The Archmage: Chapter Thirty-Six (Patreon)

I completed Oracle’s bracer the following week, alongside the veils for Osheen, to give him some time to practice with them. After that, I started working on the training wands. 

Those proved to be an interesting problem to puzzle over. Building them with human magic was a well-established tradition. Faerie magic, on the other hand, I couldn’t figure out. Converting one to one just caused the magic to dissolve, much like the bedsheets I’d used to escape House Elide. In the end, I thought there must be some principal I was misunderstanding… 

“Mellt, Lady of Storms, soon to be Queen of Storms, I summon you!” I intoned, holding my hand over the summoning array. This summoning was far less elaborate than the one I’d used to summon Oberon, in no small part due to the fact that Mellt was actually quite likely to answer me, while Oberon often had better things to do with his time than answer to outsiders. 

Sure enough, there was a flash of lightning, lash of rain, gust of wind, and clap of thunder as Mellt appeared. 

“Hi hi!” she said, and her words, while still quick, were spaced enough that I was able to make them out easier. 

“Hello Mellt,” Osheen said from where he powered the ward. “How are you today?”

I was beginning to think of the ward as mostly a formality at this point, and had to slap myself. Even if it wasn’t likely that Mellt’s internal calculation of worth would see more in tricking me or eating me, ‘wasn’t likely’ was still not a chance I should take. 

“Good!” she said. “Standard non-aggression?” 

“Deal,” I agreed. 

“So what’d’ya want?” she asked, leaning back in the air as if it were a cushion. 

I wondered for a moment if that was some sort of standard spell for air-related fae. Oberon had done it too, after all. 

I shook that thought off. 

“I want to learn how to create a type of enchanted item to help train me in shaping a specific spell,” I said. “I’m willing to hand over a copy of the information of this spell to you as a part of the training. I got the spell from Oberon, who had it from an ex-lover.” 

She blinked at me. 

“Oberon has had a lot of ex-lovers,” she finally said. “I don’t know if the spell is worth it. It’s also a change magic spell, since you can cast it.”

“The information of the spell and thirty copies of a one use iron repelling pa–” 

“Deal!” Mellt shouted, shaking my hand abruptly. 

I blinked. I knew thirty had been a lot for such a simple ask, but… 

“I can sell that to so many people for enchanting gear,” Mellt agreed. 

“Oh really?” I asked. “Here.” 

I handed her the entire stack of papers. 

“Feel free to sell these under the same arrangement we made in the beginning of the year for selling weapons for me to Fae,” I said. “They may not be weapons, but we can expand our deal to enchantments.

“Okay!” Mellt agreed, vigorously shaking my hand. In a flash, the papers vanished, and Osheen laughed slightly as I went to retrieve the papers from Oberon. 

“Oh, yeah, I see,” Mellt agreed when she got a look at the papers. “These are pretty complicated. Even a lot of Sovereigns I’ve met couldn’t cast it, though they’re only about Lord level in power. A training foci is definitely a good idea.” 

“You really think so?” I asked, wondering if it was really that complex. It looked hard, yeah, and my shaping skills were terrible compared to Osheen, but I’d built rituals far more complex. 

“Oh yeah!” she said. “It’s like an instrument. If you focus on learning a single really complex song, you can learn it, even if you can’t do other songs at the same complexity. You might not be able to cast–” 

“I meant do you really think they’re that complex,” I said, shaking my head, and Osheen spoke up. 

“You’re still a witch, at the end of the day, not a sorcerer,” he said. “I could cast those spells, sure, but I’ve got practice. If you’d asked me to do these during our first year, I might have been able to do one, but not all three.” 

He lit his aura and began weaving it into complex shapes, completing the first spell over the course of about ten seconds, then the other two over half a minute. 

I sighed at that. It was easy to dismiss sorcerers as brutes, but it would have taken me four times that long to get one spell done, and I wouldn’t have been able to do all three at once. Osheen winked at me and let the spell dissolve. It was a faerie spell, and not even a fire-based one, after all. Casting the spell would have just caused it to blow up in his face, rather than work. 

“He’s not a witch,” Mellt said, sounding genuinely confused. “Or a Sorcerer. Or a Druid. Humans are bad about that, and I never understood why. You like putting boxes around things, and then getting mad when things don’t fit into the boxes you’ve formed.” 

“What do you mean?” I asked. 

“Look at faeries,” Mellt said. “Someone might be better at ritual, or better at freecasitng, or better at bargains, but they’re still a faerie. Why is it different for you? Your entire intent with that seal was to allow you to reach the pinnacle of the lord stage, yes?” 

“Yeah,” I confirmed, nodding. 

“It’s all still the lord stage,” Mellt said. “Ritual or freecasting or bargain, it’s all still just a lord. Don’t box yourself in, stupid.” 

As she said that, she bonked me over the head. 

“Hey!” I protested. 

“Box yourself in as what you think a witch is, and you’ll never be able to cast the spells,” Mellt said. “You’ll be too busy thinking you can’t do it, because to you, witches don’t work that way.” 

I frowned. I took her point, even if I wasn’t sure I agreed. It might be true enough for faerie magic, but there were clear limits. As a witch, no matter how good I got at shaping my aura, I couldn’t throw a fireball with it. I’d still need to chant the spell, and place the components down, and make sure everything was in order.

The edges were blurry, I admitted that. I’d bargained with the fae a lot for a witch. A healer used sorcery and rituals hand in hand. A necromancer used druidic techniques, sorcery, and ritual. 

But blurry or not, they were still there. Maybe it was just more of a color gradient than boxes.

Still, it was probably a bad idea to treat faerie magic that way. If a faerie told me it was all the same, then it was all the same. 

Of course, that didn’t somehow transform me from barely being able to shape one of the spells to being able to cast all three. But it did alter my mindset some, and with Mellt’s help, we got started on the actual enchantments. 

They were… strange. 

All foci flowed magic along the predetermined path, powering what existed within it to release an effect. The same was true of training foci, but the path that it flowed along… was the spell. Rather than activating the power already there and fueling it – inefficiently, when it came to my foci, I wasn’t the best at making them – it instead acted like pipes, letting you flow aura through them to get used to it. 

Perhaps pipes were the wrong analogy, though, because it didn’t just casually flow like water. I still had to push through and shape it, I just was guided to ensure that the shape wasn’t fundamentally off. 

The whole thing was slow and clunky, compared to even normal aura exercises, and the resultant shape wasn’t able to be modified, since the very same walls that made it possible in the first place prevented it, but if nothing else, it did help me get a start on training for the specific base shape. 

All in all, once I had the spellforms, I probably could have dismissed Mellt and made them myself, but I enjoyed the company of the woman, even if her transformation seemed to have calmed her and given her a solidity that wasn’t there before. 

That probably said something about the sad state of my social life that a storm fae was arguably closer to me than some of the people who I’d started school with, like Sarai or Lyn, but I tried to not dwell on that fact. 

When we completed all three of the foci, Mellt turned to go, but I held up my hand.

“Wait,” I said. “I’ve got something to do, but I need a lot of hands.”

Mellt blinked.

“I’m not a flesh faerie. If you want more hands –”

“No no, not like that,” I said. “I just have more projects than I have time for. If you or other fae from Awell’s court are willing to give help, I’ll pay three sheets of my iron repelling charm per hour of genuine effort given for the help with research, then ten for materials.”

While the fae – mostly sylphs, but a few others – started sorting through the piles of books in our room, I began practicing with the newly built foci, but I was only able to practice for about half an hour before my head was throbbing with the effort of holding so many specific items in place in my mind at once. 

“It gets better,” Osheen reassured me as he handed me a damp cloth, scented with a bit of lavender, to put over my eyes while I lay back on the couch. 

“It’s a pain,” I said, “but it’s needed. I very nearly revealed myself to Travis.” 

“Really?” Osheen asked. 

“If I hadn’t done so many shaping exercises, I never could have only lit the aura around my hand, rather than all of it, when I swore the compact,” I said, and I heard the grin in Osheen’s voice when he responded. 

“Seems like there is some use for them after all, huh?” he teased me, and I scrunched up my nose at him. 

“I wonder if Wisteria has any potions to help remove pain?” I wondered aloud. “Or Emilia. I know that body mages can remove the ache. It might actually be in the library, come to think of it…” 

“That can be dangerous,” Osheen cautioned me. “If you have a tension headache, it’s because the strain is getting to you. Ignoring that and pushing through anyways, even when the mind and body are telling you to stop is liable to keep making it worse.” 

I nodded my agreement, but the following day, I still headed into the library and found a spell to suppress the feeling of headaches and threw together a quick artifact for it. 

I wasn’t completely foolish, though. I only put enough power into it for it to last for roughly fifteen minutes. That would let me spend a bit of extra time, but I did understand Osheen’s points.” 

As time trickled by, I continued to work on my spells and teaching. Most of my students were able to throw together an artifact, despite it supposedly being too hard for a first year. Of those who failed, any who visited my office hours and got some one-on-one tutoring, they eventually were able to slap it together. Those who failed and then gave up, though, I was forced to mostly for this portion of the class. I wasn’t happy to do so, but I tried my best to grade them on effort. 

One girl – I think her name was Elyia – for example, gave up completely after her failure, so she got a sixty. But those who tried again, I felt comfortable giving a seventy, and if they repeatedly tried, even without success, I gave them an eighty. 

That unit concluded five weeks before the tournament began, and with little time left, I headed into my enchanting class to start them on making artifacts my way.