Path of the Deathless (Book 3 Completed)

119 (I)  Offer [I]

-Hero-Ranger Morgan Munny119 (I)

Offer [I]

heless, he would let Adam have his moment first. All the questionable and miserable business could wait.

"But then, we still must talk of your new skill," Valor said, sounding uncertain. "This skill, this merged ability of yours, Shiv. You understand it?"

"Yeah," Shiv replied. "It's kind of like becoming your own magic in a weird way." He summoned a little bit of Vitae to his palm, and as the swirling mass of red and white shivered, he drew it back inside of himself before he lost too much vitality. "Still don't know what this really does," Shiv began. "It reaches out for me. It's like a solid."

"A solid?" Valor asked. "You can touch things with it?”

"Yeah, I spiked Adam in the chest earlier. I put a hole through a basilisk. It's about as hard as I am, moves as fast as I can, and I can direct it using my gravitic field. But inside me," Shiv patted his chest, "there's an active field—a mana field—that keeps it stable, keeps it from leaking out. Even after I die now, it's like a stasis zone for vitality."

"And your Revenant form before, what was the difference?"

Shiv considered that. "Before, I was just like a faint outline of myself. I couldn't really move because I didn't have mass. My bound equipment still followed me. I could strike people with that. But aside from my equipment and my magic, I didn't really have any way of affecting someone. When I resurrected, a layer of shadows would form over me and, well, it would hatch and I'd be back. Now, the red just stitches me back together. Well, it fills up, and then I surface from it. All this weird metaphysical shit's giving me a headache."

"This is good," Valor said. "This is useful information. Was your shadowy cocoon before as large as your field now?"

Shiv considered that. "Yeah, just about.”

"Then I suspect it was simply the immature form of your current metamorphosis. A frame being built before the evolution, so to speak. And right now, you have ripened the skill. It has become something active, something properly mature."

"That's not the only thing," Shiv said. He remembered his conversation with the Vicar. Especially the part that had to do with Udraal Thann. "Valor. I had an encounter with Sullain. We exchanged words while time was frozen—Alright, maybe exchanging words wasn't all of it. He talked to me real nicely at first after he set me on fire with his Necromantic sun. And then he started trying to hash my name, trying to figure things out for me. He was pretty pissed off when I revealed what Havel was trying to pull on him. So maybe we have an opening there.”

“Good,” Valor said. “The more at odds our enemies are, the better.”

“But, uh, he has some of my Vitae. He literally pulled it out of me when I exploded. After I went off, he caught it somehow. Just like he managed to capture some of Roland's arrows. Arrows that removed me from existence in a second. He’s godsdamn powerful. I felt like an insect next to him. What kind of Magical Skills does he even have?”

Valor paused as he strained himself, trying to remember something. “His ability to control magic was... Omnimancy," Valor suddenly said. The flames in his eyes flickered. "The control of all magics."