Subject: Second Circles ch. 10: Ordeals Effected
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Posted on: 2018-04-15 17:13:00 UTC
Julia’s second plan, created in consultation with Naldross and the cloud as the sun still balanced, ruby-red, fire-red on the horizon, was no less audacious than her first.
She wasn’t going to try to hold back the cloud. She wasn’t going to fight something that had asked for her help.
She was going to change it.
It was going to be a big spell. It was going to be a big circle- the only construction Julia could get to conjugate was to wrap the circle around the mountain entire, capturing the peak and the cloud roaring down it inside.
It was going to take a lot of energy. Fortunately for Julia, the cloud already had a lot of energy- thermal and kinetic energy, that she was going to have to transmute into the magical energy it would take to turn ash and stone to water.
And she was going to need to balance out all that energy- just handling the side-effects, the leftovers of that transmutation would count as a major working in its own right.
And worst of all, she still had no idea what would go in the most important part of the spell- the circle for her name. The circle where she would stand.
(I am not a wizard,) Naldross had said, (I do not know your art. I cannot help you with this.)
The timestall had slipped, once, twice, the cloud gobbling up distance downhill every time before Julia stabilized it. Just holding that spell in her mind hurt, a painful knot of chronocausal energy building with each second she held back death.
She walked the perilous path again, and again, asking stones to shift and move and make it a perfect circle. The red sun balanced on the horizon, frozen, as Julia walked the circle again, marker in hand, drawing an unbroken circle four miles long.
The body of the spell was not complicated, but it too had to be written around the length of the circle. Julia’s hold on the timestall slipped once more, while she was on the far side of the mountain, the cloud rushed forwards again- she was close enough to hear its scream of despair, now, before she once again propped up the spell burning in her mind.
It was done an immeasurable eternity later. Julia’s knees were bleeding, her arms were aching, the timestall burned in her mind as hot as the flame that burned in the cloud and she stood in a hole in the spell, the last hole, the place where her name had to go, where the anchor had to go for more energy than she had any idea what to do with, and she had no idea how to fill it.
They were both made wrong, the cloud had said. They had known what was wrong with the cloud, Julia had known how to fix it- but as for herself, there was nothing. She couldn’t write her own name, because she didn’t even know it.
There had been a spell for this!
It was one of the scary ones, one of the untwisting ones, one of the fixing ones. Julia could barely focus on her Manual as she searched through it, all the words that weren’t written in the Speech beyond her pained ability to focus.
But there it was. The diagram had stood out to her even in idle flipping- it wasn’t a circle. The Arc of Duane was a spiral, a spell that cut inwards to the heart of anything with life that it was wrapped around. It would consume the tremendous amount of energy Julia needed it to, and it would use all of it to petition the Great Powers. “Who should this person be?”, the Arc would ask. Who were they meant to be? And then it asked Them to rename the wizard-who-no-longer-thought-her-name-was-James, to bring what should be to reality.
The warnings were mercifully and terribly clear. Renaming magic was a terrifyingly powerful thing. To invoke the Great Powers like this would leave Julia owing a significant favor to the entirety of the universe. And perhaps more significantly, the Arc did not care for external reality- a person renamed was a person remade, body and soul.
There were two examples, great works that had used the Arc of Duane to mend or destroy. None of them wrapped it around a wizard. The examples given had put extra circles, buffers, between the worker and the spiral, to ensure that they would be safe from its remaking.
Julia was out of time, out of strength, out of options. She drew the start of the Arc in the space she had left, knowing that each term would follow the first.
And then she read. One word at a time, one step at a time, she walked the perilous path once more. She read the smaller loop, the one that circled Naldross and placed him outside the spell, outside of the dragon’s-breath blast of the unchanged cloud. And then she stepped into her place, inside the inmost circle-that-was-not-a-circle and read the first term, and the second, and the third, a recursive spiral that shrank into a simple prayer.
“Please help. Please help. Please-”
The timestall failed, the world roared, the cloud surged forward and Julia felt the spell flare to life an instant before darkness took her.
...And I will post the conclusion this evening because I am a terrible person who likes her cliffhangers far too much to give up the chance to hold one last one over you all.
