“Thank goodness for that, now I don’t have to try and dance,” Ceras said gratefully.
“Can you dance like these nobles?”
“Not one bit, so I’m hoping not to have to try.”
“Well, I’m going to try and have a go,” said Rinaldo with his usual adventurous grin.
Rinaldo got up and walked through the groups of people that were now surrounding the dancefloor with its glowing magical lights and decorations. Ceras watched him look around for a few seconds and eventually set his eye on his target of choice. Shunneth was standing and talking in a group of people, wearing a deep blue and gold trimmed dress that set off her hair. Rinaldo tapped her on the shoulder to gain her attention, bowed slightly and gestured to the dancefloor where the two promptly headed, Rinaldo beaming with happiness.
“You're the only one left!” came the voice of the queen from beside Ceras while he was watching Rinaldo dance with Shunneth.
“Sorry, Your Majesty. I didn't notice you approaching,” said Ceras with a bow, acknowledging the smiling queen.
“That’s fine, dear. I said you’re the only one of Symania’s friends not dancing.”
“Well, I’ve got nobody to dance with!”
“Look at all the nice young women still sitting down; they're in the same boat as you. If you just get together that’ll solve that problem,” said the queen with a look as if it was obvious.
Ceras felt his face turn red, embarrassed by the thought of having to ask some unknown girl to dance. He tried another excuse by saying to the queen, “I also don't know how to dance as you nobles do.”
“There’s nothing to it. I’ll give you a quick lesson so that you’re not standing on the ladies' feet, and then you can dance the night away.” The queen took Ceras by the arm and led him through the crowd who made room for the couple. Soon Ceras was on the dancefloor, flushed with embarrassment as the elegant queen showed him how to hold a woman and lead her around the floor so he did not step on her feet. As Ceras had such a high agility, he was able to pick up the basics in a few minutes so that he did not move like an elephant with four large left feet.
The musician started to play another piece of music and the queen led Ceras by the arm to the edge of the dancefloor, where a girl was sitting by herself with a slightly bored look. She had braided red hair that fell over a deep green dress and was about Ceras’ age, as most people at the ball seemed to be.
“Doriafa, Ceras was just saying how pretty you looked but that he had not yet met you, so I thought that I’d come over and introduce you so you can dance,” said the queen with a smile at the young woman.
Ceras’ face flushed with color again, but bowed his head to the now beaming girl. She stood up, and he took her hand and led her onto the dancefloor. For the next piece of music, the pair danced slowly around the wooden floor, Ceras holding her as if she was a live snake about to bite. Every now and then they would make small talk about people they both knew, or about their studies.
Ceras found out that she was a cousin of Shunneth who was studying anything that connected magic with art at the university.
“So, what do you do?” Doriafa asked curiously. “I’m new in court and I just arrived yesterday, so I still don’t know everybody here yet.”
“I’m at the university working on magic, but I’ve only been here a few weeks so I still don’t know many people either.”
“So, you were here for the attack on the city. I heard that it was one of the largest goblin hordes seen in a long time.”
“It was very large, but the king knew what he was doing.”
They passed the time with small talk and danced around the magically-lit dancefloor until the end of the dance, when Ceras took Doriafa back to her chair and thanked her for dancing. As he was moving away, he got a direct look from the queen firmly indicating that he needed to dance more, so Ceras turned and went back to Doriafa.
“Do you want to dance again, please?” pleaded Ceras with a smile.
“Of course!” said the excited young woman.
The dancing continued periodically for the rest of the evening, and several times Ceras was led over to another young woman by the queen when he had not been dancing for a while. He did notice that he was not the only victim of the queen's matchmaking efforts but he certainly felt like he suffered the most.
Rinaldo and Qyndad spent the whole evening dancing with the two girls as if the pairs were glued to each other. Qyndad looked especially happy with a big smile on his face and when anybody tried to cut in, he would give them a look of death as if they were a mouse in front of a large, fierce cat, and they soon backed off.
Chapter 4 A Working Legend
Parchment notes filled one of the walls of Ceras’ laboratory, stuck to the wall with his immobility spell. This was what he considered his mind map of what he had discovered about these spherical objects that seemed to be at the heart of all materials, and that he had been investigating with his usual single-focused effort for the last month. As always, this had become all-consuming to the detriment of his social life, which had been nonexistent despite the other boys trying to entice him out of the laboratory. They had even tried to stop him from using magical anti-sleep spells that enabled him to work around the clock, saying that they would get Symania to have a word with him if he continued for too long.
During this time of fully-focused effort, he had tried to categorize the different spheres in matter that he had found with his magnification spell by counting the number and type of balls – of which there were only two - at the center of the spheres.
Using this information he wrote a note on parchment for each type, listing the material it was found in. Now he had a confusing array of notes on the wall that, at the moment, made little or no sense to his befuddled mind.
Using his magic, a light appeared all over the wall as he moved all the notes to be sorted in order of the number of the largest type of ball in the nuclei of the spheres.
As they reordered themselves, he noted that for these spheres that made up all matter, the two types of balls at the center of the sphere were equal to each other in most cases. One of the most common spheres that he had found in wood - and anything made from animals or that had grown organically - had six large balls and the same number of smaller balls at the sphere’s nucleus. This sphere seemed to form long chains that were in most materials with a sphere that only had one small ball at its center.
Ceras had almost given up trying to understand the structure that the spheres made as sometimes they were chains, while in other materials they formed a crystalline structure; with the large crystalline structure there always seemed to be a sea of mist that surrounded them.
Sighing with frustration, he focused on something he’d developed over the last few weeks for helping him with his experimental work:
Spells
Spell Effectiveness %:
1000
Name
Mastery
MP
Effects
Damage/Heal
Detect Magic
Master
-
-
Shows the working of magic
-
He was using this to check on the effects of his own immobilization spell on materials when he cast it on the spheres or the structures surrounding them. The magic appeared as webs of tiny strands of light that locked everything into place. At least he understood that, but the spheres were still a mystery. He could still work with them in experimental work, but only by a process of trial and error. This was not enough, as Ceras wanted an overarching theory of how sphere structure affected the material and its properties.
Hidden-Caverns and Phoxas had been of no help, as their heads were too full of magic to even care about the mystery of the spheres that made up matter, but Ceras was convinced that there was something useful to his experimental observations that nobody else seemed to care about.
He had developed several additional useful spells as p
art of his investigation over the last month. The first was a spell that purified a material, separating all the different types of spheres into distinct locations and structures. The type of structure he could create was only limited by his imagination.
On his first attempt to separate the spheres of fundamental matter with a block of wood, he had found that most of the spheres disappeared as soon as he cast the spell, leaving him with only a black powder that he recognized as ash. Later on, he started using his immobilization spell to ensure that the separate materials stayed in the location he wished so he could go on to experiment with the pure material.
This often produced material in the form of a gas, liquid or solid with different properties. Some of them smelled horrific while others exploded on contact with air and fire. Ceras had gotten very used to healing himself when something inevitably went wrong. The black marks on some of the walls were a testimony to the dangerous nature of his work as he’d had many a fireball burn him.
To store the materials safely, Ceras had employed a glass blower to make hundreds of bottles to keep the separated materials inside. Now he had shelves full of the materials with notes on them that indicated the number and types of ball at the center of the spheres. When Ceras has experimented with them he had also made notes on the properties they had.
The other really useful spell development was one that combined the different materials’ spheres into any structures he could envision. Using the separated material spell to isolate the different matter’s spheres, he could later recombine the material into any forms he could imagine. Because of his lack of knowledge, Ceras was mostly restricted to structures he had seen before in other material but he was hopeful to start making new structures that would be stable.
Turning away from the wall with the notes of parchment all over it, Ceras went back to the spell he was developing that used the vision magnification, material separation and recombination spells all together. He hoped that this would create a whole new method of making new items from almost any materials.
A few hours later he was just finishing writing this new spell that even for him would require a high level of mastery, and he was excited to try it out. Leaning back on his chair and stretching for a few seconds, he considered what to do.
Lying on top of one of the work benches in the laboratory was a collection of odd bits of material, spread across the surface in a random mess. Ceras smiled, as this would be perfect to try the new ‘Matter Transformation’ spell.
Casting the spell, he gathered his full resource of magical energies, as this would be a complicated spell. He pointed his hand dramatically at the collection of materials. At first, a light surrounded the material and he was able to envision what each of the items was made up of. He imagined in his mind the new item he wanted to produce, which was a staff like the one he had just bought recently. Concentrating on the image, structure and function of the staff he saw the material on the bench start to glow and fade into a red mist of matter, that swirled around in a tornado of force as it started to move into the shape of the staff he was imagining. Suddenly, the red mist disappeared and the staff fell onto the bench with a clang.
In Ceras’ vision a surprising notification appeared:
XP 20 of 64 to level 54 Wizard (Task required for progressing from Master to Legendary is completed)
Twenty-five stat points to place into character sheet
Twenty-five stat points to place into dungeon sheet
I’ve done it. Great! I hope that that makes me safer from people attacking Hidden-Caverns now.
Ceras sat down on his chair. He was overcome with relief and optimism for the future, now that he was a legendary wizard. He still had a lot of skills to allocate as well as the new stat points, but he wanted the help of Master Phoxas and Hidden-Caverns before he made that commitment.
Through his fingers he could see a slight glow in the darkness of the laboratory, so he opened his hand to look at his palm and saw that the wizard image had changed from the guild icon to an image of a golden goddess with four stars around her head and a staff in her hand. As the glowing light started to fade, he stared in wonder at the new symbol on his palm.
Still examining his hand, he walked over to the bench with his magically-produced staff and examined it with the goddess blessing:
Equipment Name
Carry
Type
Effect
Worth
Staff of Power
5
Legendary Magical Weapon
MP storage unknown
Unknown
That’s really useless, for the goddess blessing to be so unspecific about the properties of this item.
As there were unknowns in the information that came up, he examined the Staff of Power with his magnification spell.
As his mind's eye entered the material it flew over the structures within the staff, which were just as he had envisioned in his creation spell. The structure was of interconnecting weaves of matter that mimicked the structure of his Dense Star Staff. He had made modifications to enhance the structure that produced a smooth crystal throughout the staff, leading to what lay in front of him.
Testing the staff, he started to pour as much MP into it as he could, soon draining himself of MP in the process. For his efforts, the staff did not even feel like it was a tiny bit full. He repeated the process several times, meditating in between fills to quickly regain his MP, but still the staff felt the same - only slightly full.
Ceras was just about to repeat the process of pouring his MP into the staff, when the door to his laboratory crashed open and in the doorway stood the old Master Phoxas with a goblin at his leg.
“It took you two long enough to get here,” said Ceras with a smile, as Hidden-Caverns would have felt the change in his level eventually.
The small goblin entered the room with a grin on his face and said in Hidden-Caverns’ voice, “I was a bit distracted with some of the work and only realized I’d changed a few seconds ago.”
The older Master Phoxas walked up to Ceras and grabbed his hand, lifting it up to his face and seeing the golden goddess.
“It's true - but how did you do it so quickly?” he asked as he gazed at the mark on Ceras’ hand. “How in all the goddess world did you manage it?”
“Oh… I just produced a material transformation spell out of three other spells we’ve been working on,” said Ceras as he pulled his hand back. “Why does the guild mark change to a golden goddess?”
The wizard, who normally had a smart answer to everything, scratched his head for a second. “Well, that’s a question for somebody else, young legend, as the legendary levels keep all the information about anything above master level to themselves. It’s a bit like a secrets club that you are now a part of, and I think one of its youngest members...”
As the master had been talking his gaze fell to the Staff of Power and he stopped, snatching it up from the bench and running his hand up and down the surface as if he was checking that it was real.
After a few seconds of examining it with envy in his eyes he asked Ceras, “When did you get a legendary magical weapon so powerful?”
“That is what I just created with the spell,” said Ceras nonchalantly, as if it was nothing. “I’ve been trying to fill it with magical energy but it’s nowhere near full.”
The goblin jumped up onto the bench to reach for the staff, and both Hidden-Caverns and the master examined it as if it was a holy relic from the goddess herself.
“I would like to run some experiments on this, if you don’t mind,” said Master Phoxas with a pleading look in his eyes.
“That’s fine, as I could always make another one anyway,” said Ceras, unconcerned about giving away a powerful magical staff. “What I’m hoping for now is some help with selecting the skills that will best suit me. I was hoping for you two to do some research for me.”
The pair nodded their heads as they accepted the task, and the master seemed to blank f
or a second as if he was accepting a quest from the dungeon.
“Well, for now I feel like celebrating, so I’m off to find Rinaldo and Qyndad as they’ve been badgering me to get out a lot more,” Ceras told them.
Master Phoxas looked relieved that he was not going to have to attend a wild party, as he was still holding the staff close to his chest.
Hidden-Caverns said, “Well, have some fun - you deserve it. We’ll start working on figuring out the skills that would be best. ”
--
Rinaldo was leading the two other young men along a cobbled street on one of the city’s levels that Ceras had never been on before. Come to think of it, he had really not been anywhere except the university and the palace. They’d gotten here by walking down the streets through the large fortifications between the city levels on this particular trip rather than taking the elevator platforms, because Ceras wanted to explore more of the many levels.
Behind them, the entrance they’d come through was one of the large wooden gates that separated each level and which would later be closed in the evening for defense.
As each level of the city had been cut into the mountain, gaining access to the gates between each level required them to climb or descend flights of stairs or navigate a large ramp with all the goods carts that were loaded with produce.
The boys had just exited the flight of stairs to this level, and were wandering down the first street they saw as none of them had visited here before. Shunneth had told Rinaldo that this was a great area of the city to go for a fun night out.
Ceras’ initial impression of the streets on this level was a maze of narrow alleyways going up and down with no plan or design, as if they had just been randomly made. The upper levels of the houses along the alleyways often hung over the streets, creating tunnels of all shapes and sizes that they passed through to walk further into the maze.
Legendary Weapons Page 4
