When I headed to the pixie ballroom that my conjuration class was held in, there was no sign of the party that I’d interrupted by accident when I was running from Emir. I hadn’t expected there to be much, but still, the thoroughness of which the faeries cleaned up the space was pretty impressive. Just how often were they throwing parties here?

  “Oh, hihi!” professor Toadweather said, buzzing over as I glanced around. “Did you enjoy your dance? My great-great-niece wouldn’t be opposed to you joining in another time!”

  She giggled as if she’d made the funniest joke in the world, then turned and buzzed away to the blackboard, where her toad ribbited out a pack of chalk for her. I just stared, unsure if she’d made a joke or not, and unsure if it would be better for me if she had or hadn’t.

  Once everyone had arrived, she shot up into the air and did a twirl before landing.

  “Congratulations!” she cheered. “If you’re still in this course, that means you’ve got at least a little bit of talent for conjuration spells, enough to get through the first circle spells. For those of you who didn’t… Bye!”

  I glanced around, but nobody moved. I thought that there might be one or two less people in here than before, but it had never been a very large class to begin with, so I wasn’t entirely sure.

  “The rest of this semester is gonna be focused on second circle spells!” professor Toadweather announced, just as cheerful as she always was. “We’re going to be starting with a spell that will serve you well in all your summoning endeavors, then move on to a spell to summon, then a spell that will teach you the basics of teleportation, and finally a spell to… summon!”

  “Summon what, exactly?” the treefolk sitting near me asked, his branches rustling as he did.

  “Oh! Well, remember how I mentioned that even though there are infinite planes of Etherius, they can largely be broken down into five categories?” the professor asked, tilting her head. I expected that it would be a rhetorical question, and for her to continue, but instead she just kept staring at us until the treefolk nodded.

  “Good! Well, we’re going to be learning spells for summoning from each of those broad categories soon. That’s why we’re learning the spell to summon and a spell to summon.”

  She grinned maniacally at us, then cackled like a witch. She continued this for several long seconds before wiping at her eyes.

  “Ahh… Alright. I’ll stop being a joking fool, and be serious.”

  She squinted in an impression of someone trying to be very serious and angry before bursting into giggles and going back to normal.

  “The first spell we will be learning is called summoner’s eye,” she said between gasps. “It lets you look through the senses of the creatures that you summon, contract with, bind, or otherwise work with on the material plane. It’s usually safe, but consider what you’re summoning.”

  She waved a wand, and a creature that resembled a hairless, eyeless bat with two heads and three pairs of wings appeared.

  “Take this croroloth demon, for example,” she said. “It has no eyes, and uses echolocation, a very strong sense for air currents, and a highly complex thermal sense to move around. I can use summoner’s eye to look through its senses, but we don’t have very many in common. I might be able to get the information, but it takes time to process them. So if you’ve just mastered a new, high circle summoning spell, and you’re looking to unleash a hoard of unending blood and violence upon your enemies, make sure to take your time getting used to the senses of your new creature before you try.”

  She started giggling again, her wings rapidly flittering and causing dust to fall to the ground where she was floating. I eyed it. The wings of pixies, much like butterflies, were covered in microscopic scales that resembled dust, and I knew from the Charm and Fable that the market price for pixie dust was about three hundred and fifty silver per ounce. Even if I could get it for closer to three hundred, it was valuable, and there had to be at least a gram of it on the floor, even accounting for the size change.

  “Woe unto the poor summoner who has brought forth a fresh monster from hell, only to be killed because they could not interpret its feedback, and tried to puppeteer it mid-combat,” professor Toadweather said, sounding remorseful, and I could swear I heard pipes playing at her words. Then the moment broke, and she moved on, dismissing the demon.

  “The neeeexxxtttt spell is your foray into teleportation magic!” she said. “Did we go over how teleportation works?”

  “It moves you through Etherius, specifically the ethereal plane, and you emerge in the material world again,” I said. “At least, that’s what you said on our first day lecture.”

  “Right, right! That’s true! Good job past me. Now, here is the thing. The ethereal plane is the material that connects all other planes. If our world is a grape, then the ethereal plane is like a grape vine, right?”

  I nodded, and professor Toadweather blew a raspberry at me.

  “Wrong. It’s a tempting analogy to make, but it’s wrong. Now we get to pull out one of my favorite models: the blanket of doom!”

  She clapped, and her frog opened its mouth. She reached into its vast, void-like maw and pulled out a… normal looking blanket made of plain gray wool. As she unfolded it, I realized that it wasn’t quite a normal blanket, since there were knots in the string that had been used to make it. Despite this, the maker had never untangled the knots, and instead had just kept knitting. Professor Toadweather spread the blanket out on the ground, and poked at the knots.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “This is the material world that you were in before you came into the castle.”

  She moved and poked another knot, one that was so close that it was practically overlapping the first.

  “This one is the faerie realm that you’re in right now. And this one is an elemental plane of fire, as is this one and this one, but this one is a demonic plane, and this one is the Etherius locker where I keep my sandwiches, because if I try to keep them in my friend, he just digests them.”

  She waved her hand over the blanket, and there was a sudden wash of light as each of the knots began to glow in different colors. The one that was intended to be the mortal world glowed blue, while the faerie realm we were currently in was purple.

  “Normally, when you’re in your knot, in your world, you move along the colors of the knot. You move through the castle, and you’re moving along the gradient I created. See how pretty it is? Blue into a deep purple? Or the reverse, if you’re going the other way? That’s us! But when you cast a teleportation spell…”

  She pulled out a dropper and put a drop of water onto the knot. As she did, the illusionary lights vanished, leaving nothing but the plain gray.

  “Your ether is the water, and it conducts along the channels of the blanket. You’re not moving from blue to blue, you’re moving through the fibers of the world itself. It’s easy to say that you’re taking a shortcut through the ethereal plane, and that’s true in a way, but it’s also incomplete. You’re moving through something deeper, but also something that’s still a part of reality. The fibers and threads that make up the ethereal plane are the same fibers that make up the material world, or that make up magic itself.”

  Her voice had dropped to a quieter tone than I was used to on the last sentence, as she spoke in an almost hushed, reverant voice. The quiet was immediately shattered as she grinned and went back to her bright and cheery voice.

  “Of course, Etherius step is a second circle spell, so it doesn’t have nearly as much water to splishy-splash around, not when compared to the fifth circle teleport, or the seventh circle true teleport. It can only move you about thirty feet, give or take a few inches.”

  “Do we need to worry about teleporting into a wall, or anything like that?” the treefolk sitting next to me asked, and professor Toadweather gave him a strange look.

  “Do you know how much effort it would take to try and fuse together two things like that?” she asked. “Seriously, getting two things to occupy the same space is a massively mighty feat of power. No, it’s easier to just shift you slightly forwards or backwards if you’ve got the ether, and if you don’t, the spell just fails.”

  “I… That makes sense,” the treefolk said. “I’ve just read stories of someone teleporting off someone’s head, leaving their limbs behind after they teleported, or teleporting into a mountain and fusing into it.”

  “Psh. Nonsense, the lot of those,” professor Toadweather said, shaking her head in an almost disappointed way. “Not only do most sapient beings have enough natural magic to resist forced teleportation without active magic, but combining with or leaving behind things is absurdly hard. This isn’t force magic, it doesn’t add force or momentum or anything like that, and you’d need that to separate a head from a body. If you want to cut off someone’s head with conjuration magic, learn to summon a sword.”

  “I understand,” the treefolk said, his branches rustling.

  “Good! So, the downside of Etherius step is that it is expensive. I’ll be providing the components needed to cast it during the tests, but that’s it. You need a blend of copper, nickel, and palladium, which the spell absorbs. It’s commonly sold as teleportation alloy, and the going rate is about one hundred and fifty silver for a nugget powerful enough to power a single casting.”

  I winced at that. While I could use my blood spell to power that, it would be quite the tax, especially once I got the spellglyph under control. I might recover faster than a human, but I certainly didn’t recover fast enough to just be throwing my blood around left and right in a fight.

  I’d see about trying to get a few nuggets of teleportation alloy before the fight, but I didn’t have high hopes about turning it into a core part of the fighting style. My best course of action would probably still be just burying Gerhard in enough summons that he could barely even move.

  “For the other spells, the ones that summon things… By the time next semester is done and you’ve finished the course, you should be able to summon something from each of the large clusters of planes: faerie, elemental, angelus, and demon. So the spell you’ll be learning is summon graymalkin, and the far more complex summon lesser elemental. Can anyone guess why summon lesser elemental is so much harder than the others?”

  Given what I’d just learned in professor Caeruleum’s class, I took a shot at it.

  “You have to adapt the spell to the plane that you’re summoning from, right?” I asked. “So if you want a fire elemental, you’d need to align it with the fire planes, or a specific fire plane, or a specific elemental?”

  “Yes! Entirely right, except for the parts that you missed out on! Great job,” professor Toadweather said. “It does work on specificity, that much is true. The interesting thing about this spell, though, is that even though the planes of Etherius are endless, and there are an infinite amount of elemental planes, including a plane I know of that’s filled with nothing but glass, the spell can only summon from the six major branches. Does anyone know those?”

  “Fire, water, earth, air, wood, and metal,” the woman who thought she was a dragon rattled off. Professor Toadweather opened her mouth, blinked, then nodded.

  “Yes, exactly right! There are elemental planes of just about anything: shadows, light, blades, smoke, and more… but many of them wind up falling in with one of those. Well done! With summon lesser elemental, you can summon a lesser being from any one of those planes, narrow it down to a particular plane if you happen to know of it, or summon a specific being if you know them. The last is true of all summoning spells, though, you can always request a re-summon. They just might not agree. Or maybe they will, and will use it to try and flay your skin from your bones and boil your eyes!”

  She started giggling again, and then began drawing the spells out on the board.

  “We’ll begin our in depth study of the parts of the spell now, and I expect a paper on all four by the end of the next month. Now, if you’ll turn your attention here…”

  We spent the rest of the class going over the spells, but after class I walked over to the professor and gestured to the dust she’d left on the floor. She got slightly pink at that and coughed.

  “Oh dear, I’ll clean it up. I do apologize, we shed after we’ve had an especially energetic time. I’m not normally one for parties, but I happened to–”

  “Oh, no,” I said, cutting her off because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. “Can I take it?”

  “What?” she asked, then her eyes widened. “Ahhh, you’re using the flyte imbuement ritual, aren’t you?”

  I didn’t know what that was, but I knew I’d be learning the flyte spell later in applied magecraft, so I just nodded. She tilted her head one way, then the other, before nodding.

  “Fine, but once you’ve used it, I want you to write a report on what you learned about the structure of the flyte spell.”

  “Deal,” I agreed. Professor Toadweather buzzed her wings several times, knocking loose all her spare scales, then patted me on the head.

  “Good lad.”

  There was a slight warping then as she and her toad vanished, leaving me alone in the ballroom… until a broom and dustpan fell out of the air to smack me on the head.

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