Chapter 496 – Hidden Spell

Sophia laid everything out, the same way she had for Archon of Stone Issvako. It was easier the second time; she had the practice of having done it once before, so she knew where to add extra details to avoid questions. The Eidolon didn’t ask as many questions, either; she definitely preferred to ask at the end. Sophia remembered that from the first time she met the starry woman.

Even so, the Eidolon’s first comment was not one Sophia expected. “M’Beja did not translate the note for me. I am not certain that she could.”

“But she could read Bridge,” Sophia protested.

The Eidolon shook her head. “Not as a language, not the way you read it. She read those runes as a language of magic, of spell effects frozen in symbols. She showed me the note, and we talked about what it might do; we never talked about what it might mean.”

“Then … she didn’t know she was supposed to break the spell in the bead?” Sophia stared at the note, horrified. Was that the reason the Mage disappeared? A simple misunderstanding? “Wait, if she couldn’t read it, how did she know it led to Mimir’s workshop? Or where to go?”

“She read it as a puzzle and a map,” the Eidolon answered. “And I cannot say she was wrong to do so; you see the lines on the paper, under the words?”

Sophia frowned, then squinted at the map. When she looked carefully, there were pale lines drawn between some of the words that looked similar to some of the lines in the bead’s projection.

“Follow the lines as they cross in a spiral pattern from the outside in,” the Eidolon suggested. “That’s the most basic form of spell M’Beja found, and I think it’s the one she said made sense for that note. We’ll get to the other marks in a minute.”

“Prepare, delivered, needed. Options, Mimir’s Workshop, Tree that Holds Worlds, climb, Inchoate Mountains,eclipsed moon. Key, door, workshop, spell, fail, shelter.” Sophia read, jumping from word to word. “That’s similar to what I read, I think, but it’s not complete.”

Sophia’s eyes drifted higher in the message, to where the Guide said he did not know how Mimir wrote messages that told people what they needed to know. If the words she’d just read were what the Guide meant, Sophia understood his frustration. It wasn’t quite the same meaning.

“She took that and the spell it overlays and used it and the key to make a spell to lead her across the mountains to the workshop,” the Eidolon explained. 

The Eidolon waved and a diagram made of starlight appeared in front of Sophia, words connected by lines that glowed softly in the darkness. It looked a lot like the projection of the bead, only much simpler. 

Sophia  glanced between the paper and the map. The similarity was obvious; it was the same words. The lines were shifted, but there was a consistent pattern to how they were shifted. “The other marks say how to move the words and lines, don’t they?”

The Eidolon nodded. “They do. It’s a type of spell used in a number of places in every Tower, usually hidden in plain sight.”

Sophia frowned. “I didn’t see anything like that in the Maze.”

“You said there were gates that had words on them,” the Eidolon reminded Sophia of something she’d mentioned at least an hour earlier. “Did none of them have other patterns?”

Sophia wasn’t sure. She’d concentrated on the words, since that was what seemed important. “I sketched the link-gates.”

Sophia grabbed the right notebook and flipped back to the sketches. The last ones only had the interleaved words she’d decoded, but the earlier ones were more complete. “There, that one looks right. And … yeah, there are other designs on the pillars. Some of them cross the letters. They don’t line up with the encoded words, but there’s a pattern.”

“It’s broken,” the Eidolon stated firmly. “Which does make sense given what else you said about the Maze. Still, there you have it; hidden patterns that encode a spell. With what I’m seeing, I think it was a spell to be able to select which Challenge the gate links to, but it’s difficult to be certain.”

Sophia sighed. She’d felt so accomplished when she translated the words hidden on some link-gates in the Maze. It was a little humbling to know that she’d only scratched the surface of a broken spell. “Okay, so how do I cast this thing?”

“Once you draw the proper spell, you push mana into it. The art lies in drawing the spell correctly. For the wayfinding spell, you’ll need the key as well.” It was a little more complicated than the Eidolon’s initial instructions, but the complications were mostly in the materials needed to properly draw the spell. Naturally, the Eidolon had all of them and was happy to part with them for more spellform instruction from Sophia. 

That was all they managed to get done that night. Before she left, Sophia had one last question. “You’re not the Eidolon I met in the Maze. She was … I don’t know. More excited?”

“I’m older,” the Eidolon admitted. “It’s not obvious in the City of Stars, because we all are no more than impressions of ourselves, but I’m far older than I was then. Sixteen hundred years … I was probably barely past my first century then.”

The Eicolon snorted with a smile, clearly amused at herself. “I was looking for any magic I could get my hands on, trying to advance my Sphere. It worked for a long time, and I’m happy with the results. These days, my goals are different. I still like magic, of course, but it’s seeing it in the hands of young ones like you that truly brings me joy. I teach more than I gather, these days. When I finally pass on, one of my students will take over the Night Market; another will step in to lead Starwind Academy. I may yet step down before that, so they can get some experience before I am no longer around to guide them.”

Sophia blinked. Somehow, she hadn’t expected the Eidolon to still be alive. The only people she’d met who were that old were the Patrons and Archon Issvako … well, and a few people back home, but they were special in their own ways. 

The Eidolon chuckled warmly. “It's always nice to surprise someone like you. I’d invite you to come visit me in the true City of Stars, but realistically we can do this far better here, where I can still move easily. I am old, and while lending my face to the City of Stars has delayed my aging, I never reached the point where I could live this long without that help. You should come visit me in this City’s Academy; they should have a door for visitors. Use your token and I will come see you.”

It really was that easy when Sophia tried it the following afternoon; finding the Academy was harder than calling for the Eidolon’s assistance.

Sophia thought it was a very productive night, which was a good thing because the next few days were not nearly as productive. While the Eidolon was happy to help Sophia understand the runescript captured in the bead, she couldn’t tell Sophia how to break it safely. 

The Eidolon was able to confirm that there were several major portions to the runescript and even pointed out the points where they connected. Several of them blurred at the edges, sharing individual words that Sophia wouldn’t have expected. One thing was reassuring, at least: none of the shared words were the ones Sophia picked out as holding the general feel of the poetry of the section. She was probably right about what each section did … well, sort of.

That was something the Eidolon was able to help with. It took quite a while to tease apart the links between the phrases, but she was confident in the five sections they worked out.

The upward steps that were essentially the ceiling were for stasis and preservation through slowed time.

The wall that held the doorway that was probably the main entrance held a script that affected physical distance, but not in any of the ways Sophia expected. It separated the workshop from the space around it as though it were an extremely long way away, yet shortened the walk to reach the workshop. The Eidolon was convinced that it interacted with the key and the spell Lady M’Beja read off the Guide’s note.

The wall to the right of the entrance was the one Sophia identified as “protection,” and that was fairly accurate. It would protect the building and everything inside it. What Sophia didn’t know until the Eidolon pointed it out was that nearly all of its functionality was suppressed when the stasis portion of the enchantment was active. 

That led into an entire discussion of how the lines on the floor handled both control and power distribution. Sophia understood some of it, but not nearly enough to be able to tell what could work together and what couldn’t.

The left wall was the “clarity” wall. It was similar to the “protection” wall in that it was affected by the activation of the stasis, but it wasn’t disabled. Instead, it was inverted twice so that instead of increasing the clarity of mind of those inside the walls, it confused people who were outside. The spell on the key disabled the confusion, which the Eidolon pointed out but had to admit that she knew only because of M’Beja’s explanation.

It didn’t surprise Sophia, not after the World Tree told her that only the keybearer could find the Temple of Memory. It did explain why Mimir’s workshop wasn’t hidden in the scenario with the warming stations; that probably predated the activation of the stasis enchantment. 

The rear wall was the one with the poetry about luck and fortune. The Eidolon couldn’t help with it at all; a lot of what she was telling Sophia was knowledge passed on from M’Beja, and the Mage did not believe in luck. She’d completely ignored that wall as nothing more than ineffective superstition. 

That was intensely frustrating to Sophia. No part of a runescript was ignorable; even if it didn’t do what the inscriber thought it would, it still affected the rest of the inscription. Worse, there were people who could affect luck, or at least could do something that was close enough that it might as well be luck. 

Most of them couldn’t affect whether it was good luck or bad luck, but they could make unlikely things come true … even if they couldn’t control what those unlikely things were. It wasn’t an Affinity Sophia wanted, but it was one she couldn’t deny existed. They were walking chaos magnets and exemplars of the sayings “it can always get worse” and “good things never last.” The opposites were also true, of course, but the very few people Sophia had heard of with a luck Affinity had next to no control over their lives. 

Sophia asked around the Academy and found several other teachers willing to look at the spell, but none of them could help even as much as the Eidolon had. A couple of them had ideas about the luck poetry, but that was all.

The final thing Sophia had to ask of the Eidolon was for her help inscribing and casting the wayfinding spell that used the key. She had the instructions and Xin’ri was able to help her find the materials, but a second set of eyes was always helpful. Xin’ri and Dav would try to help, but the Eidolon was the expert.

Fortunately, the Eidolon was happy to help. As far as they could tell, it worked without any issues.

The Eidolon wished them well as they left. She seemed a little more serious than she had before, so Sophia told herself that she’d come visit the Eidolon to tell her how it went when they got back, before Issvako built the Gateway they needed.