Busi Goes Blue (or How to be a Blue Mage in Eorzea) – An Excerpt from Martyn’s Guide to Blue Magic [FFXIV Fanfic]

Summary: What can the magic of blue do for you? Well, for Cocobusi it offered a chance to become a mage like he’d always wanted. Even if it wasn’t the same magic that his brothers could use, it was still worth a shot… right?

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An Excerpt from Martyn’s Guide to Blue Magic

So, you’ve gone and picked up the Soul of the Blue Mage and Martyn’s Guide to Blue Magic, have you?

Congratulations, you’re now one of the few and proud members of this new school of magic. You had the bravery to step onto this path and will be rewarded with great power in the end. But before you can call forth and wield the might and magicks of the beasts roaming around Eorzea, you must know what makes this form of magic special, and what it can do for you that the other modern schools of magic can’t.

Blue Magic itself is a form of magic that comes from my research into the mystic arts of the Whalaquee, inhabitants of the New World who managed to create a form of spellcasting based off the wild creatures that prowl the plains and forests. Over centuries of facing off against the creatures as they brought their magicks to bear in self-defense, they gained the ability to make it their own. I was fortunate enough to have learned from the best of them and will now pass on these teachings to you through this book.

Now, surely you must think that such it requires an immense amount of training and massive inner reserves of aetheric energy in order to use such spells?

Well that’s where you’re wrong, my apprentice. While most modern schools of magic might demand such a thing, blue magic stems from a different principle. You might still need a little aether of your own to start up the spells, but by drawing in aether from the immediate surroundings, you can use spells even greater than one could imagine.

Now I’m sure that to some that might seem like the white or black magic of old, but the similarities end there. These near-extinct (and forbidden) magicks rely on connecting oneself to the world’s aetherial current, but blue magic simply borrows ambient aether from the local environment in the same manner that the beasts do and returns it once the spell has done its work. It’s not unlike Conjury taught in the Twelveswood and that’s not illegal, is it?

Best of all, since you aren’t using your inner aetheric reserves to form the spells, you don’t have to worry about the complex relationship of aetheric balancing and efficiency like they teach in the Ossuary in Ul’dah. If you want to cast fire spells all day you can do so with no risk of burning yourself inside-out from over-aspecting or anything else.

So now that you know the skies are the limit for blue magic, you’ll surely be wondering how to learn the spells that you’ll be adding to your arsenal. Will you need to study from countless theurgical tomes and recite ancient incantations? Spend hours meditating and begging the elementals to let you borrow their power? Memorize complicated arcane patterns and geometries to shape the spells?

Of course not! Part of what makes blue magic wonderful is that it’s the simplest form of magic to use since you don’t need to do anything like that. All you need is one of my specialized focuses and a brand-new soul crystal.

As you might know, soul crystals are designed to store an echo of the user’s memories and allow future holders to learn from them. Well, thanks to my time in studying the arcanum, I’ve created a rune that allows for the soul crystal to formulate the memories of various creatures into spells instead. While not all of the local wildlife possesses the necessary aetherial composition to be engraved properly into it, you’ll find a list of those that can and their habitats in the pages of this spellbook.

As for actually learning the spells, you need to be either the target of the ability being used or close to it with the soul crystal present.

The mere threat of combat increases the flow of aetheric energies flowing throughout the beast’s inner channels and thus the instinctual patterns that it uses to weave the magic will permeate it to a certain degree. Then, once you vanquish the beast, that aether will be dispersed and you’ll absorb some of it into yourself by proximity. If that aether has the residual pattern within it, it’ll be stored and transcribed in the crystal as a spell for you to use.

Simple right?

Well, casting the spell is even simpler. You just need to attune yourself to the instincts of the beast and the crystal will formulate the spell from the stored knowledge, allowing you to use aether in a similar manner to the beast. That’s all it takes.

You don’t need to meditate on raising the potency of the elements to shape the spell like Conjurers do with their unworked wands and canes.

You don’t need to use speak a string of hard to remember words in the heat of battle and worry about ending up in a grave from biting your tongue like Thaumaturges.

You don’t even have to lug around a heavy book filled with complicated scribblings, written in enchanted ink and tipped with an expensive gemstone, and worry about the little creatures you call forth getting distracted while you’re in the middle of pitched combat like many Arcanists do.

So now that you know what blue can do for you, it’s time to start your acquisition of spells until you swell with the power to rival even the greatest of spellcasters.

Go forth and make your mark upon the world as a Blue Mage.

Sincerely,

Martyn

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Peering down at the pages of the book from his room at the Mizzenmast Inn of Limsa Lominsa, Cocobusi found himself intrigued by the prospect of this new form of magic. So much so that his legs swung back and forth while he sat on the edge of the chair, his linen robes rustling in excitement. The discovery had been more than he expected when he joined the caravan to come to the seaside city-state. There had been a request for a member of the Alchemist Guild in the crafting of a grimoire and he had volunteered for a number of reasons.

The first was because he wanted to have a chance to learn of this city-state’s most common form of spellcasting, done through tomes and ink laced with pigments of metals that were conductors of aether. That made it much easier using gemstones and geometries, the two things that defined their school of magic. Unfortunately, since it relied on one’s inherent anima, practicing it held the same risk as with his brothers’ magic.

Then he had come for supplies to work on improving his potion, since the materials he needed weren’t easily procured in Ul’dah. The prices for getting them imported was far too expensive on his current budget. Especially since he had just saved up enough to purchase a Mythril Mortar, which he hoped would help him push past his current progress with the addition of a crafting materia.

It was by chance that he had come across the Blue Mage. After witnessing his demonstration and hearing his explanation, the alchemist couldn’t help but be drawn in by the opportunity it presented. Even though it cost him all the gil he’d saved towards getting his new mortar, he couldn’t pass up the chance to finally use magic.

Though his brothers had assured him that they appreciated what he could do as an alchemist, the desire to weave spells still thrummed in his very core. But his conundrum was that he lacked the excess reserves of anima needed to use the same arcane arts as his brothers, a quirk of fate that was cruel in itself. In Blue Magic, however, he saw a fortuitous chance to challenge that fate itself.

The aether from living beings flowed out and tended to return to the other realm upon death, but the more violent and sudden the death, the more frantic the process. And one’s own aether could be stained by it, though the effects were so miniscule that it would be unnoticed given that one’s inner reserves were often greater—a soluble within a solvent. But if the Soul Crystal could capture the essence that was diluted in oneself as the body absorbed it and somehow reconstruct it when the caster attuned themselves to it…

It was possible for it to work. And if the majority of the aether was drawn from the surroundings rather than one’s anima, the costs of using the spells themselves would be lower. Low enough to where he could perhaps use a spell without the risk it would pose to his life.

Then, one day, maybe he could even stand alongside his siblings.

Flipping through the pages to see the potential spells he could learn, he noticed how they were ranked based on a star-system from easiest to obtain to hardest, including some theoretical ones like the primals. There were a few beasts he could go after while he was in the region, so he marked the first of his prey. Then he turned back to his tools, since he had just enough materials on-hand to make some things useful enough to see the job done.

By this time tomorrow, he would have his first spell.