Chapter 103: Progress (Patreon)

[A picture of a giant with a crown holding a fist over his head.]

J is for Jarl, the kings of the giants, who can rule over their kin as kratocratic tyrants.

-Sally Rider’s ABCs of Magic

—

Kole spent the rest of that weekend cloistered in his room, only leaving for the occasional bathroom break—though he limited his water consumption to reduce the need for even that. By the end of Sunday, he didn’t have a new version of Magic Missile or Shield ready, but he knew the tasks were within his reach.

Without classes, the weeks that followed became a blur and lost all their structure to Kole as he dove headfirst into magic. Each morning he woke up, went to Zale’s trainings, rushed through whatever tutoring he had to do, and returned to his room to study. The only reason he didn’t give his other schoolwork a half-hearted effort was because his spellbook made doing the work so easy.

If only I could make the book write the words themselves, he wished one day while nursing a hand cramp. While Kole studied, Amara went with Zale one day to replace the alarm device with something more permanent. Her tracker still showed doors were open somewhere in the Dahn, and the continued emergence of scalequine herds and strange rabbits that begun showing up on campus reinforced that. The rabbits had feathers, but were largely rabbit-shaped, except for their front legs mirrored their hind legs and they could jump in any direction. For PREVENT, they were taken on more missions by Tigereye and Underbrook, to clear out threats just strong enough to be too much for a village, but not too strong for them. Each time they were offered a reward, they declined, as each far flung village seemed more destitute than the one before.

“Wasn’t there another door here?” Underbrook asked the group the first time they returned to the door chamber. “Very curious.”

He hadn’t pushed the issue, only smiling at Zale extra wide as he ushered them through another door.

By the end of the eleventh week of class, two weeks after they’d found the soldier ants, Kole finally felt like his goals were within his reach as he completed the last version of Shield. As he’d hoped and expected, the final Will cost of the spell was 18. Short of making his own spell from scratch and navigating all the way from his natural bridge opening to the Font of Barriers, a task he estimated to be far beyond him, it seemed he’d found the limits to spells outside his affinities to cast. The version of Shield he’d built had the most of archaic components available to him.

His traditional wizardry made progress too. While he’d not yet gotten Thunderwave below 14 Will, he figured out that he could indeed cast a cantrip for the Font of Sound. The cantrip, which was called Message after he looked up the effect in a reference book, allowed  him to throw his voice to somewhere else within range. For a minuscule amount of Will, he could tap into the Font of Sound, hold his hand up to his mouth, and send his voice out.

He of course used it to torment Rakin as they did their morning conditioning. He cast the cantrip as he ran, and made the sound of his ragged breathing appear just over the dwarf’s shoulder. Kole had to restrain himself from laughing right into Rakin’s ear as he watched him give strange looked to everyone he passed. Kole would have kept it up for weeks if Zale hadn’t eagerly asked him what he was doing.

“I can sense that!” she said excitedly as she ran past him, the sound also appearing next to Rakin across the field.

Rakin stopped, and his eyes fixed onto Kole, and even from thirty feet away Kole could thought he could sense the malice.

“Oh,” Zale said, following Kole’s eyes when he stopped. “Sorry Kole. Don’t be like that Rakin. You deserve worse.”

Rakin heard the sound through the spell and continued running, and now it was Kole’s t turn to look over his shoulder.

Kole wasn’t the only one to make progress over those first two weeks of waiting. Doug and Rakin practiced with their Fonts daily. Rakin became able to produce larger flames, while keeping the rage he felt at the drawings to a minimum. It got to the point where he could easily light a fire without feeling anything but his natural surlyness, and if he risked getting a little unhinged, he could wreath his fist in flames for nearly a minutes.

Doug’s progress was less noticeable. He discovered that if he closed his eyes when he sensed a teleportation coming along, he could stop it from happening altogether. Closing one’s eye’s during battle wasn’t the best way to stop the involuntary action, but it was better than randomly appearing before an enemy.

Zale continued to train with her sound aura, finding Kole while he pathed Thunderwave, and trying to reinforce her connection to the Font.

“Hit me with Thunderwave,” she told him one day during training.

Kole was used to the request and did so without hesitation.

He built the spell construct, sent it through his bridge, and felt it channel through his body out into the world where… nothing happened.

Kole looked at his palm, as if the spell had somehow gotten stuck in it. When he looked up at Zale, she was grinning ear to ear.

“What did you do?” he asked, amazed.

Counterspell was a third-tier spell for a wizard, and from what Kole had read, it felt nothing like what Kole had just experienced.

“I ate it!” she said proudly. “Well, sort of. I connected the spell to my Font.”

“You found your Font?” Kole asked, even more surprised.

Zale had been exploring the Arcane Realm using her own strangely voidy methods that differed greatly from Kole’s but he’d never heard her update him on any progress.

Growing dark in embarrassment, Zale admitted, “I found it a few days ago, but I didn’t want to tell you until I could do that. I felt like it would be possible ever since we fought hose gnolls but it seemed too far-fetched.”

“That’s amazing! That third-tier spell!”

“Oh, it’s not that big of a deal. It only works for Sound spells.”

Kole admonished her modesty and set plans in place for her to get connected to even more Fonts—as soon as he was sure to pass the semester at least.

Their alarm went off four times during those next three weeks, each time Kole was studying alone. Kole raced out of his room as soon as he heard the whistling of the alarm—a feature added when everyone apparently missed the first one, the color on the run devices not exactly being noticeable in one’s pocket or backpack.

Invisible, he ran out of the library, making efforts to avoid people but occasionally his wake would disturb papers as he ran past. He wouldn’t call himself an athlete, but their endurance training had begun to bear notable fruit.

Distantly he recalled running away from the bullies of his childhood, holding his cramping sides as he tried to stifle his breathing as they passed the ally he’d ducked into.

Despite his new ability to run more than a minute without wanting to pass out, he never made it to Zale’s in time to enter the portal—none of them did. Twice, Zale had been in her room when the alarm went off and could have made it through the door and into the abandoned section of the Dahn, but they’d all sworn to each other to not enter unless they were all present.

Each time, Kole would return to his room to resume his studying, but not without trying to get that door in Zale’s home to open to his room.

Despite Kole spending most of his time in his room, Theral was only an occasional presence, the other boy’s teleporting had begun to become less frequent. To Kole’s eye, the book looked more tired than usual and aged, as if whatever he was struggling with when outside that room had caused him to get years older in a matter of months.

Maybe he also fell into a time-dilated magical gateway into a maybe-alternate-reality maybe-illusion. Kole joked to himself.

With each appearance, Kole picked his brain for help on pathing and used him as a sounding board for his discussions with Lonin.

“So, you found yourself a mentor?” Theral had asked one day as they discussed the few offensive Light spell options Kole had gone over with Lonin.

“No,” Kole admitted. “But, I’m hoping I can wear him down.”

Kole had skipped the now weekly mentor-mentee mingling events that were happening in the lead-up to finals. He figured that having a mentor was next semester Kole’s problem, and this semester Kole had very little sympathy for his feature self.

“Ha!” Kole said, holding his empty palm out one Saturday morning.

Without study group, and no longer searching for portals, they’d extended their training to Saturday mornings, though this training focused on cross-training each other. Rakin taught hand-to-hand combat, Doug taught them woodcraft, and Zale taught them some of the roguish tricks her mother had educated her with her whole like.

“You did it!” Zale said excitedly.

She’d been teaching them sleight of hand and were working on back palming cards, which was to hold them with the back of your fingers so an empty hand could be displayed to others. Palming had been the first trick, and they’d all picked it up quickly.

At the start, Kole had experimented with Fade to make the palming easier, and it had, allowing him to do a poor job but still get the card hidden. Through that, he’d also found that through repeated exposure his Fade ability stopped working. Now, if he tried to hide something from his friends’ attention, they’d not only be unaffected but find their attention towards the object heightened as they somehow felt failed ability against their minds.

Kole was the first to pick up back palming—or so it appeared.

“The cards not behind his hand!” Rakin shouted, able to see it from his perspective.

Zale squinted one eye as if she was trying to figure it out, but then her smile grew larger.

Kole let the card reappear in his hand. He’d learned to make an object invisible.

Sorcerers manifest new spells through need. When a sorcerer was in danger—or in this case deeply frustrated—and had sufficient potential built up, they had the chance of learning a new spell.

Potentially is a vague way of saying they’d mastered their current abilities. The new spell was more likely to be an evolution of a current spell if one could molded to accomplish the task, and if not a new one would manifest from one of the other Fonts with which the sorcerer had affinities.

So, while Kole was getting frustrated trying to hide the card, if he’d been connected to the Font of Space, he might have instead manifested the ability to teleport the object out of his hand.

So far, Kole’s sorcerous spells had all been improvements to his invisibility spell. It had started as a chameleon spell and gotten better until it was true invisibility. Now, it seemed, he could make other objects invisible, while not making himself so. He’d long since been able to make objects he held invisible along time him, but never alone.

“So, ye just learned a new spell? Just like that?” Rakin asked.

Kole nodded, as he made the card appear and disappear in his hand. The Will cost was the same as turning himself invisible, which he thought was odd, but at only 3, it was incredibly low.

Then, suddenly there were two cards in his hand.

“What in the realms?” Kole asked in disbelief. “I don’t think I did that.”

“I did that!” Doug shouted excited himself now.

“You duplicated my card?” Kole asked, but then realized the truth as Doug answered.

“I teleported the card out of my hand! Since I got the amulet with my soul stone, I’ve only been focusing on trying to gain control of my involuntary teleporting. I never tried using the Font for anything else until just now when Kole gave me the idea.”

“Great job! Both of you! We should celebrate…” Zale said excitedly but then trailed off. “Actually, I have plans today, but we definitely should.”

Then, the card in Rakin’s hand burst into flame.

“Yay, look at me,” he deadpanned, causing everyone to break out into laughter.

Rakin smiled then seeing his joke land. After that, to not feel left out, Zale used her own ability to disolve the card into dust by infusing it with her Will as she’d once shown off in collapsing Rakin’s chair leg.