4.04: OHSW exists for a reason

“Can spells be destroyed?” I asked Max while he painted runes up and down my arms. For the first time, he wasn’t painting the complicated, circular designs that we’d been taught at Skolala Refujeyo, but the spiderweb designs that we’d found on the skeleton under the lake. (With Saina not around to return Duniyasar to, Kylie was still the owner, and apparently she’d been letting him in to study the tapestries; he was pretty sure he had some idea of how magic flowed through them, now, and wanted my confirmation.)

“Hard to say,” Max murmured, most of his attention on the brush in his hand. “Theoretically, spells probably degrade to nothing eventually, or there’d be a lot more of them about, but it’s never been directly observed. Sometimes a spell will simply disappear for a while and everyone will think it’s dead, and then it’ll rise up again out of nowhere. Fionnrath probably thought their spell was dead, until Kylie showed up.” He scowled. “I’m running out of skin. You don’t have enough. You should eat more and put on weight.”

“Sure, I’ll get right on it.”

“Ugh, I’m going to have to paint over these scars. Do they hurt?”

“No, I can’t feel them. I don’t know if I’ll feel the magic in that part.”

“It’s okay, it’s not an important junction. Anyway, nobody’s sure about the life cycle of a spell because they’re kind of hard to track. We know that sometimes, the easy ones, the ones with lineages, will vanish, and sometimes they’ll come back generations later and sometimes they won’t. So maybe those that don’t come back are gone, or maybe they’re just… waiting. Which even makes calculating the number of spells we should have by looking at the rate of spell generation unreliable, and let’s not get into how unreliable every single formula already is for calculating the rate of spell generation. Can you turn your arm – yeah, like that. As for deliberately destroying spells, well, there’s probably a way, but I don’t know anybody who knows how. They say Sekura Refujeyo used to have a bunch of scary witch assassins during the Purity Revolution, but they say all kinds of things. You know the stories.”

I nodded, and focused on not trembling while Max was still painting my arms. I did know the stories. During the witch hunts of the Purity Revolution, people would root out and kill cursed people in all kinds of creative ways, hoping to trap the curses inside their bodies and destroy them along with the witch. Of course, there had always been dangerous curses and people ready to try to destroy them, but with the Purity Revolution came the witch hunters, the mages tasked with protecting the world from curses, and if a curse repeatedly cropped up in a community no matter how many witches they burned or drowned or skinned or whatever, then they’d be called in to… deal with the problem.

The Revolution calmed down over time, but the witch hunting mages never went away. I’d been warned about them for most of my life.

“So Sekura Refujeyo can destroy spells?”

Max snorted. “If you listen to the rumours, sekkies can do pretty much anything. They’re cops with lots of magic and not very much oversight. But no, I think if they were out there destroying spells, we’d know about it. There’s no reason to keep it a secret; the scientific community would be aware of the method, at least. I expect that what happened is that desperate people hiding their dangerous cursed children had witch hunters show up on their door to take them here to be trained – you know, the entire purpose of this school – and all the parents noticed was that big scary mages showed up and they never saw their children again. Repeat that process several hundred times, while commonfolk are killing witches out of desperation to try and eliminate their curses, and…” he shrugged.

“So… spells can’t be destroyed?”

“I don’t know of a method by which they can. But that isn’t to say that that method isn’t out there. There are teams of cultural researchers out there unearthing old commonfolk curse binding methods and occasionally turning up things that work; who’s to say that some of their old curse destroying methods didn’t work as well? Okay, these are done; let me get the thing.”

“The thing?”

Max went into his little area and retrieved a large ceramic tile with a simple illumination rune circle engraved into it. “We’ll use this to earth the magic. I’m basically going to channel some magic through your left arm, and need you to take note of where the magic flows; then I’ll do your right arm. Alright?”

I nodded. “We don’t usually use anything to ground the magic.”

“That’s because usually I’d just paint this part onto your arm. But this is… okay, if you think of normal runes like circuit boards, my theory is that these runes are more like wires. They can channel a lot of magic, but they’re not complicated enough to do much with it. Not in the limited space of your arms anyway. I think.” He bit his lip. “Anyway, if we want the magic to flow, we need to tell it to actually do something. I considered just putting it in a holding rune, but with an illumination rune we’ll be able to see it working by checking for light.”

I nodded. “Aright then. So I just touch it?”

“Yeah. So long as the black pads I painted on your fingertips are making contact with the rune, it should work. Okay.” He rubbed his hands together. “You ready?”

“Let’s do this.” I touched the tile.

A loud bang echoed through the confined space of the bedroom, and I was on the floor, seeing stars.

“Kayden? Kayden!”

“’M’fine,” I mumbled, sitting up and trying to blink my vision into something resembling normalcy. I felt… numb… inside. Weak? Drained? “Maybe use a bit less magic next time?”

“I hadn’t channelled any yet! I wasn’t even touching you! I’m so sorry, I have no idea what that was. Clearly I don’t understand any of this enough to be experimenting on you. I’m sor – ”

“Seriously, Max, I’m completely fine.” I pushed the heels of my hands against my eyes for a few seconds, and when I took them away, my vision was clear. I’d identified the drained feeling – it was the absence of Kylie’s magic. I felt like I’d been out of her range for a couple of weeks, at least.

Oh no. Had the experiment broken the familiarity link? Max had been careful not to paint over the link runes, but – no, the link was still intact. There just wasn’t any magic flowing through it, and the magic that had been inside me was gone.

I grabbed my tablet. “We have to check on Kylie.”

“Why? What’s going on?” Max asked, grabbing his own tablet.

I gestured at the small pile of rubble and dust that had once been a ceramic tile with runes on it. “That was her magic, not yours. I can’t feel her magic inside me any more.” I went to send her a message, but just then, she stumbled through the door.

“Are you alright?” Max and I asked simultaneously, causing her to jump.

“Yes,” she said with a certainty belied by the how her legs shook as she took the few steps to her bed, and collapsed onto it.

“How do you feel?” Max asked.

“Weak and dizzy, if you must know. What’s going on?”

“It’s our fault,” I said. “Sorry. We were experimenting. We, um.” I glanced at my arms. “I’m not feeling any of your magic. I think we might have… accidentally drained it? It was disorienting for me, too.”

“Oh. Huh.”

“I’m sorry,” Max said for the millionth time. “We didn’t even consider that this experiment might affect you.”

“We probably should have, with the link,” I added. “We’re idiots.”

“It wasn’t supposed to channel Kylie’s magic at all!” Max pointed out. “None of the previous runes did! We know you can’t channel Kylie’s magic. That’s an established fact.”

“True. But you said those are like circuit boards, and these are like wires, right?”

“Metaphorically, yes. They don’t behave exactly like – ”

“I might not be able to, um… run programs?… with Kylie’s spell, but the power is still there. I think you just earthed it. Does that metaphor make sense?”

“Not even a little bit, but I think you have a point, nevertheless. At least as far as earthing the magic that happens to be present goes.”

“Hey,” Kylie said, “what are you two even talking about?”

“Oh, nothing.” I shrugged. “Max just accidentally invented a new magical weapon.”

“I what?!”

I gestured at the broken ceramic on the floor, and then kicked some fragments aside to reveal what I’d just noticed – the stone floor beneath was pitted and cracked. “I mean.”

Max flushed. “I… didn’t mean to do that. Or hurt either of you. I’m sorry.”

“We’re not hurt,” Kylie pointed out. “I just need to rest a bit and the magic – ”

“You could have been! This proves that I had no idea what I was doing, and I shouldn’t have put you in danger like that! What if something worse had happened? Something more dangerous? I mean, even this is dangerous; if that tile had’ve exploded outward then the fragments – ”

“Kylie can be mad if she wants,” I said, “but I agreed to this experiment. I took the risks, too.”

“Because you trusted my competence. You trusted that this would be safe, because I thought it was. Same as you trusted that I’d be able to undo that familiarity link.”

Kylie and I exchanged a glance.

“You’re right, Max,” I said, deadpan. “We are very traumatised and will never forgive you.”

“Honestly, I think you’re the source of all evil in the world,” Kylie added. “After all, your magical big brain legacy mage genius hasn’t solved world hunger yet. People are starving. For shame.”

“Yeah, and why haven’t you eliminated all disease? And stopped all the wars? People are trusting in you, Max.”

He sighed. “Do you two ever take anything seriously?”

“No,” I said. “It’s bad for my health.”

“We take you concerns seriously when they’re not total bullshit,” Kylie added. “Do you think your little earthing trick would work for people who aren’t Kayden?”

“What do you mean?” Max asked.

“I mean, channelling that amount of magic would normally have killed both of us, right?” she explained. Max clearly hadn’t considered this, because he went completely white and opened his mouth to respond, but she kept talking over him. “But that discharged the magic into that instead. Side note: how deep do you think those cracks go? Should we change to a different bedroom? Not important right now. My point is, it discharged the magic in Kayden because he’s a familiar, right? Because of the way the magic moved through his body, it was just there and available?”

“I assume so,” Max said, “but we’ve done no research and everything is guesswork at this point.”

“Right. So my question is, does it only work for familiars, or could a mage discharge their spell like that, too? If they channelled their magic through it?”

“Hmm.” Max rubbed his goatee, slipping back into Mad Scientist mode. I caught Kylie’s eye, and gave her a ‘congratulations on sufficiently distracting him’ eyebrow waggle, which I assumed the context of the situation would sufficiently communicate. She gave me a thumbs up.

“I don’t think that would work,” Max continued, “since they’d still be channelling the spell to get it into the, um, wires. Since they’d have to be touching the rune anyway, I don’t thing drawing these on their arms would change anything. They could be used to convey magic outside the body and activate runes at a distance, but we already have runes for that… I guess it’s worth experimenting to see if these kinds are better or worse than modern runes, but they’d probably be worse, because otherwise why have they fallen out of use?” He bit his lip thoughtfully. “Now, if there was a way to get the magic of the spell directly into the ‘wires’ without channelling, then another mage might be able to accomplish the same as Kayden. I’d have to paint over the mage mark, I think...” he frowned at the mage mark on his arm thoughtfully. “Mmm. Excuse me, I have some work to do.”

“Try not to blow up any school equipment!” I called after him as he left. I looked at Kylie. “We should probably go to the kuracar, right after I wash all these runes off.”

“Oh, yeah. We could have all kinds of internal injuries. Let’s be quick; if he finds anything, I don’t want Max to know about it.”

“So that whole situation was fucked up, right? Human experimentation and unexpectedly dangerous magic? He’s right, that could’ve been way more dangerous.”

“Well, yeah, but aren’t we used to that by now?”