Chapter 16: new spells

Today was the day I would start to create a new spell. The spell I wanted to first makes was an earth wall spell which should be simple but effective. While it would not stop a modern day canon, it would be plenty to stop most of the things they could throw at me here, the only difficulty would be that it’d block my sight. While this is annoying, making it see through would add a whole new layer of difficulty that I was currently not prepared for.

The idea behind the spell was simple, simply make a wall of densely packed earth rise from the ground. Luckily for me developing the spell was also very easy. It wasn’t a very expensive spell to cast since it didn’t conjure nor did it do too much with the earth, it simply packed it a bit denser then raised it up and held it together for about 10 seconds after which it could probably be blown away since without magic holding it together, it was just a large pile of dirt. The runework itself was done quite quickly. The foundation rune was earth of course and then it was just a matter of making it so that it first pushes down on the section of earth to more densely pack it and keep it together and afterwards raising it upwards. All in all the process only took him a couple of days and when he tested it out a simple wall of earth appeared, about three meters high and two meters wide. I tried punching it and all it did was hurt my hand but I quickly ignored that and was rather impressed by the wall. It was a lot more solid than I expected, the spell was still only 1^st level by my system though, very simple spell after all.

The other spell was more than likely going to be a lot more troublesome though. I was quite close to water as an element so that part of the spell should be fine but the fire and simply the entire spell was quite a daunting task. I first grabbed some potion bottles and put them close by in case anything went wrong, I was literally playing with fire after all. I started work on the water part first. This would include a cleansing and purifying aspect. It would more than likely work on corruptions of various kinds although I imagined it was still somewhat limited. It would also make sure that wounds couldn’t get infected.  The next part was the fire part. This was bound to be hard but I was pretty prepared for it. The first step would be to separate the rebirth elements and use only those. It quickly became apparent that I was nowhere near good enough with the fire element to do that so it was time for plan B: very painful healing. Fire not only had a purifying part just like water, this one more focussed on destroying rather than slowly widdling down, it also had a rebirth part but it was rebirth through destruction so I’d be destroying the damaged tissue to then replace it with new and healthy tissue, very painful. Accomplishing this was still a hassle, I wasn’t super proficient with fire but I managed to make it at least work. The rest of the spell consisted of me combining the two parts of the spell which seemed to go rather well when I worked on the purifying aspect, they were quite similar which was interesting. Could multiple Mana types share traits and would that make them easier to work with? Worth looking into if I got some more Mana runes.

The difficulty spiked when I started working on combining the other aspects. Cleansing was quite different from destruction and I was having difficulty connecting the two. Whenever I tried the Mana simply refused to take hold. I tried connecting the two to different aspects of the element which worked. Mostly. The spell would still be unstable which I did not want to have to deal with so I’d have to possibly see if I could use a combination of runes to make the two more compatible. The entire process just to connect these two aspects had already taken me a couple of days so to switch it up a bit I decided to work on connecting the purifying aspect to the rebirth aspect since more connections would make the spell more stable and therefore cheaper. This worked quite well and within a day or two I managed to connect the two. I had gotten some inspiration from connecting these two and what I figured was that if I could find two things that destruction and cleansing had in common, I might be able to make it work. The issue with this was that I couldn’t think of anything that destruction and cleansing had in common. I decided to take a break and simply relax a bit.

The following days I did some simple stuff, I made myself a card set so I could play solitaire to have something to do. I then invented a simple magic puzzle which basically consisted of some random runes that had to be connected in the right pattern which would then result in a coloured light flashing. It wasn’t very hard to make since it mostly banked on an overly complicated rune pattern constantly shifting above the actual spell. It also helped me get a bit better at runes so that was a nice addition. During this I did get a nice idea as to how to fix my spell’s issue.

The solution I came up with was rather simple, connect the cleansing aspect not with just the destruction aspect but break up the destruction aspect which also contained a form of cleansing, then reroute the part that damages things to the rune of rebirth. This process worked and I was now ready to cast the spell. I tried it out, adjusted some runes then tried again. This repeated a few times until I was satisfied and I had another 2^nd level spell which I named [healing flame], clear enough as to what it does. The thing that surprised me was that despite it being a flame and water spell, the two elements didn’t fundamentally collide, it was just separate aspects that collided. I noted it down in my journal and I also noted down how long it approximately took me to develop the spell which was about two weeks which I was quite satisfied with.