When morning came, I groggily looked around. I was comfortable and warm but something felt off. My eyesight gradually resolved. I was curled up in between Sable’s nice soft thighs, which seemed… questionable for a few reasons, but the one I most quickly settled on was the fact that I was a cat. A normal, cat-sized cat. Looking at my black paws, my mind raced, adrenaline pumping.
“Ow, Lu- Morgan, don’t claw me.” Sable was also groggily waking up, and I noticed my claws were out, gripping into her thigh once I had tensed up. I retracted my claws.
I tried speaking, and found that I could despite my state.
“Sable, what’s going on? Why am I a cat?”
“Yesterday was a long day, and you spent a lot of mana practicing your potion brewing. Mana you’d never used before and don’t know how to use efficiently yet. When you fell asleep, you flopped over into my lap and went into, let’s call it a power-saving mode, your animal form. You saw Lyris using hers yesterday to pretend to be a normal raven, right?”
“That’s right. She used it when she was initially following me, and also to escape. I thought it was a special ability at the time.”
“Nope, just something any familiar with an animal spirit as a base can do. And once you were a cat sleeping in my lap, I couldn’t just move. Society has rules.”
“Right… thanks I guess. How do I turn back?”
“Well now that your mana has returned, try to visualize pushing it outside of your body and forming it into a roughy person-sized shape.”
I already knew how to direct mana flow a bit, but pushing it out all across my body seemed like a lot of effort. I concentrated on this until I felt it reach the right general shape, then visualized that shape as myself. The mana seemed to snap into place, my body forming out of the mana flow as it locked into its previous circulation through my humanoid form. That was freaky, but I registered that my body was back to “normal” and, surprisingly, I was also still clothed. But also laying across Sable’s lap. I carefully removed myself, dismounting the couch in the process.
“That was good. You’re learning fast.”
“Wait a second, if that’s how familiars change forms, why can’t Lyris use magic?”
“Using magic, or specifically spells sigils, is a bit more complicated than just having mana and moving it around. There’s lots of magical creatures around, many with interesting mana-based powers, but most of them can’t cast spells. They use their mana instinctively, even Lyris. When I found you, however, I knew I’d struck pay-dirt because you have a witch bloodline.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Usually people have a little bit of mana matching their gender, whether or not they have enough to cast a spell. Males of a good, strong witch line appear to have no mana, though. Same for girls born of wizards. It’s unfortunate, but by making you a female familiar I was able to activate your witch heritage as well as fill you with my mana. Instant witch.”
“Okay, I’m a cat witch or whatever, and hypothetically my family has witches in it. Cool. So now what? How do I cast a spell?”
“Here, let me show you something.” She got a book down from a shelf and passed it over. It was clearly a spellbook, though the descriptions of the spells had a lot of technical jargon. What was more interesting was the sigil drawn on each page. They were more complex than the trivial sigils the potion recipes had.
“This is a spell sigil. Just like most other sigils, you could activate it by pouring mana into it and making it flow, but spell sigils generally can’t handle more than a single use without burning out most kinds of ink. If you can memorize how the mana flow changes and evolves within the sigil, you can likely draw one yourself using mana, and use that instead of burning out the copy on the scroll.”
“I see. This is pretty complicated…”
“Are you familiar with the trope of scrolls being single-use spells in certain fantasy games and books? This is where that comes from, I think. The sigil on the paper isn’t strong enough to withstand being fully activated, but a creature with a bit of mana of the right kind could probably handle activating it in a pinch if instructed. Meanwhile, if the creature can feel around inside the sigil and learn how it works without activating the spell, they might be able to memorize how the sigil is made. That’s something witches and wizards can do that most other magical creatures can’t. Even if you gave a normal person enough mana that they could activate it, as with a familiar transformation, they lack the sensitivity in their mana to feel what happens inside a sigil. Memorizing a spell sigil is pretty implausible if they can’t do that, but with a bit of training they can activate certain sigils.”
I carefully placed fingers on appropriate node symbols on the page and slowly filled it with mana, “feeling around” inside of it without allowing it to fully trigger. This was going to be a lot of work, but I was on my way to learning and casting my first ever first-tier spells. Not all of the sigils in the book had the same amount of detail as the one I’d landed on, but in terms of overall complexity they were fairly similar. Once I had a very simple sigil memorized in terms of both its appearance and the feel of its flow, it was time to try it. I created the sigil by drawing it in space with a version of my own mana, and then pushed mana through it, just like I had previous sigils on pages. Somehow, it worked. With my first sigil memorized, I could ignite, douse, or move small fires. Not a hugely powerful spell, but potentially a handy one. And just like that, I was a witch.
Sable looked excited. “You picked up Control Flame pretty fast. I guess I was just a kid when I learned it, but I expected that to take longer.”
“I’ve noticed that sigils look a bit like a circuit diagram, and the different symbols of the sigils seem like electronic components.”
She tapped her finger to her lips while thinking about that analogy. “I think I know what you’re talking about, but could you show me an example?”
Pulling out my phone, I loaded the Wikipedia article on circuit diagrams and brought it up. There were a few images of different ways to draw an electrical circuit, and examples of the symbols used to represent different components.
I wasn’t an expert in this by any means, but I had taken an intro to circuits course, so I had some vague knowledge to draw on. “So this symbol is a battery or other power source that creates a… flow of electricity if the circuit is closed properly. This zig-zag one is a resistor, it makes the electricity flow kind of… less well? It resists the flow of electricity, and can produce heat or light as a byproduct, which is how a lot of heaters and old-style light bulbs work. This one is a switch or button, it connects the circuit only if activated from the outside. This is a relay, it’s kind of like a switch that’s only ‘on’ if there’s current coming in from another part of the circuit. There’s a bunch of more complicated components, but the gist is that they each change the properties of the electrical flow, or allow it to be influenced by an outside force, or allow it to cause some effect in the outside world in some way.”
Sable nodded along with the explanation. “I see, and so does the zig-zagging of the resistor symbol make the electricity flow slower by having it turn a bunch of sharp angles?”
“No… no, not exactly. The symbols in electronics aren’t the actual things. They just represent those things. The inside of an actual resistor is… I don’t actually know, but I think it’s more complicated for electricity to flow through, which is like having to turn a bunch of corners like that. But it’s different in sigils, right?”
“Yeah. The sigil is the diagram, and the symbols are the components. We call them runes, though. The actual way you draw the runes determines how and why they work. There’s something like a resistor in the language of sigils that restricts the flow of mana, and it looks kind of similar, like this…”
She drew a repetitive wavy pattern in the air with her mana, punctuated by short jagged sections. “The amount that it restricts mana flow is determined by the number of these repetitions you draw.”
That was pretty interesting… I started wondering if I could design a computer based solely on sigils, but Sable pulled me out of it.
“Let’s focus. For now, you just need to memorize more sigils and get a feel for what the runes are doing. Actually doing anything new with the rune language is complex and requires both a good feel for them and a grounding in mana theory.”
“And you’ll teach me about that?”
”When you’re ready. I feel like you might be able to handle second tier spells within a few months at this rate, but they’re both more complex and have new types of runes not found in first tier spells. For now, focus on learning new first tier spells and practicing everything. The rest will come in time.”
Pointing to the lightly glowing spell sigil floating in front of me, I asked, “So, what do I do with this now?”
“Put it away. It’s made of your mana so you can just store it inside of you so that you can bring it out and use it on demand. You’ll get used to managing them in time, which will determine how many you can store at once. The sigil will eventually break down until it doesn’t work, at which point it’ll fall apart and you’ll need to repair it. ”
I willed the sigil to float towards me and inside of my hand, and as it merged with my internal mana I felt it settle within my… mind, I guess. Weird.
In any case, my mind needed a rest. A nice trip outside to touch grass would be great. Sable had a wishlist of ingredients to gather for some kind of project, though the last item on the list caught my eye. It was time to hunt a magical creature.