The OP Lich is a Returnee, Chapter 17 (Patreon)

Chapter 17 – Enchanted

There were four pieces of any enchantment. First, you had the materials, which would hold the enchantment, and conduct mana into it. Second, you had the symbology, which could strengthen or weaken the enchantment. Third, you had the inscriptions, which ‘programmed’ the enchantment. And finally, you had the magic, which ‘installed’ the enchantment.

I already had the first two steps done, so now I needed to work on the third step. This was actually both the simplest and most complex step of the enchanting process. The difference between simple and complex was in setting the instructions for the enchantment.

In our first year at the International School, we’d been sent through a computers and technology class. Basically, it was a class to make sure that everyone at the school could use the computers, and taught us a bunch of things about databases and the like. One thing it also included was basic programming. As in BASIC, the computer language.

Oh, it wasn’t anything in depth. I think the most complicated thing any of us programmed in that class was a replica of Pong. But the basics of computer programming definitely applied when dealing with enchantment, especially when you considered GIGO and the KISS principle.

The KISS principle was the simplest one. Keep It Simple, Stupid. The more complicated an enchantment was, the more carefully you had to go over the wording to be sure that what it said matched what you wanted to happen. The enchantment to make a sword sharper, or to increase the protection a suit of armor gave you? Simplicity itself. An enchantment to ensure that only the husband of the bride could impregnate her? That was a LOT more complicated!

Which led to the GIGO concept. Garbage In, Garbage Out. A simple equation z = x / y is easy enough to program in. But what happens if y is 0? Your program fails. If you’re just doing a exercises for Algebra homework, that just means you get an error, and the class laughs at you.

If you were doing an enchantment, however, that kind of mistake could turn a supposedly beneficial item into one carrying a deadly curse. Some of the most dangerous items in the other world had come about because of unfortunate enchantments with accidental effects. The example my teacher gave me, while I was learning enchanting, was that of the Slippers of the Dancing Queen.

The entire shop wasn’t even pretending to work as I went into the story, but that was fine. They were here to learn, after all. I would be a poor teacher indeed if I didn’t hammer some of the dangers into their skulls first, so they wouldn’t make the mistakes other people did.

“In the land of Rafrad, the King was married to the daughter of the Astren tribe in the north, to forge an alliance between their peoples. Rafrad was a noble country ruled by the aristocracy, while the Astren were a warrior people who put more faith in one’s skill at arms than their skill on the dance floor.

“Queen Svolhu was a mighty warrior of her people, a ferocious fighter who, with her legendary greataxe, Spinecleaver, slew a dragon in single combat, or so all the bards proclaimed. But the battlefield of the ballrooms and palaces of Rafrad were alien to her. She could barely perform the steps of the simple dances commoners used, because her body knew only the rhythm of combat. The complicated and delicate dances of the nobility were simply impossible for her.

“This was a weakness that saw Svolhu mocked by all the nobles, the aristocrats viciously cutting her down with their words whenever they could pretend that she couldn’t hear. In her despair, she turned to the local enchanter for help. If learning the dances was impossible for her, was there not some way to use magic to help her pretend, at least enough to keep up appearances?

“The enchanter took her dancing slippers, and enchanted them with magic to allow her to dance with the most talented of the Rafradian nobility. When one said the word of command, they would begin dancing in perfect time to the music they heard. With that alone, Svolhu would have been happy.

“But the enchanter wished to impress the Queen, in a bid to become the official court enchanter. So, he added several powers to the slippers. First, he gave the slippers the power to meld into her feet, so that the queen might always be ready to dance, no matter what fashion demanded of her for footware. Second, he enchanted the shoes to grant the wearer stamina while dancing, so that they would be able to keep dancing long into the night. And finally, he gave them the power to force others to dance along with her, so that the nobles who insulted her might be made to dance to her tune.

“It was a masterful piece of work, an enchantment that was sure to please the Queen. But the enchanter made one terrible mistake. He made the command words for the spells in the Rafradian tongue. Queen Svolhu could speak Rafradian, but her accent was no different from that of an American trying to speak Japanese.”

I nodded at my audience’s winces. They all knew how badly a foreign accent could mar someone’s speech. Even if they were saying the proper words, it was easy to believe that they might not be understandable to a native speaker. And, when magic was involved, this became a big problem.

“At the first ball after Svolhu received the slippers, she spoke the word of command to begin dancing, and all was well. But when she tried to speak the word to stop, the shoes did not understand her, for her Astren accent made it sound like the word used to make everyone dance with her. Now, this on its own would only qualify for a minor embarrassment. If that was all, then the tale would be that of a woman who tried to gain skills she did not have by cheating, and the whole thing would likely never be thought about, outside her own lifetime.

“But that was not all, and it is here where the actual mistakes in the enchantment came to light. For, in his haste to impress the Queen, the enchanter had forgotten to include any limiters into the enchantment, save for the command words. She could not properly pronounce the word to stop, and so the slippers made her keep dancing, past the point of exhaustion. And because the slippers heard the word to force others to dance with her, the entire hall, everyone who could see the queen, began dancing with her.

“Servants who had been outside the room, and were unaffected by the spell, cautiously entered the ballroom, and found themselves unaffected. Seeing this, they tried to separate the dancers, dragging those closest to the doors out of the hall, to see if breaking the line of sight would end the effect, but it was not so. Those caught in the enchantment’s web would continue dancing until the enchantment stopped.

“A maid who served Svolhu mentioned the enchanted slippers, and suggested that, if they were removed, the spell might end. Four of the kingdom’s nights entered the hall, and attempted to subdue the queen, so they could remove her shoes. But that was not as easy as it might seem, for Svolhu was still a mighty warrior, and her body was ingrained with the reflexes of one who has lived upon the battlefield.

“Despite herself, she fought against the knights. When they tried to grapple her, or even tackle her to the ground, they found that any injury done to her, no matter how slight, was translated through the enchanted slippers to all those affected. Yet, somehow, they managed to pin her to the ground, though it took the four of them, struggling with all their might, to hold her down, and keep her steady.

“And it was then that the final tragedy of the slippers was revealed. Once they melded into the wearer’s skin, only the wearer could remove them. And Svolhu was incapable of doing anything but dancing at the moment, even though the music had long since stopped.

“The only way to stop the macabre dance was for the Queen to die. But killing her would kill all the rest of the dancers, effectively decapitating the entire nobility of the country, since the damage was replicated on the other dancers. Even if they were knocked out or put to sleep, their bodies danced on.

“One by one, the guests began dropping, for the pampered nobles did not have the stamina of a warrior queen from the north. Svolhu danced until she died, the last to fall. Only then, could her slippers be removed.

“But the deaths of so many, combined with their dying curses, had changed the slippers. Once pure white, the slippers were now blood red, and their powers had changed with them. Now, simply putting on the slippers would cause the wearer, and all who saw them, to dance the dance macabre once again, until the cycle of death repeated itself.”

I sighed, shaking my head. It was a tragic tale, after all, but an important one to tell, if her students were to learn from others’ mistakes instead of their own. “And all of this because of the cruelty of women, a queen’s vanity, and an enchanter who made his enchantments more complicated than they needed to be.” I looked at my students, and grinned. “So, when you begin your own enchantments, remember to always check your work.”

And, with that, I turned back to my own work. The enchantment I wanted was a complex one, after all, and it wouldn’t do to follow the footsteps of the enchanter in the tale. Especially since, following the chaos of the Rafradian nobility being wiped out, and the civil war that followed, the country was renamed as Haerth, and its new ruler was the man that would come to be called a Demon King.

To simplify the enchantment, I broke it into sections. The first, and most important, would be the Blood Enchantment. When activated, that would bind the amulet to the wearer’s bloodline. No one who was not of that bloodline would be able to pick up the amulet, much less wear it. To try would be to invite a fate worse than death. But for one who was of that bloodline, they would be able to wear the amulet, and access its other enchantments.

The actual bloodline enchantment was simple enough. Not because the actual ‘programming’ was simple, but rather because it was such a common enchantment, especially when dealing with royalty, that the formula was already written and ready, like getting a piece of code from an online repository. Anchoring it to the bloodstone was child’s play for me, allowing me to move on to the next part of the enchantment.

The protective aspects of the enchantment could be handled in four parts. You had protection from physical harm, protection from poisons, protection from disease, and protection from mental manipulation. Each protective aspect had ‘detection’, ‘passive defense’, and ‘active defense’ parts.

Each section started with some generic formulas, which I then refined with the restrictions I intended to place. For instance, when dealing with protection from poisons, without any restrictions, it would not only block things like birth control, or any other medications the wearer might take, but it would also block the effects of alcohol and other recreational substances. That might not sound like a problem to some, but I knew many people would simply take the chain off when they wanted to drink, which would leave them unprotected, and vulnerable to attack. That wouldn’t be my fault, naturally, but it was bad design, and I couldn’t have that.

So, I worked for quite a while on the poison protections, to ensure that the protections didn’t give the wearer a reason to take off the protections. The same thing with the protection from harm. I had to limit it to external sources, or the wearer’s muscles would atrophy because they were never worked. In fact, the only area where the protections were not limited hardly at all was the mental protections. Those, I just locked down so that anyone trying to manipulate the wearer’s mind would have about as much luck as if they were trying to mind control a brick wall.

The final two parts of the enchantment were the simplest of all. Causing the chain to change shape to fit the wearer’s will at a mental command was simple enough, as that was a secondary function of a very common item, a hat designed to disguise the wearer as any other creature of their basic size and body type, with the hat changing shape to fit the form and clothing style the wearer decided. Protecting the chain from damage was also an incredibly simple enchantment, since I did not have to deal with any restrictions, just make it so that the chain would never rust, shatter, break, stretch, or even so much as scratch. Someone would have to be, well, on my level to affect that chain.

It took me the whole night, and most of the next day of constant work, but, soon, I had completed my first complex enchantment in this new world. As I pushed my magic into the piece, cementing the final pieces of the enchantment and binding it together, I could feel the mana flowing through me. The magic was young, raw, primal when compared to that of the other world, but it could not help but obey my will. And then, it was done, a piece fit for a king.