image [https://i.imgur.com/9JnFmXw.jpg]

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Rick wandered along the Loverlock docks, looking out at the floating festival platform as a few barges tugged it into the centre of Lake Allura. They weighed it down with heavy anchors and long lines attached to mooring posts on the shore, making sure it couldn’t drift too far.

The scale of the festival preparations were very impressive. Loverlock’s sizeable warehouse district teemed with labourers loading building materials and supplies into boats so they could be shipped to the floating platform for the following night’s festivities.

Rick stopped at one of the stalls along the waterfront and bought a bottle of chilled cider, then he sat on the edge of the docks while he sipped it, enjoying the cool wash of refreshing sweetness in the midsummer heat. That taste… It threw him back into memories of his life before this journey began.

Back home in Brightlodge, long groves of orchards grew around the banks of Lake Aldbloom, so similar to how they did here in Loverlock.

In the autumn, the Brightlodge apples grew so large and green that every tree branch seemed to sag under their weight, until they were finally picked and carted off to the warehouses of the Brightwillow Cider Company to be turned into barrels of strong dry cider that Rick’s superior, Knight Archivist Hesselbur, loved so much.

Loverlock’s cider industry was one of Brightlodge’s main competitors for exports across the Dynasty, with a sweeter profile and a distinctly floral taste, where the Brightlodge cider had more bite, like the near bitterness of a barely ripe apple. Rick had always favoured the Loverlock taste, a preference which Hesselbur met with good natured disapproval.

‘Loverlock is full of artists and romantics. They’re soft folk, and they’ve never had to face down the unholy darkness that knights are bound to seek out and oppose. Perhaps that’s why their sweet palette offends me?’ the old Knight Archivist once said.

Occasionally, there would be a summer day where Rick and Hesselbur sat outside in the gardens of the Enduring Dawn chapterhouse, splitting a bottle of cider while the old Archivist shared stories from his travels with the Order.

And sometimes after his shifts in the archives were done, Rick used to take a fresh apple or pear with him while he went out on late afternoon walks along the grassy shore of Lake Aldbloom.

Looking out at the groves of orchards just around the lakeshore, Rick decided he felt like taking one of those walks, retreading his old steps in this town that was so new to him, and yet in many ways familiar to Brightlodge, the place he’d called home for three years.

He took a road from the docks and along the lakefront until it crossed a wooden cart-bridge over a stream that ran down from the Berabrick Forest, passing groups of workers bringing goods into town from the surrounding farms and homesteads.

Walking long distances was more challenging for him now than it had ever been before, but he took his time and leant on his walking stick for support as he turned off onto a smaller farmers’ trail running parallel to the waterline.

For thirty minutes or so Rick followed the shore, while Loverlock grew smaller in the distance. He walked through orchards, surrounded by rows of apple trees just starting to grow their fruit buds that would be ready for harvest in a few months. The rustle of wind and the sounds of insects buzzing through the trees and the long grass nearer to the water's edge was such a pleasant symphony.

Looking back across the lake, he could see the Lost Love Lodge towering over the town. The day was clear and bright enough that he even thought he could probably tell which high hotel balcony was the one leading into their suite; the fourth one from the left on the top floor, if he counted right.

From a couple of miles away, the town could hardly have looked more idyllic, basking in the last afternoon rays of the sun, just before its path westward brought the shadow of the Twirling Ridge Mountains to fall across the streets, cooling the baked roof tiles and Lake Allura’s shimmering surface.

Rick unstoppered his half-full cider bottle to take another sip, and found it had grown disappointingly warm.

But he was a mage now, and he could probably do something about that.

Rick sat down on an abandoned apple cart in the centre of an orchard grove full of flocks of little chirping songbirds dancing between the branches and swooping for insects by the lakeside.

After checking that there was definitely no-one else around, Rick got out the Book and opened it on his lap.

‘Cold… cold… chilling…’ he muttered under his breath as he flipped through the pages of invocations the Book lined up for him.

He’d already managed to memorise ten simple invocations, and his repertoire was expanding by the day. Based on his current estimates, there were another hundred or so invocations in the Book. Some he would try to learn in due time, but others…Well, they frightened him to say the least.

Further practice and investigation into the Book had revealed a disturbing trend. A lot of the spells it showed him, at least half of all the invocations in the Book, were related to death magic. It came as no surprise really. The Undying King was a fallen Shepherd of Sumat, the Face of Death. It made sense that the evil creature’s book would contain unholy necromantic rites. The enchanted tome was packed with invocations that directly affected the soul via interference with a person’s ethereal essence.

Most of the time that was basically impossible. The conceptual power of a person’s innate self-concept was a form of crude armour against direct outside interference with their ethereal being.

Sadly, the bodies of the dead had no such protection. Devoid of an active consciousness to assert its own self-concept, but still steeped in the ethereal baggage of the dead person’s life and experiences, the dead, especially the recently dead, could be manipulated freely. They could be mined for information, memories, secrets, or even partially animated into servitude in a macabre facsimile of life, shambling around and bound to the caster’s will.

Such power was an abomination. The very thing the Enduring Dawn had always taught him to hate and fear. It was exactly the kind of dark magic that would get a mage excommunicated from the Magisterium and shunned by all but the most depraved practitioners. But Rick had an entire Book full of those spells, always at his fingertips, and constantly showing up on pages when he read, as if they were begging to be used.

Rick hadn’t told anyone else about those death spells. He didn’t want to freak Fig out any further, as she seemed to be magic-phobic enough already. Instead, he’d simply been deliberately avoiding them, turning those disgusting pages quickly and sticking to the simpler and more broadly useful invocations for his ongoing studies.

Let the Undying King try to tempt him down a dark path of unholy magic. Rick wasn’t going to do it.

He finally found an invocation that looked like it would roughly suit his needs.

‘Bristerfel,’ he whispered, tasting the slight chill of the word, but not drawing any power yet.

It was a spell designed to conjure up a freezing wind, but Rick thought he could probably manipulate the casting to reduce the effect and direct it only at his cider bottle.

There was only one way to find out if it would work.

He fixed the intended effect of the spell in his head, creating a shape for the power with his mind with the necessary modifications in place, then spoke the invocation again with full conviction.

‘Bristerfel!’

Power surged from the Book, filling Rick’s body with chills as a cold wind sprung from seemingly nowhere and made a glittering circle of frost form in a flash on the grass around him.

He reached out and touched the cider bottle, guiding the wind with his hand until it formed a tiny vortex around the bottle, webbing the surface with lines of tiny ice crystals.

The effort of restraining the spell’s full effect was considerable, and he could feel the power fighting him the way it used to before he learnt his new spellcasting method, but all that hard won experience paid off here, making him comfortably capable of slightly changing the spell’s expression without losing control of it. The bottle was chilled, but not fully frozen. Rick smiled with triumph at the successful result.

Right up until the cider bottle shattered and the perfectly chilled contents splashed across the ground.

‘Shit!’ he gasped, releasing the spell and letting the frigid wind fade away, replaced again by the warm relief of the day’s midsummer breeze.

Why did that happen?

He picked up a shard of the bottle, and found it was still icy cold to the touch.

Come to think of it, the bottle had been pretty warm from sitting in bright sunshine before he cast the spell. Perhaps such a sudden temperature change was too much for the glass to handle.

Rick looked down at the damp stain fading into the soil. All that lovely sweet cider, wasted.

Magic practice was a such a frustrating process of trial and error.

Rick cleared up his mess, not wanting to leave a load of broken glass on the ground for someone to step on and cut their foot.

He was getting better at creative problem solving with the invocations at his disposal, but he still had a lot to learn about their range of possible effects. It seemed like the kind of thing only practical experience could teach him. Hopefully travelling with Fig would give him the time to learn.

Since the orchard was pretty isolated, this was probably a good time to do a little more practice, and he’d been meaning to try out his new ether-crystals

Rick fished out the pouch of ether-crystals he’d bought from the I.G.A earlier, and one by one held them up to the light.

They were all about the size of an egg, and cut to smooth off any overly protruding crystal spikes. He could see little flaws inside, tiny imperfections and cloudy patches that lowered the energy capacity and brought these ether-crystals down to a grade three.

Ok. What did he want to test?

A good start was probably to see if he could do what Grisson had done on The Rogue Wave and recreate the Book’s force blast invocation with just an ether-crystal.

He picked out the red crystal, force affinity, like the crystals that Mageknight had embedded into its armour to send blasts of force and fire at its enemies.

The crimson light gleamed through his gloved fingers, modulating slightly to some strange rhythm.

Holding the charged crystal in one hand, Rick pointed his other palm at a large moss covered rock that sat a short distance away on the lake’s shoreline. He fixed an intention for the spell in his mind.

There were no words or invocation to speak, so he just reached out to the ethereal potential seething inside the charged crystal.

It flashed, and the feeling was like a wave slamming him in the face.

‘Ooof!’ Rick staggered back even as the power pulsed through his outstretched palm and lashed out before him.

A spray of diffuse kinetic energy scattered across the shoreline in a wide spread, throwing up gravel and clumps of earth without any single target or coherence. It completely missed the large mossy rock.

Rick shook his head and steadied himself against the apple cart.

That had not gone as well as he’d hoped.

Ok, trial and error. Here we go.

He planted his feet and readied himself for the rush of untamed power as he prepared to try again, this time focusing on drawing less from the crystal, and narrowing the focus of the blast.

Boom!

The wave of force glanced off the side of the rock without causing any obvious damage. At least he hadn’t lost his balance this time, but it still wasn’t nearly effective enough. The spell was bleeding wasted energy and splashing unfocused kinetic potential around the target without hitting dead centre. The problem was his mental focus. He tried to reinforce the spell’s conceptual mould in his mind beyond what he’d already trained with his invocations.

Two more shaky and failed attempts confirmed that casting with an ether-crystal was very different to drawing power from the Book.

When he used the Book, there were preset invocations with roughly predetermined effects. The power already wanted to follow a particular path.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Through the invocations, the Book had some influence in broadly directing the expression of a spell before it even got to Rick and his final spell shaping. In that sense, the Book acted as a bit of a spellcasting crutch. He’d known this was probably the case, but only now was Rick made uncomfortably aware of just how much the Book had been helping him.

Without an invocation to provide a preset plan for the spell, it was entirely down to Rick to control the wild and chaotic power he drew from an ether-crystal, and that was proving to be a difficult task.

It was so easy for tiny cracks in his focus to mean complete failure when he drew from the crystal, something he didn’t have to worry about nearly as much when he used the Book.

He kept up the practice, taking a minute to refine his process between each casting, until by his fifth attempt he could just about emulate the effect of the Auusvartun invocation from the Book.

The red crystal pulsed and a bolt of force cracked the distant rock like an egg, sending shards of grey stone splashing and skimming across the lake. Fortunately there were no boats nearby.

The bolt left a trail of vibrating haze in the air behind it, faintly tinted red. It buzzed and slowly diffused into the environment. Rick waved his hand through it, feeling it crackle like static between his fingers. It was almost certainly the wasted energy that he couldn’t yet properly integrate into the spell.

Despite his best attempts he was still drawing a very inefficient amount of power, probably because his focusing control for crystal casting was so untrained. Also, the range at which he could reliably target the force blast was far shorter than when he just used an invocation. There was a lot to criticise, but at least he’d crossed the first hurdle. From here, further improvement was probably just a matter of practice.

In fact, training his spell shaping skills with the ether-crystals would probably make him even better with his invocations, especially once he started attempting more complex spells because the crystals put his abilities through a much more rigorous shaping challenge.

Of course, the major downside of the crystals was that the Book never stopped providing power to his invocations, while ether-crystals swiftly ran out of charge. After only a handful of castings, the red crystal in his hand was visibly dimmer. He doubted it would last even two more attempts at the spell.

And Rick didn’t have access to any means of charging the crystals on his own.

Some wizards had their own setups for recharging their crystals, which usually consisted of a miniature furnace that would heat them to extreme temperatures for hours until they absorbed all that additional environmental energy. But even the most compact of those weren’t easily portable or simple to operate.

There were more expensive and efficient enchanted machines that drew ethereal potential directly from the Veil, and imbued it into the crystals in minutes. Rick had never seen one up close, but he’d heard that they were huge and designed to charge many hundreds of crystals at once. That was what the I.G.A probably had in their Loverlock guildhouse.

He’d be reliant on their charging services for the foreseeable future, which complicated his plans to practise crystal fuelled spellcasting on the road with Fig. How was he supposed to train if he could only cast a few spells with each crystal before it ran out of charge?

Rick paced around the grove while he turned that problem over in his head, at least a little bit embarrassed by his own impatience.

This was what most wizards had to put up with. They constantly had to ration out the fuel for their spells whenever they couldn’t easily access charging services. Rick, on the other hand, had been completely spoiled by the Book of the Undying King, which let him breeze past such restrictions.

Once again he was struck by just how powerful it really was; a bottomless well of spellcasting power, not quite as versatile as ether-crystal casting because you were bound by the utility of the invocations, but it made up for that minor drawback by never running out of juice.

‘I wonder…’ he held the book in one hand and the red ether crystal in the other.

How would he even attempt it? In transit, perhaps he could use an incomplete invocation?

Better to start small in case it blew up in his face.

‘Vroshtik Wshantha!’ he spoke the words to one of the first invocations he’d memorised, a minor illusory effect that could conjure simple images.

However, instead of letting the spell complete its casting, he seized the power that came flowing from the Book and tried to channel it across into the ether-crystal.

After all, if the Book of the Undying King was an inexhaustible source of spellcasting power, didn’t it stand to reason that it might be possible to recharge ether-crystals with it?

As it turned out, the answer was no.

When he tried to press the power into the crystal it was like pushing against a wall. He could almost feel the nearly depleted crystal wanting to accept the ethereal energy, but then the power ran up against that barrier and just stopped flowing.

He pushed harder, leveraging his will against the barrier in the hopes that he might break through, but the invocation’s power writhed against his hold harder than it ever had before.

'Fuck!' Rick couldn't contain it.

With a flash, the invocation's power broke free.

Since he hadn’t provided any shape for the spell, the whole thing flew apart in a shower of harmless colourful sparks that winked and tumbled in the air around Rick for a second before fading into nothing.

The red ether-crystal was still dim. It had taken on no additional charge. More than that, it was smoking slightly and hot to the touch. Strange. He set it down and shook out his hand in the breeze to stop his glove smouldering.

Another failure.

Rick slumped back down on the apple cart and sat in silent contemplation for a moment as soft wind ruffled the folds of his cloak.

It was difficult not to feel disheartened.

Looking down at the Book and the cooling ether-crystal beside him, he tried to figure out the problem. He really felt like that should have worked. Why didn’t it? What was he misunderstanding about ethereal mechanics?

He didn’t notice that every bird in the orchard had stopped singing, until an awful voice rasped, ‘Is that brutish display truly the thanks I get?’

He could almost feel the speaker’s teeth brushing his ear.

Rick tumbled out of the apple cart and scrambled backwards across the grass, regaining his footing as he whipped around in a panic.

There was nobody standing by the apple cart, but the shade under a nearby apple tree had grown in darkness and depth until it was an impenetrable black void, utterly at odds with the sunny orchard around it.

Oh, dawn preserve him! There was someone within that darkness. Unseen, but present.

Not a thing, not a monster, a person. He could feel it as clearly as he felt his heart hammering in his chest.

They were a terror upon the world. Just the weight of their presence pinned him in place. Rick found his limbs seizing up. The Book hummed and shook in his grip so much that it hurt his wrist but he was incapable of dropping it.

Every living sound had stopped. There was no wind, no soft lap of the lakeside waves, even the cicadas dared not make a sound while that dark figure was near. The silence was crushing, until the voice came once more.

‘My power is not the equivalent of cheap lamp oil, to be freely decanted, bottled, or burned at anyone’s leisure. Yet you tried to cram into a paltry container with all the finesse of a fumbling drunk. In your foolishness, you go too far, Rickard Crichét.’

Again, it was like the speaker was whispering right beside his head, and he knew that voice.

‘So you finally decided to show yourself!’ he growled, ‘What do you want with me, Undying King?’

The dark voice seemed to consider for a moment before responding.

‘How presumptive. I must remember that you are young, and only mortal. I will resist judging you too harshly, but I am not here to answer your trivial questions, servant. To do so would be telling far too much at such an early stage and the pawns need not know how the game is played. Suffice to say that I have you right where I want you, for now.’

‘I don’t want to be a piece in your twisted game!’

‘Then you wish to return to death? How strange. As I recall, you agreed to this pact. I merely made the offer. It was you who pledged yourself to my service and claimed willingness to do anything, if I allowed you to avoid the darkness beyond.’

‘You knew I wouldn’t say no!’ Rick cried, ‘You trapped me.’

‘No, boy. I saved you.’

The voice hissed in deathly tones, and the apple tree above the darkness began to wither and die. Leaves lost their colour, turning first brown, then as grey as ash before crumbling into dust that spread on the wind. Yet the lack of leafy canopy did nothing to dispel the impenetrable pool of shade around the tree’s trunk.

‘Until now I favoured a light touch out of respect for your hardship, but perhaps it is time to teach you proper reverence for your master, and the power you were so generously endowed.’

Green flames suddenly sprung from the ground to encircle Rick. He screamed and recoiled, but as before in the temple these uncanny fires did not burn him.

‘Let us see how you fare for a time without the gifts of my favour.’

The flames washed over him for a moment, then they vanished and it was like the world lost all definition.

The sky went dark. His vision clouded until he could barely see through the milky haze of his half ruined eye.

Rick staggered, then fell to his knees with a groan.

What was happening to him?

All vigour drained away and Rick’s body collapsed to the ground.

The only clear thing was pain.

His skin was raw and tender, burning where it rubbed against the fabric of his clothes. The agony was as fresh as it had been the morning he first woke up in the burning rubble of that cult village, back in hills of the Lordswood.

‘This is but a fraction of what I can take from you, if you don’t learn to behave.’

‘Please…’ Rick couldn’t even get out a full sentence.

‘And if you ever try to force my power into an ether-crystal again, I will drag you to the foulest parasite realm I can find and leave you there to be tortured for eternity.’

He could barely even comprehend the threat. Parasite realm?

‘I won’t…’ Rick gasped.

‘Enjoy doing everything the hard way, until I decide you’ve learnt your lesson.’

Then the dark presence was gone.

Rick lay in the grass with the sun beating down on him, barely able to move and slowly roasting in his clothes until the cool shadow of the mountains fell across him.

Sound slowly returned, but only a muted version. The waves of Lake Allura lapping the shore in the summer breeze became indistinct, mere watery echoes.

He managed to crawl to his walking stick. Standing proved almost unbearably painful, but he eventually found his feet with the help of his stick and a nearby tree trunk.

He was back to how he’d been six weeks ago, crawling out from under the smouldering rafters of the healers hut.

He tried to open the Book but found he couldn’t. Even with his weak shaking fingers jammed between the covers they just wouldn’t come apart. It was denied to him; the power, the rejuvenation of his wounded body, everything the Book had offered since the moment he first touched it.

Damn it!

He tried to fling the Book away, almost falling in the process, but the compulsion to retrieve it kicked in immediately, and he found himself hobbling to pick it up against his own will.

So, some things remained.

The Undying King did say there was more it could take, and given how terrible Rick felt already, he really didn’t want to find out what would happen if he pissed the unholy entity off even further.

He hadn’t even realised he was doing something forbidden by his patron. It wasn’t like he’d been given a list of tenets to follow. A little clarity would have been nice before he brought down such heavy punishment on himself. What if he made another mistake without realising it.

The thought was paralysing.

He supposed the punishment was already doing its job then. He’d do almost anything to avoid more of this torture, just as he’d do almost anything to avoid death, and that was a stick the Undying King could beat him with until he obeyed, like the coward he was.

Rick slowly shuffled away from that ominous dead apple tree, standing withered and alone in the midst of the otherwise verdant orchard.

Through his cloudy vision he could just make out the lights of Loverlock appearing in the far distance as afternoon turned into evening and the townsfolk lit coloured lanterns across the waterfront.

The walk out of town to the orchard had taken him barely thirty minutes.

Weak and in agony, his return took all night.

For hours he shuffled, hunched over his stick in the darkness, faintly hearing the distant sounds of music and partying. So many times he lost his way in the gloom, fumbling like a blind man until the hazy lights of the town led him back to the right path.

He crossed the cart bridge long after midnight, and continued until he made it to the edge of town.

The streets flowed with drunken revellers. It must have been four in the morning, but some people had clearly decided to get an early start on the festival.

Rick hugged the buildings, letting people dismiss him as an old vagrant, or the carrier of some undesirable disease, until A drunkard knocked him off his feet to sprawl in the gutter. Not a single person stopped to offer him assistance as he crawled away.

He’d made it so far already, but now the maze of rowdy streets seemed an insurmountable obstacle.

He ended up huddled in the dark doorway of a closed bookshop, shivering and too dazed to continue, until an arm looped around him and lifted him back to his feet.

‘This way,’ a warm feminine voice spoke softly at his side.

She half carried him on a slow shuffle away from the docks towards the glowing tower of the Lost Love Lodge..

Rick couldn’t quite make out who it was. She stood to his side, supporting his weight with strong hands in such a position that he couldn’t turn or raise his eyes to her face. But he could see high cuffed boots on her feet, and detect the faint smell of jasmine as she pressed close to guide him.

‘The Lost… Love Lodge’ he managed to mumble, so exhausted that he could hardly string the words together.

‘Yeah, don’t worry I know,’ the strange woman said, ‘I saw you there yesterday, looking a lot better than you do now, by the way. I’ve seen some bad hangovers before, shit, I’ve had some bad hangovers myself, but what kind of crazy night did you have?’

‘...wouldn’t believe me,’ Rick said, and the woman laughed.

‘Maybe, maybe not,’ she helped him slowly across the final square and into the hotel foyer.

The mystery saviour handed him off to the hotel staff with a stern instruction to take him to room 1507.

'How'd you know my room number?' Rick whispered, but the woman just patted him on the shoulder and disappeared before he ever got a good look at her face.

One of the bellhops rode the lift with him all the way up to the fifteenth floor, and helped open their suite door when Rick fumbled the key.

‘Thank you,’ he croaked, and closed the door behind him.

The suite was dark, but he could faintly hear Dorian snoring from the chaise-longue in the common area.

Rick tried to call out and wake the writer, but the words caught in his throat. A tide of exhaustion smothered him under its overwhelming weight.

He took a few shambling steps, but before he made it even halfway into the room Rick fell to the floor and passed out.

[End of Chapter 23]