Some wizards have learned to incorporate their spells into their casting, allowing them to use the artifact as the origin of the spell. A common application of this is using ensouled weapons as delivery devices for otherwise weak short range cantrips such Shock. Other wizards have crafted spells that required the ensouled artifact to cast. If a wizard has bonded an ensouled artifact with a strong connection to a Font, that artifact can serve as a focus for spellcasting, and spells crafted to take advantage of that connection can be cast with greatly reduced cost and complexity.
-Deckard’s Compendium of Ensouled Artifacts
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“What's wrong with yer face?” Rakin asked Kole as he came in late to join them for dinner.
Kole felt his face in concern for a moment before stopping himself.
“Don’t be a jerk,” Zale chasized her cousin. “He’s happy.”
Kole hadn’t been able to stop smiling since he’d left the spell range and his face was beginning to hurt. He’d spent a few hours there that afternoon, working on Thunderwave, and after that ran off to the library to copy more spells into his book to reduce the cost of all of his spells.
“I had another breakthrough,” Kole said, trying and failing to contain his smile.
“New spells?” Rakin asked, sounding actually interested.
Kole shook his head.
“Radiant Bolt and Thunderwave now both cost about 5 Will,” Kole said proudly.
Rakin let out an impressed whistle. Without context, making a first tier spell cost 5 Will wasn’t a notable feat. 5 Will was basically the threshold that established what was and wasn't a first-tier spell once properly optimized.
But the process of optimizing took months, and Kole had done it in days. On top of that, Kole’s massive Will reserve meant that he could now cast these spells far more times than his classmates could cast their cheaper modern 3 Will first-tier spells.
“Yer magic book do that for ya?” Rakin asked.
“Yeah,” Kole said, excited for the chance to explain. “I found I could review—”
“Ahp!” Rakin said, raising his hand to stop Kole. “I’m happy for ye, but I don’t really care about the details.”
Kole looked at Zale, who blushed slightly and sunk in her chair.
“I’m sort of with him on this,” she said. “I’m probably happier for you than he is though if that’s any consolation.”
Kole found that it was, and just nodded, keeping the explanation to himself. He knew how they felt after all. He’d been on the receiving end of more than one of Amara’s explanations.
“So are you just planning on staying in your room studying for the rest of the week, or will you be able to hangout outside of training?” Zale asked.
“Training is not ‘hanging out’,” Kole said, not answering her question.
Zale frowned, and looked to Rakin for support.
“It totally is!” she insisted.
“Sure, if yer a sadist,” Rakin said, laughing to himself.
“It is!” Zale insisted again.
“So you admit you're a sadist!” Kole said, joining.
Zale’s mouth opened and shut, as she grew more flustered, and then she gave up, sinking back down into her chair.
“I just like training with you guys,” she said, defeated.
She dabbed lightly at her eye, as if catching a tear. In a tone that put a pit in Kole’s stomach she continued.
“And I thought you guys liked spending time with me.”
Kole and Rakin both looked at each other uncomfortably for a moment before both speaking at once, denying they didn’t want to spend time with her, until Zale started to shudder.
Oh no... Kole thought, but before he could beat himself up over it too much, Zale began to let out laughs.
“I got you!” she said, pointing at Rakin.
“Aye, ye did,” the dwarf admitted, hands in the air. “Turnabout is fair play.”
“What?” Kole demanded, relieved he hadn’t actually made her cry.
“You called me a sadist!” Zale insisted.
“I stand by that,” Kole said, and the trio spent the rest of the dinner debating whether or not Kole deserved the prank.
After dinner, Kole ran into the library to get a few new spells. He started with collecting old spellform copies of Radiant Bolt and Thunderwave, and once he had a large pile, began perusing the old spellbook catalog for others that might be of interest.
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After an hour, he had a rather large stack of spellbooks, each with a strip of paper from his own spellbook protruding out the side marking the location and name of the spell he saved.
Kole sat down to begin copying spells into his spellbook, and a thought struck.
“Wait...” he said aloud.
Am I really going to rip pages out of all these spellbooks?
He eyed his stack of spellbooks,
He’d been in a bit of a mania when he’d ripped out Mirror Image and justified it to himself despite knowing it was wrong. But now, there were dozens of spellbooks here.
He hummed thoughtfully.
“Maybe...””
With his spellbook open to a blank page, he flipped it over and lay it atop the spellform for Radiant Bolt he was copying. After leaving it there for a moment, he pulled it back up, only for the page to remain blank.
He tried again, this time pressing down on his spellbook, as if the ink would imprint onto the page. In his mind, he pictured the ink spilling from one page to the other, and when he flipped it over, there was a perfect copy of the spellform in his book—only it was mirrored.
“Flood,” he cursed.
An idea came to him, and he flipped the page, placing his palm on the back side of the page he’d just copied over, and willed the ink to bleed through to the other side. Still amazed by the way the ink flowed in his spellbook, he watched in awe as the black liquid seemed to bleed out of the page, before drawing itself out over the paper, leaving a spellform in its wake.
With one spell copied, he quickly labeled the page with the source, and moved onto the next, trying not to feel too bad about not thinking of this before he’d destroyed the other spellforms.
After six spells, he found he didn’t need to flip the page to reverse it; a quick drag of his finger across the spell form would do so just as well, but faster. And soon the daunting pile of spellbooks on the table was gone, transferred to a stack on the floor, waiting for the library’s magic to sweep it away.
Kole left the library in high spirits, despite having to go to class, because now he knew that wherever he went, he could take the library with him.
This is probably going to get out of hand, he reflected, having enough self awareness that this might have developed into a problem.
Kole spent all of Astronomy class copying over spells from one page of his spellbook to the next, reviewing each component before willing a copy to appear and then learning the small mote of imbued intent before depositing it back down in the book.
As he went, he found he was gaining a better understanding of what each unknown bit of these spell components actually did. He could always sort of deduce the purpose of a spell component from the context of it within the spellform, and if he built it in his mind he could see what it did, but now, his spellbook enhance mind was drawing upon all the little details of his years of study, and giving him insights.
When class was dismissed, Kole ran home and secluded himself.
----------------------------------------
“Turn in your defensive essays on your way out,” Underbrook announced, and Kole’s heart sank.
“Flood,” Kole cursed.
“You forgot to do it?” Gray, who’d been Kole’s partner in mental defense training again, asked.
“Yeah...” Kole said.
He hadn’t told Gray about his explosive growth as of late. The other boy still didn’t know about his ensouled artifact, and they weren’t exactly friends yet—though it did seem to be heading in that direction. Even then, a secret like that wasn’t one he planned to share with anyone but his team. Each of them had saved his life in one way or another, and he knew he could trust them to keep his secret.
While he didn’t think Gray would turn back to his antagonistic ways, he wasn’t certain. Zale trusted him, but she’d kept things from him as well.
And also, Kole thought, what if he gets jealous?
Kole didn’t think him to be the jealous type, but Kole knew he’d be jealous if someone else could do what he’d just learned. While the magic of the spellbook was uniquely suited to help his extremely niche situation, he didn’t doubt for a moment it wouldn’t be immensely useful to any other wizard. Kole was certain if his needs had been different, the spellbook would have met the challenge.
“Goodluck,” Gray said earnestly, as he fished his own essay out of his bag.
Kole waited for everyone to leave before he approached the professor who was using a spell to collect the papers. A spectral hand was picking them up one at a time and stacking them in a manner much slower than two real hands would have managed.
“Professor,” Kole said, getting his attention.
“Oh let me guess,” Underbrook said, “Giant ant people ate your homework?”
Kole smiled.
“No, from what I can tell, they preferred to eat each other,” he said, but then had to stop himself from retching as the memory of the smell came back to him.
“Sorry,” Kole said, after he’d settled himself.
“Are you really?” the professor asked, grinning. “So, why didn’t you do your assignment?”
“I... uh, got a little distracted,” Kole said.
“Hmmm,” Underbrook said, talking to himself quietly with a mocking smile. “The student tries a bold new strategy. Brutal honesty in admitting they simply forgot to do the assignment. Let’s see if that pays off for him.”
To Kole he said, “Distracted doing what?”
In response, Kole cast Mirror Image, and two duplicates appeared alongside him.
“Learning the spell,” he said, unable to hide his grin.
“Distracted indeed...” Underbrook said, his mocking smile gone and replaced with genuine interest.
He was intrigued how—after struggling so long to learn any spells at all—Kole had suddenly learned a second tier spell in a week and asked Kole to explain.
Kole held nothing back—save his initial destructive form of spellform copying where he tore a page out of school property.
“So, let me get this straight,” Professor Underbrook asked after Kole had finished his account. “You want to know if you can get credit for writing an essay debating the merits of two options by instead learning a spell?”
“Yeah,” Kole said, “But when you put it that way it sounds silly.”
Underbrook smiled, and Kole couldn’t tell if it was mocking or sincere.
“Explain your reasoning for picking Mirror Image over whatever your other choice was.”
Kole did, telling the professor how he was between Mirror Image and Blur, but ultimately chose Mirror image due to the lack of concentration.
“Alright, you at least thought it through,” Underbrook said. “Best I can do is just not count the essay towards your grade. If you’d just learned this spell because it was easy, I would have given you a zero.”
Kole was a little disappointed in the professor’s reaction. If he was being honest, he thought the halfling with a penchant for spectacle would have been more impressed.
Reading Kole’s disappointment, Underbrook said, “I take it you don’t want Professor Lonin knowing about your new ability?”
“How’d you know?”
“I know him, and if you’d told him he’d already have found some way to convince you to drop out of the adventuring program,” Underbrook said. “And since you’re still here, you haven’t told him and likely aren't planning on doing so.”
“I do plan to tell him eventually...” Kole said, trailing off.
Kole did want to share the discovery with the head of the wizard college. He just didn’t want to deal with the ramifications of that at the moment.
“I’d put it off as long as you can,” the professor advised. “He’s really going to want you to drop out if he finds out. In fact, I’m going to forget all about this conversation the next time he asks after you.”
“So,” Underbrook asked, as Kole was about to leave. “Have you put any thought into your future spell repertoire?”
Kole, who’d been a little focused on his immediate potential growth, hadn’t and said as much.
“Well, give it some thought before the next class and let's talk,” Underbrook said, then collected the assignments from the spectral hand that had clumsily been gathering papers, and then vanished, teleporting away.