I spied the same attendant as yesterday through the crack in the crate I was in as he locked the door behind him, the jingle of keys and an upbeat whistle accompanying his departure. As his footsteps finally faded off into the distance, I pushed the lid off of me and breathed in the fresh air.
“God, that took forever!” I complained, stepping out of the pile of furry sardines as I massaged my dead limbs. “Did he really have to make three sandwiches before he left?”
We’d snuck in through a side door of the library, one which had led straight into the staff kitchen it apparently had attached. It was only by a miracle that we hadn’t been seen by two other librarians who’d been in the room at the time, and I had managed to repeat the same trick I’d done in the warehouse, only that this time it had taken much longer. Almost twenty minutes longer.
Personally, I quite liked the fish crate. Gideon licked his lips, catching a scrap of meat from his chin. Though I could do without the fur.
After a few minutes of trying to wipe the dead fish smell off of myself and failing, I left the kitchen into the main atrium of the library.
If the library was stunning during the day, it was dazzling in the night. Dull glyphs, unnoticed in the harsh light of the sun, suddenly gleamed free among the shelves, mingling with the dim moonlight of the rising twins to almost give the huge room an ethereal feeling, as if each tome were filled with magical power. Despite the long day the exhaustion left my limbs again as I slowly spun to take in the sight, my coat swirling around as I committed the whole thing to memory.
If I ever got back to Earth, I was definitely going to take up painting. And I was going to make some really kickass minecraft builds.
Far from being as eerie as I thought it’d be, I found that I almost couldn’t walk slow enough in the empty library as I made my way to the main entrance, but before long I was already there. Upon sighting it, I dashed behind the desk in the back, hoping that their security was as bad as I hoped, whooping when I found a box tucked on the bottom shelf marked with the words ‘Third Fl. Passes’ on it.
“Saphry?”
My cheers died in my throat as the words chimed out behind me, and my left hand slowly reached into my shirt for the handle of the knife I kept in there. After a second I whirled around with it, sending my ambusher flying to the floor in a panic.
“Wait! Wait! I’m sorry!” Auro looked at me with one eye between her arms. “I wasn’t going to report you!”
I stared at her for a second in astonishment before finally lowering my guard.
“Why are you even here?” I set the knife on the desk and laughed. “Are you following me or something?”
“No, of course not!” She slowly lowered her arms from her face and accepted my hand up. “I simply… lost track of the time while reading!”
I really had misjudged her earlier, hadn’t I? She was here for the thaumaturgy too, that much was obvious from her manner and how she’d acted before. But what were the chances that we chose the same night? Or rather, what were the chances that we were both so incredibly impulsive to break in the first night after speaking with Hans?
Maybe the people here weren’t so red after all.
“Uh-huh, I’m sure.” I grinned as I raised up the pass. “I guess I’ll just be reading up on the third floor by myself then.”
“Oh, it looks like I might be losing a little more track of time…”
Laughing, I passed her another one of the glyph marked slips and we walked towards the stairs at the end of the atrium together.
…
“I wouldn’t expect too much right away.” Auro warned as we crested to the top floor. “I tried this a couple years ago once and wasn’t able to even cast any of the exercises.”
“We’ll see.”
The third floor was arranged in almost the exact same way as the second, with a massive balcony ringing the walls while wide bridges filled with shelves and tables periodically jutted off to join with the other side. Huge flags hung from each of these bridges, and it was from these flags that Auro pointed out the bridge holding the most simple of thaumaturgies: pyromancy.
We joined Auro at a table on the bridge, picking out and stacking up books that Gideon or I found interesting, though mostly we chose guides and textbooks meant for beginners.
It was pretty interesting just how different this experience was to just reading the grimoire, and yet how it felt. The grimoire back on Earth had been organised as a collection of different authors, each over a different branch of magic. Almost half of it had been devoted to cryomancy or other sub forms of combat casting, covering the basic principles of spell crafting and how you could tweak it to do just about anything you could think of. It was a complicated affair if you wanted anything truly neat however, practically requiring that you wrote down and mathed out how you wanted a new spell to work before you attempted it, and the really big spells were almost impossibly complex to work out, limiting the scale quite a bit.
That wasn’t the only thing stopping someone from dumping out huge earth-shattering spells every four seconds though, for the magic had a small sort of accumulated blowback on the user which clouded the user’s mind the more they used magic consistently. This clouding would keep coming, appearing to outsiders as if the user was getting drunker and drunker until eventually the user collapsed in a stupor. Some magicians lasted longer of course- one of the people I’d met doing the hero gig had been able to cast almost twice what I was able to- but it meant nobody could handle a magical duel for too terribly long lest they begin to go loopy. And being drunk in the middle of a fight was liable to get you killed.
After seeing the long casts Andril had performed under the church, I had been expecting magic to be relatively the same, or I had hoped. Despite that, I was surprised when I opened up the first book and began reading the same opening as I had first read in the Grimoire a year or so ago.
It wasn’t the exact same of course, it was a different author and a different language, but it began with the same basic principles.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
1.Using a base casting word, which was in Verol’s case an ancient dialect called ‘Lmeri’, begin the cast visualising a box with inputs and outputs.
This one was always the one that tripped you up in my experience, as you couldn’t just start chanting dozens of spell names to cast a billion at a time, but you had to really visualise some kind of arcane construct in your mind as you did so. The grimoire on Earth had told of ancient techniques for specific spells like ‘visualise a spectral bear holding a spear’, but apparently the magical community here had settled on teaching the simple casting box, which was admittedly much easier.
This box was a simple answer to a simple purpose. Spells were normally designed in strange and…well, arcane ways, and the ways they consumed magical power had to be carefully fed to them. Casting a spell was almost like a circuitry problem, in that you needed to put the right amount of power into very specific parts of your arcane construct for it to work correctly. For example, to cast an ice bolt spell I might need to put a small amount into the input ‘cold’, a moderate amount into ‘form’, and as much as I wanted in ‘force’ for it to cast. For the more poorly crafted spells, they might even have two or three inputs for ‘force’ or ‘’form’. It wasn’t like crafting a spell was easy, after all, and some people didn’t care about cleaning up their work before it was published in the grimoire apparently.
For the book in front of me however, there was a different instruction for that step.
2. Measure out mana expelled into ‘rin’, or the amount it takes yourself to summon a single spark, and put the exact portions into the spell as specified.
“Holy shit.” I breathed, drawing Gideon’s head from the railing.
What’s wrong? He squinted at me. Is it extremely complicated?
“No, it’s extremely easy to understand.” I rubbed my eyes, thinking of the thousands of miscasts I’d undergone learning each individual spell back on Earth. “Why didn’t the grimoire explain its spells like this?”
If all the spell recipes had been explained in such easy to understand units instead of the ‘large amount’, ‘massive amount’, and ‘very small amount’ descriptors it had given instead, everything would’ve advanced so much faster. It might not sound like a ton of effort to experience with a single input spell, varying the inputted ‘mana’ until the shoddily crafted spell stopped either failing or exploding, but when the actually useful spells needed upwards of ten or twenty inputs and most of their tolerances were legendarily small, it quickly became a level of tedium that almost preventing me from learning them. You almost needed to guess the spell crafter’s intentions when you were learning a spell for the first time if you wanted to get it relatively right.
But this? By having such specific amounts I surmised an experienced caster could probably cast them first try. In fact…
I skipped the rest of the steps until I found a small list of exercise spells, starting with the one for spark:
Spark
Phrase: Spatal
1 Input(Heat): 1 rin
1 Output: Projection(Palm), Forward, Hot
According to the small blurb before it, this was the first spell anybody should learn, as most everything else was based off of it. I glanced over the small clinical graphic showing a blue box with two holes before pushing it aside, visualising the box before I spoke.
“You won’t be able to do it if you just skip the entire beginning.” Auro warned from the bookshelf.
Ignoring her, I pointed my palms at each other, roughly half a foot apart in order to catch the spark if it worked. After taking one last deep breath, I began.
“Spatal.”
I felt a small rush as a small amount of mana was leeched off of me, and the spell successfully cast, only for that to give way to confusion as I stared at what had appeared in the centre of my palm.
Not a spark, but a snowflake.
“Didn’t work, right?” Auro smiled at me from the shelf, and I smashed my palms together in panic. “Like I said: it’s hard!”
Why did a snowflake come out? The output was for heat! Was the wrong word in the spellbook? Or perhaps it had meant a ‘spark of winter’ somehow?
“Auro?” I didn’t turn, instead reading through the short spell description again, finding that it clearly mentioned the spark being a prelude to a ‘flame’.
“Yep?”
Unlike her very rookie problem of a visualisation problem, this was a much more confusing one, as so far I had not seen anyone use any thaumaturgy that didn’t involve fire. Though, seeing as I hadn’t seen too much thaumaturgy here in general, I thought it prudent to ask before I freaked out.
“Have you ever heard of anyone using a different kind of magic?”
“Hmm? Like warding or…?”
“No, like… like ice magic?” I clarified. “Like pyromancies but without the whole ‘pyro’ part.”
She tilted her head and looked upwards as she thought about it.
“Err, no… wait.” She nodded. “Do you mean like the old fables? The ones about when we first got thaumaturgy? Didn’t they say they used all kinds of magic like that back then? I definitely remember ice and wind and ethereal…”
“But no one today?”
“I mean, I wouldn’t think so.” She frowned. “That’s kind of a cardinal rule of magic, which you’d know if you actually read the opening there.”
“Ha, yeah, of course…”
Auro glanced away for a second, at another bridge further down.
“I’m gonna to check out the banishment section for a bit, actually. Do you need help with that?”
I shook my head, and she took off down the ring, leaving me and Gideon alone.
Don’t tell me. The drake hopped over to the table, having heard our conversation, and I simply opened my hand for him to see.
“Spatal.”
Again, a small snowflake materialized in front of my hand, outlined in blue for a quarter second.
That… is strange. He matched my gaze. Even pulling from Silst’s extensive memories, I don’t remember ever seeing anyone here cast with anything but fire. Do you think it was a Saphry thing?
“I don’t know.” I said honestly. “From what I can tell, she’s never casted anything before, so it’s hard to know. But-”
But it’d be just a little too convenient. Gideon finished.
I nodded. “Exactly.”
So what, do you think element is linked to the soul or something crazy like that? That your type followed you over?
I glanced over at Auro, making sure she was on the other bridge before I continued in a whisper.
“Probably. Why don’t you try casting something? That’d confirm it right away.”
But the dragon shook its head.
Can’t. Dragons can’t use thaumaturgy.
“Wait, really?” I pat him on the back. “I’m sorry, man. That sucks.”
I wasn’t really big on it anyway. He laughed. You know, it’s a little stupid, but I’m actually kind of relieved you can’t use pyromancy.
“Why’s that?” I stared wistfully at the spell entries. “I always thought fire throwing was the very picture of magework. You know, casting fireball and such.”
Neither you or Saphry really look like pyromancers. He said. With the hair and the colour palette it just looks right to see snowflakes come out instead.
“What a dumb reason…”
Suddenly a thought came to mind, and I looked at the drake in horror.
“...I don’t look like Elsa, do I?” I hadn’t thought about it before, but we both had long white hair right? I’d have to check when I got back to my room, see if I were able to look at myself without ‘letting it go’…
Err, not really, though that is some good ammunition…
“Veto. No.” I crossed my arms in front of me into the shape of an ‘x’. “Or I’m calling you Saphira from now on.”
I actually liked Eragon.
“I’m-”
A loud clanging and the drum of metal boots interrupted me as what sounded like a small company of people entered the library. Faint sounds of hurried commands amid the din of sheathes banging on armour had me immediately imagine soldiers.
What were they doing here so late? Seriously, what the hell was my luck?
Carefully I peeked over the railing to see half a dozen blue lanterns already entering the atrium. Whatever they were here for, they didn’t look friendly.
“The books should be on the top floor!” A harsh voice shouted at the others, and I heard the heavy footfalls start to climb the first flight.
I looked once again, only for my mind to immediately buckle in confusion when I saw the symbol inscribed on their tabards and shoulders.
Why were the king’s soldiers raiding the library?