The room was large and round. It smelled like a latrine or a stable. A prison, I guess. Even the fire hadn’t completely scoured it of its scent.

  Two twisted faces carved in stone graced the far wall of the room. For once, they weren’t my own. Instead, they reminded me of vision-dragons. Those terrifying faces seen if one stared into another’s eyes for too long. Halfway between dragon and man, and glittering with gold scales.

  Two doors led from the room. One on the right hand side, one directly ahead and between the two draconic figures. I moved back into the recently scorched hallway and sent my sword to the right hand door.

  The door popped free from where it was wedged and swung freely on its hinges. Another stuck door. A loud hissing noise filled the air.

  I quickly changed my ring’s senses to include taste and smell and waited ahead of Attar in the doorway.

  Something which deadened my nose and numbed my tongue, yet tasted of nothing but cold was creeping towards us.

  “Fall back! There is gas pouring from the door!”

  Attar led the way back to our safe haven of yellow swirling rocks.

  The gas followed. We could outrun it, but we were rapidly becoming cornered. Attar began crawling frantically through the hole.

  A spark of inspiration struck me as I remembered my fireball, abandoned next to the endless sea where I had summoned my sword. I quickly called it to me, then sent it down the hall to track the gas’s progress.

  The hall exploded in another wave of flame, this one heading back to the round room which had held the first explosion.

  I called Attar back.

  “I guess the gas is flammable. Perhaps that is why it exploded the first time.”

  “You didn’t have your fireball the first time.”

  “A natural source of gas then, with a pressure plate to act as a strike plate? It would be a simple trap to build, yet it would be deadly,” I started jogging back towards the room, “Wait here a moment, I’ll see how quickly the gas replenishes.”

  I wasn’t annihilated when I entered the room, so the gas couldn’t have refilled that fast, but now that I had gas on the mind, the strange, stable-like scent, was the gas. It grew stronger as I approached the door.

  Already, it was difficult to breathe.

  Blight the apples! We weren’t heading this way.

  I’d have to wait until the map came back, and chart a separate course.

  I returned to Attar, “We’ll have to pursue the way upward for now. The gas returns too quickly. If we hold our breath, we might trip the fire again, and we have no way of knowing how long the path is.”

  At the back of my mind was the thought that even if we could navigate the path, I hoped to someday have a path Brace’s party could navigate.

  The Tunnel spell had finished its job back on the other side of our survey.

  This time, I crawled through first, as we didn’t know what to expect in the large room.

  The moment my head reached the end of the tunnel, I discovered a flaw with the pixie’s amulet. It took me several minutes to crawl through the tunnel, yet the amulet only gave me two second’s warning. If I ended up in a dangerous situation—say, completely hypothetically, a second cockatrice—which wouldn’t kill me until the cockatrice noticed 5 seconds later, but would take several minutes to escape, I was dead.

  I glared at the cockatrice hard enough I was almost surprised I didn’t counter-poison it. What were the odds? One cockatrice was already impossible, two in two hours?

  I didn’t give the amulet a chance to grow warm.

  ?Safe Teleport? TransportII

  I landed with my spellbook and ring on top of me. I’d had to cast both the spells at once to keep them. My Fast Teleport was always at the ready, but if I’d been forced to leave behind my spellbook with a cockatrice I wasn’t getting it back.

  I took one of the shields I’d strapped to my pack and wedged it in the tunnel, then packed stone dust around the gaps. I didn’t have the breath to answer Attar’s unasked question until I was done.

  “Cockatrice,” I panted even though the exertion had been light.

  “Another one?” he asked in disbelief.

  “My thought as well. I’m also regretting my wall spell being transparent at the moment.”

  “How do we kill it?”

  “Not today. I need my spells back.”

  “What about my ghosts?”

  “The cockatrice poisons on a transcendent level of existence. They may not be immune.”

  We couldn’t fight the creature. We could continue to explore new rooms to find a place to hole up for the rest of the day, but if we’d already encountered two cockatrices their might be a third. Then end of the hall was a dead end, twenty feet of space I could section off with my bone barrier, but I’d encountered enough secret passages to doubt it was truly secure, and I didn’t know if the barrier would stop any wandering cockatrice’s gaze.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “We’ll need to return to the fifth floor for now,” I said.

  “How?”

  Too easy. I’d take the chance anyway.

  I waggled my eyebrows, even though he couldn’t see them.

  “Magic.”

  ***

  Rapture

  Lightstep Again

  Attar began to glow and rise into the air. The outline of his body became visible, even his nose and eyelids shone enough to make out the delight on his face. He was cloaked in my soul, yet also himself, allowing both spells to target him, though they had opposite foundations. 160 lbs of force began pulling Attar up the shaft.

  He hooked a foot against the low ceiling to stop himself and called, “How are you going to get up?”

  “Dangerously. Move up as fast as you can. I’ll be right behind you.”

  The sun rose just as his foot slipped up the hole. One light source leaving, another replacing it.

  Perfect.

  I pulled out my crayon. This was going to hurt.

  Attar began kicking off the walls and scrambling against them with his hands and feet, rising like a leaf caught on the breeze and light as cotton down.

  I took off my fouta and wrapped it around my hand. Attar was a speck near underside of the wooden lift by the time I was happy with how secure I made it. I readied my spellbook and cast my own spell.

  Scorch, Sword, Scintillation

  The blade (why hadn’t I recorded the handle?) appeared in the palm of my outstretched left hand. My spellbook was pinned to my chest with my chin, and my right hand held my crayon.

  “Let the rains come early and the breeze stay calm.”

  I began to rise up into the air. My skin was strong and I gripped the flat of the blade rather than the edge. My hand was protected by the fouta. But the blade had to dance. The journey, though 100 feet in distance, took less time than walking on level ground. I forced the blade to slow near the end, and modulated my speed for the purposes of recording my spell.

  Ascension: The caster is pulled upwards with up to 1936 lbs of force at a speed of up to 4ft/sec for up to thirty seconds.

  That was a spell which could get out of hand quickly. I might not be trying it outside any time soon.

  Attar was clinging to the ceiling when I arrived.

  I lowered him to the ground with a thought while I began scattering around my wall bones. Once the bones were in place I climbed up on the lift and lowered it down to floor level to prevent us from accidentally stumbling down the hole and sealing the way for anyone climbing back up.

  The fire in the hearth was still a dim glow, warming the room to a comfortable degree, though I doubted it had much more than an hour left in it.

  I stretched my legs out in front of the fire with a contented sigh, “It is afternoon yet, what shall we discuss while we wait for our dinner time?”

  “How does one become one of the Magi? Is it a Mystery, or can you speak of it?”

  “I may speak in broad terms. There is no central hierophant, nor a Mysterious initiation, but the path is not easy.”

  The sun rose. My eyebrows raised. Attar’s still glowing eyebrows did so as well as my body sent the spinning colours of dawn across the room.

  I started casting about in my mind for a thing to record while I continued to answer his question.

  “The path most take—all but myself from those I am aware of—is a specific vow; a neophyte Magus may not speak for five years. Only then can understanding begin. The aspirant will have mastery, eventually, over those things which he understands, so long as he also has dominion over them. Understand is not the understanding of natural philosophy, but the simpler patterns of meaning writ into the universe. I may, for instance, record a tool I have never seen before, so long as its purpose is to serve or enhance, as that is how I understand the nature of tools.”

  I took out my shield and began fanning it up and down towards the dying fire. It flared up as though I used a bellows. Smoke and dust swirled and rose in the wake.

  “Is this learning difficult?”

  Both of my hands grasped the shield, lending it my full strength. The air caught like it was water, and the shield struggled against my hands, but the wood would break before my grip.

  “It is the hardest and most important task any may set themselves. But all who seek mastery—not just Magi—walk towards the same mountain peak, even if all take a different path. Any path, no matter how poor, extended far enough, must eventually travel upward, save for those determined to turn their backs on meaning.”

  “Meaning being?”

  “In this context, the path, meaning, and nature are all the same.”

  “What did you mean that you did not take the path of silence?”

  “Some insights are only gained when you have no choice. Silence forces listening, even when you desperately need to speak. You learn why you should speak and when. You learn that most words are unnecessary, and some are vital. You learn that some problems can be trivially solved with the correct action, and that inaction, taken consciously, is equally powerful.

  “My path was pain. My body betrayed me. My limbs failed. My voice became splinters and my mind became a guttering fire. I was ground into dust, and remoulded as clay. Silence isolates, as does pain. You either survive isolation as one who is no longer lonely and alone, or you die.”

  I rotated away from the fire to prevent the whole room from filling with smoke. Slow steps took me carefully I wanted control of direction and bearing with my spell. Both angle and strength were modulated. Attar let me work. I let him let me. Our words had been said.

  Zephyr: A gust of wind with a conical base the size of a shield blows outward at a rate and direction controlled by the caster. The source of the wind moves up to two feet per second, following the whims of its master for up to an hour.

  My crayon shone like a crystal as I wrote the last line of my rune. A sunrise in miniature, contained inside the wax.

  I could write again.

  Strange. Still, I wasn’t going to tempt fate. I’d seen the suns swallowed when I’d failed to utilize them before.

  “Attar, I will be writing a number of spells. Something has changed, and I intend to take full advantage of it.”

  Zephyr. My shield began beating up and down again like bellows. The Zephyr spell vanished from my spellbook, but I was used to the fickle whims of dark magic by now. I wouldn’t let the loss of a weaker spell distract me from a stronger.

  Zephyr II: A gust of wind with a conical base the size of a shield blows outward at a rate and direction controlled by the caster. The source of the wind moves up to two feet per second, following the whims of its master for up to an hour.

  The spell was twice as strong as the previous version, but the shape of the rune was nearly identical. Only a small variance hinted at a difference, though not what that difference was. I’d have to incorporate it somehow in any further version I attempted.

  This time the room was still after completing the spell. I waited, head bowed, as the minutes slowly burned down. Not even the warlock’s whispers tested me.

  “I think that was it,” I said to Attar, “Let us sup, and then rest. I’m sure night is approaching.”