BT - Book 1 - Chapter 80

His eyes pored over the pages, struggling against the low light to make out the archaic words.  For some reason every author found it necessary to write a book introducing each spell.  He didn’t need to know about the blessed’s youthful vacation to the horn coast where a summer on the sun dappled beaches provided the inspiration he needed to finish the spell.

Micah skipped ahead.  Now they were blathering about how their grandmother inspired them to try and reverse the flow of aging.  He flipped another page.  Something about a lab accident reducing her to an infant.  Another page.

Finally.  He practically sighed.  Deep in the middle of a hostile building with enemies roaming the halls, the last thing he needed was some dead wizard’s life story.  At least the spell sounded promising.

Temporal Vortex.  Micah’s finger traced over the complex spellforms, consigning the shape and formation of the mana constructs to the Ageless Folio.

They were impossibly complex.  He’d need to purify his mana to an impossible degree to  stretch it thin enough for him to weave it into the multiplex of geometric designs that would form the tapestry of the completed spell.

It would take dozens of tries for him to perfect it, but even without reading the description, Micah could see what the spell did.  The alternating layers of temporal energy would create a zone of flux, drawing on the potential of any object inside it and twisting it.

It couldn’t just age a target or give them back their youth.  That was a level of power that even Micah’s enhanced mana couldn’t sustain.  Temporal energy was just too potent.  Instead, by drawing from the target, it fired tendrils of energy, about the size of his index finger, through its quarry.

Some of the ropes of energy pulled power, stealing years from their quarry.  Others transferred them right back into the entity, aging it noticeably.  Ultimately the effect would be brutal.  Organs and bones would twist and warp under the conflicting strain of the magic, hopefully crippling the target.

The only problem was the spell’s slow casting speed and high cost.  The complex sigils would take Micah almost a minute to complete, and even then they might not be successful.  Worse, his ability to move the area that the spell targetted was limited, locked into the complexity of the spellform that made its casting so slow.  A potent ability to be sure.  One that could fell even a Royal Knight if he managed to hit them, but the actual casting would be a problem.

The next spell, after Micah made it past the author’s mushroom risotto recipe, was almost as interesting.  Temporal Stutter was also a tier six spell.  Unlike most, its spell form could be formed in advance and would last dormant for up to an entire day until Micah had need of it at which point a simple somatic trigger would cast it.

The spell itself was both powerful and simple.  Once cast, it reversed the flow of time by one second.  Enough to save him from an ambush or unslit his throat.

Several more pages of notes on the spells casting and potential complications, and Micah found the diagrams for casting Foresight.  He skipped ahead, paging past the end of the spell that he already had only to find the back cover of the grimoire staring back at him.  Gently, almost reverently he closed the tome and picked up The Magic of Growth.

A much thinner book, the wood magic grimoire was fairly straightforward.  Micah quickly found the spells he was looking for in the index, flipping to them and recording them into the Folio one by one.

He already knew most of the healing spells, but three new spells stood out.  Panacea, Coma, and Binding Vines.  Panacea was a tier five spell that cured all diseases, status effects, and poisons from a target touched by the caster.  Interestingly enough, the spell also stopped all bleeding, internal and external, but it wouldn’t actively heal the target.

Coma was the other tier five spell.  A risky ability, it allowed the caster to target someone with a brain and circulatory system and try to disrupt the flow of blood and nervous signals to their brain.  If successful, the spell would knock the target out until a powerful caster undid it.  Unfortunately, it wouldn’t work on targets with more than a certain number hit points.  Further skill levels in the spell could raise that number, but it would still be more of a spell to disable and capture powerful injured opponents rather than something useful in defeating an opponent.

Micah smiled slightly as he read the spells description further.  Apparently the spells were right next to each other in the grimoire because Panacea was traditionally considered to be Coma’s cure.

The final spell, Binding Vines, was a fairly straightforward evolution of Plant Weave.  So long as there was some sort of plant matter nearby, the mana would excite the vegetation and force it to grow into long grasping vines that could grasp, pin down, and in certain situations strangle smaller foes.

He closed the second grimoire, returning it to its glass case.  Quietly, he slid the protective covering back over the books.

“Micah,” Jo hissed from the doorway.  “I hear footsteps, we need to get behind the couches or something right away.”

“No need,” a woman’s chilly voice startled Micah into jumping slightly.  He whipped around seeing a silhouette standing behind Jo, a hand on her shoulder.  “I have a ring that checks the integrity of the seal on the forbidden books once an hour.  I already knew you were here before I arrived.  Hiding would just be impolite.”

Micah’s mouth narrowed into a thin line as he watched Jo stiffen and slump to the ground.  The faint green glow of paralytic sting disappearing from the other woman’s hand even as Micah’s companion bounced off the wood paneling of the library floor.

“You must be the ritualist that killed the Baron’s son,” the woman stepped into the library with him, gaunt and pale as she pulled out a handkerchief and wiped the hand that had touched Jo clean.  “I can taste the flavor of your casting on the display case.”

She paused, cocking her head slightly, dark eyes alternating between Micah and the grimoires.

“Orthodox rituals?”  She asked.  “But with a bit of rawness around the edges.  The Royal Academy followed by self teaching perhaps?”

Micah nodded slowly, the knuckles of his hand white around the haft of his spear as he watched her approach him, counting each step away from Jo.

He wasn’t entirely sure that he’d be able to beat the woman, but the worst possible outcome would be a life and death fight when she was within easy range of Jo.  Everything about her screamed danger in a way that he hadn’t felt since encountering the Khan.  More than anything, she reminded him of his days at the academy.  Something he’d desperately prefer to avoid.

“And here I thought that being called out to this frontier town as a favor would be a drag,” she stopped walking, about ten paces from Micah, “but what do I find but a fledgling, freshly escaped from his masters.”

“Still,” she frowned at Micah, “you look a bit young to crack an alarm ritual of that power seamlessly.  Are you sure that you aren’t the apprentice of some old monster hiding out in the capital?  If so let me know.  I have to apprehend you, but not making an enemy is significantly more important than whatever some provincial baron sitting on the tallest pile of mud in a swamp has to say.”

He bit his lower lip, looking nervously from Jo’s still form to the slim and pale woman that radiated menace across from him.  He wasn’t getting out of the room without a fight, and it was only a matter of time before the woman ran out of patience and stopped toying with him like a cat.

Micah slipped the enchanted silver whistle between his lips and blew.  A pulse of magic shattered the instrument into a cloud of shards that bit and stung his face, a problem to be resolved with the next model.

“Oh?” The woman waved a hand, instantly summoning a cloud of purple mist that began to fill the room.  “That seems like a dirty trick.  We were just having a friendly talk and you had to go and summon backup.”

Micah didn’t respond, casting air supply to prevent himself from inhaling the cloying mist.

“An air mage too,” her pale face broke into a smile of appreciation.  “I suppose I deserved to be countered with a simple spell like that when I tried to use a cheap shot like sleeping mist.”

Her voice changed, deepening as she began intoning the words to a spell.  Micah lunged at her, activating the enchantments in his spear as he closed the distance between them, racing the chopping movements of her hands and the crescendo of the woman’s voice as she finished her spell.

“Blizzard,” she sneered triumphantly, just as Micah reached her, his blade pressing a handspan into her stomach, buzzing from the sonic enhancement as blood began to flow from the wound.

Immediately, he hopped to the side, using every point of his agility to dodge the dozens of razor sharp icicles that whipped toward him faster than any arrow he’d seen.  His spear flashed back and forth, knocking the translucent blades aside before they could strike him even as his body wove through the remaining attacks.

A couple of seconds later, he was breathing heavily but unharmed, roughly back where he had started.  Across from him, the wound on the woman’s stomach was bleeding noticeably less.  Even as he watched the wound began to draw to a close.

“You might be fast,” she clicked her tongue, “but I doubt you’ll be able to deal enough damage to me to overcome regeneration.  I think I can see how someone with a physical class and the ability to use air magic and ritual cast could defeat the Baron’s son, but that doesn’t mean I have to report the entire truth to him.”

“We have a scapegoat,” she nodded at Jo’s unconscious form.  “All I have to do is hand her over to him as an ‘associate of the killer’ and my contract is done.  I’m much more interested in an apprentice that can move and cast as well as you at a young age.”

Micah took a step back from her, still unwilling to speak lest she hear enough of his voice to identify him further.

“Oh don’t worry about those stodgy assholes at the Royal Academy,” she waved a hand.  “So long as you’re associated with me, you’ll be doing missions that benefit Pereston and that’s all they really care about.  They’ll give us some sort of speech about how disappointed they are in you running away and how they have their eyes on you, but with my backing it isn’t worth their while for them to make a move.”

“What do you say kid?” she reached out with an empty hand toward Micah.  “If you give it a couple of years, together we can corner the ritual magic market in the capital.  We’ll be able to charge anything we want.”

Mercifully, her speech was interrupted with a crash.  Micah’s Luoca dove straight through the top floor of the estate, leaving a tunnel to the night sky through the expensive wood flooring it had destroyed in its descent.

Before Micah could give the daemon an order, the woman hissed.

“By the Sixteen!” a spike of ice erupted from her hand, slamming into the Luoca’s side, drawing a thin scratch through its thick skin.  “How did you even learn to summon this?  What have you done boy!”

The Luoca’s tail was barely visible as it dove into the woman’s shoulder.  A second later, she disappeared in a flash of light only to reappear in the hallway, trying to open up the distance between her and the charging creature.

Blood poured from the open wound in her shoulder, curving in the air to form strange floating runes before they ignited in green flame.

Micah sprinted toward Jo, frantically casting Haste on his Daemon as he ran.  The creature batted at the woman only for two manacles of water to grow from the floor, grasping at the daemon’s bladelike insect forelegs.

As Micah picked Jo up, the Luoca screamed in rage, its scorpion tale lashing out and destroying one of the pillars of water.  Its wings buzzed, shredding the walls of the estate as reality warped and bent around their sharp edges.

He didn’t have time.  Micah quickly chanted the incantation to Flight, Jo over his shoulder.  In the distance he could hear the sounds of the compound waking up.  A bell was ringing as soldiers shouted.

An explosion erupted in the hallway as the Luoca somehow sucked the water of the other manacle into its humanoid mouth.  The wizard stepped back, her sallow chest heaving but her eyes bright as she began another spell.

It was time to leave.  The Luoca would follow its orders and catch up later once the two of them were out.

He lept into the air, grunting slightly as the magic buoyed him.  Seconds later he was approaching the clouds.  Magelights sprang to life all across the compound as Baron Hurden’s blessed finally stirred to full wakefulness.

Then he was gone, the cotton white of the clouds protecting him from sight as he flew away, Jo’s stiff body still draped across his shoulder.