It had not been an easy morning.

  Anabeth had asked me to push the bed against one wall, shoving the desk aside, and she had even made the effort to stack chairs atop one another for more space. What remained was an open square of stone floor in the corner nearest the window, where the building’s foundation was thickest.

  She had drawn the ritual space directly onto the floor with coarse salt, laid down in three concentric rings. The outermost circle was wide and imperfect, and within it lay a tighter ring etched with sigils she’d spent five minutes drawing and redrawing. The innermost circle was bare stone, polished clean by repeated passes of cloth until it reflected the lamplight like a still pool. At the cardinal points sat weighted anchors: fist-sized stones wrapped in copper wire spiralled in different ways. Anabeth had muttered something about ‘stress patterns’ while arranging them.

  I made a point of not watching too closely. There were limits to how much academic curiosity I could safely indulge before it crossed into the sort of knowledge that was better left unlearned. Instead, I focused on the Aura Markets and the skills I wanted to unlock.

  My AP reserve was pathetic, and that was something to rectify immediately.

  The 3rd allocation alone cost more than what I currently had. Sighing, I redeemed 18 AP with 230 Aura, increased to 27 with the Earthen Aegis Path Bonus.

  Now, with enough Aura Points to fire off six Static Surges, what I could do was to redeem another Foundational Lightning Spell to cast while Static Surge was on cooldown.

  The first obvious thing to do was to unlock the foundational skill:

  I confirmed the redemption.

  At first, I thought nothing had happened. Then I realized that assumption was wrong in a very specific way.

  I could feel aether now. Like becoming aware of blood in my veins only after someone pointed out that you should be able to feel it. Aether was inside me, threaded through me in thin, diffuse currents, faint enough that I’d mistaken them for absence.

  I swallowed and flexed my fingers.

  The aether traced along my forearm, pooling weakly in my palm before thinning again, never spilling.

  Great.

  I reopened the entry for Lightning Chain Residue, hoping to learn it while Anabeth was busy doing her rock ritual. Yet, I immediately ran into a stumbling block.

  What was I supposed to hit now? Anabeth?

  I didn’t want to pay Aura for a skill I had the blueprint to learn, so I begrudgingly closed the description for Lightning Chain Residue and tried to find something else.

  There seemed to be another good skill to learn:

  Now that was a pretty decent skill. The range was deliberately tight, and with a RES high enough, Ceralis all but admitted I could force the result toward the upper band. The maximum output was higher than Static Surge, but there was a catch, of course. The scaling was additive, not multiplicative. That meant Septimal Charge interacted poorly with percentage-based amplification.

  I didn’t need a skill to usurp Static Burst, though. I needed one to use when I couldn’t burst.

  So I redeemed the skill. Then I stopped looking at offensive skills.

  I didn’t need to know how to strike three different ways. One burst and one pressure tool covered nearly every realistic engagement scenario. Anything beyond that would be redundancy masquerading as versatility, and redundancy was expensive.

  What I actually needed was sustain.

  Every experienced magus I’d observed shared the same quiet advantage. When lesser casters slowed, when their breathing hitched and their casting grew sloppy, the veterans simply… didn’t, even though a lot of them were as old as the border statutes they loved citing. None of my skills had gotten me physically glowing, yet whenever those veteran magi glowed, they seemed to be able to cast spells until eternity. I’d seen mages who looked exhausted by all outward measures—sweat-soaked, pale, barely standing—yet still managed to cast again, and then again, as if drawing from a reserve no one else could see.

  I was looking for those passive frameworks.

  Yet within the Lightning catalog, I couldn’t find anything like that at Tier I.

  I scrolled through the listings twice just to be sure. I saw damage, control, mobility spikes, conditional bursts. Variants of the same problem, all dressed in increasingly dramatic language. Lightning, according to Ceralis, was meant to end fights—not outlast them.

  There was a sustain-adjacent option at Tier II, a passive that reduced the AP cost of Lightning spells by fifteen percent. Yet, it was locked behind an infuriating prerequisite: five different Tier I Lightning skills.

  Realistically, Tier I should have sustaining effects. From what Sir Roland had told me, any magic system that trained novices without some form of endurance scaffolding would be a meat grinder. They just weren’t here.

  Lightning’s Tier I tree wasn’t missing sustain skills by accident. It was missing it by philosophy. I’d hazard that Tier I was about teaching identity. Lightning wasn’t meant to glow steadily or recycle itself. It was meant to discharge, collapse, and force a resolution.

  Maybe I should just redeem the mobility spike skills and call it a day.

  Then I heard Anabeth’s whispers from the far corner, “… Next step, for the summoning ritual, the spine of an infant, aligned lengthwise.”

  I closed the Aura Market. Slowly.

  She continued, “Preferably unfused. Early-stage calcification allows for better resonance transmission. The younger the infant, the better.”

  My jaw tightened. I became acutely aware of the fact that she was still talking.

  I stood and turned. She knelt at the circle’s edge, sleeves rolled back, hair tied with a strip of cloth rather than ribbon. A book lay open on her lap, and she murmured as she read it.

  I must stop whatever this was before it crossed from academic horror into active intervention.

  And then—

  “Oh!” Anabeth said, as if she’d just remembered something pleasant. “Here we are.” She tapped the page with one finger. “Ah! Or a suitable substitute: bonetree root, pre-weathered, minimum three growth forks. Fossilized avian spinal segments acceptable if resonance has not fully decayed. In absence of the above, any symbolic analogue expressing incipient structure may suffice.”

  She reached beneath the stacked chairs without looking and pulled out a wrapped bundle. I didn’t know when she’d found the time to prepare that. It was no larger than my forearm. Burlap, tied neatly with twine, the knot sealed with a thumb-smear of gray wax stamped in an academic sigil I didn’t recognize. She loosened the binding and peeled the cloth back, revealing a pale, jointed, and gently curved root, striated with natural ridges that did resemble vertebrae if one were inclined toward morbid metaphor.

  It was bonetree root.

  “My lord, you may feel a mild sense of vertigo,” she turned to me and said. “If you smell ozone or wet earth, that’s normal. If you hear anything speaking in complete sentences, tell me immediately.”

  She placed her hand over the bonetree root.

  “Commencing summoning scaffold,” she intoned.

  Her entire body immediately lit from within. This was what I’d been thinking about: aether flooding her frame in a way I had only ever seen from senior magi in controlled demonstrations. Milky white radiance traced the lines of her limbs and spine, bleeding softly through skin and cloth alike, while thin sparks of pale green crackled and drifted around her like errant fireflies.

  Dust lifted from the stone floor in spirals. I covered my face. Fine grit rattled against the walls, and powdered stone bled from the salt lines as the sigils heated. The copper-wrapped anchors began to vibrate.

  Anabeth leaned forward and began to chant,

  “By structure unfinished and form yet to choose,

  I call what was promised but never made whole.

  From weight without flesh and from bone without bruise,

  Arise, take your shape, remember your role.”

  The innermost circle collapsed. The floor buckled.

  “Insolent sorceress! Cease this at once!” I roared over the rising grit.

  She looked back at me, guilty. “I can’t cancel it now, my lord. But don’t you worry… nobody has ever died during this phase.”

  The bonetree root blackened, then crumbled into pale ash. Then a pale humanoid pulled itself upright. Plates interlocked where muscles should have been, overlapping strata forming shoulders, a torso, limbs. Its proportions were wrong in the way statues sometimes were: too intentional. When it finished assembling, it stood nearly as tall as I was, broad through the chest, head bowed slightly as though awaiting instruction.

  “Durand!” Anabeth yelped.

  I stared at the creature.

  That was NOT Durand.