The Abjurer: Chapter 11-12

“It’s called the realm reaching arch-star,” I told Tara that evening. “House Elide has access to it, but the biggest problem is that it requires access to three different realms to form it.”

“I see,” Tara said. “Do you have a plan for that?”

“We do, actually,” I said.

“And I can take care of one,” Osheen said. “Or rather, Kelsie can. It’s going to be expensive, but she can open a portal for us. It’s lucky there are so many ley lines around here – it makes portals much easier.”

We’d discussed how we could open three portals. My initial instinct was to ask Liam, but he was a necromancer, and the undead were from our own plane, not another one. He didn’t know how to open a gate to another realm.

Which was when Osheen brought up Kelsie, the druid who had helped us fight against the assassin the year before. When Bridgette had discorporated in the fight, Kelsie was the one who’d summoned her back.

“I need a portal to the Elemental Fields anyways,” Osheen said. “It’s going to take a pretty hefty amount of Aura, but Bridgette and I think we have a way that we can help her catch up to my father’s phoenix, at least a little bit.”

“And I’m handling the other two. There are multiple Fae ley lines around here,” I said. “They’re under the rule of the Silver Queen, or at least most of them are. I’ve got a good enough grasp on divination and faerie magic to find a point where there’s leakage to her court. And I have a small personal storage space to the Wandering Path that I can open.”

“You’ve got quite the plan, then,” she said. “I just need to steal the technique.”

“And that’s going to be much easier, now,” Osheen said. “You already broke House Elide’s main house. Whatever containment measures they’re using to hide their secret libraries are going to be much weaker.”

I removed a spell bottle from my pocket. A brightly glowing spell spun inside of it.

“You’ve got a powerful spell to absorb knowledge from books,” I said. “I used it on House Hawthorne’s library. This is a relay spell I designed off of that one, it should connect to a bookstore I have contact with, hidden using clarified Aura.”

“Why not just send it here?” Tara asked suspiciously.

I bit my lip. This was going to be delicate.

“The bookstore is where I got access to the Assassin’s cloak spell, as well as my own familiar spell. They do a lot of work to try and spread knowledge freely. They have every use for this knowledge.”

Tara stared at me for a few seconds.

“Fine,” she eventually relented. “I don’t like it, but it will easily weaken the grip of the Archmages, so I’ll go along with it.”

I let out a sigh of relief.

“How long will it take you?”

“A month,” she said.

I frowned.

“You cracked House Hawthorne’s security in a few days. Not even.”

“I knew where the house was, and I’d already tested their wards a few times. I don’t know where the books are staying now. You’re lucky I’m able to do it at all, a lesser diviner probably couldn’t. I’m going to have to scour the country from the mere impressions that the books left in the world.”

I considered the problem from my perspective. I wasn’t entirely sure I would be able to do it, at least not remotely. If I was able to visit them in person, sure, but that wasn’t an option for Tara.

“Alright. Thank you.”

Tara inclined her head, then looked at Osheen.

“Do you have any idea which arch-star you’re going to pursue?”

“Spell storage or elemental alignment,” Osheen said. “My Aura recharge is already good enough that a trickle recharge likely won’t effect my abilities much. The expansion… It does explain a few things, but it takes decades to mature. I don’t have decades to expand to the level of my father, and my Aura storage does serve a somewhat similar purpose, even if it won’t be effected by my recharge.”

“I see,” Tara said. “You’re thinking about storing a massive spell or two in the star, to catch your father off guard. Or else turning up the power of your flame to challenge the lightning he mixes into his.”

“Yes,” Osheen said simply.

“I don’t have much information about the elemental one, but I can get you started on the exercises for spell storage. I’ll try to grab the elemental arch-star when I can, it’s likely they keep their arch-star information all in one spot anyhow.

There wasn’t much else left to say after that, so we both set to work on our projects. In the interim month, I worked on abjuration.

I built a simple, weak version of each of the three principles of abjuration: Spell altering, disrupting, and reflecting.

The spell altering array was built to break through force armor, the disruptor was built to stand against force bolts, and the reflector was built to reflect a sustained force beam.

None of them had much power – this was making sure that I had the basic theory behind abjuration before I went on to building something more impressive.

None of these spells had needed a lot of modification, due to how standard and basic they were.

But I’d done something stupid.

I’d integrated the strange spell array that Roark’s three-fold defense used.

I had to guess at some of the more precise details of the array, filling in the bits that the Roark witches had left out.

I wasn’t confident that I’d done it perfectly, but if there was one thing I was good at, it was taking pieces of spells and putting them together in new formations. I wasn’t a prodigal spell designer, making new spells from nothing. But I’d managed to cobble together enough bits and pieces in original ways that I was confident the mysterious spell would work. Maybe not perfectly. But it would work.

“Let’s start with the armor,” I said, lifting the cloth bandages wrapped around my left hand.

In response, Osheen powered his force armor around him. I stepped forwards and reached out.

My hand hit the force armor, and then a moment later, pushed through. My hand landed on his chest, and I pulled it back.

It had taken more energy from the artifact’s reserves than I’d expected, but it had worked.

“Force bolt.”

Osheen raised his palm and fired one at me. There was a flicker in the air as the spell broke apart before it struck me.

I frowned. That one also took more power than I’d expected.

“Force beam.”

A beam of force shot from his hand. It dissolved as it got close to me, and then fired back at Osheen, who took it on his force armor.

The power in my spell began to drain sharply. Far too sharply.

Then less sharply. It wasn’t much, but the drain wasn’t staying steady. It was decreasing.

“Are you toning down the power?” I asked.

“I’ve been keeping it at the lowest level I can,” Osheen responded. “I can’t go lower.”

The power drain for the spell was down to nearly half of what it had been.

“Cut it off, then fire again.”

He did as I said. There was an instant where the defenses drained sharply, but then it returned to the same level it had been at before.

“Fascinating,” I mumbled. “Force armor?”

He cut off the beam. I approached and put my hand out.

The spell broke through his armor with less power and in a shorter time than it had before.

I tried again.

The spell died, out of power. I sighed and unwrapped it from my arm.

“What is it?” Osheen asked.

“I have a theory,” I said. “That spell that you didn’t recognize in your father’s stuff?”

“Yeah?”

“I didn’t know what it did. Oracle thought it may be a detection and storage spell to let the user steal the spell arrays from their opponent. He was almost right. It does detect and store spells, but not to use them later… To more efficiently focus their effects.”

Osheen’s eyes widened and he sucked in a sharp breath.

“Yeah,” I said. “Abjuration spells already do something similar, or at least the good ones do, but they have to be manually added in – they only keep a record and identify spells I put in them.”

“With this,” Osheen said.

“It could grow on its own,” I finished. “As could your tattoo.”

He glanced down at his arm.

“Do you think that’s possible?”

“I’m not a tattoo or foci expert,” I said. “But I’d bet money that’s the effect that unlocks when you hit Archmage. And it’s probably why his force magic seems so indomitable, even though he should be using the same powers as you.”

“Evan, this… This kind of secret is the thing he’d kill us for figuring out.”

I felt a wolfish grin spread across my face.

“Well, if he didn’t want me to have his secrets, he shouldn’t have let me work so closely with them.”

Osheen let out a small chuckle at that, but I could tell he wasn’t as amused as I was.

“So what are you going to do now?” he asked. “You’d been planning to test the theory with this, but now what.”

“I need to do some redesigning for my spells,” I said. “I think I’m going to make a three-fold defense of my own. I have my current five-fold one, but I need two more five-fold spells.”

I rummaged about in my bag, and my fingertips hit something sharp and cold. I pulled it out, noting the ice fang from our trip to gather mushrooms, then shoved it aside.

I began to draw.

“The interlocking spell between each of the fivefold components will be the growth spell,” I said. “It will allow each of the three five-folds to grow, which should trickle down to their lesser components. For abjuration, I’m going to build a disrupting, altering, and reflecting array, but I’m going to cut out the storage banks. That’ll help them be more efficient, even if it means they won’t work on their own.”

“Why would you make something that doesn’t work?” Osheen asked.

“Because, the other two components are going to be a type of abjuration that isn’t covered in class, and a memory bank. A huge one, with plenty of power to hold as many spells as the growth spell feeds it. The bank will connect to whichever of the three defenses is most efficient.”

“And the new type of abjuration?”

“One I’ve already used,” I said. “Draining power out of the ambient aura to feed into the array. Which, thanks to the Stained Glass spells, I can feed back into the power of my defenses.”

Osheen stared for a moment, his mind working, and then he sucked in a breath.

“Not many spells use ambient aura, but that’s one of the classic ways of shutting down the ones that do… Is it really abjuration? I think it’s more of a technique.”

“Oh, it’s not abjuration, not practically. But thematically?”

I drew a spell.

“Sympathetically, even. They’re defense by breaking apart another spell. All five of them. The sympathetic linking spell should help them all work in harmony.”

“And the other set of five?” Osheena asked.

“The Assassin’s Cloak,” I said instantly, “or at least, a reworked version of it. I’ll need to do a bit of serious remodeling, but the components and skills I need to make it are no longer so far beyond my grasp. It’s going to weaken the effect a bit, but spread it over a slightly bigger area. The future sight spell is another obvious one, as is the rune detecting one – that one’s going to be super helpful with the growth spell feeding into it. And the other two… I’m not sure. But they need to shore up my weaknesses.”

“The way I see it, there are still two main weaknesses,” Osheen said slowly, thinking. “One of them is that against a wide area effecting spell, your defenses are… Subpar. Your abjuration should help with that, but a good old fashioned force dome may be a good idea, if it had a switch to flick it on and off. The other one is staring you in the face.”

I glanced at him, confused, and he picked up the fang of the ice cat.

“Enhanced physical bodies. My father’s tattoo has one, and I’ve got one now too. Most mages find a way to enhance their body, at least a little bit. Force enhancement won’t lead you astray.”

I paused my scribbling, then crossed out the list of modifications I planned to make to the cloak.

“What?” he asked.

“I’m not going to turn it into an aura, after all. I’m going to let me switch it on and off with more control. All of these spells are switching spells. The rune only comes on when it detects something worthy of note, same with the future sight one. The enhancement doesn’t need to drain power continuously, nor does the force bubble. A sympathetic linking spell can let me link together the idea of an impeccable defense that flickers on and off as needed.”

“Won’t that limit the benefits of your physical enhancement to just defensive movements?” Osheen asked.

“Yes, but I’m not a brawler. Even my new staff is more of a ranged weapon than a melee one. Running away is more important than hitting hard.”

“If you’re only flickering on the bubble when it’s needed, why not do the same thing Jerimiah does, and make it a semi-mobile ward?” Osheen asked.

“I’d need the ward to be useful and modular enough to work with the…” I trailed off.

A modular ward that was adaptive to all sorts of attacks. Something like that would be impressive.

Some may even call it grand.

“I can ask the Princess of Selt for the basic schematics of Zheren’s Grande Ward,” I said. “I don’t need the secrets and details, not really, that’d be a stupid level of security risk. I just need enough pieces to be able to replicate its lattice on a small scale. A bubble to protect me.”

“You’d have so many levels of defense wrapped around you that moving, you’d be impossible to hit, and sitting still, you’d still be hard to break through, especially if it’s a focused, single target attack.”

“And with the growth spell, I’m only going to get more and more slippery.”

“Do you have the time for it?” Osheen asked.

“We should be getting the arch-stars soon, and I really only have one shot. I can’t afford to keep opening portals. That should, hopefully, provide enough pressure for me to succeed. How are things coming with your own development?”

“I’m having trouble with the spell storage,” Osheen admitted. “I think it may be better to go for the elemental alignment one. Maybe being in a plane full of fire will help spark inspiration. Other than that… I’m running out of things the professors can teach me, to be honest. Which isn’t to say I don’t have room to grow – my speed at constructing spells is still abysmal compared to any Archmage. But that’s not something I need a professor to help work on. But you never answered my question.”

I shut my eyes and did calculations. We still had three months left until the winter solstice, and the meeting of the faerie powers. I would need at least half that time preparing my gift for Medb.

The other half…

I had plenty of components I’d needed for the random hodgepodge, but I was going to need a lot more consumer parts and faerie magic for the abjuration spells. Both would be difficult – I could find more consumer parts with divinations, but I’d have to barter with the Silver Queen or someone from Autumn to find the power of change. I only needed a small sample though.

“Yes,” I said. “Just barely.”

I reached into my bag again and withdrew the smooth sphere of darkness that was the component from Phillip’s consumer, then tossed it in the air and caught it.

“But we’re going to need to go hunting.”

~~~

Despite my dramatic words, it actually took us several days to be ready for hunting down whatever would be left of the consumers. I had to design a tracking spell for them, one that wouldn’t be blocked by their natural abjurative abilities, and that would also let me target their dead bodies. After that, we had to wait until we both had time off to go hunting.

The first half an hour of wandering in the forest felt extremely anticlimactic. We weren’t attacked by anything, consumer or otherwise.

The first thing that we came across was a dead consumer body. It was bigger than the one I’d faced in the forest the year before, but nowhere near the absurd size of the one that Phillip had used.

Regardless, it would be useful.

The second thing we came across, however, was a problem.

A problem, and an opportunity.

It was humanoid, shaped like a scarecrow made entirely of twisting vines. Green symbols shimmered in the air around it, and I recognized a few of them, but not many. The magic was antithetical to the nature of faerie magic I understood.

This wasn’t the power of change. It was a stagnant power, an eternal summer.

Oracle and I opened our eyes in unison, and we saw.

It wasn’t a creature, not a real one. It was a golem, a construct of Summer’s power, one that was probing at the Silver Queen’s powers.

And it was strong. I wasn’t a master of estimating a Fae’s strength, but it had to be a Lord. The Silver Queen had Lords, but she didn’t have that many of them. So there was probably…

I grinned and sent a mental message to Oracle, who vanished from my consciousness, then turned to Osheen, who was conjuring a flame orb over his hand.

Luckily for me, we were in Autumn. Its powers were waning, despite the push for stagnancy. Even so, this would still be difficult, but worth it.

I shut my third eye – staring at it during the fight would be too distracting, and the light could be blinding, like staring into a summer sun.

“Don’t kill it. Don’t even hurt it. Just defend yourself or get into the air, until I give you the signal.”

I called up the power of my assassin’s cloak and leapt away. Osheen shot up into the air on his burning wings.

The scarecrow looked around and focused on me, then unfocused, then refocused. It lunged in my general direction, and I pulled on my defensive power.

I’d been giving myself a hard time about my defensive power, but it wasn’t entirely earned. It was true that I had a lot of weaknesses in my current five-part defense, ones that would be resolved with my three-fold complete defense.

But against a single target, my magic was still very, very strong.

The scarecrow had lunged at me, but with my armor’s space warping effect, it missed me by a country mile. I leapt back.

That was a mistake. I didn’t have a divination spell active to help guide me against danger, so I tripped on a tree root and hit the ground. I wasn’t hurt – no more than my pride, at least – and scrambled up quickly.

I dodged back and forth with the golem, waiting for the response I felt. I didn’t try anything too fancy, just keeping out of its way.

Then I heard a soft, lilting sigh in my ear.

“Fine,” the Silver Queen said.

I aimed my staff at the Lord level construct and unleashed lightning. It ripped through the golem’s chest, leaving a burning hole in the center.

But this was the power of Summer. New vines erupted and pulled its body together.

And then Osheen’s spells struck. He’d had the entire time I’d been playing with the construct to build up magic, and it showed.

He unleashed a three-part spell. The center was a massive pillar of fire that engulphed the entire body. Heat drained out of the entire surrounding area to enhance the power of the flame.

At the bottom of the pillar, a sphere of fire burned, expanding outwards in a flame so hot it burned blue.

It vanished, and the third part of the spell struck. Dozens upon dozens of flame orbs, some as small as a cherry, and others the size of my head, crashed down on the spot where the scarecrow had been.

I leveled my staff at the spot. A part of me was convinced that nothing could have survived a blast like that, but…

The plants around us writhed and congealed into a new body.

I unloaded a shot of lightning into it, and then another, and then another.

I could have unleashed all of them in a single massive bolt, but if my hunch about how this thing worked was right, a single regeneration wouldn’t drain it as much as multiple smaller ones.

Osheen must have noticed what I was doing, because he conjured waves of fire that scythed through the body, burning away and chopping off chunks of the scarecrow.

The construct writhed and fought, but the relentless assault didn’t stop, and eventually it grew still.

I lowered my staff, and Osheen descended to land next to me – or at least close enough. Once my cloak wore off, he turned to me.

“Do we just leave the body? Or do you have use for it?” he asked.

“I still need it,” I said. “I needed a sample of Summer’s power, and we may have drained that thing’s reserve of power, but the spell framework should still be intact. Like your tattoo without power, the magic of the tattoo is still there, just not doing anything.”

We walked over to the ruined remnants of the creature, and Osheen leaned down to grab what had once been an arm.

The vines exploded and surrounded Osheen. He lit up his force armor, but it still surrounded him, and would suffocate him eventually, once his armor ran out.

I cursed and began to slash at the vines with my knife, unleashing a paralysis spell to no avail. It had no body or mind to really disrupt, after all.

“Get back!” Osheen shouted.

I turned and ran. I didn’t know what he had planned, but I trusted him.

Fire exploded around him, lighting him up like some sort of human bonfire. He tore his way out of the construct with superhuman strength, and then the fire let out. He cupped his hands together and then spread them.

An immolation spell bloomed to life and slammed into the construct; the spell’s power enhanced by the booster I’d made for him.

He clapped, and another ball of fire, smaller this time, shot from his hands and down onto the creature.

This time, it didn’t stand up, and I felt a cool metal marble settle into my palm, then walked over to Osheen.

“It’s dead, for real this time,” I said. “Though, I’m not sure dead is the right word. Deactivated?”

I opened my third eye to study the plant life that the construct had taken control of. It was still bright, but it was no longer blinding. There were a few oddly disjointed sections, and I expected that if I actually wanted to get it running again, I’d need to perform some serious repairs and feed it an absolutely ridiculous amount of Aura.

But I didn’t need any of that. For my purposes, the more broken up the construct was, the better.

I rolled the silver marble of energy in between my fingers. That would also do nicely. I’d been worried I may have to weaken my autumnal armband to harvest the power it held inside of it. Unlike with the wand, it had multiple functions, and I was confident I could have split off the unknown functions without destroying the messaging part of the spell, but I didn’t like the idea of giving up a useful tool.

Of course, this only solved the use for my five-fold abjuration magic, but the abjuration blade was a bridge I’d cross when I got there.

As we dragged the remnants of the summer construct and dead consumer through the woods with us, following the divination spell, I found myself wishing for access to a chunk of the Wandering Path for storage. I technically had my Ligature’s knot, but that was a small space meant for communication, not storage.

Over the course of the day, we ran into several more dead consumers, but no living ones.

“Do you think they all died when the portal to the Starless Night was destroyed?” I asked as I tied the tentacles of two of the creatures together for easier carrying.

“Probably not all at once,” Osheen said. “From my understanding, they would have basically starved to death without access to their realm. But I’m not a druid, and even druids have very little knowledge about deep realms. Every time a source of information about them shows up, death and destruction shortly follow. I’ve heard of two, maybe three of them, but not by name, just sort of embodying the concepts of creation, destruction, and maybe change? Though I’m not sure if that one’s even real or just a rumor.”

“Interesting,” I commented. “I guess that makes sense? They’re not even from an adjacent realm, let alone our own…”

By the time the day came to an end, we’d collected what I hoped would be enough corpses, and I had the materials I needed in order to get to work...