I spent the rest of the week working.

  While I was at work at the Charm and Fable, I practiced my abjuration spells, worked with the Summers’ inversion training rod, and worked on my conjuration spells, either shaping or gesturing, but not both. I didn’t want to actually practice casting those, since summon goo seemed messy, summoning a bunch of rats seemed unsanitary, and I didn’t have anything to compact with. Still, I could practice the individual bits.

  During my Friday abjuration class, I worked on drawing out as much of professor Caeruleum’s power as possible, steadily improving my casting speed with allies’ sigil, hidden conversation, and peacecharm, until I was confident in my ability to cast all three of them completely unaided at my usual speed. From there, I set to work improving my shield spell. I’d seen professor Alydia flick her hands and mutter a few words to create a shield in mere moments, and while I was good, I wasn’t anywhere near that level.

  With professor Caeruleum’s magic enhancing me, I made progress, but it was far too slow for my tastes. When the professor wandered over to watch me as I rapid-cast the spell, they tilted their head one way, then the other.

  “You’re too good,” they said.

  “Huh?” I asked, blinking in confusion.

  “You’ve practiced making a shield spell a lot,” they told me. “But you haven’t actually had to throw one up in combat, have you?”

  “Not a whole lot,” I admitted. “Usually I just cast them beforehand, instead of trying to do it mid-fight.”

  “If you make a wand, this may be a touch moot, but there’s also no guarantee,” the professor said. “But if I were you, I’d let go. You’re making textbook perfect shapes in your ether pool, but that’s slowing you down.”

  “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,” I said, and Caeruleum snorted.

  “Yeah, sure, when you’re talking about knife skills in the kitchen. But when you’re talking about combat, slow is dead, and dead is dead. Now I’m not saying you should ignore shaping skills, that’s a limiter in the long run for sure. But you can already do slow and good. Learn to do fast and bad. Then learn to do fast and good.”

  They flicked their hands quickly, muttering, and a navy blue shield appeared before them. It flickered there for a moment, then vanished.

  “When you’ve got a hail of necrotic bolts raining down on you in an organized volley, it doesn’t much matter if your shield is perfectly transparent and capable of lasting for the full minute the spell is capable of,” they said. “Let go, and just cast fast.”

  I took a breath, imagined the spellform in my head, then spat out the incantation. I snapped my hands out, and shaped the ether, and…

  The spell fell apart.

  But it was almost there. I’d been close.

  I tried again, and again, and on the fourth attempt, a flickering light blue shield appeared before me. It was thin, thinner than it should be, and it vanished a second later, but I felt vindicated.

  “Yes!” Caeruleum said. “Now do it again. When you can do it consistently, then work on getting it as thick and strong as possible while staying fast. Then work on getting it to last. Then transparent.”

  “I understand. Thank you.”

  “It’s what I’m here for,” they agreed.

  I spent the rest of the period working on speeding up the spell, and I got it to normal thickness pretty quickly. It had so many parts in common with other spells I knew, like arcane armor and the umbrella cantrip, that it was easy to make that part completely rote. Getting it to last was a little harder, but I made some progress. There was none on actually making it transparent again, but I allowed myself to be satisfied with my progress.

  During lunch I ran my way through Xander’s massage, working to restore my depleted ether pool before I had professor Toadweather’s class, as well as training with Summers’ inversion.

  I was in the middle of eating my bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich when the rod lit green.

  I let out a laugh and did it four more times, until I was sure of what I was doing, then I reached into myself, cutting off the massage in order to practice the inversion.

  The moment I finished the technique, I felt my connection to Etherius warping, flexing, inverting, and turning in on itself. An instant later, power rushed into my ether pool. It didn’t linger long, the technique not actually helping restore power, but it still slammed into the walls of my ether pool with force that far exceeded even the bottled explosion.

  Unlike the explosion, it wasn’t actively painful, and my pool stretched and warped, expanding quickly to hold more ether. It left me feeling somewhat wrung out and sore, though, like how humans described the day after doing strenuous exercise.

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  The power I’d gained from it was considerable. About a quarter of what I needed to fire off another arcane missile spell. From a single use of the technique.

  I sucked in a breath and tried again, only to have my entire spirit start bucking and straining. It wasn’t painful, not like the bottled explosion was, but it was more like my connection to Etherius was rebelling against me. It was like trying to stay on a bucking horse without using any of my bloodline, while my legs were also tied together, and within moments, the technique fell apart.

  I sucked in a breath and started working on Xander’s massage, poking and prodding at my connection to Etherius, and I felt a grin break out on my face, and a bit of admiration for professor Silverbark. The massage was definitely restoring my ether pool, but it was also undoing some of the strain from using Summers’ Inversion.

  That was honestly a great way to pick out which of the students were putting in real effort. After all, if you were just skating by with the bare minimum, there would be no need to try the techniques together.

  I spent the rest of my meal using the massage, then tweaked my spirit one more time with Summers’ inversion. This time, it was actually painful, with my spirit still messed up from the first use, but not much worse than the bottled explosion. Still, as I tried a third time, my spirit utterly rebelled, not in pain, but like a muscle twitch that was simply beyond conscious control.

  I grunted and started the massage technique again, heading towards my next class, where I cast the shrinking spell and headed to the ballroom. It had been set up with targets on the left end of the room, large circular bits of hay bound together with twine and painted with a red bullseye. On the left side of the room, there had been small wooden boxes with glass panels on the size and a maze built up, like the sort of thing one of my sisters had used to let her cat run through when I’d been very small. And in the center, a large space had been cleared, with only her familiar placidly laying there.

  Once everyone was there, standing awkwardly due to the lack of chairs, professor Toadweather buzzed her wings and started separating us into groups. The toad opened its mouth, and again I felt the faint scent of a horrible void beyond the stars, something empty and hungry, with too many eyes and teeth.

  “Alright! Everyone please turn your essays into the void of my familiar, and then… You all to the left, you all to the right, and you all in the middle! Today we’re going to be working on actually casting the spells that we’ve spent last week learning.”

  I shuffled towards the frog, tossing my essay in before I headed to the targets as directed, the tree-folk standing next to me. Given what the three spells were, I raised my hand and began making the steady gestures of summon goo, shaping my ether, and speaking the words of power.

  It only took me two tries to get it right. As the last syllable fell from my lips, I felt the spell complete, reaching out to Etherius and through the planes, until it found what it needed. The spell called forth ball of blackish-green goop, which launched from my hand and struck the target, splattering out. The entire target was left covered, and I felt the channeled ether in my spirit to keep it on this plane. I cut the connection, and moments later the goop faded away as well.

  I nodded my head, forced to mentally admit that I could see the utility of learning spells the way that Toadweather taught. I’d spent a few hours going over them in class, then more when writing my essay, enough to have learned it inside and out, and that made shaping them and remembering the incantation incredibly easy. I still thought I preferred professor Caeruleum’s method, but this definitely had its advantages.

  The treefolk next to me conjured his own ball of goo then, and professor Toadweather flittered over to us, watching. I cast the spell again, and she corrected a few of my gestures, shaving off a bit of the initial ether cost, then she corrected the cadence of a few words in the treefolk’s incantation, before nodding.

  “Well done you two, well done! I’m sure you did great on your essays too. Now, the next step is controlling the flight of your goo ball.”

  A wand appeared in her hand, and she flicked it to the side. A goo ball appeared, then curved towards the target, striking with uncanny accuracy.

  “It’s not as easy as an arcane missile to guide, but it can be done!”

  She then pinched my cheek and the treefolk’s bark around his face before buzzing away in a burst of speed. We continued to practice, and I focused on aiming the spell, curving it and such. As she’d said, it was less intuitive than aiming the missile spell, but it wasn’t too horribly hard, nowhere near the level of ether manipulation needed to create a lifeberry.

  After a quarter of the period had gone by, she called out for us to change stations, and I was shuffled to the far side of the room, where I began practicing the spell to summon a swarm of rats. I flicked my hands about, clearly enunciated the words of power, and shaped the circuit, but I felt when I failed to flick my fingers in time, and the spell fell apart in a moment.

  I let out a sigh and started again. This spell was much more complex than the summon goo spell, requiring me to cup my hands in a circle, flick out my pinkies, and index fingers, before I raised my left ring finger and right middle finger at the same time. After that, I had to do a quick series of sharp motions in a shape that almost resembled a backwards ‘z’ motion.

  The cracks in professor Toadweather’s method started to show here. While I’d practiced the finger and hand motions at work, they were still hard enough that I was struggling to get it together, even with the chant and shaping parts completely mastered.

  By the middle of the training block, I managed to get the motions right. Once again, I felt my ether pool reach deep into Etherius, and a moment later, three rats appeared. They were slightly larger than normal rats, almost the size of a younger cat, and they had blue fur speckled with red and green dots.

  Unlike with my summon gadhar or summon stone spells, the ether cost for summoning these was completely static, but they would fade upon either being dismissed, or after an hour. That was a good amount of time, so I put down some of the peanuts and walnuts that professor Toadweather had laid out, let them run the course, then dismissed them to start the summoning process again.

  “Good! Do it again. Get used to letting them move about, but not puppeting them. Just use gentle suggestions and allow them to do it,” professor Toadweather said, whispering into my ear.

  “Gah!” I said, not having heard her come up behind me. I could forgive not smelling her – we were in a faerie castle, of course I couldn’t smell one specific fae – but I thought I should have heard her. She was normally so loud!

  She giggled and zoomed away, and I practiced summoning the rat pack back and forth, feeding them nuts and stroking their fur. Despite being rats, they smelled of moonlight and forests, and were actually quite cute and tame.

  Eventually, though, it came time for my last part of the class: creating a familiar compact.

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