A Practical Guide to Sorcery

Chapter 222: The Land of Dreams

Siobhan

Month 8, Day 30, Monday 12:15 a.m.

“My intentions?” Siobhan repeated slowly, trying to buy time while she figured out how to answer Thaddeus’s question. Her divination-diverting ward had not activated, meaning that he was not attempting to divine the truth. But she still preferred not to lie, if possible. He was astute, and might be able to tell even without the help of magic, but lying also weaved a web that she could get tangled in someday.

Thaddeus stared at her silently, intangibly increasing the pressure to answer.

Siobhan looked to the side, refusing to be rushed. Finally, she said, “I mean Sebastien Siverling no harm. His existence is irreplaceably useful to me, and my intentions are to do what it takes so that he continues to be so. If possible, I want all of Sebastien’s hopes and dreams to come true.”

Thaddeus scoffed. “A statement full of loopholes.”

She looked back to Thaddeus and raised a challenging eyebrow.

“But I believe you mean your words, in essence,” he conceded, relaxing. “I already know that he has been allowing you to access Myrddin’s journals. Are you and he…related? How is it that he came to be recognized by Myrddin’s magic?”

Siobhan blinked in surprise, then suppressed a grimace. How was it that Thaddeus always managed to ask the most inconvenient questions? “Related? Well…I suppose you could say that, though the truth is far from the traditional meaning of that word. I do not know the exact mechanism for how Myrddin’s journal recognizes him, or even why, exactly, it does so.”

Thaddeus’s gaze flicked away for half a second, an uncharacteristic flash of shyness twisting his features. “So you aren’t…his mother? Or great, great…ancestor of some kind?”

Siobhan’s eyes grew wide. ‘How would that even be possible? We’re the same age!’ she screamed internally. She pressed her lips together in a displeased line. “No.”

“Will you tell me how you are related? And how it connects to Myrddin?”

“No,” Siobhan repeated. Siobhan dropped the dome of darkness, revealing the dimly lit tunnel once more.

Following suit, Thaddeus did the same with his sound-muffling spell.

Kiernan’s eyes darted between her and Thaddeus, the edges of his eyes pinched and wrinkled with agitation. He opened his mouth to question them, but then closed it again. When neither of them volunteered any explanation, he grunted his displeasure to himself. “Are we ready to continue? Myrddin’s journals have been waiting to be read for over a thousand years now.”

“I doubt Myrddin would mind,” Siobhan said, waving for Thaddeus to take the lead once more.

They continued through the winding white cliff tunnels and occasional caves, climbing steadily upward until her legs burned despite all of the physical exercise she had been getting recently. Eventually, they reached familiar halls cut from the stone. Siobhan followed Thaddeus to the small, warded room that held three of Myrddin’s other journals.

She slowed as she was forced to push through the magical resistance around the doorway. Finally, she slipped past as if the barrier were a thick, invisible soap bubble that snapped back into place behind her.

Kiernan let out a strangled sound from behind her.

She turned, looking for whatever danger had surprised him, but found him looking between Siobhan and the threshold several times, his eyes wide with awe.

He pushed through the doorway himself, and as soon as Thaddeus met his gaze, pointed urgently and silently to the doorway.

“What is wrong? Has an intruder disturbed your wards?” Siobhan guessed.

Kiernan gave her a strange look that was half-scornful, half-disgruntled, and moved to examine the warding spell array around the doorway with intense scrutiny.

Thaddeus let slip a tiny smirk.

When neither of them explained what was going on, Siobhan guessed that they didn’t want to explain the details of the wards to her for some reason. She felt a twinge of paranoia, but Thaddeus didn’t seem worried at all, so the situation was probably fine. She was as prepared for danger as she could reasonably be.

Inside, the room looked exactly as Siobhan remembered from her last visit. A smaller circle of ever-burning dark red flame surrounded a white pedestal made of what she suspected to be pure salt. Atop the pedestal lay the three books, their leather covers unmarked by age or use. Siobhan kept her expression neutral, careful not to show any excessive interest in the books or admiration for the complex wards protecting them.

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After a short while, Kiernan gave up on his examination.

“If you will spoof the correct identity, I will handle the rest,” Siobhan said, gesturing imperiously.

Kiernan and Thaddeus each produced one half of a plate-like artifact—an exquisite creation of shimmering opal, gold, and ruby, with several small encapsulated and hidden components under opaque domes around its edges. Carefully, they notched both halves together into a single, seamless Circle, then lifted one of the books and placed it beneath.

Siobhan approached the pedestal. She felt the weight of Myrddin’s legacy pressing down on her, but refused to let it show. Instead, she focused on the task at hand, her mind already racing with possibilities of what knowledge these ancient tomes might contain.

Thaddeus stood on one side and Kiernan the other, both of them staring at her with almost palpable eagerness.

“I am not as powerful or accomplished as Myrddin,” she warned. “Accessing the contents of his journals is difficult, and can quickly push my Will to its limits. I will not be able to access every page. I recommend we start by checking the first page of all three, to see if Myrddin left any notes. After that, I can clarify two dozen pages at most before my Will gives out, after which I will require a week or more to recover.”

Professor Lacer frowned. “Will-strain?”

“Not exactly,” she said, “though that could happen if I am not careful.” Really, the requirement for such a long time between sessions was only meant to keep them from trapping her there for days on end when she really needed to be Sebastien.

“Do not risk damaging yourself,” he warned, in a tone that reminded her of the way he spoke to her in her other body.

Siobhan smiled with delight.

“Only two dozen pages?” Kiernan complained, taking out a handkerchief and wiping some sweat off of his neck. “But each journal has a couple hundred, at least. How long will it take us to get through them, at that rate?”

“Perhaps we can spread those pages out to get a general idea of the contents covered, and then return to focus on anything that the History Department finds particularly interesting,” Siobhan said, suggesting the exact same tactic she had employed on her stolen journal.

Kiernan was reluctantly appeased, and so Siobhan took a moment to center herself, then dropped her shadow-familiar spell and bent the entirety of her Will to entering the key to Myrddin’s journal.

She slipped up halfway through and had to start over from the beginning, which had both of her companions even tenser with suspense. Finally, however, the glyphs stopped shifting and the contents resolved into clarity.

Kiernan couldn’t restrain a reverent gasp, sidling closer until his arm pressed against Siobhan’s.

She gave him a single, hard look, and he retreated.

This journal did not have any special note in the beginning, as hers did. Flipping the page revealed an entire spread of gibberish equations. Siobhan stared at them impassively, unable to be impressed with what she didn’t understand at all. She also didn’t try too hard, as almost all of her concentration was in use simply maintaining the journal’s clarity.

Kiernan squinted. “Oh, I cannot see clearly from this distance. The magic is interfering. I suppose to keep anyone from spying from afar. Can you read it, Thaddeus? Did she succeed?”

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Thaddeus had stepped closer, too, looming barely an inch behind Siobhan’s left shoulder. He was tall enough to easily read over her shoulder. “They are equations for a space-related spell,” he said.

Siobhan was impressed that he was able to deduce that from the gibberish on the page, until she saw a small drawing of what looked to be a piece of paper folded in half, along with a legible note from Myrddin.

If I could just fold it and punch a hole, I could travel great distances almost instantly.

“Teleportation, it seems like,” she said softly.

Kiernan’s eyes grew wide, and he inched slightly closer. “A working teleportation spell? How many thaums?”

Thaddeus shook his head. “It doesn’t say.”

“And it might not be ‘working,’” Siobhan added. “This is only the one page. Myrddin could very well have abandoned development halfway through if he had too much trouble.”

Kiernan looked as if he wanted to argue, but restrained himself. “You would know best,” he muttered.

Thaddeus moved over to the wall and opened up a hidden compartment there, from which he pulled a dozen sheets of parchment. “Can you hold it?” he asked.

“Not indefinitely. But long enough for you to transcribe the page. However, it will reduce the number of pages we can access later.”

Professor Lacer and Grandmaster Kiernan shared a long look. Finally, Kiernan sighed. “Skip it for now. We need to find any information on celerium. Barring that, some other immediately useful spell.”

Siobhan carefully let her Will loose, and the journal slipped back into true incomprehensibility. The next journal was again missing any introductory note, and was perhaps even more incomprehensible.

“I believe it has something to do with divination, based on the fact that it uses both a pentagram and a nonagon sub-array and no numerological symbol in the main array, but I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” Thaddeus said.

The third journal started with plans for Carnagore, only slightly more advanced than what Siobhan’s ended with. “I could be wrong, as Myrddin was rather flighty and liked to jump around between projects, but I believe this one is chronologically first,” she said, basing that off of little more than that her journal had a prefacing note, as well as the fact that she had been able to vaguely understand several of the projects in her own, while the ones in these other two entries were ridiculously beyond her.

“The one with the space-bending spell,” Kiernan said, casting his vote immediately. “Think how useful it could be to teleport.”

“How many thaums do you imagine it takes to teleport?” Thaddeus asked conversationally.

Kiernan deflated. “We could cast it…as a group?”

“Only if you are willing to bring in the world’s top experts in mathematics and natural science,” Thaddeus said. “I suggest we get an overview from beginning to end, and hope that Myrddin’s ideas build upon each other.”

“They often did, in my experience,” Siobhan offered. “I agree with Thaddeus.”

And so Thaddeus carefully counted out ten pages without lifting them, then used the edge of his thumbnail to turn them all. The surface flashed with another two glyphs, but Siobhan easily matched them both with her Will, and the contents remained legible.

A half-dozen intricate diagrams spread across the pages.

Myrddin was an impressive artist, and had penned several close-up examinations and dissections of the muscular structure of a horse, and an annotation about their strength-to-weight ratio. A note rested at the bottom of the second page. As always, Siobhan mentally translated the archaic spellings and word choices into something more modern.

Next on the list: unicorn, peryton, moonspring hare, dryad, quicksilver serpent, troll, sky kraken, dragon. Surely, that will be enough.

“Fascinating,” Thaddeus said. “I imagine he hoped to combine the best properties of each into Carnagore. It would be impossible with a flesh and blood being, but with a creature made out of metal…”

Obviously, Myrddin had succeeded in some capacity, as the results spoke for themselves.

The next set of pages delved into joints and tendons, interspersed with drawings of manually constructed versions, some of which were in strange shapes that Siobhan had never seen before and which would allow an unprecedented, disturbing range of motion.

After the next jump of ten pages, the focus shifted to an exploration of metal qualities. Myrddin’s meticulous charts compared the tensile strength, malleability, and magical conductivity of various metals. Siobhan noticed a small doodle of a frustrated face next to a failed experiment with mithril, which was the catch-all name for an alchemically modified metal that had over a dozen different formulations depending on the time period and thaumaturge who created it. Nowadays, any respectable metal-focused alchemist used more specific names for their formulations.

This exploration soon diverged into extensive work testing various alloys, both of metals and magical components. Thaddeus raised an eyebrow at a particularly audacious combination. “He attempted to alloy a charcoal reduction of wolframite with phoenix ash? Bold.”

Siobhan had no idea what that meant, so she nodded noncommittally.

Finally, they reached a section detailing Myrddin’s efforts to create an alchemical metal. The pages were filled with complex alchemical formulas and ritual diagrams, all aimed at producing a super-metal with seemingly impossible properties. Siobhan chuckled as she read Myrddin’s latest note.

Success! The metal resists heat and damage like dragon-scale, conducts magic like silver, and maintains flexibility like a yew sapling. Now, I just have to repeat this process sixty-three more times…

Hmm.

I realize now that I may have failed to plan ahead. I need a way to make bigger batches.

Grandmaster Kiernan had apparently gotten tired of squinting to try and make out the contents while remaining a safe distance from Siobhan, and had taken to pacing back and forth while throwing glances burning with curiosity at them.

Both Thaddeus and Siobhan ignored him.

The next section was more of the same, except with detailed examinations of various animal feet, hooves, and paws.

Following this was a propulsion spell designed to improve the grip and thrust of hooves. This ingenuity had eventually led to Carnagore’s speed and legendary sure-footedness.

The next pages revealed a diversion into compulsion spells aimed at keeping living beings away from a particular area.

“We need this,” Kiernan announced immediately.

Siobhan imagined that it would be helpful to keep the Crowns from finding the Architects of Khronos. She, too, could think of more than a few personal uses for such a spell.

The next set of pages held notes on Myrddin’s tests using something called “infrasound” to enhance the aversion compulsions. The notes detailed experiments with the sound frequency as well as the vibrational intensity required for humans to pick up the feeling that “something was wrong.”

However, it was the next section that truly captured Siobhan’s attention. Myrddin had written about the Black Wastes, noting how they, too, created a natural, deeply instinctual aversion in living beings.

The Black Wastes are troubling. Unlike other environmental taints, which I would expect to slowly improve over time, these seem to persist. I must map out their borders and come up with severity metrics that I can use to calculate whether they are changing at all.

Siobhan felt a chill run down her spine, remembering the effects of the Black Wastes on the Archaeologist—once Edgar—who she had met at the Retreat at Willowdale. That was what the Black Wastes had done to the man with the strongest mental resistance. The rest of his party were either dead or completely insane.

‘Except, perhaps, for Oliver’s thief. Did she get away before they could do irreparable damage?’

These journals had been recovered from a hermitage within the Black Wastes, which meant that at some point, Myrddin had decided to live within them. ‘What could have driven him to such a decision? What did he discover about the nature of that magic-warped land? And did it have anything to do with the Brillig?’

It was said that now-extinct species was the cause of the Black Wastes, but Professor Lacer also once mentioned that they were rumored to have been able to split their Wills. Like Myrddin. And like her.

She met Thaddeus’s gaze and saw the knowledge of the implications in his eyes. This could be significant. Myrddin’s research into the Black Wastes might hold answers to questions they hadn’t even thought to ask.

Siobhan wanted to keep reading here, but Thaddeus turned to the next section. Luckily, or perhaps ominously, Myrddin was still focused on the Black Wastes. Whatever the outcome of his desire to map and measure them, his worries had not been satisfied. The left page was filled with a disturbing sketch of a twisted landscape. The right page held a single note.

Before, I would have simply done a massive divination with a heptagram, reaching out to the world itself for answers. All of the data is there, to be sure, and accessible one way or another. But now, that seems…dangerous. Some things can not only be harmful to know, but harmful to access, for the knowledge to be poked and prodded like an open wound.

Siobhan had no idea what Myrddin might be referencing, but her own thoughts immediately jumped to the thing sealed in her mind. The thing that wanted her so badly to remember it. To know it. There was a reason Grandfather had made her forget.

After the next skip, Myrddin was planning an “expedition.” Except the preparations did not include travel gear, arrangements to handle magical beasts, or any maps.

I suspect that somewhere in the land of dreams exists an analogue for the Black Wastes. With the help of a friendly spirit, I may be able to find it in only a few days of exploration. I must prepare armor of magic and thought. It will surely be a dangerous trip. Still, it could be important to the Work.

The remainder of the page was covered in what looked like a coffee—or perhaps potion—spill, and Myrddin had not bothered to write over the dark stain.

Siobhan re-read Myrddin’s note several times. ‘The land of dreams…is that what Myrddin called the spirit realm?’ It could have been a simple, innocent turn of phrase, but something about it tickled in the back of Siobhan’s mind. Unfortunately, she didn’t have the spare brain-power to really dig into the thought.

Before Thaddeus could reach for the next set of pages, Siobhan turned one. She wanted to see what came of this. Who knew how long it would be until she could get answers, if they skipped past them now?

I found it. I did not enter, because I had not prepared enough protections, and I suspected my mind would be ripped apart. At this point in my life, I do not have enough sanity left to spare!

Siobhan wondered if that was supposed to be a dark joke, or if something had actually damaged Myrddin’s mental health. Maybe too many expeditions into the spirit realm.

After that, the journal moved on to a recipe for spiced hot chocolate that Myrddin rated, “Delicious!”

‘But where are the notes about his trip? Aren’t explorers supposed to catalogue their adventures? He didn’t even explain what exactly “it” was that he found!’ Siobhan complained silently.

Only, in the margin at the bottom of the page, below the recipe, Myrddin had written another note in an unusually messy scrawl.

I find myself worrying about the scar that isn’t healing.

Somehow, she knew he wasn’t talking about a physical wound.