Lateral Movement

by Alzrius

845 - Rachis Resolution

The spells that Adagio had woven into his spine were beyond what she should have been capable of.

Or at least, they were beyond anything that her sisters were capable of. Although Lex had only spent a few months with Sonata and Aria, he’d not only observed them using their magic on multiple occasions, he’d thoroughly examined the magical channels in their bodies. He’d even made sure to question them about how their powers worked.

That last mode of inquiry hadn’t been particularly fruitful, since both Sirens used their magic instinctively rather than through any sort of dedicated study. But although they lacked the knowledge or the terminology to describe how their powers worked, both had agreed on one critical detail: it had only been recently that they’d actually started working to develop them, bringing their magic more into bloom over the last year than they had in the last millennium.

For his part, Lex suspected that had more to do with how that “Earth” place they’d been exiled to had apparently been bereft of any native form of magical energy – stunting their own abilities as a consequence – than with lassitude on Sonata and Aria’s part. But that mattered less than the fact that both Sirens’ powers had flourished once they’d found themselves in a new, magic-rich environment. In that regard, that Adagio had apparently grown in magical strength was no surprise.

But for her to have gained this much power this quickly isn’t just surprising, it’s absolutely unprecedented, decided Lex as he looked over his vertebrae in the magical spectrum.

The spells Adagio had woven around his spine not only far outstripped anything that Sonata or Aria could ever have hoped to cast, but were intricate enough that Lex himself had spent over an hour trying to comprehend them...with only limited success.

As near as he could tell, there were three separate enchantments laid on his backbone. The first was some sort of binding spell, though even that was unclear, as it seemed designed to imbue as much as contain. The second was a shaping, made to direct massive quantities of energy. The third was a protection spell, but try as he might, Lex couldn’t seem to determine what exactly it was protecting, nor what it was protecting against. As best he could guess, it was somehow preserving Hvitdod’s curse, despite the supernatural aspects of the dragon’s facsimile having been retroactively undone.

But even that was entirely speculative on his part.

The mystery was deepened by the fact that those spells all functioned together in a sequence, building to some sort of gestalt. Or at least they were supposed to, except the sequence was incomplete. Lex could clearly see areas where the spells were supposed to interface with other spells...but whatever magic they’d been intended to join with hadn’t been cast.

As Nenet had told him, whatever weapon Adagio had wanted to make his spine into was apparently incomplete.

That had been disturbing enough that Lex had contemplated simply removing Adagio’s magic altogether, only to find that course of action beyond his power as well.

In theory, Nenet’s countermagic – which now belonged to him, too – would have allowed him to do that. But while his newest servitor had a reservoir of power that could only be used to fuel her countermagic, Lex had no such cache. For him, using countermagic required a sacrifice of some other magical energy that he had, and right now he was running extremely low on that. Even if that hadn’t been the case, the sheer amount of power and the incredible resiliency that the wayward Siren had woven into her spells left Lex with little hope that Nenet’s countermagic could have undone it; certainly, the sphinx herself hadn’t thought so when she’d confronted Adagio personally.

And even if he had been able to remove Adagio’s magic, Lex couldn’t even begin to guess what that would do to the so-called “godsblood” that she’d placed on his vertebrae.

For that matter, he had no idea what godsblood was even supposed to be...save for the fact that Adagio had apparently believed that it was the literal blood of a god. Or rather, the blood of the demigod Kryonex – the ice elemental that the yetis apparently worshiped, according to what Toklo had said when they’d first captured him – whose realm she’d apparently assaulted, sacrificing all of her children and her daemon mercenaries in order to obtain her prize.

Had he not personally examined the spells she’d woven around his vertebrae, Lex could have scoffed at the idea that Adagio could possibly have faced a god – even a minor one – in battle and survived to tell the tale. He’d only ever seen the barest fractions of the Night Mare’s power, but what he had glimpsed remained beyond his ability to quantify or calculate.

As it was, he still had a hard time believing it. He wasn’t sure how much weaker demigods were than their full-fledged counterparts, but assuming they were at all comparable to the Night Mare, then even the least demigod had to be far beyond the greatest of mortal achievements.

But if all Adagio had wanted was a few drops of blood, her success in acquiring them wasn’t entirely beyond plausibility. Not with the baffling degree of power she’d gained, especially if she’d supplemented it with a small army of daemons and her own cadre of aristeia-empowered children.

Which was another mystery: Adagio’s hyper-fecundity.

Lex had originally presumed that “Mother” was simply a codename that Grisela, Sissel, Paska, and the rest of their group used to refer to their leader. But the context by which they’d referred to her hadn’t matched that idea, and once he’d brought Nenet over to his side, she’d disabused him of it entirely.

Adagio was, according to the sphinx, their biological mother. She’d find males of various races and species, entice them into a conjugal encounter – something Lex had no trouble believing she could do, if his single glimpse of her was any indication – and then gestate and birth the resulting offspring. All apparently within the span of a few days.

More mystifying was that said offspring apparently took entirely after their father’s type, having none of Adagio’s own characteristics. But while that might have explained why she apparently felt no maternal devotion to them – given her readily sacrificing them to acquire a few drops of godsblood, to say nothing of selling their souls to daemons – it didn’t explain why she wasn’t apparently passing any of her own genes along. Even the crossbreeding spell that Kara had given him was just that: crossbreeding, creating a hybrid of both parents, as disgusting as that idea was. Nor did it accelerate their growth, prenatal or otherwise.

It was a complete reversal from what Sonata and Aria had described of their time on Earth. As much as Lex hated to think about it, he knew they hadn’t been chaste during their exile. But he was equally aware that – according to them – they’d never once conceived. That had been, they’d made it clear, as true for Adagio as it had been for the two of them.

Which was supposed to be the case for all of the Sirens’ salient characteristics, Lex knew. Adagio might have been more ambitious, and perhaps a touch wiser, than her sisters, but besides their personalities, their appearances, and their names, they were virtually identical. They’d had the same powers, the same weaknesses, and the same desires. They were, for all intents and purposes, practically the same being.

But that had changed once they’d come to Everglow. At that point, they’d split up – apparently for the first time in their lives – and started to differentiate. Sonata had become a pony, further refining her innate talents with manipulating music and minds alike. Aria had been maimed and left in her original form, learning more combative spells in order to survive her time among the sahuagin.

Adagio, however, had broken from her sisters’ paradigm. Not only had she acquired magic far in excess than either of them and regained her human form, but she’d become supernaturally attractive, bizarrely fertile, and collected a supply of exceptionally potent magic items. All within a few months of coming to Everglow.

None of it made any sense.

Nenet had mentioned that Adagio had alluded to making deals to increase her strength, which sounded similar to what Thermal Draft had done with Prevarius. But even that was a poor explanation; Thermal Draft's agreement to sell her soul had bought her only modest magical ability. Certainly nothing like what Adagio now possessed.

Presumably, at least some of the difference could be attributed to aristeia, that unknown power that Sissel had indicated was the only thing that Adagio had passed on to her children. But as for what that was, and how Adagio had acquired it...

Nenet likely knew the answer to the first question, even if she didn’t know the second. But Lex had been too focused on making sure the sphinx was capable of carrying out her mission to ask her about it before. In hindsight, that had likely been for the best; talking about powerful Adagio was would likely have made Nenet even more nervous before she’d set out to retrieve his spine. But now that she had...

I’ll ask her later, Lex decided, staring at where his vertebrae were hovering in the air, still encased within Adagio’s magic. Whatever aristeia was, it would help explain how she was able to reach such heights of power, but that wouldn’t do anything about his current situation.

And his current situation demanded that he make a decision.

But that decision – despite his taking the time to meticulously review everything he knew about Adagio – had grown no easier.

With his supply of dark magic diminishing by the minute, Lex knew he couldn’t remain in shadow-form much longer. But while Nenet had brought back not only his spine, but also a magic ring capable of abetting his reattaching it to his body, he still found himself hesitating.

Adagio’s alterations to his spine were far and away beyond anything Lex had considered. The sheer amount of magic – to say nothing of the godsblood – that she’d put into it was enough to make him extremely leery of reattaching it to his body. With no clue what she’d been trying to do (besides making some sort of weapon, according to Nenet), no idea how well her half-finished spells would hold up or what would happen if they collapsed, and no way to know what godsblood would do to him, it was impossible to predict what would happen to him once he put it back into his body.

The alternative was to use the ring Nenet had brought him to simply grow a new spine altogether. In theory, so long as he overcharged the ring to defeat its limitation about only regenerating injuries taken while wearing it, then so long as he donned it in the same instant that he returned to corporeal body, it would drag him back from the brink of death while it grew new vertebrae for him.

But that theory had problems of its own.

While Lex felt reasonably – though not completely – confident that he had enough power left to augment the ring’s powers, he wasn’t sure how long that would hold out. Previous instances of his overcharging magic items had lasted for minutes on end, but none of those had nearly as much energy as this, nor had he ever been so seriously injured while trying to augment them. Even if he succeeded, there was no way to be sure how long the enhancement would last.

That was a consideration of paramount importance, because once he returned to his physical body, Lex knew that he’d die in a matter of seconds...and in its unaugmented state, the ring couldn’t overcome death.

In all likelihood, that would be the case after he augmented it as well. Overcharging a magic item was, like with his thaumaturgical magic, something which needed to be done carefully and with great precision. He had to introduce the additional power into the specific parts of the magic item’s internal channels so as to augment particular aspects of its functionality. Doing that so as to overcome its inability to cure wounds taken while it wasn’t worn would be hard enough.

But Lex had been able to examine the ring through the magical spectrum at length now, and knew that empowering it that way while simultaneously increasing its healing ability to the point where it could reverse immediate loss of life was something that would have taxed him even if he’d been in peak condition.

And that made all the difference, because while the ring could regrow a lost limb – or in this case, spinal column – in a minute or so, it could reattach a severed body part of any sort in seconds.

Which meant that he had two options:

Either augment the ring enough to reattach his original spine, and bear with whatever effects happened as a result of Adagio’s magic and the godsblood.

Or try and augment the ring so that he could survive long enough to grow a new backbone altogether, despite it being highly likely that his magic would give out before his spine regenerated sufficiently.

The first choice meant that he’d almost certainly survive the procedure, but there was no telling what would happen to him afterward; death, or worse, remained a possibility.

The second offered low odds of survival, but if he managed to make it through, he’d be restored without any side effects.

Even after several minutes putting all of his brainpower into searching for a third option, Lex hadn’t been able to find an alternative. His tulpa couldn’t conjure anything of sufficient power to make either option less dangerous, though he’d tried several times now. Nor could he use the Charismata to grant Solvei or Nenet sufficient power to safeguard him; not without imbuing it with enough of his own internal magic that he wouldn’t be able to augment the ring in the first place. There was neither a congregation nor religious relics necessary to conduct a ceremony to the Night Mare. And trying to shape ambient magic into a ritual would have taken more time than he currently had, even if he’d already had one designed and properly tested.

All that he could do was choose from the two options he had, and hope that he’d survive whichever one he picked.

“I think we’ll meet again very soon.”

Soft Whisper’s parting words came back to him then, the death goddess’s taunt more germane to his current predicament than Lex was comfortable with.

Putting her words out of his mind, he levitated the ring of regeneration in front of him, looking it over. There was no sensation of barbed wire grinding across his leg as he weighed the decision he was about to make, not that he’d expected it. As always, the Night Mare would let him succeed or fail on his own merits, in accordance with her dogma.

Knowing that his hesitation was accomplishing nothing, Lex pushed his doubts aside and made his choice.

Pulling the ring into his umbral form, he held it so that his talon would reform inside the loop of metal when he changed back.

Then he began to channel all the power he had left into it...

Author's Note:

Faced with two choices about restoring his spine, Lex finds that both come with considerable risks!

Which option did he select? Or does it matter, if both choices lead back to death?

Comments

[Not so New Brony]

If Lex had gone with option two and succeed, then he'd have the option of potentially weaponizing his spine or at least making it into an artifact and if any friend or foe asks where he'd acquired it, he can just say it's his spine and probably earn some uneasy laughs of disbelief that will turn into horror when they realize Lex isn't kidding.

But given the low odds of survival in option two, I can see why Lex went with the first option and plus, even though he possibly didn't consider it, this would ensure that Adagio comes for him which will give him the opportunity to keep his promise with Aria and Sonata. Or try to at least.

[Booster Spice]

Adagios capabilities sounds like she made a deal with Prevarious for some of his power as a succubus breeder soul aquirer for him?

Whats going to be intresting is if and how Lex makes use of those spell hooks in Adagios casting, either to try and control it himself, or merely close those links off so that Adagio cant just drop one of her other preselected spells into the slots, while its inside Lex, thereby creating even more problems for him?

[Alzrius]

11627485 As it stands now, which option Lex chose is ambiguous...though I briefly posted, on accident, an earlier draft which indicated what his decision was; I quickly changed it out for the updated one, but a few readers apparently saw what it was before I fixed it. My bad there!

Also, upon review, I'd also somehow omitted a paragraph which was supposed to be present in the text (and has now been added):

Nenet had mentioned that Adagio had alluded to making deals to increase her strength, which sounded similar to what Thermal Draft had done with Prevarius. But even that was a poor explanation; Thermal Draft's agreement to sell her soul had bought her only modest magical ability. Certainly nothing like what Adagio now possessed.

I've mentioned before how one of the drawbacks of working with such an expansive system of rules is that every so often it requires exposition as to how things work (which isn't nearly the literary sin that people think it is, but does still sit opposed to action). I've seen it said that this is best done in the form of a conversation between two or more characters, but that wasn't really an option here. Not to mention that, with a story this long, existing elements had to be folded back in to establish how they relate (if they relate at all) to new events. Unfortunately, that resulted in a few things falling through the cracks here. As the youth of today (yesterday?) like to say, my bad!

[Alzrius]

11627736 Adagio herself repeatedly referenced making deals to gain power (something which should have been addressed in this chapter, as per my previous comment regarding the newly-inserted paragraph of text), so there's definitely something to that idea. After all, her agreements with daemons make it clear that she's no stranger to working with planar creatures for her own benefit...even if she's working hard to try and break some (all?) of her other agreements.

As for what will happen if Lex decides to reintegrate his original spine back into his body...well, there's no way of knowing.