103 - To Cast A Curse

Professor Valeria considered Arielle, the faint noise of footsteps in the hallways filling up the stretching silence. She took off her glasses, leaning back in her seat.
“Before we do that, I’m going to need more from you. First, tell me what a mini-orb is.”
“It’s…” Arielle drew in a sharp breath, belatedly realizing that she’d made a mistake. She couldn’t explain to Valeria what a mini-orb was because then she would have to admit to seeing orbs in the first place.
“Arielle?” Valeria prompted in the silence.
“I’m not sure I can explain it.”
“Why not?”
“Because…” Arielle’s hands gripped into fists. She should take it back. Elric would definitely not approve of her sharing anything she had just discovered and it would be exposing herself somewhat.
But she was just really excited with her discovery and the fact that it would get her close to getting her own abyssal spell. She needed Professor Valeria’s help for that. But could she trust the professor?
Valeria had never done anything for her to distrust. She had even warned her about Llywyd.
She was suddenly gifted with an idea. She kept her eyes trained on the table so she would not look at the ceiling. “You know how you said that people who discover isotopes did so with meditation and feeling?”
“Yes.”
“It’s similar here. I discovered the true nature of each essence through meditation and feeling, and I feel that each essence is made up of orbs, each orb of mini-orbs in a series of concentric rings around a central core. And the core is essentially what is the driving force of attraction that holds the entire structure together, and it’s the reason the mini-orbs are arranged how they are.“
“Okay…” Valeria’s unruffled expression didn’t look like she accepted Arielle’s thesis, but she wasn’t discounting it either.
“Essences are also differentiated by the number of mini-orbs in their outer ring. That’s what gives them their charge. +1 means it has one orb in its outer ring, and -2 means it has six mini-orbs in its outer ring, which is two less than eight. Eight is balanced, like Vitae. The mini-orbs move around, but they’re all pretty much equidistant from each other, at least when they’re in the same concentric ring.
“However, with Vacu things are different. Vacu, particularly Vacu 𝚫, is defined by the absence of something, not by its presence. That’s why it’s hard to figure out why, even with the same isotope, Vacu can act differently in different situations. Because concepts like void and abyss aren’t given by the essences independently of each other. It’s how they interact relationally that matters, because that aligns the negative space in such a way that it generates the intended effect.” She took a breath before she continued, spotting a parchment and a quill to the side. “May I?”
“Please,” Valeria responded.
Ari dragged the writing apparatus over to the edge of the table and began to sketch, drawing the structure she saw on the page.
“This is the core,” she pointed with the quill, the ink dropping in the middle of the central sphere. “It’s the thing that exerts force on the rest of the mini-orbs and determines their position. It’s also the thing that charges up the mini-orbs, and when a mini-orb cannot be charged anymore, it eats it. Which is admittedly strange, and I’m not sure why it does that, but that’s not the important part here. The important part is that this is what controls where the orb sits in inner and outer rings. At first, I didn’t pay much attention to the position of the inner orbs, just the outer ones, because the inner ones were arranged in varied ways and didn’t seem to have much effect on the bonding capabilities of the essence. But then I noticed that the inner mini-orbs, though they move around, typically sit equidistant from each other on the same ring. However, with Vacu, the core exerts differing pressures on the inner orbs, so there is a slight shift where they’re not so equidistant, and it means that the shift is what matters. The imbalance presents a pattern like…” She fell silent and quickly sketched another orb, and another and another.
Valeria was quiet as she watched Arielle draw the spell script for one of the proposed abyssal spells. It was one of the lesser curses from the lost spells, which produced a shadowy fog that spread through the atmosphere. Ari traced through it to show the pattern of slightly off-center orbs forming a path, after which she turned to Valeria with an eager look. “See?”
“I’m not sure I do,” Valeria smiled wryly. “You’re talented at very many things, Arielle, but I don’t think art is one of them.”
Arielle wasn’t amused, her cheeks pushing out with her frown. She pointed insistently. “This negative space pattern in the spell form is what gives an abyssal spell its signature. Or at least something similar to this. I’m sure the general spell form differs slightly when discussing different forms of abyss, but they must share a similar base.”
“I see.” However, it still looked like she was struggling to digest what Arielle had said.
Arielle sighed. “You don’t believe me.”
“It’s not that I don’t believe you, Arielle,” Valeria hurried to say. “It’s more that I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying. Nearly everything you told me is something that I have never heard of before, and I never claimed to be a fast learner, so it’s taking me some time to comprehend.”
Ari nodded. “I thought it might. This is why I say we should practice. I believe the scripts for all these abyssal curse spells you gave me are not entirely accurate. That’s why it doesn’t work, and it’s why the abyssal patterns are close to but not exactly like each other. However, it’s close to what we need, and if we work together, I think that we can get the exact spell script that we’ve been looking for, and we can perfect it into a true abyssal spell.”
“Hold on, Arielle. Abyssal spells can be difficult to cast, and they require runes that I don’t yet have. I’ve ordered them, but it will take time–”
“You don’t need runes. I’ll help you.”
“How?”
“I can’t explain that either. You just have to trust me.”

---

Valeria stared at her student as her logic warred with her good sense. Good sense told her that trusting in a young girl–a beginner to magic and ascendant society, someone who had only recently discovered the existence of abyssal spells and had not read even half of the literature concerning it–would be unwise at best, and dangerous at worst. Arielle was extremely intelligent. She was even a genius who had managed to make a rune that helped Lyra cast Vitae-only spells.
However, she was still young, barely more than a child, and was talking about things that were so profoundly foreign to Valeria that she didn’t even know where to start.
Not to mention, the consequences of failure were more than just embarrassment.
This was not entirely like Arielle’s earlier experimentation.
The failure of an abyssal spell could, in some cases, lead to a rift, which was why experimentation was under strict observation, and they would need to go somewhere like a dedicated essence exploration lab. They didn’t have one on campus. The core balancing lab was similar, but it may not be strong enough to contain a rift were one to form, and that would endanger all the students on campus.
However, the queue to access such a lab would be absurd, at least several months long. Valeria could cut in line, but she would need some evidence to show that she had a good reason to. Arielle’s word would not be good enough, especially since what she was saying was so technically outlandish that it would take time to convince any research lab of the validity of it.
Good sense told Valeria that they would need to do it the proper way and wait and convince people of what she was saying.
However, logic said something different.
It reminded her that Arielle was not like any other student. That Arielle showed talent beyond their wildest imagination. That Arielle had copied–yes, now that she’d had time to think on it, she knew that was what happened–Valeria’s own spell from the first time she saw it.
Arielle had just told her she could instinctively feel things about the orbs.
But those feelings required meditation for long periods of time, months, sometimes years. Many of their greatest research mages went on near-constant sabbaticals to uncover more about the essences they used.
There were often decades, and centuries between major discoveries.
It had been less than a week.
Now she understood a little of what Llywyd felt.
It was unbelievable, but Arielle had already done the impossible once. Logic bore that she do it again.

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“Professor Valeria?” Arielle bounced from heel to heel impatiently. “Can we try it now? Please?”
Valeria got to her feet. She closed her eyes and inhaled, feeling like she was on the precipice of a monumental decision that she wasn’t equipped to handle.
“Give me some time to think about it,” Valeria told her.
Arielle looked disappointed, but she nodded.
Before she left, with a forlorn expression, Valeria said, “Arielle.”
The young girl paused.
“I truly will think about it. I’m not writing you off at all.” She remembered what Arielle had said about previous teachers disregarding her and finding her passion irritating. Valeria didn’t want her to think that was what was happening. “It’s a lot to digest, but I will try my best to digest it regardless. And I appreciate you for working so hard on this.”
Arielle gave her a shy, hopeful smile.
“Thank you,” she said, then she walked out.
And think about it, she did.
Valeria moved through the rest of the day with almost nothing else on her mind, nearly making a couple of errors in the reports she was grading.
Even late at night in the teacher’s residential quarters, when she tried to sleep, Arielle’s words reverberated in her head, the spell form swimming in her dreams.
So, the next day, with the dean’s permission, they set off to North Base. Because if they were going to cause a rift, it couldn’t be on campus.
Arielle seemed very familiar with the place as they stepped off the boat. She even smiled when they entered the cave and whispered, “Hello.”
“Who are you talking to?” Valeria asked, but Arielle shook her head.
“No one,” she said.
Valeria cocked her eyebrow, but she simply shrugged it off. Just another item to add to the list of peculiarities that was Arielle Blacksoil.
“Okay,” Valeria said as she stood still and took out her wand.
“Now, we try to cast the curse spell,” Ari said, opening up her miniscrolls. “I have prepared ten possible scripts for the spell.” She showed them to Valeria, who nodded as she examined them.
“These three won’t work,” she said as she selected them. “There’s a concept I haven’t taught you yet called resonance structures. Though it builds on the double and triple bonds we already covered, it’s a bit more than that, but what you should know is that essentially these spells will split apart as the structure formed by these three components will prevent bonding with this.” She examined another. “This one might work, but partly because of cross-congugation, it will be extremely unstable. We will absolutely need a rune to try it out.”
“Okay. How about the others?”
Valeria examined them more before she nodded. They would be complex but doable.
“We can try those,” Valeria said.
It was the same curse spell they were working with, one of the most researched spells that was said to behave closest to what the Vaelors had.
It was a spell mages had tweaked with time, in order to get it closer to the original, but each alteration had only made it worse and farther from its intended goal. Valeria did not have much hope of it going better for her.
Nevertheless, she copied it into her Grimoire, and she waved her hand in the air anyway, forming the spell. It would take a lesser mage the entire day to get that spell, or perhaps even weeks.
Valeria only needed a few tries, however, picturing the spell form and outlining essences into place. Even with the numerous Vacu contained in the master-tier spell and how unstable it was likely to be, she had no fear of breaking the spell, because excellent casting was her expertise.
As she attempted the spell again and again, she watched Arielle.
Her pupils moved strangely. They would jerk from side to side, frowning as though examining an odd composition. She also muttered to herself before she said, “Can you slow down the activation of the spell?”
Valeria didn’t ask why. She merely nodded. She’d always had a strong core connection, which enabled her to alter the timing of the spell within limits.
However, when the spell finally formed, it only made a grey shadow cloud to whisper around the cave; nothing compared to the mist that the original spell was purported to form.
That spell form was certainly not it.
“That was wrong,” Arielle announced.
“Well, it was only the first one. We can try another.”
“Yes, but also you need to hold the spell more firmly.”
“Me?”
“Yes. You have to be more confident.”
Valeria raised an eyebrow. “I’m very confident in my spell casting. Thank you very much.”
“Not right now. Right now you don’t believe me, and so you’re wavering. Vacu doesn’t like when you waver. It’s constantly unsure, so you have to be sure enough for both of you.”
There she goes again, speaking of the essences like they’re living things.
The ancients did call them spirits at one point of discovery, but they had since moved past such archaic definitions. Valeria certainly didn’t consider essences to be things that had feelings as humans did
Yet, Arielle was giving her a look that reminded her a little of her old spell-casting teacher, with an expectant expression and an arched brow.
Come, Valeria, the woman would say. You can do far better than that.
And Valeria always strove to meet her expectations. She pushed herself not only to prove her professor right, but also to correct for her besmirched family name, their ruin brought on by the volatile combination of a wastrel brother, their absent-minded father, and a spendthrift mother.
Valeria had spent her life trying to rise above that.
This was her opportunity. If there was even a chance that Arielle was right, she needed to trust her.
So she did, calling the spell form of the second script Arielle had given her.
While Valeria focused on holding the essences together, Arielle watched her, and her eyes once again made an odd movement, jerking to the side routinely. She cocked her head and muttered some more, and finally her eyes glittered, and her lip quirked.
Valeria was about to drop the spell when it happened.
The first thing she felt was an ungodly chill trembling over her body, spreading across the room.
Then the hissing.
Then from the tip of her wand burst a roaring wraith, a looming darkness that quickly filled the space; two bright slits and a smoky hole opened in an infernal scream.
Reeeeee!
“Arielle, duck!” she yelled as the spell grew rapidly, the wraith wrapping around her wrist, trying to wrest free so it could wreak havoc.
Arielle got out of the way, and Valeria managed not to drop her wand. The wraith fought with her fiercely, nearly yanking her arm out of her socket. It tried to escape, breaking its link to her, but she would not let it.
She gritted her teeth, holding the spell in place, then systematically cast a high-tier illumination spell to contain and banish the darkness.
As the light spread, the wraith swept toward her, its maw opening right before it disappeared.
Valeria dropped her hand down to her side, breathing heavily.
The whispering silence that followed had her yanking her head from side to side, making sure her charge was safe.
“Arielle? Are you okay?”
Rather than terrified, Arielle looked triumphant.
“The curse was a creature.” She nodded. “Of course. I guess we figured out the base spell to summon abyssal cursed beings.”
She said it so casually, like she had solved a silly homework problem rather than made a monumental discovery. She said it like it had been nothing to her, like they had not been attacked by a monster.
She even stroked her chin absentmindedly and added, “I wonder if we can use the same base to form the Abyssal Titan. Do you think it’s a curse too?”
Valeria didn’t answer. She couldn’t.
The world swam, and she leaned out a hand to brace herself against the wall. It took her a second to realize that she hadn’t been breathing, and her heart was beating way too fast.
“Professor Valeria,” Arielle called out. “Are you okay?”
She nodded vaguely. “I think so.” But her head and heart pounded in tandem.
Her thoughts constantly circled a path like one of Ari’s mini-orbs, centering around a core thought.
I just cast an abyssal spell.
I just cast an abyssal spell that has been lost for generations.
I am the first person to cast this spell in over a thousand years.
I….
I…
No. She.
Arielle had done something.
She’d been staring at the air with too much focus. She had not only crafted the script, but her observation might have altered the outcome.
What had she done?
What was she?
“Should we try another one? I think I know the exact script now.” Arielle asked, and it was hard for Valeria not to stare at her with slack-jawed awe.
Valeria reluctantly shook her head. She needed time to digest what just happened. She also needed to steel herself and recover her energy. Abyssal spells were unpleasant to cast, and that last one had taken a lot out of her.
She had not anticipated a creature that would fight her for control. The light spell had been a fortuitous act of desperation, but they needed to be better prepared next time.
However, she would master that spell. And once she could…
What did they do now with this information?
Who could she even tell? How could she explain it?
Most importantly, how could she explain it while keeping Arielle out of it?
 
[NEW SPELL DETECTED]
Name: Unknown
Tier: Master
Experience Points: 4
Would you like to name the spell?
 
As the words blinked across her system screen, Valeria stared at Arielle, who tilted her head to the side. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
Valeria swallowed and nodded weakly again.
However, when she got back to the teacher’s lounge, filled with chatting staff, Valeria barely heard any of them. She ignored everyone calling out to her as she headed to the tankards of wine and ale at the back of the room, kept there at Professor Graham’s request.
Valeria had never imbibed before. She’d never been one for alcoholic beverages, but today had really tempted that resolve.
Nevertheless, she reached for the soothing herbs that Llywyd kept in a jar above the sink.
She grabbed a chalice without a word, measured out just enough tea for her liking, then poured water and heated it with magic.
Then she retired to a single table and sat staring into space.
It wasn’t long before someone joined her.
“What happened?” Llywyd asked, and Valeria shook her head. She couldn’t say it, especially not to Llywyd. She wouldn’t expose Arielle like that.
“I saw her heading somewhere with Arielle,” Professor Graham said, sounding amused, leaning back to enjoy his own jug. “I’m guessing the wee scamp did something again, didn’t she?”
Valeria took a sip of her tea, wishing it was something stronger.
Oh, you have no idea.