“You can try to figure it out, Renthorn,” she managed through the giggles. “You can try.”
“Miss Freynan,” Tanrel said as she doubled over, gripping the back of a chair to steady herself through the laughter. “Are you quite well? Do you need help?”
“No…” She straightened up, grinning. “No… I need a cup of tea!” Pushing past Highmage Tanrel, Sciona picked up her skirts and ran from the library.
The next several hours—then several more passed—in a whir of scribbles on notepaper and fingers on keys. If Sciona’s body tired, she didn’t feel it. How could she when each draft, each test, brought her closer to the revelation that would change Tiran forever?
The fleeting red sun had come and gone again when the laboratory door cracked open.
“Oh!” Thomil said. “You’re already here, ma’am… I was going to do some tidying before… you… Highmage Freynan, are you crying?”
Sciona hadn’t even noticed the tears rolling down her face. Nothing was real except the visual in the mapping coil before her. How long had she stood staring into it? Who could say? And what did it matter? Everything that mattered in the world was glowing inside that copper circle.
“It works,” she whispered. “This is it, Thomil! I’ve done it!”
“What?”
“Thomil, bless you! Bless you, I’ve done it!”
“Bless me? And… done what?”
“The mapping spell! The one! The mapping spell to end all others. Look!”
Bounding to the door on sleepless mania, she grabbed Thomil’s sleeve and dragged him to the spellograph. Within the mapping coil, the results of her latest experiment stood in sharp gray and white glory. It was a visual of the Otherrealm like any other—except that the energy sources were crisp, forming edges as defined as Tiran’s skyline on a clear day. “See? There’s no way to miss the energy sources!”
“How did you figure it out, ma’am?”
“It was you, Thomil!” She tugged his arm in excitement, wanting to shake him, wanting to kiss him. “It was what you said about the Kwen mages of the mountains. I traced Founding Mage Stravos’s lineage—and I guess, more importantly, his magical knowledge—back to the Venhold Kwen you mentioned. Then, I went back through all his curly, confusing spellwork, and I found this in his composition!” She hauled the thousand-page Stravos Collection open to the page she had marked and stabbed a finger at her discovery.
“Um—” Thomil stared down at the brittle yellow page, nonplused. “What am I looking at, Highmage?”
“These four lines here!” Sciona indicated a half-paragraph of handwritten spellwork. “None of Stravos’s students could replicate his spells with any sort of consistency, so most of his compositions fell out of common use in the first half-century of Tiranish history. But these lines specifically don’t appear in any other mage’s mapping methods. Not Leon’s, not Kaedor’s, not anyone’s. Scholars couldn’t figure out what they were for and scrapped them for the sake of efficiency long before the spellograph was even invented, so chances are that no one has even tried to slot these lines into a mapping spell for over a century.”
“But you’ve figured out what they do?” Thomil said.
“It wasn’t easy. The trial and error, all the different variations I’ve been through, you wouldn’t believe!”
“No, ma’am.” Thomil looked over the masses of notes and used spellpaper spilling off the tables. “I believe it.”
“Anyway, after all that fiddling, I finally wrestled all Stravos’s cryptic little flourishes into spellograph-friendly characters”—Sciona brandished the page of notes on which she had aggressively circled her final version of Stravos’s imaging lines—“and I got this!” She lifted both hands triumphantly to the shapes of the Otherrealm before her. “You see? Those complicated, Stravos-exclusive lines clarify energy sources to perfection! No blur, no spotty variations in brightness, no ambiguity at all. They just needed to be transcribed and translated for the spellograph just so.”
“Incredible…” Thomil was still staring into the coil, the shifting light pulsing white in the gray of his irises. “How does it work?”
“Well, it’s quite a bit longer than a standard mapping spell. There are more layers to it, including something Stravos calls a ‘pooling layer.’ Now I just have to decide what we even call this take on the Stravos Method since it’s so heavily reliant on Kaedor lines for compatibility with the spellograph. Maybe Kaevos? Stravdor?”
“Stravdor?”
“Shut up—We’ll workshop it later.”
“Have you told anyone yet?” Thomil asked. “Archmage Bringham?”
“No, no. Not yet.”
“Why not?”
Sciona beamed. “Because I’m not done. I haven’t made my final stride.”
“Your final stride?”
“This”—she gestured to her divinely clear mapping visual—“is Stravos-level clarity filtered through the grayscale lens we apply to all modern mapping spells. For my final experiment, I’m going to do what we debated earlier: I’m going to remove those Faene-ordained lines that cloud the lens. Thomil!” She gripped the Kwen’s shoulders and shook him—or would have had his body not been so damn solid. “We’re going to open a clear window to the Otherrealm! A Freynan Mirror!”
“So, you’ve decided that you’re alright with that?” Thomil said, and if Sciona didn’t know better, she would have said he looked proud of her. “Modifying sacred spellwork?”
“Well, I’m not modifying, exactly, am I? I’m just restoring it to the way it was once upon a time in the Age of Founders. What could be holier than that?”
“And how do you know that a place like the Otherrealm can actually be seen?” Thomil asked. “How do you know our human eyes can take it?”
“I don’t,” Sciona whispered through an irrepressible grin. “Would you like to find out with me?”
“Damn it, Highmage Freynan… Of course, I do.” And bless him; behind the veneer of calm, he looked almost as excited as she was. They had, after all, been working on this project together for the better part of three months. Here was the fruit of all their labor.
For once, Sciona typed a spell slowly, making sure she thought each line through to perfection and inserted her adjustments just so. Heart in her throat, she activated the mapping spell, and an image flared to life inside the coil.
In color.
“All the gods!” Thomil breathed. “It is a window!”
“It is a window!” Sciona’s voice cracked with emotion. “A clear, clear window!” She was practically screaming, uncaring who heard her, bouncing like a child as she clutched Thomil’s arm.
The Otherrealm wasn’t a sea of floating lanterns or a garden of never-before-seen colors, as some texts speculated. It was a rolling expanse of snow, breached in places by evergreen bushes and cut through with animal tracks. Sciona had only ever seen snow at a great distance, on the peaks of the Venhold Mountains. She hadn’t realized that up close, it would catch the light of the moon and sparkle like alchemical diamond dust. An unfamiliar creature bounded from the cover of one bush to the next, and, Feryn be praised, the image was so clear, Sciona could have counted the hairs on its bushy tail.