After eating a quick lunch in the cafeteria, I rushed to the pixie castle’s solarium to help professor Toadweather begin setting up, as I had for a while now. There was a lot more cleaning to do today than there had been in the past, as it seemed like the solarium had been the home of a raging party over the course of the break, and I found myself composing a dozen variations on clean. Domestic magic might not have been the most intense course to choose to take over the summer, but as I watched a pool of glowing green absinthe vanish off a chair, leaving no stains, I was incredibly glad to have learned it. Professor Toadweather set me to using it to de-stain and deep clean the cushions throughout the room before she began to talk, her face unusually serious as she spoke.

  “What do you plan to do once you’re finished with your three year degree? If what I’ve heard from my co-workers is even half correct, then you’re on track to become an archmage. To graduate, you’re required to know fifth circle magic, but I suspect that you’ve got a real shot at being one of the dozen or so we get each year who learns to cast well enough to cast a sixth circle spell. From there, the leap to seventh is large, but not as large as the leap from fifth to sixth; it’s more like the leap from third to fourth. You may be able to stretch to reach seventh, especially if you nail down sixth circle spells for real, rather than simply stretching to cast one or two.”

  “What about eighth and ninth? I’ve noticed most of my professors are able to stretch to seventh circle, but no further. The only one who I’ve seen reach that far is professor Alydia, and she only got there recently.”

  “Eighth and ninth level spells require entirely higher orders of spellcraft, constructs built within the mind and soul that are capable of changing and building spellcraft in four spatial dimensions. They’re a massive leap in ether command and skill to reach, which is why most Erudite have an ether affinity. But we’re getting rather off course – what do you plan to do?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Some members of the Dreki family are still hanging around, hiding and attempting to lash out at Gerhard. I’ll help quell them, and hopefully they’ve got the artifact that I need. After that, though? I’m not sure. I’m becoming increasingly certain that there’s human life on other planes, perhaps even entire planes like our own. Do you know anything about them?”

  “Etherius is endless. As far as we can tell it is truly, genuinely, endless,” professor Toadweather responded. That wasn’t an answer, but in the proper faerie fashion, it also was. After a moment of silence, she added a few more details.

  “There are people who make a good living for themselves delving into other planes. Some masters of conjuration magic delve deep enough that they claim to see strange sights, meet strange beings, and wield strange powers that seem to have the same form as the magic we use, but with unique applications unlike what we believe magic could and should do. Many of them vanish forever.”

  “I’m not too keen on vanishing forever, but I do like the idea of reaching a level of skill that I can walk across strange new worlds. If I manage to fuse my bloodline with my magic and become an archmage, I don’t think that it’s entirely impossible either.”

  “I certainly don’t think so either. I did a bit of planeswalking when I was younger, before I settled down to become a teacher. I actually once killed the demon lord Mafibuloit and destroyed most of his realm in the doing so,” professor Toadweather said, letting out a terrifying cackle as she laughed, wiping a tear from her eye as she did. “Anyways, it’s a good idea if you can gather the strength to pull it off. You should see about getting your friends into the Coven of the Twilight Grotto. And maybe you should talk to those… beings… you work for about it.”

  I blinked, caught off guard about the suggestion that I should push my friends into the Coven. I hadn’t planned on being a member myself, but maybe their assistance in stopping the Traitor Wyrm would be enough? Still, it seemed like professor Toadweather had let something else slip.

  “So they are opening portals to other planes where humans live, then?” I asked. “I was all but certain that they were, but Charm was cagey about it, and told me to wait until I completed my rituals to talk to Fable about it.”

  In response, professor Toadweather made a grumbling, annoyed sound, and I thought I caught her mumbling something about ‘hellsforsaken voyagers’, but I wasn’t entirely certain one way or another. We didn’t have much more time to talk about it, however, as the rest of the class began to trickle in, and I hastened to finish up the last handful of castings of clean.

  Once everyone had taken their seat – I’d triple cast clean on my own chair – professor Toadweather clapped, and the huge frog next to her let out a ribbiting noise.

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  “Quite right!” she agreed, nodding to her frog. “We’ve got a lot of work to do this semester, as it’s got some of the most important spells in all of the school of conjuration! So before we get to those, we’ll look at two of the spells that you’re going to learn to help round out your repertoire.”

  She drew out a spell on the board, a fairly standard summoning spell, save for the fact that it seemed to be summoning multiple creatures, not entirely unlike the swarm of celestial mice spell that we’d learned the year before.

  “Summon giant formica swarm!” professor Toadweather announced, hands on her hips. “It’s a spell to summon a swarm of ants, about the size of a large shepherd dog.”

  “Why would we summon ants?” one of the students a year ahead of me asked. “Even if they’re the size of gods, they’re… ants. Do they have some sort of powerful bloodline, or something like that?”

  “They do have weak bloodlines that enhance their strength and durability, as well as their grip, bite, and acid, but that’s not the real reason to summon a swarm of ants. No, the real reason that an ant is worth summoning isn’t really combat. As fighters, they’re merely passable, the swarm as a whole more akin to a lightning ermine or cerberus. They’re incredibly hard workers, they’re more than happy to work for sugar and other sweet things, and given their status as a communal species it’s possible to bind an entire swarm of a half dozen using a single spell. They’re also sapient enough to understand complex tasks, but seem to have no real concept of going back on their word except as retribution. They have a great amount of skill as laborers.”

  “Why do they like sugar so much?” I asked. “I understand why normal ants like it. Is it especially rare on their world?”

  “The elemental plane they come from is mostly filled with hard stone, and it has almost no ability to grow sugarcane, while the bees that they contend with in their world guard their honey quite jealously. Really, the whole plane is locked in an eternal multi-way war between giant insects, but that’s neither here nor there. Suffice it to say, it’s quite uncommon for the giant formica ants to get sugar, so it’s highly valued on their plane, and being able to return with some is quite good for their lives and social standing.”

  That still felt rather strange to me, given how common sugar was in our world, especially with the advances in magical farming across Cendel, but what did I know? It was entirely possible that they felt that they were taking advantage of the poor, stupid summoners. I’d have to chat with them when I summoned them.

  Professor Toadweather fielded a few more questions, then erased the spell and drew out a new one. I was tempted to call this one an object summoning spell, except… that wasn’t quite right. It was, but it had too many parts in common with a creature summoning spell. I frowned and leaned forward, and professor Toadweather let out another witch-like cackle of laughter.

  “Summon eldritch tentacles! Opening gateways to places like the darkness betwixt the stars, or the deep, deep parts of the ethereal plane where monsters unlike anything seen across the planet, save for some few aberrants, exist! In fact, some people believe these depths are where aberrant magic comes from, or perhaps is the end phase of where aberrants that have power beyond power go to avoid the rest of existence.”

  “And we’re just going to be summoning them?” the treefolk next to me asked. “Just like that?”

  “Oh no, not at all. No paltry fourth circle spell would ever have that much power. Indeed some of these creatures I’m not sure that even the Erudite would be able to summon, not without risking the stability of this plane. And if he did, it might do nothing at all! Isn’t that funny? All the power, and being completely worthless! Hah! No, we’re opening the tiniest crack of a portal to let their power seep through.”

  Professor Toadweather held up her hands and went through the casting of the spell. As soon as it was done, she drew a circle in the air with one finger. A colorless void that was nevertheless the brightest rainbow riot of light and color erupted into a ring, and through that ring, tentacles made of bone, and bones made of gelatin, and wiggling teeth with eyes on the end, and eyes with sharp shards of bone sticking out where its iris should have been, and a thousand other things, erupted. The power that actually leaked through the portal smelled of annihilation, of destruction, desolation. But it was constrained, limited heavily to the power that could actually pass through the portal.

  It also felt… dangerous. Not horribly dangerous, not with the power constrained and given form through the spell. But dangerous regardless. It would burn at me with its raw annihilating power if it were to touch me, and I was confident that if I had the weak, frail body of an ordinary human, it would have killed me just from stepping into that area.

  “It’s a very useful spell for combat and for general destruction. It rends at mind, body, and spirit as one, making it hard to think or focus on spells while being attacked by it. Even if the sheer damage output and precision targeting aren’t as potent as a spell like fireball, lightning bolt, or ice spear, it’s not constrained by elemental effects, and in my opinion the additional benefits are more than worth it. Nothing says terrifying like opening a hole to the depths of aberrant power right over your opponents heads to lash at them with things from the beyond!”

  She giggled maniacally, before dismissing the portal and causing the tentacles-that-weren’t to vanish back to wherever they had come from. She slowly erased the board, before she turned to us and smiled.

  “Now, onto the next two spells! These, as well as the fifth circle spell I’ll show you later in the year, are some of the most important spells for a summoner to learn.”

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