[EB Bonus Chap] - Devour (Patreon)

“Initially, I did,” Henry said. “But I was thinking, and I realized I’m doing you a huge disservice.”

What do you mean?

“If I just give you every single spell, your mind won’t develop enough. You need to practice and learn yourself, or you’ll never be able to think on your feet.”

That’s… a fair point, actually. But isn’t that suboptimal? It would take a lot less time if you just told me what to do.

“You’d also be a lot worse of a mage that wouldn’t be able to do anything without my help,” Henry pointed out. “Is that what you want?”

No. So in that case, I’ll just look into researching some magic myself. Are you saying I should try to make more magic on my own?

“The chances of you creating new magic with the understanding you currently have are pretty much zero,” Henry said. “But, here’s what we can do. You look through the library and try to figure out what kind of spell you want to learn and improve. I’ll fill in any information you’re looking for that they don’t have and give you pointers as you work, but you’ll be the one working on the spell. If it’s something I don’t think you can handle, I’ll just stop you. That way, you’ll get all the benefits of learning a spell without any of the drawbacks.”

I like the sound of that. To the library, then?

“To the library,” Henry agreed, sounding just as excited as Damien felt.

Damien bid farewell to Sylph and slipped out of the room, heading toward the library as fast as he could go without actually breaking into a run.

When he reached the library, it took him a few minutes to find a section about space magic. It was a large hall, full of crooked cabinets that were one light shove from falling over. He carefully picked through them, taking any books that looked interesting.

Before long, Damien had surrounded himself in a makeshift fort of instructional manuals. He rubbed his hands together eagerly and grabbed one, flipping it open and starting to read. Off to his side, Henry formed an eye with a tiny tendril attached to it and floated over to another book to read it.

Damien considered telling him to stop, but nobody was in the area and he couldn’t blame his companion for wanting to learn more magic. He buried his nose in the book he’d chosen, scanning over it closely to see what secrets he could draw out from it.

As he’d expected, there were hundreds of Space magic spells. They ranged in complexity and difficulty, but he mostly stuck to the intermediate ones. He wouldn’t admit it if anyone asked, but the fancy spells were a lot cooler than the basic ones, and that was having more than a little influence on his search.

Time ticked by and books shifted piles while the two flipped through them. Several hours passed before either of them knew it.

“Well?” Henry asked. “Any thoughts yet?”

Well, I want a defensive spell. I saw some defensive spells that were higher level for Space magic, but they were seriously complicated. But, while I was looking at some other spells, it looks like there’s a lot of messing with, well, space. Like bending it or moving things to other locations. Would it be possible to make some kind of one-way portal?

Henry let out a gleeful cackle. “Keep going. Let’s assume it is. What would this portal be for?”

Ideally, I could just make it and block anything someone threw at me by sending it somewhere else.

“It’s possible,” Henry said. “Not everything, but a lot of it. You’ve got a starting point. I’ll give my approval – if you can get this working, it would be very useful. It’s worth the time.”

Damien rose to his feet, grabbing several books that he thought might be useful. Henry slid a stack of books over to Damien, adding them to his pile wordlessly. Damien stacked them on without glancing at their contents, too lost in his own thoughts. He glanced around at the pile surrounding him. They twitched, almost as if they’d realized he was finished, and floated back to their spots on the shelves.

“Wow,” Damien muttered. “I wonder what runes they’re using to do that.”

He examined the cabinets. Henry poked him with a barb of mental energy. “Come on. One thing at a time. If you let your attention get split, you’ll never master a spell before you move on to the next. A few well honed tools are far superior to a dozen rusty ones.”

Fine, fine.

Damien turned and walked back to the entrance of the library. A librarian took note of the books he’d taken, then sent him on his way. He jogged all the way back to his room and was rather winded by the time he got back.

After stopping for a moment to catch his breath and not look completely pathetic in front of Sylph, Damien stepped into the room. She sat on her bed, her legs crossed and eyes closed. Motes of dark energy flickered around her.

Damien crept past Sylph, doing his best not to bother her. He sat down in the training room and set his books out around him, flipping them open to the pages he needed.

“This spell is one of the high level portals,” Damien said, tapping one page of a book. “I don’t get all the runes, but if I’m not mistaken, this outer ring of runes is the one that sends the person walking through it to another location.”

Henry didn’t say anything. Damien flipped through another book, searching through it for a few minutes before stopping on a page depicting another spell. He grabbed a piece of chalk and got to work on the ground, sketching out runes.

He went from book to book over the next two hours, adding notes and runes to his rudimentary sketches. Finally, he rocked back and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.

What books did you end up wanting me to bring, by the way? I never got a glance.

“Nothing too crazy. A history of the school and the continent. Information about what you’ll be learning each year. A bestiary of every known monster. And whatever that book that the lunch lady was reading.”

I suppose that makes – wait. What? Why in the Seven Planes do you need that book?

“Humans put a lot of culture into their smut,” Henry said. “You never know what you’ll learn from it.”

You made me check out Love Making for the Uninitiated and Lustful?

He picked through the pile of books Henry had made him get. Sure enough, the book in question was there. Along with it were eight volumes of Dredd’s Demon’s and Monsters and a bunch of other history books that were completely uninteresting to him.

Bleh. You do you, I guess.

“I will,” Henry replied. “You need to make me a room so that I don’t have to worry about getting discovered. I want to read. I could just wait until she’s asleep, but I feel strangely drawn to start immediately, despite how illogical that is.”

It’s called being impatient. Human emotion.

“Well, I don’t like it,” Henry said, the glower apparent in his tone. “It makes me feel antsy.”

We don’t like it any more than you do.

Henry grunted. Damien’s shadow peeled away from his feet, rising up from the ground like a ball of darkness. It expanded, turning into a large, hunchbacked figure covered with eyes. One particularly large eye on the front of its face flicked to Damien and Henry gave him a wide grin, gathering up his books and heading into the back training room.