His isolation ended when his magnum opus escaped from the wilds to terrorize civilization. Combining drake, snake, and troll biology, Rettew created the hydra of legend. With the body of a drake, the head of a snake, and the regeneration of a troll, the beast escaped his control and attacked a small village. In an effort to stop it, the villagers tried to slay it, but with each attempt to do so, the hydra grew additional heads. For years it roamed the outskirts of civilization, Rettew pursuing it, always trying to coax it back home while innocents fled its destruction.
-Excerpt from Wicket’s Guides to the Pantheon.
—
The first thing Kole did on returning to his room was cast the first-tier Light spell he’d unprepared in preparations for the hardball match. Unlike in his grasping for Shield in battle it took him a moment to figure out how to do it.
There was a bit of a mental shift required. Normally his mind went in on itself to cast a spell from a prepared template in his vault. But with this new ability he had to reach out to his spellbook’s icon inside his vault. Without fully entering the vault, he couldn’t relive memories like he’d done while using it to improve his pathing, but he could access the spellforms within it.
Playing around with it more, he found he could access anything within the spellbook that was imbued with Will. Meaning the deep memory unlocking ability the spellbook granted was still held from him when only lightly entering his vault, but any Will intent was free for him to find. If he wasn’t already using the spellbook to write his spellforms in, he’d be able to access those easily to write on any paper.
He tried looking for the rune intent for the repair runes for his blasting rod and bracer, but they weren’t there—not that he expected them to be. Those had never been written in his spellbook, and being runes and not spells, he had no idea where to even begin in finding the stable components that would hold their intent without activating them.
Common wisdom was that stable components that could hold rune intent didn’t exist, and while Kole wasn’t one to be told something was impossible, he bowed to the knowledge of the expert runesmiths on this one. He’d discussed it once with Amara, and she’d seemed convinced, and he trusted her judgement—so long as it was in relation to runes.
Kole only had a little Will to work with, not enough to make much progress in learning new spells but enough to rearrange the spells in his vault. In talking to Amara, he’d decided to dedicate the four slots in his mental vault to rune intent. She would develop a few options for him to keep on hand to fill the gap his Font restrictive repertoire left.
As Kole tried to decide what best to spend his time on, an idea struck him.
I wonder, he thought, even as he dove into his vault.
Once inside, he went to the icon of his spellbook and brought to mind one of the countless time’s he’d studied the rune intent imbued emerald with the blasting rod’s components in it.
He’d relived moments a dozen times trying to fully understand the bizarre geometry of the Arcane Realm, why couldn’t he do the same to review a memory of something as comparatively simple as some rune intent?
And he found that he could. As soon as he accessed the memory, he saw the familiar shape of the Will. He tried pulling the intent from the memory, placing it in his vault, but that failed. All he could do was copy it over as he would a spellform cast in a page before him but even that was a monumental discovery.
It took nearly half an hour, but he got it done. To confirm his effort, he fired a blast of force into the floor of his room. Immediately afterward he realized that might have been a mistake. He looked around the empty room, expecting the walls to crash in on him, but he was met with still silence.
If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
“I think I miss the rat,” Kole said to himself. “And Theral.”
With that casting, Kole was out of Will, but still riding high on the discovery of his new found ability, he needed to do more. His hands moved to the potion of clarity, but he stopped himself.
“No,” he said, needing the words to be spoken aloud to take hold.
This wouldn’t be a good use of the potion. Back home he’d often used potions to extend a night of study, but that wasn’t something he could afford up here on the surface. Instead, he went to his other old standby. The library.
Kole needed to do some research. He’d sought information on ensouled artifacts in the past, but hadn’t really dived into the practical applications of a magical spellbook.
Before him, he had two books, Deckard’s Compendium of Ensouled Artifacts, and Wizards and the Ensouled.
The first was everyone’s go to reference when researching ensouled artifacts. He found a few references to ensouled spellbooks, but they contained little advice or guidance on how to use his.
Wizards and the Ensouled was a more recent work. It was a detailed list of accounts of wizards using their magic to enhance ensouled artifacts. A lot of wizards hard developed magic specifically meant to interact with their ensouled artifacts, and Kole wanted a hint of what he could do. He’d seen Theral use his spellbook as a reservoir of runed pages, and he wanted to look into that eventually, but he knew if he suggested that to Amara he’d never get the book back and she’d never get anything else done.
There was a lot of high level magic in the books, all far beyond Kole’s ability to use at that moment, but he did come away with some ideas. The best takeaway was to learn the Spatial cantrip Conjure. The simple cantrip would normally allow a wizard to summon an item from on their person to hand, so long as that item wasn’t enchanted, and had a sufficient amount of the wizard’s Will within it.
The range of the spell was limited to a few inches, except for when it came to ensouled artifacts. For those, the range started at a few dozen feet, and only went up from there. There was one report of an archer that created an ensouled arrow, using his soulstone as the tip. He created a vault and learned wizardry just so he could Conjure the devastating missile back to himself. Kole wondered what would compel an archer to make an ensouled arrow he wouldn’t be able to recall.
Other stories told of wizards that could Conjure their artifacts back miles. So, Conjure went to the top of the spells Kole would learn.
He also found reports that spells meant to affect the self could also affect just the ensouled artifact—even if it was at a distance. He tested this by making his spellbook turn invisible as it sat on the table and found it surprisingly easy. This wasn’t something he couldn’t already do by touch, but he could probably think of some use for it eventually. Making three copies of his spellbook on the desk was probably also something he could do, but lacked the Will at that moment to try it out. That he determined would be very useful if he could somehow find a way to make the illusions unique like his uncle. Having the ability to write in one book while two more were open for reference would be really helpful, even if he could already recall everything perfectly.
Once he’d determined he’d gotten everything he could out of those books, and had a plan in place for his future studies, Kole copied a few versions of the oldest spellforms for Conjure he could find into his spellbook, and then went to bed at the completely reasonable and early hour of 1 o’clock in the morning.
Kole managed to hide his tiredness the next morning as they ate breakfast and planned their day. As she promised, Amara brought Kole a new shield bracer, which fit exactly as the previous one had. He inspected the runes carved into the wooden cylinder and marveled that it had been made by ants.
Together they headed to the room of doors which Zale called the ‘Lemon Hall’ and stood eagerly outside the door to the outskirts of Orinqth.
“Tracker reader?” Zale asked Amara, who nodded in return as she stared intently at it.
“Why are we going back here?” Kole asked. “Didn’t Amara make more trackers for the school to monitor these places for doors?”
“Those ones don’t work as well,” Amara said. “The range isn’t as long because we couldn’t replicate my connection to my sister.”
“So what?” Rakin asked, “We’re gunna see if the adventurers missed something and run in headlong ourselves if they did?”
They all looked at each other before Zale said, “Pretty much.”
“Alright,” Rakin said, shrugging. “Just checking.”
Zale opened the door revealing the grass taller than even Doug’s antlers. As soon as it opened a crack, the indicator on the tracker stopped its aimless pointing and pointed straight through the door.
Amara let out a squeal of excitement and ran out into the grass.
“Wait!” Zale shouted after her. “I was joking! Let’s get the adults!”
But it was too late, and Amara was out in the grass.
“Danar,” Rakin cursed, and ran out into the grass, everyone else trailing behind, trying to keep up.
Thanks for reading. Don't forget to the story.
If you want more, you can read up to 20 chapters ahead on the .
Boosts last 7 days and you can boost as many stories as you like, so make sure to give one to all your favorite serials.
If you want more in this world, my published series Dear Spellbook will have a lot of familiar places and even a few faces. The two series can be read independently of each other and knowledge doesn't spoil the other. All 3 books are out on .
