Measureless Magic 1: Ch. 13, 14

Chapter 13

There is no need to rely on risky perceptual magic for something as important as personal enchantments. In these pages you will find aggressive, defensive, and utility enchantments fit for every purpose you can imagine, and each requires only a single perceptual rune. We would do without that rune as well, if possible, but it is necessary to properly target the user.

• Tried & Tested Pragmatic Enchantments

The moment the chamber sealed, the barriers keeping everyone back dropped and sound returned.

Raza ran toward the metallic chamber, but didn’t reach it before it vanished into the wall. She slammed both palms into the wall and made a sound of incoherent frustration before spinning. “There was something wrong with her!”

“Yeah, she was really suffering,” Dee said.

“No! I mean, yes, but she shouldn’t have been. The Guardians have dozens of well-tested personal enchantments. They’re almost completely pragmatic magic, so they’re idiot-proof! There’s no reason that someone should almost die when they come to a low-magic environment like this.” Raza looked around the room for confirmation, almost panicked. “There isn’t.”

“Maybe she didn’t know those enchantments,” Ravel said. “I don’t. I mean, I’ve heard of them but I don’t have them memorized. I wasn’t planning on becoming a Guardian or a mage.”

“I know them!” said Anna. Ravel stared at her in surprise, and she flushed. “Well, kind of. Let me show you!”

She dropped her backpack and rummaged around inside, digging out a large clothbound volume. She flipped it open to reveal pages filled with notes and large diagrams of runes. “I wasn’t sure which set I wanted, so I brought - No!”

A red light formed around the book. Frightened, Anna dropped the volume and sprang back.

To Ravel’s relief, the light didn’t follow her… but it grew brighter. A second later, the book caught fire. Shortly afterward, nothing was left of it but a pile of ash. 

Everyone stared.

The floor beneath it was undamaged, but the book was gone.

Hesitantly, a boy took off his backpack, holding it at arm’s length. “I brought a book like that too. With enchantment diagrams. Is it going to catch fire too?”

“I bet it will if you open it,” Raza said. “Shit. I have the first enchantment I want memorized, but…”

“Memorization is risky!” Dee said. “If you get one detail wrong, anything could happen. My mother lost a patient once who added an extra line to the ‘gather’ rune and turned it into ‘compress.’ He caused a huge explosion.”

“I could do it right,” Raza said dismissively. “But so what? If the castle did that to a book…” She trailed off, frowning.

“She was alive, though,” Ravel said. 

He didn’t realize he’d spoken until both girls looked at him. 

He cleared his throat awkwardly. “She was… she was pretty old, right? And she said she’d been through these chambers a long time ago, so she probably came in at our age. And she’s still alive, so… so we can survive too. Probably. If we follow the rules. Right?”

Dee looked away. Raza’s shoulders twitched in what might have been a shrug, her eyes drifting to Marat’s dead body.

I’ve got to survive, Ravel thought. I’ve been here a day. Less than a day. Niko and Vera probably don’t even know anything’s wrong yet. Skies, Aunt Fi will be devastated. And Lanat! 

Except, they won’t find out I’m trapped in here, will they?

The thought brought him up short. 

It was obvious, in retrospect. He’d grown up “knowing” that the only people that went into the castle were retired Guardians, but both the people who’d trapped them here and that strange woman had implied that this was something that had happened before, probably many times.

But no one knows. 

Or, at least, most people don’t.

So… what do they tell our families?

They’ll… they’ll have to tell them we died. 

Nothing else makes sense. Otherwise, there’s no way to explain why I never talked to them again. Why none of us will. 

That’s going to destroy them. None of us have been the same since Terry died, and-

Ravel sucked in a breath. Wait. 

Dee seemed to misinterpret his sudden revelation as panic. She spoke with exhausted insincerity: “I’m sure you’re right. I’m sure we can survive.”

Ravel smiled, shaking his head. “No! I mean, maybe. But… but I just realized something. They’re going to tell our families we died during training. I’m sure they are. Did you hear that woman?”

Raza spun, straightening. “She… she’d been here for decades. And she seemed to know what had happened to us. We’re not the first people that have been trapped in the castle. Not by a long shot!”

Dee shuddered. “That’s horrible! Why do you both seem excited about that? When my sister Zenale died, I-”

Dee cut off mid-sentence, eyes widening.

Ravel nodded, grinning. “She might still be alive! Your sister, my cousin… Maybe they never died at all! Maybe they were just brought into the castle!”

“Maybe,” Dee said slowly. “It makes sense, what you’re saying - that some of the people we were told died during training were actually kidnapped and shipped here - but it’s not all of them. Training really is dangerous.”

“How do you know?” Ravel asked.

Dee looked away. “My mom’s a doctor. A lot of my aunts and uncles and cousins are, too. Mutations happen a lot, but they don’t always kill people right off. Helping people survive the complications is a lot of what doctors talk about in their spare time.”

“Maybe those mutations came from other places? Failed wards and stuff?” Ravel suggested. Terry might be alive. He might!

“Not all of them. As I said, this is what they talked about all the time. I know a lot of deaths and injuries happen during training. Plus, well…” Dee shrugged her hand drifting out to indicate the dead body on the floor. “Just because they were alive when they were put into the castle doesn’t mean they’re alive now.”

“Unless your mom and your relatives were lying,” Raza said, her voice dark. “Some people know what’s happening here, I guarantee it. It’s not just those two monsters that led us down here. It’s not just that kid’s dad.”

“No!” Dee said. “They… my mom… no. They wouldn’t! They wouldn’t.”

Ravel raised a hand the armored vest his aunt had shoved toward him at the last minute. Did… Did Aunt Fi know about this? About the castle?

No. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t have let me come.

Right?

There was no way to answer that question, and he refused to let new fears overwhelm his sudden hope.

Resolutely, he put the suspicion out of his mind. That’s not important, he thought. What’s important is that Terry might still be alive. He might not be, but… he might! I have to believe he is. It never seemed right to me, him dying during training. He was planning to be a Walker, for crying out loud! They said he decided to try out magecraft, but I never believed it. Not him.

When Ravel had first arrived at Spider Nursery, Lanat had been hostile and suspicious of him and his siblings.

Terry never had.

Easygoing: that was the word that came to mind when Ravel thought of his cousin. He didn’t think he’d ever seen Terry upset about anything. He had things he liked more than others - he spent a lot of his free time at the activity center’s pool - but he was always open to try new things and never seemed ruffled when plans changed. 

Someone who knew Terry only shallowly might have thought that his agreeable nature meant it would be easy to talk him into trying out the mage path.

Ravel knew better.

His older cousin was relaxed, not dumb. The older boy had paid enough attention in class to know that magery required precision, focus, and hard work, and he’d always been adamant that it wasn’t for him. 

Terry had learned to sew, knit, and crochet, of course - he’d grown up as Aunt Fi’s oldest son - but he’d abandoned these things quickly, and didn’t intend to join his mom at the weavery.

“It’s just not fun for me,” he’d told Ravel. “It’s not relaxing. Well, carding the wool isn’t too bad, but everything else? Not for me. If I do something wrong and don’t notice, I have to undo all my work. I want to try out a lot of things after I graduate. Grandelion harvesting looks fun. Maybe I’ll apprentice at the ant hive? If none of that works out, maybe I’ll move back near the nursery and teach swimming.”

No way they talked him into the mage path. No way. He must have been sent in here.

And… I’m sure he would have survived. He wouldn’t have gotten angry enough to break something, and he wouldn’t have frozen up in panic when he was surprised.

Ravel’s traitorous brain suggested that there were probably other dangers, other ways to die, but he ignored it. 

I’ve got to try to find him. If I do, maybe we can make it out of here together.

How do I do that?

Can I trust that lady?

Probably. 

She pushed us around like we were nothing. If she’d wanted to kill us, I’m sure she could have. There’s no reason for her to lie to us that I can see.

She said the castle liked her. That it would try to keep her alive. That’s something I should aim for. The castle can kill people; I’ve seen it kill people. If I want to live, I need to make the castle like me too. I don’t know how to do that, but she said to keep moving. Keep trying. Doing the castle’s weird… lessons? Learning those, I guess.

His stomach rumbled. His eyes fell on the pile of weird stuff. The woman had said it was food and he hadn’t eaten anything since dinner yesterday. 

And there wasn’t anything else to eat.

He knelt next to the pile. It didn’t look like any food he’d ever seen. Was it magically created, like water or salt? No, it couldn’t be: pragmatic magic was good at creating simple, uniform substances, but whatever these were, they clearly weren’t uniform. And creating something edible from perceptual magic would just be insane.

Some parts looked sort of like grandelion stems, so maybe these were plants. Actually, the glossy surface of the largest objects reminded him a little of the chillis grown in the rooftop herb gardens, even if the smallest of these objects was still dozens of times bigger than the largest chilli he’d ever seen. 

Ravel didn’t love the idea of eating unknown plants, but it seemed a little better than eating unknown creatures. Chicken and eggs were delicacies, of course, but he didn’t like ant meat any better than most people. It was sour and tough, and could easily make you ill if not cooked well.

It can’t be meat. The lady said we didn’t need to cook any of it.

Steeling himself, he grabbed a green stick that looked a little more normal than the rest of it. If he squinted, he could pretend it was a grandelion shoot. 

He chomped down, and a surprisingly loud sound that echoed throughout the room.

The… the whatever-it-was bland and tasted kind of like dirty water, with stringy bits that got stuck in his teeth. It wasn’t terrible, though. Easier to chew than grandelion stem, at least, and not quite as bitter.

Others were watching him as he chewed, and when he went in for a second bite, other people became brave enough to follow suit.

The rest of the stem-like sticks were snatched up before he finished the first one he’d grabbed, as was all the leafy green stuff. It hadn’t looked at all like grandelion leaves, but it had looked food-adjacent.

Ravel hesitated. Should I try something else, or…? He frowned. I should. I think eating that little bit just made me hungrier. Reluctantly, he grabbed something that looked kind of like an orange grandelion root. The first bite surprised him with a faint sweetness, and he hurriedly gathered up the rest and loaded them into his bag. 

These don’t seem very squishy or wet. I can take them with me. 

I need to get moving.

I need to find Terry.

Chapter 14

Mages are known for their creativity. However, confidence, discipline, and focus are even more important qualities if you seek to become a successful magic-user. 

• Handbook of the Guardians of Marynth

The next few lesson chambers were evolutions of the first: darkened mazes navigable only by sensing magic. 

More paths, but with subtler and subtler distinctions, until there was only the most minute difference between the magic level of the path and the rest of the darkened area.

Then it wasn’t full paths: a single line of concentrated magic at waist-height, then one out of reach above Ravel’s head, then a series of unconnected dots of dense magic that marked the correct route.

It took Ravel a few hours to make it through each maze, but not many attempts. He didn’t rush or guess, sitting or standing in the darkness for as long as necessary to figure out what was going on. 

The last maze took him the most tries, even though the magic path was all connected, because the castle didn’t blank out his other senses. Actually, it did the opposite, playing music, blowing a breeze through the room, and filling the room with colorful sparks and swirling mists.

Closing his eyes and plugging his ears probably would have helped him focus, but Ravel ignored the temptation. 

I’m starting to see why that woman called these “lessons,” he thought. This is clearly meant to help me learn to sense magic while my other senses are distracting me. Getting pushed out when I make a mistake doesn’t really hurt, so… why not train?

Ravel was confident that he didn’t need to rush. The only person who’d made it through the second chamber before him was Dee, who was apparently some kind of magical prodigy, and only three others had made it to that chamber before he’d moved on to the next maze. He hadn’t actually seen anyone in the last three rooms, although Dee was presumably somewhere ahead of him.

But that’s okay. It’s not a race, he thought. Not that kind of race, anyway. That woman didn’t say we needed to hurry or be first through, we just needed to keep moving.

A good thing, because when he finally made it through the maze, the next chamber was different.

Very different.

The walls were almost completely white, interrupted only by more of the weird text. After seeing the same ornate markings above every archway he’d entered, Ravel had gotten a little more used to it. He still thought it was strange, but he could recognize the letters he’d already seen: N, T, and R. And the L was obvious enough, he hoped.

The other letters he could only guess on, but…

“It looks like it says ‘Control?’” Ravel said aloud. He shuddered. “Creepy thing to write on the walls. And why write it so many times? Once was enough for ‘Enter.’”

He wasn’t sure why he was talking aloud. Maybe he hoped the castle would correct him or help him out if he got it wrong? Maybe someone else would appear, hidden in some new Challenge like the maze?

He was alone in the room, so either he’d passed Dee - which he didn’t think was likely - or she’d figured out the puzzle here and moved on.

She’s probably still ahead of me, Ravel thought. 

Suddenly, he regretted his rush forward. It had made so much sense at the time: to get far, far ahead of the castle’s anger at the stragglers and try to earn its trust. The challenges he’d faced had all been variations of the first, so why wait?

Because now you have to do something completely new, and you have no idea how, moron, he chastised himself. It’s not like I can even go back for people. I could wait for them to catch up?

Unless the castle gets mad at me for waiting.

He sighed. Alright, then. Better do my best, here. What clues do I have?

Previous rooms had been narrow and oblong, but this one was square: obviously so. The floor was divided into white tiles, each large enough that Ravel could lay down completely within them.

The tiles in the center of the room were blank, but the ones around the walls had a smaller gray square in the middle. Ravel walked over.

The moment he stepped onto one of the tiles, he blinked: the magic was different here. His time in the mazes had made him very attuned to magical differences. He could feel now without touching it, almost see it, although it wasn’t quite sight. It was a new sense all its own, both like and unlike touch and sight and smell and taste and hearing.

There’d been some kind of barrier keeping him from sensing the tile from far away, but the moment he stepped across the edge the whole area snapped into focus. A thin layer of magic coated the edges of the tile, but it stopped after a few inches, held back by an intangible barrier, far from the gray square.

There was another clue: delicate painted arrows started right after the magic, pointing across the empty white space toward the gray target at the center.

He looked up at the wall. The word “control” had seemed threatening; the castle had certainly been controlling him. But now that he could see the magic on the tile, the meaning was clear enough.

Writing the word above every tile seemed menacing and unnecessary, but what did he know? He wasn’t an ancient magical murder building.

Just get the magic into the middle area. That’s got to be it. Ravel frowned. If only I knew how to do that.

He’d taken Introduction to Magic, of course - everyone did - and he’d paid attention. But those classes had included a lot of rune memorization and magic theory, and had intentionally avoided instructing students on how they’d actually implement any of what they learned.

“You’ll be given hands-on instruction the moment you graduate!” Miss Farelle had told his class. “If I told you now, odds are that at least one of you would get impatient and try it - dangerously! I don’t want to be responsible for one of my students mutating themselves, so please stop asking.”

Just one more thing that hasn’t gone as planned, Ravel thought. 

Hesitantly, he poked a finger into the magic. When that didn’t perturb the substance, he swept his hand through it, trying to physically push it into the middle.

His hand moved through the magic as if it wasn’t there. There was no resistance, and it didn’t leave the slightest swirl or eddy behind. 

I guess that was dumb, Ravel thought. Maybe I just… think it should move? Magic, go!

Nothing happened.

Ravel cleared his throat, feeling foolish, and spoke aloud. “Move, magic!”

It ignored his command.

He was glad no one else was in the room.

Well, what, then? Ravel wondered. He sat down, crosslegged, and stared at the magic. He felt a headache coming on, and his stomach rumbled painfully. He’d thought he’d picked up plenty of the orange sticks, but while they’d tasted good, they hadn’t been very filling. He’d eaten the last of what he’d grabbed hours before, and none of the other rooms he’d passed through had held any food.

I hope the castle gives me more tomorrow, Ravel thought. Maybe I should just go to sleep? Someone else might catch up during the night. They might have a better idea of what I’m supposed to do. The teachers weren’t supposed to tell us - and I know there are accidents - but surely someone has a mage brother or sister who let them in on the secret.

He blinked away sleep. Everything he’d thought seemed reasonable, but now that he was sitting, he was hesitant to move. Just a few more minutes. Then I’ll go to sleep, and in the morning, I’ll find out the secret. It must be easy, if they don’t feel like they need to explain it advance. Once I know, the magic will just move into the-

Wait.

Something happened.

Ravel sat up straight, replaying his thoughts. Once again, when he thought that the magic would move, it did. 

It was the slightest motion imaginable: the tiniest, most temporary bend in the boundary that held the pool of magic back from the center of the square.

But it had definitely happened.

Just think that magic will move, and it does? Ravel thought. Don’t tell it to move, just believe it will? 

It seemed strange, but the more Ravel thought about it, the more sense it made. Pragmatic magic was all about powering runes for specific, predictable effects, but from what he knew about perceptual magic, belief was key. 

 He was far from an expert - he’d never planned to do any magic  - but he was glad that he’d paid some attention in class.

Perceptual magic was… weird. It was all about contradictions. If you convinced yourself that a pillow was a rock, you could turn it into one… but if you convinced yourself it was very similar to a rock, while remembering that it was a pillow, you could get the pillow to take on some of the rock’s properties while retaining its own. For example, you could let it retain its softness while taking on the rock’s weight.

Or you could make it as hard as a rock, but as light as a pillow. 

It was quite easy to get wrong, and the dangers of using perceptual magic on yourself were obvious.

But at its core, perceptual magic was all about belief.

Maybe that’s what it took to manipulate magic as well.

Ravel glared at the magic, trying to command it to move, before remembering that he’d already realized that wasn’t right. He took a deep breath, trying to clear his mind. The magic is going to move into the middle. It is.

The pool of magic wobbled slightly.

He was on the right track.

After five minutes of effort, Ravel took a break. What am I doing wrong? I feel stupid. I’m not going to be able to do this! 

Oh.

Damn, if I think that… I’m probably not.

The moment the thought crossed his mind, he flushed. It was obvious, in retrospect: Ravel didn’t think of himself as a mage. He didn’t think this was something he could do, or something he’d be good at. 

He didn’t even want to be a mage.

He just had to.

How did he convince himself to believe?