ArcaneCadence

73 - The Sorceress

Isabella Caldimore wondered why she was still alive.

In every conceivable future, the completion of her father’s oft-alluded-to grand ritual had been the end of her. She’d known for months that he intended to use her as some main component in the proceedings. Even if he hadn’t always spoken cryptically of necessary sacrifices and ultimate duties, she wouldn’t have struggled to deduce that. And seeing how decades-long secret rituals to create weapons of...

Book 1 Part 2 Feedback Thread

Same deal as the last one. This is where you can leave feedback for either book 1 as a whole, or specifically book 1 part 2 (from chapter 40 and onward). I won't promise the feedback will be addressed, of course, but I will read it and decide if I agree, and make changes as I see fit :)

Thanks for reading!

72 - Beyond

Vivi actually had to drink a mana potion.

Sure, she hadn’t been as efficient with her killing methods as possible, particularly at the start of this whole debacle. Even so, expending enough of her magical stamina that she had to draw a potion out and quaff it surprised her. Considering the sheer number of corpses she’d created, maybe it shouldn’t have. Even a bucket could empty a lake eventually.

Thanks to her experiments, her spells had grown remarkably more effective at pe...

71 - Interrogation

Rafael watched Vivisari rip apart a Cataclysm-level threat like it was some insect she found crawling around on the ground.

Nineteen hundred and fifty. He could read the creature’s level; they all could. The Grand System was freely handing out approximations to even those who should have failed a regular [Inspection].

Seeing a person so casually end an extinction-level monster was sobering in its own right, even for a man as aware of what the pinnacles of power looked like as he...

70 - Cleaning Up

Frustration and worry had been mounting in Vivi since her meeting with the Duke, and especially since Saffra had banged on her door in the middle of the night. Having something physical to vent on, especially a monster rather than a sapient being, was, honestly, a blessing. She might not know how to navigate sensitive discussions with a potentially insane Duke, but when it came to putting down city-erasing monstrosities from beyond the dimensional veil—well, that happened to be her specialt...

69 - Unleashed

Eventually, Vivi forced her gaze from where she’d torn a hole in the spatial fabric. It wasn’t nearly a disaster on the scale of the dimensional anomaly, but where that was a theoretical branch, and thus even less known, spatial spells were still bleeding-edge, not perfectly understood even by her. Casting a spell pioneered by the Shattered Oracle in the middle of Meridian had been…reckless beyond reason. She just hadn’t thought about what she was doing. She’d reacted. Seei...

68 - Carve

Vivi watched as, for the second time, the assassin’s face went slack with shock.

The assassin whose Title she finally knew, based on the skill he’d activated. She couldn’t always remember what Rafael told her, but the Red Tithe had been on a short list of ‘most dangerous individuals in the world’. For Rafael to mention him at all meant she was surely dealing with the assassin equivalent of an archmage. And probably on the stronger side of that comparison.

“What kind of...

67 - Tithe

Vivi woke to banging on her door.

“Lady Vivi?” came Saffra’s muffled, distressed voice. “Lady Vivi, are you awake?”

Distressed?

It was embarrassing how much adrenaline dumped into her veins. She didn’t even bother rolling out of bed. She [Blinked] past the doorway, materializing next to Saffra with staff raised. After finding nothing but a startled red-haired catgirl, Vivi realized she might have overreacted. She dispelled her weapon and, after a brief awkward pa...

66 - Help

The halting, mumbling explanation Saffra received wasn’t easy to follow—bordering on incoherent. Clearly not rehearsed, either aloud or in Isabella’s head. Still, Saffra pieced together the big picture, and it was as bad as she had feared.

Saffra hadn’t even done something to draw Duke Caldimore’s ire. The Duke had simply wanted to punish Isabella, or ‘remove a distraction’ and ‘test her’—the specifics were somewhat unclear, since Isabella wasn’t being particularly...

65 - Family

Eight Months Earlier

Isabella Caldimore had a plan. Or more specifically, she had a goal, and any goal worth pursuing deserved a sufficiently foolproof plan. Working toward something without a guiding strategy was nothing short of idiocy; Father had taught her that. And he wasn’t one of the most important people in the Kingdoms without reason.

Still. Having a plan and working up the nerve to execute it were two different things. Father had also taught h...

64 - Garden

Saffra was too frazzled to practice.

And that was saying something. Practicing magic had become her solution to dealing with bad feelings. It was like saying she was too hungry to eat. But after returning from the Institute’s restricted archives—and getting to look through those shelves should have been the highlight of her year—she felt too confused and anxious to do anything but excuse herself to her room upstairs, drop into bed, and stare at the ceiling.

She didn...

63 - Apostate

Unfortunately, Damon’s plans primarily hinged upon another’s work and not his own. Whether or not they could be accelerated depended on the mage preparing the ritual.

Thus, carrying his growing concern over the Keresi situation, he wound through the Wardens' vault to the room where the Titled ritualist was bringing his most recent, and likely greatest ever, arcane working to life.

Damon’s eyes passed across the dense magical runes encircling the huge room. Laid in t...

62 - Keresi

Damon came away from the brief meeting with Nysari Keresi not nearly as pleased as he’d expected.

It should have been satisfying for once not bending to the whims of men and women he shouldn’t need to placate. Perhaps it had been how utterly unperturbed that woman had seemed despite his attempts to aggravate her. Or perhaps it was how little he had gleaned from the brief interaction—his main goal in the first place. But since something had itched at his instincts, he’d ...

61 - Niceties

Distracted by the incident with the strange man Tobin—and more importantly, his dagger—Vivi took a second longer to respond than she should have. She forcefully shook away the uneasy feelings and refocused.

She tried to remember the advice Rafael had given her leading up to this meeting. He’d had plenty to say, both about how the Duke might act and how she should.

“Yes. I wanted to apologize on behalf of my apprentice and the man known as William Trent. I hope we can set a...

60 - The Duke

“You learned something concerning about the Caldimores?” Vivi asked, shifting in surprise. “What?”

“We’ll get there,” Rafael said. “What do you know of that house and its history?”

She thought for a moment, then slowly shook her head. “The name sounds the slightest bit familiar, but I might be imagining it.”

“Seeing how you’ve been gone for a century, that isn’t surprising. It was during that period they rose to prominence. The Caldimores were of ...

59 - Isabella

Vivi’s conversation with Osmian turned out far less productive than she’d hoped. Though a fiercely educated man, he was an academic belonging to a period of history long past, and immense magical progress had been made in that time. There was no substitute for the slow, inevitable accrual of knowledge; even titans like him would be left behind.

Mostly, he huffed and sputtered about how dimensional magic was ludicrous at its conceptual core, and she should dispense with that inane no...

58 - Ritualism

Draw the necessary energy from the island itself.

She could maybe manage that. But of the major magical disciplines, ritualism was by far her weakest—and certainly her worst among the three fields Osmian was testing her on. Vivisari had been an accomplished spellcaster for obvious reasons: her adventures against the Cataclysms had forged her into such. Likewise, a decade of campaigns had given her plenty of rare materials and experience in enchanting by constantly making lege...

57 - Fly

Several arcane workings activated at once.

First and foremost, a teleportation spell reached out and tried to grab Saffra—no doubt Osmian’s attempt to send her away. Vivi was near certain the spell would have bounced impotently off the defensive spells she had placed on her apprentice, but, on principle, she squashed the magic herself.

Secondly, she appeared on the flat top of an unfamiliar mountain range, gazing out across flowing green plains. For a moment, she was startled:...

56 - Osmian's Door

“Osmian? The archmage?”

“Yes, the archmage! The founder of the Institute!”

“This is his door?” Vivi raised an eyebrow at the cracked-open entrance. “How so? And what’s the big deal? Why are you so flustered?”

“I’m not flustered,” Saffra said defensively. “But I thought we were just grabbing some books. You—you went and opened Osmian’s Door?” She hurriedly looked around, checking to confirm that nobody was nearby. A lumbering golem did...

55 - The Library

The loss of the Zone Boss’s loot didn’t bother Vivi, obviously. There were a dozen higher-rank hunting grounds she could fly over to and clear out in an afternoon if she actually needed coin. She shut down Saffra’s panicked apologies for vaporizing an admittedly significant sum in crafting materials, telling her that if she had wanted to, she could have extinguished the supercharged [Scorchlance] herself. She had purposefully allowed it.

With the day’s leveling session coming to...

54 - Borrowed Power

An artifact that allowed the sharing of mana. Saffra hadn’t known such a thing existed. Could exist. A person shouldn’t be able to share mana. Rituals and enchantments came close, she supposed, since those allowed for collaboratively fueling some grand working, but they weren’t the same as spellcasting, even if the different disciplines used the same language of the arcane.

Lady Vivi held the codex out, and Saffra hesitantly accepted.

She nearly toppled ove...

53 - Class Evolution

People could adapt to anything. Saffra knew that on a personal level, not as some truism. Her life had veered off course wildly on two occasions now, and she’d settled into a routine both times, despite how world-ending each had seemed. And there were people who had gone through worse, she knew, and they had learned to get by. People were resilient. By nature, they survived.

That said. While Lady Vivi’s introduction into Saffra’s life was a good left turn for once, how co...

52 - Feather

The expression on Saffra’s face was rather comical. She at least didn’t look panicked at being presented another gift—though Vivi predicted that was only thanks to superseding emotions. Wide green eyes flicked around at the huge radius of melted snow, then back to the brilliant, otherworldly red and orange feather.

“Please tell me that isn’t what I think it is,” she said weakly.

“It’s a phoenix feather.”

Saffra winced hard, as if Vivi had physically struck ...

51 - Gifts

Vivi had [Blinked] Saffra around a few times now, so the girl had developed resilience to spatially-induced nausea. Nevertheless, [Greater Warp] was an order of magnitude more powerful, so when the two of them popped into existence atop Prismarche’s wall, her tail dropped to the floor and she went pale in the face.

“That’s really unpleasant,” she groaned, a hand shooting to press against her stomach. After a few seconds of breathing deeply, she shook herself, and her co...

50 - Misinterpreting

Saffra had traced this arrangement of runes so many times that she was sick of it. She could go the rest of her life without sketching that sequence, mentally or physically, a single instance more.

And never mind trying to manifest that design into reality. [Scorchlance] was complicated even on a basic level. She would struggle to paint it with ink on paper. Doing so with the unwieldy, chaotic force that was mana was an exercise to induce madness.

But she’d been practicing relen...

49 - Sinew-Stitcher

The project began in earnest.

Rhek barked commands, and, somewhat to his surprise, the Sorceress’s daughter obeyed without question—once more raising his estimation of her. Climbing the hierarchy had meant Rhek had needed to work with gigantic egos more and more commonly. Someone who would just listen for once was a breath of fresh air.

He discovered quickly that the woman had not lied about her rank. Her presence trivialized several steps of the process. Rhek assigne...

48 - Reaping Shades

With the outrageous list of materials Rhek gave to Stellan—a list he almost felt guilty for handing over—he had expected not to hear back for weeks if not longer, except perhaps a revision insisting he be reasonable with his demands. Five days at the very minimum. But it was later that same day that the Leatherworker’s Guild contacted him. Apparently, the client had gathered the necessary resources and was heading to his workshop, wanting to complete the job without delays. Rhek had cle...

47 - Leatherworker

The light of dawn spilled across wooden floorboards, painting Rhek’s bedroom in muted hues of orange and yellow. A long groan broke the quiet of the morning. Wood creaked as he rolled out of his cot and, reluctantly, set to his routine like a golem infused with not quite enough mana.

He spooned dark, fragrant leaves into a mug and poured steaming water over. With the warm cup in hand, he shuffled to the balcony and eased into a squat chair. He carefully kept from twinging his knee as ...

46 - The Vault

While the Codex of the Hollowed Sun had occupied their initial attention, the rest of the vault had plenty of lesser—if still astounding—treasures to sift through. Mae especially lost herself in the process of rummaging around in the storage cabinets, shelves, and drawers, oohing and aahing at each alchemical reagent she identified.

Jasper, meanwhile, had walked over to a pedestal with a glass container. He stared blankly at the three blocky shapes of silvery-blue material.

�...

45 - Reinduction

Vivi appreciated Rafael’s interruption, not because she was interested in the quest’s payout, but because she had no idea how to deal with a starstruck, emotional old friend who wasn’t really an old friend at all.

Meeting Winston and Rafael had gone smoothly, but that was because they were social deftness personified. Mae was…not so much that. She was also clearly far more amazed by Vivi’s presence.

She supposed she’d interacted constantly with Winsto...