With my agreement with the saint complete, I should have been able to turn my attention to something else. But even as I tried to make some sketches in my grimoire, a part of me still couldn’t help but feel like I was making a fatal error. I’d been warned again and again about letting stronger entities bind the contracts. I trusted Effervesce, at least more than most other deities, but not enough to actually have complete faith. I didn’t know if Hykym would actually follow the instructions. If he decided that the best way to keep Yushin safe was to spirit her off to the divine realm of his god, I’d have very little recourse. That wasn’t helped by Amos tapping me with the end of his tail.

  “What do you want us to do while we wait? There are still a few days left.”

  “You’re free to do most anything you want, except for fight. Don’t hurt people – I don’t think I need to tell you that. You should avoid the faerie castle. Students are protected, but I doubt it extends to you. Sleep if you’d like. Just make sure you’re back in time.”

  The serpents nodded, then as one, raced out to explore the city. In a way, that distraction from my racing thoughts was good, as I was able to steady myself and turn my attention to a crate full of materials that Shé Rui had delivered to me. I began pulling them out one at a time and examining them. Since we were going to be replicating the ritual on a small scale for my counter-curse, that meant that the box was basically stuffed to the gills with various materials. None of the materials were as high quality, intense, specific, or powerful as the materials that would be used in the actual summoning, but all of them were adequate enough to stand in. By the time I was done with them, I thought that they should be even better.

  The first things I removed were bundles of chi directing flags that could produce cultivation-based effects. I didn’t pretend to be an expert on cultivation, life force, or anything of that sort, so I wasn’t sure exactly what all of them did. I wouldn’t be able to tailor my curses as effectively, but that was fine. I set to work, writing out a long lasting curse that would lay dormant unless the flags were used in service of the Traitor Wyrm, at which point they’d strike with a large blast of misfortune.

  From there, I pulled out three large jars, each one as large as the containers of dust we had received from the moles. The first jar was filled with ether crystal dust, while the second was filled with charcoal dust from trees that had gathered enough life force to be useful to druids or cultivators, and the third was holy soil. Jackson and the church of Effervesce had actually provided that one, since Shé Rui requesting soil blessed by the Traitor Wyrm would raise too many alarm flags. Their sanctification had given it powerful protective properties, and ones I didn’t dare mess up with a curse, but the first two? Writing down a curse to affect a jar of tiny objects like dust, rather than a single discrete item, was an interesting challenge but I got there in the end using a loose curse similar to what I’d laid on the flags. At least, I got there partially – I could lay the curse on a handful of dust at a time, but no more. Though it was inconvenient to have to work that way, it was good enough for now. In some ways, it was actually better, since it meant there would be more curse magic overall.

  The next item I removed looked rather interesting to me, a single vial of rippling liquid that seemed to shift between silver, bronze, and gold as the light struck it. A vial of liquid taken from a destiny pool. According to Shé Rui, if the vial was unstoppered and poured out on the ground, it would actually form an entire pool, large enough that I could submerge myself in it, and in that way gain a destiny mark. The curse I designed for this was much more specific – anyone who attempted to use the pool to bind the destiny of one within it to the service of the Traitor Wyrm would be cursed with horrific luck.

  After that came a group of holy relics powered by blessings or boons of the Traitor Wyrm, nearly Shé Rui’s entire personal connection. For all that I had my own issues with his blind loyalty, he was dedicated to his family, I couldn’t deny that. Creating a powerful but useful curse design with these materials was simple with a minor application of Yushin’s blood. I wrote it out so that whoever turned the holy power within against their own children and blood to be struck with powerful suffering magic to bleed away their power every instant it was used.

  Bloodline materials came next. A briefcase clicked open to reveal row after row of vials of blood, nestled within cushions of suede and down feathers, each of them neatly labeled. A second case of poisons came next, followed by a half-dozen smooth stones that I didn’t immediately recognize. They looked like marbles, nearly perfectly round, and almost glassy in texture, or perhaps crystalline, but each of them was as dark as a pot of ink. Eventually, I put together that they were beast cores, filled with a fusion of bloodline magic with shadow chi.

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  There was something to that. Why did humans with a bloodline not develop a beast core when they began cultivating, but beasts did? Did beasts like the moles have ether-cores? I’d never heard of an ether version of a beast core, even among creatures whose magic intersected with the ether pool, like an incubus. But those were questions for another time. I didn’t have the answers now, and I might never have them. I began writing out some potential curses for the vials of blood, poison, and the stones, before I moved onto the last bag within.

  The bag was filled with an assortment of lesser materials that were simply used to round out the effectiveness of the ritual, and I scratched out a handful of minor curses upon them.

  With all of the curses written, I went back to the beginning and began to lay the curses onto the components. Every formation flag, vial, core, relic, and each handful of dirt was cursed over the course of the next few days, until my ether pool felt worn out in a way I’d never fully experienced before. It was made both worse and better by the fact that in a way, none of the curses I’d lain upon the materials mattered. But as had been pointed out to me, cursing the materials should get them to resonate even more with my own magic than if I hadn’t, meaning all of the ether I was putting in now would be consumed to empower the magic of the greater curse ritual.

  With the work finally done, I took one day of rest. I needed it. I’d begun to self-isolate, and to view the piles of components with greed. It wasn’t awful, but I needed a break. So I spent the day with Jackson and Salem, wandering around the campus. Salem took us to the gardens, where alchemical plants hummed and pulsed with all sorts of different magics. Jackson took us to a small fountain some ways off the beaten path, which seemed to flow with liquid steel or perhaps quicksilver. Each splash of the fountain created a dozen different images playing across its surface, as if portraying our futures. I felt like a bit of a charlatan, as the only place I could really take them was the fairy castle. It seemed to go over well, though, as Jackson gawked at the suits of wooden armor, the glass floors, and the elaborate magic that I’d become used to seeing as mundane.

  “There is a trial somewhere around here,” I said. “I just haven’t found it yet. But I will.”

  “Really?” Salem asked. “Maybe, after all this, we can search for it.”

  “The two of you have fun,” Jackson said. “I’m not sure a faerie component is going to be great for me.”

  I nodded my agreement. It really did sound good, and if anyone was able to do it, a man from a land teeming with faeries would be the one. Jackson left us not long after we exited the castle, and Salem and I took the opportunity to go out on a date. We left to head into the city, buying some food from a nice-ish restaurant, then returned to the campus and laid out on the campus green, watching the stars, before returning to our rooms. It had been a wonderful day, marred only by the fact that Yushin hadn’t been there at all. She had been with her clan elders, testing and preparing her for the trial to come.

  We woke early the following morning, well before the sun even rose, from a knock at the door. Wesley stumbled out of his room with us, and I glanced at him. He blinked languidly at me.

  “You’ve been hating on me less this year.”

  “I’ve been busy. Now I’ve got to go. You’re not invited.”

  He humphed and shrugged, then returned to his room, while Jackson just shook his head and a wry smile touched Salem’s lips.

  “He’s really not so bad,” Jackson said. “His family are terrible. I thought you’d understand that.”

  “He’s a prick who was rude to me for no reason and chalks my skill in spellcasting up to having a bloodline that doesn’t even interact with my ether pool,” I said. “No thank you.”

  “We really gotta work on you learnin’ to let stuff go,” Salem said, his voice still laced with sleep. “But that’s for another time.”

  I grunted in half-agreement. I knew I could be a bit petty, and working on that would probably be good, but it sounded like a lot of effort. We got ready as quickly as we could, and with Jackson’s help, the three of us moved the overstuffed box out into the hall, where Shé Rui, Martha, and Yushin were waiting for us. As soon as we stepped into the hall, he placed his hand on the box and it vanished, pulled into his spatial ring.

  “Are you ready?” Martha asked, lifting her wand. “Rui has prepared us a space, and I broke Yushin out, but we don’t have long. Less than twenty-four hours now. They’re going to bait the dark cultivators out this afternoon, and begin the spell as soon as the sun sets.”

  I touched the piles of notes I’d made over the past year. I’d iterated on the design countless times, improved it with loads of feedback, integrated knowledge that had been lost with the shifts of magic during the Age of Sunder, and stretched my affinity to a degree that a realmwalker had been impressed with my work.

  “I’m ready.”

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