The Archmage: Chapter Twenty-Seven

“Lemme see!” Mellt demanded, and the moment broke. I shook myself and took a breath, then laid out the spell, describing how it would allow moisture, air pressure, and charge to all float together in the air, even when it missed, then all come back together for a powerful attack. 

As I explained and started listing out the components, as well as their interactions, something lit itself in Mellt’s eyes. My faerie aura, suppressed though it may be, started to shiver and twist, reacting to what was happening. 

Wind began to blow across the room, and for just a moment, the air grew humid, fog rolling off of Mellt’s form. She closed her eyes, and then when they snapped open, they were a thundercloud gray color. 

“I did it!” she whispered, and while she still spoke quickly, it wasn’t as quick. But there was more pressure behind them, a weight that lingered in the air that hadn’t before. 

She thrust her hand up and magic spiraled off of it. An orb of gray storm clouds, churning and crackling with occasional flashes of lightning, condensed in her palm. She let out a laugh, then tackled me in a hug. 

Literally tackled. I was flung back by the force of the blow, and had my defensive enchantments not activated, I would have had the wind knocked out of me. 

“Ohhh! You’re the best semi-mortal-semi-faerie being thing I know!” she said, then whipped around and crossed the room in an instant, tackling Osheen in a hug as well. 

“And you’re the best mortal!” 

I chuckled slightly as I stood up and walked back to the enchantment. 

“I’m happy to have helped,” I said honestly. “Now, should we get the design done?” 

“Nope!” Mellt said. “I see how it can be improved. Let’s get to that first.” 

And so we dove in, Mellt's insights into the nature of storms providing powerful impetus for the changes, as well as a slight problem. 

She was incorporating her magic in – not just her understanding of the concept of lightning, but her actual magic. That provided a potent boost to the effects, in particular, the synergistic powers of the sympathetic link, but it meant I couldn’t use the design.

I narrowed my eyes and glanced at Mellt. 

“I want to make a deal with you, for the trading of a sample of your aura, which I will only use for the purposes of enchanting…” 

I listed out most of the same provisions that I’d given with the nightmare hag, but instead of getting a sample of her magic for one task, I’d keep it for the remainder of my mortal lifespan – that was crucial. If I became an fae, I wouldn’t be allowed to keep it. 

She got a sample of my human power as an assurance, and for use in her own enchanting projects, also for the remainder of my mortal life span. 

All in all, it was an equitable deal. We’d both started to pick up on the use of one another’s magical systems in our enchantments, and this would just help us make better use. 

With the design done, it was implementation time. With Mellt’s help, it was a breeze – no pun intended – and the moment the spell activated, she began to dump buckets full of power into it. She got it about halfway charged before she ran dry. 

“I think my help is done,” she said with a nod. “I’ll come to pick it up once it’s done charging!” 

“Sounds reasonable,” Osheen agreed. “I’m glad we made this deal.” 

Mellt beamed, and lightning flashed in her eyes. 

“Me too!” she said, before approaching the tear in space that Awel Meddal had left. It closed after a few moments, and I glanced at Osheen. 

“Well. While we wait for this to charge, do you want to have some tea?” 

“Will it be that short?” he asked, and I shook my head. 

“Oh no, it’ll take days. Weeks, maybe. I don’t have the power to just dump into it like I did last year, and the upgraded charging rig only goes so far. I just want to spend time with you. I’ll set up the iron repelling spell in my lab tomorrow, but for now? Just us.” 

It was a lovely cup of tea, and I even baked scones to go with it. I wasn’t the best baker – I’d been raised in a tailor shop, not a bakery – but they turned out passable. Once I’d put a bit of butter and honey on it, it was hardly noticeable that I’d slightly burnt the bottoms. 

The following morning, I started setting up the enchantment that would repel iron. I didn’t know much about Oberon’s personal fashion sense, but I did know that blue ties were wonderful things, and that they could match with most outfits. 

They also had more fabric than most people expected them to – the ones Aldvari made took over a yard and a half of fabric. 

That gave me plenty of room to stitch in the three sets of three that would move metal, layer mundane protections, and break apart elemental or mortal metal magic. 

With that done, I wrote out the inversing arrays for the components that Seth had delivered to me, as well as the cheque for his first payment. The payments were going to be a burden, I could already tell, but at least he was letting me pay over time, rather than as just a lump sum I couldn’t afford. 

After that, it was just a matter of using my printer trick to create a few dozen sheets of inductors and capacitors, then I set to work with the chanting. 

In the end, it took two weeks for Mellt’s staff to complete. Based on the fact she’d managed to half fill the array, I thought it would probably take a month or so to complete. 

More importantly, I’d need to create the spell that would convert my faerie aura into a different type of faerie magic. 

I thought that would be easy, but it actually turned out to be a lot more complex than I’d imagined. The aspect that a faerie had wasn’t quite the same as the stain of the aura, and when I ran my change aura through the stained glass spell set in order to set it to the power of Mellt’s, what I got out wasn’t storm aura. Instead it was change aura of a different color, with a thunderstorm recharge.

That gave me pause for a little bit. If I couldn’t convert my change aura into a different sort, then all of the work that I’d put into learning the hag’s magic would be for nothing, and the whole ritual would need to go back to the drawing board. 

I was halfway in a panic when Osheen made an offhand comment that caused me to freeze. 

“Oh, then it’s almost like a rune bond?”

It was. It wasn’t the same, but it was similar. Osheen could clarify his aura to charge up a ritual, but it wasn’t enough to turn him into a witch or invest it into runes. I’d noted that when I’d first gotten the stained glass spell set. 

But there was something he had that could convert his fire rune-bonded aura into a different state – his tattoo. 

I’d taken a bunch of notes on it when I’d been building Osheen’s artifacts, in order to create a channel that could let him refuel his artifacts. 

I just needed to rework that with faerie magic. It had to be possible. My faerie aura was all about change, after all, it should be capable of changing one thing to another. And if there was something capable of changing, it should be the power of change itself. 

I went through nearly three dozen designs before I slapped together something that I was mostly confident would work. When I tested it, though, I got a strange… amalgam. It was a blend of different aspects that was an absolute mess. I tried to thread the power into a rune, but it couldn’t activate anything – not a change rune, not storm, not lightning, not even Mellt’s cage. 

But the failure was still a step forwards. I spent some time delving into the mechanisms that converted the power for Osheen’s tattoos, and finally came to the conclusion that there was some sort of ephemeral aspect I was missing. 

Which meant… components. I could use them to bridge the gap in my knowledge. 

For storm, that was easy enough. I added some lightning-struck wood, a pinwheel, and a bowl of water. 

That time, when I ran the spell through, using Mellt’s aura sample, it worked. 

The conversion rate was terrible – nearly forty to one, if I had to put a number on it – but that was fine. Well, maybe ‘fine’ was the wrong term. But it worked, and even with the terrible efficiency rate, it should let me activate the faerie magic in the spell. I’d never want to use it to try and cast something that was purely faerie storm magic, but for a ritual that straddled the line between that and human magic, it was acceptable. 

Getting it to work with the hag’s magic was harder. I started out with lavender, warm milk, and rosemary. That resulted in another amalgam, but one that was clearly slanted towards the hag’s magic. 

I was getting closer, and after a trip to town, I added a chunk of lepidolite, amethyst, moonstone, and a white silk handkerchief – apparently all crucial components in deep sleep spells. 

With that, I was able to form a spell actually capable of changing the aura. Its own efficiency was even worse than that of the storm conversion one, but it was able to work. Even if it took almost my entire aura to activate a single relay, that was better than nothing. 

With the ritual more or less hammered out, I started creating a glove for the spells. I used leather, though, and as I added to it, I started to realize I had more of a leather bracer than a true glove. 

Ah, well. Maybe it was a good thing. After all, every attempt at a glove I’d made had wound up breaking or burning. Maybe my new bracer could avoid that fate. 

With Osheen’s help, I built small notches where I could place the samples of aura, and then layered on the spells I’d built, alongside a memory bank, network spell, and the growth spell. After all, while I might need to return the sample from the hag, that didn’t mean I couldn’t barter for other samples in the future. If I made part of the deal to only keep it for enchanting, and then clarified the enchantments so that the items couldn’t be traced back to the person who gave the sample, that might be enough to bring the price down to a reasonable level. From there, I could modify the glove, and I’d hopefully be able to slowly increase the efficiency over time. 

As we finished and began to charge the final two iterations of my staff – my original one’s upgrade, and the one I’d be handing over to Obereon, I could feel my nerves starting to set in. 

After all, only five days after the winter solstice, I’d be summoning one of the most infamous Kings of Faerie. 

I just hoped all my preparations would be enough.