Finley Cai Aies Hall April 12th, 20XX

The smooth surface of my wand rested across my lap as I hovered in the air.

Flying wasn’t hard, but it was tiring and engaged muscles I wasn’t used to using. As things were, if not for my training sessions with Theodulus, I wouldn’t have been able to hover in the air with my legs crossed as I was now.

Esmeralda and Cambridge were off dealing with something or the other, so I was on my own.

I hovered above my bed in case I lost control and fell out of the air again. While I was only a few feet in the air, I’d landed on my tailbone a few too many times to wave it off.

The diary hovered to my side, and a mass of magic congregated into a mass in front of me. I had both of my hands extended as I tried to keep control of the lump of magic, but it wasn’t easy. I could feel my efforts tug at my energy reserves, but it wasn’t at the level that I needed to be stingy with it.

The Royal family is essential to keep the Fairy society’s order, but they are the only individuals capable of recycling and purifying magic. Usually, this is not an issue since it is an automatic process, but since you spend so much time in the human world, it would be more efficient to do it manually.

I skimmed past the explanation I’d read before and returned to the explanations. While the process didn’t seem too complicated, I was having a bit of a hard time understanding it.

The ambient magic would sometimes try to intrude into the mass of magic in front of me, but I couldn’t let that happen. This much was already more than I was comfortable controlling, but any more than this would be downright impossible.

Think of ambient magic as an orchestra and yourself as the conductor. You can make it play certain pieces, but how effective that piece is delivered depends on you.

The problem wasn’t that the magic wasn’t listening to me, but rather the opposite. I couldn’t control it well enough, and every slight movement I made in the mass ended up becoming an uncontrollable wave.

I’d gotten yelled at a lot by Esmeralda about it, and I had a lot of giant plants and even more dead ones from overfeeding them. Quite ironically, it had become more challenging to keep up with the lessons after I got a grasp on how to use magic.

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The spell to purify magic uses your body as a circuit; this is a royal privilege. It comes in four steps.

Create a bubble around yourself. Gather as much magic as you can and then flatten it into a shield, then wrap it around yourself. Slowly create a funnel into the bubble and draw in as much unclean magic as you can. Tainted magic will naturally come to you, but it will be more efficient to use the spell.

It padded the explanation with illustrations of patterns that I now knew were spells.

Fill up the bubble with unclean magic and move the magic through your body. The most efficient way to do so is with an attack spell. If you take the last section out of it, it stops being dangerous and is just an effective way to move large amounts of magic. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I read over the instructions a few more times before starting the process.

The mass of magic playfully ducked and weaved between my fingers as I pushed and pulled it into the shape I wanted. I’d never been that artistic of a person, but the magic seemed to know what I wanted before I did and would force itself into the shape. Most of the hard work came from trying to keep the lump of magic contained and prevent it from intermingling with the rest of the magic in the room.

The magic in the room at the moment was primarily clean and sparkled like golden particles in the air, but every so often, a mass of dull bronze magic would enter the room and fly towards me like I was a magnet.

I finished shaping it into a flat sheet, and with a few strong hand movements, wrapped it around myself and curved the top and bottom of the sheet together.

I moved my hands around the sphere to make sure it was equally thick all around and that it maintained a perfectly spherical shape. I used a mirror on the wall as a point of reference, but maybe I would get a cast of a giant sphere or circle that I could use.

The thought of having a giant metallic bubble wand made me chuckle, but I recognized I was getting distracted.

That was the first step, now onto the second.

I reached out directly in front of myself, pinched at a section of the bubble, and then drew it into myself. I could feel the chaotic magic on the outside that frantically fought to come closer to me, but the sphere acted like a wall and protected me.

I double-checked the integrity of the sphere overall before gently pinching open the section I’d pulled inwards. I layered another pattern over the opening and watched in amazement as all the bright gold magic made way for the dark mass of dull bronze magic to enter the bubble.

While the bubble quickly filled up, I suddenly felt ill, and a vague sense of repulsion filled me. It wasn’t to the extent of throwing up, but it felt like I was smelling something foul.

I pushed past it as best I could and moved on to the last stage. The dull magic slowly filtered into me as I ran the spell, and thankfully the awful feeling dissipated.

The newly recycled magic bounced around the bubble with new energy and used the opening I’d made to exit the bubble. I closed the gap and gathered myself before reopening it and repeating the process.

I ended up spending hours repeating the process until it became automatic. While I did, I brought out my school work and started to work on it. My final paper exams were currently happening, and I hadn’t had as much time to study as I would have liked. The stopwatch Theodulus had helped a bit, but this seemed like a suitable alternative to losing sleep time.