"Well," Henry said, taking a sip of what looked like a cup of coffee, but smelled like something else that I couldn't place. "That was a rather dramatic exit."

I let out a sigh of relief as I dismissed my summoned fox, Seren climbed back up on my shoulder, and my friends slumped into the grass. I fished around in my locker, then pulled out the gelid crystal, holding it up in the air. Salem did the same after a few long moments, though he pulled out the other ten. The Erudite flicked a finger and the ten lifted up into the air and vanished.

"Well done. There were a few things you could have done, but frankly, the largest mistake you made was when your heavy hitter was out of power, and you decided to press on anyways. Money is great, and in this specific situation, it wasn't a bad call. You had a retreat. But if I'd established a portal? Or if you'd had to go unnoticed, or else risk setting off an international incident? You would have failed utterly."

We all nodded our understanding, and the Erudite spent a while longer with us, outlining other plans we might have gone with, before he finally relented and offered to purchase the gelid crystal for eight and a half thousand silver, in service to the school. After divvying up the money, the Erudite informed us we had passed, and then left.

"I wish he'd said a little more than that we passed," I grumbled. "Passed could be an A or a C and I've got no way to know."

"I think the Erudite is simply like that," Jackson observed. "I'm sorry I was unable to harvest the snake skin."

"It's fine," I said, waving a hand dismissively. "Maybe another time."

We laid in the grass and chatted, but eventually Yushin peeled off to go cultivate more poisons, and Jackson left for his church's soup kitchen. Salem snuggled closer to me, and we looked up, enjoying the stars until we both fell asleep.

The following morning, I didn't have class for once, nor did I have work. With the midterms finally wrapped up, my brain returned to wandering and thinking about Yushin. I wanted to help her, but there wasn't really all that much I could do. I could disrupt the ritual if it looked like she was going to be possessed, sure, but that was pretty much it. I was working on a sealing spell that might be able to help, and I was manufacturing four or so spellglyphs with my blood each week, but neither of those were guaranteed to actually do anything.

After all, I was pitting my power against a god's.

I knew from professor Toadweather's class and the study of planar theory that stopping a god wasn't quite as impossible as it sounded. Gods were nearly infinitely powerful within their realm, but their ability to influence any realm outside of it was much more sharply limited by a mix of the creed that they established when they ascended, certain rules laid down by Magyk, and relativistic faith concentrations in each world. That was the entire reason they had priests and proxies, rather than simply working divine miracles on their own whenever they wanted. There were times these barriers were thinned, like during solstices and equinoxes, but thinned was far from eliminated.

It was rather sad, in its way, and it made me consider what the Erudite, and to a lesser extent Charm and Fable, had said about the process of gathering enough power to tap into faith and forge a new realm. The Erudite had flat out told me that he'd chosen to cut off the opportunity to become a god and decided to remain in the mortal world. When I reframed the idea of godhood as being a permanent prison, a world where you had unlimited power but were trapped? I could see why.

I was less certain about my employers, but I suspected both of them knew a lot more about the processes of forming a divine realm than they let on. The shop's defenses were far beyond my ability to understand, but they were intense, and both Charm and Fable wielded a mix of powers in a way I didn't understand. I wasn't sure either of them had hit the threshold where they could ascend and become a deity, but they definitely had more secrets than magical component shop owners really ought to have.

Regardless of what each person's take on godhood was, I didn't need my curse to out-muscle a god. That would be downright impossible for me. Three hundred years from now, maybe I could pull off something of the sort, but as I was now? It would be like tossing a bucket of water into a volcano, hoping to stop it from going off. But if I put him in a position where the limitations of divine power were in play, then he'd be blocked by Magyk herself. I just needed to find a way that I could do that.

And the only way I could do that…

"We have to do a deep dive into the library over winter break," I told Jackson and Salem that evening. Yushin wasn't there, busy cultivating in a pool of horrifyingly deadly poisons, which was why I'd felt safe to bring it up.

"Why?" Jackson asked.

"The library can produce any text, supposedly. We know it produced an ancient, probably lost, grimoire containing information that I needed for guiding my magical growth" I said. "It can produce the missives that Yushin's clan elders have had with the Traitor Wyrm. That might let us confirm or deny what they're saying about a summoning. Perhaps just as importantly, my curses draw power from specificity and infractions. If I can use the exact divine ritual that the god gave them in my designs, and draw upon the fact that it's an act of betrayal, I can leverage dozens of times more power."

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"Dozens?" Jackson asked.

"Dozens. That might actually be a lowball if I can work with samples of Yushin's chi and bloodline. I've never had the chance to write a sealing spell as specific as this before, so its efficiency should be off the charts."

"That's great, an' I hope ya' can. But it's assumin' the ritual's written down a' all," Salem pointed out. "If I were 'im, I wouldn't wanna leave a written record of any of it."

"Yushin said that she had seen it, and that was why she was certain that it wouldn't take her over to create an avatar, despite all evidence to the contrary," Jackson said. "But when I asked to see the record, she told me that it had been destroyed when she was sixteen, as the nascent immortal who had shown her didn't want a record laying around."

I paused as I considered that, and felt incredibly stupid. Not that the record had been destroyed – I had considered it as a possibility. No, I felt stupid because I hadn't even considered the idea of just asking Yushin to see the ritual. I'd shouldered all of the responsibility onto myself. That was foolish, and more than that, it was dangerous.

"I see," I said, then sighed. "I still think that it's a good idea. Even if the library can only produce a pile of ash for us, it's worth doing."

"I agree," Salem said. "The library is a spooky artifac' that migh' be able ta' take artifacts outa time. It's from the Age a' the Wilds, aye? It oughta be able ta' do jus' about anythin."

"I don't know about anything, but there's definitely a chance," Jackson agreed. "There's no evidence it's actually stealing items from across the world. It might be constantly copying down all written information into some sort of memory spell, then reproducing it."

"We're in agreement then. When do we want to go?"

"Now. I want to enjoy the solstice celebrations, and spend time relaxing," Jackson said firmly. "The sooner we start, the sooner it ends."

"Fine," I said, then twitched my ring, opening the portal to the coven's pathways within my room. "Come with me."

Leading Jackson and Salem through the portals was strange. I walked in with Salem just fine, but Jackson ran headfirst into a wall, despite there not being one there. I let go of Salem's hand, and he vanished, teleported out of the strange demiplane woven into the school by some force.

That set off a brief round of experimentation, as I brought Salem to the library reading room, then released him. Nothing happened. The same thing occurred when I brought Jackson through. When I brought them halfway down the pathway back, then let go, they were teleported back to the reading room. It seemed like the ring needed me to be touching the visitors the entire time they were in the space, but didn't inherently need them exit through the same spot they entered, which I felt was a bit strange.

With the experimentation done, our group set out into the library, where we immediately stopped again. Four books were laying on the old, battered and bloodstained wooden table. Knowing that the library could make books vanish from the table if they weren't taken quickly, I burnt a touch of my bloodline and shot forward, scooping up the four books and leaping back to Salem and Jackson. I let out a yelp as one of the books snapped down on my arm, drawing blood, and Jackson's wand shot out. A torrent of arcane missiles, rapid enough that it looked more like a beam of force than lone spikes of it, slammed into the mimic book. It squealed and erupted into paper and ink, as well as a half-dozen shadow creatures.

This time, I was less caught off guard, snapping my wand up and casting abjure shadows. Light burst from the tip of my wand, and the shadow beings evaporated into fading bits of nothingness, leaving me standing there with a dripping series of slashes on my arm, and three free spell books.

I supposed I shouldn't be shocked at the three tomes – I hadn't had a chance to delve into the library much this year, since I'd been busy working on so many classes. I knew that Jackson and Salem had a few times, but they hadn't gotten too deep. In effect, we had all been wracking up whatever criteria the library used to judge people, and were now cashing in on that debt.

"Effervesce, I come before you today seeking your healing touch," Jackson intoned gently as he stepped forward, placing a hand on my cut. For an instant, I could swear that I could actually feel the divine energy coursing through him, perhaps a strange leftover of the connection that I had once had to Effervesce, before my wound was healed.

"Let's get back to the readin' room an' see what we got before we go any deeper," Salem advised, taking my hand and squeezing tightly. I agreed, and we beat a rapid retreat, killing a strange one-eyed pink slime as we did.

Once we were safely within, I laid the books out, and nodded. It had been too much to hope that we'd get lucky, and find the correspondence between the Traitor Wyrm and the Shé family. Still, the books we had actually gotten were quite useful, and not just to any one member of our group.

The first book was written in a script that looked about four hundred years out of date, but from what I could tell of the title, was called A Primer on Wizardry and Exotic Rituals: Affinity and Ancient, Demonic and Divine, Polyphony and Psionic. If it was really as expansive as the overblown title suggested, then it might hold some insights into Yushin's ritual, but it may also help Salem with merging his psychic knots and his spellcraft, as well as help me design a better ritual for use with the bloodflame brazier. It might even help Jackson improve the synergy between his soulfire boon and his fire affinity, if he could design an affinity ritual to use it.

The second book was a bit less dramatic, and certainly less old, but it looked just as useful, at least in my opinion. Delver's Guide to Advanced Combat Shaping contained a variety of ether manipulation techniques that were specifically designed for combat. They weren't the kind of thing that were going to immediately present a massive boost to our combat potential, but they would help us learn to use less ether for greater effect with just about any offensive spell. Seeing as even Salem used offensive psychic attacks, it felt very valuable to me.

The final book was a spellbook, and a fairly large one at that. It was called A Guide To the Elements, and it contained first, second, third, and fourth circle spells for fire, water, earth, and air. Salem happily took the air spells, and Jackson already knew all of the fire spells, but we let him copy them anyways to increase their ether efficiency. He rounded out with the earth spells, and I was content to take the water spells: water whip, conjure wave, water wall, and dessicate. That last one sounded especially nasty if I paired it with a dehydration curse, though being a fourth circle spell, it would be expensive to cast.

With our bounty of new spells copied into our grimoires, I made a quick trip back to my room to store them, then as one, we marched into the library.

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