“Worry not,” he assured his subordinates. “I happen to know a specific ritual that will make its presence known to all around it. Since it’s not making any moves, it seems that our speculations were correct in that it must be of a muddled mind. How else would the boy have been able to drive it off?”

“You didn’t wake the boy.”

Everyone turned their gazes to Arienne, who stood with her back to a thick tree trunk in a calm stance, the positions of her feet betraying her readiness to act.

“You will refer to him as ‘Your Grace,’” came the first speaker’s reprimand. “And what does the boy have to do with anything?”

“He said that he would wake the boy so that he could lead us to the place where he had the encounter. He didn’t wake the boy, so why are we stopping here? I can’t help but wonder how you know exactly where this demon is hiding, Your Grace.”

“You aren’t proficient in light magics, let alone high magic in that field. Of course you can’t sense him.”

Pulling a packet of paralysis poison from a pocket, Maels approached the cage of Ket children and carefully emptied the powder onto one of the metal bars that made up its rusted ceiling. He then relied on a basic spell to stir up a contained whirlwind of air that evenly distributed the powder throughout the cage, his face an unmoving mask as he watched the children collapse to the ground within a matter of moments. The young girl was the last to fall, one of her small, dirty hands coming to rest atop that of her brother’s before she lost the ability to move. All of the children began to sob, their voices riddled with innocent fear.

Turning to those around him, he infused his voice with inner energies and gave a compulsory command. “You aren’t allowed to speak of what happens in this clearing. If anybody asks, we woke up the boy and he directed us to the demon. Is that understood?”

All of them dropped to their knees and bowed their heads. All save for Deena, who stood off to the side of the clearing while keeping a discreet eye on the young female knight on the opposing end.

“Now, back to your posts.”

Once the guards had reformed their perimeter around the immediate vicinity, Maels noticed that the boy began to stir where Ser Asten had laid him on the forest floor a few minutes earlier. Walking over, he added further confusion to the faces of those around him as he took out another packet of poison, lifted up the boy’s shirt and gently sprinkled it onto his chest.

Why doesn’t he open his eyes?

The moment he’d regained consciousness, the boy had pretended that he was still sleeping. Reading the contours of his expression, Maels judged that the lad was attempting to take stock of his surroundings with his other senses, which caught him slightly off guard. In such a situation, how could someone so young keep so calm and collected?

Suppressing his admiration, Maels handed a sheet of parchment to his battle mages for inspection and then bade them to recreate the magic circle that was recorded on it. About ten minutes later, a large portion of the ground had been cleared of detritus and an exact replica of the schematic drawn out in the dirt. At this point, he ordered his uncertain arcanites to unlock the cage and remove the Kets from within, having the immobile children arranged around the drawing with their heads facing inward at critical spots on the magic circle’s circumference.

“Make sure they’re holding hands,” he said sternly. “They won’t serve as a proper conduit otherwise.”

Once the children had been laid out in the proper fashion, he used advanced wind magic to carefully lift and then lower the ‘unconscious’ youth into the centre of the magic circle, successfully solidifying him as its nucleus. As far as the necromancer Neiro’s ritual went, all that was left to do was to carefully kill the boy while leaving his torso and head intact. If anything, the magical supplements on the lad’s hands would only make the curse more effective once they were slipped back onto the corpse’s regenerated limbs following the burning away of his flesh.

Yes, Maels thought gravely, reminding himself of the nature of this ritual. This isn’t a spell, but a curse. After today, I will have made use of two curses in my lifetime. In particular, this was called the curse of replication, one that he’d never heard of until he had discovered the hidden notebook behind the bookshelf in his primary study. Once the boy was killed, Maels would restore his limbs with energies siphoned from the surrounding children and then animate his corpse, which would, upon his command, be able to replicate the exact spell that had killed him but only on a much, much larger scale. With his face intact—for faces, eyes and hair were far more difficult to restore than bones or limbs—nobody would suspect him to be an animated corpse if they happened to catch sight of him in town, a contingency plan in the event that the invisibility spell that Maels intended to cast upon him was somehow disrupted.

“What is this magic?” asked Deena, who inspected the circle with interest amidst a backdrop of sobbing children. “It seems more like a curse than a spell or an enchantment.”

“Pay it no mind.”

Next, he strode over to an empty section of the clearing and removed the medallion from within an inner pocket. It was a simple thing, a smooth oval of unmarked steel that was indented at the centre with a simple circle where a spherical black gemstone had been embedded. Thinking on it, the piece looked very similar to the religious necklaces that were worn by followers of the faith.

Recalling the instructions that had been laid out in the notes of the unknown author, he steeled his heart and prepared to initiate his delicate plan.

Can I really pull this off?

The medallion had several spells attached to it that formed a very complex enchantment. It was a combination of a seal to prevent the beast within from fighting its way free—a concept that he didn’t entirely understand—as well as a suppression spell that limited the creature’s strength greatly upon summoning it, a spatial manipulation spell to create an isolated space within which to trap it, and of course, a summoning spell that could remove or insert the demon from the independent space that the medallion was bound to so long as enough energy was supplied. Although Maels was one of the most proficient magi in the empire and despite the fact that he had studied the unknown master’s notes to the point of perfect memorization and theoretical understanding, the fact remained that he had never attempted to undo such a seal let alone summon an unknown creature that was bound within an enchanted object. Would everything proceed smoothly as planned?

Stop it, Maels. You’re already at this juncture. There’s no turning back now!

Under the watchful eyes of those around him, he disabled the seal on the medallion as per the instructions recorded in the leather-bound notebook, by disrupting the weakest energy imprint on the metallic oval. The moment he did so, a tremendous magical force spilled out from the black gemstone at the centre of the piece, unleashing a turbulent windstorm of energies that caused everyone present to pale by several shades.

Ignoring the evident unease of his followers, Maels left the suppression seal intact and then disrupted the other two energy imprints, which represented the other spells involved in the complex enchantment.

He hesitated for a moment, but reassured himself by recalling that the writer of the notebook had labelled the sealed demon as of ‘moderate strength,’ and had outlined that the beast would only be able to make use of about five percent of its original capabilities. Thinking of the specific page in the notebook that described how to make use of the medallion, an eye-catching note that the author had jotted down rose to the fore of Maels’s mind.

Assumed Spell Classification: High Magic, upper end. Trial Results: Grand Magic, upper end. Moderately powerful beast successfully sealed within medallion, humanoid species.

Interested in what sort of sight he was about to see, he glanced at his battle mages and said, “Be ready! I’m about to expose the beast.” After a moment’s thought, he added, “This spell will also render it harmless for a time, so don’t attack it until I give the order. We need to question it in order to find out if there are any more of its kind in the area!”