The library, as it turned out, did have quite a bit of historical information about the various kinds of pacts that warlocks made and had made in the past. Unfortunately, none of the sources ed themselves with summoning demons, or aailed theory oly how demonic pacts were formed. Not that he nning to hat. Still, it might have been worth reading about.

  Bernt was about to give up, re-shelving a three hundred year-old historical treatise on the crimes of te Madurian warlocks in the Mirian ies, when a narrow book with a cracked leather cover caught his eye. It was oddly tall and stuck out a bit from the other books, revealing a bit of silver lettering on the cover.

  On a whim, Bernt pulled it out. It was bound oddly, with pages that felt too tall and narrow pared to the other books here. The full title was ‘A Summuide to Elementals’.

  Bernt bli it dumbly for a moment. It was a book on summoning. He hadn’t noticed it before, because unlike most of the books on these shelves, it didn’t have aering on the spi wasn’t what he needed, but it had to be useful somehow. His education at the Academy hadn’t been exhaustive regarding other pnes, but he khey were all uill, there had to be some parallels to pierg the veil from oo another.

  Making a decisioook the book back to Haln.

  “ I check this out?” he asked, holding out the book for him. “It’s not really that relevant, but it caught my eye. Maybe I learn to summon fire right from the source!”

  Haln grinned. “Go for it! Seriously, though, I wouldn’t reend actually trying it. That sounds like a great way to actally melt down half the city. And yourself.”

  The junior librarian took the book and noted down its title, the date a’s name before handing it back. “You borrow it for two weeks. If you want it longer, you have t it bad check it out again or pay a fee.”

  Bernt frowned. “That seems unnecessarily plicated.”

  “It’s not.” Haln replied, shaking his head firmly. “It’s psychology. Mages have a way of h books. If we force them to carry them back here every few weeks anyway, they’ll only hold on to those they’re still actively using.”

  “Ah.” Bernt nodded. “Alright, I’ll see you in a couple of weeks then.”

  He started to turn, but then stopped himself.

  “One more thing. Why do you shelve texts oal summoning in the middle of all the warlock stuff? I mean, I’m not pining, but why?”

  “Because they’re reted.” Haln shrugged. “Separating warlocks off as a unique css of spellcaster is mostly a political decision, or a social one, maybe. Doesn’t make seo separate them in terms of their practice of ritual magic. Over in Miria, they call everyone who summons interpnar creatures a warlock, even the ones who just use elementals.”

  “Right. I guess that makes sense.” Bernt nodded. It was all ritual magic, he supposed. In faow that he sidered it, elemental summoning likely had some overp with shamanism as well. What was aal, if not a natural spirit? It just came from aal pne, rather than this one, right?

  sidering this, Bernt thanked Haln and excused himself, but he didn’t leave the guild right away. He still had a few hours before work, and the librarian’s earlier mention of Pollock had reminded him of something he’d fotten in all the turmoil of the past few days, since he’d gotten his sed iure.

  Hiking up the stairs to the Wizards’ Society, Bernt made his way to Pollock’s offid knocked.

  “In!” the magister’s reedy voice called out a entered.

  The old man looked exactly as he always did, sitting behind his desk with an open book sitting on top of two other open books on one side and a disanized mound of papers oher. They were covered in partial diagrams and hurriedly scrawled notes, as if he’d been trying to catch each thought and put it down on paper before it escaped. Many were crossed out, and a few sched up papers had been tossed clear across the room, where other, much older bits of paper were already colleg dust all around an overflowing trash bin.

  “Ah, Bernt! I’m gd to see all that unpleasantness yesterday didn’t e my young protege. How’s your spellcasting?”

  “Good. Better, at least.” Bernt replied, stepping inside and closing the door before settling down in the chair across from the a wizard. “I worked out how to manipute my els – the sorcerous ones – enough to mostly bypass the iure. Or, Jori figured it out, actually. With practice, I should be able to incorporate the parts I want into my spells. I think I firm the at about the Tib’nar Orcs, too. Watch.”

  Raising both hands Bernt cast a torch spell in his left while pooling mana into white fme on his right. “It takes focus and io cast a spell normally, but sihe new iure shapes and activates the mana on its own, I essentially cast two spells at the same time. It’s just this one spell, but it saved my life a couple of times yesterday. Sihe individual fmes don’t dissipate, they also build up otlefield over time. It… well, it made quite a difference I realized that I could pull them all together with a trol trip.”

  Pollock stared wide-eyed at the two different fmes flickering i’s hands.

  “Remarkable! You spent aire battle just flinging practically unaltered perpetual fmes around willy-nilly? Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?”

  “I found out. Yes.” Bernt suppressed a shudder as fresh and gruesome memories pyed before his eyes. “But there wasn’t much choice, and the ce of friendly fire was low.”

  “Just… don’t ignite anything that’ll make a bigger fire than you handle.” Pollock said in a heavy tohat made Bernt suspect he eaking from experience. “Sometimes, the colteral damage…” he stopped, apparently lost in a painful memory of his own. Then he blinked and he was back. “Well. Just be sure you know what you’re lighting on fire, alright?”

  Bernt nodded ahe siletle for a moment before reag into his bag. Pulling out his mysterious wizard’s journal he set it down oable.

  “You said that, when we fixed my spiritual injury, you were going to tell me what the author of this thing was trying to do.” He held up his right hand as if to demonstrate. His sleeve fell down, and the glowing patterns of the perpetual fme’s spellform cast a soft glow out from under his skin. “I spent aire battle casting one spell after another, and I don’t feel a thing. It’s fixed. So, what was the old archwizard up to?”

  Pollock watched him thoughtfully for a moment. “I don’t know that we’ve really solved your problem. As you just said, you’re still w on adjusting to your new situation. We barely even know what it is. Don’t you think your attention is best focused on that for the time being?”

  “Maybe.” Bernt said. “But maybe not. You seemed pretty excited about it at the time. I’m trying to decide what I do now, sure, but I o know how to move forward, too. And, well, I’ve been thinking. If I cast two spells at the same time, then the diagrams in the book don’t seem quite as impossible anymore. Don’t get me wrong. I ’t cast these spellforms here, but… well, I do something. If I learn more about what this archwizard was thinking, I might learn something about where I could take this.”

  Magister Pollock pursed his lips for a moment, then grimaced and grabbed the book. “Oh, alright. But only because you’re dead right! I didn’t think you’d be able to do it so quickly, or that it would be so simple to do.” He flipped the book open and began to leaf through it. “Here, at the back, he discusses his ‘soul shaping’. That’s an archaic way to talk about mana architectures.”

  Bernt sat up straighter. That did sound iing. “He wrote down his architecture? How did I miss that? What iures did he use?”

  “No, no. Nothing so specific. It’s not important. Information about specifiovel iures be fun, but they’re not that iing for a wizard. What you want to look out for are the ideas behind them. The why. That’s what this se here is about.” Pollock poi a page taining three short paragraphs. There were no reference diagrams in this part of the journal, a couldn’t remember if he’d tried to decipher it himself. “He tried to develop an augmentation to help him disie normal matter into its stituent elements, and another one for what he calls ‘reiion’. Do you see what he was doing?”

  Bernt nodded. “Sure. He was going to try to create two separate augmentations in hopes that he could work out a way to bihem to cast a single spell to transmute matter. That, or maybe he decided that he could cast them sequentially. If he could do that, he would just have to tweak the spellform for the reiion augmentation a bit to ge the output.”

  “Almost.” Pollock said. “And I doubt it would work sequentially. Spells to refigure more basis of matter into more plex forms isn’t new, and there’s a reason we don’t generally use it. It takes too muergy, and you have to know precisely what elements you’re dealing with. Very ky, and not very useful.”

  He flipped excitedly back toward the front of the book and showed him one of the diagrams. “The way the shells are formed in these diagrams suggest that the reiion part of the spell is supposed to draw on the energy released by the disiion process in a pattern describing the inal material. So, in a way, the first part of the spell gives the sed part instrus oly what it’s reiing, and supplies the energy to do so in the process. It’s genius!”

  “I don’t know,” Bernt said. “Maybe if it worked…”

  Pollock tapped the side of his nose. “Ah, but I think it did! Think about it! He didn’t he augmentation to do all the work – just one of the spells. Most likely, he could have manually cast his disiiohrough the reiion augmentation. The resulting spellform would likely require a lot of adjustment before it would work, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t be possible.

  “So, you think he already could transmute materials, but it would have been excruciatingly slow to cast.”

  “Right, and that’s what this third augmentation was supposed to be for. He thought that if he could get a plementary third augmentation, it and the previous two might fuse into… well, some kind of super-augmentation, the same way that iures synergize ohey fuse into an augmentation. We don’t have a word for that, because no one’s ever succeeded, so far as we know.”

  Bernt sat back, trying to let the implications sink in. Three augmentations. He had the notes of someone who’d actually tried it. Not that there was much to go on. It sounded like the author had mainly attempted it to try to gloss over the problems with his initial architecture. But that brought up another question.

  “Why couldn’t he use both augmentations in a single spell to begin with?” Bernt asked. “I mean, I know that you ’t – the lecturers at the academy were clear about that – but it’s not something they went ih about, sihe fewest people actually attempt more tha’s not as though they’re not already ected within the same mawork. What’s actually stopping him from using both?

  “Ah.” Pollock frowned severely. “I’m surprised standards have slipped so much at the Academy, then. As I mentioned before, the why of an issue is often far more important than simple information without text.”

  Bernt made a vague noise of agreement, trying not to seem impatient.

  “You apply any part of or all of your spirit to the casting of any single spell.” Pollock went on, leaning ba his chair and steepling his fingers. “Or rather, a typical mage . We’ve already learhat your sorcerous iure doesn’t work this way. Excluding any part of your mawork when casting requires incredible trol of your internal mana flow. Developing that normally takes years of dedicated practice, and it’s something few non-archmages bother to master. As you know, eavestiture built into your mawork will attempt to weave itself into the spell you are casting. Your two iures are highly patible, so it’s not an issue for you, but if they were too inpatible, they would scramble your spellforms to the point that they would be nearly impossible to cast. It’s one of the most on pitfalls for wizards attempting to develop their own augmentations – few institutions will i in a mage who won’t be able to cast spells for years, much less a wizard whose future capabilities are pletely unknown.”

  Bernt winced. He uood the issue of inpatible iures, of course – but he hadn’t really sidered what it meant for wizards. Unlike mages, they were often taking shots into the dark with their iures. If the sed iure didn’t work as pnned, odds were that they o take time to analyze the result ahink their future development as well.

  “Traditional mages don’t generally have this problem, they’ll know what’s ing, so they gather the material they need for their third iure and finish the augmentation as quickly as possible. Ohe iures are fused, they fun as a whole. Whenever you cast a spell, the augmentation will greatly modify and augment the spellform in a way that expresses all the stituent iures to their fullest patible extent.”

  Bernt nodded, uanding where Pollock was going. “You’re saying that, if this archwizard tried to use both augmentations, the resulting spellform would be too scrambled to make sense of.”

  The wizard nodded emphatically. “That’s right. The augmentations don't naturally synergize. It would be an enormous mess – orders of magnitude more plex than inpatible iures. Practically impossible to make sense of, much less to adjust into a usable form.”

  “Alright, but how do we know he didn’t succeed with the third augmentation? What if he died before he could tell anyone, or if he just wao keep it a secret?”

  Pollock shrugged. “Because of where you found the notebook. My guess is that he tried to barter his knowledge for some kind of support from the elder dragon. A near-immortal like that, who has spent untold millennia colleg secrets and magical knowledge would be the perfect source of information for this kind of thing. The dragon probably just wasn’t very impressed with his work.” Pollock looked down at the book for a moment before flipping it closed aing it down oable. “Or maybe none of this was o him. Who knows what kinds of secrets an elder dragon might be h, after all?”

  Bernt frowhinking for a moment as he picked it up and stowed it ba his bag. Could any of this help him? For that matter, what would happen wheempted his iure. Would it even be able to fuse into an augmentation? What was going to happen?

  “Don’t worry too much about the dead archwizard or his project.” Pollock said, correctly interpreti’s expression. “You still have a lot of work to do uanding where you are now. You should spend the time to find your footing properly before you try te ahead. The notebook is fasating, certainly, but you shouldn’t let that distract you from yourself and what you want to do.”

  Bernt nodded. Pollock had been right. It was fasating, but for now, it was just a distra.