With the rest of the assignments for the semester locked in, time started to move at a rapid pace. I spent a lot of my free time studying the massive number of spells that I needed to learn, working at Charm and Fable, or with Salem, but I made a time to attend professor Caeruleum's office hours several times. Their skills and affinity was incredibly useful in working on sealing magic, but what really shocked me was a comment they made.

"Frankly, even simple sealing curses have as much complexity as some fifth circle spells," they said as they helped me re-draw the lines channeling ether. "I suspect a complex one could easily reach the same levels of complexity as a sixth or seventh. Maybe more…"

That comment made it quite a nice little ego boost when I finally managed to cast a sealing spell. It wasn't much, merely sealing away the power of sight from professor Caeruleum. The spell had emptied out my ether pool to cast, but I wasn't too concerned about that, though. A huge amount of the spell's power was derived from slights and transgressions that almost reminded me of faerie magic, and professor Caeruleum wasn't an enemy. If anything, I owed them a lot. In an actual use, when someone had done something thematically related to vision against me, it would be far cheaper to cast.

Admittedly, if all I wanted to do was blind someone, there were necromancy spells that would do the trick for a static ether cost and a much lower complexity, but that wasn't really the point. The point was that it was the first step in a highly versatile application of my affinity.

Of course, my classwork and affinity weren't the only things I worked on. In between working on everything on my endless-feeling list of tasks, I managed to work on the naiad's kiss ritual, crushing up the pearls, mixing it with collected seawater, and painting on the sigils. Salem did the same, and before we knew it, we had received the kiss on the forehead from Stream.

Despite the negotiation that it had required, the long time I'd held onto the ritual, and the fairly expensive components, the actual completion was fairly anti-climatic. The ritual was long, but not especially difficult, and when Stream pecked me on the forehead, I only felt a moment of unnatural moistness sweep over me. An instant later, a construct formed on the edge of my ether pool, similar to the construct for the buckler. With it finished, and as Stream slipped back into the water, I looked at Salem and gestured to the pool.

"Care to join me? There's some sort of trial or test at the bottom. We'll have to pass through the attempts of the naiads to drown us, and then make our way down. With the ritual complete, though…"

"Do ya' think the component'll be worth it?" Salem asked curiously. "M' not a water mage, an' neither are you."

"True, but I like water. I feel like I have an affinity for it, even if it's not my actual affinity."

"Fair… Alright, I'll do it, but next semester, we've gotta dive the fifth circle a' the crystal caverns."

"Deal," I agreed. Salem and I quickly stripped down to our smallclothes, put our stuff into our lockers, and cast orbs of air over our heads before diving into the water. The orbs likely would wind up getting broken by the naiad's attempts to drown us, but there was no sense in not trying them.

As we began swimming down, the formless shapes in the water started to solidify, and I saw the true form of the naiads. They were almost exactly the same shade and transparency as the water around them, making them hard to look at, but what I could see was far less of a pretty, nude woman of roughly my age, and far more in line with a wide-mouthed monster with teeth like needles filling their mouths. As we swam, they reached out, and waves of water crashed into our heads, popping the orbs of air. An instant later, one of them was pushing water in my lungs, trying to drown me.

I sent a small pulse of ether into the new construct in my ether pool, and my body shifted. The water rushing into my lungs no longer seemed to be a problem so much as an oddity. The sensation wasn't exactly comfortable, but it wasn't painful either. As I breathed out, the water rushed back out, before sliding in again as I breathed in. I glanced over at Salem, who gave me a thumbs up.

Then a large creature swam up from the depths of the pool. It looked almost like a shark, but it was much leaner, and its body seemed to be made entirely of crackling sheets of ice that were nevertheless metallic, like someone had mixed steel with water, then frozen it. As soon as it appeared, it opened its mouth, and a pair of teeth made of the same strange material ripped out, firing at Salem and I. Salem slashed his wand and said a single quick syllable, conjuring a shield in front of him, while I spun my buckler to take the hit and raised my own wand.

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I cast aquatic torrent, compressing the attack into as focused of a blast as I could while also feeding it a few licks of dragonfire. It was a risk to use the spell underwater, since I didn't know how the spell would work. A jet of water underwater might be more powerful, since the conjuration part of the spell didn't need to work as hard, but it also might be less potent, as the water just mingled with the rest of the water.

The spell hammered into the head of the shark and a liquid gray metal spurted from its nose even as I was sent flying backwards and crashed against the walls of the pool. I caught myself a moment later as Salem shot arcane missiles at the creature, and had an instant to think. The spell clearly worked well underwater, but how could I deal with the blowback? Well, I was already against the wall. I slammed my foot against the earth and thrust my wand forward, sending another line of super-pressurized water against the gills of the creature. An instant later, I was spinning my wand and summoning a pair of water elementals.

"Attack the shark-thing," I said in the bloodline tongue of water to one of them, before turning to the other and pointing to Salem. "Bring him to me."

I didn't know if it was due to my lungs being filled with water, some side effect of the naiad's kiss ritual, or just luck, but the bloodline tongue came out far smoother and quicker than it ever had when I'd been on dry land.

What I did know, however, was that in their native element, water elementals were far more powerful, quick, and effective than they were on land. Within moments, Salem was next to me, and we were all raining spells down on the shark monster, even as I cast a shield from arrows spell to defend us from the shark's projectile-like teeth.

With a solid method of both attack and defense, it didn't take us long to banish the shark back to the elemental plane of water or ice or wherever it had come from, and I instructed the water elementals to help pull us deeper.

Rather than narrow, as I felt a pond that looked shallow from the surface ought to, the pool only continued to widen as we kept making our way down, until we were practically in a small lake. I chalked it up to more space-bending magic of the school, but it certainly made me wary. There was something absolutely uncanny about looking over a seemingly-endlessly deep abyss of water that grew darker and darker, even when you knew you had the tools to deal with it.

Several more monsters attacked us as we continued down. Some were simpler than the shark, including a water elemental, which I was actually able to convince to just let us pass, but most were much more dangerous. After a solid thirty minutes of swimming down, we encountered a massive sea-anemone monster that seemed to fill the entire mouth of the lake down. Its tendrils shot at us, and I barely had time to shout for the water elementals to bring us out of the way.

Salem and I were fine, but the tendril brushed one of the elementals, and in an instant, it was sent back to its home plane. I slashed and frantically summoned more of the lesser water elementals while conjuring shields. The vibrant, toxic green of Salem's ether flickered as he also conjured shields.

Then an anemone tendril crashed through another of his shields, and I pivoted mine to help shed the blow. It was enough, but barely, and I was forced to burn dragonfire to empower my kicks and swim out of the way of one headed for me. Another speared down, having somehow come at me from above, and I barely had an instant to conjure a dragonfire infused shield and mass energy barrier over Salem, several of my elementals, and me. It was enough, but barely. Already, there were more tendrils coming for me.

"Buy me thirty seconds!" Salem called. I nodded and focused, then drew out my wand and cast one of my newest spells. It was a powerful spell, but not one that I had much experience with, and the cost if I failed…

I put it aside as I cast haste. Immediately, the world around me seemed to slow, as if I was drawing on my dragonfire. When I actually did draw heavily on my fire, kicking through the water, I rocketed down with the force of a trebuchet stone. I frantically pulled up in time to prevent me from slamming into the creature's body, but it wouldn't be enough.

Instead, I cast aquatic torrent. The spell slammed into the somewhat jelly-like substance of the creature, and I was thrown upward. Around me, vortexes of magic from my elementals spun, hammering into the monster, and I kicked up, then aimed my wand down and cast a swarm of arcane missiles at the creature.

Then I was off again. Tendrils slammed through spaces where I had been mere moments before, but I was always faster. Up, left, down, down, right, up, left, right, on and on the fight went. With my fire and haste spells, I was even leaving the water elementals in my dust.

It couldn't last. Haste was a taxing spell, and I'd been throwing around a lot of magic. I was forced to use Maugrim's surge to replenish my ether, just to keep going a little longer. I glanced at Salem, who held up a hand with five fingers.

Five seconds left. I squeezed out the last of my dragonfire to kick off from the wall and rush through the water, dodging and rolling. I spun, threw up a shield, ducked, and swam down. I pushed to the side, but my ether was bottoming out quickly.

Just as I was debating the wisdom of attempting a surge for a second time, Salem shouted a word, and the creature froze. A moment later, its tendrils shifted, moving in a pattern that I hadn't seen before, and revealing a cavern in the walls of the massive underwater complex. The revealed area was a strange one, and it took me a second to realize that the membrane around it was a pocket of air inside the cavern.

Salem swam over to me, before he grinned, though he was still panting with effort.

"It's na' very smart, but it's got mini-brains in all a' the tendrils, like an' octopus. Just had'ta figure out how to hit all a' them at once," he explained, before gesturing to the cave. "Care ta' get our prize?"

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