I immediately leaned forward. It was hard not to, with a stinger like that for an opening introduction.

  “Teleportation circle is, in my opinion, the single best fifth circle spell out of all of them. No holds barred, no ‘other than X’, nothing. It’s simply the best,” professor Toadweather began, which caused me to raise my eyebrows. “Before I go into a weighted list of upsides, downsides, comparing and contrasting to the teleport spell, why don’t I nail down what teleportation circle actually does? There are three use-cases for the spell, can anyone tell me what they are?”

  “Teleporting from one permanent teleportation circle to another?” I guessed.

  “Right! If you’re standing at a permanent circle, you can use it to teleport yourself, anyone else, and anything within the confines of the circle, allllllll the way around the world! This is done via planetary coordinates, seemingly established by Magyk herself, though there is some evidence that they were actually a holdover from the Age of Sunder, as a use of spatial affinities and other sources of spatial magic. Whatever the truth may be, it’s essentially just a string of thirty-six numbers that indicate the location of the circle, and are woven into the spell when you cast it. So long as you’re standing in an existing permanent portal… Whooomph! Now you’re at the one whose coordinates you input. Okay, who’s next?”

  “What about creating a permanent portal?” a third year asked.

  “Of course! No, not at all! It depends on what you mean. A permanently open portal requires a much higher spell circle, but if you’re simply creating a permanent teleportation circle location via the permanency spell and a lot of cash dropped on teleporter’s alloy and ether crystal? That’s entirely possible Now, the establishment of a permanent teleportation circle of any sort is highly – and I do mean very highly – regulated by basically every nation under the sun. We don’t want to give anyone else a way to slip an elite team of high level powers in under our noses. Still, it’s a way that businesses and the government do operate. What’s the last?”

  “Teleporting to another plane?” I guessed, and professor Toadweather hesitated.

  “Well. You somewhat can. Planar boundaries aren’t nearly as rigid and strict as people like to think. If I set up a teleportation circle in this room, I could likely step out in one of the circles in Ongu, despite the fact that we’re in a faerie’s plane. There’s spatial bleeding at areas where the planes naturally intersect. But you couldn’t just teleport to, say, the plane of most gods. While the god may influence our world a lot, they typically only have one spot their plane bleeds over, and that’s the ascension point. Unless the god placed a teleportation circle right where they ascended, it would be hard to jump to the god’s plane. Anyhow, good question, but that wasn’t quite what I’d intended to ask.”

  “Teleporting to an existing permanent circle?” someone hazarded. I frowned. Hadn’t I already said that?

  “Exactly! Unlike Emrys’ first statement, moving from one to another, this is moving from where you already are to an existing permanent circle somewhere else. Now, this is expensive. You’ll need enough teleportation alloy to feed a small village of tiny metalshredders, which at the current rate is about… nineteen hundred silver worth of the alloy? But if you sacrifice that, you can teleport to any circle whose coordinates you are aware of.”

  I winced at that. I could probably use blood price to cover that in an emergency, but I’d be losing a lot of blood to force it. I certainly wouldn’t be doing it with any sort of regularity.

  “Now, this is the reason I actually believe that it’s more valuable than any other fifth circle spell. Most nations have at least a handful of locations with semi-public or corporate circles available, and despite the possible security risks and the red tape, it’s perhaps the single most important spell in Cendel. Our portal network allows us to move people far faster than any of the Six Lord’s ships, and transport high value goods. It’s the cog on which our world turns, so you should give it the respect it deserves.”

  I drummed my fingers on the table, thinking. I thought that on an individual level, I might still get better use out of the standard teleport spell, but I could see the massive economic and military impact teleportation circle had. On a personal level, I could probably get the coordinates to a few circles run by corporations, and the one established on the Isle of Dreki, but that wasn’t what interested me the most.

  No, that was the Coven of the Twilight Grotto. My ring had an ability that was similar to the teleportation circle spell – uncannily similar. As in, I wondered if the spell was actually the same, and had merely been altered by the spatial affinities of whoever had helped create the rings. Given that Henry and Syn both had rings like this, it could really be just about any affinity modifying it. And while my ring did require ether to establish points, it didn’t require ether to slip into and out of the Grotto’s paths. I wanted to know just how the spell would interact.

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  So as professor Toadweather started breaking down the circuit, I leaned forward and started focusing. Normally, I preferred Caeruleum’s hands-on approach to learning, but I’d take whatever I could get.

  Over the next several days, I threw myself into the study of the spell. It wasn’t quite as all consuming as it might have once been, as I intentionally forced myself to take breaks, but in less than a week, I had mastered it. Without either the established coordinates, or nearly two thousand silver of alloy, the spell should have done nothing. There was still a large part of me that expected for nothing to happen.

  Instead, the third star on the ring began to glow, and my ether pool began to drain into the spell. It drained as much as I’d come to expect with a fifth circle spell, and then kept draining. Within a few moments, my ether was almost empty, and I used Maugrim’s surge to pour more power into it.

  It still wasn’t enough. The spell, or perhaps the function of the ring, needed more power. I flooded my fire up through my spiritual channel in a wave, and it began to power the function instead of ether. I used the variation of the surge that I’d developed for fire, and Seren lent me more power. Just as I was about to give up and let the spell fail, space tore. I stumbled back, nearly losing my balance, but as soon as I righted myself, I looked through the portal. It seemed to open onto a common room, or perhaps a library? The portal started to waver, and I rushed in, having long since lost my suspicions around the ring’s power.

  The room that I emerged in was massive, the ceilings towering at least thirty feet high, and stained glass allowed a mixture of different light to flow through the room. My portal seemed to have opened near the center of the room. There was a small oval in the ground, a ring of runes, where the portal seemed to have acted as a doorway to and from. Around the runes, several plush carpets had been laid out, as well as thick, overstuffed leather armchairs, each of which had small serving tables where one could rest coffee cups or small plates. The armchairs had been turned to face a large, currently unlit, fireplace, which seemed to be the true center of the room. Past the fireplace were more rugs and armchairs, but behind them, ringing the circular room in every direction, was a collection.

  It looked somewhere between a library and an eclectic rich person’s cabinet of curiosities. There were endless books and scrolls, several of them ancient or written in languages that I couldn’t have read without the true tongue ritual translating for me. But amongst the books were other arcane artifacts. I spotted vials of fluids in a dozen different colors, stone statuettes of different animals, jars containing preserved and pickled monster parts, skulls with glowing lights hidden within their recessed sockets, mortars and pestles made of many materials, herbs that had been hung up to dry, spheres of crystal with dancing reflections, silver bowls that seemed empty, and so much more. Occasionally, there was a door set into the shelves. At least, I thought they were doors – the shelf had some hinges that suggested it could be turned in and out.

  I was incredibly tempted to start combing through the shelves, but I forced myself to stop. Frankly, the only reason that I was able to stop myself was the fact that the room was clearly used. It was subtle – a newspaper that had been draped over one armchair, as if someone had put it down mid-reading, fit with the ambiance of the room. A reclining armchair not fully put in the upward position could just be. The plates on some of the small tables might also simply be aesthetic. They were perfectly clean, after all.

  What had finally given it away, though, was the faint scent of tea. It was emanating from a thin film at the bottom of a cup on one of the small tables, like someone had drained most of the cup, then left without washing it. And in the moments since I’d entered the room, the scent had slowly faded. I stepped over to the cup to see the stains at the bottom slowly vanishing, as if I’d cast clean on the cup.

  “Hellfire and brimstone, I wasn’t done drinking that yet. There was still a few sips left. Thrice-cursed cleaning enchantments.”

  I nearly jumped out of my own skin as a voice rang out through the silent common area, and quickly spun to see an older looking elfin woman, tall and portly, with waist-length hair that shone like gold. She was wearing long, flowing white robes, and had a pair of spectacles perched on her nose, tiny runes etched into the golden rims, and she squinted at me through the crystalline lenses. Behind her, one of the shelves that I thought were semi-hidden doors, silently swung shut.

  “Who are you?” the old elf asked curiously. “You’re a bit young to have made your way to the common room.”

  “Emrys of White Sands?”

  “Hmm, truly? And you forced your way in? Aren’t you still a student at the university? I seem to recall Henry mentioning he was mentoring you and a few other somewhat promising kids.”

  “That would be me and my team, yes. We’re second years, nearly done with the second year. Who a–”

  “Second year? Are you older than you look? Your reserves shouldn’t have enough quantity and density to open the Grotto’s common room. And if you are that young, you shouldn’t be compressing your…” She trailed off, frowning. An instant later, her glasses flashed, spells rushing across their surface. I tried to understand what I was seeing, but each rune was gone too fast for me to identify.

  “Ah, I see. You’ve essentially cheated it. Clever! Still, it must have taken nearly everything you had to open the way. You certainly aren’t done yet – you’ve yet to fully peel away your rooms and paths and truly incorporate them into your ring yet. Have you even cast teleport yet? No, you haven’t. Incredible!”

  My head started spinning at her rapidfire questions and statements.

  “Who are you? Where exactly am I?” I finally managed to get out.

  “Oh, I didn’t introduce myself, did I? I am Thalia Eklebryte. I could give you a handful of titles, but they don’t really matter, now do they? And you, my dear, are where the top students of the Citadel of Ether tend to gather to read, discuss, and borrow one another’s knick nacks: the common room of the Coven of the Twilight Grotto.”

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