg bone at her.

You have been cursed with Spirit Banishment
You are trapped in the Spirit Realm.
Curse – Duration: 2 minutes.

The world around Ali wavered, all the color leaching from the jungle until it was a shockingly familiar monochrome gray and somewhat ethereally transparent. She stared at the clearing, her friends still visible to her, fighting the witch doctor, but their insubstantial gray appearance and the uncanny silence created a powerful sense of being somehow apart from the world she viewed. Suddenly, the entire scene flickered, and everyone vanished, leaving an empty clearing. The echo lasted only a second before it flickered again, reverting to the present.

This is… Ali stared, dumbfounded. This was the same strange world she came to whenever she used Arcane Recall. The same place her mother had brought her when she had saved her from the Blind Lich. The same place she had spent three thousand years in stasis. But this time, she could move.

She watched the gray and washed-out form of the witch doctor casting his draining beams at her minions and friends, but even those had lost their brilliant blue and were muted to gray in this bizarre, surreal world. She took a hesitant step forward, and her body warped and shifted as if it were not altogether coherent, held together perhaps by her memories, rather than physical consistency. Ali swallowed uncomfortably, and parts of her seemed to fray. Reflexively she clamped at herself with the full force of her will, yet the fact that it seemed to work was the most disconcerting thing of all. Whenever she used her own spell, her body was kept frozen, held immobile for the entire duration it transported her here. It had never required holding herself together with her mind.

At the far edge of the clearing, something gleamed with an eye-catching flash of actual color, and so she tried another step in that direction. It was not difficult to move, but the sensation of coming apart did not ease up. Clinging to her image of herself, she took another step, and then another, getting used to the space, and soon she stood beside the large ghostly tree. She reached her hand out to steady herself, but shockingly, it passed right through the bark, sinking deep into the trunk before finding any resistance. She snatched her hand back and gazed at it, but her hand – and the tree – seemed unblemished from the disconcerting contact. Behind the tree she found a whole host of tiny mushrooms nestled in a larger patch of Soulshade Blossoms, glowing an intense blue color – the only color in this strange place.

Ghost Mushroom – level 63 (Soul)

A soul magic mushroom? And such a high level? Ali was intrigued, and of course, immediately deconstructed it. However, much to her surprise, her deconstruction magic, usually bright gold and green, came out gray and muted and passed right through the mushrooms without any effect.

Huh? That’s weird.

Ali's attention was snagged by a sudden flicker of bluish movement, crawling down the tree next to her and she almost screamed, vividly recalling the terrifying monster that had tried to attack her once while using Arcane Recall.

Ghostly Spider – Spirit Spider – level 5 (Soul)

Oh, is that all? Ali steadied herself in relief upon discovering it was only a level five monster. What was remarkable was that it was bluish, transparent, and glowing – a stark contrast to the gray of the tree it was crawling on.

Out in the normal world, she spied the bizarre sight of Gara chasing a tiny, hopping frog while swinging her blood-drenched axe in wild arcs, but before Ali could get a closer look, the spider crawling along the tree leapt out at her. In a flash, she summoned a protective barrier, but the spider sailed right through her grayish magic and bit her on the shoulder. It was a tiny amount of damage, but Ali’s defensive magic had never failed her before. Well, besides the light elementals – but never like this, gray and completely inert. The spider bit her again, crawling down her arm, but when she tried to flick it off, her hand passed right through it. A second spider appeared, and then a third, and Ali backed away as they approached. More and more spiders appeared, streaming in from all around the gray reflections of the jungle trees.

Ali ran. She tried, but she couldn’t get on her barrier in this place, so all she could do was run.

She tried to scream as the incorporeal spiders swarmed up her body, but nobody was there to hear her. As soon as the thought occurred to her, she used Minion Teleport, switching locations with her freshly frog-hexed shaman. Her body switched locations to the other side of the clearing, but she remained in the Spirit Realm, while her shaman, somehow miraculously freeing herself of the frog hex, appeared where she had originally stood among the spiders, but still gray and insubstantial.

Why does teleport work and not barrier? Well, it half-worked… It certainly hadn’t done what she had expected.

But she had evaded the crawling spiders for a moment. She didn’t have any other ideas, so she used the time she had gained to analyze the magic of the Spirit Banishment curse. As soon as the Ghostly Spiders caught up with her, she teleported again. She was messing with her shaman, but she didn’t think it would cause too many issues, and she simply couldn’t help anyone from here. She pursued her analysis with a single-minded focus.

Ali continued in this way, evading the spiders and studying for several rounds, when suddenly there was a powerful ripple of mana and the witch doctor appeared in the center of the clearing. His body glowed with blue and white mana, standing out like a beacon in the gray of the surroundings. His body paint, and the decorations and embellishments on his gear, shone with brilliant colors, leaving haloes and shimmering trails as he moved. Ali couldn’t help noticing that the edges of his body did not blur like hers.

“Hah, now you’re mine,” he said, with a wide, ghastly grin. He thrust forward a weathered hand, and an incandescent blue beam hit her. Ali’s mana and health drained into his spell. She summoned her barrier in vain, but his magic ignored it, his beams passing right through as if it were not even there.

She ran, but the beam followed her, ignoring obstacles, passing through trees, and tracking her through her teleports to drain her constantly. She tried retrieving a health potion from her ring, but it summoned gray and insubstantial, falling through her hand to shatter on the ground. In frustration, she simply clenched her teeth and endured the magic and the cackling taunts coming from the Troll, focusing once again on the Spirit Banishment curse, until finally she understood.

“Goodbye,” she said in the troll language, waving at him with a tight smile, and dispelled her curse. What surprised her most was that it actually worked. She didn’t feel much of anything except the drain vanishing, but the clearing suddenly snapped back to full color, and she found herself standing in the real world once again, minus the witch doctor.

“Ali! You’re back!” Malika exclaimed.

“He cursed me into the Spirit Realm,” Ali explained. “That’s where he keeps going.” She had so many questions about the realm, how it was related to her magic, and how the witch doctor was able to use his magic there while she couldn’t. But none of them would have any better answers.

Ali turned to where Gara was still chasing her tiny, frog-hexed Armored Drake. “Stop attacking my monsters,” she said, annoyed with the troll’s inexplicably bizarre behavior in the middle of a frustrating fight. It wasn’t like she could do any damage to the drake, but she had told her to stand back, and now she was actively hindering their forces at substantial risk to herself. “What if you get drained?”

“The frog hex, it breaks with damage,” Gara said. “But your drake is very hard to hit, and your friends don’t understand proper speech.”

“Oh,” Ali said. That’s surprisingly useful information. Gara’s response had unraveled her entire frustration and annoyance. Of course the curse broke on damage, it was right there in the description, and she had read right over it. Her own shamans, running their self-bleeds, had almost instantly broken the curse and she hadn’t put two-and-two together. “Thank you.”

“Damage breaks the frog hex,” she said, switching to Common to translate for her friends. Then she swapped back to Trollish and instructed her shamans to inflict bleeds on her drakes while the witch doctor was absent in the Spirit Realm.

“Oh, that’s how they’re breaking it,” Malika said, sudden realization brightening her face as she stared at the shamans.

Ali began recovering her mana using Inspiration, stopping only when her Arcane Insight recharge expired. Immediately, she dispelled the Frog Hex on Calen, returning him to normal.

“Thank you,” he said, seeming immensely relieved and grateful as he checked his limbs and body. He accepted his bow from Mato, flew over to the edge of the clearing, and disappeared, vanishing in the shadows of the trees.

“This has to be the weirdest fight we’ve ever had,” Ali said, regenerating more mana while she waited for the troll witch doctor to reappear. She had spent most of the fight waiting around and using Arcane Insight – aside from the few minutes running away from Ghostly Spiders with Minion Teleport in the spirit realm. And now she had her minions fighting each other to stack up bleeds.

“Most annoying, you mean?” Malika grumbled.

The witch doctor suddenly reappeared nearby, and Ali found herself once again transforming into a frog. Mato vanished in a shimmer immediately afterward, presumably banished to the Spirit Realm. When Malika suddenly turned into a frog also, Ali dispelled her friend’s curse immediately. While she didn’t personally enjoy hopping around and croaking, the Frog Hex was merely an inconvenience to her – in fact, she only lost one point of strength in the transformation. I’m barely stronger than a frog, she realized with a frown. The fact that it was an Aman Rak frog did not make it any less embarrassing, but for a physical class like Malika, it would be a significant liability.

“Get a bleed on Malika,” she told her shamans, expanding the list of targets that could handle the extra damage.

Five blue beams blasted out from the witch doctor’s hands, snaking through the trees, but his spell was interrupted by a flash of light and black flame as an arrow to the chest blasted him off his feet, knocking him into a tree. Calen’s arrows followed in a rapid-fire stream of light and black flame as his bow howled from the opposite side of the clearing.

The witch doctor scrambled to his feet and ran as three hellfire fireballs detonated in the hastily vacated spot. A flicker of unusual magic rippled through him, and a murky red potion appeared in his hands briefly before he downed it. His dark hair suddenly changed to a brilliant pink color, and his health began to rise quickly. In his frantic escape, the witch doctor had run right next to Ali. He stopped, not noticing her flopping about at his feet, and cast his five-way beam drain again.

Ali cast Minion Teleport, switching places with one of her Armored Drakes right as the bleed dispelled its frog hex, dropping it close enough to the witch doctor to knock him down.

The witch doctor screeched in surprise as the drake unleashed its dragon-fire breath attack and a powerful talon cleave from point-blank range. There was a shimmer and a flash as the drake was turned back into a frog. The drake immediately reverted to normal, breaking the frog hex, but their enemy had already fled – both Malika and the witch doctor vanishing into the Spirit Realm in a gleaming rush of soul magic.

This time, however, all was not quiet. Ali could see the wavering, indistinct flashes of Malika’s powerful soul magic, even though she was in the Spirit Realm. A few moments later, the witch doctor reappeared, looking panicked and much worse for wear. The instant he reappeared, an Eimuuran steel arrow from Calen’s bow pierced his chest, blasting him backward, sending his rune-etched troll femur staff soaring end-over-end through the air until it pegged itself into the soft soil beside a tall tree.

Ali’s chime sounded.

Your group has defeated Witchdoctor – Troll – level 80 (Soul).

Ali dispelled her curse and looked around. Both Mato and Malika were nowhere to be found, still presumably stuck in the Spirit Realm.

“You ok?” she asked, catching Calen’s eyes.

“Yup,” he nodded, looking around. “I hope the others…”

“The banishment curse expires in two minutes,” Ali reassured him. Hopefully, the curse expires as normal with the witch doctor dead. But she needn’t have worried, because after a few moments of waiting, Mato appeared from a within shimmering ripple. Then, a minute later, Malika rejoined them in the normal world.

“I stand by my earlier comment, this was an annoying fight,” Mato declared.

“Ugh, yes,” Malika agreed.

“I was very worried he was going to be able to pick us off one at a time in the Spirit Realm, none of my magic worked in there,” Ali said.

“I could hit him just fine,” Malika answered, eyeing her with a puzzled glance.

With her comment, the end of the battle finally made sense. Ali had seen Malika’s magic flickering; the troll must have retreated to the Spirit Realm when she had teleported her drake on top of him. As soon as he appeared there, Malika attacked him with her soul magic and martial arts, and he must have panicked and tried to return. Then Calen had finished him off with a devastating Ambush.

The witch doctor also uses soul-affinity magic, Ali realized. He had seemed particularly at home and confident in that strange washed-out realm, and it had to be that Malika’s particular affinity was able to naturally function there. Even the ghostly spiders, Soulshade Blossoms, and the Ghost Mushrooms of the Spirit Realm had similar soul-affinity mana.

“I think soul magic is special in the Spirit Realm,” Ali mused.

“Yup, my magic didn’t work either,” Mato said. “Only stamina abilities.”

While Ali had been focused on the fight, the implications of what she had seen had of necessity been put on hold, but now that she was no longer busy, her mind reeled from the profound realization. Her magic used the Spirit Realm; that’s what that place really was. Immediately, she was filled with a thousand new questions, most importantly: how or why did it work that way? Her magic actually did function there – some of it, anyway – it just manifested in the real world instead of the Spirit Realm. But what about Arcane Recall? What would happen if she used it there?

“I got Ambush on him every time he left and returned,” Calen said as he walked up. “Well, every time I wasn’t a frog,” he said with a wry grimace.

“I’m just frustrated,” Ali said, putting her questions about the Spirit Realm down for a moment. Likely she would need to consult with her mother’s book for any insight or understanding. “I found a patch of the Ghost Mushrooms, but I couldn’t deconstruct them – my magic simply didn’t work. I have no idea how we can get them.”

“I’ll check Mr. Slippery here and see if he has any on him,” Malika said, eyeing the corpse of the witch doctor.

“I got a bunch,” Mato said, reaching out with broad cupped hands which suddenly filled with a pile of the strange blue mushrooms Ali had found when she had been banished to the Spirit Realm. They glowed still, perhaps slightly less brightly, but still ethereally transparent.

“How did you get them?” Ali looked at them incredulously. Deconstruction had just failed.

“My Herb Gathering skill isn’t magic,” Mato said. “It seemed to work just fine, as long as I didn’t get attacked by those annoying spiders.”

Excited, Ali deconstructed several mushrooms until her Grimoire updated.

Variant: Ghost Mushroom added to Imprint: Mushroom.

Ali quickly created a patch of the ghostly blue mushrooms, watching in fascination as several of them simply faded away till they were gone.

“Most of them will fade to the Spirit Realm over time,” Gara said, watching the mushrooms, but despite her matter-of-fact comment, her face radiated curiosity as she examined the mushrooms and glanced several times at Ali’s Grimoire.

“How do we use them?” Ali asked, already considering several locations in her own dungeon where she would introduce her new mushroom variant.

“I have a recipe. I can teach the bear to cook them if you help me to translate the words,” Gara said, pointing at Mato.

“Ooh, you really do eat them?” Ali asked.

“Of course,” Gara said, grinning. “They’re best lightly salted.”

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