The Failing Light Prequel

With a functional way to contain and direct castings discovered, Turner and the master began their research into what kind of spell to use in the battle against time leaving to me the job of refining the design and performing minor experiments with it to learn as much as I could about the effect the crystals.

In many ways these were the brightest moments of my life. We had achieved so much together: we had created something completely new and unknown to the rest of the world, and there was still so much more we could learn from it. I spent many happy days tinkering with the design, making storm clouds and sunsets appear within the cube, and even working on a few side projects using fragments of the crystals we had brought back.

We eventually reconvened in the arena to perform the first true test of the device with a spell that could theoretically cause a small gap in the flow of time. As the master explained it, the casting created a bubble in reality that held everything within it exactly as it was, and when 'popped' by the counter-casting that occurred at the same instant it should create a tiny gap in reality and snap the present as we observe it into some other present. It didn't sound like a very safe experiment to me, but I had come to trust Turner and certainly the master's judgment.

That said, neither of them could venture even a cautious prediction as to the what the spell actually did; it was one thing to determine how to cast a spell through theory, but as it was a two part spell it could not be performed by any unicorn to observe the results... Only through the holding ability of the crystals could the casting be completed and unleashed.

We decided the best approach was to place a candle within the cage and allow it to burn half way down before releasing the spell, the idea being that if it worked we would have a way to tell how much of a time gap had been created by observing how much of the candle returned or vanished. Without any idea how much of an effect the casting would have at any strength, the master spent several days in contemplation before preparing for the first test. To the uninitiated it may seem like our caution was exaggerated, but understand that an experiment like this could go horribly wrong and have completely unknown consequences... Caution was the rule we planned to live by.

As luck would have it, the first experiment went as well as could be hoped for; when the crystal released the master's spell the candle suddenly sprang back into existence, although interestingly it was no longer lit. While the master and I sighed with relief and started recording notes and taking measurements, Turner stared at the candle in baffled silence.

After several long minutes he said dully that what we had seen here didn't make sense. While he had contributed to the theory that drove the event and knew it as well and any of us, he observed that all the melted wax from the original candle had remained in place where it had fallen outside the cage. About 1/3 of the candle had been returned and was now standing tall where the stub had been, but the wax that had melted from the original candle had remained in place on the bench. This caught the master off guard and sent him into deep contemplation.

I ventured the observation that the wax was outside the cage and therefore it was not affected by the casting, and to this Turner voiced the obvious question: if the pool of wax was from the candle we had seen melt, and that candle was no longer entirely melted, where had the wax that now made up the candle in the cage come from?

Over the next couple weeks we performed the experiment several times going both forwards and backwards, always with the same results; if the pool of wax was outside the cage the candle simply snapped back into existence. If the wax was allowed to pool within the cage however, it was reduced when the candle was reformed, as was to be expected, but this only made the our observations even more confused... It seemed we had succeeded in creating a way to interrupt the flow of time, but in a curiously localized fashion which utterly broke the laws of physics that Turner held so dear. No matter how he approached the problem, it remained that the effects of the castings had no influence outside the area upon which they were cast, regardless of the effect the object inside the cage had on the outside world.

This may not seem like a particularly significant observation given what we had accomplished, but consider what would happen if Turner or I were to crawl within the cage for a period of time, and the machine was triggered after we had removed ourselves from it. Would we be confronted with another us, drawn into existence from nothing? What would happen if you met yourself? What would happen if it was switched on after the original had ceased to exist? Such problems occupied the mind of the master and perhaps even that of Turner for a long time as they tried to reason it out. As for myself, I was less troubled by such matters and glad for the quiet that settled about the tree as I worked on several smaller projects to pass the time.

One of them that turned out to be particularly useful was a small pendant that could increase the strength of the wearers spells. As you may remember, I mentioned a scroll discussing transformational magic earlier; by this time I had read it enough times to recite the entire thing from memory... It was so cryptically written that it almost felt like the author wanted to hide the subject from the reader, but the information was there for those who truly understood magic and part of the document discussed ways to increase a spells strength. Among other things the scroll indicated that, hypothetically, by casting the same spell several times and timing it such that the separate castings would reach their target at the same time a caster could increase the effect of the spell without having to be a stronger practitioner. While this hadn't been useful for our initial problem of casting two spells at once, it did inspired me to research the idea in case we needed to strengthen our device at some future point.

Using a few of the crystal fragments left over from the cage I carefully crafted a small framework of silver to hold two of them, cut such that one fit slightly inside the other without being in direct contact. I then rounded off a tiny fragment and inserted it between the two in a small insulated cavity such that it could slide back and forth, always in contact with either one crystal or the other but never both. The idea was that when a spell was cast into the pendent, the two crystals would absorb it and one would immediately release it due to being in contact with the fragment, only to have it absorbed again by the other crystal which would then release it back to the first along with the casting it had absorbed originally as the fragment was pushed from one to the other by the release... With the fragment bouncing back and forth the spell was doubled and tripled and quadrupled, and so on, for as long as the spell was applied. When the spell was cut off the outer crystal would emit the casting outward and break the cycle, unleashing an exponentially more powerful rendition of the original spell. In effect, it allowed the wearer to cast a spell a hundred times, or a thousand, or more, all in the space of a heartbeat.

I built the device as an amusement, as something to pass the time while the big brains discussed our findings and tried to integrate them into their formulas and theories. The master turned out to be very impressed with the device, even venturing a few ideas of his own on how similar devices could be made and used.  I was of course happy to build anything he wished, although I fear that original amulet survived our disaster and eventually found its way into the wrong hooves... Still, it had been constructed in good faith and served us well while we had it.