DearSpellbook
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Chapter 41: Grafting
🕑 Added 2024-12-27 07:00:07 +0000 UTCThe sea drakes were more nuisance than monster before the Flood. The magical beasts were a creation of Assuine, a precursor to her eventual triumph in creating the dragons. The sea drakes, as their names imply, are draconids that live within the ocean. They are serpentine in appearance, lacking limbs and wings. The beasts consume metal, not for energy but for material to grow their scales. The metals they eat make their way to their scales, forming into alloys. The composition of the scales of any two sea drakes are completely unique.
-Lidian’s Manual to Magical Fauna, 283rd ed
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Kole had to recast Silent Image twice more before they were confident the bird creature was gone. By then, they’d all given in to Doug’s example and finished eating, sitting in silence as they chewed on their strange alien foods.
After that, Rakin got to work deepening the shallow holes for them to sleep in while Doug coaxed some of the grass nearby to drape over them, allowing them to have cover from above should the bird come out once more while they slept in shifts.
As Kole lay down in his strange half buried bed, he didn’t even need to fight the urge to take out his spellbook and study. Staying up late while he had classes the next day was one thing, but when the lives of his friends would be on the line, he found the choice to be a simple one.
Kole slept through the night, no one waking him for his turn at watch.
“Rakin and I don’t need as much sleep,” Zale said in the morning when Kole asked after it.
Rakin could enter some sort of meditative state that let him rest in a shorter period of time, and Zale could get by just fine on a few hours of sleep—though she wasn’t sure if that was from her elven or voidling heritage.
They could sleep, and couldn’t avoid it forever, but they were able to forgo it easily enough for a few days.
Hopefully no more than a few days, Kole thought to himself.
The morning meal was once more strange animals and strange roots, and they continued their journey with an eye to the sky.
It didn’t take them long to find signs of inhabitation after that. Hidden by a hill that had blended into the mountain behind it, they found a large and neatly organized camp, with little figures walking up and down the orderly rows.
In the center of the otherwise densely packed camp, they saw a large opening, and in the center of it stood a stone large plinth, thirty feet tall, with other large stone structures lay out around it in the pattern that seemed vaguely familiar to Kole.
Two rivers met just between them and the camp, where they formed the river that they’d followed to this place. Both rivers came down from the mountains in the distance. Besides the rivers, large crews worked, moving earth with shovels and wheelbarrows, excavating a trench intended to alter the river's flow.
The work reminded him of ants pushing the dirt out of their hills, letting it pile up outside.
“They are ants,” Kole said at the thought, recognizing the familiar giant forms.
“Get down!” Zale hissed, pulling Kole and Amara down by their shirts.
They lay on the ridge watching the camp for signs of notable activity. Amara took out her runic spyglass and watched the camp, reporting what she saw. The device was once more one of her wooden runic devices, free of any alchemical reinforcement, but dependent on a repair rune etched into it to keep up its function.
“How many runes do you have stored in your vault?” Kole asked Amara when he noticed her fixing it.
He himself only had space for four runes or spells and had to return to Amara to relearn the repair intent when his equipment needed to be fixed.
“I don’t know,” Amara said.
Her eyes went vacant for a moment and then she said, “Eight.”
“Eight!?” Kole asked in shock, barely containing a shout.
Amara just nodded like it was nothing. Eight was a lot, as much as Journeyman wizard could hope to have by the time they turned twenty five. Ignoring the ridiculous discovery of his spellbook, Kole could only store four.
He’d always had a high opinion of Amara’s skill in her chosen art, but he realized then that he might have been underestimating her still.
As they watched the camp, they saw large groups of soldier ants march in and out at regular intervals, leaving by one of the two roads that came into the camp. Occasionally wagons entered, driven by smaller ant people.
"I see normal people!” Amara said, having gone back to her watch.
Only she could use the device, so they were relegated to listening to her relaying what she saw.
“No...” she said. “Not normal. They look like they are made from stone.”
“Are they golems?” Kole asked.
“No, they’re people sized. They’re wearing armor too, and clothes over it.”
Kole tried to squint to see, but it was hopeless.
“They went into a big tent,” she said after a few minutes of tracking the progress.
“What do we do?” Doug asked the question everyone was thinking.
Through their journey, Zale, Kole, and Doug had regularly checked to see if the Font of Space was still blocked and continued to do so as they walked. While the Font had certainly been blocked before, Doug had begun to feel more and more uncomfortable as they walked toward the camp in a way he couldn’t really describe, but which they all took to mean they were nearing whatever was causing the blockage.
“I could go and investigate Invisible,” Kole suggested.
“The ants will smell you,” Amara said, shooting down the idea.
“We shouldn’t rush this,” Zale said. “We have access to food and water, and we can hide from their sky patrols. Let's just watch and see if we can find a pattern or opening.”
“Or,” Rakin said, holding up a hand. “I set the plains on fire, and we see what happens.”
“I would rather we didn’t,” Doug said, and then added. “If we are voting.”
“Bah, yer all no fun,” Rakin said, rolling onto his back from where he lay. “I’m going to meditate. Wake me when we need to fight stuff.”
With no better options at hand, they prepared for an extended stakeout.
Amara kept up her watch on the base, while Zale occupied herself studying the patterns of the camp. Using some paper from Kole’s spellbook, she took notes on the comings and goings of groups, noting the direction they took and their size—occasionally asking Rakin for the time, which he provided to the minute without opening his eyes.
Doug busied himself collecting long grasses and weaving them into a sort of blanket to cover themselves with to hide them from above.
As they sat watching, Kole’s mind kept returning to what Amara had said.
“The ants will smell you.”
His Invisibility spell was of the Font of Illusions, and as such had a mind aspect to it—or at least, it could. Rakin’s ability to track Kole with his tremor sense implied it only made him invisible to vision despite the Font’s potential to do more. His Silent Image spell was an illusion of light, but it also worked on other levels, appearing in the mind of those less reliant on sight as what he wanted in every way but physical touch.
Could I use Fade while Invisible? he wondered.
He turned Invisible, and then moved to activate Fade. As soon as he drew on the power, the Invisibility collapsed, his mind unable to hold both abilities in his mind at once.
Nope.
Kole tried again, this time stopping the sorcerous aspect of his mind outside the Font of Illusions. He closed his eyes in the real world and with his mind still by the Font, he activated Fade. Doing so with his mind split was an effort, but the primal ability was a simple one, and he was eventually able to activate it. Then, he cast Invisibility, and just as before, felt the Fade vanish.
He knew that he wouldn’t be able to do it. Concentrating on multiple spells at once was something only Master wizards could do, and even then, not all of them. But he wasn’t trying to make it work, he was trying to watch it fail.
Once more he tried, this time beginning with Fade, and pausing halfway through. Tenuously he held onto the half-formed ability and began to cast Invisibility. This time the casting was much, much, harder.
Both the spells fell apart in his mind, and he let out a sigh and tried again.
Kole attempted a dozen times before taking a break, each failing but all in their own unique ways. He wasn’t sure what he was trying, grafting his primal ability onto his sorcerous spell, was even possible. But being a primal and a sorcerer was thought to be impossible, and Kole was a wizard now on top of that, so he tried not to let the fact that no one had ever done this before distract him.
He didn’t let the failures deter him, he’d expected to fail after all, success hadn’t been the point—though he admitted to himself that it would have been nice. No, his failures served a purpose beyond mere practice. With a large variety of failures behind him, Kole went into his vault flipped over the mental icon of his spellbook and began to review the memories.
