The strange older woman – Thalia Eklebryte, apparently – shoved her glasses up her nose and spun around, gesturing to the piles of ancient books and assorted items on the shelves.

  “We’ve got a bit of a gentleman’s agreement about how to use the room, alright? You’re welcome to use most of what’s on the shelves, so long as you put it back in the same shelf. You’re also expected to add the things you can uniquely offer.”

  She squinted at me, shifting her glasses again. The lenses flared in a shimmering mix of blues, greens, reds, and even a few flecks of black. I couldn’t see any spellforms this time, but she must have been seeing something, because she nodded.

  “You’re still pretty young, so nobody’s going to be too annoyed about you not putting anything interesting in for a while, but once you manage to leap off the deep end and work with fifth or higher spells, some cursed trinkets would probably be a good idea.”

  I shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. Had she somehow deduced my affinity just by looking at me? As far as I was aware, the only known method to discover an affinity was through the summoning of a grimoire, or by examining someone or something with the magic imbued in it.

  To be fair, it was possible she'd gleaned the information from my defensive bracelet, but to do so that fast? I didn’t like how much Thalia was able to determine with just a glance.

  “You mentioned properly absorbing my room and paths into the ring,” I said after a moment of awkward silence. “Would you mind explaining what that means?”

  “Oh, did I? Oops! Forget I said that. It’s tradition to let newcomers discover the intricacies of the signet through discovery and development. It encourages experimentation and exploration, as a proper wizard should know how to do. But once you do manage it, you’ll be able to hook up with this room and access it much more easily than you could to get here. It’s also a particularly convenient tool for when you’re out wandering the demon wastes to look for materials.”

  “I… see,” I said. I thought I mostly followed, but I was still confused on how everything was supposed to work. Then again, according to her, that confusion was almost the point.

  “Good,” Thalia beamed. “Now, a few more things. The common room has a powerful cleaning enchantment on it – probably too powerful, if I’m being honest. Why, once I saw George fall over, and his suit promptly started trying to fold itself into a neat pile. It gave up after he moved, but it was rather funny. The tables are also bespelled to produce drinks and mini-sandwiches. So long as you use it sparingly, it shouldn’t risk running low on base materials, which it gathers from a few planar portals. Hmm… Anything else?”

  “Affinity rituals,” I said. She gave me an odd look and I shrugged. “I figured that if there was anywhere in the world that would have texts on affinity rituals, it would be here.”

  “We might have a few? Stone’s something of an archeologist, so most of them would be historical tablets, scrolls, and books that were recovered from the Age of Sunder,” Thalia said, blinking. “Are you an affinity focused caster?”

  “No, but it kind of feels like I’m becoming one,” I admitted. “Regardless, I’ll need to wait a bit for my reserves to recharge in order to cast teleportation circle and get out of here.”

  Thalia nodded in agreement and walked away, before flopping in one of the chairs, knocking on the table, and opening a book she pulled from her locker. I blinked in surprise. That had felt a little abrupt to me, but I supposed she had told me everything important. Probably. Well, if nobody was going to protest…

  I turned and began scanning the walls. They were absolutely stuffed to the brim with endless rows of seemingly randomized stuff – enchanted items, affinity imbued items, spell components, and countless books. But through the randomness, a pattern emerged. It wasn’t clear, or even incredibly standardized, but the sections around each of the semi-hidden doors tended to follow a general theme. One section had dozens of beast parts, vials of blood from different bloodline beasts, and items that had been infused with the power of a bloodline: a gauntlet that channeled the passive strength of a giant, a bandana infused with the aquatic breathing and speed of a naiad, a folded cloak infused with the whirling power of an air elemental’s flight, and more. It was clearly the byproduct of some sort of crafting affinity, maybe a variant artificer that used bloodlines?

  Another section, one that I was all but certain belonged to Henry, had an assortment of random magical equipment, as well as countless spell guides. The strange thing was, for every one that was done in block text, there were three or four guides for the same spell that were in his distinctive, lazy scrawl. All of the ones that he’d written were… strange. I picked up a spell tome for arcane missile, and immediately noticed that it was wrong. The spell was far more complex than the first circle spell ought to be, and it wove in several elements of divination magic. I wasn’t familiar enough with the school to put a finger on what the modification was, but it had clearly been modified somehow. I flipped to the back, and noted a short essay scratched onto the page, describing the modification as one to help improve the accuracy of the spell.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  I picked up the next arcane missile that he’d made, and saw that for this one, he’d again increased the complexity of the spell in order to try and create additional missiles for the same ether cost. This one was marked as a failure, and it looked like he was about a quarter of the way through iteration on a second version that used what he’d learned from his initial failure.

  Finally, I picked up the block text guide and opened it. There were a handful of minor stylistic differences from the one I knew – a bit more flare of the wrist, counterbalanced by a softer vocalization – but it was fundamentally the spell I knew.

  Fascinating. I still didn’t know enough about spell modification. I knew that if I just picked up one of Henry’s variants and tried to cast it, I’d just lose control of the spell and cause it to backlash in my pool, but it seemed that he’d found some success with at least some of them, judging by the fact that the divination one had been implied to be successful, while the other had been marked as a failure.

  Well, I couldn’t use them – or at least not yet – but there was something that I could use: any of the guides that were done in simple block text meant for mass production and sale. I skimmed through the shelf, looking at those for any spells that leapt out at me. There were several I didn’t know, but I had no particular interest in learning several of the necromancy spells on the shelf, nor most of the obliteration spells. In the end, I selected three spells and set about making copies of them with the scribe’s friend spell.

  The first spell I took was arcane wall, which conjured an incredibly robust wall of force. There were a handful of creatures with the raw power needed to break through the spell, but as a person’s ether density increased, the toughness of the wall skyrocketed. I was willing to bet this was the spell Henry had cast to block off the attempted attack from the Dreki Matriarch. It was a fifth circle spell, much like wall of stone, and while they shared some superficial similarities, they were fundamentally quite different in spell construction, and even effect. The wall of stone was permanent and as tough as the material that created it, while arcane walls were far tougher, but vanished after just a minute. A classic case of construction spell versus battle spell.

  The second spell was called paper swarm, another fifth circle, and it looked to be near perfect for the style that I was slowly building. It was a very specific sort of kinesis spell, similar to levitation or telekinetic volley, but with a highly specific focus. It spread a layer of arcane force over up to a hundred sheets of paper, reinforcing them, sharpening the edges, and making them stick to most things other than themselves for an hour. While the spell was active, it was possible to move the sheets with ether manipulation, similar to steering the course of an arcane missile. The sharpened edges could be used to cut things, though individually they were weaker than most arcane missiles, making them really only effective at coating people or using a swarm.

  I didn’t have a paper, ink, or rune affinity, nor anything similar, but by the time Yushin’s ritual happened, I’d have a bit over a hundred different spellglyphs on different sheets of paper. And there was one other problem it should help me with, namely that I couldn’t get my spells to target a specific person, at least not while storing the spell in a spellglyph. I could get it to work on whoever touched it, but I couldn’t rely on that. It had forced me to create odd workarounds, like curses that only worked on older dragons within a hundred foot radius. But with this spell, I had a method to deliver the spells directly, opening up several more powerful offensive options.

  The final spell was ambitious, but I wanted to have access to it to work on in the future, and thought I’d be able to use it well in conjunction with my affinity: disintegrate. Henry had placed a single version of the spell in my ring, essentially eating up almost all of its ability to store spells, but I hadn’t used it yet. But I wanted the ability to cast it on my own. It was a powerful sixth circle spell, and as I’d seen with erode matter and dessicate, my suffering curses did an excellent job at turning up the power of these sorts of spells.

  I knew that I wouldn’t be able to learn it before Yushin’s ritual, but the harsh truth was that even if she died, became an avatar of the Traitor Wyrm, and threw her home nation into chaos… that was an entire ocean away. As long as I didn’t die in the fight, my life would go on.

  With those three spells copied, I replaced the guides on the shelf and continued my exploring until I found the location that I assumed belonged to Stone. The shelf was covered in clay tablets, charcoal rubbings, and crumbling scrolls, describing assorted ancient cultures. Many of them were entirely focused on nonmagical things, like the importation and exportation of grain, but I eventually found where he put the ancient academic texts on the mass rituals that had been far more common in the Age of Sunder. As I did, I let out a short, barking laugh.

  There, on the shelf, sitting amongst the other reference texts for magic, was a copy of Ketsalkuet’s Grimoire. That wouldn’t have been so surprising, if not for the fact that I recognized the copy – it was one of the very same ones that I’d created and donated to the history department!

  Looking at the book, something occurred to me, and I frowned. Imbuing a complete affinity was impossible, according to professor Silverbark, and I believed him. I’d seen the affinity imbuement spell, and I even used it myself a few times. And yet the bloodflame brazier was supposed to contain a complete dragon affinity. Was it simply that the laws of magic had changed between the Age of Sunder and the Age of Stars? I knew that they had, but it was still strange.

  There was nothing to do about that right this moment, however, so I gathered up the materials from Stone’s section and set about making copies as I waited for my ether to regenerate enough to take me back.

  Patreon Here!

  Discord Here!