Finley Cai Aies Hall April 20th, 20XX

The smooth pages of the diary felt slick in my hands as I memorized the procedure one last time. No matter how I thought of it, there was absolutely no logical reason for me to be in charge of casting such a complicated spell.

The first segment alone was an amalgamation of all the magic I’d learned so far. Corin and Cambridge had provided me with a ‘guide’ and had tried to teach me yesterday, but I’d still had to spend the entire night consulting the diary.

I only felt more pressure when Corin led me to the site where I would perform the spell. It was yet another large room I had never seen before today.

Intimidating paintings of women that vaguely resembled me hung on the walls and glared down at me with unbearable regality. If there had been time, I would have loved to look through them and match their faces with the names I’d learned.

I turned around to see the general and somewhat felt sympathy for her. It was unfortunate, but I’d already confirmed that she was okay with this. There wasn’t much else I could do but respect her decision and try my best not to screw up.

She sat in a cross-legged position on the floor and kept her eyes closed. I could see her magic coagulate into a mass around her as she tried her best to rein it in and not sense my presence. I still wasn’t too sure how it all worked, but as long as she wasn’t trying to jump my bones, then I didn’t need an immediate explanation.

A crowd of six guard fairies took each limb and held her down as best they could. There were two on her arms, two on her legs and the last two on her wings. Aside from the two holding her wings, the other four kept a relaxed grip on each limb but stayed prepared to leap into action.

Another ten surrounded the edges of the room and had their wands pointed at the general.

I’d initially thought it was excessive, but after the general had shown a presentation of how quickly she could break past those guards and cross a short distance, I’d stopped trying to speak up for her.

Only the general and maybe Corin and Cambridge knew what she had done to Esmeralda, but the green fairy was still completely unconscious.

The infirmary had refused to give her any more than basic care, so it would be a little while until she woke up again. I hadn’t even known there was an infirmary until yesterday, but it had been a nice place. The head medic had given me some sort of medicine to take daily while they coldly refused to treat Esmeralda.

The general’s eyes suddenly snapped open, and her eyes captured mine. Her bright eyes were as dim as they had been two days ago, and her body was tensed like she was ready to fly over to me. It was fascinating to watch her struggle against herself and bind her body with vines of harsh magic, but more entrancing was the volatile ebbing and waving of her magic. She would seal it all in one go, completely closing herself out from the rest of the magic-filled room, but ever so slowly, her own magic would crawl out from her body and interact with the ambient magic. It would try its best to absorb as much of the ambient magic as possible before she would rein it back in.

“Your highness, at your convenience.”

“Ah, yeah.”

A fairy I’d seen wandering around my quarters a few times approached me and cautiously. I flipped back to the first page and decided to read through the procedure one more time. The actual thing wasn’t that difficult, but with the modifications the book had recommended and the theory behind it, it wasn’t something I was comfortable doing with only one day of preparation.

This was like asking a first-year med student to perform surgery. Stupid and highly inadvisable in my eyes, yet here I was.

I drew my wand for the first time in what seemed like forever and got used to the feeling of magic flowing through it again. Theodulus had drilled how terrible over-relying on tools could be, so I usually used my hands while handling magic. The wand made things so easy that it made me uncomfortable. It could conduct an extensive amount of magic and would bring every confident thought I had to reality. I was more accustomed to going bare-handed, but I didn’t dare act cocky in this situation.

The general let out a heavy exhale, and I saw her magic recede into her body again. Aside from the stress of trying not to attack me, I could tell that she was anxious about me casting the spell. Not only did I not blame her for not being nervous, but I also agreed. Even if everything was normal and I had grown up in this world, male fairies of my rank usually weren’t too proficient at magic. There were so many reasons for someone to have stopped this by now. There were also a lot of moments for someone to barge into the room and stop this madness. I knew it wouldn’t happen, but I couldn’t help but reserve hope.

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Corin and Cambridge stood guard outside of the room but couldn’t come in for fear that my casting the spell would interfere with their seals that my mother had cast.

Unlike the ‘lite’ version I planned to cast for the general, my mother had gone deep with the spell. She had sealed all of their capacities to about thirty percent of their original states. In a state of emergency, they could access about sixty percent, but even that would take an enormous toll on their bodies.

I wondered if there was any way I could release the seals or at least loosen them, but that would have to wait for later experimentation.

All the workers had similar seals on their magic, but the seals on the two sisters were the most severe and the most volatile. While I knew it was customary for each ascending royal to replace the previous royal’s seals with their own, I had no intentions of following the tradition. One because it sounded like a waste of time, and two because I didn’t like the idea of being tried to that many people. Even if they couldn’t sense where I was through the seals, I would gain the ability to track them, and that sounded like much more of a burden than I would ever be willing to carry.

Instead of the total seals that my mother had cast on the Gagnon sisters, I planned on taking a unique approach.

I didn’t have confidence in my ability to pull it off, but I had faith in the diary’s spells, and I had confidence in my abilities to do research and homework on a time budget.

According to the papers in the library, fairies’ magic and overall power depended on multiple facets.

There was how much magic they could sense in the air- this was magical perception and why the general had such difficulties controlling herself around me. The effects of my magic affected her more intensely because she could sense it more.

The next was how much magic they could draw into themselves and how much they could keep in their bodies long enough to use the spell. By default, the more magic one could sense, the more advantaged they were at this stage.

There was then how much magic they could push out into the spell and how long they could sustain it. Faries above or equal to the rank of duchess could process magic and put it into a spell simultaneously. Anyone below that would have to make sure they had enough magic stored to maintain a spell for any meaningful amount of time.

My mother had just slapped a seal over all the functions and had essentially crippled all of her friends, but an old study I’d found had suggested that there was a way to isolate each of these functions.

While working with the diary, I’d also figured out how to make it conditional to how much distance she had from me. The reason the guard fairies weren’t holding on as tightly as they could to her was because of a small experiment I was running, although she didn’t know of it.

Anything below fifteen feet was utterly out of the question, but even that seemed to call for more willpower than was realistic to expect the general to employ consistently.

With a limit on when the seal would be active and what it would seal, the general would come out better for it.

In the end, she was only doing this so she could become queen. It wouldn’t make much sense to cripple her and make her unable to rule over others.

This way, even if she in her affected state came towards me, she would immediately regain her senses as she neared me.

“I’m ready.”

The general couldn’t give a verbal response as she was too busy reining back her magic for what I hoped would be the last time. She nodded firmly and further braced herself.

Around us, the guards stood at the ready for a violent attempt to break free.

She had warned that she might subconsciously try to break free when she felt a spell being cast on her. A habit she’d picked up on the battlefield, as she had termed it.

The realization that ‘general’ wasn’t just a nickname but was a descriptor of her job threatened to break through my wall of apathy and make me scared, but I pushed it back down where it belonged.

Whatever she was, and whatever she had done in the past, didn’t matter to me. Nope, not at all.

I took one last deep breath before stretching out my wand and gathering magic into the room. There wasn’t much unclean magic in the space, but the clearer the environment, the better the spell would go.

No one else could see it, but the room flooded with the golden specks and almost made it difficult to see. I waved them out of my face and focus on the spell.

The first thing I did was to lull her into a sleeplike state. It was a low levelled spell, so it wouldn’t have worked if she had resisted, but thankfully she didn’t.

The next step was to create an isolated field where I could work in private. It wasn’t like I didn’t trust any of the people in the room, but the less talk that came out about me, the better.

I had a feeling that Esmeralda wouldn’t let anyone hear I’d done anything successfully, so I wasn’t too worried about that. But eyewitnesses to a complex spell would change the game.

The sphere was such a helpful spell that I’d only grown more and more fond of. It worked as a perfect isolation field when I needed it to be, and I could cloud up the exterior if I needed to and prevent any unwanted eyes. If I worked on it a bit more, I had confidence in developing it into a shield. The quality and quantity of my magic wouldn’t lose to anyone, so as long as I could preempt any magic disruption spells an enemy might send my way, then I could consider my safety guaranteed.

No. I needed to focus.

I redirected my attention to the sleeping general, who looked just as fierce as she did when she was awake. It was less about her expression and more about the general mien of her. The tight hairstyle that pulled at the skin on her forehead, the thick armour she wore under the long flowing robes of her dress, the various outlines of weaponry I could see on her person.

What type of life had she lived till now to always walk around so heavily armed.

Once again, I shook off the distracting thoughts and brought the diary out to float beside me. As long as I followed the instructions, then nothing would go wrong.

I hoped.