119 - Hollis

Rather than heading straight for Hollis, Vivi first [Blinked] around the cave system and found the townsfolk-turned-monsters, which Eshara’s team had restrained in various locations. Doing so gave her a moment to think, which she appreciated for a few reasons. Eshara was the one who had primarily tossed her thoughts into disarray, but Vivi also didn’t want to face down another ‘the Sorceress reveals herself’ with Hollis—an ordeal that would probably never stop making her uncomfortable.

Vivi hadn’t known how to act when Eshara had collapsed in front of her. She didn’t like being thanked under normal circumstances, like by Guard Captain Soren or the previous townsfolk, much less… that. The effusive, gasping, forehead-pressed-to-the-ground display which Eshara had insisted on. 

Vivi hated how useless she’d been. She hadn’t had a single clue what to say to the woman. Emotions weren’t her strong suit at the best of times, but she’d been at even more of a loss than usual. Maybe she should’ve anticipated an intense reaction, planned for it. She just hadn’t expected to arrive to find Eshara battling her prior teammate. The timing had, in different senses, been both poor and incredible at once.

Though Vivi didn’t know Hollis, she expected the man would do a much better job comforting Eshara than Vivi herself could, which was why she’d flitted off to collect him rather than stay by Eshara’s side.

While tracking down the knight and her team earlier, Vivi had identified nine mutated townsfolk through the cave system. She returned to them now and wrapped each in a bubble of magic to drag them along. The task took a few minutes at most; she had dropped beacons, and [Blink] accelerated the process too.

Her last stop was the source [Detect Presence] had pinged earlier, hidden behind a stone wall. When she’d first noticed him, she had phased through to check that he was safe, though she had cast [Invisibility] since she knew meeting him would be an ordeal. As any introduction with her tattoos openly worn would be.

With a swish of her staff, mana suffused the rock and melted it outward, opening a pathway in. She left the captured townsfolk behind and stepped through. Upon hearing stone grumbling sideways, Hollis jerked in surprise and snapped his gaze toward the disturbance. She met his eyes. 

The man was closer to his twilight years than his dawning ones, though he wasn’t elderly. He had short dirty-blond hair greased down with the filth of the expedition. His staff lying by his side—a smooth, polished white rod—and his robes gave away his profession in an instant. Even something about the wrinkles on his face, the kindness and wisdom in his eyes, gave off an aura of ‘cleric.’

“Eshara?” the man had immediately asked, since that was the reasonable explanation. But instead, Vivi walked in, and she watched his face go blank in response. He stared at her—no doubt taking in the red tears painting her cheeks, her general appearance that suggested one identity. She waited patiently as the man’s thoughts visibly froze, in the way that everyone’s did upon learning the Sorceress was standing in front of them.

Maybe when I announce myself to the world, the reactions will stop being so painful. One reason to look forward to that, I suppose.

“Hello, Hollis. Eshara’s safe,” she opened with, hoping to break the stunned silence. “As is Corvan.” She wouldn’t bury the lede on that, since his teammates’ fates were what he surely cared about most. “Are you hurt? I’m assuming it’s mostly manaburn.”

She accomplished her goal: the words startled the man out of his shock. He reacted in a way Vivi hadn’t seen yet for ‘the Sorceress revealing herself,’ though.

He smiled, slumped back, and started chuckling to himself.

“Better late than never, as they say,” he said wryly. “Ah, what a relief. I would stand to greet you, Lady Sorceress, but I’m certain my face would meet the ground the moment I tried. I would prefer to not make a fool of myself. Please forgive the reception.”

After a second’s pause—his lack of surprise had caught her off guard in turn—Vivi said, “No, please don’t strain yourself. Stay seated.” Since she hadn’t gotten an answer, she repeated, “Are you hurt?”

“Ah.” Hollis twitched at the reminder. “No, my lady, simply manaburn.” He snorted. “That, and mundane exhaustions of every imaginable sort. It has been a very trying expedition. As even the easiest are, I admit, when I have that woman to keep up with.”

She was pleased by how smoothly the man seemed to have taken her arrival. “I have something that can help.” She pulled a potion out of her inventory and walked over. “I was dealing with manaburn myself recently, and my alchemist made this for me. It won’t fix anything, but it’ll take the edge off.”

Hollis eyed the glass vial. “Miraelle of Vanguard’s. You’re sure you’re willing to part with it?”

“Yes, please. Take.”

“I know better than to decline help when offered.” He accepted the vial, uncorked it, and downed the liquid in a single go. A pause, and then a shiver seized him. “Thank you, Lady Vivisari.”

“I think I’m the one who should be thanking you.”

Continuing to pleasantly surprise her, the man considered her statement with a contemplative look rather than immediately tripping over himself with something along the lines of ‘the Sorceress shouldn’t be thanking me,’ like some might have. 

“We’re all doing what we can,” Hollis said eventually. He smiled. “Let us compromise on the matter and express mutual gratitude.”

“I can do that.” She hesitated, wondering whether she should voice her curiosity. “You… don’t seem very surprised.” It was undoubtedly one of the most subdued reactions she’d gotten so far.

“Is that how you see it?” He hummed. “In a sense, I of course am. But also not.”

“Why?”

“I knew the heavens would provide for her,” the cleric said seriously. “It was a monstrous position Eshara was put in. One that seemed too cruel even by the capricious whims of Fate. The gods would not abandon her in that way.”

Ah, Vivi thought. Right. A man of faith.

“And there were the rumors from the capital,” the man added. “It was difficult to do anything but dismiss those as wild hearsay, yet in retrospect, I harbored suspicions.” He seemed to realize something. “The capital—the source of your own manaburn, I take it?”

“Yes. I needed to push myself.” She changed topics. “Did the potion help?”

“Immensely,” he said, rubbing the side of his head. He sounded impressed. “Merely a pickaxe bashing into my skull, rather than a boulder dropping onto it, now.”

Vivi winced in sympathy. It hadn’t been long since her own course of magically induced hangover, and she hadn’t enjoyed that experience either. “I have a stamina potion as well, if you want it.” The overuse effects were independent of each other. “So you can stand and move around. You’ll be able to rest as long as you need to after this.”

“Am I needed somewhere?” he asked, sensing the intent of the request.

Vivi was quiet for a moment. “Yes. Eshara wasn’t…” She trailed off. “I arrived last second. The very last. She was winning.”

“Ah.” The man sobered. He understood what Vivi meant without her needing to be explicit. “I see. Yes, I should probably speak with her.”

Vivi withdrew a yellow vial from her inventory, and Hollis accepted the item. He physically jerked when magic poured out from the uncorked container. “Some kick to it, I see.” Bracing himself, he downed the liquid. His whole body seized, and he froze for a long moment before relaxing. “Rejuvenating,” the man coughed out. “To say the very least.”

He handed the empty vial back and stood. Vivi watched him carefully, ready to catch the man. But the combination of alchemical remedies had gotten him up, though she knew he wouldn’t be enjoying life for the next few days.

“Shall we?” he asked.

“Yes, please. I’m bringing the infected back with us, so don’t be alarmed.” She gave him a second to digest that announcement before dragging in the airborne collection of monsters from around the bend. Hollis seemed startled, but recovered. She held out a hand. “I’ll [Blink] us there.”

He accepted the offer, and with a twisting of the spatial fabric, their group of eleven appeared inside the chamber where the Seed of Genesis had made its nest.

Vivi had been prepared for a still slumped-over Eshara, but instead, she found the woman standing straight and confident, her helmet tucked under one arm. At the influx of magic announcing Vivi’s arrival, the knight turned around to face her. She wore a serious expression without a hint of her prior turmoil. Her armor shone with a polished finish. She looked every inch the gallant and noble Roving Justicar that Vivi had heard so much about.

“Welcome back, my lady,” Eshara said, nodding firmly at her. “Hollis,” she greeted as well. “You’re looking better.”

It took Hollis a second to recover from his surprise. With how Vivi had framed the events, he surely hadn’t expected the woman to be so composed. “Thanks to the benevolence of the Sorceress, indeed I am. She lent me a few potions. I dare not imagine casting, but yes, I’m on my feet.” He faced Saffra. “And who is this?”

“My apprentice,” Vivi answered on the girl’s behalf. “Saffra.”

Saffra gave an uncomfortable wave.

Hollis’s eyebrows rose, but he didn’t comment on the announcement that Vivi had taken an apprentice. “A pleasure to meet you. Hollis. Please forgo the titles.” He smiled at the girl, then turned back to Eshara and studied her intently. The woman met his gaze with a pointed look and a narrowing of her eyes, and Vivi had no idea what they were communicating to each other. 

Whatever the case, Eshara spoke first, and not to her ally. She said to Vivi, “You brought all nine. That was my total count. I don’t believe there are more.”

Vivi guessed that she was supposed to ignore everything that had happened upon first meeting Eshara. She was happy to do so. “Not that I could identify,” she agreed. “Just nine.” She’d looked through the tunnels extensively.

“What are our plans going forward?” Eshara asked. Her attention drifted to Corvan. “You… truly have means of curing them all?”

“I already have for the villagers at Crestwood, so I’m not speaking theoretically when I say that yes, I can. None were as advanced as these, but fundamentally, it’s two steps: remove the infection, heal the damage from the mutations. The former is biomancy and thus relatively simple for me.” An exaggeration, but true in spirit.

“The restoration of a Titled will require much stronger healing magic than a villager’s,” Eshara murmured. Not because she thought Vivi didn’t know that, surely, but just to voice her concerns aloud.

And yes. A generalist mage had access to a versatile array of spells, but some specialties were heavily restricted, if not locked from generalists. Perhaps most prototypically, healing. The vast majority of healers infused their mana with divine essence through a link to the heavens… and the precise mechanisms of that—if they could be described as mechanisms at all—were something the Sorceress, and thus Vivi, didn’t understand well. 

An immense level advantage helped, but not to the extent she trusted her simple spells—however overcharged—to work against whatever a Seed of Genesis had done to Corvan. It was corrupting magic from a Cataclysm.

She had two solutions. First, potions. A [Phoenix Blood Elixir] was both more potent and more comprehensive than her own healing spells, to the extent she trusted it would handle any necessary post-care. The other method, while it had several benefits, she was more hesitant to employ. 

Making use of the Titled healer standing next to her.

Vivi did have a means of sharing her mana pool with other mages, after all, and seeing how the Codex interacted with Hollis’s magic seemed like an experiment worth pursuing. She wanted to know if Hollis—healers in general—could infuse divine energies into the mana they pulled from the Codex. The day might come when she needed to lend an enormous amount of mana to the Archbishop, for example, since if properly fueled, the man would be able to perform healing miracles that even she couldn’t, and perhaps that even her potions couldn’t. 

The only reason she didn’t go to him now with a [Greater Warp] was that meeting with the Archbishop, much less asking favors, would entail complications. If she needed to, she would, but this problem wasn’t on that scale.

So, Hollis. He was suffering manaburn, yes, but that shouldn’t prevent him from casting. Manaburn came from potion overuse, from stuffing his core full of false, alchemical power too many times in quick succession. The Codex didn’t work that way.

That said, she imagined it would be far from pleasant. Manaburn made casting difficult, and while he wouldn’t have to draw the energy from his own core, focusing on any task that required concentration—magical or not—would be uncomfortable at best.

But he was a grown man, and more than accustomed to hardship. She thought he might even appreciate the chance to be responsible for helping his teammate, along with the others he and Eshara had worked so hard to save. Which was the less practical reason Vivi was considering the option.

I should just ask him, Vivi thought. He’s fully capable of deciding for himself. This was a Titled, career adventurer, not someone she needed to coddle.

Turning her contemplative gaze away from the mutated once-beastkin, she looked at the cleric and raised her free hand. The heavy, thick form of a book with a hollow sun etched on its cover appeared.

“I have an idea,” she told the man. “Let me explain.”