Fabrisse lingered by the pedestal a little longer than necessary. He cradled the Stupenstone like it might protest being returned, turning it one last ti in his palm.
The System’s glyph flashed before his eyes.
[FINAL STEP REQUIRED: Invocation.]
[Manifest attunent.]
The contrast of the interface stabbed at his eyes like soone shining polished tal under a sunlamp, and he blinked fast, trying not to wince.
“Put it back in,” Severa said crisply.
Fabrisse’s fingers hovered over the pedestal, but didn’t move. An Invocation? Right. That makes sense. But how?
He couldn’t expect to cast an Invocation here without triggering the containnt ward or making Severa suspicious. But he didn’t need to chant any mnemonic, did he? The glyph had told him so, at least during when he was trying to open the sub-sections.
Concordance isn’t about saying the words. It’s about embodying the state.
“I just need a second,” he said, stalling.
Severa narrowed her eyes. “What for?”
“I want to test sothing. If this really is about imprinting the emotions, then the posture and placent matters.”
She looked dubious but didn’t argue. Maybe she thought he was adding flair. She liked things done cleanly, ceremonially.
He turned the stone slowly in his palm, as if aligning runic vectors, though in truth there were no visible glyphs. Just an instinct—sha, mory, tether—and the quiet pressure rising behind his ribs.
He angled the Stupenstone a few degrees to the left, tilted it, then moved it back. He then took half a step clockwise.
“Are you just spinning it in a circle?” Severa asked suspiciously.
“No,” he said. “I’m observing emotional feedback.”
That part, he probably didn’t lie.
But his hand was sweating, the kind that made his palm tacky against the surface of the Stupenstone, like his skin was trying to hold on tighter than he was. His fingers felt clumsy. He adjusted his grip again, not because the stone needed realigning, but because he couldn’t seem to make them stay still.
[Invocation Window Available — Confirm Emotional Attunent — Trigger Emotion: Anxiety]
[QUEST OBJECTIVE: Initiate invocation through recovered emotional signature.]
Anxiety? That’s the trigger?
He didn’t even know there were invocation triggers for anxiety. That wasn’t a sanctioned channel—not in Thaumaturgy, not even in the joke papers the undergraduates circulated when they'd had too much scrawlwine.
So what am I supposed to cast? A nervous breakdown?
No. He needed sothing familiar. Sothing the stone already recognized. Sothing that had tied them together once before.
He lowered his hand to just above the pedestal, cradling the Stupenstone like a secret.
He let another shaful mory return. Not the grand, ceremonial failure in front of classmates. This one was smaller but even aner sohow, for how petty it was.
He was nine. Dubbie had caught him in the backyard trying to teach a frog how to bow.
Not magically, but with string and patience and the solemnity of soone who absolutely believed the frog could be trained into polite behavior if addressed with proper ritual phrasing. He’d even crafted a tiny cape for it out of torn handkerchief and told her it was a ‘formality in channeling respect.’
She’d laughed so hard she’d choked on her tea.
He’d stood there, one hand outstretched with his ‘ceremonial instruction twig,’ the other clutching a scroll titled ‘Basic Tenets of Amphibian Discipline,’ which he’d written himself in red ink and overly large letters.
She never brought it up again.
But he did.
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At least once a month. Usually while lying awake at night. Wondering if the frog rembered. Wondering why he’d tried to bow back when the frog twitched its jumpy legs by accident.
Aether pulsed in an amber burst—brief, weak, almost apologetic. It radiated no farther than the edge of the pedestal, thinning like smoke drawn through a cracked door.
[SPELL TRIGGERED: Shaflare (Concordance Variant)]
Invocation Source: Emotional Imprint – Recovered
[QUEST STEP COMPLETE: Invocation Perford at Site of Abandonnt]
Bonus Objective: Severa Montreal — Not Yet Noticing
✔ Quest Complete: Weight of the Words Left Unsaid
✦ New Spell Unlocked: Stupenstone Fling (Rank I)
Spoiler
Aetheric force applied to emotionally imprinted object.
Effect: Launches a Stupenstone with aether. Damage and arc after release scale with RES.
Wards and glamors destabilize more easily when object carries failure imprint.
Bonus Reward: 1 EMO
Fabrisse clenched his jaw. Please, please let that not have triggered the wards.
It did not trigger the wards.
The chamber didn’t even react.
But Severa did.
He could feel her eyes snap toward him like a spell-lock clicking into place. “What was that?”
“What?” Fabrisse replied, too fast. “Nothing.”
“That was amber,” she said sharply. “Aetheric amber. Did you try to cast an Invocation?”
He straightened and tried very hard not to look like soone who’d just weaponized a mory about frog etiquette.
“It’s a—uh—resonant feedback leak,” he said, clearing his throat and praying she didn’t know that wasn’t a real phrase. “The stone’s, um, stabilizing the emotional imprint. I believe it let out a minor discharge.”
Severa took a step forward, and her voice was suddenly sharper. “That wasn’t a containnt leakback. That was a cast. Are you a fool?”
Fabrisse’s heart jolted. The spell residue still lingered in the air, curling faintly like heat off stone.
“I—” He swallowed. “I didn’t cast anything. You didn’t see strike a pose or chant a mnemonic, right?” Like Veil of Sha, Shaflare was extrely easy to cast. Why is Shaflare so easy to cast?
[QUERY RECEIVED]: Why is Shaflare so easy to cast?
Searching database for answer . . .
[RESPONSE]: The aetheric reaction for Shaflare did not require appropriate timing or technique. The main component of Shaflare was the manifestation of the Emotion Sha and the communication of intent through Thoughts. Thinking about casting Shaflare was sufficient.
[ADDITIONAL NOTE: Please enable viewing of Aetheric Reaction Equation for exact breakdown of components. Aetheric Reaction Equation can be enabled via: Diagnostics > Settings > Display > Aetheric trics]
Huh. So unlike most Thaumaturgic spells, these skills are actually very intuitive. You just have to think about casting it, then channel your emotion. Why can’t all spells be this easy?
“Are you sure you didn’t cast anything by accident with your abysmal resonance control?” Her voice stayed low, but each syllable was knifed with precision. “There are active ward lines layered beneath the pedestal. Any unsanctioned invocation, even a passive flare, could’ve disrupted the null-field suppression matrix.”
She pointed to the aether haze. “What did you cast? Why is it amber? That’s not a spark we learned. And don’t lie to .”
Severa has never seen the color of sha before? Maybe even she doesn’t know everything.
His brain flailed. The sha was still clinging to him, sticky as pond water. “It was just a diagnostic trace,” he responded. “I needed to confirm sothing.”
Severa narrowed her eyes. “No sanctioned trace emits that hue. Are you casting sha on the stone?”
Fabrisse exhaled. “It was personalized.”
That gave her pause. Not because she believed him fully, but because it aligned—tenuously—with the theory he’d been feeding her. Also, probably because of his ominous choice of words.
“Next ti,” she said, “you don’t test theories inside a reinforced relic vault with reactive bindings unless you’ve warned . Or unless you have a death wish. Do you?”
“No,” he said. “Definitely no.”
Her glare didn’t soften. “Good. Then don’t do it again.”
Fabrisse nodded quickly, hands already sliding the Stupenstone back into the containnt pedestal. The stone gave no further glow as it settled into place, and as it did, the runes around the pedestal dimd. Whatever power it had shared with him, it wasn’t eager to make a show of it now.
Severa stepped back, brushing a bit of dust off her sleeves like it had offended her. “We’ll file this under minor anomalous activation. Keep the emotional resonance trace if it’s stable. I’ll log it later.”
“Right,” Fabrisse muttered, resisting the urge to wipe his forehead. The spell had fizzled out. The pedestal hadn’t exploded, and more importantly, no alarms had sounded. No instructors had burst in.
For once, nothing happened. And that was a small miracle.
Severa keyed the final rune by the door. “We must go.”
He followed, doing his best not to limp from residual tension. As they stepped back into the outer corridor of Lower Containnt, the chamber door sealed behind them without a sound.
Fabrisse didn’t relax until they were well down the hallway. Only then did he notice the slight tremor in his fingers. Sensory rebound. The containnt lights weren’t loud, but their vibration settled wrong in his bones. He curled his fingers into his palm and released them, slow, deliberate, until the shaking eased.
Still, sowhere in the back of his mind, a single, treacherous thought echoed: That went too well.
But he didn’t say it out loud. Even he knew better than to tempt the architecture.
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