Page 64 of Elemental Affections

Resting an ungloved hand against the ground, she summoned magic into her fingertips, pulling on water from the nearby well to augment her waning energy. Only two full days left before she would have to pack up and return to the Valley, her research notebooks filled with pages upon pages of things that hadn’t worked. It was to be expected, Dae knew it, but she’d hoped that being in Rhell would provide an extra insight she had been missing at the university. Wishful thinking.

The tract of land she was using for her test bore the signature of Ezzyn’s magic, so familiar to her senses. She saw him every day, yet it felt like she spent more time with this phantom of him than the real man. The intensity Garethe had warned of all but consumed Ezzyn. He had to be reminded to eat, to rest. To relinquish a modicum of control because—though he tried—he couldn’t be everywhere at once. Especially not with the Sylveren group in residence, expanding the Den’olm mages’ reach. They’d managed to push the poison back to the safety threshold for the wells, but the fresh ground and its protections were too new to know if they would hold.

Ezzyn seemed intent on maintaining the line even if it killed him.

“You know we’re going back to the Valley in a few days, yes?” she’d said to him that morning. “Let the others get used to placing the protection spells.”

He’d ignored her.

At the edges of her senses, Dae felt tendrils of the poison dribbling back into the fire-cleansed land. It had only been a day since Ezzyn had cleared this stretch, too soon for any of the grovetenders’ plants to root and withstand another sweep of either fire or ice. Her ward had failed.

Sending her magic out, Dae latched onto the droplet-like grains of poison, the feel of them finally coming readily to mind. With the already cold ground, freezing the poison went quickly when she didn’t have plants or sensitive magical works to cast around. A bittersweet boon. Tired after successive, draining days, her spellwork was sloppy, the targeting spell bleeding out into what she’d normally consider an unacceptable amount of clean soil. A problem for another day.

Moving down her row of wards, each bearing different versions of her ice enchantment, Dae recorded the results. So far, none had managed to deploy her targeted icing spells in the way she’d envisioned. Too slow, or weak, or with improper range. Sometimes all three, sometimes simply a dud of an enchant.

The few water spells she’d managed to layer into wards hadn’t fared much better, either flooding the soil until the spell gave out, or attacking her icework until it melted, freeing the poison granules back into the earth.

Grim-faced, she went down the row, reaching the second-to-last batch with her pencil already tracing the letters for failure, the only questions left being how much and in which ways. Yet, the results here were different. One ward sent out gentle pulses of cold, a light breath of her magic spreading outward in a circle. Enlarged, ice-encrusted grains of poison dotted the surface, flushed to the surface by her water spell.

Dae stared. Her layered spells had worked. Had frozen the poison with minimal bleed into the surroundings. Targeted the poison first for ice, then for the flooding enchantment to float only the poison up through the soil to the top. The grains were tiny, visible because she knew what to look for, and even then she relied on the ice flashing as it caught the weak sunlight. The spread was only a fraction of what the ward should’ve covered, so minimal that Ezzyn’s slow-release fire ward caught only a smidgen of her successful zone.

But it had worked. Only one, butit had worked.Dae would need to refine the spells from the ground up, improve timeframes, get the ward to reproduce the effect with consistency … so many things before she could actually call it a true success.

Heat brushed across the ground. Dae turned to find Ezzyn doing his sweep, incinerating the ground with the failed wards.

“Ezzyn!” Dae ushered him closer, pointing at his fire ward allocated to her current zone. “That one. Boost that one.”

He frowned, light flickering in his hand as he fed the dwindling ward. “Why am I—” His brows went up. Light flared at the base of the ward, crackles intermittently heard as fire magic zipped across the ground, searing Dae’s ice.

“Flame snuffing … fuck.” He turned to her, shock on his face. “It…”

“Worked,” Dae said, a giddy exhale suffusing the word.

“Can you make more?” Ezzyn clutched her shoulders.

“There’s still so much—”

“Can you? Do you have any left?”

“Y-Yes, but it’s not reliable. This is the only one that—”

“It doesn’t matter.” Ezzyn let go of her and surveyed the rest of the field. “I’ll clear the southern quadrant. Meet me there once you’ve finished this section.”

He went back to the ward, walking over for closer inspection.

Dae glanced at the sky. Late afternoon already, darkness approaching despite the winter sun they’d enjoyed. Given how intensely focused Ezzyn was of late, she didn’t bother arguing. In Den’olm, unless confronted with physical evidence, it was difficult to convince him of anything contrary to what he’d already decided to obsess over.

A quick check of her final variations of wards revealed more failures, mostly of her ice and flooding spells attacking one another. Probably an error in her layering spellwork, but she could get Zhenya to help her with fixes later. Dae’s sole properly functioning ward used inscription techniques that she’d picked more for time-saving than belief in their viability. There wasn’t time to refine testing of them now since Dae was rubbish at inscription work, but she made a few notes before collecting fresh wards from the field tent.

She rushed the enchanting, figuring since it was more to test the basics of her ice spells and dial in Ezzyn’s magic in seeking out the iced poison that it wouldn’t matter. Precise timing and range could be experimented with by the Den’olm mages.

Garethe stuck his head in the tent. “Anadae, have you seen Ezzyn?”

“He’s out in the field. I was just going to meet him.” Dae held up a ward, a tentative smile on her face. “I think we might’ve finally had a bit of luck.”

“That’s great news,” Garethe said, looking back over his shoulder. “Tell Ezzyn to get to the main hall. The Restorers are already arriving, and he’s late.”

Garethe disappeared before Dae could respond. Disquieted, she gathered her slapdash wards and went to the south quadrant.

---