I knelt down in front of the empty candle.

  I placed in the middle of the runed circle.

  It lit up momentarily.

  Mother flicked through her tome, confirming her sensors and readers were running.

  The room around me darkened.

  I exhaled.

  I inhaled.

  I recalled everything my mother had tried to teach me over the past few weeks, about the different manifestations of mana through the Four Elements, and what it meant to propagate their eternal cycle.

  The unique properties of each cardinal direction, how energy transformed into Fire when pulled South, or Water when pulled North.

  That was the guiding principle of Setsuna’s sword. It was why her sword style required her to be a vagrant; if one wished to utilise Elemental mana beyond what one’s body naturally resonated with, then they either had to channel it through external means like ritual mages did, or they had to do as Setsuna did and submit themselves to the world’s endless wheel, letting themselves be pulled in whichever direction the world’s heedless whims desired to take them.

  She and her deceased master had hoped that by doing so, they would be able to discover the ‘fifth direction’, and be pulled with it, attaining enlightenment.

  This ‘fifth direction’ had many names across history and different fields of study, each uttered with different levels of reverence, fear and mystery.

  For Setsuna, she called it the ‘Sky’.

  For classical mages working on Cardinal Theory, it was called ‘aether’; the mysterious preferential direction through which light travelled.

  But for most, they knew it only as the terrifying ‘Void’, spoken of only in hushed, fearful whispers about events that had been erased from history.

  My mother could not do as Setsuna wished to do; submit to the World and let it take her.

  No, ‘submission’ was not a word that existed in her vocabulary, not unless it referred to submitting papers for publication.

  She intended to ascend above it, to reach the stars themselves.

  And now, she was passing that on to me.

  She had a very, very different reason for teaching me this, though.

  She absolutely could not permit me to ‘submit’ to the Void.

  I leaned forward, and placed my thumb on the candle’s wick.

  The wheel was always turning.

  It was always repeating its eternal cycle, trying to complete itself.

  And it would not stop until it found me.

  If I wanted to live, I had to take a hold of that wheel myself, and forcefully turn it the way I wanted.

  I ushered mana into my fingers, and lit the candle with a tiny ember.

  I closed my eyes and focused, letting the sight of the fire fade from the physical world, and projected its form into my mind’s eye.

  I let its imaginary light, its form and shape, disappear, only leaving behind that faint, metaphysical warmth.

  I untangled the colours and glows until all that was left in my mind was a bundle of freely-flowing threads of invisible energy.

  My mother had given this process – of grabbing a hold of the ‘Wheel’ and forcing it to turn – a name, after the very ‘wheel of the world’ itself.

  One of the impossible masterpieces amongst her personal spells, the ultimate principle of energy conversion.

  I uttered the name.

  “Samsara.”

  I took a hold of the wheel, and I pulled the Southern Flame eastwards.

  Fire was the most sporadic and energetic of the Elements. Quick to ignite and explode, even faster to die out and wither. It was the hungriest of the bunch, always roaring and outputting as much of its life as it could, always seeking the next thing to consume to let it grow.

  I had to temper it, smooth it out.

  I had to take ahold of those fraying, spastic sparks and straighten them out.

  I groaned, feeling a sharp pain prick me from inside my finger’s nerves.

  My mana started to strain.

  The frenzied flickering and wavering of the fire mellowed out.

  I felt the warmth slowly fade away, replaced by a cool and gentle breeze, wrapping around my fingers.

  My hand started to tremble.

  The mana bit back at me, resisting the unnatural change I was forcing it though.

  I grit my teeth and forced myself through the pain, focusing on the core properties of the Eastern Wind.

  It was free of form and it flowed with grace. It was light, invisible, almost non-existent, nearly impossible to grasp in one’s fingers, only existing as long as the breeze blew past.

  I took hold of the fire, and pulled it out strand by strand, untangling and unwinding the ferocious heat into a winding sheet of dancing wind.

  The pain intensified.

  The mana started to slip.

  The emanating heat of the remaining embers dissipated into the air, lost entirely as it unwound back into raw mana, instead of Wind.

  I tried to salvage it, extending my senses to wrap around the fleeting mana to regain control of it.

  The distraction only led to further disaster.

  The flame destabilised entirely, swelling up with the last of its energy, brightening and condensing into a blinding ball of light.

  I covered myself, bracing myself for the oncoming explosion.

  Mother just sighed, shutting her book and snapping her fingers.

  The explosion unwound in front of me, unravelling into a simple smoky breeze that spun around the melted candle.

  I winced in pain as I rubbed my stinging wrists.

  It looked so effortless when she did it.

  The wind continued to spiral around the candle, forming a miniature tornado as it did so.

  Then it started to slow down, becoming heavy as it dragged and spun, collecting mass until it became a ribbon of flying water.

  In the corner of the darkened room, the Helios Engine whirred as it spun and lit up, spurring the transformation of energy.

  The water unravelled into a thick sheet of dust, which then coalesced into a ball of embers that lit itself aflame, and at last, with the cycle completed, it unwound into a stream of pure, fundamental mana that was then absorbed and stored away inside of the Helios Engine.

  Stolen story; please report.

  Mother pulled open the tome again, surveying her readings from my attempt.

  “Your visualisation is improving a lot. You took control of the flame in less than a second, that’s good. Your control of it degraded too fast, though. Mana efficiency plummeted below 50% almost immediately. That won’t be good enough for even a single conversion, let alone a full cycle. You need above at least 80% to keep the element stable as you convert it.”

  I sighed.

  “Sorry, Mother.”

  I was trying my best, I really was, but using the sixth sense for mana that people had in this world was still foreign to me. It still sometimes felt like I was walking off-balance when I was casting unfamiliar spells for the first time, or when I was being exposed to unfamiliar wavelengths or forms of energy.

  “You’re picking this up better than I could have asked,” Mother waved my words away without looking, scrubbing away at the small magic circle inscribed onto the floor, “Don’t worry about whether you’re fast or slow. All that matters is that you’re not rushing through it. I can’t afford you making a mistake when it comes to this thing.”

  She handed me the chalk again, pointing towards the now clean floor.

  “Here. Draw out Samsara in its ritual form, and walk me through its functions. Need to make sure this isn’t why you’re being inefficient.”

  I nodded warily, hesitating with the chalk hovering over the ground for a few seconds as I recollected the ritual Mother taught me.

  It had been a few weeks since we moved on from Samsara in its perfect form.

  It was a spell that was meant to act as a beacon and waypoint that searched for the ‘fifth direction’ of the Void.

  I drew out Samsara’s core components as a ritual.

  It was a very strict, grand ritual, requiring not only mastery of runic syntax, but an instinctive grasp on geography, mana flow and Cardinal Theory, requiring the invoker to align themselves very strictly with certain points in the world, constantly self-correcting for every change in elevation, temperature, wind speed, soil composition, mana density, etcetera.

  I wasn’t the greatest at the magic-related components of it, but luckily, I was able to get a decent hold of the self-correcting, variable part of it as a person who found travelling around the world as something that came naturally, which more than made up for my deficiencies as an orthodox witch for the sake of Samsara specifically.

  I got up and drew a grand wheel around the entire room, marking four points along it, filling them out with the necessary information about the current state of the world around us as I went, all the while reciting the exact purpose of each Elemental function to Mother, who nodded along with my explanation.

  The original purpose of Samsara in its perfect ritual form, as my Mother intended for it and as it was used in the Helios Engine, was to take the Four Elements and cycle them continuously, which when filtered through the Qliphoth Bridge, would create an approximation of Null energy.

  It was an artificial recreation of ‘Anitya’ and ‘Nirvana’, which were part of the other half of my Mother’s teachings.

  They made up one axis of the Void’s dreaded 'Five' Spells.

  Samsara was a way to generate fake Null energy that bypassed the madness of invoking Nirvana by recreating the core principle of Anitya, that of ‘impermanence’.

  Every emanation of the Void was a different expression of futility and nihility; Anitya’s principle of impermanence stated that nothing could last in a singular state for eternity, that all things in life were destined to crumble with time, moving on to the next part in an endless cycle of transformation, churning an infinite wheel.

  Form did not matter. It was a transient thing, destined to become meaningless eventually. There was no reason to place importance or meaning onto Fire when it would inevitably burn into embers and be scattered into Wind, where it would then be carried across the world and sown into the soil, nourishing Earth, through which Water would sweep, growing life until that life one day died and returned to nothing, to Null.

  The convergence of all matter and energy into the Void; that was what Anitya accomplished, and what mother had recreated.

  Mother looked upon my handiwork and sighed, scratching her head.

  “Yeah, seems like it’s what I thought. Your grasp of Samsara in its ritual form is fine. You seem to be able to visualise its functions fairly well… it’s just a matter of your mana circulation itself. You need to work on your control more, meditation exercises and all that.”

  I frowned.

  “Looks like I’ll have to bother Setsuna for some pointers, then.”

  I chuckled.

  It was always nice to spend some time with her. She was particularly amusing this year, always complaining and scowling about the pettiness of the headmaster and his esoteric teachings, who she had reluctantly apprenticed under after he had scared away all of her other potential mentors.

  “How’s the other part of your lessons going?” Mother asked idly as she took the chalk away from me and started cleaning up again, leaving me a bit restless.

  “...Fine.”

  “Alright, quick pop quiz before I test you next week. Lucius Andrealphus, who was he?”

  “The 66th Marquis of Lemegetia, the erased nation off of Litanus’s coast, theorised to be the reason it fell, after an encounter with the Void.”

  “What do you think about that?”

  “Unlikely. The accounts say he was acting suspiciously, but it was likely unrelated to the Void. He was stated in Lemegetia’s last few weeks to have been obsessed with art pieces involving five candles, even displaying one in his castle, but recreations of the arrangement are rather weak, and show little resemblance to Nirvana beyond the presence of a particular number of candles.”

  “Who do you think actually did it?”

  “Atheia Vepar… I was looking at the cartography, particularly of his fortress… the arrangement of his watchtowers was particularly unfortunate with their exact distance and angles from one another, and when the sixth one fell in the last week of Lemegetia’s existence… I think it might have unwittingly transformed his entire territory into the five required ‘candles’ for Nirvana.”

  I was wondering for a while when studying the topic of Lemegetia’s fall why Mother wanted me to study this particular case so badly.

  I think I understood now.

  The ‘five candles’ required to invite Null energy into the world did not have to be literal. And if one was unfortunate enough, if the scale of the ‘candles’ was great enough to summon an astronomical amount of Null energy into the world, then it did not have to be a human heart that it had to be invited into.

  In this case, the Null energy took home in his fortress, the ‘heart’ of his territory, where it then crept into his heart.

  I had to be on the lookout for anything that could even be slightly construed as a candle, not just a literal wax stick, no matter the scale or shape.

  And that was just the first of Nirvana’s requirements.

  Atheia Vepar might have been the unluckiest person to ever exist. Invoking Nirvana was astronomically difficult, requiring many esoteric and difficult conditions, and his territory just accidentally happened to fulfill all of them.

  “What do you think destroyed Lemegetia?”

  Mother continued her questioning.

  “Common knowledge says it was Revelation, but… I don’t think that’s the case.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “People usually point at the unnatural crater formed in Litanus’s coast, and the ‘Null Shearing’ that samples of the sand and soil there contain, but… Revelation doesn’t leave behind that kind of residue. Common knowledge says Revelation is the spell of ‘destruction’ but that’s a misnomer… all of the Spells are spells of destruction. Nirvana destroys mortality and sentience, and Anitya destroys form itself… Revelation is the spell of unravelling. If Revelation was invoked at Lemegetia… we would have seen the coastline naturally change over time, but it’s been stuck as it is for centuries.”

  “So what do you think did it?”

  “If I had to hazard a guess… I would say it was Ein Sof. Dimensional tearing would both explain the ‘Null Shearing’ effect observed in the soil along with its strange spatial qualities, resisting the flow of nature. Vepar accidentally opened a gateway to another Realm, and was unable to close it before it consumed the entirety of his kingdom.”

  Mother grunted in approval as she finished cleaning up the last of the ritual circle.

  “Alright, seems like you’re doing fine. Have you started the case study on Caylus yet?”

  “That’s… the Knight in Shadow, right? No, I’m still stumped on Queen Hylea at the moment.”

  “Ugh, yeah, tell me about it,” Mother rolled her eyes, “her Royal Court was a fucking shitshow, wasn’t it? Good lady, but unfortunately, not much you can get done when you’re surrounded by a bunch of sycophants and bumbling idiots. I would have succumbed as well if I was her.”

  Despite the morose topic, I somehow found it within myself to giggle at Mother’s words.

  She then followed up her sarcastic remark with a wince.

  “Yeah, sorry I can’t help you much with that like I did last week with Lemegetia. Work’s been kind of busy lately… we’re getting around to finally assembling the parts and none of the engineers can wrap their heads around the construction, I need to be on site basically twenty-four seven. I’ll be free probably in a week or so. I’ll probably be able to move us into Arden itself once everything’s up and running, and then I can focus on your studies full-time.”

  “That’s fine,” I sighed, patting the chalk dust off of myself, “I’ll need a bit of time to myself for a bit anyways. I have to figure out how to get my mana circulating better for the initial step of Samsara.”

  After all, that was the most important thing I could be learning.

  I remembered the ultimatum my mother gave me.

  She would not let me graduate from Nindo until I fully internalised Samsara.

  That was what this entire thing was about.

  That spell of hers was the only true defence mechanism that existed against the Void and its Null energy.

  While its ritual form tried to spin the world's energies into infinity, its spontaneous spell form did the opposite, taking Null energy and converting it into raw mana.

  If all else failed, if I was unable to see the warning signs and exit the radius of an enacted Nirvana ritual, then that was the final line of defence.

  I had to use Samsara to convert away the Null energy before it could find its way to me.

  If I could not transform it in time, the Null energy would forcibly trigger Nirvana within my heart, forcing me to submit to the principle of impermanence, Anitya, turning my body into a manifestation of the Void’s axes.

  That would complete the circuit, using my heart to cycle the Null energy towards my brain, towards the final ingredient needed to herald the end.

  And the final Spell, Ain Soph Aur, would be invoked, whether I wanted it or not.

  Bit of an exposition heavy chapter this time, mostly since we need to play catch-up with what Estelle’s been up to for several months.

  Short one today. This was originally meant to have a second half where Estelle met up with Setsuna again and spent some time chatting on Yrd about how things were going, life in general, and the Void + Ain Soph Aur, but that also isn’t meant to happen on-screen in the game, so I think I’m better off just separating it into a Daily Life chapter.

  Also, to be clear on something because it probably won't come up for a while; Estelle and Belle still only refer to 'five candles' in the context of Nirvana, even while knowing the existence of the sixth. To be clear, Luna does not, nor is anyone else aware of the sixth Spell/candle for that matter.