***

  Today during our joint session after a brief training, Calypso was particularly serious. He spent several hours ‘probing’ my aura, periodically stopping to make notes in his records. For his notes, he’d prepared a new thick notebook, which he’d completely filled with graphs I couldn’t make sense of.

  “What are you trying to do?”

  “I’m working out a formula for an official spell that could help solve your imbalance problem. Or rather, I’m trying to work it out for the umpteenth time. But there are a couple of things that aren’t working, I’m missing something, and I can’t figure out what exactly…”

  “I’ve never understood how mages come up with new spells,” I sighed, looking at the intimidating jumble of numbers, arrows, runes, and notes in tiny handwriting.

  Actually, creating spells is a separate branch of magical study that only a very small percentage of mages can master. Some mages have a gift that allows them to sense energy fluctuations keenly and understand which combination of actions and sounds needs to be put together to produce a specific magical output. I didn’t understand any of it. I’d tried once to get into it, but quickly realized it wasn’t my thing at all. I’m good at combat spells, but inventing new ones — that’s definitely not for me. I have no idea where to even begin.

  But Calypso was truly a jack of all trades when it came to magical knowledge, and this area came easily to him too. Which I, I won’t lie, watched with the wild admiration of someone who’s incredibly far from such intellectual capabilities. To me, it was like technical inventions, which I understood nothing about.

  Calypso smirked.

  “For me, it’s just another interesting puzzle. I love working out formulas for new spells, but with your individual formula I’ve hit a wall. I think I understand what needs to be done… In the big picture. But I can’t seem to get that last crucial piece right…”

  Calypso sighed, leaning back tiredly in his chair and absently surveying the pile of papers he’d surrounded himself with on the long table in the common work room where we were currently holed up.

  “It’s annoying that there’s no one to even consult about this, of course… Oh, who’s that over there?” Calypso perked up, spotting someone at the entrance to the hall.

  “Is that Agatha? Agatha! Hey, Agatha, wait!” he waved her over and explained to me:

  “I’ve been wanting to catch her for a while, but she’s so rarely at Armarillis these days, that it’s practically a once-a-year event. Hi, Agatha! Can you spare us a couple of minutes?”

  Agatha di Vern-Rodinger was Dayon and Delson’s mother, a princess from northern Lakor, the realm of eternal snow and ice. A powerful dark mage with a demonic nature, she was a greater water demon in her true form. In her human form, she was a lovely woman with blonde hair and expressive blue eyes.

  She spent most of her time in her element — in the sea between Lakor and Tyrol — and also sailed the ocean aboard a ship with her husband Drake di Vern. Agatha rarely appeared at Armarillis; her area of responsibility was that very sea where she lived. So her appearance at the academy really was a rare event.

  “Eric asked me to stop by about something,” Agatha explained in response to my question about what brought her to the academy.

  “It turned out to be a small matter, we resolved it quickly. But I lingered a bit, it’s been so long since I was at the academy. Walking the halls, chatting with colleagues, getting nostalgic…”

  Agatha broke into a dreamy smile.

  She sat down next to me at our table, briefly shared the latest news from Lakor, and then Calypso got straight to business.

  “You know, every time you show up at Armarillis, I look at you and I’m amazed at how beautifully balanced your dark magic is,” he said, scanning Agatha with that special magical gaze that reads auras.

  “You’re a very dark mage by nature, with a greater water demon essence. By all rights, you should be periodically getting surges of darkness. Not as badly as Lori, but at least sometimes. But you give the impression of a very stable mage…”

  “Yeah, can’t complain,” Agatha smirked, propping her cheek on her hand and squinting at Calypso.

  “Your stabilization is amazing… Who’s the master who helped you unlock your dark essence? You didn’t reach this level on your own, did you?”

  “Not without a conduit’s help, no,” Agatha smirked, her smile growing even more sly.

  “Can you introduce me to him?” Calypso leaned forward, bracing himself on the table and looking at Agatha hopefully.

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  “I’d like to ask him a couple of questions, maybe he could help…”

  “Some other time I’ll definitely introduce you,” Agatha smiled brilliantly.

  “But right now, unfortunately, that’s not possible.”

  “Why?” Calypso’s face fell immediately.

  “Well… He’s very far away…”

  “If needed, I can teleport anywhere to see him myself.”

  “It’s a different kind of ‘far,’” Agatha smiled, carefully choosing every word.

  “He’s… well hidden, let’s say so. And I’ve lost contact with him. He helped me and we went our separate ways. It had to be that way.”

  “Can you at least tell me his name? Maybe I can reach out to him myself, find a way. I just need to ask a couple of questions…”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t tell you who helped me stabilize my dark magic or how,” Agatha shook her head.

  “I gave that man an oath of secrecy. The Zetvikh Oath. You know it? Exactly. He was very worried I might let something slip.”

  “What a pain in the ass this master of yours is,” Calypso grumbled, crossing his arms over his chest in displeasure.

  “Could’ve at least shared his knowledge with others…”

  He snorted in disappointment and stared longingly at his scribbled notes.

  “Damn… And I was so hoping I could get at least some information out of you…”

  Agatha gave Calypso a strange look, biting her lower lip.

  “What’s the problem exactly? Let me take a look at what you’re doing. I know a thing or two about dark magic myself, maybe I can give you a hint.”

  “I’m developing a complex ritual sequence, but I’m stuck at one point,” Calypso tapped his pencil on the open notebook and pushed it closer to Agatha.

  “Right here.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Agatha hummed with an enigmatic smile, examining the scribbled notebook.” A ritual for extracting darkness from a mage outward?”

  “Oh, you understand this? Yeah. Extracting it into something… Into someone… Into an object, a person, or something else… Even into a familiar like yours,” Calypso waved at the small familiar in the form of a cute black octopus that had been hovering around Agatha the whole time.

  “But I can’t make the ends meet. Or rather, one end doesn’t meet. This one,” Calypso circled a rune he’d drawn earlier with a red pencil.

  “According to my calculations, to extract darkness from Lori or anyone else, I need some strong dark emotion to activate the final rune, which needs to be drawn on myself somehow… With ink or better yet carved directly with a ritual knife I haven’t decided yet… But the problem isn’t with those, it’s with the emotion. I’ve been trying different ones, and the formula just won’t work… Something’s wrong with the energy combination…”

  “Well, judging by your scribbles, you haven’t tried everything,” Agatha noted, flipping through Calypso’s notebook and studying with curiosity everything he’d written and crossed out earlier.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t see you trying to weave the emotion of joy into the formula, for instance.”

  “Joy?” Calypso said doubtfully.

  “How could joy possibly fit into this sequence? No, that definitely won’t work.”

  “Have you tried?” Agatha asked.

  “No, but…”

  “Then why are you so sure?” Agatha smirked.

  “Try it first before claiming that. If it doesn’t work well, it’ll just be another failed attempt. But what if it works?”

  “Joy… But it doesn’t correlate with dark matter at all,” Calypso sighed with a frown, a crease appearing on his forehead.

  “Dark matter is dark emotions. Fear, anger, and so on… Those are what I have here in the first part of the ritual.”

  “Well, joy can be different too. Sometimes you can find joy watching your enemy’s corpse float by,” Agatha smiled darkly.

  I snorted with laughter, and Calypso nodded knowingly, frowned even harder, and started writing something very quickly. I understood nothing about his formulas — my brain was very far from complex mathematical calculations of aura’s digital code and its resonance with spells’ digital code.

  For several minutes he continued scribbling in silence, while Agatha and I chatted about this and that, exchanging news. Agatha told us about the discovery of new lands in the Zaylon Ocean and how she was thinking of sending Delson or Dayon there to explore the islands and meet the locals. And I shared my progress; Agatha was very happy and hopeful that a solution to my magical imbalance problem would be found soon.

  “All kinds of difficulties happen, especially for dark mages,” she said, watching her black octopus familiar with a thoughtful smile. It had settled into Calypso’s chair and was now curiously tugging at the ends of his long white hair with its tentacles.

  “But you know, all difficulties can be solved. Even when it seems like there’s no way out… So everything will be fine for you, Lora. I’m sure of it.”

  “I wish I had your confidence,” I sighed, also propping my cheek on my hand and tapping a pencil thoughtfully against the wooden tabletop.

  “Brilliant!!” Calypso suddenly exclaimed out of nowhere, so unexpectedly and sharply that Agatha and I actually jumped.

  “It works… It all works! Joy… Damn, joy! I never would have thought to weave it into this sequence, I assumed it was wrong from the start, but this emotion and its corresponding rune fits perfectly, a complete match in digital and energy code… How did you even think of this?”

  “Oh, you know… A little sweetheart whispered it to me once,” Agatha smiled.

  “This is brilliant!..”

  “Ye-e-es, sometimes I’m amazed by my own brilliance too,” Agatha said thoughtfully.

  Calypso was literally glowing with excitement — you know, that wild excitement of a mad scientist who’s finally solved some incredibly complex problem.

  “All that’s left is to choose the right frequency for the spell, and then we can start trying it out,” Calypso said in an extremely satisfied voice, quickly finishing something in tiny handwriting on the last clean page.

  “Thank you, Agatha! I was right that you could help me with something, my instincts didn’t fail me…”

  “Always at your service,” Agatha made a sort of mocking curtsy, then said goodbye to us and hurried off to her other business.