MAGNUS

The next day found the eight of us sitting in Introduction to Aether Binding trying to rub the sleep out of our eyes. It had taken Marion coming into the lounge and chasing us all to our beds to get us away from what we were discovering. We had figured out most of the components for the rune, and to an extent where to put them in the pattern. What we couldn’t find was the portion of a spell that represented the bindings within the aetherflow itself. After looking at a few examples I found something that might work, but we all agreed that I needed to check with Professor Siodha and Dean Brenner before we tried it. We had made a functional binding and put it into an image binding to test it out, but it wasn’t as detailed as the concept we couldn’t try yet.

The dean began her class with a question, “Who here decided to work in a group to complete your assignment.”

The eight of us, and a few others raised their hands. I noticed that most of the ones who raised their hands were in pairs that sat together, probably dorm mates.

Brenner looked at us, then the rest of the class and said, “Why didn’t you work together?”

There was some muttering, but it was the dark haired girl with the ravens that spoke up, “I don’t know about the others, but I wanted to see if I could come up with the solution on my own.”

“Well, Miss Brundottir, did you?” the professor asked.

The girl nodded and said, “I think I did.”

She pulled out a few sheets of paper and handed it to the dean. Brenner looked them over and raised an eyebrow, “Very clever. You set it up to identify the Talents of the person who put their aether into it, but you forgot a step. Do you want me to share that, or do you want to figure it out and turn it in with the project portion.”

Brundottir hunched her shoulders a little and said, “Can you tell me what I missed?”

Dean Brenner patted her lightly on the shoulder and said, “A way for the user to see the Talents. Your spellbinding will find them, identify them, but then it stops.”

I saw her rest her face in her palms and heard a soft groan. I didn’t blame her, we almost forgot that part too. Without us back checking each other it is quite likely we wouldn’t have gotten as far as we did. Dean Brenner moved through the class and looked at the work each student had done. She collected a few of the papers to use as examples for the class until finally she reached our group.

“I know for a fact all eight of you worked on the project together and had to be shuffled off to your beds or you would have still been at it when it was time for class. I expect to be impressed,” she said with a stern grandmotherly tone.

I put on my best worried look as I pulled out a notebook, and carefully pulled a piece of parchment out of it and laid it down for the dean to see. She was so focused on me she didn’t notice the four infront of me pulling oversized cards out of their own bags.

“The design looks good, what are these other elements in the method?” the dean asked.

Vara answered, “They are light shaping: illusions. We realized that the technique for bending and reflecting light could show the results and used a method similar to that family in Haven and their training cards.”

“So you have it show the Talents as the bindings, and then what consult a compendium?” she asked.

“For version one yes,” Jessica said, “Version two we came up with a separate rune pattern, and no we aren’t exactly sure why it works.”

“Young lady, are you telling me you already tested it?” the dean asked with a bit of anger seeping into her tone.

Behind her Mai said, with a smirk on her face, “Status: Call.”

A silhouette of a human body appeared in miniature above the card she held in her hand. Overlaid on it was the flow of her aether and the bindings within herself. Each of the Talents shown in the focal points had a line that led to words that shimmered in soft blue light in the air next to the silhouette.

The dean spun around to stare at the silhouette as the rest of the group, save for myself, also activated a card. The dean froze, her mouth hanging open as she looked at Mai’s list of Talents: Stormeborne, Dragonblessed, Wind Touched, Inner Well, and Expanded Flow. There were still a multitude of unused focal points in her aetherflow, which made me wonder if they could be added later.”

The dean reached forward a hand to touch the image, and I let myself smirk as her finger landed on Wind Touched, a Talent she would recognize. The words changed colors slightly and more words appeared beside the name of the Talent: Increases efficiency of aether when used for the aspect of Elemental Air.

She quickly pulled her finger back and the image vanished, when she touched another Talent, this time Inner Well, another set of words appeared and she read them aloud, “An internal storage for aether siphoned from internal flow that can be drawn from. How did you manage this?”

Vara took up the explanation, “Some aetherical creatures have the ability to read the Talents. We incorporated an equipment binding variant into the spell to reference that document, and filled it with confirmed information given by that creature, and a few guesses for other Talents like Fire Touched.”

“So you used an equipment binding to store the words rather than a physical object, making the cost negligible since words in ink have very little mass compared to what you bound it to. I will admit, I am impressed. I notice however that you don’t have one of these cards Mr. Ward,” the dean said with a bit of awe in her voice.

I coughed a bit and pulled out another piece of paper and showed it to her, “I created one like it, but I wasn’t happy with it. This is what I came up with, but I don’t want to anger Professor Siodha by trying it.”

I caught Vara’s smirk as the dean looked at the design I had laid out and notated. She paused at a section and said sharply, “Miss Nilavs, stop smirking and run and get Professor Siodha. Quickly girl, and Professor Schneider while you’re at it; don’t dawdle girl.”

Vara stood and took off at a sprint as I cocked my head at the dean. She looked around, “Class, you are dismissed. You may remain but there won’t be much of a lesson today. I would encourage you to work on creating a functional version of your theories. Takahashi, Mai, Selena, and Ezekiel; please move to the front of the classroom and space yourself to where they can ask you questions about your research if they need. Jessica and Richard please do the same at the side of the class. I assume you six are already aware of what he has on these pages?”

They all nodded and moved where she said. I took note of the fact that she had lost her professional demeanor enough to use their first names. Then she pinned me to my seat with a glare and demanded as she slapped a page down in front of me, “Where did you discover this? Has that old bastard been holding out on us?”

I looked down at the page; it was my notes on the grid pattern I had discovered in bindings. I looked back up and shook my head saying, “Something weird happened while we were studying the runes trying to come up with a solution. That image overlaid the spellbinding runes and I just knew that all spell binding used that pattern for the effect. Varis said she couldn’t grasp more than its related directly to the use of aether itself, it’s bound to my origin flow, and it eats half the aether before it ever enters the flow within my body.”

“Yet you were also able to identify the pattern in the method and activation, as well as the sigils for equipment binding. You are trying to tell me that no one else noticed this?” she said in almost a rant.

I raised a hand in a placating gesture, “Someone else may have discovered this before, but didn’t share it publicly. I wasn’t sure if it was accurate so I wanted to bring it to you and Professor Siodha first before I attempted my project.”

“Have you been able to activate the Talent manually, or is it just a passive trait like the ‘Touched’ Talents?” she asked.

“Once I knew what it was I tried to actively use it, similar to my Aether Sight. It worked but left me drained as if I had overdrawn my aether,” I answered.

“Well, what did it do?” she demanded.

“For the few seconds it was active I knew what each of the Talents we had mapped were, how they formed, and what the spells we had drawn to test the pattern were composed of. It was like I had the same ability as Varis to read the flow directly but also comprehend it rather than relying on my own knowledge,” I answered.

“Do you remember that information?” Professor Siodha gasped out as she stopped from her run at my desk.

“No, at least not what I would consider accurately enough to record,” I answered.

“So you would need to either learn to use it more efficiently or grow your available aether, which has to be a challenge with how choked your aether flow is,” Dean Brenner said.

I nodded and passed the papers over to the Spellcraft instructor. She quickly leafed through them, pausing on the page I knew held a new runescript for activation, before she moved on. She pulled the page with the notes on the patterns out and stared at it for almost five minutes before she let her hand, still holding the page, fall to her side with a sigh.

The dean looked at her and asked, “What is it Augusta?”

“It fits. It fits so perfectly I don’t know why I didn’t see it before, even his notes on the activation sequence make logical sense. I will have to test his proposed alteration, but I think it will work,” Augusta Siodha said.

“Then what is the problem?” Dean Brenner asked with a curious note to her voice.

The professor looked to her superior and spat out, “It means I will need to redo the entire lesson plan to somehow incorporate this. I can’t teach spell binding without this data if it can be verified.”

I coughed into my hand and pulled a notebook out of my bag and handed it to her. She turned a frosty glare at me and said, “What is this?”

“My research notes, updated to include a thesis on the pattern,” I said meekly.

It was in fact a copy of my notes rather than the original. I had placed a clever little binding in an empty notebook as a test for the Status cards. It stored the image of the pages from my actual research and displayed them on the page as if written there. I had also placed an aether gathering rune, like what was used in combat cards, in the spine to power it with the siphon of the same to make sure it didn’t turn the book to ash.

I heard the dean mutter, “That book is too new.”

I watched as her eyes glimmered slightly with the tell tale sign of her activating Aether Sight, before she broke out in a chuckle, “Oh now that is an impressive binding young man. Professor Schneider will want to see that.”

Professor Siodha was too caught up reading through the notes to notice Schneider arriving to hear the dean’s comment; but he asked, “What binding will I want to see?”

The dean said, “He bound the image of his research notes into a new book and, if I’m reading the binding correctly, he made it where it is current to the book he is using now.”

Professor Schneider stared at the book in Siodha’s hands and said, “Does that mean it updates as his notes update?”

I nodded and he asked, “Young man, do you know what this means?”

“It means I don’t have to keep handing over my research journal,” I replied, not understanding what was so special.

“What is the range of that binding?” he asked.

“Well I bound it to a bar of iron I put in the spine, so it actually has an almost inverse cost. Because of that I was able to boost the range to what I think would allow the professor to have updated notes even if I was back on the mountain,” I answered in confusion.

Siddha snapped out, “So in essence you created a binding that allows near instant long distance messages.”

I stared at the professors and dean before I bent over and banged my forehead into the desk. I swear, sometimes I would miss my nose even though it is attached.