Spellscribed: Resurgence (2 page)

If Endrance had anything, stuck in the position he was in, it was a surplus of time. He had no food, no water, no light, not even space. Just… time.

The bastille had some kind of effect built into the design that maintained him. As long as he remained within the glass sphere, he never felt hungry or thirsty, nor did he have to deal with the consequences of eating or drinking. He also never got tired. Being unable to sleep was at first an interesting experience, but it quickly became mentally taxing. He spent many days in a row where he wouldn’t see the suns, but during those times he would be able to get a general feeling of time passing based on his sleep cycle.

Now, he had nothing to do but sit at the bottom of the sphere and stare mindlessly into the dim orange lighting of the area outside the glass. Part of him recognized he would quickly go mad if he remained this way; it would simply be a matter of time.

The Crystalphage spires pointing towards him hummed nearly inaudibly. He had spent uncountable hours, and even days, attempting to escape. Any attempt to summon up power was thwarted. The sole purpose of the spires was to wick away any energy he tried to manipulate. Fearing them draining everything, he stopped before he ran out of power. Over time, he realized that the spires also drained any power he stored in his body; meaning what reserves he had left in his aura were all he would have.

He closed his eyes and tried to sleep again. Somehow he could not. His body felt, for all intents and purposes, freshly rested. He couldn’t make himself go to sleep, even when he employed self hypnosis or any other trick he had learned to swiftly lose consciousness.

However, he did think he had another option. Keeping his eyes closed, he sat up and got as comfortable as he could within the glass sphere. Once he was certain his posture was correct, he started performing the mental exercises that would let him relax his mind.

When he opened his eyes, he was standing on the surface of a thin layer of water filling a silver pool in the center of a grand library. The library was larger than it had been years ago, when he had started relying on it more heavily; and his increased usage of the mental construct had only made it more magnificent.

The area around the reflecting pool was clean and open, with alabaster stone floors that were polished to mirror sheen. The ground floor was expansive, shaped like circles with four sections extended out like a cross. The second floor followed the same pattern, but the third and fourth floors were only the circular part, giving the ceiling an arched dome that made the building massively spacious. The different wings were separated by double doors made of beautiful redwood and inlaid with fine silver lines depicting leafy vines along the edges of the doors and composing the door latches.

The walls were hung with tapestries portraying scenes from Endrance’s memories. Along one wall was the first battle with the Hydra, which seamlessly transitioned to a second one showing the final battle with the beast. Others included the first time he'd summoned Gullin, his familiar. Other moments included the door of iron bones that guarded King Rothel’s tomb, his battle with Kaelob on the high mountain ruins, and even one of him in the ridiculous garb made of cloth strips that he had danced in for the Ascension ritual.

The library was illuminated by four stained glass windows that composed almost the entire dome of the central hall. Each of the four displayed one of his Draugnoa in a beautiful cascade of colored glass. Each one showed to him the women as he saw them, and they were ever changing as his understanding of them increased.

Anna’s was the only one that remained static. The window depicted a beautiful blonde woman in a white dress bearing a spear and a shield. She hefted the spear up, and rays of golden sunlight streamed across the window. Around her head was a ring of blackened glass like a dark halo. Of the four, she was the only one who had fallen.

Bridget’s depicted a strong woman with short brown hair wearing leather armor; a large sword held in a hand and arm that looked like willow wood. Her head was turned to her left, and her normal hand held a cluster of flowers that dropped petals on the floor. Though she was fierce, she was also blushing as if she was embarrassed to open up to him. Around her head was a golden ring that the other two subjects shared.

Selene’s window was the most dynamic of the four. Her image was once split down the middle, one side depicting her human side, pretty and innocent. The other side displayed her demonic form. Now, it showed her whole, a mixture of the two, but the background was split between a thunderstorm and the other a clear sunny day. She held a hand over her chest, a heart clenched in her grip so hard it bulged around her fingers. Her golden ring was slightly off kilter.

Tanya’s window was the newest. A woman with long wavy brown hair and a great horn bow in her hand. Though she had this impressive weapon, her window portrayed an aura of peace about her, with green grass at her feet and the moons in the distant background. Her eyes looked down upon the library.

Endrance had been unconsciously altering the pictures once he had set them up in the library of his mind. The tapestries were also being added as significant moments occurred. He even noticed that his defeat and subsequent imprisonment was the newest tapestry on the walls.

He turned around in a circle, surveying the room. The spell form that had been planted in his mind was nowhere to be seen. It had either been snuffed out when it completed its hidden order, or was in hiding in the deep recesses of his mind. Endrance walked across the water’s surface, leaving concentric ripples where his bare feet touched the cool liquid without breaking the surface. He would have to take some time to dig it out.

When he stepped onto stone, he realized he had imagined himself as naked as his physical body was. He spent an instant of thought and fine cotton clothes rippled into existence onto his person. He had chosen a simple linen shirt and pants, with soft leather shoes. He looked at his forearms and considered adding his bracers, but decided against it. They were as much his shackles as they were accoutrements at the current moment, and he didn’t want to remind himself of it.

The silver crystalphage embedded bracers remained the sole property of his physical form for the time being. He turned and looked up to the stained glass windows above him. The light behind them was without source, but it streamed into the room like rays of warm sunlight.

Endrance concentrated a few seconds to take inventory of the main room. Each shelf for a split second glowed warmly as his thoughts scanned through them in a radial spiral, first scanning the closest shelves and rolling out into the next row until every shelf on every floor had been checked.

He confirmed his memories, his experiences, everything he had learned about the world and people and cultures were stored on those shelves. Each book was a specific, narrow subject only filled with what he knew about it. Many shelves had empty spaces; some of them were almost barren. Several shelves had been so full he had split them off into even more refined subjects.

In the central hall of the library of his mind, no information about magic remained. It was not a point of his concern, but rather an assurance. Now, should anyone intrude into his mind, the bulk of his arcane knowledge would not be available to just pick up off a shelf. His spells, research, and other magic teaching were safely locked away in chambers he had made intentionally difficult to access. Ever since the Mercanian had forcefully projected his voice into Endrance’s head, he had been worried that there would be foes capable of doing even more than that.

He turned back to the silver-lined reflecting pool and knelt, touching his fingertips to the silver lip above the water. He formed the correct mental picture, which was reflected in the pool. A separate room appeared reflected in the still pool of water, showing a dark gray stone chamber. Endrance stood, and held a foot out over the pool for a moment before putting his weight into it and stepping onto the water.

His foot plunged through the water as if it was far deeper than it appeared. Having committed his full weight to it, he quickly fell forward into the water. The surface accepted him without splashing; only a light ripple marked his passing.

The water-filled silver reflecting pool in the back of the dark stone room rippled as Endrance came out of it in the same smooth motion by which he had fallen in, except in the reverse. His foot touched stone as he completed his swing and came upright, standing in the room he had been watching just a second before. He was dry, and the only sensation he had felt was the familiar feeling of having to suddenly change his train of thought.

This chamber had nothing in the way of decoration. The floors and walls were simple dark, gray stone slabs, set so precisely together that there was no mortar. A ring of glowing wards were carved into the stones around the reflecting pool, forming a secondary barrier. Though large, the chamber was not nearly as big as the rest of his library. Endrance had never visualized where the room was within the building. That would have enabled an intruder to discern a way to get there directly. It was neither above nor below any of the rooms; it was something that he'd left intentionally undecided. At the moment, the only way even Endrance could get into the room was through specific patterns of thoughts. This kept his mind safe from being subtly explored by any mind-reading spells, but also kept others from being able to get an idea of what his abilities were, should he find himself in another mental battle of wills, like he'd had with the succubus.

The room appeared to be forty feet long and forty feet across, with a ten foot ceiling. The reflecting pool was in a twenty foot square alcove at the back of the room. In the center of the main chamber was a five foot diameter, circular low table that was set into the stone with six legs. The table’s surface was a layer of finely hammered, and excruciatingly detailed etched silver, with the edges entwining with white wooden legs. Patterns were etched into the silver in extremely tight, very thin lines in an elven pattern he had learned while living in Salthimere. If he could show it to any mages, it would have been recognized for what it was, but not understood. The complex, interweaving pattern of lines and carefully set circles on the outer edges appeared like a diagram of multiple spell forms overlapping each other.

On the walls were gilded, glass-doored bookshelves, stacked from floor to ceiling. Each section of shelves was organized by element, then each shelf within that section was separated by further values such as the person the knowledge came from, how long ago it was acquired, and how much was confirmed to be correct. Because he had gone through everything he had learned from the foes he had defeated before Salthimere, the shelves bearing the four traditional elements were quite full, having collectively gathered centuries of arcane research and experiences in it. Even his understanding of teleportation, spirit magic, rituals, and item empowerment each warranted at least a row of books on a disparate shelf. He was nineteen, perhaps even twenty now, considering how long he'd been in the Bastille, yet he had the knowledge and, even more importantly, the practical experiences of a mage hundreds of years old.

Filling those shelves was a harder task than he had thought it would be. Even with the spell-form’s assistance, the knowledge he had gained was, as a whole, incomplete. Bits and fragments of their memories escaped while he was absorbing their auras, making quite a bit of the actual magical comprehension insufficient.

Instead, Endrance had to sort through each fragment of understanding and fill in the missing pieces. He did most of it by comparing one piece of the spell with another he already knew worked, and then copying over the missing chunks; or using his own understanding to figure out what had been there. From that point, he was able to extrapolate how the person had composed their spells and could make the adjustments. It was a grueling task, one that left him mentally exhausted on the days he had worked on it while in Salthimere and on the road. Though they never understood how he could get so tired, or even that hungry, doing nothing but thinking, Joven on some level understood he was doing some kind of thing regarding magic and wisely never complained.

There was one shelf that had very little stored in it. Even after three years of tutoring in life magic, there was a scant two books on the entire shelf for the element. One was a book containing his memory of everything his tutor had told him of the history of life magic, from its discovery until the tutor had sat down to teach the first human that element of magic. The second, and quite obviously the thinnest book, contained every spell he comprehended that used life magic. It was markedly thin, mostly because he had devised the few spells as a practical means of learning more advanced topics. Unlike the human method of learning and teaching magic, elves learned it naturally and instinctively and never had a formal school or mechanism to pass on that knowledge to their younger generations. This led to some great difficulties in actually learning any spell forms, but Endrance had managed to bumble together a few spells. His tutor had found that these at least approximated effective life magic spells. These were the ones he had managed to copy down, but even then, the concepts were still harder to work with than the others. To even to use them, Endrance had to rely on a transitive medium to cast life spells. His Grandstaff, Pentarch, had been that medium until Endrance's capture.

Until he devised an escape from his prison, he would need to get to work on better comprehending those principles of life magic he had so much trouble with, otherwise he'd be in a lot of trouble.  The spell table would be of some assistance in this endeavor.