Riloth the 15th

I'm tired of sitting here pretending to study this spellbook full of gibberish. I might as well use this time for something almost useful—instead of making doodles of Daulf. I think I will start chronicling my journey.

I've been risking my life “adventuring”—as my father would say—for two months now, but can hardly believe it's been that short a time. Living under the constant threat of death, dismemberment and summary execution makes the time pass slowly. Despite the fact that I am on what could be broadly described as an adventure, I am not an adventurer. Those people are insane. I am just tagging along with a few. I am not one of them.

So, here on page three hundred and something of this unwieldy tome, I guess I'll start to chronicle my journey. This book is full of useless pages. I can't even recognize the language, which is saying something. If it weren't in a book I wouldn't have guessed these scribbles were a language at all. There's not even any spelIforms in this so-called spellbook. I tried tearing the sheets out once, but they came back the next day. I wish they would go away.

Nearly 300 pages disappear

That was unexpected. Can this book understand what I am writing? Those pages are gone, can it bring them back?

Nearly 300 pages reappear

That worked too!

I just tried a verbal command, it doesn't seem that it can hear me, or at least it doesn't react to sound. Get rid of those pages again.

Nearly 300 pages disappear

Can you make yourself smaller?

Book shrinks

A little bigger than that.

Book resizes

Perfect.

Amazing, the text shrunk to fit the pages.

Can you answer questions? Are you sentient?

Okay, guess that's a no, but maybe you're just shy. I'm going to hedge and say shy. Should I call you something,? You need a name. You probably have a name. What’s your name?

Looks like it's up to me. What name do you give a spell book? Paige? No, that’s terrible, Trish would kill me for a pun that bad. Spellbook? Can I call you Spellbook? Spellbook it is. I'm Tal but I've been going by Apprentice Theral Stormcaller for a while now. Call me Tal though please.

Also, I'm sorry about those sketches of Daulf and his horse. You can get rid of those pages too.

More pages disappear

This changes things. I've been doodling in you to pass the time, pretending to copy my old "spellbook" into you but I think continuing to do that would be wrong. Plus I feel a little bad. Ever since Daulf lost the horse it's been starting to feel cruel.

Let's start over.

Dear Spellbook,

I'm Tal, and if I'm going to be chronicling my life in you, I think I should start by being honest with you. I'm not really a wizard.

I’m a sorcerer.

And now I kind of feel dumb. I expected a reaction, maybe pages bursting into flames or some sort of alarm spell, but what does a spellbook know about the world? You probably don't know enough to try to drown me and steal my bones. I suppose it would be rather difficult for you to collect on the bounty if you did.

I don't really want to give a possibly ancient spellbook a lesson in the history of the Dragon Wars and the resulting genocide tonight, maybe tomorrow when we get to town. Just trust me, being a sorcerer is not conducive to keeping one's bones inside their body. Even if you aren't a dragon blood sorcerer, self-righteous seekers like Daulf will try to ferret you out and kill you. So ever since setting out on my own I've carried around a book of lewd doodles, gibberish, and the occasional shopping list and pretended to study it each night to throw off suspicion. It takes a lot more than that to fool a Seeker, especially since some of them can literally smell untruths, but it does well enough for the casual bigot. When they witness magic they just look for a spellbook, move on if you got one and gather a posse if you don’t. Lucky for me, no one would dare actually look in a wizard’s spellbook, because if I was actually a wizard, I’d have the right to kill them on the spot.

Sometimes I wish I was a real wizard, so I could learn a useful spell like Clean— instead of spontaneously manifesting magic in life or death situations. Sure it’s convenient in life or death situations, but those don’t come up every day— unlike getting covered in road dust. Don’t even get me started about doing one’s laundry in a stream. I want to learn Clean.

What's this? I mean, clearly it’s a spellform diagram, but why did you show it to me? Is this Clean? Why do I keep asking you questions? Do you have more? Obviously, you are a spellbook. I should have realized this the other day when I made those pages disappear. Show me all your spells.

Hundreds of pages appear

I can’t understand any of that. The annotations aren’t even in a language I recognize. Hide all those.

Show me a non-spell sample of the text in the language from the spells.

50 pages appear

I can’t decipher those spellforms, that's beyond me, but maybe I can do something about this text. I think I may be uniquely qualified for this task.

Spellbook, let me tell you a bit about myself. While I am a sorcerer by blood, by training I am a researcher— but that may run in my blood a little too. Before I was on this adventure, I traveled The Continent with my parents. Tamyl, my father, was an itinerant scholar. His life's work was to unravel the history of the pre-Flood world, but I never saw him pass up a chance to unravel any mystery he came across.

Decoding unknown texts was my father’s idea of fun. Not all children are fortunate enough to learn how to read, but most are lucky enough not to be forced to learn to read and write all the contemporary languages on The Continent. Torcish, Rilith, and Waasian: I was tutored endlessly to read and write them all before I turned ten. Once I grew old enough to handle the content, I even started on the language of The Fallen. Before my life got upturned, I was learning some lost language my father refused to name, and I had only ever encountered written in his hand.

Suffice to say, I think you are in good hands. Literally. If anyone outside The Tower has a chance of decoding your mysteries, I think I can. I got to say though, that script is like nothing I have ever seen; this might be tricky.

Don’t think my life was all daisies, libraries and hand cramps though. My father’s training was mind-numbingly dull at times, but my mother’s training was.... much worse.

My mother, Esriel, was a sorcerer as well. She came from the ship clan Farvoyage, but never spoke about it much. Most I know I had to infer from conversations about her childhood and our training together. She was an apprentice to the ship’s Stormcaller, but something happened during her training that caused her to be cast out. Amongst the ship clans, each ship has a Stormcaller, a “wizard” who specializes in auguries, scrying and storm magics meant to control the winds.

I am going to let you in on a secret of the ship clans. While the Stormcallers are spell casting, spellbook toting, spellform diagram memorizing, Clean casting wizards, they are all also Stormborn sorcerers. Supposedly it is a secret from everyone but the Stormcallers and clan heads, but I imagine that the Tower has already figured it out. I suspect they know and just choose to play along. After all, officially it is the Dragonblood sorcerers that they have sworn to eradicate, but in practice they tend to be less picky.

Mother taught me some wizard spells she had picked up in her training. The Tower probably doesn’t want people to know this, but it is possible for pretty much anyone to learn how to cast a wizard spell without access to the tightly controlled spellforms. It's just hard. Very, very, hard. Over the years she was able to teach me some basic spells. I can summon a Light and even a Ghost Light, Knit a rope or cloth, Purify water, and shoot a Lightning Bolt but the reason wizards carry around their big books of spells is that there are only so many spells a person can keep in their mind before they run the risk of miscasting. I had reached the end of what I could retain when my mother passed. We had been working on summoning lightning from the sky but at the time it was beyond me. She knew Clean, but deemed it a triviality and refused to teach me it until I mastered the more “practical” spells.

It takes more than memorizing a few words and hand gestures to cast a spell. Tower trained wizards use verbal spell components as learning aids, but those aids eventually become crutches, so my mother refused to allow me to use them. The hand gestures are more necessary, since most magics manifest from the hands. The most powerful wizards and moderately powerful sorcerers can forgo the use of gestures entirely, or so I am told. The real challenge is the work going on in your head as you tap into the power of the universe and bend it to your will. A wizard must review their mental constructs each morning to ensure they can cast spells properly without blowing up or disintegrating into a pile of dust. The more a wizard can keep track of the more powerful they tend to be.

While reading spellforms is an art my mother knew, the Stormcallers lacked the knowledge to create or copy spellforms. She tried to explain to me what she knew of reading spellforms, but without an example, it's not possible to learn and spellforms are exceedingly rare. The Stormcallers only knew a handful of spells, all pertaining to weather, acquired at great expense and guarded fiercely. With a limited number of spellforms, an individual Stormcaller may go years without access to a spellform, as such they have developed mental exercises to help retain, and teach spells. These methods are not known to denizens of The Continent.

Most wizard’s spellbooks explode, disappear, turn into mice, etc., on their author’s death and—unless you belong to a halfling house—finding a copy of something as simple as Clean would cost you more money than you could earn in a dozen lifetimes on the black market. Then you probably will be hunted down and murdered by the Tower for owning it. Since being able to read and write spellforms is a tightly controlled skill of the Tower and they offer huge bounties to anyone who finds one (and hunt down and kill anyone who has one and doesn’t turn it over), spellforms are extremely rare. If only I could see the spellforms to a spell I knew, I think I could puzzle out the secrets to reading them.

Show me the spellform for Light

Well, this changes things.