Chapter 151: One Hundred Ways to Die

Chapter 151: One Hundred Ways to Die

Sebastien

Month 3, Day 27, Saturday 3:00 a.m.

Sebastien sat at the head of her dormitory bed, looking through the window. The University was quiet enough to hear the wind. She hadn’t realized how much ambient noise thousands of students could add to a place, even at night when they were all supposed to be asleep.

It was like how many more stars one could see in the night sky when they woke after their fire had gone out along the edge of one of the roads between distant cities.

She picked up 100 Clever Ways Thaumaturges Have Committed Suicide and settled in to pass the time with a few entries. The title was not entirely accurate. Sometimes, “clever” experiments didn’t kill the caster, but the subject of the spell, or even completely unrelated innocents who happened to get too close. All told in an almost comically dry tone, about half of the entries within referenced something done during the era of the Blood Empire, notorious for its immoral exploration of magic’s furthest reaches.

The other half were from random thaumaturges who thought they’d had an ingenious idea that would revolutionize the world.

Many of these ideas were obviously foolish, but frighteningly, some seemed just the wrong side of reasonable. As the title said, “clever.”

Severin Whilkes, a woman known for developing several modern cosmetic glamours, had decided to experiment with Sacrificing her own fat stores for power. She found initial success, but while demonstrating this feat to a group of her contemporaries, lost control. Accounts of the incident varied, but it was generally accepted that she had slipped and begun to channel magic through her own flesh.

Rather than mercifully dying, her Will broke and she became an Aberrant. Most of those in the audience were downed by the experience, but one woman’s daughter had not yet begun to practice magic. The twelve-year old girl had fumbled out the battle wand from her mother’s purse and used every single fireball spell stored within it to kill the Aberrant.

In the process, six other women were killed by the Aberrant, classified Fiend-type as it’s attack was touch-based and without any abstract effects. While using illusions to appear as a young, slender girl, it ate them from the inside, leaving empty bags of skin behind.

Afterward, the investigation used divination to reconstruct an image of the Aberrant from its charred remains. It was nothing more than a huge ball of layered, wrinkled, and sagging flesh peppered with random eyes, mouths, and noses.

‘It would be like trying to cast through a Conduit that’s been embedded inside your body—possible, but incredibly dangerous. Without the natural barrier of your skin, the only thing containing the magic would be your Will. Any tiny mistake and suddenly you’re not just Sacrificing your fat stores, but channeling through your own flesh.’ This was not one of the particularly clever experiments.

The next entry was about a thaumaturge who lived during the Third Empire—under the reign of the infamous Blood Emperor. The man had attempted to develop a spell that could directly improve one’s Will, under the theory that thaumaturges had a magical “core” that could be stimulated externally. After multiple failures that involved the death of his test subjects, he concluded that there was in fact, no magical core, and no way to directly improve the Will, tossed that idea aside, and decided to develop a spell that would practice magic for the subject.

Sebastien didn’t need to read the rest of the entry to know how badly this would go, but she continued on, grotesquely fascinated. After even more failures, and the threat of his research being defunded, the thaumaturge decided that the way to do this was to create a spell that could take over the subject entirely, effecting perfect mind, body, and emotional control, as all those were needed to effectively exert the Will.

After the death of even more subjects as he fine-tuned this delicate and powerful spell, he saw initial success. Followed by the subjects repeatedly going insane and dying to Will-strain.

In addition to the mental strain exacerbated by whatever was left of the subjects’ original personality fighting against the curse he’d forced on them, there was only so much effort a person could exert in a period of time without hurting themselves.

His efforts, however, did lead to a wave of popularity among the wealthy and influential, who began cursing their “lazy” children with a much milder compulsion to make them more likely to practice. It was accompanied by a correspondingly milder rise in debilitating Will-strain.

The practice, of course, was outlawed with the fall of the Third Empire and the rise of the Thirteen Crowns.

But the absence of pressure was a problem. She tried to hold her breath as the air in her lungs expanded, and ended up rupturing the delicate tissue. The blood in her veins began to boil, essentially, and caused embolisms—blood vessels being blocked by gas bubbles in the bloodstream.

Without oxygen, her brain immediately began to shut down, and she would have passed out in less than half a minute and died in under two, except for the fact that she was as paranoid as her ex-husband was sadistic. She carried an expensive healing potion at all times, with the bottle’s lid spelled with the same modified piercing spell Healer Nidson had used to get Humphries’ adapting solution directly into the bloodstream.

Using the overpowered reparative effects, the woman bought herself time, which she used to bombard the spell’s barrier with a battle wand while simultaneously wresting control of the spell array from him.

He couldn’t withstand the dual-sided attack, and lost control. The air rushing back in caused the woman more damage, but not enough to overcome the lingering effects of her healing potion.

In the end, she caught him, overpowered and beat him bloody, then dragged him literally kicking and screaming into the spell array he had meant for her. He died approximately two minutes later. There were illustrations to drive home the point.

His ex-wife was questioned and charged with excessive force when retaliating, but as she was now the lover of the town’s most influential man, her actions were deemed self-defense and all charges were dropped.

Sebastien set the book down. Fascinating as it was, this was not helping to soothe her anxiety. ‘Maybe, just maybe, sitting around in bed reading about everything that can go horribly wrong is making it worse.’ The sun was not yet rising, but the University grounds were lit, and the streetlamps in the nice areas of town had been on all night. No carriages would be out at this early hour, but she was no stranger to walking, and even if the servants would all be asleep, she still had a key to Dryden Manor.

She arrived quite chilled, closing the front door stealthily behind her and tiptoeing through the dark house up to the guest room set aside as her own. A couple minutes of work got Myrddin’s journal out from its hiding place within the stone floor. She let out a breath of relief, because though she had no particular reason to believe Oliver would suddenly go after her book, or that he even knew where it was, her current lack of trust in him had left her paranoid.

It had been weeks since she received these decryption spells from the secret thaumaturge meetings, but she had been so busy she hadn’t made much progress after that first night.

She tried the more standard divination spell first, while she was still mentally fresh. It required her to make an extremely fine alchemical powder, which she sprinkled over and around the book. When she finally cast the actual divination spell, the powder shifted and began to glow, highlighting areas of recent interaction and possible interest. As she had feared, it showed a few of her own fingerprints, as well as drawing attention to the otherwise invisible signs of tampering where she had cut away the binding to search for clues. Nothing seemed like an actual clue toward decrypting it, or any potential password.

She had expected as much, and wasn’t too disappointed.

The brute-force mathematical decryption came next, which still required a few more hours of work on her part to lower the power requirements via extending the casting time, and to solidify a Word that a layman such as herself could understand. In the end, she put an entire stack of notes within one of the component Circles, because she couldn’t actually fit everything within the spell array scratched onto the floor in chalk.

Finally, she spent the next three hours feeding the spell array a steady stream of energy from a grouped series of candles, because her beast core didn’t have the power to last that long and should be reserved for emergencies.

It was too much power, and too long spent concentrating, even for her. The book sat there innocently, the glyph on the front shifting as steadily as ever. Once it was clear she was not making any progress, and she could not safely continue, she dropped the spell. She closed her eyes against a wave of dizziness and nausea as the room spun around her.

The sun was up now, and despite the early hour she felt almost sick with sheer mental fatigue, as if her thoughts were unmoored.

When the dizziness passed, she stared impassively down at the mess of her latest attempt. It took a while to build up the energy, but eventually she roused herself to clean it all up and hide the book away again. She hesitated before sealing it beneath the floor. ‘I cannot take it with me to the University, and I dare not leave it somewhere without wards better than I can cast. ...Perhaps Liza would be willing to keep it securely?’ Sebastien considered. But she hadn’t forgotten Oliver’s warning when he first introduced her to Liza. The woman was trustworthy, but not honorable. Even if she agreed to house something so potentially dangerous, could Sebastien trust her with the temptation?

In the end, she sealed the floor seamlessly over it once again.

As she exited her room and walked down the stairway into the entrance atrium, Oliver turned from the front doorway he had just been about to step through. His eyes widened with surprise.

Simultaneously, they said, “We need to talk.”