Chapter 35 - 35: Needles of Ice, Runes of Power, My head is hurting.

Voxea closed her eyes after telling me that this was my first magic lesson and clasped her hands together. She began to chant in an unknown language and I saw small strands of aether begining to gather into her hands. Her chant soon drew to a close as she opened her eyes and blow a purple puff of frost into her closed hands. She slowly opened her hands to reveal a needle made of ice and shining with the colors of a rain now. "Well then...yet another perk to being made of aether. Doing something like this is usually more draining and takes longer", she said to me. "This needle should last long enough for our purposes. Here", she said as she handed me the needle.

I delicately took the needle with two fingers and I couldn't help but to admire it. The needle was a solid piece of ice yet it didn't feel cold in my hands. Instead it felt somewhat warm and comforting, yet powerful due to all the aether infused inside it. A closer look revealed all sorts of patterns and symbols, but it wasn't carved in. Instead, it looked like Voxea naturally shaped the patterns into the ice.

Voxea cleared her throat in order to get my attention away from the needle, then began her lesson.

"The first thing I am going to teach you is the runes you'll need to carve into your belt and into your staff", Voxea said as her fingertip began to glow purple. She drew in the air three runes, one that looked like a circle, another like a star and the last one like a pair of rectangles with a line through them.

"You don't need to understand what they mean yet, right now all you need to know is that they form the enchantment to fuse your items together. You'll need to write them in the order I wrote them as well".

"They're not gonna dissappear while I write are they?", I asked.

"No", she replied,"You're too new at this for me to force memorization upon you, plus you're my only student".

I stared at the runes as I began to take the needle to the staff in order to etch them in. The only issue was that I couldn't draw them regardless of how hard I pushed into it. I felt that even if I had a fine steel needle that this staff wouldn't budge or break. No wonder Voxea was so calm about it not blowing up in my face. I was about to ask Voxea why it wasn't working until she stopped me to explain, "You need to channel your inner aether into the needle as you write out the runes. It works like summoning me or Rakka, but more prolonged. Imagine that feeling but keep it inside the needle".

Voxea then gave me some additional pointers on what to do in terms of getting the aether to flow into the needle onto the medium. It was a little complicated, but I managed to get the gist of it. I took a deep breath as I willed the aether to flow from my channels, to my head, into my hands and into the needle. The experience was rather odd to say the least. I felt a warm substance was draining from an indeterminate part of my body, moving to my head and down into the needle. The needle soon began to glow brighter and the tip appeared to be a small ball of light. I figured this was the signal to start writing the runes.

I immediately felt the difference as I took the aether infused ice needle to the magic staff. First, I could finally etch in the runes onto my staff, leaving clear purple lines of magic power into the pine wood. Not exactly cutting into it, more like the wood parted itself to allow the etching. Second, my head was pounding the whole time.