Now that hostilities had shifted from Normenia, he was at a loss for what to do. It wasn’t that Norman didn’t have projects to work on, if anything he had too many. He realized he was unfocused. It was easy to focus on a goal when there was a threat. But now that there wasn’t a pressing need, he couldn’t quite decide what should get his immediate attention.
There was also Kalia to consider. While he enjoyed the woman’s company, he didn’t want to jump into a relationship with her without getting to know her first. That was one of the major reasons his previous relationships failed. That and his inability to stay emotionally invested in the previous women he had dated. He now understood they were all shallow, meaningless flings.
Even his long-term relationship with Charise was more due to his unwillingness to be alone than it was for any affection he held for the woman. The only thing she brought to that failed relationship was superficial beauty. If only he had realized that back then, it would have saved him a lot of trouble.
Shifting away from those thoughts, Norman turned towards his work. There would be time later to reflect on his feelings.
To help sort through what he needed to accomplish, he pulled out a sheet of paper and started making a list. The first item on that list was decoding the rest of the symbols he knew. Honestly, each symbol should be a separate entry on the list because that was a long-term project.
Next up was experimenting with his spells and optimizing them or finding out every little tweak or change inherent in them. Again, not a simple one-day job. It would require weeks of work for each spell. Maybe even longer with the more advanced ones.
It also didn’t make much sense to do that unless he first figured out what each symbol that made up that particular spell was used for. He circled both and added a note to maybe do those in tandem.
Creating new spells from the symbols he already knew went on the list. Again, this was reliant on his understanding of the base symbols.
He moved on and wrote down, ‘Understanding the underlying principles behind magic’ as his next item. He had a decent foundational understanding of magic. Internal mana, external mana, and spells couldn’t work without a transfer of energy of some type. But the why eluded him. He had asked Saliu about it once, but the man was confused by the question. It seemed the jorik didn’t care what the principle behind the magic was, for them it just was. It was something ingrained in their very nature. It was like asking them the meaning of life.
As for the gron, well, they didn’t care either. The only thing they worried about was whether it had a fixed set of rules they could work from. They treated magic more like a programming language. Which wasn’t inherently wrong.
The gron Norman had spoken to couldn’t tell him what those rules were, apart from the very limited scope of knowledge they had. And none of those applied to what he knew other than what he had already learned from Grobert.
Norman put a note next to that entry as ‘lifelong.’
He continued the list: Experiment with creating more mana-touched creatures; experiment with skeletons; understand what causes magical arcing; spell arrays; quick casting; multi-dimensional magical circles; etc…
It was a very comprehensive list.
One thing he hadn’t added to the list was his experiments into the soul. Or more accurately, using a soul to power spells and enchantments. Technically that wasn’t completely accurate either.
Ever since he had learned souls were extremely resilient, he had wanted to know why. In order to do that, he needed to glimpse inside a soul. That meant he had to break one open first. Breaking something open that was as tough as a soul, sounded dangerous. This is why Norman had asked Grobert to build that teleporter far away from anything in the jungle. If his theory proved true, a soul could be the most powerful form of energy known to man. And that’s why he wasn’t recording anything related to that line of research. Being the only person with that knowledge would give Normenia a huge edge. But he wasn’t quite ready to work on those experiments.
In the end, he decided to focus his current efforts on his multi-dimensional spell circles and quick casting.
He chose the first because he had yet to see anyone else casting spells that way. And going by the enchanters’ surprised faces, neither had they. It wasn’t that multidimensional magic was new. It wasn’t. The gron had their version with magitech and while he hadn’t seen it, he would bet that the jorik had some version as well. But if he had to guess, theirs was performed using some sort of magical item. Otherwise, Saliu wouldn’t have been so surprised to see Norman casting the spell in the air.
And that wasn’t even that complex of a spell. What Norman really wanted to accomplish, was to convert or enhance all of his spells this way.
As for why he picked quick casting, that was easy. If his opponent couldn’t react to Norman’s casting, then he could come out on top that much easier. This was abundantly evident way back when Vincent hit him with the surprise Plague Ray. And he already had a few ideas kicking around in the back of his head as to how the man had accomplished the feat. He just hadn’t had time to experiment with them. Well, there was no time like the present.
After making his decision, he gathered up his notes and looked them over quickly before sticking them in the new safe inside his workroom. The safe worked much like the shredder, in that it would turn anything inside it to component atoms scattered across the country if someone attempted to move or open it without his mana signature. Norman kind of wished Grobert hadn’t told him what happened to items inside the safe. He was hesitant to stick any body parts within now that he knew.
With his notes secure, he moved to the testing chamber. For the first time in months, he was alone. Princess and the other hellhounds were out patrolling. It seemed they could smell those shapeshifters. So he let them roam and a pair of Death Knights followed them to perhaps capture one of the things for questioning. He didn’t hold out much hope for that outcome though.
With the room secure, he started preparing the ingredients for the spells, along with going over the designs in his mind. His magical intuition made this whole process possible. He couldn’t imagine another mage accidentally stumbling upon the correct orientation for a multidimensional spell circle.
It wasn’t as simple as duplicating the flat circle and orienting it at a different angle. Although you could do that, it didn’t change or enhance the original spell in any way. No, the multidimensional circle, or MDC for short, required the original circle to be stretched and twisted, sometimes even looped like some weird toroidal puzzle. Even the one he was testing today had taken him months of effort to construct. But after he learned the trick, he was able to convert three more of his spells to the MDC model over another month's time. He couldn’t wait to see what they did.
The first spell started to take shape as he weaved both of his hands in a complex gesture in front of him. While he hadn’t figured out quick casting, he had improved his hand and finger motions to a ridiculous degree. It was to the point that he could cast any of his basic spells in under three seconds.
His twitching and jerking hand motions would probably look odd and even unnatural to anyone else though. Especially with him using more than one finger in tandem to draw the circle while the others formed the runes. It wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for his enhanced mental acuity and daily rigorous practice with his fingers. The hours of practice always made his hands feel like someone had beaten them with hammers repeatedly for hours, but his potions took care of that.
As the spell formed, occasionally his hand would zip away and he would wipe the fingers across his blood bracers to pick up additional magic powder. That was the biggest downside of not knowing how to quick cast. He had never seen Vincent use any magical powder or ingredient in his spells. For now, the how eluded him, but he would figure it out eventually.
With one last flourish, the spell circle snapped into place. It swirled and twisted in the air, emitting its bloody red light as Norman reached into the sleeve of his jacket and flicked a tiny bone shard into the orbiting construct.
As soon as the bone entered the sphere of twisting magical lines, it collapsed on itself, forming a dense red ball about the size of a marble. That didn’t last long though as the red was overtaken by black and the sphere compressed even further to the size of a pea.
Norman held his open palm toward the sphere and it jerked toward him, hovering an inch above his hand. He felt a connection to the orb and he tried to will it to move. It shook in his hand and made him gag slightly from the weird pull it produced, but it didn’t leave.
Once he settled his stomach, he examined the tiny ball of darkness. “I wonder if you need a target first?”
Almost as soon as he had the thought, the ball zipped away faster than he could follow. The closest cage seemed to be where the ball had headed. And the tiny black orb didn’t care what got in its way. He peaked through the perfect little hole drilled through the side of the cage. But when he inspected the animal inside, it was unhurt.
He felt that same pulling sensation again, only this time it came from the creature. Norman tugged at it and the animal moved.
Wanting to verify his findings, he opened the cage. The small animal didn’t even attempt to escape until he willed it to exit the cage.
“A control spell?” This is not at all what he expected to happen when he built the spell form. Then again, he didn’t know what to expect considering it was a wholly unique spell.
He continued to command the creature around the room. It wasn’t like puppeteering, but he could also tell the creature wasn’t using its own understanding to do stuff. Unless the small rodent had learned how to pick up a pen and write recently.
Wanting to see how far this spell went, Norman closed his eyes and tried to will the creature to see for him.
At first, he didn’t think it worked, but soon a monochromatic scene entered his mind. It was very odd, to say the least. If it wasn’t for his experience with Glimpse from Beyond and his early practice with rodents, it might have been too much for him. But as it was, he could stand it. So long as he kept his eyes closed. As soon as he opened one eye, a splitting migraine shot straight into his brain.
Norman winced at the pain but quickly shut his eye as he moved the creature around through its own eyes. It was a bit surreal to see himself standing there with his eyes closed while also looking at himself. Kind of like an out-of-body experience.
After about ten minutes, the vision abruptly snapped off and Norman blinked his eyes open. He could tell the spell was starting to fade. After checking the clock, he saw it had lasted around thirty minutes. Before the spell completely broke, he commanded the rodent back into its cage where it shut the door behind itself.
It was just in time as the spell suddenly cut off, leaving Norman feeling mentally exhausted. There was also a noticeable drain on his mana, but not enough to worry him. He could probably cast the spell four or five times with his current pool.
Taking a seat, he thought about the uses for a spell like this. The name was obvious, Command. Spycraft would be a good use, but he already had Wraiths for that. Although it would always be good to have other options. It was possible he could arm the Wraiths or Death Knights with single-use versions of this spell to help with scouting. Although he wasn’t sure if they would have the mana capacity to run the spell.
But he was getting ahead of himself. There was more testing that needed to be done before he figured out where and how it could be deployed.
The next spell was quite a bit different. Norman took out the frozen skull of one of the grazers. After his strange success with the Orb of Abominination, or did he decide to call it the Orb of Chaos? You know what… neither of those names was good. He decided to rename it to the Orb of Change. It fit the spell better. Anyway… after his success with the Orb of Change, he wanted to test a multidimensional version.
He started weaving the spell around the skull, the threads of crimson magic sticking to it like whisps of cotton candy. Soon the skull started to rise in the air allowing him to complete the final lines. It almost looked like someone had wrapped the skull in red twine. Black smoke started to rise from the skull as the lines of magic sunk through the hair, skin, and muscles of the creature. What wasn’t burned off, simply fell to the floor, but it turned into ash before it hit the ground.
Once the meat was burned away from the skull, he was left staring at a floating skull that had taken on a ruby-like coloring, its eyes shining the same colored fire. He could also see an almost invisible aura around it that made it appear to be bathed in flaming shadows.
“Well, that’s something…” He didn’t feel any connection to this spell like he did with the last one. And no amount of mental gymnastics could get it to respond. But it had turned toward him when he spoke.
“Kill everything inside this room.”
While the floating spell couldn’t speak, Norman could swear its eyes glowed brighter in glee right before it zipped away and opened its mouth. What came out wasn’t fire, but it sure as hell acted that way. The shadowy flames belched from inside the skull’s mouth, covering the cages and reducing the animals inside to the same black ash that had drifted down from it when Norman cast the spell. And while the shadows didn’t burn or even harm the cages, he could see the shadows they cast, now also wavered in the same flame-like way. Now this was a useful spell. Numerous ways to use the nearly invisible fire quickly came to mind.
Now that hostilities had shifted from Normenia, he was at a loss for what to do. It wasn’t that Norman didn’t have projects to work on, if anything he had too many. He realized he was unfocused. It was easy to focus on a goal when there was a threat. But now that there wasn’t a pressing need, he couldn’t quite decide what should get his immediate attention.
There was also Kalia to consider. While he enjoyed the woman’s company, he didn’t want to jump into a relationship with her without getting to know her first. That was one of the major reasons his previous relationships failed. That and his inability to stay emotionally invested in the previous women he had dated. He now understood they were all shallow, meaningless flings.
Even his long-term relationship with Charise was more due to his unwillingness to be alone than it was for any affection he held for the woman. The only thing she brought to that failed relationship was superficial beauty. If only he had realized that back then, it would have saved him a lot of trouble.
Shifting away from those thoughts, Norman turned towards his work. There would be time later to reflect on his feelings.
To help sort through what he needed to accomplish, he pulled out a sheet of paper and started making a list. The first item on that list was decoding the rest of the symbols he knew. Honestly, each symbol should be a separate entry on the list because that was a long-term project.
Next up was experimenting with his spells and optimizing them or finding out every little tweak or change inherent in them. Again, not a simple one-day job. It would require weeks of work for each spell. Maybe even longer with the more advanced ones.
It also didn’t make much sense to do that unless he first figured out what each symbol that made up that particular spell was used for. He circled both and added a note to maybe do those in tandem.
Creating new spells from the symbols he already knew went on the list. Again, this was reliant on his understanding of the base symbols.
He moved on and wrote down, ‘Understanding the underlying principles behind magic’ as his next item. He had a decent foundational understanding of magic. Internal mana, external mana, and spells couldn’t work without a transfer of energy of some type. But the why eluded him. He had asked Saliu about it once, but the man was confused by the question. It seemed the jorik didn’t care what the principle behind the magic was, for them it just was. It was something ingrained in their very nature. It was like asking them the meaning of life.
As for the gron, well, they didn’t care either. The only thing they worried about was whether it had a fixed set of rules they could work from. They treated magic more like a programming language. Which wasn’t inherently wrong.
The gron Norman had spoken to couldn’t tell him what those rules were, apart from the very limited scope of knowledge they had. And none of those applied to what he knew other than what he had already learned from Grobert.
Norman put a note next to that entry as ‘lifelong.’
He continued the list: Experiment with creating more mana-touched creatures; experiment with skeletons; understand what causes magical arcing; spell arrays; quick casting; multi-dimensional magical circles; etc…
It was a very comprehensive list.
One thing he hadn’t added to the list was his experiments into the soul. Or more accurately, using a soul to power spells and enchantments. Technically that wasn’t completely accurate either.
Ever since he had learned souls were extremely resilient, he had wanted to know why. In order to do that, he needed to glimpse inside a soul. That meant he had to break one open first. Breaking something open that was as tough as a soul, sounded dangerous. This is why Norman had asked Grobert to build that teleporter far away from anything in the jungle. If his theory proved true, a soul could be the most powerful form of energy known to man. And that’s why he wasn’t recording anything related to that line of research. Being the only person with that knowledge would give Normenia a huge edge. But he wasn’t quite ready to work on those experiments.
In the end, he decided to focus his current efforts on his multi-dimensional spell circles and quick casting.
He chose the first because he had yet to see anyone else casting spells that way. And going by the enchanters’ surprised faces, neither had they. It wasn’t that multidimensional magic was new. It wasn’t. The gron had their version with magitech and while he hadn’t seen it, he would bet that the jorik had some version as well. But if he had to guess, theirs was performed using some sort of magical item. Otherwise, Saliu wouldn’t have been so surprised to see Norman casting the spell in the air.
And that wasn’t even that complex of a spell. What Norman really wanted to accomplish, was to convert or enhance all of his spells this way.
As for why he picked quick casting, that was easy. If his opponent couldn’t react to Norman’s casting, then he could come out on top that much easier. This was abundantly evident way back when Vincent hit him with the surprise Plague Ray. And he already had a few ideas kicking around in the back of his head as to how the man had accomplished the feat. He just hadn’t had time to experiment with them. Well, there was no time like the present.
After making his decision, he gathered up his notes and looked them over quickly before sticking them in the new safe inside his workroom. The safe worked much like the shredder, in that it would turn anything inside it to component atoms scattered across the country if someone attempted to move or open it without his mana signature. Norman kind of wished Grobert hadn’t told him what happened to items inside the safe. He was hesitant to stick any body parts within now that he knew.
With his notes secure, he moved to the testing chamber. For the first time in months, he was alone. Princess and the other hellhounds were out patrolling. It seemed they could smell those shapeshifters. So he let them roam and a pair of Death Knights followed them to perhaps capture one of the things for questioning. He didn’t hold out much hope for that outcome though.
With the room secure, he started preparing the ingredients for the spells, along with going over the designs in his mind. His magical intuition made this whole process possible. He couldn’t imagine another mage accidentally stumbling upon the correct orientation for a multidimensional spell circle.
It wasn’t as simple as duplicating the flat circle and orienting it at a different angle. Although you could do that, it didn’t change or enhance the original spell in any way. No, the multidimensional circle, or MDC for short, required the original circle to be stretched and twisted, sometimes even looped like some weird toroidal puzzle. Even the one he was testing today had taken him months of effort to construct. But after he learned the trick, he was able to convert three more of his spells to the MDC model over another month's time. He couldn’t wait to see what they did.
The first spell started to take shape as he weaved both of his hands in a complex gesture in front of him. While he hadn’t figured out quick casting, he had improved his hand and finger motions to a ridiculous degree. It was to the point that he could cast any of his basic spells in under three seconds.
His twitching and jerking hand motions would probably look odd and even unnatural to anyone else though. Especially with him using more than one finger in tandem to draw the circle while the others formed the runes. It wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for his enhanced mental acuity and daily rigorous practice with his fingers. The hours of practice always made his hands feel like someone had beaten them with hammers repeatedly for hours, but his potions took care of that.
As the spell formed, occasionally his hand would zip away and he would wipe the fingers across his blood bracers to pick up additional magic powder. That was the biggest downside of not knowing how to quick cast. He had never seen Vincent use any magical powder or ingredient in his spells. For now, the how eluded him, but he would figure it out eventually.
With one last flourish, the spell circle snapped into place. It swirled and twisted in the air, emitting its bloody red light as Norman reached into the sleeve of his jacket and flicked a tiny bone shard into the orbiting construct.
As soon as the bone entered the sphere of twisting magical lines, it collapsed on itself, forming a dense red ball about the size of a marble. That didn’t last long though as the red was overtaken by black and the sphere compressed even further to the size of a pea.
Norman held his open palm toward the sphere and it jerked toward him, hovering an inch above his hand. He felt a connection to the orb and he tried to will it to move. It shook in his hand and made him gag slightly from the weird pull it produced, but it didn’t leave.
Once he settled his stomach, he examined the tiny ball of darkness. “I wonder if you need a target first?”
Almost as soon as he had the thought, the ball zipped away faster than he could follow. The closest cage seemed to be where the ball had headed. And the tiny black orb didn’t care what got in its way. He peaked through the perfect little hole drilled through the side of the cage. But when he inspected the animal inside, it was unhurt.
He felt that same pulling sensation again, only this time it came from the creature. Norman tugged at it and the animal moved.
Wanting to verify his findings, he opened the cage. The small animal didn’t even attempt to escape until he willed it to exit the cage.
“A control spell?” This is not at all what he expected to happen when he built the spell form. Then again, he didn’t know what to expect considering it was a wholly unique spell.
He continued to command the creature around the room. It wasn’t like puppeteering, but he could also tell the creature wasn’t using its own understanding to do stuff. Unless the small rodent had learned how to pick up a pen and write recently.
Wanting to see how far this spell went, Norman closed his eyes and tried to will the creature to see for him.
At first, he didn’t think it worked, but soon a monochromatic scene entered his mind. It was very odd, to say the least. If it wasn’t for his experience with Glimpse from Beyond and his early practice with rodents, it might have been too much for him. But as it was, he could stand it. So long as he kept his eyes closed. As soon as he opened one eye, a splitting migraine shot straight into his brain.
Norman winced at the pain but quickly shut his eye as he moved the creature around through its own eyes. It was a bit surreal to see himself standing there with his eyes closed while also looking at himself. Kind of like an out-of-body experience.
After about ten minutes, the vision abruptly snapped off and Norman blinked his eyes open. He could tell the spell was starting to fade. After checking the clock, he saw it had lasted around thirty minutes. Before the spell completely broke, he commanded the rodent back into its cage where it shut the door behind itself.
It was just in time as the spell suddenly cut off, leaving Norman feeling mentally exhausted. There was also a noticeable drain on his mana, but not enough to worry him. He could probably cast the spell four or five times with his current pool.
Taking a seat, he thought about the uses for a spell like this. The name was obvious, Command. Spycraft would be a good use, but he already had Wraiths for that. Although it would always be good to have other options. It was possible he could arm the Wraiths or Death Knights with single-use versions of this spell to help with scouting. Although he wasn’t sure if they would have the mana capacity to run the spell.
But he was getting ahead of himself. There was more testing that needed to be done before he figured out where and how it could be deployed.
The next spell was quite a bit different. Norman took out the frozen skull of one of the grazers. After his strange success with the Orb of Abominination, or did he decide to call it the Orb of Chaos? You know what… neither of those names was good. He decided to rename it to the Orb of Change. It fit the spell better. Anyway… after his success with the Orb of Change, he wanted to test a multidimensional version.
He started weaving the spell around the skull, the threads of crimson magic sticking to it like whisps of cotton candy. Soon the skull started to rise in the air allowing him to complete the final lines. It almost looked like someone had wrapped the skull in red twine. Black smoke started to rise from the skull as the lines of magic sunk through the hair, skin, and muscles of the creature. What wasn’t burned off, simply fell to the floor, but it turned into ash before it hit the ground.
Once the meat was burned away from the skull, he was left staring at a floating skull that had taken on a ruby-like coloring, its eyes shining the same colored fire. He could also see an almost invisible aura around it that made it appear to be bathed in flaming shadows.
“Well, that’s something…” He didn’t feel any connection to this spell like he did with the last one. And no amount of mental gymnastics could get it to respond. But it had turned toward him when he spoke.
“Kill everything inside this room.”
While the floating spell couldn’t speak, Norman could swear its eyes glowed brighter in glee right before it zipped away and opened its mouth. What came out wasn’t fire, but it sure as hell acted that way. The shadowy flames belched from inside the skull’s mouth, covering the cages and reducing the animals inside to the same black ash that had drifted down from it when Norman cast the spell. And while the shadows didn’t burn or even harm the cages, he could see the shadows they cast, now also wavered in the same flame-like way. Now this was a useful spell. Numerous ways to use the nearly invisible fire quickly came to mind.
