Fabrisse Book 2 (Chapter 12)

[Mastery Training: Whirlweave (Rank I)—Progress to Rank II: 100%]

[Training Completed: +87 EXP]

[Progress to Level 7: 3811/4550]

Fabrisse had managed to finish leveling up during the break after his morning lecture. The instant he levelled up, he was met with the following message: 

[FP: 0/38]

[You cannot cast spells anymore. Please rest and drink water.]

From 10 to 0 in approximately 26 minutes, he jotted down on his notes, down from 27 minutes with the extra 1 STR gain. The change was probably too insignificant, and the statistics too few to lean towards any result, as there would be too many other variables to account for.

He found an empty bench at a more secluded place outside the lecture hall to inspect his new Whirlweaving spell.

Spell Profile — Whirlweave (Rank II — Intermediate Air Control)

Type: Air Thaumaturgy, Localized Current Generation & Vector Manipulation

Description: Create a stable wind current within a 2 m radius from caster’s locus (±10° directional tolerance by default); speed adjustable between 0.8 – 2.5 m/s at Rank II. At high resonance control, currents can be curved to follow a set trajectory.

Duration: 7 s + 1.5 s per RES after 4 (capped at 18)

Wind Speed: 2.5 m/s (light wind) + 0.5 m/s per RES after 10 (capped at 20)

Wind Bending: Available only if RES ≥ 15 — caster may curve wind path up to 15° per 1 m traveled, maximum 30° total bend per cast.

Aetheric Reaction Equation: 35% Continuity Shaping + 25% Spatial Awareness + 20% Spellcasting Speed + 15% Mnemonic: Breathe, Shape, Guide, Curve + 5% Emotional Neutrality

Casting Requirement: SYN ≥ 9

I can bend my wind now. Good—Wait. Huh? The equation has changed. Now I have to speed up my casting to achieve a good result, instead of being able to dawdle like before.

He went to check the next immediate levels, and sure enough, the winds got stronger and stronger, and the radius grew further (but not that far). This might become an extremely powerful spell for something that was only Common grade, at least for slapping people in the face. Although it seemed like the maximum rank he could train towards for this spell was only V. It made sense; the spell would be too overpowered otherwise without a ceiling.

Someone passed by on the gravel path. Fabrisse lifted his head. Spatial awareness had started to get drilled into him after so many stupid mistakes, enough to keep him from staring at his Eidralith like a magpie with a bauble. 

It was the same tall, grey-haired guy. Sven was the name, he believed.

“Fabrisse Kestovar, right?” Sven said with an easy-going smile.

“Yes.” It still weirded him out a bit that this guy’d learned Fabrisse’s full name now, and the only thing he remembered about him was that he’d asked to be called Sven.

“I’ve just walked out of an Emotional Theory lecture too. How far along are you?”

“We’re learning Story Construction today.” 

“And how’s it?”

“Not good.” It was still the one thing Fabrisse struggled greatly with, actually. He still remembered the last time he tried to come up with a fake dead dog grieving story to cast a spell. It did not work out.

“I struggled with emotional channeling in general once, but my story construction isn’t half bad.” Sven nodded once and put a finger on his chin. “Liene told me you have a bit of trouble channeling your emotions, and I think I have just the right solution.”

Liene told him? Is he and Liene close enough for that? And why is he offering me a solution? We’ve barely talked, and I haven’t even examined his brick yet.

But this seemed like an important moment. If what Sven offered him was of substantial value, the system would likely validate it by giving him a quest or something.

He wasn’t wrong.

[Quest Received: “The Beginner Playwright”]

Objective: Successfully channel an emotion into a thaumaturgic spell.

Reward: + 300 EXP, + 1 EMO

Would you like to accept this quest?

[Yes] [No] [Remind Me Later]

The Eidralith doesn’t even bother leaving a cheeky note for this quest. Rude.

He glanced at Sven again, hoping another five seconds without verbal communication wouldn’t come off as weird.

To do this, I need to pick a spell with emotions as a casting requirement. But I’ve been actively avoiding learning those. Even spells that required emotions like Steadroot only called for safe, grounding emotions like Calm or Resolve. He didn’t have to fake resolve.

“I don’t have much time now,” he glanced at his glyphwatch.

“I can give you a suggestion that I think is actionable, and you can follow it and see how it works for you,” Sven said. “Then if you think you’d like to know more, we can chat.”

“Okay.”

“Good. We’ll need to take a short walk to the Dramaturgy and Performance Wing. That’s where I usually am.”

Of course there was a department for acting in the Synod. Emotional channeling was a cornerstone of most schools of thaumaturgy, and acting was simply the art of packaging an emotion convincingly enough to make it contagious, even to yourself. Students who couldn’t conjure feelings on demand sometimes learned to fake them so well that the magic didn’t care about the difference. The Synod called it ‘Applied Performance for Thaumaturgic Efficacy.’ Most students just called it ‘acting class.’ 

Fabrisse had enrolled in a couple of the open workshops once, on the optimistic theory that maybe this was a skill you could brute-force through exposure. It turned out the exercises were about as far from his comfort zone as one could get—big, expressive movements, voice projection, pretending to cry over imaginary tragedies while making prolonged eye contact with strangers. He’d lasted an hour before excusing himself under the pretense of a sudden schedule conflict, then spent the rest of the day quietly recovering from the sensory whiplash.

This time, however, he’d go. He was never going to get past the bottleneck if he avoided it forever.

They left the bench and cut across two courtyards before turning into one of the narrower side corridors. Sven led him past a row of poster frames advertising upcoming student performances—half of which looked like spellcasting showcases in disguise—and stopped at a heavy door with a brass placard that read Rehearsal Studio 3B.

Inside was a spacious, black-walled room with tiered seating on one side and a polished wooden floor in the center. High above, a lattice of floating crystal orbs drifted in slow arcs, shifting hue and brightness with each command rune on the wall.

“Are we even allowed to be in here?” Fabrisse asked, halting at the threshold.

“Don’t worry,” Sven said, flicking a slim silver pass engraved with the twin masks of the Dramaturgy Wing. “I have access.” Sven strode to the center of the ashwood circle and turned, hands loosely clasped behind his back. “So, say, you need to channel grief. What have your mentors been trying to get you to do?”

Fabrisse hesitated. “You really want to know?”

Sven raised an eyebrow.

Fabrisse sighed, and the memory came back in vivid, mauve-tinted detail. “Your dog’s dead, Kestovar! Kill the demon now!” 

He was too embarrassed to recall the rest. But he did summarize what happened to Sven.

“Right,” Sven said once Fabrisse had trailed off. “That’s exactly the problem. Do you like dogs, Fabrisse?”

“Not particularly.”

“Tell me one thing that you like.”

“Uh . . . mingleberry pies.”

“Pie, huh? Hmm . . . Now, I don’t want to sound like I’m smarter than your mentor, but I am a professional play actor, so I know a bit about story crafting.”

“Oh?”

Sven showed him a mysterious smile. “And here’s the thing—emotions don’t come in a one-size-fits-all box. You can’t hand someone a stock tragedy and expect it to bite. Grief, joy, rage; they hit hardest when the story hooks into something you care about, not something the instructant thinks you ought to care about.”

He stepped closer, lowering his voice as if weaving a spell. “Imagine them! Golden pastries of your choice, crisp at the edge, buttery-soft at the center, steam curling from their perfect lattice tops. You’ve waited all week for them. You’re carrying the box home, the smell wrapping around you like a lover’s embrace. And then . . .” Sven mimed catching a dropping object, “. . . you trip. The box flies. It bursts open. Pastries tumble into the wet, cold mud. You scramble to save them—only to drop your heavy satchel on top, crushing them into an unrecognizable, soggy ruin. Gone. Forever. No spell in the Synod could restore them.”

Fabrisse winced at the ‘tripping’ bit. He used to be clumsy like that, before he started training his own stealth skills.

“Now you try casting the Invocation of Grief,” Sven smiled. “The practice automaton out there is a safe target.”

Fabrisse closed his eyes. The image slid into place: a pie in his hands—not his favorite pie, not even the right filling, but close enough. His mind tried to argue the details, swapping crust textures, adjusting the lattice pattern, but the scene still bruised something faintly inside him. The imagined weight of the pie in his arms. The twist of his ankle. The awful, sodden thump as the satchel crushed it flat. The sting of waste and disappointment settled like a thin frost over his chest.

The sting of waste and disappointment settled like a thin frost over his chest.

[Emotional State Detected: GRIEF]

Status: Partially Contaminated

Contaminating Emotion: Frustration

He scowled—half at the loss of the pie, half at the fact the grief was actually working despite the pie not being his pie. The PRAXIS NODE didn’t care about pastry fidelity.

Under his breath, he murmured the clean, textbook mnemonic for the Invocation of Grief:

“bind the weight to the heart, and the heart to the void; 

from absence, let the tears fall.”

He raised his hand and let the shape of the emotion push through him into the weave.

It worked. The arc leapt from his palm, travelling farther than his usual range, but still dying just short of the practice automaton. Periwinkle sparks burst forth—true grief, no longer the muddy mauve he usually produced—but with a thin tail of orange trailing behind, a telltale leak of frustration.

Still, that was it. Invocation of Grief.

[Spell Registered: Invocation of Grief (Rank I)]

Type: Concordance (Emotion [Grief])

Description:

Draws upon a conjured or genuine grief-state to manifest a periwinkle discharge that inflicts emotional disruption and mild physical backlash on the target. The effect is brief, intended for controlled training or low-threat engagements. Incomplete or contaminated grief-states reduce potency, range, and alter hue.

Aetheric Reaction Equation: 40% Emotional Output (Grief) + 30% Aetheric Synchronization + 30% Mnemonic Phrasing

Base Damage Output: 12–18 Spell Damage on direct contact. Scales with EMO: +1 Spell Damage per EMO over 5 (capped at 12). 

Base Velocity: 15m/s. Scales with RES: +0.3 m/s per RES over 5 (capped at 12).

Base Range: 5 m (emotive arc dissipates rapidly beyond this). 

Scales with EMO: +0.1 m per EMO over 5 (capped at 12).

Scales with RES: +0.2 m per RES over 5 (capped at 12).

[Quest Completed: “The Beginner Playwright”]

Reward: + 300 EXP, + 1 EMO

[SYSTEM NOTE: You haven’t learned to feel, but you have learned how to fake your feelings.]

[Progress to Level 7: 4111/4550]

This was it. His first pure emotion spell that could actually go on the offensive. And it was with the help of a guy he didn’t even know two days ago.

But how strong is ‘12 Spell Damage’? This was his first offensive spell after Stupenstone Fling, and the Fling’s damage output had been calculated using a different quantifier, so he had no framework for it.

[Automatic Response: 20 Spell Damage would roughly equal to throwing a stone with 55 N of force—enough to sting, bruise, and briefly stagger an unarmored person.]

Thank you for the easily visualizable response, system, though I asked for 12, not 20.

“Hey, nice one,” Sven called from across the room, grinning like this was his victory too. “First clean cast always feels good, doesn’t it?”

Fabrisse just gave a small nod, still staring at the faint traces of periwinkle drifting from his fingertips.

“Have you checked out the brick in the lab yet?” Sven asked.

“No,” Fabrisse said.

“No rush.” Sven leaned back against the workbench. “So did you find it helpful?” 

“Very. Thank you.”

“Good. You can come find me in this very room every Monday, Wednesday, Friday morning. Just ask for Sven.”

Fabrisse tried not to meet Sven’s eyes, and ended up staring at his shirt instead. It was printed with a sketchy illustration of a blond priestess from some popular serial he vaguely recognized, a giant dragonfly wheeling through the background behind her. He didn’t particularly care for that character, but staring at her felt . . . inappropriate, somehow. So he let his gaze drift past, settling on a random light orb hovering in the far corner of the room.

Does Sven count as a friend now? I really need to run tests on the brick he gave me to see if the primary and bonus objectives have been met.

Sven will be an important Book 2 character; I swear. Not random addition for the sake of word count.