Riloth the 19th the 126th-171st

I left Levar's in search of lunch and wound up at the baker with the pretzels. I threw the wizard's coin purse on the counter, letting the gems and coins spill out.

"I'll take some pretzels please," I requested casually.

"Mustard cheese sauce if you have it," I added.

"We—I—the sign," he stammered, eyes darting from the sign to the bag of wealth on his counter.

Eventually, his mouth caught up to his mind—or at least his purse—and he said, "Of course, of course. Pretzels with mustard cheese coming right up."

He ran to his oven and quickly pulled the still-baking loaves of bread out, throwing them to the floor in his haste.

While he fretted over producing pretzels worthy of the fortune I'd just provided, I made myself marginally comfortable in the small chair awkwardly set in the corner. I pulled out the spellbook and began to study.

My rush order was ready shortly, and I took them to go and made my way to the library.

"Welcome back Mage Theral, what arcane wonders can I help you—are those pretzels?”

At the sight of the pretzel I was eating upon entering, Jarreth broke off from his usual greeting.

“Sure is, do you want one?”

“I couldn’t impose no, I was hoping to get off early tomorrow to get in line but... Do I detect mustard cheese? Maybe if I could just have one.”

In an eager frenzy, he cleared his counter of the binding equipment and books to protect them from his impending snack.

I gave him three of the hand-sized pretzels, along with a clay jar of sauce, and found myself a desk.

“Too kind of you! Is there anything I can help you find before I, uh—” he paused to look down at his awaiting treat.

“No, that's alright. I’m just here for a quiet place to study a new book I acquired,” I said before making my way to a far table.

With a stuffed mouth, Jarreth called across the room, “No eating near library books!”

Once seated, I flipped to the version of Shield I’d deemed the most promising and got to work—with intermittent pretzel breaks. You wouldn’t expect the mustard and cheese to pair so well, but they did. Together with the salt and slightly sweet bread of the pretzel, it was no wonder they were on such high demand. Not to generalize a whole people, but when it comes to leisure and snacks, those halflings have no peers.

The art of learning a new spell is far easier with the aid of a spellform, a matter of months instead of years, but it is still a difficult and skillful task. I liken it to copying a drawing. Anyone with a hand can place a blank sheet of paper atop an image and trace it. With an eraser and enough time they could perfectly match the original drawing. The more skilled one is at the art of drawing, the fewer errors they are prone to make, allowing them to finish quickly.

Comparatively, the traditional method of learning spells—which my mother used to teach me—is like attempting to copy a drawing of an elephant at the direction of another. Only you have never seen the drawing, let alone an actual elephant, and the instructor is unable to check your work.

My previous learning had all been of the second method, so it took me a little while to get started, but once I did, the progress was swift. The benefit of having undergone neigh upon a decade of traditional wizard training is that I expect I’ve spent countless more hours forming and reforming mental spell constructs than a comparatively aged Tower trained wizard.

That first day, I sat at the table with my hand upon the spellform for Shield v3.2 with my mind in my mental vault. Much like with the wand, I’d found that I could examine the Will in the objects around me while my mind was fully in that other place. And so, with a reference in my hands, I began to work. Isolating one minute sliver of intent imbued Will at a time, I drew. The work was arduous and Will draining, limiting the amount I could do each day, but slowly, day after day, I made progress and the mental construct for Shield took shape in my mind.

The months that followed were repetitive—as all the todays had been—yet oddly felt more like my old life than any time since I’d left Landing. I had never been alone for long in my life. I’d grown up with my parents and spent most of each day with one or the other. Most days began with training in wizardry from my mother occasionally ended with a nighttime jaunt to the wilderness for sorcerous torture, and was filled with study at my father's side in the moments inbetween.

Each morning of those few months of resets were spent with Dagmar as we worked tirelessly to slay the Tower duo. Dagmar in a lot of ways reminds me of my mother, though her cursing included far more references to subterranean rodents while my mother's usually revolved around creatures of the sea.

After gathering our weapons and the spellbook, Dagmar would return me to town while she returned to the Kituh to explore.

Once in town, I'd gather a snack from the market and head to the library to continue my mastery of these new spells. No food I brought caught Jarreth's attention quite like the pretzels had, so I made a point to get them frequently, not that it was a burden, I quite enjoyed them myself.

Each day I worked in the library until my Will was exhausted from the effort, took a potion of clarity, and then worked for another hour or two, reserving half my full capacity for the assault on the Dahn. On a typical day, I was able to work for four to five hours—depending on how the wizard battle had gone in the morning.

When the mood struck, or I needed a break from study, I went to Ren's to undergo training in mundane swordsmanship, not revealing to her my magical abilities since I had no Will to spare.

Then, I'd head to the Kituh entrance and ride with Dagmar to the Dahn to chip away at its stony defenders.

Levar had divined the nature of the potions on the second day I'd left them—the Will gauge having thoroughly absorbed him the first, leading to me only leaving the potion with him the next today. The potion was much as he expected, a weak regenerative potion derived from troll hair, a potion of clarity of the same variety I'd grown familiar with, a potion of endurance which both returned energy to the body and provided a temporary boost, and a general antitoxin.

Dagmar and I had begun to take these shortly before entering the Dahn, and they proved useful after a long day of study and toil. If they had any adverse reactions to the other potions in our system, we didn't live long enough to find out.

The attempts against the golems continued much as I described before. Each day our coordination in battle improved, but we had to keep altering our tactics, lest the golems begin to predict our actions. We'd learned that destroying the wand once I'd spent its charges prevented the new one from exploding the next reset, and most days I succeeded in doing so before succumbing to the golems attacks.

Through it all, I continued to study. After two weeks, I was confident that I'd accurately built the construct for Shield, and I made my way to my clearing to test it out.

Throughout my training, I'd taken breaks from building the construct to practice both the somatic and verbal components of the spell. The references in the back of the spellbook were very informative, but there was no way of knowing if I'd gotten them right until I tried. Jarreth gave me strange stares when I practiced each as I repeated the word "Bo" with an outstretched palm. My Willsight had proved vital in learning what it meant to channel Will into one's hand, and imbue it into my voice. I wasn't exactly sure what it would do, but I was reasonably sure I could get it to work—eventually.

Fifteen days into my efforts I found myself back in my training clearing, ready to test a new spell. Before casting, I spent a few minutes practicing the physical elements of the spell. While I retained my mind and Will gains between resets, each morning found me with fresh hands, unfamiliar with the requisite gestures needed to cast these new spells. I could already tell I'd struggle to match the casting times recorded in the spellbook until I found a way out of these resets.

Once I was confident I had the gestures correct, I activated my Willsight and I built the mental construct for Shield. With my Willsight active, it took a bit longer to do, but the strange vision had proved invaluable in providing feedback in all my magical ventures.

"Bo," I said as I brought my palm up before me, channeling Will into both my voice and hand as I sent the spell into the Arcane Realm.

As it went through my bridge, the air before me darkened to the color of my own aura. The swirling blue breath from the 'Bo' shot out from my mouth with unnatural speed, outpacing the exhalation of my words and spreading out before my palm—which too was emitting a haze of Will.

I felt the familiar rush as the magic began to move through me from the Arcane Realm, but instead of building and leaving my body to manifest in the world, it simply vanished without a trace or effect.

Flood.

I tried again, this time paying careful attention to the Will-imbued air. On this attempt, I saw that the Will did not seem to be moving as I would have expected. Much like poorly formed runes bleed Will into their surroundings, my poor pronunciation of 'Bo' and deficiently splayed fingers were preventing the Will from forming and allowing the spell to manifest.

In my study, I'd worked out that the verbal and somatic components acted to reduce the cost and time of the spell by preparing the Material Realm for the energy that was to come from the Fonts. Normally a wizard's body was the conduit through which this happened, but some genius wizard had discovered you could make spells more efficient by essentially imbuing the air.

While it took fifteen days to transcribe the spell into my mind, it took twice that to master the physical aspects. With the help of my Willsight—and the ability to watch the spell’s creator cast it each morning while we ambushed him—I made progress in learning the correct intonation of my voice and articulation of my hand. Slowly but surely the blue cloud of Will resolved and took shape into a defined pattern, a pattern that one day suddenly became a sharply defined Shield.

After countless failed attempts, on the forty-sixth day of study, a crisp and well-defined blue barrier appeared just beyond my outstretched palm.

Thank Riloth, I thought, exhausted from the toil and extremely grateful for the success.

The barrier appeared for just over five seconds before disappearing. Immediately after my first successful casting, I dismissed my Willsight and tried again. While the ability to see Will was critical for identifying my mistakes, it made all other aspects of casting more difficult, and I was able to cast the spell much more easily on the second attempt, now that I knew the trick of it.

I spent the remainder of my allotted Will practicing the spell and learning its limitations. The barrier was the shape of a shallow dome that extended four feet below my palm and two feet above. I found that the barrier moved with my palm for the six seconds of its duration and that I could extend my sword through the barrier.

Good thing I took Ren's advice and took up training with my left hand. Maybe she does know what she's talking about.

Another pleasant surprise was the fact that the Shield required no concentration. I couldn't yet cast it while maintaining another active effect like Force Armor or Vortex—I could still only cast sorcerous cantrips in such situations—but I could cast other spells when the Shield was active.

It was much more difficult casting my sorcery through my left hand, but I found that with Shield active I could cast Fireball through the spell—though I had very little chance of hitting my target. Air spells on the other hand had a targeting component as part of their casting and had no difficulty appearing where I willed them.

Most important though, was the wand. Not only did the force darts pass through Shield unabated, but it was also no more difficult to wield or aim the wand with my left hand than it was with my right.

When Dagmar arrived to pick me up from town, I was waiting in the forest in front of the secret entrance to the underground tunnel.

"Why are you so blasted happy?" she asked, noticing my uncontained smile.

"Throw something at me," I said in lieu of an answer.

Without a second thought or hesitation, she drew her runed war pick, cocked it back, and threw. A part of me naively thought she'd ask why, and so I barely managed to bring my hand before me and cast Shield as the war pick was inches from my palm.

The spell manifested, and the weapon bounced off the invisible barrier with a deep thud, reminiscent of an ax chopping into wood.

"Good job," she said, resounding praise coming from her mouth.

"How long does it last?" she asked, drawing the Will draining sword back for a second throw.

"Not that long!" I shouted, bringing my palm up to cast the spell again.

Dagmar chuckled to herself as she sheathed her sword.

"I liked you better when you didn't make jokes," I said, unamused.

"That's a lie. I've always made jokes."

I thought back to our first meetings.

"Killing me does not count as a joke."

"I sure thought it was funny at the time," she said, laughing at the thought. Then she added, face growing somber, "But, I'll admit I thought you were a demon, and once I learned otherwise I did feel a bit bad about it."

"Just remember, that you still owe me for that," I reminded her and set off into the darkness.

According to the Will gauge, I had fifty three grains of Will, and Shield cost just under four. While I couldn't match the casting speed of the spells creator, I was confident that my spell construct matched his exactly. Based on that, I could cast the spell fourteen times, which seemed like a lot.

I think I'm due for another benchmark. There needs to be a better way of doing that though that doesn't take a whole day's Will. I'll need to spend a day investigating that Will gauge alongside Levar.

We traveled back through the Kituh, and I made use of the time to review the mental constructs for the wizard spells my mother had taught me, as had become my habit during these uneventful subterranean jaunts.

After the Kituh trip, we traveled the short distance overland to the Dahn. Despite having made the journey more than fifty times, Dagmar's complaints about the terrors of nature never ceased.

Outside the Dahn, we each took one of the wizard's "healing potions" to revitalize ourselves and put us in peak form for the battle. The potion was not sufficient to top off my Will, but even with Shield it was unlikely I'd survive long enough to need it.

With coordination built from repetition, Dagmar and I made eye contact and wordlessly stepped through the doorway.

She ran straight for Tim while I once again drew Jim’s attention with the crossbow, letting him advance toward her a dozen steps before taking my shot. Despite the countless times we’d assaulted the pair, and the small amount they seemed to learn from each battle, they still always went for whoever attacked them first so long as the other one of us was further away. After gaining his attention, I sent a barrage of force darts from my wand at Tim in the spare moment I had before Jim’s arrival and began to backpedal towards the door. My attack hit the golem a moment before Dagmar reached him, and she made a quick slash at the legs with the Will draining sword before casting it aside and dodging around Tim’s first strike.

With the aid of Wind Jump, I reached the doorway before Jim arrived, and held off until the last possible moment before Blinking away. Without the need to visualize a destination, I could cast the spell nearly as fast as my Air magic, and I disappeared when Jim’s stony fist was mere inches from my face. I appeared before Tim just as Dagmar dodged another of his attacks and sent my remaining charge of force darts into his once-pristine and now severely pitted chest. At my attack, he shifted his focus to me and brought his arm around, in a golem’s best impression of a right hook.

As soon as I’d loosed my wand attack, I’d begun constructing the spell for Shield and extending my palm out before me. Just as I began to utter “Bo” I had a moment to think, I hope this works!

I felt the spell take shape before me, though I couldn't see it. To my delight and immense relief, I watched as Tim’s fist halted an inch from my open palm, the impact sent out a deep boom I felt in my chest more than heard.

It worked!

My body released some of the tension that had gripped me, though not all of it—I was still in a battle to my own inevitable death.

In the moment Tim’s attention had shifted to me, Dagmar got in an additional war pick attack against his rear. Through the ground, I felt Jim’s approach and Wind Jumped to the side in order to lead him away once more. Usually at this point, I would flee Jim with the aid of that spell until Dagmar needed me to teleport in and distract Tim, buying her another attack at the cost of my life, but today the plan was different.

As usual, I fled from Jim back toward the door and threw the wand outside, I’d found that easier than attempting to snap it mid-battle. That day when Jim arrived, I Blinked again, appearing once more before Tim, war pick in hand and swinging for his chest. My attack was insignificant, not having the time or inclination to charge the weapon, but it—along with my teleport, which always seemed to gain the construct’s attention—taunted another swing from the golem.

Once again, his featureless fist met my Shield, only this time he came around for a second attack in quick succession, which my Shield also withstood—to my even greater relief. Dagmar swung two more times before Tim returned his attention to the dwarf, and once more I led Jimothy on a chase. Unfortunately, the brief exertion had caught up to Dagmar, and she was unable to dodge the next attack—I on the other hand ran around the returning Jim with the help of a Shield before running through the door with a Wind Jump.

I stumbled out into the grass as the portal’s wards canceled my spell and threw off my momentum. Lying there, I rolled over on my back and watched as the pair of golems—one immaculate and the other quite the worse for wear—approached the door and closed it without a word.

Exhaustion hit as the adrenaline left my system, but my mood was as high as any man's would be if he’d narrowly avoided his own execution. That was at least, until I realized I’d not brought any food.