Next morning started quite normal. We had breakfast with Caroline as usual. We started to work on manipulating our mana after that.

After a while Miss Iralalith entered the room.

“How are things going?” She sat down on the sofa.

“Quite well.” Tilly twiddled her thumps.

“I have a question regarding our attire. We know it’s magical and we should be able to activate magical effect they have.” Milly leaned back in her armchair.

“I can feel something when I focus on the slave mark.” I looked down on my chest.

“Let me look at it in detail.” Miss Iralalith waved me over to her, activation some magic which focussed on the mark for a while.

“Try to focus on your mark!” Her gaze seemed to pierce through my chest.

I moved my inner focus to the construct by the slave mark.

“It’s already bonded.” Miss Iralalith touched the slave mark lightly.

She scrutinized the mark closely for a few minutes.

“Try to push only a bit of your mana in it.” She looked into my eyes.

I did as she said, and took a single blob of mana and pushed it to the mark. There was a resistance and the mana returned back to my pool. I tried it with a bit more mana with the same effect. The resistance might have been a little bit lower, but the difference was hard to notice.

“You need more mana to activate it. You may try it, maybe after your mana regeneration has started.” Miss Iralalith tilted her head and smiled.

“How long does it take for mana regeneration over the day will start?” Milly pressed her lips together while eyeing Miss Iralalith.

“It differs, but it is common knowledge that your using magic frequently would speed it up. What exactly triggers it I don’t know, but you have to actually be able to use your mana for it. You should consult Miss Tessa before starting anything with these magical clothes.” Miss Iralalith folded her hands on her lap.

We looked at each other and nodded.

“Lilly, do you have something to add to yesterday evening?” Miss Iralalith gave me a piercing look.

“No. Nothing.” I blushed.

“Good.” She got to her feet again and went for the door, leaving downstairs.

“You didn’t tell us anything this morning.” Milly looked at me with wide eyes.

“There isn’t much to tell. It was a drunkard trying to show me the way to real womanhood. I busted his balls and Miss Iralalith dealt with the aftermath. It was right near her chamber.” I frowned.

“As long as you’re fine.” Milly nodded.

“It was creepy, yes. It got easy as he resorted to violence. I know how to deal with that.” I grinned at Milly.

“Then let’s get back to this stubborn mana.” Tilly grinned back at me.

We continued learning to move our mana. The mana increases got smaller in relation to the total mana each time as did the time to increase the the mana at all started to take longer as well. The month of spring passed with working hard on our spells. First Tilly managed to create a magic light. She had no visible or audible component with her spell.

Milly finished her clean spell in the evening. Milly sang while casting a spell and it was clear and loud in the end. It messed a bit with my focus but on the day after I was able to dry my first piece of cloth.

Spell casting turned out to be a kind of functional programming to me. The instructions used were completely different from anything I knew, but in the end that was it. I could use spells with a bit flexibility depending on how I deployed the mana into the structure. I could change certain parameters to influence the result a bit.

It took some more days until they worked reliable. Still I needed plenty of focus to make it happen. This would be a mess in combat situations. Well drying stuff while fighting wasn’t useful at all.

Tilly tried to explain me something of a tensor and vector fields to control how the spell worked. Maybe I would try to understand it later. I still had to get grasp on my way of spell casting.

Unfortunately the time in the donjon came to an end and we had to move into our old room again.

“You have to try to cast your spells as often as possible in the next time. One reason is to increase your available mana for obvious reason. Another reason is that with more practice you will need less focus and time to pull the spell off. Finally you want your mana to recover over the time when not asleep. Teach each other the spell you learned. I expect you to use them while you work, and you will regret going for the light spell, Tilly. There will be a few more spells for you later.” Miss Iralalith propped her hands on her hips looking at each of us in turn.

Miss Tessa started her combat training, this time in the afternoon, again. In the morning we spent cleaning and I had to spent time in the attic, drying wet cloth. It took a few day to get accustomed to the new time schedule and the training.

“I’m going to try to read the book now.” Tilly went for the door a bit after dinner.

“Be careful and don’t read too long!” Milly was already busy sewing.

“Good luck, Tilly.” I spent my time playing around with the remaining mana I had, casting my drying spell on occasion until I was drained.

The late spring passed like a breeze. Casting my spell got easier and I managed to learn the clean spell as well and Milly could sing cloth dry.

It was the morning of the High Suns. While the mana I could spent over the day had increased gradually, there was still no regeneration over the day. I had felt confident enough to learn a second spell as my dry spell went off easily. Learning a second spell with the help of Milly proved to be much easier as the first one as I could reuse much of the stuff I had developed for the first spell. The clean spell was hard to focus as well in the beginning.

“Let’s go, we have to discuss stuff.” Tilly got up from our bed half an hour after breakfast.

“It seems that you found something interesting.” Milly smiled and got up as well.

“Where are you going?” Caroline looked at Tilly.

“Where eternal darkness rules.” I whispered in Caroline’s ear while clasping my hands on her eyes.

“I’ll come with you.” Caroline pushed away my arms.

We carefully went to the secret library room.

“Okay. First you need a mana to open the book. After that you can read to a point where you need mana as well. I think you will need stronger mana to go on.” Tilly scratched her head.

“Second it contains a chapter about something which is called rune magic. As most of you know draconic runes are best carved into a surface as the depths and form of the engraving matters. While you can read the most when written on a piece of paper, you won’t be able to use rune magic. The effects are rather weak, even compared to our spells, but they are quite versatile. If you correctly engrave a rune on an object and infuse the rune with a bit magic, they wrote, the object may assume properties of what the runes describe. Putting a sharpness rune on a sword makes it a bit sharper for example. The effect is not much I think, but it’s easy to make. I wasn’t able to fill a rune completely, even if it requires just a little bit of it. Ah. There is an engrave spell as well. I managed to learn it and I could use it to write a rune into a stone surface. It reqires multiple castings, which makes writing a bit hazardous, but it works.”

“Third is a chapter which covers what I can see with my magic vision. I can find out quite a bit more of details than before. The question it raises is why it is described in this book? Is the magic vision we have something related to dragons?”

“This sounds dangerous!” Caroline looked at Tilly with wide eyes.

“I think it’s save. There were numerous powerful artifacts made from dragon parts. It was a given thing, nothing we had inherently.” I looked at Caroline who calmed down.

“So we should focus on the magic detection for today. The rest we will all study later on.” I rubbed my chin looking at Tilly.

Tilly started to explained what she had found out about the magic sense and we burned all our mana for today to get some practice interpreting the symbols we saw when the sight was active. It would take some time to get fully acquainted with it. Especially with all the spell learning on top.

We made a break for lunch and studied a bit more in the afternoon. After dinner we went to our room and spent some time cuddling until it was time to go to bed.

Four days later, my mana pool just grew two day ago, my mana started to come back over the day!

“Lilly. What’s up? You look like the cat who stole the milk.” Milly looked at me curiously.

“My mana recovered a bit over the day. It’s slow, but it is there.” I beamed at the others.

“Then we could expect it as well in the next days.” Tilly looked at me with wide eyes.

“It will help quite a bit with learning to use a new spell.” Milly propped her head on her elbow and smiled.

“I’m envious! I wished I could use magic as well!” Caroline ate a spoon of the stew.

“It’s nice to have, but nothing fancy. Being able to clean a room quicker is not that impressive.” I gave her a hug.

“I know, but it is something many people can’t do.” Caroline hugged me back.

Over the day I consumed about twice the mana as I was able before. I was done early with my duties that day which gave me a raised eyebrow of Miss Iralalith.

The next day Milly’s regeneration started as well and the day after Tilly’s. I was much easier now to train the new spells.

There was a spell for heating and cooling each and another one to comb the hair. Nice, but still not very impressive.

I tried to activate the magic of the attire again, but it didn’t work. I did loose most of my mana as I tried and I turned out to be a long day.

We decided to wait for a while and after the first increase in mana regeneration Milly decided to try it again in the morning.

“It worked, but I’m drained now.” She slumped down and collapsed on the bed. She dragged herself to the refectory and to work later.

It was possible to work while drained, but every step needed an act of willpower, in addition to be prone to failures.

We had occasional training sessions while drained. Miss Tessa had insisted that we had to be able to fight in any condition. We literally crawled to our room after these occasions.

Tilly and I exchanged a glance.

“Let’s help her out today and tomorrow one of us will take her turn” I looked at Tilly.

“Sounds reasonable.” She smirked.

In the evening Milly started to experiment with the outfit.

“Whoops!” Suddenly Milly stood stark naked in front of us, blushing

Tilly and I looked at each other and started to giggle.

“Milly!” Caroline frowned as she became aware of Milly predicament..

Milly started to focus again for a while and suddenly the outfit winked in with a sparkle.

“What happened?” I looked at Milly

“As the clothes vanished, I could sense them in the mark.” Milly looked down at her sternum.

“I needed another mana to retrieve them. We don’t need a locker for them anymore.” Milly came over and sat down between us.

“Probably you will less concentration after a while. All of our magic abilities were that way.” Tilly laid an arm around her shoulder.

“Even the nails and the skin got better, albeit at the cost of more mana.” I looked at Caroline who was climbing down from her bed.

“You should have warned us at least.” She sat down next to me.

Tilly and I activated the attire on the following days. It became easier and faster over the next weeks to store and retrieve the clothes, which made dressing and undressing faster. Another perk was that the clothes came out clean. It gave us a bit more spare time and that’s it.

We still needed to have other clothes around for the night for example. It would be convenient while traveling.

We examined the slave marks with our magic sense as well. The location beacon was easy to discern. The ring which was with Miss Tessa most of the we saw it had a similar magical property. Our enemies would be able the ring as well.

“Then it makes no sense to hide it while fleeing.” Milly frowned.

“We can’t even touch that nasty thing.” Tilly objected.

“I can take care of that!” Caroline patted Tilly on the head.

“Maybe I will be able to retrieve it. I know where Miss Tessa keeps it when she don’t wear it.” Caroline grinned at us.

“Leaving it here would not make sense at all, since it improves the tracking capabilities of our pursuers considerably.” I looked a Caroline.

“What should we do with the thing in that case? Taking it with us?” Milly looked at me.

“Nothing against Caroline, but I don’t like the thought of anyone with that ring near me.” I looked at Caroline.

“I don’t want do leave you!” Caroline frowned at me.

“I’m not thinking about sending you away with it.” I smiled at her.

“Leaving it somewhere is bad, so what do think?” Milly gave me a hug, smiling.

“Well. We can try to split our pursuers. I’m thinking about sending it away via ship, or even tossing it in the sea. The sea devils are not a big thread as long as we avoid the sea.” I gave Caroline a hug.

“Taking the thing with us would make it easier to target us with the divination magic.” Tilly looked at her slave mark.

“A ship to another continent would be nice.” Milly snuggled against me

“We have to see what options we have at the time. The best would be the ring goes the opposite direction we go. We still have to deal with someone wearing it at some time.” I clenched my fists.

“We should try to get some allies.” Milly nodded.

“We only need time enough to reach that dungeon to hide for a while.” I looked at Milly.

“We find some way to get rid of them some day.” Tilly looked at the ceiling.

We dressed for the night and went to bed.

At the end of summer we had learned all spells we got access to and it wasn’t much of a problem casting them anymore. My manapool grew, as well as the regeneration, which seemed to be coupled with the size of the mana pool in a way. The regeneration only increased when the manapool increased as well. The regeneration didn’t increase with every manapool extension though.

Tomorrow was Happy Harvest. Again.