The Rifts of Psyche by Kyle West (popular e readers txt) 📗

wards are second-to-none, and he can do them well in almost every Aspect. Like most Radiants, he’s also greatly sensitive to any abnormal deviations in the ethereal field. Don’t think you can defend yourself against him with just one lesson from me.”

“Could you teach me to stream a ward, anyway?”

“Certainly,” Erymmo said. “Especially since I do not believe you are close to fraying. But I’m interested in how you’ve developed your Binding stream so . . . cleanly. I daresay it is near one hundred percent purity, with hardly any trace of Manifoldic toxin . . . if any. Of course, that cannot be possible.”

Lucian tried to play it off with a shrug. If other mages learned how “pure” his Binding streams were, it might make them suspicious.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I had a good teacher at the Academy.”

“I see,” Erymmo said, his tone suggesting he knew Lucian was hiding something. “First, back to wards. As I said before, a ward can only defend against a specific Aspect. A Radiant ward, for example, can only defend against Radiant Magic. So, if you are in a duel with a Radiant, you better have a strong ward prepared. Now, to stream the ward, you must open a dualstream, with the warding stream as the primary, and a cohered stream as the secondary. That second stream is called the shell. Its only purpose is to hold the primary stream in place.”

“I think I understand. So, how do I stream one?”

“Patience, young mage,” Erymmo said. “You must imagine the primary stream diffusing around your entire person. If hostile magic is streamed at you, your ward will focus on the point of attack and counteract it. Of course, a ward can be broken with a powerful enough stream, but it will take much more magic to undo a ward than to form one. That is part of their advantage. Then again, if you waste your ether on a ward and another mage comes at you with a differing Aspect, then you will be at a disadvantage.”

“So, how is warding different from shielding? Like a Thermal shield or a Dynamistic shield.”

“Shields require only one Aspect and are active streams. That means they burn ether as you use them. Wards require a subset of your pool in advance and remain active for hours or longer, depending on the total ether a mage dedicates to the ward, and they unravel on their own after a certain amount of time, and must be restreamed. A shield can be advantageous, as upfront the ether investment is less, but over time, will be greater than that of a ward. And of course, active streams cannot be maintained during sleep, while wards can. That makes wards useful if you’re out in the wilds and want to be protected from frays, for example. Radiant wards can detect deviations in the ethereal field, allowing a mage to wake up in time to defend themselves. As said before, wards require at least two Aspects to set, while shields require only one.”

“Wait. You said at least. You can add more than one Aspect to a ward?”

“You can. You still need a shell Aspect, and coherence between all three. But obviously, it requires a greater supply of ether, and you can only stream one ward at a time, and a ward as strong as the total supply of your ether pool. That is something that can only be guessed at; a ward will collapse if there is not enough ether to supply it. If you decide to ward against two Aspects, the Aspects still need to be complementary – that is, within two spaces of each other on the Septagon. And obviously, a dual ward in effect is a tristream, only streamable by the most powerful of mages with large pools of ether. Anything above that is theoretical. As I’m sure you know from your training, a dualstream uses four times as much ether as a single stream, and a tristream uses nine times as much. Of course, a quadrastream would use sixteen times as much. So on and so forth. So yes, you could make a Dynamistic and Radiant ward with an Atomic shell, for example, which would defend you from Dynamistic and Radiant Magic. Or alternately, you could create a Dynamistic ward with an Atomic and Radiant shell, which would last for an exceptionally long time before needing to be refreshed. The more streams in the shell, the longer the ward will last. In theory, six Aspects could be used to shell just one, leading to a ward that would, in theory, last an infinite amount of time.”

Lucian was learning far more than he had ever bargained for. These lessons were no doubt reserved for the Talents in the Volsung Academy. “Could multiple mages join streams and create a ward like that?”

“In theory, yes. If they worked together closely, with intense concentration and no mistakes by anyone. And it would require a great many powerful mages. I don’t know the purpose of such a ward, which is why it has likely never been done. But assuming you got enough powerful mages – no doubt dozens at the least, and you had a leader whose Focus was trained and powerful enough to direct all that magic, to the point where the leader didn’t pass out or fray from it, then yes, it is possible. Or you could do any variation thereof – six Aspects, five, or four, so on and so forth. But if any one of those mages loses their Focus, then that Focus will slip out of the lead mage’s control, making creating such a theoretical ward extremely problematic. And it’s likely having access to that amount of magic will fray the mind of anyone controlling the stream.”

“So, how about when a mage completely cuts you off from magic? How is that done?”

“By using a brand. I won’t show you how to do that, but essentially, a brand is a ward that you