#weird word

der Hammel = mutton

der Sprung = jump

As soon as we figure out what it means, we'll be sure to start taking a circumspencive view more often! 

Aislinn could recall a time when magic had come easy to her. As a child in Ala Mhigo it flowed from her fingertips as though she floated in the midst of her own personal aetheric current. She could almost taste it as she pulled it towards her, wrote out its boundaries and instructions, geometric code to which the aether would happily conform. 

This was a constant source of vexation for her da, who did everything he could to dampen and quell her curiosity around the matter. She supposed he felt she stuck out enough as it was, she didn’t need people whispering about this as well. 

But over the years the magic drifted further and further from her. Or perhaps she was the one who drifted. All she knew was that each spell started requiring more of her concentration, more of her effort to wrestle the aether into shape. 

And then the Helm came into her life. The cursed artifact Momori insisted Heartwood track down. They visited location after location, each one corrupted by the interruption of the aetheric flow the Helm had caused. The hot flares in her chest she wrote off as her temper. It was easy to do as it often seemed to happen in Momori’s presence and the woman was infuriating. 

And then, in pursuit of this damned artifact, Wyda shed her skin and became a primal. And Aislinn’s chest exploded in the face of the unnatural creature. Crippled under the weight of this new pain she couldn’t get out of the way of the fireball the perverted version of Wyda hurled at her. The arcane shield that should have protected her shattered like brittle glass as all around and within her was swallowed in flame. 

On the last day of her stay in the Heartwood’s clinic, she awoke with a dawning realization that left her feeling as if she stood on a precipice, staring down into a black, foreboding depth. It drove her to sit up, dress and make her slow, limping way out to the training yard. She remembers it distinctly. The sun was just cresting the edge of the land, its rays pouring through the groves as a soft breeze ribboned away the last fog of the morning. 

With a breath, she wrote out the spell for her carbuncle. By this point she could do this in her sleep, the easiest and most comfortable of her spells. One that didn’t require any calculations or adjustments made on the fly. She didn’t have to account for another person, it was arcanist skill at its purest form. The formula was the same and unchanging since she had first learned it as a child. 

But from the very first calculation she could tell something was wrong. The aether that fed the spell was her own, stored in one of her gemstone bracelets for just such an occasion but it felt like a living thing. An entity that snarled away from her mental grasp. The more she tried to hold its shape, the harder it fought. All her concentration on the aetherial plane, she was only dimly aware of the growing embers of pain in her chest. 

The carbuncle she had conjured was not the ready friend to aid in her endeavors but an anemic, uncertain creature. It yelped as with brute force she tried to will the aether to remain within the guidelines she had imposed. The fight lasted for what felt like bells but she knew had only been minutes. A fight she ultimately lost. The edges of the carbuncle darkened, the corruption sinking further and further into its aetheric form. In horror, Aislinn tried to dismiss the summons, but even in this the aether refused to obey. She could only watch helplessly as the carbuncle crumbled apart as though it was nothing more than a creature of ash, leaving behind a blackened heap of crystalline dust and a smell of burning ozone. 

“I’m not ready to talk yet.”