The Abjurer: Chapters 3-4

When I got to my rooms, I was surprised to see Wisteria leaving my door, headed towards the stairwell.

“Good evening, professor,” I said, “I must admit, I wasn’t expecting to see you.”

“Remember at the end of last year, when you said that you’d like to take a potions class, but didn’t have room in your schedule, and I said that I’d see what I could do?” she asked, smiling excitedly.

I bit my lip, then slowly nodded. I hadn’t thought much of it at the time, if I was being honest.

She pointed to a small pile of letters that had been left at my door.

“The exact details are in there, along with your but I’ve gotten permission to open a potions club. It’ll meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays from eighth bell in the morning until tenth bell. It’s not quite a class, but it has a self-guided study that I think you’re really going to enjoy. It’s keyed for intermediate to adept students, with some journeyman serving as my aides.”

“We have clubs?” I asked, “But that sounds great!”

She stared at me as if I’d grown a second head.

“Of course we have clubs,” she said. “You were given a list of them in your first year.”

“I was?” I asked. I felt like I would remember that, if I had been.

“It was left for you in the public areas that you stayed in before you got your assigned rooms,” she said.

I winced. That explained it. I had spent as little time as possible there, since there had been far too many people for my tastes.

“Oh,” was all I said. “Is it possible to get a new list of them?”

“There’s one in the letter I left you, with my new potions club circled,” she said with a wry smile.

“Oh, well… thank you. I’ll definitely join the potions club.”

“Excellent,” she said cheerfully. “It’s a hundred silver crowns to join.”

I didn’t wince as I once might have. I’d made several spell bottles and sold them over the summer, and I’d decided to stockpile the money, rather than put it towards the debt I had.

I wasn’t entirely sure why – maybe I was hoping I’d be able to get out of it with the end of the year tournament, maybe I was just stubborn.

But either way, I had more money in my accounts than I’d ever had, and a hundred crowns didn’t phase me the way that it would have a few years ago.

“Does a letter of credit work?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said. “We can get the application done now, if you’d like.”

“Of course,” I said. I didn’t invite her into my dorm – that would have been a touch improper, since she and I were alone, and even though living among mages for so long had stripped me of a lot of my worries about propriety, I hadn’t lost them completely.

Instead we sat in the hallway filling out paperwork for joining the club, I wrote her a letter of credit, and she rose to leave.

“Thank you,” I said, and she nodded.

“See you in a few weeks!”

I paged through the list of clubs while I waited for Osheen to return. When he eventually did, I looked up at him.

“Did you know that Yesgol has clubs?” I asked. He stared at me.

“Yes,” he said eventually, “did you not?”

“Nope,” I said, “I hadn’t the foggiest idea.”

“Babe, I’m in some of them. Last year, I was in one that was all about exercise.”

“That wasn’t a class?” I asked.

“I was in the combat class, but exercise was a club.” He said gently.

“Huh,” was all I could say. I glanced down at the club list. “To be honest, it may be a good thing I’m just now learning about them. I’m not sure that I would have had the wherewithal for them in my first year, and last year was crazy busy.”

“True enough,” he said, sitting next to me and peering at the list. “Are you going to join any?”

“I joined the potions club already,” I said. “Wisteria invited me, and I did want to keep advancing in potions. But a few others looked interesting, too. Like this one.”

I pointed to a spot on the list.

“Spell languages club,” he read. “To be honest, that sounds boring to me, but I can see why you’d enjoy it.”

“I’m also looking at the fine arts club,” I said. “Which reminds me! Would you be willing to come with me to the party?”

“Can I?” he asked.

“According to Seth,” I said.

“Then of course I’ll be there,” he said instantly.

“Thank you,” I said, and he nodded.

“Why fine arts?” he asked after a moment. “Lyn is in it, I think. She uses her metal magic to make jewelry.

“I need a gift for the party,” I said. “And you should make or buy one too. Seth really stressed the importance of bringing a gift to me. Remember those three components I got in the ritual chamber?”

“The sea scale, the gemstone acorn, and the silvery metal,” he recalled, nodding.

“I was thinking the scale made sense for you. You’re a fire mage, so you can spell yourself to be resistant to heat, but I was thinking it seems to have a powerful water affinity. If I was able to link a water attack spell into it, it could give you an offensive option outside of your booster, or I could use it defensively to make your defenses against fire even better.”

I felt a surge of self-consciousness at that, and rushed to add.

“If that’s okay with you. Is there something you’d prefer?”

“Honestly, not really,” he said. “Since my ascension to second arch-star, I’ve got five force spells: Force bolt, force beam, force armor, force enhancement, and a force bubble I can put over myself. But I haven’t really trained with the last two much, and they’re all things my father and his friends know about. Having a powerful water spell for offense could throw them off guard.”

I nodded.

“I was thinking of making the metal into a weapon that’s filled with abjurative enchantments to slice through Summer magic,” I said, “though I’d need a sample of a Summer Fae’s magic, and I’d need to get good enough at abjuration to do it. If I can’t, then some sort of powerful slice spell that could punch through defenses with pure power would probably be a good idea.”

“Don’t you need to embarrass a member of the Vernal Court, not Summer?” he asked.

“Yes, this would be my gift,” I said. “Medb is Winter, so I figure a gift that can slice through Summer Magic would be especially useful for her warriors, and would score me some points.”

“Ah, that’s a good point,” Osheen said. “What should I do?”

“Uh,” I said, “I’m not sure. Let’s think about that. He said it could be fancy or practical, but ideally, it would be both.”

“My magic isn’t exactly the best for making gifts,” he said, “but I can try to do something with it. But… Maybe we could collaborate on something? Then I can say that it’s truly something I helped to make.”

“What were you thinking about?” I asked with a nod.

“Well, Summer Fae use fire a lot, don’t they?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“I have spells that can shelter from heat and flame. Not abjuration – it isn’t affecting the actual magic at all. It’s altering heat and fire. So I was thinking maybe some sort of ring or necklace that would protect from heat and flame. I could provide the Aura, to allow it to be mostly self-sustaining, as well as the spells that actually do it, and you handle imparting it onto an object.”

My brain began to spin with ideas on how to do it, and I nodded.

“That sounds great. But I’ve got one thing I’d change.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Make it a scabbard,” I said. “I can present the sword, and you can present the scabbard.”

His eyes lit up and he nodded.

“That works great,” he said. “What do you need on your end? The scabbard, of course.”

“Low-grade Aura crystals,” I said, “As big as possible. Fire aligned components. Maybe we can go hunting for flamemoss again. And…”

My eyes narrowed.

“Nothing in our oaths prevents us from going near to the ritual site.”

“Why would you want to go back?” Osheen asked, looking rather horrified at the prospect.

“Not into the mausoleum or into the ritual chamber,” I said, shaking my head. “But the entire area is rich with components. You told me that most of the components in Paerús come from noble families, and this area is rich in components. If we can go near the ritual circle, I’d be willing to bet there’s an abundance of powerful components around the area. It’s situated near some ley lines, and it’s the center of a powerful pillar of Aura.”

“Wouldn’t it be well harvested by noble families?” Osheen asked dubiously.

“Not necessarily,” I said. “They can buy or get most of them from their families. They probably pick a few things, sure, but I’m not trying to fund an army or create an airship. I’m picking things out for a few projects.”

I picked up a sheet of paper and let out a long, slow breath.

“Which brings me to my plan for the semester,” I said. “I’ve got a pretty solid set of defenses, but they’ve got a glaring weakness against area spells. I can run circles around single attack spells, but I need to shore up that weakness. I’m hoping that abjuration can help me with that. It’s all about counter-magic, after all.”

I wrote the words ‘Abjurative Defenses’ on the paper, followed by a question mark.

“The next issue I have is that I’ve got a handful of useful divination spells for combat, but I’m reliant on spell bottles to store them. I need to build them into a set of artifacts.”

I wrote the words ‘Divinatory Defenses’ on the paper.

“For it, I think the foresight spell is probably the most obvious part. A quick and dirty scan for some runes is another one – I can see magic, but that doesn’t do me much good if the spell is hidden by physical matter. I also need to look around and see if there’s any way for me to build something that can enhance Oracle’s eyesight temporarily that I can build into it as another section. I’m thinking about reworking my assassin’s cloak spell to be a part of this as well, since hiding from spells acts as a solid thematic duality to divination and seeing spells.”

“Makes sense,” Osheen said.

“If I can get one more in that section, and work with five abjuration spells, I can do something really interesting,” I said. “My current defenses work on the principle of nestling five spells within a spell. If I can then layer those three sets of five into one, I can unify all of them to create a single three-layer, five-sublayer defense.”

I wrote the words ‘original five’, then drew a line between each of the words I’d written, so that it formed a circuit with three parts.

Osheen stared at me. I stared back. He shook his head and laughed.

“That’s… Wow.”

I grinned.

“Impressed?”

“Yeah, I am,” he said. “If all goes well, your defenses would be able to stand up to… Just about anyone. Maybe even my father. What are you going to do for the single unifying spell?”

I shrugged.

“More power, maybe? I’m honestly not sure. The designs I’m working on for your father have something pretty interesting.”

I riffled through the papers on the desk until I found the designs that I’d been given. He looked over them.

“This… makes no sense to me,” he confessed after a moment. “I assume the design came from one of our witches, or maybe we got it from another family.”

I sighed. That would have been far too easy.

“Anyhow,” I said, turning back to the paper, “that leaves me with one remaining issue.”

I wrote the word offense and underlined it.

“I’ve got no real offensive power,” I said.

“Do you need it?” Osheen asked. “If we’re fighting together, I can be on offense, while you tie them up and are on defense.”

“I won’t always be with you, though,” I said. “I don’t think I need to be unstoppable on offense. But I need more than a couple of force darts.”

“That’s true,” Osheen conceded. “So how are you going to do that?”

“I’m… Not sure,” I admitted. “I’ve been thinking about building a staff.”

“Weren’t you opposed to using a spear because it was too bulky, and could interfere with your stealth spell?”

“I was, but that was when stealth was my only defense. Now I’ve got a lot more options. If I incorporate my cloak in with new defenses, then it should be strong enough to not need to worry about it. Besides, while the design for the assassin’s cloak is decent, its anchors leave a lot to be desired.”

I shook my head and sighed.

“For now, I think the best thing that I can do is just go to school. A lot of these ideas rely on knowledge that I don’t have yet.”

“If you didn’t plan five thousand steps ahead, I think I’d know someone had glamoured themselves to replace you,” Osheen said with a small smile. “But we should head to bed.”

---

I spent the rest of the weekend tinkering on the project for Archmage Roark, but by the time Monday rolled around, I couldn’t help but have a lot of excitement for my first real abjuration class.

The unfortunate thing was, like all of Travis’ classes, it was early in the morning. For some reason, he’d decided that the best time to run abjuration was from fifth bell in the morning to ninth bell, then immediately scheduled his artifact class to run from ninth bell in the morning to first bell in the afternoon.

I had an idea that by the end of the semester, I was going to want to kill the man for his impossible standards.

Not actually. I wasn’t planning to murder him, the same way I was wanting to kill Archmage Roark.

When I arrived in the classroom that Travis always used, I wasn’t surprised to see Victoria, George, and Jerimiah. I’d had the basic lessons with Victoria over the summer, and it had been rather awkward, with both of us avoiding each other.

I let out a low sigh. This… wasn’t going to be fun.

“Good morning class,” Travis called, entering behind me. His necklace of spells jingled as he walked to the blackboard he’d left set up in one part of the room, and he waved his hand to shut and seal the doors.

He was met with a low muttering from everyone – including myself. I wondered exactly what herb or potion Travis used. I was used to getting up early, but holding class at fifth bell? That was ridiculous.

“George, Jerimiah, you two didn’t join us for lessons over the summer. I assume that Chris gave you a primer on the basic arrays of abjuration?”

“Yes sir,” George said, nodding.

I glanced over at the sandy haired youth, then focused back on Travis.

“Excellent,” Travis said. “Let me outline what you’ll learn in this course. There are three elements of abjuration. The first, and most simple is spell alteration. Jerimiah, power your mobile ward.”

Jerimiah nodded and lit his Aura, then poured it into a spell he’d made around his belt. A ward snapped up around him, and I let out a low whistle.

Wards were rather geographically locked, so he probably couldn’t move while it was active, but it would provide a far better defense than even force armor or a force bubble could.

Travis leapt across the room, and I flicked my third eye open frantically to watch. He poured his aura into one of the necklaces, and its runes lit up brightly. He reached towards Jerimiah, and I saw them align, shifting, cutting portions of the spell, and creating an opening in the ward’s spell array. His hand landed squarely on Jerimiah’s shoulder, and he stopped, then stepped back.

“I negated the power of his ward. I’m sure you can see the benefit of negating defenses. With some common certain spells, like force armor, are, a proper abjurer should be able to tear through them like wet tissue paper.”

I frowned. The way the spell had moved and altered… I’d seen it before.

No, I’d DONE it before. Two years ago, I’d used magic from the Starless Night to do something rather similar. Travis had dismissed it, since it was entirely guided by the user’s ability to see magic. It had been simple, but it had worked.

Then, when I’d gotten the Silver Power, the power of change, to move the king’s spells to dodge them. I hadn’t known what I was doing, but I’d been performing abjuration, just with Fae magic and runecraft, not human.

I felt a slow smile spread across my face.

“The next part of abjuration is spell disruption,” Travis said, then turned to Victoria. “Force lance.”

Victoria raised her hand and power flared through one of her rings, and a force lance shot towards Travis. He powered a different necklace, and the runes spun around wildly, forming a new array that had the core of a force lance, but had several long parts that were meant to deconstruct that exact power.

The force lance fell apart before it could hit Travis.

“Finally, we have the most important. Spell reflection. This combines the altering and negation to break down the power and send it back at the person. George, flame lance, then duck.”

George drew his sword and fired a flame lance at Travis. He powered another necklace, and I saw spell form. This combined the elements of negation to break down the power – not all the way, just back into shreds of shaped Aura, rather than actual fire – then used elements of altering to reassemble it and send it back at George, who ducked out of the way.

“Everyone,” Travis said, slipping his hands into his pockets. “Come at my with everything you’ve got. Treat it like I’m here to kill you, and don’t give up until I say so.”

I drew a knife and fired a paralysis spell at Travis. George launched a series of fire lances, Jerimiah released a cloud of gas, and Victoria clenched her fist and sent a bolt of lightning at him.

Travis stepped forwards and his aura flickered wildly, fueling spells and his coat. A sweep of his hand caused my paralysis spell to slam into George, and Travis’ spell reflected the fire lances at Victoria. The lightning smashed into his coat and stopped dead, and the gas dissipated around him. He’d burnt through much of his Aura to power the defenses, but he hadn’t needed to do anything but stand there.

Jerimiah raised his hand and fired a bolt of lightning of his own, and I knew the knife. The lightning hit the coat and did nothing more than drain his Aura, and my knife bounced off a set of force armor.

George and Victoria had recovered then, and George fired off a combination of three force spells that layered together. Victoria peppered him with blasts of force from range, while Jerimiah sent wave after wave of gas at him. I added my force darts into the mix

Travis reflected the supporting fire that Victoria and I were laying down back at us, dissipated the mist again, and stopped George’s three-layer spell dead.

“That’s enough,” he said. “You see my point? You four are all competent mages. Maybe not masters, but adequate. And yet, four to one, I was able to stop you all. If this had been life or death, and I’d counterattacked, Victoria and George would have died in the initial barrage. Jerimiah and Evan’s defenses would have let them last for a few more moments, until I cut through them and killed them both.”

Travis smirked with so much arrogance that it would give Draven a run for his money.

“No master of abjuration should lose a fight against an opponent they’re prepared for. Even if that opponent outnumbers them or outpowers them.”

I leaned forwards. This was interesting. Very interesting. I knew more about abjuration than I’d thought, and it could arm me against opponents I knew about beforehand?

With this kind of power, I might be able to challenge Archmage Roark for real.

Travis walked back to the blackboard and began to draw.

“There are, of course, limits. Abjuration requires you to know the spell that’s coming at you or the one you’re breaking through. I was able to prepare this little display in large part because I know what all of you are capable of.”

I frowned.

That… wasn’t true. Or at least, it was incomplete. When I’d wielded the Silver Power and the Consumer Glove, I’d torn apart spells without knowing what spells they were beforehand. I’d just needed to analyze the spell when it was being used.

Travis reached into his desk and withdrew four books. Each was the size of a journal, and bound in soft white leather.

“These are the textbooks I wrote for this course. It will explain the theory, and guide you to building a defense against a spell that you know. I expect you to be able to create an example of spell altering by the end of the month, negation two weeks after that, and reflection after that.”

I frowned. That would leave two months until winter solstice.

“After that, it’ll be your job to design a more comprehensive set of abjuration spells that are able to defend against most common offensive spells and break through most common defensive ones.”

“What will we be doing in the spring semester?” Victoria asked.

“You’ll be using each of your unique skills to combine with abjuration. For example, Jerimiah, you might create wards that can also reflect spells.”

I frowned as my brain began to whirl. I thought I might be able to do one better than that…

We spent the rest of the class reading through our textbooks and asking questions to Travis, and I put aside my thoughts of using Fae magic for the time being. I wasn’t going to be able to incorporate it into something I didn’t understand at all.

When ninth bell rang, Jerimiah rose and left, but Victoria, George, and myself remained seated. Two older students from the year before us came in, ones I didn’t recognize.

“Welcome to Journeyman Artifacts,” Travis said. “This class is going to be a little bit more unique than previous ones. As you know, I usually begin with more general challenges, then move on to ones that are tailored to you personally.”

I nodded, as did everyone else.

“This year, I’m going to assign you two personal challenges to complete in the first semester. Then, for your second semester, I want you to impress me.”

One of the older students frowned.

“That’s all?” they asked.

“Yes,” Travis said.

“Huh,” they said.

“Then without further ado,” Travis said, reaching into his drawer again. This time he withdrew several sheets of paper and began to pass them out.

When he handed me mine, I quickly unfolded it to look at my challenges. I let out a snort of laughter at the first one.

I needed to impress him with an enchantment that relied on pure power. I’d failed that last year, when I’d created my now destroyed curse glove. I’d been too ‘clever’ for my own good then by incorporating the backlash from my luck armor.

Fine, if he wanted raw power, I’d give him raw power. Maybe that would be what I made my staff.

I began to sketch out ideas for the staff.

I needed raw power, so lightning was the obvious choice, with fire and force not too far behind. But I’d just seen an example of why that wasn’t the best idea.

Body enhancement wouldn’t fit well with my ranged spell style, so Emilia’s methods were out.

Earth would be too dependent on my environment – since I wasn’t a sorcerer, I couldn’t easily alter the spell to change where I was moving the earth from. Plant magic was out for a similar reason.

Ice could work, but that was limited by the water in the air, which defeated the point of pure power. The same issue came up with water magic.

Air magic was okay, but it wasn’t the best on offense.

Mind magic? That was probably getting back into ‘too clever for my own good’ territory again. Not to mention, it wasn’t great on offense.

With a sigh, I circled back to the idea of lightning or force. I’d seen Travis’ coat shrug it off, but that wasn’t a common item, was it?

I closed my eyes and considered how Archmage Roark had designed his defenses against lightning and force.

He’d used a spell designed to break up charge and heat. That would make lightning spells a lot harder to hit, but it was limited on how much it could actually cut through. The same was true of the force bubble that blocked physical attacks. It could also be punched through with raw power.

Even with abjuration, he’d had to fuel the coat ahead of time in order to prepare for the lightning, and it had drained a fair chunk of his Aura.

Then it clicked.

“Oh,” I muttered under my breath. I got why he’d assigned this to me twice.

Being clever was great. Tricks like preparation could help in almost every single situation.

But sometimes?

Sometimes there was no other solution than raw power.

Raw power could solve a lot of problems. But just like there were times that power couldn’t do anything, there were times cleverness couldn’t either.

I took out a sheet of paper and began to sketch a design for a staff with a glass orb at the top.

The staff would serve as the power storage for the spell, and the actual anchor would be on the glass.

I wanted to be able to fire this more than once and be done, though, so I’d need to add a meter to decide how much power to add into a spell, like my force dart spell did. Only, instead of wanting to fire the spell a bunch of times when I used multiple charges, I’d direct all that power into one blast.

My rune compression arch-star would let me squeeze a lot of capacitors and inductors onto the staff, but lightning spells took a lot of power too. If I made it a bit shorter than me, so that it didn’t interfere with me in combat, I’d probably be able to get three charges.

I frowned and stared at it. That was okay, but if I was going to be going for more raw power, I needed a lot more than that.

I stared at the sheet, frowning. It was strong, but it wasn’t making use of the things I’d learned.

Maybe if I made the glass hollow, I could put a force lance on the inside, then use the spell within a spell to link them into one attack. That’d make it so much easier to break though, and would drop the amount of times I could fire it to two, even though both shots would be stronger. If I wanted to reinforce the glass, it would make it almost useless in terms of raw power.

I frowned and sighed. I tried a dozen different designs, but no matter how I aligned the capacitors and inductors, I was only able to make it fire three to four shots.

Sure, I could buy several aura crystals and link them together, but that felt like cheating. It also didn’t actually push my enchanting skills much, at least in my opinion.

By the time first bell in the afternoon rolled around and I was let out for lunch, I was feeling rather annoyed and grumpy. Osheen must have noticed, because he slipped his hand into mine.