Chapter 8

Tufted with scraggly grass and wind-battered shrubs, the hill rose like a bump on the landscape’s forehead. Fabrisse had named it Reflection Knoll years ago, back when he was ten and decided all significant hills needed names. The name never caught on with anyone else, mostly because the townsfolk of Itakonra Hollow didn’t think a hill with three trees and one ancient mailbox deserved the word ‘knoll’ in it.

The shrine light shone below like fireflies bottled in glass. From this distance, the lanterns made the whole valley seem touched by something sacred, or at least municipally funded. Fabrisse picked his way up the slope with his breath misting in the night air and his pockets clinking with every other step. Behind him, Dubbie trudged in silence, her cloak pulled tight around her shoulders.

When they finally reached the crest, he spun in a deformed circle and muttered, “Perfect. Elemental things definitely happen on hills.”

She sighed, took a seat on a smoothish patch of earth, and rubbed at her eyes. “Alright then, great wizard of the knoll. What now?”

“I start gathering,” he said confidently, then immediately picked a wildflower, pinched its stem, and held it up to the sky. “One element done. I have collected the Totem of the Great Wood.”

[Item does not qualify for elemental trace.]

What? He thought.

The System’s polite denial floated in his vision.

“Should’ve been Wood,” he muttered, confused.

Dubbie raised an eyebrow. “It’s a petal. That’s not Wood. It’s flower.”

“It’s vascular plant matter,” Fabrisse held it up so Dubbie could see, despite her seeing completely fine. “That’s the working definition of Wood under the Twelvefold Flame. Subtypes include root, stem, petal, and leaf. Wood’s about growth, not bark.”

He stared at the error message again.

[Item does not qualify for elemental trace.]

“Unless . . .” His brow furrowed. “This isn’t using Twelvefold Flame classifications, is it? Different schema. Great. What even counts as a ‘natural element’ then?”

“Well, you’re the one hallucinating apparitions,” Dubbie said.

Fabrisse ignored her. “It’s not based on applied symbolism, so it’s fundamentalist.” He suddenly remembered the primary elements he shown to him while he was looking at his Spiritual Alignment. “Like pre-Order schema. Fire, Stone, Water, Air . . . and something abstract. Aether? Or is it Spirit?” The fifth element in the apparition had been marked with ‘???’. Fabrisse didn’t understand why the glyph felt a need to hide the fifth element if it had already shown him the first four.

“If it’s stone, you should have one element already. It’s probably Earth.”

“One way to find out,” he took out a Stupenstone and held it in his hand. That was the first requirement as per the glyph quest.

[Trace Element Detected: Earth]

— Earth: Registered (1/5 elements held)

— Begin resonance period: Awaiting Aetheric Impression.

“It did register as Earth,” he said. Dubbie shrugged.

Now he just needed to perform Thaumaturgic Stonecraft, a legitimate ritual channeling method from the Second Ordinance of Mineral Invocation. You align with the mineral lattice, synchronize your breath to the stone’s heat retention curve, and let the bedrock speak.

Too bad Stone Thaumaturgy sucked. He’d be lucky if his Stupenstone got slightly heavier.

He inhaled, centered himself, and whispered a breath into the stone’s grain.

Then stopped.

Wait. Was he supposed to match the heat pattern to the stone, or do the opposite?

He squinted at the rock. He had a chart for this. Somewhere. In his notes. In a drawer. At home.

He tried again anyway, opting for the generalist rhythm used in introductory Stonecraft theory. Halfway through the chant, he realized he was reciting the intro to a completely different invocation—something about mineral preservation wards.

Nothing happened.

Fabrisse took a steadier breath, reset his grip, and tried again, this time whispering just the first line of the proper alignment script and focusing all his effort into syncing with the stone’s utterly unimpressed thermal signature.

Let the bedrock speak.

Then he felt something.

Fabrisse widened his eyes. The stone did feel a bit heavier.

[Aetheric Resonance Registered Successfully: Rank I Spell]

Rank I. The lowest possible recognition of magical output. The participation trophy of spellcasting. But it was progress.

Excited, he stood and hurried over to Dubbie, who was sitting nearby chewing on a twig she’d picked up out of boredom.

“Hold out your hand,” he said.

“Why?”

“I need you to confirm if this got heavier.”

“Compared to what?”

He placed the stone gingerly in her hand. “To this rock a minute earlier.”

She held it for a beat. “. . . You didn’t give it to me before you invoked it. Also, how much time do you have left?”

“Oh! Oh no!”

As if it’d read his mind, the glyph showed him the timer again.

[1 hour, 18 minutes remaining]

He’d spent too much time walking up the nearby hill and experimenting on a rock he’d already had. He needed the other four elements quickly.

Water would be the easiest next. He’d brought a small flask in case there wasn’t a stream nearby, but the valley was kind to fools tonight. A seasonal runoff line whispered behind the shrine path and Fabrisse knelt beside it, uncorked his flask, and dipped it into the stream.

The glyph confirmed it a second later:

[Trace Element Detected: Water]
— Water: Registered (2/5 elements held)
— Begin resonance period: Awaiting Aetheric Impression.

Perfect. He adjusted his posture, cradled the flask between his hands, and began channeling the water-breath. It was an older rhythm, passed down from introductory liturgies on liquid-bound flowwork: Ripple, draw, hold. Breathe in. Let flow. Let go.

He centered his thoughts, smoothed out his mind, and focused on the elemental feel of water,, its reflection, its depth. He imagined still lakes, rushing rivers, even that one time his dorm roof leaked directly onto his notes during finals.

Absolutely nothing happened. The flask remained cool and silent, unmoved and unimpressed.

[Aetheric Resonance Registered Successfully: Rank I Spell]

Huh? It still registered. 

Dubbie peered over. “Did it work?”

“I mean,” he said, holding up the flask, “technically, yes? The glyph called it a success.”

“Did it do anything?”

“No. The water just sat there.”

She nodded. “Well. Maybe it’s polite.”

He was sure he did the breath pattern right, and the script was solid. His emotional state was calm and focused. A Rank I spell shouldn’t require any level of innate resonance. Some random bumpkin could just chant a mnemonic and if it happened to rhyme at the right time, they could make a drop of water drop more slowly.

He had probably messed up the third element again: Intent.

[Suggestion: Review basic resonance timing. Emotional intent may not register if phrased like a question.]

Okay. He had absolutely messed up the third element again.

“Did you communicate your mnemonic at the right moment?” Dubbie asked.

“I don’t know. I’m supposed to resonate with the ripple by chanting ‘ripple’ as I just set the flask down and the water’s the most disturbed, then follow up with an anchor phrase at the right tempo. Maybe I got the timing wrong again, so the water understood the intention but didn’t act.”

Water wasn’t passive like Stone. Stone rewarded presence, but water was responsive. He needed to be able to communicate his intent at the right time, or in Lorvan’s word, ‘find the moment it’s already leaning toward, and you meet it there’.

He didn’t tell it to do anything.

“Why is Thaumaturgy so over-complicated? You should’ve just learned Pre-Order Magic.” Dubbie clicked her tongue.

“There’s a reason Thaumaturges are sought-after all across the realms, you know. Their magical output is great.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this difficult. Fabrisse just hadn’t practiced enough to land it.

He glanced at the sky. The clouds drifted slow and uncaring. Somewhere in the distance, a night-cricket whirred.

“Two down,” he muttered.

[Time remaining: 1 hour, 11 minutes]

He shoved the flask into his robe pocket. “Air’s next.”