#aeau main works

[arcane-essence]

How It Begins

The Blackrock Chronicles pre-canon fic, 1041 words

Rythian hummed happily to himself as he entered his flat; the holiday was here, and he was looking forward to spending it with his family after spending a long while too busy with study to visit. Of course, he wasn't near an End Portal, but he had a way around that.

Once he’d made sure his door was locked, he untucked his ender pearl necklace from his shirt, cupping the pearl in his hands and concentrating. In the second it took for his teleport magic to run through his body, the ender pearl cooled to an almost icy temperature, its own magic releasing, mingling with his own and boosting it.

For humans, ender pearls granted the ability to teleport – once. For people like Rythian, however, who could already teleport under their own power (at the cost of a lot of energy), they did something different. Rythian may not have been near enough to an End Portal to use one, but he had the next best thing.

His teleport activated, and he fell through the world.

After a moment of feeling like he was free-falling, the teleport completed, his feet touched the ground again, and he was in the End. He took a deep breath, ready to look around and find his bearings-

and almost choked on the smog in the air.

It wasn’t smoke – well, not entirely, he could smell the distinct scent of burnt wood and purpur among it. It was a spell, one so dense it had become tangible, and it was making Rythian’s eyes water and his throat burn.

He squeezed his eyes shut to protect them from the smog, taking shallower breaths, and opened the small fronds under his ears that marked him as enderborn, to try and sense the purpose of the spell. He could pick out the qualities of transfiguration and… binding? It was hard to make out, the spell was constructed in a completely archaic way. The transfigurative quality seemed to be connected to what may be an isolation quality, but that was the last aspect he could pick out before his fronds started burning too.

That was when he realised that the burning wasn’t due to the tangibility of the spell – sensory fronds weren’t so fragile that they could be harmed by smoke. No, the spell itself was causing this pain, seeping into his skin and his blood and his very bones.

And then he realised that it had transfigurative effects.

Now that he’d realised what was going on, he could recognise the way the pain was coming from the spell trying to forcibly alter his body. He closed his fronds, and forced his eyes open again to see where the range of the spell ended. He needed to get out. Where had he even landed, to find this awful creation?

His knees almost buckled, and not from the steadily growing pain from the spell. He was standing on the central end island, exactly where he’d intended to go, but the city... The buildings were burnt and shattered husks, and the once towering castle was rubble. The only things intact were the obsidian pillars and the crystals they were supporting, and the almost-clear smog appeared to span the entire island.

What had happened here?

Rythian finally fell to the ground as a pulse of intense pain went through his entire body, especially his jaw. Whatever the spell was meant to do, it was working, and he couldn’t stay here. He grabbed the ender pearl still hanging around his neck and readied a teleport.

He saw movement in the corner of his eye and turned to look, and in the split second before the teleport activated, his eyes met another's.

The feeling of floating once again, and he was back in his house. Safe again, but exhausted from the two consecutive dimensional teleports, he didn’t bother even going to his sofa; he simply curled up on the floor as the pain slowly ebbed away.

-

Later, Rythian found himself staring at his teeth in the bathroom mirror.

One minute. That’s how long he’d spent in the End, and in one minute, the spell had done this. They were still teeth, but...

After he’d mostly recovered from the teleports, he’d had the thought to examine himself for any traces of the spell, hoping he could decode the remnants to find its purpose. The few remaining fragments of it were too faded for that, but he’d noticed where in his body they’d been before they faded. His eyes, teeth and fronds; the only parts of him that were ender in origin. It’s what had led him to look in the mirror.

His canines had lengthened, and the rest of his teeth sharpened, making them look predatory. They were also now black, the pearlescent sheen of his end-folk teeth giving them a black-pearl appearance. They looked kind of cool, actually, but also like they’d give him trouble eating certain foods, and he’d probably be biting his tongue for a while until he could reverse this, and… he didn’t like the implications.

Rythian was, mostly, human. This meant he had human blood, with water and iron; naturally resistant to magic. The spell had needed to work past that resistance before it could do anything, working remarkably fast even at that, and once he’d left the source, it had simply stopped working and then disappeared.

Humans, however, were not the primary population of the End. On an enderman, with their magical blood... The spell would have started working much faster, for one thing, and would have been a lot more painful. Then, if the one being affected had been lucid enough through the pain to get out of range, the spell would have been able to stick much more efficiently and keep working on them even once the source was gone.

He wasn’t stupid. The spell had targeted his ender traits; it would have been many times more effective on a full enderman; and it was cast on the main city of the end dimension. It was meant for endermen.

Rythian closed his eyes and leaned on the sink.

…if it had done this much to him after only a minute, what would have happened to someone fully affected?