~Chapter Eight: Modifying Magic~

The next morning snuck up on Eola.

She usually came in late, grabbed a few hours of sleep, and woke up before the sun to hit the library or start grading, but sometime around the crack of dawn, she realized that she’d pulled an all-nighter. The rune in her spellbook remained unchanged. Chalk dust coated the desk. The little blackboard was almost impossible to use because of all the powder on it. She hadn’t had anything to drink in hours. And, oh yes, there was a cat asleep on her desk, taking up half of the space.

And people were moving around in the common room, using the toilet, and taking care of their morning business. The worst-case scenario was that Atta woke up, said something, and raised suspicions, especially with—

Someone knocked on the door, and Eola jumped in her chair as the cat started hissing. The chair overbalanced, crashed to the floor, and took her with it. “What?” she groaned from inside the still-active diamond she’d bounced off on the way down.

Colin’s voice drifted in from the common room. “Breakfast. It’s probably sludge porridge again. Your favorite. You okay in there?”

Eola pushed the chair off herself and stared at the scared-looking, puffed-out cat, trying not to laugh. Atta looked about twice her usual size—she’d woken up just once all night, just long enough to turn around, knead Eola’s spellbook briefly, pronounce that she was on the right track, and answer her “Are you a boy or a girl cat” with “A girl, stupid girl,” then fallen back asleep. Now she looked like a fluffy fur coat.

“Tell him to go away,” Atta hissed. She bolted for the ladder, intent on clambering up it, only to hit Eola’s Guard Shape and bounce off, too.

“I’m fine, Colin. I’ll…” Eola stopped. The rune—and the half-digested parchment with four new modifying marks but no descriptions of what they did—sat on her desk, finally dry enough not to turn her stomach. “I’m working on something personal, and I won’t be in classes today. Can you let the professors know?”

“Sure. What’s going on?”

“I…it’s hard to explain, but if I don’t have it figured out…”

Colin waited for a moment before realizing that Eola wasn’t going to finish her sentence. “So, that’s a likely rain check on dinner tonight? I get it. Just…make sure you’re taking care of yourself, Eola. Alright?”

“I will, Colin. And thanks for understanding.”

She relaxed, still on the floor, and slowly undid the Guard Shape. It had been drawing on her Mana all night, and she was running a little lower than usual, but it had done its job. If Colin did his, she’d have all day to keep working on solving the Call and Calm rune.

Colin had given her a solid third of the puzzle, and the extra runes Atta had so graciously gifted her had been perfect, once the cat vomit had dried off of them and she’d picked off the matted hair. It still stank, but she couldn’t do anything about that. Chalk moved slowly across the filthy chalkboard as she re-sketched the Call and Calm symbol, then started erasing lines. Her goal wasn’t to solve the entire rune all at once. All the effort so far was just to confirm her theory.

Gradually, one glance at her spellbook or the parchment at a time, a single rune started to appear.

It wasn’t the whole thing. But it was enough. It was obviously the same as the one on the parchment, just without a few trailing tails and flourishes in the Old Alemic. She sketched those in with the chalk, then added the rest of the Call and Calm symbol back in.

It was wrong. Eola didn’t know how she knew it, but it was obvious that the sketch wouldn’t fill this way.

And, more importantly, it was obvious what mistakes she’d made earlier in the night while working on it.

With another hour’s work, she’d isolated three more modifying marks—two from the parchment, plus the meandering Forsooth Script for Delayed. It had been hiding inside the Old Alemic, cleverly concealed under the more complex language.

There was still something missing, but this was enough.

Eola had the grace—or the self-consciousness—not to barge into the Ideograms classroom and slam the chalkboard down on Instructor Tarik’s lectern right then and there.

Instead, she spent the half-hour before the class ended making ink-and-parchment sketches of everything she’d done. All four of the modifying marks, complete version on one side and the truncated, in-symbol version on the other. Then four more sheets, showing each of their positions within the Call and Calm rune itself.

It was painful, exhausting work, made worse because all she wanted to do was show her mentor how much progress she’d made, and even worse than that by the cat that refused to either help or get off the desk. Atta seemed intent on making a bed out of Eola’s spellbook and dipping her tail in the inkwell, and the desk was splattered with ink-drops by the time she sanded the last parchment, rolled it up carefully, and tucked it into her robe’s pocket with the other seven.

Then she disappeared from the room, locking the door behind her. A weight fell into her pocket between the scrolls, and she reached between the scrolls and felt the warm stone carving.

Apparently, Atta was coming along.

Ten minutes later, she pushed Instructor Tarik’s door open. “I figured it out!”

“Your friend told me you were sick.” The professor looked up, red ink dripping from a pen and a half-graded ideogram spread out on his desk. “What did you figure out?”

“Ordered Magic.”

“Explain.”

Eola pushed papers and books out of the way. Once she had a mostly-clean space on the cluttered desk, she set down her spellbook and flipped to the bookmarked page with the Call and Calm symbol. “I understand why Ordered Magic spells can’t take modifying marks, except for attunement modifiers. This is Call and Calm. It’s a First Order spell, able to be cast by—“

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“Anyone with an attunement. I gave this lecture a month ago, Eola.”

“Right. Sorry, sir.” Eola pulled her first scroll out. It showed the Delayed mark. “This is Delayed.”

Then she flipped it over, revealing a similar symbol, but without any of the flourishes. “This is delayed, too, but it’s stripped down and tweaked slightly. It doesn’t work as an independent modifying mark anymore, but…”

A second scroll flopped onto the table—Call and Calm, but with a section circled in a whirling, chaotic scrawl meant to stand out from the precise lines of the symbol itself. “This, right here, is where that stripped-down Delayed is inside of the Call and Calm spell.”

“Okay, I see it. Could be a coincidence, though.”

“It’s not.” The next sketch came down, and Eola pointed at the symbol. “This…I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s a modifying mark. I’ve never seen it anywhere before. It fits here.”