Riloth 19th the 13th

Dear Spellbook,

Today did not go well.

I washed up in my room, dressed in my travel gear with my travel bag and set off to start the day.

When the staff came to escort me to the cashier, I went without the confusion of before. This time I collected all of my winnings as well.

On my way out of the Parlor I gave Simon a gold coin and detailed instructions on how to collect my minion’s reports. I also provided him with their pay. This time I instructed my minions to give their reports to the "Parlor employee who looks like he is perpetually smelling a fart" when he shows up, to prevent a repeat of last night where they ran from him. Rail thought that was funny, no one else did. I knew I liked that kid.

This time I was escorted out of the Parlor by two guards in Parlor security uniforms similar to the town guard, but less armored. This did not happen the last time I tried this but I also wasn’t walking out with a small fortune. They were not guards I had seen before around town or at the gate. They wore no armor but carried swords, and were dressed in military uniforms in the red, white, and gold of the Parlor.

“Are you two going to follow me around all day or just till sundown?” I asked, trying to keep any suspicious behavior from my tone.

The shorter of the two replied, “Well, we could if you'd like, but I get the feeling a young fellow like yourself doesn’t want chaperones after a windfall like that.” Then he winked at me. Why do people keep winking at me? “We are required to escort you to the square at the very least, if you don’t want our protection, we will part ways there.”

True to their word, they stopped at the bottom of the stairs that marked the edge of the square and turned back to go inside. On their way, they noticed the passed-out dwarf I had seen the street children pestering what felt like years ago. They tapped him lightly with a booted foot, “Move along sir, if you’re a refugee, please go to the camps. I'm sure they can find a place for you. If you're just on a bender, best get yourself home.”

Not waiting around to see how this progressed, I continued on my mission, now free of supervision. At Levar’s I bought four clarity potions and the foregone sleep potion. He gave me the sleep potion for free and it was an even hundred gold coins.

Potions in hand, I swung by the market square to pick up some food for the day and headed out into the woods. It has been some time since I had followed my mother’s training regimen, and it was time to get back into the swing of things.

As part of the training with my mother, she would regularly require me to benchmark my mental Will. To gauge my ability, she had me cast spells until I no longer could. When I learned my first spells beyond cantrips, I could cast them one or two times a day before I could no longer build the constructs correctly. Whenever you cast a spell, it drains your Will, which is essentially your capacity to affect the Arcane Realm. Constructs are manifestations of your Will in the Arcane Realm. If your Will runs out, your mind won't be able to build a construct, and a wizard without constructs is like a knight without a sword. No, that's inaccurate, Daulf can do some damage with his bare hands. And feet. Without constructs a wizard is like a child in front of a locked door without a key.

The feeling of being mentally drained is hard to describe. You can still think and act, you are not tired, but there is a weight in your mind. A drag on your thoughts. Your mind can think critically, its just much more comfortable not to. Like being under a warm blanket on a cold day, you can get up but you really would rather not. Have you ever tried to move something with your mind? What am I saying? You are a book. Well anyway, if a non-book person looks at an object and focuses on it with their mind, willing it to move, eventually they start to feel a pressure in the back of their head, even if nothing happens. This pressure is the result of Will being used. It doesn't matter that a person cannot move things with their mind, the attempt uses the Will regardless. I once stared for hours trying to move a feather, thinking I could unlock telekinesis this way. It didn’t work but afterwards I couldn’t cast anything, not even a cantrip.

Sorcerer or wizard spells of similar power all use similar amounts of Will. To measure my capacity, my mother had me fire as many Lightning Bolts as I could in sequence. The last time I did this I was able to cast the spell four times. By the end of the day she had me try again and I was able to cast the spell one more time. The next day I repeated the process, but this time casting Firebolt and I was able to cast the spell five times. At the end of the day, I could cast it twice more.

Cantrips are simple, the constructs or holes you make to access the font are so small, that the Will taken to cast them is regained almost immediately. If I cast Light non-stop without a break, my Will would eventually run out, but it would take a very long time.

Firebolt and Lightning Bolt are both spells a step above a cantrip and take a significant amount of mental effort to cast. For wizard spells, that effort comes from building and maintaining the mental constructs required to access and shape the font. For sorcerous castings the effort comes from piercing and shaping the wall of the font. In most instances, the Will is comparable, but because sorcery is more flexible than wizardry, my spells go a little further there. My familiarity with the fire font also allows me to use less will to cast a “standard” Firebolt. Another aspect of this flexibility is that I can cast slightly larger Firebolts and tap myself out in three or four castings

The more complex or powerful a spell, the more Will it takes. While I could cast Firebolt six times, I could only cast Blink twice, and the second was never able to go as far as the first. If Blink was a spell of wizardry, instead of not being as effective, the second attempt would fail to cast.

As sorcerers become more familiar with their spells, they are able to cast them using less Will than a wizard would require to create the same effect. A wizard can never cast using any less, but wizard spells are optimized by centuries of trial and refinement and are far more efficient than sorcerous spells can be without years of practice.

Both wizards and sorcerers grow in their mental fortitude as they practice and age. Will is tied somehow to the amount of spells a wizard can retain in their mind. As you grow in the ability to cast more spells, your ability to retain them grows as well. But conversely the more spells you have stored in your mind, the less you are able to cast. My mental vault is always full, but if I had the luxury of spellforms I could divest myself of some spells for some extra Will.

Recovery of Will occurs slowly throughout the day. An average day, light on mental activity, will recover a quarter to a third of a caster’s Will, which an hour nap can do too. A good night sleep will usually grant a full recovery.

Really, you should know all this. You’re a spellbook.

So, lunch packed, potions ready, I headed into the wilderness to resume my training. There's a lot I need to do, but growing in my powers can only make the job easier.

I left through the North gate, to find that the caravan of Dwarves was no longer camped out at the treeline.

Walking through the refugee camp was a lot more pleasant when children's laughter didn't feel like nails being hammered into your eyes. The place was actually beginning to look nice, for a tent city at least. The roads were filled with happy children playing. Who knows how these few escaped Daulf's lessons. The air was filled with the smell of cooking food, and everyone looked more hopeful than I remembered.

Walking through the camp, I kept you hidden in my bag. I may no longer be cloistering myself away, but I want to create as few waves as possible in case I am not alone here and the other parties are hostile. The camp now reached from the city wall to the forest edge, though the edge was being pushed back continuously to feed the camp's demand for wood.

Twenty minutes into my trek through the woods I found a clearing that suited my needs. The clearing was about thirty feet wide and had a large moss covered boulder in the center. I set my bag down and began without ceremony.

In quick succession I cast Lightning Bolts at the boulder. Lightning magic is loud. Not as loud as some of the other fonts, but the reason I traveled so far into the woods was to avoid unwanted attention. The spell created a loud cracking noise and brilliant blue flash that I'm sure would have been audible to the camp if the forest was not absorbing the sound. Looking at the lightning left a pink after image in my eyes that took some time to fade.

While the camp couldn't hear it, the forest did. Birds and mammals alike burst from the trees trying to escape the sudden disruption. The sky became dark with the creatures.

The subsequent Lightning Bolts were equally loud but less dramatic, the animals already fled. After eight bolts I was tapped out. A solid improvement on my last benchmark of four from a few months back. This is the most significant short term gain I've seen. It took me years to get to four and I just doubled it.

Casting Lightning Bolt at a rock is a difficult task. It's almost as if the lightning doesn't want to hit it. Until recently I'd only ever cast the spell against rocks and trees, and I always just assumed it was tricky. The first time I cast the spell at a living target I realized I had been fighting the nature of the spell every time I'd cast it up till that point. I wonder, is it the spell form itself that seeks living targets or the nature of the font of lightning?

After each bolt I felt the weight of the loss of Will, but after the eighth I knew that I did not have it in me for a ninth. The pressure in my head was like a lead weight, just under my hair at the crown of my skull. I chugged a clarity potion, awful as before, and just like that the weight was gone.

Just like before I began casting Firebolt at the boulder. While Lightning bolt created a short loud popping crack sound when it appeared and was silent on impact, Firebolt created the faintest swoosh on its appearance and nice satisfying, but not too loud, thud-woooooosh when it hit the target.

I am describing sounds to a book, is it more absurd that I am doing it, or that I think you understand?

With Firebolt I made it to nine “standard” castings before the tenth was more of a sad hiss than a thud-woooooosh. I could feel my Will waning as I tried to channel the power for the last spell, until I lost it and the hole in the Font closed to a trickle.

Where the lightning lightly charred the mossy rock, the Firebolts scoured it clean, leaving behind scorched bare stone.

This time when my Will was exhausted, I started to feel the symptoms of my hangover once more for a brief moment before I drank the next potion. Clarity potions, where have you been my whole life?

Before moving on I took my lunch out, which consisted of six apples, laid in the grass, and watched the clouds as I ate. I like apples, they are the perfect travel food. They don’t need to be cooked, they clean off easily if you drop them, and the juice clears out the taste of road dust. I don’t know why I am defending lunch choices to you.

After lunch, I decided that Blink would be the best thing to benchmark next. From previous benchmarks with my mother, I can calculate how many times I can cast other wizardry spells based on my Lightning Bolt benchmark. Sorcerous spells are... more complicated with Font affinities, and the ability to vary a spell's power. So Blink needs a benchmark of its own and I would use my last potion on testing it.

Spellbook, I know what you are thinking “Last potion? Even I, a humble book of spells, can do the math and see that you have two remaining.”

Well, if you said that, which you can’t (right?), I would inform you that I did not want to spend the remainder of the day with a headache, hangover or Will drain induced.

To benchmark Blink, a little extra prep work is required. I went to the edge of the clearing, stood with my back against a large tree, and paced through the clearing and out into the woods on the opposite side until I had walked fifty feet and marked it with a stick stuck into the ground. Then I walked back to the tree, focused on the stick and tapped into the Font of... I always just assumed it was Location, but that doesn’t seem like a fundamental force of reality. Lets call it Travel until proven wrong. I need to do some research into that, they aren’t exactly labeled in the Arcane Realm.

I willed myself to move and appeared at the spot with a subtle pffft as the air moved to fill the area I left and out of the area I now occupied. I Blinked back and forth between the two marked points four times, and the fourth try I was only a few feet short of the target. Blinked? Blunk? I really need to find a book on spell terminology. I am realizing just how much of my training is words I made up myself. Every day I realize just how flimsy my disguise really is. If I ever get to talking about this with anyone who has more formal training, my charade will fall apart.

With that my benchmarking for the day was complete. All I had left to test was Gust and Arcane Armor, but both of those should be doable in town. I hope that whatever allows me to remember these resets will allow me to retain any magical skill improvements. It takes months, even years, to progress, but we shall see.

Month. Years. Will I be here that long?

The idea of spending years here would have brought me to tears a few todays back. It is still daunting, but now that the physical torment is gone, it is less terrifying now.

Best not to dwell on that right now.

With all my benchmarking for the day completed I downed my fourth and final potion to regain my mental acuity and set off back to town to relax in the baths.

I took about four steps into the woods before my legs seized, I collapsed on my face and began vomiting uncontrollably. Before I started writing that was all I remembered but now, thanks to you, I vividly remember having a seizure and soiling myself. Thanks for that.

It was just past noon when the... incident occurred. It's very late now, I think the reset is going to happen any minute and I'm writing this by Light under a tree, covered in my own filth. My legs don't seem to work and casting spells causes excruciating pain. I never thought I'd be looking forward to the reset and waking up hungover.

Casting a simple cantrip was a trial. Using any Will caused massive headaches and it took three attempts to cast Light through the pain.

So I think, possibly, just maybe, there may have been some side effects to those clarity potions that Levar failed to mention.

One positive thing came out of it, I learned that I don't actually need ink to write in you. I ran out lying here a while ago but my quill just kept on writing without it. Silver linings I guess. I think I might just burn Levar's shop down tomorrow. Would that be wr◜