Basic Thaumaturgy for the Emotionally Incompetent

Rubidi? That’s Severa Montreal’s mentor. Fabrisse’s eyes widened. Is House Montreal actually involved? Surely Severa is smarter and more morally upright than resorting to this?

But then again, she just stole my lore clerk position.

But if Lorvan said that was Rubidi, that was Rubidi. He couldn’t argue against cold, hard facts.

Rubidi was never one to waste words. She’d never talked much before unless it was to belittle someone, and she certainly wouldn’t talk much now that her mouth had been replaced by rippling shadows.

She lunged forward, her shadows stretching, dragged by the weight of her own gravity. Trailing streaks of her afterimage stuttered at rapid intervals, which was absolutely offensive to the eyes.

Lorvan whipped. With a smash of his rod at air, the scattered fractures of his Veyruhn’s lock knitted together—six radiant strokes locking into a jagged star. Symbols bloomed at each corner like branded constellations, and from the heart of the formation, spectral filaments shot out. At the center of Lorvan’s chest, just above his sternum, floated a faint, hovering fragment of aether—barely the size of a coin, yet thrumming with dense, radiant rhythm. That must be how his lock was sustaining itself and drawing in aether.

Then he flung the lock at her.

For a split second, her body froze, locked by the threads latching onto her mass.

But then the slit across her chest split wider. With a sickening rip, she shed her own skin like a cloak. Her silhouette peeled from herself, becoming two overlapping shadows. One crumbled beneath the binding light. The other slid backward into the haze.

“She just severed her presence?” Fabrisse muttered in awe as Celine smashed the head of a voidspawn underneath his feet with her javelin.

“Help me with the spawns, Fabrisse . . .” Celine pleaded.

“Oh. Sorry.” He immediately cast Tremblehold on the next spawn, and Celine pinned it down with ease.

Lorvan’s rod traced another glyph, this one arcing along the ground, morphing into a crescent woven from mirrored runes. The stones beneath Rubidi’s new position rose like teeth, then locked into a cage of aetherial bone, each bar scribed with cancelling seals. It was an elegant construct, recursive and multilayered, sealing not the body, but the pattern of the enemy.

But darkness has no pattern.

Rubidi’s body split again, this time vertically. It warped the containment arc, curving the cage toward one version of her, possibly the wrong one.

Lorvan corrected immediately, twisting the rod to collapse the false seal.

Too late.

Rubidi reached him.

Her limb elongated, thinning into a shadow-spike that pierced the glyph circling his chest—aiming not for his heart, but the harmonic node that anchored the spell.

Lorvan swallowed the damage. His rings blazed. One snapped in half as its stored aether diverted into a defensive bloom. Hexagonal plates of force flared between them like window shutters in a storm.

She hit him.

The rod skidded from his hand as he was flung backward. Rubidi surged forward to follow up.

But the moment her foot touched down, a minor glyph embedded in Lorvan’s falling rod flared.