[Spell: Spiritual Familiar]

[Level: 3]

[HP: 15/15]

[Mana: 0/0]

Noli! I take a step forward before I even have a chance to think—then a hasty step back as the cat swipes a paw at me. Noli isn’t moving. She isn’t even trying to sign at me. No, no, no—

The spell cat growls, advancing on me as I continue to retreat toward the bushes. Does it think like a cat? Is it after me out of curiosity, or because it was spelled to hunt down prey? I don’t know, and I don’t have time to figure it out. The cat abruptly stops and crouches, but I don’t feel any relief as I notice it tense, getting ready to spring—

Echo summon a spell book!

The cat leaps just as the tome manifests in the air before me, and I’m rewarded with a solid thwump as the cat collides with the book.

[2 points of Bludgeoning damage dealt.]

The book tips back, falling toward me—

Echo, back in my inventory!

I feel the slightest brush of breeze against my glass, a ghost of sensation as the book falls back on top of me—just for it to vanish the moment before it makes contact. Whew.

But now there’s nothing between me and the cat. It picks itself up, shaking its head, whipping Noli from side to side like a rag doll. My stomach drops through the ground. I have to end this and get Noli out of there ASAP.

The cat turns its attention back on me and, to my relief, it drops Noli. Placing one paw on her back, the cat hisses in a very life-like manner. Those aren’t real teeth, right? And no animal in its right mind would try to bite through glass, right? Well, no real animal.

The cat steps over Noli, apparently having decided its prey is dealt with and I am course number two. Not if I have anything to say about it.

I summon four pieces of Attuned glass from my inventory, the largest of which is the size of a grapefruit. It’s still significantly smaller than the cat, but it’s twice the size of me, and now I have the advantage of numbers. The cat stops, ears flicking about as I fan out my glass. We stare each other down for a moment. My glass hovers in place. Its tail snaps from side to side. Then, it strikes.

I collapse my glass in at the same moment. I don’t stand a chance at dodging, but if I can knock it off course—

My largest piece hits the cat at the same moment it tries to arch away, glancing off its shoulder instead of striking its head. Two other pieces miss, a third clipping its back as it yowls. A lightning flash of yellow fills my vision, then—

My legs are swiped from underneath me and I fall back, hard.

[3 points of Bludgeoning damage dealt.]

[1 point of Fall damage sustained.]

I roll away from my legs, but don’t bother trying to summon them back—there’s no time. Instead, I focus on my shards, whipping them around blindly as I roll to a stop and gather my bearings.

I feel another piece of glass connect and am rewarded with an angry hiss.

[5 points of Bludgeoning damage dealt.]

Lucky! But I can’t rely on luck to win this; I only had a handful of hit points to begin with, and there’s even less now. All it will take is one direct hit from the cat, and I’ll be finished.

When the world stops spinning, I can see the cat has backed off outside the range of my glass and is watching me warily. I call my glass closer, clustering it around me in a makeshift shield. We’re both low on HP. Whoever deals the next strike will decide it. I tense, mind racing, ready for the slightest movement. Would it come straight at me again? Or come around the side, looking for a blind spot? Or try something else, something tricky—

The cat yowls in surprise as it jumps into the air. It spins around as it lands, only to stagger to one side as if slapped, whereupon it promptly vanishes in a plume of yellow embers. I freeze, completely bewildered. What happened? I hadn’t touched it.

A familiar warm sensation is the only warning I receive before Echo announces, [Level Up!]

[Name: Kanin]

[Species: N/A]

[Class: Wizard]

[Level: 3]

[HP: 10/10]

[Bonus HP: 24]

[Mana: 23/23]

[Void: 72%]

[Role: Homunculus]

I’m healed. The crack in my glass is gone. But how? The magic cat just poofed. What on earth…

“Sneak attack!” Noli signs triumphantly as the specks of yellow magic flicker out around her. “That’s what you get for biting me! Hah, I knew playing dead would trick that stupid spell.”

I let all my glass sag to the ground in weary relief. She was faking it. Thank god.

Then, irritation flashes through me. She was faking it! What the fuck, Noli! Way to give me a heart attack for no reason. Angrily, I roll back over to my legs, and use my Attuned and signing glass to help push myself to my feet.

“No!” I sharply sign at her. “Bad!” Then I rap one of my pieces of glass on her for good measure.

She pushes the glass away. “Sorry! Didn’t mean to scare you. But it all worked out in the end, didn’t it?”

Concerned voices drift through the woods.

“Well, mostly,” Noli amends. “Maybe we should get out of here before they come looking for their familiar.”

The best idea I’ve heard all day.

Noli and I retreat deeper into the woods as the party investigates the site of our battle. Luckily, they’re all fairly loud and easy to avoid. The darkness sufficiently obscures our hasty retreat.

“What now?” I ask Noli as we run. I suppose we could still try to hitch a ride on one of their steeds, but if they found us at any point we probably wouldn’t have the same opportunity to escape.

“I don’t know,” Noli admits. “Even if we do make it to town, we’re going to run into the same problem.”

I hadn’t even been thinking that far ahead, but she’s right. If we can’t find anyone who signs, we’ll be in trouble—and judging by the reactions of this group, it’s not like we can go around asking people one at a time. Shit. I was just kind of hoping everything would fall into place once we could talk to someone—once someone could help us—but that possibility is starting to seem remote.

“Arg!” Noli throws up her limbs in frustration. “I’d give an arm for a translator charm right now.”

A translator? My soul leaps. They have translators in this world! That’s exactly what we needed. The question is: How to get one?

I gesture for Noli to continue that train of thought.

“Rezira would give me grief if she saw me saying this,” Noli signs. “I always hated using them. It just doesn’t pick up the nuance of signs, you know?”

I don’t know, actually. A translator sounds absolutely fantastic. But there’s another asset she’s mentioned a few times now that could maybe help us.

“Re…” I pause, unable to remember the rest of the signs. She’s been signing a name, I can see. But her signs are too fast, and the name is too nuanced for me to capture.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“Rezira?” Noli gathers.

“Rezi…” Shit this was way more complicated than the other basic signs she’d taught me. At least a lot of those were kind of intuitive.

Noli chuckles. “I’ll teach you names later. What is it?”

“Who?” I ask. Can they help us?

“Who’s Rezira?” Noli fills in. “Oh! I really haven’t said? Gosh, I can’t believe I haven’t talked your ear off about her already. Although, I suppose we have had more pressing matters. Still, I could have sworn I mentioned it. She’s my wife!”

A stumble as I miss a step. Wife? Noli is married? Someone out there has the patience to put up with this soul for a lifetime?

More importantly… “She can sign?” I ask.

Noli laughs. “Of course she can. She’s married to me, isn’t she?”

Someone who can understand us. Finally, a breakthrough! Except we still have no idea where we are, or how far away Rezira is, or even if we have time to find her before our spells are up.

Back where we started, then. But maybe a couple more cards we’ll have to deal down the road. In the meantime, we have to focus on surviving the night.

“Nightbanes?” I ask as the firelight of the travelers becomes a distant smudge of red.

“Could still be a problem,” Noli admits. “Haven’t really had time to keep an eye out while on the run. But based on last night, we might be safe. Do you think it’s worth it to push through tonight? Get a head start on the road?”

With only the moonlight to guide us, it would certainly be easier to walk the road than these woods. But we don’t need to risk our lives by rushing things. Not yet, at least.

“We stop,” I reluctantly decide.

“We should stop,” Noli signs, showing me the proper grammar. “Or ‘We can stop.’ Or ‘We will stop…’”

It’s going to be a long night.

Finding a hollow at the base of a tree, sheltered on either side by its twisting roots, we settle in to wait out another long night. This time, however, I decide to leave Attunements for another night. Afterall, I’ve already Attuned my largest pieces of glass, which should give me plenty more ammo whenever I want to Sculpt it into many more (and smaller) pieces.

“Book,” I sign, giving Noli a head’s up. Then I summon one of Trenevalt’s tomes. It’s opened up already to some random page in the middle, which doesn’t help answer the question I’m looking for. I put it back in my inventory, then summon it again, but this time upside down.

Its spine is pointing up, spindly silver letters catching the moonlight: Vessel Construction and Binding.

I repeat the process with the second book I’d picked up: Planar Theories.

This second one feels less useful than the first, so I put it back in my inventory, but at least I know what I’m working with now. Wish I would have picked up all his other books while I was at it—and I hope none of the important pages are missing.

“More practice?” Noli asks, shuffling over after I’ve put Vessel Construction page-side-up once more. “We don’t really need the book for that, unless there’s any words in particular you want to learn.”

That’s not exactly what I have in mind. I quickly Sculpt a couple pieces of signing glass to be more flat, then slot them between two pages of the book, and flip the stack of papers over. The book is thicker than I am tall, so it’ll take me a minute to turn the book all the way to the beginning, but I suppose that’s the best place to start.

“You want to read that thing?” Noli asks, catching on as I steadily flip the papers a few at a time. “Whatever for?”

Learn something about our spell, ideally. If there’s one thing those travelers taught us, it’s that we might not be able to rely on others to solve our problem for us. At least this way, if we knew the first thing about what our spell entailed, or how it could be renewed, at least we’d know what sort of help to even ask for if someone gave us a chance to explain.

I make it to the first page. Vessel Construction and Binding, it reads, by Loquacious Skyheart.

Psh, well that’s a pen name if I’ve ever heard one. I flip the page, hoping to find some kind of index. Instead, it appears to be some kind of foreword.

It’s hard to make out by moonlight, but I try to skim the first couple lines.

“Though I doubt, by this level of reading, the text herein needs any introduction, I wish to impart upon the reader the importance of prior mastery within the fields of elemental kinematics, planar deracination, and receptacle harmonics…”

“Dense stuff,” Noli comments as I summon Trenevalt’s charmed bracelet as a makeshift flashlight. Six beads are dark, now. Fifteen days left. “Way over my head. You think you’ll be able to jump into all this without some lower-level stuff first? I mean, I know you’re a wizard and all. I definitely am not doubting your ability or anything. Well, maybe a little. But it takes years of practice to learn these sorts of spells, doesn’t it? It’s not that I don’t think you could learn, but you know, I’m not wild about you practicing in the general vicinity of… me.”

“I’m reading,” I reassure her. Just reading. “No spells.”

“Oh, well in that case.” Noli grabs the bracelet I’ve been trying to shuffle over the page and positions it for me. “Maybe I can help. Anything you’re looking for in particular?”

I tap on the word “Vessel” at the top of the page.

Noli reads it. “Ah. You really think you’ll be able to learn something about our spell?”

I can always try.

With Noli’s help, I flip the pages while she illuminates the areas I point to with my glass. Unfortunately, it’s starting to feel like she’s right. There’s no table of contents, and for that matter there’s hardly even chapter divisions—just the dense, hand-written instructions of a very smart and very incoherent wizard. There’s discussions of proper spell circle drawings: of what each symbol and positioning means relative to one another, and how different intersections of circles would alter the intent of the spell. There are pages dedicated to honing the proper magical frequency of the target vessel. There are even graphs for proper sizing of homunculus shells versus the “Mana density” its core has been imbued with.

Am I reading a book about magic or physics?

Eventually my mind is buzzing with too much information. It feels like the ink in me has been replaced with the contents of a shaken-up bottle of Coke. Wearily, after who knows how many hours, I return the book and bracelet to my Inventory.

[New spells obtained,] Echo abruptly says.

Oh? What spells? I ask.

[Core Bond: Level 1. Mana Stowage: Level 1. Sever Bond: Level 1. Bond Trace: Level 1.]

These all sound like stuff I was reading about in the book. Does that mean I can learn a spell just by reading about it? Nice!

Echo, what does Sever Bond do?

[Sever Bond,] Echo recites. [Prematurely ends a magical tether between two objects. Mana Cost: Equivalent to the Mana sustaining the spell.]

Vague. But maybe it could be used to end our spell, on our own terms. And how much mana is sustaining my spell?

[The spell which binds your soul to the homunculus core is currently consuming 720 mana.]

Or maybe not.

But I still have other spells I learned. Okay, how about Core Bond? What does that do? How much mana does that cost?

[Core Bond: A spell which secures a target energy source to a vessel of the caster’s choosing. Requirements: 30 mana—]

Well that’s not so bad.

[—one spell circle—]

Okay, I could learn that.

[—a target foci—]

Don’t know what that is, but—

[—and null arcanum-enriched salt from the undersea ruins of Emrox, refined into the chalk to be used for the spell circle.]

Okay. That one might be a little harder to get a hold of. But at least now I have a list of ingredients. That’s something, right?

I try to remember the other spells Echo had mentioned. Mana Stowage?

[Mana Stowage,] Echo repeats. [A spell used to temporarily contain magical energy, most frequently used to collect and store power from an arcanum source. Requirements: 50 mana, target arcanum, and the corresponding spell circle.]

Interesting. Was that what Trenevalt had done to catch Noli and I? Some combination of Mana Stowage and Core Bond? But what had gone wrong in all that? The spell, the vessel, the circle… Or maybe it really was just a case of “Wrong place, wrong time.”

Either way, this is a good starting point. It’s something to work with. I don’t have the mana for any of these spells, but maybe an experienced wizard would.

There’s one more spell I’m forgetting. Echo, what was the last one you said?

[Bond Trace: A spell which reveals the arcane threads of a bond. Range: 5 feet. Mana: 10.]

Oh hey, that one at least I can do. Compared to the others, it sounds pretty benign, too.

Alright, Echo. Let’s use Bond Trace. I mentally focus on the spell and feel something click into place.

[Activated.]

A pulse of black emanates from me, passing through Noli and the rest of my surroundings.

She shivers. “Did you feel that?”

No, but I can see it. There’s a light inside Noli that I’d never noticed before, warm and radiating, like a sun. It’s burning so fiercely, with so much sincerity and hope and compassion. It’s so Noli. It’s so… it’s her soul. And barely visible against her light is a strand of light, no thicker than a hair, that’s threaded through her soul and body. The more I look for it, the more I see it, as fine as cobwebs, a gossamer of magic that’s binding Noli’s soul to her clockwork vessel.

Echo, I ask. What happens to Noli if that thread is cut? Or for that matter, if the spell ends on its own.

[A soul which is not bonded in any planar dimension would move Between,] Echo replies.

A resigned dread settles in me. It wouldn’t go back to her body? I ask.

[A soul may only be bound to one physical object at a time,] Echo says.

Echo was right: I didn’t see any other threads coming off of Noli. Was the bond between her body and soul severed when Trenevalt inadvertently bound her to that toy instead? And did that mean that if this thread is similarly severed, she’ll go Between—and then move beyond?

Even more reason to extend our spell until we can figure out how to return to our original bodies. As if the threat of the predator wasn’t enough. Even if it doesn’t catch us, our spell ending means we’ll be perma-dead.

At least, I assume it’s the same for me. Unfortunately I have no easy method of looking at myself while this Bond Trace spell is in effect. Lifting the two flattened pieces of glass I’d been using for page turning, I try to angle them toward myself to catch any glimpse of a reflection I could manage in this half-light. And surprisingly, it works.

The first thing I see is my soul. Glowing so bright my glass seems to vanish behind it, it’s shimmering with all the hues of stubbornness, and resilience, and creativity. Hah, is that really me? I’m flattered. Well, except for that first part. I like to think ‘stubborn’ is just a jealous term for determined.

The thread of magic is there, too. That same tether I’d used to pull myself out from Between when Trenevalt and the predator fought. Woven all about my soul and glass, it appears so thin and insubstantial. Must be stronger than it looks.

But there’s something else there, too. Hidden behind my soul—invisible if I weren’t looking so intently—is a second thread. It’s that same dark-light color as my magic. This thread doesn’t seem to be woven into my glass, however. It’s more like a cut string. It just seems to… end.

Echo, I thought you said a soul can’t be bound to more than one thing.

[Affirmative.]

Then does that mean this string isn’t bound to anything? Maybe it’s the remnants of a string that was cut.

Could it be the string that went to my body? That one was definitely severed. But Noli doesn’t have one. Is it because I died, while Noli was snatched away from her body?

I suppose it could make sense. I don’t have any other ideas.

I let the spell fade.

Now that I’m nearly out of mana, Attunements are seeming less likely—not to mention it’s probably an hour or two before dawn. My mind is spinning with all this new information—spells, the magic book, trying to understand what all this means for us. In other more corporeal circumstances, this would be a great time to get some rest. Let the information digest. But given sleep is no longer an option for me, I opt for a different form of distraction.

“Noli,” I sign, gesturing her over. “Practice?”

“You are a diligent student, Apprentice Kanin,” Noli teases. But she seems as excited as ever to work with me. I settle in, copying Noli’s movements, letting her nudge my glass around in the proper configuration, as the night grows old and the stars wheel above us.