Chapter 18 : Double Knot

Nikolaï was in the library, researching about level 2 spells. He wasn’t looking for something specific or a spell but to improve his general knowledge about them. Each spell was different but their classifications had a reason and a logic.

It was what Nikolaï was reading about right now. He had often viewed the level as information on power and difficulty to perform but those were fluctuating concepts depending on the caster. Someone was going to naturally struggle with a spell using an elementium opposed to its own affinities rather than one with the right affinity but a higher level.

The level of one spell could change through the years depending on the school of thought leading the current times. Even now, where consensus had been found, the Empire Arcanium was publishing Grimoires every year where spells could change level due to scholars.

The book Nikolaï was reading didn’t take the difficulty of the spell as a defining aspect but only cared about the way the Sigil was structured. For the first two levels, it seemed only to depend on the number of knots the Sigil had. A knot was the way to describe the junction between the main branch of a Sigil and the rest of its design.

With the exception of Spectral Sword, every spell Nikolaï knew had only one knot in their Sigil. Spectral Sword had two so it was rightfully a level 2 spell even if he could be considered easier to learn than Dissipation from Nikolaï’s point of view.

Nikolaï was very intrigued by the book, its way of ranking the spell was making sense to him but he also recognized that it was highly theoretical. With this logic, weak spells could be “equal” to more sophisticated ones for the only reason that they had the same number of Knots.

Even if the book lacked practical understanding Nikolaï kept looking for the second volume. The theory had the elegance to ignore questions about power and finesse to just look at Sigil as a construct. Nikolaï had read a lot about Sigil but most of the time it was a treaty about an Arcanist detailing a specific spell or a lecture about how an Arcanist had modernized an old spell.

All of this had always felt like an introduction to the field to Nikolaï but now he had finally found a book that talked about the theories and concepts of Sigil's creation. As he was reading Nikolaï started to take notes on the side of things that he wanted to research later as well as basic definitions.

The first one he wrote was about the two kinds of knots. The first was the Shape Knot and every spell had one. It didn’t define the shape of the spell directly but the way energy was split in the Sigil and this repartition to each branch was responsible for the spell form and effects. Shape Knot was the cornerstone of a spell and every Sigil had one.

The second kind of Knot was the Elementium Knot. They were added to use elementium into the spell and even if they were self-explanatory, Nikolaï was a bit confused. If, to use elementium, a spell needed an Elementium Node then each of those would be level 2 spells. Nikolaï knew it couldn’t be right, he was using spells with elementium, like Palm Flam, which only had one Knot and it was necessarily a Shape Knot.

Nikolaï unravelled the mystery when he read about Tether. They were part of the Sigil surrounding the Knots and their varieties produced different kinds of alteration on the Knots. There were a lot of kinds of Tethers but the most basic one was Elementium Tether. They were only capable of a fraction of what an Elementim Knot could handle but it was with them that a level 1 spell could use elementium even if it had only one Knot.

Nikolaï continued his reading and understood why trying to use Runic Alteration on Spectral Sword had failed. Runic Alteration was in fact closer to being a Tether than a real spell but it was made for a spell with only one Knot.

Nikolaï had tried to use it to improve his handling of Spectral Sword. He had done it for every spell he knew and tweaking with the spell once cast was a good way to understand his mechanic, especially with the help of Nikolaï’s Third Eye. Rather than blindly following every instruction in the book without seeing why he was learning better that way.

When Nikolaï was going for the third volume he realised how late it was. After browsing it quickly he decided to rent it and the second one for the night. By bringing them before noon he was only going to have to pay for half a day.

Nikolaï went to dinner and back to his room with his books and notes.

The third volume was thinner than the other but he had taken it because it contained practical exercises to demonstrate the other volumes concepts. Normally an Aspirant would have ignored those kinds of exercises, it could require a lot for nothing but Nikolaï was different. The demonstration spells inside were not going to ask him days of practice thanks to his Third Eye. He could probably try the demonstration himself and learn the content more thoroughly.

Nikolaï had also brought the second volume because a significant part of it contained the basics of Sigil's creation. Creating a spell was a very complex task requiring a lot and a lot of knowledge to do so. Most Arcanists were satisfied by learning spells already existing, there were thousands of them so very few felt the need to create new ones. Beyond the 4th Circle, an Arcanist would need to know the basics as part of his education but only a handful of them would seek to become a Drawspeller.

Drawspellers were experts in Sigil and Rune creation but to become one an Arcanist had to study for years. In the Tower of Dzürkül, there were only two Arcanists who could pretend to the title and Expert Orsana was one of them.

Nikolaï was getting ready to cast one of the spells from the third volume. It was called Ephemeral Cube and its only point was to materialize a cube the size of a human fist. Its sides were semi-transparent as if they were made of fog and their densities were so low that any physical object could go throw. The spell had literally no use, it was a pure exercise to demonstrate how worked a Shaping Knot.

Nikolaï cast it on the first try and looked at the explanation of how each branch of the Sigil was responsible for the spell properties. The spell eventually lost its energy but Nikolaï continued reading. In the Ephemeral Cube Sigil, he could recognize parts similar to the Impalpable Wall one. After all, they were both belonging to the Intangible Arcane so it wasn’t that surprising but Nikolaï wondered if he could modify the Sigil.

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Nikolaï had to get used to blend Runic Alteration to Impalpable Wall and modify it but those modifications had to be done after casting. If he understood the book correctly he could maybe include his variations in the Sigil directly. It could be more than useful for his talismans than his direct spell.

Nikolaï wanted to try but the spell required a bit more energy, contrary to Ephemeral Cube which was insignificant. Playing with it and experimenting would have to wait for a later date when Nikolaï could waste the energy.

For the evening Nikolaï wanted to stick to the book and cast Ephemeral Orb. It had the same physical properties, volume and requirement as the Ephemeral Cube, only the shape was different. He compared the two Sigils and even drew both of them on a piece of paper to superpose them in front of the light.

Nikolaï wanted to try an experience of his own before going further in the book and found how to add Runic Alteration into the Ephemeral Cube. He successfully did it and when the cube appeared he started to alter the Sigil to reform as the Orb one. The cube trembled while the Sigil was changing like he was unstable but when the modification had been down it collapsed as if it had been sucked at his centre. The Sigil was still shining between Nikolaï’s joined hand, proving that the spell was still cast. For a second nothing happened then the Orb formed itself where the Cube had been. Nikolaï smiled and used the Runic Alteration to recharge the spell rather than having to cast it again in a few minutes.

He kept reading and found how the two shapes could be interpolated to create a dodecahedron. The Sigil wasn’t a compromise between the two original Sigil but an intertwining of them. The concept of depth in a Sigil was becoming clearer for Nikolaï and how the subtleness of it mattered.

Nikolaï successfully formed the dodecahedron after a few minutes but the form didn’t stay long before the spell collapsed for good, out of energy.

Nikolaï kept reading but he wanted to try more experiments. He wanted to know if he could switch from one spell to another after he had been cast. He had thought of this idea some time ago when practising Runic Alteration but couldn’t do it. With a clearer understanding of a Sigil structure and its concept of depth, he wanted to try again.

Nikolaï joined hands once again and cast Spectral Hand. He chose this spell because it was the one he had mastered the most so the most stable of his arsenal. He made the hand fly in front of him and put his real right hand and the back of the spectral one. He focused and tried to detach the different parts of the Sigil to alter them individually rather than modifying all things at once.

He was trying to reshape the spell into Moist Mirror. Nikolaï pictured a sliced version of the Sigil, still perfectly aligned from the top but layered from the side. This way the spell was not going to collapse like when he tried the other time. Nikolaï started to alter the parts of the Sigil but the structure was resisting. It was different from tweaking the existing properties of the spell, Nikolaï was trying to edit those properties.

The spectral hand started to shimmer as Nikolaï put more strength into its try. Something happened but the hand didn’t change. Some kind of leak appeared on its surface and the released ether started to shape itself rather than dissolve in the air.

A second spectral hand was formed, a left one but looking exactly like the reflection of the original one. Nikolaï stopped his attempt at modifying the Sigil and the two hands stabilized themselves. Nikolaï tried to move the hands but he had no grip on the new one, it was only mimicking the first one as if it was its reflection.

The new hand seemed to have the same physical properties as the other and Nikolaï was a bit confused and surprised by its apparition. The spell faded quickly the energy in it seemed to have been consumed two times faster than Nikolaï's assumption.

He looked for an answer in the book. There were still a lot of pages that he hadn’t read and a small voice in Nikolaï’s head was telling him that he should have finished it before playing the Apprentice Arcanist.

Nikolaï was scrolling through the book looking for keywords. He was going to take his time to read the rest but right now he wanted an answer. He had learned to fast search like that from the time he was looking for his error in spellbooks. In a weird way reading all of the ways you could fail to cast a spell wasn’t very productive when trying to learn it. It only confused the primary instructions so most Aspirants were only reading them to correct their mistakes or identify how they could improve.

Nikolaï found something called the Shadow effect. It happened when two Shaping Knots were piled up rather than balanced like on 2 level spell and higher. Nikolaï had done it by accident when he tried to substitute the Moist Mirror Sigil for the Spectral Hand one. He continued to read about it as the author was not just explaining the reasons for the Shadow effect but how it had been used in a practical way since its discovery.

The book laid down an example of an Arcanist using Fireball. The spell was creating an orb of fire, the size of a human head, which exploded at contact when thrown. It was a well-known level 2 spell that every Arcanist enrolling in the Imperial Army learned. Using the Shadow effect an Arcanist could double the damage and impact of the spell without having to cast it twice. The energy required still needed to be double for the spell to work properly and a well-structured Sigil.

Nikolaï understood that casting a spell twice was equal to using the Shadow effect on paper but in a real situation, it could be an advantage in timing. As Nikolaï went further he also read about the fact that the duplicate could be controlled independently by the caster. It was harder than just having it ‘shadowing’ the original but it was possible. For a spell like Fireball, he would not necessarily make a big difference but Nikolaï was looking at things from his point of view.

Nikolaï arsenal was from the Intangible Arcane, he had dived in materialisation and the idea of casting two Spectral Swords in one spell was more than tempting.

Casting two spells at the same time was a high skill that required a lot of control over the Ether. There was a reason most people needed to form a circle with their hands and it was the fact that projecting a Sigil from nowhere wasn’t easy.

Ether dissolved in the air so to project a Sigil an Arcanist needed to create something where the ether was going to be trapped and stuck in the proper shape. To do that they needed to create a canvas of ether and the easier way was to form a space between two hands where the ether would be contained between the palms.

The circle formed by the hands helped to create an area of control but beyond a certain level of mastery, an Arcanist could maintain this area with only one hand. At an even more advanced level, an Arcanist could handle and create those small pockets of ether with no hand at all. Making Sigil appeared from thin air and capable of using multiple ones.

Nikolaï, even by the progress he made with the Third Eye, was far from the one-hand casting so his vision of “double swords” was still a fantasy. But if he could master the shadow effect it could become an achievable reality. It wouldn't be true multi-casting but he could work the same if he trained enough.

After daydreaming a bit more about the future Nikolaï took two decisions. First, he was going to copy the book he was holding and look if there was a follow-up from this series. Second, he needed to work on his projection skills. He had to look for a way to improve his canvas if he wanted to be able to reach for the shadow’s control, rather than having it mirroring the movements of the other original construct.

***

The next day Nikolaï used his Spectral Hand to copy the book in his room before returning it to the library. He didn’t look for the rest yet, he had to focus on his current training for now and until he passed the exam.