Primal creatures typically exhibit one to three distinct manifestations of the Font’s power. The key identifying feature distinguishing a primal creature from a formed or magical creature is that it is identical in appearance to a mundane animal and exhibits magic that could be ascribed to a single Font. Pack rats are primal creatures. They live in swarms alongside their non-magical cousins and are indistinguishable from them. Though I have not performed the test, based on previous primal breeding programs, it is expected that cross-breeding with mundane rats would result in non-magical rats that could produce primal offspring if bred with primal rats.

Lidian’s Manual to Magical Fauna, 283rd ed

—

After Zale left, Rakin and Amara stayed in the training hall a while longer. Rakin was focusing on expanding the range he could sense with his stone sense, while Amara was trying to glean ’understandings’ from mundane objects.

Kole read a book, angrily trying to forget about his lack of advice.

“Can we get out of here?” Kole asked, slamming the book down.

“Okay,” Amara said, placing a quill down on the desk gently.

“Nah,” Rakin, said, eyes still closed in concentration. “I’m staying.”

“What do you have planned for today?” Kole asked Amara.

“Well…” Amara began uncertainly, looking at the ground as she twirled her toe, tracing a circle. “I was going to go look for my sister.”

“Alright, let's go then.”

“Really?! You’ll help?” she asked, almost making eye contact in the excitement.

“Yeah. I said I would. Didn’t I?” Kole said, thinking.

Had he told her he’d help? He was pretty sure he had.

Amara pulled a familiar-looking device out of her pocket.

“This is a tracker I built to find my sister, like the paired ones we have. It uses the Font of Understanding as a conduit and filters out…” she trailed off looking at the small stone object. “It’s broken. It was working before. I swear!”

The stack of small little stone disks was spinning rapidly, pointing in one direction, then spinning for a while before stopping and pointing in another direction before spinning randomly once more.

“Well, it was sort of working before. It would jump around like she was moving, but nothing like this.”

Amara continued to stare at the device, chewing her lip.

"Do you want to go fix it?" he asked.

"Yes, thanks see you later!" she said in a breath, running out of the room.

Kole smiled, watching her go. He'd been willing to help her search, but he hadn't exactly been excited about it. His study into the new version of Shield was almost reaching a breaking point. If he could focus this weekend, he'd be able to learn the new version of the spell.

Then he recalled his assignments for the week and his smile faded. He knew himself well enough to know that if he let himself start working on spells, he'd wake up Monday morning with nothing else accomplished.

***

Kole left the strange basement room and navigated his way to the college proper. The sun was high in the sky when he left, and he took a moment to marvel at it. The Globe of Day, the great orb of light at the apex of the dome back home had been a magical wonder, but it paled in comparison to the natural beauty of the sun. Though Kole supposed, the sun itself was a magical wonder, created by the gods using the Fonts just as man had created the light in Illandrios, only, much, much grander.

Since he had the time, he went out into the city to buy some food for the weekend. He didn't plan on leaving the library once he'd entered, and he hoped his presence would keep any time-traveling rats away—not that it had the last time.

Kole eventually made his way back to his corner of the library with a bag full of food, and slightly lighter on coin.

The first assignment to get out of the way was for WIZ 105. He had already settled on two of the spells he would learn for the year; Shield and Magic Missile. The third he was still uncertain on, and if he was being honest with himself, he had no prospects. For the purposes of the assignment, he wrote down Sleep. As a nonlethal spell that can deal with large numbers of smaller enemies, it filled two large holes in his repertoire. No matter what he discovered, he doubted that he’d ever suffer from a preponderance of spell options, so it would be wise if he picked up spells useful in multiple situations instead of highly specialized ones.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

It took him half an hour to write up his reasoning for his spell selection, and he moved on to his alchemy and history. These assignments were just reading, which was simple but time-consuming.

As soon as he finished his last chapter on the ill-fated Midlian expedition to the pre-Flood Basin, he slammed the book down and pulled out the old spellbook he’d been working on. He’d nearly completed copying the spellform into his own spellbook. The process was arduous and required him to reconstruct the faded and damaged components by referencing his spellbook and other available spellforms, but once he’d done that, he could move onto the hopefully easier phase.

His supply of Will conductive ink was running dangerously low, but he expected that he had enough to finish this one spell. The ink was expensive back home, but he had hoped the cost would be more affordable in the city. If not, at least he wouldn’t be any more homeless than he already was if he ran out of funds.

Getting by on only Zale’s breakfasts wouldn’t be easy, but he wouldn’t starve—unless these weekend trips were a regular thing. He resolved to ask about that as soon as he could think of a way to do so without sounding like a desperate beggar.

After hours of hunched-back toil, he was just about to finish, but Kole couldn’t ignore the rumble in his stomach any longer. He wasn’t sure what time it was, but he knew it to be late. He wrestled with his desire to continue weighed against his hunger, but his hunger won out.

***

“I should probably take a break,” he said aloud to himself.

Taking a block of cheese and apple as his meal, Kole took a stroll through the stacks, intending to check on the hidden room. Walking around helped clear his head, and he often connected the dots to problems in these mid-study strolls, though getting himself to remember to take one was always a challenge.

In the hidden room, the bed he’d made looked just as he’d left it after his first visit, but the mayonnaise had been cleaned up. That in itself meant nothing, since sections of the Dahn had various degrees of self-cleaning magic at work.

He sat on the bed to eat and looked at the wall. At some point he couldn’t recall, his sitting had turned to laying, and that in turn became sleep.

The first thing Kole noticed upon waking was the lack of pain. If a bedroll existed that could make the stone floor of the Dahn’s library comfortable, it was out of Kole’s price range, and he’d woken up stiff and sore every day of the past week—not that he’d even had a bed roll. Today he felt comfortable and refreshed. Eventually, his brain caught up with him, and he realized he must have fallen asleep in the possibly-occupied room.

Kole jumped to his feet, casting Invisibility as he did, but a quick scan showed the room to be empty. Quickly—and still invisible—he made the bed, putting in his marking folds, and snuck out the door into the library. As he was crawling through the small hole in the shelf he’d created, arms spread out ahead of him, he noticed something else. His clothes were clean.

They hadn’t exactly been filthy before, but he was a teenage boy, and that came with certain odors he lacked the magics or funds to mitigate. Bathing at the martial college every day helped a lot, but his three sets of clothing had been in need of a thorough washing.

But now, armpit in his own face, he realized it didn’t smell too bad.

Did the Dahn’s enchantments clean my clothes while I slept? He wondered.

He really hoped no one was using that room and he could move in.

“Flood!” he shouted to himself when his nook came back into view. He’d left his light on—which had been a mistake—but by that light, he saw three rats digging through his bag of food. They scurried away as he ran, disappearing into the books on the shelves, but the damage was done. He took what he could salvage out of the chewed-up bag, and threw the rest back into the destroyed satchel.

Angry, frustrated, and hungry—but not sleepy, stinky, or sore—Kole got back to work.

***

Some unknowable amount of time later—but not a small amount judging by the sleepiness, stink, and back pain Kole had regained—he finished his task.

Before him sat a completed spellform, but more than that, each little painstakingly scribed swirl and squiggle was filled with Will. He’d checked, double-checked, and then triple-checked, found a mistake fixed it, and checked it all again, but now he’d done it.

The spellform was finished, the spell was imbued into it, and most importantly, stored in Kole’s mind. Now all he had to do was test it. What he wouldn’t do for a rat at that moment.

Thinking of rats, Kole turned to his pile of ruined food scraps and pulled out an apple core. He arranged his desk into the middle of the racks, placed the apple core on it, and walked back a dozen paces.

Without further ado, Kole filled the mental spell template with his Will, recreating the spell in an instant, and then tried to move his bridge to open at the requisite gate. This was the tricky part.

The Will cost of a spell was a complicated interplay of spell and path complexity, one can be sacrificed for the other, but the end cost was multiplicative, not additive, making it an art to balance. Unfortunately for Kole, the Will cost for him to move his bridge was exorbitant, and it was like wrestling with reality itself to make it budge. But, budge it did.

Will flowed from him, into the Arcane Realm, returning just as it left. He spoke the verbal component of the spell, infusing this too with Will, preparing the Material Realm to accept the magic of the Arcane more easily.

“Roh Ka!”

Three faint shimmers of light shot from his outstretched hand toward the apple in the blink of an eye. The first obliterated the apple, and the next two shot past it, thankfully striking the ground harmlessly.

“Oops,” he said to himself. “Maybe I don’t test spells here again… Offensive ones at least.”

He thought back to the Will cost he’d just expended. It had definitely been less than his old version, which measured in at 40 Will. But only by a little, maybe 10 or 20 percent, putting in the range of 32 to 36 Will. He was a little disappointed, but at the same time, it gave him hope. Coming to the Dahn had been the right choice. This place held the key to his problems, he just had to find them. Even if no one seemed willing to help.

Just then, the high-pitched whine of his alarm went off, signaling it was time to wake up and meet Zale for training.

“Flood,” he cursed.

Either he’d slept much longer than he realized, or he’d truly been lost in his work. Probably a combination of the two he reflected, but in either case, this day was going to be unpleasant.

He ran off to meet Zale, dread for the weary day ahead tempered by his recent success.