What We Do to Survive

The books that Professor Williams pointed me towards proved to be technically helpful. Unfortunately, the ‘technically’ was a key modifier in this case. The books were about rituals using outsiders as components, but they were all deeply technical and arcane to the point that I struggled to follow what the authors were saying.

One of them, a journal detailing a long-dead mage’s attempts to learn about other worlds by translating a monstrous outsider’s memories into a form interpretable by human minds, included a ritual diagram that was so large that I doubted even an archmage could charge it before everything destabilized. It was drawn out across four pages of the journal and shrunk down so much that I needed specialized viewing spells to examine the individual specks of ink on the page.

The others weren’t quite that bad, but it was a close thing. It didn’t help that the term ‘outsider’ covered an entire menagerie of wildly different creatures. Several books proved immediately useless simply because the outsiders used within were so divergent from my own that copying their work would only cause additional problems.

I was fortunate enough to find one journal that actually used almost exactly the creature I was dealing with. Less fortunately, it was a detailed step-by-step walkthrough of how the mage in question had carefully rendered down the outsider into a number of highly valuable spell components and what he did with them afterward.

This was an excellent find, but it didn’t really help me right now. It would be very useful once it came time to butcher the post-sacrifice corpse, assuming the ritual didn’t damage it too badly, but until then I was trying to avoid killing the thing. At the very least, the book was my best source of information about how the creature’s body and magic functioned, which was rather priceless at the moment. It went into far more detail than any of the more general books Miranda had helped me locate.

Outside of that though, my work so far had been utterly fruitless. After reinforcing the wards around its temporary prison, I had spent most of the next few days considering my options and theorycrafting various approaches.

I was now even more certain than I had been that I wanted to go through with the ritual. Learning more about the outsider’s various natural abilities, I’d discovered some fascinating qualities that Miranda had missed in her initial explanation.

The most important of these was how incredibly adaptive the creatures were. It wasn’t just their social and language skills that could quickly shift to accommodate their new surroundings, but their very bodies themselves. Starspawn doppelgangers could survive in nearly any environment, from the depths of the ocean to the frozen poles and everything in between, they needed barely any time to adjust before they could thrive.

This adaptability wasn’t limited to only environment either. With just a few days of exposure, one could grow resistant to entire branches of magic. It wasn’t perfect, I’d accidentally stumbled on a near fool-proof way of containing one since it was a single ongoing spell effect and not repeated exposure, but it was still a very potent ability. Similarly, the effect could work in the other direction as well. Physical enhancement spells were known to be much more effective on the creatures than expected, and I assumed mental enhancements would be similarly effective.

I had no expectation that I would be able to gain all of those abilities. My biology was just too different and there were limits to what even the best mages could manage with only a single specimen. If I could get even a fragment of that power however and cultivate it with specialized training regiments and other enhancements, it could potentially greatly improve my future survivability.

The problem was, that was easier said than done. I was… fine with runic magic. I wasn’t an expert by any means, but I was very familiar with how mana flowed interacted with itself which gave me some measure of advantage in analyzing how a ritual would work.

I’d already prepared most of the ritual I had been planning to use for Professor Williams’ class, and I was rather confident in my work. Had my intended sacrifice been an ordinary magical creature or object, I had no doubts I could have made the needed adjustments in just a few days of work.

I even had several completed versions filed away ready to go in case I had to get it done in a hurry. One was for a siren’s innate vocal magic, another for their ability to make their bodies lighter or heavier at will. I also had versions prepared for three of the more common beasts I knew could be found in these islands.

Making the adjustments for the outsider on the other hand was proving to be mind bendingly difficult. I’d run the calculations several times. If I simply attempted to use my current framework, at best it simply wouldn’t work. More likely, the outsider and I would be turned into a chunky mass and splattered across the room.

The issue was the outsider’s bizarre, warped mana. I only had second-hand notes and a few minutes of initial examination to work from without risking freeing the outsider from its current stasis spell, but things didn’t look promising. I simply didn’t know how to account for it correctly, and all the changes I’d considered making simply resulted in a completely non-functional ritual.

What I really needed was an expert and a safe way to examine the outsider. That was why, after an entire week of fruitlessly pounding my head against the issue, I found myself standing outside Professor Williams’ office waiting for my appointment.

I didn’t like it, this meeting left me with only two additional consultations with a professor left for the semester, but she had already said she was willing to work with me and that was the best I was likely to get. At least this had the upside of binding her into not talking about what I was doing. Professors were expressly forbidden from sharing secrets learned during such sessions.

I jolted when I heard a voice directly behind me. I hadn’t felt nor heard anyone approaching. Why did people feel the need to keep doing this? “Perfectly punctual, some of my students could do to learn from your example, Mr. Hunter.”

I turned around slowly, then bowed my head politely to the professor, heart hammering in my chest. “Good evening Professor. Thank you for taking the time to meet with me.”

She smiled back at me and laughed quietly, a tinkling, musical sound that––

I doubled the amount of mana flowing through my mental circulations and her voice lost the alluring note it had suddenly gained. She stopped laughing and pouted at me, “Ah, you’re no fun.”

I could feel the traces of mana flowing off her expression, but managed to filter them out before whatever magic she was emitting could affect me. I’d never noticed anything of the sort during class, she probably actively controlled whatever enhancements I was looking at while teaching. I wondered if this was a test, and if so, how I was doing.

“As you say, professor.”

“Well, let us get started then. No time like the present.” Her office door swung open, much more slowly than Professor Laushring’s thankfully, and she waved for me to follow her.

I’d never been in Professor Williams’ office before, but it looked much like I’d have expected it would. Her desk was gigantic, an L-shaped slab of shiny red wood that took up nearly half the room’s space. It was covered in stacks of papers, small baubles, and large diagrams drawn on thin stone slates. Two of the walls were entirely taken up by massive drawing slates covered in hastily scrawled runes and messy notes. The others were lined with bookshelves showing off an impressive library of unlabeled notebooks, ancient-looking tomes, and modern rune-reference books.

It was very clearly a well used space, and I watched the professor cast an irritated glance at the papers on her table. She clicked her tongue loudly, “Excuse the mess, I was working with Erna earlier and haven’t had time to clean up. Here.”

A spell matrix flickered in front of her chest before vanishing so quickly I could barely get a look at it. An invisible wind blew through the room, ruffling my hair and neatly sweeping half the scattered work on the table into a pair of piles, clearing a large area at the center of the table.

Just as quickly, she cast a second spell and the chair piled with books standing in one corner of the room floated over to the desk, deposited its load in a neat stack on the corner of the table, and then positioned itself across from her heavy armchair.

“That's better. Now, before we get started let’s discuss some preliminary information. What we’re working on, what you’re trying to achieve, so on.”

“Of course, professor.”

Things proceeded quickly from there. I’d been worried that it would take a lot of work for us to both get up to speed on what I wanted to achieve, but luckily it seemed I’d chosen a very good professor to go to. Professor Williams not only had experience in using outsiders as ritual sacrifices, though she wouldn’t tell me how that had happened, she had even encountered several varieties of starspawn in the past and knew quite a bit more about the creatures than I did.

After some initial discussion, she spent a few minutes looking through what I had done so far, humming quietly and taking shorthand notes in a leather-bound notebook identical to the hundreds of others on her bookshelves. According to her, my methodology was ‘novel but poorly directed’ and she complimented me on my prudence in not attempting any of the rituals without speaking to her first, but she refused to say anything more than that. Very helpful.

Then, she decided that we couldn’t make any proper progress before she got a good look at the outsider itself. I was slightly concerned about releasing it from its current stasis, I had no confidence that I would be able to repeat that feat while it was awake and I was worried about it growing resistant to the other protections I had in place, but she told me not to worry about it and that she would deal with keeping it restrained.

I wasn’t going to doubt the competence of an actual archmage. If she said she could do it, I believed her. In all honesty, I was more relieved to have it out of my room than anything else, particularly since she promised to hold onto it until I needed it for the ritual. The more I learned about its capabilities the less I liked sleeping in my own bedroom.

I was slightly concerned about her simply taking it or using it for her own work and leaving me high and dry, but after what had happened with Elpha my trust in Avalon’s rules had grown considerably. I’d read the handbook from cover to cover and it very specifically stipulated that faculty could not steal the work or materials of their students.

I didn’t like trusting other people without oaths to bind them, but if I couldn’t trust Avalon to keep to its own rules then I couldn’t trust anything. I was simply too weak to do anything about it one way or another. It was a risk telling anyone that I had something like that stowed away in my room, particularly since I now knew that people could break into those with enough effort, but I’d concluded that it was a risk I needed to take. I just wasn’t getting anywhere otherwise.

Professor Williams escorted me down to my room, then politely waited outside while I slipped in and extracted the frozen creature from the heavily warded corner of my room where I’d stowed it. I was very glad for the privacy enchantments on the room’s entrance, without permission no one except the room’s owner could see anything except an empty stone box until they physically passed through the door. I trusted her to keep my secrets during our session, but there were some things in my room that I didn’t want anyone to know about if possible, sworn to silence or otherwise.

The trip back to her office was nerve-wracking despite her presence. I was constantly on guard, looking all around for signs of someone coming to steal my precious statue. I was rather confident that I could escape from anyone allowed to attack me, but I wasn’t nearly so sure about it while carrying a person-sized, immobile frozen outsider. Professor Williams’ protective presence was the only reason I had dared to leave my room with it without the extra assurance of Miranda’s company to keep it hidden under her illusions.

The next five hours were simply incredible. Professor Williams went above and beyond what was required of her, helping me for far more than the mandated one hour per session. It was my first peek into how an archmage-level ritualist worked and I was left thoroughly humbled by the end of it.

More than just a skilled mage, Professor Williams was a consummate educator, her work accompanied by an endless explanation of exactly what and why she was doing. She showed me nearly fifty different analysis spells I’d never seen and how to interpret their results, a new method of computing ritual outcomes I’d never come across in any book, and so much more. I learned more in that single session than I had in entire semesters of classes.

She was a whirlwind of activity and yet somehow managed to work me into the process in such a way that I felt like I was doing the work with her help instead of simply following along with what she was doing. Each conclusion came to me just as she was ready to move onto the next step, each rune drawn and repositioned was done by my hand but with her perfectly worded guidance ringing in my ears.

It was mind boggling, and I barely noticed the time passing until she stopped me with a gentle hand on my shoulder and told me I was done for the day. I stared up at her through bleary eyes, mind spinning with equations, runes, and spell matrices. “Huh?” I asked blankly, then caught myself. “Sorry, I mean, thank you professor. You’ve been… a great help.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I think we’ve made some good progress today, but we’re not quite done yet. See what you can do over the weekend, then I’ll take a look at things before class on Tuesday. I think you’ll probably need another session with me, I have some time Friday evening next week as well, but perhaps you’ll prove me wrong.”

I considered what we had now and then looked around the office that had become twice as messy as it had been when I’d arrived. I somehow doubted it. “I’ll do my best, professor. Thank you. That was…”

“You did great. I see a lot of promise in your future Orion. Perhaps after next year, we’ll be working together much more closely, hmm? Think about it.”

I didn’t quite know what to say to that. Was she implying that she wanted me as one of her mentees after I finished my fourth year? It sure sounded like it. That was… potentially huge. Was that why she’d let the session go on for so much longer than she had to? “I’m honored by your praise. Thank you again, for everything. I’ll see you in class.”

Then I stumbled out of her office. I managed to make it back to my room in one piece and just collapsed into bed, a wave of exhaustion washing over me like a black tide. I didn’t even remember closing my eyes.