“That seems like a needlessly restrictive solution.” Josie said, shaking her head. “Why don’t you just use your other hand to cast? Why haven’t you been doing that this whole time?”

  They were sitting in the Underkeepers’ break room over a cup of tea as Bernt caught her up on what had happened since she noticed his spiritual injury.

  Bernt sighed. “The strai really e from eling the mana out of my hand – at least not the worst of it, unless I lose trol of the mana flows. That’s not how it works, I use my entire mawork to help mahe spellform that I’m visualizing. The arm is just the weakest link, so that’s where I feel the strain. I mean, I guess it would be a little safer… but it’s not a solution.”

  Josie frowned, holding up her own hand. Over the course of a sed or two, her fiips darkened and long cws grew out, then they melted bad the normal hand reemerged. “Doesn’t work that way for me. I have sort of a loopy pattern, a bit of my midnight hag’s spirit, inside my hand. It’s not like your mawork though – it’s physically there, not just spiritual. If I sort of ‘push’ on it, the cws e out. It’s simple. The third eye works basically the same way.”

  Bernt grunted. “Well, mages don’t. It’s probably just because you’re a warlock.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Josie replied, waving the topic away. “This magister is supposed to be an expert on fire magic, right? Why don’t you just bring him some hellfire and see if he figure it out? I mean, there has to be some overp with alchemy there. The alchemists have to use reas with ical materials to get whatever they’re making, but you just rewrite the spellform for it, ’t you?”

  “Yeah. Just.” Bernt ughed without humor. “We ‘just’ have to figure out how to tell the spellform for soul-burning hellfire to restore my mawork instead of burning it up some more.”

  Josie frow him. “I don’t see the problem. Think about it. You’re reshaping your mawork every time you add an iure, right? You’re just adding ara step here, straightening it out a bit right there and maybe clearing out some kind of metaphysical obstru, ironing out those weird wrihere. Hellfire seems like exactly the right thing to use, or something kind of like it as long as you’re not too heavy handed with it.”

  Bernt froze, staring at her as he sidered it. If he had the right derivative, he might be able to wear away the malformed "scarring", in a sense, and then heal or reinforce those mana pathways. Josie was right, even though she probably didn’t know why. The best way to do that would probably be during an iment procedure, when he had a spellform to serve as a sort of scaffold. It should also provide that reinf effect he o help the healing process along.

  “Josie. I think you might be a genius,” Bernt said. “That, or yoing to get me killed. I o find Jori, and I o get something from my house – but I’m going back up to see Pollock today. At least provided that we don’t get an arm in the couple of minutes.”

  Josie didn’t respond. She had raised her head and was curiously staring right past Bernt’s arm over the edge of the table and down into his p.

  Bernt swallowed and slowly moved his hands to block her view.

  Josie blinked and looked up. Then she leaned forward and hissed. “You saved the skin from the beaver?! How did you get it made into a belt? Tell me everything!”

  Bernt grinned.

  –------------

  Whe stepped into the Mages’ Guild this time, Jori half a step behind, the receptionist did not ignore him. Instead, he drew a slim metal wand from his robe and poi right at the two of them. Bernt stopped.

  From the ba, the man's monkey familiar screeched in agitation.

  “No demons on the premises!” he snapped, scowling furiously. “What is the meaning of this?”

  Taken aback, Bernt held up both hands in a calmiure. “Hey! Easy. I just wa Jori by fister Pollock. We need her support for something.”

  Jori, who was standing mostly behi, leaned around him to gre at the man. "He is rude!" She was surprised and agitated, and it showed in the way she spoke – simpler, a bit less fluently and with more hissing. “A bad man, I think.”

  The mage ignored her, eyei sternly.

  “I don’t know how you do things in your sewers, but this is the Mages’ Guild. You’ll o go and talk to Magister Pollod request a Permit for Temporary tai of arapy on Guild Grounds. When that’s done, he has to e down here and escort the creature personally.”

  Bernt groaned quietly. This couldn't be happening. For a moment, he sidered trying to push his ast the man, but he looked deadly serious. Grinding his teeth, Bernt took a deep breath and chose the only way forward.

  “I don’t suppose I get one of those forms here from you?”

  –--------

  Nearly thirty mier, Bernt and Jori followed Polloto his office, who immediately shuffled over to his chair and sank down into it with a small sigh of relief.

  “Ah. That’s better,” he said, peering at Bernt. “Now. You’re tellihat you want to try to create a hellfire derivative that you use to fix your mawork directly. And you think the best time to do that is during an iment process…” he paused, waiting for Bernt to nod. “Alright. Why the timing, though? You could infuse hellfire into your wht now without doing a proper iure, just by carefully running a bit of your spirit out of yourself in a loop and holding the fme over it while you circute some mana.” He waved a hand at the air. “I would advise against that, mind you. It’s been done. But why do you think so?”

  “Too dangerous,” Bernt said immediately. “That might affect my entire mawork somehow, even if it shouldn’t. If I do it during the iment process, I would be able to limit the impact to the new iure. Even in the worst case, it wouldn’t ruin what I’ve already got and I would still be able to finish the augmentation, even if it ends up modified somehow.”

  “Yes,” Pollock said enthusiastically, “that’s exactly right! Being aware of and managing risk is a critical part of being a wizard.” He leaned forward, raising both eyebrows. “Now, what else have you got? I certainly hope you didn’t e here thinking you could just casually rearrange hellfire into some manner of spirit restoration spell.”

  "No, of course not. I'm not sure that's even possible.“ Bernt shook his head and pulled open his bag. Reag inside, he drew out a thick stack of poorly anized notes along with an old, worn-looking journal.

  “This isly about restoration, but I’ve been trying to make sense of this journal for a couple of months now,” he began, as Pollock reached for the book and flipped it open. “It’s some long-dead wizard’s theory for transmutation magic – I found it in a pile of garbage down in the dungeon. I think we use some of the principles he talks about io help. I don’t uand everything because it’s all in some old archaic dialect, but I’ve made a lot of notes. I was hoping you could fill in a fes…”

  The old man flipped through the book with growiement, turning the book sideways as he got to one of the diagrams.

  “Ha!” he cackled. “Hahaha! Do you have any idea what you found!?” He wheezed, flipping through to another diagram and examining it. “This person was an absolute madman – and my favorite kind!”

  He looked up at Bernt, eyes now aglow with a feverish iy. “We’re going to make history with this, boy. History!”

  –------

  It took a few minutes for the old man to collect himself, a spent the time digging through his o find the relevant pages. Bored, Jori eained herself by jumping up as high as she could into the air to see how far she could glide on her wings. She thumped against the far wall ohird try, knog over a small stack of books on the way.

  Meanwhile, Pollock started reading the text, flipping pages at a rate that suggested he had absolutely no trouble with the odd nguage that it was written in.

  “Not half pretentious, wasn’t he?” he muttered. “Probably an archwizard. He calls regur mages ‘bottom-feeding cretins’ here. And now a little underkeeper found his lega a pile of garbage. Good irony there, very nice.”

  Bernt made a noise of agreement, though he wasn’t really listening. “Here it is!" he said, holding up a page of notes. "So, the spells recorded in there use fire as a basis to transform objects, but it requires two current spells to do it. Oo disie matter and ao reie it into the desired form. But I don’t really need to reie anything here – not if I don’t pletely destroy the els, anyway.”

  “Hmm,“ Pollock said, taking the piece of paper from him and reading his notes. “You want to modify the hellfire to mimic this kind of solvent effed the to wear away the damaged el. You prop up what's left with the spellform for the iure and then finish the iment process to restore the els for you. You would probably lose the normal reinf effect, so the iure might be a bit weaker at the end, but it could work...”

  Bernt watched as the old man pursed his lips, apparently thinking about the idea.

  “You realize that, if you damage your spirit so much that the iure doesn’t take, you might cripple yourself, right?” the wizard asked. “It would weaken your spells permaly. Though, I suppose you’d still have solved the strain issue – your mawork would just be smaller.”

  Bernt nodded.

  “Hmmm, alright.” Pollock said, “It’s a worthy experiment. Someone has to take these risks, after all, so why not you? If it works, we might even be able to adapt it into a proper treatment for overstrained maworks. You might well bee one of the you wizards to make such a signifit tribution to magical researever mind the kingdom as a whole!”

  At Bernt’s skeptical expression, the old man stood up straight and wagged his fi him seriously. “Don’t uimate the value of innovation. Healing that kind of damage could restore hundreds of veteran war mages to the Beseri military, even if it's not perfect. It would ge the bance of power iire region and probably make you stupendously ri the process...”

  That. Well, that did sound pretty iing. Before he could say anything, though, Pollock went on.

  “...never mind what’s in that journal of yours. You don’t even know what he was really doing, do you?” He shook his head disbelievingly. “I’ll tell you about it after we solve this problem of yours. No sense in distrag you with the dreams of a mad genius now, is there? e along!”

  He shuffled out of the room eically, moving quickly for a man his age.

  He didn’t go far. Across the hall was a much rger boratory than the o had seen two days earlier. This one was, like Pollock’s office, a mess. Tables and chairs were covered with heaps of books and notes, and there were a variety of items lying around that Bernt reized as focuses, b equipment, and a discarded cloak. The floor was i with many rune circles, poured into the stone floor with metal. Only a few of them were the standard version for analyzing spells that Bernt was familiar with.

  “Alright, young Jori. Cast a bit of fire over into that rune circle there, please,“ the old man said, rummaging through the clutter on one of the tables, before ing up with a small pen knife. “And when you’re doh that, prick yourself in the skin with this, if you don’t mind. I’ll want to take a look at some of your blood, too.”

  With a wide grin, Jori threw a rather rger-than-necessary handful of hellfire into the rune circle, which obligingly unraveled inte and plex spellform as it came us influehen she jumped up into the air and glided over to the old man, ing to rest on top of the table that he was still standio. She accepted the knife and pricked herself in the palm, pointing up. As usual, a searingly bright fme erupted from the tiny cut, which closed almost instantly.

  What was less usual was that, instead of dissipating, the fire rolled itself into a ball and floated ly into one of the other rune circles, where it also unraveled into its stituent spellform.

  “Now then.” Magister Pollock said, adopting a lecturing tone. “Why don’t you go and take a look at those and tell me where you think we should start?”