Novels2Search

Ch 3

Jason was keen for Cal to come back and have dinner at his place in Larimer street, south of the river, but Cal insisted he wanted to stay at the enchantery. Jason left, and Cal set to work in the back room.

He lit the candle stubs on the mantelpiece above the fire, then dragged some of the scrap wood out of the little hall at the back and broke it up. He stacked it in the fireplace and got a blaze going.

With the fire lit and a few candles burning, the room began to feel a bit more homely. Cal dragged the locked wooden box he’d found earlier over in front of the hearth and explored it more closely.

The box was old, but the lock looked fairly new. It gleamed with an odd light that didn’t quite match the light of the room. An enchantment! This was no ordinary lock.

Cal put his hands over the lock and breathed slowly in, feeling around the edges of the enchantment. Yes, there was a spell here. It was quite a good one, but not too complicated if you knew what you were doing, and Cal did.

He took the box to the enchanting table, dusted off a few of the runes, and set to work. Using the basic enchanting runes, he was able to work backward through the enchantment, picking off the three layers of the spell separately until there was a click, and the box popped open.

Going back to the hearth, he tilted the box toward the light and began to take out the contents, laying his new treasures on the bare stone of the hearth in the winking light of the fire.

An enchanted box like this would have been made to hold more valuable items than this, but to Cal, the things he took from the box were still good finds. The thing he took out first was an old enchanter’s eyeglass, a kind of monocle that the enchanter could fit over one eye. The more expensive of these had adjustable magnification for delicate work, and the ability to identify different kinds of magical effects by giving them different colors.

This was not one of the more expensive ones. From the state of the rest of the shop, Cal fully expected the lens to be cracked, but when he lifted it up and examined it in the light of the fire, he was delighted to find that the thick glass lens was sound. It was greasy and sticky with some unidentified substance, but Cal got water from the bathroom pump and cleaned his new find up, and aside from a bit of scratching on the brass frame, the eyepiece was perfectly fine.

The next thing he examined was a leather bag that clinked promisingly. When he emptied it out, he found it was full of small change, mainly ten and twenty centim pieces, but with a few half-crowns mixed in. Clearly, this was a bag of small change that the previous enchanter had collected over the years and had either forgotten about or couldn’t be bothered counting up.

When Cal counted the money for himself, he found that there were twelve crowns and fifty centims in total. He added his own three crowns and ten centims to the stack. It wasn’t much, but it was all he had, and he’d be able to stretch it out while working on getting the shop up and running.

But the third item, when he dusted it off and realized what it was, turned out to be the most interesting of all. It was a monster core, but not a kind that he’d ever seen before in real life. He’d seen pictures, but that was all.

There was no question, though. The opaque, pure white color was unmistakable. No other core was that color. He held it up to the light of the fire, a smooth, hard object like a polished crystal, almond shaped and about the size of Cal’s thumb.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Monster cores were the most fundamental resource for material mages like enchanters, but core effects weren’t random. Specific monsters yielded specific kinds of core, and each kind could make a particular type of enchantment.

But there were lots of monsters whose cores were useless to enchanters. They were full of energy, but it wasn’t focused enough by the monsters’ elemental type. Those cores were called blanks in the trade, and they were rare precisely because they were considered useless.

But Cal had long wondered about the so-called blanks. For several years, he’d been working on a theory for a particular kind of spell, a modification to an existing enchantment. Many trades used enchanted eyeglasses in their work - hunters, sailors, merchants, and enchanters. Eyeglasses that could give a bit of information by showing magical traces were very useful, valuable tools. Cal had theorized a modification that might be done with a blank core on the seeing spell on an enchanter’s eyeglass.

He’d always wanted to test his theory. Now he had a chance to do so.

Lights pulsed from the runes of the enchanting table, flickering blue and green and red and mixing their arcane glow with the cozy light from the fire. Cal’s eager face was illuminated by the rune lighting as he leaned over his enchanting table, working the power from the blank core out into the item he’d chosen for his experiment - the enchanter’s eyeglass.

An hour passed, then another. It was complex, difficult work, and Cal was totally absorbed. The fire in the hearth flickered out and all but one of the candle stubs fizzed and died. Snow started falling again, heavy white flakes drifting past the grubby window and settling thickly in the little back court.

As he worked, the magnitude of what he was attempting wasn’t lost on him. This was new magic, something utterly unheard-of in the world before. The world of enchanters and material mages was a closely regulated one, and most people were content to follow the rules and not stray outside the boundaries of what was acceptable.

As Cal looked at the enchantment that was within the eyeglass, the powerful, highly refined seeing spell that he was about to modify to his own blueprint, he paused for a moment, wondering.

Magic wreathed around his hands, brightly colored smokes wrapping themselves around him and glowing on his face and in the darkness of the room. Was he really going to do this?

Yes. He’d gone too far to turn back now, and if he succeeded, he’d have broken new ground in magic. Cal had always wanted his own shop, but he didn’t want it just so that he could do the same thing that everyone else had been doing for years. He wanted it because it allowed him to break new ground in the world of enchanting, and maybe even for the other material magics as well.

He took a deep breath and went back to work.

An hour later, Cal held up the newly enchanted eyeglass and placed it over his left eye. He peered through it for a moment, looking around his dark shop.

“Yes!” he yelled, jumping up suddenly up into the air. “I’ve done it! Enchanters are going to have to eat their words - new magic is possible!”

It was probably just as well there was nobody about to see. Cal danced around the cluttered shop in his excitement, capering about through the dark space until he caught his foot on the edge of the soggy rug in the front shop and stumbled, nearly colliding with a broken display cabinet.

Chuckling to himself and catching his breath, he stepped up to the main shop door and pushed it open.

Fresh, cold air hit him, and he breathed deep as he stepped out into the street. His feet crunched through the undisturbed snow as he walked into the middle of the street, then turned round and looked back, holding his newly enchanted eyeglass up and looking through it.

His spell had worked. It was an examination spell, an idea he’d been working up for over a year now, and the enchanter’s glass was the perfect vehicle for the spell.

As he gazed over the road at the dark shop front, words flickered into being in front of his eyes. Words that only he could see.

Cal Markwyrth’s Northwood Enchantery

Shop Level: Threadbare

Reputation Level: Unknown

Finances: Impoverished

Cal chuckled.

“Not for long,” he said quietly. His breath steamed in the freezing air. “Soon, this’ll be the best little enchanter’s shop in town.”