Chapter 88: The Components of Magic
When I finally managed to stumble back to the alcove under the immense weight of what I had seen, my legs were trembling so badly I could no longer walk. Jared had to carry me the last few steps. The world outside had become a source of profound psychological horror. I didn't even dare to open my eyes on the way back, preferring the darkness behind my eyelids to the monster-haunted reality of the city. I would rather be mad, to believe that everything I saw was a mere hallucination. Because if it wasn't a hallucination, if those things were real, then this city was a hunting ground, and its citizens were blissfully unaware, unprotected prey, just like the poor souls who had vanished from the canal last night. I couldn't go outside again. The thought of it made my hands and feet turn to ice. I could only retreat into the witch's grimoire, to lose myself in the arcane text, to forget the horrors that lurked just beyond the curtain of our hovel. And there was another, more practical reason. Since reality itself was a minefield of unseen dangers, I had to acquire the means to protect myself and Jared. And right now, the grimoire was my only hope. I had to decipher it. I had to learn its secrets.
I threw myself into the work with a scholar's desperate focus, making notes, analyzing, cross-referencing, trying to wring sense from the mad, alien script.
“Parula,” Jared’s voice cut through my concentration. “I have to go out. Will you be alright here alone?”
“Go out?” I looked up, a knot of fear tightening in my chest. “It’s… it’s too dangerous out there. Can’t you stay?” I admitted it, my voice small. I was terrified. I didn't want him to leave me alone, and I was even more afraid that if he left, he might not come back. I wished he'd stayed right here with me.
“I have to, Parula,” he said, his voice gentle but firm. “We’re almost out of food. I have to buy more. And I need to… acquire a few other things. For the future.” I fell silent. For him, the world hadn't changed. It had always been a dangerous place, full of monsters both human and otherwise. He still had to think about survival, about our next meal. I understood. We couldn't just sit here and wait for our resources to dwindle to nothing.
I nodded. “Be careful,” I said. “If you see any trouble, run. And… try not to steal. We can afford to buy things now. We don't need the risk.”
“Alright,” he said. “And you, Parula, you don’t leave this alcove. But if something happens, you run. Go to the bathhouse. I’ll meet you there.” We exchanged these small, desperate instructions, a pact against the dangers of the city, and then he was gone.
The moment he left, a profound sense of isolation, of vulnerability, descended upon me. The small alcove, once a refuge, now felt like a prison. The ragged curtain at the entrance was no barrier at all; anyone, or anything, could wander in. I took a deep breath, fighting down the rising panic. Fear was useless. I had to gain the power to fight back against the unknown. I forced myself to look down at the grimoire, to continue my work.
At midday, Jared returned with lunch. He found me on the floor, surrounded by a sprawling, chaotic web of my own strange script. “Parula,” he said with a dry laugh. “Look what I brought you.”
“I told you, don’t show me the food…” I looked up, and my words died in my throat. He was holding out a stack of scrap paper, and on top of it, a long, elegant feather.
“What’s this?”
“A quill pen,” he said with a proud grin. “I ‘acquired’ it. And the paper. Now you can write properly.” He had also ‘acquired’ a small bottle of ink. My eyes widened. It was the perfect gift. I had been growing increasingly frustrated with the limitations of my charred stick, and the floor was quickly running out of space.
“Thank you!” I cried, my voice filled with a genuine, heartfelt gratitude. “This is exactly what I needed!” I took the quill. It felt strange in my hand, light and unfamiliar, and my first few attempts at writing were clumsy. But it was infinitely better than the stick.
“So, have you made any progress?” Jared asked, settling down beside me.
I frowned. “I’ve translated most of the first spell, Life Drain,” I said. “But there are… problems. First, the mana itself. I don’t know how to use it. Second, the incantation. I don’t know how to pronounce it. And third, the materials, though that part seems straightforward enough.”
It was only after translating the full text of a single spell that I realized how complex it was. The witch had made it look so effortless, but when you learned it by yourself, you just felt dizzness bloating your brain.
To cast a spell, it seemed, required several components: mana, a gesture, an incantation, materials, and a cost. And that wasn't even getting into the more abstract concepts of "willpower" and "inspiration."
So, according to this "Life Drain" spell, mana is a person's life force. To be without it is to be dead. This spell, then, isn't just draining life; it's siphoning magic. It pulls the vitality from another person into the caster, converting that stolen life into usable power to fuel their own sorcery.
But the grimoire simply assumed the reader would know how to convert that life force into magical energy. It was treated as a basic, fundamental skill, and so it was skipped over entirely. I was stuck at the very first step.
The gesture was simple enough—point your hand at the target. But the incantation was written in the ancient script. I knew what the symbols meant, but not how they sounded. The witch, bless her dark, twisted heart, had added phonetic notes in the margins. But they were written in her own, unreadable hand, in a script that wasn't English.
“So,” I said, looking up at Jared, a new plan already forming in my mind, “I need you to do one more thing for me, Brother Jared.You must find me a dictionary for this script. I have to understand what that witch wrote in her notes."
The witch's notebook contained more than just the results of her research; it held her entire process, her unique insights, and even the personal notations she'd made to make spell-casting easier. It would undoubtedly be an invaluable guide for my own studies.
He stared at me, his expression a mixture of confusion. “A dictionary? Parula, I don’t even know what language that is. How am I supposed to find a dictionary for it?” It was the first time he had looked at me as if my request was truly, utterly impossible. The people he knew are generally uneducated, too.
“I have an idea,” I said, a new, desperate hope dawning. “Did you get the money pouch?” He nodded. “Then do you know where to find a bookshop? An old one. The older, the better. the shopkeeper must be old enough too."
He knew, of course. A thief knew the layout of every shop in his territory, every back alley, every unlocked window. But he had never once considered setting foot in a bookshop. To him, books were worthless things, their only value in the paper they were printed on. And if you needed paper, you simply "took" it from the dumping ground. And so, I had to venture out again, steeling myself. Jared, for all his skills in the shadows, was not cut out for this kind of work.
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