Salem and I spent several more hours in the swampy area, collecting pearls. Not all of them were quite as rich in magic as the first I found, but by the end, I had enough that I was confident if I found a way to fuse them together and compress their power, I’d have a powerful seventh circle focus component. I thought I knew how I could do the first, since I suspected that the guy who sold my cursed defensive bracelets would be able to fuse the pearls together with his particular variant on an artifice affinity. Getting the power compressed was going to be harder, but I had a couple different ideas to try – the simplest being simply crushing the pearl in my hand and just trying to use willpower to compress the power.

  That didn’t do anything, so after we returned, I spent a while running various tests, before eventually accepting that I wouldn’t be able to do anything now. With that settled, I turned my attention to working on other problems – namely, the rituals that Salem and Yushin would be doing, as well as stocking up on spellglyphs for our plan. The following day, which was our last in this realm, we had the third and final break from our comfortable stay in the house: Salem was finally ready to take the flute.

  “You’re sure you have your part of the plan down?” Salem asked, glancing between Jackson and Yushin. Both of them nodded in agreement, and Salem shifted his gaze to me. I nodded as well, and he sighed, closed his eyes, and cast a flight spell on himself. As he lifted into the air, we began to cast as well, and flew out to the forest. When we finally arrived, Salem called for Kilyriza, and the green woman materialized out of the forest, her staff held in hand.

  “This is the final time I will ferry you. You are certain that you are ready to free our mother?”

  “No,” Salem admitted. “But I am about as well prepared as I can be.”

  Kilyriza stared, then waved her staff. A moment later, the plants around us began to ripple, and the world seemed to bend. I felt as if we were crossing a truly immense distance, but also little distance at all. For a moment, I swore I could see a dozen other figures wearing similar forested clothing to Kilyriza, with green skin and hair like leaves, and then we were standing at the edge of a glade.

  Within the center of the glade, there was a flute made of stone, hanging suspended in midair, and beneath it was a tall, willowy being who resembled the Lauma like Kilyriza, but also distinctly looked different. She had patches of bark-like scales all over, with eyes emerging from her elbow joints, her cheeks, her forehead, and the palms of her hands. I could smell her power, and it was… surprisingly weak. The density of her bloodline was roughly on par with my own, and though she had a much larger quantity, I had expected the mother of the forest spirits to have significantly more power than that. At least she wasn’t turning into an aberrant – seeing all the eyes had begun to worry me.

  Then I cast ethersight, and things started to make more sense. She didn’t have any of the affinity-holding objects like the staff Kilyriza had called her affinity regalia, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have any affinities. Near as I could tell, she had a half-dozen core affinity spells, imbued into each of the eyes, which could only be the result of the three additional eyes on her face. The one on her forehead was a bit strange, but it seemed like some sort of eye affinity, while the one on her right cheek looked to be a Lauma affinity. Her left cheek had something closer to a conduit or transference affinity, which I guessed she had used to make her eyes into conduits for other regalia.

  I wasn’t entirely sure that I’d gotten the exact nature of those three affinities right – every affinity was unique, so I was mostly guessing based on cross referencing the shapes, patterns, and runes that I could see within the affinity against my personal knowledge. Still, it would explain the source of her power, as she had nearly a dozen other affinities emerging from the eyes in her body. Even without traditional spellforms that fell from the sky when Magyk created the Age of Stars, having that many affinities was bound to turn someone into a powerhouse. I was tempted to ask how exactly Kilyriza and the other Lauma had developed these affinity regalia, but Kilyriza hadn’t exactly been welcoming to us. Maybe if she implied she owed us a debt after freeing her mother…

  My eyes flicked to the stone flute, and though ethersight was mainly designed to see wizardry and thus had weaker feedback with things like songcalling, I could tell that the material was potent. It might be enough to carry Salem to eighth circle.

  Of course, the flute and the many-eyed progenitor weren’t the only things in the glade. Like Salem had said, there were several other Lauma scattered throughout the glade, each of them clutching assorted objects that glowed with core affinity spells. I spotted books, wands, staves, amulets, circlets, knives, and polished crystals. That made a certain sort of sense to me, as all of those were options for grimoire summoning, the third circle mage tools ritual, and the fifth circle version. Where it got stranger were the objects that weren’t included in the limited ritual. In the glade, I spotted a ring imbued with a light affinity, and an earring with a wall affinity. Two wasn’t many, but it was just enough that it threw off the proto-theory I’d begun to develop that we were missing some sort of spell to have multiple affinities.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Alright. If we want to free her, I’m going to need some space to work a ritual,” Salem said, glancing around. “Where should I begin?”

  Kilyriza glanced around, grumbling, but waved her staff. A moment later, several of the trees began to uproot themselves and simply… walk away. I watched in curiosity and wonder, then turned to refocus on Salem as he cleaned the leaf detritus off the floor, then removed the jar of ether crystal dust that the moles had given to him. He started to measure it out on the floor, building a large circle with several piles in it. Once that was done, he took out bundles of a silvery object that looked rather like threads of woven moonlight, and began to move it through the ritual, preparing the psionic sections.

  Kilyriza actually looked interested as he used the silk, and I was as well. Through conversation with my boyfriend throughout the year, I’d gotten to know more about psychic magic than most, but I was still far from an expert. This was a material somewhat similar to ether crystal dust, but for psychics, rather than wizards. But where ether crystals were naturally forming concentrations of ether, and technically not even real crystals, this thread didn’t form naturally. There was some debate on that – some claimed it was because there wasn’t enough psionic energy in our realm to form it, while others said that psychic magic was innately meant to be harder to access. Whatever the truth of the matter, the normal way for psychic threads to form was a psychic untying one of their knots and ejecting the power into reality, destroying the knot entirely and losing progress on their psychic powers.

  Salem, thankfully, was a cheater. Not on me, that wouldn’t be the kind of thing I’d be thankful for. But when it came to magic, he was capable of using his psychic affinity to produce these threads from his ether pool. It wasn’t fast, efficient, or even terribly worthwhile for him to do most of the time – the demand was too low, with so few true psychics. But for large psychic rituals, it was just about the perfect material, and in preparation for Yushin’s ritual, he’d created quite the stockpile.

  I leaned down and went to my portion of the ritual, working out the parts of the spell I’d be involved with. I still wasn’t confident in throwing out my sealing curses on the fly, but with the help of a ritual, I was confident that I’d be able to help Salem here. Once we had both finished our parts of the ritual, I drew out my staff and lifted it into the air. Salem drew out his own staff, and both of us began to chant. As we did, Yushin and Jackson watched carefully, trying to make sure that Kilyriza wasn’t going to pull something on us. We suspected we knew what trick she was playing, but one could never be too careful.

  As the chant continued, the ether crystal dust around me began to glow, and power flowed into my spell, drawn not from my ether pool, but from the dust itself. It was a powerful stream, and between my pool and the dust, it was more power than I’d ever wrangled before. I still wasn’t sure it would be enough, though… Salem’s ritual completed, and he stepped forward into the clearing. Instantly, the flute lashed out, and I slammed my staff against the ground.

  Emotion was a source of power, at least for my curse affinity. I channeled my anger at the flute for attacking Salem into the spell. It was joined by the fear that we wouldn’t succeed, and that Salem would become a mindless drone of the flute forever. Finally, the lesser emotions flowed in: mistrust of Kilyriza’s mother, greed at being able to have a powerful staff, longing to get this done so we could return home, and more.

  Themes were also important. I could seal away a dancer’s ability to dance if they were mocking other, weaker dancers. This flute wanted to seal anyone who broke the magic, but the way it did that was simply by attacking anyone in range. That wasn’t what it really wanted. So, I leveled my sealing spell at its third function, and sealed off the mental attacks it made against those who got close. It could still attack anyone who attempted to dispel the magic, but simple proximity? No. This seal was a punishment for the over-zealousness of the original creator.

  Time was important, as the longer it would last, the more of the overall power the spell would take. So I made the spell short lived, only thirty minutes. Hopefully it would be enough.

  It wasn’t perfect. This spell, cobbled together in a few days, didn’t match the complexity and power that I would be fueling Yushin’s ritual with. But it was like stuffing cotton into the mouth of a funnel – water might still leak through, but it would be much slower to do so. Drops, rather than a stream.

  My part of the spell was over now, but Salem’s had just begun. The power of the flute struck at his mental shielding, and then slid off. Another drop struck his defenses, and was flicked aside. Another. No one drop did much, but each one wore away at his protective spell just that little bit more. But with each drop that struck, Salem grew closer to the flute. We didn’t need this to last forever. Just long enough for Salem to claim all that raw magical power as a part of his staff.

  Salem arrived at the center, and using his staff, drew a circle on the ground, then began the chant for the mage tools ritual. I watched with baited breath as his shields began to thin, then crack. Then right before they shattered, the final syllable of the spell passed his lips.

  His staff warped, the gemstone that had once been its focusing component flowing out into the shape of an emerald flute.

  The magic holding everyone in place shattered.

  And Kilyriza’s mother shouted two words, magic surging around her.

  “Die, mortals!”

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