The Archdruid led Jeb back to the large tree where he had come on his first day in the Enclave. The interior had changed. Rather than being set up for a large party, the room had a single large table running through the middle. The table was covered in objects which radiated Magic.
“Your next Trial,” the Archdruid said, “is identifying these Objects of Power.” With that, he left, and other Druids filed in.
Jeb went to the first item on the table. It was a piece of granite about the size of his fist. Like the cave that he had just come from, the surface was covered in looping whorls.
“Am I allowed to touch the objects?” Jeb asked to the room in general.
A voice responded in the affirmative, so he picked up the stone. Turning it around, he saw that the whorls covered the entirety of the stone, not just the portion he had initially seen. Try as he might, though, Jeb was unable to find any beginning or end to the pattern. Unlike a Glyph or an Enchantment, there was no clear place for Mana to be pushed into the stone.
Trying anyways, Jeb pushed a small beam of Magic into the rock, sweeping it across the surface. He was unsurprised to find that his Magic did not catch on any portion of the rock. However, the longer that Jeb held the rock, the more that he could tell there was something intrinsically Magical about it. Setting it back down, he took a step back and looked through it with Magical sight.
To his surprise, the Magical feeling emanating from the rock did not come from the engravings. They were Magical, to be sure, but it reminded him more of the lute case he had made so long ago. Watching for longer, Jeb was positive: the carvings worked to trap and recycle whatever Magic the rock already had. When he told the crowd as much, he was asked what the rock’s Magic was. Unable to tell them, the rock was taken away, and Jeb moved down to the next object.
It was a shirt.
Picking it up, Jeb felt the familiar texture of woven fire. Unlike the fire that he had practiced Weaving, however, there was an actual Magic within the shirt. Once again, Jeb saw the lines and curves that he was beginning to associate with Druidic Magic. These appeared to be embroidered onto the fabric.
Shaking his head, Jeb realized that the embroidering was meant to be a distraction. Although it was very pretty, there was nothing Magical in the thread. When he looked past the embroidery to the fabric below, however, Jeb saw that the strands of fire within the cloth themselves traced out Druidic symbols.
Small sparks flashed in his Magical sight as he held the clothing. For a few minutes, Jeb forgot that he was trying to figure out what made the object Magical, too entranced by the skill that had gone into crafting it. The entire shirt was made without a single seam, and it was apparently Woven entirely from a single fire. What, exactly, the benefits of working with only a single fire were, Jeb did not know, but he could not imagine working so quickly. Something about the shirt told him that the Weaver had made the entire shirt while the flame was still alive.
Refocusing on his task, Jeb noticed that the shirt was leeching Magic from him, albeit slowly. When he tried pushing more Magic into the shirt, it greedily drank it in.
“It absorbs Magic?” Jeb hazarded, getting polite nods from a few of the Druids. They took the shirt, and Jeb moved down to the next object. Continuing down the table, Jeb saw more and more wondrous creations of Magic. He fell into a trance as he tried to piece together what made them work. Even as he spoke, another part of his mind was trying to come up with ways for him to make his own Magical creations so beautiful.
Even though he was unable to determine exactly what any object did, every part of them worked in perfect harmony. Unlike the perfectly crafted Enchantments he’d seen, they were not perfect in the way that an unadorned object could be beautiful in its stark lines. Instead, they were ornate, almost baroque in their construction. Somehow, though, the layers upon layers of Magics never became overwhelming. Each piece seemed necessary to the whole.
As day turned to night, the Druids in the room traded places with others. Jeb noted it absently, continuing to identify part, though not all, of the Magics within each object. When the sun had completely fallen, Jeb found an object that he recognized at a single glance.
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“This is just a piece of Water Attuned Wood,” Jeb said, holding the branch up.
The quiet commentary that had accompanied most of his pronouncements grew louder at that.
“How do you know?” one voice shouted.
Jeb frowned, trying to think of the best way to answer. He was certain that “because it is,” was not the answer anyone was looking for. In the end, he settled with answering the question he assumed that he was asking, “I made Water Attuned Wood before I went to the Academy,” he said.
The crowd died down a little bit at the mention that Jeb had seen the material before. He saw a number of objects on the table suddenly start to move. Someone called his name, and when he turned around, Jeb found that he was unable to remember what objects had been where. He was certain that the set of objects on the table were different, but that was all he was certain of. Which had been replaced, and what they had been replaced for, he had no idea.
Moving to the next object, Jeb once again called out instantly, “this is a piece of Water Attuned Wood that has a Glyph for Conjuring Water on it.”
“What Glyph?” a person called out.
Jeb rolled his eyes, annoyed at how particular they were being.
“It’s a Fifth Tier Glyph of Greater Conjure Water. It appears to have been constructed based on Young’s Second Principle for Water Glyph construction, though with clear influences from the Adler School. Would you like me to continue?” he asked, already moving to the next object.
When the voice didn’t reply, Jeb paused before picking up the next object. The question didn’t deserve the level of scorn that he had used in responding. Thinking back on the encounter, he remembered feeling angry, but he could not remember why.
He looked back at the carved wood. Even after poring through every cell of the wood individually, Jeb was unable to find another Magical effect. Whatever had made him angry either had not come from the wood or was a single-use effect. The lack of Magical residue implied the former.
Making a note to watch his emotions more carefully, Jeb moved back to the next object. It was another piece of wood. Rolling his eyes, he called out, “Fire Attuned Wood.”
The next dozen objects he was asked to identify were all chunks of Elementally Attuned Wood. None even had a Glyph on them. Reaching down for the next object, Jeb found that he could not lift it. Looking more carefully, he saw nothing in the stone that would suggest that it would be so heavy. Shifting it side to side was easy enough, but it seemed completely unwilling to let go of the table.
Furrowing his brows, Jeb tried to think of where else he had seen that happen. He remembered the lectures on magnetism that he had gone to on a whim. Even though each Lecturer was beyond clear that the effect was not Magic, Jeb still could not think of a mundane reason that two objects would be so attracted to each other. Looking at the stone on the table, Jeb saw no signs of Magic at all. Reaching underneath the table, he found the magnet’s pair.
“Mundane magnets,” Jeb called out.
The next object, to his mixed relief and disappointment, was once again a work of crafted Magic. At first glance, it was simply a perfectly carved sphere of wood. Looking closer, however, Jeb saw that it was made of many small shards of wood, rather than being a single carving, as he had initially assumed. The grains of each shard matched perfectly to all the shards surrounding it, and together the grain of the sphere was itself some sort of Druidic carving. Unlike the woven fire, this carving had an almost blindingly bright Magic pulsing through it. Jeb saw fragments of every Element he could name as Attuned Woods, and lost himself in the creation for a long while.
Someone’s coughing broke him out of the admiration, and Jeb shook himself, trying to look at it analytically. There was clearly a method to the way that each shard’s Element had been chosen. Try as Jeb might, though, he was completely unable to see what that pattern was. The fact that each Element was only a single shard in the sphere made it even harder.
Blinking, Jeb realized that the orb had changed as he held it. Lost in the tracing Magics, Jeb had not noticed that the actual shards had changed location. The object was in a constant state of motion, reforming new Druidic carvings with every passing moment. Jeb looked at it again in fascinated wonder, though he kept himself from falling back into the sphere’s pull.
“This is made of a number of shards of Elementally Attuned Wood,” Jeb said, “and the grain within the shards is used to create changing Magical Effects. More than that, though, I cannot say.”
With a pang in his heart, Jeb set the object down. He would have loved nothing more at that moment than to stare at the orb indefinitely. Looking at the orb, Jeb tried to see if it was mentally affecting him. A mesmerizing Magic would be completely reasonable for an object like that. To his relief, despite the Magic burning within the orb, it did not in any way interact with the Magic in the air around it. Jeb was fairly confident that he was interested in the orb on its own merits, rather than due to any Magical compulsion.
Looking away from the sphere, Jeb noticed that he was at the end of the table. When he turned his gaze to the room at large, he saw that it had cleared out. Only the Archdruid and the leaders of each Circle stood there.
“Jeb,” the Archdruid said, “come for your final Trial.”
Jeb followed the crowd out of the tree, feeling his bees once again returned to him.