«Ah, you’re too quiet!» she complained. «Courage, Zorian, courage!»
«Right,» agreed Zorian half-heartedly.
«We’ll make a proper crafter out of you yet, just you see!» huffed Nora. «But first, let me just wrap up our discussion from last time. I was a little long-winded, but what I had been trying to build up to was that spell formula are… support magic. Magic affecting other magic. By itself, even the most elegant spell formula is merely a theoretical exercise. You need to actually cast the spells and anchor them to the spell formula before it’s of any use. I note this because Ilsa seemed to think your skill in invocations would do you no good in my subject, which annoyed me because it revealed a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of the discipline. Which is very disappointing, coming from her, since she is… well, you know…»
«A teacher,» finished Zorian.
«Yeah,» Nora agreed, a little awkwardly. Teachers rarely spoke ill of one another, in Zorian’s experience, so it was no wonder why she was uncomfortable criticizing Ilsa in front of a student. They did have to work with one another on a regular basis, after all, and undermining other teacher’s authority like that could get ugly very quickly. Fortunately, only Zorian was present in this case, and he didn’t intend to make trouble for her. She seemed to realize it too, after a moment, because she smiled and continued as if nothing had happened. «Anyway, I guess we should get you started on the beginner’s cube.»
As it turned out, the beginner’s cube was a perfectly cubical block of grey stone, each side roughly 10 centimeters long. The one Zorian was given was completely blank and smooth, but Nora showed him a couple of finished ones as a demonstration. They did things like heat up, shed light, or float in the air when activated, or when certain conditions were met. Basically, each finished cube was a crude magic item that used a couple of simple spells and a whole lot of spell formula to produce a neat little toy. They were a standard training tool, according to Nora.
Zorian wanted one the moment he had laid his eyes on them. Giving such a blatantly magical toy to Kirielle would probably keep her out of his hair for hours. It would be his secret weapon against her! Besides, a small floating cube would make a much more challenging target for his magic missile practice than the boulders and tree trunks he usually practiced on. Especially if he could somehow get it to dodge…
He wouldn’t have to wait long to acquire one, as it turned out — crafting one was the idea behind today’s lesson. And not just any beginner’s cube, either. Zorian had expected Nora to give him something easy for a start, but apparently she had something a little more… ambitious… in mind.
«But those ones are too easy for you,» Nora concluded. «No, I have something much more fun for you to work on. Here.»
She handed him another cube, though this one was positively covered with spell formula. Zorian noted with rising dread that he couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Hell, many of the sections looked like mere placeholders instead of working spell formula, being little more than stylized pictograms. Wait…
«As you may have noticed, I compressed the spell formula somewhat,» Nora said. «Partially it’s because there wasn’t enough space on the cube to represent it fully in its raw form, and partially to stop you from simply copying the entire thing line by line on the blank one I gave you earlier.»
«Isn’t that the whole point?» Zorian asked. «For me to study a working example to see how it’s done, that is?»
«Absolutely. But I’m afraid blindly copying the spell formula from one cube to another won’t teach you what I want you to learn. If I thought you needed to practice memorization and precision, I’d have you copy a dozen or so easy ones to start with, but I’m sure you’re already beyond that. No one spends as much time on spell formula theory as you have without trying out some practical examples.»
«Err, I never encountered anything like those cubes in the texts I read,» said Zorian. «But yes, I have been using spell formulas from time to time. Mostly to establish an alarm perimeter around my bed during my second year — I had a really nosy roommate — and also to make some free lamps and heating plates.»
Invocations didn’t last long. Even if a mage poured more mana into them than absolutely necessary — and there was only so much you could overpower a spell before it shattered from the strain — they inevitably degraded after a couple of hours at most. The spell boundary degraded with time and eventually fell apart, regardless of whether the spell had enough mana left or not. As a consequence, if Zorian wanted his alarm spell to last throughout the entire night, or his makeshift lamp not to wink out every hour or so, he had to stabilize the spell boundary somehow. Spell formulas were the easiest and most reliable way to do that, so long as someone already crafted a stabilization formula for that particular spell and made it available to the public.
«It’s not very surprising you never encountered beginner’s cubes in your reading,» Nora said. «They’re mostly used for theoretical exercises. Not very useful. Most mages don’t really care how spell formulas work — only that they do. They memorize the well-documented formulas and some quick-and-dirty methods of modifying existing ones, and then they only have to know when to apply which one. Then they say spell formulas are dry and boring. Hah! If only they knew the true mysteries of the Art, the hidden beauty of numbers and geometry…»
Zorian listened stoically as Nora mumbled to herself about ‘unimaginative rabble’ and ‘sleeping in the bed they made for themselves’ for a while. After a while she took a deep breath and plastered a pleasant smile on her face before turning her attention to him again.
There was no sane teacher in this school, it seemed. Zorian wondered whether it was the stress of teaching itself that was producing these kind of effects, or if you simply had to be crazy to accept a teaching position here.
«But I digress,» Nora said cheerfully. «I guess I should stop wasting our time and tell you what I want you to do. Here, let me demonstrate…»
The cube Nora wanted Zorian to recreate was quite complicated. At its core, it was a glorified lamp using a simple ‘torch’ spell as its base. It could be activated and deactivated verbally, by saying one of the several command words, and it had to be able to tell when someone was referring to it specifically, as opposed to using the command word in some other context. It had three different brightness settings. It conserved mana by not shedding light from any side that was covered by something — the side resting on the floor didn’t shine, for example, and wrapping it in a blanket would cause it to turn itself off. Each individual side could be turned on and off by tapping on it twice in quick succession. It could be keyed in to a specific person, taking orders from him or her alone.
Nora had told him not to worry if he couldn’t duplicate it exactly — she only wanted to see how far he’d get on his own by the next time they met. That was good, because this assignment was far more complex than anything spell formula related he had done up until now. Their next session was on Monday, so he had an entire weekend to work with, but he doubted he could fully rise to the challenge.
He had mixed feelings about Nora’s teaching methods. On one hand, she was taking him seriously, and that was good. On the other hand, she seemed to think that throwing a person overboard was a perfectly valid way of teaching people how to swim, metaphorically speaking.