“Haa,” Tara exhaled, mana flowing through her body.
“Good. Now, cast the spell,” Nephthys ordered, sitting cross-legged in the air before her.
Right. Just cast the spell. Easy.
She made it sound as if casting a spell was as easy as walking. She had never cast a spell manually! It took several days of practice—and vomiting—just to circulate her mana properly. However, the distance from mana circulation to spell activation felt infinite, an impassable gulch squeezed into a millisecond.
“How?” was all Tara managed to get out, the circulation occupying most of her focus.
“You have invoked before, yes? Remember what that felt like? Even if the Words were controlling the process, your body was still the conduit. When you cast a spell, it will feel the same. Your body remembers what to do, even if your mind does not,” Nephthys instructed, her voice impassive.
Tara thought about the last time she had cast this spell, coincidentally also with Nephthys observing. She had made Tara focus on the feeling at the time, and while watching the Words work, she had glimpsed a strange—
Suddenly, Tara was staring at a mountain vista. There were trees whose leaves swayed calmly in the breeze. There was a small river—
Tara shook as the vision vanished and a light appeared in front of her chest. It was faint and white, little more than a candle flame.
“Congratulations,” Nephthys said, clapping softly.
Tara smiled. It was not impressive, nor was it even as bright as the invocation. Still, it was the first spell she cast on her own. Her first real spell.
She started shaking, surprised that she would be so emotional, but the shaking grew more intense, and she quickly realized it was not emotion she was stricken with.
Drip. Drip.
She glanced down to see drops of a black fluid hit the back of her hands. She touched under her eyes and felt tracks of a familiar sludge trailing from them and her nose. Her breathing had increased, and she was now wracked by tremors as black sludge began to press out of every orifice it could find.
“Gah,” she coughed, wads of sludge exiting her throat like phlegm.
She doubled over, holding her knees close to her chest as sludge pressed through her pores, the stench unbearable. She had few thoughts, strangely. The physical sensation of filth exiting her body occupied her full attention, grounding her firmly in the present. Yet, she watched herself tremble and bleed neutrally, disconnected.
It did not disturb her to see and smell all the horror exiting her body. It was almost comforting, like when a fever finally breaks, and one’s body begins to stabilize. It felt less like a change and more like a reversion, as if her body had somehow deviated from its proper course and was now being corrected.
The trembling stopped after only a few seconds. Tara straightened, sitting on her knees and wrinkling her nose as she examined the puddle of filth around her. She glanced up to see Nephthys, still sitting in the air, posture unchanged.
“Hold still,” she said, making a quick gesture, as if waving something away.
Water suddenly assaulted Tara, swirling around her in a whirlpool, whisking the black sludge away from both her clothing and skin. It went flying away toward a corner of the training room, where it seemed to soak into the floor.
Blue flames followed the water, swirling around her and steaming the water away, drying her. The flames felt only slightly warm, like bath water, despite being bright and blue.
“How do you feel?” Nephthys asked as the flames died.
“Better, thank you. That stuff was nasty—” Tara started.
“How does your body feel after that ordeal, is what I mean. I do not need you to describe the impurities. I experienced them enough from over here,” Nephthys interrupted.
Tara blushed slightly, opening and closing her hands. She stretched, working various muscles and feeling her body from top to bottom.
“Good. Nothing life-changing, but it feels like I got a really good night of sleep, or maybe like I just recovered from a cold? Something like that,” she mused.
Nephthys nodded, her eyes seemed to glaze over, as if lost in thought. Tara continued to stretch, allowing her time to think, but her curiosity eventually got the better of her.
“What happened, exactly?” she asked.
Nephthys’s eyes refocused on her, looking her up and down.
“I have only hypotheses, no firm answers. Are you okay with speculation?” she asked, to which Tara nodded.
“I suspect it is like resistance in a wire,” she said.
“Resistance in—what?” Tara blurted.
She knew cutting her instructor off was rude, but she also did not want Nephthys to waste time on an explanation she would have no way to understand. Nephthys glanced at her before looking up at the ceiling, seemingly pondering a different explanation.
“I described your use of magic like a breaking dam, yes? When dams are built, riverbeds dry. If the dam were to suddenly release, the torrent of water would tear apart the bed and banks, stripping away layers of dried soil and debris.
“My hypothesis is that your body possesses similar ‘riverbeds’ that mana flows through—mana channels, perhaps. I doubt they are a physical thing.
“Regardless, your ‘mana channels’ have been unused and accumulated…let us call them ‘impurities’. These impurities are stripped away by using your mana, but they also must exit your body somehow, so they are pushed out.
“Circulating the mana starts the process, but it is during spell activation that the mana actually leaves your body, and it is this process that scours the most impurities out, as it recruits mana channels not used by circulation alone,” Nephthys finished, a hand on her chin.
Tara mulled it over. The explanation made sense, on some level, but there were discrepancies that bothered her.
“Why does casting with the Words not trigger this reaction?” she asked.
“I suspect the Words use whatever they consider the ‘optimal’ mana channels to cast. Those channels are the same every time, so they never fade into disuse. If we continue with the dam example, dams often allow a trickle of water through, which helps ensure it never overfills and bursts. You could consider this the trickle of mana that the Words utilize. It is always flowing, so its bed never dries out,” Nephthys explained.
Tara crossed her arms in front of her, thinking things through. She must have made a face, as Nephthys interrupted.
“The wire analogy would have worked better. Did you see the landscape again?” she asked.
“Yes, though only a brief glimpse,” Tara answered, trying to recall the scene.
“That was the spell form, the formula that defines what your spell is going to be, what it will do, and all the parameters it will follow. Did you notice any…oddities? Discrepancies?” she asked.
Tara struggled to remember the brief vision she had. There was a valley, trees—
“Yeah, there was…something. The landscape was peaceful and comforting, but there were spots that made me uncomfortable, somehow. I guess it was kind of like seeing a predator’s eyes lurking in the underbrush.
“For some reason, I feel certain that the scene should be one of calm and serenity, but those spots contradict that feeling,” she said, brows furrowed.
Nephthys cast her arms out, and a thousand-or-more images of lines spread out around them. Spell diagrams, she realized. This was Nephthys’s spellbook! There were so many!
“My working hypothesis is that Praxia omitted spell forms from their diagrams because they are too personal to record. You see a landscape when you cast a spell, with spots that feel vaguely threatening informing you of inefficiencies in the spell form.
“I see a spool of strings, all vibrating with a single chord. There are discordant notes cutting through the harmony, and I can tune the strings to remove them, to maximize the spell's efficacy, just as you should be able to trim those spots of threat in your landscapes—” Nephthys lectured, when she was suddenly interrupted by a portal cutting through the air next to her.
Ramose emerged, his hands clasped behind his back professionally—was that how Nemesis members were getting around this place so quickly?!
“My lady, I apologize for interrupting, but there is a situation developing. Would you mind coming with me?” he asked, bowing.
Tara glanced at Nephthys, who uncrossed her legs, though she remained floating. She motioned Ramose forward and nodded to Tara, who followed after them.
“Basically, what I am saying is that you simply need to acclimate to casting spells yourself. You will learn to tweak it as you cast more. That infinitesimally small window will open for you,” Nephthys explained, looking back at Tara as she floated next to Ramose.
“Why is it so random? Spell casting seems like it should be extremely precise, yet it feels almost completely instinctual,” Tara called.
Nephthys flew with a hand on her chin for a while, thinking. Eventually, she responded, glancing behind her.
“I believe it is the best our minds can do,” she replied cryptically.
“The best…that we can do? What do you mean?” Tara asked, walking at just under a jog to keep up.
“Do you know what your Light spell does? If I asked you to convert mana into light without using magic, would you even know where to begin?” Nephthys asked.
Tara shook her head. The thought had never crossed her mind. She could rub two sticks together to make fire, but that was not the same. The spell’s light gave off no heat and came directly from mana. The best she could do was use fire as an intermediary, and even that was without involving mana.
“The effects magic creates are unbelievably complicated. Our minds are not built to process that sort of information. They do their best to approximate spell forms just the same as they do their best to imagine other abstract information, such as large distances or numbers.
“What you get is an image that you could logically understand is not accurate, but you recognize the approximation as good enough. It is a sort of translation of the cosmic to something we can process.
“This is also why spell forms are so personal. We all process information differently. We all imagine different scenes, even when the same scenario is described to us. This is my hypothesis, at least,” Nephthys finished.
“Well-reasoned, my lady,” Ramose said from the front.
Nephthys was emotionless as always, but Tara could swear she saw her roll her eyes. Granted, the stars that twinkled behind her pupils could have created the illusion.
They emerged from a tunnel onto a ledge overlooking the front gate. This was not the front gate facing the lava bridges. They had somehow traveled through a single corridor all the way through the mountain itself. They now stood overlooking the entrance to the mountain, rather than the entrance to Nemesis’s interior.
“I see. A stampede, then,” Nephthys said.
“Indeed. The usual culprits, as far as we know. They seem to think that trying the same thing but bigger will produce a different result,” a low voice rumbled.
Tara jumped, turning to discover the blue-eyed demon, Hannibal, already present on the balcony, somehow having slipped her notice entirely.
She was momentarily confused. The Crater was as desolate as ever, nothing but the occasional geyser or minor earthquake disturbing the barren peace.
Only now did she notice a subtle vibration rising over the din of volcanic noise. It was a consistent rattling she felt in the soles of her feet and through her palms when she placed her hands on the balcony railing.
Looking up, she noticed a cloud of dust on the horizon, as if a dust storm were raging, large enough to be seen from miles away.
And it was getting closer.