Ryn of Avonside

“I think that's as good as we're going to get it,” I said, several hours later.

We were using miniscule amounts of Red Nightmare to test my new shield spell. The first few tests with a copy of my old one went as predicted — the Nightmare energy ate through it like fire devours paper.

The current iteration of the shield, however, could shrug off a small splattering of Nightmare before it failed. I could overcharge it to hell and back, though. Catherine had done some research into various ways to apply scientific knowledge to magic, and she'd found a few things. Here, we incorporated a hunch of hers into the power distribution capillaries — weaving an alloy of copper and silver around them in a tight mesh. It used most of our internal reserves of the stuff, because Nameless Garden spell plants couldn't just create non-organic elements. Well, that wasn't entirely true — it could create very small amounts of it.

Anyway, with that alloy — known for its good heat conduction — we had increased the amount of magical power that could be channelled. The metal not only allowed us to direct waste heat up into the leaves where it could be vented, but it was also good at channelling magic in its own right. As an added bonus, it gave the leaves of the tree a pretty pinkish silver hue.

As for how we made it resist Red Nightmare energy at all, we made it vibrate ever so slightly, at high speeds. It gave the shield a vaguely magiphobic quality, similar to an oiled coat shrugging off rain. It meant that whenever the Nightmare magic gained contact with the shield, it was shunted away before it could do more than a tiny amount of damage in that specific instant. Of course, with the shield vibrating fast like that, it had a lot of opportunities for contact — especially if it was sitting on top, where gravity would push it back down.

“I think so too,” Cat sighed, frustrated. “That Nightmare stuff is just too good at eating anything from the Nameless Garden.”

“Sorry,” Grace said sheepishly.

I gave her a look and reached out to grasp her bicep. It was nice and firm under my grip — my girl worked out. “Why are you saying sorry?”

With a blush and a small smile, she ducked her head. “Uh. No reason, actually. Just reflex.”

I kissed her cheek. “Silly.”@@novelbin@@

Letting go of her, I looked over at my new spell tree. My hands went to my hips as I considered it. “That thing was expensive. We didn't have a lot of silver.”

“Yeah we used all of our silver stones,” Cat agreed with a wry smile. “Cad is going to pass out when we tell him how much silver and copper we need for this new shield.”

“At least the trees don't need to be initially grown with the metal. We can just put some down at their roots after the fact. They'll absorb and incorporate it—” I said, then snapped my fingers as a thought occurred to me. “We'll need to be able to tell when a tree is full up on the metals it needs, though. Let me add something.”

Moving back to the holographic cooperation table, I pictured my addition and pushed it mentally at the floral device. The exploded visual representation of the shield tree gained a new low-priority offshoot of metal that reached out to the side of the trunk. Basically, a tree that was finished would have a CuAg alloy dot somewhere on the trunk at about shoulder height.

Using a tiny sliver of the titanic reservoir of storm energy collected below us, I imposed the change on the tree. The dot formed, gleaming with a pinkish silvery colour.

“Any tree that has that dot will have absorbed as much metal as it needs,” I said happily. “I can be organised for once.”

“How novel,” Cat said sarcastically. “Who knows, eventually you might keep a record of how many spell plants of a given spell you have — so you don't overtax them and blow them up.”

I glared at her, but she fixed me with her signature deadpan expression.

Grace, chuckling under her breath, stepped towards the tree. “Good idea… but, I mean, it's kinda bland. Can you give it a cute symbol? A bunny face or something? A little dot is pretty meh.”

“Everyone's a damned critic,” I grumbled, turning to the holotable once more. I thought for a moment, then realised maybe it would be cool to give the tree a bit more of a mystical flair to it. With that in mind, I turned the dot into a little rune-looking symbol. It was a circle with two smaller curved rectangles on either side, like a person using their hands to protect their head. Then, I enveloped them in a diamond, and finally added a little Y-shaped thingy that cupped the bottom point of the diamond.

“There,” I said, pushing the changes into the living tree. The symbol slowly appeared as the tree rapidly grew and shifted to accommodate my command. “A little symbol to signify that it's a shield made to protect from the Red Nightmare. It's a person in a shield, protecting their head from the evil soul-sucking Nightmare as it splashes in from below.”

The exact moment I was done speaking, I felt an odd surge from what I could only describe as the core of my being. It was a sensation so intimate, it reminded me of the empathic connection I could create with Grace, only on an intellectual level instead of emotional.

The symbol on the tree flared with a dark, sparkling energy, like nothing I'd ever seen before, and held it. The magic, or whatever had come to inhabit the symbol, pulsed with a green and orange autumnal light every so often while the three of us gawked in confused silence.

Finally, Cat said, “What have you done now.”

“I hate to alarm anyone, but I don't recognise that energy,” Grace said, looking at me with worry. “If I tried, I don't think I could recreate whatever that is.”

“It's not even magic,” Catherine said, approaching the symbol while her eyes sparkled with mage-sight. “It's not registering as magic, anyway.”

When I followed suit, activating my mage-sight, I thought initially that she was right, but then I peered closer, and it flared with a sort of silvery-grey light. When the autumnal outline pulsed again, I heard distant, whimsical laughter in my own voice.

Suddenly deeply alarmed, I stumbled back a few steps. “What the fuck?!”

Both of the other girls looked at me. “What?”

“I can see it with my senses, it is magic — silvery-grey, and it’s… it’s laughing with my own voice,” I stammered, confused and uncomfortable.

They looked back at the symbol in unison, squinted, then looked to me with bemused expressions. Grace’s held notes of protective worry, while Catherine just looked thoroughly intrigued.

“I still don’t see it,” my mage-sister said. “Definitely don’t hear anything.”

The magic symbol giggled again — breathlessly, like it was viewing the fruits of a particularly funny prank it had just pulled.

“I've fucked magic again,” I said with a harsh, disbelieving frustration. It was vaguely amusing how often it'd happened, but also deeply worrying because as Esra kept saying, eventually I was going to run out of luck.

“Well,” Grace said, hand on her hip as she contemplated the glyph. “Time to try it out, huh? Let's see what it did to the spell.”

She had a point, and it lit a fire of excitement under me. Moving back to the wooden stump we were using as a target, I summoned the shield around it.

At first, I thought that nothing was different, but then I saw it — the glyph from the tree, multiplied too many times to count, almost transparent, floating on the surface like leaves on a pond. Experimentally, I threw a small burst of arcane energy at it, and the shield shrugged it off.

I picked up a rock with my telekinesis and flicked it at the shield as hard as I could. It hit the shield and made a sound like a long length of wire being struck, and was halted in its tracks. Slowly, it fell to the ground with a gentle thump.

My friends, when I looked back at them, weren't fazed. The shield was working as intended.

“Hopefully it made it stronger,” said Grace, stepping forward.

She held a small vial of Red Nightmare, and very carefully, she removed the cap and tipped it out onto the shield. The barrier began to hum as it repelled the awful invading energy, holding for one, then two, then three seconds — the limit of the pre-glyph shield.

All three of us held our breath as it continued on to five seconds, until suddenly the glob of Red Nightmare exploded in a flash of sparking midnight mist.

The air continued to fizzle and pop for another five seconds, until all that was left was an acrid smell and a vaguely unstable energy barrier.

Catherine was beside me before I even heard her coming, eyes glowing with mage-sight. “The magic that I can see is all mostly intact, except it seems to have a sort of lopsided oscillation going on. Visually, some of those glyphs are gone too.”

She looked up at me, still with her eyes glowing, and shrugged. “What can you see with yours?”

As she asked that, I was dipping into my own mage-sight. The glyphs glowed with a sort of autumnal midnight energy as they floated lazily over the surface of the shield. Wherever there was a large gap between them, the shield began to wobble erratically, like it was unstable.

“Wait, what…” Cat muttered.

For a moment, I thought she was finally seeing the glyphs properly. Then, I realised she was looking at me.

“What?” I asked, looking down at myself. I didn't see anything out of the ordinary — just my body, with my hafornsu currently occupying an ephemeral state of pure magic.

“Your ears,” Catherine said, pointing to them. “They're poi—”

She gasped when I looked back up, then she looked to Grace for backup.

My girlfriend was staring at me with magesight too, bemused but not alarmed. “Your ears have shimmery orange and green pointed extensions. When you move your face, we can sometimes see a… it's tough to explain. It's like you're wearing a pretty theatrical mask made of silver, but we can only see the shine that the metal creates, and the rest is invisible.”

“It has horns, I think. They come from the sides of your forehead and curl up, then around in a spiral just behind your ears.

I stood there, listening to them describe a thing that I couldn't see, and tried to process. I had shimmery pointed ears, and a horned mask? What the heck?

I think it might be time to consult Esra…