Andrew Rowe - Sufficiently Advanced Magic

So, I wasn’t afraid of the dark exactly, but I admit I was more than a little concerned .

Yeah, concerned. That’s a good word.

Once I stopped shaking, I took a deep breath and considered my options. I didn’t have any kind of light magic available, but Patrick could probably illuminate the room with fire… assuming there wasn’t anything combustible in the air.

They wouldn’t do that, would they?

I held off on the suggestion, just in case the teachers were feeling particularly malicious with the room’s design.

I also wasn’t even sure Patrick was still with me.

“Patrick, you there?”

There was a brief, disconcerting pause. “Uh, yeah, sorry. I can’t see, can you?”

“No, but I’m working on it.”

Maybe I could see something with my attunement enabled?

I concentrated for a moment, activating my attunement.

The light was nearly as blinding as the darkness.

The whole room glowed brightly under my enhanced vision, which shouldn’t have surprised me. The test was probably being constructed from a whole bunch of illusions and enchanted objects, meaning practically everything was magical.

The luminescence of the objects in the room didn’t extend to anything around them, so I wasn’t exactly getting a clear image of the whole place, just glowing outlines within a canvas of black. It was enough to let me pick out some key features, though.

The room itself was rectangular, and I was near one of the corners, standing on solid ground. A man stood next to me. Presumably, that was Patrick, but I couldn’t actually see that level of detail. All I could make out was a glowing person’s outline. He had something in his right hand. A dueling cane, maybe?

No door behind us, but I could see outlines that might have been doorframes on two of the walls.

The center of the room was obscured, and it took me a few seconds to figure out what I was looking at. There was a dome-shaped cage, with some light leaking through the bars, making it look almost solid.

There was a humanoid figure standing inside the cage, arms uplifted toward the ceiling. Completely immobile. That was mildly disconcerting.

I saw something that looked like a box on the floor near a corner directly across from where I was standing. The glow around it was vibrant red, indicating some kind of destructive magic. An explosive, then? Or a trapped box?

A rectangular wedge jutted out of the floor in front of the cage. It was too thin to be another box. It looked like a wall segment that was out of position.

Finally, there were small, rod-like objects attached to several of the walls. It took me an embarrassingly long moment to realize what they were.

“There are unlit torches on the walls. Can you make fire?”

I hadn’t disproven the presence of flammable gas, but my attunement wasn’t picking up anything obvious, and the presence of torches pretty strongly implied they were meant to be lit.

“Uh, yeah, but I only know attack spells. They’re not really meant for light.”

I nodded, belatedly realizing he couldn’t actually see my response. “That’s fine. I’ll guide you to a torch, and hopefully it’s got some kind of material on the top you can ignite. If not, we’ll try something else.”

I wasn’t big on touching other people, but it couldn’t be helped. It was easier for me to tolerate when I was the one initiating contact, at least. “Going to grab your hand and lead you. Follow slowly.”

“Got it.”

His skin felt weirdly clammy. Maybe that was normal, though… it’d been a while since I’d held anyone’s hand. A long while. I guided him to the a torch on the wall nearest us and set his hand on top of it.

“That’s it. I’d recommend trying something weak.” I pulled my own hand away, taking a step back.

“I could have figured that one out on my own, Corin.” The wry observation was tempered by Patrick’s natural geniality. “Okay, lemme see.” He took a breath.

“Extinguished fire in the night,

I beseech you to Ignite. ”

A sphere of flame manifested in Patrick’s hand and blasted through the torch, right into the wall behind it. I winced at the scorch marks left on the wall, but the spell succeeded at serving its purpose. The torch was lit, but not without consequence.

The chime of a bell sounded in the distance. I frowned, looking around the room, but I couldn’t see the source of the noise.

I could see the rest of the room a bit more clearly, though, even with only one torch lit.

We weren’t far from the box. In better lighting, I determined that it was… a box. Not a treasure chest, not a coffin, not even a wooden crate. A box. It had no obvious seams, cracks, or keyhole. I couldn’t even tell what it was made out of.

I could see the cage a little more clearly, too. No prisoner inside, but there was something… a statue of Tenjin, the Visage of Inspiration. She was at the center of a fountain, with water descending from her uplifted hands into the basin below. I thought I caught a glimmer of something metallic near her feet, but it was still too dark to see.

The torch itself was wrought from blackened metal with a glass-encased top, almost like a lantern, but with a visible sphere of orange fire swirling within. I felt fortunate the fire spell had worked. If I’d seen the strange torch more clearly before I tried the plan, I would have assumed the glass would have blocked the spell.

Upon closer examination, I found a piece of fiber. A wick, maybe? It led right into the enclosed glass. That meant the torches could probably be lit through mundane means, too. I hadn’t actually brought any fire starting supplies in my bag, but I’d have to think about that for next time.

“You got enough mana to light the other torches?” I noted five more of them around the room. With some light available, I also turned off my attunement. Keeping it on was going to give me a headache, as well as drain my mana supply.

Patrick grinned, looking visibly more confident now that we had a bit of light. “Yep, I’ll get started.”

He walked over to the next one, put his hand over it, and repeated his incantation. A brief flicker of flame, the torch was lit—

And the room went black.

There was no bell to accompany this event. It was a hiss in the air, a sound of something being torn apart, followed by the growl of something bestial.

At that point, I was no longer merely concerned. I’d made the leap straight to terrified.

Something slammed into me with battering-ram force. I flew backward, smashing into the wall, my shield sigil absorbing as much of the impact as it could. I sunk to the floor.

“Corin?” came Patrick’s uncertain voice.

“Reshing relight the other torch, now!”

I turned my attunement back on just before it hit me again, a clawed hand the size of my torso tossing me along the wall and sending me skidding across the floor.

“I can’t see where it is!”

The beast was fast, nearly on top of me again before I had a chance to reply. It wasn’t truly visible even with my attunement active, more of a blur of disruption within the things I could see. From the blur of movement streaking toward me, I pictured a lion the size of a carriage, trailing multiple spine-laced tails.

I raised my demi-gauntlet and focused my will, pressing raw mana into the device. A sphere of gray mana flashed from my outstretched hand, blasting into my onrushing foe. The impact didn’t stagger it much — I was using the attack function, not the knockback function — but it let out a roar of pain at the impact.

The blast had also briefly illuminated the room enough for me to get a better look at what I was fighting. It wasn’t a lion… it was utterly, horribly worse. It looked more like a horned panther with draconic scales the size of my fist, each of the tails I’d seen before a serpentine tendril that extended from the creature’s spine. The tendrils moved independently and several of them were raised above the creature’s back, looking poised to strike like a snake.