I celebrate my 20th birthday in my pimped out harpy roost, now more like a hive really. just like a bee hive, my flock of angels is not limited by gravity, truly allowing me to build archetecture very similar to actual bee hive. but instead of hanging out by a tree, mine stands atop a pyramid, like a city at top of a hill, and similarly to that, the road to the top of pyramid is populated by structures that serve as villas and casino as if the exterior of the pyramid is a hill resort. the inside of the pyramid, is secret to everyone but my angles who built it to my design.
the interior of the pyramid is completely filled with a liquid with a pendulum like structure inside it hanging from where the base of hive sits atop the pyramid. when the black ark that is our city travels in Ocean among waves, it makes the pendulum undulate and stirs up the liquid inside it. I'm not a engineer so I didn't know how to turn mechanical energy to other usable energy or magic, so I had to make one.
the liquid inside has a plankton/algae that I have imprinted with high magic varient of wild-heart passive spell. offsprings they produce don't have this passive, so I or a subordinate will have to imprint such spell on New plankton all the time and pour it inside. every time the algae is agitated by pendulum it glows like star light from bioluminescence, but my imprint actuates with such action and the algae uses its nutrition to create magic. runes throughout the pyramid concentrate such energy's into the hive.
since my Angels can turn life force of willing creature to dark magic to be absorbed, I've tweaked their abilities through their generations to be able to do so without causing more pain than they cause pleasure, hence being able to hide the fact that they are stealing energy from their willing mates. now they fly away from hive as if they were worker bees, and mate with willing creatures and beast to create more offsprings and gather more magic. if they find a settlement of civilisation, instead of just mating like a bitch in heat, they even negotiate for more benifits or goods like money and jewelery or other things that they think will please me.
I of course ani their hive mind, their Queen bee, or King in my case. every time I fuck one of these angles that come back from the would with excess dark energy and use my purification method, I bring qualitative and quantitative improvement in myself, while putting by-product of impurities into the angels. my study of these Chaos impurities that I put in my angels and pure energy that I absorb had made my study of high magic grow in leaps and bounds.
in my studies of high magic, I truly grew to appritiate it. it allowed me to finally learn true runes and make magic items. my high magic teacher also taught me how to condense my magic into crystals of concentrated aethry, stabilized by homogeneity of its structure. a crystal can not have more than one school of magic sustainably unless it's high magic. if I try to force it like in dark magic, it blows up.
if dark magic is great for will based casting, it means casting any long duration spell requires constant concentration of the highest regard to continuously break and dominate aethyr to perform a task, while all other magic is channeling it into concepts that are ruled by logic and rules, making it easier to sustain long duration spells.
if high/true magic is knowing 2+2=4, while dark magic is loudly disagreeing with a threatening voice and saying it is actually 2+2=5 or whatever you want it to be. you may be able to scare some people into agreeing with you even if they know you are wrong because you are strong and aggressive about it. this is the cruelty inherent to dark magic, while all magic is employing aethyr to do your bidding, dark magic is making aethyr your slave. a strong employ might prefer phisical task and smart employ might prefer social or intellectual task, such is the difference between different schools of magic. while in dark magic , you make aethyr your slave.
casting dark magic without learning other schools is like ignoring those differences and making everyone, irrespective of speciality, like physical or smart slave, do the same task. it will get the job done, but if you recognise the differences, you can more efficiently make phisical slaves do labour and smart slave do clerical stuff.
so it was no surprise that when I reached pinnacle of our current understanding of theoretical magics, with learning high magic, I could make dark magic spells much more efficient . high magic is like running a complex operation of any company that requires many employees with different skills to perform one overall task, like phisical labour, quality control, customer care, marketing department or financial department,HR department, while individual school is like an individual department.
dark magic performed with understanding of high magic would be as if all these employees for all these departments were slaves and thus didn't require rest, break , food or even basic human rights, allowing workers to overwork, for more instantaneous profit, but it is not really sustainable without constant supply of slaves, since existing slaves are disposable in such scenario.
for example I could make a far sight spell with light magic, but I couldn't get enough magnification , even with dark magic to truly use such spell as microscope. but with learning high magic, I could not only create microscope like spell,I can even use mix of high magic and dark magic to pigment my view of different components to make them more or less visible. it requires mastery over a passive spell called true sight which allows you to see the aethyr in the environment.
similarly by using beast taming(beast magic) spell, and possession/telepathy spell(death magic) with my knowledge of high magic and tweeking with dark magic, allowed me to turn my angels into my familiar's. only enjoyment they get, is by pleasing me, and due to possession spell, I can relay commands at long distance, and even transfer my senses to that of one of my angels. this is great for spying, since my angels can look like any race, so possessing them, I can infiltrate any place without ever leaving my room.
every angel gives birth to only harpy's though who have to be trained and imbued with at least power of darkness to qualify as an angel. but the father of the harpy has great influence on magic affinity for it. dark pegasus bred harpies have affinity to heavens magic.
salamander bred harpies with fire magic and fell bat bred harpies have death magic.while most other wild beast often produce beast magic affinity in progeny. i haven't found a way to produce affinities for light, Life, or shadow magic affiliated harpies and every harpy or angels that attempted sex with a dragon died during mating.
I don't have to imbue them with any spells though as older angels take care of that. I even have set up spell alters, standing on which makes casting a single spell, corresponding to the alter, extremely easy. I have at least one alter for each spell I need them to know, I just need to imbue it to one of them, who can with help of alter imbue it to the rest. they are no more intellegent than common crows so they can't really be taught, but their magic memory is like muscle memory, once they are forced to cast same spell too many times, their body developed a memory for it, as if to make it an animal instincts rather than a thought out action. it doesn't mean every harpy becomes an angel though. to become an Angel the harpy not only has to have progressed much in their affiliated magic, they also have to impress me enough to perform flesh crafting on them to make them beautiful and look like civilised race , by now, after 7 years of owning a harpy roost, I've have made a total of 700 angles of each school I could. I even have 200 angles proficient in dark magic, they are progeny of manticore, not many angels used to survive a manticore, but as my forces grew in numbers, I encouraged pain and challange, even at cost of allowing infighting, to have them improve in quality, and it shows. now most of my at least 5 year old angles can survive sex with a manticore.
my oldest harpies at the end of their lives, spend their ending years inside rooms where eggs are layed , separated by affinity for each school. these rooms are at bottom of the hive, where it connects with the pyramid, where all the energy from algae is concentrated. here, using the eggs as a focus, these harpies use Rune Alters to turn excess energy in these rooms into magic gems/crystals. this makes eggs more conductive to magic, hence harpies born every generation seems better to last in terms of potential. right now, even though I'm generating all magics, due to lack of labor(harpies/angels affiliated with those schools),I cannot make life, light or shadow crystals. I sometimes go there to meditate on a rune alter to produce high magic crystals.
my 20th birthday gift is a hydra my mom got for me. I don't really need it for its military might, but it's regeneration ability. I'm able to feed it basically scraps, while my harpies/angles feed on its bound body, and it regenerates so this cycle can go on. it's basically a great food source for harpies, as they have taken a shine to drinking it's blood. it seems to imbue some temporary regeneration, but it never lasts. my harpies can take more health, simply by absorbing it from their prey through life leeching. but still, I'm hoping such beings can help me evolve my harpies one step further.
today in celebration of my birthday, I have set up a ritual at the hive, that will deepen my connection with my angels. I'm about to use up all of my stored high magic gems to power a possession ritual of my own design to let me possess all my angles or harpies capable of magic, who have a familiar bound with me, simultaneously for 24 hours. this has high chance to actually give most of them some form of intellegence , while making their Bond to me even stronger. for next 24 hours, they will take all decisions as if it were me controlling their body from inside them.