Once the gods had left, the races spread across the world, and men and dragons met and interacted once more. By then, the dragons had learned to rein in their hunger. However, the relationship was not the peaceful, cooperative one it had once been, and there existed a distance between men and dragons from then on.
-Unnamed Dwarven Text
—
Kole escorted Amara back to her dorm elsewhere on the crafting college’s part of campus. He asked a female student exiting the building where the girl’s bathroom was, which almost saw him slapped, But, once the girl in question spotted Amara and her obvious need for a shower, the student held back and provided instructions. Kole walked Amara to her room, and then to the bathroom and sat outside while she got cleaned up, and afterward they went to the crafting dining hall for a very late dinner.
Ten bits down. Kole mourned as he paid the entry fee.
He’d counted his money as he’d waited for Amara and was down to twenty silver, eighty-five copper, and now two bits.
Thats… 280.1 copper, or 560.2 meals, or 1.867 more vials of ink.
He stopped himself before his math could lead him to the inevitable conclusion that he would need to find a job. He knew he would need to eventually, but for now, he could focus on his studies.
They sat with their meals and Kole let Amara speak about her projects the entire meal. He tried to follow, but it was far beyond him.
Later that night, after seeing Amara back to her room and getting Gus to promise to bite her if she left without sleeping, Kole returned to his own room in the library.
I still don’t understand how the Font of ‘Understanding’ could make that rat so smart. He mused as he made his way back.
Theral was gone when he arrived, but the rat was there, waiting for Kole’s return. He threw the rodent a bread crust, and it took it with it as it vanished into thin air.
“Well, at least he’s not eating…” Kole trailed off as he noticed a mess of bed crumbs on his bed. “Now…”
The rat had gone into the past to eat on his bed, free from Kole’s presence.
Kole brushed the crumbs off his bed, before setting up at his desk. With his focus on Thunderwave, he’d been slacking on his work to improve Magic Missile and Shield, but he felt he was just starting to make progress.
“One more night…” he told himself.
Two hours later, Kole’s study was broken as Theral appeared in the room in a seated position, hand held up to his mouth as if he were about to eat from an invisible fork. He immediately fell on his butt.
“Flood,” he cursed from the ground.
“Welcome back,” Kole said from his desk.
“Thanks, but I can’t say I’m glad to be here. I was about to eat dinner.”
Theral then walked to the corner of the room where the magical jug lay. He picked it up and waved his hand over his bed before placing the jug on the magical floating disk he’d summoned. Kole watched, mesmerized by the absurdity of it all as Theral pulled out his spellbook and casually ripped a page out. The page folded itself into a bowl, black lines drawing themselves over its surface. He then tipped the jug over the bowl, and a blob of oatmeal poured out, followed shortly by a splash of honey.
“That jug could do that the whole time?!” Kole asked, bewildered by it all.
Theral turned to Kole, a paper spoon of oatmeal already on its way to his mouth.
“Yeah… did you need some?”
Kole sighed.
“What else can it make?”
“Lamp oil, mayonnaise, vinegar, wine that tastes like vinegar, water, beer that tastes like water, honey, and oatmeal. It might be able to do more. You need to think about something to make it appear, but if it can’t make what you want, it just produces this gross black sludge. And if you don’t eat something, it goes away after a day.”
“Can I use it when you’re gone?”
“Go for it, but don’t take it out of the room.”
If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.
Kole let Theral return to his very magical meal and returned to his studying. He’d been about to test a new component of Thunderwave when Theral had arrived.
He sent the construct through his bridge and felt the spell swerve around the strange non-Font that it had crashed into on his last dozen attempts. Allowing himself a small self satisfied smile, Kole reached for his ink vial to record his latest addition to the spell.
“Flood,” Kole cursed.
“What’s wrong?” Theral asked.
The young wizard was done with his meal, and Kole watched as the paper cutlery vanished into black motes.
“I’m out of spellform ink.”
“Oh,” Theral said, looking around the room. “I don’t have any, but… have you tried using regular ink?”
Kole stared at the clearly wizard who was clearly a prodigy as if he were an idiot.
“It’s not that strange. You have magic paper in that book right?”
Kole nodded.
“Maybe it can store spellforms with regular ink,” Theral said. “I can’t think of a lot of reasons to make magic paper if not for creating spellforms.”
“You mean you can’t think of any reason besides making magic paper bowls and utensils,” Kole said.
“Good point, but that was more of a side project of a friend. I had the magical spellbook way before we found that use for it.”
Kole wondered how long this young wizard could have possibly owned that magical book.
With no better option, Kole gave it a shot. He drew the simplest spell component he knew, using his new nib and old ink. Once that was done—the work of a few minutes—he filled it with the intent required, borrowing it from one of the spell constructs in his mind.
He then held his hand on it and focused, watching to see if the intent decayed. Theral watched too, with eager eyes as if he could somehow see what was happening on the page. A minute passed, then two, but the intent Kole had imparted into the Will remained the same.
“It worked!” Kole exclaimed, not sure if he was more excited by the financial or magical implications of the discovery. “Do you think there are more of these books around the school?”
Before Kole finished the question, he felt the strong magical force that heralded Theral’s departure and by the time he finished turning to face him, the other wizard was gone. Kole returned to the journal. The cover was old and worn, whatever had been written on it long gone, and there were what looked like claw marks across the surface, though there was so much damage to the cover it was hard to make them out.
Flicking through the blank pages. He immediately began to regret using the journal for something as simple as note taking—though that had saved him precious hours while doing homework, with the information flooding back into him as he wrote. The journal was thick, and had a large number of pages, but that didn’t mean he could be frivolous with them. In the past, he’d kept a detailed catalog of the spell components he’d needed to do his work of spell reconstruction, but he’d been judicious in his selection due to the cost of recording a spellform component. Now however, he could afford to be a little more… thorough.
Several hour later, Kole lay passed out at his desk where he’d fallen asleep copying his latest revisions of Magic Missile and Shield over to his new spellbook.
Some time after that, he stirred as he heard something in his room. He shot up, lifting his face from the pages and taking some of the ink with him, and scanned the room.
His new and ruined clothes—which now that he considered it, he was pretty sure had been missing when he’d returned—were laying on his bed, folded into a neat bundle with a envelope attached. He spent a moment, making sure this wasn’t a dream before examining it closer. He undid the ties holding the garment together, and held out the shirt. Instead of having been cleaned, the blue fabric had been dyed black all over, the multi-hued blue of the original cloth showing through slightly and resulting in a look that reminded Kole of a cloudy night sky, full of different shades of deep black. The silver accents from before left silver and replaced where they’d been stained.
The blue pattern of the previous outfit had been a nod to his mother’s magical tradition, but he found he didn’t mind the black. The pants too had been stained black, and the spider silk cords had been dyed scarlet.
“That’s a bit menacing,” he said to himself, unsure if he liked it.
He reflected that it would pair nicely with his voidling and demonkin companions, he just needed to get Rakin something so they could really live up to the name “The Forsaken.”
Next he reached for the envelope and was surprised by its weight. Turning it over, two gold coins fell out onto the bed.
He read the note, which was written in elegantly scrawled lettering that was perfectly legible despite the flair.
Kole,
Thank you for helping my daughter—though I expect she would have faired just as well by herself and come home with less blood on her. I cleared up the issue with the guards, and the men will recover nicely in jail, so you don’t have to worry about being a murderer. Though, I would have still cleared it up if they had died. Don’t make a habit of assaulting people on the street, but also don’t hold back when your life is on the line.
I hope you don’t mind the new color. I understand that you don’t actually need the ink you lost, so I decided to instead return the money you spent on it instead of replacing it.
-Trish
P.S. The door will not open to my home without my say so. Stop trying.
Kole scanned the room again. Someone, presumably Zale's mother, had snuck in while he'd slept. He didn't know how he felt about that. She could enter his room at any moment, and from what Zale said, she wasn't above murder.
Flood, she kind of just condoned it in the note.
Not that Kole had ever planned to, but he decided then and there to never hurt Zale in any way that could garner her mother's ire.
He placed his new clothes under his bed, and got ready to go back to sleep—in the bed this time—but stopped himself. He moved the desk, and pushed it a foot over so that it was partially blocking the door to Zale's home. It wouldn't keep out a determined intruder, but it'd make a lot of noise.
Kole's last thought as he drifted back to sleep was the realization that Zale's mother could turn into a breeze and likely slip through any crack.
Maybe I should move.