The Archmage: Chapter Nineteen (Patreon)

It didn’t take long for her to be ready to mentor me after that. Tara and Osheen had to leave the room, and with a promise of mutual safety, the wards were lowered. I brought out some blank paper and ink, so she could sketch the spells onto the paper, and then she – still in Oracle’s form – stood across from me, where I sat on the ground.

“The thing you must understand about human magic is that it is the ultimate neutrality,” the Silver Queen said. “What else would it be? It is the nexus between all of the worlds.” 

“What about the deep realms?” I asked. “To access the Starless Night, you have to go through the Fallen Void.” 

“Deep realms are… Strange. And irrelevant for this,” the Silver Queen said. “Tell me, does human magic have an aspect of the physical?” 

“Of course,” I said. “That’s why I was able to make my staff more efficient, understanding how lightning works, and how Mellt’s Cage works.” 

“And does it have an aspect of the conceptual?” the Silver Queen asked. 

“Sure, that’s why you can use salt for purity,” I nodded. 

“Faerie magic is purely conceptual,” the Silver Queen said. “We can tap into some degree of physicality, but not in the way you can. We can only harness the power of lightning’s physical properties because that alters the concept of lightning. That is why your friend Mellt has risen so quickly – she has done much work with mortals in the ways of lightning, and harnessed the new concepts, much as I shall harness the change of nations.”

I didn’t see what this had to do with learning to compress memory magic into a smaller form, but I wasn’t about to question it either, so I just nodded and jotted down some notes. 

“Elemental magic is purely physical,” the Silver Queen continued. 

“Wait, that doesn’t make sense. How can a Phoenix heal, if its magic is purely physical?” I interjected.

“How can a sorcerer with a flame and life rune bonds heal, if it can cast fire?” the Silver Queen asked, sounding almost scornful. “Just because something appears basic on the surface does not mean it is simple. There is every bit as much power to be found in the purely physical as the purely conceptual.” 

I shut my mouth at that. It still didn’t entirely make sense to me how something could be purely physical and yet contradictory, but her rune bond analogy was good enough for me to accept it, even if I didn’t understand it. 

“Okay,” I said, then, unable to help myself, asked. “What does this have to do with transferring memories?” 

I could swear for a moment that I heard the Silver Queen sigh in annoyance, and I wondered if it was because she felt cheated by our deal, because she couldn’t bully me, or because of my questions. 

It was probably a little of all three, come to think of it. 

“Because, your mortal magic’s mind is fettered by both concept, physicality, and mentality,” the exasperated Silver Queen said. “You must inscribe the memories as a physical part of the ritual in order to create an artifact like a memory saber, yes?”

“Yes,” I agreed easily enough.

“For most of your uses as a diviner, like in your cloak, this is fine,” she said. “Indeed, since your cloak’s memory bank takes the inscription of a phenomena, it works better that way. But this is an instance where you don’t need to hold onto the information forever. There is no need for physicality. By the use of faerie magic, rather than human, you can alter the spell array to simply target the concepts you wish to push out. The issue with faerie magic is that it is too tightly bound to raw concepts. If you wished to push out knowledge about your own change magic, it would work fine. Indeed, this is how Garnet, his servant, and my own transfers of knowledge operated. But you wish to do it the other way around – you wish to send out knowledge in order to create change. You need to hone in on an aspect of mortal magic I just mentioned, but one that is specialized in by the Dreamscape.”

As she spoke, she moved Oracle over to the inkwell and dipped a talon in, then began to write out the spell for doing exactly that on a sheet. It was quite familiar to me, now that I’d seen it – different from the spell on the memory saber, or on the crystals that Garnet had given me, but with the same basic spellwork and ideas. 

“Mentality, that’s what’s missing,” I said once she’d finished, and the Silver Queen bowed Oracle’s head to me. 

“Precisely. I don’t pretend to be a master of how Dreamscape magic works – it is far stranger to me than human magic or elemental magic, since I interact with those regularly. But I do have a contact, and even though she’s just considered to be a Maestro of Dreams, she should have far more information on relevant spellcraft than I.”

“A Maestro of dreams could send out knowledge of dreams,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “But could they send out other dreams?” 

“Yes,” the Silver Queen said. “And her song borders on where the Fae Sovereignties intertwine with the Dreamscape. There are many such beings like that, which straddle the line between two things – both faerie and dream spirit, or both spirit and demon, and so forth.” 

“That’s… Weird,” I said. 

“Try defining salad in a way that perfectly encapsulates a salad, without leaving out anything, and leaving out anything that isn’t a salad,” the Silver Queen said, with a rather un-regal bark of laughter. “The realms are more fluid than you know, and to think that there are rigid boundaries is foolish.” 

“I take your point,” I said. “So what’s this being you want me to call up?” 

“Her name is Gwrach Freuddwyd, Nightmare Hag, Maestro of Dreams, Prefect of Slipping.” 

Once again, she wet Oracle’s claws with ink, then started scratching out the ritual for summoning the hag on a new piece of paper.

“Prefect of Slipping?” I asked as she worked.

“Some Dreamscape title,” the Silver Queen said. “I know her not. Know this – when you summon her, nothing will happen. She will attack you in your dreams that night, and for two nights further. If you can rebuke her, then she will appear.” 

I stared at her, and she finished, then pushed the paper towards me. 

“You’ll want to cast this with fully faerie magic,” the Silver Queen warned. “I don’t know how to translate it into human – as I said, she’s strange and foreign, but my old court had dealings with her before. My lands are not so horribly far away from where the Dreamscape bleeds into my world.” 

I took the paper and nodded to the Silver Queen. 

“Well, I think that was talisman papers well spent,” I said, and the Silver Queen sighed. 

“Some defense against iron is always welcome,” she agreed. 

“Say, since you’re a Queen of Change, I don’t suppose you’ve had dealings with the Court of Air? I’d be willing to offer more papers in exchange for components.” 

“What do you need?” the Silver Queen asked. 

“High grade components, equal to the infused silver I used in the construction of the blade I gifted to the Queen of Winter,” I said, not wanting to say Medb’s name aloud. She  probably wasn’t listening, but probably wasn’t good enough for me. 

“How many? Of what sort?” 

“Two water, two wind, three lightning, and one force,” I said. “Within a month and a day.” 

That would give me enough to make – or in my staff’s case, improve – three staves: one for Mellt, one for Obereon, and one for me. 

The force… 

I had a debt to repay. Ever since I’d started practicing with my faerie aura more, I could feel it tingling under my skin, eating away at me a little bit.

“I want one hundred and one of your talismans,” she said. 

I’d made a stack of five hundred, so I could spend the one hundred, but if I accepted her initial offer, she’d think I could produce them effortlessly. To be fair, making five hundred only cost about a thousand crowns and a week of effort, but there was no reason she needed to know that. 

A thousand crowns… 

Once that amount of money would have been absurd to me, but now it was a reasonable expense to get what I wanted. 

That was absurd to me, but it just made the fortune of the noble families even more absurd. Draven was worth thirty-four billion silver crowns, and he could pour hundreds of thousands into maintaining a portal network, without diminishing that fortune by a noticeable amount.

I realized that I’d been paused for way too long, however, and spoke up.

“Ridiculous,” I said. “You want over a hundred one use items for five one use items?” 

“Nonsense, you’ll use them to make permanent spells. One hundred is fair.”

“Fifty,” I said. “You’re just getting components, nothing more.” 

“Seventy-five,” she countered. “You’ve clearly got them to burn, and made them for this reason, no?” 

“I’ll need to barter with the nightmare hag,” I rebutted. “Sixty-eight. That will give you one hundred and one total, since you’ve already got thirty three from our earlier bargain.” 

“Fine,” she agreed, and I counted out the sheets from Tara’s bag, then slid them over to her, where they vanished in a flash of silver light. 

“A pleasure doing business as always,” I said to the Silver Queen, “and my hopes that we can continue to work together in the future.” 

She agreed, and I picked up the ritual for summoning the hag, then wandered to go get Osheen and Tara.

Suffering three nights of nightmares wouldn’t be fun, but I could manage it, especially if it meant that I was able to finally get the ritual condensed enough to actually layer it in population centers, out of the eye of anyone who’d see it. 

But, I wasn’t going to do it tonight. I had classes in the morning, and I’d need to pull off a good bit of active spellwork. It would be best to do it next Friday night, so I suffered over the weekend, and only lost sleep on Monday. 

It was time for my students to gain their familiars.