100 – Mend

The fabric of space was not so structurally simple that it could genuinely be viewed as a piece of cloth. The metaphor was deeply flawed—as was often the truth when using analogies for magic of this tier. Comparisons to real-world ideas and concepts could serve as a framework to approach various theories from, a starting point for the mundane mind to begin grokking underlying mystical principles, but there was something fundamentally other when it came to the arcane that could not be explained in words.

Even if Vivi fully understood this bleeding-edge branch of magic—she didn’t—and even if she’d taken extreme care cutting into the fabric when she’d removed the Red Tithe from reality—she hadn’t—repairing the damage [Carve the Firmament] had done would still have been difficult. Vivi didn’t even have the benefit of having been the person who had designed the spell. She likely understood the Shattered Oracle’s work better than anyone in the world, but that man had been both uniquely genius and uniquely insane, and those two qualities made for very difficult-to-understand spell designs.

“[Carve the Firmament].”

Unlike the first time she’d cast the spell, she took her time wreaking havoc. Rather than hacking, sawing, and desperately ripping away the portion of space she’d targeted, Vivi took a sharp pair of tailor’s scissors to the bolt of black silk holding the physical world together. She sliced as carefully as she could, and while doing so, she needed to sever the fabric in more directions than just up and down, back and forward, left and right. Even her immense intuition struggled to understand what she was doing at a fundamental level.

But that was fine. It was a learning exercise.

[Carve the Firmament] had clearly been created for excising and destroying indiscriminately, which meant trying to wrangle the attack spell into something neat and precise was twice as difficult. But Vivisari was quite good with magic, and so she managed.

The second hole she ripped into space, when it manifested, wasn’t quite as gruesome to gaze upon… but only in the way one blood-spattered, gory murder scene might be ‘less offensive’ to the senses than another. She certainly didn’t enjoy looking upon it, no matter how much tamer it was than the original.

Now, then. Actually fixing it.

She had a few angles she could approach the problem from. Continuing to use the fabric comparison, before she could stitch anything back together, she had to first find where that shredded patch of space had gone. Though honestly, Vivi didn’t know whether it existed at all anymore. She didn’t think space could truly be erased, and the more likely outcome was that it had simply been broken into small pieces and tossed aside into some… some other place… but not only did she have no hard proof for that theory, even if she was right, dredging up that missing chunk from whatever nowhere-zone it had gone to was going to be a headache and a half.

Nothing to do but try, and see where I can get.

Vivi lost herself in the effort over the next several hours. Gruesome and violative as making a mockery of fundamental laws of the universe was, she had a lot of fun with it. Her recent encounter with Remian reminded her to rein in her fascination, and she forced herself to go about her experiments cautiously and methodically even if she found enjoyment in the process. In a sad irony, true love for magic was both the source and downfall of most great mages.

Moderation, she warned herself every few minutes. Let’s not accidentally become the next Cataclysm, Vivi.

First, by tweaking the spell over and over and carefully observing how the magical phenomenon manifested in various ways, she found where the void-stuff went. There was no worldly metaphor to draw: there was the logical, ordered expanse that she, and all other physical matter, existed in, where one meter in one direction was one meter in one direction. An organized grid.

Outside of that—a place she found only by tracing the ruined material as it was tossed away—was a yawning black void where such rules didn’t exist. Where no rules existed. In that place, the cast-aside chunks of many [Carve the Firmaments] were easy to find, and though her mind strained to understand what she was seeing, she could even interact with them as she could with structured space.

With that achieved, it was time for step two: repairing those twisted chunks before she brought them back into the ‘real world.’

It was a much easier mission than the previous one. As she worked, her perspective shifted: the space wasn’t torn and ripped so much as it was bent, broken, and twisted in ways it shouldn’t be. While the lost pocket had been separated from the rest of the world, the piece had been thrown away in one intact clump—just in a horribly warped shape. She improved with each successive repair, bending forty-six-degree angles into proper ninety-degree ones faster and faster. It wasn’t long before she had cobbled together what she thought was a normal section of space again.

Then the third and final step: bringing the segment of space back to reality and stitching it where it belonged.

The ability to tear out space in such a complete manner was what made [Carve the Firmament] such an awful masterpiece to begin with, though. She barely understood how it worked even now. Thankfully, while healing wasn’t always as simple as reversing damage—a burn could hardly be healed by freezing it—in the case of spatial dislocation, reverse-engineering the spell’s carving mechanism provided an excellent starting point for how to seal the disparate pieces back together.

In the end, she cast around three dozen instances of [Carve the Firmament] and spent four hours experimenting. With how intrigued she was throughout the process, it honestly felt like a quarter of that time passed. Her spatial manipulation abilities had definitely improved in no small way… though mostly in subdomains that really shouldn’t be delved into, arguably even in emergencies.

Gazing on the most recent of the black rents floating high above the clouds, Vivi pointed her staff and incanted:

This novel’s true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

“[Seal the Firmament.]”

And space obeyed. The spell burrowed into that empty, black refuse heap, found the ordered chunk of space that didn’t belong, grabbed it, hammered it into proper shape, and slotted it where it had once been. Afterward, the patch of sky appeared to both her physical and magical senses as entirely normal. She floated through the healed patch of air without issue.

A complete success.

And so, all that remained was the final stage of experimentation. Using her new spell on a living test subject.

Five minutes later, she’d grabbed a fish from the ocean below, cast [Carve the Firmament] on it, and repaired the violated segment of space.

And she discovered something that didn’t surprise her.

Despite only having been in that shredded pocket space for less than ten seconds, the creature was definitely dead—likely, she’d killed it the moment the spell had activated. She had no idea what kind of damage was wrought onto living beings when their bodies were mashed up with spatial magic, but regardless: even though it seemed unharmed, [Carve the Firmament] had killed the fish quite thoroughly.

Anxiety settled into her, though maybe it shouldn’t have.

She experimented a little longer but eventually accepted reality. With a heavy feeling in her gut, she teleported back to Meridian and made for the Institute. Who knew, anyway? Maybe the Red Tithe’s magical armor had better preserved him, or sapient, more whole creatures like humans interacted differently with the experience.

It was late at night, but not so late that she roused the Headmaster from sleep when she [Blinked] to his office and requested his presence through his secretary. Perhaps she could have waited until morning, but she wanted an answer as soon as possible. Especially since she didn’t know for sure what happened to creatures caught inside [Carve the Firmament]. Now that she had a solution, she was morally obligated to use it as fast as she could, in case she was accidentally torturing the man even as she waited around.

A few minutes later, Lysander strode into the office looking put-together if tired. “Lady Sorceress,” he said. “How may I help you?”