[A silhouette of a man laughing]
X is for Xoctule the shadowing figure, is he a god, or something much bigger? His wants are as unknown as his whereabouts, but of one thing there can be no doubts. The one thing about Xoctule that is known to be true, is if you think you know Xoctule I don’t want to know you.
-Sally Rider’s ABCs of Magic
—
Kole spent the night after his meeting with Underbrook returning to his magical study, pushing a new batch of intrusive thoughts out of his head.
Why did Lonin want to help him now? Why hadn’t he put any plans in place for new magic based on Doug and Rakin? What spell should he look for next?
The best way to deal with these thoughts, he’d found, was to ignore them and focus on Thunderwave. Maybe it wasn’t the healthiest of coping mechanisms, but on this day it paid off, and Wednesday morning before meeting his friends for training, he cast a Thunderwave at the newly reduced cost of 14 Will.
----------------------------------------
Kole gave his friends an update on his meeting with Underbrook as they ate a post training breakfast.
“Why does Lonin want to see you?” Zale asked.
“Probably to shower me with praise and take me on as his apprentice,” Kole said.
“I like the positive thinking,” Zale said. “But why do you really think?”
“I have no idea,” Kole said.
Kole had a wide open morning before he was scheduled for tutoring with Amara followed by Pale Oak and Doug. As much has he knew Pale Oak hated him, it was the first session he was the most nervous for. Amara was extremely knowledgeable, but focused was not a term he’d ever use to describe her.
----------------------------------------
Amara, it turned out, was a great teacher—so long as the topic was rune related, or rune adjacent. Professor Donglefore had tasked her with teaching Kole the basics of alchemical material sciences that were to be covered in the class, and as it was something of her specialty, she proved a great teacher—with only a small very minor almost insignificant caveat.
Her lectures were more rapid-fire barrages of information fired directly at one’s face. Thankfully for Kole, he had a magic spellbook he could use to perfectly recall. So, after a forty-five-minute “lecture” Kole found himself taking notes for twice that time, using his magic book-enhanced recall to pull out the pertinent information, writing it on paper and cementing it into his own mind.
Unfortunately for Kole, that method didn’t work as well for the rest of his Alchemical tutors.
“Welcome, Kole,” Pale Oak said when Kole entered the greenhouse, speaking his name with the same disgust he imagined she used when discussing various types of tree rot.
“Good evening Pale Oak,” Kole said with a small bow of his head. She had no title, and Pale Oak was not actually her name, and as such he felt a little uncomfortable not addressing her with some form of respect.
The dryad made a tsk sound like that of a dry twig snapping.
“We bow only to the wind,” she chastised Kole. “Let’s get this over with. Your friend Doug here has assured me you have been practicing in your time in the dungeon, so please. Do not disappoint.”
Pale Oak gave Kole some instructions, and he got to work pruning and plucking a variety of grasses, earning the occasional groan reminiscent of strained wood as he narrowly avoided mistakes.
“Passable,” she said when he was done with less disdain than before. “Your final assignment will be to gather all the ingredients for a weak herbal remedy. You have four weeks. Doug will prepare you for your theoretical exam.”
Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.
The dryad gave a curt nod, and then left the greenhouse, where she immediately left the path to walk up to a tree and then continued straight into the tree as if it were a doorway, disappearing from sight into its bark.
“Wow,” Doug said, speaking up for the first time. “She really doesn’t like you. What did you do to that plant?”
“I think if I knew, she’d be less angry with me.”
----------------------------------------
Kole finished his days of tutoring with optimism for the remaining three and a half weeks. He really needed to cram to get his spells lower enough to cast. Back in his room, he was surprised to see both his roommates had returned. It had been over a month since he’d seen either after all, and Kole had been missing for much of it.
“Good evening,” Kole greeted Theral. “It’s been a while.”
“It has?” Theral asked. “I suppose so. How are things going with your projects”
Kole dove right into catching the other young wizard up. He’d long ago learned Theral was reluctant to share much of anything about himself outside of his magical knowledge, and in return was completely uninterested in anything regarding Kole’s personal life.
“So,” Kole said, after catching him up. “I was hoping to ask you if you had any more of those old spellforms you could let me copy.”
Asking a wizard for a spell is not the taboo it once was before the Disavowment of the Tower, but, it was still a bit brazen of Kole to simply ask.
“Maybe,” Theral said, scrunching his face as he thought in a familiar manner Kole couldn’t place. “I don’t have a lot of Sound or Light magic spellforms. I do have a few Mind spellforms you could take a copy of, however.”
“May I?” Theral said, gesturing to Kole’s spellbook.
Kole handed it over, uncertain what Theral was planning but not suspicious of his motives. Theral, with his ability to teleport, could have stolen the spellbook any number of times in Kole’s sleep.
Theral summoned his spellbook into his open hand, and then lowered it, the book remaining in place, floating. He opened his book up to the center, and pulled the page out, not even bothering to look that it was the correct one. He then laid Kole’s book on the room’s desk and opened it to the back.
“Let’s see if this works,” Theral said, looking at Kole.
He placed the sheet inside the book, near the end, and closed the cover. Kole watched in surprised delight as the oversized sheet shrunk to the dimensions of his smaller, more worn, spellbook. Theral opened it up again, and showed Kole the new addition to his spellbook.
“How did you know that would work?”
Theral shrugged.
“It’s something my spellbook could do, I took a guess it would work for yours. Give it a try with something else.”
Kole looked around for a scrap of paper and eventually took the tutor schedule out and stuffed it in before closing the cover on it. When he opened the book back up, the page had become bound within.
“Neat!” Kole said triumphantly.
Theral chuckled.
“Neat indeed. That one took me a while to figure out,” Theral agreed, and then went back to the original topic. “That is a spellform for Mind Spike. It’s a first-tier spell. The spell uses a somatic component tied to the gate. You shouldn’t need it since you won’t use a gate, but it could have unforeseen effects on the spell. I didn’t make it myself. I also have a Light spell, that’s probably going to work for you better than most of what you’ve encountered. It only costs 2 Will, so if you master it with your affinity to the Font, I imagine it might almost work like a cantrip for you.”
“Thanks!” Kole said, grateful.
He had realized after mastering Thunderwave, that the library in the Dahn was full of old spells of Sound, Light, and Mind he could reconstruct as he had with Magic Missile and Shield, but the idea of doing that yet again was not one he relished, for even after he’d reconstructed the spell, he’d still have to create the path.
“Where did you find such old spells from?” Kole asked, hoping for a secret cache he could mine—besides Theral himself that is.
“Oh, every now and then I stumbled upon a wizard with a few spells to share,” Theral said noncommittally. “I don’t have any offensive Light magic, but I recommend looking up one Galok Lightsmith. He was a traditional wizard—and a Blessed by Tin Lan. If you can find any copies of his old spellbook, you can recreate the spell the old-fashioned way and path it yourself. I think that would be faster than that reconstruction method of yours. For sound, I actually have just the thing.”
Theral produced a sheaf of papers from his spellbook, and put it on the desk. Kole pounced on it eagerly, before deflating as soon as he saw the first page.
“What’s wrong?” Theral asked, confused.
“I don’t speak Torcish,” Kole said.
The page Theral had produced were covered in the tightly packed scrawl of some gnome or dwarf of old.
“Oh…” Theral, the pages vanishing into black motes. “Sorry, you don’t want to get it translated. It’s more likely to kill you than work, but it would most likely just be a big waste of time. You should look into a Ma—Flood!”
Kole felt the powerful magic of Theral’s magic gathering a moment before he let out a curse, and then the helpful wizard disappeared, leaving Kole along with the pack rat that had been patiently watching them through the whole conversation. Ignoring the rat, Kole dove into the spells he’d just received.