I froze for a second, my brain racing. I knew that the geas and curse magic pact that I’d sworn with the Shé family had specified that they couldn’t share information with anyone else, but it had put no such ban on Jackson, Salem, or myself. But Yushin had still shot down my offer to bring professor Caeruleum in on the sealing magic, despite my protests. I didn’t want to break my word to her.

  On the other hand, I did feel some relief. Charm and Fable were strange, but they were good people. Fable might not be as powerful of a mage as the Erudite, but given the comments that professor Toadweather had made about having been something of a planeswalker in her youth, meeting masters of conjuration magic that wielded strange magics in different forms, the occasional oblique comment on ways to re-structure my magic, and the sheer number of unusual people who’d drifted through the shop, I was increasingly certain that Charm and Fable were both powerful planeswalkers, more than they seemed on first glance.

  “On this world, you mean?” I asked, trying to press him for more details.

  “There were several different places that developed such extensive affinity rituals during the Age of Sunder, as you’re well aware,” Fable said, his voice slightly stern. “But it has fallen out of fashion, especially since the turning of the age, and the solidification of the schools of magic.”

  “Does that mean you’re old enough to have remembered before said solidification?”

  “No,” Fable said, suppressing a faint snort. “That was well over two thousand years ago. People love to bandy about terms like centuries as if they were nothing at all, but even three centuries ago, there were less than half the number of Erudites, countless nations that do not exist today were prominent, and Cendel itself was seen as weak and likely to fall to the demons."

  “What about the immortals? You can’t tell me that certain fae haven’t lived for centuries or millennia.”

  “Oh, there are a few, certainly, but measuring objective time between realms is difficult. Many faerie courts operate under time dilations and differentials. To my knowledge, there are only three Faeries with realms connected to this one old enough to remember the Age of Sunder. There are plenty of things around that are a century. Two. three. A handful that are five. But two thousand years is twenty centuries, and there are few beings that old. If nothing else, things that old tend to become isolated and lost.”

  “What are those Faeries’ names?” I asked. I was nowhere near strong enough to be safely calling up something that old with contact otherworldly sage now, but I was a dragon. I’d live for centuries.

  “I’m not telling you that,” Fable said, but a smile touched his lips as he shot me down. “Now, I can offer you a bit of advice on that spell.”

  “Because you’re a planeswalker and have seen other worlds where people have developed affinity magic differently?” I asked, prodding at him for information or confirmation. A tight, disquieted look came across Fable’s face and he sighed.

  “I have walked across multiple planes, but you already know this.”

  “I’m talking about other planes like ours, where humans hav–”

  “I know what you’re asking,” Fable interrupted. “I understand your question. But you have to understand, even setting Magyk herself aside, I am not the most powerful being to walk through Etherius. Some of them have placed certain… divination spells, shall we call them? They’ve woven them into certain information. You’re a powerful young man, what with your cleverness, magecraft, and bloodline. But you’re not ready to become a realmwalker, not yet. Layer your magic together as a unified whole, become an archmage. Then, and only then, will your mental shielding be strong enough to avoid those divinations.”

  I noted that he used the term ‘realmwalker’, rather than ‘planeswalker’, as professor Toadweather had. I wondered if that indicated other mortal realms, like the planet I was on now. He’d also been vague, indicating that the name of these organizations was likely also protected by divinations.

  "The information about forming layers around my wizardry, rather than simply melting them together,” I said slowly. “Can you tell me where you got that idea?”

  “No, and neither can I tell you everything about where I got the information about large-scale affinity rituals. I can tell you that some of it was received from studying ancient texts from the Age of Sunder. And if anyone asks, I suggest that’s what you tell them.”

  Fable waved his hand and tore open a portal to what looked like a void of nothingness. He reached in, and a moment later, placed a dozen clay tablets, some butcher’s paper, and charcoal. He flicked one finger, and the charcoal animated itself to create rubbings of the tablets.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “These tablets detail a handful of destiny mark and affinity combination rituals from the land that would eventually become Charm’s home,” Fable explained. “They should help you further refine this information. The work done on the ritual you’re counter-cursing is impressive, and it’s clear that the creator had a vast understanding of chi flows and bloodline magic. They also clearly understood wizardry, at least well enough. But their understanding of destiny is poor. You can, in time, learn to exploit those openings.”

  The portly old man winked at me and let out a laugh, dusting his hands off and replacing the tablets in the strange void portal.

  “Now, I’d suggest for everyone’s sake that if you’re pressed on where you got these, you tell people you did a quick dip into the library. That library is quite the stunning artifact – I have no idea where Henry found it, and he’s always been quite tight lipped about it.”

  The mood seemed to lighten after that as I placed the rubbings into my Etherius locker, and Charm went back to his act of being the harmless shopkeeper, taking inventory, replacing some of the stock, and tallying up some of the profits. As he hummed away, he looked at me.

  “You know, your affinity partially works on sympathetic and conceptual principles, doesn’t it? I wonder what would happen if you were to cast a sealing curse on the ether crystal dust you used for the spell?”

  “I don’t have the ether pool size for that much cursing, not with a sealing curse. I might be able to manage bad luck, though, that’s pretty simple.”

  Fable nodded, pulling a rag from nowhere and beginning to wipe down the shelves, whistling a jaunty tune as he did. I turned my attention down to my notes on the ritual spell. That was when I noticed that the stick of charcoal was still animated, making small notes on the paper. None of it was the kind of thing that re-wrote my understanding of the underlying principles.

  It was simpler than that. These were the same sorts of notes that I got back from professor Toadweather when I handed in an analysis of a spellform's components, or from Silverbark when I had handed in the analysis of applications for my curse affinity. An angle that would channel ether more efficiently to the next section here, a shape that would serve for better containment of the rune that included the word of power there. Most of them weren’t even mistakes, simply places where my spellwork had been functional but sub-optimal. All together, though, they represented a substantial improvement in the spell. I looked up to see Fable wink at me again.

  That was the second of the distractions from learning the new spells, and by far my personal favorite. I didn’t get answers, not fully, but at least I understood that there were legitimate reasons for those being withheld from me. It did somewhat slow my progress with learning new spells, as I used my newfound true tongue powers to read through the tablets, shared them with Salem and Jackson, and used the information that they contained to completely re-write sections of the destiny magic interactions.

  It was through studying them that I understood what, exactly, the flaw that the Traitor Wyrm and his cult had made with their ritual’s connection. Destiny magic was an entire set of magic, like wizardry, and I was most familiar with its marks. That was what basically everyone I knew used, and it was the Shé elders had as well. Charm had once compared marks to affinity magic for destiny users, though given it was all I’d ever seen, I wasn’t sure how that comparison held up.

  Whatever the truth was, though, the ritual had been designed utilizing underlying principles of freeflowing destiny magic. I didn’t know what that was, nor did anyone in our group. Based on Charm’s analogy, I thought it might indicate the non-mark based magic, which I’d never seen to exist, but whatever the truth of the matter was, the destiny magic flowing into the ritual was coming from a compatible, but not perfect source.

  It was like using milk with lemon instead of real buttermilk in pancakes – they might chemically activate the same way, but the flavor wasn’t exactly the same. They were still different products.

  It wasn’t much to go on, but it was enough for me to begin spinning out parts of the curse to target that. Instead of needing to seal a full quarter of the Shé family’s ritual spell, it meant I only needed to seal a small section of it for a greater effect. Like sealing the lemon away to stop the chemical reaction from happening.

  That caused us to comb back over the wizardry, bloodline, and cultivation sections of the spell, looking for anything similar that we could utilize. The bloodline and cultivation sections were flawless beyond any simple tricks like that, which was somewhat to be expected, given that they were the powers that the Traitor Wyrm had used to ascend to godhood.

  The wizardry section, on the other hand, yielded some results. There weren’t any glaring flaws, not in the same way as there had been with the destiny section, but no glaring flaws wasn’t the same as flawless. There were minor inefficiencies, the same sort of things that Fable’s animated stick of charcoal had pointed out on my own paper. By focusing my sealing on attempting to seal those specific sections, I could better leverage the power gap between us, letting my strong spot hit his weak spot, which would hopefully be further backed by the fact that direct intervention was a violation of Magyk’s rules.

  Though all of the searching and re-searching through the spell and redesigning of my own had been a distraction, and a big one, I still continued to make slow but steady progress on my ability to cast fifth circle magic, until I was slowed down by the third and final distraction.

  At least the distraction hadn’t been entirely unexpected: classes. The lower-circle spells that professor Silverbark had given us were each supposed to be turned in to demonstrate mastery, which meant it was time for the final set of new spells for the semester. Which meant I had even more fourth circle spells that I needed to learn before the semester ended.

  Patreon Here!

  Discord Here!