92 of Nemulum, 426 EA
Citadel of the Athalial League, Athal
A pair of runes sparked under Kohri’s etching rod, their ambic auras fizzling into an unworkable, conjoined mess.
“You know,” Nital piped up in high tone, “You could try-”
“No.” Kohri interrupted, forcibly separating the unruly runes with a barrier mark. “Just shut it. You always do this. Coming in at the end of my work, when it’s almost ready, and adding little bits.”
“I just want to help,” Nital grumbled, “Thought we were friends, for hells sake.”
Kohri chewed on the disappointment she felt from Nital for the time it took to close out the final border of the ritual’s ring. The focal point of this work was an ornate lantern, white bronze in make, with a large handling ring and a myriad of inlaid patterns. Four vertical bars undergirded four horizontal in a treacherous curve spanning its entirety. Its interior had been kept purposefully rested in preparation for the coming affair.
“I don’t mean anything bad by it.” She spoke with trepidation, “It’s just, if you give your input then I have to say that it’s our project when it had been my project. Please, just let me show this one on my own.”
The edges of Nital’s disappointment softened, though the core of it all still lingered. “If that’s what you need.”
Kohri drew a long breath in, surveying her work around the lamp. Each component was segregated into its atomized place. She exhaled.
Hallmaster Somerle drifted into the terse laboratory after some time. He was an older man, human, like Kohri. He had white hair pulled straight back out of his face and a full white beard shaped to give a nearly right angle to the jaw. He was preemptory in the air of busyness that he carried along with the scrawling wand set upon notebook in his hands and the dead-embered ashpipe pursed between his lips. He performed his perfunctory rounds with his typical absentmindedness.
“Hallmaster,” Kohri straightened her shoulders from the hunch of the last dozen fiddling adjustments. “What perfect timing, I was hoping to show you the culmination of my past cycle’s research.”
“Certainly.” The hallmaster harrumphed. “Tell me, Guildsfellow…”
“Thireth, sir.” Kohri withered under the lack of recognition.
“Yes, of course, Thireth. Quite right. Please, Guildsfellow Thireth, illuminate me as to what we have here.”
“Well, sir,” Kohri motioned over the ringed lantern, out from which a pale blue glow began to emanate. “I have deduced that the animating force behind this object is not its cursed components, as was presented to me on its transfer into our laboratory. Rather, this lantern contains a spirit, on which the curse acts in imprisonment and domination.”
“I see.” The hallmaster’s brow scrunched in a way that implied either perplexity or concern, though it was difficult for Kohri to discern which. “I see you have some rite prepared. Should the cursed components of this artifact be harmless to any purposeful user, what further acts do you intend to levy on it?”
“Well, my intent is to break the entrapment – to release the entrapped spirit.” Kohri put herself back in quick composure from her stutter, “In accordance with the League’s edicts surrounding the handing of objects containing beings of sentience, of course.”
The hallmaster pushed spectacles up his nose, his gaze lingering long on Kohri’s preparations and the illuminated lantern at its focus.
“I have the relevant passages pulled here, somewhere.” Kohri began to riffle through her notebook for justification, “If you need-”
“No need, guildsfellow.” The heirophant waved away her searching motions, “I am most pleased by this benevolent intervention, and would be keen to witness its execution.”
Relief and something close to joy flooded Kohri’s frame. “Right, right, yes, thank you Hallmaster. The settings have all been placed, give me just a moment to finish my final preparations and we can get underway.”
The hallmaster nodded, his gaze shifting form the lantern to Kohri herself as she mixed a prepared set of reagents. Her focus flitted across the room, from the lamp to her work around it to the now-bubbling cauldron to Nital wringing her hands to the imperious hallmaster. He gave her a jolted nod to begin.
“Coamzer Wyrce, T’izet Zrenlwegerce,” her first chants were quick, eager, as she poured the caustic substance from the cauldron to flow through the grooves she had carved along the table. Her mind raced in attempted anticipation. She felt a sharp twinge as she poured herself, more of herself than she had meant to, into the magic that fueled the ritual. The acid underneath and around the lamp flowed out at a more constant pace, and Kohri used its connecting sight to modulate her voice into a sustainable rhythm. As the final joints connected, the etchings themselves being eaten away by the acid they carried, Kohri called out a word of engagement, only once, “P’iur Veol”
In a burst of green like lightning, tendrils leapt off the runic table to harry the lantern, only barely held at bay by the imprisoning shell’s white-blue aura. Subsumed by her control of the technics in front of her, Kohri no longer perceived Nital or the hallmaster as those onlookers instinctually stumbled a step backwards.
The form of the spirit came into shape behind the glass, a negative space within the light it was bound to produce, swimming through the lux in agitated bursts. Kohri manipulated her spell’s energy in abrasive rend, the bands of metal that held the spirit bending taught and then snapping under her will. Like water no longer contained, the spirit could not help but flow out of the cracked vessel. Kohri angled her magic to aid its escape, lashing to the translucent form and stretching it with tugging tendrils. The spirit’s frantic thrashing against its binds grew to crescendo, its light flaring up to blinding intensity. Kohri felt a tug and a slip through her spell’s net, and all of a sudden the spirit was snapped back into the lamp.
The metal ringlets groaned back into their hold, and, lacking a focal point to attach to, Kohri’s spell energy scattered and died. The sudden stillness of the room was punctuated by the lamplight going to still. Kohri stood to the center of the room, dumbfounded, the aftershocks of the most elaborate spell she had ever cast rendered impotent across her hands and heart.
“Hmm,” The hallmaster muttered from behind, only half-heard. “A step in the right direction, it seems. Always something to learn from our failures, Tryo.”
“No, I-” Kohri turned and sputtered, keeping herself from her instinct to grab onto the hallmaster’s robes. “I can do it again. There must have been some miscalculation on my part, minor, I’m sure. That should have worked. It should have, it simply should have.”
All the while, the hallmaster collected his set-down papers and made for the door. “Yes, certainly. This absolutely warrants further attempts. I’ve not the time to stay and attend to the preliminaries of this ritual, but I have full faith in your abilities, Guildsfellow Thyre. Here, in fact, take a boon of mine. Some spell energy, to offset your expenditure on this draft. Now, be well, young hands.”
Despite Kohri’s attempts at polite protesting, he floated out from the room and away. She found herself alone, with her racing mind and with Nital.
Nital was older than Kohri, a stout gnome with peaceable features. She wore creamy gold over red over white and brown, colors that suited her complexion well.
Kohri sighed heavily, letting her bunched shoulders come down. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you earlier. I just thought I could- I don’t know.”
Nital hopped up on a stepstool to be at eye level with her taller companion. “I understand. Sometimes these things get the best of us.” After a moment, she added, “It was pretty impressive, Guildsfellow Thyre.”
A chuckle cracked through Kohri’s stony demeanor, lifting her heart. The two stood, surveying the remains of the ritual together. After a moment of pause, Kohri turned, “What was it you were going to suggest?”
“A component to work in, a rune of affinity centered on another of trust. Hok’e, maybe Qosvune. Something to soothe the spirit that’s trapped, ease the transition. It has a power locked away in there, better to work with it than against it.”
Kohri sat with the thought for a long moment, her assumptions on the work realigning behind her eyes. She nodded with a clear resolution, and wiped over a rune on the underside of the ritual table. The space around the lantern, full of a mistake, wiped itself clean, the etched stone repairing itself to cool flat. Kohri and Nital set to work, replacing the ritual in its newly integrated pattern.
Hours later, when the runic net had been etched and the black wax candles had been lit and the residuum fluid had been distilled, Kohri turned to Nital and asked “Ready?”
Nital nodded back, and with steady hands poured the cauldron. Kohri chanted from beside, feeling their intents mingle as the magic sparked and ignited.
The spirit of the lantern was bathed once again, this time in a washing green against its azure. An incanted wave wiped across the glass, clarifying it to the point that one could believe it was no longer present to hold in any flame. The spirit pulled back instinctually, recoiling against the unfamiliar air.
Kohri’s breath hitched, as she saw it happened again. She nudged Nital nervously between chants, prompting her to redouble her outpouring of magic, the softly curved runes she had contributed growing in spiral patterns to subsume the ritual space. “Qosvune Hok’e Qosvune Hok’e Qosvune Hok’e Qosvune Hok’e.”
A feeling of deep peace filled the room, and gently the spirit was coaxed out from their prison. The spirit floated around and above them, so much larger than could possibly have been condensed into the mundane mantle that had held it, speckled and pale light dancing in open air.
Kohri let herself feel the being in the hands of her ritual, some part of it touched by it and it by her, and she released. With a swirling pulse, the curse of the lantern was broken and the spirit dispersed into the great beyond.
Kohri and Nital relaxed into the afterglow of their working, not feeling a need to speak for a moment but rather just to remain close to one another.
“There was a beauty there.” Nital’s eyes crinkled in the soft smile of simple appreciation.
“There was.” Kohri nodded from her reverie. “How did- How did you know? About the missing component? It never occurred to me that the spirit would fight against the ritual.”
“Well,” Nital chose her words thoughtfully, searching through her self to find them, “the spirit was trapped in the lantern, had been trapped in the lantern for a long time it seemed. But before that, it was a person. And when people have been trapped for a long time, their binds can start to feel like protection, like something to hold onto, even if it would be better for them to be free. You know?”
Kohri nodded, rolling over the words and the voice behind them. They echoed through her mind as she began to clear her station, pulling her belongings from the laboratory.
“I’m off,” Nital started, making for the door, “Good night Kohri.”
“Right, yes, goodnight.” Kohri watched them go, and then followed after. “Wait, Nital? I just wanted to say, for you to know. I’m excited for the next project of ours.”
The Etra Anthology 