Lily pulled up to her old apartment building for the second time since it burned to the ground. To her surprise, it was looking… better. A lot of the scorch marks were missing now, and some of the concrete seemed like it had re-formed. Lily was not at all surprised to see it was looking better, but was a bit shocked by how little had changed. Hadn’t this repair spell been going for several days already, at least? She would have been shocked as hell if the apartment had fully re-assembled or something, but she expected much more obvious changes.

This time, Lily knew she was looking for a large spell circle, and she made sure to park outside of it. Star growled a little as they got out of the car, and Lily shot him a glance. She didn’t blame him for being wary, given their experiences last time. But they weren’t here for trouble now. This should be a pretty routine visit.

“Should be. But you never know.”

Sure enough, there was a huge spell circle that seemed like it probably circled the whole complex. While focusing on it, Lily could just make out the nearest line drawn of mana. She’d have to follow it to find a glyph or two.

“Did I not notice this the first time because I wasn’t paying attention? Or was it not here until after I fell into the pit? If so, how did it form?”

There were always so many questions. Like, did she cast this spell somehow? That seemed unlikely, and yet there was evidence for it. She really didn’t think it had been here when she first arrived, and she had been wishing really hard to return to her apartment. At the same time, she knew she didn’t have enough mana in her body for a circle this big.

“So, what gives, huh?”

Star whined, and pawed at her calf.

“Oh, sorry buddy. I guess I’m kinda talking to myself huh? I’m just trying to figure out how this spell got here. After I copy down the glyphs, I think I’ll break it and leave a Chaos Emerald to charge here instead. Come on, let’s find the glyphs.”

Star trotted on ahead, sniffing along the ground. Lily decided he must have a pretty good sense for mana, because he was sniffing right along the line, and as he came to the first glyph, he stopped, looking proud of himself.

“Yeah yeah, you’re a good boy. Now move so I can write this down.”

Lily didn’t actually need him to move. The circle was created from Mana, so it wasn’t really sight she was using to interact with it. She was actually starting to think it existed in a sort of meta layer on top of reality rather than as a physical thing at all. But, a dog sitting in the center of it still somehow made it harder to read.

Star moved, but looked a little dejected.

“You wanna help? Find the next one, so I can just run to you when I’m done here.”

He perked up immediately, and started sniffing out the line again. Lily smiled. It was nice having him with her. Lily would need to do some introspection about why it was easy for her to be around a sentient dog but not other people sometime, but for now she just cherished having a partner.

The first glyph had something to do with mana, but Lily didn’t understand more than that. The second glyph was a different mana glyph that Lily didn’t understand. By the time she was writing down the third, Lily was noticing a pattern. 

“Is this spell almost entirely mana generation? How much mana does it take to repair something? Or is it that infusing something with mana is what repairs it? That can’t be it right? I’ve personally seen something overflow with mana and explode, and I sure as hell don’t feel healed standing in my charging spell.”

No, there had to be something more to it than that. The more Lily thought about it though, the more questions she had. Like, how would a repair spell even work in the first place? How does the spell know what is repaired and what isn’t? How did the spell earlier know not to drain the electricity from her nervous system? Lily was sure this had come up before too.

Sometimes, it seemed like spells just knew things that weren’t explicitly written into them. In some ways, she could consider the glyphs with settings to be like that. Some meta informational layer on top of the magic that responded to… what? Intention of the caster? 

“Oh this is going to drive me nuts! The repair spell worked on my phone. It didn’t even remove any data. Why did it restore it to that? How did it know? Why not factory defaults? Or a pile of component parts?”

Lily was sure there was some witty observation to be made about Plato and staring at shadows on the wall of a cave, but she was too frustrated to put it together right now. While she was busy thinking it through, she stumbled upon the only remaining glyph on the circle, and the first one that seemed to have nothing to do with manipulating mana.

It was a very strange glyph, in comparison to most of the ones she had encountered so far. For one, it was much larger. The circle was structured in a way that this node covered much more area than the rest of them. Lily wasn’t sure if that was important to the spell or not. But also, the glyph appeared different in some major ways.

It was much more complex, and didn’t seem to be created from the same radicals, or simply a radical itself. The node it was recessed in was different too. In fact, the more she looked at it, the more she was sure that the node was very different and the glyph itself was…

“It’s gibberish! Junk data! What the actual hell! That’s not even a glyph!”

Not only was it not a glyph as she was used to seeing them at all, it wasn’t even something that could be considered a glyph. Every time she looked at it, it was different. There was no way she could write this down! It looked like it didn’t belong in this circle at all!

So, what was she looking at? Lily paused. The node was foreign too. Most nodes were just circles. The rare ones had a geometric shape in them, and usually were markers of the entry point of the circle, or a capacitor, or a gate. But this one was complicated, and connected to this strange magical… something.

“Well, that’s going to make it hard to use this however I want. I can’t even really wrap my head around what it is.”

Star was standing at attention, looking at the strange node too. It seemed utterly foreign. Like it didn’t even belong in this system of magic.

Maybe that’s what it was? It was an idle thought. But maybe this was some kind of API? A different kind of magic entirely, worked into a circle? That would imply that it wasn’t naturally occurring. Lily wasn’t sure. She wasn’t ready to decide that yet, but her gut was telling her that this was something completely foreign to what she’d been learning. It looked more out of place in the circle than her circuit board concepts by miles. At least those used the same sorts of lines and structures.

“Well shit. Now what?”

Lily took the opportunity to walk over to Star and pat him on the head.

“Everything’s okay. I don’t think it’s going to hurt us, but we can be nice and careful okay? I think it just repairs things. But, let’s disable it for now to be sure.”

Lily looked over her notes on the spell. Well, aside from the strange foreign spell embedded in the circle, it was pretty straightforward. She didn’t know exactly what all the mana glyphs did, but she could read them enough to be sure it mostly just gathered a lot of mana.

Her plan had been to take down the spell, recreate it over her car to test it, and set up a charging spell for a chaos emerald. But if she couldn’t recreate the repair spell she didn’t want to take it down. At the same time, she didn’t want it just running and running when she wasn’t sure how it worked. More than that, she wanted to use the magic power of this spooky spot to charge up some chaos emeralds.

Could she make changes to the existing circle and make those things happen? It was a very large circle, and she’d be dealing with the node she didn’t understand. But, how dangerous could it be to just redirect the mana supply into one of her charging spells and leave the foreign node intact but not connected to anything?

Lily couldn’t see the danger in doing that. But, she knew she didn’t always. Was it worth the danger to not lose the repair spell? It might be. If this wasn’t a naturally occurring spell, she might not find it again.

Maybe she could split the circle so that it did two things mostly disconnected from one another? It’d technically be one spell, but if she completely disconnected the mana gathering from the repair spell, and then routed the mana to charging up her special rocks and created a separate circle to power the repair spell and divert it to a small testing area… Would that work? It was complicated.

Lily sat down and began doodling in her notebook. She suspected that it was possible. Maybe even there would be reasons to create an asynchronous spell like this where the circles did work together for a result? Well, plenty of time to think about that later. For now, she had a basic formation in mind.

She’d start by neutering the repair spell. To do that, she needed to make an edit to the circle that directed mana to a glyph of her choice rather than to the repair spell, skipping that node entirely. This was the smallest change she needed to make, and she was thinking of diverting it to her Light spell. She wasn’t actually sure what a light spell with that much mana funneled into it would look like, but it still had to be better than fire, or heat, or electricity, or air which were her other options.

This was also the smallest portion of the circle she’d need to work on. She was a bit worried about that. The circle was physically quite large. Earlier in the middle of the electric circle she’d had a problem reaching the whole thing. But then she’d been on the inside trying to reach the edge. This time she was starting on the edge.

Well, there was only one thing to do, and that was try it. Lily briefly explained her plan to Star, and then got to work. She reached out and felt for the line she wanted to change. As she got hold of it, a sensation flooded her. She could sense the whole circle while working on part of it. The problem was, it was an immense amount of mana.

Lily gasped, suddenly feeling like she was going to be crushed by the weight of it. But of course, it had no actual weight. She was okay. It was just a sensation. It was huge. It was made of more mana than she’d ever interacted with at once. She had the disturbing thought that if it all rushed into her, she’d pop like her first spell had. She pushed that thought away, lest she somehow will it into being.

She just wanted to make a small change. This should be easy. The circle already had so much mana. Lily could feel the magical energy coursing through her. It wasn’t like it was when her body had too much. That felt like an electric fire inside her. This was an almost buzzing static feeling that was nearly overwhelming. Memory tickled the back of her mind. Had she felt this somewhere before? In any case, now wasn’t the time.

Lily focused on forming her new circle. It was one she’d created a fair few times now, but she was working on a larger scale and with much more energy than ever before. She visualized the change she wanted, and pushed.

Drawing circles before had always felt like cardio to Lily. Like running until her heart and lungs were ready to give out. This was more like trying to lift too much weight at once with her mana muscle. She strained, but it didn’t want to budge! It was overwhelming. 

Lily pushed. Nothing happened. She was about to give up and let it go when she realized the situation was a little more dire than that. It really was like she was lifting too much weight. She had destabilized it at all, and now she needed to either finish what she was doing or put it back the exact way she found it. She couldn’t just let go or the whole thing might collapse. Lily didn’t want to know what happened if the whole thing collapsed.

She took a deep breath, and pushed. The circle moved. She could feel it. She was changing something! But it was miniscule! It was nothing! She’d have to do that a thousand times to make the change she had already started! She didn’t have that in her! Lily gathered herself and tried to push things back into place instead. No change.

It was like she was pushing a truck and had somehow gotten it to start rolling. Grabbing it and pulling it to a stop wasn’t going to happen at this point. She could direct it, or she could get run over.

“Oh god. Oh god! I’m not strong enough!”

Panic raced through her. Lily did everything she could to just hold on for a second longer. She felt herself slipping. She was losing control of it! Panic was making her lose focus! She closed her eyes and tried to drown out the world around her. Focus on only this. Only this mattered in the whole world right now. Just don’t let the spell with this much mana collapse on itself!

It wasn’t enough. It had already started to slip, and she couldn’t calm down enough to refocus. She held on as hard as she could.

Lily felt something fluffy push itself up against her. Fluffy and warm. She opened her eyes. Star was pressing himself gently up against her. He was here to help. Here with her, no matter what happened.

A wave of calm focus passed through her. Yes. She wasn’t alone. If things went wrong, she had a partner. She didn’t know what he could do to help. But he’d try. So, she’d give it her best too.

Lily gathered herself and pushed again. To her surprise, the circle moved. Not easily. Not at all easily. But it did. She started reshaping the spell. First her light spell. The mana moved where she wanted it to. It felt like directing a river with her mind. It was raging, splashing, flowing faster and with more force than she could really understand. But it was obeying her.

It was getting easier to focus. But she still wasn’t feeling in control. The mana flowed, and she flowed with it. As she finished her light spell, she directed the magic to run through that node instead of the repair spell. But she wasn’t done. She couldn’t just stop now that the spell was obeying her. She’d never had access to this much power before. So, she let it continue to flow, and let herself be swept along by the current.

Yes, it was a current, she could see it now. Not weight. Her mistake at the beginning had been trying to go against the current she hadn’t realized was there. The mana flowed through the circle. Now that it was a whole circle, she could direct it.

When she’d written her own circles before, she’d used the mana inside herself. This mana was already here. She was just reshaping it. She didn’t need to push against it. She didn’t need to pull from herself. It was here. Somewhere between a current and a live wire.

No, it was more than that. The mana was flowing into her body, but it was flowing back out again. She was part of the circle. Why did it not feel like when she’d been overflowing with mana before?

A huge ball of light appeared. Lily hardly noticed as it rose above the broken remains of the apartment complex, practically a second sun in the sky. But the girl was in a trance. Caught in the current of the spell.

She directed the flow. A second circle appeared. Her charging spell, set to benefit from the huge flow of mana the circle generated. The light spell was connected to the overflow for when the battery was full. Easy. It was like nothing.

Lily had never felt so powerful. Fine, let’s do some more. Why not? She waited until she had the current behind her again and let it flow. This time, it was a circle stemming from the repair spell. The mana felt like it flowed around that node like a river past a stone. But that was fine. As long as she could direct the circle itself, even if not that node.

An ornate circle Lily never could have drawn with her hands sprang forth as she imagined it. It responded to her will. This was so easy! Why had her own mana never been like this before? Had she been resisting on some subconscious level rather than just letting it pour out of her? Why? This was so easy!

The new circle used some of her logic gates to only feed the repair spell with mana when something was inside the circle to be repaired, and the mana circle wasn’t charging an item. Lily vaguely felt an ache. It was getting more annoying as time went on.

But while she was here she wanted to study that repair spell. Could she move the circle if she made it smaller? It’d use the same amount of mana right? Why not? She focused on shifting it. But it was getting harder.

The pain was growing more intense. It was so distracting! She couldn’t focus! Lily centered the repair spell on her car. The circle had to be about that small to be all the way over there. That was fine. Now, the spell should be stable.

Which was good, because Lily was really starting to have trouble again. Something was shaking her? It hurt. She was deep in her trance, but now she was trying to rise out of it. The pain was making it a little easier. It was all over. Why did it hurt all over?

Lily opened her eyes. She was on her back. Star was dragging her across the asphalt. His teeth were dug into her shoulder to get a strong enough grip. They’d only just punctured the skin, but it was enough to hurt a good bit. Lily tried to open her mouth to chastise him. It wouldn’t work. She tried to move an arm, or flail, or communicate that she was conscious. Nothing.

Star stopped dragging her, and started licking her face. She was having a hard time breathing around his kisses, but finally managed a groan. The relieved whines that came from him broke her heart. She wanted to ask him how bad it had been.

But, she couldn’t stay awake. Instead, she closed her eyes and let sleep take her.