What We Do to Survive

I met Professor Williams at her office nearly eight hours before class. She’d arranged things with Professor Shrike such that I would not be penalized for missing one of his lectures and it wasn’t like we were going to be covering any new material anyway. It was our last real class since next week was going to be two days of exams and he’d told us weeks ago that we were just going to be reviewing some of the key concepts covered throughout the course.

On Miranda’s suggestion I’d also warned Brenda that I would be otherwise occupied during our usual class time. It was a good suggestion, I absolutely didn’t want her trying to hunt me down and the pestering I would have gotten the next time I saw her would have been even worse than her usual nagging.

She’d initially been very curious about what was making me skip class, but when I’d told her I would just be doing prep work for one of my other classes she had quickly lost interest. I was just glad she hadn’t asked any more questions because I certainly wasn’t going to be giving out any more information about my upcoming ritual than I absolutely had to.

Professor Williams was waiting for me in the hallway when I arrived. Beside her floated a massive chest of dull black metal that took up a not inconsiderable portion of the hallway. Though outwardly it appeared completely unadorned, simply six perfectly smooth and flat faces, to my mana sense it glowed as bright as the sun.

Under the surface of the metal I could feel a web of dense, rippling enchantments that completely isolated the inside of the container from the outside world. After a few inches my senses simply stopped, cut off in a way I’d never quite experienced before. It was rather jarring. As my skill with the technique had increased, I’d grown increasingly dependent on my mana sense. To feel it fail like this was very unpleasant, like looking down into a bottomless dark abyss.

Typically when I couldn’t sense beyond something or I was reaching towards the edge of my range there was a sort of fuzzy boundary, like a dense fog that slowly dampened my vision until I could no longer see through it. Here it was more like a cliff face, a sharp boundary through which no light could pass.

“I assume that’s it?” I asked curiously, gesturing towards the menacing-looking chest.

“Sure is,” she replied, a cheery smile on her face. “Should keep it safe and secure until you need it. I’ll show you how to operate the corpse vault when we get to the chamber. It's not too difficult, I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it quickly enough.”

She paused for a moment and her expression turned deadly serious. “How are you feeling? Did everything go well in practice? The calculations all checked out, but sometimes that’s not a guarantee that everything will balance out perfectly. If you’re not ready I may be able to reserve the room for tomorrow? Perhaps an extra day of practice would do you good?”

Another day to practice would have been nice, but this felt like a test. Professor Williams had told me my mana control should be good enough that I could learn the ritual by today. I wasn’t going to disappoint her by not living up to the standards of competence she set.

“I’m ready,” I said firmly, “It’s still taking me slightly longer to charge the circle than I would like, but it's well within the needed time frame and I managed to acquire the reagents we discussed to complement the casting. Ink shouldn’t be an issue either, I collected more than enough blood over the last few days.”

There were two small kegs in my bag, one filled with elven blood, the other filled with milk. I was pretty sure Professor Williams could now guess I had an elf locked up in my room, you didn’t become an archmage by missing the obvious and I’d told her I could ‘acquire’ both materials in large quantities for the ritual, but not using such powerful reagents would have been an utter waste of my priceless outsider and knowing what materials I would be using for the ink was crucial for properly tuning the mana flows.

It was a risk, but one worth taking. I didn’t think she was going to rat me out to the Elven Kingdoms and it was more than likely she already knew regardless. Professor Igor certainly had, and he was not even particularly specialized in information gathering. Who knew what sort of advanced divination and monitoring spells Professor Williams had access to.

She stared at me searchingly and then her smile reappeared as quickly as it had vanished. “Excellent! Now then, I took the liberty of making some initial preparations, but you’ll be mostly on your own from here. Once I show you the command signals to operate the vault it will be up to you to craft the circle and execute the ritual. I can’t have my fellows accuse me of favoritism after all, no matter how right or wrong they may be!”

She let out another one of those musical, hypnotic laughs, but this time I was pleased to see that the minor alterations I’d made to my sensory circulations seemed to have done their job. I could still hear the laugh and feel the magic washing over me, but it was no longer as irresistibly mesmerizing as it had been.

Between her antics, Miranda, and the other hazards of Avalon, I was getting a lot of practice tuning my enhancements to block out mind-altering magics. It gave me hope that eventually I’d be able to develop a general-purpose circulation meant to counteract that kind of magic. I hadn’t been able to locate anything of the sort in the library, but I was growing increasingly confident that such a thing was possible. If nothing else it would make a fine stepping stone towards some of the other circulation-based magics I was researching.

“Thank you Professor, your aid has been greatly appreciated. You’ve gone above and beyond what is required of you and I will not forget it.”

Something unreadable flashed across her face and then she laughed again, but this time it was a much more genuine sounding chuckle than her usual unnatural tinkle. “Oh, you charmer. You’re making this old woman blush.” She very clearly wasn’t blushing. She also wasn’t all that old, somewhere in her early fifties judging by when she’d graduated from Avalon. That was very young by archmage standards, even if her proficiency with time magic likely meant she was actually older than the chronology would suggest. “Just don’t die. So you can remember it for a good long time, hmm?”

“I certainly don’t plan too.”

“Few do.” She fell silent for a moment, then clapped her hands together. “Well, come on then. No time to waste. I’ve reserved ritual room thirty-one for you. The dune-slate in the walls should make sure none of the outsider’s essence can escape, but it's a tad slippery so it can be hard to get your runes to lie straight. It’s got a shielding viewing balcony too so all of your classmates will be safely out of your way.”

She set off down the hall at a blisteringly fast walk, the ‘corpse vault’, as she’d called it, floating soundlessly after her. I hurried after her, having to nearly jog to keep pace with her despite my longer legs.

“I’ll keep that in mind, Professor.”

The rest of the walk passed in silence as I mentally went over every step of the ritual. In the end, the ritual itself was shockingly simple, without many of the strange arrangements and design choices many of my classmates had incorporated into their own work. There would be no chanting, no ritualistic dancing, not even a special way to kill my sacrifice to extract the maximum amount of power from the ritual.

It certainly wouldn’t be nearly as arcane as the intricate set of sixteen interlocking ritual circles that Alan and Ulan had used in their ritual on Tuesday. Even having seen the circle design ahead of time it had been quite a spectacle and Professor Williams’s excited stream of commentary had been very enlightening.

The twins had shown an impressive level of coordination and precision, I was pretty sure I would have struggled to charge a ritual circle as delicately balanced as that one had been without anything going wrong. Then again, it had been two of them working at it simultaneously. Another copy of me would certainly make a lot of things much, much simpler.

For instance, it would have been nice to have some I trusted to help me draw out the ritual circle I would need to prepare. I’d already done a lot of the initial prep work for mixing the ink I would be using and creating a template for the ritual, but I would still need to draw out all three-hundred-forty-three runes that made up the main part of the circle, along with the outline and one-hundred-and-five runes that would ensure I gained as much out of the ritual as I could with my current power level.

It was a good thing I’d managed to get out of my afternoon class and didn’t have any other commitments this morning. Getting everything set up was going to take long, mind numbing hours where a single mistake could result in my messy death. This was the most complicated ritual I had ever attempted, stretching the bounds of my mana reserves and control. I could pull it off, I knew I could, but it was going to take everything I had to do so. It was a good thing I still had some of that potion left over from my previous attempt at a complex ritual because I was going to need it.

The circle Professor Williams and I had eventually settled on was a variation on the classic seven segment design that I had used in the past. The core of the circle consisted of seven triangles arranged into a heptagon, each triangle containing seven sevens of runes and each one directing a different portion of the ritual’s magic.

Unlike a regular seven segment ritual circle however, this one added another layer of complexity to the design. The regular boundary between each segment was replaced with a subsegment that was designed to mesh the effects on either side of it into a whole greater than the sum of its parts using seven additional runes in each one.

The outer edge of the circle was similarly modified, with a border of seven runes at each edge of the heptagon and another rune at every corner to contain the mana within the ritual and help ensure all of the outsider’s energy was funneled into me instead of dissipating into the ambient mana around us.

The additions massively increased the power of the ritual with a much more modest increase to the design’s complexity. Based on some calculations that Professor Williams had shown me, we’d managed to boost the power of the ritual past the level of an eight-segment circle despite only adding two-thirds the number of runes.

Despite my best efforts, I felt my mind drifting away from the specifics of the spell towards more… nebulous topics that I was trying to avoid thinking about too hard. I was nervous. This ritual was undoubtedly the most complicated, expensive piece of magic I had ever considered attempting and I only had one shot to get it right.

Preparation was my one advantage, the trump card that had carried me from a desperate, broken orphan to where I was now. I had always strived to work harder, to be better, to always be ready for any eventuality and to take advantage of any opportunity I could get my hands on. Sometimes that meant going into situations that I was maybe not fully ready for, but I never liked having to do so.

Today, I wasn’t feeling very prepared at all. I had practiced, done as much as I possibly could in the short few days since my previous meeting with Professor Williams, but there was only so much that I could do.

I had practiced all the parts of the ritual that I could, but that was not very much of it at all. I couldn’t afford to waste the massive amount of reagents required to draw the full ritual circle, which meant that there were no trial runs for that part of the ritual.

Without using mana-charged materials for the ink, there was no way I could fully charge the circle in the way I would need to during the ritual itself, so once again I could only do things piece by piece and hope everything came together in the end. Finally, I only had one outsider so I certainly couldn’t practice the sacrifice portion of the ritual either.

I was worried. And afraid. This was serious magic, the sort that would kill you instantly or make you wish it had if anything went wrong. I didn’t want to die. I still had so much more left to do. I couldn’t die here. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t fail. I wouldn’t. I would succeed. I would push through this, rise above this. I was better than this fear. There was no room for doubt in the face of progress.

Maybe if I kept repeating it I would even believe it properly some day. I glanced over at Professor Williams. She looked completely calm and collected. She seemed to believe in my abilities and she must have done this sort of thing dozens of times in her life. That had to count for something.

I refocused on the task at hand, mentally going over every rune and line in the ritual circle. I had drawn the entire thing five times in the last three days, and practiced each individual section at least a dozen times more. Even with my enhancements it had made my wrist and knees ache, but I’d visited the healing hall this morning and a few minutes of exposure to the Ring of Recovery maintained there had washed that away without any trouble.

I was still silently tracing each rune when, slightly less than ten minutes after leaving Professor Williams’s office, we arrived at the ritual room she had selected for me to use. Ritual room thirty-one was a massive hall of yellow-gray stone. The walls formed a perfect circle roughly thirty yards across, massive bricks of the rough-looking stone fitting seamlessly together to give the illusion of one unbroken mass.

Even the doors were carved from the same material, ponderous sheets of stone thicker than I was tall, swinging open soundlessly at Professor Williams’s touch and then sliding back into place behind us, curved faces perfectly flush with the walls around them.

I walked slowly around the perimeter of the room, examining the way mana seemed to slide across the stone as I ran my fingers along the wall. Despite the material’s sandy appearance, it felt more like glass under my fingertips than any sort of stone. I also noticed some of my things, the sealed containers of blood I’d prepared ahead of time, containers of reagents, and brushes for applying the ink, lying in a neat pile not far from the doorway.

Professor Williams loudly cleared her throat and I spun around to face her. Somehow I’d managed to get so lost in my own thoughts that I’d all but forgotten about the archmage standing beside me. “You can take all the time you need looking around once I’m out of here. For now though, I think you probably want to know how to get at your sacrifice, no?”

“Of course, Professor!” I said hurriedly, “I’m sorry, I was… distracted. It won’t happen again.”

“You’re alright, it's a big day for you. Only so many times you can go through a ritual like this and the next one gets more complicated after every attempt. You’ve chosen quite an ambitious undertaking, but I like it. Ambitious is good, you just have to have the skill to back it up. I certainly hope I haven’t wasted all this time teaching a corpse.”

“I won’t fail,” I said firmly, my voice hopefully showing more confidence than I really felt.

“Good. Now here’s the first command sign you need to know.” She summoned a glowing line of light over her hand and shaped it into a half-spiral. “You have to tune your mana correctly, I’ll show you how to do it in just a moment, but if you do it right this one here opens the vault.” The shape changed into a hexagonal helix of sorts that reminded me of a fancy ring I’d seen at a market once. “This one will activate the suppression field, you’ll want to use it before…”