In all honesty, the escape was the most taxing part of that entire situation for Charlotte. The magic she had used in the audience chamber was challenging, sure, but only challenging in the way that a logic puzzle was. The escape had been difficult in the way that lifting something several times your own bodyweight would be. 

Charlotte had walked straight out the front door with no issues, then, when she was sure there were enough eyes on her, she had summoned a massive pillar of blue fire around herself. That part was fairly easy as well; fire obeyed her like it was just another limb. 

The hard part came when she started pulling herself upwards in a crude approximation of flight. Using the pillar for cover and as a distraction, Charlotte pulled herself into the air in the same way she had pulled those two men. This required a massive amount of energy to sustain, but she eventually pulled herself high enough to land on the roof of the palace. The fire obscured this from those watching below, but Charlotte was shaking and dry-heaving by the time she was safely on top of the palace.

“What kind of grandiose egotist builds a house hundreds of feet tall?” she groused as she lay panting under the afternoon sun. She could feel the edges of her spirit ache and throb from channeling so much energy all at once, but that hardly mattered. 

Looking up at the sky, she held up two gemstones. They caught the light and refracted blue and pale green light onto her sweaty face. A childish grin of excitement split her face as she began giggling uncontrollably.

I got them!

She would need to recover before she could make use of them, so after a moment she begrudgingly tucked them away, stood, and began making her way to a secluded section of the palace roof where she had tucked away her belongings. She had found this place in her preparations, a small nook where three corners met that had probably come about from some kind of renovations. She could only be thankful that none of the past royals had considered someone like her might come along when they had approved the construction of this palace.

It’s not ideal, but I’ll finish up with these stones over the next week and just drop back in. Hopefully nobody thinks to look up here.

With that in mind, Charlotte tucked herself into the shaded nook and began resting her body and spirit for what was to come.

…

Charlotte had been born with an inherent advantage over human mages. Her father had belonged to a race of people that had long been mythologized. They had been called by the names of Fae, Elves, Wraiths, Demigods, and many more. While each and every one of those names was incorrect, they all circled around and nudged against the edges of the true shape of things.

What people referred to as gods in this world were spirits. Charlotte knew this for a fact. The spirits that were referred to as gods were so old that they no longer remembered what they had begun as. They no longer had physical form, but in place of that they held vast understanding of the ways of the world and the natural forces therein. 

Every human has a spirit which serves to house their being. Without a spirit to inhabit it, a body is nothing more than a shell that will wither away into bones and memory. The spirit also served as a conduit for magic, with the prerequisite being that the spirit held some understanding of the facet of the world it wished to manipulate. 

That was why most humans failed to awaken as magicians; their spirits simply never reached the level of understanding needed for them to consciously manipulate the world. In fact, humans didn’t seem to have much of a concept of their own spirits in general. In Charlotte’s mind, it was a miracle that any human mages naturally occurred to begin with.

So what did that have to do with Charlotte? The race her father had belonged to–best referred to as Elders–had a natural understanding of their spirits. While humans walked around with their spirits loose and hazy all about their bodies, Elders had their spirits stitched into their bodies in much the same way a quilt is constructed. Their spirits were stitched into their physical forms, which formed a natural connection between their minds and spirits. With that natural awareness, both learning about and manipulating magic became second nature.

There were various advantages and disadvantages to this. The two main advantages were the aforementioned magical proficiency and the subsequent pseudo-immortality that came with your body having a direct connection to magical energy. Elders could not die of old age, and only the most potent diseases or poisons would ever be able to take effect. 

The disadvantages were almost as dramatic. While it may seem like a minor inconvenience, Elders could not see into the spirit realm with the same range as humans with untethered spirits. With something holding their spirit in place, there was a distinct limit to how far they could push out their spirit to see around them. Charlotte was only half-Elder, and her spiritual vision was limited to around a hundred feet. A true Elder would probably be limited to thirty feet or so.

The more important drawback was that if an Elder were to be killed, their spirit would die as well. There was no afterlife for Elders, at least not unless they found a way to sever the stitching that bound their spirits to the physical world. Charlotte did not know if that applied to her as well, but she was less than eager to find out.

Charlotte had a less intense binding between her spirit and her body, but she had already stopped aging and had never fallen ill. Her father had taught her much about her heritage and even more about magic, but even now she had questions about her own existence. 

She had started off with a strange aptitude–strange even among Elders–for unattributed magic. After a certain event, that aptitude had been matched by her understanding of fire. Her spirit had a deep and complex understanding of both of these forces, which was what had allowed her to become the destructive force that she is today.

Her body also naturally healed much faster than a human’s. A deep cut that might take a month to heal for a normal person would be gone in a matter of days for her. This did very little to aid her during combat, but it did keep her ready to fight at a moment’s notice.

That was where the stones came in.

The gemstones she had stolen were, put simply, crystalline shards of some poor fools’ spirits. She did not know exactly how they were made, but she had that fact on good authority and had confirmed it when she had initially brushed her spirit against them. She had felt the unmistakable presence of a spirit, albeit only enough in each stone to be considered maybe a quarter of a complete spirit. 

The stones were used by the Collective as a focus for magic of specific attributes. Each stone contained a spirit with a deep understanding of a specific attribute, and by channeling energy through them one could use a crude form of that attribute without any personal understanding on their part. A magician with these stones would come to develop their own understanding of that attribute over time as their own spirit intermingled with that of the stone. 

That practice also had the effect of gradually burning through the spirits in the stones. This only happened when too much energy was pushed through the spirit at once, but those idiots with no understanding of their own spirits probably didn’t know that. As a result, the amount of spirit left in the stones was as it stood today.

That wasn’t all bad though. For Charlotte’s purposes, this was a godsend. She needed to absorb these stones into her own spirit, and doing that with a complete spirit would be impossible for her. Saso Rhanna–her patron–had taught her how to do it, but this would still be her first attempt.

These worn-down spirits had also had their egos sanded away over time by the repetitive commingling with the uncontrolled spirits of countless magicians and the energy that had been rammed through them. They were now the spiritual equivalent of river-smoothed pebbles, devoid of unique characteristics yet beautiful in their own way. 

Whoever you were, I’m sorry, she thought as her spirit brushed against the stones. You are already without ego, doomed to be nothing more than a vessel for power. Instead, join me. Together, we will crush those that did this to you.

By sunrise on the day following the incident, Charlotte had confirmed the attributes within each stone. The blue stone contained an understanding of water, which would serve as a useful counterpoint to her signature inferno. The pale green stone, however, was what she was really after. 

In spiritual/magical terms, the color green usually denoted nature magic. This usually manifested as plant manipulation, but there were some notable outliers throughout history. What had been theorized by scholars of the Collective–and what Charlotte knew to be true–was that nature magic was a subset of life magic. It was a domain encompassing all living things, but the tradeoff for many of the unique effects it could produce was that it consumed a genuinely terrifying amount of energy. Charlotte hoped to one day get her hands on a few more aspects of life magic and test it out herself, but she would be content with what she held now in her palm for the time being.

The pale green stone she had acquired held a deep understanding of healing, specialized for the human form. Charlotte’s body already naturally healed quickly, but she expected this stone to increase the speed of that ability many times over. Additionally, this would allow her to heal others beside herself.

Not that she really had anyone she wanted to heal. She fought alone, so the idea of that specific facet of the ability coming up in combat was laughable.

Once they were absorbed and assimilated into her own body, these stones’ knowledge would serve as a baseline for her to build on through the use of their attributes. The effects wouldn’t be nearly as impressive as her fire, but they would be solid tools for her in the fights to come.

She would absorb these, collect more, absorb those, and continue the cycle until she was ready to move on to the next leg of her journey. 

It took her three days to absorb the first stone. She did not sleep during that time, letting her natural endurance carry her through to the end. It was exhausting work, and the meditative state she maintained throughout the process left her vulnerable. Luckily, nobody bothered to check the roof of the palace during that time.

She had prioritized the one with the understanding of healing, and when she was done it crumbled into dust and blew away with the wind. Ecstatic, Charlotte called out one of her metal spikes and cut herself across the back of the hand. Entranced, she watched as her flesh knitted itself together almost instantaneously as she directed energy towards the wound. 

It was even better than she had hoped. Not only was the effect more potent, but she could feel that the size of her spirit had increased with the absorption of the stone. It would take some getting used to, but this increase in volume would allow her to channel more energy at once without the risk of burning away her own spirit.

She let herself sleep then, and when she woke she began absorbing the blue stone. After the experience of the first stone, this one went much faster. This one was finished in a little under two days, and when it was done she called forth water and marveled at how easy it was to use. 

It required less energy to manipulate existing water, which made sense, but this newfound understanding also allowed her to create water in much the same way she did with her flames. Creating water was much less efficient than creating fire, which made sense considering the density of the two things, but she could create a decent pool of water around herself without too much strain.

Giddy, Charlotte used this ability to wash herself as she changed from the ceremonial looking robes she had been in into her usual black leather outfit. She slid her bracers and their ten spikes of metal back onto her forearms, tied the bandages around her eyes once more, then donned a black cloak and the handprint mask. She took some time to rest, then, at the appointed time, stood and walked out to the edge of the roof above the palace entrance. 

Summoning the pillar of fire once more, Charlotte stepped off the roof and used unattributed magic to slow her fall. She landed deftly, turned to face the palace, and dismissed the flames in a whirl of dispersing azure light that was sure to look imposing to those watching. She had been expecting it, but she still felt excitement well up in her chest as she confirmed the veritable battalion surrounding her. Among them, Charlotte could feel a number of mages. 

Reveling in her good fortune, a predatory grin threatened to spread beyond the edges of her mask.

“I am honored that the king chose to supply me with an honor guard!” she announced. “Take me to the prisoner and we can be done with all of this.”

As a response, Charlotte felt energy coalescing in multiple places around her as the mages began their assault.