Advanced Thaumaturgy (Severa Book 1) - Chapter 1

No breaks for me after all :) I like writing too much. I think this is a quality introduction to Severa's book. Making it funny might be a challenge.

The wyvern fell from the sky with a burning sigil seared into its chest.

It struck the earth like a meteor: with talons curled, wings convulsing, and a scream still lodged in its throat. The sigil ignited on impact, and in the breath between heartbeats, the entire creature combusted. A cone of flame surged skyward, crimson and unnatural, painting the cliffs in strobing shadows before vanishing into nothing but scorched bones.

Severa Montreal landed in a crouch. Her ears rang from the aether recoil, and she let out a controlled breath. 

She stood at the rim of the Calderic Expanse, a collapsed caldera older than most written histories, its floor veined with cooled lava flows and ancient warding channels. Lightning forked silently in the far clouds, hinting at residual aetheric instability. Somewhere beneath stone arches, behind sigil-locked doors and dormant guardian wards would lay the loots she had come for.

She held the posture for a moment. Her internal ledger was already running: trajectory acceptable, sigil timing sharp, but she’d overcommitted her emotion: rage—as made evident from the crimson color of her flame. She could feel the emotion draining her aether pool from the sluggish throb behind her eyes.

Crimson again. Obvious rage overload. Merry would notice.

Controlling one’s emotion was one of the three pillars of thaumaturgy: emotion + intent + technique = a perfect spell. Any other time, Severa could summon emotion like flipping through a well-ordered index: awe for clarity, terror for precision, grief for depth. Whatever the spell demanded, she’d provide it; sterile, strategic, precise.

But not today.

What’s wrong with me? She gritted her teeth. A Montreal doesn’t lose her head.

“Montreal,” a woman’s voice came from behind her. Her supervisor for today’s dungeon delve, Magus Prefect Merriah ‘Merry’ Halveth.

Severa’s moment of introspection shattered. She looked up.

The second wyvern came in low, hugging the thermals rising off the caldera’s fractured edge. Smaller than the first one but faster, it skimmed just above the basalt outcrops, eyes catching the dying light with a glint of uncanny purpose. 

Severa rose, brushing dust from her gloves with the same motion she used to unlock the next sigil string across her left palm. Her breath hitched, then leveled. 

But her heart didn’t answer.

Instead, what surged forward was the raw, splintering burn of inadequacy—that shriveling, heatless cousin to shame.

Her sigil lines burned to life, flaring in disciplined arcs across her forearm and left palm. Rank VI Fire Spell: Infernal Pinion.

In theory, the cast was straightforward. At this level, any spell wasn’t mechanics, but filtration. Intent moved first: aether latching onto emotion like vapor seeking a container. And that container had to be exact.

The container was exact; but once again, her rage was overbearing. 

She clamped down on the rage with the same discipline she’d learned since she turned five: naming it, segmenting it, boxing it away.

And there it was, at the root. Her father’s voice, crisp as crystal: ‘A Montreal doesn’t cheat. You’ll do well to remember that.’

But I did not cheat. Everything I earned, I earned with my own hands.

The sigil left her hands.

Infernal Pinion surged from her outstretched palm in a broad, clawed arc of compressed flame. The spell struck true: the wyvern’s left wing caught the brunt of it, and fire bloomed like fungal rot across its membrane. Exactly as she’d calculated. This strain—Ravener-class, salt-skinned, membrane-thin—was notoriously vulnerable to thermal rupture. Even a moderate ignition would destabilize its flight equilibrium.

The beast howled. Its feathers and skin peeled back in charred strips.

That should’ve been the kill.

And it would have been, if she’d held the casting two seconds longer.

Her flame had collapsed early. The emotional overload—still tainted with that wild thread of rage—had burned through her internal mana pool (aether) and shortened the spell’s duration.

“Low on pool? Finish with marrow-snap. Base of the neck.” Merriah’s voice sliced through the aether haze.

Severa hated when Merriah spoke. It meant she’d done something wrong.

“Understood,” Severa said through clenched teeth.

Her reservoir throbbed, hollow. She dashed forward, boots skidding over fractured basalt as the wyvern thrashed weakly against the slope.

One of its wings was half-torn and its breath stuttered in its throat, but the creature was not yet dead. Her fingers curled into the sigil for Marrow-Snap—a Rank III Bone Thaumaturgy finisher, inelegant but brutally efficient. She didn’t need power.

The sigil flashed once, silver-white, as she drove it into the charred ridge where the neck met spine.

The wyvern spasmed once. Then it dropped dead.

Severa stepped back, chest heaving, heat rising up her throat. Aether sparked behind her eyes, possibly from residual overcast, or rage, or both. She flexed one hand, as if testing for tremors. None. But her jaw still ached from the clench.

A glint of black bone jutted from the carcass. She forced herself to look away. This wasn’t over.

“Efficient,” said Magus Prefect Merriah Halveth as she stepped forward, scanning the charred remains. The slope was still steaming beneath the corpse, molten veins cooling in thin threads of sable black. “But why did you drop your Pinion so soon?” The Magus Prefect’s complexion was almost translucent in the dim light—fair-skinned, almost too fair, like moon-pale ice under starlight. It was a common trait among those from the Far North, where her father had hailed—the frost-ridged icicles of Zarlund, beyond the Windcut Range.

Severa knew Halveth’s gaze was landing on her, but she didn’t meet her supervisor’s eyes. “I already know where I failed.”

“Did the Magister say something to you again?”

“The Magister didn’t say anything out of the ordinary.” Which was precisely the problem.

Nothing out of the ordinary meant the same measured, slicing dismissal barbed in civility. The same tone he used when offering lines like: ‘Still within projected benchmarks, I see. Competent, if uninspired.’

Or worse, ‘I presume the additional instructors managed to help you meet expectations, then?’ The additional instructors were those he’d brought in for her, with his own money. She should’ve refused his offer.

Severa Montreal was excellent. She’d been the best in every single class she was in at the academy. But excellence meant little to a man who measured worth by innovation. A Montreal only earned their name if they left something behind worth footnoting in a hundred dissertations. A new spellform. A reclassification of an entire school. An aetheric theorem reshaping the next generation’s curriculum.

“Severa. You’ve already decided you will succeed without him. Why care what the Magister says?” Merry was the daughter of the Magister’s aunt, which meant she bore no Montreal surname—all of the expectation with none of the recognition. Still, she was a Rank VII Fire Thaumaturge, a title reserved for field commanders and academy war-theorists alike.

Severa didn’t answer. Why, indeed. She didn’t need to be so rattled. Not when she’d cleared the entire dungeon by herself, with minimal help from Merry Halveth.

Severa approached the archway that marked the dungeon’s final chamber. The structure loomed in monolithic silence, built from black-veined stone that glowed with residual enchantment. Twin pillars flanked the entrance, both etched with age-worn sigils and bearing the faint scarring of past attempts to breach them by force. Above the lintel, a mosaic of cracked opal glinted like a fractured eye.

Severa extended her hand and drew a sigil. The spell required no emotion, only precision—a transference glyph designed to interface with the ancient ward embedded in the doorframe. A thin strand of silver tethered the active sigil to the runes carved into the stone. The dungeon itself responded, groaning as locks unwound and hinges wept vapor.

Severa Montreal loved sigils. They represent the precise, encoded form of thaumaturgy technique. Casting a sigil meant she had done it right: exactly the right amount of emotion, exactly the right moment to release it, precisely the structure she’d practiced until her muscles remembered better than her mind. A sigil didn’t care why she was angry—only that her anger was exact, her ratios correct, her timing impeccable.

The doors opened inward, revealing a cavernous antechamber draped in shadow.

“Next time, maybe I won’t even need to accompany you,” Merry commented as she stepped up beside her.

Severa arched a brow, smoothing her gloves with a meticulous tug. “Spare me the flattery, Merry. Even I am not arrogant enough to attempt a solo Tier II Dungeon Run.”

The antechamber spanned wider than expected. Residual aether hung heavy in the chamber, clinging to the walls like condensation. Torches aligning the walls responded to the aether and ignited as they crossed the threshold. Severa's skin prickled with the sudden temperature shift.

“Good preservation field,” Merry murmured, noting how the air lacked the usual rot of time-sealed crypts.

Severa paused three steps in, frowning at the faint echo.

“Hold.” She raised her hand. Severa unhooked the casting stylus from her belt loop and knelt, pressing two fingers to the stone floor. Her lips moved without sound. Glyphwork spiraled from her touch—fine lines of gold and umber that spread across the flagstones like frost.

Divinatory Veil, Rank IV Veil Thaumaturgy Glyphwork, adjusted to spot trap glyphs and hidden enchantments.

The spell took. Light flared, then stabilized, outlining the room in clean geometry. There didn’t seem to be any trap.

Not yet satisfied, Severa stood and rotated her stylus once in her grip before murmuring a second invocation. This one she spoke aloud, her voice precise:

“Fakes reveal, and truth confirms.”

She cast Thaurosight Protocol, a Rank V Veil Thaumaturgy spell.

The mnemonic wasn’t just tradition—it was a necessity, at least until Severa could control Rank V spells fully without verbal command. Many mid- to high-tier spells required more than internal focus. When a caster’s control wasn’t fully fine-tuned to a spell’s deeper structure, verbal interface with the aether became the stabilizing force. Mnemonics served as rhythmic anchors, shaping the spell’s flow and locking it into place.

“No illusion wards,” she said. Her shoulders dropped by a fraction. “Proceeding.”

Merry let out a low breath behind her. “You know, most people just toss a Reveal Orb.”

Severa didn’t respond. She was already scanning the far alcove, where faint shimmer limned a glass-encased object barely visible through the veil’s echo.

The loot was spread across raised plinths and embedded alcoves—no mimicry, no final traps, just the rewards left behind by ancient builders who never expected their dungeon to be breached.

Severa moved first. Her gaze swept across categorized artifacts, fingers brushing labels still etched in High Thaumel script.

A platinum ring set with five converging glyph-nodes glimmered under a sheath of preservation glass. She plucked it free, inspecting its runework. Ring of Synaptic Clarity. It was only a Rare-grade item, and Severa already had something of similar make in her collection, but she recognized the lattice pattern on the underside. It could be fused with her current Resonant Loop to produce a dual-affinity control ring. That would make it Epic-tier, and worthy.

Merry found a cloak next—Wyrmskin Interfold, Grade A. Elemental resistance, high durability, aesthetic enough to pass for formalwear. She twirled it once on a finger and nodded approvingly.

“Will match your field kit,” Merry said.

Severa found a trio of spell-crystals keyed to kinetic compression. She pocketed them without comment. She scanned the area a final time and couldn’t find anything else. She should’ve expected that much. The loot here was decent—respectable, even—but not exceptional. 

Severa had declined a private dungeon run invitation from Archmagus Lellian Dir, with guaranteed epic-tier loots, for this dungeon entrance she’d found herself. For this.

Her jaw tightened.

No. She straightened her spine. I will not let others hand me easy power anymore.

Merry glanced around, already slinging the cloak over one shoulder. “That’s the lot. Nothing left to sniff out. We should go before the wardline resets.”

Severa gave a terse nod. “Agreed.”

She turned to leave, then paused.

A subtle outline tugged at her attention. It was nothing bright or obvious, just an edge too perfectly drawn to be natural. The Divinatory Veil had long since settled, but the mnemonic she’d spoken must have sent a delayed pulse through the matrix. Certain wards didn’t react immediately. Some waited—hinged on timing, sequence, or the right spell pattern.

And this one had just responded.

Severa’s brow furrowed. She drew a slow breath through her nose and reached into her belt pouch, extracting a tracing slate. With a flick of her stylus, she activated a low-output detection spell called Aetheric Diagnostic Matrix, Rank VII, and passed it once over the stone.

Her spell glowed a muted milky white as a matrix formed mid-air, visualizing spellwork patterns with white aether sparks. After a few seconds, the matrix returned a flat result: no aetheric imprint, no glyph structure, no ambient mana retention. In other words, nothing.

She frowned, crouching beside it. It was a muted grey-black with faint blue flecks, like distant stars buried in soot. Inert. 

“What’s this?” she asked aloud.

Merry glanced over, shrugged. “I’m not a geomancer.”

“But—?”

“But from what I’ve seen? If it doesn’t glow, float, sing, or whisper your true name—it’s probably trash.”

Severa didn’t respond immediately. Something about the stone felt . . . wrong in its plainness. 

What if this was an artifact? she thought. One of the hidden-grade relics like the Eidralith that had reacted with Kestovar. Obviously not many artifacts in this realm could ever be supposedly as powerful as the Eidralith, but artifacts had been known for granting incomprehensible powers. So much so that even Muro Muradius—the Head of the entire Order—had openly expressed fear of them.

But then, logic returned.

No way. Not in a Tier II dungeon. Artifacts didn’t show up in places like this. The last time anyone had recorded finding a new artifact was after clearing a Tier V Dungeon, an equivalent of a room full of Legendary-grade loots. This? This was a basic expedition with good preservation fields and a couple of decent finds.

She was about to drop the stone back to the floor when Merry said, “If you’re unsure, take it with you. You hate doubt almost as much as you hate regret. This way, you dodge both.”

Severa paused, lips pressing into a thin line.

There’s no way I’m disrespecting inert stones anymore. Not after Kestovar.

Without another word, she wrapped the stone in an aether-damp cloth, tucked it into her secondary pack, and rose to her feet. The stone had no weight to it magically, but physically it was solid, and a tad too dense for its size. And it hadn’t warmed in her palm at all. Not even a little. The rest of her casting slate was warmer by comparison.

Severa turned toward the exit. The dungeon’s ambient glow had begun to falter—signs the wardline was entering its reset interval. These dungeons are directly connected to the Aetherrealm, which meant after a set interval, creatures would re-emerge across all different levels of said dungeon, so they would need to hurry before having to exert themselves fighting more aetherically-formed creatures for no good reason. The loots would not re-emerge, however, not unless they return to the first level. Aetherrealm worked in strange ways.

She shared a look with Merry, and both nodded. It was time to leave.