Basic Thaumaturgy for the Emotionally Incompetent

Rubidi (presumably) came out of nowhere, hurling herself straight at him like a shadow-fed spear. Her fingers were now claws, her mouth open in a voiceless snarl.

She’s going for the kill, Fabrisse realized. He raised another Stupenstone and tried to aim, but didn’t know where to.

The purple gleam of the rod shaft shivered in the air as Lorvan stepped in the way, followed by pearl white shards. The rod writhed in his palm. From its end, seven serpentine appendages burst forth with a crackle.

Purple-gold sigils flared across their fanged mouths as they expanded, whip-like and precise.

They struck just as Rubidi closed the final meter.

One snake wrapped around her wrist, halting her claws inches from Celine’s bulwark. Another snared her ankle and yanked her. She staggered, then spun. Rubidi tried to counter, bringing her free hand around in a raw palmstrike, but two more serpents coiled around her waist and neck, anchoring her like she was being caught in a ritual web.

Lorvan raised his left hand, fingers already weaving the configuration. His voice dropped into the rhythm of spellcraft:

“Seal the fourth with tethered thread,

Lock them fast or strike me dead.”

A binding circle surged beneath her, white runes flaring across the floor like horizontal lightning. The serpents anchored her limbs with radiant precision, feeding their energy into the tightening lock.

He had her. For a heartbeat, it looked absolute.

Then Rubidi screamed. The serpents convulsed.

It’s this feeling again.

Fabrisse felt the void; it felt like someone was constricting his windpipe. Cracks spidered across her limbs, and the void swallowed the cracks. She was phasing through her bindings.

One serpent slipped.

Rubidi’s ankle twisted in an inhuman angle as the void slipped through the coils. The snakes’ fangs dug deeper, radiant gold sparking at their seams.

A final serpent lunged for her throat—one last desperate clamp to stall her phase distortion—but it passed straight through. She was slipping out of time, out of form, out of containability.

And then the Veyruhn’s Lock tried to close.

It slammed with a clap like heaven breaking, glyph-spikes punching up from the floor to impale the shadow beneath her.

But they hit nothing.

Rubidi had already torn free.

“Voidphasing. That’s a technique only someone who’s neck-deep in Voidcasting could learn.” Lorvan closed his palm. The Lock shattered on impact with the void, fragmenting into a whirl of dead symbols and bleeding sparks. “She’s in a Voidfold now.”

“Why can’t we just attack that visible rift?” Fabrisse pointed at the same rift that’d brought all these void creatures into the pondside.

Lorvan replied, “It’s a mouth. What we’re seeing is just the lip of it; the entry flare. A fold so strong to the point it can summon infinite voidspawn has to sit beneath the space, braided into the leylines.”

A crack of soundless golden lightning split the sky. It struck down, targeting what looked like empty air outside the pond’s perimeter.

The moment the bolt descended, a vertical seam in reality split wide like an eyelid opening. It sucked the lightning in, and the fold closed again before the echo of its presence could fully register. The Voidfold devoured it whole.

“Found the fold!”

The voice rang out from the edge of the shattered dome. A tall silhouette stood against the light, coat flared by magical recoil, his fingers still crackling with golden aether sparks from the spell’s release.

Professor Kaldrin!

More voidspawns peeled out of the shadows. One spawned too close to Fabrisse, and he jolted as he dodged aside and cast Tremblehold on it. Either the creature was too heavy or it had become much more dexterous now, because his spell could barely sway it for a second. Celine immediately hit it with a javelin, slamming the creature against the inside of her bulwark. However, the creature didn’t die. It wiggled and attempted to regain its footing.

Celine scowled. “That should’ve pinned it.”

She summoned another javelin and rammed it through the creature’s chest before it could lurch. This time, it spasmed and dissolved into oily smoke. Close. But the delay was new, and deeply disturbing.

Fabrisse saw Celine sweating, and after a quick check with Spectral Appraisal, he confirmed his suspicion:

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