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dandelion-wings · 2 months ago

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for whumptober: jean or lisa for “magic with a cost”? thank you!!

Thank you for the prompt! :> I was going to just go with Lisa because I've done less whump for her, but somewhere along the development process I went, "why not both?" Which made twisting Lisa's arm (c.f. yesterday's post) that extra bit harder, but it was fun to do! I hope you enjoy it too.

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ETA: Now on AO3.

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Even an illustrious member of the Hexenzirkel can make mistakes at times.

Lisa hadn't been thrilled when Alice co-opted the doors to the restricted section to install a passage to her Theater Lobby. The guests passing in and out of the library are not always quiet, and it makes entering the actual restricted section *much* more difficult. The one advantage is that now, everyone who's poked and prodded her over the years as to what may be down there now believes that it was Alice's little play-place the whole time. Only a handful of people know otherwise.

Unfortunately, the restricted section doesn't just hold books. Not everything there has dealt well with having such strong, otherworldly magic nearby, and Alice... well, Lisa has long known that Alice doesn't bother to cleanly seal her spells. Klee isn't a patch on her mother when it comes to collateral damage.

Though that seems a bit too understated a term for what they're looking at.

"What *is* it?" Jean asks, her voice hushed with horror. "Something of the Abyss?"

"No," Lisa tells her. "I'm not impressed with the Hexenzirkel right now, but I must admit they're very good about keeping Abyssal influences out of any space they decide to meddle with. They would never take the easy way out when making a new domain."

Not that Jean likely knows that partitioning off a space where the leylines touch the more malleable space of the Abyss *is* the easiest way to make a domain. Jean isn't here for her expertise, but because she had been the first one Klee had found to report that there was "something funny" behind the door. In the real space behind the door, not Alice's portal.

Jean is also the only other person currently present in Mondstadt who's actually allowed into the restricted section, or to know what everything in it *is*. She, like Varka, has a general understanding of the tomes and artifacts kept here; unlike Varka, she's put effort into learning which ones are most dangerous and why instead of just asking Lisa to keep an eye on them all. Lisa can sure she's trying desperately to match this sprawling mass, glittering tendrils of elemental energy creeping out of the room it's in to dig into the walls and floor and ceiling, with her own mental inventory of the place.

For her own part, Lisa feels almost preternaturally calm. When they had rounded the corner and seen this glittering maelstrom bulging out of the room it had been in, door torn down and mostly subsumed into the mass--it is, after all, mostly Dendro--she had been terrified for one hot, awful second, the taste of metal all down her throat. Lisa can't think of any better way to have a Nail hammered into the city than to let an unauthorized branch of Irminsul, laden with the forbidden knowledge concealed beneath the Ordo, arise within its walls.

Then she had remembered Jean behind her, and Klee waiting anxiously up in the library, and Sucrose in the lab next door, and Noelle dusting upstairs. All the knights in and around this building. All the people of Mondstadt, going calmly about their daily lives. That was when the calm had fallen. She doesn't know how long it will last, but she'll make every second count.

"*This* actually comes from one of the restricted books themselves. The Lawrences collected many books about magic in their attempts to more and more strictly control Mondstadt. A few thought they could somehow become the next Decarabian. But, well, when you're collecting books about foul magics, sometimes the book *is* the foul magic. This one was written in elementally-charged ink on paper woven in part out of Petrified Trees. Which is a very foolish thing to do. All you need is some resin... which I'm sure Alice used in her own work."

"So when Alice designed her Theater, there was enough resin in it for this to revitalize? Like a tree in a Domain?" Jean asks.

"Yes," Lisa says, proud as she would be of any student making a connection between what they've been told and what they already know, "very good. Not in the same way, of course. But once it woke, it started to take root and seek for leylines. That takes elemental energy, so it's consuming all it can from the environment. You can see how it's going after the Geo in the walls now. There was Dendro in the other books in there, so I suppose they've all been lost."

She sighs in regret. The knowledge they'd held might not have been forbidden, but there was a reason the Librarians of the Ordo had spent generations keeping those books hidden underground, safe from Celestia's gaze. What was in there might have had value, someday, in helping defend Mondstadt against threats the gods would rather they not even know exist.

"All right." Jean's voice is stronger now that she feels she has a handle on the situation. "What can we do about it?"

Her eyes shadowed with worry, but her hand flexes with eager impatience on her sword's hilt. Through the fear and false calm, Lisa almost smiles. Of course it was *'we'*, even though Jean has no idea what she faces or what to do. She won't abandon this to Lisa's expertise.

Perhaps it's unfair to let Jean participate, young and unknowing as she is. Lisa knows what taking control of this situation will cost anyone involved in it. She has paid that fee before, for a much more foolish cause. It would be kinder to tell Jean to step aside and tell her there's nothing she, unskilled in magic, could do. Jean is full of the kind of potential that Lisa has long since burnt out; isn't it waste to risk burning that, too, when Lisa could in theory bear the full cost? But she's too selfish to refuse.

"We'll need a seal. A very strong one. Luckily, that's something I'm very good at. Unluckily... making it will be very dangerous for us both."

Two years of helping Cyrus seal Hermanubis, over and over, until it stopped breaking through to overwhelm Cyno and he could develop his own control. She'd done a great deal of research in those two years. Along with all the other learning she'd been doing at the Akademiya, of course.

She had left her notes for them when she left the Akademiya, and Cyrus and Cyno far surpass her now. But this thing is taking root far too fast. There's no time to send for either. There's only what Lisa knows, from all that research and from one painful trial, about containing anything that feeds on elemental energy. It has to be blocked off before it *does* reach the leylines. There are no emergent outcroppings in the city, or close around it, thank Barbatos (quite literally, Lisa suspects), but if the roots continue to lengthen, they'll eventually reach deeper flows.

"What will we need?" Jean asks, as if Lisa hadn't said a word about danger. She's so charmingly reliable in moments like these.

"That adorable book Alice gave Klee as her catalyst," Lisa tells her, not without regret. "And two more catalysts from the armory. If we have a copy of the 'Skyward Atlas', I would prefer that, but I know we have copies of 'Sacrificial Fragments' and 'The Widsith,' and both of those would work. I already have my Favonius Codex," she adds tapping the familiar tome, passed down from one Ordo Librarian to another over the centuries.

It, like Klee's book, will be a shame to sacrifice, but she's written out copies of what it contains, just as her predecessors have before her. Those are locked away down here too. Binding a new copy in the requisite metals for magical channeling is simple enough.

Jean nods, salutes her, and turns to rush back up the hall to the stairs.

That leaves Lisa to begin designing the seal. This is going to have to be a strong one. *Very* strong, to lock this would-be leyline tree in. Fortunately, it doesn't have to literally encompass the sprouting mess in front of her; it just needs to do so symbolically. Otherwise, Cyno would have had to stand in the middle of a seal diagram for most of his childhood. Such seals rely on the caster's will to give that symbol force.

Will, and magical energy. If Lisa was relying on her Vision, that would be enough for this--the elemental strength she can bring to bear with it, reinforced in this case by Celestia's magic locking the energy that flows through Visions into a rigid and obedient course, would do the job, though it might cost her Vision to do so. That's a price Lisa, ambivalent about that very power, would be willing to pay alone. But an elementally-fueled seal would only serve as more sustenance for this sprout. This one has to rely on another source.

Very little magic in the modern era doesn't rely on the elements. Even when scholars speak of "old techniques," they're talking about herbalism, which still involves the elemental affinities of certain plants, or tapping the leylines, which remains an occasional if dangerous recourse for those without Visions but had been much more common before the Cataclysm. But there are even older techniques from before the establishment of the Thrones, some still practiced in various cultures under the guise of traditional healing, or martial arts, or superstitious rituals, that draw on another source entirely.

Her own lifeforce isn't a price Lisa *wishes* to pay. Neither if Jean's, whether or not she's willing--which of course she is, as a Gunnhildr, even if she doesn't fully understand the danger Lisa had mentioned. The danger Lisa isn't willing to explain, too close to old memory, too likely to rouse the fear that she's barely holding back.

Lisa draws her seal slowly, carefully, refusing to let that fear, however bitter in her throat, impede her work. She does use her Vision to crack two blocks in the walls, creating niches where she can set the catalysts she'll use as anchor-points. Her Codex she goes ahead and sets on the floor beneath one niche before drawing the appropriate lines around it.

Sumeran seals tend to use threes, Liyue prefers sevens, and Inazuma likes fives. Khaenri'ah was emphatically locked into pairs, and Fontaine has a terrible, unstable tendency to use just one anchor-point that Lisa hopes will change now that it's nearly wiped them out. Mondstadt doesn't have a sealing tradition in the first place as far as the Akademiya is concerned, but Lisa knows better. What else are the Four Winds and their Temples?

"I have them," Jean says, appearing behind her with her arms full of books.

The armory did have a Skyward Atlas; Lisa places it above the Codex, and Klee's book in the other niche. She hesitates between the small stack of copies of Sacrificial Fragments (ones Lisa had very precisely copied herself, each blurred and illegible line, while demanding exact replicas from Wagner for the binding) and the single copy of The Widsth before choosing one of the first. It may matter that it's in her own hand.

"It's growing fast," Jean says, audibly unnerved.

Lisa had been deliberately keeping her eyes averted as she worked. Now she looks. The tendrils have grown thicker, plunging deep into the stone--not breaking it, but absorbing it as they go. The door is gone, and the mass is taking on the distinct shape of a trunk. There are at least three questing taproots.

"We'll take care of *that*," Lisa tells her. She reaches up to undo her Vision from her throat, passing it back to Jean. "Our Visions will only get in the way. Set them by the exit, please. Mine will reinforce the wards on that door nicely, just in case."

She feels naked without her Vision. Even with all her suspicions about what it is, what it means, the cost of using it, it's still a part of her, and a well-worn and familiar tool. Which is why she can't risk drawing upon it in a panic.

Facing the burgeoning growth before her, Lisa breathes in deeply, tasting more bile bitter and metallic in her throat. By the time Jean returns, she has the shape of what they need in her mind.

"We need to extend this seal to encompass the whole root, and block it off," Lisa tells her, and holds out her hand. "Put your right hand within the circle on the wall, and your right foot within that one on the floor. Good." Lisa follows suit on the left. "Now, look with your Elemental Sight. Can you see the seal?"

"The square closing off the hall? It has no elemental signature...."

"If it hadn't already started eating the walls and Albedo wasn't up on Dragonspine, Geo might have worked. Though with that much Dendro, I doubt it. The technique we're using does have a physical cost," Lisa adds, because it wouldn't be fair not to warn her. "We both may end up incapacitated, or worse, when it's over, but we have to put up with it until the end unless we want this to go *very* badly."

Jean squares her shoulders and straightens her spine. "If that is so, place as much of the burden onto me as you can. I am the better suited. Though I mean no offense."

The fond affection that warms Lisa at that so-characteristic declaration is tinged with guilt. "None taken, cutie. Now, focus on the right-hand corners of the square, and imagine them pushing outward, into the corners of a box. Try to do so as you imagine the dandelions of your breeze," she adds, aware of Jean's personal mnemonics, "so that it will manifest in your Sight."

Jean nods and sets her jaw, and Lisa feels the seal start to shift. Lisa has to moderate her own efforts to match Jean's pace and not deform the spell. Already Lisa can feel energy starting to siphon out of her, a gradual lethargy like an afternoon slump, not yet the torrent she knows will come.

The far corners of the box slide past the trunk, laying out the dimensions of a boundary not yet formed. "Stop," Lisa says, and Jean stops pushing, holding steady, maintaining position with a warrior's rather than a mage's discipline. It's good enough. "Now the walls of the box. This will be the hard part. That tree is aware enough to resist."

"We won't let it pass," Jean vows.

Already, the tendrils are reaching further, closer to the intended boundary. "Jean, *now.*"

Walls shimmer into existence in their Elemental Sight. For a moment they simply glow, clear and white, not yet fully solid, but drawing more and more strength. Lisa blinks against the growing lethargy of it. Then a creeping tendril brushes against one forming barrier.

Confused, curious, more tendrils react out, seeking along the boundaries of its confinement for a way through. They pause for a considering moment as they determine there is none. And then the roots *erupt*.

The tendrils lash against the barrier of the seal, and Lisa hears Jean cry out. Her side holds steady, though, even against such onslaught. Lisa's waver as she feels her skin ripping open, as if she herself had borne the lash. She gasps, tasting iron, and steadies them by force of will.

"This will harden them," she manages to say, "but it will get worse," and then she starts to recite the verbal seal.

More tendrils slam against the walls of the box, and more open welts bloom with them. Lisa's voice falters. Ripples appear, on her side, where the tendrils rake the seal.

She can feel Jean reaching out within their joint working, the visualization that's far closer to what Jean has trained in before, and take hold of Lisa's half of the box. Taking more of the burden, as she'd asked. With guilty relief, Lisa lets the brunt of that go and focuses on the chant.

Her fingertips and toes are beginning to tingle. Fatigue, not merely lethargy, creeps into her bones. Jean's fingers tighten on hers in a way that suggests she can feel the numbness, too, while welts continue to split her flesh. Lisa adjusts her grip to hold her wrist. They can't lose this connection.

The walls are holding strong by the force of a Gunnhildr's will. Word by word, Lisa hardens them further. They begin to take solid form, almost, *almost* visible without Sight as well as through it. The tendrils beat harder against them, those three thick taproots trying to bore through. Jean sets her jaw, only a low moan escaping through gritted teeth. Her breath hitches, then steadies.

Under Lisa's tingling fingertips, her pulse hitches, too. Hitches, steadies, then hitches again, beating too-fast and uneven, fluttering and frantic with more than just the palpitations of fear and fatigue. Lisa tastes iron again, and this time the terror isn't for herself.

"Jean, let go," she says, between verses of the chant. "I can finish this alone."

Jean's grip tightens around her wrist. "I will not fall before this is done."

Lisa feels the walls soften and takes up another round of the spell, but she dares a sideways look at Jean as she does. She's white-faced where her cheeks haven't cracked bloodily open, and her lips are going blue. The clumsiness of her grip says that the numbness must be all through her hands, and she has the wide-legged stance of the unsteady.

She is the stronger of them, it's true. Physically, she has more stamina. But she runs close to her limits all the time, no days at peace, no time to recover. Lisa hoards her strength and barely ever expends it. She has more reserves than Jean has endurance.

Twisting her arm free, she slams her elbow into Jean, pushing her backwards. Jean stumbles, crying out in fear and horror as her foot leaves its circle, and her hand slips from the niche. Lisa steps into them, spread-eagle, and seizes all four points of the seal.

For a moment the box's corners weaken. Sensing weakness, the tendrils lash out again. Lisa feels her skin split, raw and red, and doesn't try to hold back her scream. Then she launches shakily back into the spell. One more chorus--two more, maybe, with the interruption--and it *will* take permanent form.

Numbness crawls up her arms, up her legs, tingling at her joints and beginning to tighten her scalp and turn her face to rubber. It's worse than the welts, though at least she can't feel them in the spots where it touches. The fatigue crushes downward; she can feel the drop through her body as it tries to crash into unconsciousness, jerks her head up against it, and feels her heart hammer with adrenaline as fear and fury buy her the time to recite the last line of the last round of the spell.

The Skyward Atlas and Klee's Dodoco Tales are gone from beneath her hands, the Favonius Codex and Sacrificial Fragments no longer at her feet. Barriers shimmer into place between the eight anchor-points of a Hypostasis-perfect cube. The tendrils flail wildly and the remaining chunks of wall within the box melt into pure Geo, the sprout consuming the last dregs of elemental energy it can touch. Then, its taproots having failed to set, it starts to dissolve.

"Give it a few hours, and we can take that back down. Though we'll have to do something about that hole it's left behind," Lisa says, and then the drop hits again and this time takes her with it, right into Jean's arms.

She's only fully out for a moment, though she's groggy and fuzzy-headed as Jean hauls her up to the section door, lays her down, and summons up a breeze from her Vision. The scent of dandelions revives her. The open welts still burn, tender and raw, but the breeze has at least stopped their bleeding. Her limbs and face and scalp are still numb.

As are Jean's. Lisa can see her, breathing steadily and easily now, pinching her own fingers. "Is this permanent?" she asks with all the worry of a knight who depends upon her body's skills.

"No, cutie," Lisa assures her, heady enough with relief to give her an indulgent smile. "It may last a few weeks, though, so you'll just have to take a break until it fades." She tries to reach out and take Jean's pulse, but she can't feel it, either; she'll have to trust in the color coming back to her face, and insist they follow up with Barbara as soon as they're able to leave. "I do mean you'll *have to*. If you don't rest and recover now, you may pay for it for the rest of your life. I have some experience on the subject."

"You do? That would explain.... Is this why you're so often tired?" Jean looks at her with too-keen eyes.

Lisa smiles up at her. "One of the reasons. Don't worry, Jean. The last time I did something like this, I was all alone. There's much less risk when working together."

"I am grateful you allowed me to take it on at your side, for so long as I could," Jean says, reaching out to clumsily grasp Lisa's hand.

She squeezes it, the pressure dull and distant through layers of nerveless skin. Lisa squeezes back as best she can.

"I couldn't have done it without you," Lisa tells her, and feels the truth of that, the relief of that, humming in her chest.

#fun fact: most of these prompts are unapologetically first drafts but this is like a 1.5 #because i had to go back and pull out SO much in the way of meandering parentheticals that did not work with the pacing #give me lisa pov and vision vs. visionless magic and apparently i wander into the weeds REAL fucking fast XD;;#asked and answered #why not meme i guess #lisa isn't lazy she's just efficient #jean and lisa: mondstadt power couple #(since you didn't request jeanlisa i tried my best not to make it shippy. but that's my only tag for the two of them regardless XD;;)#ascended fic

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