~Chapter Five: Emerald Cursive~

Twenty minutes later, Eola was back in her suite. Her roommates weren’t asleep, but Evelyn and Bannoque weren’t in the common room, thank Y’aer. Colin was, though. “You’re covered in blood. Are you alright?”

“Yes.” Eola nodded. “It belonged to a monster—a trog—and to a girl I rescued in the library.”

Colin collapsed back into the couch cushions. “Oh, good. Not the monster, but that you rescued her. Who was she?”

“Patrice Clerk? Do you know her?”

Colin shook his head.

“Anyway, she needed help, so I got her out of the library.”

“That’s good.” Colin yawned. “Now that you’re back, I can finally get to sleep.”

“You stayed up for me?” Eola asked, genuinely surprised and a little touched. Colin hadn’t done that for any of her other trips to the library. “Thanks.”

“Of course. We’re suitemates, and Bannoque and Evelyn are too busy getting to ‘know’ each other to watch our backs. It’s all us.”

Eola laughed quietly. “Good night, Colin.”

The boy nodded and walked to his room as she slid through the narrow gap between the couch and table and hurried to her own. She had the books. Now, she’d have all night to study them and learn how modifying marks worked.

She shut her door behind her, then locked it with a satisfying click that wouldn’t actually keep even her roommates out if they wanted to come in. Then she took a moment to compose herself.

Eola wasn’t very good at magic—but she was good at studying it.

Evander’s Guide to Battle-Marks came first. Eola flipped through the pages, skimming past the descriptions and various uses Evander had come up with for the half-dozen modifying marks he considered to be worthwhile. Silenced, Hasty, Delayed, Reaching, Echoing, and Stilled were worth casting, but nothing else was even mentioned. That was fine; Eola wasn’t reading his book for ideas on which modifying marks to pick. She was looking for how they worked.

But after half an hour—and a more complete skimming—Eola glared at the book. “Evander, you’re an idiot.” He wasn’t helpful at all for theory. The entire thing was just what it said on the cover—a guide for battle-mages looking to add variety to the limited number of combat-functional cantrips. And that was fine.

For someone like Catrine—a normal mage.

Eola pushed the pale green book to the top corner of her desk. She’d look it over again once she had a better idea of how modifying marks worked. For now, Combat Tricks, by Tiphane waited.

Truthfully, Eola didn’t have much hope for this one. The first page didn’t help matters at all.

I, Tiphane Skystalk, record my thoughts on combat tricks in this tome for future fighters of the Greenlands.

That was all it said, but Eola got a sinking feeling in her stomach as she flipped the page.

“Oh, curse Y’aer!”

The entire thing was written in Emerald Cursive—a nightmare of a magical script. Words changed meaning if they were written even a hair’s breadth wrong, straight lines were more like suggestions than rules, and there were at least a thousand different symbols in Emerald Cursive. That first part was only made worse by its structure. Every sentence was a tangled string of symbols, all flowing together and folding onto each other until it was all but impossible to break the symbols into meaningful chunks.

It was a language for someone who lived two hundred years or more, not for a girl with a single term to solve her attunement problem.

Eola set the books aside. This wasn’t a dead-end. It couldn’t be. She just had to track down the last of the three tomes she’d wanted.

Someone knocked on the suite door.

Eola ignored it. Knocks were never for her—and if they were, they were never a good thing. It was usually one of Evelyn’s friends. That girl had dozens of them, somehow. Instead, she re-opened Combat Tricks, by Tiphane, fished through her language books, and started the painstaking process of translating the first page of real notes.

She was halfway through the first sentence—This being the most basic of—when the knocking started up again, and this time, it didn’t stop.

After a minute, Eola sighed and pushed herself out of the straight-backed, wooden chair. Her behind was sore anyway, and movement wouldn’t hurt her. But when she opened her door, then the common room one, no one was there.

She glared down the hall. The wooden floorboards gave away nothing. There weren’t any nooks or hiding places—the nearest stairwell was eight doors away, and the knocking hadn’t stopped until she touched the doorknob. “Catrine, if that’s you, go away.”

No response.

Eola retreated to her room and returned to her translation. It was painful, slow-going, and by the time she’d gotten through Tiphane Skystalk’s introduction for, of all things, the Hasty modifying mark, she couldn’t stop from yawning. Worse, there were meaning-shifting mistakes in at least three symbols, but maybe as many as seven, the way they strung together. Clearly, this wasn’t going to be a one-night job.

As she changed into a sleeping shift, Eola stared out of her window. Her suite was on the third floor of five. Fifteen rooms to a floor, all on the outside, with the hall directly against the marble walls of the spire. She couldn’t be sure from this high up, but it looked like something was moving down below. It was small, and almost perfectly invisible in the evening shadows. Eola watched carefully, but even after a minute, she couldn’t be sure it even existed.

Her stomach growled. She ignored it. There’d be time for breakfast tomorrow, before Ideograms. She’d wake up early, get into the cafeteria before Catrine could corner her, and maybe even take Combat Tricks, by Tiphane with her for some early-morning translation. After all, she had a lot of work to do if she wanted to figure out modifying marks.

The next morning, Eola followed Instructor Tarik to his office instead of going to Mana Studies, notebook in hand. He’d sent Colin along with a note letting Madame Reyanna know that Eola would be late, and—apparently against his better judgment—opened his office to her demonstration. It was still a mess, but at least this time, Eola was braced for it.

As Eola prepared her explanation, Instructor Tarik massaged his temples. She barely noticed. She’d gotten a hold of the chalkboard and a stick of chalk, and after a moment, a fresh symbol sat on the desk between the two.

“You’re showing me Child’s Magic?” Tarik asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Yes. No. I don’t know. You asked for an update when I’d learned something, and this is the easiest rune to demonstrate with.”

“They’re Ideograms, Miss Lemiene.”

She ignored him. “Look, this is Bright Ball.” Eola’s chalk flew across the symbol, adding a trio of lines to the left side. “And this is Hasty Bright Ball.”

“It is.”

Eola rubbed her robe-sleeve across the symbol, then re-drew the three lines. “This is Hasty.”

“Agreed.”

“And…” Eola spent three seconds quickly scribbling only the Old Alemic rune for Bright Ball, placing it so the three lines were exactly where they’d been the first time. “…this is also Hasty Bright Ball, according to the pages I translated. It should work if I try to cast it.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“And?”

Eola groaned in frustration. Why didn’t he see it? “And it takes about three seconds to sketch a normal Bright Ball, about six for a fully-detailed Hasty Bright Ball, and about four for the cut-down one. That’s why battle-mages use modifying marks on Child’s Magic all the time, right? It’s not that much longer to cast and fill, and it’s a slightly different effect that’s harder to counter. It’s also why they all use the same six symbols. Silenced, Hasty, Delayed, Reaching, Echoing, and Stilled. I couldn’t find any others in the books I found, or in the texts for Magical Dueling.”

Instructor Tarik didn’t say anything. Eola clenched a fist behind the desk. He had to be testing her. “Combat magic is all about the Taron-Li. The goal is to make your opponent lose the beat of the dance. Little changes do that.”