The Archmage: Chapter Twenty-One

As the week ticked by, I ensured that each of my students got a familiar. A few of them, mainly those who came from high-class enough families, had enough money to purchase slightly more curated familiar summonings and their materials, and I helped those students set up their rituals, coaching them through each step of the summoning. 

That weekend, I started looking into more powerful water and wind spells that would mesh well with my lightning staff, reaching out to Emilia for the advice of Finnalir. 

It was probably a touch strange to ask the son of a high ranking government official of another country for help with water spells, but he was the best water sorcerer I knew.

Part of the trouble was, I wanted to create a cohesive blending of spells, and my current staff didn’t exactly lend itself to that. I’d layered a bunch of powerful spells together, but I hadn’t put a lot of thought into transforming them into a cohesive whole in the same manner as the sword I’d gifted Medb, or my current seven sets of seven cloak. I wasn’t going to be making another seven sets of seven – I didn’t have time – but I could make some massive improvements. 

The fact that I’d gone on to modify and change the structure of the staff when working with Mellt had further disrupted the overall flow, and essentially put me back at the drawing board for when it came to designs. 

I also had to consider how to deal with the goal of the item as well – helping Mellt grow her personal power to become a Lady of Storms, rather than immediately ascending to become a Queen of Lightning. 

Water was a great conductor for electricity, as far as I understood it. Finnalir’s letter veered off into a tangent about how it wasn’t actually pure water that acted that way, but rather the things within water.

For my purposes, it didn’t really matter. I was going to be blending together human water magic and faerie change magic to make this work, and both of those condensed impure water out of the air. Purifying water completely was apparently possible, but incredibly hard, and not even helpful for this task. 

My current plan was to build a spell that held three spells nestled within three spells, one for wind, water, and lightning. 

Lightning was the easy part. My original staff had possessed four functions – one for guiding the lightning, one for power switching, one for releasing a medium bolt of lightning, and one to discharge all of the remaining power. 

Mellt had helped me alter the guidance function, so that it would only release a low-powered bolt until it struck someone, before releasing the full power, but that wasn’t a new function, just an upgrade. 

I could pull out the function that would allow it to discharge all of its power, and put that… Somewhere else. I wasn’t sure where, yet, but somewhere for sure. 

Wind and water were a bit harder, but I settled on wrapping a windshield around a water bullet, and attaching that to the tip of the guidance function. That would allow the condensed water bullet on the tip of the lightning to move faster than it normally could, and the windshield should help stop most sorcery’s attempts to disrupt the spell before it landed. It also provided some insurance against Mellt’s cage, since the powerful bullet would still blow through that like wet tissue paper. 

Connecting them in this manner did mean needed to make the spell three dimensional, and attach it using strings, but I could live with that.It gave me more space to cram in components, capacitors, and inductors, after all. 

But that left two functions for water and air, and that was where Osheen’s sorcery experience shone through. 

“Why not recycle the energy of the condensed water?” he suggested. “Lightning moves fast, but it’s still being aimed by a person. They can dodge you, even if not the lightning.”

“Right,” I agreed. 

“Well, think about how my more complex fire spells grab onto the fire I’ve already made and recycle it, or how my heat spells do something similar. You could do that with water. Add a function that would preserve the water bullets in the air. Then you could have the third function be pulling it back into the central target when you get a hit.” 

“If I made the wind function similar, I could slam them with a bunch of pretty powerful attacks at once on currents of wind that mess up flight pretty bad,” I said, nodding. “But… Hmm. what if I did something with lightning? Based on the concepts Mellt was talking about, I can leave it as invisible buildups of static and charge in the air.”

“Put the guidance construct in between the three of three?” Osheen suggested. “That would help you guide all of them together, as well as enforce the idea that they’re all, essentially speaking, one and the same.” 

“Good idea,” I said. “I can then have the lightning consist of a normal bolt, the charge maintenance, and the recall spell. Power switching can go in between those three.” 

“Water bullet, water maintenance, and recall,” Osheen said, “That would let you nest the single giant bolt function in there, as long as you linked it in three-dimensional space, like how Tara did.” 

“Ugh, that’ll be so much string,” I griped. “But yeah, it’s a good idea. That just leaves the wind shield – though if we’re combining them with lightning so much, it should be more like a pointed tunnel, surrounding the lightning and the water bullet – wind pressure maintenance, and wind recall. I guess I can fit… extra power? Or something like that.” 

“Shame you can’t have the sympathetic link as the center instead of guidance,” Osheen said. “Since all three are plays on one thing, I think it would be pretty effective.” 

“I… Well, if I made guidance fit in the wind spell,” I mused. “We’re talking about a LOT of string now, but it should be possible to then put the sympathetic link in.”

Osheen’s eyes flittered around as he envisioned the three of three, then he eventually nodded.

“We should look at the notes that the really annoying faerie lord of storms, Mellt, and Awell gave us when we devised your storm protection sphere,” Osheen said, “that might have some ideas on blending the faerie magic and the human magic better, but it’s a solid idea.” 

“Absolutely,” I agreed. “I’ll start with building the one that Mellt’s going to get, then build the one for me. That will give me two rounds to perfect the one I’m going to be bartering with Obereon for, and then I’ll build the iron and iron spell repelling artifact that I’ll be using as a gift to summon him.” 

“But tonight, we’re going to summon the nightmare hag,” Osheen reminded me, and I had to suppress a groan. 

“Yeah, I’d forgotten about that,” I said. “Or more accurately, I allowed myself to forget that, because I didn’t want to deal with it.” 

“Let me,” Osheen offered, and I turned to look at him.

“No,” I said. 

“Love, I’ve been having nightmares of some sort or another since I was ten,” he said. “I can handle a few more. I might not be as faerie-tongued as you are, but I know enough about bartering to deal with it. You’ll just need to coach me on how to deal with some things that humans don’t do, like not thanking one another. That will let you spend the nights working on the spell for Mellt, to get it a test run.” 

“I can’t ask you to do that,” I objected.

“You’re not,” Osheen said. “I’m offering to allow you to. Besides, the fae already seem to think that we’re married, despite neither it nor our engagement technically being official yet, and that you’re my King and I’m your Lord? I’m not entirely sure of that, to be honest, faerie dynamics and politics are strange. But I don’t think it would be that strange for a Lord to barter with a Maestro in exchange for something the Lord’s King wants.”

I had to stop myself from grimacing at the reminder that we weren’t properly engaged. 

I wanted to make my engagement ring for Osheen something truly spectacular, but I just didn’t have the time to squeeze it in yet. By some arguments, we were already engaged, or already married, but I wanted to go through the proper human ceremony as well. 

“Well, not just the faeries,” I said, teasingly, doing the best I could to inject a bit of levity into the situation. “Did you not her Elaine? She called us Evan and Osheen tailor.” 

“True enough,” he said, rumbling in a deep chuckle. “But what do you think?” 

“I think it may be a good idea to start the negotiation by reminding her what happened to the last person who took you away,” I said. “Just to help set the tone that her trickery isn’t going to be tolerated. But… are you sure?” I can’t reasonably ask or expect you to put up with a bunch of nightmares, just for helping me get things done a little bit quicker.” 

“And you didn’t,” he repeated. “Again, I’m offering.” 

My lips pressed together, and I was about to say yes, when I remembered something.

“I can’t start casting them now,” I said. “Before you protest, I can’t. I used a bunch of huge logs for my cloak’s three dimensional spell, and I don’t have anything like that for this. I can get some work done, but there’s no way I can easily do something like that in time for tonight.” 

“True,” Osheen said, frowning. “I want to do something, though. I’m already going to be as useless as a lout.”

I gently whacked his arm. 

“Don’t even say that,” I said. “I’ll handle the fae, but if you want to help, you can. You can gather the fallen logs and bring them to my deep root lab, then burn the spells in. I need to finish working out the details, but just having it set up will be a huge time saver. I have no idea how long this thing will take to charge up – it could be a good chance for me to look at Tara’s recharge idea… We don’t have any convenient archmage level spells to just drop in as fuel, noy anymore.” 

Osheen and I spent the rest of Saturday looking up specific spells for water and wind, then working on interconnecting them in a three dimensional space, while also going through them with Osheen, ensuring that he’d be able to get the angles, runes, and lines all correct, then I headed up to the summoning array and started setting up. 

Black sand, salt, and some hallucinogenic mushrooms all made their way into bowls, followed by three hairs from a black cat, water that had been soaked in the lack of light of a new moon, and a bundle of sage. I finished up with a bundle of lavender, a small bit of gold shaved off the edge of a coin, and a sketched out image of a human brain. 

With the components lit, I began to weave my aura through the spell and cleared my throat, opened my mouth, and began to cast.