Chapter 22: Isekai Life & Dragon Lore

I awoke to the soft sounds of someone snoring. I wriggled and stretched, feeling barely rested at all, and when I reached up to rub the sleep from eyes, my had encountered a gossamer curtain that felt impossibly soft.

I blinked sleepily upwards, to see that Yua had herself drifted off, with my head in her lap, in her sitting position. Her head had fallen forward at some point, and now I was surrounded by a curtain of her dark blue hair.

Her face was so close, I could feel her breath on my eyes. I swallowed, hard, and tried not to focus on my unattended morning wood as I oh so carefully shimmied out from beneath her. I didn’t realize how my heart was pounding in my chest until I struggled to rise without disturbing the sleeping dragonborn.

Once I was back on my feet, I could regain some composure.

The first thing I thought up was Yua’s position. She was still on her knees, just sleeping, with her lower back resting against the headboard of the bed and her body curved forward from there. I shook my head. That had to be hell on her back, and even if we were taking the day off from goblin hunting, she didn’t deserve to wake up aching.

As gently as I could, I took her my the shoulder and slowly tipped her forward, pulling her back straight so she didn’t feel as though she was falling. There was a brief moment of panic when, as I was setting her down, her antler caught on the sheet, but she barely stirred as I carefully unhooked the fabric.

There. She was splayed out on her front, with her feet on the pillows, but at least she wasn’t crouched over like before, and she hadn’t woken up. An overall win, I told myself.

Quietly as I could, I crept over to where Yua had put down Calliope’s saddlebags. It felt a little bit like cheating- certainly Calliope, had she been alive to do so, would object to my poking through her things like this- but I promised myself, this was ultimately in service of getting her back as soon as possible.

I found what I was looking for- the slim travel copy of the spellbook Calliope had been awarded by Hawkins back in Tresens, and cracked it open. Luckily for me it was written in ascending order of spell complexity- ie, spell level- so it was pretty easily to find what I was looking for.

I flipped through the first level magic, at first struck by Calliope’s poor luck. Of the five spells here, four of them were things we already had covered between us- The Sigil of the Burning Hands, Hex of Lotus and Willow, Eyes of the Arcane (that is, Detect Magic), and Mind of the Arcane (Read Magic). The fifth spell was unique (or at least I didn’t think Calliope had it before), “Summoning of Celestial Lanterns”, aka Dancing Lights. It was a moderately useful alternate take on the basic Light spell that sacrificed tactical utility for the ability to conjure up to four torchlike lights, lighting a wider area, being able to snuff them quickly, and so forth. It was useful, but nothing to write home about.

Then I hit upon the stuff I was seeking- the second level magics. At first it started with more niche stuff, enough so that I was somewhat bewildered at exactly what kind of mage Hawkins had working for him. “Grasp the Fog of Thought”, or ESP, was certainly useful in the right situations, but of niche use. It’d be handy to have for negotiations or interrogations, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. “Shroud of Waking Dream”, or Forget, was even less useful, as the “forgetting” effect only deleted a minute of memory and you couldn’t make stuff up to fill the void, so under most circumstances you couldn’t use it with perfect stealth. It could be useful, but it required a certain amount of set-up, or the perfect opportunity. “Kazar’s Cunning Rope Trick”, or, well, Rope Trick, was a very useful travel spell that I honestly wish Calliope had let me study on the way up here from Pendelton- it let you conjure an extradimensional safe zone thirty feet up in the air, big enough for a certain amount of people to safely rest in. Then, finally, I hit gold.

“The Breath of Malediction”, more commonly known as Stinking Cloud, one of the gold-tier second-level spells. Or at least silver-tier. Affecting a twenty-foot cube, creatures within the gas had to save vs poison for me rendered completely unable to attack for up to five rounds after leaving the cloud. With a chokepoint or bottleneck, or even casting it into the middle of a mob, could render large numbers of enemies largely helpless for a long time. Using it against a crowd would be for the best, but even deploying it against a single enemy could make a hard boss fight into a breeze.

First things first, though, I had a lot of study of my own to get to. I set the smaller spellbook aside, open to the page I wanted, and dragged my larger personal spellbook out of my own bags.

After yesterday’s (this morning’s?) ordeal, I didn’t have a firm grasp on how my Armor spell protection was doing, and while the spell was never explicit on whether you could renew it while the effect was still on, it couldn’t hurt to just leave it to Corgiel’s judgment whether it was okay. So, first spell was obviously Armor, and with study tomorrow I could replace it with Burning Hands, which did too much damage to safely ignore. I just had to be more careful with how I used it.

For the next time I found myself in a position where it was tactically unsound to use fire magic, I picked Magic Missile. It’s damage was severely under par still, but I could take some comfort in the fact that since I was now third level, I got to fire two magic missiles at once, which could be useful for taking out two weak goblins at once or just dealing like sixish damage to something larger.

Finally, Sleep was my third choice. It was still far too useful to abandon, and I was still cursing myself for not memorizing it yesterday.

The next step in my spell-learning sequence today was to dismiss one of my previously memorized uses of Knock. There weren’t any locked objects in Big Dap’s house that I was comfortable opening, but luckily Knock was a bit more multipurpose that than. I drew Calliope’s dagger, and wedged the blade in the doorframe, down near the floor, careful not the damage the wood, although scracthing the paint a little was inevitable. When the door was good and stuck, I cast the spell- only once, as I might have need to open a cell or unlock a manacle in a hurry if there were slaves to rescue.

I don’t know if the it was the sound of the spell “knocking” on the door or the clatter of the dagger falling to the floor, but I heard a sleepy groan from behind me. I rubbed my face with my palm in exasperation with myself. I had totally forgotten about Yua.

When I turn around, she was scrambling back to her knees, looking like a startled animal. “M-my lord, I-I’m so very sorry,” Yua babbled in her native tongue, “I-I-I may have done something indecent.”

I gave her a perplexed look, as I sat down on the edge of the bed next to her. “Indecent? No, nothing indecent happened,” I explained, “I finally had time to really process my grief, and you comforted me with some gentle words and a song. It was very appreciated, thank you.”