5/16 afternoon
Sadie arrived by amulet shortly after lunch, with Talaada called in shortly after. Dena had prepared some tasty fish; I'm not sure who tossed freshly caught fish into the inventory, but I approve. Especially since becoming a dragon, anything meaty has been extremely welcome.
"Good afternoon, Sadie." I smiled up at her as she came into my room and sat next to my bed.
"Good morning Sir Bismark. Are you feeling better?"
"Eh, I can move both shoulders and hips now, but the extremities are still basically just for show."
"Oh good. I'm glad to hear it. Um. I can't actually do anything more to help heal it, you know."
"Oh yeah. I know. It's fine. I actually wanted to call you in to talk to you. I chose you for a reason."
"The thing you said? About my destiny?"
"Yes. Someday you will be a great wielder of the light, but you will also have powers that are all your own. I look forward to seeing you develop in both areas. More importantly, I want you to teach me and Talaada, the dragon you were riding on, more about how to use the Light. Anything you know would be very valuable. I can learn faster than most, even if you just explain it to me verbally."
I went on to explain where I was at so far. From her response, I was not very advanced at all. When Talaada arrived, Sadie was drilling me on the concept of ranked healing spells. I fullyintended to learn several other forms of magic and keep diversifying, so I didn't really need a 30 step process with specific niche uses; I just created a 10 stage gradient from healing a bad burn to a heavy burst intended to save someone on the brink of death at the cost of making me dizzy.
She had me drill with the different levels; my rank 3 or lower wouldn't really tire me out unless I was casting for hours at a time. Rank five could be chain cast for around fifteen minutes but would exhaust me. Rank 8 might take a minute to drain my reserves. Rank 10 would knock me on my ass after one cast.
Talaada got a ton out of the discussion, probably more than me. She was casting a lesser heal, not quite equivalent to my newly dubbed tier 1 heal, by the end of the lesson. That shocked me a bit. It had taken me a few days to get up to speed. Maybe it's because she had a much stronger teacher than I did, so she had further to go? My pride refused to countenance that she was just a better student.
After Talaada and I poured out our full mana bars into my legs and left arm, (which produced a pleasant tingling sensation and slight reduction in pain, but no visible effects) we switched over to theory, and Sadie's growth into Paletress. I had been thinking over what I could remember of shadow spells, both from the game and from Natalie Seline's book, and soul talent had helped me reconstruct a loose path headed towards her nightmare summoning ability.
I started by having her demonstrate her soothing spell on me, and pointed out that she was linking minds with me to cast it. To my mild surprise, she hadn't even realized she was casting a spell. She'd just intuited it.
"Good, good. From my visions of the future, I believe that your unique magic is related to your strong sense of empathy. You can connect to people, and understand their pain in a way most can't. I think you need to train that, and practice connecting your mind to other people. In time, I think you'll be able to not only soothe their pain, but bolster their spirits and even see through their eyes." I needed to couch it in a way that she could accept.
For now anyway; eventually I'll need her to get over the hump of summoning shadow beasts, which is a far less impressive version of her nightmare summoning that normal shadow priests can do. I didn't want to push her personality or even her aesthetics too much while she was still part of the Argent Dawn, especially while they were ambivalent about me. If she started meeting with me and then immediately switched to dark eyeliner while mind crushing people left and right, laughing like an anime dub aristocrat all the while, there would be some justifiable questions.
All told, I had come out of this lesson with a very fun new tool. Mind soothe. Or, as it should probably be properly titled, shadow word: Soothe. A shadow word that makes someone relax, incidentally also making them let their guard down. If you can't figure out at least one application of a spell like this in a story like this? I'm not sure if I can help you.
I'd need to be careful using it in high profile situations, so it would have limited applications in political negotiations or the like. In any other situation where I'd like to de-escalate, though? I'm going to fire this bad boy up. My mind was just ablaze with all of the ways I needed to test this. Would it accelerate capture? Could it be cast from stealth? Would it make someone more open to possession? Dammit I wanted a prisoner to experiment on, but all of the ones I had here in the apartment had to go and get themselves sent to punish town. That meant that the only other prisoner I had left was Nadira, in the Raven Hill basement lab, and Eliza was out catching… worgen. Nice. That'll be good to test too, actually.
I had Talaada suck me off, and I'm quite happy to say that the family jewels have been restored. I even had a bit of fun practicing soothe by using it to stave off orgasm. If I was getting too close, I'd soothe Talaada; she'd become less excited and generally slow down, and I'd also calm down myself. I confirmed that like most shadow words it hit the target harder than me, but it was always proportional. I'd hazard it was about twice as big a reduction. When I went all in with it, she was practically a tranquil from Dragon Age, at least in the way she looked at the world. She just had almost no emotional reactions to anything. I don't know if this state makes people obedient, a woman who literally worships me as a prophet isn't a very good sample for that question, but she seemed content to mechanically go about her business, whatever she'd been doing before I used the spell.
I tried to teach her a bit more about magic while she was in this state, since we were both operating entirely on logic. Light magic was a no go; the required sense of righteous purpose just wasn't there. Shadow magic did work, though. I managed to teach her shadow word pain; it was the easiest shadow word by far, but I was still shocked that she learned it with just a few hours of tutoring.
The form of channeling for both the light and shadow were pretty similar, so I was pretty sure she had a leg up despite only having soul talent for Holy magic. I thought at first it might be because she was an Eredar, who had a natural affinity for magic anyway, but right now she actually wasn't. Like me, she was biologically a black dragon wearing a human face. Did dragons have an affinity for shadow magic? Did any species have an affinity strong enough I could use it as a teaching aid? Or was it really just that learning very basic healing was a skill that was transferable to very basic shadow magic?
After about an hour spent that way, equal parts sex, experimentation, and teaching, we switched to planning. Talaada was a unique asset for me. Thanks to her regional upgrade she could accept love confessions on my behalf, she was a powerful healer in the making, and she had communication talent, which would allow her to speak with people almost as well as I could. Her only weakness would be any time she needed to lie, which was covered by Covert Talent. Keeping her in the Swamp of Sorrows, especially with how recruitment of the Lost dried up over the last few days, was outright unconscionable.
"I think I'm going to partner you up with both Mary and Sadie, and I'll be sending you somewhere very dangerous to serve as my ambassador. We can do something not many people can; cure the plague of undeath no matter how far advanced it is." She looked at me blankly. Of course. She had no particular knowledge of the Scourge or the plague. She'd grown up in a swamp and hadn't ever met a human until me.
The revelation being wasted was a tragedy, because this was exciting. The Scourge plague was a nearly always lethal disease if you got enough of it in your system; it was more like a poison in most ways, or even radiation, as it wasn't terribly communicable from person to person but it would build up to a lethal level given time. It was most often food borne actually; blighted grain shipments killed off a huge percentage of the civilian population in the initial outbreak. Anyone who ingested that much blight was pretty much doomed to a swift death, and it wasn't always obvious when something was blighted.
The modern Plaguelands were called that because the whole region was crop dusted with the liquid form of blight from flying death fortresses, or giant cauldrons that amounted to evil sprinkler systems. I'm pretty sure that nothing in the region is good to eat without some serious purification going into it first. Adding to that, a smaller amount of the blight would still have an effect; a bit of blight in the system would prime the body to be reanimated in the service of the Lich King. As it built up, the victim would reach the point where their death would immediately result in their reanimation as a mindless zombie, then as an intelligent zombie enslaved by the Lich King (most of the population of Undercity were emancipated undead of this kind), and eventually the blight would get tired of waiting and manifest as a wasting disease with a one hundred percent fatality rate. A necromancer from the Cult of the Damned could accelerate the process, or make "better" undead from less blighted people.
Being able to flush blight from someone's system, which I'm pretty sure Body Defense covered, would be huge for the Argent Dawn. I'm pretty sure they could already do it to a limited degree, but there was at least one case where a man lucid enough to carry on a conversation and wait around for at least a day was beyond the help of multiple demigods. I'm pretty sure it was a metaphor for cancer, but it was also canon so I'm going with it. Sadly, if they didn't trust me enough to bring them groceries yet, I didn't think they would trust my miracle cure for the plague until they saw it in action.
Talaada's eyes glazed over a bit as I explained all of this to her, reminding me again that though she was smart and very sweet, Talaada didn't have much to connect this information to in her head. Honestly, she also probably didn't find it all that interesting. Time to circle around to the part relevant to her. "Anyway. The important part is that there are people that The Argent Dawn would otherwise need to execute for their own good. The light of love can heal them, if they let it. I want you to offer that blessing to them, like you do the lost ones. To get that opportunity, and to learn more about how to wield the Light from them, you will need to earn their trust. I trust you to do that for me."
"Are you sure? I've only really met Mosu and the people you've introduced me to. I'm a hunter, mostly." I put my good hand on her shoulder.
"We can go together tomorrow morning. I think I'll be in a slightly better state by then. But trust me, you will speak with my voice. If you let yourself be open to guidance, you will know what to do. Now go home and rest up."