Chapter 2 — What Could Go Wrong?

The first day of travel had been a nightmare. While they were following the bandits trail originally, Mira had used her magic to silence their footfalls and obscure them from sight while they moved, letting them cross the terrain as quickly as they were able, heedless of any potential interception.

Instead, they had to be incredibly careful; watching out for the snapping of twigs or the rattling of their equipment, and keeping a careful watch all around them, lest they stumble upon the lair of one of the more fearsome denizens of the forest. They spent hours huddled together behind shrubs waiting for an entire troop of soldiers-turned-highwaymen to pass out of sight.

When night fell, and it was far too dangerous to travel, they had barely made a tenth as much progress as they had in one day of travel on the way out. At this rate they would be months amongst the deer trails and thorn bushes.

Mira assumed at some point she would snap and attack Mictlan in a fit of annoyance, who would summarily run her through with a sword. What’s worse, she couldn’t shake the thought of the bathhouse girls, and she couldn’t do anything about that with Mictlan around.

“Okay.. I.. have an idea.”

((Good idea?)) Mictlan eyed her warily.

“If it works.”

She needed a circle, first. And it had to be a circle. She found a level patch of dirt, and drove a stake into the middle; then looped a ribbon around it, so that she could trace out a circle, keeping the ribbon taut against the stake. It took her several tries, but she soon had a furrow of dirt, almost perfectly circular.

Next, she had collected a pile of stones, each one no larger than the tip of her finger. She debated how many to use; it had to be a prime number, the more the better; but the stones wouldn’t be perfectly placed, and the deviations would add up. It was a balance, and she settled on thirteen. She thought of thirteen as her lucky number.

Placing the thirteen stones evenly spaced around the circle took longer than anything else. She measured each gap against a benchmark, adjusting them by tiny amounts until every gap was the same size.

This was all simple, elemental sorcery. She had not needed to construct a magic circle like this in years; that was the point of a familiar. The circle would allow her to trap wild magic, and then channel it via a spell.

The catch was, there was no wild magic here to trap.

That’s where the scroll came in.

((Bad idea.)) The harsh, choppy motions of the gesture made it clear this was not a question.

“We don’t have ten weeks of supplies. Unless you have a magical weasel in your leggi-” she stopped herself. “Don’t answer that. I don’t want to hear about it.”

((My lips are sealed.)) Her comprehension of Mictlan’s gesture language was improving enough that she got the joke. She glared back at him.

“I won’t read the entire scroll. I can’t. But if I start, then the mesh will unravel and release the magic into the circle, and from there I can channel it into the spell I need.”

She didn’t tell him about how magic eventually took on the shape of its container. She thought at worst she might end up with a mephit familiar from one of the elemental planes, which would be something of a feather in her cap.

((I’ll stand over here.)) Mictlan gestured at her, as he backed away.

She sighed at his lack of confidence, and placed the scroll in the middle of the thirteen-stone circle, careful not to disturb the stones even slightly. The circle would be leaky; she would’ve needed a continuous circle of angelic crystal to hold magic perfectly; the best she could hope for with thirteen stones was thirty seconds or so of containment, and the magic would be leaking out the whole time.

“Here goes,” she muttered, more to herself than anyone else.

Mira wasn’t sure how much of the scroll to invoke- it was always a balance; too much would give some shape to the magic, wasting it for her purposes, and potentially resulting in unforeseen side effects. Too little and the magic would seep out of the scroll too slowly for her to harness.

She had decided she would read the first full stanza. There were six, in the scroll; the second was unreadable, due to the ink stain. The first stanza simply created something like a gateway. She had not been able to determine the purpose of the second; the rest of the stanzas focused on stabilizing the gateway and binding it to the plane.

Without those last stanzas, she knew the unstable gateway would simply flicker in and out of existence for a few minutes and then dissipate harmlessly.

Her part, the tunneling spell, would create a pinprick in the membrane that separated reality from magic, and anchor that pinprick to the nearest animal.

“Where eyes of glass do watch and sear…”

She started reading the scroll; each iamb she pronounced smoldered bright red as she read along it. Reading even the first word aloud would be enough to ruin the scroll; it would smolder and burn, producing now heat, until the vellum was a pile of ash.

“To world a-part yet world a’near…”

She could sense the magic starting to flow out of the scroll; at this point it was all drawn into the words she spoke; it was hard to speak about the shape of magic in physical terms, but it reminded her of some of the strange contraptions she had seen in alchemists’ workshops.

“A door I open, a catch I free…”

Clouds started to gather overhead, dimming the already fading dusk light. Mira didn’t expect this- the most powerful magicks could draw the attention of the weather, but controlling that amount of magic was far beyond her capabilities. She started to grow nervous.

“From place that is, to place that can be.”

There was a crack of thunder, and she was blinded for a moment. It seemed as if lightning had struck directly in front of her; but she had made it through the first stanza. She squeezed her eyes shut against the pain of the searingly bright bolt, and quickly spoke the words of tunneling.

This spell was a simple one, the first spell a sorcerer learned by heart.

“A prick, a poke, a tunnel, a yoke

“A thread of twine from there to mine

“My heart, my hand, to guard and command

“A beast to hold and anchor the line”

She felt the magic that poured out of the scroll flow into her words; she could sense in ways she could never describe in words the tiny hole- but no, it felt wrong. There was too much magic; and the tiny hole, smaller than the eye of a needle, was more like a fist-shaped tear.

That much magic would shred whatever little woodland creature it anchored to; even a mephit couldn’t hold it. A human would do, but Mictlan was too far away, the magic would only bind to the closest creature, and it couldn’t be her.

The rest of the magic drained out of the scroll, funneling useless up into the sky. Mira was angry at herself; this had been their only shot at getting out of this goddess-forsaken forest without months of danger and hard living, and she’d wasted it.

As her vision ever so slowly cleared, she expected to feel the subconscious pop when the amount of magic she had channeled into some poor little forest critter ended its life.

She didn’t expect there to be a woman standing in the stone circle in front of her.