Draith
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Chapter 120 - Memoirs of Arthe Balthum
🕑 Added 2025-06-03 15:00:10 +0000 UTCAuthor's Note: Chapter 2/2 for today.
I soon found the answer to my questions in Balthum's journals. Arthe was apparently his first name. He only used it in his earliest journals, when he'd first become the Magus Dominus of the Mount Aeternia region.
These are the memoirs of Arthe Balthum. I suppose I am a Magus Dominus now. A better fate than death, to be certain, yet not one I relish.
I hate this place. I'm always cold, and the people are little better than the slaves we kept to pick the fields. My twenty-one years cannot pass swiftly enough. I am thankful I will at least have Sadhe to spend my years with. That she left Aranor to come with me fills my heart with joy. Her desire to explore the libraries of Althon remind me of why I fell in love with her all over again.
Of course, I understood why she chose to delay her departure.
By the time she is ready to join me, I shall make a home worthy of her.
Huh. Seemed Sadhe and Balthum had known Perth’s father. That was… kinda weird. Was easy to forget how old Perth’s father was sometimes.
A lot of the entries after that were similar, mostly complaining of the cold and the poor skills of the locals. Up until one that caught my interest.
There are secrets in these mountains.
One of the locals was rambling his way through a drunken story, which I was sure was no more than exactly that. However, when, in a fit of passing whimsy, I investigated the location he spoke of, a cave on the very northeasternmost mountain, just south of the harbor, I found something. He'd been correct. It was a ruin half buried, the dripping water over the years having encased it in stone. Buried not by magic but the simple power of time. A fascinating concept. Beneath that rock I found a spell engraved into the wall. One of unexpected sophistication. Even modern spell theory could not easily create such a spell.
Its existence redefines history as I know it. And it is but the start.
If only Sadhe were not delayed once more, she would love to delve the true history with me. The airship that was to bring her was brought down, and they are saying the route will be closed. She has never been able to endure travel by sea, not since the leviathans swamped her home as a girl. And I cannot bring myself to push her to do so.
The answer feels simple. I shall go and bring her myself. These savages will survive without me.
I'm coming Sadhe.
Was unpleasant feeling even a degree of understanding for the man. I flipped through the next few entries. Most of them were rambling, and hardly coherent. I was able to piece together that he'd attempted to leave but he'd encountered an old enemy not far outside his domain. If not for an emergency teleport token, he would've died.
I stared at the page, shocked that he'd actually included the full instructions of how he'd designed the token. And the spot they teleported him to. All of it with his signature underneath. They looked to be single use items with complicated contingencies woven into them.
Note to self, soon as I was Pegasus-souled, make emergency teleport tokens. See if I couldn't modify his designs to make emergency healing tokens too.
The enemy who drove him to use his tokens was apparently the source of the curse, though the mess that were the entries at the time made it hard to tell who the enemy had been. A man cloaked in eyes was a phrase repeated several times, though never given a name.
It was over a year before his next coherent entry, and by that point he'd completely stopped writing about the man from the attack.
I am certain Mount Aeternia is the key, yet I am unable to gain access. There is some form of enchantment protecting it. One I shall have to breach if I want the secrets buried within. Of course, first I must discover a way to breathe at such horrid heights.
This place continues to vex me, as though the curse was not enough.
Sadhe has fallen sick. I wish to go to her, but I know now that my enemies will not allow it. I fear that they are the source of her suffering as well. That they are the ones keeping her from me.
I grow weaker by the day. If that were not bad enough, I cannot advance. Something inside me is broken. My soul will not accept even the most powerful of sacrifices. A dragon's heart, perfectly prepared and readied, and it was not enough to prompt my Hydra soul to respond.
Am I even a Hydra soul, any longer?
The next few entries all included possible points of interest, locations where he found different minor secrets of the mountains, which I jotted down for exploration after the Howl had passed. Then he recorded the first moment where he kept his oath as a Magus Dominus. Probably his only moment.
The port was struck by a storm, what the locals call a Howl, as though the ever present winds are the result of some great monster. It has been struck by hundreds of storms before, maybe thousands.
Something about this storm was different. The defenses failed, and the mortals died.
I was attending to my studies when they got themselves killed. When I returned for a nice warm bath, I found the entire town had been reduced to scrap.
Of course, that was unacceptable. I might be on the edge of civilization, but I was not willing to go without. Nor was I willing to rebuild their little shanty town. So I gathered enough debris and whichever people happened to be hanging off it, and brought it back to my staging area for ascending Mount Aeternia, commanding them to rebuild there. I've gained access to the mountains uppermost chambers, and therein, instead of the secrets I deserve, I've found only a creature most vexing. It claims to have access to ancient knowledge but only for those it deems worthy.
That it does not acknowledge me as such proves how little it must know.
At least the hot springs in my staging area are still intact, though I suspect I shall have to make my own proper bath chambers. There is only so long I can stomach the stench of dragon's breath.
With the effects of the curse pressing in on me, I realize that I will not have the life I had once assumed, stretching beyond the history of mortal kingdoms. It is tempting to take several of these women to gift with my seed. Yet none of them are worthy. Perhaps I can make one who is?
The only woman worthy of my child is Sadhe, and she grows weaker by the month. She does not tell me, but I see it in the strokes of her pen, or in the trembles in her hand when I travel to Spellford to Mirror her.
Wonder if this Sadhe person was as bad as Balthum, or if she just didn't know how bad he was? Or maybe she did, and that was the real reason she never joined him.
There was one last entry that caught my eye.
It was right at my feet the entire time. The Golden Halls of Ascension were beneath the inn of the same name. I spent years within a hundred paces of the greatest legacy Aeternia had to offer!
The entrance was spell locked, the combination fiendishly complex. That was the only clue I had that the location was important. It took me years to solve, though by the time I did, it had become more of a hobby than an actual pursuit.
I am surprisingly proud of my success.
Perhaps that is why I find myself compelled to record it here.
Wait…
I flipped to the next page, which was a series of numbers, lines and diagrams. It looked more like a spell design than any Spellcode I'd seen before. Flipping open my grimoire to the Keyring spell, I started taking notes. Even though Balthum had solved it, I realized I'd have to decipher his notes before I'd have any chance at using the Spellcode myself. Parts of it didn't make sense, but then, Balthum had been… weird.
Still, it would be a lot easier than working from nothing. Especially since I now had a lot of his research journals.
I put the journal back on the workbench in Memory Palace. I'd gone through them the old fashioned way since I had more important things to be downloading. The last of the notes from Keeper on the construction of the Beacon, for one. I'd already started sketching out a design for a version of Assess Self that included the full Diagnostic components, but it was looking like it would need to be split up into several second Order spells. That or I'd have to save it for a third Order spell.
The most important thing I took away from the design though, was how to set up a permanent device like the beacon that would let people who didn't have Spell slots cast it. Kind of like the skull that had read off my Affinities shortly after I woke up as Perth. There were a lot of affinities. If what I got from Keeper was correct, there were over a hundred known affinities. But what was counted as an unique affinity got kinda blurry at the higher rarities, cause something like Celestial could technically also be labelled as Worlds. They had different 'strengths'. Celestial was a little better at the 'hidden world' part of Worlds magics while Worlds was better at the teleportation part. They weren't nearly as distinct as I'd originally been taught.
My main takeaway was that I should pay more attention to Celestial spells, since I'd likely be able to cast them without needing a Focus.
Returning to the real world, I found dinner waiting for me. I dug in as Tamrie sketched in one of her notebooks. I hadn't noticed at first, but she was actually a decent artist. She was currently filling in a sketch of a scene of Calbern and Bevel studying. They'd long since finished, but she'd gotten the broad strokes down earlier and had started slowly filling it in shortly before I slipped into Memory Palace.
"That's really good," I said after finishing my dinner, wiping my lips with a cloth that either Tamrie or Calbern had left for me.
"Not winning no prizes, but kinda captures the heart of it, more'n like," Tamrie said with a shrug. "Could probably do twice as good with a wave of your hand."
"Not really the same thing," I said. Even in a world with cameras in every cell phone, I'd thought hand drawn art had its place. More soul. And nothing about Ro'an had changed my opinion. "Like you said, you're able to capture the heart of it. A spell wouldn't do that."
Tamrie stopped, looking up at me with a big grin. "Sometimes, being your fake girlfriend ain't half-bad."
"Ouch," I said, grasping at my chest with a chuckle.
She chuckled along, returning to her sketch.
Deciding to 'take it easy' I also decided to do some sketching. That I sketched out a few casual designs for ways to build a proper Assess Self device was beside the point.
"I'm off," Tamrie said, patting my arm then leaning over and kissing the top of my head before heading for bed.
I found myself watching her as she left, her earlier comment about being my fake girlfriend making its way back to the fore of my mind.
For a second, I considered going back inside Memory Palace, and pulling open the bathroom door. If things continued with Tamrie the way they were, I'd have to face it eventually. But…
I didn't feel ready.
Tamrie deserved better, one way or another. But I didn't know if I'd ever be able to open that door again.
What I was ready for… was to go see Nexxa. If she wouldn’t come to me… well, Balthum was right about one thing. Sometimes you had to go to the people you cared about.
Even if they might not want to see you.
