The Abjurer: Chapters 7-8

The next morning, I rose early to head to the potions club.

“Good morning, Evan!” Wisteria greeted brightly as I entered her lab. I smiled and nodded to her, then glanced around the room.

She’d set up several cauldrons and other apparatuses throughout the room, many of which were already occupied. I recognized a few of the people at them – mainly people who I’d seen in her class last year, or who I’d seen around the school.

There was one person who I actually knew, however.

“How are you?” I asked Liam as I walked over. The short necromancer had his hair tied back, and he was staring at a pile of components like they held all the mysteries of the planes in them.

He blinked then glanced up.

“Oh, hey Evan. How are you?”

“I’m good, you?”

“Fine. Trying to work on a potion that can be consumed by a ghost.”

I blinked.

Was that even possible? Would it be possible to make a potion that could be ‘consumed’ by an enchantment? That called up the image of a blade that could be imbued with a bunch of different potion effects.

I shook my head, clearing away the thoughts. I had enough projects to work on right now, I didn’t need to get another one.

Having made my introduction, I wandered back to Wisteria, who was now sorting components into jars.

“What can I help you with, Evan?” Wisteria asked.

“My current set of projects involve lightning magic and abjuration magic. Do you have any advice on potions I could use for that?”

“Oh, certainly!” Wisteria said, seeming to grow a bit excited by the prospect. “I actually used to help… someone… with wardbreaking spells, so I’ve got a few good recommendations for you there.”

She’d helped Tara with her wardbreaking? That was interesting. I’d assumed they dated, but… How much did Wisteria know about Tara?

I opened my third eye and focused on Wisteria. She radiated her aura around her, with a single yellowish familiar blending inside it – maybe some sort of Seelie Fae or the like, and she had three arch-stars.

The first one was the same as my first, a ritual charging one.

The second was rather different. It resembled Osheen’s sensory one, but it looked like it was more attuned to water, though that wasn’t quite right either.

The third wasn’t the one that Tara had. I didn’t know which one it actually was, but it wasn’t the spell storage one. Maybe it was the elemental alignment one? It seemed to resemble water and fire to a degree.

Her belt held dozens of potions, each of which glowed with concentrated power.

I didn’t think she was hiding more power, like Seth or Draven did, but that was pure speculation.

But even if Tara had helped her, which I wasn’t sure she had, it was an impressive amount of skill and power on display, more than I’d been able to scrape together.

“…for conductivity,” Wisteria said.

“I’m sorry, I totally zoned out for a second,” I said. “What was that?”

“There are a few ones I can recommend for use with lightning,” Wisteria said, sighing at having to repeat herself. “The first one is bottled lighting in a liquid state, which can explode out in lightning. The second is a copper-based potion for conductivity. It’s a potent ink, it can do wood staining really well.”

“That sounds great!” I said. “How about the ones for abjuration?”

“There’s a potion that’s designed to disrupt a mage’s ability to shape their Aura,” the willowy mage said. “It’s not going to stop a sorcerer dead in their tracks, but it’s enough to totally shut down a novice mage, and annoy a more skilled one. Outside of that, there’s a precision cutting spell that some wardbreakers use. It’s supposed to be applied to a blade as an oil, to sharpen it to an obscene edge, and let you make incredibly precise cuts.”

I could definitely see applications for those.

“All four of them sound interesting to me,” I said. “Is the one that disrupts aura shaping ingested or skin contact?”

“Skin contact. I actually used it against the consumer.”

My eyes narrowed. The consumer.

“Wisteria, have there been any consumer bodies left on the market?”

“There have been a few,” she said. “But they’re moderately expensive, and require a lot of special licenses.”

As she spoke, an idea entered my head. The consumers had been all over the forest, but people hadn’t been actively hunting them, at least as far as I knew. Their bodies didn’t decompose, as far as I could tell, so if I just got my hands on one sample, I might be able to find more. And…

“Alright,” I said, nodding.

I spent the rest of the time at the club looking over the recipes for the potions that Wisteria had recommended me. As soon as it was over, however, I headed up to the branches of the tree and to my room.

When I'd made my consumer glove, I'd chopped up the tentacles of a consumer, but there were still a few parts left. The beak, namely.

I'd shoved them back under my bed, and there they'd lain, forgotten for an entire year.

Until now.

I constructed a basic divination using the beak, and sure enough, I got a second ping from the high branches of Yesgol.

I followed the spell through the halls, my stomach upset just by the thought of where I was going. I already knew, after all.

The battle I’d had against the king two years ago had been fierce, and it had taken place over a giant summoning circle. Most of the components had been consumed or destroyed, but…

What was I doing?

I frowned. I needed the components.

I glanced at the blank wall where the entry to the wing should have…

My cloak activated, and the illusion over the wall faded as my bubble shield encased my mind, protecting me from the effects of the ward. Just to be safe, I slipped on the assassin’s cloak as well, fading into nothingness as I crossed into the old, abandoned wing.

I didn’t think anyone at the school knew what had happened in the battle against the king, outside of my inner circle, but it was always possible Tara or one of the Archmages had already looted the place.

I glanced down at the wards carved into the floor. The work was undeniably Tara’s, the spidery runework elegant and precise.

I walked down the hall and slipped into the ritual summoning chamber, and immediately felt sick to my stomach.

The bodies had been removed, presumably needed for the funerals, but the room hadn’t been looted.

Or cleaned. The bloodstains were still here, soaked into the wood.

I wandered through the room, picking things out of bowls and slipping it into my bag. Most of the components were expensive, like blue blood-cap, but some of them had degraded too much to be useful in the time since the battle.

Oracle appeared with a flash of silver and began to fly around the room, helping me look for components. I felt a flash of gratefulness to the little bird, helping me not stay in here longer than I had to.

Eventually, however, I found what I’d really come here for.

Phillip had been bonded to a consumer, and a powerful one. The strongest consumer I’d ever personally seen. When he died, the power of their bond should have left a remnant, and indeed, it had.

I found an oily black stone that seemed to want to slip out of my hands as I touched it, and tucked that away. Next to it was a pair of brownish red stones that were quite jagged, and a white stone that was shaped vaguely like a claw, presumably from his demons and grimalkin.

I added all of them into my bag, and then Oracle returned, holding a few components in his claws. He dropped them into the bag, perched on my shoulder, and then vanished.

I left the room, feeling a bit sick to my stomach.

I didn’t know if I was glad or not that the Archmages hadn’t looted the room. They’d probably not considered it worth it, since they were all worth millions or billions of silver, or else didn’t want to stay in the room longer than they had to. I couldn’t blame them.

I was a little more surprised that Tara hadn’t looted it, but it seemed likely that she hadn’t needed to. Most of the materials were useless for divination, and she’d likely just laid down the wards and left.

I used the other charge of my cloak and crossed the wards again, then wandered back into my room. I had a few hours before I was going to the crafting club, and I spent them with Osheen, reading and recovering.

To my surprise, when I got up to leave, Osheen did too.

“Do you have a club too?” I asked.

“I think I’m going to join the crafting club!” he said. “I’m going to be making the scabbard, so I want to actually make the scabbard, not just buy one.”

I nodded and laced our fingers together as we headed to the room.

It was down near the roots, actually in a location that I’d never been to before. The room was pretty average, not nearly as domineeringly huge as the ones I’d been in for many classes.

Lyn was already there, and she waved to us. To my surprise, Jerimiah Heenling was there, sewing a pattern into a shirt.

It probably shouldn’t have surprised me. He and George had collaborated on the toxin ward handkerchief, and someone had needed to do the sewing for that.

He glanced at us as we entered, but didn’t say anything.

But the most interesting thing in the room was a witch who I only vaguely recognized, a year younger than I was, working on some sort of alteration spell on glass. The glass kept shattering, but then reforming.

Osheen headed to a leatherworking bench, and began speaking to the woman there. I headed over to the alteration mage. I looked over the spell she was using, but I didn’t see anything that would heal the glass that way.

“How are you reforming the glass?” I asked. I wasn’t super experienced with alteration magic, but I’d used enough of the glass changing arrays to at least have an idea about it.

“I’m not,” she said, sounding annoyed that I’d asked her. “It’s landglass.”

“Landglass?” I asked, flicking open my third eye. There was a faint glow of magic around the glass, but I would have likely assumed it was just a part of the alteration spell if it hadn’t been pointed out.

“Magical material sold by the Court of Land in the Fae Sovereignties,” the witch said as if I was an idiot. “It takes tons of effort to change its shape permanently, but once it’s in a permanent state, it’ll almost instantly repair itself to the same shape, and it hard to break.”

“That’s… huh,” I said. I supposed it wasn’t any weirder than flamemoss, but it wasn’t a property I’d ever heard of before.

Then my brain began to whirl around. This could be the solution to one of my problems.

“Can you carve rituals into the landglass?” I asked.

“Of course you can,” the witch snapped. “This is going to be a golem. What, did you think I was making a glass statue for fun?”

I actually had thought that, since this was a crafting club, I figured some people would definitely do things just for fun. But I didn’t say that.

“Where can you buy it?” I asked.

“Just go to one of the druid shops in town,” she said. “Now leave me alone, I’m working.”

I left as she asked, but opened my journal and began to sketch.

If I didn’t have to worry about breaking or reinforcing the glass…

The design I eventually came up with was a sphere of glass with runework on the outside and inside. The array on the inside connected to a series of glass spokes which ran into a smaller ball on the inside, which had its own dual set of rituals.

I took out my silver dart wand and opened my third eye to begin working on it.

The Fae magic in the wand had guiding magical effects built in that let me aim the darts, something most purely mortal enchantments wouldn’t be able to do.

If I melted some Fae magic into the orb, it should bond well with the glass’ inherent properties, and let me use the aiming system as the spell hidden within the spell.

I wasn’t entirely sure why faerie magic did work, while human didn’t, but I didn’t actually need to understand why something worked to make use of it – I’d proven that from my very first serious attempt at artifact creation, my assassin’s cloak.

I began to scribble more furiously.

With a single lightning spell on the outside, and the inside being a spell that consumed all the remaining power in the staff for a single lightning bolt, then the aiming being the spell within a spell, inlaid on the inside of the inner orb, that left me just a bit of room…

I felt a hand touch my shoulder and jerked back, then looked up to see Osheen.

“Love, the club’s meeting ended almost twenties minutes ago. I was waiting for you to finish up, but it’s getting late.”

“Oh,” I said, closing my journal. “Sorry, I got really excited.”

“I can tell,” he said. “Want me to bring dinner to our rooms?”

I nodded and headed back to the rooms.

---

On my way back to the rooms, I realized that there was a clear use for the inside of the outer orb.

A switching Aura recharge from the stained glass spell set. I could use my own Aura, to guarantee that it’d recharge to full at midnight, but then also use a sample of pure Aura to allow it to recharge by drawing on ambient aura. Just have it switch to mine right before midnight, then switch back a moment after.

Osheen arrived a bit later and I picked at my food as he read and I worked. When I was finally done, though…

I stared at my design.

It was elegant, using the space excellently, and would allow for some versatile use of the power within.

But there was one problem. It would drain power even worse than the original ideas I had.

It was hard to do any sort of calculation about Aura, since there were so many small factors that could change it, but… I suspected that this would maybe be able to fire a single shot with the entire staff.

I may be able to get someone to help me paint the runes onto the wood even smaller than I could, but that wouldn’t let me run the spell a dozen times. And, while I was skilled enough with compressing runes, I wasn’t at the level that Rowan had been at, where her individual runes needed a magnifying glass to see them.

I let out a slow sigh. The problem of power would have to wait for now.

I walked over to Osheen and slumped next to him.

“Welcome back,” he said with a faintly teasing smile. “Did you get what you wanted accomplished?”

“Mostly,” I said, “but I’m running into problems of raw power. I just can’t pack that much energy into the area.”

Osheen was quiet for a time, then lit up his Aura and tapped his Aura Storage arch-star.

“I don’t just draw power from my Aura, but also from what I store in here. Have you considered incorporating some storage crystals into the design, alongside your own runes? You have the money now.”

I… hadn’t.

It would be expensive. Very expensive. It would let it hold a lot of power, combining the two of them together. I’d probably need to alter the universal anchor a bit, since it wasn’t actually anchoring a spell, just the power of the…

I stared at Osheen, my mouth hanging open.

“You… Are a genius.”

“I am?” he asked. “I mean, I thought it may have been something that you didn’t think about, but…”

“It was, but you pointed me towards something even smarter. You know the universal anchor?”

“That’s what holds a spell and the power for it from a spell.”

“Right,” I said. “But it can hold a foci. It doesn’t NEED an aura crystal.”

“Alright,” he said.

“So why can’t it hold an Aura inductor or capacitor?” I asked. “Those are a type of spell. They just store and release Aura.”

Osheen’s eyes widened as he realized what I was saying.

“The enchantment would need to be altered,” I said. “And the universal anchor may need to be as well. But I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work.”

I’d need to have some of the storage still be on the staff itself, feeding into the enchanted sphere, but that wasn’t a bad thing, not necessarily.

“We can’t have been the only people to realize this,” I said. “House Hawthorne is the main enchanting house for House Elide right?”

“Right,” Osheen confirmed. “Do you think there’s something in there about this?”

“Maybe?” I said. I picked up one of my library search cards and funneled my Aura into it to activate it, then headed over to the bookshelf. “These are the books we got from Travis’ place. They may have something in them. Want to grab a card and help me look?”

He rose and started looking through the books with me, searching for uses of the universal anchor. Eventually, he passed a book over to me, and pointed to a passage.

“Our scrying of Durtare’s capital city of Cineres has revealed an interesting application of the universal anchor. By using even a very small Aura crystal of any grade to filter the power, one can contain a series of capacitors and inductors, then flow them through the crystal and into an enchantment, significantly reducing the space. There is some evidence to suggest this method has spread to Elderglass and Tracktath, though scrying so far is difficult.”

Beneath it was a modified example of the universal anchor, which was hooking into a series of capacitors and inductors on either end. I stared at it, trying to figure out what the point of the Aura crystal was. Eventually, it clicked though. It was essentially being used to modulate the power to whatever level was needed, letting you hold much more dense power on one side than the other.

“I don’t think I could have read through all forty or so books in this pile anytime soon,” I said, “let alone in time for my staff. Thank you, seriously.”

“It’s the least I could do,” Osheen said with a shrug. “I’m glad it was useful, though.”

“It definitely was,” I said. “And it’s gonna be useful for the scabbard and for the sword too. You are a genius.”

The rest of the week passed by without much incident. I used sheets of butcher paper to make as many power storage arrays as I could, and Travis seemed increasingly interested in what exactly I was doing.

That weekend, I headed into Hallowbrooke to meet Mabel. She was out front of her store today, using her magic to fix one of the posts that had some weathering cracks on it.

“Good morning, Evander,” she greeted as I approached. I wondered how she was able to tell that it was me specifically, since her cataracts meant she should be all but blind, but pushed it aside in excitement.

“Morning Mabel,” I said. “Do you sell any landglass?”

She turned and blinked and then slowly nodded.

“I do, yes. We get a few golemmakers who use it. It is expensive, though.”

“How much?” I asked. I hadn’t put any of my profits into paying off my debt yet, so I wasn’t too worried about the cost.”

“Nine hundred silver crowns per pound,” she said.

I didn’t freak out at the price the way I once would have. I’d begun to make the money that enchanters were always supposed to.

But even still, a part of me cringed at having to spend so much for a single component.

“I’m also going to need copper filings, lightning bugs, holly wood, Alcyone feathers, and Lightscorpion venom,” I said. The components I’d looted from the summoning ritual would be great for the abjuration, but for the lightning staff, they weren’t the best, and I was getting low on the components from Zheren.

She let out a cackling, haglike laugh.

“Cooking up some sort of nasty lightning spell, then?” she asked.

“I am,” I confirmed. “Oh, I also need fourteen Aura storage crystals, thirteen of which are the smallest you can manage of any grade, and the last one being whatever size as well, but it has to be high-grade.”

She hobbled into the shop and began to measure out things, and I wound up paying close to two thousand crowns for everything.

There was only one thing left to do.

“Osheen, do you mind flying us out to the Mausoleum in order to collect blue blood-cap?” I asked.

He shifted in his seat, then eventually nodded.

“Sure. I can fly fairly fast, so it should only take me about four or five hours to get there. But… I don’t want to spend a lot of time there, to be honest. It gives me the creeps, and brings up nothing but bad memories. We can spend one night, but that’s all I want to do.”

“That’s very fair, thank you,” I said, then went to go prepare.

I brought five burlap sacks, which was probably more than I needed, but I wanted to be prepared, then set up some divination rituals. I didn’t do anything with the Consumer stone yet, since they were too big for us to really fly back. I’d have to search more locally for them.

The flight to the mausoleum wasn’t too eventful, to my surprise. There were a few birds that would fly close, one of which looked almost like one of the Silver Queen’s owls, but other than them, I didn’t think most of the birds were even magical.

We did have to make several small stops to let Osheen’s arms rest from carrying me. I was light, and magic was doing most of the lifting, but holding onto me for that long was still tiring.

But, after about six hours, we finally landed for the last time. Osheen put us down at the edge of the lake, not wanting to actually land on the island itself, which I couldn’t blame him for.

“Do you need any help foraging?” Osheen asked.

“It would be helpful, if you don’t mind,” I said. “But I don’t want to force you to, I know even being here is uncomfortable enough.”

“I’m already here,” he said. “I may as well.”

“Thank you,” I said, leaning up and pecking him on the cheek. “If you can find one, I’ve prepared some search cards to look for more, so just give me a shout.

Oracle manifested out of my Aura and soared overhead to start looking for the mushrooms, Osheen went left, and I went right, flicking open my third eye to look for any areas where the ambient Aura had bunched together around an object, which would indicate the presence of a worthwhile component.

By the end of the day, I’d gathered twenty-three samples of blue blood-cap, Osheen had gathered nineteen, and Oracle had gathered sixteen. I’d also found a few other components that would be potentially useful to me – nothing abjuration or lightning related, but some plants soaked in Aura that I could mix into potions, a sample of a psychedelic fruit that would be great for divination magic, and a few samples particularly deadly lichen that would be useful for luck spells.

That night, as we laid down to sleep, there was a faint crunching sound. Osheen paused and his eyes focused on the middle distance.

“There’s something out there. It’s not… right. It’s large, some sort of beast, but it’s almost… negative heat? As if the beast is colder than the surrounding area.”

“Some sort of ice elemental?” I asked.

“Maybe…”

“Or a winter Fae,” I said.

Osheen nodded slowly.

“I think so. It’s got a small core of heat wher–”

He cut himself off as he dove at me, tackling me to the ground.

I felt a huge rush of air above my head as something passed by. Osheen and I scrambled to our feet, and I flexed my will to activate my five layered defenses and assassin’s cloak. Fire began to spiral around Osheen’s arms, bathing the area around us in reddish-white light.

The beast looked like a huge cat, with white fur that was speckled with brown dots. It had a pair of huge fangs that were made of ice, with a massive overbite.

Seeing that it had missed us, the beast let out a terrifying roar that shook the air around us. I flicked open my third eye and asked Oracle if he knew anything about them. I received images of winter, speed, and blood, which was…

Blood? That was… Disconcerting.

Osheen released a blast of fire at the monster, who moved out of the way… slowly. The beast’s Aura was congealing into its muscles, so between that and the explosive burst of speed that it had shown off earlier, I’d been expecting to see another terrifying display of speed.

I fired a paralysis spell at it, and once again it moved out of the way slowly.

Then the Aura stopped, and the beast exploded into motion, rushing Osheen faster than I could track. His tattoos glowed and the beast slammed into his force armor, its fangs crunching down around his head, one cracking off and falling to the forest floor.

I cursed my lack of offensive power and fired another paralysis bolt and a series of a half a dozen force darts. This time, with its mouth around Osheen’s head, they all hit. The beast froze, and Osheen activated another aspect of his tattoo.

Force enhancement was a classic spell among force magic users. It enhanced every motion the user made with extra force, letting them move faster, hit harder, and more. It was dangerous, since if you overextended yourself, you could easily cause damage to your body, but it was useful.

Osheen flooded his powerful Aura into the spell and ripped the monster off his head.

And then he threw it!

Like throwing a heavy sack of potatoes, he drew it back over his head and then threw it with his entire body. A moment later, an immolation spell launched after the beast, boosted by the amulet I’d made him. It smashed into the monster, who howled as it fell to the ground.

“Do you think it’s over?” I asked, before I abruptly realized that, thanks to the assassin’s cloak, he wouldn’t be able to tell me if he thought it was over or not for another several minutes.

“I think it’s over,” Osheen said, glancing to near where I was standing, though not quite getting it right. I shifted to stand where he was looking, and nodded out of habit.

He looked for a few more moments, then turned and went back to the sleeping bag, sitting down on top of it, though he didn’t lay down yet.

I picked up the ice fang and tucked it away. It wasn’t as potent as some materials, but I was sure it could be useful.

Once my cloak faded, I sat down next to Osheen and slipped my hand around his waist, pulling him into me. He put his head on my chest and began to slowly cry. I pulled him closer and cradled his head in my hands, then ran my fingers through his hair.

“I really want this to be over,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I do too.”

As I looked up at the stars and held Osheen in my arms, my resolve deepened. I had to fix this, somehow.

The flight home was fairly uneventful, and we went back into school just fine. I tracked down the alteration spells that I needed to shape landglass in the library.

The spells were complex, but the instructions were clear enough that I was certain I’d be able to cast it first try. The main issue was time – the spell took four days to complete. Not to charge, to actually complete. The witch I’d been speaking to hadn’t been exaggerating when she’d said it took a lot of effort to permanently change it into a new shape.

To take care of that problem, I rented a room in the basement on Tuesday, set up the spell, and got to work. I didn’t have a clever way to cut down the casting time, so the only way to get it done was to simply get it done.