15-2. Circle of Victory

“You should use your dragon form,” said Mano.

“You should help.”

“I am helping. Through supervision.”

From beneath a multi-ton rock, Elijah just glared at the dragon. Predictably, Mano wore a self-satisfied smirk. Doubtless, he’d taken quite a lot of pleasure in someone else being on the receiving end of his mother’s scolding.

Unfortunately, that someone else happened to be Elijah. The anger was less of a problem than the disappointment. She’d pointed out – at length – how dangerous using Root Nexus had been. The ley lines of a moon like Vyrin formed a delicate structure, largely because they weren’t entirely natural. And Elijah had upset the balance by redirecting them elsewhere.

And from what Kirlissa had said, doing so had sent her ethereal engineers into a panic as they attempted to contain the effects, which could be summed up into a thirty-three percent drop in the palace’s ethereal density. The vitality had also been affected, though to a lesser extent.

Even now, more than a week later, they were still scrambling to reestablish the old norms. Elijah wasn’t sure they could. Not without uprooting his tree and destroying the Root Nexus.

And Kirlissa had agreed not to do that.

Instead, she’d scolded him for what felt like hours, then left him to his own devices. Which meant he’d spent a couple of days examining the tree, only to discover that it unsurprisingly resembled Treebie. Not in scope, but it had clearly drawn some inspiration from him.

Had the system reacted to his accomplishment to influence his spell? Or had he simply followed an inevitable course with Treebie? The answer wasn’t obvious, even to someone like Mano, who’d said that he didn’t really study the system as keenly as some others.

To him, the path forward had always been battle, rather than academic understanding.

Elijah could respect that, given that much of his own progress had been based on instinct. Sometimes, he thought that too much information could cripple personal growth. Or maybe just creativity. Or uniqueness. Elijah had taken a circuitous path to power, and he knew that he never would have arrived at his current destination if he’d known that so many of his accomplishments were considered impossible.

Too much guidance was a crutch, as Tura was fond of saying. According to her, the key to being a good mentor was to let the pupil discover things on his own. She would push when necessary, but she preferred to give hints that would force him to think for himself.

Regardless, he’d soon moved on to his original task – creating a dolmen – which was how he found himself toting a multi-ton hunk of rock toward the tree. Unfortunately, though the moon was made of rock, its nature dictated that most of its composition was low-quality trash. So, he’d been forced to range far and wide to find a mountain range featuring appropriately tiered materials.

To his untrained eye, the rock looked a bit like quartz, though with a structure more reminiscent of limestone. In addition, it was potently energetic, meaning it was perfect for his dolmen.

Mano was no help in identifying it.

But then again, Elijah had never expected the battle-obsessed dragon to be, so it worked out just fine.

What he had expected was for Mano to assist in carrying the huge hunks of stone, which would have been trivial for him. He refused outright, and though he didn’t say as much, it was obviously at his mother’s behest. A punishment of sorts.

Too bad that Elijah didn’t particularly mind the physical labor. It served to center him and take him back to the days when he’d built his first dolmen outside Argos. Back then, carrying a few tons of rock was much, much more difficult. So laborious, in fact, that it had given him a few extra attribute points for the trouble.

He didn’t expect as much in this instance, largely because the weight was no longer an issue. The burden was certainly awkward, but so long as he maintained the right positioning, he could manage it easily enough.

So it went that Elijah carried fifteen hunks of rock back to the general area surrounding the new tree. It still pulsed with life and ethera, so much so that flowers and other plants had begun to bloom around it. Elijah wasn’t entirely certain where they’d come from. He surely hadn’t brought those seeds along. But there they were, all the same, as if the sheer vitality of the localized atmosphere was enough to spontaneously manifest life.

He ignored it, setting the final rock down.

Each one was a hundred feet tall and half as wide, meaning that he’d definitely gone overboard on the materials. His dolmens weren’t meant to be like the trilithons he’d raised around Druhmor. Instead, they were intended to be much more constrained. Smaller and less expansive.

Nine, in total. Eighteen feet tall and just as wide, spaced exactly thirty yards apart so that they encircled the area in perfect symmetry.

Elijah got to work.

Digging the holes was cathartic, but attacking the ground always was. He took great care not to go too deep, and through it all, he maintained his Mantle of Authority as well as Blessing of the Grove. Soul of the Wild was always active.

The result was that his particular brand of ethera and vitality continuously infused the place, marking it as his undisputed territory. Would it override Kirlissa’s domain? No. He wasn’t even close to powerful enough for that. But even if he didn’t have her permission, she would’ve had to concentrate to keep it from standing out. That was quite an accomplishment, given how far above Elijah she stood.

Fortunately, she had already granted her permission, and she had agreed to let the dolmen stand on its own.

Benefits of being her adopted son, Elijah supposed.

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It took Elijah three days to dig the holes properly, and then he moved on to the rocks that would become his trilithons. Getting them into proper shape required Elijah to use stonecutting techniques, scoring each rock, then forcing it to calve. That got them into the basic dimensions before Elijah shifted into his dragon form to make more minute adjustments.

Each scrape of his claws came with a bit of his soul as he used his mantle to cut the stone in a more ephemeral way. It was a technique he’d learned on Gorveth, but with his new grandmaster soul, it was far more effective than it had been on that excised planet. When he used his soul, it was like cutting the very idea of the stone, rather than just the physical representation of it.

“How do you do that?” asked Mano.

“Do what?”

“The soul thing,” he answered, clearly trying to play it cool, as if he was only vaguely interested.

“Oh. Mantle of Authority.”

“I have never seen a Mantle of Authority do that.”

“Really? I guess mine is more developed than most. I’ve been using it since the fourth tier. That was…I don’t know. Fifty years ago, maybe? It’s hard for me to keep track, sometimes. Gorveth seemed to have roughly the same time cycle as Earth, but Ashakar is definitely different. But I think I’m pretty close.”

“Fourth tier?”

“Yeah. Expert. But I was using…I don’t know…a nascent form of the mantle before that,” Elijah explained. Then, he went on to describe how One with Nature evolved into Soul of the Wild. “I actually expected it to evolve again since then, but I guess I still need to wait. Maybe it never will.”

“What stage were you then?” asked Mano.

“Novice, but it wasn’t long after that that I got to Student,” Elijah answered. “Back then, it was a lot easier to cultivate. These days, I basically destroy my body every time I take a step forward. Totally worth it, though.”

“You…you destroy your body?” he asked.

“Oh, for sure. It’s like fighting a war with the ethera. If I survive and accomplish my goals, I progress. If not…well, I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t win those battles,” Elijah said.

“Who taught you this?”

“Nobody,” Elijah admitted. “Well, I take that back. I bought a guide or two early on. Taught me some basic techniques to prepare my core and gave me an example of what a Druid’s soul should look like. But I diverged from those plans almost immediately. Have to forge your own path, you know?”

“I see.”

Elijah suspected that Mano had neglected some aspects of his cultivation. His disdain for mages wasn’t proof, but it was an indicator of what he prioritized. Certainly, his soul was much more powerful than Elijah’s, but he was also a transcendent. So, it was well within the realm of possibility that the Warrior hadn’t advanced it much past Elijah’s current grandmaster tier.

Not that he was going to ask. That was a personal question, and he didn’t know his adopted brother well enough to go down that path.

Mano watched the rest of Elijah’s process with elevated interest, though he still didn’t help maneuver the stones into place. Meanwhile, Elijah worked the same way he always did – with steady effort and unhurried attention to detail. And within another few days, the bones of his dolmen had been built.

“Now, I need to build the mortice holes and tenons,” he explained to Mano. Then, he went on to describe how they all fit together. Mano listened, even if he seemed vaguely familiar with the concept. He didn’t interrupt, though.

Elijah continued on, carving the appropriate structures before settling the lintels in place. With that, the basic trilithon structures were complete.

“Now, I just need to carve them,” Elijah told Mano.

“Tradesman work.”

“More of an Artist thing,” Elijah said. “The dolmens need embellishment to work properly. I guess I could just do something basic, but the grade’s always better when I do something meaningful.”

“How does a higher grade affect the end result?” Mano asked. “Aura?”

Elijah shrugged. “There’s some of that, but I’m actually hoping for something else that wasn’t always obvious back on Earth,” he said answered before explaining what he expected to happen.

Mano nodded. “A good hypothesis. If it works that way, it will be quite helpful.”

“I hope so.”

With that, Elijah moved on to the carving. In this case, he wanted to commemorate his victory in the Tournament of the First Fang, so he etched a wide variety of scenes meant to depict his fights. When he got to his victory over Skahan, Mano gave him a grave nod of approval before saying, “The snake got what he deserved.”

Elijah agreed. There was no regret there. No moral quandary. Just absolute certainty that he had done what was necessary. Maybe it was right. Perhaps it was wrong. But Elijah was far from conflicted about his actions.

If anything, he wished he could have replicated the feat with Cyran. But a combination of increased power, preparation, and what could only be called cheating meant that Elijah had to pull out all the stops just to win the fight.

Only a handful of the other fights were really memorable, but Elijah paid homage to them anyway. He also spent some time carving other scenes from the past year. Like the many balls and celebrations he’d been forced to attend. His doomed relationship with Kaelari. The friendship with Alrhok, Morin, and Piki. His love for Sara, who’d become an indispensable part of his life.

“Is that supposed to be me?”

Elijah looked up to see Mano hovering over his shoulder. “Supposed to be, yeah.”

“Needs to be bigger.”

Elijah sighed. Then, he used his soul to sheer a layer of rock away before starting over. This time, the depiction of Mano towered over everyone else, which the dragon considered fitting.

Kirlissa also made a few appearances, as did Tura and Birk, who’d been instrumental in his growth. They’d both become family to him, and in ways he hadn’t expected.

Of course, there was more to the carvings than simple scenes. Elijah also included flowery vines, roots, trees, and everything else he could imagine. Most of the time, he just let his instincts guide him, but every now and again, his intentions took the lead.

And in the end, the process took nearly three weeks.

But Elijah was satisfied with the results.

“Now what?” asked Mano when Elijah stepped back to admire it from afar.

“Now, I cast another spell. Hopefully, it activates the dolmen.”

“Is there a chance of failure?”

“I don’t think so, but this is the first time I’ve used Root Nexus to create an artificial ley line intersection. So who knows?”

Mano repositioned himself, almost as if he expected it all to blow up in Elijah’s face. That was a possibility, he had to admit, though a remote one. The bottom line was that he was flying a bit blind, and he had no real notion of how the spell might react.

Still, he felt like he was on the right track, so he stepped forward and approached the tree at the center. It hadn’t grown any larger, but its aura had become much more stable over the past few weeks. Elijah laid his hand on the trunk, feeling the dense flows of ethera rushing through it. Almost as if it had become the ley line intersection.

Which was probably as close to accurate as he could get with his description of what was happening beneath its white bark.

Elijah cast Root Nexus, focusing on the portion meant to create a dolmen.

Power rushed out of him and into the tree. Dense beams of ethera shot out from its branches, slamming into the dolmens. They shook with power, and so violently that Elijah worried that they might fall apart.

But they held.

And over the next few minutes, the ethera subsided. Finally, Elijah received a notification:

Elijah pumped his fist in celebration.

“Did it work?” asked Mano as he rested his hand on the dolmen. Despite being more than forty yards away, Elijah could hear him clearly.

“Yeah. It definitely did.”