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Post by Noa on Jul 11, 2022 1:11:47 GMT -6
“Yes,” Noa said evenly. Rhys was right; he could feel the drowsiness tugging at him already. But he had known the risks and the side effects going in, and he felt they were a small price to pay to test the true efficacy of the spell. “You’re the one always telling me to take a rest.”
{You saw it work once. Now don’t do it again. I’m really going to leave you like that next time,} Rhys said.
“Mmm.” Noa laid his head down on the desk and closed his eyes. Magical sleep always felt heavy, just like this -- like a blanket settling over him, dulling the edges of his senses, until his pain faded to the cottony edges of his consciousness. It wouldn't be long until even that slipped away.
Distantly, he felt the weight of something tangible settle over his body too.
This… was probably good enough for now.
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Post by Noa on Jul 15, 2022 20:21:10 GMT -6
When Noa had promised to teach Rhys a spell of his choice, he hadn’t expected Rhys to make the request that he did. Admittedly he hadn’t given a lot of thought to what Rhys might actually choose. Maybe he should have had a better guess, since they had been together for so long, but their dynamic was such that Rhys usually went along with what Noa said, or made suggestions. And if Rhys didn’t say anything, well, Noa had better things to do than to try and read his mind. Noa wasn’t the one with telepathy, after all.
Still, since Rhys had gone out of his way to request a specific spell, then Noa wouldn’t deny him. Noa had promised, after all.
It wasn’t exactly that Rhys had picked out a spell by name, as he had no way of doing that, since he couldn’t read.
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Post by Noa on Jul 15, 2022 20:22:11 GMT -6
But he had something that he wanted to accomplish with magic. {I want to be able to… take someone out, maybe? But without hurting them,} Rhys had said. {There has to be a spell like that, right?}
“Why the sudden interest in internment?” Noa had asked. “I hadn’t realized you had a vindictive streak.”
{No, that isn’t it,} Rhys said hurriedly, then fell quiet. {... I was thinking… About the man who tried to kill you before, on that trip to the city. If we could have stopped him, really stopped him, then maybe we wouldn’t have had to…}
“Kill him,” Noa finished for him. Rhys had flinched at the words, but Noa remained impassive, flipping through his notes with the same bored expression he had worn before Rhys had first broached the topic. “Well, I suppose that would be less complicated to explain to any interested authorities.”
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Post by Noa on Jul 15, 2022 20:22:54 GMT -6
Though what the hopped up city guard could do to someone from his family, Noa would have privately liked to see -- but it had been a hassle to clean up, metaphorically speaking, and a reputation for murder did make it harder to find people to work with. Rather near-sighted of everyone involved, Noa thought, since revivals were available at the healing temple for free, but pointing that out didn't seem to change anyone's mind. “Very well, I’ll look into it,” he had promised, and a little cursory research did turn up a few likely spells that might do for Rhys.
Seeing as Rhys had more mana to work with these days, Noa decided to just teach him the most energy-intensive one. It suited the parameters that Rhys had asked for: a total debilitation of the target, at least in their ability to do harm, without harming the target themselves.
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Post by Noa on Jul 15, 2022 20:24:04 GMT -6
Noa hadn’t learned it because he didn’t have enough order mana to cast it, but even if he could, he didn’t know if he would have. There were easier, less expensive ways to subdue a person, and if they came to harm, they could just be healed after -- or even revived, if it came to that.
Still, in the interest of honoring his promise... Well, Rhys would be insufferable for a while if he reneged on it anyway, Noa was sure.
“The spell is called ‘Crystal Prison’,” Noa explained. “It has a high energy cost -- and well it should, considering it totally contains the target, and can’t be destroyed by any means except spells specifically designed to break other spells.” Short of that, it was supposed to be able to stand up to anything, up to and including whatever Avander or Azalea could throw at it.
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Post by Noa on Jul 15, 2022 20:24:17 GMT -6
Now that he was looking into it, Noa was a little curious to see if this would really be the case. But taking one of his creatures out of commission for an entire day merely to satisfy his own curiosity was a bit much, so Noa set that thought aside for now.
{How much energy?} Rhys asked. Noa thought the Faeron would be more preoccupied with wowing over the capabilities of such a spell, but it seemed that Rhys was in the mood to focus instead, seeing as he asked a fairly practical question. {Is it as much as ‘Restore’?}
“No, not quite that much. Gods. I don’t know that I’ve heard of a more expensive spell than ‘Restore’.” Noa smiled sardonically. “But I doubt it will be within your means to cast it more than twice, maybe thrice a day.”
Rhys mulled it over. {But you say it lasts the whole day?}
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Post by Noa on Jul 15, 2022 20:24:28 GMT -6
“Twenty-four hours, according to what’s documented here.” Noa indicated one of the books that lay open on his desk. It was a little off to the side; once he had found the spell he wanted, he had more or less discarded the tome in favor of the other projects he was working on. But he had left it there, just in case he needed to refer back to it.
{Then that’s fine,} Rhys said. {I hope we won’t have to detain that many people. Or creatures, I guess.} Rhys seemed deep in thought. The incident must have weighed more heavily upon him than Noa had thought. But, well, if it got him interested in learning more magic… And while the spell wasn’t one that Noa would have chosen himself, it wasn’t without practical applications. No, indeed, in certain situations he imagined it would be preferred.
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Post by Noa on Jul 15, 2022 20:24:41 GMT -6
“If you’re ready, we will begin. Unfortunately this time I’ll be teaching you the same way as I did with ‘Restore’. I fear a spell of this caliber is still beyond your ability to construct organically.” Noa wouldn’t be constructing it from scratch either, but he had his experience with larger spells to draw upon, and he had still mastered a much wider variety of spells than what Rhys was currently able to cast.
Rhys didn’t protest, but simply made himself ready as best he could. Noa took a moment to re-familiarize himself with the spell’s workings, and then the notes on its construct. Order wasn’t an element he had worked with extensively, so he had made more careful notes than he otherwise might have. There was an entire page scrawled half in Common and half in runes, with a series of complicated diagrams.
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Post by Noa on Jul 15, 2022 20:24:54 GMT -6
When he felt confident that he had it, he said, “Pay attention.” Then he went through the spell in his mind, with Rhys presumably following along with his telepathy.
Like he did when he was teaching Rhys to cast ‘Restore’, Noa began with the whole spell, so that Rhys could get a sense for that whole -- both the shape and the scale of it. And then he focused on one component, going over it in excruciating detail. Rhys tried to memorize this, and then to reconstruct it in his memory, before comparing it against what Noa held in his mind.
Only when Rhys had correctly memorized and reproduced one part did they move on to another.
It was slow work, and the work of many days. During this time, Rhys didn’t bother trying to cast anything. Without the whole spell, feeding live mana into simply a portion could have ugly consequences; and it certainly wouldn’t have succeeded.
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Post by Noa on Jul 15, 2022 20:25:24 GMT -6
But Rhys applied himself -- if anything, with even more determination than when he was learning to cast ‘Restore’. It made sense, Noa supposed; Rhys was the one who had chosen this spell himself. Rhys didn’t once complain this time, and Noa could catch him in deep concentration even when their formal sessions were over, probably tracing the shape of the spell in his mind.
Even with Rhys’s determination, the memorization was clearly harder this time. They took nearly the same amount of time with this as they had with the last big spell, even though this was a smaller work, and Rhys practiced harder. Rhys had a background in healing, but none at all in the making of physical barriers, so it was harder for him to properly envision the spell.
Eventually though, they were able to put it together, linking the separate pieces of the spell to one another.
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Post by Noa on Jul 15, 2022 20:25:37 GMT -6
That was more work, but it was easier the second time, even with a different element, because Rhys had gone through the process once before. Any background understanding was preferable to none at all.
And then, weeks later, they finally cast it live -- on the smallest of test subjects, a pocketpet that Noa had pulled out of his collection. There was still room for things to go wrong, so if they had to suffer a casualty, at least this would be no great loss. “You can cast ‘Crystal Prison’ when you’re ready,” Noa said. There was no sense in rushing Rhys, not for this first cast.
Rhys was nervous, but the same determination that had pushed him to put in all those hours now pushed him to follow through. He closed his eyes and fed energy into the spell… or tried to, anyway.
Noa sighed when he realized the problem.
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Post by Noa on Jul 15, 2022 20:25:52 GMT -6
They had spent all that time working on the spell itself, but not on the specific type of mana that it required. He considered giving Rhys some verbal coaching, then decided against that in favor of simply producing his Order node and setting it on the table.
“Can you feel the energy?” Noa said. “Try to match yours to this.” Rhys didn’t have Noa’s sensitivity to magic, but as a familiar he couldn’t be utterly insensate to it. Rhys fluttered down and inspected the node more closely, then gathered a bit of energy and began trying to attune it to the node. After a few attempts, he had some success. “Good. Now try ‘Crystal Prison’ again.”
Here, at last, Rhys’s hard work paid off. A shimmering cage of pink crystal panes erected itself around the pocketpet. On such a scale, the spell looked very fine, like something one would expect to find in a dollhouse.
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Post by Noa on Jul 15, 2022 20:26:03 GMT -6
The color was a little unexpected; Noa usually associated Order magic with the same color as its nodes. But perhaps that was more a quirk of Rhys’s casting than the spell itself. Too much deviation was considered poor form, but most mages had at least slight personal idiosyncrasies to their casting, himself included.
The real question now would be whether it worked as intended.
Noa tried several spells of his own to try and destroy the shield. This startled the pocketpet enough to make it scrabble in earnest in an attempt to escape. Neither had any noticeable effect on the shield, but to be fair, the pocketpet was hardly a force to contend with, even in a panic.
But seeing as the pocketpet didn’t die, they could move on to testing on hardier targets. Noa and Rhys moved out to the stables, where they tried the spell on Albion.
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Post by Noa on Jul 15, 2022 20:26:14 GMT -6
He wasn’t the most powerful of the Sarane, but he was the most aggressive. Rhys was able to cast the spell a second time, and Albion proved to be just as powerless to break the prison as the pocketpet had been.
Watching the drake struggle, Noa found himself warming to the spell. He hadn’t thought much of it at first, what with its limitations and situationality, but one did have to admire its resilience. Most barriers could be broken, or only lasted a short time. For sheer containment potential though, this had to be the best possible option.
Over the course of the next few days, they tested the spell on one or two of Noa’s bigger creatures at a time. Noa didn’t want all of them out of commission at once, and anyway Rhys couldn’t cast it very many times, owing to the mana cost.
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Post by Noa on Jul 15, 2022 20:28:36 GMT -6
In this way, Rhys got in more practice with the casting, while Noa got to test its effectiveness. The outcome of their attempts to break the spell fortunately didn’t change, but Rhys did slowly get faster at casting it.
When there was no more reason to test the spell further, Noa declared their lessons finished, until Rhys next needed to learn a spell -- for Noa’s purposes or his own.
Maybe he ought to find more high-cost spells to teach Rhys, come to that. He couldn't cast many of them himself, and they were sort of a hassle to teach, but it would offer him the opportunity to observe them being cast. That might offer him better insights for his research. Were there any other big healing spells? Certainly nothing so powerful as 'Restore', but perhaps some lesser ones he had overlooked...
With a new topic to explore, Noa headed back to the study.
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