Then he stops trying to figure out what the hell just happened and decides to do the obvious thing. He's practiced shields, and his slowest time was five seconds to think of a unique one.
It's so tempting for young mages to try and tell the air what to do, to tell it to protect them - but Adarin's learned that it's not worth the effort. As a rule, air does not like to stay still. At best it can redirect and slow things down, but it's not any good at stopping. He's not going to waste his time trying.
Instead, he works by location. In a perfect, razor-thin sphere around himself and Isabella, nothing will pass. He gives an exception to air, because suffocating them both is a bad plan. Light is a bit trickier, he doesn't want to give total exception to it - dangerous things can count as light, so he filters that a bit more carefully. Light can pass through and they can therefore see, but he puts it firmly in visual-only range. The result of this is that it tints the shield itself faintly indigo, since that was the most visible end point for what types of light could pass through and now indigo can only partially pass through. Some bounces off, instead, coloring the shield faintly indigo. There are other safeties he automatically adds. A contingency to prevent anything caught in the middle of the shield being injured or cut. The allowance of sound (he's less strict about sound protection than he is about light, but protections are there nonetheless) among other things. He has a list, he has it memorized, he is very thorough with his shields.
Reality, as it stands, does not like to have things that don't make sense. Magic, or at least, Adarin's type of magic, tricks reality into thinking things that normally don't make sense into making sense. With an object - that's easy enough. Tell it once, base it off of something it already knows, weave the spell correctly, and it'll do the equivalent of saying, 'Okay, that makes sense. Carry on.' The object then just exists, no problem, even if it does some things that break the rules. It does them subtly, not doing anything but the thing that made sense because mana told it to do that.
Shields are not based off of anything. There is nothing to blend in with the order of the rest of the cosmos. The existence of one is blatantly and obviously foreign. It did not exist a minute ago, and then it did. It stops things, absolutely, with no weight or mass or anything that would register as an object. It does not make sense. It does not exist.
His magic says otherwise. His magic wins.
But it continues to not exist. So he needs to keep telling reality that it does, using mana, over and over. His reserves aren't infinite, but if luck holds - he won't need to keep it up forever. Just long enough that they don't die from whatever it is that thing is pointing at them.
no subject
Then he stops trying to figure out what the hell just happened and decides to do the obvious thing. He's practiced shields, and his slowest time was five seconds to think of a unique one.
It's so tempting for young mages to try and tell the air what to do, to tell it to protect them - but Adarin's learned that it's not worth the effort. As a rule, air does not like to stay still. At best it can redirect and slow things down, but it's not any good at stopping. He's not going to waste his time trying.
Instead, he works by location. In a perfect, razor-thin sphere around himself and Isabella, nothing will pass. He gives an exception to air, because suffocating them both is a bad plan. Light is a bit trickier, he doesn't want to give total exception to it - dangerous things can count as light, so he filters that a bit more carefully. Light can pass through and they can therefore see, but he puts it firmly in visual-only range. The result of this is that it tints the shield itself faintly indigo, since that was the most visible end point for what types of light could pass through and now indigo can only partially pass through. Some bounces off, instead, coloring the shield faintly indigo. There are other safeties he automatically adds. A contingency to prevent anything caught in the middle of the shield being injured or cut. The allowance of sound (he's less strict about sound protection than he is about light, but protections are there nonetheless) among other things. He has a list, he has it memorized, he is very thorough with his shields.
Reality, as it stands, does not like to have things that don't make sense. Magic, or at least, Adarin's type of magic, tricks reality into thinking things that normally don't make sense into making sense. With an object - that's easy enough. Tell it once, base it off of something it already knows, weave the spell correctly, and it'll do the equivalent of saying, 'Okay, that makes sense. Carry on.' The object then just exists, no problem, even if it does some things that break the rules. It does them subtly, not doing anything but the thing that made sense because mana told it to do that.
Shields are not based off of anything. There is nothing to blend in with the order of the rest of the cosmos. The existence of one is blatantly and obviously foreign. It did not exist a minute ago, and then it did. It stops things, absolutely, with no weight or mass or anything that would register as an object. It does not make sense. It does not exist.
His magic says otherwise. His magic wins.
But it continues to not exist. So he needs to keep telling reality that it does, using mana, over and over. His reserves aren't infinite, but if luck holds - he won't need to keep it up forever. Just long enough that they don't die from whatever it is that thing is pointing at them.
It takes him two seconds, in total.