Crack!

The sound pierced through the muted clamor of the ritual hall, its initial burst followed by a low, ringing chime. Noah Fel, the instructor on duty, felt something in his neck snap as he twisted around, eyes flickering through the surrounding students in an attempt to locate the source of the noise.

He paled as he found it. “Mr. Macormand! Place your orb slowly onto the ground; do not drop it, and do not leave your circle! Everyone else, please stop what you’re doing and exit the hall!” He grabbed for his cane and rose, toppling his chair in his rush to stand.

There was little reaction from the students at first, light confusion mixing with surprise. Then one of the more observant ones yelped, her arm swinging up towards the north corner of the room.

There, Angus Macormand appeared to be frozen in shock. He was a large lad, relative to his age, and was dressed in the brightly colored robes of a mercantile family. In his hands, he held a shining sphere of crystal-- the focal point of the ritual the boy had been attempting to cast. Its polished surface was marred by a growing, sparking crack across its length.

“Macormand!” Fel called again as the boy remained motionless, shouting to be heard above the now-agitated students and the incessant crackling of the orb. “Angus, focus! What ritual is this? How far has it gotten?”

The boy flinched, fumbling over his response as Fel arrived at the edge of his circle. “I— I thought it was done! I only looked away for a second, and then—”

Fel cut him off. “What did you cast?”

“Growth and permanence! My aunt’s plants keep dying; I just wanted something to help!”

“Nature, then. When a spattering of time. Good—we’ll get you out of there yet.” Arriving next to Angus’s ritual circle, Fel tapped his cane hard against the floor. In doing so, he pushed a tendril of his mana through the stone, orienting it towards a far older circle deep beneath the room. A warding scheme— used by the school in precisely such occurrences as these. Fel connected to it, allowing the process to jumpstart itself with mana from his reservoir, and watched as a semi-opaque bubble of blue flowed upward from the floor, quarantining the two of them from the rest of the room.

“Now, I need you to set the crystal down carefully, Angus. Do you understand?” Fel asked.

The boy nodded, visibly steeling himself, then squatted slowly. He placed the orb against the ground with only the slightest of clinks, even as the crystal hummed and shifted, its crack growing ever wider.

“Good. I'm going to begin siphoning power from your ritual now, and I need you to unlink yourself from it. Start by shutting down your mana feed— I’ll lead you through the rest.”

Having said as much, Fel probed one of the ritual’s primary flow lines. It was the ending segment, placed just before the dimple that would output Angus’s ritual-altered mana to the degrading crystal. A quick application of will transformed his mana tendril into a needle-like tube, which he unceremoniously jammed into a weak point in the flow. Fel’s makeshift siphon redirected the ritual’s mana towards himself, to be absorbed into his reservoir and expelled later. With the most significant escalation point dealt with, he turned to where Angus was detaching himself from the feeds.

Un-snaking his mana tendrils from the ritual’s lines, the boy was rapidly decreasing the amount of power he’d been pumping into the whole. Skilled, but nervous. A feed sparked as Angus pulled too quickly out of it, and a small burst of mana shot out past the boy’s head. It spiraled for a moment before being sucked into the crystal orb lying on the ground.

Almost instantly, the orb split itself near in half as its crack widened. Fel swore. Hurriedly, he spat out a spell-form. The magic flew out from his staff and snagged the two sides of the crystal, crushing them together and sacrificing the orb’s limited durability for a temporary reprieve. Dangerous. Risky. But necessary. So long as Macormand hurried, Fel wouldn’t need to try anything truly drastic.

Unfortunately, however, the boy panicked as he heard the fragments of crystal shatter. He ripped his remaining tendrils of mana from the ritual’s feeds in one jagged movement and attempted to dive from the circle. A fool’s move and one every student had been warned against.

Fel’s life flashed before his eyes. He shouted, loud enough that his throat crackled. “No! Don’t—”

His reaction came too late to have mattered. The ritual destabilized. Its input feeds, torn wide by the improper removal of the half-dozen remaining mana tendrils, attempted to suck in the environmental mana of the hall and immediately flooded the ritual’s lines. One feed failure, the lines could’ve handled. Three, even, with a bit of leakage. But six? The chalk-packed engravings exploded from the back-pressure.

Fel felt more than saw the resulting wave of power, directed inwards by the warding scheme that protected the students outside. It launched him from his feet and towards the center of the ritual circle, the same as Angus. The crystal, still in the middle of it all, was the third to be hit.

Primed by Angus before the boy had begun his casting, the crystal was a container for the completed ritual’s magics. A slow-release carrying case which he would then give to his aunt, to be placed in the woman’s garden. With growth and permanence, it would promote hardiness in her plants for a great many years to come.

Said crystal, still yet to be sealed by the proper completion of the ritual, sucked in the oncoming wave of mana and exploded. Shards flickered in and out of visible space as they were launched outwards by the secondary blast. Angus was thoroughly perforated, his body doing little to stop their expansion, and Fel watched as the boy’s body was flung once more to impact the surrounding ward. Where he slumped, moss sprung from the stone and began to cover him.

Still more of the shards hit the wards directly, sending ripples of light across their surface. Thankfully, none made it through. The warding scheme’s internalized mana pool could take far larger hits than these and was specifically made to prevent all forms of matter and mana from passing through to the other side.

Yet, Fel? He, too, stood inside. No less than six fragments impacted against the man’s own personal shields, shattering against a translucent barrier that stemmed from his cane. Two others made it past. They flickered out of existence, reappearing within the barrier’s scope as the mana within the shards attempted to escape their over-charged bounds. One pierced upwards through the head of his cane, pinning it to him by the meat of his hand. The second thudded into his eye.

Fel’s head snapped back as he lost feeling in his right side. He fell, a stumble turning into a graceless collapse. The back of his skull cracked against the stone floor of the ritual hall, and, as the light faded from his remaining eye, a carpet of green grew to claim him.