Primal Wizardry - A Magic School Progression Fantasy

In her meadow, tall and strong, Serune basked beneath the sun. Tended by her friends the druids, she knew them all, every one.

Through the years druids came and went, but here they had a home. Human, dwarf, elf or orc, once even a small gnome.

Serune swayed and sang with joy from morning to the eves. Her friends would dance and sing a song their own to accompany the tree’s.

The Sea Tree by Stelar Leafblossom

—

Kole decided it would be best to eat something before trying his latest spell. Things could go wrong if one messed up a spell casting, not something that was common with spell templates stored in one’s mind, but it did happen when people made new spells—or reconstructed them from dozens of various sources. A full belly and a clear mind would see the chances of a mistake minimized.

So, once he was fed, Kole went to the spell range to test his latest spell. The place had been further reduced since his last visit, now a hallway with only six rooms set in it. He found an open one and stilled his mind before sighting down the target dummy at the opposite end.

Tracing the template he’d painstakingly reconstructed, first on paper and then in his mind, he built the spell. Once it was complete he held it in his thoughts, examining it one last time before throwing it through his bridge for it to make its way to the Font of Force.

As usual, opening the bridge to the relevant place of the Arcane Realm took more from Kole than would have been required by any other wizard—unless there was another Illusion primal-sorcerer-wizard running around—but the door opened nonetheless.

And then, three shimmering bolts of force shot out of his hand to the targets in rapid succession.

“Huh,” he said, noticing that these bolts were more visible than the last version. “That’s different.”

He knew every version of the spell he’d learned had slight variations in the effect as well as the larger variations with the pathing he was specifically trying to improve, but he’d not noticed any tangible differences in the final spell.

Hoping that maybe this version had more power to make up for the improved visibility, Kole ran up to the dummy, only to be disappointed to find the damage pattern indistinguishable from the other versions.

“Oh well,” Kole said, feeling a little let down.

That is until he slapped himself on the forehead.

What are you thinking?

He was moping that his newly improved 18 Will Magic Missile he’d developed over a few months was only as good as the 30 Will version he’d spent literally years on.

As he walked out of the range, he tried to drum up the sense of pride and accomplishment he’d had during the first casting of the spell, but, it wouldn’t come. Instead, he found relief.

This moment marked a change in his life. He was relieved to finally be done with the two reconstruction projects he’d spent the last years of his life obsessing over. Now, with traditional wizardry revealed to him and the library of the Dahn at his disposal, he could finally dive into the pursuit of it at full speed.

“Shite weasel,” Rakin cursed when Kole recounted the conversation he’d heard as they ran around the training yard.

“I don’t know,” Kole said, “it’s basically the least horrible reason he could have for standing her up. I thought he was cheating on her with that Esme, I think she has a crush on him.”

Rakin spat.

“That’s the problem. It’s making it a little harder to hate him. What are ye going to do?”

“Why is this up to me?” Kole asked. “You’re as invested in this as me.”

“Yer the one that loves her.”

“Whoa! No one said the ‘L’ word, I said I liked her.”

"That's also an 'L' word," Rakin pointed out.

The topic died, unsettled, as the ‘her’ in question noticed them talking and not running.

“Get moving!” she barked, in the very-not-cheery voice she only used when in charge of their training.

This was the last week of classes—or in their case tutoring—before finals began. Kole was fairly certain he would pass Alchemy, Doug and Amara’s help along with his spellbook got him confident that, even if he desecrated the practical, his written scores would see him at least pass the class.

For History, he knew he’d be fine, and Zale assured him he’d improved enough with the quarterstaff to pass. In reflection, he’d been in a lot of battles this semester, and while he’d seen the benefit of the quarterstaff in his first battle against goblins, he’d not had to use one much. But, that had more to do with his allies’ ability to keep his enemies away, and less to do with his own skills.

The PREVENT final—for which they did not yet have any details—wasn’t really worrying him either. He trusted his team completely, and they’d been in actual life-and-death situations and come out on top.

The class that really worried him was wizardry. He’d been all but assured by Underbrook and Lonin that he’d ace the written final, but he also needed to demonstrate three spells to pass. He’d asked, and potion usage was not permitted during the final practical, and by his math, he was still 5 Will short of doing so. His capacity, as last measured was 46. With Magic Missile and Shield bottomed out at 18 each, he needed to get his Thunderwave down from 14 to 10—a possible if difficult task he’d yet to master.

Thankfully, he’d gotten Underbrook to schedule his practical for the last possible day of finals week, after even the PREVENT final that was supposed to be the last.

“So, I’m going to go lock myself in my room until I get this down,” Kole told his friends as they ate breakfast Monday morning.

“How is that different than normal?” Rakin asked.

Speaking quickly as if to sneak it in, Kole said, “With Zale’s permission, I want to skip the morning training.”

Kole wasn’t sure what he expected her response to be, but it wasn’t silence.

Sheepishly he looked up at her to see her chewing her lip.

Eventually, she asked, “How badly do you need to cram?”

“Really, really badly.”

“Alright, but on two conditions,” she said, holding her gauntleted hand up, delicately holding chopsticks she’d only just been able to use wearing them.

“You need to eat—like actual meals, not oatmeal—with us once a day,” she said.

Kole nodded in agreement. He already planned to go get some real food for his room to hold him over.

“What’s the second condition?”

“Bathe,” she said.

“What!? I always bathe!”

“Yeah, but only after training. You don’t do it otherwise,” Zale explained.

“We train every day!”

Zale held her hands up in surrender, “I just wanted to make sure you continue to take care of yourself. Sometimes, people can get tunnel vision.”

Zale snuck a glance at Amara as she said this. Amara had been dragged out of her workshop each morning to meet them for breakfasts, afterward Zale occasionally helped her remember to clean up.

Kole took in his room. There was a stack of books on the floor next to his bed and a crate of food under the bed. There were no time-traveling rats or roommates in sight, and he had four days before he needed to go anywhere.

He sat down, flipped open a book, and got to work.

Squeek.

He looked down to see a rat inspecting his crate. But, instead of being irritated, Kole smiled. Today, he came prepared.

He reached into his box on the desk, pulled out a handful of berries, and tossed them to the rat, who abandoned the crate and pounced on the small fruits.

After asking around—Doug and Gus via Amara—he was informed rats preferred berries to most other foods.

The rat, with a berry in its mouth, gave Kole a squeak Kole could have sworn was a “thank you” and then vanished.

“Do I understand rats?” Kole asked aloud but dug into his book before he could overthink the implications.

Amara’s Font was nothing but a headache.

Kole soon discovered that having the chance to focus fully on one task was not the same as having the ability to do so. Even through his previous cram session to reach the final versions of Magic Missile and Shield, he took breaks to read up on pathing theory or even made some small attempts to progress Thunderwave and learn the Message Cantrip.

So, after two days straight of concerted effort on pathing, Kole sat up with a groan.

“I need a break.”

His statement was met by a squeak as his pack rat companion woke up from its own nap at the sound of his voice. The rat, after having been fed berries, had decided to stick around. And, since it had refrained from digging through his stuff, Kole had decided to allow it.

For lack of a better word, Kole’s mental feet hurt. Each time he sent Thunderwave out through the bridge, he followed it with his mind, and now the part of his brain that was responsible for that specific magical task was aching. He had the Will to spare, but not the will it would seem.

In the past when this occurred, Kole would just go work on something else, but now he had nothing else to work on. His eyes scanned the room and settled on a book. The Collected Works of Galok Lightsmith, The First Chosen of Tin Lan.

He’d tracked the book down with the librarian’s aid after Theral had mentioned it but had only ever given it a cursory perusal. Enough to know the spells he wanted were in there, just not enough to have actually started on any. After a brief, and not very hard fought internal battle, Kole reached for the book.

Just a tiny break, he said to himself.

BZZZ BZZZ BZZZ BZZZ BZzZzzssssss

Kole’s alarm went off telling him it was time to go meet his friends for lunch—and apparently also get a new alarm. The device had been a temporary one, made without a gem or alchemically treated materials, and it ought to have failed long ago in the semester, only his disappearance from reality for four weeks had allowed it to last this long.

He’d seen Amara tinkering with some in her workshop and was fairly certain she could be convinced to part with one to replace this. He could afford a replacement, but why spend money when you had a rune-obsessed friend willing to do the work for free?

This is where his mind went when the alarm went off before he realized the implication. His short break from pathing Thunderwave had turned into a three-hour deep diving into the construction of a new cantrip.

It had started innocently enough. He’d looked through the book, trying to make some sense of the esoteric descriptions of the spell construct template he’d need to build. He’d never really looked into traditional wizard spellbooks before. Intellectually he knew that they were prose descriptions of spells that wizards could use to communicate their shape and structure to other wizards, but in reality, he hadn’t known what that looked like.

What he found, while reading, was that the words resonated with him in a way he couldn’t articulate. While he couldn’t say how he knew what a ‘quarter twist double inversion repel” was, he found that he did know what it was. Furthermore, with the help of his magical spellbook, he could draw the spellform for it with perfect recall. Now, not all of the spell components in the book were ones he knew from his life of spell reconstruction, but enough were that the process went far quicker than it had any right to.

He’d only recently been emboldened by the speed he’d adapted Thunderwave from the spellform Theral had given him, but that pace couldn’t be matched without finding similarly preserved spellforms. Without those, his pace with new spells he pathed himself would be on par with his pace for Magic Missile and Shield. While he wouldn’t need to copy the path components over, he’d still have to reconstruct and repair the spell while also pathing the spell himself. But now, he found that the years of glacial progress had uniquely prepared him for this very task.

Quick though, was a relative term. The spell he was working on was spread across dozens of pages, and he was almost through the first. A task he’d expected to take him a week of intermittent work. Kole had found the spell Radiant Bolt, a first-tier spell that shot a beam of bright light out at a target to burn them and temporarily illuminate them.

Eventually, during this time, his mental pathing feet had felt recovered, but, instead of returning to his work on Thunderwave, Kole had an idea he decided to indulge. He’d recently learned to cast the cantrip Message by opening his bridge and sending essentially an empty spell construct out to the Font of Sound. After pathing a whole spell to that Font, guiding the skeleton of one had been simple.

So when he was working on this new spell, he thought, why not just do that first?

And that’s why he’d spent the last hour trying to unlock a version of the Light cantrip that he could cast without exhausting three-fourths of his Will.

Kole explained all of this to Zale and Rakin, with Amara-like energy, as they stared at him with blank stares over lunch.

“It’s like he’s been cooped up alone for a month, not a day,” Rakin commented when Kole’s summary of his progress had wrapped.

“Let’s just be glad the alarm broke after going off, or we wouldn’t have seen him for weeks.”

Kole didn’t think that was fair, but for some reason didn’t feel right denying it.

And so the week went, Kole—with a new Amara-supplied-alarm—would wake, study until lunch, and then study until bedtime, jumping from Thunderwave pathing to altering the structure of the spell, to pathing the Light cantrip, dabbling in the reconstruction of Radiant Bolt when he felt like he needed to mix things up for fun.

“I did it!” Kole said triumphantly to his friends as he met them for breakfast before their last PREVENT session of the semester.

“Did what?” Zale asked as she delicately scooped the flesh out of her grapefruit with a spoon held in her articulated gauntlets.

“Yer going to pass your magic class?” Rakin asked at the same time.

“Well, no…” Kole said, losing some of his excitement. “But, I’m closer. Thunderwave costs 13 now, and I just need to get it down to 10.”

“What did ye do then?”

“This!” Kole said, sticking his palm out, an orb of light appearing in it.

“Couldn’t ye do that before?” Rakin asked, cocking his head to the side as he stared at the orb.

“Not like this,” Kole said, and the orb vanished, only to reappear again.”

There was a loud clank as Zale clapped her hands together in excitement.

“Great job!” she cheered, and Rakin gave a curt nod.

With all eyes on him, Kole was the only one to see Doug as he touched ripped-up pieces of spinach one at a time, vanishing them.

Kole thought it strange but ignored it as he showed off. He went to grab breakfast and made it back just in time to figure out where all those greens had gone as Rakin spit out his mouthful of oats.

“Bleh!” he shouted. “Who put this shite in my food?”

For the last session of PREVENT, the students were instructed to meet at the Griffin’s Roost, and the place was packed with students when Kole and his friends arrived. Zale spotted Harold and his group at a table and swung by to say hi before rejoining them.

They found themselves in an empty booth and waited for their teachers to arrive. It didn’t take long as Underbrook and Tigereye appeared suddenly in the center of the room, their appearance accompanied by a quiet roll of thunder for effect.

“Good morning class!” Underbrook shouted, amplifying his voice. “Today, we will announce the details of the final and have special training to prepare you just for it!”

The students all grew silent and found seats.

“Your final exam will be a hardball battle royale! And to prepare, we will be watching the one that’s about to begin!”

Excited chattering filled the room, as the students discussed the announcement interrupted by Underbrook.

“And, last, but certainly not least, snacks and drinks are on the Academy!”

The chatter broke out into cheers, only to be interrupted once more, only this time by Tigereye’s naturally and unenhanced booming voice.

“One drink each. Then you pay yourselves.”