FWFW 3 - 64

After they left the scene of Alyss’s murder, Oylla tried to get Olivia to come with her to her office, but, failing that, she urged her to return to her dorm. Olivia argued, saying she wanted to be alone, her voice ringing with the finality of the statement. This led to a rather long and tedious discussion about Olivia’s feelings, her fragility, and the fact that the killer was obviously targetting her in some way.

“It’s not me you should be worried about!” Olivia snapped. “You should be protecting the people that I’m close to. My cohort, for instance! I feel like the more time I spend with anyone, you included, professor, puts more of a target on their back!”

“Well, if you won’t come with me, and you won’t go to your friends, I need you to promise me you’ll stay in a public area. I also expect you to check in with me this afternoon when you’ve had some time to process your feelings.” Oylla’s face looked sour at the compromise, but Olivia nodded, already turning as she responded.

“I agree to your conditions. I’m going to the library.” As she walked away, Olivia couldn’t help comparing how things were happening at Fainhallow to how a university back on Earth would respond to a serial killer on campus. There would be crisis counselors, canceled classes, news reports, political intervention, and the list went on and on. Things were very different in this world, in this remote mountain academy for training Energy users.

When Olivia arrived at the library, she looked around, saw her favorite chair, and the other students talking in hushed voices over their projects at the widely scattered tables, and a strange, profoundly uncomfortable feeling came over her as she thought about how she’d spent time studying her spellcrafting for Alyss’s class in much the same way. Olivia sighed and moved to a chair by one of the bay windows, and she stared out at the gray fall skies and the cloud-shrouded mountain tops outside the distant academy wall.

Olivia had known people who died, of course, but something about Alyss’s death, no, murder, was hitting her especially hard. She wondered about the need for her to see the murder scene. If she were being honest, she thought Oylla had made an error in judgment. There was no need for her to see Alyss that way. Oylla could have broadly described the scene and told her about the ridiculous poem. “She’d said Carlu wanted me to see it,” Olivia said, talking to herself under her breath. “I wish she’d told him to . . .” she sighed and rubbed at her head, seeing no point to the train of thought.

“Obedient love?” she whispered, looking out the window again. Was the poem referring to her? To someone she knew? To the killer? “Who’s obedient?” Was the killer mocking her for pulling away from Adaida in the garden? Surely he’d seen her and Adaida before he attacked—had he listened to their conversation? Had he watched them kissing? “In vain, I ache?” Suddenly her mind turned to Alyss, and she wondered if the poem had been about her. The poor woman’s hand had been pointing at it, after all. Had Alyss been in love? Had she obediently avoided acting on it, aching in vain?

“God, did she have feelings for me?” Olivia didn’t believe it, and the more she wracked her brain, the more she wondered if the killer was just messing with her mind, trying to make her crazy. “Poor Alyss, were you killed just to get at me?” If so, Olivia had to wonder why. Why had the killer set his sights on her? Had she always been the intended target of his actions, or had she put herself into his crosshairs when she fought him off in the Alchemy gardens? She decided it didn’t matter—she’d been determined to find and stop him before, but now it was all she would think about. If he wanted her obsessed, then he was going to get it.

Olivia stood and moved to the part of the library where professors’ and other scholars’ published spell patterns were shelved. There were thousands of volumes, taking up several rows of bookshelves along the far wall of the first floor. Alyss had cautioned her students about delving into those tomes too early or without guidance. None were off-limits, but it was a widely held belief that many of the patterns were inelegant or ill-suited for most people’s purposes. Alyss had said they needed a few years of proper basics and a slow ramp-up of understanding before they went exploring through those esoteric books.

“Well, I don’t have Alyss to guide me anymore, do I?” She said, eyeing the rows and rows of books. Most were thin—containing what a professor or visiting scholar deemed to be a clever application of Energy or, in some cases, what they viewed to be their greatest work. Some of the tomes were matching in the bindings, and she knew they were spells written by the same author over a number of years. Many shelves had empty spots where books were out on loan, but the vast majority were in place, and many were dusty with disuse. “Poor things. Students too busy learning their curriculum to come looking for more?”

Olivia wanted to learn more magic. She wanted to learn spells like the one Morgan had, allowing a form of teleportation, flight, or anything to make her more mobile. She wanted to learn spells to bind criminals or render them helpless. She wanted to learn magic to find people more effectively or at least differently than her Hunt Energy spell. She wanted a way to put her prodigious Energy pool to use, protecting her without having to take on her Elemental Form. There had to be spells to make shields like the one the killer had used to block her attacks.

Olivia reached up to touch her crown, wishing she’d been wearing it that night in the garden. If she’d ended the killer then and there, Alyss would be teaching her class today. “All right, where to begin?” The shelves weren’t organized by spell type or Energy affinity. No, they were arranged by authors—alphabetized names that meant absolutely nothing to her. “I need a spell to find the right kinds of spells.” Her attempt at humor did nothing to lift her spirits, and she didn’t even smile as she ran her finger along the dusty tomes. Not having a better idea, she closed her eyes and walked back and forth along the long, back row of books, allowing her fingertips to brush the spines gently as she passed.

When she felt a slight tingle at the tips of her fingers, real or imagined, she didn’t know, she stopped and pulled out the fat, dusty tome. The cover was black leather, with no identifying marks, not even the author’s name. She blew off the dust and opened the heavy cover, and, after turning the flyleaf, she saw a handwritten note.

Reader,

Within, please find some of my most elegant applications of Energy. Should you enjoy them, I’d appreciate a note letting me know how you used them or if you made any improvements.

-Tuzrical of Tharcray

“All right, Tuzrical. Let’s see what you got up to.” Olivia took the heavy tome and walked back through the stacks to the bay window and her favorite chair. She sat down to read, and, for the first time in days, her mind didn’t wander to thoughts of the killer. She flipped to the first spell pattern, read the description, and flipped to the next. She repeated this process several times, not seeing anything of interest until she’d made it to Tuzrical’s seventh spell, something called “Flesh Wards.”

Olivia’s eyes widened as she looked at the diagrams, expertly drawn of a humanoid shape with tattoo-like markings at key points—one at the throat, one at each wrist, one just above the pubic region, at the base of the belly, and one at each ankle. She read through the text and found that Tuzrical had “perfected” a method for turning a person’s flesh into a sort of artificed item, powering the enchantment with Energy in the person’s Core.

The following several pages had the main spell pattern with variations for different effects—things like resistance to heat or cold, physical damage, or even enchantments to shrug off decay or acid. The more complicated the pattern for the initial spell, the more complex the corresponding tattoos on the flesh had to be, and the more Energy their maintenance would require. According to Tuzrical, he’d enchanted his flesh to resist blades and found the Energy draw “tolerable,” though it did slow his overall recovery rate by nearly twenty percent.

“How badly do I want to make myself resistant to damage? Enough to put tattoos all over my body?” Olivia asked herself as she sketched the patterns in one of her notebooks. She truthfully didn’t really care about the tattoos, and the prospect of having passive defenses appealed to her, but to feel safe, she’d want several effects. Could her passive regeneration keep up? Would there be a way to turn them off if she wanted to recover her Energy more quickly?

While copying the various patterns for both the spell and the tattoos, she started to recognize their similarities, and an understanding of how the spell worked and how it tied into the tattoos, much like a warded item, began to click in her mind. “Tuzrical, I think I see a mistake in your process already,” she breathed as she held two patterns up next to each other, one to resist heat and one cold. They were essentially identical—just a tiny section on one pattern was a mirror image of the other.

At first, Olivia couldn’t figure out why the mage had created different spell patterns for so many effects. Why create a pattern for cold and another for fire and yet another for decay, and so on, when you could just make a spell design with a generic resistance to Energy? Then it had occurred to her that not everyone was worried about defending themselves from hostile Energy. Someone might want protection from actual fire or freezing temperatures. “Well, not me, Tuzrical. I just want to resist hostile spells.”

With that in mind, Olivia began to sketch out the spell but altered the specific resistance sections to have only two branches, one to resist hostile Energy and one to guard her flesh from cuts. As she finished sketching the double-pronged pattern and the corresponding glyph tattoos, a thought occurred to her. She altered the part of the spell that would activate the tattoo at her neck and added a third prong, one that would shield her from concussive forces.

Olivia triple-checked her work, comparing her new designs to the ones in Tuzrical’s book, and felt confident that they’d work. “The only question is how much Energy these things will draw. Will I cripple myself? Will they draw more Energy than I can maintain?” She thought about what would happen if that were the case. She’d eventually run out of Energy and be unable to replenish her Core, so long as the wards were trying to draw from her. Olivia wondered what would happen then. Would it be like being hobbled, unable to maintain her body because she had no Energy to spare? She figured she could deface the tattoos to ruin the spell, saving herself if it came to that, but she wanted a more elegant solution.

Olivia pulled up her sketches and thought about what she’d learned while studying artificing. She thought about how some items were activated by trickling Energy into them. What if she could design the ward markings so that they didn’t work unless she turned them on? All it would take was a small addition to their design—a trigger she had to consciously trip by priming it with a tiny stream of Energy from her Core. When she wanted to turn them off, she could just stop the flow of Energy to the trigger. Best of all, if she ran out of Energy, the shutoff would be automatic, and her normal regeneration would resume.

While she made the changes, Olivia wondered if she was acting too hastily. Tuzrical’s book was the first one she’d picked up, and she’d only read through the first few of several dozen spells. Did she want to go through this process before exploring more options? She glanced through the stacks toward the rear wall decked with thousands of spellbooks and realized that if she took the time to be genuinely thorough, the killer would be an old man before she was decided.

No, Olivia thought; she needed to learn. She needed to get things done, and this was a good first step. Tuzrical’s patterns were elegant, and though she hadn’t wanted to use the first few spells she read about, they’d been quite clever—better than anything in her class texts. She didn’t believe in fate, but she certainly had a more open mind about the mysteries of the universe than she did back on Earth. It felt right, somehow, that she’d found Tuzrcal’s book so quickly.

She still wanted to know more—she needed to find the spells that would help her locate and catch the killer, but this one would make her a lot tougher. “I’m sorry it won’t help you, Alyss, but I hope he tries to stab me again. I’ll give him a surprise,” Olivia hissed as she stood up, tucking Tuzrical’s book under her arm. She walked out of the library, striding purposefully toward the main academy exit. She needed to find a tattoo artist or, failing that, get her hands on a needle and some ink.