Vacant Throne

Alyssa took a deep breath. “Sorry I snapped at you,” she said after a long moment of holding it. “I’m just a little frustrated. I expected this to be…”

“Easy?” Irulon said, handling a glob of dripping… something. Alyssa’s latest failure. The princess didn’t seem concerned in the slightest that whatever it was leaking might be toxic. Rather, she looked at it like she wanted to dissect it. Not that it was living. At least, Alyssa was pretty sure it wasn’t living. Alyssa wasn’t even sure that it was organic.

“Something like that,” Alyssa mumbled.

“What you are doing is definitely impossible.”

Blinking, Alyssa looked up to Irulon. “Impossible? Magic can do all kinds of things that I thought was impossible.”

“No magic that I am aware of can create something physical. Or, if it does create something physical, it is a temporary object and will vanish in time.”

Frowning, Alyssa went through her mental library of all her spells. As far as she could tell in her limited experience with magic, Irulon was right. The only ones that she could think up that actually created something were the Spectral style death spells and anything to do with fire. The Spectral spells disappeared as soon as she dismissed them and, while fire did not, it was entirely possible that the original magical flames vanished and were replaced by regular flames as the fire spread. Fractal spells did create lots of mirror-like constructs, but they vanished as soon as the effect ended.

“I wonder if I can use what I see on your hands when you create these,” Irulon paused to heft up the leaking green glob, “to craft a whole new school of magic. Even something simple like creating a metal ball would be revolutionary. I could be known as the greatest arcanist to have ever lived. My name would be taught in the Observatorium until the end of time. I could—”

“Shouldn’t we focus on you first? You know, the whole soul problem?”

Irulon blinked, looking over the wooden desk covered with various creations to stare at Alyssa. If Alyssa hadn’t known better, she might have thought that the princess had forgotten about the whole reason they were doing this in the first place.

Perhaps forgotten was the wrong word. Perhaps it was more that she was debating between saving her and the dragon’s soul and the possibility of having her name in every history book ever made going forward. To Alyssa, the choice seemed obvious. To Irulon?

“Of course,” she said after too long of a minute.

Alyssa sighed, wondering if her supposition was correct. Then she reconsidered. Irulon would surely focus on saving herself first. If only so that she could claim this new magical field for herself and secure her name instead of being merely the footnote to someone else who would complete her research in the future should she die.

Fiddling with one of the marble-sized ball bearings she had created, Alyssa decided to focus on her own problems. Irulon was a grown woman. She could decide how to live her own life. Though if she did decide to do something hazardous to her own health, Alyssa would have to have some words with her.

“Any real ideas on how we can fix this? Unless the dragon wants to live inside a ball of metal or whatever that thing is—” Alyssa pointed toward the leaking glob in Irulon’s hands.

“It doesn’t.”

“Then we’ve still got a lot of work to do it seems.”

“Indeed. There are a few more tests I would like to run. However… our results seem to have been declining as of late. It may be time for a break.”

Alyssa’s eyes flicked to the window in the room. Their experiments had gone on for a few hours now. Night had fallen a while ago. But… it didn’t seem like it had been that long of a session since. However, upon looking at her phone, she realized that it was almost morning again. “My sleep schedule is so messed up,” Alyssa groaned.

“We’ve been at this for ten hours, give or take.”

“With nothing to show for it. But we have to keep trying, right?”

“No sense being so down. It is unreasonable to expect you to have mastered a new skill in such little time, especially when you have little experience in similar tasks.”

“I created a towering statue in Teneville…”

“Tenebrael created a statue. You merely acted as a proxy for her body. This is something you are doing entirely on your own, albeit using her power. My evidence for this theory is that you do not need to speak any words to generate this effect. As such, you are likely failing to frame your mindset in the proper patterns. If you were a classically trained arcanist, you might find this task easier. However, such an education would take years. Most arcanists are identified and begin their education from a young age. We… I do not have that much time. So we will have to take a different approach. Were I you, I would not be expecting Tenebrael to come along with all the answers to turn this task into something easily accomplished. Not unless she meddles with your mind. Knowing you, you would object to that.”

“Object. Yeah. That’s one word for it.” Messing with my mind? Alyssa bit her lip as Irulon turned away. The princess kept her back straight, bending only at the hip as she leaned forward to make a few notes in a notebook. Her face was poised, as usual, and she had remained that way for their entire meeting. While Alyssa had lost her patience more than once, Irulon had kept perfectly calm.

If it came down to it, would she allow Tenebrael into her head? It wasn’t a question that she had an answer to. It wasn’t a question that she thought she would have an answer to unless it came down to it. Assuming Tenebrael could do something like that in the first place. For all Alyssa knew, that would count as harming a mortal.

Maybe that was why Tenebrael had disappeared. She had known that using this ability wouldn’t be easy and, rather than answer questions, had simply vanished for a time until Alyssa realized the scope of the actual problem. Checking her phone again, Alyssa frowned. Still no response to her text message to Tenebrael. It was entirely possible that something else had happened. Iosefael apparently was not ready to fulfill a Dominion’s duties and had caused quite a mess as well.

“In any case,” Irulon said, turning back to Alyssa—who tried to act as if she hadn’t been staring. “I haven’t slept in three days now. With all this excitement, I am not sure when I might find time to sleep in the future. My companion is encouraging me to rest for a time. So we will be taking a break regardless of your wishes.”

“Three days? Irulon… you have to sleep more often than that. It’s bad for your body.”

“I’m fine. I’ll be better once this stress is behind me.”

Alyssa pressed her lips together, wondering if she should press the point more. Before she could, Irulon spoke again.

“If you wish to continue trying variations on what we have already done, that is your prerogative. But you’ll have to do that in your own room.”

“No. You’re probably right. I don’t feel tired yet, but I should probably sleep soon. If only so that I can wake up when you get up… Though knowing you, I could wait as long as I wanted as long as no one came around to wake you up.”

“I imagine my sleep will be quite light with all the excitement going on.”

“Imagine all you want. Light sleep for you is still heavy sleep for everyone else.”

“Hm. We’ll see.”

Leaving the created material behind on Irulon’s desk, Alyssa headed out. She first headed down to the guild’s main tavern, only to find the room completely empty. Not even the receptionist was at the desk with all the jobs and requests posted behind it. A bit of an eerie scene, but it wasn’t the first time Alyssa had gone in while it was empty. While the guild’s taverns tended to stay up later than anything else in this world, even over regular taverns, it did shut down relatively early on into the night. Relative to Earth, anyway.

In fact, someone would probably be along shortly to open up its doors to the public as they did every morning.

Alyssa considered heading up to her own bed, but she didn’t quite feel tired yet. She had only been up for ten hours, plus a bit extra. The entirety of that time had been spent with Irulon.

At the same time, she really didn’t have anywhere to go. Although Illuna was, overall, safer than Lyria, she still didn’t really want to go wandering the streets alone for a little early morning walk. Kasita hadn’t stopped by, so she was probably watching the people from Yora. Brakkt was gone. The monsters down in the camp were fine on their own.

Alyssa took a seat down at the usual table. The room was still well lit. Jars of light potion couldn’t just be turned off with a flick of a switch, so they remained on more or less permanently until the magic of the alchemy waned to the point where they had to be replaced.

She started off with another text message to Tenebrael. It was… mildly awkward. She felt like she was in high school again, sending a message to someone who hadn’t messaged her back after the last one always felt like she was nagging or just being annoying. But in this case, she really didn’t care if she was annoying Tenebrael.

After, she decided to pull up a movie on her phone. A little relaxation went a long way, and it had been a long time since she had a real minute to relax like this. It was a shame that Kasita wasn’t around. Kasita always seemed to enjoy movies from Earth. Especially when they had monsters in them. She didn’t seem to like Alien that much though. The xenomorph reminded her a bit too much of a much more aggressive gaunt. Still, it meant that now was the perfect time to watch the second one in the series.

The movie failed to capture her interest. Part of it was that she had seen the movie before. Maybe too many times. The other part was that her mind kept wandering. She was trying to give herself an hour or two of freedom from thinking about being connected to Tenebrael. Instead, she just felt like she was procrastinating. It was the same sensation that she got when she had a school assignment to do and wasn’t doing it.

Halfway through, Alyssa put the movie on pause and stopped pretending like it was distracting her at all. Instead, she closed her eyes and decided to try creating something again. This time, she kept in mind something Irulon had said. She was thinking about it wrong. Her mindset was wrong. A classically trained arcanist would be able to use the ability. Alyssa couldn’t because she… took shortcuts? She didn’t have to speak spells before casting them. She didn’t even have to know what a spell did as long as she more or less guessed right. She had proved that when she killed the old woman at the Juno Federation’s outpost using Irulon’s tome. From what she understood, that was highly abnormal. A normal arcanist had to know the spell’s activation name and its intended effect or the spell would fail.

She didn’t know what kind of activation phrase would work. She knew her intended outcome, but wasn’t sure if that was the same thing. Rather, she was starting to think that she couldn’t just focus on a picture of what she wanted. Tenebrael, while performing the same spell, had listed off components of the human body individually until she got lazy and wrapped up the rest. Tenebrael had not verbally identified any shape or order of composition. Just the material that made up a body.

Hands together, Alyssa decided that there was no downside to verbally stating what she wanted from her experiment in the relatively private room. “Iron and glass,” she said, deciding to not go for anything more complicated than two separate materials. She slowly pulled her hands apart, wanting nothing more than a simple sphere.

The lump settled into the palms of her hands. Cold. Metallic.

Opening her eyes, Alyssa found just what she feared. A ball of solid metal. At least, she assumed that it was solid. With the metal being opaque, it could have glass in the center. Instinct, or perhaps just pessimism, told Alyssa that it did not.

Still, it hadn’t been worse than any attempts up in Irulon’s room. Undaunted, she set it aside and tried again.

And again.

And again.

And…

Alyssa held up a small marble. There were eleven failures on the table around her. Eleven marbles that were either metal or glass. But this one, this twelfth attempt, was… a success? It was a marble like all the others. But this one was different in composition. Metal and glass swirled together in a way that Alyssa thought would be impossible through traditional manufacturing techniques. It was quite an interesting design, one that caught the light with the glass portion.

Excited by something being different, she had half a mind to rush upstairs and show off her creation to Irulon. Reality tempered her excitement; the thought of having to wake up Irulon right after she had gone to bed was daunting. Besides that, she wasn’t sure that this was really worth getting too complacent with. Although it seemed to be some kind of progress, it was still essentially worthless unless she wanted to play a game of marbles.

She put her hands together again, ready for another attempt, only to be startled out of it by light footsteps. Her hand dropped to her side where she kept her pistol and her spell cards entirely out of habit. Alyssa paused as she saw who was coming down the stairs.

“Lumen,” Alyssa greeted. They didn’t really get along, but that was no reason to not be cordial.

For her part, Lumen just stared for a long moment. Alyssa thought she heard a soft groan coming from the woman as she slowly approached. “Your eyes are glowing again.”

“Yes,” Alyssa said, making some effort to avoid rolling her eyes. “Very observant.”

Lumen either didn’t notice or didn’t care about the heavy sarcasm. She turned her eyes to the table and the many marbles lying on top of it. One of her hands twitched like she considered touching one of the marbles before thinking better of it. “What’s all this then?”

“A little science experiment,” Alyssa said as she spun the swirled marble. It didn’t spin perfectly, possibly because the iron was weightier than the glass. After practically flipping over, it did steady its spin, but it still wasn’t smooth. “Say, you were trained and educated at the Observatorium, weren’t you?”

“Yeah?” Lumen said, suddenly defensive. “What of it?”

“Just wondering… If you came across a spell to do something you had never seen or heard of before, how would you go about experimenting with it to figure out exactly what it does and how it can be used?”

Lumen raised an eyebrow. After what appeared to be a long mental debate with herself, she sat down at the table across from Alyssa. She didn’t speak for a long moment, choosing to simply stare at Alyssa. “I suppose it depends,” she said slowly. “The method that I would have acquired a spell would account for a great deal of my investigation. If I found the design among some ancient ruins, I would likely start looking up the history of the area, finding out what magic the people who once lived there were known to have used. If, for example, the ruins were known to be from some ancient ‘Kingdom of the Sun’ and were known for pioneering a great many light-based rituals, I would probably start looking there. Many spells of a similar type will have common identifying features. Though ancient spells would more than likely be rituals, which are a bit harder to discern exactly what they are supposed to be doing. Rituals are far less refined arcanery than modern spell cards.”

Alyssa nodded along, finding Lumen’s lecture interesting but not all that relevant to what she needed. This wasn’t exactly a spell, first of all. Not in the same way that rituals and spell cards were. Secondly, she knew where it came from. The Endless Expanse. But she wasn’t sure how that might help her. Not unless the mathematics Tenebrael had showed her were the key to this.

Given that she had made some progress here at the table, it might simply be a matter of practice.

Lumen continued on, discussing a few other scenarios and how she would go about trying to identify a random spell. From spells developed in a contemporary time outside the Observatorium to a theoretical ancient ritual discovered by a hostile group that the guild had been sent to take down with no known origins. Many of her scenarios ended with heading to the Observatorium to seek guidance from those more experienced than her.

Thanking her, Alyssa collected the marbles and headed back upstairs. This time to her room. Fela looked to be just waking up, making Alyssa wonder if the hellhound had spent the entire night asleep. Shaking her head, Alyssa looked over to one of the other beds in the room. Since arriving in Illuna, Alyssa had been in the same room as Lumen, Fela, and her mother. Kasita as well, though the mimic didn’t really sleep much.

Her mother was up as well, looking like she had woken not long before and had just finished getting dressed.

Alyssa paused, then smiled softly. “Hey mom. You got a minute to talk?”

Lisa looked over, pursing her lips as her eyes flicked to Alyssa’s. She didn’t comment, however, looking back down to her own belt where she was tightening it around her waist. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, really. Just wanted to talk. Not even about anything in particular. Just… a bit of talk before you head back to Lyria.”

Raising an eyebrow, Lisa stared. Perhaps looking for something that might be bothering her daughter. Whether or not she found anything went unsaid. Instead, she nodded. “I’ve got nothing pressing on my schedule.”

“Thanks,” Alyssa said, taking a seat on her own bed. She didn’t say anything right away. In fact, it was several minutes before either spoke. But eventually, Alyssa started talking, mentioning the minotaur brothers and hoping that she might get a little closer to her own mother by the end of their chat.