Cantrip Mage B1 C1: Child's Magic

~Author’s Note~

It’s new story time!

I’ve been brewing Cantrip Mage for a long, long time. I think the first Chapter One I wrote that could possibly be tied to the concept was in late 2023, while it crystallized into something close to its current form in early 2025. It’s been through multiple planning cycles, beta readers, and content edits—this one’s more of a passion project of mine.

In the interests of maintaining my sanity, I'm going to post the first eight chapters for Patrons over the next couple of weeks, then start posting on Royal Road. That should give me time to finish up one of my many, many projects so I can focus on writing this and Stormblade. After that initial eight, I'll have a bunch of early-access chapters available (not sure how many yet).

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Magic has rules. Eola must break them. 

Eola loves magic, but she’s got a problem—her ‘unique’ magical attunement. Her soul is filled with unattuned Mana, useful for only the runes children learn. Cantrips won’t help her pass her first year of school, much less save her parents, but Eola refuses to believe she’s stuck casting them forever. She just needs a less…conventional…education. 

Eola’s study plan is clear. It’s also dangerous. 

The academy’s library holds tomes no living mage has read. Monsters stalk its aisles, and forgotten knowledge haunts its shelves. If a solution for her useless attunement exists, it’ll be archived there. To master magic, Eola must learn—and break–-its accepted rules. That’s fine with her, though.

It’s time to rewrite the rulebooks.

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~Chapter One: Child's Magic~

Eola Lemiene wasn’t very good at magic.

Child’s Magic? Sure, loved it. She knew her cantrips, and she knew them well. She’d memorized every one she could get her hands on, even the ones no one learned. Their runes weren’t complicated—the basic languages of magic were simple, and they forgave mistakes easily. Cantrips were literally child’s play, though, and they didn’t count. Anyone could draw those.

But do real magic? Not so much.

Varin’s Academy was the perfect place to change that and find a way around her little problem with her Mana’s attunement. All she had to do was spend every free moment she had in the library, digging through the shelves for answers. That was where the real knowledge was, after all. Her classes were fine, but only for theory. She carefully avoided the practical work every chance she got.

But even if all the knowledge she desperately needed was in the library, Eola couldn’t eat it. She’d get hungry eventually. She tried to do it as little as possible—she had too much to do—but at least once a day, her stomach and tongue got insistent. When they did, she had to find food, even if it meant sacrificing her study time and risking the attention of a few less…kind…classmates.

And this morning, Catrine and her cronies had cornered her in the academy’s cafeteria, at one of the long, wooden benches and tables set up in the narrow, smoky room. As usual, her friends attacked first.

“Cast a spell, toddler!”

“One real spell, and we’ll leave you alone.”

Eola hesitated. Her stomach growled—she probably hadn’t eaten since yesterday morning, and the oatmeal had dried apple chunks in it today. It smelled almost too fruity, and it looked like just the right mix of sticky and milky.

This was such a waste of her time. She stared at her tray longingly, and in that moment, Catrine slid onto the bench next to her. “Hello, toddler.”

“I’m not—“

“Not what?” Catrine cut her off. She slid in even closer, grinning.

Eola shut her mouth and tried to scoot over, but Catrine’s arm wrapped around her blue-robed shoulder. “Just cast one spell. Show us you’re a real mage. If you’re not a toddler, prove it.”

Eola’s face went hot, not from embarrassment, but from frustration. She stared at the oatmeal for a moment, then took a deep breath and reached for the leather book on her lap. One hand pushed her tray out of the way, oatmeal forgotten, and she licked a finger and started flipping pages. Catrine’s arm stiffened for a moment, and Eola forced herself not to smile through her annoyance. Every student had a spellbook full of runes for different spells, but she’d be willing to bet no one had one quite as extensive as hers.

Inside, one to a page, were her spell-runes. Not just the few dozen that an actual child would have, either. She had those, yes. They were drawn in a shaky hand, then copied onto the next page over—when she was older, she’d cleaned up her errors. She flipped past the Child’s Magic section, and the spells’ runic symbols got more complicated. Sweeping lines, different thicknesses and pressures in the strokes, and precise crossing patterns. First Order spells.

“What are you doing?” Catrine asked. Her arm tightened around Eola’s shoulder, and she leaned in over her so her curly blonde hair blocked Eola’s vision. “My father warned me not to let people see my spells. They could use it against our house. But then again, you’re no noble, with no house spells or attunements. I’m not sure why Varin’s even let you in.”

Eola wasn’t stupid. She caught the other girl’s tone—and if Eola had been anyone else, she’d have been right. But Eola didn’t care what Catrine saw. She just wanted to finish eating and get back to her studies—or at least disengage from this waste of time. “I earned a scholarship, and I’m trying to pick a spell.”

“You’re past the toddler’s section, and scholarship cases like you are an affront to proper magecraft.”

Eola stopped, her fingers halfway through turning the page. “You asked me to show you a spell. I’m trying to find the right one to show you.” Her right hand ran a familiar pattern: lick finger, flip page, trace rune, repeat. It was almost mesmerizing.

But her left hand—her sketching hand—was still in her lap, hidden under a fold in her robes. She wasn’t good at real magic, but she was excellent at Child’s Magic, and she had a few advantages when casting it that her classmates never would.

The rune she drew was simple. A single phrase in Old Alemic—the simplest possible symbols in the complex language—with no other languages to modify it. One line entering a triangle and two lines leaving the other side; Child’s Magic wasn’t complicated. It also wasn’t what Catrine was asking for, but that was okay. It didn’t have to be. All it had to be was distracting. And it would be that. She’d been drawing Bright Ball since she was six.

It’d form empty, though—and most first-year students, even at a school like Varin’s, needed a second or two to fill a rune with Mana. Until it was full, the spell wouldn’t go off, and a hallmark of Child’s Magic—and Ordered Magic in general—was that everyone would see the spell filling up. That’d give Catrine time to figure out what was going on and stop it. She was going to be a spellsword, after all. If she wasn’t ready to stop Eola’s spell with an opposed one, she’d eat her shoe.

Either that or one of Catrine’s lackeys would punch her in the nose. That’d stop the spell in a hurry.

Most students needed a couple of seconds to fill an rune, but Eola wasn’t most students. Her soul was crammed absolutely full of unattuned Mana, and when she uncorked it like a champagne bottle, she didn’t even have to push it into the Bright Ball symbol. It filled instantly, burning out the rune and summoning a ball of light a foot wide right where Eola wanted it.

Which was in the lap of the young noblewoman sitting next to her.

Catrine jerked back, squeaking in shock and squeezing her eyes shut against the bright yellow-white light, and Eola slipped past her, spellbook in hand. Her knee hit the table painfully. Most of the oatmeal ended up on the floor, but that was fine. She could eat later. Missing one or two meals wouldn’t kill her. Her boots slapped the floor as Catrine’s cronies rushed toward their friend—and away from Eola.

Eola looked over her shoulder as her tormentors slowly identified the spell and Catrine used an opposed spell on it, just like Eola had known she would. The noble girl would track her down, of course, but for now, she’d gotten away with—

She hit something solid, found herself on the floor, and looked up. Standing over her was one of Varin’s professors—Instructor Tarik. He was one of the younger teachers, only fifteen or so years older than her eighteen. He brushed off his coat, then offered her a hand. “Are you okay, Miss Lemiene?”

After a moment to check that the other girls were distracted, Eola accepted and got back to her feet. “Sorry, sir. I was leaving and—“

“Didn’t see me? It’d be wise to pay less attention to problems you’re running from and more to the ones you’re running toward,” Instructor Tarik said. His eyes shifted to Catrine’s cronies, and he stroked his short brown beard slowly, then nodded once. “I’ll have a chat with Miss Andrese, and then I’ll see you both in Ideograms. I have something special lined up today.”

Eola nodded and slipped past the professor. But as she pushed through the doors, she took one look over her shoulder. Catrine caught her eye, and she knew that nothing the professor said would matter. Catrine of House Andrese had smelled blood in the water, and like a shark, she was on the hunt.

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“Today’s lesson is on a new Ideogram,” Instructor Tarik said a half-hour later. He started drawing a runic array in chalk on the board in front of the class as three dozen or so eighteen-year-olds looked on from the tiered, wooden desks looping around the room. Ideograms usually took place in the fifth of Varin’s six demonstration and lecture halls, a wide, echoing space made from stone, with every desk looking down on the demonstration circle beside the lectern. There was plenty of space in the hall—so much, in fact, that she only shared her desk on the fourth row with Colin Tremory because he was one of her suite mates, and some lessons required pairing up.

Even the large, stone-walled room reeked of eighteen-year-olds—the stench of body odor and hormones—but it was less noticeable here than in the smaller rooms.

 “Notebooks open, please.”

Eola’s was already open. She’d recognized the rune after the third concentric ring—or at least narrowed it down to one of two. A summoning spell. First Order. A pit formed in her stomach, and she stared at the possible sets of rings in her notebook. The first wouldn’t be so bad. Her dad had shown it to her when she was eleven, and she’d traced it into her notebook, but only after promising not to cast it. It summoned a monster. An uncontrolled monster. Most eleven-year-olds wouldn’t be given a spell that dangerous, and that meant Tarik would be casting it.

The first reason she had that one at all was that, by the time she was nine, her parents knew that if they didn’t give her runes, she’d simply find them herself. They’d made a deal with her. As long as she didn’t try to draw any of them outside of her spellbook or on a slate with chalk, they’d teach her any spell she asked for up to the Second Order.

Eola snorted. Her parents hadn’t needed to worry.

By the time she was ten, her parents had realized she’d never do Ordered Magic. After that, they’d given her any spell she’d wanted.

“Instructor Tarik, why don’t you call them runes?” one of the boys in the front row asked.

“Because any symbol is a rune, Mr. Parsim. It doesn’t have to be magical in nature. An ideogram is something special.” Instructor Tarik finished sketching the rune, and Eola’s stomach finished tying itself into knots. It was the worst-case scenario. “Today, we will be mastering the ideogram Call and Calm. Who knows the spell?”

“Sounds like a rune to me,” the boy muttered. The professor ignored him and watched the rest of the class as a dozen hands went up. Eola’s stayed down, but she felt the professor’s eyes linger on her for a moment.

She swallowed painfully, empty stomach tightening, and stared at her spellbook.

“The purpose of Call and Calm is to create a familiar, then bind it to you. The animal companion that your subconscious calls from the void will serve as a study assistant and ally, growing in knowledge and power the longer it remains in your service. Therefore, it is important to bind said familiar as early in your careers as mages as is practical. Today is the day,” Instructor Tarik said.

Eola was only half-paying attention.

Call and Calm had been the other option. It was a First Order spell—one of the Great Mage Varin’s first designs, in fact—that summoned a small animal and attempted to begin a binding ritual. If the caster was successful, the ritual would finish after about two weeks. With daily bonding—the kind you did with pets, not the magical kind—the animal would gradually become a fully sapient familiar. That was all well and good, but it required the one thing she didn’t have: an attunement.

It was the reason she wasn’t very good at magic—the reason she was here, at Varin’s, in the first place.

Her stupid, unattuned soul.

While Instructor Tarik described the Call and Calm rune and its design, Eola stewed…and plotted.

It wasn’t her soul’s fault. It had an attunement, technically. Unattuned Mana was an attunement. It just wasn’t a useful one. Ordered Magic was the only way to learn real magic, and without a useful attunement, she’d never be able to cast even the First Order spell on the blackboard, much less the good stuff at the Second and Third Orders or the handful of world-shaping Fourth Order spells only Great Mages could cast.

So far, she’d checked every corner of the library that a first-year student had easy access to. No answers. That didn’t mean there were no answers, though. The first floor was less than a quarter of the library.

But she needed more time to find that answer—and judging by the squealing the other girls had just started, this was going to be a practical lesson.

“We’ll be working with Call and Calm for two additional reasons. First, it has no baseline attunement, which means any mage who knows their attunement modifier can cast it. Most First Order spells—or anything beyond Child’s Magic—require specific Mana attunements, but for the rest of the term, this course will focus on the open-attunement general suite.” Instructor Tarik was doing a good job of ignoring the girls’ fawning. He’d summoned a jet-black rabbit with his spell, and most of them weren’t paying any attention to the lesson anymore—typical girls.

“Second, Call and Calm is one of the most forgiving First Order spells. Since failure will only result in losing the spell, it’ll be good practice for positioning your modifying marks. That symbol’s position will be different for each of you, and each of you should already know it from last week’s homework—“

“Sir,” Catrine interrupted, “Modifying spells are basic. Everyone should have them figured out, even toddlers.”

Eola didn’t miss the pointed glance her way.

Could he know?

“They are, and your classmates should, but since you’re looking at battle magic as a career, you’d better get comfortable with them, Miss Andrese. Many spellswords use a handful of other modifying marks to tweak their Child’s Magic and make it less predictable for their opponents, or to defeat barrier spells,” Instructor Tarik said. “Now, please sketch the symbol on the board into your spellbooks, then add your attuning modifier. I’ll be around to assist.”

How could Tarik know? Attunements were private by tradition—even Varin’s headmaster didn’t know what any students’ were, only that they had one. That held true for a student’s entire first year at the school, until the end of the general suite of First Order spells. Tarik couldn’t know. It wasn’t possible. But if he did…and then there was Catrine. She only suspected, but that’d be enough.

Solutions. Solutions.

Eola stared at her copy of the Call and Calm rune. Symbols—Old Alemic for the core rune, because Call and Calm, like all Ordered Magic, required a core rune in that language—scrawled in three rings, with a stylized, vaguely animal-shaped diamond in the middle and Forsooth Script—the secondary magical language—crossing it in stylized patterns. The interaction between Forsooth Script and Old Alemic powered the higher Orders of magic. Eola wasn’t sure how, but First Order and higher spells required both, and some of the highest Orders needed even more languages.

Her sketch was identical to the one on the board. But she didn’t have a useful attunement, and she didn’t have an attunement modifier, either. You couldn’t modify unattuned Mana.

“But what if I did?”

She looked around. The other students’ noses were all in their books or staring at the board. No one was paying attention to her, and no one had heard her whispering to herself. She took out a pen, dipped it in ink, and held it to her mouth for a moment. Which mark to use, and where to put it?

After a moment, Eola drew a diamond against the upper right edge of the outer circle. Just a blank diamond. Nothing inside. Then she raised her hand and waited. This was going to work. Even better, it’d throw everyone off of her—including Instructor Tarik.

Her attunement modifier was fake. The spell wouldn’t work. She knew it wouldn’t work. But it wouldn’t have to. She needed to buy herself time, that was all. With over three dozen students, all she had to do was be one of the last four or five to raise her hand, and she’d have a full day to figure out a more permanent solution. And she’d convince the professor that she was participating in a practical lesson without actually participating. The spell wouldn’t work, but her plan would. She smiled smugly to herself.

Eola Lemiene wasn’t very good at magic.

She was just very good at hiding that fact.

“Instructor Tarik, I think Eola’s ready!” Catrine called.

Y’aer curse her.

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