While it is still unknown and heavily debated as to how the dwarves knew to prepare Basin for the Flood, it is universally accepted that without that action, the Illusian races would have been lost to the Flood.
-A Brief History of the Flood by Albert Moonsuckle
----------------------------------------
The party broke up shortly after Doug’s departure, and they all headed back home.
On the way, Kole thought over the implications of their encounter with Runt.
Are we really doing this again? He asked himself over and over, unsure how he felt about it.
The larger sensible part of him that preferred to spend as much time studying to improve his wizardry thought they should just take whatever information they found straight to the Academy’s staff. But the smaller—yet rapidly growing—part of him that had gotten a taste for adventuring wanted to... he wasn’t exactly sure, but he was certain meekly turning over information to adults to handle the problem for him wasn’t it.
He wasn’t being stupid, at least that's what he kept telling himself. Their plans weren’t to thwart the possible invasion of the Midlian remnants from whatever other Realm they’d hidden in all these years. They just wanted to find Amintha. Sure, she was terrifying, in the uncanny way she looked exactly like the sweet and innocent Amara while being a literal sociopath who’d capture other people imprison and drain for power, but she’d lost all that power, and as far as they’d seen and heard from Amara, she wasn’t individually powerful.
By the time they got back home, Kole had mostly talked himself around to being okay with the decision they’d made to investigate these occurrences, but he couldn't help but wish Tal and Zale’s mother were here.
“What’s everyone want to do now?“ Zale asked when they got home.
“Bed,” Rakin said, walking past her.
Zale nodded to Rakin, unconcerned by his rejection.
“I’ve got so much work to do,” Amara said, holding up a notebook she’d been sketching in the whole walk back.
None of them were certain what she was doing. She’d explained what she’d been working on in detail on the way back, but that had been the problem. It had been in exacting detail and none of them had the knowledge in runecrafting to see the bigger picture.
Zale nodded at that and looked to Kole hopefully.
While part of Kole had been worrying over their plans to find Amintha, another part of his mind had been reviewing his spell construct in his mental vault. Mental vaults, while essential for wizardry, served purposes even for people who constructed them without the intention of ever crafting a bridge. As he’d explained to Rakin, he was working on gaining some of these benefits.
“I’ve got a new variant of Radiant Bolt I’m going to try,” he said.
“Oh, okay,” Zale said, disappointment evident.
What did I do? Kole wondered.
She’d not cared when Rakin and Amara had left, so he’d taken that as leave to be a hermit as well.
“I can—” he began, but Zale shook her head.
“It’s fine,” she said, forcing a smile. “Just don’t stay up too late.”
“I promise,” Kole said with every intention of keeping his word.
Too many hours later, Kole fell asleep. He’d begun working at his desk, reviewing the spellform he was constructing for Radiant Bolt on paper even as he worked on the construct in his mind, but after a while he’d moved to his bed to begin work on his pathing.
At first, he would leave his vault bringing his awareness back to reality after every attempt to monitor the time. But as his work progressed, he sensed he was getting close and his patience left him. With each failed attempt of the spell, he dove back in tweaking the spell and trying again.
Closer and closer, his spell made its way to the Font of Light, until... he fell asleep.
The next morning, Kole woke up confused after having vivid dreams of success in his spell casting. Without checking the time, or even getting out of bed, he dove right back into it once realizing the success he’d experienced had been a dream.
And some unknown time later—unknown to Kole at least, but five hours to his friends who’d long since stopped waiting for him to get up—Kole sent his spell construct into the Arcane Realm, and a brilliant bolt of golden light shot out from his hand and hit the ceiling before dispersing.
Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.
“I did it!” he shouted, but no one was around to see it.
At that point, Kole realized he’d not seen the pack rat around since the Dahn had tightened its security, or Theral for that matter.
Is that a coincidence or related? he wondered.
Finally, Kole got out of bed, with a rumbling stomach and went out into the communal living area to find it empty. The clock showed it to be almost dinner time.
He went back to his room, got dressed, and went to find some dinner, but somehow his feet found their way to the spell range. Which was an accomplishment as the spell range was quite a way off campus after that section of the Dahn had been closed off.
While the spell range was no longer complete with openings into the void for students to safely cast extremely destructive spells into, it still had some magical trappings. The target golems, for one, were what Kole was after in his trip here. From his research Kole knew Radiant Bolt caused the target to feel a whole body burning sensation that wasn’t caused by fire or affected by fire resistance. The pain came from inside out—which to Kole seemed horrible. The spell also cast the target in a wreath of golden light for a few moments after it struck, illuminating the space around them and making it harder to obscure oneself and impossible to turn invisible.
Kole was tempted to find a way to cast it on himself and then test it, but the whole ‘burning from the inside out’ thing quickly ended his curiosity.
Kole found the spell range to be fairly active at dinner time on a Sunday, unlike the last time Kole had completed a spell and rushed out immediately to test it. Of course, that time had been in the middle of the night.
He eventually found a bay with the target style he was looking for, a golem that had an enchantment on it that let it simulate the effects of striking a person. Many spells, when cast on inanimate objects, didn’t have their full effect in force. Lightning magic, for example, was more likely to strike a living target than a rock. Dummies like these let wizards practice their magic fully, without having to find willing targets.
Kole lined up his shot, pointing his index finger at the target dummy thirty feet away, built the construct for the spell, and sent it out through his bridge. The beam of golden light appeared at the tip of his finger, and flew across the field, striking the dummy in the chest. The range was lit by magical lights, but Kole turned them off quickly after hitting, to see the dummy emitted a gentle golden glow, illuminating the space around it for five feet.
Kole smiled to himself, taking stock of his Will. That spell had definitely taken less than 10, but more than the 5 that would mark it as a first tier spell. Being a traditionally cast spell he’d literally just created, the Will cost was not optimized. He knew from his reading and discussions with Theral and Tal, that if he put the time in, he could get the cost of first tier spells down as low as 2 Will, but 3 to 4 was more likely as the Font of Illusions was his highest affinity, and Sound and Light magic were a bit further from his bridge.
The spell description also stated that this spell was effective over one hundred feet. Kole turned the lights back on, each sitting below a dummy illuminating the target. He found the one sitting at the hundred-foot mark, pointed, and fired. The beam of light streaked across the field once more in an eye blink, and missed the dummy by… quite a bit. He watched the beam briefly light up the night up to the one hundred and forty foot mark before it grew too diffuse to be called much of anything.
“Well Flood,” he cursed.
Magic Missile, which had a similarly long range, didn’t require Kole to aim so much as envision what he wanted to hit and generally point in its direction. This, he realized, would take some more practice.
Two more times he cast the spell, finally striking the target on the fourth attempt.
“Woo!” he shouted in celebration, earning a few curious looks from those at the bays besides him, but Kole recognized none of them from his classes.
At least I didn’t try to turn invisible, he reflected.
His go to response to unwanted attention and embarrassment had always been to turn invisible and hide. He wasn’t sure when that had started to fade, but he hadn’t even considered it in that moment—though he had grown a bit red in embarrassment at the attention.
But, what seventeen-year-old boy wasn’t embarrassed regularly by his own actions?
8 Will, he decided, after gauging how much he’d spent.
He was now very low on Will, but could probably cast the spell a fifth time if he wanted to walk around with a headache the rest of the day.
Kole looked up at the sky.
Well, the rest of the night, he corrected.
From the morning’s work, he figured he’d spent about 6. So with a capacity of 48, he guessed the spell to be between 7 and 9. He’d long since gotten fairly proficient in guessing Will costs.
While Kole was frugal with his money—though others would simply call him cheap—he was extremely discerning in his use of Will. The typical means of measuring a spells cost was to cast the spell into a special runic device meant to measure the expenditure. That, in Kole’s opinion, was a good way to waste Will that could better be spent practicing magic, so he’d tried hard to learn to gauge his usage without it. It also helped that—due to his own particular struggles in opening gates artificially increasing spell costs—those gauges never truly worked for him.
But Kole liked to think it was his judicial usage of Will that let him gain the skill.
Gurgle
Kole felt at his stomach, telling him it was time to find a meal.
He made his way back to campus, but his friends were nowhere to be found. Belatedly he thought to check the signaling devices Amara had made, but ever since they’d all moved in together, they’d gotten out of the habit of using those, and he’d left his back in his room.
So Kole ate alone and then headed to the library to finish up the classwork for the week ahead, proud with his accomplishment and excited to see how he could further reduce the cost. But that was for tomorrow, for tonight he had to write a paper about the Midlian Empire.
While history was not his favorite topic, he found himself somewhat eager to begin. The purpose of history classes as part of the adventuring track curriculum were to prepare prospective adventurers for the dangers they might face in forgotten ruins, or even help them uncover them. But now with the potential that the Midlian Empire was still very much alive and poised to invade, Kole found researching the topic had an allure similar to when studying goblins or other foes he might face.
Though, as Kole read about the horrible atrocities committed in the name of magical study, that allure was replaced with no small amount of dread.