4.94: Impractical Magic

Stacey left her location on on the school map, so it was no trouble at all to track her to the library. She was combing over some kind of complicated rune diagram with di Fiore, but looked up and smiled brightly when she saw me. “Kayden! What’s up?”

“Hi.” I braced myself against the sudden wave of mild nausea that trickled through me, but it was quickly gone. “I have a problem I want your help with, if there’s some time later when you’re not busy?”

“Sure! I was just… um…” she frowned at the diagram in front of her. “Anyway, I’m not busy right now. What do you need?” She gestured at the empty seat next to her.

I sat down and pulled Max’s want out of my bag. “A friend of mine was working on this awhile back,” I said. “He can’t finish it, but I had some ideas for it. I was wondering how viable they’d be, and how I might go about making them happen.”

“Hmm.” She took the wand from me, inspected it a moment, and deconstructed it into its component pieces. “Oh, you put ichor inside?”

“Yeah. He was working with Alania, so…”

“Everyone in that lab is obsessed with extracted ichor.” She examined the pieces. “Most of the runework seems to be embedded in the wood itself. Do you have diagrams?”

“I could probably find them.”

“And it’s done in silver? Interesting choice.”

“He liked working with silver.”

“So far as metals go, it’s a good one for magic. Although making your runes out of anything except ichor or blood has some inherent power-limiting problems.” She inspected the test tube cartridge. “Hmm. He’s incorporated a runic language I’ve never seen before. I might be able to give some general advice on this, but I’m not acquainted enough with this kind of design to give specifics. Di Fiore is good at breaking down unfamiliars like this; we could track him down and ask him.”

“Maybe I will later. Right now, I just want to know your opinion on whether the function of the wand can be reversed.”

“Reversed?”

“Yeah. Like, instead of pulling power out of a fluid for an effect, if it could be adjusted to pour magic into it to store it in the fluid.”

“You want to make a device to empower water.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

She shook her head. “I’m not saying that’s completely impossible, but I’d be very surprised if anyone could do it.”

“Oh. But it’s possible.”

“I very much doubt it. These runes seem to be designed for a cleaner raw channelling of power, although as I said, I’m unfamiliar, so you might be able to reverse the flow of power through them. I don’t know anything about that. But your big issue here is the empowering water part. Empowering water is a complicated process; you can’t just force magic in water and expect it to stick there. I think the most likely scenario if you tried what you want to do would be just blowing up this wand. Instruktanto Miratova used to have a power dampening staff that inefficiently empowered preserved ichor for this kind of effect but…”

“Yeah, Max researched that,” I said. “He based a lot of his work off her stuff, so I figured we might be able to do the same thing with this.”

“With preserved ichor… maybe. You’d probably want to ask Instruktanto Miratova about that, it’s not my field. But not with water.” She reconstructed the wand and handed it back. “Of course, even if you could manage it, your power absorption would be extremely limited.”

“How would you go about forcing a lot of power in there?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I wouldn’t. The capacity for water or extracted ichor to hold power is extremely limited. You’d be better off just making a fetish. Although of course, with the exception of a good enchanted object, any inanimate item has a really limited ability to handle magic. If you want something to absorb extra magic, your best bet is the obvious route.”

“What obvious route?” I asked.

She raised an eyebrow. “You should know that better than me,” she said. “Nothing has a greater capacity for magic than a living animal.”

She meant a familiar. That wasn’t helpful to us, though.  We’d been specifically informed that the ‘vessel’ we needed was something that Max had started building, and Max had never worked with animals. Meaning that, despite living things being the best at handling magic, there must be some trick he’d figured out, some way to increase the capacity of one of his inanimate devices, because…

I glanced down at my familiarity mark. At the runes that Max had carved into my arm, at my insistence, his hand guiding Kylie’s on the pen.

“Thanks for your help,” I said, jumping to my feet. “I have to go.”

Stacey wasn’t wrong. The second best general-use storage device for magical power was a familiar, a living animal. And the absolute best general-use storage device for magical power was a mage. A human being. Loci and enchantments could be excellent devices for handling very specific spells, but in general, nothing could hold and manage magical power like a human being could.

I found Kylie again, dragged her back out of range of the school network just in case, and said, “It’s us. The scout and vessel in the prophecy. It’s you and me.”

“What?”

I tapped my familiarity mark. “Ever since Max cut this into me, my capacity to hold onto magic has been growing. I can handle way more than any other familiar. I can handle way more than I could when we first made this link; it stands to reason that I can handle way more than any other person. That’s what all the stuff about the vessel being incomplete means; when I do the climb, I’m going to be carrying the magic.”

“How? I mean, the whole point is that there’s just way too much magic down there, right? Way too many spells. And you’re barely handling a fraction of one powerful spell.”

“Two spells.”

“What?”

“I’m carrying two spells. Part of yours, as your familiar. But also mine.” I tapped my chest. “This thing has been in me for most of my life, and it’s never caused any issues. I’ve tried to wake it up and it doesn’t do anything. It takes up practically no space; I don’t even notice that it’s there. Magic that’s in use is one thing; a dormant spell is another. How many dormant spells do you think I could carry now?”

“Hmm.” Kylie rubbed her chin. “If you’re right, the familiarity link is going to break.”

“H-how do you figure?”

“Well, like you said. That prophecy mentions the vessel in relation to how much danger my spell proposes to me. It says that once the vessel is ‘refined’, my spell is too big, and that’s what the ‘borrowed throne’ is for, right? Which I assume is Duniyasar, since I’m currently borrowing ownership of it from Saina.”

“That… makes sense,” I said, trying not to sound upset by the news. Breaking the familiarity link in a way that wouldn’t kill Kylie was a good thing, right? It’s what we’d wanted to do ever since establishing the link, right? I shouldn’t feel disappointed by the possibility. “But there’s no way that just being at Duniyasar is enough to handle your spell. I mean, it makes it easier for you to channel the power efficiently, I know, but being there certainly doesn’t take any of the load off me. It’s not like it’s supporting your magic for you like a familiar does. So how is that supposed to help?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it is something else. I guess we’ll find out. So. If you’re the ‘vessel’, do you know how to, uh, complete yourself?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I do. It all works out pretty neatly, actually.”

“We’re really making progress here, aren’t we?”

“Yeah. We are.”

“We’re… really going to do this, aren’t we. Probably quite soon.”

“Yeah. I… guess we are.”

We looked at each other in silence for a bit.

“You know,” Kylie said, “we’ve known that this would happen for awhile. Long before we even knew what the danger was, we’ve known that there was some big danger, and we were going to have to give up something to stop it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Since the Labyrinth of Dreams, I’d say. That’s when we first got the full Hero and Child prophecy. We didn’t know what exactly the danger was, but… I mean, back then, I assumed it’d involve killing me, for awhile.”

“You always used to assume things like that. Remember back in our initiate semester, when you thought your spell was super dangerous to everyone?”

“My point is, for me personally, all this is technically a lot safer than I initially thought. I mean, death’s far from a certainty. And we’ve had a really, really long time to get used to this. But somehow… well, it’s not right to say it’s only starting to feel real now, but…”

“But it’s only starting to feel soon, now,” Kylie finished. “Like this is a thing that’s happening, rather than a thing off in the future somewhere.”

“Yeah. It’s felt urgent for awhile, but never soon.”

We stood in thoughtful silence for a bit.

“We’re not ready yet, though,” Kylie pointed out. “We have a general idea of what we need to do, but not nearly enough specifics. We don’t know how to get back out of the Labyrinth with the heart yet.”

“Or how to protect you from the power of Fionnrath’s Destiny,” I added. “Beyond Duniyasar somehow being involved.”

“Right,” she agreed. “So we’re still not ready to do anything.”

“Right.” I scratched my head. “What do you think they’ll do to us? After? I mean, best case scenario, we manage to actually destroy the Pit without collapsing this place or anything.”

Kylie shrugged. “Who knows?”

“We can go on the run. Phantom bandits, lauded as legends for striking a blow against the magical monopoly! Often spoken about, never seen.”

Kylie raised an eyebrow. “We wouldn’t last five minutes.”

“You don’t know that! Maybe we’ll be great at being on the run!”

“Kayden, if we’re right about the general idea of what we’re doing here, the backlash of severing the familiarity link alone is probably going to leave us incapacitated.”

“Why does it have to be us, though? Why is this our problem?”

“It’s got to be someone’s problem.”

“Yeah, but we didn’t make this mess. This isn’t even our world; we weren’t born into a mage family and we weren’t rich commonfolk who fought to come here. We just got cursed. And now their problem is dumped on us. Hell, I’m only involved because some random janitor assumed I was you on the first day and lead me to that lake! And you’re only involved because you got cursed by the World’s Most Busybody Prophecy. This shouldn’t be our problem.”

“Yeah. It shouldn’t. But it is.”

“I know. It just really sucks.”

We headed back to the school, trying not to think too hard about the task ahead. This had seemed easier, with Max. Just two people wasn’t that much different from being alone.

It was getting late, but my potion stocks were running low and there were always last-minute crammers looking to buy a magical boost, so I found an unbooked workshop and went to make some stock. Potioncraft was good, it was something I knew how to do. It was something I could do without being judged by a magical doctor whose home and life support system I planned to destroy to save the world, and it was something I could mess up without dooming my species to destruction via an eldritch spell god. Potions were simple, and understandable, and routine.

I spent perhaps a bit too long making them. I only stopped when my eyes were too blurred from exhaustion to read the scales properly.

Kylie was long asleep when I got back to the room, of course. I quickly washed up and stumbled to bed, planning to just throw myself onto it and pass out.

Someone was behind my force field.

I stumbled back, opened my mouth to raise an alarm, and stopped. The intruder was dressed in janitor’s robes, so he clearly wasn’t here to rob me or anything (a janitor would be much better at staying out of my sight if they wanted to), and more importantly, his face was uncovered, presumably so I could recognise him.

“Max,” I breathed.

“Hi. It’s Kayden, right?” He gave me a small, awkward smile. “Can we talk?”