Future Present Day - 2020 A.D. (0 A.R.) - March
I HATE WIZARDRY! It is the biggest pain in the ass. I get that it works. I get that it makes life easier for uncounted quan-trillions of people across the multiverse, but it still fucking sucks. Yes, in comparison to true Sorcery.
But I did it. Merlin, oh that sneaky fucker, he left his mirror portal in my home, the one that was going to send me back in time to correct the ‘split flows’. The gigantic upright oval of floating ice framed by solidified energies darker than the forgotten armpit of space, it was LOCKED BY WIZARDRY.
The Santa impersonator well and truly was planning on screwing me over and blowing up a slice of this universe if I didn’t knuckle down and learn wizardry. The basics. The building blocks of all of magic, the foundation of the reality-bending force serving as the heartbeat of the universe.
So, when it was all said and done and I stood there in front of the portal with nothing but my soulbound weapons and some clothes that were going to disintegrate from the journey to the past, I used the tool that I hated the most.
Math.
You have to use math and true equations to use wizardry. Even my usual style of enchantments were technically fueled by my Sorceries. My specific blend of innate understanding of the elements did all the work for me, bypassing the math portion so that I could create objects capable of doing what I want. The downside that I didn’t know about was that ALL of my enchantments were extremely mana hungry compared to any kind of normal wizard-based enchantments. Sorcery allowed elemental understanding, affinity, and extra mana infused into the enchantment to bypass the silly requirements of careful mathematical computations. And after Kraken joined my team and began helping me, I didn’t even notice that with his help combined with Gungnir as a focus, Kraken had been ensuring that anything new or reworked was actually efficient according to the Wizarding Industrial Galactic Standards.
And I was forced to learn the copious amounts of information regarding WIGS. But that’s all in the past. Now, I know the basics. Now, I’ve been educated enough to read portal runes and their coordinates. Now, I can time-travel!
[What are you waiting for?]
I ignored Kraken’s question. But be it far from me to savor this moment. Well, after the math part. Opening my mind to allow my eyes the ability to see mana and interpret the ebbs and flows of creation swirling all around me is what I would usually do. But that’s not how wizards did it. They had a ‘spell’, something they learned really early on, a variable pseudo enchantment built upon careful principles and finely ordered parameters that functioned in one of two ways: either it tweaked the perception centers of the brain and the eyeballs themselves to see mana just like night vision goggles picked up on certain frequencies to allow night-vision. The other method was a precise conjuration of a very thin, very delicate window that when looked through, showed the hidden nature and workings of mana.
These spells had names. Altering your vision centers was called ‘Mana-Sight’ but due to how it worked and how it could be enhanced to view other frequencies its other name was ‘Veil-Lifter’. The second name was an older name, coming from the time where wizards viewed the world of magic being intentionally ‘veiled’ from the sight of man by the gods.
The second spell however, was meant for more delicate work due to its varying levels of variability and the skill of the user. One name was the ‘Magic Window’ spell but I liked the other one better, the ‘Monocle’. It was a base spell taught to children, the title of ‘Monocle’ being more accurate as it imitated a single glass circle lens that enhanced your vision when looking through it. Learning the ‘Monocle’ spell allowed young magic users to learn the calculations behind basic conjuring, hovering, and hovering within a fixed point in space or having that anchor point tied to an object. Because the ‘Monocle’ spell could be enhanced to the nth degree based on the user’s comfort level or need, it was widely used by most wizards working on their enchantments. Kraken was more than happy to annoy me to death so that I was forced to learn the ‘Monocle’ spell and I had to admit, it was damn useful.
Technically, the ‘Monocle’ spell was a spell that had its roots in the element of air but the variation I used was its alternative form based in water. Putting my weeks of practice to use, I conjured a large window of water, bigger than the iridescent portal in front of me and began imbuing the runic sequences into it that corresponded with what I needed. The Centauri scripts were perfectly fine for what I needed. Kraken wanted me to learn Aelven runes, Dwarven blocks, Asmorai helix prints, but I argued that learning one at a time would be hard enough.
“Kraken, check my work.” I said, my hands moving independent from each other as my fingers traced the three-dimensional Centauri scripts. “Hover at a fixed point goes after the border maintenance block, set that to rotate around the edge to maintain the integrity of the spell.”
Kraken hummed, bored with me as I’d done this many, many times.
“Insert the prism sequence to show mana as standard colors ordered by the dominant element, not forgetting the minor variation of added silver to show trace elements so I know if something isn’t perfectly pure. Section out the focus feature to allow for zooming in and zooming out for detail work but that still allows it to single out individual sections without destroying the view in the rest of the Monocle’s surface area.”
Kraken coughed.
“You’re right, getting caught in the weeds here. Let’s use the Centauri de-scripter disk with the correct plugin, can’t forget to attach the added runic language database in case it’s needed.”
I loved that de-scripter disk. In fact, it’s the main reason I took a trip back down to Florida. Why learn another runic language when the Centauri have already done the work and created template sigil chips that hold databases of the most common runes from all of the known runic languages? The ‘Monocle’ spell can be used in tandem with the de-scripter disk to allow an enchanter to learn new languages while still enabling them to decode or use that language. It’s like using google translate to help you write your high school Castilian spanish paper then having your Mexican friend look it over. You’ll probably be most of the way there as long as you’re willing to risk the dialectical difference.
Creating a second fixed hover point, I stuck the de-scripter disk at the bottom of my Monocle spell and shaped the runic plugin so my spell could host the device. Inserting a bit of mana turned on the de-scripter, the unfamiliar runes of Merlin’s portal suddenly highlighted in alternating silver and black.
I grinned. “This . . . is . . . AWESOME!” I didn’t let my excitement get the best of me. The ‘Monocle’ spell always had to be built bit by bit unless you had it all perfectly memorized but few people did that work for a spell meant to be used in this intended fashion. “Okay, put the mana storage sigil over here, beef it up because this might take a while, a few more feedback lines connecting to the viewing controls, and then a reformation crystallization sequence in case I need to adjust Merlin’s portal through my own spell . . . and what else?”
Kraken didn’t look at me. Instead he just whistled within the confines of Gungnir’s storage space, idly making an infinitely more complex version of the ‘Monocle’ spell just to irritate me. Little oceanic fucker. Not my fault his nature as a higher-order spirit allowed him to use wizardry to the same degree I was capable of using sorcery. Not exactly fair but he could do this shit in his sleep. In fact, I’m pretty sure he already had the answer.
I looked around my living room, noting the light layer of dust on the furniture and my mind getting distracted by thinking up a nice cleaning spell using the properties of water and earth to attract, combine, consolidate, and bury the offending dust particles. My stone plates and countertops were in similar straights. Cleaning hadn’t been a priority the last month and probably still wouldn’t be for at least a few more.
The glow from my quartz mana lights, my first real enchantment project using wizardry, were bright enough to show me how dirty my place was. Redoing my home using wizardry turned out to be a very good project for me, forcing me to think about the basics of everyday life and how I could make it better, more efficient through wizardry. I wasn’t even allowed to use conjuration at all per the orders of my ever-watchful taskmaster, Kraken. I figured Susan would be harder on me but Kraken did make a good point. His fate was tied in with mine. And during my nightly three hours of sleep, Kraken learned all he could from Susan, forcing her to expound greatly detailed lectures of wizardry, necromancy, soulumancy, and enchantment so he, Kraken, could be my real teacher in the arts of mundane mana usage.
And under his tutelage, I made stone skillets and kettles for cooking, a revamped refrigerator with cooling coils capable of adjusting their temperature through mana insertion or through the use of a dial. I made enchanted quartz windows capable of providing fake sunlight and stored scenery so that on rainy days I could look out and see a snow-covered landscape. Kitchen knife sharpeners capable of making blades sharper than scalpels, doors that provided extra insulation to keep the heat out and the cold in, upgraded room heaters and miniscule air conditioners, the list goes on. I had to do all of that before I could even work on the ‘Monocle’ spell and it made sense in the end.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
The quartz light enchantments taught me the right sequences for colors, shades of colors, making equivalent mana types into easily recognizable colors. The cooking equipment taught me the right sigils for showing heat or cold as well as the ‘dial’ circular input that guided moving the intended effect to move up or down. Cooking implements taught me the correct containment protocols so that I could localize the effects that I wanted, heating and cooling in very specific areas so that the handle wouldn’t be affected at all. The quartz windows, or ‘False View’ spell brought home the lessons of providing a cohesive viewpoint and the need for an image/data translation or storage capability.
Other little projects were enchanted for fun, forks that could grow extra tines to spear even more food, spoons that shifted into ladles and back, even a glass cup that sang that old gospel song ‘Fill-a-me up’ when it got low. That one was just to annoy Kraken. I put the enchanted empty cup on a table brain vat docking station when Kraken was inside of Gungnir. He hasn’t retaliated yet. Blenders that operated off of mana and blades of water but could also dehydrate based off of mana inputs or timed schedules, auto-sizing hammers along with hammers and screwdrivers that could reshape themselves based on the task at hand. I was a one man kitchen and handyman revolution!
But still, it all came down to this, learning the tools of the wizardry trade so I could properly take my first steps into learning the craziness behind wizard portals. I understood one of the parts, the general structure of coordinates, the preservation or ‘presence stasis’ sequences that kept you alive through the transition. What I still couldn’t wrap my mind around were the ‘slice’ and ‘splice’ part of this.
Portals are essentially miniature wormholes, the more friendly version of their cousin the ominous black hole. Cut two identical circles in a piece of paper and then fold that piece of paper so that the holes are on top of each other. That’s a portal. That’s how it works in a nutshell. You cut a hole in reality in two places at the same time and then squash them together. That’s the easy part for most wizards. What they struggle with is the mooooshing part, the squishing together of two separate places in space to connect the rents in space-time. I struggled with the ‘cutting’ part. My inner nature rebelled at the thought of harming reality in such a way when a perfectly good traveling alternative, Yggdrasil’s roots, were much easier. But I understood that was a position in the extreme minority. Without Nature Sorcery, anyone else would be torn apart by the World Trees unfettered pressure until the unsuspecting traveler was nothing more than ground up molecules to use as fuel.
But I didn’t have to cut reality. I didn’t have to screw around with what was already here. I had two tests, first, unlock Merlin’s portal so I could go through it and back through time, and then mess up the portal in the Hungry Ones’ fortress WITHOUT blowing it up or sending magical WMDs through it.
Kraken popped out of Gungnir. “SO? ARE YA GONNA DO SOMETHING?”
His watery eye stared in my own, switching back and forth as he wiggled with excitement. “COME ON! I WANNA TIME TRAVEL! NO OTHER SCION HAS DONE CRAZINESS LIKE THIS YET?”
I laughed, pushing my familiar back into Gungnir. “Got it, got it.” I focused back on my ‘Monocle’ spell, lightly adjusting the settings until Merlin’s portal, if you can believe it, became even more alive. The border lit up with regularly pulsing veins of arcane energies that lashed against the bindings of Merlin’s Wild Magic. “That can’t be right,” I whispered, zooming in and out on each individual space where I expected a runic sequence or set of sigils to be. “There’s nothing here!”
Zooming out so the entire portal was in view, my hands quickly yet carefully manipulated the frequency dial while the de-scripter tool lit up with the extra mana I hastily infused into it. It wasn’t until I hit the highest and then the lowest frequencies that I noticed two runes. Without Kraken having to say anything, I carefully inserted another runic sequence into the frequency detector so that I could pick and choose, allowing more than one frequency to be available at one time. The highest frequency, according to most scholars, was the ‘Light of Sol’ or ‘Heaven’s Gift’. Wizards have spells known as dispelling, the ability to break down spells into their component parts so they’re rendered useless. The act of dispelling comes from spells built from this frequency. But like light, it’s too active, too full of energy to be used to build a spell, which is why the high energy frequency is best used for dispelling.
But the rune I saw was sitting in one frequency higher than that, genuine, actual Celestial power. It was shining in front of me clear as day. This is the frequency priests use when channeling their deity and the exact same one as my hidden angelic swords use. That’s probably why they’re so powerful. Because the swords of Mik’hail were a paradox, solidified blades crafted from something that shouldn’t be a solid, that normally isn’t capable of being held inside of a stable form.
At the base of the portal sat another solitary rune, so black it was purple to my eyes. The shade deeper than necromancy. True Infernal power didn’t glow, it sucked in the light so well that it formed a shape that made me want to tear my eyes out.
Shielding my face, I cursed, yanking Kraken out of Gungnir. “Those aren’t runes! Those aren’t even wizardry! How the fuck am I supposed to unlock a portal that isn’t even locked! It doesn’t even make sense!”
Kraken opened his mouth but I kept right on yelling. “Are you telling me I wasted a month! A goddamn month of my people getting blown up or worse up north and it’s all for me to learn useless crap with my thumb up my ass???”
Susan stepped forward out of the darkness. I hated when she did that. She wasn’t allowed to use magic without my express permission but one of the skills she’d picked up over hundreds of years of undeath was being sneaky as fuck. Although, now that I think about it, she’s allowed to use one spell, the ‘stasis-stink-be-gone’ smell. It’s the first one the higher order undead learn, especially if they are going to be around mortals or living things. It’s a small working of air and space magic used to preserve their bodies from rotting too much and pull in air that contains their scent. It does have a secondary use where they can vent the stored air containing their wretched scent in a particular direction. Useful for confusing scent-based trackers or tracking spells.
Her voice was something I didn’t think I’d ever get used to. Obviously feminine but still too deep, too snake-like for me to ever relax in her presence. Creepy. “My lord sorcerer, don’t be discouraged. You grasped the point of what I believe the lesson was here. That there is nothing to decipher. Merlin didn’t actually lock it. Your ‘Monocle’ spell is perfect. No traps were detected, all languages you could know where scanned for, the frequencies from top to bottom were accounted for, and there’s nothing left to do except enter.”
I rounded on her but didn’t bother to threaten her with Gungnir. I didn’t need to. She knew where she stood. “Then tell me what those runes mean. I can barely look at them.”
Susan stared at my hovering spell for too long. “The languages of higher and lower beings are difficult. They pierce multiple dimensions. As you learn more about enchanting, length, width, height, and depth can only cover so much. A layer above that, area, volume, and density play fundamental roles, the confluence of the previously listed attributes. Then temperature and movement come into play rewriting all of the rules yet again. But that is where the most stop, where one in several million wizards decide to refuse to halt and keep going.”
Kraken popped out on his own again, casually taking his own perusal of the floating ‘Monocle’ spell. Growing his tentacles until they were long enough to stretch all around the window, he began to redo all of the tests, adding in his own variables. I watched as my familiar, who was much much better than I at wizardry, connected scanning sequences and divination runes to check to see if Merlin’s portal had changed at all in the last month. After some time, Kraken gave up and floated in front of Susan.
“It’s Wild Magic, isn’t it?” Susan slyly grinned. “Wild Magic encasing two runes that are keeping this portal viable. So it’ll disappear when we go through it. And that means . . .”
“Yeeees,” she said, drawing it out, gesturing for Kraken to continue that line of thinking.
“Space and Time. That’s it.” Kraken pointed at the top. “That is the Celestial rune of Space. Heaven does not bother the timeline nor do they deign to mess with the lower realms. And they also don’t believe anyone is dumb enough to try and do so. So it’s space, the connector of the squished space, the structure of the portal tunnel connecting the here and now to the past and then.”
The portal runes glowed ominously. “You’d better hurry up.” I gripped my weapon tighter, checking and rechecking that I had what I needed. Gungnir, Svalinn, my trident and dagger. My soul-tree already had my nature-mace and I had my rifle stored away in Gungnir hoping that it would make the trip.
Kraken hummed. “So, if I’m right about the top rune being the stabilizing piece, then the bottom piece is the Infernal rune for Time, or the dissolution or breaking of Time. It is the part cutting through space and gravity in such a way that time travel is possible. This Infernal rune is also the part to dissolve first once our travel is complete allowing the Celestial rune for Space to restabilize everything.”
A slow clap rang out. “Bravo. Now that you’ve figured it out, step on through.”
Slowly taking notes on Kraken’s upgrades to the ‘Monocle’ spell, I re-energized it as I pulled out my new Grimoire. Before Kraken could say anything, I shoved him in Gungnir and tanked the structure of the spell into the Grimoire.
[Hey!] My familiar sputtered. [That’s mine!]
I snickered, snapping my Grimoire shut as it drank in the structure of the spell while also conveniently drinking in the database from the de-scripter tool. My latest soul-bound item guzzled copious amounts of mana from the spell as it deconstructed, crystalizing the best version of the ‘Monocle’ spell that I’d seen so far. Helping it along, I poured in enough mana to flatten a few tanks just so my Grimoire wouldn’t run dry. From all of my sources, its use was offset by a consistent mana drain but that didn’t bother me too much. I had more than enough resources to make that a minor concern.
Grinning like a fat farm cat who got into the milk, I smiled down at the dark brown leather cover of my Grimoire. Fashioned from homemade materials, my own blood, deconstructed leaves from Yggdrasil, the body of a dead dryad, and so much more, my Grimoire would become a powerful addition to my arsenal.
Now all I had to do was muster up the courage to step through the damn portal!