IWUAaDNW: Party 5.3

“Yeah, uh… I guess not. Sorry. I guess I’ll just… cast at nothing, then. Uh…” He picked a spot in the tall grass opposite to the village, raised his wand and started chanting. “Spirits of bravery, gather the glitter and strike at my foe! Air bolt!”

The spell fizzled out. He frowned and tried again, with the same result. He was making a mistake, and I was pretty sure he wasn’t trying to pull a Legend, so it had to be the word ‘glitter’, which was acting as complement to the verb. Knowing their sentence structure, I showed him three green squares, with the second half of the first flashing in red. He saw it, and blinked.

“You know what I’m saying wrong?”

I pantomimed the spell; little ghost souls with confident smiles picking up glitter and throwing it at a figure. He blinked. “Uh… so I’m… huh. Wait, you understand spell words?”

A thumbs up. After last night, I figured everyone knew what that one meant.

“That’s fascinating.”

He wasn’t the one who answered, though. Coming out of the village at just the right moment were Eira and Kamella.

“Uh, ma’am.” Cirys gave Eira a salute.

“Hello, young man,” Eira replied with a smile. “Were you practicing?”

“Yes ma’am,” he replied. “I was trying to get Air Bolt to work, I thought maybe it was just that I was trying without a target, but it looks like I was mispronouncing it somehow?”

Eira smiled. “You have a good work ethic. I appreciate that.” She turned to my entrance. “As for you, is it true? You understand spell words?”

“Taylor has a powerful and somewhat invasive translation ability,” Kamella replied for me. “We’ve attempted to work around it in the past with… moderate results.”

I made my word wall wasp buzz. Her solution had come in useful, and it still explained some concepts better than illusions could. Although admittedly, most of the nouns on the wall were now useless.

“I see. That’s absolutely fascinating. That must mean, then, that either she, or dungeons themselves, have access to the Arcanum.”

The Arcanum? I flashed a question mark.

Kamella replied for her. “The Arcanum is a theoretical repository of all spells and spell words that have ever entered the stream of life; the sum knowledge of all things to have ever lived on the Planet. Although I was unaware that its existence had been confirmed to Lady Eira’s satisfaction.”

It wasn’t quite possible to see Eira’s face under her hood, but her voice sounded a bit flustered when she said, “A strong case for it was made in Ysolda the Spellweaver’s Almanac. I… never truly stopped considering it as a possibility. As the most likely possibility, I mean to say. It would explain why the Druids’ writing defies all attempts at translation, if somehow they were writing from pieces of the Arcanum itself.” She cleared her throat. “Although, you are not wrong. Making hasty deductions is the enemy of proper methodology.”

Kamella tittered. Eira turned to her and asked pointedly, “And where, might I wonder, have you heard of the Arcanum?”

“Oh, it was mentioned in a few pieces of my collection,” she waved over to the bestiary tent, where the rest of her books and scrolls were stored. “Including some handwritten notes by a Khannite researcher whose works were… liberated, along with a few of his more lively possessions.”