While ensouled artifacts tend to have strong preferences for Fonts that match the affinity of their creators, they are not limited to those. Attempts to isolate the Font’s ensouled artifacts draw upon has shown that not only do they draw on multiple Font’s to create a magical effect, but they also have redundancies. An ensouled artifact that creates fire will not only draw on the Font of Fire, but the Fonts of Heat and Destruction as well, meaning that even in a zone isolated from the Font of Fire, the fire effect could still manifest—though it would be muted.
-Deckard’s Compendium of Ensouled Artifacts
—
Kole woke up and groaned rolling out of bed.
Checking the time, he saw it was still early. He knew he’d stayed out late, and drank too much, but he felt fine.
Why aren’t I miserable? He wondered.
Then the events of the night came back to him, and he remembered Harold’s healing.
Despite himself—and the company—he’d had a lot of fun the night before. But through the whole night, he’d been very aware that he’d been harming his ability to work on his wizardry the following day. He had a very detailed understanding of his own Will recovery rate and knew how to optimize it to allow him to get the most amount of work done. That detailed knowledge told him that drinking alcohol—even a little, but especially in excess—hindered his Will recovery.
But now in his room following a night of excess, he felt fine. Better than fine in fact, he felt good, and his Will was topped off.
Suddenly full of excitement that his day wouldn’t be wasted, he quickly got dressed, threw his spellbook in his bag, and ran off to get something to eat before spending the rest of the day studying.
Kole made it to the library without having to make any excuses to his friends about wanting to spend the day in isolation. He wasn’t ashamed of his likely unhealthy commitment to studying at the expense of social interactions, and his friends understood it wasn’t personal, but it was always awkward to talk about and he preferred to just avoid the interaction at all.
Plus, a part of him knew that if he really was neglecting his responsibilities, his friends wouldn’t take no for an answer when he tried to turn them down. This was a reassurance, but also a nagging fear, that this time would be the time they told him he needed to take a break.
Once in the library, Kole began to plan his day. In his past life back home, he’d not really had the luxury of diversifying his spell work. He’d be lucky to have even one spell to work on with the amount of time and effort it took him to find and rebuild them.
Now ever since his breakthrough discovery with traditional wizardry, he’d found that pursuing multiple projects helped him get more for his efforts. Grinding away at the same spell pathing task had diminishing returns as the session went on. If he could take a break from a spell after hitting a wall, he found when he returned, he could approach the problem from a fresh perspective.
He had two spells he still needed to improve. Thunderwave and Radiant Boll, which cost 8 and 7 Will respectively. He knew they could get as low as 3 or 4 Will, and he was determined to get them there, but he couldn’t focus solely on these.
As part of WIZ 205, he had to learn a defensive spell. He’d been between Blur and Mirror Image, but the brief battle the night before had made up his mind on that matter. He’d not had a lot of experience in the past having to cast a spell while concentrating on another. He’d only had the ability to cast two spells in a day for less than a year, and he’d not been in combat situations before then that would require such a thing.
The night before, his light going out when he cast Thunderwave had been really inconvenient. He knew he could practice, and one day be able to maintain concentration on a spell while casting others. But he could more immediately resolve the problem by simply learning spells that didn’t require his concentration to maintain. This made the choice between Blur and Mirror Image easier.
Blur made his body hard to distinguish and hard to hit, also making his attacks hard to block, but it required he maintain concentration on it. And besides, as far as concentration spells went, Invisibility worked better as well at doing both those things. Mirror Image only lasted a minute, but the illusory duplicates persisted until the time was up, or they were disrupted by an attack. The choice really had been obvious, as he had little offensive capabilities without using his magic, but he’d still waffled between the two until now.
Another thing that battle had taught him was the need for a Light spell that didn’t require concentration. Even the basic light cantrip for Light required a part of his attention constantly to remain active. These duration Light spells were common, and he knew they existed in a dozen different varieties, he just had to learn one. He had the runic devices he could use, but he didn’t want to be dependent on any more items than were necessary.
So, cloistered away in a deserted corner of the library, Kole worked on his wizardry. He began by looking through the test of Galok Lightsmith’s spellbook. As expected, the ancient wizard had a version of Mirror Image, but before he began painstakingly trying to recreate it, he read through the seemingly nonsensical description of the spell.
He began his task by going for the low hanging fruit. Some of the nonsense in the spell description were familiar to Kole and he spent a few minutes doodling the approximate spellform components that corresponded to passages in the spell.
In his use of his new spellbook, he’d learned the nuances of its memory enhancing properties. If he tried to recall anything from after he’d found and Bonded to the book, he could recall the event with perfect clarity if he tried to write about it. This allowed him to create transcripts of lectures he only half paid attention to.
Similarly, if he needed to write about a topic, he could recall any readings he'd done perfectly—including details he’d seen but not paid conscious attention to such as the page number he’d found the information on. These together made academics effortless.
When it came to wizardry, it functioned much the same. If he needed to draw a spellform component he’d drawn at any point after Bonding the spellbook, he could do it from memory without needing to reference the spellform he’d originally copied it from. This rapidly accelerated the pace at which he could create spellforms for spells once he’d mastered the mental construct and needed to scribe the spellform.
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When learning new spells, be it through pathing them or recreating them out of traditional spellbooks, he first always created them in his mind, only putting them to paper once he’d completed them.
Kole was likely the youngest wizard alive that had ever done this task of creating a spellform for a spell construct that lacked one. The art was was not a common one and was only practiced by wizards who were creating new spells—a task reserved the elite or the reckless, but usually both. Traditional wizards didn’t do this, because spellforms hadn’t existed. Contemporary wizards didn’t do this because they learned all their spells from spellforms.
Kole’s current task of drawing spellform components was a means of jogging his memory, not an attempt to create the spellform in full. Doing so without knowing the complete spell was asking for mistakes. As he read through the spell, he’d begin to draw some of the spellform components he thought might fit. As his spellbook filled his mind with the details, he could quickly tell if they were right or not.
Over the course of an hour, Kole had filled a whole page with a random hodgepodge of spellform components. When he stopped to take in his progress, he’d drawn over a hundred, and of those twelve were a part of the spell he needed.
“Twelve out of twelve hundred,” Kole sighed, exaggerating, but not by much.
He went over them, touching each of the spellform components he meant to keep. Idly, he began tapping his nib on the page.
I wish I could erase these other ones, he thought, not particularly wanting to redraw the twelve he needed.
He then recalled another wizard with a magic spellbook similar to his, using the pages covered with runes to create cutlery.
“Why can’t I?” Kole asked aloud.
He touched a spellform component he didn’t want and pictured it disappearing.
And just like that, it was gone.
A huge smile filled Kole’s face as he poked the components he didn’t need, one by one, watching them disappear.
“Boop. Boop. Boop,” he found himself making sound effects with each one.
Then he touched one he meant to keep, and it vanished.
“Flood,” he cursed, rubbing his sore hand.
He began to draw it out again, but stopped, looking from his finger to his nib.
“Could I?” he asked himself.
Gently, he placed the tip of his finger on the page and pictured the component he’d just erased coming back. As he lifted his finger, there it was.
“Whoa,” he said, looking at his finger in awe as if it had just summoned a Fireball.
Kole spent the next twenty minutes in furious experimentation and discovered the mechanics of this new feature.
He could make anything disappear if he touched it. He could make anything reappear so long as it existed in his spellbook already.
Any letter he could reproduce and most words, though if he wanted to make a new word appear, he’d have to do it letter by letter. This he discovered by trying to write made up words by rubbing his finger across the page.
By simply dragging his finger across the page, words and sentences appeared at the speed of thought. As a test, Kole quickly made the opening paragraph of the adventure novel The Lost Prince he’d read appear and found he could write it out verbatim in seconds.
Next, he moved back to spellforms, a little afraid that it wouldn’t work and a little nervous at the implications if it did. He quickly found the limitations were similar. If the spellform had been written into the spellbook, he could have it appear with a thought.
More significantly, it appeared already imbued with the intent of the components of the spell.
After discovering this, he leaned back, taking in the implications of this. Before coming to the Academy, he’d have said that copying spellforms like this was impossible, but seeing the magic paper at the entrance exam had destroyed that notion.
Now, he could copy spellforms at will. The time savings was only the smallest benefit of this discovery—that and the marked decrease in hand cramps in Kole’s future. The largest implication was the Will savings. Imbuing intent into a spellform took a lot of Will. Spellforms didn’t contain a lot of Will, but the act of creating them burned up far more than what remained in the page at the end.
And now, Kole didn’t have to do that anymore. Well—not as much as he quickly discovered.
He could only copy spellforms that were already inside the spellbook. As a test, he ran to the shelf with the old forgotten spellbooks and picked out a spell at random.
Lingering Odor
Second-Tier Mind spell.
This spell will cause the air within a 15 foot area to take on the odor of the casters choosing for 24 hours. Anyone within the area will smell the odor faintly but will not be able to deduce the source. As a Mind spell, strong mental defenses will prevent the spell from taking effect.
He quickly read the spell before putting it into his spellbook.
“No one will miss this one,” he said to himself, more trying to convince himself of the fact than because he believed it.
Despite his words, his mind kept thinking of good uses for the spell.
He pulled the page out carefully, and placed it inside his spellbook as he had with Theral’s spells.
After checking that the spellform had been integrated into his spellbook, he examined the pattern on it and picked out a component he didn’t know, guaranteeing it hadn’t already been written into the book by him.
He willed the component to appear on the page opposite, and the shape appeared. But when he checked the shape lacked the intent.
If is because I didn’t write it? Or because I don’t know it?
He double checked the version he’d inserted into his spellbook and found the intent still within the arcane symbols.
Next, he Willed a random component of the spell Thunderwave that Theral had given to appear, and the strange squiggly shape drew itself beneath his finger, the ink seeming to bleed out of the page. This shape too lacked the Will imbued information that held the sliver of the spell.
“Because I didn’t write it,” Kole said with a sigh.
He’d briefly dreamed of shoving every spellbook from the forgotten section of the library into his spellbook and reaping the rewards of decades of accumulated knowledge. Though, in hindsight, that likely would have caught someone’s attention, even if that section seemed abandoned.
As a final test, Kole copied the shape of a component he wasn’t familiar with, and then transferred the Will from the old book to his new copy, putting a finger on each and quickly recreating the unfamiliar intent. Once finished, an act of only a few moments, he touched the paper beside the symbol, and willed another to appear. It did, containing the same intent.
Kole stood up, and began to pace, thinking through how he could use this to his advantage.
A short time later, Kole found himself in the old spellbook section of the library once more. He looked through the index in search of Mirror Image and found dozens of entries. He picked the oldest three, pulled the books from the shelves to confirm the Will inside them hadn’t deteriorated, and brought them back to his table.
Next, he did something he felt quite bad about, but not bad enough to stop himself from doing it. He carefully tore the pages out of Galok’s and put them into his own spellbook. He normally wouldn’t have done this, but there had been seventeen copies of this particular book in the depths of the library, and none of them seemed to have been touched in decades.
And then, he was ready.
He pulled out the first copy of Mirror Image and set it next to his spellbook and began to painstakingly draw the first component of the spellform.
Fifteen minutes later, it was done. He’d drawn a tiny fragment of the great swirling mass of lines that made up the spellform of the second-tier Light spell. He copied the intent of that piece over, and then looked at the largely blank page before him.
“This is going to take forever,” he said, but then had another idea.
Do I need to actually draw it? Or imbue it?
He decided to do something else he felt really bad about. He didn’t think anyone would miss these copies of Mirror Image, but he was certain they would be missed more than the odor spell.
“Maybe I test that one,” he said before going forward with his plan.
He looked back to the Lingering Odor spell, found another component he didn’t know, and willed it to appear on the page opposite. Then, he copied the small fragment of Will over to the copy. After that was done, he willed a third copy of the shape to appear beside the other, and this time he sensed the intent within it immediately.
“Whoop!” he cheered, and then looked around in alarm at his own outburst.
He relaxed as there was no one in this section, and aside from the natural noise dampening effect stacks of books had, this library was further silenced via magic.
All trepidation he’d had was now gone, and he carefully tore the first copy of Mirror Image out of the spellbook and placed it into his own.