The staff was slightly taller than I was, made of rich red and brown wood, with small speckles of gold dappling its surface. Its top was set with the red stone of the slowstrength fire opal, but the gem had been transformed by the ritual.

  Instead of being a thumbnail sized chunk of shimmering red and white, it was now stained a rich purple color, and had grown to the size of a duck’s egg, where it sat atop the staff. It had become slightly translucent, and within it I could see the gryphon feathers, drifting as if caught in an invisible wind.

  I hefted the staff, and was surprised at its weight. It wasn’t going to be a burden to carry, but it was definitely not nearly as light as I had been expecting. As I lifted it, I felt my affinity for the staff, mainly radiating from the slowstrength fire opal. Much like with the foo lion whisker, I had earned the opal. But to my surprise, I could also feel some connection to the staff’s wood as well. It hadn’t been earned in the same way that the opal had been, but it had come from a relationship, from people who had extended what helping hands they could.

  I spun the staff lazily around me, getting used to the motions needed to flow my ether through its construction, then pulled out a sheet of paper and began my testing. When I had cast my first spellglyph, it had consumed almost my entire ether pool to create.

  I began the low and slow incantation, moving my hand and staff together, shaping the ether. As I did, I felt the slowstrength opal pushing against me, making it more difficult to manipulate my ether into the exacting shapes that were needed for the spellcasting.

  If I’d been the same as when I’d first arrived at the school, I would have struggled to control it. But through refining my abilities with the ether manipulation techniques, learning new spells, and improving my understanding of why each part of the spell did what, I had grown into a competent enough mage to work through the interference.

  A perfectly cast spellglyph took ten minutes to cast. I hadn’t been able to cast it perfectly even before I’d created my staff, but I’d gotten it to about fifteen minutes. With my need to push through my staff’s meddling, it took me almost thirty minutes to complete the spell.

  But when I finished?

  Ether poured from my pool, and the jewel atop my staff flipped. Instead of slowing my ether, it added power, pulling it in from Etherius, refining it, and taking on more than its fair share of the casting burden. The glyph formed on my paper with a bit less than half of my ether pool consumed.

  I let out a low, impressed whistle. I definitely didn’t think I’d be using it in combat, at least not usually, but the power it held was immense. It was a shame that the limiting factor in my creation of spellglyphs was my blood. If it had been raw ether…

  Still, even if it wouldn’t be as effective as doubling the number, I could use the array layering technique to infuse more power into the glyphs. If that was anything like when I used dragonfire, it should let me store layered spells inside of them.

  There was no sense in wasting a perfectly good spellglyph, even if it wasn’t perfectly optimized, so I flicked my wand out and cast blood price, dropped the component onto the symbol, and stored a summon gadhar spell in the rune.

  I flopped back on my bed, glancing at the portrait. It was late, but with all the energy buzzing through my body, I knew that I’d have a hard time getting to sleep, so I took out the tree for Xander’s massage. I began looping my ether through it, while I cracked open my grimoire and started working on a spell.

  I’d spent a lot of time working with my misfortune magic since summoning the grimoire, and with my wand holding a large portion of that quarter of my affinity, I was reasonably confident in being able to compose a misfortune spell on the fly, or close enough to it.

  Suffering curses, on the other hand, were still something that I was fairly new to, so I read through the sections of my spellbook that covered the information one more time. Suffering magic was all about exacerbating something that was already happening, like turning the blood loss from a cut from a nuisance to an active danger. It was able to work on more esoteric things too, like causing someone’s slipping emotional state to deteriorate.

  Just like all curses, the break condition, limitation on what it would affect, and reason behind the layering of the curse were all powerful factors in creation of the curse, as was the scale of how much amplification the curse needed to do.

  I started designing a very specific curse, one that I thought I might have occasion to use. I began with the effect that it would make worse – control.

  Everyone, even powerful dragons like my mother, had minor inefficiencies when they were using their fire. Nobody was capable of being one hundred percent efficient at all times. I played on that, causing their inefficiencies to get worse the more fire they spent.

  That was a substantial effect, and one that would probably bottom out my ether pool, even with my staff improving my efficiency to unheard of heights. It was also complex enough that I thought I would struggle to cast it at all, even with my wand.

  Which is why I began layering limitations on the spell. First and easiest, I made it only worsen flame bloodlines, then draconic flame, then specifically the Dreki bloodline. That reduced the power quite a bit, and I found myself snorting at how similar it was to the energy barrier spell. The barrier couldn’t get specific enough to only target a specific breed of dragon, given it lacked the innate flexibility of affinity magic, but the principles were clearly similar in both design and in effect.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  The next limitation that I baked into the spell was that it would only work when a Dreki was fighting another Dreki. That had a strong resonance with Etherius, as the concept of using a suffering curse resonated well with punishing someone for breaking the love and care a family should have.

  Finally, I turned to the break condition, which was easy. All the Dreki would have to do was not attack another Dreki for a full minute, and the curse would shatter.

  Making the curse so specific while also being relatively easy to break freed up a massive amount of power, though it didn’t make it much easier to cast. It was difficult to estimate, but I thought that it had to be at least as hard as casting water to wine was, and it might even be edging into the territory of a fourth circle spell.

  I knew it probably wasn’t a great idea to burn more of my blood on something that I wasn’t confident would actually work, but I started experimenting with storing the spell inside of a spellglyph. It was too powerful for the basic glyph to hold, but I found that both a dragonfire infused spell and a layered array were capable of holding it. I was starting to get a little bit woozy after that, so I flared as much of my fire through my body as I could in order to stimulate my recovery, before I finally went to bed.

  I had work the following day, and both Charm and Fable left the store to take care of their own business, leaving me to tend it alone. Most of the people coming in were Citadel university students looking to purchase supplies for their wands, staves, and amulets, and I was forced to do an awful amount of math as I had to apply the coupons to the components that they were purchasing.

  It also made me look over my own finances, and look at what I could potentially buy. The improvement to spell efficiency was the second most potent effect of a wand, and while I wouldn’t want to get a stone that further slowed my casting in order to improve its power, I wouldn’t mind being able to improve my third circle spells as well.

  With the three shifts a week that I’d been doing, the money from my scholarship, and the ability to purchase the components at cost, I actually had a surprising amount of silver I could reasonably spend on a component. Most of the third circle focusing components were within my grasp, and if I was willing to commit just about everything to it, I could even afford a fourth circle component.

  I hummed and hawed over the decision for quite a while, before I finally decided that it was worth spending extra money. It would feel bad to see my silver drop from four digits down to two, but in the long run, I thought it would be worth it. Ideally, I should be able to stretch to cast a fourth circle spell by the end of the year – which meant before I was able to fight Gerhard.

  If I beat him in the duel, then the component should be able to carry me through most, if not all, of my second year, making it a worthwhile long term investment.

  If I failed, then it wouldn’t matter that I had no silver, because I’d be on a one way trip back to the richest family in the world, where I had no doubt I’d be locked up and ‘re-educated’ into accepting my superior bloodline.

  I just had to decide what component to get. I used a fair few abjuration spells with my wand, but the foo lion whisker was already heavily biased towards working with abjuration magic. I didn’t want a wand so specialized that it struggled with other magic types – I wanted it to be able to help me with my obliteration spells like arcane missile, and transmutation spells like coinshot.

  Pure ether crystal was the single most universal component I could get. It wasn’t quite as powerful as an ultra-focused component like an alchemically refined and solidified angelus-tear, which could improve restoration spells while actively hindering all other spell schools, but it was reasonably close. An eight, instead of a ten, so to speak. And unlike the tear, it could work on every spell cast through it.

  The annoying thing was that completely pure ether crystal was also absurdly expensive, since it was both rare and also used in a lot of rituals. I couldn’t afford a piece large enough to work as a focus for fourth circle spells. It cost almost as much as some of the sixth circle components.

  That left me shopping for the components that were actually within my price range, while also being broad enough to help me. What I eventually settled on was a stone known as eight-phase moonstone.

  It provided a broad, general empowerment to most spells, though the exact amount varied with the phase of the moon. For example, during the days around a full moon abjuration and restoration spells were boosted more, while obliteration and illusion spells had a weaker enhancement. They were still enhanced, just… less so.

  None of the enhancement that the moonstone provided to the spells was as strong as the slowstrength opal, even when the moon phase was optimal for that spellcraft, but it was still something of an improvement from my current smoky quartz. Importantly to me, it was a fourth circle component.

  It cost me enough to leave me feeling pained, but I took a breath and forcibly crushed that emotion. I didn’t know if it was draconic instincts flaring, the Creep, or just normal human desire, but I wasn’t going to risk it being draconic pride or the Creep. I could deal with human greed, but it was hard to tell the limits.

  After work, I added my new piece of moonstone to my wand, causing the smooth, button-like gemstone to transform into the polished shimmer of moonstone, and slightly increased the weight on my spirit.

  The following few days passed peacefully. Each day I stored one or two spells away in a spellglyph, practiced my ether exercises with the tools from class, and worked on schoolwork. Abjuration and conjuration continued to work on the easier second circle spells. I read a lot of the theoretical texts that professor Gemheart had recommended me for transmutation, and even delved into the library to pick up telekinetic volley, one of the second circle spells that he had listed for me to learn.

  It levitated three objects around my head for up to ten minutes, and at any point that I had them levitating, I could launch them at someone at speed, or more slowly manipulate them as if I were casting the levitation cantrip.

  Fundamental Magecraft was shifting into teaching spells that every mage should know, and it started to expand my repertoire. While some of the spells, like shield, arcane missile, and circle of alarm, I already knew, there were ones I didn’t.

  Identify, for example, gave more detailed feedback than ethersight, but also required you to touch an object for an entire hour. Sleep spells weren’t weapons to be used against powerful opponents like demons, but they were a great way to subdue weaker enemies or wild animals. Slowfall was supposedly critical to any wizard, and seeing as flyte came later on the syllabus, I was guessing that I knew why.

  I also got to ask professor Silverbark about the interactions between the expanded ether pool a staff gave and Summers’ inversion. I’d been overly cautious, as it turned out – the inversion only worked on a person’s natural pools, and any supplements weren’t counted. That let me free up more of the dappled hawthorn’s power, and my pool expanded artificially again.

  Before I knew it, days turned to weeks, and we began approaching the end of my first semester.

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