The Abjurer: Chapters 9-10

That Sunday, I was ready to create a staff that would hopefully level the playing field between me and an archmage. Tara had said it back in my very first year. Arch-stars weren’t as useful for witches as they were for other styles of casting, because a witch with a good ritual could

The center of the room held the staff. I’d stained the staff with the conductivity potion and carved in runes to form the actual power storage on the staff itself.

There were said thirteen sheets of paper was scattered around the room, drawn out in an Aura enhanced ink, with lines of power drawn in more conductivity potion connecting to their Aura crystals, and then to the staff, and each one had a sample of blue blood-cap in the center to act as a booster for the power.

I’d painted the lightning spell around the base of the staff, using liquid lightning, and placed my silver wand in a power drain spell that I’d calibrated to drain a bit more than half the fae magic in it, then send that into the aiming portions of the spell. In theory, both sides would have enough that when their Auras recharged, they should return to full.

I’d also added a tiny shaving of the silver bar – I wanted to keep almost all of it for the abjuration blade, but a small shaving off the bar wasn’t going to break things too badly.

The liquid lightning held four more samples of the blue blood-cap, one for each part of the spells laid into the orb.

Said landglass orb was set into the staff, lines of power inked on in a conductivity potion – which should have a powerful synergistic effect with the liquid lightning – running down and into the staff and out onto the spell itself.

And finally, the entire array was encompassed by the stained glass switching spell that would allow it to use a pure recharge, as well as my own.

Osheen stood beside me, surveying the spell. He’d relaxed a bit since his breakdown, and I thought he’d probably needed to release the pent up emotions, but today he looked nervous. Just for a different reason.

“This looks really complex. A lot more complex than anything I’ve seen you use before.”

“It is,” I admitted. “But it all works in theory, so hopefully it goes well.”

He nodded and put his hand on my shoulder, ready to forcibly trigger my defenses and his own if something went wrong. I pushed my Aura into the liquid lightning, using the power of both my arch-stars to compress the runes and draw in more power. The liquid lightning exploded into crackling lines of powerful blue-white energy that was almost painful to look at, and power began to rush in.

A lot more power than I’d anticipated. The draw on the ambient Aura was so harsh that I stumbled forwards a bit, my defenses flaring around me, though only the Ghost Plate spell would be able to do anything.

The wards in the room began to flare, bright lines of power appearing, but the spell had been inscribed on the floor. It drank the wards in for power, until there was nothing left. The illusions on the spell dissolved, and Osheen’s Aura lit up around him.

For a second, I wondered what exactly he was doing, but then I realized my own Aura was flickering wildly around me as well, trying to light, though the Ghost Plate was shielding me from some of the drain’s effects.

I turned back to look at Osheen. His Aura was draining rapidly, and he was drawing upon his power storage arch-star to sustain himself.

There was a sudden sound like the lightning splitting the air, and I looked over to see that my silver wand had exploded, its magic completely drained and swirling into the staff.

It felt like I was dragging myself through mud, but I began to walk towards Osheen. I grabbed his wrist and began to pull him towards the exit. He tried to flow his Aura into his tattoo to help him move, but the power drain consumed it before he could flow enough Aura in to activate it.

Out in the hall, I saw an attendant sprinting towards us. With a start, I realized that I recognized her. It was Elaine, the sorcerer with force and light rune bonds. Her necklace was emitting a shroud around her that seemed to be acting similiarly to my ghost plate, letting her withstand some of the effects, and she was using a force enhancement spell to move.

“You can withstand the effects?” Elaine asked me. I nodded silently.

“Help me evacuate students, then,” she said.

“Go,” Osheen said. “The drain’s not so bad in the hall.”

As if to prove his point, he poured power into his tattoo. It weakly flickered around him, and he started to move more confidently down the hall. I watched him for a moment, then turned to Elaine.

“How many students are in here?”

“There are five rooms rented,” she responded grimly. “I’ll take the left and you take the right.”

I nodded and did my best to sprint down the hallway. Without any sort of body enhancement of my own, I was struggling, but I was still moving a lot more than normal people could.

The first room that I checked was empty – mostly. There had been a potion simmering in it, but the power from it had been drained to render the spell inert, though not before the potion had exploded and cracked the cauldron. I winced and made a mental reminder to repay the person for the cost of the damage.

Elaine rushed by me, pulling an older student along, and I checked the next room. There was a student my age, a sorcerer I thought I almost recognized, who’d been testing combat spells. He’d staggered his way to the door, and was fighting to get it open. A look of surprise came over his face as I opened it, and I grabbed his wrist and yanked him down the hall.

I scowled when I saw Osheen.

He was using his half operational tattoo to stay as close to the doors as he could, and then helping to escort people towards the exit. I didn’t have time to argue, though, and it wasn’t like I was doing anything less dangerous.

I ran – or at least the closest approximation to running that I was able to do – down the hall again, and checked on the last door.

Inside, the young witch who’d sassed me about the Landglass had collapsed, passed out. Her half-built golem had fallen off the table she’d placed it on, and its left arm was on top of her, pinning her down. I rushed over to her and grabbed the statue’s arm, then slowly pulled her out.

I slung her over my shoulder in a fireman carry, then began to head back out. Midway down the hall, however, my Ghost Plate fizzled out.

I let out a grunt as my Aura flared around me brightly, and forced myself to put one foot forwards after the other.

Then I felt a hand grip my own. I saw Osheen standing there, having gone deeper in, his Aura now too out of control to maintain his spell. I smiled at him gratefully, though I was still a bit upset that he was risking himself.

We slowly marched down the hallway, where Elaine was waiting for us. As soon as we stopped and I put the girl down on the floor gently, she gave us a nod, then slammed her palm into the wall.

A strange ward, which seemed to be half spiritual and half force, slid up over the root’s entrance, and she turned to look at me.

“You again?” She asked dryly. “You seem to like to experiment.”

I opened my mouth, then shut it. She shook her head and sighed.

“At least you did it in the experimentation rooms this time. You’re going to need to pay for any damages that you’ve made to other people’s stuff, however.”

“I’m happy to,” I said, though I was a bit worried about the costs. “But I don’t plan to stop doing spells at that level. Is there a safer place where I can do them?”

“We do have the deep rooms,” she said. “They’re hard to access, but they’re far away from anything else, and have much heavier wards. We don’t open them up to just anyone, though, you need to be a licensed Journeyman.”

“He is,” Osheen said. “He’s a Journeyman Information Mage.”

She looked at Osheen, then looked at me. I dug in my pockets, then pulled out my identification papers, which she took and nodded.

“Alright then. We just need a week or so to get one prepared, but you can sign up to rent one for the semester.”

“Good to know,” I said. “I’d like to sign up for one.”

“It’s a ten thousand silver cost,” she warned. I winced, but nodded and wrote out a check, then handed it to her. She blinked and took the check.

“Alright, I… guess I’ll get on that, after we get everyone to the hospital branch.

“Thank you,” I said.

Elaine conjured a force disk for us to load the witch I’d rescued, as well as two of those who Elaine had rescued that had passed out.

Osheen and I had a brief checkup, but there was nothing wrong with us, other than the fact that we had a heavy drain on our Auras, so we were let go pretty fast. When we were back in our rooms, Osheen took a shower to replenish some of his Aura, and I took a brief nap. When he finally emerged, he sat down on the couch next to me and let out a low chuckle.

“You should be proud,” he said.

“Why?” I asked. “I put people in danger.”

“You helped them,” he said, “but even outside of that. The booster you made for me was strong enough to crack the wards in the room, but this was on another scale. It’s going to be a powerful weapon.”

“I hope so,” I said. “It needs to stand in battle against an Archmage level being, and it destroyed my wand…”

“I’m sure it will be,” Osheen reassured me.

The next several days passed without too much event, to my surprise. There was a bit more paperwork that I needed to fill out, and I wound up having to pay almost two thousand crowns in damages.

That did give me pause. There was a time in my life, not too long ago, where an expense of that sort would have bankrupted me.

Apart from a bit of contemplation and paperwork, however, nothing much happened. It felt almost anticlimactic – I’d had an assassin sent after me the previous year, but the most powerful spell I’d ever cast did nothing.

That Saturday, the spell finally completed, and Osheen and I headed down to fetch the staff.

I was apprehensive as I opened the door, half convinced that I’d burnt the staff into a useless crisp and destroyed the room.

The staff had blackened, and for a second, I was afraid that my worst fears had come to pass.

As soon as I touched the staff, I felt the power surging up my arm in a tingle that reminded me of recharging my Aura, but magnified many times over.

I lifted it, and was pleasantly surprised with how firm the wood had remained. The blackening char must have only been skin deep, because it was still heavy, and I didn’t think I’d be able to break it.

“Ready to test it out?” Osheen asked.

“Yes,” I said, and I couldn’t help but let a small bead of excitement trickle through me.

~~~

The ranks of novice, intermediate, adept, and journeyman were supposedly how one measured the skill and power of spellcraft, but they were soft ranks.

The arch-stars were a fundamental change in the Aura brought about by pressure, both internal and external, but they didn’t inherently measure power either. Sure, someone who had enough control of their Aura and ability to put pressure on it to form multiple arch-stars was almost certainly going to be dangerous, but that wasn’t the same as skill or power.

For a long time now, I’d been hanging at the upper edge of what an ordinary witch could accomplish. My enchantments had been enough to hold off an Archmage when he was playing around and toying with me, but they’d failed the moment he got serious. My defenses had stopped me from suffering the worst of injuries, but they hadn’t been designed for stopping area of effect spells.

This… wouldn’t.

I wasn’t going to be tearing Archmage Roark out of the sky with a single shot, but I could feel a difference in this when compared to the other spells I’d cast. It reminded me of the feeling when all five pieces of my defensive set were operating together.

We walked to my new laboratory, deep in the bowels of the earth, where the damage wouldn’t be able to spread, and the wards were more intense. This was actually my first time seeing it.

When I unlocked the room, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. There was a line of dummies on one side, with benches on the opposite side. The center was clear space, with a smooth glass plate to allow for the easy painting of spells.

It was… strangely normal.

I flicked open my third eye, and I could immediately see the difference. The power that was crammed into this room’s wards was a lot more significant.

As soon as Osheen shut the door behind him, I raised the staff and unleased a lighting bolt, aiming at one of the targets.

The air exploded with light and thunder, and the target exploded into tiny chunks. The wards in the room started to slowly reassemble it, but it was going to take a while.

Osheen let out a low whistle.

“Now that’s a proper lighting spell,” he said. “I’d have to spend my Aura like coppers in order to bock that. How much do you have left in the tank?”

I sent my Aura into the staff to check its internal energy reserves, and my eyebrows knit together.

“Twelve more shots,” I said in surprise. That was better than I’d hoped, and it made sense in a way. Thirteen held a powerful significance in magic, after all.

We burnt through three more lightning bolts testing the honing function of the lightning. It was potent – it wasn’t going to cause the lighting to double back to hit someone, but it could certainly curve it to almost a full right angle.

Then it was time to test the other function.

I raised the staff one last time and unleashed all of the remaining power inside the staff.

The world exploded. My vision whited out for a moment, and my ears rang from the sound of the bolt. I blinked several times to clear my vision the best I could, and when the world finally returned to normal, I stared.

The dummy that I’d hit was a pile of ash now.

It hadn’t been blasted apart like the other ones had been.

It was ash. Not splinters. Ash.

“Starless Night,” I swore under my breath. “I’m going to have to pay for that, aren’t I?”

Osheen threw his head back, his wavy hair bouncing as he did, and laughed.

“What?!” I asked defensively. “Wasn’t the whole point of the new room to not do things like this?”

“Yes,” he said, “it’s just funny that the immediate concern you jump to is having to pay for a new target.”

The following class with Travis, I showed him the staff.

“I never thought I’d see you wielding a staff, Mr. Tailor,” he said as he ran his eyes over the staff and the spell diagram I used. Or at least, the one I said that I’d used.

I was already doing something risky by showing him this spell diagram, and I wasn’t about to risk it further by showing him a spell array stolen from his own house’s notes.

Instead, the diagram I had used was an earlier iteration, one that would fire up to three shots.

“I didn’t either,” I said. “When I first began with magic, I was so focused on getting a single powerful spell that I couldn’t use one. Now, my armor is solid enough to make use of one.”

“Understandable. It’s always a wise idea to experiment in order to find what works. What’s this part of the design?” Travis asked, pointing at the fae segments of the array.

“It’s faerie magic,” I said. “It doesn’t add to the power of the spell much, but it allows the lightning to curve some with my will.”

Travis’ eyes narrowed, and I could clearly see that he was thinking about something.

“Have you ever been to the Fae Sovereignties?” he asked.

“Briefly,” I said. “I was in the realm of a minor Fae queen, and I traded my glove for some of her knowledge. I used a wand from the same queen as the source of Fae energies in this staff.”

“You have two arch-stars, yes?” he asked.

I felt a tiny spark of excitement rise up in my chest.

“Yes,” I said.

“Hm,” he said. “Would you be interested in a contract with House Hawthorne?”

I stared at him blankly, and he put his hands in his coat pockets, then shrugged.

“You’re advancing adequately as an enchanter. There are only about twelve members of House Hawthorne, but we provide a significant amount of the enchanting for House Elide. We don’t have a Fae enchanter on our roster, and if you’re capable of integrating fae magic, we’d be willing to provide resources for your third arch-star in exchange for some work with it.”

“What kind of resources?” I asked curiously.

“The arch-star I’ve got in mind is an uncommon one, even among druids. It’s called the realm reaching arch-star,” he explained. “It’s a rare technique, one I’d need to fetch from House Elide, since it’s not in my records.”

I mentally cursed at that. There went the hopes of simply copying it from one of his books.

“What does it do?” I asked. “And what sort of resources? Just Aura techniques to form it?”

“It scatters the Aura some, decreasing its total size,” he said. “But it makes pulling in energies from other realms into your spells far more effective. It has some use among druids, but less than you may think. It doesn’t make boons and bonds more effective: Those aren’t your magic, they’re others magic you’re wielding. In essence, all it does is make their portal magic more effective, but they’re already skilled with portals, and they’ve little reason to permanently decrease their power in order to improve them.”

“But for me, it would allow me to incorporate Fae magic into my rituals more effectively,” I said.

What I didn’t say, however, was that it would do more than that. I was planning to incorporate some of the Starless Night’s magic alongside Fae magic into my abjuration spells.

There was a chance that the Starless Night’s magic wouldn’t be assisted, since it was a deep realm.

But there was a chance it would.

Even if it didn’t, though, using fae magic in my spells more effectively was a powerful boon.

“Precisely,” he said. “As for resources… Yes, the manipulation techniques for your aura would be one of them. But the other cost of the arch-star is that it needs open portals to at least three other realms in order to properly scatter your Aura. We would provide the portals as well.”

“And what would the cost for this generous offer be?” I asked.

“Your expertise in faerie enchantment,” he said. “What else? What do you think, assisting us in fifty spells in exchange for this?”

“Fifty?” I balked. “How about five? One for each portal, one for the knowledge, and one for payment.”

If this deal fell through, then Tara and I would have to target House Elide for the techniques, but he’d given me more than he thought he had by letting me know they had it.

The portals would be… difficult. I didn’t know how I’d get that set up, but I was certain I could do it for less than fifty spells.

“Thirty,” he said.

“Ten,” I countered.

“Twenty-five.”

“Ten,” I repeated.

He frowned and shook his head.

“They won’t go for that. I’m trying to help you here.”

“I’m sure I can figure it out,” I said. “I don’t need the information that desperately. I didn’t need to make deals with the nobility for my first two arch-stars. All I really need is the portals, and I’m sure I can figure out a way to get that handled.”

“Don’t be a child,” he snapped. “The third realm is where most people fail, or else they form the arch-star, and go no further. Do you know how many people I’ve seen fail here?”

I gazed levelly at him. He let out a snort.

“Fine. Attempt it yourself, and when you fail, return to me and remember my generosity. Your next spell I want you to work on before you impress me…”

He considered me for a moment.

“I want you to build a spell that’s no more than forty percent human magic. But it still needs to be a useful spell.”

“I understand,” I said.

That was actually perfect for my abjuration…

“Travis,” I asked. “By the end of this semester, you want everyone to have built a set of comprehensive abjuration spells. If I was able to get that to you, using a blend of human magic and other magics, could I skip the other tests, and count it for this too?”

The corner of his mouth curled up in a vicious little smile.

“If you can manage to do that as the first abjuration spell you turn in, then I’ll pass you for both courses,” he said. “You have to the end of the semester.”

“Deal,” I said.

I wasn’t actually as confident as I appeared: I’d definitely be making a few test run spells in order to ensure I understood what I was doing.

But I did think it was possible.

But that was secondary. I grabbed a pen and paper and began to sketch out a series of new spells. I had work to do.