Personal Illusion Charm
Whether the caster intends to bind the illusion to a physical totem or to cast the spell directly with each use, the first working of a personal illusion charm must be branded by ritual with the following items: dridnet hair, bundled darkfire twigs, and a chicken’s egg laid two days before.
Cheyenne pulled away from the page and groaned. Maybe R’mahr and Yadje would bump their weekly shopping to Monday.
Shaking her head, she flipped quickly through the other pages, scanning the first paragraphs for the list of ingredients. She’d gone through the first half of Mattie’s spell collection before she found just one which didn’t need some weird magical ingredient she couldn’t even pronounce. Her eyes widened as she looked back at the title of the spell.
Phasing? How does that not need something?
The ability to move one’s corporeal form through objects on the physical plane requires a working knowledge of spells typically possessed by the advanced beginner.’
Cheyenne snorted. “Yeah, I’ll try this one.”
Taking out the sheet of paper with the phasing spell, she stood and walked into the hall outside her bedroom. She closed the door and stared down at the instructions in her hand, clarified by convenient diagrams of bodiless hands and bent fingers making a series of shapes one right after the other. With arrows and everything.
Cheyenne copied the first few gestures with her right hand, then grunted in frustration when she realized this was a two-handed spell. Dropping to her knees, she laid the paper on the carpet in front of her and started over. Got moves one and two. Are those both the left hand? She squinted at the diagram, shook her head, and kept going. When she finished the final gesture in the epic game of finger-Twister, a spark of pale silver light bloomed around her hands. The halfling tried to sound out the foreign words of the spell that had to be O’gúleesh, stumbling a little over a ridiculously long word in the middle. The silver light flared again around her hands, and she brought both palms slowly toward the door.
Time to phase through shit.
A short tingle flared through her hands when she pressed them against her bedroom door, and then she applied more pressure. When nothing happened, she closed her eyes and tried to focus. Just lean into it…
She felt something give, then a loud snap sounded in the hallway. Cheyenne opened her eyes and sat back on her heels, dropping both hands to her thighs. “I wanted to go through the door, not…” The halfling tossed a hand at the massive splinters jutting out of the crack that ran almost all the way to the ceiling. “Not through it.”
The sheet with directions for a useless phasing spell crumpled in her hand when she snatched it off the carpet. She stopped halfway back to her desk and tried to smooth out the paper with a sigh. Maybe not advanced beginner. I’ll find something else.
Two hours later, the drow halfling had gone through all the spells she could find in Mattie’s starter collection that didn’t require magical ingredients. She dropped into her office chair and slapped the last sheet of paper down on her desk. “She should’ve named these spells Charred Carpet, Stink Bomb, and Pissed-Off Drow.”
That made her laugh, but only for a second as she took inventory of the damage to her apartment from so many backfired spells. With a sigh, she shoved all the pages together in something like their original order and dropped them into the bottom drawer of her desk. The drawer slammed shut with a bang, and the drow halfling shook her head vigorously. The chains dangling around her wrists jingled when she shook her hands out. Maybe I’m just not a spell-casting halfling. Maybe I need to figure out my magic first.
She drew her hands down both sides of her face and let out a little groan. Then she hopped out of her chair and headed for her bedroom again. The door stuck a little in its frame, and she had to shove it open. Once she’d reassured herself the splintered wood wasn’t going to fall apart right in front of her, she went to the foot of her bed and scowled at the copper legacy box lying on her comforter.
“This was what you wanted all along, wasn’t it?”
The metal trinket didn’t offer a reply.
“Fine. We’ll try it your way.” Cheyenne snatched the puzzle box off the bed and turned it over in her hands. The metal stayed innocuously cool, and no light burst out through the hair-thin runes etched into the sides. Rolling her eyes, the halfling stormed back out of her bedroom and stopped to drop the legacy box into her backpack.
Corian better know as much as he thought he did.
The drow halfling pulled her battered Ford Focus to the curb in front of the address Corian had given her before they’d met in person. Unbuckling her seatbelt, she shut off the engine and grabbed her backpack from the passenger seat. This thing better not start a disco light show before I get to the basement.
She locked up and took a quick glance up and down the street. Nothing moved in the darkness punctured by the dim yellow streetlamps, and the two rental houses only had one or two lights on inside. Frowning up at the top floors, Cheyenne headed toward the far-left side of Corian’s building, waiting to hear a dozen tires rolling over the asphalt before more idiots wearing bull’s-head pendants stepped out of their cars for round two. That sound never came.
The cement stairs were just as dank and creepy as they had been two nights ago, but she moved swiftly down them anyway and stopped to knock on the metal door with the giant D at the top in peeling black paint. The
