NOVEL WEB Ch. 10
Some minutes later, Fabrisse was crouched near the base of a leafless tree, both hands shielding a shallow indentation he’d cleared in the dirt. A few brittle twigs and shaved bark curls lay cradled inside like a nest made of frustration and secondhand kindling. Dubbie had slumped sideways against the tree trunk nearby, fingers intertwined, head tilted just enough to keep one eye on him out of sheer obligation. Her other eye was already half-lidded in sleep.
[TIME REMAINING: 36 minutes]
Unlike water or air, fire couldn’t normally be gathered. That’s what they drilled into the newcomers at the Synod. Flames must be called.
Every apprentice had to pass the Trial of Flame. Lighting the candle without a match was proof that you weren’t deadweight.
Fabrisse had passed with sufficient marks. Lorvan, out of grim responsibility or pity, had spent months making sure this was the one thing he wouldn’t fail at. He knew the precise intake of breath before ignition. He knew to stay focused, even when a spark refused to catch. He knew to hide failure when the Archmagi called for random spell recalls during inspections.
And still, it took him three tries on a good day.
He slowed the tempo, adjusted finger angle by a degree, recalibrated for wind direction even though there wasn’t any. It made him feel better. He needed it to be procedural, so he whispered the syllables again, this time slower, pressing his palm a few inches above the kindling.
Dubbie started yammering incoherently to herself in her sleep.
Just do exactly as I’m trained and I’ll get this done easily.
He exhaled and reached into his satchel for his apprentice’s standard-issue ignition candle.
His hand hit an empty compartment.
Fabrisse paused.
He checked again.
Then checked the wrong pocket, just in case.
Then the right pocket, just in case the first one became the wrong pocket.
He’d forgotten the candle, and he was not nearly as well-trained on ignition with leaves.
No! I’m close to finishing this quest!
He turned to his little sister. “Dubbie. Dubbie, do you have any candles? Tinder? Literally anything flammable? Paper?”
No response.
She was slumped more fully now, cheek mashed against her arm, cloak half-slipped off her shoulder. One leg twitched occasionally like she was fighting something in a dream.
Fabrisse tried again, louder this time. “Dubbs. Do you have wax, or sticks, or ancient parchment?”
Dubbie snorted softly in her sleep and murmured something that sounded like “don’t let the potatoes unionize.”
Fabrisse dropped his forehead into his hands. “Oh good. She’s dreaming about agriculture again.”
He turned back to the pathetic pile of bark shavings, considered lighting it with the sheer friction of his panic, and sighed. “Okay. Improvised ignition. One trial by fire, coming up.”
He adjusted his angle and whispered a different set of syllables, something standard for lighting damp leaves and stubborn twigs. Then came a twitch of his fingers accompanied the breath pattern Lorvan had drilled into him.
A soft fshhhp answered him.
Success?
Fabrisse hadn’t expected it to be that easy. He had accepted the fact that he would get no reaction on his first try.
He could smell the faint bite of scorched fabric, maybe even a wisp of smoke, but he couldn’t see any fire. The leaves were still damp, and the twigs were still stubborn.
Fabrisse narrowed his eyes and leaned in, one palm hovering. Heat? No heat.
Then came the scorching scent again, stronger this time, and entirely the wrong direction.
He turned just in time to see a slow orange glow creeping up the edge of his sister’s robe.
“Ah—!”
He lunged, grabbed the edge of the smoldering fabric, and yanked. She didn’t even stir as he frantically slapped it out with one hand and ripped the hem off with the other.
The flame sputtered in his palm for a half second before leaping to the bark pile, settling there as if that had been the plan all along.
He stared. Then sighed. “Synod forgive me, I’ve lit my sister on fire.”
Dubbie snored.
The panic hit five seconds too late. First came the checklist: was she hurt, was the spell stable, had he voided the aetheric signature? Then came the heat behind his ears. He pushed it down by reorganizing his priorities.
Fabrisse gently patted her leg. “You’re fine. You’re fine. You didn’t need that part of your outfit anyway.”
The fire was burning now. He could feel the resonance forming. The spell circle beneath his kindling cooed as the fire anchored itself.
[Aetheric Impression Registered.]
[RESONANCE ACHIEVED: Rank II Spell – Invocation of Accidental Combustion – Fire-Type]
Fabrisse let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. The fire was alive. The spell was valid. That made four.
[ELEMENTS REGISTERED: 4/5]
— Water: Held
— Earth: Held
— Air: Held
— Fire: Held
— ???: Unknown
[BEGIN RESONANCE PERIOD: Awaiting Final Aetheric Impression]
[TIME REMAINING: 30 minutes]
“One more,” he muttered, tapping the glyph menu. “Just one. And it has to be the weird one.”
He hadn’t even tried to hold whatever element it was yet, and the glyph had already asked him to start resonating. It would mean that he’d had this element in him all along.
Four elements held, one slot remained. Could the final anchor be structural rather than elemental? An interlink? Emotion fit behaviorally, but not structurally. Still, it was the next variable worth testing.
Emotion is the foundation of all Thaumaturgic spellcraft. Every invocation was shaped by it. The entire philosophy of thaumism revolved around it. Lorvan used to call it “the spell behind the spell”—the hidden spark that let magic recognize its wielder.
So be it.
He tried channeling the emotion he knew best: embarrassment.
He drew his knees up, watching the fire crackle and spit in the pit he’d made. The flicker of flame should have been comforting. It just reminded him of a dozen things he didn’t want to be thinking about.
He let the memory come anyway.
It was during his second year at the Synod, just after one of the archmagi had all but declared him ‘elementally unspecialized.’ They’d just finished a field assessment—group practicals involving summoned mud traps and evasive flame glyphs. Fabrisse had failed two in a row.
He remembered crouching at the edge of the practice field afterward, pretending to study sediment layers near the runoff channel. In reality, he was trying to look busy enough that no one would come talk to him. Mostly, he didn’t want anyone to see how tightly he was gripping the hem of his robe to keep from punching the dirt.
Severa had walked past. Tall, gilded uniform robes, the smug tilt of someone who always passed with top marks. Her new elemental affinity was lightning, the fifth one she’d collected after two years, and her tongue was about as subtle.
She stopped when she saw him sorting through a few loose rocks.
“Oh,” she said in a voice so sweet it could trap bees. “Stone suits you.”
He looked up. “Pardon?”
She crouched beside him, picked up one of the pebbles he'd gathered—a green-veined one he’d pocketed earlier—and tilted her head. “Stonecraft is interesting, don’t you think? I saw you a bit down back there, so maybe I can offer you some advice.”
For a moment, he thought she meant it. Maybe she’d noticed how hard he was trying. Maybe she was actually going to share something helpful. “I’d appreciate that,” he said.
Severa smiled.
“If you’re going to be mediocre at everything else,” she said, “you should at least have a hobby to distract from it. And these little rocks? Adorable. It might give you an excuse when your spells fail again. Maybe if you collect enough of these, no one will notice you’re not good at anything else.” Then she stood and walked away from him. “Not everyone’s meant for power, don’t you agree? Some are just texture.”
Then she walked off, robes trailing behind her like a comet tail, sparks flickering at her heels.
She took that rock with her too. It was a rare one.
Fabrisse didn’t move for a long moment. Then he picked up a Stupenstone and tucked it into his satchel. Not because she was right. But because he needed something to hold.
He was now more mature and more content with the fact he wasn’t suited for the bigger things in life, but sometimes the memory would still resurface, and it would leave him wincing every time.
Fabrisse drew in a breath and whispered an invocation.
There was a single invocation tied to embarrassment, and it was creatively named the Invocation of Embarrassment. It was not officially taught, but it was written down.
He spoke the syllables, let the heat creep up his neck, and focused on the memory. The world warped around him in a tiny radius, and he felt his presence dull, like a candle behind tinted glass. A faint but vibrant amber spark flickered at his fingertips.
The glyph responded.
[INVOCATION REGISTERED: Embarrassment — Rank I]
— Active Spellform: Veil of Shame
— Effect: User becomes 10% less detectable to observers for 60 seconds.
— Interference with scrying, tracking glyphs, and direct visual focus.
— Duration scales with intensity of memory.
Spellform registered. No elemental anchor detected.
All this time, I thought this spell didn’t do anything, and turns out it does?
It helped him evade attention. Maybe that was why he was good at stealth.
Does it mean I’ve activated the resonance?
[SYSTEM NOTE: Emotional spellforms are not elements.]
Spellforms are the shaped expressions of elemental resonance. Emotions are Sub-affinities only.
They are not themselves sources.
Please proceed with a valid aetheric anchor.
“Guess not,” he murmured. He should’ve figured that much. Even beneath the Spiritual Alignment glyph, Emotion was shown in the sub-section, not the main one.
[TIME REMAINING: 23 minutes]
He rubbed the side of his thumb across his lower lip, thinking.
“Right. Spellforms aren’t the root. They’re just . . . the bloom. Not the seed.”
The Veil of Shame had felt like a spell. It had altered perception, even his own. But if the system didn’t register it as an element, then emotion, however foundational it was to thaumaturgic behavior, wasn’t the final piece.
It was a catalyst.