Cantrip Mage B1 C8: Modifying Magic

Hello, readers,

I'm pulling the trigger and launching Cantrip Mage today! If you'd like to follow it on Royal Road, I'll update this post with a link to the story. If you're already a Stormblade reader and you'd like to read both, I believe you can transfer your membership from Stormblade to All Stories, a new tier I've released. The cost is the same, but it gives access to both stories (or will when I finish updating Stormblade's 30 chapters with it). The only reason to pick only one is to avoid being spammed by emails for a story you're not reading.

In any case, I'll update these chapters as RR ones come out. Thanks for reading!

~Chapter Eight: Modifying Magic~

The next morning snuck up on Eola.

She usually came in late, grabbed a few hours of sleep, and woke up before the sun to hit the library or start grading, but sometime around the crack of dawn, she realized that she’d pulled an all-nighter. The rune in her spellbook remained unchanged. Chalk dust coated the desk. The little blackboard was almost impossible to use because of all the powder on it. She hadn’t had anything to drink in hours. And, oh yes, there was a cat asleep on her desk, taking up half of the space.

And people were moving around in the common room, using the toilet, and taking care of their morning business. The worst-case scenario was that Atta woke up, said something, and raised suspicions, especially with—

Someone knocked on the door, and Eola jumped in her chair as the cat started hissing. The chair overbalanced, crashed to the floor, and took her with it. “What?” she groaned from inside the still-active diamond she’d bounced off on the way down.

Colin’s voice drifted in from the common room. “Breakfast. It’s probably sludge porridge again. Your favorite. You okay in there?”

Eola pushed the chair off herself and stared at the scared-looking, puffed-out cat, trying not to laugh. Atta looked about twice her usual size—she’d woken up just once all night, just long enough to turn around, knead Eola’s spellbook briefly, pronounce that she was on the right track, and answer her “Are you a boy or a girl cat” with “A girl, stupid girl,” then fallen back asleep. Now she looked like a fluffy fur coat.

“Tell him to go away,” Atta hissed. She bolted for the ladder, intent on clambering up it, only to hit Eola’s Guard Shape and bounce off, too.

“I’m fine, Colin. I’ll…” Eola stopped. The rune—and the half-digested parchment with four new modifying marks but no descriptions of what they did—sat on her desk, finally dry enough not to turn her stomach. “I’m working on something personal, and I won’t be in classes today. Can you let the professors know?”

“Sure. What’s going on?”

“I…it’s hard to explain, but if I don’t have it figured out...”

Colin waited for a moment before realizing that Eola wasn’t going to finish her sentence. “So, that’s a likely rain check on dinner tonight? I get it. Just…make sure you’re taking care of yourself, Eola. Alright?”

“I will, Colin. And thanks for understanding.”

She relaxed, still on the floor, and slowly undid the Guard Shape. It had been drawing on her Mana all night, and she was running a little lower than usual, but it had done its job. If Colin did his, she’d have all day to keep working on solving the Call and Calm rune.

Colin had given her a solid third of the puzzle, and the extra runes Atta had so graciously gifted her had been perfect, once the cat vomit had dried off of them and she’d picked off the matted hair. It still stank, but she couldn’t do anything about that. Chalk moved slowly across the filthy chalkboard as she re-sketched the Call and Calm symbol, then started erasing lines. Her goal wasn’t to solve the entire rune all at once. All the effort so far was just to confirm her theory.

Gradually, one glance at her spellbook or the parchment at a time, a single rune started to appear.

It wasn’t the whole thing. But it was enough. It was obviously the same as the one on the parchment, just without a few trailing tails and flourishes in the Old Alemic. She sketched those in with the chalk, then added the rest of the Call and Calm symbol back in.

It was wrong. Eola didn’t know how she knew it, but it was obvious that the sketch wouldn’t fill this way.

And, more importantly, it was obvious what mistakes she’d made earlier in the night while working on it.

With another hour’s work, she’d isolated three more modifying marks—two from the parchment, plus the meandering Forsooth Script for Delayed. It had been hiding inside the Old Alemic, cleverly concealed under the more complex language.

There was still something missing, but this was enough.

◄▼►

Eola had the grace—or the self-consciousness—not to barge into the Ideograms classroom and slam the chalkboard down on Instructor Tarik’s lectern right then and there.

Instead, she spent the half-hour before the class ended making ink-and-parchment sketches of everything she’d done. All four of the modifying marks, complete version on one side and the truncated, in-symbol version on the other. Then four more sheets, showing each of their positions within the Call and Calm rune itself.

It was painful, exhausting work, made worse because all she wanted to do was show her mentor how much progress she’d made, and even worse than that by the cat that refused to either help or get off the desk. Atta seemed intent on making a bed out of Eola’s spellbook and dipping her tail in the inkwell, and the desk was splattered with ink-drops by the time she sanded the last parchment, rolled it up carefully, and tucked it into her robe’s pocket with the other seven.

Then she disappeared from the room, locking the door behind her. A weight fell into her pocket between the scrolls, and she reached between the scrolls and felt the warm stone carving.

Apparently, Atta was coming along.

Ten minutes later, she pushed Instructor Tarik’s door open. “I figured it out!”

“Your friend told me you were sick.” The professor looked up, red ink dripping from a pen and a half-graded ideogram spread out on his desk. “What did you figure out?”

“Ordered Magic.”

“Explain.”

Eola pushed papers and books out of the way. Once she had a mostly-clean space on the cluttered desk, she set down her spellbook and flipped to the bookmarked page with the Call and Calm symbol. “I understand why Ordered Magic spells can’t take modifying marks, except for attunement modifiers. This is Call and Calm. It’s a First Order spell, able to be cast by—“

“Anyone with an attunement. I gave this lecture a month ago, Eola.”

“Right. Sorry, sir.” Eola pulled her first scroll out. It showed the Delayed mark. “This is Delayed.”

Then she flipped it over, revealing a similar symbol, but without any of the flourishes. “This is delayed, too, but it’s stripped down and tweaked slightly. It doesn’t work as an independent modifying mark anymore, but…”

A second scroll flopped onto the table—Call and Calm, but with a section circled in a whirling, chaotic scrawl meant to stand out from the precise lines of the symbol itself. “This, right here, is where that stripped-down Delayed is inside of the Call and Calm spell.”

“Okay, I see it. Could be a coincidence, though.”

“It’s not.” The next sketch came down, and Eola pointed at the symbol. “This…I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s a modifying mark. I’ve never seen it anywhere before. It fits here.”

She tapped another sketch right in the circle, and this time, the professor didn’t say anything. He just watched.

At some point during the third rune, Instructor Tarik started paying real attention, holding his breath and hanging on her every word, and Eola couldn’t help but grin. She raced through the last two, only spending enough time on them to make it abundantly clear that, while she knew what the symbols looked like, she didn’t know what they did. “I found these three in some notes I got out of the library last night, and they gave me the idea. I haven’t identified them yet, and I’m missing the core elements, but I think, if I were to take another rune and do the same thing, I could find more hidden symbols inside of it,” Eola finished.

Then she fell silent and waited for Instructor Tarik’s verdict.

He stayed silent for a long time, slowly moving the scrolls to the side and winding them up like they were the most valuable things in his office. Eola watched his hands work across the parchment, and he handed them back to her, one after another, as she tucked them back into her robe pocket. Then he nodded slowly.

“Interesting. Are you familiar with the Great Mage Kleiren?”

Eola shook her head.

“She studied Ordered Magic three hundred years ago. It’s been known that modifying marks don’t work on Ordered Magic, but since then, progress on understanding why has been nonexistent. If your discovery is true, it has implications for Ordered Magic as a whole.

“Some of the Great Mage Varin’s earliest notebooks are lost to us. Thus, so are the rules he used to construct Ordered Magic. Almost every ideogram we use today was produced by him or his apprentices—with a handful of exceptions over the centuries. I’d like to spend some time working with you on confirming your theory’s validity.”

Eola nodded quickly, the sword on a string pulling away from her just a touch. That was exactly the result she’d hoped for. With a professor’s help, she’d be able to get this figured out and be one step closer to being powerful enough to rescue her parents.

“I would also ask that you not breathe a word of this to anyone else.”

“Why not?” Eola asked.

“Because of the Cult of Y’aer and Alemia’s Governing Houses. They won’t take kindly to the kingdom’s magical worldview being shifted, so you’d be wise to hide this as long as possible. Of course, this is all theoretical. Before we really dig into this, I want proof that it works.” Instructor Tarik stood and stared at the spellbook.

“Proof?” Eola asked. She tried not to yawn; she’d been up all night, and she’d been working hard every minute of that time. What more proof could the professor need?

“Yes. This is your theory. It falls on you to prove it.” He snapped Eola’s spellbook closed, handed it to her, and opened the door. “Cast Call and Calm—or put these symbols together to cast something similar.

“I’ll be here when you’re ready,” he said as he motioned her out.

◄▼►

It took four days before Eola felt ready.

Two days of poring over her spellbook and notes, trying to find the Child’s Magic cantrip that had to be at the core of Call and Calm. Nothing fit—but a few spells, including Guard Shape, were close. It was incredibly disheartening. Eola had prided herself on her spellbook’s completeness, and knowing that there were missing cantrips out there was frustrating and disappointing at the same time. It was even worse knowing that the spells she wanted were almost certainly in the library, but that she couldn’t go inside without risking Tagg’s wrath.

Once she was sure she didn’t have the spells, Eola got to work on the part of the weird, chopped-apart Call and Calm she could figure out—the new modifying marks. Her experiments all centered on Bright Ball and took place only when the suite was empty so her roommates didn’t hear them. And, by the time she was done, she had ten modifying marks. In addition to the marks from Evander’s Guide to Battle-Marks—Silenced, Hasty, Delayed, Reaching, Echoing, and Stilled—she also had symbols for Personal, Permanent, Peacebonded, and Held. Of those, only Personal and Held were possible battle marks; they strengthened spells targeted at the caster and stored the magic to be released at another time, respectively. The other two were too slow and awkward to cast to be worth the time.

She rain-checked on Colin two more times, skipped her classes, and stayed locked in her room except to find her once-daily meal and refill a jug of water every so often. There wasn’t time for more.

And every day, when the library opened, she moved into the general public rows, poring over the books on Child’s Magic for hours. She only stopped when Catrine found her, and only until she could shake the noble annoyance and return to her studies.

It was grueling work.

But after four days, Eola was confident enough to hunt down Instructor Tarik.

She came dressed for battle under her robes, smallsword at her hip and wand in its bandolier. The breastplate felt like a hug from her parents, and she wanted them there for this. This was all for them—and for her love of magic. A single piece of folded parchment and the blue-black cat figurine were the only things in her pocket—she wouldn’t need her spellbook or exhaustive notes for just one spell.

When she knocked on Instructor Tarik’s door, it felt like walking under the sword on a string again. Fate, or doom, or whatever it was. But she did it anyway.

“Come in.”

She opened the door. Instructor Tarik glanced up, then carefully tucked the parchment he was marking off to the side. Eola had just enough time to notice that the stacks of books were more orderly, the black rabbit was inside its hutch, and the mountains of papers that covered the plain wooden desk looked downright organized. Then the professor cleared his throat. “You’re ready, Miss Lemiene?”

“I am. I’ve figured it out, in theory, and I’m ready to put it to the test in practice.”

“Excellent. Lecture Hall Number Five is open for another half-hour. Will that be enough time?”

“I hope so,” Eola said seriously. If it weren’t, something would probably have gone horribly wrong.

“Then let’s see your proof.”

The lecture hall was, in fact, empty. That made it so much worse, though. Eola’s boots echoed on the stone floor as she walked down to the demonstration circle and stepped into it. Instructor Tarik stood just outside it, a notebook in one hand and a pen in the other,. The desks and chairs were empty, with the exception of a silvered cage near the professor. If she succeeded, there’d be no one to witness it but Instructor Tarik. And if she failed…

She swallowed. No. She wouldn’t fail. She’d worked too hard to fail, and even if she hadn’t, she was right. This wasn’t Child’s Magic anymore. What she was about to do would work. It had to.

Eola took a deep breath. She held it.

This was it. Seven weeks of the hardest work she’d ever done—harder than helping her dad at Greenarbor’s waterfront, or working the woods with her uncle as he hunted goblins. If she was right, she’d have a path forward—a path toward Journeymage, Truemage, Archmage, and maybe beyond. The whole world would open up to her.

Eola Lemiene wasn’t very good at magic, but if this worked, that would change.

She held her breath for a moment longer. Then she let it out and started sketching her rune. 

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