He cast the spell, taking his time to get it right, and felt the magic flow through him. It hurt, but he relished the pain; it meant the spell was drawing power from him. This being the first time he had cast a spell using the Pinnacle, his casting was far from perfect: the magic left him drained. He fell to his knees and stayed there while he recuperated.
Did it work?
he asked himself when he felt better.
Looking at the basket of potatoes in the corner of the pantry, Benen selected one of them and willed it to move up into the air. It shot straight up and hit the ceiling with such force that it became a flat wet mess on the ceiling.
Despite this setback, Benen whooped with delight at the thing. It had moved so fast!
He concentrated on his rag and willed it in the direction of the mess on the ceiling. This time he tried to moderate the speed and maintain control over the object. It didn’t work. The rag moved with lightning speed to the spot and flopped against the ceiling.
Undeterred, Benen continued working with the rag, moving it around the kitchen with his mind. He found that it took intense concentration for him to exercise fine control over the rag. He thought this might be something to do with the spell he had envisioned. He might very well have overestimated the force he needed for lifting, having had no reference point. Still, he worked with what he had created and soon enough, managed to manipulate the rag and clean the mess on the ceiling.
Using this newfound control, he picked up a new potato and held it before him in the air. He found he was grinning like an idiot and tried to calm himself for the next part. This part might be more dangerous and a mistake there could cause much greater damage than what had happened with the Pinnacle-based spell and the potato.
For his next spell Benen chose to call upon the Cleaver constellation. He had already verified it was in the sky and shining and thankfully this was a constellation he had worked with before. The effect he wanted was one that would destroy the peel but leave the potato unharmed. Control and precision were called for.
He cast the spell and this time, his problem was not one where the effect was overly powerful. This time the effect of the spell was far too subtle. Benen’s fear of creating too great an effect had reduced the spell’s power to the point that all it had done was clean the exterior of the potato, and not even very well at that. He sighed. He was already feeling drained and he’d not even prepared one potato yet.
Taking a deep breath, he refocused and cast a greater version of the same spell he had just tried. This time he annihilated the potato! Nothing at all was left of it.
Determined to get this right, Benen took up another potato with his mind. He pictured the exact effect he desired, concentrating on that above all. This time the spell burned and hurt him beyond any of the spells he had cast so far that day. Benen fell to the ground and lost consciousness for a few seconds. Everything hurt. When he was recovered enough he looked to where the potato had fallen: it was perfectly de-peeled.
Worth it,
he told himself, forcing belief that it was into his head.
He picked himself back up from the ground, used his magic rag to clean the potato, moving both with his strained mind and placed the potato in the pot of water he had prepared for cooking the vegetables.
The problem, he knew, was that he had concentrated too much on the effect and lost his proper focus on the constellation, the motions, and the incantation.
I can do better,
he thought.
He worked at it and managed to peel enough potatoes for the wizard’s meal. By this time he felt truly retched and wanted to lie down and sleep for an eternity while his body recovered, but he still needed to prepare a chicken and cook the vegetables. He abandoned the magic-only approach and prepared the rest of the meal using mundane means. He napped while the whole cooked, waking periodically to stir, baste, and check on things.
In the end, lunch was a success, but Benen felt he needed to practise the spells more. As it was, it had taken greater effort by far to do the steps using magic than to do them by mundane means. This was not as it should be. He was convinced practise was key and tried again at supper time.
Next he tackled the stain that had defied cleaning by mundane means. He ran into it as part of the normal rotation and confidently applied his magic rag to it. It surprised him that the stain resisted the power of the rag. No matter how much he rubbed it with his enchanted cloth, the stain didn’t change.
Is this even a stain?
he wondered.
The Overseer had insisted he clean this, so it was definitely something the wizard wanted gone, but it didn’t get removed by the cleaning effect on his rag.
What could it be?
Benen knew there were means to try to identify something through a variety of sensory enhancements, but this all seemed like a lot of work to him just so he could clean a stain up. Instead of trying those out he decided to stick with what he knew best: The Cleaver.
The constellation wasn’t up in the sky yet, so he continued his rotation and came back to the stain some time later. When he did return, he tried the rag once more, just in case. It had no more effect than before. Determined to make this work with the Cleaver, he brought that constellation to mind and wrought a spell of destruction to clear the stain from the stone.
He reasoned this would be a more powerful, more directed effect than that on the rag and therefore stood a better chance of working. He was careful not to direct any of the effect onto the stone itself; he didn’t want to break the floor.
When he was done, and the spell completed, the stain still remained.
He did not give up on The Cleaver yet. Undeterred, Benen created a more powerful effect than the one he had just tried; as powerful of an effect as he could. He knew this would leave him drained and tired for the rest of the day, but he didn’t want to just leave this stain here.
I can do this. I am a wizard in training and no simple stain is going to defy me.
He unleashed his spell upon the stain and was gratified when he saw it vanish. He fell to his knees, exhausted.
I got it!
But then, before his eyes, the stain reappeared!
Benen beat at it with his fists in sheer frustration. “No! No! No!”
He slunk back to his quarters to study up on sensory improvements. It seemed the wizard had planned this to be more of a challenge than Benen had expected. This was a challenge the wizard had placed there for him to overcome. He decided he wouldn’t fail.
He spent the rest of his free time that day and the next reading about the constellations that governed magic of the sensory type. It seemed to Benen that too many different sorts of enchantments existed for this sort of thing. He preferred the simplicity of The Cleaver’s effects.
In the end, he decided that the stain was likely the result of a magical effect on the part of the wizard. In that case, what he needed was an enhancement that allowed him to tell what had been done so that he would know what to undo. The undoing would be performed using his old friend, The Cleaver.
Detection magic was not actually governed by a constellation, but by the moon itself. The moon was always tricky to use because there were so many features to the body that were observable and they all needed to be kept in mind. Benen refreshed himself on the subject by going to the telescope array and using it to peer at the surface of the moon and study the topography. With it firmly in mind, he returned to the stain.
Closing his eyes and concentrating on what he had just seen of the moon, Benen called to mind the other facts he knew about it: the phase it was in, its weight, its apparent size and magnitude; all this and more. Then he used the not-yet familiar motions associated with moon magic and spoke the incantation words so foreign to his tongue. The spell, minor though it was, nearly knocked him out and left him writhing with pain on the ground.
When he finally felt better, about an hour later, Benen’s spell had elapsed and he had to cast it again.
Tomorrow,
he decided.
I’ll do it tomorrow.
This had proven to Benen that he needed to practise more of the different sorts of magic. He had gotten quite confident in his use of The Cleaver and forgotten how punishing even minor magic was when it was unfamiliar.
When he came back the next day, he tried the same effect once more and was slightly less devastated by it. This spell was meant to reveal the weaves of magic, so he looked around to see what he could now detect.
Unfortunately, the entire tower seemed to be enchanted, in some places with a multitude of effects. The magic revealed lines of force laid down in patterns to create effects and there were lines and whorls everywhere. Worse, he didn’t understand them. He saw the patterns relating to the stain, but they had lines going from it to elsewhere. He followed those and they led to another clump of patterns near the base of the tower, many yards away.
Benen despaired.
He couldn’t just dispel any of these patterns, too many were interconnected. He feared some of the patterns were integral to the flying effect keeping the tower in the skies. If he cut any of these lines, would the whole unravel?
He decided he couldn’t just use brute force on this problem and would need to learn more about what it was he was seeing. He sought out Orafin and asked him about the patterns.
“Identifying magic is an entire education, my young friend,” the rat told him. “Different magicians will often cause a unique pattern for the same effect. There are rules, certainly, but there are many variables involved; enough to make casual learning of this impossible.”
“Point me to the book,” Benen said and sighed. The stain would wait for a while, it seemed.
Learning to decipher the traces of magic left behind by spells and magical effects in general was long and hard. While learning this so that he could erase the stain, Benen continued in his attempts to use magic for all things he possibly could. The exception to this was when he was in the presence of the wizard.
When with the wizard he used no magic at all. He had not been forbidden from using it, he simply was unsure if it was allowed and since the wizard had never mentioned he should use magic for any of his tasks, he did not. This ended one day in the laboratory.
The wizard had been working on a new effect and kept using animals as the targets for the spell. Unfortunately, the work had not been going well and the animals kept dying. This was not actually the intent of the wizard’s magic. He meant to combine a growth effect, which comes from the Sun, and endurance and strength, which came from the fourth planet, Mithran. The wizard could apply one effect and then the other, but he was trying to apply both at the same time, as one spell. What was happening was that the two would combine to result in an extra-strong growth spell, causing the creature to grow out of all proportions and die from heart failure. When the last of the animals was used up — there had not been very many — the wizard decided he would use his apprentice as the target of the spell.
“You will be perfectly safe, boy,” said the wizard. “You’ll first cast your own strength and endurance spell to make sure you can withstand the growth even if my own effect goes awry. It’s about time you started using magic more, by your age I was doing everything with magic.”
Benen reddened but did not correct the wizard. He was too busy fearing he would soon die from a growth spell gone wrong. He had never called upon the fourth planet and was afraid he would fail his spell, or succeed it insufficiently to survive the growth.
He tried to call facts about Mithran to mind, but he couldn’t remember enough. He knew that it appeared red in the telescope and that it was named after an ancient god of war that no one worshipped anymore. All the planets were named after old gods, some from different pantheons. Wizards, of course, did not believe in gods. They were certain the universe was the result of magical processes perfectly explainable, if one understands magic theory deeply enough.
Still, knowing the history of a constellation, or other celestial body, helped with the casting so Benen latched onto what he knew of Mithran and about the physical look of the planet and hoped it would carry him through the spell casting intact.
It wasn’t enough.
He cast the spell and it worked, but it floored him. Benen found himself face first on the ground, twitching from the magic’s flow through him, barely conscious. All of this in front of the wizard. The man harrumphed his disappointment.
“Do not ever shame me with such a display again,” the wizard said. “No apprentice of mine should ever be so poor at casting simple magic. From now on you will not use your hands at all for tasks. You will do
everything
with magic. That will ensure this never happens again.”
The wizard approached Benen and helped him up, grabbing him by both hands. He did not let go of Benen’s hands once he was up, instead he cast a spell. From the incantation words the wizard used, Benen was able to tell that the spell called upon The Fool. This constellation was used for curses, among other things. Benen braced himself for the worst.
The worst didn’t materialize.
The wizard let go of his hands and asked Benen if he was ready to be grown. Benen was waiting for some effect from the wizard’s spell to make itself manifest, but nothing did. He nodded and hoped that he would survive the growth. He should — probably. He did have enhanced strength and endurance, so his heart should hold out.
Should
. He didn’t like the sound of that at all.