Chapter 60

  The best place to find books would be a library. As would a clinic be the best place for curing of disease and treatment of wounds. And the best place to practice spellcraft was at the Academies. Money and privilege could substitute for a lot, but they would remain substitutes nonetheless in the face of institutions that were built to purpose in pursuit of such ideals.

  Even someone with the fortunes of Gwen Croft, with all the wants and riches, a trail of personal tutors at her beck and call with an exclusive library at her fingertips, had to admit to the charms and practicality of being a student at the Academy.

  The spell-laboratories at the Academies, for one, Gwen found particularly alluring. Even though she had her own personal state of the art spell-lab in Croft Manor, how could she not as any wizarding heiress worth her salt, she often made to visit those at the Academy.

  That isn’t to say that spell-lab at Croft Manor was found lacking. It boasted all the latest equipment and innovations in wizardry, matching if not going beyond those at the Academies in its quality and resources. Personalized and built solely to cater to Gwen’s ascension.

  Still, for all the exclusivity and elitism, Gwen found herself often in the Academy spell-labs. It was somewhat illogical, wasteful even with all her resources, but there was something to be said for pursuing knowledge within such hallowed walls of learning. The Academies were amongst such places that always seemed to manifest an ethereal power. Akin to battlefields and graveyards in their tribute to Mortality, to temples and monasteries in their homage to Faith, Academies seeped with the essence of Learning that was hard to replicate elsewhere.

  And for all the dramatic bluster and poetic musings, a skeptical Gwen did find creativity and inspiration more often in said Academy halls than in her own home.

  A part of the appeal was simply being away from home. For all that she was, with all the privilege, wealth and power, came the expectations and responsibilities of a Croft. While prideful Gwen would never be anything but herself, only in the rare moments when she practiced wizardry would she feel free and truest to herself.

  Everywhere and at all times, Gwen had to be many things. In the Academy, she only had to be a student of wizardry.

  As it were, Gwen Croft was deemed to be many things. To the masses, she was rich and powerful, talented and beautiful. While superficial and shallow, those four attributes always seemed enough to label and describe Gwen Croft to every stranger who had never even seen Gwen with their own eyes or exchanged a spoken word with her.

  What people were all too eager to overlook was Gwen’s endeavor and dedication. Everyone always seemed to forget the fact that no one achieved Gwen’s proficiencies in wizardry on genius alone. It was so much easier and simpler to disregard the graft and commitment of a more than a decade’s worth of discipline and rigorous education. So much more fun to entertain guesses as to how they imagined her to be.

  For all her fortune, Gwen was denied the common courtesy of not judging a book by its cover. For lazy ignorance, Gwen’s hard work and journey didn’t bear consideration and it was only the image of who she was at present that was taken for granted. Though in the gossip mongers’ poor defense, they were left to make assumptions about Gwen Croft from afar because they had never had a chance of getting close to her.

  Then how could they know that Gwen was a diligent student who went for days on end in practicing with aether and working on her spells? Of the pain she went through when she got her alchemical infusions to better her wizard body ever since the age of twelve? Fewer knew of Gwen’s burden of inheriting her father’s legacy where she was groomed to takeover an international business empire. The general public only knew about a few of her triumphs and none of her struggles, and deemed that enough to paint an image of Gwen Croft in their minds. Her beauty and mystique only added to the cycle of rumors turning into assumptions that eventually went on to become public opinion. All along they knew next to nothing about the person behind their assumptions. They certainly didn’t consider Gwen for the intelligent and driven woman that she was. One who never compromised, nor apologized as she forged ahead in her path. Nor did they know how little Gwen cared for the opinion of others and how little they mattered to her.

  Alone, in the quiet solitude of the spell-lab, Gwen was immersed in her work. All else faded to the background in place of the task before her.

  Free from unwanted distractions and spared the tedium of company, Gwen was in those rare moods where she let her hair down and forgot about everything she found undesirable and was free to indulge in her fondest desire.

  Wizardry was Gwen’s true calling and she most closely identified herself as a wizard. Even before being a Croft, in the face of all her blessings and fortune, Gwen would choose being a wizard over it all. Though when she was younger, she had put her parents and being a daughter at the forefront, but since then her priorities had shifted as she had grown to adulthood. She had worked too hard, endured too much, to not be anything else than what she had strived to be.

  Of her immediate surroundings, the spell-lab was a large hall of a room that was partitioned into sections, some of which could be rearranged to the occupant’s preferences with portable dividers. The entire room; roof, floor and walls, was constructed out of hard grey stone and left bare. Utmost practicality was favored over decorations with almost no excessive décor beyond wizarding apparatuses and equipment.

  Bracketed lamps were mounted on the walls, as were a few torchlights that could be positioned to highlight the various areas like stage-lights. Cordoned sections held numerous workstations, including elaborate chemistry sets, complex enchanted machinery and even a study area of sorts complete with a massive blackboard. A significant area was secluded and designated to be a testing range where a wizard could practice and experiment their spells with the option of protective barriers for safety.

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  Gwen stood engrossed in front on one of the enchanted tables. Of its different applications, Gwen was powering the projection enchantment to construct a three-dimensional model of a spell. Wand in hand, she continuously rotated the model, carefully observing the design and making changes while consulting her research held on a separate table alongside.

  A wand was the appropriate tool for such a delicate task.

  There were numerous foci used in spellcraft but the three most often used were wands, staffs and crystals. Wands remained the most popular choice for their finesse and accessibility, despite their lacking power. Staffs were the opposite in that they could channel much more aether, but lost in terms of precision to wands.

  Certain gems and crystals could hold massive amounts of aether depending on their size and composition, making the them perfect containers of aether. No surprise they were a major component in aether batteries. In spellcraft, however, they were almost exclusively employed in small shapes. Crystals were not the choice when altering or improvising spells mid-cast, but they were the fastest casters when it came to executing the simpler spells. They were mostly used by wizards for and against quick casts. They could be easily hidden and integrated into clothing and jewelry, making them a convenient safeguard or a hidden trump card.

  The spell that held Gwen’s focus was from the catalogue of disintegration runes.

  Almost all spells included two fundamentals in their construction. They included runes and they included geometric circuits.

  Spells were, at their core, a language. Words could describe the abstract and invoke meaning in their very usage, and where words where fundamental to communication between people, spells communed with the aether.

  When someone read or heard of a rainbow-colored cat, they would imagine a rainbow-colored cat. It didn’t matter that such a creature was fictional, the reader would be compelled to think of a fantastical creature just by the words alone, written or spoken. Such was the power of language in that it compelled thought and imagination just by its usage and understanding.

  Similarly, spells were the language of wizardry. The language with which to affect aether.

  Carrying forth the same analogy, runes could be loosely ascribed to be nouns and the geometric circuits surrounding them to be verbs and grammar. As such, spells invoked the aether to react in certain ways upon their construction, similar to a sentence. And the resultant reaction of spells being infused with aether from a wizard’s well activated them to perform wizardry.

  As to how such a language of spells came to be, how runes come to confer with the aether was an open-ended question. Lost to passage of time, the validation of truths and facts on the topic was long forgotten. That didn’t stop people from questing for answers to the mystery. The esoteric and philosophical subject was an evergreen debate in all corners of Gaia. Whether it was a child wondering the same in innocent curiosity or scholars shouting at each other in contested screaming matches in lecture halls.

  Theories abound, but some held the more weight than others. The most widespread belief was that a most powerful mage magicked the aether to conform to wizardry and thusly became the First Wizard. Another was that runes and spells were some divine language of a long forgotten civilization or the tongue of ascended beings who imparted the gift upon mortals. A more contemporary theory amongst scholars had emerged that aether possessed its own will and it was aether itself that imbued such properties to spells in a means to converse with sentient beings.

  Regardless of the origin of spells came to be, Gwen’s immediate concern was in the mastery of the disintegration rune.

  Disintegration spells were amongst the more morbid and dangerous kind of wizardry. Verging on being taboo, they belonged to the more advanced branch of adept spells, crossing over to the expert rank. Which was a blessing given their enormous potential for misuse.

  As the name implied, spells of the disintegration rune ate away at substances. They dismantled and broke down matter to simpler forms or converted them into energy, mostly erasing their solidness. In its application, the spell could be used to disintegrate anything from a diamond to water to living flesh. Though the aether required to dismantle a diamond would be exponentially more than that needed to unmake something like water. The spell was also incredibly complex and mutable in that it had many permutations in its execution based upon the targeted substance.

  The complexity of the spell was one of the reasons why acid spells were more readily used as a substitute.

  As it were, Gwen had grown proficient with casting the spell in as conical blast through her wand. It was a weak version to start with, but power wasn’t the intent. Control was, given the danger.

  Gwen’s most pressing objective was to give an adhesive quality to the spell so that it would only affect the targeted substance. This would also add a corrosive liquid like element to the spell which was something Gwen was keen to study.

  She was having trouble making the spell ‘stick’. Quite literally as she had solved and memorized visually aiming the spell with her wand. She was struggling to control the spell to obey after casting.

  Gwen didn’t bemoan the difficulty. She welcomed it. Gwen thoroughly enjoyed the experimentation and embraced the discipline in the pursuit of mastery. She loved all things to do with wizardry and becoming stronger. So much so that she was all for spending another ten hours in the lab over the ten she already had ever since secluding herself in the morning.

  That she was in the Academy meant that she would be left alone. For longer at least. The biggest nuisance that was her mother wasn’t there to annoy and distract and demand her time. Gwen had long since stopped feeling guilty of ignoring her mother as Eleanor had retaliated to her daughter’s obsession by becoming all the more insistent on getting involved in Gwen’s life.

  It was a constant battle, a game of hide and seek where Gwen was prone to get lost in her passion and Eleanor was the one hunting to bring her daughter back into the folds of the family.

  It wasn’t anything nefarious, just one of the quirks of the relationship between Mother and Daughter Croft.

  Alas, Gwen had gone missing long enough. A silently blinking light on one of the pillars drew her attention to indicate that there was someone awaiting to enter the lab. The silent indicator was used so as to not startle the occupant during a dangerous or sensitive moment.

  Gwen sighed, accepting that this was the most that she would be allowed to get away with this once.

  With a flick of her wand, she deactivated the enchantments on the table and switched off the projection of the spell. After which she went through the various workstations making sure they were deactivated safely. As a final measure, she made sure to cover up her work and not leave any clues as to what she had been doing.

  By the use of her wand, it all took less than a minute before Gwen was opening the door to meet the intruder.

  Gwen had been expecting her bodyguard Thelma or a messenger from her mother. So she was taken completely by surprise to find Alex Narcy awaiting her.