Nightlord: Orb by Garon Whited

Author:Garon Whited
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Published: 2016-05-30T06:00:00+00:00

The Ascension Van—I really need a new name for that spell—worked pretty well. In fact, I think it worked exceptionally well. Power seemed to be building up more rapidly than expected. Was it the region? Or was it the constant motion, with the spell acting like a scoop? It wasn’t a huge difference, but it was more than merely noticeable; it was definite. It was also enough to make me wonder.

I toyed with the idea of an actual scoop of magical force on the front of the van. I gave up on the idea when I realized I needed to place it outside the effect of the power-gathering spell in order to work. The concept would be something like a Bussard interstellar ramjet, only scooping up magical energy instead of interstellar hydrogen.

On the other hand, the overhead light gave me an idea. At the heart of my mountain was a matter-conversion spell—a pants-wettingly frightening thing. Around it were several layers of conversion spell, each layer absorbing a fraction of the released energy and allowing the rest to go right through. Those spells were things I nightmared during a long sleep. Having seen them and thought about them since, I’ve had some ideas for improvements.

In the mountain’s matter-conversion reactor, each spell layer converted as much as it could into two things: magical power to keep the spell going and vital force to feed into the mountain. By the time the radiant energy reached the last layer of those spells, it was merely an eye-searing glare of intolerable brightness instead of a wave of radiant destruction.

I didn’t want anything on such a scale. I turned on an overhead light and put a revised and improved spell around it to convert the light into magical power—enough to maintain the spell, and the excess helping charge the Ascension Van. Outside the first spell, an identical spell repeated the process, catching some of what the first spell didn’t.

Very quickly, I realized the conversion factor wasn’t an absolute value. The output of a dome light is next to nothing, yet the spell still didn’t convert all of it. Instead, the spell converted a fraction of it into magical energy and the rest of the dome light’s radiant energy made it through. The second spell layer did the same thing, converting roughly the same fraction of the energy it received into magical power. Every successive layer continued to convert the same fraction of power, but every layer also received less power than the ones inside, reducing the absolute amount of magical energy produced.

I want my voltmeter. No, it’s a burned bit of junk in a collapsed basement. I want a new voltmeter so I can run some tests. As it is, I think my best conversion spell weighs in at about a four percent conversion—and my so-called measurement has a large margin of error. I need better instruments than I have in this van. But I know the physical transformer I built did a much better job. How much better? I wish I knew.

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