The Archmage: Chapter Fourteen

Tara, Osheen, Oracle, Bridgette, and I sat at a table that held a large sheet of butcher’s paper and a plate of metal. 

“There are two problems,” Tara said. “Power and functions. Both take up way too much space to fit here.” 

“Fill me in,” Osheen said. “I’m not a ritualist, and while I’ve learned a lot, this is complicated.” 

“Right,” I said, pulling the paper over to me. “So basically there are three parts of the spell. Let’s start with the biggest – the mind array. Similar to the mind saber I got in my first year, or the crystals from the fae I got. This is probably my most promising lead to shrink – faerie magic clearly has a way of imparting information far faster and easier than our current magic, and if I can get my hands on that…” 

“It should be helpful,” Tara said. “But it won’t be enough. Even if we removed it entirely, the array is too large.” 

“Which we wouldn’t want to do,” Osheen said, warming up to the talk. “It’s the most vital part of the spell – uh, no offense, Tara.” 

Tara tilted her head, and I nodded. 

“Tara’s part of the array is next. I won’t lie, it’s not my speciality, but it’s sympathetic connections. The basic idea is that all of Paerús’ Aura pillars are maintained by basically the same ritual. If we use the magic to then break one, we can send that out in a ripple effect to break them all.” 

Osheen frowned and leaned forward, then poked at the magic. 

“This is force magic, right? That’s what you’ll use to break the crystal?” 

“Yes,” Tara said. 

“Why not just remove it and break the crystal yourself?” Osheen said. “Or if you need to do it from a distance, set it up as a separate spell, and not one that needs to be tied into every single one that goes up? Or am I misunderstanding the sympathetic array?” 

While Tara was considering that, Oracle sent me a few idle thoughts about cheese. I gave the bird a strange look. Did birds eat cheese? It wasn’t something that exactly popped up in the wilds. 

Oracle sent me the image of me breaking into a cheese factory and making all cheese print the spell to act as cheese-relays. 

I started to chuckle, but was drawn back to my thoughts as Tara started speaking.

“It’s lower in power cost if I just try to replicate the breaking spell, rather than the causality of it breaking, but power is only a problem if we can actually cast the spell. I’ll run through a couple of designs. It could shrink the array, but not by much.” 

“Power is the next biggest problem,” I admitted. “But we should talk about the last function of the array first, and the one that I don’t have any clues on how to simplify: the safety array.”

“This goes hand in hand with the information spell,” I said. “People are going to be hit with a sudden vision, or a surge of information, all across the country. People who are performing surgeries, operating train safety procedures, casting a spell, and any other highly focused or risky task could wind up dying or killing someone else by the effect of the spell breaking their concentration.”

“Definitely an important part to include,” Osheen said, then Bridgette hopped off his shoulder. The phoenix walked over to the blank spot in the spell and tapped it with her claw. 

“Exactly,” Osheen said. “Why is there a big blank spot in the spell design?”

“It’s for the other half of the safety procedures,” Tara said. “Right now, I’m using a couple of mind spells to hold the effect off until someone’s mind isn’t at high levels of concentration, but that’s less than ideal, so I’ve had to put in a bunch of countermeasures, like if they’re moving at a certain speed. All of this balloons the amount of space we need, as well as the amount of power it takes, since the spell has to hold off until none of the conditions are met. The worst part is that I’m still coming up with more situations.” 

She shook her head and sighed. 

“Unfortunately, I don’t know of any mental magic that will just casually allow me to slip it in when they’re not busy. I have to go about it the other way by limiting, not defining.” 

“Which brings us to the final issue of power,” I said. “Even if we’re tapping into the energy that all of the pillars produce to act as a catalyst before they break, we still need a truly staggering amount of power to activate the spell. After all, we’re creating a spell that will web outwards and resonate across an entire country.” 

“That is a problem,” Osheen said. “How much raw power are we talking about?” 

“A lot,” I said. “I don’t have a good estimation. More than my cloak took to build, though admittedly it’s sort of different – my cloak just needed to activate all the functions and storage, and then it’s able to refuel with my recharge.” 

“What about building a bunch of spells that are essentially giant storage devices?” Tara threw out there. “Use the stained glass spell set to give them as many recharges as possible, then scatter them all over and send the power in here. Your recharge is one of the ones that doesn’t seem to draw on ambient aura, Evan, so if you got a bunch more…”

“My human recharge is drawing on astral magic,” I said. “It is converting from ambient aura, it’s just limited by a different set of rules than something as mundane as physical location.” 

I frowned as the words just sort of… tumbled… out of my mouth. I knew they were true, and I even thought I knew why I knew – my expanded understanding of constellations magic had provided me the answer. 

But there was no reason for me to just blurt it all out like that. 

A horrifying thought raced through my mind, and I quickly lit both of my auras again. The silvery aura of faerie magic had grown even more silvery in color, losing the faint traces of humanity that had been running through it. 

Osheen let out a loud curse and shot to his feet. Tara’s eyes widened, and she was on her feet as well. 

“What’s going on?” Osheen asked. 

“I don’t know,” I said cautiously. I dismissed my human aura and spun it around me to examine every possible angle. There wasn’t a thread of faerie magic anywhere inside it, which brought me some – small – relief. 

Small, mainly because I didn’t know what would happen once the human magic on the faerie side was gone. That was what the faerie magic was currently eating away at. Would it be able to leap that jump?

“Let’s try the test again,” Tara said, leaping over to one of her counters and pulling out a bottle of iron filings. She sprinkled some on my skin, and I felt… nothing. I tried to pull up my faerie aura, and the moment I did, pain rippled through me. 

I let out a yelp and ripped my hand back, then watched as Tara went very still and quiet. Next to her, Osheen was doing the same. 

“It’s slowed down a lot,” Osheen said. “We spent time over the summer, and didn’t notice anything. But it’s still there.” 

“What we really need to find out,” I said. “Is if it can jump the gap between my two auras. If it can’t, then I should be fine, so long as I don’t call on my faerie aura. If it can…” 

“We do still have the preserved ritual,” Tara said. “In the spell bottle. We can try that.” 

“I need to speak to a faerie as well,” I said. “Awel Meddal has always been good to me – she clearly sees more value in cultivating me as an ally than cheaply undercutting me.” 

Tara went a little bit pink around her cheeks, but nodded. 

“Wind is shockingly good at divination,” she said. “It’s possible she’ll be able to tell something. I’m also going to try and set up some divination spells of my own to see what I can. There are spells for detecting fae, of course, but there is no record of your arch-stars anywhere I can see, so I can’t promise any results.” 

“I’m sorry,” I finally said. “I’ve gotten us way off track.” 

“Love, it’s a matter of your life,” Osheen said. “I’m not upset. The nation can wait.”

I vehemently disagreed there, and that made things worse. Was I just letting the darker sides of my mind overwhelm me, putting the needs of the many above my own life? Or was I being compelled to follow the rules, to abide by the promises that I had made? 

“We should still finish the meeting,” I said, walking back to the table and sitting down. “Do any of you have any ideas for power? Or for compressing the runes more?” 

“No,” Osheen said. “But I’m not really thinking straight right now.” 

“My generator idea is still the most likely to work, in my opinion,” Tara said. 

“It’s something,” I said to Tara, nodding. “I’ll get to work on figuring out some designs and see how viable it is.” 

“For compression,” Osheen said. “What if we didn’t? What if we broke it up into three spells and hid them in different spots?” 

“That would triple the odds that we’d get found out,” I said. “But the idea has merit. If we incorporated all the parts having the same meaningless sigil, then used that as a linking mark…”

“It’s worth thinking about,” Tara said. “But it’s not a guaranteed solution.” 

“Well, either way, it seems likely that I’m going to have to speak to the faeries,” I said, tapping the sheet. 

Our meeting didn’t last very long after that. It felt strange to simply go to bed, but I had classes that I needed to teach in the morning. I wasn’t a student anymore, able to skive off classes just because I had more important things to do. 

That set off another round of worries in my mind – was that the faerie part of me simply agreeing to the contracts I’d signed? Or was that the logical choice? I couldn’t afford to burn my bridges here at Yesgol, after all. 

Or could I? 

With those thoughts sinking into my brain, I went to bed. As I was about to drift off, Osheen came in and sat down next to me. 

“We’ll overcome this,” he told me. “Even if the worst comes to pass, you’ve bought yourself months or years. I was thinking about it in the shower – we took a month off after you split your aura, and it’s only gone from mostly corrupted to almost entirely corrupted. And what’s more, when Bridgette and I fuse, our auras… mesh. They become one. But it just splits up again the moment we unfuse. It’s possible. I know it is. Even if your arch-star can’t, we’ll just re-human-ify you.” 

I pulled him in for a kiss, smiling at him. 

“I believe you,” I said, and in that moment, I felt a great sense of relief. 

Because that was a lie. 

Deep down, I didn’t believe him. This faerie magic would keep spreading and changing me, until I was nothing but a strange faerie king. 

That wasn’t to say I didn’t think the points he’d made were good – they were. And it wasn’t to say I wasn’t going to try – I was. I’d prefer to die trying than accept it and become a full faerie on my own.

But at my core, I just didn’t think it was possible.

I had lied.

A partial lie, true, but a lie. 

A lie for a good purpose, to help my incredibly boyfriend, and my soon to be husband, if I had anything to say about it.

But a lie.

And lies were the most human thing in the world.