Salem finished the last word of the chant on the third day, and I felt magic coalesce. Power began to burn, and for a moment, I felt a spark opening in the center of my forehead, where a third eye would have been.

Threads of mental awareness began to spin, and then began to descend, rushing down my spine and merging with my ether pool.

Ether began to rush up the same channel, and then I felt it form into a sphere around my mind, which settled into place. The threads of what I could only assume were psychic energy faded away, and I no longer felt much of anything from my third eye, but I could still distinctly feel the shell of magic that Salem and I had formed, protecting me from invasion.

I opened my eyes and looked up at him, then rose to my feet and pulled him into a hug. He let out a squawking noise, one that was almost crow or raven-like, and then hugged me back.

"Thank you," I said. "You didn't need to help me, but you did."

"S' the leas' I could do," he said, quickly letting me go and smiling awkwardly. "Dinnae wan' ya to burn up jus' fightin' his aura."

"Thank you," I repeated. "Are you sure there's nothing I can do to help you with your end of the ritual?"

"Nah," Salem said, waving his hand. "Thank ya though. Go an' work on your spells."

I did just that.

Time started ticking by, as it was wont to do, and I began to make progress. I wrote and turned in my essay for professor Toadweather on the use of her pixie dust in imbuing the flyte spell, chipped away at the slow process of learning my fourth circle spells, as well as finishing rounding out the third circle spells that I'd learned from my courses, like aquatic torrent and abjure shadows.

Salem, Jackson, Yushin and I continued our work on planning for how to take down an ember-roc, and we continued delving the library for magic. Abjure shadows was every bit the utility spell that professor Caeruleum had promised it was, and everyone in the team wound up copying down the spell for their personal use.

With our new might, we were able to consistently get deep enough to access third circle spells, and even occasionally fourth circle ones, which Jackson said was where the truly powerful obliteration spells began.

I was sure he was right, but I'd seen how well obliteration mages fared against my family. I was far more interested in the remainder of the transmutation spells I'd managed to pull out of the library's grasp.

Rubblewall was, well, a wall of rubble. It essentially grabbed whatever loose materials it could in the area and compacted them into a three foot tall wall via simple material kinesis and pressure. That required an incredible amount of ether manipulation in casting, as the spell's array was complex and tended to grab anything it could with the force.

While the amount of force it could exert to pick up rubble was quite low, only around a pound or so, more than one wizard had accidentally lost trinkets that weren't secured in place through reckless practice of the spell. Stopping it from grabbing things like loose papers was possible, but required you to actively guide parts of the spell array with ether manipulation in a method that wasn't entirely unlike tuning an energy barrier.

While the rubblewall spell wasn't exactly anything revolutionary in and of itself, it was definitely useful when it came to erecting a quick and dirty defensive wall, or even patching up a normal wall temporarily. It was also staggeringly ether efficient, at least compared to any other spell I'd seen that created something permanent.

Further, the spellbook I'd found the spell in promised that it paved the way for far more powerful and impressive spells, namely wall of stone, a fifth circle spell that was able to transmute loose dirt and ether into thick slabs of granite. I was looking forward to that.

If rubblewall was tricky to use, then animate plants was downright devilish. The spell put water to wine to shame in terms of complexity, and I was half convinced that Magyk had meant for it to be a fourth circle spell, then changed her mind at the last second and shoved the full contents into only three circles.

Despite sharing a name with animate writing implement, the spells were remarkably different. An animated writing implement was essentially using force to move the pen or chalk or quill in accordance with the caster's will. I had thought it was kind of complex for a cantrip, but it made sense.

Animate plants didn't have any sort of will link to the caster. Instead, it used ether to connect to the life force of the plant and flooded it with ether to give it a massive amount of extra life, almost like the plant had become a practitioner of life enforcement. The amount of base life the plant had could easily balloon the cost of the spell upwards: animating a small house plant would be pretty average ether cost for a third circle spell, but animating an ancient redwood tree would cost more than I could hold in my pool a half dozen times over.

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Once the life force had been enforced, it then worked to create a series of routes that allowed the plant to use that energy for movement and manipulation of its limbs in new ways. But given that it was still a plant, that wouldn't have done much if it weren't for the complex series of instructions that were encoded into the spell.

The end result was a plant that could move, attack, defend, and obey simple commands entirely on its own for the next day, after which, the magic would fade and it would return to being a normal plant.

The entire thing seemed to remind me more of the basic theory behind creating a golem than it did ordinary spellwork, and I had actually initially expected it to be an imbued spell, like dreamshield or flyte, but it wasn't. The book did mention that it could be turned permanent with the permanency spell.

That really seemed like the key that would let the spell transform from mildly useful to a truly impressive bit of magic, but unfortunately, permanency was a fifth circle spell, and well beyond my abilities. I still hadn't managed to cast a fourth circle spell yet, let alone a fifth.

Though, when it came to fourth circle spells, the library saw fit to bestow me with a copy of the fourth circle spell that professor Gemheart had suggested I learn for transmutation: animal morph.

Now, that was a truly staggering bit of spellwork. Much like with animate plants or shield vitality, it was another spell that mucked about with the life force, but it did so in a rather unique and different way.

The spell required the caster to hold onto a part from a bloodline free beast they wanted to transform into, and it then shifted the life energy of the body into the form of the beast's, while shifting the matter around. What matter wasn't used was stored away inside of Etherius, or excess matter was called in if the transformation needed to add mass.

While I could see parts of the spell that clearly altered the physical body, restructuring muscle, melting bone, and reforming tissue, there was also a great deal that was happening underneath, in the more mystical realm of things that professor Gemheart had talked about.

According to the book, the instincts of the animal whose sample was used would bleed through into the subconscious mind, allowing the caster to control the form with an ease and grace entirely their own. That effect was something of a double edged sword, however, as the instincts could potentially overwhelm the person who cast the spell, leaving them locked in an animal form for an entire hour without any sort of control over themselves.

That was a risk I wasn't especially worried about. On top of it really not being that much of a risk if you picked a safe form for your first transformation, all of my siblings, cousins, and other relatives were trained to keep our draconic instincts in check, at least to an extent. The Dreki were bloodline supremacists, true, but at the same time, they were honorable and practical – you couldn't become the richest family in the world if you burned down a city every time someone looked at you funny.

As my mother had said: allow the instincts to guide you, but not command you, for that is the way of beasts. While I was generally loath to accept her advice about most things, I thought this was a rare instance where we were in agreement.

With the new spells, theory reading, and essays, I found myself absurdly busy, but I still made sure to work on my spellglyphs, ether shaping, and bloodline shaping every day. Any one of them could be the tiny fraction of an advantage that I needed to defeat Gerhard.

That was also true of teleporting, which was why I worked tirelessly on expanding my skill and casting arcane passage, but it was still a long, complex spell. It wasn't even the only new spell I had to learn, either.

True to their word, while the rest of the class was focused on spellglyphs, Professor Caeruleum brought small vials of their blood, and I worked on holy healing. The spell was oddly reminiscent of conjuration magic in its way, as well as my other blood magic spells. It used the angelus blood to open a gateway to a divine realm, and channeled that holy power into a passive regenerative effect that lasted about a minute.

The healing it provided wasn't staggering, even compared to some of the divine boons that I'd seen Jackson use, but it was enough to heal up small cuts or bruises, and might keep me alive in the fight.

Time continued to tick down, and with only three weeks left until the end of first year final exams, I finally managed my breakthrough.

Salem, Jackson, Yushin, and I were all out on the campus greens together, having gotten lunch and brought it out to enjoy the spring atmosphere. None of us were in conversation, since we were all working on our various tasks, but it was nice to just be together. It had been entirely too long since I'd had friends.

Salem had been in the middle of working to conjure an arcane eye, Yushin was working on a robust invisibility spell, and Jackson had been in meditation, expanding his ability to weave soulfire into his affinity's flame, when it happened. I was on what felt like my thousandth attempt of arcane passage, going through the complex spell chant, sweeping my hands in the broad gestures to structure the passage into Etherius, and shaping the ether.

I was coming up on the last section, where I needed to actually punch through into the ethereal plane, which was where the spell always broke my grasp, and I basically gave up. It was in that state of not caring that I finally stopped getting in my own way. The fourth circle of the magic completed, the world tore around me, and I was cast into the cobalt blue light of my spell.

Where I fell out almost immediately.

I hadn't been expecting it, and hadn't held the spell vessel together, so I only teleported a few inches. I immediately lost my balance from the sensation of lurching through the realms, and when I regained my balance, I felt the slate in my pocket grew hot, I pulled my ID out, and sure enough, the artifact had registered my accomplishment. It seemed like it was time to turn in my uniform to the tailors for an update.

Because I was officially a fourth circle spellcaster.

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