We began moving down the hallways again, our library practice helping us evade, nullify, or prematurely activate the traps, and after a bit of wandering through the zig-zagging corridors, we found ourselves stepping to the next room. Given that it wasn’t a treasure trove of crystals, I sighed.

  “Guess this answers if hallways count or not. If they did, we’d have just completed the entire thing.”

  Jackson let out an annoyed sounding grunt of agreement while we surveyed the room. It was circular, as all of them had been, but unlike the previous ones, it was filled with stuff. There were couches, tables, oil lamps, and more. Stranger still, the room was filled with mirrors, and the sealed door wasn’t visible anywhere.

  We studied the room for some time before Salem spoke.

  “The reflections dun’ match the reality, an’ worse, they’re slowly changin’. Look.”

  He pointed at a mirror reflecting part of an oil lamp and couch. The lamp was set in a different position in the mirror, and as he’d pointed out, the flame was much higher in the reflection than reality. It was creeping close to some of the lace on the couch’s reflection, and I moved, quickly shifting the lamp and lace to match the mirror’s. The flame died down to a normal level, and the mirror vanished.

  “Match the reflections, before they start burning things,” I said. “Noted. Shall we?”

  We spread through the room, matching things to their reflections. The trickiest instance was when a mirror also contained the reflection of another mirror, forcing us to swap things around several times before we got it, but when the last mirror vanished, so too did the blank patch of wall where the exit should have been. We moved down the hall again, once more dealing with the traps as we came across them.

  “It went puzzle, fight, puzzle,” Jackson said. “I would bet that the next room is a fight.”

  “Unfortunately, I agree,” Yushin said, bobbing her head. “We should prepare.”

  I conjured a second shield, and prepared to cast coinshot, arcane missile, or a curse as we finally stepped into the next room.

  There was nothing there.

  At least, to my eyes.

  My nose was immediately filled with the scent of mist and steel, somehow both faint and strong at the same time, and most worrisome of all, covered in the whitewyrm mercury poison. I could smell no less than ten distinct sources of poison scattered all throughout the room.

  “Invisible assailants!” Yushin and I shouted in unison. I whipped my wand out in an arc, layering allies’ sigils over each of us, while Yushin flexed her hand, chanting in a spell that seemed to weave her bloodline and her affinity together. Salem began casting a spell of his own, and the instant my sigils appeared, Jackson brought his hands together, gold and silver light sparking to life. I hurriedly layed orbs of air over each of us as Jackson’s spell completed, and the entire room was turned into a massive inferno.

  The sigils strained, and an instant before they popped, the fire cut off. Jackson was panting and shook his head.

  “That took most of my ether,” he said. “I’m out.”

  Salem’s spell went off, and suddenly I could feel the position of the three remaining assassins, even as one of them struck my arcane armor. Salem dodged out of the way of one, while Yushin held her hand out. It had transformed into a claw, and swirls of white and purple flowed out of the invisible assassin’s knives and to her.

  We launched into motion as Salem conjured a pair of shields and helped push Jackson back. I punched the gut of the one attacking me, and shook my hand. The thing was made of metal, and it hurt, especially with my depleted bloodline not fully backing up the strike.

  I wove my hand and wand through the air, placing misfortune curses over the remaining assailants, while Yushin finished the one she had been fighting. A rain of arcane missiles from myself and Salem helped serve to finish the remaining two, and the door slid open.

  “Everyone okay?” Jackson asked. “My healing boon is still workable, even without ether.”

  Yushin had a few shallow cuts, which Jackson healed, and once everyone was patched up, we stepped down the hall. I was wary of traps, but this time, there were none, and we emerged in a final circular room.

  This one was better lit than the others, and its exit was a cloud of silvery mist set against the wall. There were a pair of statues on either side of the exit, and in the center of the room, a series of short tables sat, covered in stones. There were amethysts the size of my thumb, rubies the size of a nail, smooth marble the size of a goose egg. There were blue ether crystals and finely cut topaz and intricate glass spheres etched with runes.

  As we stepped into the room, the statues shifted. Their entire body turned fluid, and they surveyed each of us before speaking, their voices ringing out in a perfectly synchronized harmony.

  “Congratulations, students, for completing one of the myriad trials of the Crystal Caves. Your party is entitled to take two items from this room, and you will be unable to enter the fourth circle trial again for a year and a day.”

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  The smooth, fluid stone making them up froze as they returned to their original positions. I glanced around. Yushin’s face was grim, not wanting to have to devolve into an argument with us, while Salem was looking contemplative. Jackson… looked utterly unconcerned.

  “Who gets a stone, then?” I asked.

  “I’ve a proposal,” Salem said, buffing his nails on his shirt. “This was pretty easy for us, tah be honest. If we hadn’t taken Applied Mage Combat, or hadnae been able to use our secondary powers, it might’a been harder. But I think we’ve still got enough power to take on the third circle trial.”

  Yushin nodded swiftly to him.

  “This is fair. Jackson, you stated that the first stone you found should go to Emrys, even if you found no others. I think you should take a third circle stone.”

  “Yeah, that’s a great idea,” Jackson agreed, perking up at the idea. “Then we can flip a silver to see who gets the third and fourth, between you two?”

  “Salem can have it,” Yushin said, though it almost sounded like it caused her physical pain. Salem pursed his lips for a moment, then nodded in thanks to her.

  He and I began pursuing the shelves, and I used my partially restored pool of ether to cast ethersight, while also examining the scent that each of the stones gave off, looking for any reaction to my bloodline.

  All of the stones were powerful, much more so than the smokey quartz that I was using for my current wand, and while some of them were stronger than others, I didn’t immediately notice standouts in the way that I had during my class. This probably was just a reward, and not a test, then.

  I hummed as I thought about what exactly I wanted from my staff. It was going to be a source of powerful, but slow, spellcraft. That seemed like it would lend itself better to either noncombat magic like waterproof or to combat magic that I could cast before the fight began like arcane armor.

  I mentally reviewed my spells, and found that most of my spells actually fit into that category. I didn’t have many direct offensive spells, and the ones I did have were woven into my wand. I’d want to add some of my affinity magic, but otherwise I needed something that could do everything.

  With that in mind, I steered away from the stones that seemed to have specific strengths or weaknesses. Eventually I found a red opal that glowing with ether that gave off faint impressions of a slow but steady power. In truth, it almost reminded me of some of the tortoise bloodlines that I had seen: able to exert tremendous power when they actually landed a blow while also being incredibly durable… but incredibly slow.

  Still, this was the point of a staff, was it not? This stone’s aspect seemed to be on concentrating the raw power of ether inside of a spell by drawing out the casting time, and that might actually work even better when I used power that was already intensely concentrated, like my bloodline.

  I put my stone in my pocket, satisfied with my choice, and Salem selected an amethyst that seemed to give off the impression of having once belonged to a race of powerful psychic spiders.

  We left, and the moment we stepped out, we re-appeared outside, looking down at the closed cellar door.

  “Did it close itself?” Jackson asked. “We opened it.”

  “It brought us to a’ demiplane, and tha’s your question?” Salem asked.

  “I don’t think it was a demiplane, actually,” I interjected. “It smelled of sand far above. I think it’s part of the Tall Mesa region, and we were just teleported.”

  “Huh.”

  “Shall we move?” Yushin asked, pragmatic as always.

  “Gimme twenty minutes to run the massage technique?” Jackson requested. “Won’t bring me back to full, but it should give me enough ether to be useful.”

  After waiting for Jackson to recover, we re-opened the door and stepped through, heading into the room where the different challenge doors were located. The entryway to the fourth circle had been sealed off by a force wall, with the number three hundred and sixty-six written in glowing symbols written atop it.

  We began moving our way through the third circle challenges, where we faced off against a puzzle involving a depiction of the night sky’s constellations that were on different sliding tiles, and then faced off against a massive boar with wings and shimmering, metallic bronze skin. Its skin resisted many of our offensive spells, but we wore it down through attrition, before Jackson finally roasted it.

  I didn’t want to make light of the challenges, considering that I was sure that if I’d been forced to fight the boar alone, it would have been a decently challenging fight, especially if I’d been a normal wizard and unable to use my fire to boost my spells or fight in melee.

  As a group, though, we weren’t especially challenged by the fight, though the puzzle had taken a little bit longer.

  Once again, we got a speech from the guardian statues, while Yushin and Jackson selected their prizes. Jackson took a bright red ruby that smelled like fire, while Yushin took a chunk of shimmering moonstone that was almost scentless, but had hints of dreams and shadows.

  “Well, I’d call that a pretty successful trial!” I said, stretching my arms and popping my back as we were teleported out for the second time. “Though, when we do the fifth circle challenge, I think we’ll need to be a lot stronger, and do it in pairs.”

  “Fifth circle is already a considerable leap in power,” Yushin agreed. “I do not think we could manage it now, let alone in pairs.”

  “Aye,” Salem agreed. “Maybe next year?”

  I nodded my agreement, and Jackson got a thoughtful look.

  “The question I have is if it’s going to be six or eight challenges. I mean, the third circle challenge had two, and the fourth had four. It could be adding two, or it could be doubling. I don’t know which.”

  We bantered about that as we walked Yushin to the school’s entrance, where Shé Rui picked her up, and then the three of us began heading back to our rooms. I nodded to Wesley as we entered, then said good night to Salem and Jackson.

  The moment I was alone, I let out a grin and began pulling out the radiant dappled hawthorn branch and bundle of gryphon feathers, alongside the lump of chalk to begin the ritual.

  Once again, I fell into an almost timeless sensation as I drew power out of the dappled hawthorn branch, allowing it to expand my ether pool. Though that was only the middle of the road effect of a staff, the multiplicative effect that professor Silverbark had spoken of combined with the much higher quality component to cause my ether pool to balloon in size.

  In an instant, my ether pool expanded to larger than it had been before I contracted Orla, and I could keep drawing. I paused after a moment though, worried this would negatively impact the effect of Summers’ inversion. I backed off the changes until my pool was only a touch larger, resolving to ask Silverbark. If it didn’t, then I could always draw more power out again.

  I turned to the gryphon feathers. With them so weak, and with it also being the least effective part of a staff, there were only wisps of power to harvest. I evenly spread it between my spells, then turned to the focusing component, the greatest effect of the staff.

  The opal flared in my mind’s eye, and I was suddenly aware it was called an etherspark opal. It was more than willing to connect to all of my magic at once and then some, but the burden that put on me was too much. I wasn’t a fourth circle mage, so I was unable to use its full power.

  I reduced the opal’s magic until it amplified the first three circles of spells, then let that slot into place. The ritual completed, and in a flash, my staff appeared before me.

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